Resume

Maybe having the degree doesn't have much to do with whether you get the job. Maybe sometimes it's more about appearance, persistence, experience, and politics.

12-16-09: Transferred "Books Requested" list from clipboard to an excel spreadsheet document, shared between reference computers, with conditional programming to display duplicate listings.

Fall Semester 2009 - pitched idea of a support group/resource center for students with children to the women's center in the student union, contacted various gropus in the area, secured offer of support from counseling center on campus.

Spring Semester 2009 - volunteer Wednesdays at women's center, primarily for students with children?

cutting snowflakes

I don't want the money. I don't give a fuck about the money. I want my son to be safe, and if the noncustodial parent is actually in compliance with the child support orders, avoids the two week order of arrest, and maintains appearances at each weekly supervised visit, he comes out looking like the good guy. And I don't want that. Because he beat me up almost nightly while I was pregnant and even though he was employed almost the entire year he failed to pay child support for that entire year, and what does that have to do with being a father anyway?

Made it through the semester (I think). I'm living here, with a beautiful well-lit apartment, a lovely job where I am treated like an adult and where my knowledge is useful and appreciated. I made it here on my own. My son is intelligent, hilarious, polite, and is doing very well at the Montessori school. The boyfriend I didn't intend to have is amazing. He's intelligent, creative, makes enough money, and we share the same concepts about relationships, how to talk, what to do with ourselves and our lives.

I am doing meaningful things with my life. I am in the program, and I have a plan. This is screamingly full of beauty and realized potential, and I'm blessed to be at the mercy of my lover's joy.

I don't know. I'm still poor, but it's never been this good 'till now.

organization

The kind of obsessive compulsive organization and caffeine-induced mania and general overall stress that means I feel best about life with I have not only a general awareness of what I need to do but also multiple physical copies and notes of/concerning everything results in blog posts like this:

1) data analysis/aggregation concerning books in the 700-899 section. checkout frequency considering amount of time in system.

2) blood panel & thyroid levels, should hear back tomorrow. it's not a pituitary tumor despite what the internet wants me to believe.

projects

Data aggregation. Collection & circulation analysis (we have the capability but this information is not currently immediately available). How can I order books if I know nothing about collection development and moreover, if we don't know what materials are useful to our community? I want charts.

Students with Children resource group - go talk to the Women's Center again, is anything going to come of this / bake goodies for kids if they'll post flyers.

Sustainable Development concentration in Social Work. Susdev is open to the concept, meeting next week with SW. Might be able to intern at the Farm & count the time toward Social Work internship requirements. Susdev seems to focus on third world & global concepts & implications, while the Local Studies department has more to do with our cultural heritage. I want to work specifically with local food: Local economic/nutritional resources, community cultural/social connections & development. From an individual / project / macro:policy perspective (EVERYTHING). Community gardens, community kitchens, school gardens, if yer poor grow some tomatoes. Goat co-op. Pig co-op. Chicken tractors. That sort of thing.

WP scholarship - need final references, final drafts of the application, meeting next week with sponsor? Or submit it now, ask for money for the summer (I'll miss the 2 month deadline for spring semester, but that's fine, the need is for fall anyway).

Can more jam.

Finish floor upstairs this weekend? In trying to think of the phrase "buy furniture," my brain went through the following: "collection development," "user interface aggregation," "resource networking"...'bout fried on this thanks.

Photo child / mailing list.

Guardian Ad Litem? 30 hour training, 4 hrs/month on appointed cases. Good way to test whether I could handle CPS, since the Child Welfare Collaborative is a heckuva lot of money.

turnip pickles and graveyard fruit

I want to make pickled turnips today. In a fit of enthusiastic poverty I bought three wax-coated turnips at the grocery store. I pitied them there, because who the hell buys turnips at Ingles? And I thought as I paid for them, I could have waited a few nights and taken them from the dumpster. Damn.

They've languished in the crisper drawer. I have food stamps now, and I am able to buy unnecessary items: a jar of sun-dried tomatoes in oil, a quart of honey, a big glass jar of lovely calamata olives. I don't want to be spoiled and lazy just because I have money. I'd rather do my weekly shopping at the farmer's market (THEY TAKE FOOD STAMPS OH WOW) and interrogate the farmers about how to grow shitakes and what variety of basil does well here and what about cold frames for kale?

