*looks at callendar*
Sep. 3rd, 2003 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyburgSeptember 18th is approaching - but I could feel it in the air this morning. It's easily ten degrees cooler today than this time last week and everyone at work is complaining about it. *rolls eyes* Yes, I kvetched about it to the four winds and the bitching went away. Good grief. It's ten degrees cooler - go put some long pants on. I can finally wear socks and sneakers again and I am not going to complain about it. Stupid ass sandals - all of them - were useless to walk in. Walk in them, I did - but between the nerve damage and the blisters, I'm glad - GLAD YOU HEAR ME - that it's cool enough to wear sneakers.
Bah.
Summers here in Los Angeles are teh shit but nobody believes me. They all come in the summer, get hot, full of smoggy air - maybe go to the beach - then go home. Spring is our wet season - and make no mistake about it, we can get damn nasty wet weather - but Fall and Winter are the beauty seasons here. We don't get all of the fall colors the rest of the country gets - but we get our share and Winters are normally fairly dry, clear and cool. Somewhere between the high fifties and upper sixties. And you don't have to wait for any of the rides at Disneyland. Summers, you have to endure. But Fall is just about here, and that's a good thing.
Cliff died on the 18th, and it was if the summer went with him. I've noticed it much more keenly as the years pass. Before the 18th, hot as hell - after that, the skies mist over and the temperature drops. October comes and the skies clear to crystal and it's time for apple season, then Halloween and the downhill slide into the holidays.
It's five years this year and past it being a round number, not much different. I remember last year when I took my roses how I stopped by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
azuli and scratch3000's house - but didn't see them. Just dropped off a note -
This year, I need to pick up some cookbooks in Old Pas - maybe I'll try to see his godparents in Sierra Madre. I know I need to take some gardening tools and clean things up, perhaps plant some things. Will have to go see what I can find. The Pioneer Cemetery allows you a great deal of freedom, strangely enough - you could plant a full-sized rosebush, if you'd like.
Cliff's headstone is a granite boulder, unfinished except for the inscription. It's beginning to sink a bit as I didn't want to set it in a concrete slab. I may have to ask to have it reset.
I have a job now that will allow me time to do this. Formerly, my employer wouldn't even give me the day he died off. *laughs* I am so utterly spoiled by my current job, it approaches insanity in comparison. Getting my lunch out of the refrigerator, one of the guys offered some tri-tip - and even cut it for me as my hands were full. Plop - salad with protein. Yummola.
I had Jim drive by the old place on our way to Nisei Festival this year. The old company looks even more like a gulag than I remembered.
But it paid the bills.
It's so different now.
I do work for a living - make no doubt about that, when I'm here, I'm at work and I'm accountable for where I spend my time. I get tired, I get short on time, I can't do what I want and I have to be here when someone needs something. I also carry a Nextel - they can call me in the middle of the night if I messed up something that bad. I've been here at 4:00 AM to fix something I fucked up.
But I don't worry about when someone is going to get tired of me and fire me. That had been hanging over my head from the first day I started with Superba. Job before that was with Cyberg8t (the ISP), and they fired me because I had told them they couldn't spend all the money on company lunches (paraphrased, but they locked out the CFO who wouldn't let the company president and his father squander the petty cash whenever they wanted). I had to go back the next day with a cop to get my final check - and I had to cut it myself because they were too dumb to live. Job before that? My boss got fired but they couldn't find cause to fire me and I needed the insurance too badly to quit. In that company, one of the people who hired me died of cancer and the other one was fired. I went through two company presidents, four CFOs, and three bosses. Every day could have been my last - or the company's last. We didn't even have money after payroll to buy batteries for the smoke detectors. Job before that? It ended the week after Cliff was discharged from the hospital after the first amputation - they had outsourced the department I was working in, promised me a job and they fired me instead. Before that, I was in Switzerland because there was no work in the United States for Cliff. Last Bush Administration.
So if you tell me you work hard, I believe you. If I am not working as hard now as I have had to in past years, don't mistake it for slacking off. I'm no longer working overtime to pay the dues - but that does not mean it couldn't happen again.
I want my house in order. I want my bills paid. I've worked damn hard to see that approaching on the horizon. I worked when my husband stayed home alone because we couldn't afford an aide and I depended on phone calls to make sure he was safe. I left wrist braces in the car so they wouldn't know I'd been hurt taking care of him. I never talked about how sick he was - they would have let me go because of the liability I posed to their health plan. I was a HUGE liability to anyone's health plan.
I want a place to work on creative projects. I don't want to throw things into boxes and think about organizing them later. I'm fucking done with it.
I want more responsibilities when I see that the ones I have are being taken care of.
It's that time of the year to take stock of where I am - where I'm going - and to remember the person who made it possible for me to do them. Complain only when your work is done. Wait for nothing - do it now.
