re-tag (seven things)

i just noticed that brett tagged jeremy and angela before i did, so my new choices are my mother and ben yancer.

hokey pokey

today we had a halloween dance at school. our little kindergarteners dressed up in costumes and we all went to the gym where they had a live dj that played the hokey pokey, chicken dance, macarena, and other dance favorites. our class had three batmen, one skeleton, a mermaid, a spider-like girl, one scream scary mask, shrek, a witch, a blue power ranger, and a clown.

i was assigned to check on the clown, sebastian, when he went to the bathroom to change into his costume. i found him putting it on backwards and told him to take it off and turn it around. i peeked in on him a little bit later and found him standing with just his tee-shirt on (nothing below the waist) patiently turning his clown suit right side out and singing to himself. i decided just to let it go, and i waited for him at least to pull the legs of the suit on before intervening to assist. i checked again, only to find that he had again started to put it on backwards, still singing, still half nude. at that point i gave up and went to the teacher, mrs. haverman, and said, "mrs. haverman, you might want to help sebastian with his costume." i took over tying wayward shoelaces, with which i was much more comfortable.

blogging is fun

i know some people don't like blogging because it tends to replace email (i find this is true for myself), but it does have a special way of bringing people together.

i like that all of the people i know have links to each other, even if they never knew each other well or hung out when they were in the same city. because we have mutual friends and link to our other friends' blogs, we all know of each other and get to know each other. a lot of my friends link to my mother's blog, which i'm sure she never intended but enjoys nonetheless. ben yancer said that bryant should post more. i didn't even know ben and bryant knew each other. maybe they don't (and maybe they do), but we're all friends here in bloggerland.

i like that when people don't update often enough we miss them and want them back. (thank you ben yancer and ceri for caring.)

i like that it's better than mass emailing for keeping in touch with lots of people. you don't have the guilt factor for not writing back. if they want to know about you, well, there it is. if they don't, it's not your problem. it is in some ways more personal as well because you can share day to day fleeting thoughts or ideas and not waste your time on generals. (i.e. dear friend, well, where do i start? since i saw you last i've gotten married. my husband works in council bluffs, so we moved to iowa a couple of months ago. we have a place in the country and two kittens that make us laugh. i'm working as a para in a kindergarten classroom, but hope to go back to school next year. what have you been up to? love, amy) now the mass email can read, "check my blog: farmertan.blogspot.com. love, amy)

there are downsides, of course. you call up a friend and ask what they've been up to and they respond, "didn't you check my blog?" that, my friends, is sad. i hope the blog craze never replaces real, person to person interaction.

tagged with seven things

i couldn't think of seven things i say most often, but i will update as they come to my attention.

seven things i plan to do before i die:
live debt free
become a certified piano tuner
have a big garden and the knowledge to care for it properly
go back to school for physical therapy (?)
spend at least one more summer on the farm (i can't really plan on this one since the future of the family farm is always in jeapordy, but i wish for it)
have a steinway grand piano
join a quality choir again

seven things i can (or once could) do:
play scott joplin's "maple leaf rag" on piano
wiggle my ears
recite the electron configuration, which i learned in ninth grade
recite james whitcomb riley's poem "when the frost is on the punkin"
drive a stick shift
make darn good cookies
long division

seven things i cannot do:
crochet slippers
drive a motorcycle
make animal whistles out of clay
tap dance
play debussy's "claire de lune"
fix a car
sell kirbys

seven things that attract me to the opposite sex:
a quality smile
a hearty laugh
mechanical ability
musical ability and/or appreciation
confidence
competence
wears his carhartts well (obviously must know what carhartts are)

seven things that i say most often
kitties!


seven celebrity crushes:
brad pitt
paul newman
james taylor
cary grant
jack lemmon
michael buble'
keith urban

i tag jeremy and angela

quit with a capital K

i should have known it wasn't right when at our morning meeting josh, our leader, announced, "amy just turned down a teaching job to work for Kirby. let's give her a cheer!" hip hip Hooray! yes, i turned down a job as a teacher's aide in a kindergarten classroom to become a demonstrator/salesperson for the Kirby company. i guess everyone tries to get rich quick in one way or another, and the Kirby company was my ticket to financial security.

i didn't really know what i was getting into when i called on the ad in the paper for carpet shampooers. carpet shampooing i could do. door to door sales? another story. but they make it sound so simple, and the product really is amazing. let me tell you about the Ultimate G sometime, the diamond edition. i actually sold one over my practice weekend when we set up our own appointments with family and friends just to get us used to the equipment and the demonstration. i quickly found that selling to people who a) you know, b) willingly and not reluctantly let you into their home c) want you to feel good about what you do is a lot easier than trying to fast-talk your way into a house by trying to convince people that you're NOT selling anything, when the minute you're in you tell them otherwise and start a sales pitch.

i was not cut out to be in sales. let me tell you why:

1. i have too much empathy for the people i'm trying to sell to. money is the prime motivation for sales people and they will lie and cajole and turn on the old charm to get their money. i have a hard time even stretching the truth, and secretly i'm hoping the people will be strong and not give into the pitch.

2. positivity. i didn't have it. we started off every morning with Kirby songs. there's a whole cd of them, knockoffs of popular tunes with inspirational kirby lyrics--songs like "that old time religion" (that old kirby feeling), "yesterday" by the beatles (i believe in kir-irby), and some similar version of "i've got the joy joy joy joy down in my heart" (i've got that old kirby feeling deep in my heart/down in my feet/all over me). they all sing at the top of their lungs while clapping and shouting. i tried, but i couldn't quite muster that old kirby feeling.