So I'll be making pickled turnips today, from this recipe. I might try these, too.

I worked at the library yesterday, and came home late and grumpy, and dinner was a beautiful clam chowder. After the second bowl I asked Marc how he made it - "The texture is wonderful" I said - and he told me, "I used those cans of clams and oysters, rinsed them in the colander, and simmered them in a pot with a little water. Then I added a stick of butter and about half a cup of parsley, and waited until you came home with the condensed milk!"

And I replied, "Oh dear god, a stick of butter."

And he grinned, "Yeah, but it's good!"

Bless him.

After dinner Marc decided I was too grumpy to do the dishes (BLESS HIS HEART) so he told me to go check out the upstairs apartment. Earlier in the week we ripped out the carpet, and he's been up there in his spare moments pulling staples from the subfloor. He and Thomas (gloriously helpful toddler playing in dirt) replanted the mint and basil and rosemary into containers along the walkway upstairs, and I saw that the bushes along the other side of the tiny yard were freshly mulched and the space outlined with railroad ties.

I immediately began thinking of edible landscaping. Can we dig up the bushes, shred them, bury them under the mulch, use the space as a compost pile this winter and plant some tomatoes and kale and zuchinni and herbs and maybe a fig tree and transplant some blackberry canes? If we replace the ornamental shrubbery before we move out, think that would be ok?

I walked around the other side of the building, plucked a big empty coffee can off the top of the trash cans, and started picking grapes from the grapevine along the driveway (between two apple trees how lucky are we). When that was full I rinsed them in the sink and let them dry on a towel on the counter while I walked up the hill to the cemetary, where there's a larger feral grapevine, and picked clusters of grapes until it was too dark to see.

Marc decided the grapes are domestic muskedines (thick bitter skins, gummy flesh, big seeds, and a dark smell), so he made a gallon of wine, combining them with the less-polite muskedines foraged from my parents' woods last week.

There are bottles of mysterious alcohol all over the house. I keep finding booze everywhere. And we don't even drink! We make it to give away! Bless 'em.

Today: pickled turnips, cloth pull-ups (because Thomas starts Montessori school in two weeks - HEY GUYS! MY CHILD GOT INTO THE MONTESSORI SCHOOL!), compost box. Maybe later more grapes, or yanking more staples from the floor upstairs.

august

August turns to autumn, the air is as sharp as it is cool, this evening smells like my memories of this town. Dinner is peppery all-day chicken stew, crusty bread, the red and orange of a japanese maple (leaves falling across a shed roof thick with moss and broken bird nests), I can hear cattle from here.

I am taking a graduate-level course on sexuality, in the social work department. This is my first semester away from a community college and I throw myself into...this, and I still feel disconnected. I have two jobs and a child, why are my classmates so young? Mostly they're older than me.

I've been in this town through warm spring and turgid summer, autumn is an ending. It's a strange time to be a beginning. This is weather for tucking in, harvesting your last, covering your earth, settling your bets. It's a strange time to be a beginning.

i am still weird

As autumn comes dew stays longer on the ground, and under the pines at the front of this house the thin soft grass is damp into late afternoon. The deck is warm, open to sunrise over a deep long blue valley. I come here to clean house, walk dogs, make money.

I can't look at food without thinking about where it came from. I can't look out at the land without thinking, top of that hill good place for a house, gets flatter toward the creek at the bottom, that little woods along the slope might keep things cool, run pigs in there and goats at the bottom and where's the sun right now? Where does the rain stand? Can you terrace that slope for a garden? Nice healthy weeds, those.

I'm too loud for this college, too armpit-hairy for these hippies, still as weird as I was in high school. Good to know, awkward just the same.

If I weren't in school my hours at the library would be perfect for the life knocking around in my brain: Wake up crazy early, get dirty outside 'till ten, hang out in the library during the siesta hours 'till two, come home and muck around 'till dark, eat for dinner what I saw grow up from the soil. Throwing my kid outside naked half the day would help with the toilet learning too, dammit. Got a ten year plan though, ask me about it latter, time to mop these warm slate floors and drink coffee 'till I wake up some more.