Spike-kitten and Lola-dog, about a year ago.

Well, the result of that day is that I did get the job. I started on Tuesday. I almost wish I hadn’t.

It’s boring. It’s mind-numbing. It’s frustrating. It’s…temporary? God, I hope so.

Shelving books. Discarding books. Shelving more books. Discarding more books. Working with people who have no respect for books whatsoever. They keep telling me that in a few weeks, I won’t care about the books either. I dearly hope not. If I ever get to the point where a book is as of little importance as an apple core or stale cracker, I don’t know if I’ll even be me anymore.

Disorganized, messy, crowded…the whole store is that way, and the book section is no exception. Sorting 3-4 carts of books right out on the floor, piles of books stacked on every available surface. And they don’t know what they have. Their logic for why they keep one book and discard another, it makes no sense at all to me. What makes one book “antique” and one book “old” is a mystery. And the woman who runs that department has been there for 8 years, so I don’t think anything will change.

I am telling myself now – it’s a temporary thing. It’s just until I can figure something else out. If nothing else, I’m going to try for a transfer to the newer store that’s close by – they haven’t even put their library up yet, so if I can get in to it early enough, maybe it won’t be so bad. I hope. Maybe I can go back to Borders and beg the manager to give me a chance – now that I have a job, maybe I’ll be more attractive

Anyway. It is a job, and that was desperately needed. I only wish I’d gotten a job where I could think and learn and do.

On the way there, the bus traveled through familiar territory. I am used to ignoring it, mostly, but it starts a chain of thoughts. As the bus pulled in to our stop, I said, this may look familiar to you. “Oh?” Yeah.

We walked to the drug testing place, and I pointed out what other building shared the walkway. Yeah, the midwife’s place. The one I went to when I lost the baby, 4 years ago. Anway, shake it off, go inside. Where the nice man asks me about the tattoos on my feet. The ones of my dead baby’s feetprints. Smile, explain it simply. Keep going. Walk out to the bus stop afterwards, try not to think too much about how many times I walked in circles around the block, trying to make labor progress so that I wouldn’t have to go to the hospital to deliver him. Distraction – visit the Asian market while we are waiting for the bus.

So the result of all of this, combined with the knowledge that my son, had he lived, would be turning 4 years old this month, really put me in a mood. Which led to having this song in my head all damn day. Blue for You , by Men At Work. A sample:

I must get out and about
Of that I have no doubt
There surely must be new places to go
Sights I’ve never seen
All with pastures green
‘Cos the old ones are making me blue for you

or how about this:

The sun it still shines in
And I shall close the blinds
‘Cos I know I won’t see you anymore

So, do I win the emo prize today?

I dunno. I’ve been without work for more than a year now. I don’t like the idea of sitting on my ass not working for the money I’m getting, but on the other hand, it’s scary out there!

Of course, I’m pre-freaking out and I probably won’t even get the job. But after a year of looking and only getting 3, yes THREE interviews, each one is a special anxiety inducing event.

Anyway. I’ll either be working by Monday, or I won’t.

The good things are:

1. I won a contest that got me a Pet’s Eye View Camera courtesy Uncle Milton and cuteashell.com cuteness.com.

This is neat because I can attach it to a chicken, a cat or…my kid. I plan to attach it to my daughter for Kumoricon. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Kumoricon is an anime convention held in Portland, Oregon on Labor day weekend. This serves a dual purpose for us – it gives us something really cool to do just before school starts again, and gets us out of going to the family gathering that same weekend. Sounds mean, but given the options, I’ll pick hundreds of oddly-dressed stranger-geeks over too many family members.

2. I did a survey thing and got a $60 gift card for Amazon – for real. Awesome because it got me a new coffee cup warmer, egg/fruit slicer and a 15ft HDMI cable (perfect for watching downloaded anime on the 42″ flatscreen the roommate got recently), as well as some seatbelt webbing and tights for my kid’s Kumo cosplay. She’s going as Dita from Chobits – and has a friend going as Dita’s partner. Kinda cool.

