Hmm, did we even get started?
Good morning. We are working out the typing with the kitty. It is 8:15 am. We’ve been up for about an hour. We had a late night last night. We stayed up and waited for fishyman. He Stayed out til after midnight because he was at a ball game with his son. He watched the White Sox win … wooohooo! We started giving him a good rub down, but soon after we started doing these big yawns and then we let ourselves be tucked in by him. Umm, we’re giving him a sense of purpose? Well I’m not sure about that, but it sure feels good to be tucked in. Plus there was a little smooching in the process. *Sigh* Life is good.Hmm, our head is pretty mellow. Just those soft mushy feelings. We figured out how to get our Yahoo Musicmatch to work at home and we’ve got on love songs. Eh, it’s the mood. Missy is petted pretty much by now … she’s left. I don’t think we’ll have too much time before mushy face gets up. He’s infamous for getting up no later than 8:30 am and even that is a rare treat. I keep making up excuses to walk past his bedroom and look at his sleep feet – one off the edge of the bed and the other stretched out in another direction. He’s got the soft covers all askew. And, the bed is making soft quiet breathing noises. I just love him to pieces.
*Double sigh* Hmm, we’re not getting to far here this morning.
Ok, ok girls … we need to focus. We can do this, right? We have our braces on this morning because we anticipate some good typing. We’ll stop when fishy face is up, but then pick it up again. He’s going to be umping a double header this afternoon.
I know … he works … we play. It’s the sort of way things go. He has a pretty cool
life and we’re admiring him for doing what he can. I hope to be/get better so we can share space in there where we are going places with him too. Still have our eye on that opportunity to go on a cruise ship with him. Sure would like to have a room with a balcony cruising around the room. I’m sure we’ll need a little space.
AHA! This is what we’re talking about … balcony! And for sure we wouldn’t get the one with the obstructed view.
Hmm, it is now a bit after. It’s almost 11 am. We’ve had kind of a rocky couple hours. Some of it was excellent, but there was a part out who didn’t think it was so excellent. She had a melt-down.
Basically, at 9 am, we went into snookies bedroom and slowly woke him up. We figured he’d have things to do and he’d had 8 hours of sleep, so that was fair enough. Something happened and we talked some and then he was on the computer, then to the washroom, dressed and out the door for errands. But, somehow all that became unsettling to us. I think it was because he was saying stuff like what we were going to do again. He had thought through a plan to take us to Lake Michigan and catch Saturday Fireworks after having a sandwich down there, but he hadn’t checked into our walking and we’ve had special problems today because we got hurt in the back of our knees – so been hard on us all week. And, then he was talking about cleaning up and he was talking about us looking at the mail. And, it all became overwhelming. We had on a terrible face and then went under for about 10-15 minutes. It wasn’t long and it seemed to have helped. We followed him to the bedroom, and then he left. He came back for a minute with the mail and we were caught trying to pickup which is something we would prefer to do after he was gone so he didn’t add too my work. Like we were picking up the computer table and had our hands full of the dishes because we were going to start that, but then he wanted me to take something more. And, it was enough! Leave us alone! Well, we didn’t say that, but that’s the attitude we were feeling. Plus, I didn’t want to get the mail because there would be birthday cards and I wasn’t in the mood for all of that.
Ok, working on that mood thing. I picked up the living room and kitchen, managed my clothes, took a shower and got dressed. I think I’m ahead of the game now. Things seem to get in a standstill after the dishwasher is hooked up … we could say it impedes. Ahh nuf said there. Basically, we just got a hold the better mood when he comes in and starts pushing us around to do this or that. I should put away some clean clothes and towels, but that will have to wait for another up time.
Oh no … our problem possum is back. Let’s see … its 11:21 … lets see how long he can go before he tells me to do something. La-da-da-da-da. I’m sitting here innocently. I’m not sure what he’s doin exactly .. whoops … here.
Hmm, he’s hunting down missing gym shoes. I didn’t take them. He seems to lose a lot of stuff. I don’t know how that happens. He’s always looking for something.
We like best when he looks for us.
AHA! So far so good … 11:32. He is sitting in the cleaned-up living room with computer and doing bills. The curtains are open now and we’ve just turned to our own projects. He’s watered the flowers. He’s on the phone with his accountant … something of an underpayment to the government … Yeeks. That sound bad. It’s just another thing that he’s got to take care of … he’s a good handler.
He talked about his daughter and son for a few moments. Things are going pretty good for one, but the other seems to be heading for more problems. There’s problems with a niece too. Rich just paid her $400 phone bill and apparently she’s not working. Yeeks. There’s hard stuff out there. That reminded me that things are in interim with our boys too. Maury is looking for a new job. Lauren has gotten a promotion to manager of her place, and Joe was interviewing this week for a new job. I think a lot of it has to do with wanting or needing more money. I don’t think any of the kids between Rich and us really know what they want to do. They are just looking for an income to support themselves. That’s fair at their age, but I feel bad that they have to go through anxiety in creating the necessary changes.
I don’t feel real invested in the changes they are going through. When we meet, they tell us how it is going and we look forward to the little things they ask like Maury gave us his resume to check over. There wasn’t much changing, because it was very good. He’s a smart boy! He’s taken on a lot of stress positions and seems to be the best family man that I know … besides Rich he’s pretty good at staying on top of things with family. Maury volunteering to be his kindergarten daughter’s soccer coach. Wow! That is something very special that I’m very proud of him for. Good Maury!
