Goooo le nubian's house! Gooooo lisah's husband's condo! We're getting our first rent check from our house next week. (We rented it to librarians who work with my ex-coworkers, so we are pretty sure they will be good tenants. People we know are *watching* them.)

In other news, Casper, aged 9 and 2.5 months, now wears a women's 7 shoe. And my mother sent a dress of mine, from when I was 10, and Casper can't even get it zipped. She's going to be the tallest woman ever, poor boo.

My house is fucking sold everyone. I am so thrilled

Oh, that's fantastic! Congratulations!

And omg how can Casper possibly be so big? She's just a wee little thing!

I've decided that I'm going to make next week a mini-vacation, even if I am spending most of it moving my parents. I'm going to sleep in and go for long runs with the dog, and maybe go to the movies or something, between packing and baking.

lisah, you should totes call up my imaginary Internet bf Nate. He's good with stats and he has all kinds of time on his hands now that he doesn't have to blog every day.

hahahaha I am seriously so remedial. I just had to create a little Excel spreadsheet to help me figure out how a median is calculated.

Yay on the house, le n!

In other news, Casper, aged 9 and 2.5 months, now wears a women's 7 shoe.

Whoa. Franny is now wearing a child's size 2 and is THRILLED to be out of the toddler sizes finally. If those girls ever meet they are going to look like Mutt and Jeff.

Is 9 5th grade? I reached my full adult height, shoe size etc in 5th grade. I was tall, now I am short.

Lisah, my uncle is taking a free online statistics course through Coursera.

Yay le nub and sarameg!

Yay for house selling and renting!! Fabulous news. Concentrating all my house~ma to Tom and Nora, now... unless I'm missing someone.

And certain non-professional conferences, if memory serves.

Right. How could I forget the one with an audience? And then there's the volunteer trips, which aren't exactly conferences. Travel. We'll just say travel.

Cannot believe Casper is so tall. Meep.

Casper is in 4th grade, and if she takes after me she'll be a late bloomer (I didn't get my period until I was 14.5; she's certainly not developing at all yet.). She's currently 4'7", and based on the rule of "double your height at 2" might hit 6'1".

So, my boss got pissed at me today. Naturally, I wanted to die. At lunch immediately following, a coworker picked up that I was upset even though I tried to play it off and gave me a hug that made me want to cry more (I was already at the stage that if I talked I would cry).

My initial emo reaction was "JC, am I allowed no wiggle room to make decisions about my time usage at work? Should I start a log of every coffee break, conversation with a coworker whether it be related to work or not, pee break, email-checking, how long it took me to walk the fence perimeter of a thirteen and a half acre lot, whether I stopped to accept a call from my mom, etc.? Have I finally tested the waters and learned that no, my boss does not want me to have a mind of my own?"

After reflection, it was a miscommunication of what we agreed on when we said "no prep until after Thanksgiving" for an upcoming deadline. In my head, that meant not the nitty gritty that I was itching to do but knew would be sill and even more timeconsuming, and she meant *anything* involving the project, up to and including plotting out a schedule for myself and volunteers (I won't be at work at all next week, and need to hit the ground running the Monday after T-day).

I spent 20 minutes gathering things that I thought I would need to be efficient the next Monday I'm in. She FLIPPED. How much time had I wasted? Hadn't she explicitly said not to waste any time doing prep? (No, we'd casually discussed that I wouldn't go crazy and dig out and catalogue the elements I'd use to prep for our house tour. There was no absolute "no prep OF ANY KIND!!! proclamation on her part").

Now, granted, she'd just wasted half her day playing friend-maker to the local club that gives us money for grants and such and tends one of our gardens gratis, and had had one of the members dis the clubs contributions to our organization. And I know that she is a butt-clencher when it comes to wasting time and is completely unable to roll with punches.

So maybe, on any other day, she wouldn't have blown up at me.

I know her personality. I know she's a control freak. I know that she tries to be as efficient and as spartan as possible, which is admirable since we are a nonprofit. We've worked together for over a year now, and even now, I'm sstill unsure as to how much she wants me to be and independent entity capable of thinking for myself (after all, I did run the place for two years without a director) and her grunt who simply asks "how high?".

A part of me says "you've gotten too used to having no oversight" but another part of me says that even so, I should have some leeway in how I go about carrying out assignments, and that she has no clue how long such a task would take since she's holed up in her office 75% of the day.

The kicker is, I know that she's not a personality that will bend. That she says that she knows she's get too much, and that she needs people to bark back at her to let her know she's gone too far, but I'm sorry, if you know that about yourself, you need to control yourself and not expect your subordinates, who's job-safety and raises you hold in your sway, to do it for you.

I can't imagine, if I were to quit, if they'd find someone who could take her management style, and I'm a giant pushover who has quite a lot of experience rolling with the punches and asking how high.

She just seems to be asking too high.

I guess, at the end of the TL;DR rant, given her personality type, if it's best just to bend and carry on and try to give up any initiative, to push back and broach all these issues (if she's the type of person who would even be receptive in the long term to my grievances), or to just start looking for a new job.

Because, after all that bitching, she is quite awesome, and I'm not totally sold on throwing in the towel, but I'm also not a fan of confrontation (again, I cry and lose the ability to communicate like a sentient creature).

lisah, you can totally do stats! I had to take general statistics, which did make me cry, and then quantitative analysis in social sciences, which I LOVED. I mean, I loved that shit. And then I got a job where I worked with psychometricians and editors on standardized tests. Super fun.

The math end of the stats was challenging, but the analytical end was phenomenal. LOVED.

I made 4 dozen cupcakes for a bake sale for the March of Dimes. They have lavender colored frosting and decorative sugar. And doodads that say "BABY" on it. The MOD is doing bake sales at pump stations for Prematurity Awareness Month.

I wish I were a little less aware of preemies.

also, juliebird, if you think she is otherwise awesome, is her need to control doable for you?