They’ve got our backs

I’m a 9-1-1 dispatcher.

I love my job. It’s vital to the safety and health of my family, my community, my world.

It’s stimulating, balls-to-the-wall, terrifying, amusing, soul-touching. It’s also boring, slow, horrifying, sad, soul-grinding.

Not all at the same time, thank the gods.

Public safety telecommunications, my part of the public safety (police, fire, EMS) picture, is the starting point for almost every emergency and routine response of law-enforcement, fire and ambulance crews in any jurisdiction. Yet it’s rarely given credit for the role it plays. Telecommunicators are used to being the red-headed stepchildren of our industry, blamed when anything goes wrong and ignored when everything goes right.

And I work nights. This means there are periods of non-stop work, with call upon call upon call upon call, often from irate and uncooperative people. Many of these callers think they “pay my salary”* and seem to believe that my calltaker abilities include mindreading (so I should know what’s really going on without them telling me anything helpful, including where the problem is) and that our dispatch center has transporter devices (so I can “beam” the responding units to them in a second, rather than the units having to drive there). That stuff is all in a night’s work and goes with the territory. (* Can I get a raise, please?)

What also goes with the territory are the dead times, when no one is calling, no one needs help (knock on wood) and the county is at peace. Sometimes these quiet times last for hours, especially between 3 and 6 a.m. And telecommunicators are expected to be as alert in these down times as they are when the phones are ringing off the hooks. That means you have to find activities that let you keep your mind sharp.

For some people, that means reading. For other people, reading leads to sleeping. Some people play solitaire on their desktops, some do crossword puzzles, some – gasp! – knit. Or crochet. Or read blogs. Or write short stories. The same activities don’t work for the everyone. Hell, the same activities don’t work for any one person every time. Variety is the spice of life, after all, and it’s hard to sleep through something spicy, right?

Why am I going on (and on and on) about this?

Because there was a blogreader on another site who became incensed when he/she read that this blogger (also a 9-1-1 dispatcher, in fact her center’s current dispatcher of the year) does knitwork in the center, on duty, on the clock. Horrors!

This incensed reader sent an e-mail expressing his/her horror and threatening the blogger’s livelihood. (Go read about it on the yarnagogo site. It’s the second of the May 13th posts. You’ll get the gist of it from Rachael’s response to this jerk.) Can you imagine? The presumption!

I was totally pissed at the incensed reader and simultaneously pleased at Rachael’s eloquent reply.

Then I read the comments to Rachael’s post and realized that people get it! They really do! The incensed reader was the exception, not the rule. Go back to the post and read those comments. It’ll warm your heart, especially if you’re a dispatcher too.

And then (’cause it gets better) I read Rabbitch’s May 13th post, which was inspired by her visceral reaction to the incensed reader’s attack on all of us telecommunicators who are just trying whatever works to stay alert enough to save lives and protect property in a job that requires nothing less than our best every time the phone rings. And then I read her readers’ comments.

Wow.

It was amazing to read such supportive, passionate defense of the folks in our profession. These people have our backs, y’all! They’re ready to kick ass and take names!

It’s humbling and heartening and just amazing to know that we red-headed stepchildren are valued and admired.

So while I deplore that Rachael was attacked by that JFMF (jerk-face mother frakker), I love that it gave me a chance to see the other side of the people who pay my salary. ‘Cause those folks rock. And it’s a privilege to work for them.

* seriously, though, I could use a raise.

Some things I listen to

In keeping with the format choices and information I’ve seen on some of my fav blogs, I’ve added a bunch of podcast titles to my sidebar. ‘Cause I’m a follower like that… even if it did take me more than a year to fall in line.

These are the podcasts I’m subscribed to via iTunes. When I get industrious and diligent and otherwise unlazy, I’ll link them all. Until then, if you want to check them out, you can go to the iTunes store and click on podcasts, then enter the name. iTunes will then offer you the chance to subscribe to these free ‘casts.

If you don’t use iTunes, you can certainly Google the titles and find links directly to the ‘casts’ websites, from which you can listen to them and find out more about the hosts.

That’s assuming, as I am wont to do, despite the known dangers of assuming anything, that you’ll like some of the same things I like. As always, you may disregard whatever doesn’t interest you. And, of course, feel free to recommend any great ‘casts I may be missing out on. ‘Cause I always need something new to listen to, right?

Pet peeve

If I have to read/hear/be in the same hemisphere with one more idiot using “author” as a verb, I may kill someone. Seriously. For example, “He authored a groundbreaking book on why word misuse can make some people homicidal.” Or “She co-authored a popular webzine that featured recipes to make from the internal organs of idiots who misuse the English language.”

