I Don't Like Pancakes

I know this is a radical statement, but I am grudgingly having to accept its truth.

This afternoon, I woke up from my extended nap hungry after not having been able to make myself each much for most of the day. (One of the paradoxes of painkiller withdrawal for me being that my appetite remains the same but most things sound hideous to eat - e.g. the fish cakes Robert made himself for lunch.) I still couldn't face the idea of eating anything with much meat in it but didn't think another package of peanut butter crackers was really going to be enough to eat. So I decided to go out for pancakes at IHOP, where they serve the only restaurant pancakes that I still actually like, the "country griddle cakes" that are made with Cream of Wheat. But after a few minutes of confusion looking at the menu, I realized that the country griddle cakes have been discontinued! They are now serving "corn cakes" instead. (Robert ordered them and they were fine - they tasted like cornbread, as the waitress said they would.)

I ordered and ate my buttermilk pancakes, but they weren't that great - adequate to eat, but I didn't enjoy them all that much. It was like, eh, pancakes. And since when is that my reaction to pancakes? At some point in the last 10 years or so, I must have stopped liking pancakes. I have noticed over the years that specific kinds of pancakes I used to like do nothing for me anymore (e.g. Kerbey Lane's or The Omelettry's pancakes) and that new pancakes I have encountered aren't that great, but I thought I was just being pickier about them. But I continued to have this idea in my head that I like pancakes even though I am (inevitably) disappointed when I eat them. However, I don't think it's that there is some Platonic ideal of "Pancake" in my head that the pancakes I encounter don't live up to. The pancakes I do like better than others (e.g. the country griddle cakes) are not good exemplars of the pancake category in my opinion. And hell, given how long it's been since I've had country griddle cakes, I might not like them very much anymore either.

So: Sally doesn't like pancakes. Update your mental model accordingly. After all, I may be counting on you to remind me of this the next time I am in a restaurant with you. I should order the oatmeal with brown sugar, cinnamon, and raisins instead.

A Poetic Tribute to the Wonderfullest Cat

Today I started going through the detritus that has amassed at the 6 years I have been working at my job, throwing away a lot and packing the seemingly useful in a box until the box filled up and I brought it home. Among the many papers was a poem that I wrote a while back as a tribute to the cat of my childhood who was at the time of its writing an old kitty who refused in a disgruntled, impossible-to-please way to eat anything my parents gave him. This snoot is now gone, but never forgotten.

Since Tam and I have been discussing how fun it would be if the poetry exam for her (absolute joke of a) freshman level online English class required that the student write a poem of their own, and since Tam suggested today that the poem should have to follow some particular style, and because a co-worker of hers today said that she didn't understand what the word "parody" meant when Tam used it in casual conversation, I present to you my submission to the Tam and Sally version of this English exam: "Tiger!" written in the style of William Blake's "The Tyger" from Songs of Experience, 1794.


Tiger! Tiger! meowing right
Through the middle of the night.
What awakened hand or paw
Could feed thy restless, squalling maw?

In what distant hut or bower
Lies the stuff you would devour?
On what dinner would you feed?
What the meat, would meet the need?

And what breakfast, & what lunch
Could twist thy mouth to stop and munch?
And when thy jaws begin to chew,
Is it sirloin or is it stew?

Is it tuna, is it cheese
That thy fussing would appease?
Is it zebra, is there hope
That you would eat an antelope?

When the stars fade in the sky,
And you turn down a chicken thigh,
Does He smile, this mess to see?
Did He who made the Dog make thee?

Tiger! Tiger! meowing right
Through the middle of the night.
What awakened hand or paw
Could feed thy restless, squalling maw?

That's Some Weird Idea of Fairness

I was so angry yesterday that I got home from work and cried. Crying seems like a weird response to being angry, and I wish I didn't do it, but as far as out-of-control behavior goes, it's better than the responses that lead to broken things/pets/people and will not get you arrested.

Why was I so angry? I am now just not-angry enough to write about it.

My boss D, my co-worker K, and I met in the afternoon to make some decisions about posting the job opening for my replacement. One thing we were trying to figure out was whether to stay within the current Planner series or try for a reclassification of the positions to another sequence (for those of you not familiar with state government, there are specific job classifications that come with pay grades and acceptable salary ranges, so you have to choose up-front which particular classification the job opening will have and the people up the food chain get to decide whether this is reasonable or not), so D looked up my and K's current salaries and discovered that K's 12-month salary is $3,500 more than mine, not even counting longevity pay. And I am the team lead and K is not. D's response in its entirety was, "I didn't know that." Even though she is our manager and she is the one who put in and signed the paperwork that authorized our taking these jobs. I basically believe her that she didn't remember this discrepancy because I don't think she's so stupid as to call out the numbers for me to calculate the yearly salaries if she knew how bad mine was going to look (unless she so completely thinks of me as out of there that she doesn't even give a shit how it comes across).

This was bad enough, but then D starts to make the case for why if K's salary goes up by the $3,000 that K wants (which K deserves and the agency would be foolish in the extreme not to give her and that D absolutely sincerely does want to give her also), then the team lead's salary should go up higher than that because it's a job with a lot of responsibility and challenging and onerous tasks and it would be unfair for the team lead not to make significantly more than K. So D writes down what she considers a reasonable salary for this new person - an amount that is $10,000 more than what I make.

"Would be" unfair?! Um, hello, I am sitting right here and can tell you how unfair this is. And you don't have to make the case to me that the job is difficult and demanding because I am doing this job right now. I was so blown away by the disconnect between what she's saying and the life I have been living for the over three years I have been doing this job at a too-low salary that I didn't know what to say. It's like she is filled with this sudden concern for this theoretical employee who does not even exist while not batting an eye that it has come to light just how thoroughly screwed over I have been for all these years.

When I make some comment about "if the job is going to pay that much, maybe I should apply for it," she kind of realizes that she's in a danger zone and attempts to deflect any possible criticism from me by saying that if I wasn't being paid enough money, I should have come to her. This is laughable given that nobody I have ever spoken to has ever heard of anyone in our agency successfully getting a raise in pay that did not come with a promotion. (Today D admitted to me that she hasn't ever heard of this either.) And since I was already at the top of my chain, I knew it was pointless to even ask. But it pissed me off big-time that she was playing this blame the victim game with me. Given that every person at our organization knows how this system works (that you are dead-ended when you hit the top of your ladder), I had assumed that D had gotten me the most money for my position that she possibly could, but instead, I got an amount even lower than K.

When D got into work today after lunch and stopped by my office to see how I was, I said, "Well, I don't know." And when she asked what was wrong, I said that I was still thinking about our meeting yesterday and that I was disappointed to find out that my salary was not just too low in general but was specifically lower than K's. She was a bit more prepared to discuss this today and she laid it at the door of HR/the budget Nazis; this is probably basically true. (I let her off the hook in my mind for screwing me of a decent salary but am still angry at her as my manager for mishandling the situation so badly the previous day. She has difficulty accepting responsibility of her own mistakes; this is the second time this has happened where she has blamed me for things that were in her purview and not mine.) She also said that she hasn't had a raise (aside from the occasional, 2% joke raises that the legislature allows) the entire time she has been at the agency. So we discussed how fucked up the system is that just about the only time you can get a position upgraded in salary is when an experienced person leaves the job and you hire in a clueless one at a higher salary. I have a friend who is an admin assistant doing the work of a higher level person and HR rejected the reclassification her boss put in on the grounds that if they "look at reclassifying this job, they would have to look at all of them." Since she is eligible to retire in 6 months, she's leaving, and not a single admin in the agency is expected to apply for the job at its current classification. So either they leave it where it is and get somebody from the outside who doesn't know our business or they reclassify it to make it attractive enough to fill internally, in which case they might as well have reclassified it so the person who already knows how to do the job would be willing to stay.

