I’ve talked before about the fact that our office has no sound insulation and how annoying it is, but bear with me, because I’m going to talk about it again. What can I say, with the recent construction in the next-door office it’s been on my mind a lot.

Today the construction wasn’t as bad as it’s been before, since it seems they are now laying carpets. This is actually a good thing, because if they are laying carpets, chances are pretty high they are nearly done with all the other banging, thumping, sawing, and other noise-producing activities involved in getting an office ready for new occupants. However, the carpet layers seemed to be big into the yelling and the arguing, and also the swearing.

I am not some quivering violet who is disturbed by a swear word every now and then. But when every other sentence includes references to bodily functions in some manner or another, it really starts getting to me. And it didn’t help that they kept arguing with each other. Loudly.

Add to this the fact that the people downstairs were in rare form, especially the woman we have nicknamed The Chipmunk, and by the end of the day most of us had just about had it. The people downstairs usually aren’t so awful as today (although with all the arguing and screeching going on this afternoon I swear it wouldn’t surprise me to one day discover The Chipmunk had gone on a gun-toting rampage and shot her coworkers), and I know that the construction next door is nearly done. But lately I’ve been wondering if Murphy’s Law will kick in with a vengeance and our soon-to-be next door neighbors will be the type who stomp up and down the stairs (that are over my head) like elephants and holler back and forth to each other even worse than The Chipmunk and her equally vocal coworkers, or worse yet, have insidiously annoying cell phone rings they keep at full volume. I worry about this because I know that if this does happen, and the people downstairs keep up with their daily tirades, one of these days I and my coworkers just might snap and take out the whole lot of them, armed with nothing more than industrial strength rubber bands, rolls of detailed construction plans, and a protractor.

In honor of Labor Day Richard and I did our very best to do nothing remotely productive all day. We actually were succeeding pretty admirably, having lounged around in our pajamas until lunchtime, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. So we got dressed and ate lunch and then headed off to pick out three different colors of paint. Two are for the claustrophobic toilet room in the master bathroom, and the other was a quart of brown paint for the breakfast nook tree. I picked up a roll of painter’s tape for the toilet room (because pin stripes are going to require an awful lot of marking – ugh), and a package of skinny art brushes, and then when we got home I spread newspaper all over the floor of the breakfast nook, dragged out the stepstool, and finally painted in the outline that has been penciled on our wall since last weekend.

Ta da! Phase one of the breakfast nook tree is complete. It’s a bit startling to round the corner and see something dark on the wall, but I’m rather happy with how it turned out. Now if I could just find the same motivation to finish sewing the curtains for that room….

Friday night we got three flats of creepers and planted them in ragged little clumps among the rocks of the path around the raised flowerbed. This has the lovely effect of making the rock path look as if it has sprouted a few dozen rather unsightly clumps of weeds. My hope is that the creepers will grow and..er…creep to fill in the holes and once it is more uniformly green and leafy, it will look slightly less unkempt.

After our little foray into gardening for the artistically inept, we watched Death to Smoochy, because apparently this week was a Robin Williams week. And after that we went to bed to try to rest up for the next day because…

Saturday we spent all day in Berkeley, helping Beth and Sabs move out of one apartment and into another about twenty minutes drive away.

Amusingly enough, we actually helped them move into that apartment a few years back – and back then we’d never met them until the day we showed up to help them lug their few thousand boxes of books up an extremely steep and narrow flight of stairs (okay, I exaggerate. There may have been only a few hundred. Heh). I teased Beth at one point, asking her if this meant the friendship was now over, since we’d moved them in and were now moving them out.

It was a long and tiring afternoon, but then moving always is. It’s impossible to ever be completely packed, and in their case it didn’t help they have six ‘helpful’ kitties and an extremely active little boy. But somehow, even after resorting to tossing things willy-nilly into huge plastic bags instead of boxes, we got them into their new apartment, where we left them with towers of boxes and headed home to shower the moving grime away and then collapse into bed and not wake up until we absolutely had to the next morning.

Sunday we were both pretty sore from the moving activities on Saturday so we tried to do as little as possible until it was time to get back into the car and go off to see a play.

Richard’s parents are involved in a theater group in their church. In the past few years we have seen Wizard of Oz, where Richard’s little sister played the scarecrow, and Honk, where she played the (male) tomcat. This year, continuing the theme of only playing male characters, she played the lead role in Peter Pan.

