Thursday 13

(Link in meme-roll)
Departures

1. Starting with a little one: my best friend left town over the weekend last week. She went to her big brother's wedding. Weddings are fraught quite often. I suspect the wedding was actually the easy part of the weekend in this case.
2. At the end of June, a 22-year employee at the library I nicknamed years ago "Complainer Tech" retired. While I was sorry to see her go because she really can't afford to retire (financially), the past month has been so very heavenly. We have spent the month uncovering 'proof' that she needed to leave.
3. My boss is leaving. THANK GOD. Oops, did I say that? Oh well, the secret's out now. She leaves on the 31st.
4. Our newest professional staff member, who started last September, is leaving. Her last day is tomorrow. I've told her several times this week that I hate her. I don't, of course, but I'm very very sad.
5. Our old (20-years-old old) bed was replaced today by a spankin' new king-size sleep-number bed. Sparky inherited the old mattress and box-springs for now. Now he can take his futon up to college when he goes next month (next month!! omg).
6. When the mattress got moved, the heated mattress pad was jettisoned. It doesn't fit the new bed, but more importantly, there's a short in the wiring which has been worrying me for the past year. I'll get another one for (at least) my side of the bed, but I don't want Sparky to catch fire in bed. [obviously, in my mind, it's perfectly ok for me to catch fire...I'm an idiot]
7. So yeah...Sparky's leaving for his sophomore year of college in a month. New roommate, but just two doors down from the room he was in last year. So, familiar enough for him, and for us.
8. Lots of money has been flying out the door lately too: bed, textbooks, clothes, gifts, health stuff, food. Buy-bye money!
9. Beast has started back on his travel regimen. He was on the road last week Tuesday-Friday night, and the week before for 3-4 days as well. This week, he is wiped out to the point of going to bed early every night. I'm hoping that the new bed helps him sleep more productively. If not, I think I have an agreement from him to see the doctor; this isn't 'normal' tired.
10. I have spent the past couple of months waking up between 1 and 3 virtually every night. There's just a lot of stress, though at the point I'm awake I don't feel particularly stressed. I read, do a crossword, whatever, till I'm tired again, and generally get back to sleep after 45 minutes or sometimes two hours. It's a little like when I was pregnant: I kind of wandered around a lot at night then too. It's peaceful and again I'm learning that I really only need 5 or 6 hours' rest a night to function. But I miss my sleep.
11. I've left Jango after using it almost exclusively for the past 3 years or so for work tunes. I tried to add some specific songs last week and discovered that their new interface won't let you do that. You can add bands, and watch videos of specific songs. But you can't actually add songs. Fine. Buh-bye!! Hello again, Pandora. And now I have even more reason to figure out Spotify.
12. A weird confluence of events over the past 5 months or so means that I have broken my longstanding schedule of baths 3-4 times a week for the past 10 years. I think I've had maybe two long soaks this summer. I need to rethink this, before winter arrives.
13. This week, Sparky's very good friend Jet moved back to the house in which he grew up two states away from us. His parents have finally completed their very lengthy divorce proceedings and mom pretty much couldn't wait to get the hell out of the vicinity of her husband. The whole thing is awful. Saturday, Jet brought his mom's van over for Beast to check out; the brakes seemed off somehow. Yup. His dad had installed one of the drums (I think) wrong, so it was actually unsafe to drive across town much less across country. There was no money to repair it, so Jet's dad did it, after consulting with Beast. Jet brought it back over later Saturday and he did manage to do it right. The truck they rented from Budget arrived without a functional speedometer, Jet's mom didn't have a key for the house in Ohio until they arrived, Jet told me today that his room was turned into the dog pen by the renters, so it's trashed, PLUS there seems to have been a flea problem, AND their electricity was being shut off tonight because mom doesn't have money to have the account switched to her name. They are, essentially, waiting for dad to show up with his maintenance money so they can afford ANYthing! Oh, and Jet's in his senior year of high school, and found out a couple of weeks ago that he has already taken all the classes the high school there offers. So he'll spend his senior year at the local community college taking classes. I just want to DO something. And there's nothing really I can do.