9 posts tagged “ut”

Yesterday being Earth Day you think I’d have something to say about it but in fact it doesn’t seem like all that big a deal and, I suspect unfortunately, it doesn’t either to much of this country’s populace.  I’ll only start to feel satisfied when more than one day a year is designated Earth Day – one a month would be a good start.  Maybe we can have some sense prevail now we have a president who’s not pissing on the earth and acting like he isn’t, if that’s not too many negatives for one sentence.  I expect it’ll be a long time before I can write/talk about Bush and not try to pack a lot of negatives in.

More to the point, yesterday was Administrative Professionals Day, which is also something I wish came more than once a year.  I did pretty well vis-à-vis presents from the two faculty groups I work with, even if one of them was a day late.  I felt better about this when I left for lunch today and noticed one of my colleagues getting into a car with some of her faculty, obviously being taken out for a delayed celebration.  In fact I felt lots better.  Her faculty are the stuffy behind-the-times type who think the proper way to honor staff is lunch on them no matter how little anyone really might enjoy the occasion.  Mine know better by now – even the ones I like, I don’t like enough to spend an hour in forced conversation with.  Everyone knows it so they just give me gift cards and all concerned are a lot happier.

This year they collectively outdid themselves, one group buying me lunch at the Clay Pit through the end of the semester and another presenting an Apple Store card that just about covers a spare adapter for the MacBook.  Also, the day-late group made a point of telling me how much they love me.  I blushed.  (I hope.)

This spring it’s 21 years that I’ve been an administrative person and I’ve gotten pretty good at it so y’know, they damn well should love me.  I didn’t set out to become a career AA – who ever does, or would if they knew it? – and for me instead it was something to do while I figured out what I did want to be.  That took long enough, but now that I have, kind of, I’ve been lucky to have integrated my professional interests of editing, DTP and web design into my work.  Enough so that I figure I’m stuck with the current line of work for some time to come.

It’s OK – I like my job, mostly.  The pay is crap, but that’s something pretty much every UT employee is expected to say no matter what they earn.  Fact is that combined with the income from my grandfather’s trust I make enough to live on comfortably for the moment.  (Even before the gift cards.)  I’ve had to do a bit of re-educating of some people here as to the difference between “staff” and “servant,” but at 2 ½ years in I think the bumpiest spots have been sufficiently smoothed out.

I think everyone here knows that with the TX budget being where it is there aren’t going to be any raises coming staff’s way this year (let alone an impressively large one like they handed me last August).  Maybe that’s why the lavishness of yesterday’s gifts.  I’ll take ‘em; I remember when I didn’t have any job at all.  I’m going to remember that for a long time to come.

Yesterday I got out my camera for pretty much the first time since returning from CA.  Some moron had dumped a banana peel in the fire escape stairwell, actually left it on the stairs like the oldest gag in the western world, and it was so absolutely ridiculous I had to snap a photo.  

Before removing the peel and depositing it in the trash, of course.  I wouldn’t want something like that on my conscience.  Fer chrissake, what are they teaching students these days?

I think I’ve been watching Dead Like Me too much.  Growing up in the fading era of slapstick didn’t teach me half the respect for stray banana peels that the first season of that show did.

Jami is running a contest over at her site and just by entering I win a galley copy of her new book.  It's easy - print out a sign, stick it on something, take a photo, and send it to her (or post to Flickr).  First thing I read it all I could think of was a certain annoying statue near my building on campus that needed Attenberg-ing:

I'm a little disappointed it didn't make her top 3, but Jami doesn't owe me anything.  I didn't buy her last book either.

The trouble was indeed the hard drive and now the iBook is back with a brand-new one.  I had time to wipe the original of personal data, back everything else up and now once the OS is restored (I’m sticking with 10.3 for this old warrior) I’m experimenting with importing all the non-Apple applications from the backup drive rather than doing the recommended reinstall from the original discs, which would prove problematical in some cases because I no longer (cough) have access to them.  So far everything seems to work OK.  Keep your fingers crossed.

The whole upside to this affair as far as I’m concerned – apart from just squeaking in on the Applecare after having barely touched it in the preceding three years – is I get to rebuild my portable iTunes library from scratch.  I could have just backed up the old one and reimported it too but it needed cleaning out badly.  Such a project may be the kind of fun only an obsessively inventorial type like me could appreciate.