The word is wrote, folks. Wrote. Co-wrote. In the present tense: writes, co-writes.

Whew.

Thank you, I feel much better now.

–

On the knitting front, there is … nothing. Nada. Rien. I have not taken needles in hand since making the charity “square” I mentioned a few days ago. (No, don’t count how many. It’s too depressing.) I have been carrying my knitting bag everywhere, with both the unfinished Kai sweater and coral yarn (for more charity “squares”) inside, waiting patiently for me to pull them out and commence knitting, but to no avail.

My knitting mojo is, um, no mo’. Or on sabbatical. Or on vacation. Or hibernating. Or something.

I’m not worried ’bout it, though, as experience has shown me that the mojo will return. It’s surely just a lull. I have every intention of finishing Kai and of making several other projects (no, I won’t say what, but there are several babies making their debuts soon and, well, I’m the baby-sweater-knitting lady ’round here… a title I have no intention of relinquishing). This means that the knitting content will recommence soon. Probably.

You may have noticed I’ve been doing a lot of reading instead. I think I’m trying to make up for the reading I didn’t have time for while I was doing Hello, Dolly. That whole pendulum-swinging thing. I don’t know when I’ll get back to center, but you know you’ll know about it almost as soon as I do. ‘Cause I’ll force you to read about it here, right? Right! (Glad we got that straightened out.)

–

Happy Mother’s Day to those of you who are celebrating it. And to those of you who are not moms, but who still have moms, call your mother! (If you and your mom are not on speaking terms - for reasons that are none of my business, I’m sure - you may consider yourself exempt from that nag.) 

For my mother’s day, I am working 4 hours of overtime (making it a 12-hour shift tonite), then sleeping all day. I am due back at work at 11 p.m. tonite, so there won’t be a whole lotta celebrating chez moi. Still, I know my BCs love me and would shower me in kisses, if given the chance (well, maybe not “shower” me in them, but certainly force themselves to give me pecks on the cheek), so all is good there.

My mom should be roadtripping today, heading down south to visit two of her sisters and other relatives. Wherever she is, she knows she goes with my love. And, yes, I’ll be calling her cellphone to be sure the message is fresh in her mind. ‘Cause I’m a good daughter like that.

Shut up. I am, too.

Just ask my mom. She’ll tell you.

And, no, you can’t have her address or phone number.

You’ll just have to trust me!

“It sure took ya long enough”

Ta-da! I told you I’d get you a photo or two of the gorgeous yarn sent to me from Canada. And, yes, it did take me too long. Sorry ’bout that, Megan! I truly do adore it and can’t wait to find just the right project for it.

Want another look? Sure you do! Look:

I love it that Megan named it “Gator Pride” after I told her that orange and blue are the colors of my alma mater, the Florida Gators.

Thank you, Megan. And thanks also to the NQEH, who took these pics with his oh-so-not-a-crapola cam!

Checklist for a good day off

My checklist would include all the activities in the blog’s name, now wouldn’t it, as those are four of my favorite things? So, how’d I do?

You be the judge:

Writing? Well, you’re reading this, so “Check!”

Knitting? Charity “square” number two. “Check!”

Reading? Started and finished book #41 for 2008, so “Check!”

Purring? With two kitties in the house, you know that’s a definite “Check!” Several times. (For me, too, although not in my house. Check! Check! Check, check, check! ‘Nuff said.)

Meet the pusses

On the left is Puffer. She’s my kitty, although she’s been living at Mom’s for almost two years. (Read the last post for details, if you haven’t already.) Isn’t she gorgeous? Her eyes are bright sky blue, although you can’t see that here. Despite being all white and having blue eyes, she’s not deaf. (Thank goodness.) I’m told this is a common problem for cats like her.

The orange striped kitty is Sam. He’s a mess. A sweet love of a mess.

puffer may 3 2008

sam at rest may 3 2008

Hm. I’m not sure I like how the WordPress update affects the picture-display function. I didn’t know the pictures would have my admittedly unimaginative, but functional, captions under them. And I didn’t know that, by uploading both pictures at the same time (into the same “gallery”), I would be forced to put both pictures up together, side by side. I meant to insert them separately, with text between them. Again, hm.

Anyway, these are my purry furries, at least for the month of May. Makes you want to pet something, doesn’t it? Go ahead. We’ll wait right here.

Didja miss me?

True, it’s only been a few days. True, it’s not the longest gap I’ve ever left between posts. True, you didn’t know I had actually gone anywhere.

Still.

OK, so where was I when I was not blogging?

