#1 - It's snowing. It's supposed to keep snowing off and on for the next day or two, but they swear there won't be any significant accumulation. Not more than 3" all told.
#2 - Working on various projects today. Trying to get all of the changes for the new site to The Webman. (Thinking, quite privately, that no matter what Bernie's other faults are, he never complains when I take a page of his text and shred it to bits and rewrite the fragments that are left. That's a virtue. Many who cannot construct a coherent sentence are unaware of the fact.) (Wow. The scansion on that one was ugly.)
#3 - Preparing for TechBoy's imminent descent upon our office. I anticipate he's going to be thrilled to hear that we want him to help us figure out how to rid ourselves of those four antique rack servers and that Bernie is going to insist on getting at least $8 or $10k for them.
Also by the news that we want him to move the network up to Bernie's little home office in Boulder.
I don't think Bernie really understands how complicated this whole process is going to be.
There's the proprietary and hard-to-use software he desperately insisted we have a server here in the office for, and that no one here has any idea how to use, the actual network server, which belongs to Buehler's parent company, and the data storage computer which belongs to Buehler but has all of Bernie's company's previous employee data on it, the Tweeneybopper's PC which has to be kept connected because it handles our spam filtering, and the PC I'm working on all have to be set up and running. That's four computers, besides his laptop. They all nave to be networked (three of them through some weirdo techhie box that allows them to share a monitor and keyboard) and all of them have to have internet access.
That's only a fraction of the miscellaneous computer equipment we have sitting around the office, too. What about that Mac machine that they bought to test stuff on and never used?
And then the VPN has to be set up on my PC at home. (I can't take my PC here home with me. I mean, I could, but it would be a stand-alone machine and I have no idea where I'd put it. And no internet access. I mean, I can't get my stupid wireless network working, much less figure out how to hardwire another PC into my cable modem box.)
Bernie's already going to have to find room for five filing cabinets in that office, plus all of his office stuff he's taking home. And he shares the office with his wife. Where's he planning to put all of these computers?
Anyhow. I don't want to be involved, but I'm going to tell TechBoy to review what we have, write up what it will take to move the network, and send it to me and Bernie in writing.
#4 - I Hate Yarn update:
Scarves, misc. Worked on the funky black/gray scarf. Did about 6 inches. Looked it over. Decided it was a mess. Ripped out 15 inches. Put all that yarn back in anew. Looked it over. Ripped out 8 inches. Worked some more, looked it over, and finally noticed that there's a big ugly spot right down by the beginning--10 rows in. Wept. Laid it down to wait for another day.
This isn't going to be like the cream-and-pastel disaster. This stupid scarf is going to behave itself or else. Mallory would probably forgive me for sending her a scarf of ugly mistakes (it doesn't affect the warmth), but can I bring myself to do so? I doubt it.
After that, I packed up several of my latest projects in a bag to show Meg, one of my best friends and now also my Knitting Friend when we meet tonight.
#5 - Surfing. I got through most of my backlog of surfing. (It's becoming clear to me that I can either have a hobby that keeps my hands busy all evening, or I can surf the internet in the evenings. I don't have time for both.)
A certain amount of delay was created by my need to download 25 parts of a story (nothing illegal, BTW) I've been reading, so I can finally read the beginning and figure out who all of these characters are and what's going on, but I got them all downloaded and unzipped and even got about half of it all read. (Aha! So that's how they got into this mess!)
Because of that, the box o'Amazon.com Joy that arrived in my office yesterday? Is still sitting, unopened, on the floor of the living room today.
Some days, it's really very inconvenient to have a job. I need a lot more free time. Not even sitting up until 11:30 in the evenings is helping. (Also, it's made me late to work every day this week.) 5-1/2 hours is less time than you might think.
(Drat. Just went out for a smoke-break and saw that I'd left my lights on this morning. I need to get out and run my car for a few minutes, to recharge the battery.)
Because, as we all know, I live to annoy my friends, let's start with Yarn Stuff and get it out of the way.
#1 - Went shopping. Bought the blue and funky black/gray yarn I needed to finish two scarves. Bought a skein of the fire-engine red for the knitted scarf. Bought two skeins of a new cream-and-brown that has been tempting me. Got out of there for under $20 but only by making a run for it as soon as my hands were too full to pick up any more skeins.
#2 - Oddball cream-and-pastel yarn. I redid about two feet of it, looked at it again, and decided there was no way this was ever going to be something I wouldn't be ashamed to put my name on. Ripped the whole thing out, wound the yarn bitterly back into balls and tried not to feel the shame of having been defeated by yarn.
#3 - Scarves, misc. Worked on the funky black/gray scarf. Did about six inches. Looked it over. Decided it was a mess. Ripped out 30 inches. I'm working much more slowly now. Every two or three rows, I lay it out on the floor and eye it suspiciously, watching for the moment when it develops a mind of its own and starts trying to recreate a series of French curves.
