We bought a new ceiling fan for our dining room today. It’s to replace the 1980′s-tastic chandelier that’s currently in there and add some air flow. This is also part of the larger project of updating our dining room.

We’ve had contractors in our house the last few weeks installing new cabinets in the dining room for storage. It wasn’t a cheap project to add hardwood custom cabinets and quartz countertops, but I’m hoping this will last us for a very long time. Of course, while the contractors are in the house I keep thinking of other things I want to do once they’re done in the dining room. But it was hard enough coming up with the case for the cabinets, so I’m not sure when any of these other things would get done.

I want the shelves in our downstairs bathroom ripped out and replaced with an attractive linen closet. The previous owner had his washing machine in that bathroom (and the dryer on the porch!) so the configuration is a bit odd. Since the light switch is actually inside these 3′ deep shelves, no adult knows how to turn on the lights and no child can reach the light. To remove the bizarre shelves we’ll end up with a bare spot of floor so we’ll need to replace the vinyl in there. And then while we’re at it we should upgrade the tiny sink to one a little taller. And then it would be nice to have a matching mirror and lights. And next thing you know there’s $5000 gone when we could just put a post-it note on the door explaining where the light switch is.

I want a second story on our detached two-car garage. We’re short on storage space despite all our square footage and that second floor could make a great climate controlled storage unit. It would also make for a bitchin’ guest house if we put heat, A/C and plumbing out there. And one day our son will need to move home for a short time or at least visit for Christmas and it’s a place for him to stay. And if we add a small elevator, my parents could stay there too. Look at me, I’m building an assisted living facility in my back yard! The loading dock will be on the west side of the house.

And while we’re revamping the garage and running plumbing out there, I’d like to dig a well for my garden in the back 40. That way I’m not running a hose for city water all that ways and my tomatoes will actually get water. And we’ve already talked about how I’m going to have corn and a myriad of other veggies out there.

Ooh, and I want chickens! Rich really hates this idea, but I’d love to have my own chicken coop and a few hens. I just need to make it raccoon proof (or as best as I can). Perhaps motion sensitive lights. Our chickens can have ADT too!

Since we’ll be raising our own eggs, I’ll need a better kitchen to create master recipes in. So we’ll have to remove the chimney that runs through the center of the house all the way up through the kitchen, upstairs bath and attic. Of course our kitchen renovation would involve all three levels of the house. I want heated floors in the kitchen since there’s no radiator in there. And I want new countertops. I don’t actually want much in there other than some better storage and the 15″ square chimney removed from the corner of the room. Simple, really.

Oh, speaking of simple, we need someone to come pour us a concrete driveway. Actually, we need a sugar daddy to afford concrete for us since it’s a million dollars. I want it double-wide all the way from the street to the fence (100′) so it meets up with the laundry room entrance and has a little sidewalk over to the front door. And while we’re paving things, I want an asphalt track that runs around our back yard for roller skating and go-cart racing.

Some of these may get done and some will never in a million years ever happen. But for now, we bought a ceiling fan.

First congratulations to Ben on his new job as Senior Editor. We’re all very excited for you!

I was chatting with his wife Megan the other day about how this new position is a great opportunity for him. In addition to health benefits for him and his family, he is able to stretch his legs in the editing studio again versus being that proverbial manager with a clipboard.

Megan lamented it had been so long since he’d blue skied and that he was so good at it, it was a shame. I replied “yeah” sympathetically and immediately started googling “blue sky”. I figured this was some video editing suite I’d never heard of. After a few dead ends I gave in and asked her what the hell she was talking about.

Blue sky (as a verb), according to Megan is “to float big ideas around, like brainstorming with no limits.” It’s “thinking an idea that’s not subject to limits” or “to play suppose.” But she followed quickly that this is very much Ben’s thing, not hers. It’s his term and his talent.

This sounded like fun! I haven’t done much blue skying in a long time, too busy dealing with the day to day items. Do you blue sky? What are your dreams that have no limits? My parents still talk about what they’ll do when they win the lottery. What’s the thing you’ll do when you stop listening to others telling you it’s not possible?

Let’s try it out together this month for our Living Out Loud project.

Details include:

• Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each prompt above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I’m just throwing out ideas.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don’t email me, I’m likely to forget to include you in the recap!

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, April 3rd (the first Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive a $25 Amazon gift card but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

In honor of Ben, let’s all blue sky to see how fun it can be!

