The beauty of boring

Hello all.

Well, the new blog was a bust.

After keeping it up for a few weeks I realized I had run out of things to say, and it lost its allure.  Besides, I got to thinking, no one really could be interested in such boring posts anyway.  I mean, if I am bored with it how could other people not be?

So, I am back here.  Sort of.  Just wanted everyone to know that all is well.  COVID-19 doesn’t seem to be a huge issue in my corner of the world, so far at least, and my summer has been busy with the normal, boring stuff of life.  Which, is not a complaint.  It is actually a pleasure.

I have a new summer job which I enjoy very much.  I have great co-workers.  It’s work from home with flexible hours for the most part.  I wish it was a permanent thing, but it is only temporary.

I have been continuing to work in tick monitoring and doing some Lyme outreach.  Our group has been asked to make a community outreach video about our work, and the bulk of this task has fallen to me to coordinate.  Parts of that have been fun, but time consuming.  This year I have trained up several undergraduates so we can monitor tick population and activity on a weekly basis, which has given us a much better data set.  Earlier on in July two undergraduates and I also built six tick traps which we plan to use bi-weekly or monthly.  The traps are actually working pretty well, but are a bit of a pain in the butt as you have to buy dry ice for them, and then they need to be carried around to various locations, left for about 18 hours and then they need to be gathered back up and inspected.  Nothing worth doing was ever easy.

I was supposed to be working on writing my thesis, but have been distracted by a great many things (obviously not by compulsive blogging, however) and have made little or, to be honest, no progress on that front.

Now I am anxiously waiting to hear whether COVID-19 will keep schools closed this fall in my neck of the woods and whether I will lose my graduate school funding.  Fingers crossed that life stays boring!!!

The spud has been summering with her dad and step mom.  Apparently they did a little road trip and the spud took horseback riding lessons and finished her basic SCUBA certification.  Yay spud!  She is going to be 16 this December, so learning to drive will likely be next summer’s activity; unless we tackle that during the school year.  While it is a bit scary to think I will have to turn over the car keys, on the other hand, I am greatly looking forward to not having to chauffeur her around to things as much.

Leif turned 50 this July.  We talked about how to celebrate, but in the end we just stayed at home and grilled rib eyes and corn on the cob and ate our weight in watermelon.  I also made a gigantic punch bowl full of potato salad and a cheesecake with Key lime curd  and homemade whip cream topping, which melted because it was stupid hot that day.  I can assure you, however, it tasted quite fine just the same.

Because I have been too lazy to dig out the air conditioner units and put them in the windows, this summer we have melted ourselves through an Aliens movie marathon, all three seasons of Stranger Things and the first two seasons of MI5.  Leif is hot and heavy into Sharpe, but although it is refreshing to see Sean Bean not die, I am take-it-or-leave it.

I planted three variety of tomatoes, a cucumber, celery, kale, Swiss chard and potatoes.  The Swiss chard is kicking butt, but the others are not harvest-able yet.  That said, they are growing well.  I am eagerly awaiting a few dozen tomatoes to finally turn red, and my cucumber is loaded with flowers.  My taste buds are tantalized.

So.  As you can see, nothing terribly exciting going on.  But then again, a normal, boring life does have some of it’s own advantages and comforts.

Hope if you have had an exciting summer it has been for all the best reasons and not due to side effects or direct effects of the pandemic.

Best,

Janie

In case you were wondering

Bloggers came, and we read them and we fell in love with some of them.  We were shocked or outraged or comforted.  We laughed.  We shared.  We felt connected.  Then, bloggers disappeared and it was like the lights went out.  Now the blogosphere feels like a ghost town in an old western, with tumbleweed spambots the only thing rambling through the comments.

Do you ever wonder what happened to them?  Some of them I really miss.  Like dear friends who move away and then never call.  You hope their lives have moved on to bigger, better, happier things.

In case any of you were wondering what happened to Janie Jones, for the most part I think I am moving on to bigger, better, happier things.

For those of you who have followed me over the years I don’t know if you’d really recognize me anymore.  I don’t always recognize myself.

Who am I now?  I don’t exactly know, I have a lot of my journey ahead of me yet, but I do feel like I’ve entered a strange, marvelous new landscape and I feel like this new landscape may be a reflection of a new me.

I think, for the first time I can remember in a really, really long time, I can manage.

I finally got laid off from the mouse lab.  And I was happy about that.  It was a huge relief.  I got offered two graduate assistant jobs so I could go back to get my master’s degree, and I love these jobs.  They pay almost as much as I made in my full time job, and I got two good sized scholarships, so I don’t have to pay for any of my education expenses this first year.  I have a third job working for a friend, I don’t like that job so much, but it almost makes up the gap in my pay from my full time job and I can kind of do it when ever I want.  All-in-all the classes aren’t too stressful, but they are sometimes a challenge  as the new material is very different and less precise than the material I studied as an undergrad.  I think in the end I will do well, and I hope that I will have more employment opportunities when I’m done.  So, it’s seeming pretty good.

