Too Cold! by B. L. Hamilton

 

There is something weird going on with the weather around here. Today I saw something on Facebook about the temperature in Dallas Texas being 23 degrees and the temperature in Salt Lake City Utah being 30 degrees!

Of course, when I saw it, the first thing that hit me was that it was a whopping 30 degrees in Salt Lake City! I found myself wishing it was that warm here. Then I noted the other city in that meme and wondered what was going on. Is it really colder in Dallas than in Salt Lake?

Though before I could fully absorb that information, a friend of mine, who lives in New Orleans, posted it was 17 degrees at her place.

My response was, well at least it wasn’t -2!

That isn’t to say it was -2 at the time I commented. No, at that time it was 23 degrees out, just like in Dallas, but it had been, well it got to -3 Monday night.

How is this happening?

Dallas and New Orleans being colder than Salt Lake is bad enough, but to have to deal with negative temperatures here, well, I’m not the only one having problems.

I wasn’t the only one at Auto Zone yesterday because of battery issues. There were three other people there with the same issue. And as that was afternoon, I’m sure they had a lot more come in earlier.

Then a friend of mine came over to help me with the new battery I needed, and he told me he moved from Bear Lake to get away from below-zero weather.

I said at the time that I didn’t think he had moved far enough south for that and I even wished I lived in Vegas with Konnie right now.

He told me Bear Lake gets colder. 

Yeah, it probably does. Bear Lake, like Rexburg, is at a much higher altitude than down on the Snake River Plains where we live. And let’s face it because Pocatello is situated in such a small valley, most storms skip over us and hit Blackfoot, I.F., and Rexburg with way more than we get here.

I should know, I’ve lived in those places, and even Salt Lake. Pocatello does not get hit with winter weather as hard as places further north or at least in much bigger valleys than here.

Which isn’t to say we don’t get hit, because we get hit, there’s a good six inches outside from this past weekend’s storm. And from all reports, it was worse out of this valley. Chubbuck and Fort Hall got it worse. They always do and considering how close they are to Pocatello it still seems amazing.

For those of you who don’t know the town I live in, to get from Pocatello to Chubbuck, you just have to cross a street. And, while driving through Chubbuck on Yellowstone Ave, about the time you hit the suburbs, you cross into the Reservation, which doesn’t end until you hit Blackfoot.

Taking Yellowstone Ave, the other way, you get to farms before you hit Inkom, but there isn’t as much open land there as there used to be! And Inkom isn’t in this valley either.

And I promise Inkom tends to get hit worse than Pocatello. Again, this small valley.

I just wish this small valley could protect us from the cold. At 9:30 last night, it was -4 outside! Yikes! I’m glad I was inside.

By the way, that doesn't include the wind chill factor.

It’s dang cold out there!

But we’re supposed to start warming up tomorrow.

The forecast is for the high 30s for tomorrow. That is tolerable, that is what we are used to for this time of year; we are in the north. If this is the kind of weather down in New Orleans, I can see how they would be miserable.

Like how I was in a hot, muggy, Virginia summer. Give me arid heat any day.

Actually, arid weather period. Humidity kicks it up several notches either way I think. Though it never got this cold in Norfolk while I lived there.

I had quite a few laughs at the reaction of the locals to the snow. They actually closed the schools over a skiff of snow! I mean you could still see the grass between what little bits of snow there was, and it wasn’t laying on the asphalt or concrete.

It was even funnier when there was a run on groceries when a winter storm was predicted. They acted like they’d be snowed in for weeks.

Sometimes you just have to stop and consider where you are, and what you are used to compared to the people around you.

We all have different experiences, or perspectives.

Anyway, happy writing everyone!

Car Trouble and Other Accidents

 

Well, National Novel Writers Month is over, and I’m glad I managed to reach 50k so early in the month this time because I didn’t get much beyond that thanks to life getting in the way, and this last week winter got in the way too.

Last Tuesday, while Konnie was probably fretting about her post for the following day, I hurried outside to scrape the ice off my car windows, and only got three windows before I slipped on the frozen over snow and landed hard on my derriere. I guess I should count myself lucky that I have so much natural padding that I only bruised my rear, rather than breaking anything.

The only thing is I ended up spending the week unable to sit up without a bunch of pillows under me. Good thing I have so many. However, it wasn’t good that I couldn’t manage work. Five hours sitting on my bruised behind was bad enough yesterday. Last week was impossible.

And that only added to my problems.

You see, the week before, I got Thanksgiving off (I usually don’t work Fridays, so I had that off too) but a storm came through Wednesday night. Thanksgiving I was socked in by fog. I called my sister-in-law and we agreed to postpone it until Saturday.