It was a wonderful production, even if they did accidentally blow up Peter Pan on the pirate ship (sound effect miscue). Conveniently enough, we passed by a Trader Joe’s the way home. This was a good thing because (horror of horrors) we had completely run out of the vegan cheese blintzes Richard and I are completely addicted to. And plus there is a Krispy Kreme right in the same shopping center, with the little “Hot Now” sign all lit up, and everyone knows that donuts so hot from the fryer they melt in your mouth are completely point free.

Another Friday Five. And yes it’s Saturday but hey, at least it’s in the same week.

1. Are you going to school this year?

   I cannot even begin to imagine going back to school. Every once in the while I toy with the idea of taking a class in something just for fun, but so far I haven’t gotten around to it. Eight years of college was more than enough school for my adult life. It’ll be a long time before I have the desire to do that again.

2. If yes, where are you going (high school, college, etc.)? If no, when did you graduate?

   Officially, I received my bachelor’s in 1991. Unofficially, I left college in 1997, with all the coursework done for my masters and with nothing left to do but write the thesis. I left voluntarily, and it’s something I’ve never regretted, but I’ve told that story a time or two already so no need to tell it again.

3. What are/were your favorite school subjects?

   In high school I think my favorite subjects were math and band. I had the same math teacher all four years of high school Turns out he hand-picked his class each year and for whatever reason I was one of the ones he picked. He was a hard teacher but none of us minded, and if it hadn’t been for my high school calculus notes I would never have made it through calculus in college, so obviously it all paid off. And I loved band because it was easy. I was in everything – jazz band, marching, concert, and the wind ensemble. I played marimba, xylophone, flute, oboe, and piano. It was marvelous.

   In college, the bulk of my favorite classes were in physiology. In fact, it was when we got to the gastrointestinal tract in my first physiology class that I decided to switch to nutrition, just because I found it so fascinating. If they’d allowed people to minor in physiology I would have, I loved it so much. As it was I took more physiology classes than I needed to, just because it was so fun.

   My other favorite in college was physiological chemistry. Inorganic chemistry never made any sense to me and my brain couldn’t ever seem to grasp the whole weak acid, strong base thing. I barely managed to pass the inorganic classes, but when we got to organic chemistry and physiological chemistry suddenly everything made perfect sense. Whereas the rest of my classmates were clutching their heads and staring in blank horror at their books (just as I had done in inorganic), I was having fun. And physiological chemistry was even better. It all made perfect sense how everything interacted in the living organism, and somehow that made up for the fact that inorganic chemistry can still reduce me to tears of noncomprehension.

4. What are/were your least favorite school subjects?
   See above re. inorganic chemistry in college (and, for that matter, in high school). My brain cannot wrap itself around this topic. Also back in high school I couldn’t stand P.E., which is perfectly understandable when you realize that if the sport involves a ball, I stink at it.

5. Have you ever had a favorite teacher? Why was he/she a favorite?

   I didn’t have a favorite professor in college, but there were a few that stand out. The professor who taught the basic phyisology class was such an incredibly good lecturer that at the end of the quarter, the class gave him a standing ovation. The professor for the two quarters of physiological chemistry had a cute sense of humor when he taught.

   In high school my favorite teacher was my senior AP English teacher. She was funny, she was smart, and she took a group of us every year and taught us how to write, and write damn well. I realized, years later after I heard about her death, that she is probably one of the reasons I love writing. She laid the foundation for how to do it and encouraged us to figure out the rest.

My office is located in an unusual sort of building. It has incredible character, both in its rather interesting interior architecture, and also from the fact that it is located right on the Sacramento River (I have a huge picture window over my desk, on which reside the office binoculars. Talk about easy way to get distracted). However, it also has its faults, including absolutely no sound insulation in any of the walls, and a wiring system that would make any self-respecting electrician bawl like a little baby from sheer horror. The lack of sound insulation has been fun enough with just our downstairs neighbors, one of whom the office has not so lovingly nicknamed The Chipmunk due to the fact that she has a rather high-pitched and unpleasant laugh.

For the longest time we were the only ones on the second floor. However, for the past several weeks they have been getting the office beside us ready for new tenants. And since the office next to us has been vacant for so long, and wasn’t exactly finished to begin with, this has included a lot of work. An awful lot of extremely noisy work, especially when it is happening directly over my head (their loft space is right over my desk).

