Gone Training

Sorry my posts have been so sketchy lately...adjusting to full-time work on the Census again. Last year at this time I worked on Quality Control for the Address Canvassing part of the Census and this year I'm a 'dedicated trainer,' teaching enumerators how to do their job before uniting them with their crew leaders. (Technically, I am a crew leader as well.) Training takes five days and the first day (Monday) is the worst as we plow through all of the paperwork and take fingerprints. Ugh!

Maybe some day soon I will have a thought that I can blog about, but right now I just barely have time to breathe.

Quotes on Venice, Italy

Streets flooded. Please advise. – telegram from Robert Benchley in Venice to his editor

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolates at one go. – Truman Capote

In the winter Venice is like an abanadoned theater. The play is finished but the echoes remain. – Arbit Blatas

*** I know -- more random quotes. Why Venice? I'm not sure. It's a place I've never been, but when I stumbled upon these quotes a few years ago I realized I want to visit there some day -- definitely not in the summer when it is overrun with tourists.

Mostly I just wanted to advance the page a little because it's been so long since I last blogged. I've been working again - for the Census again. I am an 'enumerator instructor / crew leader.' This full-time working thing is a very, very hard adjustment. Thank goodness it is yet another temporary job, and the type that only comes along every decade or so.

I realized the other day that I am multi-tasking my life, and everyone knows that when you're multi-tasking it's difficult to do anything well. So I am re-thinking my priorities and wondering why I am running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I guess I fell into the trap of beleiving that when your youngest child is in school you should be contributing to the family coffers, even though it might be better for all concerned (children, husband, self) to take care of things at home and pursue lifelong goals.

More Quotes (Again)

I know...Quotes! Quotes! Quotes! And some people don't like quotes, but I love them because they make me think and/or laugh. I finished transcribing my very first quote collection from a small pink corduroy blank book to the computer this week. I remember walking to the drug store in high school to buy that quote book, and it took me years to fill it up. Now I have several others still waiting to be transcribed. I rarely write quotes down by hand anymore as I stumble across them -- I just type them directly into the computer. Saves a step.

Anyway, I hope you will enjoy this eclectic assortment of quotes:

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons. – Popular Mechanics, 1949

The average person has one ovary and one testicle. – Statistical fact, proving that statistics are not the whole story

I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix. – Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone”

Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart. – Confucius 500 BC

When the pilot told us to brace and grab our ankles, the first thing that went through my mind was that we must all look pretty stupid. – Jeremiah Rawlings, age 12, after the 1989 DC-10 crash in Sioux City, Iowa

I am a bit suspicious of any theory that says that the highest moral stage is one in which people talk like college professors. – James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense, 1993

I am still learning. – Michelangelo, 1560, age 85

In youth we learn. In age we understand. – Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorisms, 1883

For some reason, possibly to save ink, the restaurants have started printing their menus in letters the height of bacteria. – Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns Fifty, 1998

The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope. – Scottish author John Buchan, 1875-1940

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. - Robert Hughes

Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God. - Leon Bloy

An irrational passion for dispassionate rationality will take all the joy out of life. - John Maurice Clark

If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers. - Doug Larson

Librarians...possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth-breather there is. - Garrison Keillor

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize I'm going to miss mine by just a few days. Garrison Keillor

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter. ~Ansel Adams

Lisa: "Do we have any food that wasn't brutally slaughtered?"
Homer: "Well, I think the veal died of loneliness." - Matt Groening, The Simpsons

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem. ~David Carradine

I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I've written for myself, and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part. ~Shirley MacLaine

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere. ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh