My Love for NY

Love for NY? There can be such a thing? The Buffalo New York area completely sucks. I NEVER want to come back here again and I advise anyone thinking of moving here to rethink what they are doing because they are completely nuts.

If anyone can help me find out what the laws concerning apartments in the Buffalo area are that would be fantastic. I'm pretty sure my landlord has broken the law in at least one way. Back home landlords are required to give you a 24 hour notice that someone is going to be entering your apartment. Multiple times I've gotten phone calls saying "Hey we're going to be at your apartment in an hour to show it." This morning I got a phone call saying "We're going to be inspecting your apartment in half an hour or so. We know your bed's by the entrance to the attic, can you please move your bed so they can get to the attic?" Of course I can't move my bed - I work lady. I'd been at work for over an hour and I wouldn't have even been able to drive home and move my bed in time for them to inspect the attic. So I get home and there's crap all over. They didn't even have the decency to clean up after they left.

I'm just so sick of this place. I miss my friends. I miss doing things with people. It's hard to want to get out and do a whole lot of things when you're all by yourself.

Party when I get home?

Going Downhill

Things are getting worse at home. As of yesterday the doctors thought my grandma would be able to make it another 6 weeks or so. She would've been able to move to the nursing home and then stop medications there. That's what the doctors said just this morning when my mom was at the hospital. She just had a cat scan and the news is not good. She can't even say my mom's name now and she probably wont make it much longer, especially if she were to go off of her meds.

Alright

This week work wasn't so terrible. I still don't like my boss but this week he wasn't around much so I didn't have to deal with him too much. And I found out that listening to my ipod when I'm on the computer makes my boss much more tolerable. I spent a LOT of time working on GIS maps while agonizing over how slow the program I was using was and how much it made me want to hit my head against the wall. Unfortunately I still can't do anything by myself on the computer that actually concerns our customers - meaning I have to have someone else log onto my computer and then log in to the program that we're using for mapping. I can't even access my own time sheet yet. If you ask me the NRCS is going overboard with security.

On the opposite side - my family could really use me at home. Last week my grandmother broke her hip and had surgery to fix it, so she was in the hospital for a bit and then take to the sister nursing home of her independent living. A couple days ago grandma had some more bad luck and had a stroke. She couldn't move her right side and wasn't really coherent. Fortunately they gave her some medication just in the nick of time for it actually being able to work, which may or may not be why she's doing a little better now - she can move her right side again and she's somewhat coherent. Unfortunately she can only remember who my mom and I are and I'm not even there. To my mom's dismay the rest of my family doesn't think grandma should be moving back to her assisted living apartment if she gets better. Grandma needs to have someone watching her.

Repeated News

I want to come home - I hate New York. I've been made to feel bad because I haven't gotten out to do much. I want to be able to do things but I want to be able to feel safe doing them. I hate large groups of people when I'm by myself. I just can't take this right now. I miss my friends, I miss my home, my parents, normalcy. I just want to come home.

Vie-ah or Vee-yah

My boss is quite annoying. How would you pronounce "via"? Supposedly my boss is the best district conservationist (DC) in New York and I'm incredibly lucky to be working under him this summer. I've definitely learned more from another person in the office who unfortunately is going to be transferring to another office in two weeks (good for him though).

But back to my boss..... You know the people who always have to make a joke, even about little stupid things? My boss is one of them. He makes all of these stupid jokes that aren't even relatively funny. He also makes me feel like I'm not good enough. He goes on and on and on about how great his sons are. How perfect his sons are in everything - I swear they could do no wrong. My mom met him once or twice and when I talked to her yesterday about my boss she completely agreed with me.

At least tomorrow I'm getting out of our office. I'm going to go see two other western NY NRCS offices. The first is in Warsaw (?) - the DC there is awesome. And then most of the day will be spent in Batavia - that's where the guy who hired me works (he's the state conservationist and the team leader for our watershed team). I'd much rather be working in the Batavia office.



On a completely different note -
I think I have a list of grad schools I want to apply to narrowed down: University of Colorado @ Denver, University of Iowa, Arizona State University, and Iowa State University [in that order]. What do you think?

Busy Weekend at Home

This is one weekend that I REALLY want to be at home. Yesterday was my dad's birthday and my parents anniversary. Tomorrow is fathers day. I wish I was there to celebrate it all with my family. If only Iowa had any money...

