I'm hungry. Shortbread + Bovril = not too bad, not too filling

1/2/09 11:10 PM

Job Status: Still Looking. Sigh. The only jobs being advertised are for things I can’t do: German-speaking administrator? Driver? Professional Carer? The Cathedral did offer a position for a part-time front desk assistant, which I’ve of course applied for, and they were also advertising for a verger on their site. I could be a verger, I think. Maybe. I don’t know if they’d want me, but I’d like to, if I’m qualified for it. There’s also a place, Sally says, that’s wants someone to do a newspaper route in the Close. I could do that too, I suppose, but I’d have to get up to deliver papers at six AM. Yuck. But if they pay me, I wouldn’t mind as much.

I don’t like waking up early. I like to stay up late and sleep in as long as I want (10 AM, these days). Then I like to lie in bed for hours and hours, especially if I have internet access. :) If you want to have me doing things for you by 11 AM, that’s fine. If you want me in town at 9:30 because you have a big long list of stuff for me to do… couldn’t you try to find some money?

I do appreciate the free lunches I can get if I volunteer at Sarum College, but I don’t like showing up at 9:30. It takes 10-15 minutes to walk in, plus at least an hour to wake up and take a shower and eat my breakfast and putz around online checking emails and everything… so that’s an 8 AM wake-up. And while all of you who have jobs or are going to school are going “8 AM!? That’s nothing!” well… you’re getting something for waking up, aren’t you? You’re getting paid for your work, or getting grades for school that will (hopefully) translate into a college and a degree… while I get lunch. Usually something Indian. I don’t like Indian food. I’m not a big fan of the spices or the spicyness. So I get a lunch I don’t care for, instead of lounging around in bed and being lazy.

Now, if Sarum College was absolutely bustling and there was way too much work to do, I’d be happy to lend a hand to ease some of their workload. But when I’m told that there’s a huge list waiting for me and they just want me to get as much done as I can, and I’ve finished every last thing on their list by 11:45 and they’ve run out of things to think up for me to do by 12:30… well, couldn’t I have turned up three hours later!? Nothing on that list was urgent, it wasn’t nearly as long as they said it would be, and I whipped through it all much faster than they expected of me.

I’m efficient. I like getting work done as fast as possible so I can move on to other things. I don’t like doing shoddy work. Ergo, I’m efficient and I get the job done well. Sadly, it doesn’t matter how efficient I am, or how knowledgeable I’m becoming on the Magna Carta, if no one is hiring, I can’t get a job.

And speaking of Magna Carta…

Seriously, I’m getting very knowledgeable. I like learning about the Magna Carta and the Chapter House, and even more, I love telling other people about it. It’s my favorite place to volunteer of the three (Salisbury Museum—more on that later, Sarum College, and the Cathedral) because my job is to talk about something I’m interested in. Now, if only they’d pay me!

But, anyway, Magna Carta. I got distracted as I tried to change the topic.

Magna Carta is Latin for “Great Charter.” There is no definite article in Latin, so it’s “Great Charter” and not “The Great Charter.” As a result, people with nothing better to do insist that saying ‘The Magna Carta’ is incorrect, and you should either say ‘Magna Carta’ or “King John’s Magna Carta.”

It’s a sign of how much of a dork I am (and how few better things I have to do) that I debated with myself on this very topic and decided that those people are wrong. It should be “The Magna Carta.”

For nearly 800 years now, the Magna Carta has been part of English life. 800 years. Yes, Magna Carta means ‘Great Charter’ in Latin, but ‘déjà vu’ means ‘already seen’ in French, and we don’t go around insisting that it’s French and needs to be pronounced Frenchly or whatever. We STOLE it from the French, beat up the pronunciation, and sometimes make the accents flee in terror. That’s what English is good at, assimilating words from other languages and making them English.

Why should ‘Magna Carta’ be immune from this treatment? What makes it so special? I think, after 800 years of English usage, ‘Magna Carta’ is just as much English as café is. And while Latin doesn’t have a definite article, English DOES. You can’t say “And cat sat on mat,” without sounding uneducated, because it’s not correct. “The cat sat on the mat,” “A cat sat on the mat,” “The cat sat on a mat,” “A cat sat on a mat.” The Magna Carta. A Magna Carta. It’s English now. Use the definite article. It sounds better, anyway.

