july’s a busy month for me! i’m off to the lake for the next four days, so don’t expect much from me here 🙂 wish i had been there this past week when it was heat wave week – tomorrow’s high up there is 69. good grief. i hope the relaxation station makes an appearance.
from a non-existant spring to a constant state of tropical storm warning. it’d be nice to have some decent weather so i can go out for a run without sweating half my weight by the time i’m done.
meanwhile, my AC hadn’t seemed to be working. finally today i asked the upstairs neighbor if hers was working. nope. so i called our landlord, who called the guy who installed the units. after an hour and a half, he got them working.
whoever had done the finishing work was an idiot (not him, he said) – they hooked up the units to the opposite apartment. on top of that, the gal upstairs hadn’t flipped her breaker to turn hers on, so no one was getting any cold air. plus mine has a freon leak (what??).
no worries; now the AC works, and nate will hopefully be less crabby.
when nate and i decided to move to rochester, i didn’t think of the implications of learning a whole new town map. the first few weeks after i started my job, i was lucky if i was able to just make it to work and back to austin. if i had to stop someplace on the way back to austin, say target or walmart, i had to plug the place into my map app in my phone and have it tell me how to get there.
this was annoying. this town wasn’t st. cloud! this town wasn’t st. joe, new london, willmar, even the cities to a point. this town wasn’t like austin, which even after being absent for almost 20 years i could easily navigate. this town wasn’t even fargo, which i knew sort of well enough to get to big landmarks.
i was driving my mom around a couple months ago and she said,
“i have no idea where we are! this isn’t st. cloud!”
“i know! right??”
rochester, while only 40 minutes from austin, was such a distant town while i was growing up. we went to rochester only a few times a year – we were more likely to go to albert lea on a regular basis – despite its proximity. and when we did go to rochester, we went to one of two places: fleet farm or tjmaxx. then once a year i would get to spend some time during the summer at my aunt colette’s house. we would go downtown and check out the fountains (and steal quarters) and maybe eat at bilotti’s for some awesome pizza.
and yet i knew nothing about this town. but now that i’ve been at my new job for a year (holy cats!) i feel like i can get around for the most part. sometimes i need to get to a place that i’ve never been to or seen as i’m driving past and still have to use my gps. but for the most part, i’m able to get around. give me another 15 years and i’ll have this town down pat. 🙂
here’s a shameless plug for medium, twitter’s new thing. it’s basically blogs that are public, like twitter. the nice thing about it is that you can follow medium on twitter and they will post when a decent new one is published. and at the top of the posts? it’ll tell you how long it will take you to read the blog.
i’m calling it a twog – twitter blog.
there are editor’s picks, featured collections and posts, about things you didn’t even know you needed to know about! take the “best of” from blogs all over the webiverse and put them in one spot: medium. love it.
and when there’s a blatant spelling error on a post that’s been sent to twitter, the twitter masses will always be there to correct; case in point: a post on macarons (…or macaroons as it had been originally published). 
yeah i was an annoy twitter corrector. oh well!
so there is my recommendation and shameless plug of the day. it’s like if all your favorite bloggers posted to the same blog. if you want a really easy way to keep up to date on them, follow @medium and they’ll tweet when a picked post is published.
hello, blogees! this week was cold at first, mid 20s on overnight, and then by sunday it will be id 70s. that’s minnesota for you! hurr hurr hurr.
my monsanto research was sidetracked by watching “hemlock grove” on netflix. they are trying to be true blood/dexter, and it kind of works? either way, i watched all 13 episodes in 3 days. now back to the grindstone with monsanto.
i’m going to a fancy thing on friday! i get to get dressed up and everything. wearing my fancy red shoes, woowoo. my mom’s new work hosts a fundraiser auction once a year and i get to go keep my dad company. i’m hoping it’ll be fun and maybe there will be something cheap enough there for me to bid on.
then 5k on sunday morning, which i am excited about because the weather’s supposed to be awesome (but windy – bleh). might make it worth it having to get up at 7:30 on a weekend. i’m hoping for sub-13min/mile time. that’s all i ask!
last night i was perusing fb while waiting for a drink at the casino buffet when i saw the announcement that branden’s wife was pregnant. it was like i was hit with a ton of bricks.
i don’t know why this is affecting me so weirdly. megan’s had a kid, angie’s had a kid, liz is about to pop, even seeing that ben had a kid did not affect me so hard as finding out that branden is going to be in charge of a little person.
is it because he’s always going to be that one person frozen in my head as a mainstay of my college years? and why i am SO attached to that time of my life? is there nothing recently or currently that can compare to the awesomeness that was my late teens and early 20s? i don’t get it.
and part of me at this point is like, ok, BRANDEN is having a kid. what am i doing with my life? time to stop dicking around and time to start doing something worthwhile? but what’s worthwhile? just thinking about having a kid wears me out. besides, we all know popping out offspring isn’t the end all be all of our worth.
it’s just a really odd sensation. i’m kind of freaked out.
i feel like i need to write a research paper for some reason. must be the numerous trips to the library lately.
anyway, i was thinking, if i were to write one, it would be on feminism and prince’s song “pussy control” hahahahaha that would be great.
i had my 6-month review on tuesday and now i’ve had 2 days to mull it over. hrrrrmmmm.
basically he said i need to take more initiative, speak up more, take the lead more. at one point i took his comments to tell me to stop smiling as much. good grief.
i hate leading crap when there is an obvious leader in the room. HATE it. but i can do it if worse comes to worse. and as i ruminated over his comments, i began to think that i was just annoyed with the fact that he wanted me to be less quiet and reserved. his words.
then i realized that i’m not annoyed at that. i’m annoyed because he has a problem with something is FUNDAMENTAL to who i am. quiet and reserved is a part of me – has been for 33 years, and since my life’s at least 1/3 over, i can say without much reservation that this won’t change, no matter how much he wants it to.
did he hire the wrong person? i don’t know. maybe. do i bring this up to him? if there’s one thing i’ve learned while working here the 7 months i have it’s that people do not expect you to stick around and loyalty is generally not that high. people bounce from position to position within the school quite a bit. maybe because ultimately you’re working for the state? i don’t know. either way, i think it would be within bounds to talk to him about this.
thoughts?
well, after almost 7 months, i think i’m finally settled for a while. i don’t have to drive anywhere until easter/dad’s bday, i don’t have to see anyone, and i don’t have to live in 3 places. i’m looking forward to doing nothing! i missed my christmas tree this year, but i did have some decorations up and watched a few movies (i still have to watch charlie brown). my cookies got made and present wrapped, so that was ok.
so now it’s just a matter of finding a routine for a while. and now that i’m done traveling all over the state for a bit, hopefully part of that will be blogging on a daily basis again. i can start up my pinterest experiments again. woo!
i got a message from liz today asking why i had a big ol’ error on my blog.
AAHHHH
(if you recall the great blog migration of 2012, i had already lost 3 years’ worth of blog posts and did NOT want to repeat that.)
i dug around in my file manager at my host. nothing that i could see. so, since i had recently updated wordpress, i decided to manually update it again to see what would happen.
oh happy day! it now works! no posts were lost! whew! now onto different anxiety-inducing activities, such as calling my landlord!