My Grandma :)

There's an article today about my grandmother in the Albany Times Union (which is a large daily paper that, despite its name, serves Albany, Troy, and Schenectady, and is read as far away as Saratoga. It's the largest of the local papers, and is quite an excellent paper).

Large Body Of Work Is Testament To Decades Of Research On Shakers.

My grandmother has been researching the Shakers since she was a child. The Shakers were a communistic celibate religious society in the United States, known primarily today for their furniture but once upon a time they revolutionized a number of industries. They rigidly separated the sexes, but men and women were equal. They took joy in working hard and dedicating their hearts to God, and their overarching philosophy was one of simplicity. They had weekly religious meetings wherein they engaged in ecstatic dancing and had visions from God. That song Copeland put into that composition of his, I forget what-- Tis a gift to be simple / 'tis a gift to be free / 'tis a gift to come down where we ought to be-- is a Shaker song, composed after an ecstatic vision of God.

Really, they were no wackier than many religious communities in the United States in the nineteenth century, and they were remarkably stable and productive. They died out in the 20th century (there are still a few elderly Shakeresses hanging on, but few indeed now) only because their celibacy meant they did not reproduce, and their role as an orphanage was supplanted by state-run facilities and systems.

Grandma's father owned a general store in Watervliet quite close to the Watervliet community of Shakers, which was the first community established in the U.S. after all the Shakers fled persecution in England in 1776. Mother Ann Lee herself, the woman who founded Shakerism, came to Watervliet and lived there until she died. Grandma's father did a lot of business with the Shakers, and so she grew up around them, and took an interest in their way of life and their community.

It also meant that she wound up with a lot of furniture from them, and recently she sold her mother's workbench for $20,000. Shaker furniture is tough, simple, and beautiful, like everything they did.

So this article is about my grandmother's work with the Shaker Heritage Society, and about her volunteer work in general.

(For any who saw the photos of my sister Katy's wedding, it was held at the Shaker Meeting House in Watervliet-- yes, kind of funny to have a wedding in the meeting house of a celibate, communistic society, but it is a lovely building, and smells of herbs, and the staff all love Grandma so much that they were more excited about it than we were.)

(no subject)

Ouch. Somebody fell off the wrong side of the election. Awesome statistics and a bitchin' domain name, but ouch, yo. And y'know, this dude didn't see that Purple America map, did he (or she)?

In the meantime:

Dave's tire just blew out. So, he can't get to his exam, and I can't get to my job interview.

Time to dial up the Niagara Frontier Transit Authority.
Oh man, their webpage says "synergistic" right in the first paragraph. That sucks.

But, the buses run.

Sweet! It'll take me an hour to get there! (It's a 10-minute drive).
And an hour and a half to get home.

Nice.


In the meantime, Dave called me to say he'd be limping home on the doughnut, and I haven't heard from him in 20 minutes. :( I may have to go get dressed and go looking for him. He said he was at Colvin & Eggert. I heard car door noises and thought it was him but I think it was just some kids parking on the street, because he hasn't come inside.
Bummer.

Maintenance.

Dave and I have a funny relationship on many levels.

Sometimes he is The Manly Man, and sometimes I am the Manly Woman. I grew up in a household with somewhat-but-not-very traditional gender roles: Mom cooked because she was good at it and enjoyed it, Dad fixed cars because he'd been working on cars since he was a little boy.

But I had no brothers, only sisters. So, as a child, among my peers, I had no real gender awareness. There was no "the boys, the girls", there were only the girls, which by default was "the kids". And I always admired my dad more-- I know, unfair, but Mom was around more and Dad was working two jobs, so I saw him less and when I did see him he was far more often doing something interesting. Also, his manner with children was always to treat us as though we were perfectly capable of understanding everything that went on-- really, he felt, the only thing separating children from adults was inexperience, and that always worked fine for me.

So, me and my sisters grew up thinking it was fun to work on cars, and Dad insisted when he taught us to drive (I learned at 13, because Katy was 15 and he was teaching her so she could get her permit on her birthday) that we also had to know how the thing worked. So we rotated tires and checked fluids and changed oil and engine coolant and the like, and he even showed us how to regap spark-plugs, not that anybody does that anymore.



