| WG's going to be laid off. |
[Jun. 3rd, 2009|12:05 pm] |
News just came down the pike.
The guys at WG's shipyard are being laid off. He just went back to work this week after months of being injured.
I leave in three days. I come back to no job and no school and not even unemployment. Now he won't have a job either.
Can we assassinate Bush? Please? It would be so satisfying with what he's done to this country with this god damned war and deregulation. |
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| Bad night for Monte kitty. |
[May. 20th, 2009|12:24 am] |
Rough night for Monte kitty.
First he gets his kitty treats from WG. So far so good.
Oooh, but they don't sit very well with him.* He makes a quick trip to the litter box.
Ten minutes later, he wafts by mom and dad for some snuggles and pets -- "Oh, ew, what's that smell? Get off of here!"
So he does what every self-respecting cat would do in his circumstance. The brown streak scootch.
Cue more noise from mom and dad -- "Hey! No!" He's confronted with swearing and grumbling. Then he's swooped up by mom and stuffed into the bathroom, where dad already has the dreaded tub running.
Nooooo!
He yowls at the door to be let out. No such luck. He's dipped in warm water, back legs struggling and kicking as mom and dad wash sticky poops off of him.
Finally he makes a break for it, dripping wet, his tail drawing a thin line of water all over the apartment. It takes him forty-five minutes to lick himself dry. Or at least damp.
He hops up onto the bed ... and is forced to sit at the foot of the bed, not on his favorite pillows.
To add insult to injury, from all that licking he ends up throwing up a hairball.
Man, what a night.
* WG has since thrown those treats away. |
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| UW Budget cuts? Try devastation. These couldn't be worse if they used napalm. |
[Apr. 28th, 2009|01:13 am] |
Tonight has been a terrible night for no reason I can discern.
WG was happy and perky when I came home. The kitty was purring. I curled up with my homework on clean sheets.
But I had a lot of reading to do. WG turned petulant and needy, cuddling close and miserable, interrupting again and again in subtle ways -- until I snapped at him. My mood turned foul and frustrated ... and then guilty.
Monte kitty also resented my homework. He chewed my book, sat on it, did "walk-bys," and then threw up a hairball on the bed.
I stripped the sheets, found a snuggle position for the (now unhappy) WG and Monte kitty. Then finished my reading. I just picked up the email from the University president.
UW Budget cuts? Try devastation. These couldn't be worse if they used napalm.
For the University of Washington, the resulting budget decisions are dramatic. The bad news is that the Legislature decided to reduce statefunding to the six public four-year college and universities more than any other sector in state government. The University of Washington received the highest percentage cut in all of higher education - 26 percent. This is a stark and sobering number. Beginning July 1, one quarter of our funding from the state will no longer exist. It is unprecedented in state history, and as far as we know, it is by far the largest reduction in state support to a flagship university by any state in the nation. It takes our state funding level back to where it was more than a decade ago and drops the portion of the state budget dedicated to four-year higher education to an all-time low.
The somewhat better news, though it may not appear so to our students and their families, is that the budget authorizes our Regents to increase resident undergraduate tuition up to 14 percent for the 2009-11 biennium ... If approved by the Regents, tuition for resident undergraduates wouldincrease $875 next academic year and $1,000 the following year.
Sigh. I thought the stimulous bill had money for universities in it. I thought that was the priority.
I feel lost. Like school right now is a hopeless black hole. Sanskrit is a lost cause. I'll never be get funding to take the final year now.
I may be a tad depressed.
Of course, I've also been reading Toni Morrison tonight. She has a talent for leaving me in the dumps. |
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| Oh, hello economy. Have we reached bottom yet? |
[Apr. 16th, 2009|09:09 pm] |
Oh. Joy. WG received a letter that his insurance claim has been refused. The insurance company insists that he has to file with L&I.
WG's been pacing and worried all day. There has been no other topic of conversation today.
He spoke with the union trust people immediately. They were surprised at his company's insistance that you have to report injuries for L&I within a 72-hour window. The woman there said, "I had some pain in my hand that I ignored at first but it kept getting worse. I was able to report it to L&I."
Now WG has to file an L&I claim after the fact. He's going in to the shipyard to talk to human resources tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the head of my work, the tutor program, has called a meeting for 10:30 tomorrow. This will be our first ever meeting.
I have a feeling I know what it's about. I was reviewing the applications for next year's tutors this week. Today I was told to put that on hold. We won't be hiring new tutors for next year. |
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| The CT scan results, or, I guess intramural soccer is out. |
[Mar. 26th, 2009|11:16 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | health, home, wg | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  lethargic | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Beastie Boys - No Sleep Till Brooklyn | ] |
I guess intramural soccer is out.
The CT scan results: WG has a fractured sessamoid. Oh.
It's a soccer player's injury. The fracture hasn't gone all the way through the bone which is why it wasn't clear on the X-ray. It looks like a knife cut across the base of the bone.
The little bone's about the size of a grape or maybe your thumbnail, on the ball of your foot right before the big toe. It's small, but important, because it's a flexor joint with the tendon of the big toe stretched across it.
The tendon kept pushing and sawing over the break which is why -- ow, ow, ow -- it hurt.
