We've got perhaps another 45 minutes of daylight. It was a productive afternoon, and a really good day for spring cleaning in the garden, and just general errand running. We:

• got the honeysuckle hacked way, way back, and freed the summersweet
• did a lot of weeding
• cut a lot of dead stuff out, such as the remains of last year's obedience plant, hydrangeas, bee balm, catnip, and daylilies
  
• stopped by the butcher (yes, we actually have one) and picked up a lovely aged t-bone, a couple of cornish hens, and a couple of beautiful pork chops
• gathered a bunch of firewood for the patio fireplace
• stopped by the plant nursery to pick up a few pansies (a mix of dark velvety red ones, white ones, and pale blue ones), some oregano, some rosemary, and some strawberries
• planted the strawberries in my strawberry pot
• re-potted a Ginko biloba seedling that finally germinated after all winter indoors, or ginko-stinkos, as we call them (the female ones really stink when they bloom)
  
• tanked up for $2.55/gal. since I hate to let the car go below 1/4 of a tank
• did a Sunday-type "drive-through" Harding to see what houses are for sale--it's almost all farmland on back-country roads that often become dirt roads toward the end, but we want to move there, anyway

I can trim back the Vinca major in the garden tomorrow; it could use a haircut. As far as what's blooming now, it's limited to snowdrops and Siberean squill, but the forsythia looks like it's starting to turn yellow. The daylilies, catnip, sedum, Spanish bluebells, hydrangeas, and grape hyacinths are pushing their way up with a vengeance. My OGR bourbon rose really isn't doing well, but it survived another winter.

My wonderful elderly next door neighbor died a few months ago and her kids have the place on the market. I talked to another neighbor of mine today, who said that her dog-walker also happens to be the realtor who has the listing for the place. The reason for my talking to my neighbor was that I found some wind chimes on my patio today that I really think belong to our mutual neighbor.

They're really nice unglazed terra cotta with little pieces of polished turquoise for accents. While I'd be perfectly willing to keep them, they do not belong to me. I believe the contractor who recently painted our patio railings forgot which house owned the wind chimes, and hung them back up at my place.

My neighbor's dog-walker also happens to be the realtor who has the listing on our deceased neighbor's house. The upshot of our conversation is that I will stop by during tomorrow's open house to talk to the realtor about it, so that she can leave a note for the son and daughter to ask whether they want the wind chimes. If they do, they can just come by to take them from my patio if nobody's home at the time. If they don't care about them, I'll keep them; they're not expensive, but they are tasteful, and rather pretty.

Today's treat for what's blooming indoors is a hybrid Cymbidium, Cym. Nancy Brown 'Elizabeth'. The flowers will last for another couple of months. That's what's in the picture accompanying this entry.

Company Reorganization

Though we have not yet had formal, written communication from our new CEO, we have had private meetings on the subject of reorganization. I think it's really good news. TT will now report to the guy who used to be the GM of our London office, who is moving to NYC in May with his wife.

The Brit is truly a gem. He understands sales, but also the highly technical end of our biz, including computer programming and mathematical models. No way will he let TT in sales run roughshod over the rest of the business, and make it subservient to her own personal bank account objectives. In fact, TT got a bit of a demotion in the process. Client support will no longer report to her. Only sales staff will report to, or through, her.

I continue to report through the guy who originally hired me almost six years ago. We're in "operations." We're technical people. We do the actual work involved in getting a finished product ready for distribution to our clients. We don't get paid for living on the phone or on blackberries. The people who do that will now be reined in. It's a good thing, as Martha Stewart would say.

I cannot believe I started four sentences in a row in that last paragraph with either "we" or "we're." But, so what?

Things are looking up on the job front. It's about time that the sales staff didn't run around selling non-existant products, then coming back to the other 90% of the company, demanding that they be manufactured on a dime.

I predict I will outlast TT at this company. Her tenure is only three months longer than mine.

Whee!