This is where the wiring system comes in to play. Not only do we get the sound of sawsalls and other equally noisy power tools (not to mention the dulcet tones of either honky tonk country music, or the top 40 teen hits) blaring through the walls along with the unmistakable aroma of paint, varnish, and carpet paste, we also get the joy of having, without warning, an entire bank of electric circuits go kaput. Sometimes it’s only a few lights. But other times it’s something a bit more critical, like our phone system, or our server.

To their credit it’s not as if they are being hopelessly negligent. The wiring system really is that screwed up. Our circuits and those of our soon-to-be next-door neighbors are so hopelessly untangled that no one seems to know which end is up. It was so bad that when my company moved in a few years ago, the electrician who was setting the office up for them pretty much said that he’d be able to get us up and running but god help whoever moved in on the other side. I’m sure that lately there’s been a fair bit of praying to one deity or another among the unfortunate souls who’ve been tasked to untangle the mess and I don’t envy them that task. But that still doesn’t detract from the fact that it can be annoyingly inconvenient for us.

Today they managed, in a sheer stroke of luck and incredible timing, to knock out both the phone system *and* the server (and thus our access to email) in one blow. Maybe not normally such a big deal, but today the plan was for us to all leave early, to get a head start on the three-day weekend. I’ve been waiting all week for final decisions on what gets changed in that database I distributed two weeks ago, so that I can do the necessary tweaks and fire off the latest copy so the rest of the offices can be ready when we go officially live on Tuesday – tasks which not only required the ability to email things to the other offices, but also to access their remote servers to update some files. The others were equally inconvenienced, since this had to happen on the last billable day of the month, when several large projects were scheduled to be completed and sent out – projects whose files reside on the aforementioned server which the electricians next door sent off to never-never land.

Luckily they were very understanding and after about an hour of us all meandering around, aimlessly twiddling our thumbs and eating peanut M&M’s, they came in toting a huge blue extension cord, which they proceeded to use to divert us to another circuit until they could figure out just what the heck they’d managed to do to the first. I don’t know about everyone else, but I at least managed to get that database modified and installed on at least two remote servers, plus learn new and interesting ways to bring up the blue screen of death on my own computer (which apparently has taken a rather violent dislike to NetMeeting) in time to escape early enough to avoid any traffic on the way home. Which, at least for me, more than made up for the power outage and the pounding and the light rain of bits of plaster falling from the ceiling onto my head.

We watched One Hour Photo last night and my mind cannot seem to let it go. I keep thinking about how old and weak they made Robin Williams look to play the part. He is an incredible actor and usually he has an incredibly powerful presence on the screen in whatever role he is in. But in this, he seemed too small. The word that kept springing into my head was ‘diminished’. They shrunk him into this empty old man, this person with no life, no home except for the sterile walls of an apartment that might as well have been vacant from the amount of personality he put into it. The entire movie I watched him play this sad and empty old man and I kept cringing, knowing that here was a person who would someday snap and do something horrible because there was never anything in him to allow him to resist it.

Richard noted that there were times when he thought he might end up like the character in that movie, but even if we had never met and never married and even if he had remained a bachelor all his life I cannot believe that he could ever end up as lost as that poor old man. We build things into our lives when we are young to keep ourselves busy and happy. We build friendships and make acquaintances and we learn how to go out and force ourselves to interact with other people, even though there are times when it is so hard to do, because we need – everyone needs – even some small bit of color in their lives. So how terrifying it was to watch someone on screen who never found his own bit of color, and know that there are people out there just like him, hidden away by the sheer fact that they are so completely unnoticeable.

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I had just walked in the door yesterday afternoon and was putting away bags of vegetables for making soup, and peaches for making pie, when the phone rang. It was Richard, stranded alongside the freeway with a flat tire, and sounding tired and frustrated that he was going to miss his meeting.

So I hopped back into my car, crossed my fingers that the gas tank would have at least enough to get me to him, and him to his meeting, and zipped off to find him. Then he took my car, since it could at least handle driving at freeway speeds, and I drove his car very slowly and carefully to the nearest tire place which was, naturally, closed for the day. So then I ended up driving it home taking all the back country roads and toodling along at the incredible speed of about 35 miles per hour since spare tires really aren’t supposed to be used for those distances, and certainly not at high speeds, and this morning we did the car switch again, since my job is a bit more flexible than his and I could afford the hour it took to take the car to a tire place and fork over a large chunk of money to get a new one.