Maybe I could call and check things out? Well, that was brief. I left a message with Maury and Joe talked to me for about 1 min 20 seconds. He said he got the new job with his friend Alex. We asked him what he’d be doing, but he was playing a game … he just said it didn’t matter what the job, just that it was paying $14 an hour instead of $8 an hour. I think that puts him around almost $30,000 a year instead of $17,000. That’s a pretty substantial jump. I like that he’s working with his friend too. I’m not sure, but I think Maury might be trying something on that order too. I think both boys have to get used to the hours, especially Maury.
Maury puts in a full day, but I think he has had time to work on leisure. He’s around a computer so he plays on the computer, but then that wouldn’t be much different than us. Well, as much as we worry about them, we’re not going to worry too much. They are smart kids … they just have to try and they seem to be fitting in with whatever has to be getting done. If we worried about anything, I would worry about Maury on the credit cards. That’s difficult, but I think its difficult because there are two of them having similar high spending habits. Welcome to traditional USA. Think it happens with a lot of people like that. We’ve been there, done that.
Ok, so now we’re going to be moving on. We’ve got music on, sweetie behind us, and we’re at the keyboard on a Saturday writing. It doesn’t get any better than that. Just need to figure out what to be thinking next.
I guess we’re going to work then … that’s what we’ve been edging up toward. There was a big project this week that was inspired somewhat by the times and somewhat because of the new Q. I think she got done with sufficient work this week, but the other thing was that she and I both fell into projects of organizing our desks. She was asked by sister to go shopping to an office supply store. So, they went. My understanding was that it was a $400 dollar trip, and Candace had a wonderful time.
We’d gone over with her previous through the Internet and a catalogue things that she might need. She had a complete list. Hehehe … I got a couple of things … but not too major. I got CDRW disks – a spindle, and I got some of my mini-clips – these were in color too. That’s enough to throw off my center, but we figured that we should take it calm. I know matching obsessions. *Sigh*
We did a lot of cleaning, though we didn’t go through the entire office. By that I mean we filled-up three office garbages of heavy papers. We had things in the file back from 1999 when we first got there, but all of it is dead files, nothing we need. Or, mostly. We went through 3 of our deep file drawers. There is more space, but that was the heaviest concentration of stuff. There was a lot of stuff, just a bunch of dead stuff. I felt like I was coming out of my cocoon. We salvaged about 4-5 inches of stuff that might be valuable in current time. There was a small brief piece of time where we were sitting back and looking at all those empty spaces. Each of them had about 20-30 hanging files with tabs. It took some thinking and we’re not all the way done with the projects. But, we made an substantial distance in that we were finding ourselves switching over to the Paper Tiger System .. it didn’t start that way, but we gained the confidence to go into it … somewhat blindly, because we didn’t really want to lose our system with the journal and the dots. That was a hard one to think through, so we just finally started throwing caution to the winds figuring we’d think through it and it would be ok.
Wow! I’m back. This is certainly going to be a short day for writing. I’m sorry for that … It’s now 5:50 pm and Rich is due back in 10 minutes. Aha! Just called and he is about 10-15 minutes out, but he says he’s got to shower first so no reason to run to getting our shoes on. It gives me a few more minutes to write.
Basically, what we’ve done since six hours was to read. There was a lot there. We also got in lunch and about 10 minutes of drifting off time. But, not much. We read through several Office of Inspector General (OIG) papers and one survey for support intensity scale, and a couple more for Quality of life (QoL) surveys. That was all my required reading, but the last one by Wehmeyer on QoL was so good in hitting major points of importance that I may have to go back tomorrow and diagram it all out.
The difference in having taken this afternoon for work, was partly because rich was home for the first half of it reading in the living room and we wanted an excuse to join him on the couch. But, we had clearly demarcated intent to be reading this material so we could be advancing the whole curriculum plan. I think we turned a cog in the wheel. I had been explaining our new system to Rich, but he got into showing me his system and he didn’t say anything positive about our system … so that led to a little flair, but not more than 7-8 minutes frustration with each other.
We were showing him how special ours was and he didn’t say anything until getting his out as if it were up for sale. He didn’t present MS Outlook very well, but we have been there including checking out the new 2007. It has a lot of spangles.
But, the bottom line is that it wasn’t adapaptable to my MS Works program, on my little computer, so it did me no good at my desk. I could have used the computer desk, but I really find myself with excuses sometimes just to work on my regular work desk. It’s a bit tougher now with the two big screens, but in general, I like doing my scheduling and planning on the little computer, and the majority of the straight out writing on the big one.
There are always a complication of systems when you are turning over a new system, but you know us and new systems. We tried to incorporate what we had with what was working and what we would like to see. What we ended up with was something where we were using the Paper Tiger desk set-up along with that system … that coincidentally was looking even better because of our widespread use of the CARF stuff in it. We had actually spelled out this direction before, but hadn’t gone as deep in eliminating stuff from drawers. That’s changed this time around. What we did different was to set up one drawer with a small section of forms needed for annuals, but then going in the other direction, we added about 14 general files Tiger Lady was suggesting like a file for copying, file for errands, file for signatures, file for calls outgoing and incoming, etc. The next part was that there were Action files that were temporary and a little more longstanding, and the other files in the system were resource. The temporary action files we used as the files on top of our desk under the binders in the cubby. They are still designated with dots, but they are thinned outsome. Some went to the other action file … I guess too because the other action file has to do with being things we work on all the time rather than
the single projects.
This week we were also adapting to the push of the new Q to take on her own territory, which not only included the desk, it included the client files. I wasn’t ready for that yet, but figured it’s a good enough time to readjust. I told her that we’d have to talk to Rich about giving up two of the file drawers (at first – maybe the other two later). We talked to him already – planted the seeds. We established client files over dead files.
posted by Ann Marie @ 7/29/2007 07:04:00 AM
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