*Six months* later.... in shiny things

Why on earth do I wait so long between entries??!!?? I don’t know!! I miss it, I often vow I’ll start anew and write regularly.... then I vanish for, oh, six months. I see I made four entries in all of 2016. FOUR. I do see a connection with entries made and my job, however. Apparently I only write here if I’m bored out of my mind at work. As I am today! Clearly this doesn’t happen often, and it will come to a screeching halt next week when the students return (they have had a weirdly long break and don’t start classes until after the MLK holiday). I don’t know why I seem to only feel the need to write when I’m at work. Maybe I can improve on that TOO.

Also, I feel totally overwhelmed at catching up with everyone, especially since I didn’t even catch up six months ago. So I apologize profusely!! Maybe I can work my way backwards. I would just start from here but I’m always feel like I’m missing things. Since, hellooo, I am missing things.

And when I wait this long, I don’t even know where to start!! Luckily my life has not been particularly exciting in these past six months. We have not moved (we haven’t even been looking seriously lately), my job is unchanged. . . well, we do have a new dean, as I noted in my six-months-ago entry, where I also posted a video clip of Mrs. Gideon on The Mighty Boosh, because New Dean looks very much like Mrs. Gideon. In an even more amusing turn, the new dean was, at first, having some problems with remembering names. This is amusing because Mrs. Gideon’s standard question every time she sees Howard is, “And who are you again??” Sadly nobody in my office has ever heard of the Boosh so nobody but me finds this hilarious.

The not-hilarious thing is that Mrs. Gideon apparently fired our immediate boss, who had also applied for her job and didn’t get it. The whole thing was bizarre- she told us he decided to step down and go back to teaching; he told us he did no such thing, and that she had told him to resign. VERY upsetting and unsettling. On the plus side for him, he actually got a new position as a dean at a big fancy private university where he will make scads more money. On the minus side for us, we’re getting yet another ass’t dean. Since this is the fifth one in my ten years here, it’s not something we’ve never gone through, but we really really loved the one who departed. And now we’re all a little paranoid about Mrs. Gideon, although in every other dealing I’ve had with her she’s been absolutely fine, and I like her – except for that. Oh, well, a little Office Draaaama always spices up entries, so maybe that will also help get me back in the routine.

I do have something quite exciting coming up, which is very cheering during these long winter months (which so far have been crazily temperate, even warm- we’ve had one 7-8” snow, which was last week and involved single digit temperatures for days, but that’s been it. It’s 56 degree right now, which is not normal but is awfully nice.) We’re......

Going to England again!

Yay!!!!!

And this time it’s a sure thing - we’ve got plane tickets and all! Just Kim and I this trip – Baker B does want to go back, but he is very concerned about leaving the country for two weeks because his mom is not in good health. Well, currently she’s doing okay, but right before Christmas she had a series of weird scary episodes, one of which landed her in the hospital for two days. We think that might have been a mini-stroke of some sort; she was totally disoriented and couldn’t follow directions and was obsessed with breaking a fingernail, of all things, and just was acting very bizarre. OH and she FELL the week before that, and although she was by some miracle not seriously hurt, her already-terrible mobility was pretty much non-existent so she couldn’t be alone at all and Baker B had to stay with her for a week until his brother got there for Christmas.

She will be 95 in March, and STILL LIVES ALONE. And is at the point she can only get around the house with her walker. Luckily, although the house is big, she’s able to live in a very small bit of it - the kitchen, bathroom, livingroom and her bedroom are all very close together. And she has home health care people. She only had them two days a week for four hours until all this happened, and finally agreed to have someone come in every day, even if it’s just a couple of hours. It seriously was that or a nursing home. Currently she can still get around enough to make herself food and get to the bathroom, so she’s okay, but just one little thing sets her back and she can’t be alone - and since Baker B’s brother lives in Baltimore (and will be 78 in a few weeks, so is no spring chicken himself; Baker B was a surprise bundle of joy obviously), he’s afraid to be gone so long. Happily he’s fine with waiting a few more years, and fine with Kim and I going without him.

SO, we leave April 28 and return May 13, and this time we aren’t going to London. Kim has this bizarre .... thing she belongs to, like a vacation club membership, I think. It’s available to government employees, and she had to pay a membership fee, but the dues are apparently very low. And using this, she was able to get us a free week in Cornwall! Near Bodmin, which is near the moors and not too far from the ocean on either side. Then the second week, we found an AirBnB near Bath that was very reasonable, and had a special deal if you book for a week. I was very shocked about the vacation membership thing, I admit- - Kim tends to fall for things like that and then find out they are useless- expensive and hard to book anywhere you actually want to go. Like, for example, her timeshare. Which IS how we managed to stay on a canal boat near Nottingham on our first trip - that’s all there was available! And it was definitely not free, and in fact seemed to me to be more expensive than just getting something through AirBnB or Travel Lettings, especially considering how much she’d already paid in maintenance fees. But this really is legitimate and a great deal, as long is she is telling the truth about her membership fees!

And after all that, I found plane tickets for $640. Round trip, Charlotte to Heathrow, SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY DOLLARS. And they are normal tickets - not the kind you have to change planes five times and it takes days to get there! It’s one change each way, normal arrival and departure times. Pretty much exactly the same as the tickets we had on our first trip. I’ve spent a lot of time these past years watching ticket prices, since we went twice and had two other times we planned to go but had to cancel, and the cheapest I have EVER seen them was just under a thousand. And that was for, like, five seconds, before they went up again. It’s less than half of what we paid last time we went. Bizarrely, they actually went down to something like $550 after that - and I’m still seeing them in the $700s via alerts. I don’t know what is going on - is it something to do with our new .... president?? I got them the day after the election, which was great as it balanced out the extreme horror and disbelief with something exciting and happy and good. Whatever it was, all these things have added up to a VERY affordable trip.

Anyhow, as usual I have gone on and on and on, and am now out of time. I WILL make this a habit again! And I will also catch up reading everyone else!