Dressing Like an Adult

Or, as my mother used to say when I was on my way out the door on a high school date, "Be a lady." God. Another ruined date.

I've had the, "Dressing like an adult," discussion with women coworkers, especially when traveling for business. On a normal work day, we all just showed up. Never dressed the way we were the day before, of course, and usually sporting different earrings. But somehow looking the same, each of us adopting our professional persona, acquired over the years as we, and fashion, evolved. When traveling, we either shared rooms because the state was too cheap to put us in reasonable accommodations alone or met at each others' rooms before the costume was fully donned; and so it was we saw each other in our more genuine states.

That conversation typically contrasted our reality to that of men who not only get away with wearing the same pair of slacks for the whole week but whom we suspected never appraised themselves in mirrors before leaving for work. We'd sigh, take the last look to be sure the mascara hadn't dribbled onto our cheeks and that no errant eyebrow hairs were evident, then come in to full character to walk down the motel hallway to our first meeting of the day, touching our coifs to be sure the closing door hadn't mussed them.

I gave up on makeup when I retired. I wear cleanish jeans and T-shirts, maybe a polo shirt if we go out into the world (i.e., other than Safeway, Pet Food Express, or the hardware store). A bra? Only when common decency demands it - that or my own sense of decorum. I've never been one to go to a women's music festival for the pleasure of walking around without a shirt on.

Leaving aside any further feminist critical thinking about all of this, I faced a decision on Monday. I went to a business to continue talking with people (all women so far, as it turns out) about how I might fit in their business and how it might work for me. The meeting was over lunch, giving the situation an air of informality, but I had to enter the workplace to meet my contact.

After much thought and reflection on 38 years of dressing like an adult, I concluded that I am - kinda sorta - ready to approach future employment on my own terms. That is, I will not be a persona, I will be me. That immediately took care of the makeup decision... Not. I'm not a slob and I do still respect most social mores, though, so jeans (for this kind of work, anyway) were out. I'll never wear a skirt again because the psoriasis on my legs might make people fear I am a leper, so that left slacks. Add a simple shirt, and earrings and the Movado watch, and I was done. I like earrings. In fact, I like gemstones. So girly of me but there you have it.

I enjoyed the meeting and the Chilean empanada was wonderful. Our discussion wandered far and wide, and we left it at the, "stay in touch," place, which is what I'd hoped for. The happy, relaxed me feels better on me every day.

This is my favorite picture of me, captured by our friend Vicky Semones as we started off to hike the falls at Mt. Shasta. I'm going with this look.

Distractions, v2

There I was, happily engaging in my usual morning distractions when I saw an email from my cousin Pam (to whom I refer to as Pee-AHM-uh-la, in deference - or not - to her distinct New York accent). Pam, a sworn member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and, perhaps surprisingly, one of the only true Democrats in Sharon Springs, N.Y., near Troy, is the family genealogist. 

Side note about family genealogy here. I am only into it as often as Pam calls to tell me about another breakthrough, or snail mails me mountains of supporting documentation about our family trees that she's unearthed through various means, up to and including cemetery visits, augmented by the likes of Ancestry.com. I, on the other hand, seem to have no real notion of having any more than my nuclear family, diminished as it is, aunts (mother's sisters), cousins (of one of the Finn sisters), and my great aunt and uncle who we visited in Colorado almost ever summer while Ed and I were young.

That Pam writes Christmas cards by the hundreds, once accused me of being Omar the Tent Maker because my changes of address wore an erasure hole through her address book, and communicates with me only by phone (other than aforementioned cards and letters, with the occasional text in times of great stress). So getting an email from her was a shock.

Pam wrote that she'd discovered great aunts, sisters to our maternal grandfather, who not even she knew about, despite the fact that we were alive when they still lived. She is a year older than I am. She forwarded with her email a note from her to her third cousin (!) spelling out some of the familial ties and asking if the cousin knew of some family feud possibly dating back to the 30s or 40s. 

I couldn't make heads or tails of what she wrote until I dredged from memory of kinship classes that were part of my cultural anthropology major at Colorado State University. Finding drawing the family tree not satisfying enough, I turned it into a graph that clearly (to me) depicts the timelines of these particular ancestors.