A Good Day

I spent the majority of the day NOT in the office. Yay! Even when I was in the office this morning, the work I was doing was pretty much meaningless and didn't require much thought at all - great for a Monday morning. This afternoon I learned a few things, the most interesting was about how Toronto, Canada has a bunch of incentives in their cities for things like green roofs. I really wish that more places would implement green roofs, they are so cool.

This afternoon I went to The Buffalo River Summit - a conference up actually in Buffalo. It was held to publicize to all of the Buffalo River stakeholders what has been going on to remediate the river. My boss thought this would be a good way for me to get to know the area some more and there was free lunch, so of course I agreed to go. So there was lunch, which was pretty good even though it was almost exactly the same thing that we had for lunch at the conference I went to last week, there were some speakers - some of which were very interesting and a couple that made me feel like I was right back in my global change class (they said the same thing over and over and over again and they even have graphs of different models), and to finish the afternoon we went on a boat ride on the Buffalo River (www.buffalorivercruises.com).

The boat ride was really cool. While the tour guide pointed out all of the river remediation points of interest, my boss pointed out to me all the random things along the river. I saw the General Mills factory where all of the Cheerios for the entire Northeast are made - the air smelled like Cheerios and was somewhat filled with dust from the factory, it was kind of like inhaling the bottom of a box of Cheerios although not quite as thick. I saw the world's (maybe it was just the country's but I really think it's the world's) largest grain elevator - It's called Cement Central and it's not even in use any more, it's 170 feet tall and 1/4 long. The last thing my boss pointed out was the oldest fireboat in the US - I find those things interesting. I do not however find my boss's jokes very funny.

So today was a good day, hopefully the rest of the week will be good too and I wont always want to be coming home.

What a Week

It has been an exhausting week, although full of lots of interesting things. I'm trying to remember what exactly it was that I spent Monday doing but I can't just off the top of my head. I think perhaps I went out into the field for a while - did a few construction checks.

I went to a really interesting conference about an hour and a half away from the office on Tuesday in Olean. I learned a lot about watersheds and Resource Conservation and Development groups. This conference and a site check on Friday, not to mention being bored nearly to tears on Thursday (more on that in a little bit) have definitely helped to confirm my conclusion that I don't want to work specifically with farms for the rest of my life. The flood at home last week also helped direct me towards wanting to work more with communities, perhaps as an environmental consultant (then I would be allowed to run for a political office).

I spent a majority of this week out in the field, primarily visiting dairy farms. Don't you just love the smell of dairy manure? One of the coolest things from this week out in the field was that I saw a brand new baby alpaca - they are the cutest things ever! If I could afford one I'd want to have an alpaca (do you have any idea how expensive they are? A baby is $3000+).

Thursday I learned just about everything there is to know about dairy grazing systems. I really hope that when I get back to Iowa that I never have to work with dairy farms or Prescribed Grazing Management programs ever again. When they first told us that we were going to have this training day it was planned to be for all the regional offices, unfortunately the region cancelled the day and it ended up being just our office that took this day to learn all this wonderfully interesting stuff. It was also meant to be a hands on day and learn how to build fencing for grazing management - that did not happen. This man, the top grazing specialist for the region, talked and talked and talked all day long. I was bored. It also didn't help that I got sunburnt and started out the morning feeling sick to my stomach (yay! for the wonderful roads of western NY).

I did get homesick this week. There was at least one night this week that I was overcome by depression. I still don't enjoy the roads of western NY nor have I found the people outside of work to be all that great.

Today I took myself to a movie, after having scurried to quickly organize my apartment and do my dishes. This morning I got a call saying that the realtor was going to be bringing someone over to look at my apt. She said they'd be here at 3 but they got here a bit earlier than that and it ended up that someone else was also going to be looking at my place a little later in the afternoon. So like I said I took myself to a movie (sad right?). I finally went and saw the Sex and the City movie - I loved it! There was almost a cat fight in the theater during the movie - one lady got mad at another because the one lady's cell phone went off several times throughout the movie. I guess you should expect something like that when you have a theater full of women - there was only one man in our theater and it turned out that he was with the lady who started the cat fight.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll play my nerdy side and go hiking and play with my gps after church. I just hope that it doesn't turn out to be too hot or that there aren't any thunder storms while I'm out and about. There have been both this week. I have experienced a change in 50 degrees since I arrived in NY. So overall this last week was long but I'm loving my weekend.