In a real sense, it doesn't matter to me how much the next person makes, and I am really happy for K if her reclassification and payraise come through. But it chaps me to realize that D is going to pay a person who walks in the door, not even knowing where their own desk is located, 20% more than they are paying me after almost 6 years of experience in this job. (And as immodest as it sounds, I really do an excellent job for them with moments of unbelievable brilliance and a fairly low level of on-the-job leisure consumption.) I was angry enough yesterday that if I wasn't already quitting, I would have quit.

But there is an upside to all of this. Dissatisfaction with the disconnect between the difficulty and stress level of my job and my pay and promotion prospects was one of the things that made me start thinking about what I wanted to do next, since I obviously could not keep doing this job much longer. And the result of that torturous thought process was the plan to go to graduate school. So if my plan works out at all, I will look back at my agency and be glad that they didn't pay me just enough that I was making good money, felt valued, and kept working there, given that I was ultimately going to be unhappy with the job due to the lack of opportunities for advancement. It's easier to walk away from something when it's kind of gone south and you can see yourself stuck in the rut forever than when it's going okay and there's some hope of improvement.

D mentioned to me today that she thinks HR should be doing marketplace salary analyses because people in the non-resource divisions (i.e. are not wildlife biologists, game wardens, etc.) are being underpaid across the board. For instance, trying to hire a qualified web developer was a nightmare for her and the web team manager a couple months ago because we pay so much less than anyone else. And not only can we not match the private sector, some people were talking recently that my agency pays less than any other state agency except maybe for the School for the Blind. The group was divided on whether we beat out that particular one, but the consensus was we are below all the rest. (This is reminiscent of the arguments in Oklahoma about whether both Mississippi and Alabama are worse along some dimension or only Mississippi.) The new admin in my area said that when people at other agencies she was interviewing with heard she was talking to my department, they told her to be prepared to be underpaid.

Well, where my HR division fears to tread, I boldly sally forth. With a high speed internet connection, 5 minutes of spare time, and one question of my house economist (not to be confused with home economist, ok?), I was able to determine from the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site that the pay for market research analysts in Austin is such that I am currently earning just under the 25th percentile. Damn.

Treadmill Desk - A Controversy

Although the development and testing of a treadmill desk is not new, I recently came across this post on the subject on a feminist blog that surprised me quite a lot in its tone:

"This is what happens when ‘your employer owns your body and soul’ cross-breeds with ‘nothing is more dangerous than fat.’ A treadmill desk designed by the Mayo clinic. Don’t mock because they were seriously scientific about their research:

“If obese individuals were to replace time spent sitting at the computer with walking computer time by 2 to 3 hours a day, and if other components of energy balance were constant, a weight loss of 20 to 30kg a year could occur.”

It’s none of our employer’s business whether or not we lose 20 to 30 kg, or gain 20 or 30 kg. Our bodies and our lives should belong to us, that’s the basic meaning of freedom."

In the comments section, it's basically a pile on about how making these desks available to workers is an example of discrimination against fat people, will not lead to health improvements because people cannot lose weight, will make work too difficult to do while walking [though the speed in the study was a leisurely 1.6 mph], is just one more thing employers are doing to take over the lives of employees, etc.

But one exchange really intrigued me:

A person named Weasel wrote: "I worked for a college for 11 years and even though they were concerned about health costs they would have never bought me this desk for simple $ reasons. Now I telecommute for a different company and I set up my own treadmill desk to help fight a family predisposition to being overweight. I actually have two desks, one that I walk at and one that I sit at for times when I need to rest, need more mouse control (such as editing a photo or illustration) or I’m just feeling lazy - ha. I walk anywhere from 1-6 miles most days depending upon the type of work I’m doing and what other exercise I am getting that week with the kids. I walk as little as 30 minutes a day and have walked 5 hours in a day as well.

Is the treadmill desk for everyone? No - a few of the comments above make that clear. Is it a dumb idea? To a lot of people it certainly is. Why do I use it? Cause I need the extra calorie burn and I want to spend non-work time with my family or having fun - not stuck in a health club.
BTW - even walking below 1 mph (which is pretty slow) gets you extra calories burned and most people won’t break a sweat at that speed so you don’t have to worry about “stinking up the meeting room”."

Then in response, B Adu writes: "Weasel, I appreciate that you find this kind of desk useful, but I am intrigued by your rationale. You say that you are burning calories, but doesn’t this encourage your body to keep up your calorie intake, after all you keep using them up all the time! When you do less, don’t you eat less automatically, and when you do more don’t you simply eat more?"

Then Kell jumps in with: "What rationale? I think it’s safe to assume anyone who thinks 1) exercise has any effect on body weight beyond about five pounds and 2) that still using the word “overweight” to describe fat people doen’t make her look naive and ignorant is going to have all sorts of food obsessions that keep her from being able to eat in response to body cues. (Yes, I’m calling her “overdumb.”)"

B Adu responds: "OK Kell,You’ve outed me. I was trying to fathom how the ‘other half’ relates their ‘theories’ to their actual reality, call me overpolite!"

Where to begin? OK, first of all, I thought Weasel's comment was pretty uncontroversial - she was simply relating her own experiences with a treadmill desk and countering some of the no doubt convenient rationalizations of those who pretended to oppose the desk because it would be too hard to use, would make you too sweaty, and so forth.

Is it a core belief within the fat acceptance community that exercise is of no value for weight loss or is this B Adu's personal idea? I saw it expressed a lot more times in the comments to the post than I would have thought. I'm sure there is a diversity of beliefs there as in any ideology [at first, I wrote movement, but that was too inappropriate given the implicit advocacy here for sedentary behavior], but I expected more comments along the "fit at any size" axis, in which the goal of weight loss is deplored but the encouragement of additional exercise is supported as important for overall health.

I found it awfully strange that Kell gives Weasel a hard time about "using the word overweight to describe fat people" when Weasel was talking about herself. Doesn't she get to use the word she wants to? Or is she obviously not fat enough to have any standing to discuss the topic of weight? And doesn't basically everyone use the word "overweight"? Maybe that word is not used by activists in the fat acceptance community or something, but it's hard to make the argument that "still" using that word is an indication of ignorance of anything but Kell's personal emotional issues. The use of the word "overdumb" was amusing in its inaptness; doesn't "overweight" indicate too much of a good thing while "overdumb" is too much of a bad thing?

It was great the way that Kell was able to glean so much about Weasel from her comment: Weasel has specific beliefs about how much weight can be lost through exercise, she has food obsessions that interfere with her ability to eat in response to body cues, and so on. I didn't have any of these insights independently. I have learned so much.

The original post brings up for me something I always think about when considering the issue of universal government-provided health care: making other people pay your way gives them a vested interest in your behavior far beyond what most of us would consider acceptable. As I see it, getting the government (i.e. the taxpayers) to pay for health insurance only ups the likelihood that behaviors associated with overweight will be regulated.

I have not forgotten what my Chinese manager at a previous job said about the enforced calisthenics regimen that she experienced during the Cultural Revolution. Exercising as part of a group was a requirement for showing loyalty to your fellow workers and the Communist government. No American company is going to force exercise on their employees at gunpoint. And since we work under at-will status, we can tell our boss to take a flying leap if we feel we are being pressured in any way to work at a treadmill desk.

