Greetings from Florida

Here is part of an email I just sent to some of my friends:


Hi everyone, I 'm writing from Daytona Beach, Forida and will be here until Friday night.

I'm staying in a hotel room the size of my whole first efficiency apartment, only one block from the office where I am working this week. The TV in that room defaults back to Fox News , very loudly, every time I turn it back on.

Jeb Bush really is the governer here. I'd forgotten that when I first came!

The law here says people only need back-end licence plates on their cars, but not front-end plates! So, I'd say about 90% of cars have nothing in front, and about 10% of the people display some kind of metalic, licence-plate sized art work in the place where a front licence plate would go. I'm going to take some pictures of them before I go.

My first night here, I ran back to my room after work, changed, and then took a 7 mile, 2 hour, walk straight to the ocean. I was thinking, it's Daytona Beach , it's spring break, there's got to be something fun going on there. But dang, it was dead there! The tide was coming right up to the shops, and the sidewalks were more full of crack heads than students. I guess you have to know WHERE to go. Plus it's been colder than usual this week, and it was late, like about 7 pm by then and it was dark.

Yesterday our line-of-business director came to visit , and he's staying at the same hotel as me, so we went out. He's so far removed from me on the boss food chain that it's almost like he's not my boss at all. He actually rented a car, I didn't.I could have, the company would have paid for it, but with my hotel being so close to work, I just didn't. But we drove down that same road, and he was as surprized as I was ! We stopped at an overpriced sea food restaurant that didn't even have much of a selection, because we got tired of looking! Somehow I just wasn't expecting it to look so much like Aberdeen Wa.

I have 2 more nights to kill, so I don't know what I'm going to do with them. I brought Games Magazine, or I'll just walk a different direction and see what else they have here.

I'm excited my old friend from high school is coming to visit my house next week, and worried the kids have torn the house apart and I'll have 2 days to restore the damage. I looked around just before I left and thought , jeez, all our walls need to be painted, we need more art, we don't own china or silver, the guest bedroom is also the CD-rack room, this isn't really a guest-friendly house, is it!

I'm going to ask Northwest Airlines to sign me up as a Frequent Flyer on my way back, because it looks like I may be becoming one, so I might as well get points.

Now that the shock of such short notice has worn off, it just occurred to me how lucky I am.
I've just been handed an all expenses paid 5 day trip to Daytona Beach Florida !
How cool is that! I'll be at work, in training, during the day, but I'll have 4 nights free !

Monday I got the flu at work! I stayed, however, because we had a lady coming all the way from Florida just to do training for me and 3 other people, and I didn't want to miss her. But it snowed so hard her plane couldn't land, so she never came that day. I went home, all tired and achey and shoveled my driveway on and off for 3 hours.

Tuesday I still went to work with the flu. I took cold medicine. The trainer from Florida came. 3 of us spent all day watching her presentation. Too bad I never noticed the cold medicine I took was "night time" cold medicine, I had a hard time staying awake!" My kids enjoyed that day, their school was closed due to 8 new inches of snow overnight! Good thing my husband worked the afternoon shift that day. But I still had to take my daughter to guitar lessons. I bought us all Arby's on the way home, and we ate it in front of the tv while I slept on the couch.

Oh yeah, Tuesday afternoon as soon as I got home, my boss called me. Not to tell me whether or not I got the promotion the toilet room lady told me about, but to tell me I need to go to Daytona Beach, Florida, for a full week, and I need to leave a week and a half from now! She said it was short notice to her too. I don't how to feel. If it doesn't get cancelled, then I'll finally realize my college-age ambition to be in a Florida Spring Break town during actual Spring Break! But I'll be a 41 year old married mom. And my husband and have very short notice to arrange child care for some of those days. Dang. Plus I still think airports are creepy. And hotels.

