Some Good Stuff in the Mix in Everyday Ramblings

It is being a particularly good year out there for wild Queen Anne’s lace. I have never seen it so abundant here before. I believe it has something to do with the composition of the soil.

This week I managed to finish and return a 445 page library book (not counting the footnotes) on the history of yoga. I had renewed the thing 37 times. It took me two and a half years to get through it! One of my students told me last night that our library will let us renew a book 50 times before they ask for it back.

There was an out of print poetry book I let that happen to about 16 years ago. This book was academic and super expensive, otherwise I would have bought a copy.

After the fiasco, and it was a fiasco with the two high level employees interfering on social media with our union negotiations (the financial consultant in my area has not been let go of yet…we don’t think they are going to fire him, they are going to try to ride this out sadly…) the new bargaining team for management (including Mr. On the Spectrum’s boss) went in and basically gave everything to the union that they were still asking for.

What a crazy way to manage an organization. Don’t deal with HR problems, let something truly regrettable happen and then throw a ton of money at it.

I’ll get a tiny boost in salary and no increase in costs for my health insurance and a modest one-time bonus starting in September when we ratify. All this is in the plus column for my last 45 weeks there.

They pretty much have made the concession that I don’t have to have meetings with Motorcycle Man and Mr. On the Spectrum together anymore. Whew.

I called in sick on Monday for the first time in at least 5 years (originally to avoid the team meeting at the steak house downtown) but actually ended up sleeping almost the whole day, basically with a little blip of activity, sleeping over 13 hours.

One of my coworkers reached out to me yesterday to say that Mr. On the Spectrum brought along Nimrod our previous problematic boss to (I guess) provide the social smoothing in the meeting. He does not work in our department anymore so what he was doing at a team meeting…

Yesterday I had to go up to the drop in clinic, as my right hearing aid wasn’t working. It was cool; these young enthusiastic techs would have seriously spent as much time as they had to get my phone and my hearing aids totally talking to each other. They did fix it so I can take calls on them. And gave me a set of filters I can change myself. Why they didn’t give them to me before… But mostly everything is all better.

Last night on the way to class I walked on this one block that has a lot of drug activity. There is a program for youth at risk and a housing complex for underserved people on the block but this part is next to an underground parking lot.

There was a small group of people gathered on the sidewalk and then right in front of me two young people came out, one not wearing any shoes (which is so scary because of stray needles) and as I passed the group I realized a young woman was in convulsions on the ground.

It really upset me. I asked if I could call Clean and Safe and they said no, they had it and that this happened to her a lot. I started to cry. I don’t know why this, why now but her suffering and the fact that these troubled young folks (like I used to be) were doing their best to help her touched me deeply.

It took a fair amount of energy to gather that all in so I could teach a few minutes later.

So it is great that I was teaching building energy in the body this week.

I find these practices fascinating. They don’t appear to be doing anything when one is doing them other than one needs to focus and could be a little uncomfortable but they have this timed-release quality.

I went right into deep sleep both nights after I taught them and then woke up feeling more hopeful and less burdened the next day.

And I am taking a vacation day tomorrow. Yeah for short work weeks!

Last updated August 15, 2019