Too bad we can't do something about real social pressures in the workplace - e.g. that we are expected to be basically friendly toward other people or we risk getting a reputation for being a snob or an asshole; that when somebody is having a baby shower, people are going to look at us as cheapskate jerks if we don't put in the $5 toward a stupid gift. And surely the true "basic meaning of freedom" in the workplace environment is having a corner window office, a high speed Internet connection, unlimited free beverage of your choice, and a sign hanging on your door that says "I prefer not to" and that everyone respects.

Some Kind of Accelerating Animal

I'm not sure whether it's more apt to say "like a horse coming back to the barn" or "like a cockroach approaching the end of the maze" but I've been increasingly productive at my job ever since I decided that July 6 would be my last day at work.

And several days ago, when only my team-mate K suspected that I was on the cusp of leaving, and when things were getting super-crazy and should have been making me stressed out and annoyed, a couple different people remarked that I was exuding a sense of calmness and sanity over the entire process.

It is rather disconcerting to consider that I am actually enjoying my job more right now, in my last few weeks, than I have for some time. But maybe this is a positive thing, given the peak-end rule of memory bias, which states that we judge our experiences based on how good or bad they were at their peak of intensity and how they were at the end. (My and Robert's tennis instructor was a good practitioner of cognitive strategy by telling us students that we should always end our practice/game on a good shot - thus exploiting the recency effect such that we will remember the practice as having been a good experience in which we excelled.) Perhaps I will look back at this job and remember how fantastic it was (there for a while) and how satisfied I was with it as it drew to a close and think, Yeah, that was a pretty much great gig. And of course, that will be accurate because I remember it as being ... oh well, I guess it's already happening.

Sally's Closet: Extra Woo Edition

Speaking of new agey stuff, in the Great Unveiling of Sally's Crap from High School that I undertook last Christmas, I found a crystal that M gave me all those years ago. I can't tell what sort of crystal this is (quartz?), so there is no knowing what amazing powers I have had the advantage of all these years. Unless crystals don't work at a physical distance, in which case, bummer.

I just googled M and discovered:
(1) He still lives in the same city (8 miles from our hometown) as he did 10 years ago. [Note how I am attempting to maintain some anonymity for him while giving information that should make those of you who know about my background and anything about M able to figure this out. This is somewhat difficult.]
(2) He is a pre-AP high school English teacher (last I knew, he was a high school Spanish teacher, though he majored in both). This is a really good fit for him. The last thing his class read this spring before school let out was The Joy Luck Club.
(3) He still has messy hair, which he now wears brushed back, but now also has a mustache and small beard. Alas.
(4) He was wearing a TIE in the photo... and an apron, though all four people on the school sale committee had those. The M I knew was into tie-dye, but an actual necktie? That's very establishment.
(5) I have no idea if he is married. Or gay. Or what. They did not publish this information in the newspaper or on the school web site.

Gave My Notice

This afternoon, I informally apprised my boss D that I am resigning from my position. She took it as well as could be expected and better than I had feared. (Not that D is particularly hard on people or has weird ideas about personal loyalty or takes things crazily personally, but given her current stress level - sick mom living with her, insane work load, already one person down in our small team - I could understand if she was overwhelmed by the news.) I will hand in my official notice tomorrow, once D can find out a bit about the possibility of swinging paying me in some capacity, after my last working day on July 6, to help hire my own replacement. She wisely would like to go to her own boss with some kind of plan for how she's going to make this broken bird fly. (I have no idea why I just wrote that. D said nothing about broken birds. O-K.)

When I told my co-worker K, a couple hours before I told D, K was initially bummed, then gave me a high five, then said, "D will want me to come back full-time and my answer is 'Fuck no'."

I am going to have to develop a pat response when asked about my school plans because they are very complicated to explain. I think I might have to keep it simple and say "I am going to grad school in the fall to study psychology and marketing." This is technically true, captures the spirit of the thing, and avoids the whole This is Step 1 of 87 Steps in Sally's Big Plan. Many of the readers of this blog probably can't keep the whole thing straight.

It's going to be nice having the situation revealed to everyone so I can stop having to be coy about my reasons for not wanting to commit to longer-term assignments or timelines at work. No, I'm not a selfish dickhead who doesn't want to help you out on this job or an incompetent loser incapable of managing her workload; I am simply not going to be around in mid-July to do anything for your fine survey project.

My resignation letter will not look like this, though I have liked to imagine it:

Kemo sabe,

Kiss my ass, I bought a boat, I'm going out to sea.

Sincerely,
Tonto

Queen of Swords

Tam recently posted about a fun evening she and Ed had doing an interpretive game incorporating the tarot deck and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - a Sally twofer; I'm envious.

Despite my obvious empirical bent, I've always had a soft spot for tarot. In high school, I had a boyfriend M who was a spiritual seeker and into all kinds of goofy new agey shit, and one time we were in one of those little shops with a name like The Crystal Unicorn Goddess of Light that sold tarot cards and somehow I ended up with one (the standard Rider-Waite deck). I also got a book that showed the classic 10 card, Celtic Cross spread. I let myself get sort of into it - as much as you can when you don't actually believe that it has any objective reality to it at all - and enjoy the experience of interpreting the symbols and telling myself (and others) stories from it. It basically scratched the same itch as dream interpretation, but was more systematic and self-contained and, you know, was explicitly like a game. I later bought an Alice in Wonderland tarot deck (they had me where I lived) and the infamous Dali deck, which was $99 that I really didn't have as a college freshman but that I absolutely could not resist - it was too beautiful and evocative and strange and basically fucked up. (For example, scroll down on the Dali link and click on The World - who would come up with this depiction of "Attainment. Completion. Perfection. The end result of all efforts. Success. Fulfillment. The path of liberation. Eternal life" and so forth?)

One sort of odd thing was the stunning regularity with which I would get the Queen of Swords in the position of the "Significator" - the card representing the person asking the question. (I followed the approach in which this card is laid out blind like the other cards, rather than choosing my own card from the deck to represent myself.) Even though I would make an effort to shuffle the deck in a different way, and I would get totally different cards in the other positions, that damn Queen kept reappearing. I did not embrace it, but eventually, I had to just accept that in the universe of tarot, I was the Queen of Swords.

How fitting was this symbol? Let's take a look at some various descriptions of the Reina de Espadas:

The Dali deck people say:

Representing the energy of a Queen, this feminine power was traditionally known as a widow, crone or divorcee. In modern times, she can be viewed as a model of self-sufficiency, independence and intelligence. She often has extremely high standards due to her subtle sensitivities, which can be perceived by those around her as being critical or hard to please. Her true motive is to refine the world, to upgrade peoples' understanding -- so that everyone can have the space they need to become fully themselves. She is not interested in conforming. She is too intelligent to be confined to the role of housewife or nursemaid, although she is perfectly competent in those areas. She chooses her associations (or her solitude), and is seldom caught up in dependent relationships -- at least not for long. Her intelligence is not always the most comfortable to be around, but she can be counted on to see through superficiality and point to the truth of a situation.

The Astral Gallery reports:

In a Tarot reading, this card indicates intelligence, complexity and perceptiveness, indicative of strength in communcation. It also suggests an aggressive, hard-working and capable character...one who is able to lead a different lifestyle without being threatened by others. Reversed, it indicates deceipt, cunning, narrow-mindedenss and intolerance. It suggests danger of insecurity, neurosis and even possible sexual dysfuncation. [Sally: I do not get this card reversed.] In classical mythology and lore, the Queen of Swords is associated with Atalanta, the gifted huntress and athletic heroine of Greek legend who went to great lengths in order to avoid marriage, challenging each potential suitor to outpace her in a foot race. Atalanta and her eventual victorious bridegroom were both turned into lions by Zeus on the night of their nuptials for consummating their union within a shrine sacred to the God.

