Wind

The wind has been the story lately.  The other day there was a wind gust of 71mph in Oklahoma.  I don't remember the town though.  Our average wind speeds have been in the 20's and 30's.  All the plants are unhappy.  Even the hardy native ones.

When my plants go out now they go on the front porch to stay out of most of the wind.  They came inside the other night when it got down to 34 and I'm going to put them back out as soon as it warms up some more.  It's almost 60 now and they could technically go out but I was cold when I went out so I'm going to wait.

Work has been stressful.  The actual work part is fine but I'm having trouble understanding what my new supervisor wants from me.  He seems to want me to operate in a way that is opposite from what the owners have aways wanted.  He wants me to ignore everything that is not currently in bindery.  But I have saved countless jobs from going out wrong because I pay attention to the whole shop.  And I have been thanked repeatedly for doing that.  The owners have specifically told me to take more initiative but the new supervisor wants me to not take initiative at all.  He doesn't want me to think for myself (it seems).  Basically what he's said is he wants me to do my job and that's it.  I can take initiative, depending on if my thinking is correct or if it's a good idea.  He doesn't want me to plan ahead for jobs or for upcoming events.  The most difficult thing is that he gets really mad when I either do things a different way than he would and then defend myself or if I question something that he's doing (because I've been here and I know that it's not going to work his way).  When I try to communicate to him about it he doesn't understand what my problem is because I do good work.  I KNOW I do good work.  That isn't the problem.  It's all the stuff that happens that isn't actually a job.  I'm not really sure what to do.  I have a hard time talking to anyone about it because I start crying.  I only cry when I'm frustrated.  I'm really frustrated right now.

Also, the flower beds at work have me frustrated.  The owner told me to buy plants and make it look good but he didn't mention to the lady who is technically in charge that he told me that.  And then he kept saying I should do what I wanted and he doesn't have any preferences but then it turns out that he had strong preferences about lots of things and now I have to take stuff back to the nursery because he refused to tell me he didn't like it!!  No communication at all.  I'm going to have to let L (lady in charge) know that either I need clear guidelines or I'm not going to mess with the beds any more.  And then when the lawn guys mulched they pulled out some of my plants.  RRrrrrrrrrrr...

So lets concentrate on home, shall we!

Yesterday we were productive.  We tacked up the ugly TV cable outside our house, cleaned the garage for 30 minutes and got a nice big corner done, and cleaned up debris on the side of the house.  I also removed a couple of wasp and mud daubber nests from the eaves, cleaned the litterboxes and the fish, moved the forsythia and put a yew in its place, potted up plants to take to the Spring Fling next weekend.  I even discovered that I hadn't gotten the lid to the snake tank closed all the way and now Garak is MIA.  I searched all over and found no evidence of poo or remains.  I looked at Tuvok's piles in the back yard and found no bones in them.  I did find a suspicious tunnel in the front flowerbed.  It could be him or a toad.  I disrupted a toad in the adjacent bed yesterday so it could be his house.  I'm a little upset with myself about this.  I do know better.  The good thing is that snakes are hardy and resourceful creatures and he's probably ridding our house of mice.  I think we'll probably run across him one of these days.

Today we have errands to run.  WalMart, PetsMart, CVS, etc.  I need to make banana bread and peanut butter cookies.  I think I might take pictures of the yard today if the wind cooperates enough.  I haven't given you guys a virtual tour in a while.   Oh!  And I need to make door prizes for the Fling.  I am really excited about it!  I'm dragging DH along this year.  He's not real thrilled about it but I know he's going to have fun.  Several of the other DH's are just the kind of guys that he enjoys talking to.  I still don't know what food I'm going to bring...

I discovered another spider egg sac while I was removing unwanted nests from the house.  The folks on Garden Web seem convinced that it's the same species as the sac in my kitchen window.  Argiope aurantia, yellow garden spider or golden orb weaver in other regions.  But the two sacs have fundamental differences that really make me feel like they are from two different species.

Argiope aurantia

ID TBD

I'm going to submit them to What's That Bug.com and see if they know.  I'll probably have to wait a while for my answer and that's ok.  They're busy.  It isn't impotant that I know right now, but I do need to know eventually.  Just because it is something I don't know and I don't like knowing that there's something I don't know.  Like a bit of information I don't know.  Skills and entire subjects are one thing, but a bit of information to make my world picture clearer is important to me.

You know, when I was a kid I thought that by the time you were an adult, you had yourself figured out and that your personality was pretty much set at that point.  I thought that since the body stopped growing and changing (more or less), that the mind did too.  But I think that my mind has evolved more as an adult than it ever did as a child.  My "who I am" has changed significantly over the last decade.  Many things are still the same but some very fundamental traits have shifted.  I'm really starting to understand life as a journey of knowledge and change.  I'm learning more about myself and I'm discovering the power to improve upon who I used to be.  I still remember the time of my life when I discovered that adults were not perfect.  I always thought that by the time you were a full fledged grownup, you knew enough to not make any mistakes.  But around 18-19 years old, my little world started falling apart.  Grownups don't have all the answers.  They screw up.  They make bad decisions.  They have flaws.  It took a few years to come to terms with that realization.  Then I had to discover that a person can be flawed but still be worthy of love and respect.  You don't have to be good at every part of life to be worthwhile.  You can have flaws that make you inept in some areas but you are really great at other areas and that's where community comes in.  Everyone together creates a whole.  I'm still trying to figure out what flaws I need to try and fix and what flaws I can just let be.  No one gets to be perfect.  In what ways am I content to be less than perfect?  What people around me fill in my gaps?  How do I fill in the gaps of my friends, family, and coworkers?  The gaps that still remain in me after others fill in with their strengths are the ones I need to work on the most/first.

So that was an interesting thing that came out of my brain...  I have not had those particular thoughts before. 


Too much thought.  Time for a kitty!



Lillibutt's nose



Houseplants and Tuvok