Today I went to work. Felt much, much better, and then found out once I got there, that although I may feel better, I have laryngitis really bad! All my co workers kept trying to declare me unfit for work and kept trying to order me to go home. But I had to convince them I just SOUND bad, I don't feel that bad any more. Plus the Florida lady is still here and I don't want to miss her training.

It is late I got to put the kids to bed.

Today was the first day in a long time that I just got to sleep in and do nothing.

Last Monday I got that car-carving kit from the Boy Scouts and starting sawing up his block of wood, trying to shape a car out of it.

Tuesday afternoon, I took my daughter to guitar lessons, came home, made dinner. Then that night I taught my last English as a Second Language class for a while. I had to quit because I just can't fit it in to my schedule any more. Luckily the school district found a replacement for me, who can start next week.

Wednesday night my husband filed down my son's Pinwood Derby car, and helped him paint it light blue, with paint left over from when we painted our kitchen blue last year, and I searched everywhere for someplace that sells rolls of butcher paper, until I found it at Office Max. I also tried to find someplace where I could weigh our son's car, that afternoon, to verify it was less than the maximum 5 ounces as regulated by the Pinewood Derby. I found out the New Brighton post office was shut down! The building is vacated! I was going to use their scale! So I took his little toy car to the Cub Food grocery store, and weighed it on their produce scale in the fruit department. It was 4 1/2 ounces, so that was good.

Thursday my husband took our son to Boy Scouts to their pre-pre-weigh in meeting, where they practiced racing their cars along a race track. His car was well under the weight limitation, so my husband and son came home and glued two Sacagawea gold coins to the top, to weigh it down more. We call it the "money car" now.

And I led my daughter's Girl Scout meeting because last week their leader said she coulndn't make it and I agreed to take it over. Since my daughter was officially the leader-daughter of the evening, I allowed her to decide what the meeting should be about, and of course she only likes art and agreed to an art project. I I brought 50 feet of butcher paper, construction paper, scissors, markers and glue, and asked people to bring magazines. Our project was to trace around each other on the butcher paper, and make black construction paper silouhettes to cut out and place on a colorful construction paper background. The magazines are for cutting up and instead of drawing your features on your life size portrait, you can paste pictures of things that are interesting or important to you.

I was afraid that we wouldn't be able to fill 90 minutes with just those projects, or that the 12 year old girls in the troop would think it was too junvenile, but instead it went great! Except for the part where the leader came to my house the day before and gave me the troop equipment such as the flags for the opening flag ceremony, and some extra art supplies and magazines, and I left her box at home on my bedroom floor!

Friday we ate out, yum, it felt good to sit down. But we had to eat quickly because we had to take my son's car to a church gymnasium for the final weigh in. It passed inspection perfectly, but they still advised us to add even more weight to it , because cars closer to the 5 ounce limit win more, against the lighter weighted cars. I was relieved when my own 7 year old son put his own foot down and declared it finished and said he didn't want to add more to it. After the official weigh in, they lock the cars in a safe over night, like top secret government documents. It was just ridiculous how many of those cars were so intricate with little cockpits carved in to them, with so much detail. No 7 year old carved that , it was all done by the dads, all of it.

Saturday morning, I had Norwegian language class at Mindekirken, still fun!

When I got home, we took my daughter to her friend's house in Little Canada. They invited her to spend the night, and we explained that the only way we could get her there was to bring her in the early afternoon, and luckily they agreed. We dropped her off. We finally grocery shopped, because we really needed it. Then my husband took my son to the actual Pinewood Derby where he got to race his car against other cars. I had about an hour to put all the groceries away, clean the house for my husband's evening house guest, make a fruit salad, and burn 7 CD's of Evig Poesi, so the other Norwegian language students coming to the party could hear this Norwegian rap group I've been enjoying. Thank hevens for my work laptop, I was able to load the songs over the t1 at work, very quickly, last week, in the morning, from the band's web site, and from their myspace web site, then bring my work laptop home and use its CD burner to make homemade CDs of the 7 songs I was able to load. They put those songs on the net themselves, I'm not violating anyone's copywrite.

