pressure drop

Yesterday it became fall. All week it was sunny and beautiful, and even yesterday dawned chilly but clear. And then the rains came. And they have stayed.

I was driving home from work, well okay, after-work errands, thinking about how to spend the rest of my evening, and I realized I couldn't make a decision about dinner. I couldn't decide if I even wanted dinner. I was totally spaced out. When I got home it dawned on me that the barometric pressure had rapidly dropped and that always drains all energy from my brain and body. So I resolved to get a couple of eggrolls and a bowl of wonton soup from the Chinese place down the block, watch some bad tv, and go to bed early.

Well, two out of three ain't bad. I ended up staying up way too late playing silly games on the computer and then had to get up at the crack of dawn to go to work. So now today I am a zombie.

word nerds

This morning I was chatting with my mom on the phone, our usual Thursday morning check-in (my daughter spends Wednesday nights with her and I like to know what they were up to and how the morning went). She mentioned J's homework assignment, which was to write as many words as she could think of about Fall, and that led us to a previous assignment, completed with her grandfather, which was to think of as many words as she could think of that rhymed with "school." One of the words on her list was "minuscule," and my mom said she asked Bompa whether he'd spelled it right and he replied defensively "Yes!" To which I replied, How is it spelled? because I spelled it in my head and couldn't figure out where the misspell might come in. And she said minUscule, related to "minus," which most people spell minIscule. And I wrote down both words and had to confess that, unlike most words that are commonly misspelled, I couldn't tell the difference with my naked eye. Quite embarrassing for an obsessively corrective speller such as myself. But then I said, Well now I will remember it forever, just like "testament," which I misspelled testEment in fifth grade (or maybe sixth) to get myself eliminated from the spelling bee. And I suppose that is a testament (ha ha) to my spelling obsession, the fact that I have remembered this for 25 years, and then my mom goes, "mine was 'murder.' MurdUr. Third grade." And this was 50 years ago, so I see that I come by my spelling obsession quite honestly.

boredom

Feeling bored and restless gets my head spinning in all sorts of directions. I have been in my present job for six months and today is the first day I've really, seriously considered my options if I were to quit. Well maybe not really seriously but pretty seriously.

I've always looked at a fairly standard set of job sites and HR department pages, keeping an eye on any opportunities that look interesting, even when I'm feeling happy with my job. There have even been a couple of postings that I've almost applied for. But nothing was ever interesting enough to tempt me to the point of actually updating my resume and composing a cover letter.

Today though, I'm feeling bored and generally irritated, and I just want to get out of here. There must be something better, is my thinking. The problem is, that's probably not true. Unless I go back to school for some serious upgrading, I'm stuck in my current income bracket, but my current place in the food chain here allows me generous sick time, educational benefits, and next year I'll get 5 weeks' paid vacation. It's pretty sweet.

so, I'm bored. Blah.