What Got Done - A Domestic Weekend

scrottie will tell you that my weekend "To Do" lists are generally ambitious and often contain one more item than a person can reasonably get done in a day. So, to begin with, I missed the First Fridays ride, for a combination of silly reasons. First, I dawdled in the lab for a few extra minutes because a labmate needed someone to stick around to catch some undergrads (so to speak), but I hadn't realized that another labmate was also in the lab anyway. Secondly, the ride meets up behind "The Chicken," and I wasn't entirely sure where that was when I arrived in the general vicinity, five minutes late. Plus, I failed to see any crowds of any size. To top it off, I hadn't eaten lunch on Friday and I was feeling peckish, so I settled for going home.

Saturday, however, I was a bit more successful in my errands. The guy who gave me free tomatoes last week at the farmer's market had more tomatoes for sale today, so I bought as many as I thought I could reasonably use. They're better than most of the tomatoes I've seen for sale in Texas, though they're still a far cry from the beautiful heirloom tomatoes we can occasionally get in Arizona. The Aggie Horticulturalists had a big bin full of tomatillos this week, so I bought those and a baggie of peppers to make some more salsa. I also bought this crazy-looking fruit...but I'll have to show you pictures tomorrow because I forgot to bring in my camera cord.

From the farmer's market, I headed over to Burr's Unfinished Furniture Store to peruse their offerings. You will not be surprised to learn that furniture made from real wood (mostly hardwoods) is expensive. It's still beautiful to look at, though. I'm still playing around with different ideas for what to do with my book collection, which is still largely in boxes. Reading about tiny houses makes me tempted to purge the collection, to some extent. The cookbooks are out and being used, but I know there are a number of other books that I probably won't ever read again, and don't necessarily want to lend/give to others because they aren't worth it. Time to let those go.

After the browsing, I went over to the Parker-Astin Hardware Co to look for materials for a couple of projects, and had great success in tracking down what I needed, hooray! I stopped by the house to drop things off, and then headed over to Goodwill to look for items for my Halloween costume. Boy, Goodwill. The last time I was in there, it was kind of crowded and claustrophobic, so I wasn't sure I really wanted to go back. But I had the brilliant idea of using my chicken hat as inspiration for a belated Halloween costume (there was a Halloween party on Saturday night), also inspired by the costume a friend made for her son. I just needed a pair of red pants and materials to make wings.

Well, I scored bigtime this time around. Somebody had donated a bundle of felt, complete with a lot of red and yellow felt pieces! I couldn't find any big pieces of red fabric to sew the felt onto, but I managed to find a cool-looking orange towel. Close enough.

So then, when I got home again, I spent the next couple of hours cutting out felt feathers and sewing them onto the towel. Again, there are pictures that I can't show you yet. Argh. The costume was definitely a success and was perfect for dancing, as I'd hoped (though there wasn't as much dancing as I would have liked). I will wear it again at some point, I know it - a big reason why I went to the bother of making it.

Sunday, I made roasted tomatillo salsa, and then spent hours and hours with a heat gun and paint scraper, stripping the paint off of one of three scavenged doors. I think I spent around 5 hours total in stripping one door. Only two more to go! After I finished that stage, I headed back to the kitchen to mix up some bread/pizza dough and some tart dough. My mother sent me a delicata squash that she'd grown in her garden, which is a featured item for a Cafe Flora Cookbook pizza made with a sage-walnut pesto. The end product was delicious, but I keep feeling a bit sad about not having anyone to share my cooking adventures with.

I also spent a portion of the weekend wondering what I'd do if I weren't blogging about such domestic minutiae. Would I wind up writing about them in my journal instead? Many projects seem like they'd be best documented as lists. Perhaps I would write lengthy letters about them. It takes a certain activation energy for me to write about things in my paper journal, which tends to be focused around thoughts and ideas instead of around actions (though some entries, written while traveling, *do* record day-to-day activities because I want to treasure those memories).

To some extent, I get frustrated by the endless cycles of stuff - trying to figure out what to do with these books and papers and memorabilia, for instance. It seems I must get things to take care of these other things. I'm trying to be careful about it, so that I don't wind up with objects that I'll have to get rid of the next time I move.

Trying to turn the bureaucratic crank

I have to post about this here, because I can't get actual work done right now. Here is the story of the grant I have been hired on, and why it's difficult to get research done at some research institutions. It is also making me look back at the research machine known as ASU with some fondness. While we did have to bend over backwards when writing out detailed explanations of the public purposes of our purchases (out of fear of auditing), the business office there got stuff DONE.

Here, well. The grant that pays me had an official starting date of September 15. Fortunately, people in the department figured out how to pay me when I was hired on at the beginning of October. Then it came time to start purchasing supplies so I could, you know, do some science. Well. Apparently, grants used to be managed through the department, with a credit-card system. I found out the hard way that my grant is not, after I'd already attempted to make a few purchases. I had to then quickly cancel those purchases and transfer one purchase to a different account. The person who informed me that I couldn't use the departmental system didn't know what I actually needed to do, or who to contact, but fortunately another person in the department gave me something that approximated the name of the department I needed to contact. That led me on a brief wild goose-chase on teh internets, as I tracked down two things that sounded like they were roughly the right thing. From there, I made a few phone calls and sent an e-mail and FINALLY found the right person to work with. I even got an account number from her.

The catch is that things still seem to be working (or, rather, not working) in mysterious ways. A week ago, I tried to put in a requisition for a purchase order (are you still with me?) for software that my advisor needed stat. Over a week later, I still hadn't heard back. In today's e-mail exchange, it appears that the account "hadn't been set up," so the whole thing has been in limbo somewhere, and nobody bothered to tell me about it.

This week, I will need a bunch of aquariums and other miscellaneous supplies to house a shipment of ~1000 crickets that are coming in from Nebraska, the bread-and-butter of this grant, which should keep me occupied for the next three months. If I run out and try to buy aquariums from a store, I'll have to provide documentation of the university's tax-exempt status - documentation that I do not have. Apparently the reimbursement process here also involves cutting an actual, physical check, so I don't particularly wish to do that anyway. My other options: call a place and ask for things to be invoiced with the account number (many companies are reluctant to do this unless they are large, expensive scientific companies accustomed to doing business with universities), or send more stuff through this requisition-purchase order loop, which would mean a time delay negatively affecting the crickets.

Ugh. Yeah, sometimes I miss the good old days.