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Good morning all, and welcome to Radio Free Monday! Short one this week :) I imagine LJ outages may be to blame.

Ways To Give:

Anon shared a link to TEN Moves, a coalition of government and private agencies raising money to build ten thousand classrooms in the Philippines in the next two years. You can read more about the project here, and donation information is here.

stasia linked me to yumemisama, who is in need of cash help, housing assistance, and suggestions or assistance finding jobs in the Boston area. She's in a pretty desperate situation and could use any help the cafe can offer.

Give For Free:

grey_damaskena needs your help with a survey! She's currently a graduate student in publsihing, and is writing her dissertation on the relationship between Manga fans and the publishing industry. Her survey is gathering information on the habits of manga readers, and she'd love to have you participate! She adds "I would be happy to discuss anything people would like concerning my research, or answer any questions or concern anyone has (regarding the survey or anything else). The survey is for academic purposes only, and the results are entirely anonymous and will not be publicized outside of my dissertation itself."

dreamwaffles made a lot of mint jelly recently and, as she does not eat lamb, needs some suggestions regarding what one does with a metric ton of mint jelly.

News To Know:

Last October, mysid asked me to help promote organ donation on behalf of her daughter, who was desperately waiting for a liver transplant. This week she wrote to say: "I'm very, very happy to report that my daughter has received her new liver. She's doing very well, and we're looking forward to her having a long and healthy life." HAPPY ENDING YAY \o/

bodlon sent me this and while it was, of course, a terrible ordeal for the coyote, I couldn't help laughing. Cautionary tale about throwing out litter in unsafe ways, happy ending, totally hilarious photo of ASTRONAUT COYOTE.

And this has been Radio Free Monday! Thank you for your time. You can always post items for my attention in comments here (or on any post) or email me at copperbadge at gmail dot com. If you're not sure how to proceed, here is a little more about what I do and how you can help. Remember, non-embedded links are love.

(no subject)

I am, apparently, now the hottest commodity on the 19th floor.

While I wait to be called for a formal interview to become BossBoss, two people from yet another department emailed me and asked if I'd care to do an informal lunch interview with them tomorrow. So for those of you keeping track I am now waiting on an interview callback for two jobs, one of which I am pretty much assured of getting, waiting for a third to exist, and interviewing for a fourth.

I AM KIND OF TIRED.

But I know it's just that they want me because I'm awesome. Like this morning, when I did not laugh in someone's face as they complained to me that the elevators had no air conditioning. HOW TERRIBLE THAT FIFTEEN SECOND RIDE MUST HAVE BEEN FOR YOU, MADAM.

Mind you, it is just about hot enough outside to slow-cook a roast. I was going to go to the Dusk Variations concert tonight in Millennium Park, but I'm just not hardcore enough about live music to die of heatstroke while listening to it.

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Someday, hopefully someday soon, I am moving out of this flat. And when the next tenants move in, they're going to have to change a lightbulb someday. They're going to notice the duct tape over the screw holes in the light fixture, and then look at all the other fixtures and see the same efficient taping job, and they are going to think I was a crazy person.

For those of you who don't know why I taped up all the holes in all the light fixtures, I will elucidate: WASPS.

Last year at some point, possibly early this year, I kept finding wasps in my bedroom. Unsettling, I think you'll agree. So I killed them, and more wasps came, because this is the terrible thing about wasps: THEY SMELL DEATH. When a wasp dies it emits a hormone or pheromone or something that tells all other wasps, hey, I'm dead! Come find out why! Which is why after I killed the first one, they kept coming.

I figured out they were coming in through the light fixture in my bedroom ceiling, so I taped all the holes shut. Clearly they were in the roof, because they then started coming in through the light fixture in the living room. This fixture has a fan attached, which did lead to one very funny incident where a wasp landed on the fan and I turned the fan on, thinking it would fly off, but it just went around and around, clinging for dear life, and when I stopped the fan it sort of tumbled dizzily to the ground. WHERE I DESTROYED IT.

The upshot is that all my light fixtures have tape over them, so the wasps can't get in. My landlord did find the wasp's nest eventually, though not until after a maintenance worker on the roof was stung in the FACE by one of Satan's tiny hellbeasts. But I guess some new wasps got the same idea the old ones did and built a nest, because this evening, sure enough, one of the wasps got past the tape.

So I'm standing in my bedroom, knowing the wasp is caught in the light fixture, whacking the light with the end of a broom handle, shoe in my other hand for when it finally breaks free, thinking I'm going to have to retape my light, wondering what my successor tenants will think of me.

AND MY MOTHER CALLS ME.

And I know she's had a bad day because she texted me about it earlier, so I can't just pick up and say "Wasp issues, call you back" which on a normal day she would, sadly, understand. So I set the broom down and put the shoe away and answer the phone, going into the kitchen where the wasp will probably not follow, and we have a forty-minute chat about how horrible her job is and what she should do about it and all I can think is, has that motherfucking wasp escaped the light fixture yet?

Which I found out it had when I hung up and went into the living room, where it landed on me and I killed it with the roll of tape I had fetched from the kitchen drawer in anticipation of re-taping the cracks.

Duct tape really does fix everything.