Come Saturday the first thing I had to deal with was all the frozen snow on my car. I managed to get all the windows except the windshield, and I couldn’t budge any of it. I ended up getting my very nice neighbor to come out and scrap my window and while he did that, I tried to start my car.

Tried being the operative word. My battery was dead. And being broke I couldn’t call a service to jump me. I called my friend, whose husband has helped me before with my car.

The problem was, he wasn’t home, and had her car. By the end of the day my car was running again but we had already postponed it until Sunday.

We did manage to get together then, and I was followed home by a man for the first time in my life. 

My cousin, Steve, knowing all the car troubles I’ve had lately, insisted on making sure I got home safely, which was actually nice of him.

Then Monday happened. I got up in time for work and hurrying around to get dressed, when I turned wrong, and put my knee out, again. Yeah, I didn’t make it work on Monday last week, then I took my spectacular spill on Tuesday trying to get work on time.

That was a great week. Here I am barely making ends meet and I lost a whole week of work, which didn’t do me any good. By Sunday I was so anxious about my finances that I had trouble sleeping. Then, when I finally did get to sleep, I slept right through my alarm and woke up, still groggy, only to discover I was late for work! As in, I should have already been there. And I was barely awake enough to realize I had to call in.

It was one in the afternoon before I was able to put two coherent thoughts together beyond that. Yeah, it was not a good start to a new week.

And then I woke up yesterday feeling a little sick to my stomach, and I thought I might have to call in again, which I didn’t want to do not just because of the money but because I felt they were getting tired of my excuses, no matter how valid they were.

Thankfully, after getting something to eat, I was able to get out the door. I’d gone out early thinking I might have to at least scrape windows, but a warm front had come in. Temps were up in the fifties.

And yes, Konnie probably thinks that fifty is cold because she’s gotten so used to warmer climates first in coastal Washington and Oregon now in Las Vegas.

The last time I visited her, I had to borrow one of her jackets because my coat was too heavy for the weather, but there was enough of a breeze I needed something. I do recall I borrowed her unlined windbreak; she was using her fleece-lined jacket.

I also recall her friends at church bundled up in parkas and complaining about how cold it was. Remember, I was wearing my sister’s windbreaker not my winter coat, and they were complaining about it being freezing outside.

Right about now, I wish I could move south for the winter. There is no way I would stay there for the summer, too warm! But it would be nice if I could go for the winter.

Anyway, happy writing everyone!

Online Quizzes and Me by Bonnie Le Hamilton

 

I like to scroll through Pinterest for ideas, but occasionally I come across some quiz or other. Now, these sometimes don’t catch my interest, mostly because they have to do with some movie or TV series I don’t watch, but they do have a few trivia quizzes with attention-catching headlines, “No one gets this without cheating,” or, “You have to have an IQ over 150 to pass this!”

Okay, I’ll bite. It is usually quite fun. (I’ve been known to laugh at the results.)

I’ve taken quizzes on history, vocabulary, grammar, and even medical knowledge (just for fun).

I, of course, aced the vocabulary and grammar quizzes, but I took them to see what the quiz would say about my performance. Generally speaking, they insist I must have a Ph.D. in the subject. College drop-out here.

But that isn’t even as funny as the one I took which insisted I would have to be an RN to pass. Really? It was so easy; I didn’t have to dig into my long-ago memory of quizzing my stepmom for her RN exams. Every single question on there I either learned from shows like Emergency and MASH or just listening to my stepmom. There was nothing tricky or involved, it was just trivia. I aced it, and the quiz the makers decided I must be a doctor. Hardly.

Another fun one for me is history quizzes or American history quizzes.

For those of you that don’t know, my husband was a history buff. After so many years of living with him, I picked up on a few things. Again, they were pure trivia and multiple choice, so not hard at all, especially when most of the time I could eliminate two of the three choices because those two events happened in my lifetime! My opinion is, that you’d have to be randomly picking any answer without reading to flunk this quiz.

But then, I can say the same for those vocabulary ones. You only have three to four choices, and believe me, it was easy to eliminate all but one of the few I wasn’t sure of.

And in everyone, I’m supposedly a master of the English language and love to read the dictionary. Folks, the lexicologist in my life would be the big sister Konnie and I often refer to as Dictionary. I never cracked a dictionary open until I was in eighth grade, and I only did that to prove I was right, and never to do my vocabulary classwork. Never needed it.

But the really laughable one which claimed you had to have an IQ over 150 to pass. Really? Then make the quiz harder. My IQ isn’t that high (I know, I’ve been tested) and I aced your simple trivia quiz.

