Tuesday, September 25, 2007

almost friends for all these years

today i had one of the most delightful, hilarious, surreal experiences in quite some time: lunch with my "new employee" buddy. part of the orientation at santa clara university is being paired up at the end of orientation with an employee buddy who takes you out to lunch (on scu's dime, too! how cool is that?! i love scu!) my buddy, vid, and i couldn't meet for lunch that day as he had a meeting and i had new faculty orientation, so we finally went to lunch today. in the meantime we'd met, since vid's office (he's the assistant director of the study abroad program) and mine are across the way from one another at cesar chavez commons. cesar chavez commons are trailers, a and b, with a big deck between them, and while i like it just fine i hope that maybe some day a cool building can be built there. maybe it's just me, but i'd like cesar to have something more, well, impressive, than two trailers and a deck. but who knows? he was by all accounts a humble man, so maybe he'd like it the way it is.

but i digress...

so vid and i go out to lunch and it starts. i live in santa cruz, and guess what? he lives on this side of the mountain, too. he mentions his wedding anniversary is coming up, and i mention mine is too. damn, but you kids are sharp as tacks! we have the same wedding anniversary; he and his wife have a year on me and drew. i ask about what he went to school for his masters for and he mentions he was a jesuit for about ten years and went to the jesuit school of theology at berkeley (jstb), which is a graduate theological union school just like my school, starr king school for the ministry. yep, right again - he was there the same time i was! in addition to the fact that we may have even had a class together without knowing it, i found out that the nickname at jstb for starr king is starfish, which i thought was pretty hilarious. i think my other starr king pals will think so, too. and last but not least, we both went to the newman center - holy spirit chapel in berkeley. heck, probably the 10 pm mass, too. talk about a small world that it took us only ten years to finally meet in. all in all it was a really fun, hilarious lunch with tons of (as my 18 and dateless friends used to say) simple chronic hilarity. and my hat is off to whoever it is in hr who did my background check, because dang! they were mighty thorough! :)

i also had a very cool evening, but it's after eleven and i have to get up early, so you'll have to wait for the next installment. try not to let the suspense get to you. ;)

Friday, September 21, 2007

week four in the bag

hidy ho, boys & girls! well, i've just finished my fourth week here at my new job and this is the first day i've felt in any way competent - thank God!!!! i was wondering if that was ever going to happen. i am sure i'll still have those days, but it's nice to feel like there's some light at the end of the tunnel.

i am trying to read a book on canine acupressure, so as to help the little dog in her advancing years. she gets a little stiff after going to the beach and running around, not all the time, but sometimes. we started her on glucosamine, so hopefully that will help. i guess i'll start looking for a doggie chiropractor. yes, i admit it, i am the personification of the childless by choice yuppie who dotes on her pets as if they were human. in point of fact, zinger is better company than a lot of humans i know, so of course i am going to take her to see a chiropractor if i can. she loves the running around like a crazy dog at the beach, even if she ends up stiff afterwards.

anyway, that's all for now. :)

Monday, September 17, 2007

sigh.......

is there anything more depressing than writing a sympathy card? well, yeah, of course there is, i suppose. kind of a self-absorbed question, if i think about it.

a friend back home, karen, lost her husband, joe, last week. he had leukemia and was all of 33. the second 33-year-old man i know who's died way before he should have, in my humble opinion, and it's that, and having to acknowledge such a monumental loss for karen and their families and everyone who loves them that makes the card writing such a bummer. necessary, of course, and often overlooked in our ever-declining society of manners and civility, but a bummer none the less (but my husband is hale and hearty, so what the hell am i complaining about?) i can't imagine what i'd do if drew went and died on me, which is another part of what makes joe's death hit so close to home. our mutual prohibition against dying and leaving the other high and dry just isn't providing the comic reassurance it usually does. a silly rule, and completely unenforceable at that, but we like it.

take a minute out of your busy day and let the people you love know it. it's good for the immune system, it's good for the soul, and life is just too unpredictable not to. :)

Friday, September 14, 2007

be careful what you wish for

my husband, drew, basically rocks my world but has this annoying habit of telling me periodically for the last two years or so that i really ought to blog. i've resisted thus far, but what can i say? it's a friday night and i'm still at work at 8:26 p.m., not because i'm working, but because drew had something blow up at work and he's still working. i'm hoping he'll finish up soon because if boredom has produced the long sought after blog, who knows what else will happen?

that said, i am thinking this might be fun. and so much happening, too. i just started a new job, at santa clara university, and i really, really love it. just finished my third week so it's early, true, but this place had a good vibe since the interview that just hasn't gone away... it's gotten stronger, if anything.

i think i'm getting used to used to living in the bay area again (san francisco bay area, fyi). northern california is a strange and wonderful place... so much that's great about it, so much that's just soooooo californian, and then the stuff that sucks. like traffic. and real estate prices. but that's such well covered ground by everyone in the world that i refuse to go there; it is what it is. the thing is, when i moved back to pittsburgh, my hometown, in 2002, all i could think about was moving back. by the time thinking about moving back out here rolled around, there was nowhere else i wanted to be than exactly where i was. my family was there, my friends were wonderful and many, i loved so much about the down-to-earth sensibility of the 'burgh. true, i was stuck in my old job, which i affectionately refer to as "the viper pit", but, i knew that couldn't last forever. alas, my one true love is literally allergic to my little slice of heaven and it became painfully obvious that if his health was going to improve we had to get out of whatever it was in pittsburgh's pollution that was making him sick, to pollution that while not much better in terms of particulate matter in the air, was more agreeable to his system.

and now it's sunday, and i'm finishing this inaugural post. not a good sign, perhaps, but, there you are. more later...