I was chez Mom. Mom lives about 90 miles away in a small town in the armpit of Florida. I call it that not just because it’s in the “Big Bend” where the peninsula joins the mainland, but also because the principle job-provider is a paper mill. When the wind blows the smoke from the factory’s stacks your direction, it smells like a particularly funky, well, armpit. If the armpit were on a corpse that had been deposited in a vat of toxic chemical waste for a week or more. Pee-yew!

Anyway, I visited with Mom and her sister, JoAnn, who just happens to be my favorite aunt. She lives in South Carolina, so I don’t get to see her often. She’s a dear soul with plenty of spunk and I love her very much… even if she doesn’t knit is hopelessly ‘publican. (I imagine she says something similar about me, only in reverse.) She has always accepted me as I am, warts and all, and loved me without reservation. And who doesn’t like that?!

It was good to spend my days off in her and Mom’s company, exclusively in the evenings, though, as she sleeps nights and I sleep days, even on my days off. Mom’s sleeping pattern is rather more catlike, so she and I spent time together after Jo Ann went to bed.

She and Mom are going to take a month or so and go on some road trips. Among other places, they’re going to visit their two sisters in the Tampa area (more or less).

There’s Sister (that’s what everyone calls her), who is the eldest child in the family. She’s in a nursing home near the home of her youngest daughter (my favorite cousin Laura), following a massive stroke two (?) years ago that left her unable to walk/talk/tend to herself. Sister and Mom used to work together years ago and they still had lunch at least weekly until the CVA. Mom misses her very much and finds it hard to deal with the new Sister for very long, as she mourns the Sister who is no longer. Plus, it’s darned hard to carry on a one-sided conversation for longer than 15 minutes or so.

The other sister is Ina Re, who lived a mile or so from Mom for about a decade before she developed Alzheimer’s a few years ago, finally moving into her youngest daughter’s home (hi, Lynn!) in Virginia roughly two years ago. Last summer, the household moved to Florida. With monitored diet and regular medical intervention, Ina Re is much more functional now, but her sense of humor (always highly prized) has changed and her sense of empathy is non-existent. So visiting her is a mixed bag, too. Again, Mom really misses the sister she remembers. I know she’ll find it easier with Jo Ann along to share the sorrow and the memories.

Bon voyage, mesdames!

To make Mom’s trip as worry-free as possible, I brought back with me two kitties. I will be fostering them while Mom is on the road. Now, one of them is, in fact, my own cat Puffer, who has been living at Mom’s while I have been in this condo for almost two years, as I didn’t want to pay the pet deposit and get hit for any pet-pee-related carpet damage when I move out.

Of course there’s a story behind that.

It seems the former occupants of this condo (renters) had crated at least one dog in the condo while they were out of the house. The crate was in the dining space (not a separate room, really). The crate’s urine-retaining capacity was evidently exceeded at more than one point (really, unless that dog was elephant-sized) and the carpet and padding were saturated.

When they moved out, the carpet was steam-cleaned and “enzymed” to neutralize the pee-stink.

Yeah, that didn’t work.

So when I moved in and was nearly bowled over by the odor in my dining space (where I was never planning to put a dining table or try to eat, but that’s beside the point), I called the landlord and said, in essence, “WTF?” I noted the problem on my move-in form, too.

The landlord sent out a carpet cleaner (the same one who did it before I moved in), who steamed the carpet front and back, re-enzymed it, told me to let him know how it worked out and left it all to dry.

Two days later, he came back (at my behest) and replaced the padding under the carpet, spraying the underflooring and everything in the area again with those enzymes, and recleaning the carpet. (He even touched up a few spots that I’d managed to soil since he’d last been there. Nice guy. Really.) He told me the urine might have gotten up behind the baseboards and maybe into the drywall, so the problem might not go away. At all. And it hasn’t. I’ve moved furniture on top of it to keep the smell under literal cover, but you can still catch a whiff sometimes.

Of course, I made sure the landlord knew all this.

Still, I was afraid that, if my cat came to live with me here, she’d try to “mark” the carpet to smell like kitty (instead of doggie) and that the landlord would therefore blame ME for the urine stench there. That kinda blame could cost me my deposit (not a trivial amount) AND the additional pet-damage fee the owner requires of renters.

Yeah, I didn’t think so either.

Mom, whose own beloved kitty had died of old age the same day I moved out of my old apartment in Daytona Beach, offered to keep Puffer for me until I move out of my current rented condo. In the meantime, she also took in my youngest sister’s slut-kitty (a super-loving orange tabby named Sam). Twice the kitties, twice the love… twice the problem for a mom who wants to hit the road.

