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!

Hello 2019!

Greetings!

As expected, when the Christmas and New Years holidays arrived they flew past in a blur of happiness and indulgence.  I can hardly tell you where the first two weeks of January has gone, but my house is still stuck in December.  All the holiday decorations are still up.  I had thought to start the de-Christmasification last weekend, but Leif cut his hand up pretty good, he needed six or seven stitches, and spent the weekend at my place and it was too hard to resist sitting like a slug watching movies and YouTube videos all weekend with him.

But despite the sloth, I am feeling inspired to do a lot of things.  I have many plans in the works.  First, but not least, I am scheduled to finally finish wallpapering the upstairs hall starting this weekend.  And, there’s a 15% off sale at my home improvement store of choice to stock up on any supplies I need, so the Universe is giving me the thumbs up to get off my ass and get the ball rolling.  It will get the same treatment I gave the living room last May, however, a new paint color will be applied.  That green-grey never, ever pleased me.

I hope once that is done I will move on to a few other home improvement projects.  I don’t know why it has been such a hurdle to get things moving on some of the stuff I’ve been wanting to do, especially considering I have most of the supplies already on hand.  But, in a way, once the biggest projects wrapped up and the house actually started to feel like home, I have just had this undeniable urge to enjoy and relax and be without always doing.

Anyway.  I am still with the Mouse Lab.  I still don’t like it much.  I still am working on borrowed time.  Meaning, I still don’t know if I will be employed in the Mouse Lab much past May/June, whether I like working in the Mouse Lab or not.  If the bosslady gets a new grant by then, I’m told I will be kept on and given my long over due raise.  If no new grants are awarded by then, I could very well be sent on my merry way.  So, I am trying not to panic while keeping an ear to the ground and an eye on the horizon in hopes I will find a new science-y job that doesn’t require Mouse Work.  As I really don’t want to be in this particular field of science anymore, whether I’m let go or my position is re-funded almost feels irrelevant to me.  In fact, I’d almost be glad if it wasn’t.  Almost.  As one can imagine it would be considerably better to find a new job sooner rather than later in any case.  Unfortunately, good paying science-y jobs seem about as easy to find as a unicorn and about as easy to catch as a greased pig.

In the meanwhile I am still trying to figure out grad school.  That has been a huge disappointment, as trying to figure out how to pay for it without it taking an impossibly long time to complete or going broke returning full time to get my degree “in a hurry” continues to leave me stymied.  Stymied, for sure but not so much as to give up entirely.  I’m thinking of trying some other programs or going in other directions which offer better financial aid packages.  Just to have options.  And, I suppose if I get laid off from Mouse Lab and I have yet to find the illusive Unicorn Lab or my greased pig catching skills fail me, going back to school full time might be better than being unemployed.  After all, it’s one more option….

Finally, the Spud is supposedly going to come home for High School next fall.  We shall see how this plays out.  I am in the midst of negotiations with how to transport her stuff, what stuff to transport (really she has a full bedroom of stuff already so all she really needs is her clothes), and where to enroll her.  The local public school or a charter school.  Which ever the case, I’m afraid she’s going to have to start growing up quickly.  I don’t have a partner to be home to make sure she’s getting off to the bus on time.  If she misses the bus, I can’t just leave work and go home and get her.  I really hope she’s going to be up to the challenge.  We shall see.

So, there’s a lot of balls in the air in these parts, but despite it all I am currently feeling fairly hopeful 2019 will be a good year.

Hope 2019 is treating you all well!

 

Bit on the ass by the cold, dark side of practicality

First the apology.  This is where I bitch about my life.  I figure I haven’t’ done that much lately, so you might have forgotten who the real Janie Jones is.

I really don’t want to go to work today.  I’d much rather stay home and make cheesecake or paint my living room.

Instead I have to go give diabetic drugs to mice and take photos of their nests.  Which, I admit, is better than the days when I have to overdose them on morphine and poke them in their feet, or harvest their organs.  But, in any event, it’s not at all the kind of thing one gets a spring in their step over.

I knew there was a reason I spent 5 years of my life and an obscene amount of money on going to college to get a science degree: to still not like to get up and go to work while only barely make enough to live on.