I’m telling you guys, you all rocked it this month! I really enjoyed reading all the entries. So many stories of change meetings and golden opportunities and perfect storms. So let’s see what we’ve got …

Peg’s Twists of fate
A life time can hinge on the difference 10 minutes can make. Makes me think of the couple on the train where they go backwards from their child being the next president to him switching trains to be on hers.

SuziCate’s Doggie friends
Love the dog photo! I’ve always wanted a standard poodle or poodle mix but Rich is not a fan. Maybe we just need one to find some long lost friends.

Erin’s Fate on the high seas
I may have to quiz you on what cruise life is like. Rich read some Reddit article and now never wants to go on a cruise ever (not that he was a fan before, what with the sharks and all). But I like the idea of all that live entertainment and feathers and fun!

Jen’s No answers here
Talk about a lot to live up to for your mother. But fascinating all the same. I love when you talk about your parents; they seem like such good folks. And hooray birthday topic!

Terry’s Semester abroad
I remembered the drug trial story but was riveted and grinning through all the rest of it. I love stories of the vagabond years (which could include the present even depending on one’s perspective)!

Megan’s Audition or destiny?
I love Ben’s line at the end. It made me grin. And who knows, you may have seen him another time, but it wouldn’t be the same. This is your story and it’s a good one.

Ruth’s The last 0.38%
Oof, this just … oof. Stars aligning and just hoping you get the best you can. Using the choices you to have to their maximum and not beating yourself up over the ones you don’t.

Candice’s Doggone It
Our wonderful dog Sarah was not always so wonderful. I can remember sobbing to my ex-husband saying we can’t get rid of her because who would take her?! But over the years she turned into a great dog. While it was rough in the beginning I’d still take her home if I had to do it all over again.

And my own Great things come from shelving

I’m torn on a winner! Ruth’s entry just really … man, the number of ways their encounter could have never happened. And would that have made a difference? It’s wonderfully written and haunting.

And Jen’s entry … first, our deadline was on her birthday (Happy Birthday, Jen!) and then to have her very existence be a cornerstone of her mother’s faith. I don’t consider myself a religious person, so hearing about how others choose that path is fascinating to me.

But I got all wrapped up in Terry’s entry! One knows German and the other knows Spanish so that covers … two countries. How bad can it be? And I learned what an arrondissement is. I’ve enjoyed being a voyeur on the “ridiculousness” that is his life and am super pleased he wrote all this.

So this month’s prize goes to Terry. He will receive our customary $25 Amazon gift certificate. But I do want to note that Jen and Ruth get honorable mentions so they both get a resounding HUZZAH for a job well done.

As always, thank you all for participating, whether it’s writing, reading or just pondering what you might write if you had the time. I look forward to our next topic!

Part of my work bio is to tell people, “be good to your shelvers; great things come from shelving.” As a freshman at Virginia Tech, my best friend Kim told me to apply at the library for a shelving job. Somewhere in all that application process, I also interviewed for a job at VTIC, the corporate equivalent of interlibrary loan in the library (filling article requests for legal firms and other for-profit institutions). They were both jobs in the library, but very different in terms of what I did during my shifts.

First, VTIC would only give me six or seven hours a week to work. Since I was a poor college student, I wanted to work the maximum of 20, so I was supplementing with the shelving job. VTIC also had all students perform the same tasks and gave out raises based on time served. You answered the phone, took messages, pulled and photocopied articles. I still remember they wouldn’t let us students update items as filled on the OCLC Passport software because it was “too hard”. This is super ironic since I now support the software that replaced Passport.

Shelving on the other hand was a brave new frontier of student employment. No one cared what you wore (the books don’t care how you’re dressed), you could change shifts to any other time the library was open versus only working 8-5 Monday-Friday and you could wear headphones while you worked. Man, I still remember the tragedy of showing up to a four hour shift to discover the batteries on my Walkman had died. That was a long shift.

I kept both jobs just to keep my options open. I had left Engineering in favor of Communication Studies after only one semester (much to my father’s dismay) and I remember my parents hypothesizing that the VTIC job would have better avenues for employment since it was an office job versus just shelving books.

But shelving had tiers of employees. If you were responsible and clueful, you could become a Team Leader, assigning your fellow students to certain floors or cart assembling duties. And they also had a very small number of Student Assistants that worked in the office (sitting down!) doing various bits of paper work, shelf reading and administrative things. Ooh, and Irene provided snacks for us all during our shifts!