Paranormality.com says:

A complex, courageous, intelligent woman, who may well have suffered some deep sorrow or loss. She is concerned with attention to accuracy and detail and can skillfully balance opposing factions to meet her own needs. She has attained inner wisdom and a sense of truth. The card is one for women who have overcome adversity especially at the hands of men, to obtain a state of grace. The ability of women.

My book says:

Sharp. Quick-witted. A keen person. Intensely perceptive. A subtle person. May signify a widow or woman of sadness. Mourning. Privation. Absence. Loneliness. Separation. One who has savoured great happiness but who presently knows the anxiety of misfortune and reversal.

The White Goddess says:

Honest, Astute, Forthright, Witty, Experienced

Not a bad fit, I think. Even the loneliness and sadness match up with my teenage depression years (though the "overcoming adversity especially at the hands of men" doesn't work in anything but the most ridiculously stretched interpretation). Of course, it's so easy for any description to sound like ourselves that it's useful to compare to something else. How about the Queen of Wands? My book says she is "A sympathetic and understanding person. Friendly. Loving. Honorable. Chaste. Practical. Full of feminine charm and grace..." Need I continue? How about the Queen of Cups? She is "A warm-hearted and fair person..." Nope. The Queen of Pentacles represents "Prosperity and well-being. Wealth. Abundance. Extreme Comfort. Security" and other irrelevancies.

My New $100 Shirt

Well, $100 if I value my time as my average hourly wage, anyway. The shirt itself was free (the other Slate shirt from Tam, used because I already had white thread in my machine and was too lazy to want to put in another color) and I had an interesting time spending my afternoon doing this instead of being at work, which I couldn't do because the electricity was out at my office after 9:00 this morning. (We hung around in small groups under emergency lights until the bigwigs decided around 10:30 that Austin Energy's estimate of "1 to 6 hours, or more" to fix the electricity was a good reason for us to leave. I thought that estimate was funny in precisely the same way as the "99c (or more)" stores are.)

This one started from a screwed up position because after waffling about planning to do one thing and then another (I wanted to do a wrap-around shirt, but didn't want to mess up the drawing and couldn't see my way to putting it on the back when it came down to it), I managed to cut the shirt too small for myself at the hips (and smaller elsewhere than I preferred). I think I mostly succeeded in salvaging it with darts at the breast, nipping at the waist and the cut-outs at the bottom of the shirt (whatever those are called - Robert thinks the term is "split hem" from his google search). Hemming the cut-outs took forever because I decided that they needed to be longer after I'd already sewn them down, and thus had to hand-sew the rest while trying to fix the angle of the original hem. The stitching looks rather bad and the hem is uneven along the sides in places, but the white-on-white doesn't really show at any normal distance.

Seeing this photo of myself, I think Damn, I really need to stop with the slouching. And no, I don't typically stand around with my hands ostentatiously in my pockets, but I wanted the hem to show well in the photo. I get this sense I should have one hand out of the pocket, tossing a quarter up in the air and catching it over and over again like a character from Guys and Dolls with my ridiculous pose. (I have decided just now to show the full length shot so you can get the complete impact of this look. Also note the goofy shoes that are great for standing around the house but I can't wear outside because they fall off when I try to go down stairs in them. I absolutely am amazed by women who wear backless shoes; they must learn to habitually scrunch down their toes to hold their feet in the shoes. I am flat unwilling to do anything of the kind.)

(OK, in the middle of the last paragraph, we had a brownout which knocked my computer out. This is the second time a computer has gone down on me today. Robert is all Mr. "Computer Backed Up by an Uninterruptable Power Supply." (Of the brand of an old client of mine, incidentally.) It's nice for him to have these little moments to justify the expense of that thing. It would have been a minor tragedy if his reading of the Gene Expression blog had been disrupted in any way. I mean, important news on the topic of "a mechanism for miRNA-mediated repression" shouldn't be missed! In fact, why aren't my readers getting the latest on this fascinating research right now?)

So, that's my $100 shirt. But if I were to make another shirt like this on July 7, it would be totally free because my income will go to zero. (Well, technically, if they will let me, I will stay on the payroll at my job for the following 4 weeks to burn out my accummulated vacation time while staying on the free health insurance a bit longer.) I break the news to my boss tomorrow, assuming there are not other acts of god like today's thunderstorm that keep her from coming into the office. I received my official acceptance letter from the graduate college in this afternoon's mail, so I can with complete confidence use going back to school as my official reason for leaving the job.

Also checking out the separation documents on the agency's intranet tonight, I found out that I have the option of moving the money in my retirement fund out as cash (less 20% taxes but no penalties) or rolling it into an IRA. (I don't have to make this decision now.) It's cool to know that I have, by back-of-envelope guesstimation, about $13,000 cash I could get if I wanted to that is already mine. It's not every day I realize that I'm richer than I thought. This is a nice counterbalance to all the expenses associated with my going back to school plan that keep surprising me - like, you know, they actually charge you tuition and stuff to go to school. Crap.

How to Value Your Time

I was reading something recently - maybe on Get Rich Slowly - in which some commenters were arguing about how to value the time that you put into doing something like cooking to determine how much cost savings you are getting out of it. The general tenor of this debate was that some people were wanting to reject money-saving, frugal options like packing a lunch to work instead of eating out as being a false economy due to the extra time burden. (This particular case was even weirder than most because at least one person was postulating that the time you spend at home making your lunch counts but the time you spend driving to a restaurant for lunch does not. So a lot of convenient rationalization was going on.)

One thing that always strikes me as ridiculous when I read this kind of discussion is that so many people suggest that you use the hourly wage you make at work as a proxy for the value of your time (e.g. if you earn $50,000 a year working 40 hour weeks, your time is worth $24 an hour). I can understand the basic logic behind this idea (opportunity cost), but what world are they living in that they think many of us can choose how many hours we work on some continuous scale? I mean, if Mr X really had the option of working for an extra hour and getting $24 for it, I could definitely see the benefit in his paying for the convenience of somebody else doing this other work (if he could pay them less than the money he would make in that time and it wasn't something he would get much or any inherent satisfaction out of), but he is unlikely to have that option. For most of us, there is no market for working one extra hour at our average hourly wage, so that is not our opportunity cost.

I don't have any hard quantitative rule like comparing to my hourly wage I use to determine whether to purchase convenience or not. I generally try to balance the expense against the overall onerousness of the task and where exactly I prefer that balance to be isn't even the same from day to day. I sometimes also think explicitly of whether I would rather spend my money on this convenience rather than on something else I could buy. And for my own convenience (ahem), I have determined that some ways of saving money are just too much of a pain to mess with; for instance, I could really work the grocery store flyers to identify loss leaders, but I find it hard enough to get to one store once a week that the idea of driving all over town to get the best deals doesn't seem worth it to me. And then I do things that seem just silly, like spending 30 minutes darning holes where my fingernails have snagged the fabric of my underwear rather than buying new. But hanging out, listening to music and doing a bit of handwork is a kind of nice way to relax to me and lets me feel good about being on the right side of the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle boundary in this small way.