But then I’ve gotten some interesting outcomes on the personality or heritage quizzes, like the one which insisted that I must be of Asian decent because of my focus on family. Family comes first with some Christian faiths; you know like Catholics and well, our Church. You don’t have to be Asian to value family.

I took one quiz that said, “no one born in the US can answer these tough questions.” Okay, that one would be considered tough by anyone who didn’t live for decades with a historian and hadn’t studied pre-law in college. That isn’t me though.

For your information, the quiz is the one people have to take to become naturized citizens. And honestly, there are many native citizens who don’t know, or ignore, some of this stuff, but, again, I’m not one of them!

Though the one I took the other day was all about common phrases from other countries. Out of curiosity, I took it.

Fun quiz. Most of these common phrases were either Latin or a language based on Latin. Folks, I took French in college. Not fluent but I can at least introduce myself in the language and ask if they speak English. I also took a course on studying the root, or history, of words. Which means learning some Latin. Ergo, any language based on Latin I can usually figure out.

Of the few that didn’t fall into that category was one from Japan, which I learned eons ago from a fellow lady at church whose family had just returned to the states after years of her husband being stationed in Japan.

The other one has been used in at least one movie, enough so I’ve heard it in that movie’s ads. And, according to the quiz makers, I must be multilingual. LOL!

A semester each of sign language and studying the roots of words, plus two semesters of French, all decades ago make me fluent in only my Native tongue, period.

Happy writing everyone!

Of Vacations and Work by Bonnie Le Hamilton

 

I don’t know how your week went, but this past week for me wasn't fun.

For starters, my direct supervisor took her first vacation in two years leaving me to do her job. To say the least, I was overwhelmed just at the prospect of being the only one in our office for an entire week, let alone that I can only work twenty hours a week, and my supervisor puts in somewhere between forty and sixty hours a week.

For one thing, I was afraid the phone would be ringing off the hook. Normally I don’t answer the phone. And I felt out of my league the first time I answered the phone, but I managed it. I thought, “Okay, I can do this, just as long as it doesn’t ring off the hook,” and believe me it has.

My supervisor had messages come through while she was on the phone.

Though my week was going okay, I even had one day where I just sat around and knitted waiting for the phone to ring, then I got an urgent call. Dang, what do I do now?

I was panic-stricken and even texted my supervisor for advice.

From that point on, I did the best I could do for the client, except she wasn’t the only one, I got two more clients the next day. And with each call, I panicked. Though to be honest those two were not as urgent as the first. That first one could not wait until my supervisor got back, period.

I must add she left me a list of things she wanted me to do while she was gone, other than dealing with calls, those things were more in line with me really just being a data entry clerk, even if my training included dealing with clients.

She fretted that she didn’t leave me enough to do because I can type so much faster than she can write. I finish entering the data in less time than she takes to write up her notes, and her notes are phrases, abbreviations, and cut-off words, I turn that into full coherent sentences.

The thing is, I was only idle one day, and at the end of that day, I realized I hadn’t worked on one thing on her list. But it wasn’t all that hard. I did finish that list for her, despite dealing with calls.

But I’m also glad that week is over.

Though now we have to do our quarterly reports. I haven’t done those before.

My supervisor thinks I finish in a flash because I’m all caught up with the data entry. She never managed that with the data entry, ever. Her supervisor was in fact glad I started working there simply because she hoped I could keep my supervisor on task better.

From the second I finished inputting one case file my supervisor has fretted that she could keep me busy for a full twenty hours a week. And believe me, she has often said, “Uh, let's see, what else can you do for me?”

But I had all files current within a week of starting, and I even cleared out all her old files that didn’t need to be stored anymore.

I can complete more in five hours, four days a week, than she can manage in eight hours five days a week. Though admittedly she does have to deal with calls, and I don’t when she’s around.

The fact is, I’m just a fast worker.

I do like working there (when I’m not stressed out by taking care of clients). The work is easy otherwise.

The people I work with are great.

And I’m sure Konnie can do the job I have far more efficiently, mainly because, unlike me, she can multitask. I have to do one thing at a time. And she doesn’t have my heart condition, so she can work a forty-hour week.

Then there is also the fact that she types faster. Believe me, my fingers don’t fly as fast over the keyboard as hers does.

She has more work experience than I have too. Not only because she got married four years after I did, but because I was able to be a housewife my whole marriage, she worked on and off during her marriage to help make ends meet.

That and she has a college degree and I don’t.

But from all this, I think I could draft a story where a simple employee had to take over for the supervisor short term. Then again, it reminds me of Dick Francis’s novel “Straight” where the main character has to take over as head of his big brother’s company. Talk about being in over his head!

Anyway, Happy writing everyone!