It's getting to be longer and longer ago - which is as it should be.
But I have work to do - and nothing more to say.
Bah.
Summers here in Los Angeles are teh shit but nobody believes me. They all come in the summer, get hot, full of smoggy air - maybe go to the beach - then go home. Spring is our wet season - and make no mistake about it, we can get damn nasty wet weather - but Fall and Winter are the beauty seasons here. We don't get all of the fall colors the rest of the country gets - but we get our share and Winters are normally fairly dry, clear and cool. Somewhere between the high fifties and upper sixties. And you don't have to wait for any of the rides at Disneyland. Summers, you have to endure. But Fall is just about here, and that's a good thing.
Cliff died on the 18th, and it was if the summer went with him. I've noticed it much more keenly as the years pass. Before the 18th, hot as hell - after that, the skies mist over and the temperature drops. October comes and the skies clear to crystal and it's time for apple season, then Halloween and the downhill slide into the holidays.
It's five years this year and past it being a round number, not much different. I remember last year when I took my roses how I stopped by
azuli and scratch3000's house - but didn't see them. Just dropped off a note - This year, I need to pick up some cookbooks in Old Pas - maybe I'll try to see his godparents in Sierra Madre. I know I need to take some gardening tools and clean things up, perhaps plant some things. Will have to go see what I can find. The Pioneer Cemetery allows you a great deal of freedom, strangely enough - you could plant a full-sized rosebush, if you'd like.
Cliff's headstone is a granite boulder, unfinished except for the inscription. It's beginning to sink a bit as I didn't want to set it in a concrete slab. I may have to ask to have it reset.
I have a job now that will allow me time to do this. Formerly, my employer wouldn't even give me the day he died off. *laughs* I am so utterly spoiled by my current job, it approaches insanity in comparison. Getting my lunch out of the refrigerator, one of the guys offered some tri-tip - and even cut it for me as my hands were full. Plop - salad with protein. Yummola.
I had Jim drive by the old place on our way to Nisei Festival this year. The old company looks even more like a gulag than I remembered.
But it paid the bills.
It's so different now.
I do work for a living - make no doubt about that, when I'm here, I'm at work and I'm accountable for where I spend my time. I get tired, I get short on time, I can't do what I want and I have to be here when someone needs something. I also carry a Nextel - they can call me in the middle of the night if I messed up something that bad. I've been here at 4:00 AM to fix something I fucked up.
But I don't worry about when someone is going to get tired of me and fire me. That had been hanging over my head from the first day I started with Superba. Job before that was with Cyberg8t (the ISP), and they fired me because I had told them they couldn't spend all the money on company lunches (paraphrased, but they locked out the CFO who wouldn't let the company president and his father squander the petty cash whenever they wanted). I had to go back the next day with a cop to get my final check - and I had to cut it myself because they were too dumb to live. Job before that? My boss got fired but they couldn't find cause to fire me and I needed the insurance too badly to quit. In that company, one of the people who hired me died of cancer and the other one was fired. I went through two company presidents, four CFOs, and three bosses. Every day could have been my last - or the company's last. We didn't even have money after payroll to buy batteries for the smoke detectors. Job before that? It ended the week after Cliff was discharged from the hospital after the first amputation - they had outsourced the department I was working in, promised me a job and they fired me instead. Before that, I was in Switzerland because there was no work in the United States for Cliff. Last Bush Administration.
So if you tell me you work hard, I believe you. If I am not working as hard now as I have had to in past years, don't mistake it for slacking off. I'm no longer working overtime to pay the dues - but that does not mean it couldn't happen again.
I want my house in order. I want my bills paid. I've worked damn hard to see that approaching on the horizon. I worked when my husband stayed home alone because we couldn't afford an aide and I depended on phone calls to make sure he was safe. I left wrist braces in the car so they wouldn't know I'd been hurt taking care of him. I never talked about how sick he was - they would have let me go because of the liability I posed to their health plan. I was a HUGE liability to anyone's health plan.
I want a place to work on creative projects. I don't want to throw things into boxes and think about organizing them later. I'm fucking done with it.
I want more responsibilities when I see that the ones I have are being taken care of.
It's that time of the year to take stock of where I am - where I'm going - and to remember the person who made it possible for me to do them. Complain only when your work is done. Wait for nothing - do it now.
It's getting to be longer and longer ago - which is as it should be.
But I have work to do - and nothing more to say.
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Seasons
Date: 2003-09-03 06:28 pm (UTC)Your adult life has been full and a beautiful open read, thank you for the view into your trip. I look at the poinent way you describe the changes and the laughing into the storm in spite of everything.
I just had another friend call me up about picking apples at Oak Glen, its suppose to be an early season so try to get out there this month!