(ASIDE:  It is 11:12 a.m., I am still in my bathrobe, having become immersed in my distraction. Why? Why did the neighbor have to come over today, of all days, and now, of all times, to borrow allen wrenches to fix the tandem bike she's taking her young niece on a ride with today. She called them hex wrenches and, after a brief stop with the wrong tool set, I gave her what I have, gathered neatly in a plastic sandwich bag. Now that I'm a bit embarrassed about being the dowdy retired lady next door, I'm off to shower and get on with the day, if not pursuing job opportunities.)

Between Patching and Painting

The past few days haven't revealed to me any particularly interesting new job opportunities. I spent a few hours researching one possibility but, other than that, have only pursued a couple of Elance freelance writing projects. I heard back from one but can't get my hands on a presentation I did so I'm figuring out where to go from here with that one.

My current obsession with patching wall cracks and painting continues unabated. At least it doesn't require using a sharp knife, so I'm pretty safe. Other than going up and down the steep, narrow basement stairs repeatedly for forgotten items.

There was a big hole in that wall.

I don't even need to climb a ladder; the original owners created the "basement" when the wife insisted that her husband get his model train sets out of the living room. I looked at original building permits some time ago and discovered that our garage initially had a 14 vertical foot clearance. They split that baby in half to create the train room. I've never measured the ceiling height down there but know that our seven-foot bookshelves didn't fit when we moved in.  I'm only painting a couple of walls, so I'm taping the ceiling without having to be on tippy-toes.

A horizontal crack ran across that wall, a vertical one from top to bottom by the light switch.

I like painting the walls because they are easier and faster than the detail I encountered painting the bathroom.  How could I make it complicated enough to entertain myself? Find more cracks to fix!

We've long ignored the basement. We refer to it as, "The Dead People's Room," a probably insensitive as hell acknowledgement that it contains, besides a quarter room of electronic waste, items and boxes retrieved after the deaths of my mother and Maureen's sister. It is hard going through that stuff and many boxes sit largely unopened. There are  boxes and file cabinet drawers full of old work paperwork. That's just flat out boring to sort through to see what needs to be shredded. So there it all sits.

Maureen's old La-Z-Boy and chair from her dining room set, with my personal book collection in the background. I built the bookshelf in the shop at Malmstrom AFB, Montana. Way long ago.

Then there's the downstairs bathroom. We paid good money to get the sink and toilet working after years of our disuse. The house was built in 1968 and we think the downstairs not long thereafter. It means that parts for such things as plumbing are hard to come by. It is a dinky thing, the bathroom, that still needs a lot of work, including probably replacing the shower door.

The plumber said the toilet is probably one of the original silent flush models; same with the pedestal sink.

We know the shower leaks but, hey, it has a full-flow shower head. The wall next to the show had pulled away so I patched that. The shifting that accompanies this winter's storms (keeping fingers crossed on that account) will show whether that patch holds. 

Not easy putting sheet rock mud in that narrow corner.

Oh. Replacing six burned out fluorescent tubes made the whole room brighten up. Funny how that works.

Nat Update

She got a job! Nat got a job in Arizona, where she's staying for now. I'm very happy for her. It is marketing and sales for an optic fiber company, and her orientation starts on Monday. That's about all I know, other than she continues to pursue a career path in other states, having found AZ not at all to her liking.

Me? Cursory job hunting this week. My normal reclusive state has been upended by numerous social engagements. Monday, we went with our traveling companions and good friends to see The Hundred-Foot Journey, starring Helen Mirren. Maureen and our friends loved it. I liked it. What's not to like about Mirren and Dreamworks? One critic called it, "Food porn," and I liked that part but it inspired me to not cook when we got home.

A Diablo Valley German Shepherd Dog Club meeting Tuesday night saw that day consumed by shopping, and making a black bean, jicama and tomato salad for the annual potluck in the park. Besides the Wednesday lunch with a dear friend to hear about her all-American Chinook puppy Ravi, I spent a couple of hours updating the dog club website and trying to decipher obtuse emails in response to my straightforward questions about content.

