Look out! Here comes SurrenderDorothy -gunning for her shoes!
Off to read 2 chapters of dry, uninteresting stuff–envy me.
Wow, I take a couple of days to fight off a bug that laid me flat out in bed, and you guys add about a thousand pages! Oh well, that’s what I get for being too busy to keep up with what’s really important.
Going back about three pages, as for the job description, lifted nearly verbatim from my resume, I transcribe trials, and depositions for various federal agencies, including several House and Senate committees, Department of Homeland Security, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Merit Systems Protection Board, and U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, as well as a variety of board of directors meetings (e.g. Legal Services Corporation, UNOS) and conferences and panels (e.g. Brookings Institution, National Institutes of Health), plus other odds and ends. Which means I work sitting at home in my PJs. (Seriously, they’re more comfortable than anything else!) It’s not exciting, but it pays well and offers flexibility in my life and schedule that at this point I simply am not willing to give up any more. I plan to never punch someone else’s clock again (as opposed to clocking someone else with a punch, obviously).
Papa Tigs keeps colonels/doctors/colonels-who-are-doctors happy. Well, technically he manages the patient information computer systems for a large military hospital, but in practice it boils down to The Care and Feeding of Tame Colonels. I’ve told him many he should write the book on it; he does a truly masterful job. His coworkers are in awe of his skills in this arena. 
Moving on to the subject of dreams, I had a traumatic dream the other night. See, I had a good friend in high school named John who had the most beautiful goldish-red hair. Even his mother begged him not to cut it, and this was in the late '60s so you can understand how aberrant her behavior was. So anyway, I dreamed I ran across John and was so traumatized, I had to go call my mother (who of course remembers him well), still in my dream, of course to report:
John’s beautiful hair had all turned white! Aaaaaaah! I think I was actually in tears as I woke up. Yes, I’m strange, why do you ask?
I have also dreamed many, many times about one particular house. It’s a beautiful house, and we’re looking at it to buy it. When I wake up, I realize it would probably cost several million dollars, but in my dream it is very vivid. I mean, I know the entire layout of the house now inside and out. The living room, for example, is huge and two stories, with a balcony around all four sides. There’s also a fourth floor loft (like I said, it’s a BIG house) that is to die for charming. I have counted seven bedrooms and five bathrooms in this house. I truly have dreamed about it so many times I honestly am waiting one day to walk into it and freak myself out permanently. Which would be really, to steal boggy ursine’s term, jake!
And now back to real life, boring as it may be.
Jahdra, I’m going to get you for this - I really want those kitty cat shoes! I do not need another pair of shoes. I am going to have to order them, tho. Darn it.
I have cleaned litter boxes, done laundry, glazed some beads and emptied the dishwasher. I have taken the trash cans to the curb for pickup in the morning.
I want kitty cat shoes. I am 45 years old and I want kitty cat shoes.
:adds fuel to the fire: They have slipons, too. 
And a pink & black kitty paw riding crop. I’m sure you need one of those, too. 
Agh! Does he hate AHLTA as much as we do?!
Your job sounds sort of nice by the way. I bet you read some interesting stuff sometimes.
He hates AHLTA far, far more than you ever could. Trust me. His company is still PO’d that they gave the AHLTA contract to someone else, and are less than thrilled with the non-service they get from that company. So I hear curses thrown the AHLTA way at least ten times a day. And I don’t even work there.
My job can occasionally be interesting. Unfortunately, usually the most interesting stuff is stuff that I can’t reveal due to various confidentiality agreements I have to sign. Takes a lot of the fun out of it. But I do sometimes know more than CNN or the Washington Post, and that always makes me happy even if I can’t tell anyone.
I too am surprised by the number of engineers here. What does that say about this bunch, anyway? [insert your favorite engineer joke here]
Did somebody say engineer jokes? You might be an engineer if…
The swelling in my mouth is almost gone. YAY!!! Add in tonight being “My Name Is Earl” and “The Office” night and I’m a happy bear.
Tigs jake is a Rue term. I use it to keep his memory going.
I read it. Where are the jokes? 
That’s my life…
Hey Cool Kids, it seems that you have all been busy!
Ya know, life in Alaska is fabulous and all that with the scenery and food and wildlife, but there are some things about very small town life that just really suck. It crosses cultures, sure, but since a great many of my friends/people I know are both Native and from the villages that is where my distress has been coming from the last 10 days or so. Alcohol is always involved, even though I never accept it as an excuse. First a guy from the village, who was told by the State Troopers to never come near my house, self, or family last winter showed up at my door, drunk, and I had to get all up in his face before I convinced him to get the hell off my property. I had the Trooper come out again, and he issued the guy a Criminal Trespass warning, so if he comes back he will be arrested, but it was very disturbing. Yeah, the guy is a convicted, registered pedophile, he tried to lure my oldest daughter into the woods several times 12 years ago when we were still living in the village, and I told him then that if he ever touched one of my kids I’d cut him open. Last winter when skiffman was out west the guy came to the house at 1:30 am and #3 answered the door before the dogs woke me up. He was drunk, grabbing her arm and kissing it, trying to push his way in. I had him arrested that time, as he was on probation and one condition was that he not drink. Then one of the kid’s cousin’s family moved to one of the villages, just long enough for her convicted, registered pedophile uncle to rape her. (She’s 13, he’s in his 30’s) They have moved back into town, and are taking legal action, which “just isn’t done”, and they are taking a lot of crap from the family to just shut up about it. Which is my problem, I will not shut up about that and Domestic Violence, which is just as prevalent here. It all just makes me sick to my stomach, and I have been dealing with my emotions. Yeah, I have issues personally with both of the above too, and incidents like these tend to bring them to the surface.
