Category: Personal

One of the things I have to do at my job involves once a month going through all the shoes, socks, and shoe care stuff that for whatever reason can’t be sold. So tonight as I was sorting out those that have to be trashed from those that get sent off to be fixed up and resold, I came to a realization. Life is too short to not like your socks.

Now, you might reasonably think that a grown woman would have figured that out at some earlier point in her life. But if I buy socks and then later decide I don’t like them, they stay in my sock drawer and get worn when I run out of the socks that I like. It’s probably some misplaced notion of thriftiness I inherited from my Depression-surviving grandparents. At any rate, I was wearing a pair today while I was sorting out the shoes, and decided to try on a pair. They fit weirdly, and I realized that my socks were twisted all around. Then I realized that I hated those socks, always had, and didn’t really want to be wearing them. And finally, the realization that despite the fact that I feel that I’d be throwing money away by getting rid of socks that were still wearable, life is too short too wear socks you hate.

There’s a lot of stress in my life right now. I recently started a new job, I had 2 people quit on me with no notice on Friday, and I’m probably not going to have a day off until Thanksgiving. I need to be kind to myself to get through that. I might as well include my sock drawer. I suppose the other lesson might be, I should be more selective about what goes into my sock drawer if I know they’re not going to get thrown out until they wear out.

Anyway, when I got home, I tossed the offending pair into the garbage can. I felt weird throwing them out, but you know what? I won’t miss them once the trash goes out.

“Lagniappe” is a word I first heard in New Orleans which I’m told more or less means “unexpected gift”. The lagniappe of my new commute is that my Saturn, which has consistantly delivered 30 highway MPG and 20-25 MPG in city driving, has somehow shot up to better than 35 MPG recently. I guess the intense highway time makes her happy. Either that, or someone at Jiffy Lube screwed up and put some pixie dust into her chassis at the last oil change.

I also gifted myself this week with a brand-new 20GB iPod and car kit. I’m still learning all the ins and outs of the thing, so I’ll save a full rundown for another blog post. But so far I’m enjoying it.

In the last 48 hours, the temperature has dropped about 30 degrees, the winds have picked up, and the first rain in months is forecast to arrive tomorrow. In short, welcome to the rainy season. The weather won’t be this nice again for several months.

The other infalliable sign that the warm weather has taken a hike? My nails are breaking, my lips are chapping like crazy and I have to apply hand lotion several times a day to keep my cuticles from drying out and cracking all over the place.

That’s the door to door length of my daily commute now. 56 miles each way. I’ve just this week been promoted at work; given a salary bump, a better title, and more responsibility. All of this is good but the catch is … the long commute.

Fortunately, it’s a reverse commute. I live in San Francisco and the job is over the Golden Gate Bridge, up Highway 101, in the fringes of wine country – a town called Santa Rosa. Unless you live in the North Bay you probably never heard of it. If there’s no traffic on the road,and I break the speed limits on the smoother stretches of 101 (Southern Marin is pretty curvy and you can’t really drive it too fast), I can go door to door in an hour, more or less. On a recent Sunday afternoon, though, the trip took 2 hours thanks to a few backup-causing accidents and heavy traffic coming back to the city from wine country.

To help manage the drive time, I’ve signed up for a monthly subscription from Audible.com. Each month, I can download one audio book from their website and burn it to CD. This month I’m listening to Al Franken’s great rebuttal to the Republican media machine, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”. Even in the unabridged version, it will only last me about 2 weeks, so I’ll have to rely on the radio and my CD collection to fend off boredom the rest of the month.

I’m seriously considering buying an iPod and an FM broadcast kit so that I can listen to the 6 GB or so of MP3s sitting on my hard drive through my car stereo system. Doing so would also allow me to download my Audible.com books to the iPod instead of having to burn them to CD.

So if you have suggestions for things I can safely do in my car to while away the time, let me know!

In a way it’s comforting to know that according to this article in USA Today, I’m not alone in what’s happened to my career. To make a long story short, about a year ago I started wortking for Aerosoles, a fairly well-known women’s shoe company, in an entry level management position. Today, as I prepare to begin work as a store manager at one of the company’s 80+ stores, I find that “survival jobs” are, well, the latest trend.

In a lot of ways, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m on salary, have health benefits for myself and my husband, and have been promoted into management in this job. I have developed strong sales skills – something I never thought I was good at – and I like what I sell. And with this promotion, I have control over my own schedule, which is a good feeling. I still won’t be able to take Saturdays off except on special occasions, but at least I can decide when my days off are.

That said, I’m still a Vassar graduate with a 15 year career in marketing who’s taken almost a $50,000 pay cut to sell shoes for a living. And this is definitely not what I moved to the Bay Area for. The day a former co-worker wandered into my store (I hadn’t seen her since getting laid off from Critical Path a couple years ago) and I found out she’d just gotten back from 18 months in France and was running her own consulting company was not a happy day for me.

Although my heart belongs to the New York Mets, I’m quite happy to also root for the Yankees as long as they’re not playing against the Mets. So last night’s game, which I caught starting in the 7th inning, was quite a thrill.

Derek Jeter has been quoted as saying “I believe we’ve got some ghosts in this Stadium that help us out. There’s some magic in this place.” Maybe he’s right and maybe he’s not. Maybe all it takes is believing that when the s**t hits the fan, you will be able to pull something out of the hat and turn a bad game around. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if it’s the ghost of Babe Ruth or not that helps you win the game. The Red Sox have gone down to defeat again and their World Series drought – whether it’s the “curse of the Bambino” or not – continues another year.

I hope the Yanks have enough time to rest up before game 1 against the Marlins. My call: Yankees in 6.