I’ve also been volunteering in Salisbury Museum, like I said, but… bleh. I prefer it over Sarum College, but not by much. I work with Roger, the librarian. He’s a nice man, but he’s the sort who knows just enough about computers to have figured out a few little ‘tricks’ (really, the longest way you could do something), and he kept insisting on showing me all of his tricks. I was supposed to do some simple data entry to catalogue things in the library. It took about an hour just for him to show me how to work Excel (which, by the way, I’m very good at, especially data-entry with Excel). He also kept stopping me to format each column as I entered it, instead of waiting until I was done and formatting them all at once (they all had exactly the same formatting). Sigh. I was ready to shove him out of the library (he has an office elsewhere) and say, “Look, you go away for a couple hours, and when you come back, I’ll be almost done…”

I ended up leaving around 2 (started at 11) because, really, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was actually going to leave at 1:30, but it took half an hour for him to show me how he could transfer a file from one computer to another over the network. Siiiiigh.

Maybe I SHOULD try to get the verger job at Salisbury. If that’s the place that makes me happiest…

First, though, I’ll need to learn what a verger does, and what it takes to be a verger.


For the most part, I’m enjoying living with Sally. It’s not a bad walk into town, and the views are gorgeous. There’s just one thing that bugs me, though.

She cleans my room.

At least once a week, I’ll come back from somewhere to find that the sheets have been changed, all my shoes lined up neatly (I line them up most of the time, except the one pair of boots I wear all the time), everything removed from the floor (stack of papers) and put on the dresser, everything vacuumed, trash can emptied, the glass I use by my bed replaced on the far side of my dresser…

I will admit, it is nice to not have to clean my own room. However, she unfailingly manages to do it every time I decide, “All right, when I get home today, I’m going to clean my room.” That means that she always hits it at the height of messiness, which makes me feel like she always sees my room as that of a slob. Which it isn’t. It just accmulates piles when I empty my purse before I run out the door (how my purse manages to spawn paper, I do not know).

She also does my laundry. Today, for example, my towel was missing, and she put a fresh one in its place. I’m sure she’s washing it now, and I’m going urrrrk, because for some reason, she doesn’t believe in fabric softener. Her towels are scratchy. Mine are fluffy and sumptuous. They were a Christmas present. :) But now it’s going to be scratchy too, until I wash it again, with fabric softener.

She doesn’t usually take my laundry to wash, though. She waits until I have a load going, and then she just moves it along and does all the rest. That’s nice, but at the same time, I get a bit weirded out by the thought of Sally draping my underwear over the radiators (which she does). Since there’s no dryer, that’s how we dry things. Except I usually put my underwear over the radiator in my room… you know, instead of the living room…

I try to help out as much as I can, but aside from doing dishes (my poor hands are so dry…), she keeps everything really clean. I mean, I can be pretty anal about cleaning, but she cleans before I think it’s a problem.

Let me put it this way: in my bathroom, there are four extra rolls of toilet paper on the extra toilet paper holder. It has never ever ever gotten below three rolls because she tops it up every time she cleans.

I feel bad, though, because I have a roll of Digestives by my bed (yummy wheat cookies with a really bad name). Sometimes, late at night, if I don’t want to disturb her but I’m hungry, I snack on those, or in the morning when I don’t want to get out of bed. So every time she comes in, she sees my cookies sitting by my bed and my pitcher of water on the windowsill.

But… I mean, she seems happy enough with me. I paid my rent last week, which surprised her (she wasn’t going to ask for it until the end end of January), and she feeds me at least once a week, and she’s always leaving me notes: “There’s a mug of soup in the refridgerator if you want it…” so I guess things are good. She’s really happy with how well-groomed Gizmo’s been looking, too.

Mr. Doughnut Man from the market remembers me now! He says my order before I can (“Two please, one of each!”) and says he remembers me. I’m going to be introducing my mom and the biplets to him when they come to visit. No idea what his name is, but he sure makes yummy doughnuts!

I’m getting tired, so I think I should wrap this up. Four pages is enough to keep you updated, right?

By the way, I keep hearing about how many people are reading this. How many people ARE reading this? Just out of curiousity…

Tomorrow, I’m going into town and bugging all my employment agencies. GIMME JOB! I’m gonna say, pounding on their doors. GIMMEGIMMEGIMMEJOB!

Tonight, though, I’m going to leave you with these five pictures of the Cathedral’s spire, taken on different days (except 2 of them are the same). Bet you can’t see it in the first picture! I promise it was gorgeous, though, all lit up against the night sky…