#4 - New cream-and-brown yarn turns out, when worked, to just look dirty. Closer inspection reveals it was designed to look good skeined but not otherwise. Disappointing. Crochet was ghastly. Knitting not much better. Will try again later, under the theory that maybe I was just getting discouraged by that point in the evening.
Possibly I need a new blog category. "I Hate Yarn" sounds like a good one.
Never again with the fancy-schmancy funky yarns. From now on, it's mass-produced stuff for me all the way. Solid colors only.
/end yarn stuff
Enterprise managed to annoy me as well.
More specifically, the Science Fiction channel annoyed me. I'd forgotten that all of their announcements about time of program start are for the East Coast. Consequently, when I turned on the television to see the news at 6:00 last night, I saw the last two minutes of the first episode of Enterprise. Since the very first episode was the one I'd most wanted to see, to see how they handled the set-up, I was Seriously Aggravated.
I went ahead and watched the next two episodes they were showing, though. And I have to say--it wasn't magic, was it?
The episode about the Cap'n and the Vulcan lady getting kidnapped? I'm thinking a sledgehammer would have been a much more delicate approach than all of that rolling around on the ground, tied together, and old enemies popping up as new friends and instantly being accepted on face value, and the Mean Vulcan being softened to mush by having his life saved by the Spunky Woman, etc., etc., etc.
The one with the two guys (it takes me a while to memorize character names) trapped on the shuttle with a limit air supply and believing the Enterprise had been destroyed? Had more potential. It was very nearly a strong, character-driven episode. Sadly, the characters were more stereotypes than real people and neither of them did anything even remotely original. (I mean, of course there was a bottle o'booze stashed there instead of in the Cap'n's quarters. And of course they got drunk and bonded. And of course the ranking officer offered to sacrifice himself to save the other guy.) (The only thing they missed was mentioning that if Guy #2 hadn't talked incessantly for two days, they'd have had more air left for breathing.)
Anyhow, I guess my curiosity is satisfied. Even if I'd tried it when it first aired, I wouldn't have watched for long.
/end television talk
I didn't have much evening left for anything else. That's the problem with watching television...you're stuck there in front of the stupid box.
I really need to work on getting some interesting posts up. I know this, but right now my brain is in hibernate mode. It's focusing madly on trivial and entirely unworthy things, which generally means some kind of Big Decision is being reached behind the scenes. No doubt me, myself, and I will fill us in on the decision when the time comes. We usually do.
Anyhow. Just so you know. The endless blather about knitting patterns, yarn colors, doing laundry, and drinking coffee won't go on forever.
And, speaking of coffee, this was the first Monday morning since December 18 that I haven't had to commute through a pile o'fresh snowfall. (Or been stuck at home, unable to get anywhere at all.) I celebrated by stopping at Starbucks on the way in. Mmmm, venti latte!
We had snow on Saturday, but it was a pretty feeble effort. No more than an inch, maybe an inch-and-a-half in places, and it was already melting off, even before it had stopped falling.
So, what did I do this weekend, without the R.C. around to nudge me into getting out and around? Not much.
Saturday:
Hair appointment:
Cut and color: Stylist went mad with the "black" in the dye and my hair looks dyed for the first time in a long time. Must talk to her about that. I don't mind being old nearly as much as I'd mind being old and giving the impression I was trying to look 20.
Laundry:
3 loads. Must refill stupid key card before can do more. Key card machine hates me, so I'll have to go with my loins girded for a struggle.
Phone calls:
Talked to my mother. For some reason, she always calls me when the R.C. is out of town. I think the two of them think I'll fall over and die for no particular reason, if no one is watching me.
Talked to the R.C. for an hour. For someone on a "business" trip, it sure sounds like she's doing an awful lot of shopping.
Yarn stuff:
Finished a scarf made with some oddball cream-and-pastel yarn I found. Inspected it closely. Decided that, with that yarn it was always going to be ugly, but there wasn't any reason it had to be that ugly. Tore it all out and started over. Remains ugly but not quite as much of an offense against humanity as the first version.
Dug out the "casting on" instructions for knitting and tried again. After a while, I regained the knack. Knitted approximately 3" of the ugliest, messiest work I've ever seen. Tore it all out (story of my life) and started over. It all came together the second time and now it's a keeper. So pretty! I'd forgotten how much prettier knitting is than crocheting. Maybe because knitting is so slow. I prefer fast results.
Worked on the latest "regular" afghan. Approximately 1/3 of the way done, I've decided that it should have been wider. After much deliberation (ten seconds), I decided I was out of love with ripping things out, so I pressed on. The world has skinny people, too. Not everyone needs an afghan that's three feet wide.