In other news, I’m almost through with the class I’ve been auditing at UT this semester, “Interactive Multimedia Design and Production,” and am I glad.  Taking it for credit would have almost killed me.  My main presentation was The Emergence of Web 2.0 As Reflected By the Product Offerings of Six Apart, which meant I got to yak for 12 minutes about Typepad and Vox to a bunch of people who know nothing about blogging tools.  Should be worth some karma points with Mena, Ben and the bunch but I doubt that’ll make much difference when my next Typepad bill comes.

The final presentation is due next week and for it I have to make some translatable sense of my main project for the class: developing five similarly-themed websites for the faculty in one of the groups I work with.  I’ve met my goal for the class of learning enough CSS to be dangerous (sadly, can't say the same for the same with Flash) and now the task is to wrap it up in a neat little Powerpoint package.  Again, cross your fingers.

I’m not necessarily saying the kids who just vacated both sides of the duplex next door are slobs but my god did they have a lot of crap.  The moving process seemed to take a week, involving trailers of various sizes and innumerable trips in their oversize throaty pickups and expensive SUVs.  And they still left all kinds of trash on the sidewalk.  Some of it they even fit into the can.

Two days ago I saw the property agent waiting outside and thought to ask whether they left the inside in better condition than the front lawn.  Then a minute later a drywall contractor van pulled up into the driveway and the crew leader greeted the agent warmly but seriously the way you do when there’s a big job to get done in a short time.  

Yesterday I met the owner of the property across the street, the one that’s been vacant for most of the year.  He was looking for the origination point of the two worn-out couches that had appeared on his front lawn as if by magic sometime the preceding evening.  Suspicion automatically fell on the duplex – I call it the Princess Palace because the whole time I’ve lived here the close side has been tenanted by a succession of kids who looked and acted like they wished they were in a sorority house, and while the far side’s been mostly male it’s been correspondingly greek/jock-like – but today I wonder.  If those were their couches why didn’t they take them in the moving truck almost the size of the house itself that had pulled up the night before?

Oh.  Because they're over-entitled upper-middle-class kids with (I overheard the property agent say) a lot more money than sense.  Thanks. 

(I stand by that assessment even if those weren't their couches.)

Included in the trash heap was a framed photo collage made to celebrate the chief princess’s 20th birthday.  Someone went to a lot of trouble to put that together – probably her roommate, I recognize her from the most BFF of the pictures – and now here it is consigned to landfill.  I felt mostly just sad seeing it out on the street waiting to get rained on.  So much for BFF.

Some mangy bastard stole my nameplate off my office door.  I don’t know what anyone else would do with my name, which IRL is a lot more distinctive than the alias I use here, but then again I work on a college campus and students do lots of things that make no sense to someone in the working world.  I certainly did my share when I was one, and mindless vandalism was a favorite.  Rarely theft, though.

I’m blaming the theft on students because they’re always the easiest target.  But I work on an open campus a short walk from downtown in a large American city and anyone can come strolling through the halls here.  Especially during football season, looking for a back door into the stadium under which my building is housed.  I’m surprised more don’t year-round.

I figure it wasn’t personal, or at least political, or otherwise they would have removed the FCNL antiwar sticker too.  Still: losing that tag burns my ass.  I kept it from my previous job, where everybody had one on their cubicle attached with little pieces of velcro because we were always getting moved around.  Folks here complimented me on such a nice-looking tag and asked where they could get one.  “Go be a slave for G_______ Bank,” I said to end the conversation.

Now all’s left are the velcro strips, twin woolly-bears permanently stranded on the door.  They remind me of a certain record company executive’s eyebrows in the rock and roll novel I just read.  Which somehow makes it a lot worse.

When I started this blog I thought I’d be posting a lot more often.  So far though my other one has been getting most of my effort, which is something that just snuck up on me.  I think what it is is I still think more like an online journaler than a blogger.

Tomorrow I get on a plane to Boston and for 10 days will be splitting my time between there, New Hampshire and the Hudson Valley.  On one hand, such traveling is ideal fodder for blog-type entries with lots of pictures.  On the other, internet access may be a little spotty; preliminary research shows that Boston ain’t exactly a hotbed of free wifi (though compared to Austin, what is?).  In any case, stay tuned.

