Perhaps it will get better

Okay. The weekend was great. I also acquired gingko leaves to play with in the silver clay. I returned home and went to work to find that the 200 envelopes I ran through the magic mail function had the wrong return address on them. My boss, already unhappy because it took me so damn long to generate the list he said I ought to have been able to make in a few minutes, got to stick 200 return address labels over them on Friday night.

He also found we had roughly 10% of the envelopes you put in when you send an appeal out. This resulted directly in my printing and stickering 2000 self-addressed envelopes yesterday. Even 500 is a lot. I called to find out what size envelopes the mailer wanted. She said bigger was better, 9's would do. Staples does not have 9's, so I got 10's. 4/5 of the way through the boss suggested the 10's would stick out of the mailer. I said she said bigger was better, and Staples had no 9's. He said I ought to have gone somewhere else and not assumed (he barely managed not to make his usual remark about how assuming "makes an 'ass' of 'u' and 'me,' " which I didn't find endearing the first time). I don't think there is anywhere else in Concord.

If the 10's don't work I am going to offer to resign. I can't stand much more. We communicate badly; he can't believe I don't think and remember everything the same way he does. Much of the time, he knows a lot more about running a non-profit (not surprisingly). I am also doing things like forgetting how to do weird things in Word in less than six months. Some of this may relate to a certain amount of stress, since we are running on the boredom-punctuated-by-panic business model.

He is right, we ought to have had more envelopes on hand. If there were anything to say on my side, it would be that he has been saying we would be sending out a mailing since the beginning of August, and as of yesterday at 5 pm, he had not yet written the copy. The inelasticity of my brain has not allowed me to make it automatic that the word "Mass mailing" should lead to a nice complete list of useful stationery, since I tend to think "Oh God, ACCESS," even though Access is behaving a bit better for me (after nearly 2 years, we are beginning to get along better).

He also wants me to be responsible for tidying the supply room, which is unfortunate because he has a much lower threshold of messy and if he didn't go in and tidy it I would know what we had on hand. The disposition of the boxes changes daily and not always in a useful way. I think it is nice for him to have something concrete to do and if he wants to disarrange the supply room it's fine with me, although I wish he would not hide things.

I had planned to leave work at two, go to the grocery store, the bank, and pick up some more fresh silver clay,get the cat's prescription, then go home, make spaghetti sauce to freeze for the archaeological weekend, use the gingko leaves in the clay before they dry out, and do a major kiln firing, as well as cut an intricate piece of gold foil for the class tomorrow (today).

I left work at about 5:00, reached the bead store at quarter past five (it closes at five, I thought it was six, but not always true...), but the nice woman had already let a family in and we all promised to leave quickly and we were all cheery and happy. I drove to the bank, endorsed my checks, and found I still hadn't got my ATM card back in my wallet. I drove to the vet, who closed at six, arriving at five past. I went to the small local grocery store which has a poster of the local buffalo it sells, perfect for dig spaghetti sauce, only it is usually out of buffalo, it turns out, which makes the times I have bought it there before relatively unusual. I bought cholesterol-laden, ecologically unsound ground cow and went home. It was 6:30 and I didn't actually do anything productive except help Doug throw back the tide of dangerously full wine bottles in central New Hampshire.