Karla Noyes' Captain's Log Series

5/19/18 The world is a better place since two young people got married on a sunny May day in England and, as far as I know, have committed themselves to a lifetime of charitable work; and two billion people around the world got to hear a very long sermon about the importance and Power of Love. The pastor said “God is Love,” how cool is that? I burst out with John Lennon’s “All you need is love.” A bi-racial bride and many people of color among the guests and performers. It’s a new day. (What would mom say?) Franz Schubert's “Ave Maria,” with the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and small orchestra, was the most beautiful piece of music – ever; transformative, from the heavens. Loved the hats! You know the bride’s huge 16-foot veil and train was held on her head only by her tiara? With all that fabric dragging on the ground, that tiara must have been attached to her head with rivets. At one point I thought she would yank it off and toss it aside. Everyone was on their best behavior an...

4/21/18 The Job Thing I’ve been “between jobs” for 2 full months and have applied to 18 local State jobs; I’m not doing nothing. Went on one interview at CalFire for which I was very prepared, charming and engaging. Haven’t heard back from them for 2 weeks, so it’s probably a “no.” I have learned more about how the State hires: a potential State employee, either new or currently employed with the State, fills out an online quiz which asks two question, how many college credit do you have in these areas, and how many years of experience do you have doing (fill in the blank.) I always whump the education but am too honest about the years of experience, I haven’t been including the years of working for myself. Out of those questions you are given a score which puts you in a ranking. The people doing the hiring are strongly encouraged to hire from the top three ranks, and current State Employees before others. I rank 4 or 5. My only hope is that people from the top three ranks do not...

3/6/18 Open House at my house… This past Sunday we had a family of Blue Birds and White Faced Nuthatches investigate the bird house 40’ outside our kitchen window. And as always, buyers come in clumps. I hope they’re not too uncomfortable about a ‘multiple offer’ situation, although in this case I think: ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law.’ No further inspections or moving trucks, yet. Last Days I’ve been officially ‘between jobs’ for 2 ½ weeks. About a month before I left I had requested a meeting with my supervisor asking her to give me a review, as she would any permanent employee, because I wanted her to come to the conclusion about how much I had improved. It didn’t go as planned. She was unprepared, couldn’t find the form online, had to dig in her file cabinet and surfaced with the paper records of our disciplinary conversations. She allowed as how I was doing good work, and was a big help to one of the employees, then she launched into all the past grievances,...

2/3/18 “Holy Smokes, Batman! This stuff is legal?” “Yes, Robin, the aging Baby Boomers who vote this in were thinking of the 1 oz. lids of light-green leaves that you’d have to smoke a whole joint to maybe get a buzz, or the so called Panama Red that was flower tops but all seeds, nasty tasting and harsh. Since those bygone days selective breeding and careful cultivation techniques have produced marijuana that is of extraordinary strength.” “I feel like I’m on a roller coaster!” (“Hoo-boy, I’ll be hiding the keys to the Batmobile tonight.”) There is no reason that having marijuana should land you in jail so it’s a good thing it’s been made legal in California. For those of you unfamiliar with the product but familiar with wine, it’s like wine but more so. It’s like the difference between wine and vodka. A 4 oz. glass of wine is a 4 oz. glass of wine, but a 4 oz. glass of vodka is much more! If you are so inclined, try it after work when the kids are out of the house, y...

12/14/17 The Exam In graduate school I took an accounting class. Now, I’d taken 3 quarters of accounting as an undergraduate, what more is there? Quite a bit. Our instructor spoke ‘accounting’ to us in every class and wrote copious notes on the board that we dutifully copied into our binders. One day I turned to the woman next to me, who always wore the most stylish high heels, she and her husband worked for Anheuser-Busch, and said “I’ve read the chapter and done the homework but I didn’t see any of this, did you?” She shook her head. It was a tough class. At the end was the final exam. The strategy for taking any test is - first put your name on the paper! Then read it through and do the easy ones first. My entire 125-member graduating class was jammed into one large room, an arm’s length between each desk. The fear hormone was thick in the air. The tests were handed out, upside down; the instructions read to us, we were told to begin. I turned mine over and confidently wrote...

