Am I oriented enough yet?

I just spent my morning at the University of Rochester new employee orientation. Yes, it was about as exciting as it sounds. Since I am only a temporary employee, and am not working at the hospital, most of the information had absolutely no relevance for me. I mean, I certainly hope I will not be dealing with hazardous materials or bodily fluids. And what I really need to know - do I need to get an ID card, for example - was not answered. Hopefully that will be covered tomorrow, when I have to go for a meeting with the staffing people at the university-run temp agency. Thank goodness I didn't have to stay for the afternoon session! Why is it that orientations never actually give you any usable information?!

NOT unemployed

Yes, that's right, I am now (or will be as of next week) employed. Doing what, you ask? Beats me - general office stuff mostly, 20-25 hours a week. Not archiving, alas, although I should be able to continue my volunteering at the Brockport archives. Still, paid employment is good, and the people I met in my interview seem nice. And it is at the Eastman School of Music, so even if the work isn't thrilling, it is in an interesting building, with piano chords coming through the walls.

Now, if we could just get the electrical problem in the living room figured out...

More waiting...

In lieu of a relevant picture, here is one of Creamsicle, who is eschewing the comfortable, warm sleeping places of the upstairs for a tissue paper filled box in the basement.

The water heater is installed and working, although it took the installers twice as long as predicted, due to some electrical issue (which may or may not be relevant to another issue that I will get to in a minute). Yay. We can shower in our own home again, and run the dishwasher! Now, however, several of our plugs in the living room don't work. We were sitting down to watch Jeopardy last night, and I decided to turn on a light too, because it was getting dark. As soon as I did so, both the light and the TV went out. We traipsed down to the basement to check the circuit breaker box...to find that all the switches were where they should be. One of them should have been switched off. Hmm. Ben switched some of them off then on again, while I stood upstairs, yelling down which lights he got with the switch. Turns out that the switches aren't labeled correctly, and some don't appear to do anything, but might - we just don't have anything plugged in to the plugs. My big fear was that there was a short that was going to cause a fire and burn us out of house and home. A call to Ben's very knowledgeable dad (he built an entire house all by himself, including the electrical wiring) soothed those fears (if it was going to start a fire, it would have probably done it right away), but that doesn't solve the dead plug problem. Anyway, it may have something to do with a bit of rewiring that the water heater guys did, but it might not. More waiting.

And I decided to decline the job offer I got for one of the jobs I interviewed for. It was too much like my job in admissions, for too few hours to justify the long drive, right in the middle of the day. Now I am waiting to hear from the other job - they hadn't made any decisions when I called this morning...

Can I just say again how much I hate waiting?