Life In Ordinary Time

Fire

My word for the day is conflagration, as in the Southern California wildfires burning now.  I went to sleep hearing about the Montecito fire, and woke up hearing about the Sylmar fire.  Everything looked normal when I took the dogs out in the morning, but when I took them out at noon, I saw a lot of smoke from a fire in Yorba Linda (the next town over from where I live) and Anaheim Hills.  

As I walked the dogs, ash was falling around us, and the smell of smoke was pervasive.  Stupidly, I drove right into it after I took the dogs back to the apartment.  I had planned to go to a yarn store today, and without thinking I continued with my plan, forgetting the yarn store was right on the border of Yorba Linda and Anaheim Hills.  As I drove east on Orangethorpe, the pall of smoke became greater and greater, until I was driving in a kind of twilight.  I thought about turning back, but I wanted to get the yarn for a gift I'm making for someone so I continued.

There was no fire in the immediate vicinity of the yarn shop, I didn't think there would be, but the fire was in the nearby hills.  There was more traffic in the area than normal, though, perhaps from people forced to evacuate.  I got out of there quickly so as to get back home and out of the way.  While in the shop I heard and saw fire engines going by, on their way into the hills and the fire.

My troubles seem to pale when compared to all the displaced people whose homes have been destroyed.  500 in one mobile home park alone, and the news is saying the fire fighters in Yorba Linda have no water pressure and are watching the homes burn, because there's nothing else they can do.

This has come closer to me than this particular fire.  Lynda and Gordon have twice had to evacuate  their home in Scripps Ranch in San Diego.  They almost came here to stay with me in my tiny apartment, when they couldn't go back to their home.  They and the dogs ended up staying in a motel for a couple of nights, but it was very scary. 

My brother is dog-sitting for them right now, and I keep calling him, asking if there are any fires in his area.  He doesn't have a car so he'd have to rely on the neighbors to get him out if he needed to evacuate.  Or wait for me to drive up in 2 hours, and that wouldn't work.

I took a picture of the way the sun has looked most of the afternoon at my apartment.  An orange ball in a haze of smoke.  Sometime the orange ball was even dimmer than the picture, you could barely see it.  This is the end of Part I,  Part II will come later.

The Last Day...

Oh,  this is really funny, positively hilarious.   I'd had this inspiration about the blog, that came to me sometime after I took the picture of the "23 Days" sign and posted it here.  I thought I might work the blog around the theme of being unemployed, starting with what it was like to know you'd be unemployed in a matter of days, but had to go to work every day in spite of it, pretending things mattered.  I took a photo of the "22" day sign, and then yesterday the "21" sign. 

Then shortly after I got to work yesterday, our manager sent an email out to all of us, only at 7:00am there weren't very many of us there, saying we were going to have a meeting at 9:00am and all of us should make sure we were off the phone by 8:30am to make sure we would be on time for the meeting.  Off the phones for a half hour before a meeting?

Well, that was worrisome.  The only time we've all gotten off the phone at the same time for a meeting was the time they told us they were closing us down.  So we started wondering if they were going to close us down earlier.  The manager over my manager was there, which was unusual, and as my supervisor came in, she saw our human resources person with a bunch of folders in his office, so we knew something was up. 

Then we remembered it was about 30 calendar days before the date we were scheduled to leave, December 12th, and they were probably just giving us the paperwork for our severance packages.

It's so strange, when we first thought they were going to let us go earlier, but still pay us through December 26th, we were happy and excited.  Then when we thought they were just giving us the severance pay documents we were all depressed.  Isn't that a little weird? 

Not really.  It was getting harder and harder to be there, harder to pretend things mattered, harder to care about learning their stupid new system.  We were just marking time to the inevitable end, and we just wanted out.  We knew we were going, no one was going to change their mind at the last instance, so why not stop prolonging our torture and let us go now?

