Journal

Work went great (again) today. I really think I’m going to like working there. Out of everyone I’ve worked with, I’m the one with the most positive attitude. Big change. Now mind you, they’ve been working all summer shorthanded, so everyone’s just a wee bit tense. I’m having fun with it though. Just being my usual, (well what I’d like to be usual) jocular self. I have fun with the folks who call the Help Desk, I have fun with my co-workers, I have fun roaming around the hospital, and I have fun on the bus to and from work. What could be better?

I actually got on the wrong bus tonight. See, the #18 and the #19 both start and finish at the same place. It’s just that one goes around the east side of the city, and the other, (the wrong one) goes around the west side. Oh well. So I had to walk home from downtown. It was a nice night, so big deal.

The weather seems to be changing. We’ve had such a mild summer. Sure it’s been hot and sticky, but we haven’t had any real storms. The last one I remember was in late June.

A couple of weeks ago, I started to write about the beach. How since it’s been such a mild summer, that the sandbars were, like, really close to shore. The first sandbar couldn’t have been more than 30 feet off the high water mark. (The Great Lakes aren’t quite big enough for tides, but they slosh like a bathtub.) And the third sandbar was considerably less than 100 yards out.

Last night driving home from south of the city, there was a truly spectacular display of lightning over the lake. Driving in from maybe 40 miles south, well I'll tell ya, I could’ve waited for the drive to end. I’ve not seen such an active storm in ages. And it missed us! It hit east of here.

This morning well before dawn, another one hit. Now as you may recall, the harder it storms, the better I sleep. Suffice it to say, I had tremendous difficulty in getting out of bed this morning. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I should drive to work or not. It was still plenty warm and humid, so wearing a raincoat or not, I’d have arrived at work equally wet had it kept up. Just as I stepped out of the shower it let up. There was barely a sprinkle left as I walked to the bus stop.

And tonight! We had MAJOR red on The Weather Channel. Even some yellow! But, like last night, it was sliding down the lake to the east. So when we arrived at the beach, we had blue skies above, and gray skies not too far offshore. And the waves! You could literally watch them move the shore and the sandbars out.

Naturally, Jeffrey, being Jeffrey, had to go for a swim. It was the first time I’ve seen, (I’m certain it’s happened before, it’s just I’ve not been there to see it,) that Lake Ontario had a major undertow. Jeffrey was swept out along with the sand. Out, and an easy quarter mile down the beach. And he was only maybe 40 yards off-shore! Now you guys who live on the ocean may laugh at that, but around the North Coast, that’s not too shabby.

We weren’t the only ones out there. In fact, the parking lots along Lake Shore Blvd. were packed with gawkers. Jeffrey and I were almost the only humans who ventured down the bluff to the beach. And he was the only one who went in the water. I stood just inches back from high water, and enjoyed the sounds and the smell of the storm. I can’t imagine how humbled I’d feel watching a hurricane. The storms over the lake are humbling enough.

Sorry I didn’t write last night. I was trés tired. Thursday night, I blew up a client’s PC. The one that payroll is run on every Monday. Seventeen year’s experience, and I still don’t know why the motherboard fried. And quite frankly, I don’t know if it was the motherboard or the processor. Eighty dollars bought a motherboard, I donated the Pentium-90 I removed from my PC in January, (she had a Pentium-75) and I still wound up with fresh tomatoes and pears for the trip home. J And they got payroll done today.

Anyway, I still haven’t decided what to share from last week, and what to keep private. We’re going to have a talk about it tomorrow night after work. It’s just that things have been so, well, interesting lately.

Detour: Constant connection to the internet is great. I’ve been spoiled at work by such simple things as automatic e-mail delivery. I don’t have to check it, it just comes in. I know it seems like such a little thing, but it’s nice now to have that convenience at home. Both the Road Runner Manager (which connects me to the cable modem) and Eudora, (the e-mail package I use) load from my Startup group and run minimized. Every once in a while, Eudora plays her little song and pops up a dialog telling me I have mail. It has nothing at all to do with the speed of the cable modem, and everything to do with the convenience of continuous connection. End of detour.

So the daily NewsPlanet headlines come in, and there was an article about Onondaga County, (which includes Syracuse, a little more than an hour east of here,) adding sexual orientation to the list of classes protected from discrimination. I was about to click on that link, and I saw this headline right below it:

So here’s a priest who was given a dump of an inner-city church (just three blocks from my apartment) that was scheduled to be closed when he took it over 20 years ago, and he’s turned it into a vital part of the community. And he’s getting the sack. Because he treats women equally, ministers to the gay community, and gives communion to non-Catholics. It’s caused a great brouhaha locally, but I was really surprised to learn the issue’s gone national.

Frankly, the priest doesn’t stand a chance since the whole thing’s political anyway. The local Bishop, Matthew Clark, is already on the Pope’s shit-list because of his stance on birth-control, condoms, homosexuality and HIV. So I figure that in order to keep his job, he has to dump the priest at Corpus Christi. And then people wonder why I spurn organized religion.

Well, now I’ve forgotten what I was going to write about tonight. Maybe it’ll come back to me.