Open Thread for Personal Stuff: June 2017 Flexicat Edition

@sunnysombrera To me that sounds like a dream job! I hope you get it, and that it’s perfect.

Can’t remember who on the previous page mentioned photographs, but it’s worth thinking about and not just for funerals and clearing estates.

My sister and I sat down with about 30 photo albums and bags and boxes of framed photos to get some stuff for a DVD and a display board for mum’s funeral tomorrow. Thought it’d be a piece of cake considering the wealth of material.

However, guess who took 90% of the family and social photos in there. Surprise, surprise. It was mum. We could have done dad, grandpa, granny, me, my sister, the kids … five times over. But it was really hard to get a suitable assortment for mum herself. One thing to be grateful for. She’d already started sorting out items to be given to other family members, so we’ve got a handful of envelopes and bags full of their family’s photos for several of the rellies who are coming tomorrow. (Some of them will already have mementos of those occasions but we know, for certain, that a few of them have missed out badly in their own family’s distribution of this kind of stuff.)

Though it was helpful that mum had both noted the photos on the pages they were displayed on and many of them included a cross-referenced typed list of contents of the whole album on the inside covers. She’d been a lifelong private secretary and was a bit of a control freak in other ways so noting, filing and cross-referencing was almost a way of life for her.

Most importantly, whenever you frame a photo, for goodness sake write the relevant names, date and occasion on the back of the photo itself. And please, if you start an album to store the photos from a holiday or a particular occasion, please leave the last half dozen pages blank if you don’t have enough to fill it completely. We very nearly chucked out a couple of albums full of scenery we’d never seen and travel companions we’d never met only to discover several pages of home-family-birthday-Xmas photos at the back.

@opposablethumbs,

@Valentine, there’s a good chance it will be helpful to her just to know she’s got a cool older-but-not-parent-like-age close relative who’s willing to listen to her.

Yes, that’s what I was trying to get at, but you put it better 🙂
One of my nieces has been exactly like that – her relationship with her mum is very intense, and she says that she appreciates having older people to talk to who are related but not parental.

@Valentine,
Re ‘Valya’ – what I meant to ask was: is it appropriate and/or correct to address you that way? Apologies for my lack of knowledge on this!

I’ve been cleaning out my nan’s house so she can move into her retirement village and she had saved in her Important Documents filing cabinet a supermarket coupon that expired in 1998. The coupon is for a chain of supermarkets that does not exist in the UK, and according to some googling no longer exists in New Zealand either. (She’s never been to New Zealand.) I found an advertisement for them on YouTube and it’s honestly surreal:

I still haven’t found anywhere to live and I have less than a month to move. It’s really stressful and messing with my head.

On the other hand, it was my birthday yesterday and I had a signing event for my new book at the local library. It went fairly well and I sold all of the copies of the book that I’d taken with me. I had a very good day and it’s spilled over in to today. I haven’t felt so good in weeks. I don’t want to hurt myself at all and I am even feeling slightly upbeat.

@dr ej: Best of luck in your new job! Where are you moving to?

@EJ (the Scheming Liberal Race-Traitor)
If they can’t get that you are doing this not out of malice but of necessity, it might be a while if they ever do. It’s understandable why they might feel that way, they want stability but their responses to you are trivializing your very real needs and actions as some haphazard whim. I’m sorry that your peers are not lending you a sympathetic ear.

@EJ

The job security in academia always sucks, and the pay is usually not great, and so I think a self-defeating martyrdom culture grows so that people can justify a career that requires a shit ton of education for not very much remuneration. You’re encouraged to find your own reward in other aspects of the job, so that your employers can continue to pay you crap and you have no job security so you have to take it. Most people do manage to find other parts rewarding (making a difference in the lives of young people, for instance, or advancing the cause of human knowledge) but these things don’t actually pay bills. I’m sure Wal Mart would use the same business model if they could convince cashiers to find their own reward in the job outside of the paycheck. It’s a pretty good hustle.

You’re not a traitor to the science if you move to the private sector. You’re taking care of yourself in the only way open to you. Businesses don’t look out for their employees, and academia is more like a business today than it has ever been in the past. You’re doing the right thing for you, and you shouldn’t be ashamed of it.

@katie

You are sleeping now i think. I also a day sleeper little bit – today Sunday so i get to long sleep until 11 ? forgive me if i sound like i argue with what you said – thats not what i want. Of course i have no ideas what statistics are in for ukraine or for uk or us or anywhere. I know nothing – thats why i ask here. So anything you say is helping. ))) i just wanted to make clear that she not cutting because i thought it can be important. But truly what is important is that i know better what to say to her now )

Mish, Valya can be normal and fine for you to use. ))

@opposablethumbs

This i can easily do! She already knows i am weird and strange ? so it will be good for me to say something like this. I better at talking with her when i really there – we can play football or go for shopping and i easy to make her feel happy. But in internet or when i talking on phone i just cant think of anything to say and i can hear that she also thinks this ? but if i tell some thing cool that i know she will also like to do then maybe that will help.

@Fabe
I might be interested. I tend to play MC in spurts though and I need to spend most of my leisure time prepping for interviews right now, so I might not be on a lot.

Wow, there’s a lot going on! I got to sleep in since Husbeast is off today and could keep Catbeast happy. It’s taken me two hours to catch up here.

I had to talk to my one remaining aunt (mom’s sister) last night on the phone. 2 1/2 hours of her medical woes, the deaths of her daughter’s MIL and her pastor’s wife, her doctor retiring and the bad doctor that replaced them, a bit about her kids and grandkids, pondering a move to North Carolina, trying to close her antique shop, people who try to sell her worthless/stolen/broken items for said shop.

It was tiring. The ‘reason’ for her call was my birthday; she didn’t ask a single thing about me, though, which is not all bad since I don’t have to dance around the fact that I’m atheist now, and she doesn’t try to discuss politics with me anymore so I guess this is the price I pay.

She wasn’t always like this, but she’s become a right-wing true believer and has graduated from Rush Limbaugh to Alex Jones. She used to be a lot of fun.

Anyway, best wishes, hugs and shoulders to any and all who need them.

@EJ

All the best to you with your new job search.

I think it’s a crime that academics aren’t better paid, I mean, seriously: people like you are the reason why we aren’t all crouching around a fire eating small animals and insects with our hands, and dying at age 16 because there are no antibiotics. Without academics I wouldn’t be able to write this message to you.

Academics are the bulwark that protects civilization from bestial, animal-like chaos and disorder. I think that a fundamental lack of respect for academia is part of the reason why modern society is decaying so badly; people ignore the institutions that have enabled us to flourish and advance as a species.

It’s nothing short of a tragedy that you have to leave your field, and it sounds like you’re distressed by your circumstance, but you must absolutely save yourself if your situation has become dire. I don’t blame you at all.

It is for similar reasons that I ran away from going to college; I don’t enjoy being an uneducated homo erectus-like ape-thing, nor do I think that education is useless; I simply refuse to encumber myself with financial debt, since the U.S. is still stuck in the 1920’s and hasn’t made college free yet, save for a few states. I am lucky to be in one of the states that tried to make college free for all, but I imagine there’s going to be a stampede to enroll now; I’ll have to jockey for position with all the others poors like myself to get a place.

“Oh, you’ll earn it back with the money from your new job that you’ll get with your academic credentials!”

Except that’s not always the case. Doing that is basically a gamble, no different from the roulette wheel. All the highly qualified professionals wandering around in debt up to their eyeballs, staring down the barrels of nasty collection agencies, employed in jobs with little prestige or salary, would seem to indicate otherwise.