May 15, 2015 by Amy

Odds and Ends on a Friday

I think there may be some sort of nuclear Miracle-Gro site outside of my office window. It’s the only way I can explain the fact that every damn day the maintenance guys are out there cutting the same patch of grass over and over. It’s not a normal amount, people. I have sat in my office (on my more unproductive days, obviously), and watched the lawnmower guy create crop circles in the lawn. Round and round he goes. Dude. It’s cut. Move on.

Yesterday I was invited to set in on end-of-year calculus presentations. The students were creative, presenting raps and songs with calculus terms, a calculus alphabet, and a cartoon that included the Calculus Palace and the Integral Pinnacle. My favorite part, though, was when two boys showed how they calculated the volume of the big church on campus. That part was impressive. The part where they admitted that they used inches as their unit slayed me. “Yeah, um, these are, like, really huge numbers.”

Just for grins I’ve been cutting out random headlines and leaving them in a colleague’s mailbox. I find them amusing when taken out of context. Are you willing to yield? Betty likes to sew as her pastime. I got a new me. Bring on the love. The best…rompers. Sometimes I find quirky want ads. Off-duty police officer: cuts grass and landscapes.

School is almost out (both at work and at home) and I’m looking forward to the slower pace of summer on both fronts. I know in the fall I will be glad to get back to our regular routine, but at this point I need a bit of down time. Clean out the email boxes, purge the paper files. And read. The Japanese have a term for books purchased but unread: Tsundoku. We need a word like that in English. I have a major Tsundoku thing going at home right now. Books piled up everywhere, including on my Kindle. I am hoping that the slower pace of summer means that I can get through more than half a page at night, when I’m so tired from the day that I just can’t keep my eyes open. It’s a good kind of tired, but my OCD is kicking into anxiety mode with all those unread books sitting around (I have a thing about needing to finish things, whether it’s the week’s laundry or picking up around the house or getting that last little bit out of the toothpaste tube).

I am also looking forward to summer because the dining hall at work will serve a greatly pared down  menu. This means that I will likely eat only one serving of lunch everyday instead of three, which happens now because who can pass up sweet and sour chicken with crab rangoon and egg rolls when it’s right there next to bacon-wrapped meatloaf with cheddar garlic mashed potatoes and smoked Gouda and wild mushroom soup? I cannot, to which my hips and thighs can testify. I have no will power when it comes to food.

I have developed a new-found appreciation of the Times New Roman font. I read an article recently that said you shouldn’t use Times New Roman as the font on your resume, and I was offended. Times New Roman is a good, solid font. There’s a reason it has been used so much. Because it’s classic and it’s legible. I have dabbled in alternative fonts. I was stuck on Century Gothic for awhile, when I was going through my sans serif phase. I dabbled in Palatino, Garamond, and Georgia. But you know what? I always come back to Times New Roman. Good ol’ TNR. Old, stodgy and grumpy. Just like me.

Dammit. The lawn mower guy just showed up again.