I remember the money was pretty even between the two jobs. Team Leader shifts earned me slightly more but I think the VTIC position was $0.10 more an hour. Granted, VTIC would only give me a paltry six hours a week, so woohoo! $1 more a week.

There was another student working in VTIC who was about to graduate. The VTIC boss lady promised me when he left she would allow me to work up to 15 hours a week and maybe even 20 on occasion. And, she’d give me a $0.50 raise so I’ve be making more like $4.75/hour. This seemed promising.

I didn’t think I’d ever get a Student Assistant job in shelving, so I figured I had maxed out my career path in that department. I wouldn’t be able to work both jobs really, so I decided I was going to quit shelving and work for VTIC only. I was sad to leave my buddies in that department, but since I was planning on staying in town that summer, I needed to have steady employment.

I went to my shelving shift and started assembling carts in circulation (side note: taking random books off the shelves and assembling them in LC call number order on a well-made wooden cart with two stationary wheels and two swivel wheels will forever be a zen sort of calming thing for me). The whole time I worked, my stomach churned over having to go talk to my boss and tell him I was quitting. But I knew shelving required a 10 hour minimum of work each week and I wouldn’t be able to do that and VTIC. And there was that extra $0.50 an hour to consider.

Towards the end of my shift, Bossman walked up behind me. Always a man of few words, he said something to the effect of, “I’m creating a new student assistant position and wanted to know if you were interested in it. You wouldn’t do shelving anymore but would work in the office on statistics and other projects. It pays $6/hour and you can work up to 20 hours a week if you want.”

I nearly fell off my stool. I immediately accepted and gleefully told VTIC the next day I was quitting. I worked in shelving the rest of that year and moved over to interlibrary loan with Bossman to be his student assistant there. I coded my first program (the shelf labels that are still adorning Newman Library stacks today) and I shadowed Bossman everywhere. When he eventually left to start his own software company, I got his old job as the programmer in interlibrary loan (salary with benefits!) and continued to work for him part time. Only two years after that, I left Virginia Tech to work for him at that little software company where I still work today.

Needless to say, I make more than $4.75/hour and can work as many hours as I want. So like I said in the beginning, be good to your shelvers; great things come from shelving.

My father moved to Virginia from North Carolina in 1964 with only a cardboard box worth of belongings and looked for a place to rent here in Ocean View. There was a man renting apartments in the neighborhood. Daddy met him at his house and rode over to the apartment. In the short drive, it came out that Daddy worked construction and it was obvious the guy considered him unreliable and didn’t want to rent to him. Daddy didn’t even look inside but just told the man to drive him back.

The next day he ended up renting a small upstairs apartment in a house on the corner that was cheaper and closer to work. It was while living in that little apartment that he noticed a single mother living in the house across the street with her five year old son. That single mother was my mom.

Mom’s sister (Sissy) pestered her that she needed to go to officer’s clubs to meet men. Sissy insisted Mom’s next husband wasn’t just going to walk up and knock on her door. As fate would have it, Daddy wandered over and knocked on her door to introduce himself. After a few years of doing whatever carpentry work in her house he could invent as an excuse to come over, they were married and haven’t left that corner. Eventually, in 1981 the whole family (all five of us at that point) moved across the street to get that extra land and bigger house. It’s that same house I went to visit this evening with their grandson.

What would have happened if Daddy rented that apartment a few miles away? I pass that little box of a building several times a week. Would he have noticed Mom at the grocery store? I don’t think he would have worked up the courage to talk to her then. Dad is many things but he is no Casanova.

Is there such a thing as destiny? How large of a role does fate play in our lives or is it just the name we give for the magic of how things come about? If we were to hop into a DeLorean and keep my father from moving in, would we offspring just have some other cute story about how our parents met? Have you ever looked back and realized how close you came to not getting where you are now? I keep mentioning my old boss Harry, but he once said that if his friend hadn’t lost his leg in the Wheel of Death, Harry would never have become a librarian (it makes sense if you hear the story, really).

I’m so pleased to be organized enough to have our Living Out Loud topic already! Tell us about how strong a part fate has played in your life. Have you dodged any bullets (actual or metaphorical)? I’m not a big Robert Frost fan, but what was the road you took that was less traveled by?

Details include:

• Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each prompt above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I’m just throwing out ideas.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don’t email me, I’m likely to forget to include you in the recap!

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, March 6th (the first Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive a $25 Amazon gift card but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

We’re back on schedule for the first Sunday of the month so that gives you a solid three weeks to ponder your destiny, past, present and future.