The other day I was watching Flea Market Flip on Hulu.  I watched someone spend $825 on an old wrought iron sewing machine stand painted orange and turned into a table with 4 rickety-ass looking orange chairs.  Who makes this kind of money where they can buy over-priced shit like this and not bat an eye?  What do they do for a living?  Seriously, I need to know what kind of soul crushing job I need to get so I can have that kind of disposable cash.  I mean, I already have a soul crushing job, I at least could get paid stupid amounts of money if I’m going to feel miserable every day anyway.

Let’s just say this.  I do understand that animal models are the most significant and accurate way to test some stuff that will truly better our medical knowledge and I do like having drugs and medical procedures that are vastly improved this past few decades.  However, as hypocritical as it may sound, I personally did not want to be the person in the trenches.  So while logically I accept the dark necessity, I am not handling it well emotionally.

Add to that the frustration of poor health and getting up every day to go to work is a challenge.

Add to that the challenge of knowing that I can’t just quit because decent paying jobs are very hard to come by, and as morally and emotionally wearing as my job is, I have no where else to go that will be enough to pay my bills.  One wants to be grateful for what one has, but damn, sometimes it’s tough.

I have been thinking a lot about getting my master’s degree so hopefully I can get out of the mouse lab.  But, my original plan hit a financial snag.  If I don’t come up with a new way to fund my degree I don’t know if I will be able to make a go of it.  What ever I do, I have to be very careful not to sink more money I don’t have into another degree that might end me up no better than I am now.

I kinda hate to be that person that says I told you so, but this is exactly the reason why I didn’t do traditional college when I was a traditional college age person.  High risk and low reward.  At least for people like me, college doesn’t pay.  I’m smart enough to aspire but not cleverly genius or curiously driven enough to really excel.

And you know what really sucks?  I finally am in a home I like and living in a town I like and have good friends.  But 5/7ths of my week is becoming so miserable I can’t enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Dammit.  I better get my ass moving or I’ll be late.

 

 

 

 

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

I like fortune cookies, with or without the fortune.

For New Years Leif and I got together with some friends and had a stir-fry themed meal.  Leif makes some rockin’ Chinese, I tell you what.  He does it all: all manner of stir-fries, egg rolls, miso soup (which is technically Japanese I guess), egg-drop soup, hot and sour soup (which I don’t like, but I have on good authority from friends that he does quite well), even spring rolls.  One thing he doesn’t do is fortune cookies.  So I buy a box of them at the grocery store, ’cause you gotta have fortune cookies when you eat Chinese.

Anyway, I still had several in the cupboard, and as I like them just for eating regardless, I’ve been tossing the leftovers in my lunchbox from time to time.

Today’s fortune said:  Good news will come to you by mail.

And what do you think?  I received my acceptance letter to grad school today.

Hmm.  A fortune cookie fortune that could actually be considered accurate.

To bad it wasn’t:  You will receive a large and unexpected windfall of cash today.  I might have been accepted to grad school, but I have no idea how I will make this work.

 

 

Tuesday Titters: Molecular Biology is the thing this semester

Why are molecular biologists fashionable? They wear designer genes.

*Sigh*

Winter break is officially over.  Spring semester begins today.

I don’t wanna go.

I only just started to feel human again.

But, Leif sent me this:

So at least now I have a smile on my face.

Do you ever wonder?

So I have a class this spring where I have to read some historical fiction novels about epidemics. To hopefully ease into the spring semester, I read one of the books already. It is “Nemesis” by Philip Roth.

As literature goes, it was okay. Not great, but okay. I liked the first half pretty well, but then the author does something with the main character I did not particularly like. Whatever. It was a short book and read quickly.

What did stand out though was that throughout the novel, which is set in during WWII, the characters refer to Frigidaires. Not refrigerators, but Frigidaires. Now, where I come from we pronounce Frigidaire as fridge-id-air. However, though I am familiar with the brand, I don’t recall ever actually seeing a Frigidaire brand refrigerator in anyone’s home before. Weird? Yeah, probably.

I have often wondered why where I grew up people called refrigerators “fridges” despite the fact that it’s not really short for refrigerator. For as long as I can remember I would try to phonetically spell refrigerator as refridgerator even though there’s no “d” in refrigerator. Although I know this now, I still sometimes try to spell it that way. But, since reading this book I wonder if the slang “fridge” didn’t come from a bastardization of Frigidaire instead of refrigerator.

So, are you all wondering why the H-E double hockey sticks I am babbling on about this?

Good question.

I have no good answer. I’ve just been thinking about it.