10/28/17 Your Vigil-Auntie and her PTSD A few years ago I recruited the neighbors in my subdivision to join Nextdoor.com in order to lobby our county supervisor to re-pave our streets. The process was well received, a lot of residents joined. We got the attention of our supervisor, she and I are on a first name basis and our streets are scheduled to be repaired in the (before-fire) not too distant future. I’ve had good cell phone service the entire time and was the Nextdoor spokesperson to the evacuees of our neighborhood. “How’s the smoke?” “Better, there’s a small oculus of blue sky directly above, otherwise everything is yellow-grey.” Speaking of smoke, when I was in Sonoma, finally getting some gas, I saw a wall of smoke, like those photos of sandstorms, totally opaque less than a football field away. It was another one of those ‘oh-s__t’ moments.  I went back to Phyllis’s, slowly trying to determine which road I could use to get out of town as there were reports of...

11/12/17 “But there aren’t any pictures!” I was one of those kids in junior high who walked to school reading a book, probably a Ray Bradbury or Robert A. Heinlein. I volunteered to work in the school library, better to discover new adventures. The librarian invited me and a couple other kids to attend a book fair! A whole auditorium filled with people talking about books! I don’t remember the featured speaker but the subject was to encourage young people to write and tell stories. In 5 th grade my teacher displayed a couple of 8 by 10’s of different scenes and invited us to compose. Something attracted me to the mixed evergreen forest. The Creative Source grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the forest. It was like hearing voices in my head, scary. The theme was some convoluted, emotional story about a half-wild, vengeful girlchild. I certainly wasn’t going to share that with the teacher. After struggling to get some control, the story had a mind of its own, I gave u...

10/22/17 Origin Stories Sunday night/Monday morning (Oct. 9) at 1:30a.m. I awoke to the smell of toast, like a freshly toasted Oak wine barrel, rather pleasant. Going into the kitchen I was sure Kevin had made toast for his late dinner until the smell of more toast came blowing in the kitchen window. It was smoky outside and an horrific wind was coming from the north, Glen Ellen/Kenwood. I called the non-emergency numbers I had for the local fire and sheriff’s departments, no answer. I went online, no fire news. I went into the bedroom to tell Kevin about the smoke, “I’m not evacuating! This is a subdivision, they’ll save us!” He went back to sleep. I then girded my loins with jeans, donned my new $200 tennis shoes (with the extra cushy socks), t-shirt and fleece, pulled out my wheeled suitcase and began packing. There wasn’t much I felt the need to take. A last, sad glance at my kimonos, I then began preparing the car for the cats: tightly covered dry food and water bowls,...

10/7/17 Stalked by the Sleeping Lion At the Ukulele play-in last weekend the lead singer wore a microphone and was flanked by 12 ukulele players/singers, everyone  sitting on folding chairs with music stands. In addition there must have been a good 15+ other musician/singers in the audience with song books and music stands. All of the 60-odd people in the room were playing or singing, or both. One song was The Lion Sleeps tonight, originally released in 1961 by The Tokens and featured in the movie The Lion King. The chorus is “A-weema-weh, a-weema-weh, a-weema-weh, a-weema-weh,” on top of that is a soaring, higher-pitched solo, very striking and the heart of the song. The lead singer couldn’t manage those high notes and nobody, that I could hear, picked up that solo. Then, from some unknown place in me emanated a loud, strong contralto that filled the room with sound. Later that week I was in the outpatient procedure room with Dr. Mueed Ahmad, a second generation Pa...