Generation T

I had planned to get myself a little treat after taking my calculus exam, so today I went to Borders and used the 30% off coupon they sent me to buy the book Generation T, which I want to use for t-shirt reconstruction ideas. Though some of them are clearly not up my particular alley (e.g. the almost entirely backless shirt), there are some basic concepts that I find quite brilliant and look forward to trying out.

I also like to check out the livejournal t-shirt surgery site. Most of the posters are young (I'd say 13 - 25) and some of the styles are definitely not something I would ever wear, but I have gotten some good tips from the tutorials and like looking at the different things people are doing. The same woman commented on two different posts I looked at this morning and gave me wonderful hints for a couple of things - making a long skirt waistband out of a t-shirt and sewing your regular fabric to it (since I am dealing with waistband issues, this seems like a potentially great fix) and the clearest, easiest description of how to make a self-fabric binding to go around the neck and arms (I have been lazy with mine and just turned the edge over and sewn it down rather than using any kind of binding).

The craftster.org site also has sewing (from scratch and reconstructive) posts on it, but I don't like that you have to click on each individual post to see a photo of the item.

Lucky for me, Robert had several shirts get snagged on one of our kitchen chairs (which I fixed as soon as I realized there was a problem by giving the chair one of Robert's knit shirts to wear - I think the chair is happy now and will not attempt to bite Robert again) and develop holes, and he had a couple work shirts also give out on him, so I have a little stash of both t-shirts and flat cotton shirts ready to play with. I am looking forward to doing something with a white with maroon strip dress shirt in particular. (Note: I do not know if any of his red and blue striped shirts made it into this stash. I hope so.) (Note: Leo also got up on the same kind of chair I keep in his room at my sewing table and chewed off some of the plastic on the edge, so Robert gave me some clear packing tape to keep the rough edge from scratching my leg. These chairs my grandmother gave me are feisty!)

I also have a pair of black capri pants that got a bleach stain on the leg that I am going to turn into shorts or a skirt, if I can salvage enough of the fabric from the bottom of the legs or am inspired with another fabric to use as the triangular inset on the front and back. Maybe something like this? (Ah, Etsy is obviously going to be another place to look at ideas and drool over them.)

My Orthogonal-to-Fashion Skirt

Last summer, I made a super-easy pull-on skirt from cheap fabric I bought at Wal-Mart. (For those of you who do not commonly make a point of checking out the Wal-Mart sewing area, they always have fabric for $1, $2, or $3 a yard, plus their regular stuff. The $1 and $2 fabric is usually not that great, but they do sometimes have cute designs.) The skirt is not stylish at all, but has that kind of timeless doll-clothes element to it. And it's very comfortable, especially in warm weather - cooler to wear than a pair of shorts, really. As I mentioned before on this blog, I would like to make a bunch of these skirts (which take about 1.5 yards of fabric and leave me good leftovers to repurpose - am I absolutely insane that I am seeing a crazy patchwork garment in my future?) to wear this summer.

But it was difficult to figure out how to wear it because it looks ridiculous with a t-shirt tucked in (ridiculous = kind of bunchy and unflattering), but was too wide in the hips to wear with the shirt untucked without looking like I have no waist. I have a "problem" of having a somewhat small waist and a big ass so making stuff fit right isn't always easy. So one of my tasks for today (Juneteenth, and hence a state holiday) was to try to fix this skirt to be more wearable.

I started by taking some of the material in at the side seams from the waist to hip, which was easy and worked pretty well (a time to be glad of no side pockets!), but I was still struggling with the t-shirt dilemma. I played with the idea of making an obi style belt to lay over the tucked in t-shirt, but I couldn't get that to look quite right. (I think with different fabric, that look would be better than with this spring flower pattern.) Then I had the idea of creating the look of a tucked in waist on the t-shirt itself. So I took the tank top I happened to be wearing (made this weekend from an old, huge Slate magazine t-shirt that Tam gave me) and gave it poor man's darts - which is to say, I turned it inside out, put in a safety pin on each side at the waist, and turned it back.

So here is the final outfit. I am basically pleased with it. I think it's basically cute, fun, summery, unusual, and did I mention cheap? (My cool shoes were not cheap, but they were pre-Operation Cheap Ass, so I get a pass on that.) On other shirts I make to go with this and the other skirts I will have, I am going to incorporate a nipped waist into the shirt itself. I think ties on the side or a tie in the back would work well. I didn't want to attempt anything like that on this shirt though because (1) I love the I Love Books picture logo and would hate to screw the shirt up and (2) this shirt is primarily going to be worn with shorts, which works better with the looser fit (it is the same as the IQ Rock shirt I posted earlier).

I am going to test drive the skirt tomorrow at work with a white shirt and these nice Mary Janes that I don't have the opportunity to wear nearly enough. I have considered putting pockets into future skirts, but that's extra work, so I am interested to try wearing this pocket-less skirt again and see if the lack of pockets is too annoying.

I also want to shout out to LivingDeb for linking to the Wardrobe Refashion blog at just the right time. Operation Cheap Ass was starting to get in the way of my desire for some new clothes for the summer, but WR inspired me to get back to sewing for myself.

Three-legged Carrot Man

He appears to me to need to take a piss. Must have just gotten out of his calculus exam.

Freezer Meals Update

A couple of months ago, I blogged about Once a Month Cooking/Frozen Assets. Since then, our stand alone freezer (that Leo chewed the cord on but was quickly fixed) has started to fill up with individually frozen dinners, as you can see:

We have not done any special mini- or mega-cooking session to do this, but have made a point of doubling a recipe when it is the kind of thing that will hold up well to freezing - casseroles, mostly, but a few other one-dish meals as well. I am crazy for one-dish meals so this works out very well for me. I have also been doubling my muffin recipes. It is a commonly observed but surprisingly true fact that doubling a recipe takes almost no additional time - much of cooking is a fixed time cost, with the only small marginal time costs in chopping up extra vegetables and such. In some cases, like when the recipe calls for half a pound of meat (an inconvenient size to buy, so we always get a full pound), it is actually easier to double the recipe and freeze the half that we don't want to eat right away. This approach has also had the nice side benefit that when Robert and I make two lasagnas, for example, we can customize our own dish to reflect our preferences (in my case, for extra vegetables; in Robert's case, for extra cheese).

Since we have yet to jump into the full-blown OAMC process, we have not seen any of the cost savings from buying ingredients in bulk. However, the time savings alone has made this a very worthwhile process for us. And I like it that with our big freezer, when we make one of our larger dishes that makes 8 servings, we can decide to eat 4 servings this week and freeze the rest for another time. That helps mitigate the burn-out we can get after eating the same dinner four nights in a row.

Just now when I went in to take the freezer photo, Leo came to investigate and found a stray piece of lettuce left over from his dinner last night, which he proceeded to eat right in front of the open freezer door. Technically, I could have moved him out of the way (since he is, for all his luxuriously kingly girth, a mini Rex who weighs under 6 pounds, and does not actually go for the jugular as our "Beware of Attack Rabbit" sign would suggest), but instead I took his picture and then moved him out of the way with the closing door when he was done.

More Math Confusion

O-kay. I just logged on to my online class page and although my test has not yet been graded, there is a new "Announcement" with "common pitfalls" from lessons 1 - 4. This was posted the day following the day I took my exam. I cannot understand what purpose this can possibly serve me at this point. Are these "hints" supposed to be of use to me personally or does the instructor have some pre-conceived idea of how far along the student is supposed to be at a given time and hence posts this stuff according to a set schedule? I'm already through lesson 9 now and if my work life hadn't recently gotten totally insane, I would be a couple lessons past that.