I would be a very sad, pathetic, ungrateful wretch of a daughter indeed if I did not bring them home with me. Now, Mom already has a daughter (not Sam’s original owner) who is ”a very sad, pathetic, ungrateful wretch of a daughter,” a daughter whom we do not name, a daughter who has made herself a pariah, a daughter whose crappy example of supreme selfishness I would never wish to follow. So the kitty-babies came home with me.

This means there will be lots of purring chez moi in the next few weeks. Of the kitty kind.

Oh, and lots of vacuuming.

Who knows, I may even post a picture or 12 of them!

More immediately, let’s hope they’ve gotten their “hiding under the bed/couch” phase completed while I’ve been at work tonight. I really do need to sleep today and kitty weirdness could, um, hinder that. Wish me luck!

–

No knitting while I was gone. More accurately, I cast on a scarf from some very soft and slippery novelty yarn, lost track of what the yarn was doing about 3 rows in, frogged it and put it away. Probably shouldn’t have tried to do it in the back of Mom’s van while the sun was setting.

Instead of knitting, I read. And read. See the sidebar? Two whole books read over my two days off! Good ones, too. Go ahead, you know you want to look!

Kai has sleeves – finally!

Hot off the needles: Kai’s sleeves are done. Whoopee!

I picked them up during my “lunch” break, more precisely at around 1:15 a.m., and knit for about 20 minutes, ending with the knit row that was to be the next-to-last row. I knew that I needed only to purl back, measure once again, and, if all was well, do the cast-off row. Alas, when I returned to work, I was just too busy to mess with them again.

After work, I hit the grocery store (ouch!), then came home to put up the groceries and set up a roast in the crockpot (yum - eventually!). Finally, I did the purl row, measured and then cast off, at 8:55 a.m.

Now all that remains is to knit the neck and sew it all together. Piece of cake, right? No problem, right? Should knock that out tonight, right?

I’ll get back to you on that.

B-I-G progress

… but not on Kai’s sleeves. In fact, I only added 5 rows (I think) to each sleeve this morning at work. In fairness, it was pretty constantly busy all night, at least until 4 a.m. or so. Still, I didn’t stop myself perusing the Interwebs (when not doing actual work-related tasks) for a couple of hours, so it was 6:05 when I picked up Kai’s sleeves.

It took about five minutes to figure out where I’d left off, to count and recount and re-recount the rows knit, before coming to the conclusion that I’d done a damn fine job keeping track when I last knit on these and my row counter was, in fact, correct. So, in theory, I could have just picked the things up and started knitting straightaway, without all that counting stuff. Sigh.

Anyway, no sooner did I start knitting than a deputy checked out with a car on a traffic stop and I had to put the sleeves down and do, ugh, work stuff. Indeed, in the 40 minutes that passed from picking up the sleeves until my relief arrived, three officers decided they desperately needed to talk to me… on the radio… about work… but still… it’s like they knew!

Result: small progress on the sleeves. *

–

I did make big progress in the last 3 days in the reading department, though. I’m on page 315 of 470 of Cecelia Ahern’s “P.S. I Love You”. The movie treatment of this novel came out this spring (I think), but I’ve not seen it yet, and I’ll probably wait a long while before I do, as I hate to read a book and then immediately see the movie. I have difficulty appreciating the film when I’m making comparisons with the novel if it’s too fresh in my memory… especially if I liked the book.

When I picked it up (months ago on the sales rack at Books-a-Million), I had no idea there’d be a movie version coming out so soon. And it wasn’t until I read the first chapter that I made the connection between the novel and the movie previews I’d seen.

It’s a really good book. So far. And I have little doubt it will end as strongly as it began. (Yes, I’ll let you know.) [edited to add: It ended as well as I'd hoped. Strongly recommended.)

* Why didn’t I knit on my night off? Ummm, well. Let’s just say there was purring involved. But no cats. Enfin, je me suis bien divertie, mes amies. Enough said.

Overheard in a bookstore

Pretty blonde, approx 22-25 years old, passing display of political books: “Obama… so he’s, like, the President?”

Her boyfriend, a couple of years older, blue-collar-ish, exasperated: “No, he’s not the President.”

PB: “But he’s, like, running for President? … Come on, we’re supposed to know these things.”

Swear to the gods, I did not make this up.

OK, so I may be a little more politically obsessed aware than the average American, reading the New York Times headlines and editorials every day, subscribing to and reading truthout.org’s daily e-newsletter, watching CNN from time to time, discussing politics with my friends and kids, actually voting.

But surely NO ONE could be alive in 2008 America and NOT know who Barack Obama is… or who the current president is. Surely.

Even the BC11 knows these things. (I just asked him to be sure.)

Man, she must do something frakkin’ amazing with her tongue for that man to be willing to be seen with her in public. Too bad that something isn’t speaking intelligently.