Then I drove to a party , held by our Norwegian language teacher, very near downtown Mpls. I was a little late, becuase I left a little late, trying to get everything done, and then getting lost in the maze of one-way streets in that neighborhood. But I got to give out the home made CD's , somone put theirs on the stereo and everyone agreed with me, they liked the band! And my fruit salad seemed to go over ok.

I came home later to find that my husband's expected dinner guest never showed up! Well at least the idea of it had motivated my to clean up the kitchen a little.

This morning I slept in , and this afternoon I scanned some photos for people who I had agreed to scan photos for a long time ago, and watched the backlog of VH1 I Love Toys that I've been recording. And I just spent a fat chunk of lazy time with my son, doing nothing, so that's been fun. My daughter is still not home from her friend's house.

I got NOTHING but my regular day job, and my daughter's Tuesday afternoon guitar class, until next Saturday, so I'm going to try to really enjoy the next few week nights and try to do as little as possible!

About 2 months ago I sent an email to the registrar of my old college, Macalester College, from which I graduated in 1987. I explained that I know my transcript shows my Anthropology major, and my French core-degree, which is like a minor.

I also explained that I took all the required courses for a Linguistics major, also. And that the only other two requirements for a Linguistics major were to prove "proficiency" in a second language, and "familiarity" with a third. The French core-degree was proof of my proficiency in a second language. But I was supposed to make an appointment with the linguistics department chair person to prove familiarity with the Norwegian language. I just never made that appointment. My transcript, of course, does not list the Linguistics major because I never fulfilled that last requirement. I only know what's on my transcript is because I requested a copy of it myself shortly after I graduated, just to see what it looked like.

In my email, I asked the registrar what I could do now to fulfill that last requirement, so that I could get my Linguistics degree to appear on my transcript.

Last week I got an email reply saying they'll just add it, I don't need to do anything more!

That makes me want to reqeust a copy of my transcript again, just to see it. No employer ever has.

I only paid off my student loan about 2 years ago, and I was so excited to get the letter from Sallie Mae Student Loan Center that I still have it magneted to my refrigerator. I should probably take it down now.

I wrote this last night.

Why is it that I can spend 9 or 10 hours a week day, at my desk at work, with my lap top and my tea cup warming plate and be perfectly competent. Customers , co workers, and even managers and administrators come to me for advice. I function very highly and even dare to complain that it bores me.

But the minute I set foot on my own property, at home, I become a bumbling idiot who leaves my keys in the door, can't remember to turn off the gas stove until 3 hours after I'm done cooking and can't find a pen, ever.

I'm particularly enjoying a good self-loathing incident tonight because apparently Boy Scouts of America seems to think it perfectly reasonable for an ordinary adult and a 7 year old boy to turn a rectangual hunk of wood the size of a woman's shoe in to a race car by this week end.

First my equally passive agressive husband and I played a game of "chicken" in which we each pretended that hunk of wood wasn't there, for the last several weeks. Then today I figured out I lost the match and would have to figure it out myself.

The Boy Scout store sold me a $17 set of tools including a saw that broke its teeth off in the wood almost right away. And I hardly even had $17 spare bucks, it was a real decision to even get that.

So I'm sitting at my dinner table with a regular saw , the kind you cut down tree branches with, trying to at least sculpt this thing in to a shape I can start filing down. I hope the file it came with works better than their stupid useless saw. It's taken me about 3 hours off and on just to get it to be kind of rough-edged oval shaped.

Everyone keeps saying my son is supposed to be actively involved in even this part of the process, but what good would it do him to sit and stare at me for hours while I quite possibly will saw my own thumb off right in front of him. That is all. Except this whole week ahead is not looking good to me.

I have set up my lap top on the table next to me so I can listen to my new favorite Evig Poesi from Norway, I wonder what they are saying ?