And that is why I have been MIA. I began a couple of posts, even began a Pitting, but it just hits too close to the bone and my expressions are best kept in my private journal. Ya know?
More later, I just needed to get the last little bit off my chest, and you are a good bunch to vent to.
Thanks for that, btw!
NC’s getting promoted! Yay! I’m so happy for her, even if that means I get left here all alone with AC. She asked me if I minded, but how could I? She’s a great worker and her main exec transferred cross-country this summer, so she’s wasted in her current position. Also, hopefully, the promotion will include a decent raise and she can quit her other job.
{{{Kai & kai’s family}}} There’s nothing worse than “that doesn’t happen to us, so just shut up already.” It just makes whatever happened 10x worse, IMHO. I hope everything gets resolved to your & your cousin’s family’s satisfaction, kai, and soon.
{{{{kai!}}}}
You’re stronger than I am. Moments after seeing him at the door last year doing that to my teenage daughter, he’d have been bear meat.
Damn.
{{{kai}}}. I hope things work out, and feel free to vent anytime, that’s what we’re here for.
I’m sorry, but I have to ask you to retract that statement. Those are the signs that one is a physicist.
Fun times. I just got done composing the following nastygram to an organization that purports to facilitate overseas study, trying to recruit my ‘daughter’ Kris:
The letter is the absolute truth. I just neglected to tell him that Kris would not have given a flying f*ck to a rolling donut about traveling Europe and seeing the Louvre or Florence, because she was a cat…
How susceptible are bears to poisoning by ingested lead? The guy would have been a human heavy bag before becoming buckshot laden hamburger…
{{{{{kai}}}}}
Vent on, dear. We are all here for you. If you need some private venting, my e-mail is in my profile - and that goes for all of you. It is sometimes amazing to me how close I have come to people I’ve never met, but there it is. I am. You are all my friends and I rejoice when you rejoice and bleed when you bleed.
Jadhra - I sent the shoes page to Mr. SCL with a gentle reminder that I have a birthday coming up. I already get laughed at (and remembered) at hockey games because I carry a small fuzzy pink cat shaped purse. What else can they do to me?
I’m so sorry to hear about your troubles, kai. Stay strong. Hope the guy stays away from now on. And definitely keep venting if you need to.
I’ve had dreams about being in all different places, often with people speaking in the wrong languages, which makes it even more confusing… Stuff like my cousins who speak Spanish and my friends who speak German all in a variation on the house I grew up in, with everyone speaking English. The language and setting varies. Sometimes it’s the house I grew up in but it’s in Mexico or Germany; sometimes it’s Faraway Best Friend’s house (which is really in Germany), but the house is in Mexico. It’s pretty much a mix and match thing meant to confuse the heck out of my sleeping self.
Cute shoes and boots. I’ll take them all.
Hope the time off really helps you heal, Rebo! Make sure you keep us updated.
It is weird, SCL, isn’t it, how you can have all kinds of friends that you’ve never met.
Work was slightly less frustrating today. Might actually be getting closer to where we need to be. And I’m less tired today since I got something like enough sleep last night and might actually get enough tonight.
Yay!
And tomorrow’s Friday, even!
GT
Kai I rarely do this, but hugs to you and my best wishes.
Disclaimer - I knew if I started to write about this it would turn into a book. I am gonna bust this post up, as it is so long. I don’t wanna put a downer on the MMP, but it’s feeling very cathartic to share, and your supportive words are making my heart feel a little less cold.
Thanks guys, I knew that you would be supportive. Believe me, I would enjoy taking several individuals I know out of the population, and I have crab pots in my yard which would serve very nicely as an end to that means.
Last winter I did not wake up during the incident, my daughter managed to get him out of the doorway, shut and locked the door, and didn’t wake me up!!! She just went back to bed, went to school the next day, and told me about it after she came home in the afternoon. I called the Troopers, and one came over. He spoke with my daughter, and he told her that if she had told me at the time it had happened, he would have been able to arrest him then, (because he had been drunk) but couldn’t now. However I knew that he was not “drinking” but “partying”, which can drag on for weeks. I knew where he was partying, as well as the fact that he was not registered at the address he was physically residing in, so I told the Trooper where he could be found, and sure enough, he was still drunk, and off to jail he went. Unfortunately the courthouse had not filed the paperwork on his conditions of probation, so he got out the next day. At that time I asked the Trooper to instill in him the fact that if he came anywhere near my property, person or family he would go to jail, which the Trooper was more than happy to do.
continued…