During the Godmothers’ Tea

Susie has three godmothers, and she and Stephanie are having a tea party for them this afternoon, even as I type.  So I have absented myself and am now at the main library bringing this blog up to date.  (I had to ask a librarian to unblock the site for me!)  I brought along nothing but my diary, a copy of Andrew Vachss’ Only Child (which I am reading for the second time), and a paperback of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, since I plan to watch my DVD of that movie soon.

My DVD of Se7en came in the mail Friday, exactly one week after I mailed Amazon.com the payment.  Now Susie wants to camp out at the mailbox for her American Girl doll to come.  (In the end, the final cost was about $200!)  I wish she could have earned this doll by saving proof-of-purchase stamps or box tops.

The closest I’ve come to that in recent memory is saving the red caps from Coca-Cola products.  As you probably know, I am the Diet Coke equivalent of a chain-smoker, so it didn’t take long to save enough enough red bottle caps to earn prizes.  I opted for a year of Esquire, and I’ve received two issues thus far.  (The December issue should be arriving before long, and I’m sure it’ll give our letter carrier a hernia.)

They should offer free dialysis for a lifetime as one of the prizes.

For family night, we’re watching the original, 1977 Star Wars.  I have it on VHS tape, when Steph and I began our vainglorious (and ultimately abandoned) effort to own all 100 movies on the Motion Picture Association of America’s Top 100 Movies of All Time, but I borrowed the DVD from the library so Susie could see it in all its glory.  Here’s a true confession: I saw it once, and only once, when it first came out.  I was 14, and I saw it at the Colony Theatre in Marietta.  (Another confession: The first movie I lied about my age to see was Saturday Night Fever.)  So, for me, it’ll be almost like seeing it again, since it’s been almost 30 years for me.

I am not sure whether the rigamarole I’ve had to go through to get onto LiveJournal here at the library is permanent or not.  I am not crying censorship, since I was able to get in.  But it is a pain in the butt.

Feast or Famine

As cliched as it is, that is the perfect way to describe the workload today at the Industrial Commission.  Either we’re flooded with work, or else we sit around on our hands all day doing nothing.  I can’t complain; I was pretty busy in the morning.  I transcribed my least favorite physician, a Dr. Marblemouth in Cleveland, and typed a few Statements of Fact.  My co-word processor didn’t arrive until after 2, so I worked on her lump-sum advancements.  (This isn’t as exciting as it sounds, believe me!)

I even looked forward to batching, my least favorite task.  Batching means taking packets of original dockets and making sure they’re in good enough condition to be scanned.  If not, I have to Xerox them.  That’s never very much fun.  Hospitals used to love using pink onionskin forms, and these things have been around so long they look like the Dead Sea Scrolls.  I made the mistake of putting one through the automatic document feeder on the machine–it, of course, tore it to shreds.  So I had to do some emergency surgery with Scotch tape before it was workable.

I’m splurging and ordering something from Amazon.com for the first time in eons.  It’s a two-disk DVD of Se7en, the monumental suspense film starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.  I ordered the New Line Platimum edition, which has many behind-the-scenes anecdotes and pictures–including how the directors went about creating the many bizarre handwritten notebooks that are found in the serial killer’s apartment.  I’m sending Amazon.com a money order, so I expect the package to be in my mailbox in about 10 days.

Se7en is one of my favorite movies.  It’s not for the faint of heart, but the gore and gruesome scenes are not as overused as they are in any of the CSI shows.  (CSI makes me nostalgic for Quincy: That was about a coroner, and yet you never once saw a corpse in the picture.)

I’m at the Franklinton library.  Susie needed a red wig for a Hallowe’en skit she’s doing at school tomorrow.  I learned this interesting fact at dinner, so we came here via Family Dollar, where we bought an Ariel wig for her.  (Family Dollar is where we buy pet food, and where I buy the composition books that I use for diaries.)  Looking at that wig, I wonder: Does the Little Mermaid also wear an algebra?  (Get it?)