Still With The "Ow"....

This temp job is kicking my ass. Three days of hauling really heavy boxes around has made me incredibly sore in many places. When they told me about this job they said it'd be moving boxes around and pulling files out of them to get shipped off to another location. I could wear jeans and it paid quite a bit. I said "oh sure, I can lift heavy boxes, I used to do it all day long." Unfortunately, that was five years ago, and now I realize I'm not nearly as strong as I used to be! I came home Friday feeling like I was 1000 years old! Still, they want me to come back next week, as there is much left to do. Basically, a whole storage locker in the basement of this office building is full of boxes of files all pertaining to one legal case. It all needs to be shipped, staying in order with a list of what's in every box, to another attorney's office. The boxes in storage are on cardboard shelving units, reinforced with metal supports. They were stacked too high, however, and then heavy things were placed on top of them. Now they are all bent out of shape, and some of the boxes were impossible to pull out without another person to help. Even with help, it was a bruising, fingertip-shredding endeavor.
These files are more than 20 years old, and the labels are coming off of nearly all of them. I spent three days standing at a card table, putting clear label tabs on the literally thousands of files. I would often have to pull out the file, open it, and search for the label, which had come off and fallen into the file out of sight. I was curious about what all this stuff meant, and couldn't help but look at what was in the files. This law firm specializes in Indian law (they didn't call it Native American law). Some of the documents went back to the 1920's, and most said Manifest Injustice on them. I remember back in grade school history, we learned how it was our "Manifest Destiny" for us white folks to occupy the whole country. What happened to the people who had already been living there for thousands of years, was mentioned, but certainly minimized. "Um, yeah," said my history books, "they fought back, but we beat them, and then they went to live on reservations, and I guess it kinda sucked for them. Moving on..."

Indians: Doing their thing for thousands of years...
Europeans: "Hi. Wow!- nice land you got here!"
Indians: "Can we help you?"
Europeans: "We're just going to move in and take all this."
Indians: "Um, well, this is our land and we've always been here..."
Europeans: "Can we see that in writing or something?"
Indians: "What's writing?"
Europeans: "Hey- while we're at it, have some smallpox and stuff!"
Indians: "Cough" *dies*


I may spend all next week there with this project. They are a really nice bunch of people, and I love working downtown. While deciding what to wear Friday, I see that I am in dire need of work clothes. I can wear jeans for this assignment, but I still need sweaters and tops, and fast! This afternoon, I went off in search of the budget work wardrobe. I started at Classic Consignment in Ballard. I love that place! Four great sweaters- cheap! Next stop, another thrift store around the corner. One more sweater, and.... a wedding dress! I wasn't planning on buying another dress, I was pretty happy with what I'd already chosen. But I've kept my eyes open in case I saw something I liked better, and today I did. I almost feel like I betrayed the purple dress, because I really do like it, but I was hoping to find something that looked more like a wedding dress. This one is an off-white suit with some beading along the edge of the top part. It's definately a "second wedding" dress. It isn't perfect, and that's part of what I like about it. It needs some simple repairs that I'm pretty sure I can do myself. And it was only $15 bucks. I had just enough money left over to go to Cupcake Royale and buy four cupcakes. Yum...

A good day...