7ToF: out of a job

1. About a month ago I told you my last day of work would be April 19th. Since I'm writing this the day before you'll see it, today is April 19th and I am DONE! I will miss it. I will miss the structure and the new friends and the feeling of accomplishment you get when you finish a project, and especially when you get paid for doing it. But having said that, I'm also really happy to be done. REALLY HAPPY. The door is open for me to possibly do some further work for them in the future, so they may never be rid of me. But for now, I'm glad to take a break.

2. Under the heading old dogs learning new tricks: I drive a 2016  Honda CR-V. It's not my favorite car I've ever had but I like it a lot. When we first got it, I hated the key fob thing because I couldn't figure out how it worked. But after several months, that little black device is just about my favorite thing about my car, because I drop it in the bottom of my purse and I never take it out. Which means I NEVER LOSE MY KEYS. For someone who spent an aggregate of probably a hundred hours a year looking for my car keys, this is like a miracle. Love.

3. I'm trying one of those meal services again. Last time we did Hello Fresh, and although it was really good and got me to try some things I would never have done on my own, we still had MadMax at home and it wasn't nearly enough food for him. Also there was so much packaging (that may have changed, I mentioned it when we quit and they said they were working on it). This time we're doing Blue Apron--no particular reason for that choice except an online friend could send me a free box. Once again, it's great for getting me out of my cooking rut (and the packaging is better, although still a problem). After I get a few more boxes I'll be able to send some free boxes to friends, so let me know if you want to try it. I've only received three boxes so far, but at this point I like it.

4. You all know that I am an Amazon fan, because it is the most amazing resource for buying books, and we don't have a bookstore in our town. But for the most part, I only use Amazon for books. I try not to buy other items from them, especially not if I can get them locally. It really kind of worries me how huge they are becoming and how easy they make it to order from them as opposed to getting dressed and actually leaving the house. A friend of mine lives in a city where she can order something from Amazon and have it delivered to her door within two hours.

5. (Remember those pod people in Wall-e? *shudders*) (although I have to admit that I can imagine certain situations where I would be thrilled to have that service)(the seductiveness of convenience. I admit it gets me more often than I probably want to admit)

6. Probably the best thing about our lack of bookstore, though, is that it got me back into using our local library. My most frequent contact with them is through their downloadable materials website, where I can get books for my Kindle 24 hours a day. But every month or two, I go to the actual physical library. It fills some deep inner weird need of mine to wander around a place full of books, choose some I want, and take them home with me.

But the good news is I'm only borrowing them, so I haven't lost any money if I pick something I end up not liking, and I don't need to find shelf space for them. For the size of our town, we have an amazing library. Last week was National Library Week, so hats off to all the libraries out there. If you haven't been to yours in awhile, highly recommend a visit. It's not just books-- ours has a whole room full of DVDs and CDs, and there are rows of shelves of audiobooks for road trips.

7. Spring. Yep, that's my good news for the week. Like most of the northern half of the USA, our winter held on for far longer and with far more snow and wind and storminess than is usual. But it is finally spring. We are supposed to hit 60 degrees today, the grass is starting to turn green, the snow is gone--even the enormous piles where the snowplows were shoving it. I'm happy.

Hope you have a lovely spring weekend. Sorry this is late, I wrote the first half of it last night and then I was so tired I bailed.

7ToF: You got a fast car, is it fast enough so we can fly away?

1. Years ago Tracy Chapman recorded "Fast Car," one of my all-time favorite songs, about driving off to a better life. Chapman grew up in the projects, and she said once in an interview that the fast car in the song was something like a Dodge Dart --in her mind at that age, any car that would run was a fast car, a vehicle for escape. (My original plan was just to explain the post title, but I started watching this video and was mesmerized, so I'm sharing-- we'll see if youtube lets me do this.)