The guy at the tire shop was extremely nice. He didn’t treat me like I had no clue because I am female and he didn’t call me ma’am in that condescending tone that I seem to get in other car maintenance type places. And when I asked whether we should replace both rear tires instead of just the one to keep them consistent he didn’t immediately jump on a chance to make a sale, but instead pointed out that the other tire was in good shape and didn’t need replacing.

I don’t know exactly what it is that Richard managed to do to that tire, by the way, but whatever it was, was pretty impressive. The tire was cracked in three placed along the sides and there was no way it could simply be repaired. I wonder if it just couldn’t handle the heat we’ve had earlier this summer and something finally just made all the weak spots explode.

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Richard and I have started a new project (because after all, what good is it to have that shared domain if we aren’t doing shared things on it?). So without further delay, let me introduce our new, joint photoblog: Cat’s Eye View It probably won’t be quite a picture a day, but the goal is get pretty darn close.

There is a tree on the wall in my breakfast nook.

Granted it is a very faint tree, done only in pencil lines, and right now it is a rather bare and leafless tree. But it is a tree, nonetheless. And those pencil lines trace out branches that jut ever so slightly onto the ceiling and travel just around the corner into the kitchen, and roots that leave the wall space and cross down to the baseboards.

I did not put this tree there, less you think that somehow I magically sprouted some small modicum of artistic talent. A friend of mine who is one of those incredibly artistic, crafty types of people came over and drew it onto the wall for me. My input was to sit on the stairs and watch her in awe, and then attempt to have an opinion when she wondered if maybe it needed more twigs. And my assignment, now that there is a penciled tree on my wall, is to go find a suitable color of brown and paint it.

Basically, this whole process is nothing more than a grown-up version of paint-by-numbers, I suppose, except it’ll all be one color and really I just have to stay within the lines. Artistic I may not be, but I could always at least stay in the lines. It’s a small and pathetic talent, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. I may not be able to do this tree without a whole lot of help, but I am consoling myself with the knowledge that at least I will be able to do the clouds in the claustrophobic toilet room upstairs all by myself, and that surely has to count for something.

Labor day is coming up so I’m hoping to get the paint sometime this week and get the first part done. Then the incredibly talented friend will come back to make add knots and swirls and make it look less like brown streaks on the wall and more like the bark of a tree, and she says she will show me how to make leaves, and the plan right now is that after a few rounds of me doing the basic painting and her coming over to make it actually look nice, we are going to have one heck of an awesome tree in our breakfast nook.

Usually, when it is summer here in the Sacramento valley, we stay inside where it is air conditioned and cool. We only open the windows late in the evening when the temperature outside has dropped to more bearable levels (although sometimes it’s too hot even for that), and we only venture outside in the evening when we are going somewhere; from one air conditioned place to another. Summer in the Sacramento valley is not my favorite time of year. I have never been a fan of the heat, and this summer there have been far too many days of 90+ degrees for my taste.

Last night, however, was a summer night I would gladly repeat. This is because last night we had a thunderstorm (in August!); a thunderstorm to beat all thunderstorms; a thunderstorm with more flash and bang and length and coverage than any thunderstorm I have ever seen before.

Driving home from Yosemite we saw a few lightning flashes in the distance but I didn’t think anything of it. There was rain while we were there in the park and I assumed it was just left over from whatever cloud system had passed by to dump water on us there. But that storm system apparently followed us home, and by the time it was dark, the storm was in full force.

I walked outside to get the mail and stared up into the sky in delighted awe. Lightning flashed so often that it lit up the sky in every direction. There was rain but it was soft and warm and not at all distracting from the show being put on by the night sky. It was with great reluctance I returned inside, and I opened all the windows to let in the cool rain-scented air.

The thunder didn’t start until later, and by then I’d wisely closed all the windows, more against the sporadic downpours of heavy rain than against the noise. It closed in slowly on our little town until it was crashing directly overhead, so loud it seemed as if someone had set up timpani in our attic. It woke me at about 1am – both the rattle of thunder so loud I could almost feel it, and the frantic exodus of seven terrified cats who practically flew through the air to find places to hide from the noise. And then again a few hours later, as if someone was bowling across our wood floors – great roars of sound and rain until it sounded as if it might come somehow through the roof.

When I woke this morning the rain had mostly stopped and the thunder was finally dying away. The early morning sun made it hard to tell if there was still lightning and by the time I left for work the storm had all but disappeared, leaving nothing but a lingering humidity, and flashing clocks on all the digital appliances since, as thunderstorms do, it had knocked out the power.

