Going Forward

You know, next time I decide to semi-retire, I am going to have to let the rest of the world in on the decision, because I seem to be busier than ever.

The cleaners did, in fact, arrive on Friday, four nice Haitian gentlemen, and I now have a blindingly clean kitchen and two blindingly clean bathrooms. Lovely...

Unfortunately, they left the front door open all day (because of cleaning product fumes, I presume), and the cat disappeared. I found this out when he didn't come bouncing down to breakfast on Saturday. I originally thought that the cat (who is, after all, almost 17) had simply crawled into the closet to die, and I spent a large part of Saturday hunting for him. But it swiftly became clear that there wasn't a cat anywhere in the house. So my next thought was that he had gotten out, and probably been run over by someone. I didn't think he'd been picked up by anyone, because here in the West Village, if anybody finds an animal, signs go up all over the place almost immediately. So I sort of commended Tarbaby's spirit to God, really.

Saturday night, Sarah and friends came over to get ready for the Halloween parade...IN MY BEAUTIFULLY CLEAN KITCHEN. With lots and lots and lots of fake blood. With which they had a wonderful time, God help me. Luckily I had decided not to go to the parade this year because it was pouring rain, and anyway I would have been way too late to get my chosen viewing spot. You really have to get there by 6 pm to get close enough to see everything - the parade starts at 7. This gave me plenty of time to reclean the entire kitchen and downstairs bathroom (growl, growl), but it was really satisfying to see that I could actually do it very quickly, because it was, after all, basically clean - just basically blood stained.

Sunday I went to a marathon party at Saint Tiger Lily and the Boss' place, still worried about the cat...I kept having a horrible feeling that I'd missed looking somewhere in the house and had a slowly decomposing cat in a closet...which would become increasingly (and very unpleasantly) evident.

Yesterday I went and sat around the office of one of my temp agencies doing a transcription job for them, which was fine, because they just hand me the stuff and leave me the hell alone to do it - my preferred method of doing anything.

And I got home - and guess who was sitting in the front yard, meowing for dinner? Dear little furball had simply decided to take the weekend off, evidently, and was quite annoyed at me for not being there immediately to let him in and feed him. You can always tell when cats are annoyed with you. What's really irritating is that the trip seems to have done him good - he seems to be in better health now than when he left, and he was doing fine then. And just to add insult to injury, he doesn't seem to have taken any pictures, so I'll never know where the hell he got to.

And we had the first read-through of my one-woman show, Tsunami, last night. Dear God. How in the hell I'm going to memorize all this is completely beyond me. 17 PAGES OF DIALOGUE. MY dialogue. We're going up after the holidays, obviously, and in town, thank God. Ted (the director) knows better than to try and drag me out to Brooklyn, particularly in the winter. And the director and the playwright are both convinced that I'm going to be spectacular in the role...

Speaking of Brooklyn, just before I left for the party on Sunday, I got a call to do Wall Street 2 tomorrow! I called in for my report info...you do this the night before a shoot. The agency records an announcement telling you where and when to report to the set the next day. I was getting a little nervous about this thing, because on the original call, they told me I was a pedestrian...in late summer. Well, the high is going to be 51 tomorrow, which didn't make the shoot sound at all appetizing. However, it turns out that I'm going to be a "Bronx blue collar subway commuter." Anybody got any clever ideas about what Bronx blue collar subway commuters wear in the summer? I sure as hell don't. I'm going to go for a low level data entry type person, wearing slacks and a blouse. Or maybe slacks and a t-shirt. And oy, the commute. They consider Williamsburg too close to Manhattan for a van, damn it, so I have to be on Marcy Avenue at a bar called Duff's at 7 am tomorrow. Even better, I have to take the F train from W. 4th to Delancy, then the J train to Marcy Avenue. Anybody who thinks I have ANY notion where I'm going can think again. And I can take the crosstown #8 bus to West 4th, but unfortunately it only runs every 45 minutes at that hour, which means a taxi to W. 4th. And, just to make it nicer, I purely hate that damn W. 4th Street station. Aaarrrgh.

Then Thursday I'll go back to my temp agency to finish up that transcription thing, and Friday I have a temp job at a Monster.com job fair, which is at least on Times Square and thus easy to get to. Unfortunately it's another one of those awful things where you're not allowed to sit down all day. You know, I have what is evidently a weird idea that temp agencies should listen to what you're telling them. Three days before they called with this job, I had turned down another job at Niketown for Marathon Weekend, because I did it last year and it was terminally terrible. And I carefully explained to my nice temp lady WHY I turned the job down (vile working conditions and the fact that I am 64 years old, and standing up for 8 hours isn't the best idea in the world - last year my back ached for three days). Two days after that she called me with this Monster job, and neglected to inform me that it was another job where I'd have to stand all day. Oh, and I'd also turned down another day at the damn Intrepid for the same reason. So evidently the temp lady feels that it'll be fine if I just don't KNOW about the conditions when I accept the job. Something seems terribly wrong about this. And of course, I was already flirting with disaster by turning down the Intrepid and Niketown, because unemployment gets antsy when you turn down jobs. Ah, well. At least I finally went and bought some arch supports for my shoes, which should help with the back problems.

And this coming weekend? So far, a glorious amount of absolutely nothing. Lovely, lovely, nothing, unless I decide to go to Brooklyn for dinner on Friday, which is still up in the air in my mind (the dinner will go on anyway...it's my participation I haven't quite decided on yet).

Eeek. It's twenty to ten and I have to be up at 4! Good night!

Love, Wendy