I guess I can say, oh crap, too bad he didn't explain this before I took the midterm, although I'm not sure it would have helped me with the trigonometric function that was on the exam:

"If this limit were 6, then for any positive E, there would be a positive D such that for every x > D, 3x - 6 <> D and 3x - 6 >= E.x will usually depend on D. That is, you will get an expression for x in terms of D.Start with E = 1 and if that doesn't work, adjust it later. You have to show that for any positive D, there is an x where x > D and 3x-6 >= 1. Since 3x-6 >= 1 when x >= 7/3 (or x <= -5/3 but we don't need to use that information), all you need to do now is show that for any D > 0, there is an x such that x > D and x >= 7/3."

Please take a moment to realize and enjoy the fact that you will never be in the position to have to understand the above material. I mean, unless you are contemplating an advanced degree in mathematics (or are unlucky enough to have not taken your calc 1 midterm yet). In which case, feel free to find whatever pleasure you can in your superior understanding of the precise definition of a limit because, really, how often do you get to do that? I personally am going to dedicate that part of my brain for thinking important, happy-making thoughts like "Bunnies are soft and cute" and "Fiber One bars may be just peanut butter chip or chocolate chip cookies with oats, but how many cookies have 9 grams of fiber in 150 scrumptious calories?"

Oh, and have I mentioned that with some consideration, I realized that there is no real reason I need to take differential equations? More room for fun stuff.

Ninja Award

For those of you who have been breathlessly awaiting (ahem) word on what award I ended up getting at my class at CSU, here it is:

Yes, my "Are you boys ready to rumble?" challenge won the day. Notice the fake last name? Everyone likes to pretend I was drunk that night even though it has been established that I was stone sober. I was the only person to get a fake name on my award, which I found amusing and convenient for posting to my pseudo-anonymous blog. After the ceremony (which was taking place at a bar), one woman told me that when the award was given and story was related to those who thought themselves accursed they were not there to see it themselves, our one female instructor had this incredible look of shock and confusion on her face, like she was having difficulty assimilating this new information. I also screwed up the photo shoot that evening when one guy dared another to pinch my ass and I spun around and threatened to totally fuck up the would-be pincher. So there's a great photo now of about 30 people and my back; it is unknown whether my aggressive hand movements show in the picture.

A couple weeks after getting this award, I walked into a meeting with three fellow researchers at work and one of them immediately started laughing. When our meeting organizer asked him what his problem was, he said that since J had told him about that event, he had imagined me coming into the room saying my now famous phrase. Which lead to J having to tell and act out the scene (which he had experienced as one of the guys on the receiving end of this thing in Fort Collins) for the fourth guy. Much fun was had by all.

Free "Rock" T Recon

This is probably my favorite t-shirt recon to date - turning the freebie t-shirt from my ex-employer's annual conference into a sleeveless top. I've always had a fondness for this t-shirt, with its silly rock concert tour theme and the listing of all the offices of the company (before it was purchased by one of the world's top 10 market research companies that has offices in 46 countries and looks kind of scarily impressive on my resume), so I was glad to rescue this one from the pile of unworn t-shirts in the bottom of my dresser. It was super easy (not having to deal with removing, resizing, and reattaching the sleeves is wonderful) and with a fun logo already on it, it didn't require any creativity whatsoever.

I am glad to be so far removed from this job, which became hellish at the end (culminating in my ex-boss personally escorting me from the office when I got laid off by mistake and without my new boss's knowledge), that I can think about the goofy elements of my experience this shirt represents with a certain fondness. And since my really nice company backpack finally bit the dust a few months ago, and I never took home one of the dozens of crazy looking company clocks that could only keep time if you laid it down flat on its back on a table rather than hanging it from the wall as it was designed to do and thus was a total failure as a tchotchke client gift but a good symbol of the screwiness of the firm, this is perhaps my only physical memento from that period of my life. Well, that and the approximately 2,000 small post-it notes that I took with me.

Front with company name and conference logo:

The back says: One Vision / Atlanta Austin London New York Redwood City

Skinny Pants

While Livingdeb is coming to grips with stylish, low-waisted pants (in which I bet she looked great, even if she felt conspicuously thighed, because a modestly low-waisted pair of pants with a bit of flare is just so much more flattering than the old style stuff we used to wear), today I finally wore a pair of skinny capri pants I bought at Our Favorite Store/The Other Talbots last summer. This morning, I had originally put on an old, comfortable pair of khakis, but they were such a fashion disaster (pleats, I tell you!) I could not really bear to wear them again. Ever. My capri pants are not quite as extreme as Audrey Hepburn's famous skinny pants, but they are rather skinny (and fortunately, have a good deal of stretch to them). I was a little uncertain about them, but a woman at work I hadn't seen in a while said to me in the hall, "Hey, you're looking skinny." I told her that this is an optical illusion of the pants and I now wish I had a pair in every color. I really had expected that only truly skinny girls could wear skinny pants, but I've changed my mind.

Too bad that it's easy to make big clown pants, but much more of a challenge to make side-zip, darted, flattering skinny pants. With my newfound mad sewing skillz (hah), I am eager to try slimming up my clown pants pattern. (For some reason, I find screwing around and floundering at the sewing machine less off-putting than following an actual damn pattern, even though it's more work and the results are surely not as good.)

Big Man Goes Down

Yesterday, my agency sent out a press release that our executive director is retiring on August 31 (the last day of our fiscal year). I guess you aren't allowed to stay in charge when on your watch the agency gets an audit report as brutal as the one handed to us this year. Robert and I are trying to decide whether the parks division director is also going to be "retiring" or "pursuing other opportunities" in the months ahead. I have two good sources of information I plan on working tomorrow to find out the skinny on this situation. Yeah, I know, I have historically eschewed the gossip chain but what the hell.

People have been fleeing the department in droves the last few months. I can't turn around without getting an email bounced back from someone who left quietly, seeing an invitation to a party for someone retiring or leaving for another job, or hearing someone say "Well normally we could ask so-and-so, but since she's no longer with us...." And you know me, I'm such a joiner.

I need to put in my notice so as to avoid getting another email like I did today from my compatriot J (from another division), who I've always gotten along with extremely well, but who is now kind of freaking out and getting "concerned" about the fact that I am not acting as team lead on a joint project. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was decided by my chain of command over a year ago that I would not be leading that project, back when I had about half a dozen fewer major projects on my list and the auditor report was just a gleam in a politician's eye, so I sure as fuck am not going to be taking this on now. I know he's feeling overwhelmed, but he doesn't know the trouble I've seen, he hasn't known the sorrow.

I've also been trying to convince my immediate supervisor that it is madness to see the latest, most appalling statements from the audit team as an "opportunity" rather than a set of requirements to be taken care of in the easiest way possible consistent with covering our asses.

Today's "lesson" in survey research, as inferred from our audit response team's rewriting of a plan I submitted to them: "to increase the number of completed surveys" (my description) is the same as "to increase the response rate" (their edit). Silly me, I've always thought that a response rate would require having a countable denominator. Thanks for straightening me out on that one.

I think the organization is moving right through Kafka toward Orwell this week. Ignorance is strength, people.

Midterm Exam

I took my midterm exam (30% of my grade) this morning at the testing center. I had a good weekend of studying and felt about as solid on this material as I am ever going to be. I was still feeling quite a bit uncertain of the very hardest proof using the precise definition of a limit from my homework set, but I had come up with a kind of sneaky work-around for that type of problem, and generally, I was ready for the test.

