Missed a day

for no better reason than I was really tired last night and fell asleep really early yesterday.

We're home from Boston now. It was a lovely visit and would have been even better a couple days longer. We all like having grandparents around - fortunately, they're coming for Christmas next month. For future travel reference, taking 287 north of NYC to the Tappanzee instead of the George Washington Bridge is definitely the way to go. I still find it a little odd to make it through five states in less than 6 hours. I'm just not used to these fun-sized states we have here out East.

Even briefer

Lots of relatives today. K was every mother's dream at dinner, sitting nicely and eating with a fork. If only we had relatives around all the time so she would stay that charming.

Aquarium tomorrow, lunch at Faneuil Hall. Dinner at B's sister's.

Am very tired and will go thud now.

Quickie post

We made it to Boston after a long poke. We're comfortably ensconsed at B's aunt and uncle's house in Brookline. After eight hours in the car and the excitement of grandparents, K is unwilling to settle down to sleep. Quel surprise.

More relatives tomorrow. Further updates as events warrant.

The day after

Now that B has been able to speak to his union, it seems the situation isn't quite so dire. It is extremely unlikely that he could be laid off, because if he makes it onto the layoff list, he can choose to take a demotion instead. Which stills really sucks, but not as much as unemployment.

How likely is he to end up on the layoff list? We dunno. He's one of the most junior supervisors, but they may decide to concentrate on lower level employees. Plenty of people have been hired since he was, so there may be enough that he'll be protected. The equation in deciding is apparently job performance score combined with seniority in some sort of arcane mystic formula and he has a good performance score, so that should help too. We shall see. We'll find out by December 8.

How is my job affected, since the museum is also city-funded? Well, on the plus side we're funded by a trust fund that's not affected by budget cutbacks. On the negative side, our fund makes its money by investing interest in the stock market, so you can imagine how well that's going. Currently, our everyday operations will go on as normal, but some of the special projects we had planned have been put off. And we'll have to rely a lot more on the Friends for help buying things, which will be SUCH a joy, dealing with the complications that come with trying to get money out of them without a gigantic production.

****

We are headed to Boston this weekend. B's parents are visiting his sister, so we're going up to see all of them, along with various bonus aunts, uncles and cousins.

I think K is a bit confused about which grandparents she's seeing, based on the fact that she keeps talking about the aide my mother travels with. Plus she keeps talking about airplanes, so she may think we're going to LaGuardia again, the way we did last month to meet with my mother on her layover. Which we most certainly won't unless we've displeased several very vengeful gods.

Sucky day

So remember back when I talked about how B's library was trying to save money by cancelling Saturday hours, and they were, then they weren't, then they were, then the mayor declared they weren't?

Well, we didn't know how good we had it then. The mayor announced a number of cost-cutting measures today which included closing 11 library branches, which will result in layoffs of 110 people.

B's library isn't closing. But it's not as simple as the people whose branches are closing losing their jobs. Layoffs are determined by seniority, so it's the most recent hires that are going first.

Now there are people who were hired after B, and 40 of the positions will be eliminated by attrition from people who were leaving anyway. Hopefully, the fact that he's at supervisor level will help give him another layer of seniority. However, there's also a possibility that if there are too many other supervisors with more seniority than him, he'll lose his position and be kicked back down to regular librarian. Fortunately, if this happens, it will happen in January when he's due to step up a grade in pay, so we would only be losing $200 a month in income instead of $400. Only.

Even if he's not affected, this bodes very ill for contract negotiations next June.

We don't know how this will shake out yet, but it certainly is definite that B's resume is going out tout suite. If he does get laid off, at least I have a stable income this time from a job I can do from anywhere. And my mother hasn't sold her house yet, so I could probably convince her to let us rent it from her. But argh. This is spectacularly bad timing. We've been wanting to move back to the Midwest, but not like this.

Brief trivia

Making it just before midnight.

I realized a few days ago that while it's very convenient that so many books get released for the Christmas shopping season right before my birthday, I now have a new stack of books to read when I still have a few books from this summer that I haven't read yet. It wasn't a reflection on the quality of the books, but probably more on my state of mind for most of the summer.

Anyway, I'm finally reading The Sharing Knife: Passage. I feel like such a bad Bujold fan for leaving it for so long, especially since I'm enjoying it so much.

