Maniacal Marty

Nothing much has happened over the past few days. At least ‘nothing’ in comparison to what happened earlier in the week. The weather has been beautiful. It rained a good bit of the day Thursday, but its turned out to be sunny and temperate Friday and Saturday—quite unnatural for August.

Marty has been up to some devilish tricks. Thursday morning I stumbled into a very messy kitchen, the aftermath of a swinging party that ended with a drunken brawl. Or at least that’s how I like to imagine Marty spent the evening which caused such a mess. (See the picture below and judge for yourself.) He’s spent the better part of today running through the house with his ball, or chasing some other imaginary fiend. I think he’s just happy that both Darryl and I are home for once. At least that’s what I think he meant when he kept biting my knee at lunch. It’s good we have Marty around or else our house would get quite dull.

Things at work are going well. I spent my last days as a lowly student worker. When I return on Monday I will be a full-fledged staff member. I will continue working in periodicals until new student workers are hired to fill my vacancy. I am continuing my realphabetization project and hope to finish that by the end of next week. This project is of my own design, realphabetizing loose issues and identifying titles that are inactive (ones that we haven’t received a new issue in over a year). I have finished the majority of the titles, A-J and T-Z. When I am finished with the whole room, the loose issues will be much more organized (they were an absolute mess before) and we will have a list of titles to investigate: see why we haven’t received any issues recently, contact the publisher and/or vendor, and possibly make some cataloging updates. This will be picked up by the next student worker, hopefully. I’ve gotten my desk in the cataloging office all cleaned out and straightened up. I’m thinking about taking some things in the next week to decorate and make it a bit more homey (or ‘homely’ as the Brits say).

Kathy called us Thursday night to tell us that she was planning on staying in Clearwater and braving Hurricane Charley. Bill was supposed to be flying back from Kansas City that night to be with her. Darryl and I were extremely anxious and worried for them and the possibility of their house flooding. I checked NOAA several times on Friday to monitor the progress of the hurricane while Darryl tuned in to the Weather Channel at home. We were very relieved to see that the hurricane went into Ft. Myers instead of Tampa, and even more happy to hear from Kathy on Friday night to say that they had not gotten any wind or rain from the storm. They were very, very fortunate!

This weekend is a time for resting and getting things done for me. I have spent a large part of today reading and working on Florida State orientation. I have to download a bunch of new applications that I will be using for my online courses, complete a few preliminary exercises, and prepare for classes to start on Monday the 23rd. I also need to do some laundry and post transactions on our budget spreadsheet. Tomorrow, we’ll be going to church and staying for a luncheon meeting of the United Methodist Women, celebrating the 135th anniversary of UMW. I’m certain we’ll go visit Ken & Lois as well. Darryl has been working on the cabinet doors and hopes to have them finished in about 10 days. He spent a large part of today preparing the doors for sanding, which he will probably start tomorrow.