10/1/17 A quick story: Lance’s Room When I turned 16 my mother gave me the keys to her brand new, burgundy-glitter, 1965 Ford Mustang. It was stunning! With the keys she said, “If you get pulled over by the police in the middle of the night, don’t call me until the morning.” That was humbling. Needless to say, I was popular among my friends. As I recall she never asked where I was going, and there wasn’t a curfew. Now that I think about it, I became a master of ‘the white lie,’ I never (or rarely) lied outright but neither did I tell the whole truth as in “Beth and I dropped acid last night and went to the beach. Driving home was hard, the road writhed and undulated like a snake.” I’m lucky I didn’t end up dead in a ditch, a couple of times. Well, I did end up in a ditch one night, that was the same night I drove on a golf course (what was I thinking?!) I dated a cute boy a year younger than me, Dave Sherry, we hung out with his friends. They had met at Robert Louis Stevens...

9/9/17 Well, I still have a job, for now. I got another talking-to with the requisite summary-of-our-conversation letter. This was the fourth time. When I went to the office I was sure I was going to be told to pack my things and get out. I rapidly tabulated my savings, how long could I support myself?! A couple months at best. Apparently I made too many mistakes on a new task, but my errors weren’t pointed out so there was no learning. Instead, I was taken off that (more complex) task. I think my supervisor’s complaint is fabricated because the ’mistakes’ I made were at the direction of another, senior employee, someone who wants me to succeed. How much of a big deal do I make of this? Do I call the union? Or just keep my head low and apply like heck for new jobs? So far I’ve done the latter. This week I’ve applied for four, promotion-type positions. It will be a couple of months before I’ll know if I get an interview. Can I avoid being fired before then? We’ll see. Have you b...

8/9/17 Other people have thought and written about Love. Here’s what a friend sent me, i.e. not my work: Karla Sam Shepard in Love, on Love “There can be a real meeting between two people at the point where they always felt marooned. Right at the edge.” BY MARIA POPOVA Of the varied threads of connection that can stretch between two people — threads of innumerable thicknesses, textures, and hues, so  difficult to classify and in such  constant evolution  — which do we get to call “love”? Perhaps love can never be defined in the singular, for it is utterly singular to each person in each relationship at each moment in time — we each love different loves, constantly navigating and negotiating the infinite continuum of meaning with which this one small, enormous word is imbued. In the history of literature,  valiant attempts at definition  abound, but perhaps those of them that seem to cut to the heart of the mystery —  Rilke’s ,...

8/6/17 Work is going smoothly ever since I ‘got with the program’ about asking permission before doing ‘my own thing.’ My supervisor is quite pleased, actually. There’s plenty to do organizing and scanning the records of clients who’ve been placed in the community. My personal relationship partner, Kevin, who works at the SDC repositioning severely deformed people, says he heard that 30 psych-techs, the people who do the hands-on care, left last month and 30 more are scheduled to leave this month. That means there’s going to be an intense effort to get clients placed in the community asap because there’s not going to be anyone left here to take care of them. This part of the change is saddening, their world is in upheaval, being moved to different units in order to consolidate clients and staff, new people taking care of them, new and different surroundings. In the long run most of them will be better off, some will surely die, or end up in jail, or be subjected to abuse, or be tra...

7/16/17 Once a upon a time I went to the dentist. In the waiting room, full of anxiety, nearly choking on the odor of clove, the high-pitched squeal of a drill in another room and the guaranteed impending pain, both physical and financial, I tried to relax with a sports magazine. It was one of those manly ones full of pictures of men swathed in brightly-colored spandex and sunglasses sweating at cross-county biking, mountain-climbing and such. There were pictures of forests and mountains with lots of blue sky. I turned the page and there was a black & white ad featuring the naked back of a seated young man with dark, tousled hair (Like he’d spent the morning in bed? With whom?) bent over a pair of long, silky, feminine legs. He was applying nail polish to her graceful toes. I just about had a stroke. I leapt out of my chair - strewing the contents of my purse across the floor - gasping in disbelief. “Who’s the target market?!” I croaked to the receptionist. She looked blank. “I...