Dave is one of two children and his only sibling is an older sister. His dad was a fairly manly man-- he worked in construction and did a lot of his cars' maintenance himself, and the like. So, theoretically, his environment was more gendered than mine, by a narrow margin (and his mom and sister do the The Girls thing sometimes, which is something that my family never even thought of until we'd all left home). But Dave has never been particularly Manly, and was never interested in cars, and didn't even get his drivers' license until he was 21.

So when I met him, he didn't know how to check his oil. And today is the first time in his life he's changed a tire. His account of doing so was really funny. (He read the owner's manual and called Roadside Assistance just to ask them where the jack handle was.) He called me up at the time of the Flat Tire Incident to tell me what had happened, and to ask me how to get the tire off once the lug nuts were removed.
"Um," I said, "pull."
"It's stuck," he said.
"Kick it around the edges to loosen it," I said. "It's probably a bit rusty or gunky."
"Ok," he said, and hung up.
When he got home he said, "I figured out why I couldn't get the tire off."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, I just had to put more ass into it."
Dave "putting some ass into" something is a funny concept, given his almost complete lack of anything in the back. But he re-enacted for me the Putting Of Ass Into Tire Removal. He squatted down, looking insectlike with his sharp knees sticking up past his shoulders (you think I'm kidding, but I'm not), and pretended to reach forward and grip the tire.
"I just kinda leaned back," he said, "and hung of the wheel for a while. Just as someone came out of the gas station it gave way--" and he flopped over onto his ass and rolled onto his back, bent legs sticking up in the air --" and I fell over, and the guy coming out looked at me and said, 'You OK?' 'Yeah,' I said, and lay there a minute," pantomining the tire on his chest and his feet in the air.

You probably had to be there but I was laughing my own less-insubstantial ass off at this point.

Of late, Dave has been discovering his latent Handy Man streak, and has discovered that he actually does have some aptitude with tools and the like. But he still comes to me with his car questions.

I think the cutest part is that he doesn't know why that's cute.


So yeah, his tire was worn through in one spot. Yup. Time for new tires. Well, the heat and phone bills will wait. The tires won't. I might call the utility company and let them know what's up-- I know they're legally required to be Very Understanding About All This, but it might help if I tell them beforehand that they're going to have to be Very Understanding About All This for at least two weeks.

Also, I need to call my bank and get an auto loan. Oh boy! More debt! At least I found out that the guy down the street with the auto-repair shop who sometimes sells used cars is indirectly related to Dave through Dave's cousin's wife, who vouches for his trustworthiness, so at least I have one "in" in the Buffalo used-car world. ^.^ Gotta go have me a conversation with him, too.

check this out: academics are humans too. :)

I know, I'm full of the updates of late. Lemme know if I should backdate the unimportant ones so they don't fill up people's friends-pages-- don't want to drive away people who think a little DL7's all right but are finding there's rather too much of me online at the moment. (Hrm, I don't know how to backdate with this client.) I started this livejournal mostly as a place to keep a diary for myself, but I know I've only stuck with it because other people read it, so while ostensibly I write things on here for my own reference, in reality I'm writing for an audience and I know it. (I specify this because I know a lot of people use livejournal primarily for its community features, and seem to apologize if they write entries that aren't particularly interesting to other people, so I suppose I should at least make a gesture towards exercising that kind of courtesy as well. This isn't a ploy to get people to say "oh no you're fascinating", it's an acknowledgement that I may use this site differently than others expect.)


So, the actual ostensible purpose of this update was to share this tidbit:

Dave's professor, who Dave emailed to let him know that his lack of a tire precluded him arriving in Rochester in time for the final exam, responded by e-mailing him the exam and saying "just do it where you are."

So Dave's lying in bed typing up his Archaeology exam. (He usually uses the laptop in his bed because it's comfy there.)

It wasn't a particularly interesting class, but nobody can say the professor wasn't nice. :)

...