We’ve been talking about it all day, this incredible storm. It’s cleared away completely now and we can already feel the heat settling back over the area, shoving away any wishful thinking that perhaps fall’s cooler weather might be just around the corner. By tonight it will seem as if last night never happened.

This entry is a collaboration for On Display. This month’s topic is “summer nights.”

I went to bed last night around 9 because I was so tired, which meant instead of waking up at 3am this morning I woke at 1:30; time enough for me to stare blankly at the ceiling and then dose on and off fitfully until the alarm clock went off at 6 and I had to finally get out of bed.

The air smelled of rain all day; no great surprise since it’s been raining on and off all morning. There was an air of exhausted excitement today, mainly, I suppose, because we all knew we were almost done. A steady collection of bags and suitcases slowly accumulated behind the screens covered in construction plans and artists’ renderings of final products as the day wore on.

I did manage to get a little bit of the Yosemite experience last night. We walked up to the base of Yosemite Falls (a rocky bed for the river that only flows in winter and spring). It was almost a bit of a disappointment, because at the base, you cannot even see the top piece of the falls. That’s only visible from further away. It was a quick 20-minute walk, hardly enough to call a hike, but at least a brief taste of what it’s like out here, when you’re not in day-long meetings during the prime nature-experiencing hours of the day.

The meeting itself has been an experience. The previous few months of head-first immersion into the murky world of construction costs have at least given me enough of a background so I haven’t been hopelessly lost in the discussions, and even better, I’m not the only one who’s never done one of these workshops, so I’m learning the process along with the bulk of the room. And for the most part, everyone here is interested in seeing where it leads us. Granted there are the requisite few who come in with chips on their shoulders, determined to have their say and get their way and be as negative as possible in the process. But luckily in this case the number is few, and the majority of the group seems not so interested in humoring them.

Today had the potential to be more serious, due both to the fact that it was the last day and we had a lot to still cover, as well as the fact that we were hitting some pretty volatile discussion topics. But it didn’t end up serious – primarily because of the squirrels. The room we were in tended to get pretty warm during the day and if there was air conditioning, it wasn’t very good. So to avoid getting to warm (and thus putting everyone to sleep) we left the doors on either end open to allow the breezes in. It wasn’t a problem Tuesday and Wednesday, but for whatever reason today the squirrels could just no longer resist the invitation. So every once in a while throughout the day someone would leap from their seats and scuttle, laughing, towards the door, half-bent at the waist and flapping hands wildly to shoo out a squirrel. I wanted so badly to be able to get a picture – especially of the rather fat one that came in and was only noticed when it meandered out from under my chair (!!), but unlike when they were outside, the squirrels that came in to join the meeting didn’t feel the need to stop and pose for the camera.

Meeting finally over, we took a quick detour down to Yosemite Village and I got a disappointingly foggy shot of Half Dome. And then we headed home, listening to the 5th Harry Potter book on tape, each of us lost in our thoughts, glad we went, but even more glad to be done.

Important things I have learned so far this week:

• Pine nuts should never be used as a primary ingredient for pie.
• More importantly, pine nuts should never be used in pie, period.
• No dinner is worth driving 40 minutes down extremely windy roads for.
• Additionally, no dinner is worth traveling 40 minutes afterwards up windy mountain roads. Especially when the dinner involved the previously mentioned pie.
• August is a very bad time to visit Yosemite if you prefer seeing the world’s 5th largest waterfall, as opposed to the world’s fifth largest anemic trickle of water down impressive faces of rock.
• Wasps prefer biscuits and gravy to people.
• Children will whine about anything anyway. See earlier point for clarification.
• Mother Nature and allergy medication are a match made in heaven.
• One should never assume that the room number displayed on the phone is the actual room number one is in when one is setting up a wakeup call.
• It is possible to take part in a three day value analysis workshop on only 3 hours of sleep per night (due to waking promptly at 3am each morning for no reason whatsoever), but it is not advisable.
• One of the cutest things ever is a herd (pack? gaggle?) of fuzzy squirrels all taking dust baths together.
• Cuter yet is when one of them comes over to inspect your shoes.
• Even though it was probably just looking for food and would have cheerfully gnawed off one of your limbs if it thought it smelled tasty enough.
• Mars can still be seen even through really big trees (if you are tired enough).
• Everyone should be ignored by wildlife now and then.