What a crazy day!

I can’t even begin to know where to start. It was a weird day. Started out with a plan. Go downtown with Brett, I go to the census and he goes to get his green card renewed, then to get his PA state ID so we can get the loan for the car on Thursday. We meet afterwards and connect with my mom, who I haven’t seen in weeks (she was spending time helping my aunt and visiting my uncle, her brother, who is in the hospital with brain cancer) because she’s leaving tomorrow morning for Texas. Plus, since I haven’t had a car she offered to take me on errands…I desperately needed chicken feed!

So we get up and are getting ready to leave when my mom calls and has to cancel because she’s not feeling well and she has a ton of stuff to do…totally understandable…I can find another way to get chicken feed, but I’ll miss seeing her for another 2 weeks. Then the guy I’m buying the car from calls with questions and concerns about paperwork, and my bank guy is away for two days until we close on the loan at 9am on Thursday…so how do I get info for car seller? OK, leave for downtown.

On the way, I can’t find my wallet…ok found it. Whew! Brett & I go our separate ways and I meet up with him at DMV for ID. At this point, we need the id to get the loan. Brett has sent in his passport to be renewed and the bank will only accept certain ID, passport or PA State ID…now I find out that the state ID requires a PASSPORT! So we are waiting in hopes that the green card, which is SOOOO difficult to get, and is a federal ID, will work.

In the meantime, I go outside to make some calls to my staff for the census and somewhere between the street and our seat in the waiting room I lose the list of employees! I look everywhere! Can’t find it! I ask everyone in the waiting room and look in all the trashcans. ARGH! This is very bad. I could be fired for this! OK, stay calm. Brett suggests walking a 2-block radius and seeing if it blew away. That’s what I do…checking trash cans all the way…no sign of it. I call a co-worker and tell her what happened and I stop at the curb while getting sympathy…I look down and there, in the sewer grate, is MY LIST!!!! All I have to do is grow 3 inches on my arm and I’ll have it!! I run into a bar and grab some straws to use as chopsticks and they do the trick…it’s kind of funky smelling, but I’m not getting fired today!!

The rest of the day went pretty smoothly. We shopped and had lunch with my mom, then Brett went to work and I rode my bike up to the farm where I weeded and planted and watered and harvested. When I was getting ready to leave I saw a group of sparrows forming a cloud in the sky…there was a hawk that they were defending against. The cloud was amazing! I’ve never seen a defense cloud before…you’ve seen the clouds of birds just dancing in the sky, you know what I’m talking about, I’ve seen them too, but I haven’t seen a hawk trying to eat the birds and the cloud split and flow…wow! It was a sight!

I feel very accomplished today! It’s 9pm and I’m sitting on my porch about to go in and make a pizza for dinner! I just had to remember why I feel like it’s been a LOOONG day!

Get this out of my head!

I’m going to try to summarize what has been keeping me busy lately…

Need a Car – but riding bike everywhere good, Looking for a car is endless and there’s always a reason the car could be bad…so I don’t know what to do. With no “verifiable income” I’m kinda stuck scraping at the bottom of the barrel.

Census job – The fun ia almost over. I’m gonna miss my crew…they’ve been supportive and fun. I love project work, where you get to meet people, create a team, get a job done figuring it out along the way. It really is an adventure!

Oakland Community Garden – planting this weekend! Yea!

Stuff that’s in my head stressing me out….

Brett’s Birthday in July – Brett loves surprises and is astonished when I don’t get hints about things he wants for Christmas and birthday…it’s always a lot of pressure for me and I usually just throw money at it, or take him somewhere (last year we went kayaking on the Allegheny and then had friends over for pizza) but this year I have no car and no money because I’m saving for a car, so I don’t know what I’ll do!

Trip to England for father-in-law’s 70^th In August –That’s not the stressful part… Brett needs his passport renewed. It expires at the end of this month. To his credit it is a complicated process, and no phone number to call for help…you just have to follow the instructions, get it right, pay them and hope they think it’s correct, or you have to start over and PAY over…so he’s very nervous…but a good time to do this would have been during the huge snow storm that kept us in the house with nothing to do for WEEKS! Not 6 weeks before the trip! ARGH! We haven’t booked a flight yet either….

Silpada Designs Conference in July – only stressful because I have 3 of my team going and I don’t know yet when the trip to England will be….can’t overlap.

Sisters wedding in California in September – I’m making something for them for their wedding and haven’t even started! But I’m looking forward to hanging with my old friends, and seeing my sister get married!!

This doesn’t even mention that I’m still looking for a job, which has taken a back seat to finding money for grad school at Chatham…I think I’ll have a great internship, I talked to the director of the program yesterday, but I still need to find money and what kind of time will I have.

And I haven’t been up to the farm much. I’m supposed to work 5 hours a week and I’m maybe doing 3…I only hope Barb considers all the work I did over the winter and last summer, and I’ll be getting back up there once the Census job is over.

**SIGH** is that all? I think it may be….