The tissue around the tendon had been tenderized and inflamed after months of walking on the fractured bone. Now that he's been off of it for two weeks, the inflammation has gone down.
Well. Kids break bones all the time. They heal. It'll just be a little slower for WG because he's not 12 anymore and it's an extremity. |
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| Watchmen and Sanskrit, or the post in which Icarus abuses the lj-cut. |
[Mar. 25th, 2009|12:58 am] |
I credit all your good wishes: WG's limp is improving. My grades are not as bad as I feared. You must share your power of good wishes with the rest of the world, since clearly you could end both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
WG will learn the results of his CT and bone scan tomorrow. I failed the Sanskrit final spectacularly, but based on the numbers here I must have been running close to a 3.8 - 3.9 before WG's injuries, so I'm saved from failing the class. I need to study those missed chapters this week or I'll be in trouble next quarter. Expect some Sanskrit posts this weekend.
My Greek History professor indeed graded harshly. I'm considering whether it's worth contesting the grade.
Who watches the Watchmen? We do!
Went to see Watchmen with WG tonight. We had our usual petty squabble on the way there. WG's a backseat driver which is why I make him my chauffeur. But it's not wise to have him drive with a walking cast. I ended up running red light after he insisted I'd missed the turn into the theater --
WG: Honey, honey! It's right there to the left, to the left--!
Icarus (baffled, looking around): What? What? It can't be, it's not--
(Vroom.)
Icarus: Driving with you sucks. Also, that traffic would have hit you first.
He was very conciliatory (he hates backseat drivers). I ruefully admitted I'd written down the address for the wrong theatre. We circled the block until we found it.
( The Neptune in the U-District is old fashioned theatre, built 80 years ago, ) There were exactly three people in the theater so we... sat in the same row with them, thus proving humans are social creatures. Someone should do a doctoral study.
WG is Nite Owl. ( That was my guy up there. )
Needless to say, I loved the movie (for other reasons as well). As a side note, we both enjoyed the tasteful frontal nudity. Good to see a movie that has just as much (or more) male nudity as female. Reading reviews from you guys, I noticed that most of the people who hated the movie hadn't read the comic, while most of those who loved the movie had. So I made sure we'd both read it first. ( In case I blunder into spoilers. ) It's visually stunning, but what made it were the actors. The actors were so well cast -- and this story is about the characters. Cast the right actors and you have 90% of it right there.
WG wants to see it again on DVD, so he can pause the opening montage and study the background details.
Afterward, he made a wistful comment about ice cream, so we hunted down an ice cream shop for sundaes and sat in the shop like 1950s teenagers. I'd brought my notebook and jotted down a scene for Out Of Bounds that hit me in the ice cream shop.
( If you want to shoplift, carry Sanskrit books. )
Now WG wants to do another date tomorrow night, this time an art film at the Varsity. Ah, old theatres. |
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| Keep up the good work. |
[Mar. 24th, 2009|04:23 pm] |
School holidays have finally begun (shortened somewhat by the fascinating events of late). Next quarter in... six days.
WG informed me yesterday that his limp is getting better. The pain is definitely going down.
Whatever you guys are doing, keep it up, it's working.
He's scheduled to go in for oral surgery next Tuesday (the absessed tooth is related to a bridge he had put in after his teeth got smashed in a car accident years ago -- long story). It would be great if he could be back at work by April 6th. His boss called yesterday. The boats are starting to pile up. WG's willing to postpone that appointment if he has to.
Next on the agenda: writing Out Of Bounds. *g*
WG is now chivvying me out the door to see the Watchmen. |
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| Newslfash: 7-Up has fizz. |
[Mar. 19th, 2009|02:42 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | home, wg | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  amused | ] |
WG: It's amazing how much fizz is in 7-Up.
Icarus: Hmm?
WG: I poured this a minute ago, and the fizz is going about three inches above the cup.
Icarus: It's the simple things in life....
WG: I'm not bored. |
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| WG update. |
[Mar. 17th, 2009|01:41 pm] |
To those of you who asked how WG is doing:
He's hobbling around in a walking cast. He goes in for a CT scan and a bone scan on Friday. In an ideal world they won't find anything and it'll just be sesamoiditus.
The root canal? It appears to be infected. He goes in on Thursday for oral surgery.
His back? A constant needle-like pain but nowhere near as bad as it was. Acupuncture was very effective.
He can't work, which in a way has taken a lot of the stress off of him. But at the moment, he's quite bored. Quote, "I feel like a prisoner." |
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| Smooshed. Hey, kitty, move over. |
[Feb. 8th, 2008|08:12 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | home, kitty, school, sga, wg | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Creedence Clearwater Revival - creedence clearwater revival - mustang sally | ] |
I have an entire seven foot couch.
How my cat manages to squish me into one corner of it, I have no idea.
In other news: ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wildernessguru has never been bowling. This sad lack in his American-ness is being remedied tomorrow.
Now. I will read my homework. I will write a chapter of Out Of Bounds (had to throw away the most recent one -- sorry. It sucked.) And I will stop shaking the internet for the next ep of Stargate Atlantis.
*shakes the internet one more time* |
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pitying