However, this did not mean that I was actually prepared for the exam as my instructor designed it. Oops.

The test was an odd combination of the easy (the questions regarding tangent lines, magnification, related rates, etc., were conceptually quite simple but I may have screwed up the calculations), the initially perplexing that resolved itself with thought (e.g. calculating the limits would not have been possible if I had only memorized the rules of thumb in the book since he picked weird little functions that took me a bit to figure out), and the unexpected and confusing. The maximization problem was, I am mostly convinced, a trick question in that it did not have a maximum value. (The homework problems had been a bunch of the "find the package with the greatest volume"/"maximize the profit" normal story problems which yielded an equation to maximize and a constraint, while this one was just a complicated equation that allowed me to demonstrate my (in-?)ability to take derivatives.) The limit proofs were (1) using an expression with a higher power of x, which we did not cover in the homework and (2) proving that a limit of a trig equation did not exist, which we did not cover in the homework; I was not ready for the test questions on limits to be harder than any of the problems in the assignments.

Fortunately I had spent the time on the hardest of the homework problems involving Rolle's Theorem, so I was able to answer the similar question on the test quite thoroughly it seems to me. I was also glad I had (extraneously, in my previous opinion) memorized the equation for motion under constant acceleration because that was what the problem the study guide had described as a "motion problem as in sections [whatever]" turned out to be; I had expected a "find the velocity and/or acceleration using the distance formula" type story problem, and I think many people will be unpleasantly surprised that it was something else. Tam, I was even able to make use of the little representation of the mean value theorem that I used early on to help remember what it was - that it implies that at some point your car must have been traveling at the average speed for your trip - on one problem. (As you may have noticed, my instructor emphasizes the theoretical/proofy aspects of the material.)

The test was not crazy hard, though. There was not, as I had been half-dreading but could not seriously imagine being possible, an equivalent to the infamous "Leibnitz problem" from the homework (i.e. a physics problem Leibnitz solved in a paper published in 1684) or the "pipe carried down a bending corridor" problem that took forever to get anywhere with. But it was a bit harder overall than I had expected, given that there is no way there can be a curve on a test given to a single individual. I should get at least partial credit even on the limit questions, since I did get some of the way there, and he doesn't take off much for dumb math errors like dropping a sign.

But the very worst thing about the test was that it was a full 3 hours with no bathroom break allowed! After an hour and a half, I was ready for a bathroom break. At two hours, I was hurting. By the time I finally gave up about 10 minutes short of the 3 hours, I was dying. I'd say I spent a good 1/3 - 1/2 of the time in the test distracted by (borderline obsessed by) a need to pee. This makes for suboptimal testing conditions. Maybe my voucher for a free Depends undergarment was lost in the mail at the same time as the postcard that told me my test was ready at the testing center.

When I was checking in, a high school girl brought her exam back to the front desk to tell them that it was the wrong version of the test (an "A" instead of a "B" for whatever exam it was); I do not know if they ever found the correct test or if she was just screwed.

At least I have my test behind me, for good or bad, and if the study guide's description of the cumulative final is to be trusted (I know - not quite 100% up til now), I will not need to know how to do proofs using the formal definition of a limit again. Like, for the rest of my life, I hope! Of course, I still have Taylor series to look forward to.

Two Small Pieces of Good News

(1) It appears that my unused vacation time will be transformed into money when I leave my job. I currently have 163 hours accrued. That will make for a nice little parting gift. You know, to get me through my upcoming poverty. I have to remind myself that I am on Operation Cheap Ass and not Operation Money Bags for a reason. That reason: I am not interested in buying and having a whole bunch of material goods or swimming around in piles of money Scrooge McDuck style. Continuing to work this job when it will make it impossible to pursue my long-term, happy-making goals isn't the solution.

I want to blog a lot more later (when I am not so tired and uninspired - I got less than four hours of sleep last night) about the book Stumbling on Happiness (written by a Harvard psychology professor) that I finished reading a few days ago. (And that I bought for myself last Xmas.) But I will report that I used the technique that his review of the happiness literature and his own research suggest is the best way to estimate how you will feel about experiencing some particular situation in the future in thinking about whether I wanted to pursue the possibility of reducing my hours at my current job from full-time to half-time (rather than getting a different part-time job altogether). Because our imaginations are unreliable, he tells us, it is better to instead ask someone who is currently experiencing the future you are contemplating for yourself and find out how they feel about it - an approach that we basically all always reject because we feel that we are so unique that no surrogate (or group of surrogates) can be a good proxy for us or shed any important light on what our own special experience would be. I took the challenge he posed and tested this out for myself. And lucky me, I have a perfect surrogate to look to - my co-worker K who is currently working half-time at my job, doing the same kind of work I would be doing and under almost identical conditions, and who used to have my exact job before I did. I quickly determined that K is overworked, stressed out, and generally unhappy with her situation (which she sticks with because one awesome thing about state service is that the benefits that come with a part-time situation are excellent compared to what you would get almost anywhere else and she is paid very well for a part-timer, the same hourly rate that she made before). So it was pretty easy to decide that I have no reason to believe that I would feel radically differently if I were in her place, thus making it an unappealing prospect I am not going to pursue at all.

In my I/O psychology class, the book listed a consistent result from many different studies of workers' experiences of the workplace - the group of employees with the lowest reported levels of stress is college professors. Yes!

(2) For some reason I had it stuck in my head that I needed to give four weeks notice at my job, but upon a review of our policy and guidelines today, I discovered that, duh, my employment is entirely at-will and thus I can leave at a moment's notice if I choose, just as they could lay me off the same way. (Oh man, wouldn't that be perfect? A RIF would be just the ticket right now.) So I am perfectly okay doing the standard two weeks notice. (Doing less would be unprofessional and flat-out meaner to my co-workers who are already going crazy than I want to be.)

Boring Bird T-shirt Recon

This was another huge t-shirt, representative in size of several I bought cheap from work a few years ago.

Here is the "woman sized" shirt that my co-worker E asked me about. (It has a big drawing of two pheasants on the back, so it's a bit less dull than it appears from the front.) This was actually my first reconstruction, so the neckline was a little bit screwy as you can see. But a definite improvement over the choking ribbing on the original. I don't know about you, but I hate a t-shirt that has a high, tight neckline - they are way too hot and constricting. A t-shirt should be comfortable, which this one definitely is.

Anyway, as you can see, these t-shirt reconstructions are lacking in fabulous artistic merit. Not a single mushroom painting, clipper ship applique, Marilyn Manson headshot, rubber duckie stamp, rock lyric stencil, or flouncy ribbon to be seen. However, I do have high hopes for salvaging some nice pale blue t-shirts that have faded in spots using a stencil/bleaching technique; I'm really thinking I need a blue t-shirt with little bunnies on it to begin with. Have you guys ever noticed how quick light blue cotton t-shirts are to fade in splotches into a lavendarish pink color after only a few washes? Even my light blue t-shirt from American Apparel faded almost immediately, while the other colors have held up very well as basically any other color of t-shirt always does. It's a disappointment to me because I love to wear a blue shirt with beige pants.

Also, I have to admit, some of the bird appliques on Wardrobe Refashion were really cute. I am also thinking little frogs have potential. Will someone reading this blog please hurry up and have children already so I can dress them in funny wee outfits? (Or perhaps I just need to indulge my inner child.) One of the things I loved about the WR blog was seeing the adorable little kid clothing. I have to say, this picture of the woman's little girl wearing a "married" dress and walking down the aisle with this unexpected companion was terribly sweet.