Ravi the Chinook at 3 months.

What could top a puppy? Thursday was nose work training followed by a play date for Merlin with his girlfriend Heidi. It is always such a joy to watch the two of them play.

Then Friday in Marin County having lunch and enjoying a ferry port walk with my pal Barbara. We both suffered the same fate at the hands of one particular director (CEA is supposed to mean Career Executive Assignment to a senior staff position; what it really means is Career Ends Abruptly when a new director prefers to surround herself with sycophants - not that I'm bitter). She went on to continue to serve the People of the State of California, at least those of us in the Bay Area, protecting us all from the nasty particulate matter coming out of people's fireplaces, among other heroics. Now both of us have retired and we compared notes about finding work. We've both run up against the so far intractable problem of having to be heavily insured to perform consulting work.

I've looked at job listings, albeit half-heartedly. I did find a response to an Elance proposal for blog and website writing this morning. Following up on that inspired me to dig out my external drive backups to search for samples of previous work. What a trip back in time that was.  I far prefer the present.

Thank You Notes

First off, I'd like to thank the Job Seeker Gods for getting Nat her third interview for a possible job. Today. I'm probably more nervous than she is.

I'd also like to thank those same deities for friends and connections that help me see there are organizations out there that are not only less toxic than the misleadingly named Cal/EPA Department of Toxic Substances Control, but that operate on philosophies so much like mine.

Well, Shoot

A day of mild anxiety turned out to be for naught yesterday. I heard back from someone on Elance. He wanted people to write ebooks for, "North American Middle Aged Women." I shot off a proposal starting with the fact that I am one. Maureen later corrected me, saying, "You're a little long in the tooth to be considered a middle-aged woman." Jeez. Can't catch a break.

The dude wanted to Skype with me after 7 p.m., and sent his address to add to my contacts. Okaaaaayyyyy. I haven't used Skype for a long time; in fact, since before I got this laptop. First, though, since some Russkies had figured out how to steal something like a billion user names and passwords, I changed my most important ones. Modern Internet security protocols dictate that we create passwords that no one, short of someone having an eidetic memory, can remember them. I'll worry about that tomorrow (hear deep Southern accent and see on me long, billowy dress blowing in the gale winds of war).

I fired up Skype. Confession time (again):  when I got this laptop, lo unto many years ago, the world and, therefore Toshiba and Best Buy, had "upgraded" to Windows8. Even Bill Gates hates Windows8. I gave up on its Start menu from the beginning, operating instead on my familiar Windows desktop. This old dog grows weary of change.

I found Skype, eventually, and cranked her on up. Nope. "Trouble connecting." Sigh. Light another cigarette and switch from Maureen Blend shakes-inducing coffee to water. An hour passed as I downloaded applications I neither need nor want, having to look up my new unbreakable passwords along the way. I succeeded/won eventually and tested the audio and video, taking care that the background of the video of me wasn't distracting or scary. I added the dude's address, which meant that Skype sent him the request. I reset all of my sleep and shutdown so they wouldn't interfere with the transmission. Congratulating myself, I waited.

And waited. No reply to my request to add the dude to my contacts list, no response to my reply, and, ultimately, no Skype contact. Well, shoot. 

I did, however, spend the intervening hours being productive. With Maureen's assistance, I finished The Great 2014 Guest Bathroom Paint Project.

Corner that was a gaping crack

I also finished patching the major sheet rock cracks in the basement. Despite the job-seeking disappointment, I had a productive day and, therefore, can't complain.

Holy MotherOfGod

That and, "Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!" were my mother's go-to comments when my brother and I misbehaved very badly. Which wasn't very often. Not when she was in visual or auditory range, anyway. She was a fallen Catholic, after all. She left the Church when Pope Paul VI opted to squash all hope of the Church getting on board the contraception bandwagon created by Pope John XXIII's promising direction in the Second Vatican Council by issuing, "ON THE REGULATION OF BIRTH, Humanae Vitae, ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS POPE PAUL VI."

An alternative headline for that encyclical could be, "Pope Paul VI Poo-Poos the Pill." See how easy that was? But nooooo. The OneAndOnlyHolyRomanApostolicCatholicChurch 

is the mother of all bureaucracies. It didn't invent acronyms but I'm quite sure that that it gave rise to the need. 