Yeah, it sucks that Dave's car chose today to be an insurmountable pain in the butt, and it sucks more that his car is Suddenly Not New And Shiny anymore right when we can't afford to fix it, but he's put 41,000 miles on it in less than two years, and it's not the car's fault. It sucks that I have no income but that was also not unexpected. I'd anticipated a bit more leeway in Dealing With That, and we'd hoped for a little more leeway with the car, but it's not unreasonable that things have gone as they have. And so, at the moment, all the crises seem surmountable. Things suck and sometimes people are bad, but there are a lot of nice, good, and decent people in the world, and I myself am not always a good person so I can understand how bad things happen.

It helps that it's sunny and I have a possibility of spending the next two weeks seeing a lot of Dave and I might even get to spend a week with my family including my Katy (and my my dog-niece). I may not feel the same way once it's dark and grungy out again, and I certainly won't if I find that I am denied Thanksgiving at home, but it's not the end of the world, and Mrs. K. is making duck with orange stuffing for Thanksgiving. (Also, if I'm denied Thanksgiving at home, it's because I got a job effective immediately, which means I have money. So, silver linings abound in all contingencies.)

The interview.

Dave's thought of the day:
"You know, no matter where you live, you should be able to say, 'Things are better here than in New Jersey'".

Apologies to New Jerseyites, but Dave lived there two years and hated it. (Jersey City. Blech.)
***********

So, the interview.

I took the bus, and the bus took me from almost my door right to the airport, but it spent an hour and a half meandering around a bunch of loop-de-loops I'd never seen before. Man, I've seen more Cheektowaga...

Anyhow.

So the guy came out and we sat in the restaurant with the people running by and eating and drinking beer and the soldier in desert camoflage running out the arrivals gate to hug his shrieking wife and excited child and happily weeping elderly mother, and this man proceeded to interview me.

It went well-- he seemed pleased with my qualifications. Less money than I'd heard, but then there's tips which are apparently decent; not such weird hours as I'd heard, but I'd surely have the weirdest of them as I'm junior and also not in school; I'd have to join the union but I'd get benefits through them; the company provides my uniform and reimburses me after I buy myself a pair of black pants that actually fit. What else? I don't remember.

But first, I must go take a drug screening test tomorrow, and they won't get those results back until Monday or Tuesday next, and then they'll call me and if I'm hired I could start the 29th or so. (So, thanksgiving at home.)

I left there feeling quite good about things, and rode the bus the long windy weird way home. Upon arriving home, I walked the half-block to my street and then quite suddenly realized that the little bar/restaurant about a tenth of a mile from my house had a Help Wanted sign up.

So I resolutely veered across the road and went right in there to ask them what positions they wanted.

"Every position!" the harried waitress behind the bar answered. "Wait," she said to her compatriot on the other side of the bar, "what's in a Manhattan, bourbon or whiskey?"
"Whiskey," I said.

So I filled out the application, and left it with my resume, and skipped home.

Sweet as it would be to work full-time at the bar in the airport, it would be sweeter to get a job .01 miles from home, because the walk is shorter than through many parking lots. I could walk the half a block to my house at 3 in the morning. I wouldn't care.
And it's a slow bar at night, but the joint jumps at the dinner hour. Fridays, you can't even get in there because their fish fry is so good that everybody comes out for it. Not that the junior person would be working on the good nights like that, but who knows.

Even if they just wanted me for a few hours it'd be a nice little corner-filler.

Anyhow. I feel accomplished. Even if neither of them wants me, at least I'm trying. I might try that new club downtown next. I'm on a roll. Somebody's gonna hire me. I just know it.


:D

and he's a fuzzy monkey

Copied from qowf, the looking back meme.
I think it largely appeals to me because I'm probably younger than the meme intends, and I don't get to feel young very often anymore, and I think it's funny to seriously ruminate on what I was doing in 1984. (later, I observe) also, the intervals get kind of silly as it goes on. I don't think I'm ready to have a retrospective on quite so much of my life yet. But, it was amusing.

( 20 years ago, I... )