3. professionalism. i prefer to work in a professional environment. even though the guys i was selling with wore dress slacks, dress shirts and ties, they were still (every last one of them) twenty-something guys, most of them early twenties. twenty-something guys (not the ones i know, but the ones out in "the world") have a certain way of speaking that includes the f-bomb, shit, and the occasional sexual reference. i tried to turn a deaf ear as much as possible, but i still wasn't comfortable. the van we rode around in was a 1987 plymouth voyager piece of crap: filthy inside, full of trash, and smelled like smoke. all five guys in the van with me smoked, and sometimes all five of them were smoking at the same time, inside the van. you can imagine how i smelled at the end of the day. it was a health hazard. oh yeah, and twenty something guys like rap music. so at the beginning of the day, they put in a cd to get them revved up and i have to listen to lyrics about masturbation, sucking dicks, and of course getting it on in a variety of ways. i felt like crying. where is the positivity here?

4. the hours. the hours of a kirby salesperson are 9am to 9:30 pm when we get back to the office. then i had a 45 minute drive home. that's five days a week, my friends, not just occasionally. the first night i got home at 9:45 because josh brought me back to the office early. the second night i got home at midnight. if i had been able to cut it for a week or two they would have made me a recruiter with regular office hours, but i lasted two days. i guess i value time with my husband too much. and my sanity. and my place as a wife. i wanted to be able to cook and clean and go grocery shopping every now and then. tim did a wonderful job those two days, but he didn't like the situation either.

so anyway, to make a long story short on the second night of my kirby career i went into a house at 8:00pm, got a reprimand from the boss for not being positive enough on the phone, had a breakdown and couldn't stop crying, and knew it was not for me.

now i'm going to give that teaching position a try.

a funny thing happened . . .

last weekend when i was in lincoln. kayla and i were at a saturday night get-together at the ben and co. house. we were in the living room when justin okimi came out to announce that dessert was being served. he said, "for those of you who have had sex, i hear there's something better in the kitchen." it took everyone a few seconds to register what he had just said, and as it did all eyes turned amusedly to me, the only married person in the room. justin realized this as well, a bit belatedly, and said, "oh, um. . . not to single you out amy," and walked away.

i, of course, headed to the kitchen.

just getting by

this weekend ben and ashley came out to visit us. they came on friday night and left this morning (sunday) for winterset, iowa, the setting for one of ashley's favorite books, The Bridges of Madison County--an enjoyable read, i thought. on sabbath we went to church in glenwood and had a tasty potluck, then tim took us for an airplane ride over the missouri river valley to see the fall colors. he did a few maneuvers that were a little too much for ashley--no, she didn't upchuck, but she did hold on to my arm pretty tightly. when we got home we cracked a few walnuts with a bat, picked some hedge balls, then had a bonfire. and then we made homemade pizza, which was goo-ood.

see how much fun you'd have if you came to our house?

today i am getting my piano tuned. it's about the worst piano you can imagine hearing. i try to play hymns and they're unrecognizable. i can play the maple leaf rag, but only because my hands have played it so many times they know they're on the right notes even if it doesn't sound like it. it was two and a half steps lower than it should have been, but they can only tune it up a step at a time for fear of breaking strings. i'd like to be a piano tuner myself, actually. i'm going to look into it.

i have an interview tuesday for a teacher's aide job in a kindergarten classroom in omaha. i thought i had missed my opportunity when i passed up the job originally (october 4) to be a kirby salesperson (i'll blog about that one sometime. it was quite the experience for two days), but it turns out the job is still available and it's mine if i want it. i'll be glad to be working again.

i've decided that i would like to be a person with a variety of useful skills and training. next year i am going to take h&r block's tax preparation course so i can do my own taxes (and other people's) during tax season. (i was too late for this year's class, which really disappointed me.) i would also seriously like to become a piano tuner so i could do that on the side. if i worked long-term at a job like this teacher's aide position, i could still pull in some extra cash on the side and during breaks doing taxes or pianos, and in the summer i could work on the farm or for a lawn company. i do enjoy that sort of thing. who needs a career?

does anyone reading this think that i would be settling if i opted for a life like that? the original plan was for me to go back to school for physical therapy. then i could make good money and have my doctorate, and everyone who ever thought i had too much brains and potential that i wasn't making good use of would look at me and not be disappointed. but that takes a lot of time and money and effort. i go back and forth myself, thinking about what i want. oh well. in the meantime i just do what i can, and we get by.

My Tiger

the morning of october 3 tim and i left for work and gave our kittens one last pat as we headed out. bubba was in the basement because he was on a special diet from his sickness. tigger and fred we left outside, as was our custom. when we got home after work fred came running to us, crying. it wasn't a normal, "i'm glad to see you" meow, it was an "i'm afraid and alone" sort of call, so i knew something wasn't right. i called for tigger and tried to look back under the house where they usually hide, but he was nowhere to be found. we rode around on the four wheeler to see if he had been run over, but there was no evidence. he was just gone, and remains gone.

i miss him. he was the cutest of the three, though i didn't know him as well as the rest. he didn't like to cuddle very often--he preferred tackling and wrestling--but he purred as much as anyone when we would pet him. i miss his little potbelly, and his fastidiousness in the litter box. he was one of our babies, and we are sad to lose him. we don't even have a picture.

the landlord said that sometimes owls will carry off a kitten. i don't like owls.

goodbye, my baby.