On a lark during lunch hour today, I Googled my high school, ASL, to see if it had a website. Indeed it does. I'm not quite an alumna, because I moved back stateside shortly before graduation, but I did spend three years there. Some things have changed--they're building a whole new theater, I think where the old one used to be, but deeper and steeper to fit more seating. The website says it's a k-12 school, but that's not quite accurate, because it does have a grade 13 for our Canadian friends.

Essentially, the student body was expatriate Americans, foreign diplomats' kids (who wanted to go to college in the U.S.), and a few Canadians. It wasn't that unusual to be in classes with famous people's kids. In this photo, the person on the right is Randy, Judy Blume's daughter. Randy looks the same in that photo as she did 30 years ago. Come to think of it, I do too. Randy was in my class, as was Susie Landau (Martin Landau's and Barbara Bain's daughter). Sam Robards was a year behind me. A history teacher of mine used to tell stories of Marlene Dietrich stopping by once in awhile to pick up a relative (grandchild? niece?) after school.

I'm not famous, and I don't get off on name dropping. The facts are simply the facts.

My curiosity was raised, so I checked the "missing alumni" for what would have been my graduation year there, and the previous one, since my friends were about half and half my year and one ahead of it. The names of so many of my old buddies were on those rosters; many were not. Those names were only of people who stayed long enough to graduate there. My family was transfered back before either of us graduated.

One thing struck me about ASL that was so different from any local school system in the U.S. There were no cliques, nor bullies. No cheerleaders, jocks, druggies, goths, etc. There just weren't. There were nerds, for sure, but nobody picked on them. Most of us were pretty darn good students anyway, because it was a private school that required an academic test before application and enrollment. Those who didn't pass the test probably got stuck going to ACS (the American Community School).

I suspect the reason for everyone's acceptance of each other was the transient nature of our parents' jobs. Most of us were American, but many had parents who worked for one of the oil companies, and had spent, say, three years in Saudi Arabia, and other two in Libya before being transfered to London. Same deal with the foreign diplomats' kids. It's in some ways like being an Army brat. You learn how to make friends with others pretty quickly, and it's not that difficult, because everyone else remembers what it was like to be the new kid.

Though I do miss my London years in the mid-late 70s, I do not miss the bomb scares my school used to have once or twice a year. Some idiot would phone in a false bomb report. The entire school evacuated out onto Waverly Place and Abbey Road. The IRA was bombing London at the time. It was mostly pubs, but a bomb did go off one weekend in the basement of Selfridge's in the china department, half an hour after I'd left. Mom sent me there to buy a Wedgwood bowl as a housewarming gift for someone, and heard about it on the news right before I walked in the front door; walking was a bit faster than taking the tube, with connecting lines.

We lived there for part of the 60s as well, but in Mayfair, not Regent's Park. My school from the 60s is no longer there; it was on some mews just off Cavendish Square. Last I saw, it had been turned into stables. Perhaps it was stables before the school as well; I don't know.

When we moved back stateside, I realized how cliquey HS in my old home town was. I don't recall JHS there being that way. Suddenly, I was the nerd taking all the AP classes. Boy did my AP English teacher make a fool of herself when she introduced me to the class as her "new student from London." I stood up, looked around and said "Hi guys! I'm back." That did not go over well, and she depressed my grades for a couple of months because of it, but after a bit of a push-pull with the school administrators, she finally started grading my papers fairly. I forget her name--just that she had a horrible do-it-yourself frost-and-tip job.

P.S. Welcome, "Mr. B." Happy reading. Feel free to comment. Or not.

I've been a bit busy lately. He Who Cannot Write got banned from Livejournal about four years ago, and recently made a reappearance under a slightly altered name, leaving no doubt who he is. Google alerts are wonderful things. I swiped a feed, and spread the word. This is rather funny, because after he got banned he threatened to sue Livejournal for discrimination against him because he's mentally handicapped. He's not physically handicapped, mind you, (or not, since we are talking about a mindless person). He got booted from the Navy because of his mental illness.

