No one can make you feel inferior without your consent... except yourself.

I just received an email from the institute that is dispersing DMH funds, stating that the stipends (which were supposed to begin being sent in June) are on hold until they have a hearing in October. I forwarded the email to Goat, with a snide comment about the inadequacy of the DMH and a prediction that I'd never see the money.

Only, I didn't send it to Goat. I accidentally hit "reply" and sent it back to the institute.

Anyone know of a good recipe for crow?

Did you miss me talking about the heat?

Apparently I came back to LA, to pack up my apartment, just in time for a heat wave.

It's so hot in my bedroom that my candles are melting, without being lit.

High Sierra

I bought a sweater at Mervyn's last week. A flimsy little cotton, lightweight, stretchy zip-up thing that will be perfect for work this winter (because I live somewhere where winter temperatures occasionally dip to, say, 65 degrees), with a completely-for-looks-because-it's-totally-useless flimsy cotton hood that only covers half your head.

And what brand was this little ditty? High Sierra.

Now, I know this sweater was not designed with the high Sierra in mind, but I'm not sure why a company who makes flimsy sweaters decided to call themselves High Sierra. Even Low Sierra Day Hike would have been a stretch. Maybe City Park on a Very Dry, Windless Summer Afternoon. I have been to the high Sierra, and this sweater would do you absolutely no good at 12,000 feet, except maybe for a pillow, only then your companions would scoff at you for wasting a lot of perfectly good space and weight in your pack hauling something that only has one function, and really, nobody wants that, right?

Anyhooo.... speaking of the high Sierra, I'm heading there tomorrow morning! And, in an extremely condensed version of the last week of my life which I will expand upon later, I accepted a job starting in September, so I can head off to the woods without the weight of having no idea what the future brings. I'll be stationed in Bridgeport and backpacking in Yosemite until the end of August!

penciled in

Does it make me a bad person, that one (of many) reasons I'm happy this week is because after a month or so of no schedule, I have a day-timer now, and it has things written in it?

911: The Irony Continues

This would be funny if it weren't so... well, I'm OK, so it is kind of funny by now.

Through absolutely positively no fault of my own (that's my disclaimer in case the insurance companies are scouring the internet for information) I was in an accident on the freeway last night. Someone in a lane traveling at 10 mph decided to change lanes abruptly into the lane where I was traveling at 50 mph, and, well, you do the math. So, armed with all my new information about the state of LA emergency services, what did I do? I didn't call 911, because I knew I'd be on hold. So I called 411 and asked to be connected with the highway patrol office. They connected me to an office that was closed. So I called 911 to reach CHP, where I was, predictably, on hold for 5 minutes before I gave up, because my car was still driveable and the other car was leaving anyway and it no longer made sense for me to be sitting on the side of the road on hold when I could go somewhere much safer and more comfortable and be on hold later.

Anyhow, today, I looked up the CHP number on their website, so that I could call them directly (instead of calling 911) and make a report. So, I called the local number of their Los Angeles office... and what do I hear?

"You have reached 911..." which was then promptly replaced by a human voice waiting to handle my emergency, now that I was sitting around in my apartment drinking iced tea and totally not having an emergency of any sort.

So, the new moral of the story, which makes me feel ever-so-slightly better, is that it's still kind of OK to have an emergency in LA, as long as it's during business hours.