I took a small step toward fewer hours of employment last week when I signed up for the “level payment plan” with the utility that supplies my home with electricity and water. With just 3.5 hours of air conditioning with my only working window unit this year, I was told my bills for the next year on the level pay plan would be only$80 a month. I still buy natural gas to heat my water, but thanks to fewer social activities, I’ve cut back on my showers. Not to worry. I always bathe (shower) on days when I KNOW I will be face-to-facing with more than a few AeroKnow Museum visitors. My employer’s air-conditioned showroom is airy, and I never get close enough to customers for my aroma to cost me a fabricated natural stone sale or return visit. The net result is that I can cut my hours at employer — who is driving me NUTS for reasons I shan’t belabor here — by at least a DAY IF he will allow me to do it, and tomorrow I will talk to him about how to make it happen. It has taken me a month and a half to be given permission (from him) to deposit one of the paychecks he wrote to me for labor I completed as far back as the second week of June.
Welcome to my world.
So, tomorrow I will run errands and deposit that paycheck, and I will work from 2 to 5 pm . . . . . and though I seldom see him most afternoons, if I do, I will talk to him about fewer hours.
There’s a two-way benefit generated when a mule who can hardly walk straight convinces the unhappy rider, driven to distraction by his incessant braying wayfaring ways and total incapacity to walk a civil path, that negotiations toward reducing the time on the saddle are in order. True, it benefits the saddle-sore rider . . . .
but it also benefits the mule.
I conclude this post with a poem by Springfield poet Vachel Lindsay whose poems I have admired and recited at the drop of a hint for a few years . . . . I don’t remember the title, but I remember the words . . .
The moon is a monk, unmated
Who walks his cell, the sky.
His strengths are those of heaven-vowed men
Whom all life’s flames defy.
They turn to stars and shadows.
They go like snow or dew,
Leaving behind no sorrow;
Only the arching blue.
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Live long . . . . . . . . and proper