He's what our grandparents would have called "slow." Anyway, it's enough to qualify him for disability benefits, allegedly because he can't work for a living, despite the fact that he writes short stories and self-publishes anthologies by the boatload without paying his naive contributors. I wonder if the state of IL and Uncle Sam know about the income he gets from his "writing career." It's next to nothing, because he's the only one who buys his crap, but he's not supposed to have any other source of income at all to get these benefits.

It would be sad if the guy were not so obnoxious to those who don't bow down at the awesomeness that is Pacione and worship his writing. Dude needs a Strunk & White, a dictionary and a thesaurus. He "literary" thinks that my use of the word literary just now is correct. Substitutes literary for literally time and again, so it can't be a stray typo or two. Anyone who ever so politely suggests that he fix typos, misspellings, grammatical errors, and impossibly convoluted plots, or lack thereof, is told to go to hell, drink bleach, get "some" AIDS, etc. Those phrases are at the politer end of his repertoire. Death and arson threats are at the other end.

Dude needs a shower, haircut, and shave. And his granny with whom he lives needs to wash out his mouth with soap. But I gather that the majority of his family thinks his illegal threats are funny. Same with his extortion attempts, hitting people up with $900 PayPal invoices for alleged damages to his sales for reviewing his publicly posted short stories.

Seriously, check out his blogs, if you have the stomach, and happen to be bored. The three he uses the most can be found here, here, and here. He has a bunch more, although he lost his Deadjournal and Greatestjournal for TOS violations.

It takes a bit of time and effort to track down his latest exploits and expose them for the world to see. That's what's been taking so much of my time lately. And work. Always work. At least I earn a paycheck rather than mooching off taxpayers, pretending to be unable to work.

A bit of advice: if you're going to crash someone's party and make a big dumb ass of yourself, don't get mad at the host. Just pick up your ball and go home. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Buh-bye.

Some moron from a couple of years ago (no not the horrible writer) found my relatively new/resurrected Xanga, and thought he'd found a kindred spirit. Started leaving comments and eprops galore, until yesterday, when it finally dawned on him who I am. He became enraged and started yakking all over my own blog and one particular forum how I'd tricked him and everyone else there, etc., etc., etc.

Nevermind that he's the only reader there who took so damn long to figure out who I am. Nevermind that he's the one who looks stupid, and knows it, which is why he's so angry. Everyone else caught on immediately, and nobody cared. The jerk even approached a friend of mine to start raving like a lunatic about how he thought I was just trying to get back in his good graces, etc. She wasn't buying it; she knows better.

It's a tempest in a teapot. I don't give a rat's patoot about being in his "good graces." They mean nothing to me. I didn't set out to make a fool of him, but since he made one of himself, I really can't feel sorry for him.

You lie in the bed you make for yourself. Don't blame the host because you crashed the wrong party. I'm just sayin' . . .

Gak!

The horrible horror writer went off the deep end last week, and managed to convince the powers that be at Xanga to yank a bunch of people's accounts. Nobody got any warning. Just tried to log in and find their account was pulled. The dude, who shall henceforth be known as HWSNBN (he who shall not be named) has been accusing people left and right of plagiarizing his work because they reviewed it in their blogs, and used quotes from his publicly posted works at Author's Den and Melodramatic. Not once did anyone attempt to claim his quotes were theirs, and he always received the requisite credits.

The carnage at Xanga was brutal. The bloodbath continues. HWSNBN keeps confusing people with each other. First off, he admits that he's mentally ill, and on disability. These accusations, however, constitute libel, which is punishable by law. Yet the Xanga admins don't seem fit to pull his blog. He just leaves such libelous comments on others' blogs.

So far, my Xanga's intact, but the admins there have been sniffing around it for the past week. HWSNBN really, really wants my Xanga pulled down, but he's been unsuccessful thus far. At what point does incessant harping from one obviously deranged person set off the alarm bells with the admins that maybe, just maybe, they should go pour through the complainant's blog as well as those he reports?

Sometimes the bad guys do indeed win.