2. We have motley crew of cars. The newest one is a 2011. My favorite, and the one I'm driving at the moment, is a 2005 Honda Pilot, and looky what happened this week (you'll ignore the dust, I'm sure):

190,000! This is the car I drove back and forth to Missoula for nearly three years while I was working on my master's, and I bonded with it in a major way. It's the old body style, more like a Jeep Cherokee than the huge Pilots they're making now. There were definitely days when it felt like I was in a fast car, escaping. Of course, there were also days when it felt like I was driving into the maw of hell. Either way, when I found out last week that its trade-in value was less than $3K, I decided I might as well drive it till it dies.

3. We're each firmly attached to our favorite elderly car-- my Pilot, Dean's 2000 pickup, MadMax's 2001 pickup, PellMel's tiny 2009 sedan-- and the advantages are obvious: they're paid off. Insurance is cheap. We know them well. And this cannot be overstated: you don't have to deal with buying a new car. But when you drive older cars, anything can go wrong at any time. It might be nice to have at least one car that is reliable for road trips, and since we're about to have a kid in college five hours away, many road trips loom. We're reluctantly considering our options. A pox on car shopping.

4. Remember awhile back when I told you about my clumsy experiments with finally, in my fifties, starting to wear makeup? Well, yeah. My need for full coverage has only grown. Now if I forget to leave time to put it on before I go out, I catch sight of myself somewhere and am horrified. Good God, I'm old. But as someone who is new to the world of makeup, there are all kinds of things I am still figuring out. Like--I swear I'm not making this up-- some people have two different shades, one for summer, when they're tan, and one for winter, when they're pale. Who knew? And how do you know when to switch?

5. We're throwing a party for our neighborhood seniors on the night before graduation. We're decorating with photos of the kids at all ages, which means I've spent several hours--and will doubtless spend several more--combing through old photos. *sniff* Good lord, these are some cute kids. Since I used up all my extra time in the rabbit warren known as YouTube looking for that Tracy Chapman video, I can't post any this week, but maybe next time. (How to win friends: force them to look at old pictures of your offspring.) How in the world did they grow up so fast? Except on the days when they're being so obstinately awful you can't wait to ship them off.

6. You know I've written at least half a dozen posts over the years defending romance novels (here's one). I will still defend to my last breath anybody's right to read whatever the heck they want to read whenever they want to read it, but I have to say I have not read a good romance novel in a couple of years now--the kind I used to put down with a sigh of pure satisfaction thinking that was a great story. I've pretty much given up. Other than my continuing intermittent fascination with Betty Neels (the most recent of which was published in 2001), I haven't read a romance novel in a long time. Maybe it's just me and I've moved on past the moment when they worked for me. But I want to blame it on the romance novel industry (the word industry used deliberately). The ones I read last year felt cranked out in a way they didn't five or six years ago, as if they were written based on what sells rather than what works as a story. But I do have three recently-published romance novels from favorite authors waiting for the beach in June, so maybe there is hope.

7. Since I'm running out of things to talk about, here is my Corny Thought For The Week, also filed under "Life Lessons I've Learned From Betty Neels." Don't smirk. She has one heroine after another who spends an entire book unable to believe the hero is interested in her, irritatingly lost in "He Can't Love Little Ol' Me" Land. But it occurred to me not long ago that I spend lots of time feeling unlovable, too. And if you can't believe you're lovable, you miss out on a lot of love, you know? And another thing that happens: it leaves her heroines (and me) open to bad advice. If you don't believe the people who clearly love and care about you, you end up believing the wrong person-- in Betty Neels, it's the cruel ex-girlfriend, the interfering busybody, the mean stepmother, the the people who are telling her he'd never love a little nobody like you. So there you go. Wisdom from romance novels. So, if the snippy ex-girlfriend tells you the ice on the pond is plenty thick enough to skate on, don't believe her. Just saying.

Have a nice weekend. Bonus video: Prince and Lenny Kravitz performing "American Woman," which is blatantly misogynist in a delicious sort of way, but somehow exactly right.