These are all good things. Hot coffee, sliced eggs, happy child. Who could ask for more?
This brings me to:

3. I got a job.

At least, that’s what I hope to be saying in a few days. I’m going in for an interview tomorrow, sadly I was half asleep when they called so I’m not sure what location or what position, only that I need to be there. It’s at St. Vincent de Paul, where they have an actual job of being the librarian. That’s what I applied for, hoping that’s what they want to talk to me about. They just opened a new location that’s very close by, so…

Anyway, it’s like a dream job until I figure out what my dream job would be. Sorting and shelving books in a thrift store? YES. Especially one the size of the St. Vinnie’s around here. My mom actually has that job in another town, and loves it. Hard work, but she loves it. She actually recommended it to me, and I was able to use her as a reference. So, cross fingers and keep them crossed for…2-3 days?

Anyway. Those are my 2/3 shiny things for this month.

It was a hard one.

I found it through deviantART originally. I was looking for a railing for a build in Second Life. I ended up building the railing, but then decided to do everything differently and didn’t use it. But it was too late, because there were so many more brushes and patterns. This is what I ended up doing:

That’s the clock tower that tops my shop in SL.

So, go look at this site. It’s got a truckload of stuff. The brushes are awesome, I can’t wait to play with them more.

And today, the picture inspired me. I’ve done something similar before, where I decided to build a clock my grandmother gave me in Second Life:

(please take note of the rubberband tied onto one of the spikes, the wood had cracked and I was waiting for the glue to dry)

I started it at about 11:30pm, now it’s 2am (and about 2 hours later than I’d intended to be up) but I really, really wanted to finish this. And this is it:

Maybe I’ve found my calling…recreating ugly-ass wall ornaments from the 50′s. Or maybe I’ll look at it tomorrow, awake and alert, and decide that I’m not allowed to look at my friends lovely pictures anymore.

We all have neat things, things we see value in, but which have no real value in our lives. And we ask ourselves, “Why am I keeping this? It’s useless to me! But it’s so neat, and it still has uses…”, so we keep it. In a closet, in a box in the garage, hell, in extreme cases we keep them in storage units because it’s just too hard to get rid of it.

This is where donating comes in. It’s a way of letting these ever-so-useful items become useful again – to someone else.

A lot of us shop at thrift stores, but we don’t consider that we could donate just as easily. We see things that we need, things we didn’t know we needed until we saw them…so why can’t we do that for someone else? Give them a chance to see our neat things, and let them see how much they need neat things.

Last week, I had a few things I wanted to donate. Not much, but a few things. Some clothes my daughter let me pry from her hands, mostly. I put them in a box in the living room, and told my roommate it was there, if he wanted to add to it. And miracle of miracles, he did! He added a jacket he’d had since the 80’s. Some shirts he’d had almost as long, things he’s had in his closet because they were too nice to throw away, but didn’t fit him anymore. They did have some sentimental value, they were from peak of his youth and all that. It was hard. But knowing that someone else can use them, that made it possible. It made it a good thing, not an angst-driven purging.

And what that means, is that somewhere out there…there is a person who will find that jacket. That jacket that looks like it was made from the upholstery of my grandmother’s couch…and think it’s neat.

And that is why we donate.

First, I got a couple shiny new tea cup/saucer sets. I’ve got a nice little collection going. Nothing fancy, maybe 20 sets. I just collect single cups with saucers, and don’t often see ones these days that suit my liking. These two were nice, and I got them for half-price. Nice.

I also got something else. I mean, really something else.

Some background here first.

I like frogs, frog things. Not all frog things though. People think sometimes that when you collect something, that you collect everything related to it. That’s not true – not even remotely. But I get cartoony frogs, beaded frogs, ceramic frogs, resin frogs, you name it. But I can’t even tell you what it is that makes some of the frogs likable and some of them not. No idea. But I think that if I were to show everyone this frog piece, it might make them think twice about picking out another plastic frog with a funny hat.

What you see there are taxidermied frogs, playing pool.

I thought it was just some weird one-off, but it turns out that they are a whole thing. There are two of the on ebay (here and here), with instruments.

Seems that it’s some kind of tradition. I’m still looking it up, I need to know more about this. It’s just really, really odd. But I like it.

What you see below took me about 90 seconds to set up, using a Facebook album as a source. You can use a ton of other sources, and publish it to a ton of places. Including WordPress. I used my login info for this blog, and the following showed up (as code) in my post list. It shows as “scheduled”, which I didn’t even know you could do.

In any case, pretty impressive. I like. Looks like I can fiddle with the size too…let me do that now…ok, now it fits the page better. It looks really incredible with more pictures, as you can see here (where I originally found the Cooliris style).

There are lots of options, color and all that. And if you know a bit of code, you can play with it yourself, for options not on their list. This could really be fun.