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Marginal Employment Day

As a teacher, I get a lot of flack about having my summers off. Brent refers to this concept as marginal employment. For these two months, I am getting paid without doing any work. Brent himself is marginally employed as a postdoc at GaTech- he gets paid, but doesn't have enough work to do or supervision to be considered fully employed. However, Brent was recently hired as a professor at Northern Arizona University and will soon be fully employed, not to mention leaving Atlanta.

So yesterday, in order to celebrate the state of our employment, we held Marginal Employment Day, a day where we participated in activities on a weekday that those who are fully employed can only do on weekends.

To start things off, we headed to brunch around 10:30 at Highland Bakery. The waitress, when told of our plan for the day, brought us what she called "marginal samples of our marginal food," (their food is hardly marginal!) which consisted of two slices of their ginormous cinnamon rolls. We had a lovely time sitting outside enjoying the cool breeze, good food, and good company.
From there, we headed back to my house, with the intention of starting to drink before noon. Margaritas were the plan. Unfortunately, due to an ice/water hose fight, a blender which had not been properly put back together after its last use (and the clean up required in the margarita-mix-all-over-the-counter debacle), and brief hysterics on my part, it was shortly after noon before we were able to imbibe. We toasted Marginal Employment Day, sat on the porch and talked for an hour and a half or so. Sitting on my front porch is good for my soul, any sort of day.A rousing game of bocce in the park down the street came next. I dug a hole for myself at 7-16, but managed to pull out a 20-18 victory. Brent decided that I won only because I had gradually sobered out during the course of the game.Next on the list of things to do was to visit our friends at their places of full employment. Jeremy was first on the list. As he is a tax attorney who bills his time down to every 6 minutes, Brent had cleared a visit with him 24 hours in advance and I was given the task of alerting him to our impending arrival. Brent said he would leave his shirt on in the building and take his hat off, but he only made good on the first. I think the receptionist thoroughly enjoyed our marginal employment shenanigans and Jeremy was kind enough to give us 0.1 hours of his time.From there we headed across the connector to visit Nathan, who works in IT. Nathan was more than willing to give us over 0.5 hours of his time and we got a tour of the TV and radio studios. Brent even got to pretend like he was working. We also stopped by Georgia Tech to visit some of Brent's grad student friends whom he claims do not get paid enough to qualify for marginal employment.We arrived back on the front porch a little after 5, the perfect time to unwind on the front porch from a tough day of marginal employment with leftover blackberry cobbler, peach ice cream, and more good conversation.

posted by CP @ 6:04 PM 0 thoughts