The latest semi-flightless avian to terrorise the neighbourhood is what appears to be an adolescent robin.
( Are you my Mummy? )

Placed a small clutch of yarn with a Local Yarn Shop as an experiment in talking like a businessdrone negotiating retail markups getting more exposure for the Alleged Day Job. The fun part of FTF sales is always getting home and trying to figure out which ones those were to take them off the etsy listing... {sigh} I'd number the skeins or something ( Read more... )

Census gig may have just ended in a confused whimper of "...so let me get this straight, the problem is the Gummint being too efficient?!?"; having hired more people than originally planned, they are now more or less out of stuff for that many people to productively occupy themselves at already, and whilst I could theoretically have spent the ( Read more... )

Worries now that the census operations are actually going too well because they hired so many people and we may be running out of stuff to do already. Currently sunk in gloom after having made the mistake of totting up my score RE hours-already-worked times payrate and having it come out to only about 3/4 of that desperately-needed new computer so ( Read more... )

I console myself with the thought that I have done far stranger things for money.

Survived second day of Tramping About Harassing People For SCIENCE! Went less well than first, as I'm through the last couple of fresh entries and on to the "...So, are you home NOW?" stage of the process. Tomorrow will be the "...So, Mister Dude In Taqueria Downstairs, do you know anything about those flats?" stage for this group of cases, so I ( Read more... )

Survived first proper day of Census service in the field. Annoyances were many but tolerable enough after the Gujarati Incident (I do have a couple Gujarati speakers, but scattered), and I could have scored a plateful of dolmades if I'd had anywhere to carry them. (The one I ate there was good, though.) The day mostly started going downhill when I ( Read more... )

Census enumerators are issued a flashcard with fifty languages on it to assist in clarifying situations that need to be referred to a translator.

Gujarati is not one of these fifty.

Guess why the first five cases hadn't sent in their forms...

Survived the first day of training proper without being thrown out and/or asked to step into the van by the Nice Men In The Jackboots, so job is apparently going okay so far. Session was basically the "The first rule of Census is you do not talk about Census" lecture about keeping people's identifiable info private, which means that if, say, I ( Read more... )

The census decided to run an extra day of training today to have us Fill Out Forms and get fingerprinted, which turns out to have been a good thing because it took six bloody hours. (Six bloody hours for which I Get Paid, so no serious complaints overall. Especially having remembered to wear black and not bring my knitting.) So now I am on file ( Read more... )