But did anyone else have "The Farmers and the Cowboys Should Be Friends" running through their heads while reading it?*



*B's response: "No, but I will now." Hee hee.

Enfranchisement

I walked the five-minute walk down to my polling place this afternoon, ran the gauntlet of supporters of local politicians brandishing flyers and went in to discover only two people ahead of me. They were both done voting by the time my name was found and I signed, so I was able to go in, vote a straight ticket and on the ballot measures and be out again in 2 minutes. Easy peasy.

Now we wait.

My plan for keeping my sanity over the next 24 hours

(I don't normally bring up politics given my mixed audience. But tonight I feel the need to help my people)
Like many liberals on election night eve, I've been letting myself feel cautiously hopeful about the polls, but too caught up in learned helplessness that the last 8 years have instilled in me to feel remotely calm about it. After all, just because even Karl Rove is predicting an Obama win is no reason to get all crazy and optimistic, now is it?

So in an effort to help preserve my fingernails, here are places I'm going to help maintain calm and sanity:

John Scalzi's Democratic poll watching kit:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/10/31/election-list-v-the-contents-of-the-democratic-poll-watching-kit/

Stop Worrying About Obama Losing Already
http://jezebel.com/5074942/stop-worrying-about-obama-losing-already

Indecision2008
Good or bad, news is always easier to take with a good dose of snark. And while you're at it, turn away from the network pundits so you can watch them being made fun of by the Daily Show/Colbert Report election special at 10pm Eastern.
http://www.indecision2008.com/

I can't believe there's anyone reading this that hasn't heard of fivethirtyeight.com, but there's no better place to go for a reality check when the mainstream press feels the need to manufacture news by reporting poll "tightening." Plus he says mean things about the Drudge Report, which is always good.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

Of course, this time tomorrow night, you'll probably find me having worn out the refresh button on my browser as I try to convince the cats they want to let me squeeze them for comfort.

I do not plan to lose NaBloPoMo on day 2

Which is the only reason I'm posting. I feel like I've been scraped up off the sidewalk. I slept late this morning, barely made it through taking care of K this afternoon while B was at work, then took an hour and a half nap after he got home. Because I was, you know, so tired from all of that lying on the couch.

Sigh. Something guaranteed to make you feel like a terrible parent is your child begging you to go play outside and having to try to convince them to stay inside and watch tv. It was a beautiful day, but I just couldn't hack even sitting in a chair and I can guarantee K would have wanted more active interaction than that. I compromised by bringing her small slide in from the backyard, which was a huge hit. It's too big to take up permanent residence in the rec room, but it's definitely good to have for an occasional treat. If we manage to clean up a bit in our storage area downstairs, we could keep it there so we can drag it in to the play area more easily.

It's times like these that I really dislike city living. If we were still in any of the houses we lived in Indiana, I could have sent K out to play on her own in the fenced backyard while keeping an eye on her from the window. Here, our backyard is approximately 2 feet square and borders the alley which has cars driving down it on a regular basis. We have a larger front yard, which isn't fenced and is on a pretty busy street.

Okay, that's enough whining for tonight. Aren't you glad you have 28 more days of this?

NaBloPoMo day 1

And I am feeling quite braindead.

It's entirely possible that my brains have been entirely replaced by mucus, most of which has taken up residence in my right ear. I've spent most of the day with the sensation of being permanently underwater. It would have been charming if that were because I had magically woken up in Atlantis and had spent the day drinking tea out of clam shells with mermaids and braiding strings of pearls in my hair while gossiping merrily about that hothead Neptune. Instead, I've spent the day achy and half-deaf.

Surprisingly, K and I had a pretty pleasant day. I will cop to way too much tv in the morning when I was still stunned by the post-wakeup mucus accumulation - I had been holding the line firm at two episodes of Blues Clues, but then she asked for Shaun the Sheep and was so happy to entertain herself in front of the computer with a bag of microwave popcorn that I didn't have the energy to try to introduce any other activities. But then we went out to the bookstore after lunch and shared trains nicely with the other kids at the train table and then left cheerfully so we could go home and nap well and happily draw pictures and blow bubbles while waiting for dinner to come.

And now I've reached the limits of my limited, mucus-constrained creativity. More tomorrow, when hopefully I will have cute dinosaur pictures and will have found yet more ways to use the word mucus in one post.