Well, that's just what they did.  Yesterday was my last day at work.  When they announced it in the meeting they were a little shocked at the response.  Everybody cheered!  The torture was over and we could get on with it, finally.   As we were madly packing up our desks,  throwing stuff out, and hugging each other someone changed the 21 day sign to read 2 Hrs.

It was so odd to throw out things that a half hour before were so important, but now were meaningless.  All the papers for the quality control work I had been doing--trashed.  For some reason I didn't want to throw away the supervisors books in which I wrote down everyone's "scores" on status calls and accident reports.  So I walked them over to Deeann and I'm sure she just trashed them in her trash can, rather than mine.  I couldn't do it.  I couldn't make the work I'd been doing so meaningless.

I threw away two trash cans full of stuff, and left  behind assorted things belonging to the company--like headsets, markers, staples and staplers, and various office supplies.

All I took fit into one packing box,  a box kindly left on our chairs while we were in the meeting and discovered by us when we emerged. 

Plenty

Someone actually put up a sign today, two pieces of copy paper taped to the wall,  "23" is written on the first paper and "Days" is written on the second paper. 

****************************

I had the TV on with the sound off.  There was a commercial on for someones pizza.  They were showing big close ups of various kinds of pizza.  To someone who had just finished eating (me) they were rather disgusting.   I noticed for the first time that they were so detailed as to be lascivious, if you know what I mean.  Meant to inspire food-lust.  My first thought after the disgust reaction was "We eat too much", and on the heels of that thought came a feeling of amusement.  I thought how funny it was, to have come so far from the caveman stage when getting our food was our chief occupation,  and it was,  by necessity,  what we were about, to now being so sophisticated, to have the tool called industry bringing our food to us without much effort on our part, yet we still slaver after food with a persistence and a dedication that you might think would be hard to explain.  I'll explain it.  We need to see big, detailed pictures of food,  to see exactly what we could eat, the very texture and color of it, if we really wanted to, if we needed to.  We need to know it's there.  We need to know we won't starve, that we could never starve, no, not us.  We need to know there is plenty.

Comfort

Last week I made macaroni and cheese and this week I made tuna noodle casserole, complete with Campbell's cream of mushroom soup and crumbled potato chips on the top.   And they both tasted very good to me.  I will restrain myself and not put their pictures in this blog.  This is not a food blog, never fear, and the macaroni & cheese is long gone.  Because this isn't a food blog,  the tuna noodle casserole Isn't particularly photogenic.  It just tasted good in a grade school sort of way.

What's the deal?  Comfort food?  Do I need comforting?  I suppose I must.  In about a month I won't have a job.  In about a month, maybe a little longer, I'm going to move, possibly to San Diego, a place I've never lived before, and the only people I know there are my sister and brother in law.   I have to find a place to rent there that will take three dogs.  I'll have to apply for unemployment, and try to get them to let me train for a new career while I'm on it.    Eventually, if not right away (my plans are rather fuzzy here), I'll have to look for a new job....  And every day before then, I have to go to work at a place I've worked for the last 22 years and pretend there's a point to everything I do, when we all know we're out of there.

Comfort food, indeed.  There's nothing like too much pasta to squash those feelings down where they belong!

I had a bad day yesterday.  I had plans to do all these moving-right-along things, and I didn't do any of it.  I stayed in the house, with the curtains drawn, slept a lot, managed to get the dogs out, and that's about it.  Then at night I drank too much wine, wrote in here and listened to some music that made me a little happier, don't ask me why.   John Tavener, Ikons, and Richard Thompson.

Today was better.  I took Noodle to the dog park this morning, got the mud off his feet after we came home (not fun, he wriggles), paid bills and worked on a budget, went grocery shopping with Molly,  then cooked the above-mentioned tuna casserole as well as a pork roast, vacuumed, fed the dogs and took them out, watered what I still laughingly call my garden....

Why was it a better day today?  I don't know-- would you believe the weather changed?  It was windy, a cool wind, not the Santa Anas, and clouds in a brilliant blue sky.  I'm so tired of the hot weather.