In fact, I posit that government created acronyms and a dizzying array at that. Logically, that means that government is the daughter of all bureaucracies. The Internet, IMHO (LOL) is its niece in that respect.

And all this has what to do with job hunting? From the Internet, we got the magic of Facebook, reconnecting us to so many friends of times long ago. One in particular, with whom I served as a Cold Warrior in the late 70s, has encouraged me to pursue seeking a job in federal service so that I could acquire the requisite service years to receive a pension. I resigned my Air Force commission after nine years.

No, I wasn't a pilot. I was a Public Affairs Officer (PAO), a DINFOS Trained Killer, here pictured in a borrowed flight suit sitting on the steps of a hangar queen B-52 on the Boeing Wichita tarmac. I served mostly at intercontinental ballistic missile bases. One particularly zany numbered air force commander decided that all of his PAOs needed to experience going on a B-52 low-level bombing training mission. I squealed, I begged, I said I'd do multiple tours in an underground launch control center in god-knows-where Kansas, but to no avail. I had to go to Enid, Okla., of all the god forsaken places, for a flight orientation course featuring being shot up a rail in an ejection seat trainer (even though my means of emergency egress was to follow the navigator through a hole in the belly of the plane), and experience both hypoxia and sudden decompression in an altitude chamber. 

Fun times. But not as much as the pre-dawn takeoff in an actual B-52 to fly at 500 miles-per-hour, 500 feet off the ground, over the hot expanse of Texas with the big old wings catching every updraft. I can't remember if I threw up or just wanted desperately to do so. Per the general's direction, I wrote a piece for our base newspaper.

Today, my Facebook friend sent me a link to a job in the San Francisco office of the USDA, listed in USAJOBS.gov. I loved being a PAO and this job looked fun, even if across a bridge, so I decided to apply.

That's where the Holy MotherOfGod part comes in. Just creating an account was an hour-long nightmare of successfully entering the same convoluted password twice and failing to find all of the hidden required fields. It wanted dates of my Air Force service but would only show a calendar that had all the months of 2014.

Still practicing, "Excellence in all we do," one of the three core values of being an Air Force officers ("Integrity First," and "Service Before Self" being the others), I persevered and achieve mastery over the over-designed headache of both USAJOBS.gov and the agency's application page. 

You have to really want it to apply for federal work online. I suppose, given the unmitigated fiasco of signing up for Obamacare, I shouldn't have been surprised.

Cold Foggy Sunday

We're not going to let that stop us, though! Us being me. 

I'm not great at reading directions before I dive into something. Or testing the water, for that matter. On an EPA-paid trip to Hawaii to facilitate and lecture that state's environmental protection agency employees on risk communication, I found myself at the beach with other instructors. My favorite co-instructor, now owner of San Francisco's Pet Camp, and I decide to try out snorkeling. I donned the mask and snorkel, then dove in to the chest high water. Arising coughing up water, I turned to see Virginia, carefully submerging only her face to take measure of the activity and plan her approach to it. Another instructor, observing from the beach, opined that this one simple act spoke tomes about our respective personalities. She didn't say, "... spoke tomes...." She's an engineer, you see, so whatever she actually said was totally literal.

I've been getting email alerts from the freelancing website Elance. I submitted a couple of proposals, having no idea what I was doing. Yesterday, I took the time to go through the tutorial. Interesting and informative, and left me feeling like a very small fish in a very large pond. Enough of that! Followed by meditation/nap outside.

Despite the dankness of the morning, I performed the ritual of going through job listings that had come through email. I found a couple that I've tabbed to get back to later today or, more likely, tomorrow. Painting the bathroom looms large on today's agenda.

Niece Nat informed me that she applied for a couple of jobs in Oregon this week. I'm glad for her. As you can tell, her Tempe, Ariz., experience is less than satisfying. She also made a "zonie" friend with whom she was hanging out watching an awful documentary about eels. "Zonie" as in Arizona inhabitant, although Nat noted, "But he's not a native, praise be." 

Loved that kid since the very beginning.