Work retail or any other customer service-oriented job. You’ll become a cynical bastard too.

You must take the A train
To go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem

If you miss the A train
You’ll find you missed the quickest way to Harlem

Hurry, get on, now it’s coming
Listen to those rails a-humming

All aboard, get on the A train
Soon you will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem
—Billy Strayhorn

(more…)

In regard to this post…

Preston woman recovers after I-68 accident

A Bruceton Mills woman involved in a rollover accident along Interstate 68 earlier this week is recovering in Ruby Hospital Memorial, a Ruby spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Linda Louise Adams, 57, was transported to Ruby by medical helicopter Tuesday evening after she lost control of her four-door Nissan Sentra.

Family members requested that Adams’ medical condition not be released to the public.

Adams’ family members said Wednesday that Adams was traveling east toward Bruceton Mills when the accident occurred.

Deputy Craig Ruscello said witnesses told him that after Adams crossed the eastbound lanes, her car flipped several times and landed roof up in the median facing the eastbound lanes.

Ruscello said he does not believe Adams was speeding.

“There doesn’t appear to be any type of negligence at this point,” Ruscello said Wednesday. “I’m waiting to talk to her until I make any (definite) conclusions.”

I like to watch people. I also like to listen to public conversations (we call this conversation paratrooping). Both together often give me little bits of strangers lives—I sometimes wonder how the people I’m watching got where they did, and wonder how they are going to end up. I think it’s related to my love of short stories—I get a peek into someone’s life, never to see or hear about them again. I find it absolutely fascinating.

Sometimes, however, I come across a slice of life, and wish I could know how things turned out. This evening was like that.

We were walking through Sears when I saw her. Her hair a little too dark, and a little too long, an odd contrast to her long denim skirt and button-up shirt. I half expected to see a kerchief. Second I noticed her face. It wasn’t precisely a look of panic, but she definitely looked frantic, desperately scanning the aisles, looking for someone. She was walking very quickly, that walk/run that you do when you’re in a hurry in public, and then she did that soft yell at a pre-teen boy wandering in the men’s department. She called to him to find his sister, and when he went over to her, they spoke quickly and quietly together. She called out to him as he dashed off, to find his sister, and not to say anything at all to his grandmother.

My first thought was that they’d lost his baby sister—the mother looked like she might have a pre-teen son as well as a toddler, but then the boy found his sister, who couldn’t have been much more than a year or two younger than he was. She was in the direction we were walking, and I continued to watch was we walked towards the exit. I overheard bits of what he was saying to his sister, “…terrible accident…they life-flighted her…whatever you do, don’t tell Grandma.” And then they were off, dashing towards the exit after their mother.

And I’ll probably never know what happened, or how things turn out. They were just random strangers, whose lives may have been turned inside out in one quick moment at the mall.

All I can do is finish their story for myself, giving it a happy ending, and hoping that their story turns out to be the same story I wrote in my head.

ADDENDUM the First: This may be part of that story.

You can’t even believe how much I hate Microsoft.

I have some data that I want to sort by date, so I copy the data into Excel, run the sort, and then discover that Excel has put the column in alphabetical order.

No good.

So I spent an hour playing with the formatting in Excel and Word, trying different varations of Paste Special. Nothing. Only a handful of dates will format as ‘date’ the rest remain formatted as text. Just as I’m about to (loudly) lose my mind, I realize that all the data that formatted correctly has something in common: all those dates are after 1900.

Apparently Excel doesn’t recognize dates before 1900.

How STUPID is THAT? I mean REALLY? HOW FROGGING STUPID IS THAT?

So I had to put my data back into Word, and run the sort there, because WORD recognizes dates before 1900.

Grrr……

ADDENDUM the First: This is what I was trying to do.

How to fold a t-shirt
(via Making Light)

The 20-year wait is over. America has its new Mary Lou, and her name is Carly Patterson.

Twenty years? What do you mean twenty years? It can’t have been twenty years! I clearly remember Mary Lou! (Okay, I’m from West (by God) Virginia. We’re required to remember Mary Lou.) How can it be twenty years already? That makes me feel… old!

Bah!

Although the rest of the University starts next week, the medical students started back Monday. As did the incoming first year students, so there are lots of (terribly young looking) students wandering around in suits.

I was, however, rather disturbed to come across a young woman wearing a ncie suit, and…

Flip flops!

Good GRIEF! What on earth? And this person wants to be a DOCTOR?

Holy cow.

4) Use caffiene responsibly. The people who say “Do without it” probably have the bills in their wallet organized by serial number and allot precise minutes of their day to use the bathroom. They are madmen. Avoid them.

Ha! He’s obviously never been around ME after a cup of coffee!

(evil laughter)

I find nothing wrong with caffeine. Not at all! However this is the second workplace where I have been banned by my coworkers from any caffeine intake. At least if I’m going to remain at work.

They’re just jealous, I’m sure.

I neglected to mention last week that I received an e-mail from my aunt which included pictures of my cousin Ben. They met up somewhere in Europe for a week or so to visit.

For those who don’t know, my cousin Ben is in the Peace Corps, and has spent the past two years since he graduated from college in Kyrgyzstan (Yeah, it’s been two years and I still hesitate over the spelling of Kyrgyzstan). He’ll be coming home this winter, at which point, I’m not quite sure what he’s going to be doing.

I was disturbed to learn that Ben had been mugged on 4 July, although I have to be honest, I wasn’t particularly surprised. Kyrgyzstan is as much Asian as Russian, and I figure that a six-foot something blonde really sticks out. He wasn’t seriously hurt, although he had a black eye, and was still pretty sore by the time they saw him, but was otherwise good.

I’m very curious as to what he’ll be doing when he returns. He’d talked about going to graduate school, but I can also see him signing up for another tour of duty. In his most recent pictures–despite the black eye–he looks like a young college professor, which is what I suspect he will end up being. Teaching is, I think, in our blood–both side of the family for both of us–and if he’s even a little bit like his father, I know he’ll make an excellent professor/teacher.

As I said, I’m curious to see what he actually does, though it also wouldn’t surprise me if he ended up becoming a priest. Apparently he and my cousins ended up with the faith that I lost.

But I can’t wait for him to come back, to actually be able to talk to him. Since he graduated high school I’ve barely seen him, except at large family gatherings, so it’s sometimes a shock to realize he’s no longer my kid cousin who wandered around the farm naked. I’m pretty sure I’ll like the grown-up just as well if not better.

The other day when I was walking past some classrooms, I heard a student giving an end of the semester presentation. If you’ve gone to school in the past several years, you know precisely the kind of presentation it was: PowerPoint, loaded with statistics and numbers, given in a monotone, and probably thrown together the day before.

It made me wonder: why don’t students actually think before creating presentations. They give presentations that are simply a compilation of statistics and dry facts, guaranteed to put their audience to sleep within a few minutes.

Yet the students who create such dust dry presentations seem to be the students most likely to complain about the teacher, and how boring the class is. I don’t think it’s hypocrisy, because I’m pretty sure that they don’t even realize the contradiction, though about five seconds into the presentation one begins to wish they would.

I think they’d best fix their thermometer. It gets hot in West Virginia, but not THAT hot.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22)

You didn’t sleep well, last night. You won’t sleep well, tonight. In fact, chances are very good that you’ll be tired and cranky for the rest of your life. Try to think of this as an opportunity to grow, spiritually.