Weekend update

I just hit the one-year mark at my ‘new’ job. We’re working out of a new operations center now, better facilities with better parking and twenty minutes closer to where I live. (In fact, my drive time is now almost exactly the same as used to be necessary for my previous, lesser-paying, less enjoyable job.) I seem to be doing decently well, just got an associate-of-the-quarter type award which is good for bragging rights but not a lot more, but it opens the possibility of advancement.

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Last week Susan saw a homeless person standing on a street corner just as it was starting to rain. She’s been working with veterans for decades now, many of them homeless, so she’s sensitive to this particular issue, and was only a few blocks from a Salvation Army center that she knew provided shelter, so she gave him a ride there. He thanked her by stealing her purse. With her phone in it. No surprise that she was greatly distressed by this, but she was lucky in that she wasn’t carrying any credit cards. Then we got double-lucky on the phone. First, when we went to report it, it turned out that she had in fact purchased insurance for it (advisable, since the phone cost about ten times as much as the model I carry); second, once the replacement arrived, we found that she had allowed someone to toggle on a backup-enable setting, so her information was retrievable. She actually started crying when she saw the granddaughter photos she thought were gone.

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September is my favorite month. Past the heat of the summer, well below the cold of winter. I also like October quite a bit, so we’re in the beginning of a pleasant stretch.

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The job Susan starts on Tuesday (she’s already done the orientation): it’s back at the place which was the first teaching job she ever held, more than thirty years after she left it. No familiar faces, of course, but lots of familiar sights. And new stuff as well; even if the days when we were there, there was always construction going on, and that doesn’t seem to have slowed down.

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Finally, we live in the country, but not way out in the country. Next door to our house — as in, right over the fence is their parking lot — is a diner specializing in country-style cooking. It’s a local favorite, and popular outside the immediate area (the Chinese soon-to-be in-laws were favorably impressed), so there’s a decent amount of activity there about four days a week. Recently, there’s been an addition to that activity: an adolescent bear has taken to swinging by now and then and digging through their dumpster. (Oh, yes, we also live right at the edge of a national forest.) Susan has seen it a time or two; she called me out today to look, and I saw … movement, between trees and shrubbery, which she said was the bear. Doubtless something will be done eventually, but for now it’s just part of the background of existence.

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Life goes on. We go with it.