So. What else is new?

Well, the Summer of Gardening is going well, in spite of the near-100 daily temperatures that have forced me to move my fragile-and-unlikely-to-survive Forget-Me-Not seedlings indoors.

Marigolds thrive in the heat. I have blooms in four or five pots, which is pretty cool.

The R.C.'s dianthus also seems to like the hot.

Much prettier than anything I'm growing. All of these live outside, but on the shady side of the balcony. I'm not sure any of them would survive both this altitude and the incredible heat generated by a concrete balcony and a stone building.

The sunflowers, that grow like weeds in Kansas, are growing much more slowly than I'd anticipated.

The R.C. had eight or ten of those going, before I burnt them up with the A/C exhaust. She has about four surviving now.

My bromeliad, an indoor plant, seems to be producing some kind of extrusions. I fully expect that the R.C. and I will be replaced by pod people sometime in the next month.

Or, you know, it could be thinking about flowering.

Otherwise, I went completely mad yesterday. I blew $70 (!!) on new clothes.

Ever since the diet, I've been down to three pairs of grossly baggy shorts and four ratty tee shirts to wear in my time off. Those, with three rapidly decaying polo shirts and two pair of jeans that it's really too hot to wear, have been rotated in and out of the laundry for the past three months as I cope with being off work full-time in the heat of summer.

Yesterday I found a really decent sale and got five shirts, two pair of shorts, and a pair of capris. Now, even if I'm out of work for the rest of the summer, at least I have something to put on my body, something that was becoming a concern. (I had to throw one of my original four tee-shirts away last week--it got too dilapidated even to wear around the house.)

(Capris, though. When I was a kid, we thought of those as being "old lady pants." Now they're fashionable again and I've been scorning them for the past couple of years. But there are times when you need something that's not as casual as shorts, but not as hot and heavy as jeans, you know? So I bought a pair. Time will tell if I ever actually wear them out in public.)

I probably shouldn't have spent the money, but I tell myself that in the olden days, back when I worked for a living, I'd have spent that much in books in one afternoon, without a second thought.

And new clothes mean laundry. What with one thing and another, I did five loads yesterday. Ugh. (Do I need to add the $9 I spent on doing laundry to the total of yesterday's expenditures?)

Spending.... In the 3-1/2 months that I've been unemployed, I've bought seven books, a purse, and these clothes. Beyond a few minor expenditures at the craft/hobby store, that's been the extent of my non-essential shopping. For me, that's a lot of restraint. I guess I was bound to break out eventually.

Which reminds me that She called yesterday, looking for a file. Fourteen weeks she's been there, and she still hasn't figured out that documents to do with company business are on the P.C., in a file marked, "company"? In spite of the fact that I've told her so half a dozen times?

She and Bernie still want me to work for them this summer.

Short version--she's proven incapable of learning or even wanting to learn to use the software programs to code jobs for the company, and it's either me or they find & train someone else to do it (an impossibility since you have to know the software to train it, and neither of them do) and it seems to them to be ideal all the way around that I should make some money while I'm job-hunting and they should get their clients serviced.

Put like that, it does seem sensible. And, at $25/hour, I wouldn't object to making a little money.

Only my experience of Bernie and my knowledge that after promising contract employees the moon, he usually winds up serving them mud pies, makes me hesitate. Knowing, as I do, that he underbids the hours necessary to actually do jobs, I just don't feel like getting into the middle of a fight with him about what he wants to pay versus what it takes to actually do the work.

Bernie said in his last email that, as I suspected and warned him, She spends a fair amount of company time living Her personal life. Lots of personal phone calls and suchlike. (One hesitates to mention that those same hours would have been more usefully spent learning the software--when I was young, we were taught that work came first during the hours you were being paid. What happened to that work ethic? I mean, She is older than I am, so it's not like She's some dumb kid.)

Anyhow. I'll think about that later. (But not too much later, because I have an email from Bernie that I need to answer.)

Other than that, it's 9:30 on a Saturday morning, so I think I'll go pour myself more coffee and start thinking about breakfast. Have a good weekend!