The spud is here with me, she’s going to a small charter school for high school that has a heavy focus on the fine arts.  She is apparently loving her ornithology class and is in the school play this fall.  She is doing great with riding the public transportation bus, and has some friends who she coordinates with to take the same bus in the mornings.  She’s a teen now, and sometimes a bit too saucy for her own britches, but that’s to be expected of the age.

So, that’s the new Janie’s Place.  It’s still busy and still a work in progress, but it seems a much happier, manageable mess.

Hope all is well with you, my bloggy buddies!

This and that

Good Monday Morning.

It’s Indian Winter here in the Great White North.  Sorry if that’s not PC.  Just when I was a kid there used to be a thing called Indian Summer every fall when we’d supposedly have a week or so of wonderful summer weather just before winter set in.  The Great White North, I’m realizing, has a similar phenomenon in the spring where we get a spate of lovely summer-esque weather then a huge snow storm dumps some wet gloppy snow right before true summer rolls in.

Yeah, who does these cartoons, I’m finding this style all over Google, but where did they come from? It reminds me of The Oatmeal. They are fun-nee! Oh, and just pretend it says April, not June….

Last week it was in the sixties and sunny almost all week, Friday it even got up to seventy, down right hot if you’re a snow bunny like me.  Shorts made an appearance everywhere.  I even got out my own short pants and summer slip-on shoes.  Today and tomorrow though we could get up to two inches of snow.

But, I am looking forward to going to class today if for one reason only:  I can use my new car door remote!  Yup I’m still jazzed about that.  Yes, yes. Still a dork.

Oh, and I’m also jazzed because I’m down to just one more physics lab, and only three more weeks of my other classes before finals begin.  The end is so close!

It has been a grueling week;

Janie Jones has officially lost her marbles.

I had so much to do last week that I can’t even tell you how I survived.  Besides, that makes for a boring blog post I’m sure.  What you will probably find more interesting is reading about the signs of my marble losing.

So first, I was trying to cook a pork chop on my single burner hot plate.  It’s temperature control is  dodgy.  Well, it wasn’t getting hot, wasn’t getting hot, wasn’t getting hot, then suddenly it was starting to smoke.  So I pulled it off and set it on the wood cutting board, as I needed to cool it down.  I’ve used a wood cutting board as a trivet before, but apparently this time the hot plate meant business, super heating the pan to I’m-done-messing-around-and-only-sort-of-getting-hot-and-am-now-hot-damn-hot, and the pan scorched the wood.  Smelled like a wood burning shop in the basement for the next two days.

Twice I almost poured orange juice in my tea instead of milk, catching myself just in the nick of time.

I thought I forgot to hand in my physics homework, and ran all the way back to the drop box only to realize I had indeed turned it in already.

On several occasions I was completely incapable of forming a simple coherent answer to straight forward questions.  It was almost as if they were speaking pig latin.

And I forgot completely to bring my teaching manual to the extra session of Cell Biology Lab I had to supervise.  Way to look like you belong in charge, Janie.

I will spare you any more details as they become less becoming as I recall them.  Suffice to say, I survived somehow.

I actually had a couple bright spots.  I got a 96% on my seminar on Lyme disease vaccine research, and an 84% on my last physics test.  An 84%!  Me.  I couldn’t believe it.

Surviving the week and getting good news meant I wanted to celebrate.  I wanted to take some time off, kick back and chill.  But that wasn’t going to happen.  I had to work the tour guide gig yesterday.  Afterward, though, Leif came to town after one of his shows.  He only stayed for a little while, as he had to get back to the dogginses, who had been left at the farm all day and both of us were totally exhausted, but it was so nice to have a meal together and sit for a half hour and do nothing but drink tea, and talk and be together.  Almost as if I had a life.

College can be really lonely, you know?  You see people and talk to people all day, but you don’t really get that human contact factor.  And spending too much time in society with out having any society is tough.  It wears on your nerves.  I’m sure the solitude is messing with my marbles, too.

Anyway.

It’s a beautiful 60 degrees today.  I want to go walk down by the lake with Leif and the pupkisses.  But they are out at the farm, and I have a microbiology paper to write.  So, the grueling week isn’t quite over yet.  It’s back to the ol’ homework grind.

And as for WordPress, I still haven’t figured out the new system, but I did discover by accident that sometimes you can back-door your way into the classic format.  Which is enabling me to type this post in my comfort zone of normalcy.  We’ll see how long this lasts….