My scary aunt should also not read this

My scary born-again Catholic spinster aunt suddenly sent me an email last week, about how my writing is very interesting, but mostly when I write about every-day things. Again, a moment of panic - have my parents actually found my blog? She finally got back to me when I asked her which writing I meant . . . apparently she found a few emails from [literally] years back, and hit the reply button assuming I would know what she was talking about.

She even sent me a sample . . . from four years back. Please note that the pet mentioned, like pretty much all our pets, came to a sad end in a dramatic way soon after this passage. It's not that our pets don't usually have relatively long, fulfulling lives - their exits are just rather extreme. But more on that next post.

So, here's from four years back:



Hello everyone - my life right isn't interesting enough for me to want
to tell anyone about it twice, so I'm doing a mass-email. Here, let me
prove it to you . . .

I got a very good job at a pulp and paper mill for the 4 months of
summer vacation from University. It pays twice as much as I thought I
would get this summer, but it means that I don't have much time to
spend with my friends. Most of them work on the weekend, and so when I
am free most of them are busy with their jobs. Yeah, poor me, right?

Well, I finally found that I CAN get sick of reading hours and hours a
day. I am working in the Health and Safety department, and I do a lot
of computer work, write papers on health issues in the mill, and test
the air for gasses and metals and so on. I like the people I am
working with, but outside of my area I don't think I would enjoy being
there much - it is certainly not the sort of place I would want to work
in for a career. For one thing, you can smell the mill from kilometers
away. A lot of the people who work there have a pretty negative
attitude about the place - the staff workers like me are paranoid about
getting fired, and the union people are almost impossible to fire, so
they complain about anything they want.

The last 4 days I had very little work to do, because my boss was too
busy to even find me any work that he didn't have to help me with.
He told me about the main job I will be doing this summer, but he
didn't give me enough information to do anything beyond a bare beginning.
I will be statistically analysing the effect of the new safety program, using
Microsoft Excel. He basically left me in my office with an Excel manual
for days -boring, but at least I learned a whole lot about the program -
I will need it for some of the courses I will be doing in September as well.

I haven't written much of anybody this last month, because as you can
tell, work is my life right now, and it isn't very fascinating. My dad
told me that whenever I have nothing to do though, I should just use
Excel to calculate how much money I am making. When I was little and
bored with a job, I use to calculate how many chocolate bars I could
buy with the money I was earning. Now I calculate how many months rent
and food it will cover- if I am very lucky, I will be able to get some sort of job
in Europe next summer - as long as I can make a little money overall, maybe I
will be able to manage it.

Some of my friends are on big trips through Europe right now, and every
time I hear about it I am horribly jealous. But at the same time, I
would much rather live in one place in Europe for several months than
travel all over for a few weeks - now I have done both to some degree,
I realize that really getting to know a culture is much more satisfying
than just seeing the sights and using a phrasebook. And I really need
to practice my German!

I was so bored today that I made a new harness for my rabbit, attatched
it to my dog's leash, and took it for a walk. Unfortunately, my rabbit
doesn't want to go anywhere, or she wants to run at about ten times my
speed - and since I made the harness so stretchy, she jumps forward,
then gets slowed down in the air and snapped back like she's on a bungee cord.
It's amusing for me, but it pisses her off and after a minute she
snorts in dusgust and lays flat on the ground to show her unhapiness.

She's got a lot of personality, especially for a rabbit - when she is
irritated with someone, she will snort, then ignore them and even
refuse to eat until she is satisfied again. When she's really
comfortable, she will flop down on her side with her feet sticking out,
which shows that she trusts you, because she can't get up from that
position very fast. We have her in the house a lot, because she's even
smart enough to know that she can't pee inside - she will even wait for
hours, if we forget to take her out soon enough. We could even make
her an inside rabbit if we wanted, because rabbits can be taught to use
litter boxes like cats, but my mom doesn't like the idea. She things
the rabbit is allright to watch, but she doesn't like it that much -
she says it is too much like a long-eared rat. She has the worst rat phobia
I have ever seen.

Anyways, I have to go water the garden, so I'll be off.

Best wishes,
-Lindsay

So - to update this letter -
This summer I am not yet sick of reading . . . I'm trying to store up, like a camel in an oasis. Not like I don't read too much in the school year anyways.

This year I have the boss (a PR/newsletter writer/communications) person I had last year, and she expects lots from me - so I always have tons of things to do. No extra time to sit around. I like it better, though it was sort of nice to the ego when she was more surprised when I managed to get things done well. Now she has decided that I am reasonably efficient and expects me to stay that way, sigh.

Calculating my healthy paycheck-per-irritating-task is still an excellent way to get over the occasional mind-numbing job.

I'm still wildly jealous every time I hear of someone who is planning a trip to Europe, etc -I've been working here every summer and going to school full time every winter, with no more than two weeks off at a time. Christmas is usually my longest break.

The rabbit, as aforementioned, is no more . . . but I did try to harness-train my cats, and it turned out to be even harder. They just sort of lie there, then eventually do a sort of slow somersault if I try to tug on the harness (made of old tights this time).

Dad has evolved new ways to harass my mom about her rat phobia - his favourite is putting some old short brown wig under the covers for her to find. That always causes some major freak-out. I'm surprised noone has shot my dad yet, now I think about it.

Yeah, things haven't really changed that much, here in the valley.