Expo Tank Top

This was the size of the t-shirt they gave me to wear when I worked at our outdoor Expo last fall. No, they didn't mistakenly think I am an XL; this was just the very smallest size they had available.

So you can imagine the envy of my female co-workers when I turned up on that warm October weekend wearing this cool little number. It was a breeze to make and breezy to wear.

(The eagle-eyed among you will notice that the camo patterns in the before and after photos do not match. That's because I didn't think to take a before picture at first, so took a photo of an equivalently sized extra shirt I had from the previous year as a proxy.)

Reconstructed Clothing

Recently, Livingdeb has been linking to the blog Wardrobe Refashion, in which people pledge to stop buying new clothing for a period of several months and instead refashion existing clothing, sheets, thrift store purchases, and such, and post photos and descriptions of their work. It's been a nifty place to see people doing creative things with their clothing and it's good for references to tutorials, books, blogs, and other sources of ideas.

For many people into this hobby, it's an opportunity to do something artistic/fun while making a statement against consumerism/supporting the environment through meaningful recycling. For others (particularly teenage girls, it seems), it's a way to express one's individuality and have cool clothes on a small budget.

So reading about Wardrobe Refashion on Livingdeb's blog has inspired me to finally post something about my own reconstructed clothing, which I have been doing on an irregular basis for a couple of years. It started, as these things often do, with the desire to make some of my huge freebie t-shirts into things I would actually be willing to wear (other than as pajama tops). Through the wonders of the internet, I stumbled upon several t-shirt surgery sites among the young, hipster crafting community and was able to use some basic techniques to turn big-ass t-shirts into fitted t-shirts and tank tops. After reading a couple tutorials on this and trying things out, I have settled on a technique that works really well for me - use an existing shirt that you like the fit of as a pattern and make your big-ass t-shirt into a match to that garment. I have found that heavier t-shirts (e.g. Beefy T's) are easier to work with and don't stretch as much. I've reconstructed a couple of t-shirts with bird designs that I bought super cheap at work, prompting the guy who purchased them to comment to me in the hall when I was wearing one, "I didn't realize we sold those in women's sizes." I said, "Yeah, you don't." I still have about 8 big t-shirts that I would like to reconstruct, including some camo, a polo shirt, and a couple shirts Tam gave me with great designs from Salon.

Last summer, I also made several pairs of simple pants (aka my "clown pants") and a skirt from a "learning to sew" pattern and cheap, brightly colored cotton fabric from Wal-Mart. These have been a lot of fun to wear to work with a solid colored t-shirt. I have two pieces of fabric right now that are waiting to be made into skirts. A cotton skirt is about the coolest thing I have found to wear in the Texas summer and unlike shorts, I can wear one to work and look not only perfectly appropriate but even more dressed up than wearing jeans.

Since I have been on Operation Cheap Ass, I have avoided buying any clothes and additional fabric (though a few weeks ago I wanted the Pink Panther fabric enough to almost make me weep, I resisted). But I did turn my old Marvin the Martian t-shirt (a beloved gift of about 10 years ago from my aunt K that mostly fit fine except for the neck being a bit tight, since it was a boy's shirt) and the "rock music tour"/annual conference t-shirt from my previous employer into nice sleeveless shirts with generous necklines. I also took in a too-wide sleeveless shirt that I bought cheap at Goodwill on a blitz session prior to starting tennis lessons - the shirt has a wonderful henley neckline, so I was glad to turn this from a tennis-only garment into something I'm willing to wear to the grocery store. I like to wear sleeveless shirts on evenings and weekends for about 5 months of the year and I didn't have enough to even get through a single week. But rather than spend even the $4 apiece for cheap-ass tank tops at Wal-Mart, I was able to repurpose some existing shirts, thus saving money, coming up with something that fits perfectly, and making use of something that was just sitting around wasting space. An all-around winner.

Of course, no post on reconstructed clothing is complete without photos, but I will post those separately now.

Texas State Application: Complete

Tonight I applied as a non-degree seeking graduate student at Texas State for the fall semester. I was able to do this on the applytexas.org website in about an hour, including paying the application fee online with my credit card. I had a funny moment when I read all the information about mailing in your check or money order and wrote it down in my notebook, then scrolled down and saw another section on paying by credit card. But overall, I thought the website was well-designed and easy to use.

This morning, I got the requisite paperwork signed by the business school people for the marketing class I want to take. Tomorrow afternoon, I have a meeting with the psychology graduate advisor and a plan to drop in on the math advisor (who is also teaching the section of Calc 2 I want to enroll in) during his office hours. I have not yet spoken to the psych advisor, but one of the other professors, who until recently was in charge of giving permission for non-degree seeking students to take the classes, favored my getting approval to take the classes I am interested in. Let's hope the other guy I need to sign my form agrees with that assessment.

With luck, I should be able to get everything signed and the forms turned in to the Graduate Admissions office tomorrow. Even if it doesn't work out as smoothly as I hope, I am in good shape to have all my paperwork in by the deadline of June 15. I am really looking forward to (1) getting accepted and (2) enrolling in my classes so I can (3) give notice at my job.

Even though it is 21 miles from my door (on the far south end of Austin) to Texas State in San Marcos (the next town of any size south on I-35 from Austin), compared to 14 miles to UT, it took less time to make it to Texas State this morning because the light, quick-moving traffic had me going 70 mph all the way. Going from Austin to the suburbs has me moving opposite the major flow of traffic. (I can easily understand why so many Texas State students live in my apartment complex; the drive is a breeze.) Driving to UT is more of a pain because I-35 within the city is crazily congested with traffic. So I am feeling about as good about driving to Texas State for an 8:00 math class M-Th as is possible. I still am not sure what the student onsite parking situation will be like, of course, other than pricey and probably not very convenient (though I am willing to view time spent walking across campus as good exercise time). I parked in the (unsustainably expensive) visitor center parking garage today.

British Psychological Society Research Digest Blog

I just refound my bookmark to this blog in the Great Work Computer Shift of May 2007. If you are interested in psychological research, this is a great place for brief descriptions of recently published articles and links to the source material.

I enjoyed reading this post - it's about a study in which adults (college undergraduates, technically) were unable to distinguish when children were telling fabricated stories or real ones. (I will leave criticism of the experiment as an exercise for the reader.) This caught my eye because of how frequently one encounters people who think that their children don't lie. This research is consistent with my own experience-based (not data-based) sense that kids lie all the time and do so well enough that adults often don't have a clue. Of course, I was primed to catch on to this by the fact that my sister was such an egregious and effective liar as a child. She was scary, scary good at it. She probably still is.

Sneakery Shoes

In the "Pain of Paying" comments, the newly boyfriended Tam pointed me to an online display of a set of "sneakery" shoes that she saw on a recent trip to the Patagonia store. Check out this green shoe from Patagonia:

And then compare to my old-school squash shoes from Keds that I bought a couple years ago using a gift card from Dillards:

Good call, Tam, on picking a shoe that would attract me. Fortunately, aside from the laughably non-Operation Cheap Ass compatible price tag of $50, I can also look at those shoes and say, My shoes are a little bit more olive green than those, so... they are also more grown up looking than the others, so... they are just a little bit more attractive than the shoes from Patagonia, so...

(I apologize if you have not seen the Saturday Night Live skit with the demonstrative woman who continuously attempts to upstage and outdo every person she meets in an increasingly ridiculous way and thus have no idea what I'm talking about. I would point to the Youtube video but I don't know how to identify it. Any ideas, Tam?)