Some of the things that’ve slipped by recently while I’ve been simultaneously wrapping up the school year and getting ready for the trip:

• Bike To Work Week happening right now, and Austinist nails the city's attitude towards its cyclists in one brief paragraph.    But damn – free breakfast tacos tomorrow.  They would have to give out the breakfast tacos right when I’ll be heading to the airport.
• The 2007 ACL lineup is announced, and everyone starts slavering.*  I however am in no way swerved from my determination to skip the whole damn thing for the first time since it started.  (For the record, I said I’d skip it last year too but gave in because a) the New Pornographers were on the bill and b) I hadn’t been working for months and had nothing better to do.  But five years sitting in puddles of stale beer on recycling runs backstage is more than enough.)

• Jerry Falwell dies.  If I ever wanted to devoutly believe in Hell, it’s for someone like him.
• I get taken to lunch at the UT Faculty Club by two of mine to honor me for putting up with them for six months.  I don’t have the heart to tell them it’s actually almost nine, and I still haven’t gotten my review.  But the food (salmon salad, tortilla-encrusted tilapia, peach cobbler) is almost good enough by itself to buy my silence.

Plus Malcolm has developed some sort of digestive disorder and all of a sudden I’m dealing with all kinds of kitty-solids/liquids I’ve been spared for a long time.  I am looking forward to getting out of town for awhile, no lie.

*I wish I could understand where all the overweening fuss about Ghostland Observatory comes from.  IME their set last year proved very little beyond their commitment to the idea that Annoying is the new black.

Six months on the job at UT and I still go to the Dobie Mall for lunch pretty much every day.  I like the cheap, I like the walk there and back, but most of all I like the illusion that I won’t know what I’m having until I walk in the door.

“Illusion,” because in fact there are really only a few places there I’ll eat, and a specific meal at each.  Lasagna and salad from Niki’s on the colder days, though their pizza is good too – I’ve come to realize over the years it’s closer to my beloved Eastern Seaboard paper crust than anything else available in Austin.  The pastor at the Burrito Factory is worthy of Taco Loco at Mission and 29th, and that’s high praise indeed.  Palak paneer and lamb curry at Student Biryani make an excellent mini-feast on days when the Clay Pit is out of reach.  And if I can’t think of anything else, the gyros and fries at Gyro King make a serviceable Plan B, as long as there’s the requisite hillock of mayo and lake of ketchup on the side.

(I’ll probably never eat at Oona’s again.  They used to be one of my faves but a couple of truly abysmal customer-service experiences killed that.  That and they just don’t give enough food for a person of my size.)

So it was with some dismay I found earlier this week that one of my standbys has to be crossed off the list.  Student Biryani has gone out of business, so abruptly that the “Full Combo” placard still sits on the display counters and cans of Pepsi crowd into the glass cooler.  

I guess it’s not really a surprise, as I was almost always the only customer at the register.  I’d hoped that was because I usually got there after the lunch rush but a nagging feeling said not; the nice man and his equally nice wife were always just a little too anxious to see me walking up.  On occasions when I kept going, preferring a little faux-Italian or Greek prepared by Koreans, they looked so crestfallen I felt awful.

One of their neighbors confirmed it was no vacation they’d left suddenly for.  “They hadn’t paid their rent in three months,” he said sadly.  It’s a cutthroat business, the Dobie Food Court, and it’s claimed another victim.

I wish the Biryani folks well on their just-begun sojourn into The Land of Failed-Business Crushing Debt; I never learned their names.  I don’t know the name of the guys at Niki’s either, though they feel like old friends by now. I should learn them while I have the chance.

While we’re still in the pre-warm months – and this is Austin so maybe that should actually be weeks – I like to walk home from my job on the UT campus.  It’s 35 minutes, 40 if you deviate a little.  And I do like to deviate.  In this case, it means more to look at and fewer cars.  (Fewer cars are important even if you don't wear headphones.  People drive like idiots in this town.)  Cross 26th St. – I defiantly call it 26th since to me Dean Keaton means Gabriel Byrne in The Usual Suspects – and up Harris Park until it doglegs into Montrose. 

Cross 38th and cut through the corner of the Hancock Golf Course, dodging the little go-carts and smiling at the dog-walkers (but only when they clean up after Cujo).  When I pass the pocket-castle of the Elizabet Ney Museum – still have to find time some weekend to go inside! – and then the squeals of Shipe Park I know I’m almost home.

This walk has evolved over the weeks.  Straight up Duval is no fun and too much bus exhaust besides; Avenue G is soft to the eyes but eerily deserted that time of day.  The golf course is the best part of the walk, just about the prettiest part of town when the sun starts to set and the shadows pool under the trees down by Waller Creek.  The best way to see the sweetness of where you live is on foot.