src07Crissy Having received all sorts of sensible and supportive advice about Erin, I sucked it up and began another band of Celtic creatures to finish up the back.

The Summer Reading Challenge starts on June 1st. You make up your own challenge for this. Last year it started off as a challenge to read every day and post about it. I realize that it doesn’t sound like much of a challenge, but summers have been intrinsically challenging for me for some time. This summer might also be, since I am jobhunting and perhaps will actually have a new job at some point this summer. But you can make your own challenge. Some people last year began with a list of things to read, or challenged themselves to read all their unread books, stuff like that. Sometimes a challenge will be thrown out — photograph the places you read, for example. As I recall, it was a nice little discipline for the summer.

haikuzoo This little creature may be too much of a challenge for me.

I joined Facebook to play Scrabble with my kids. I don’t really have time for Facebook, so — while I haven’t rejected any requests to be friends — I do ignore all the people the site offers me as friends, even though I know them, and I never post anything there.

Now that I am unemployed, I could perhaps be more friendly on Facebook, but I always feel that keeping up at Xanga is about all I can do in the way of online socializing.

However, I am friends with my daughters, and they invited me to join in the Zoo at Facebook. It seems harmless enough. You choose a little creature. My daughter plunked it down in San Francisco for me. I felt that I had done the cooperative thing.

No. These creatures get sad if you don’t play with them. You have to feed them. You have to earn ethereal coins to buy their food by playing with other people’s pets. You have to arrange for them to sleep. Yes, that is correct, they get all exhausted if you don’t push the sleeping button. They are in this way more trouble than real pets.

It’s cute, though.

Yesterday I made it to Sunday School for a few minutes. I have, this semester, been messing around with music during Sunday School time on most Sundays, and this summer I will be teaching the Jr. High Sunday School class, so I have missed the ladies int hat group. They asked me about my job hunt and I told them that I was still unemployed and would they let me know if they heard of any cool jobs.

“She only wants to know about cool jobs,” said one, who works at Wal-Mart. She later told us that she makes $9 an hour, and the others were impressed. One woman had retired with her income at $10.65 an hour. How can people live on $9 an hour? I honestly feel that I was just making ends meet in my previous job. One of the other ladies pointed out to me that I had a lot of advantages: a husband with a job that provides me with health insurance, skills that people are willing to pay for, freelance work while I search.

I acknowledged that I was being a brat about it. I also had to go play bells, so I acknowledged that I was only showing up for long enough to whine at them and then leaving.

I resolved to quit being a whiny brat about my unemployment. We’ll see how long that lasts. On the way out of church, one of the ladies invited me to her Triple Crown party. She requires gloves and hat. She told me to bring my girls — Girls, put it on your calendars.