Shell Afghan - Worked on the afghan with the fancy "shell" pattern. Can't decide if it's pretty or a gosh-awful mess. May wind up tearing it out and using the yarn for another scarf.
Scarves, misc. - Finished two of three of the scarves I was working on for friends. Fringed one. Need to buy more yarn before I can fringe the other and finish and fringe the last one.
Summary:
This day was a triumph. You know why? Because not only did I not overspend (nothing but the hairdresser), I didn't overeat.
Sunday:
Much the same, without the hairdresser. Spent no money. Worked on my "projects" and did a bit of housecleaning. Watched a few DVDs. Very peaceful.
And! I got in three solid hours of sketching practice! I am grossly out of practice, but I found a portable table (actually, it's a watercolor painting board) I can keep my stuff on, so now it's out and available.
I plan to practice a little every day. Sunday I achieved something that might have been a tree and another thing that really very nearly looked like a pile of rocks. And a building that, triumph of futuristic science, clearly exists on three different planes of existence.
I'm working strictly with technical pens this time. I had a ton of fun using the pencils and charcoal, but my teacher was very scornful of me using blending to cover the deficiencies of my line drawing. This time, it's nothing but pens until I get the hang of lines.
Otherwise? I watched the new Dresden Files episode last night. I can't decide if I'm going to like this show or not. I thought about Shakespeare (consequence of a discussion in another forum) and Very Nearly put in Henry V (I'm sure we still have it) but never quite got around to it. (Television isn't high on my priorities when I'm alone. I still have an urge, to watch it, though.
Tonight:
Yarn store to get the aforementioned supplies.
Apartment complex office building to refill key card
Tape Studio 60 for the R.C.
May decide to try Enterprise. I understand it's re-running on the Science Fiction channel, starting tonight. I've never actually seen it. I assume it wasn't good since it wasn't on the air for very long, but I really like Scott Bakula, so who knows?
I can hear you all snoring from here, so I'll stop now.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new "disease." Meet "IED" or "Intermittent Explosive Disorder."
The clinical description isn't all that complicated, but let me put it in layman's terms for you anyhow. "Sometimes people lose their temper and you're not always sure what triggered it."
I am passive-aggressive with mild obsessive-compulsive disorder. When I was growing up, I grew up in a family and an environment that instilled a certain amount of discipline in me. Consequently, in spite of "suffering" from these two "mental disorders" I am a fully functional member of society who expects no special treatment for my "conditions." (My procrastination and laziness are quite unrelated, and would be quite under my control if I wanted.)
Seriously. We need less self-help and a little more discipline in this country.
Not that long ago, I heard someone excusing her friend (or an acquaintance?) for having been intolerably rude by saying that she "had trouble with social boundaries." And you know what? That's crap. No 30ish person not having been locked away from society for their entire life has any reason not to have learned social behavior the way way we, the other monkeys, and the whales learned it. By familial training, observation, and interaction.
The fact is that Ms No Social Boundaries was a wallower in self-pity who thought she was mistreated by nearly everyone she met, so she felt free to lash out at the merest implication of criticism. And her "friends" were only making things worse, chasing after her and trying to get everyone to play into her fantasy.
Ahem. But that's beside the point.
It's not that I don't have sympathy for people who suffer from serious disorders, or from seemingly benign disorders to an extent that makes their condition serious, but I have trouble taking medical research seriously when they're so desperate to name everything.*
I'm still looking forward to the day when medical researchers find a completely normal person and have to come up with a label for that condition.
__________________________
* I've been rolling my eyes about this ever since I heard about the doctor who was bitterly disappointed to have his suggestion ("Name the 'condition' after me!" he said.) rejected in favor of the more generic "shopping bag arm" (for those red marks a heavy bag makes on your forearm).
__________________________
I had a sudden cranky moment. I don't know why.
Posted by AnneZook at 01:55 PM | Comments (2)Not only is it sometimes hard to remember it's 2007, it's hard to believe that January of 2007 is almost over. Time gets away from you when all you think about is the weather. It's like the olden days. I sit around in the long winter evenings, talking about tomorrow's snowfall, and making "handicrafts" to keep people warm.
Tape shows you how things are made. For instance, once I've printed text onto paper, I have a tendency to think of them as a single unit. But let a bit of tape fall against the surface of the paper and lift off some of the ink, and suddenly I'm reminded not only of my own mortality, but of the inevitability that bits of my body will someday be incorporated into someone else's existence.
Mortality also comes to mind when I look down at my arm and see some huge, unsightly scrape. There's a reason girls don't do manual labor, especially if they're older (ahem) women who haven't been used to such things. Women who aren't used to such things tend to forget that the inner elbow is a delicate place.
The face is delicate as well. I've taken reasonably good care of my face during my lifetime. I mean, okay, no, I didn't wear sun block but when I was young, "sun block" meant that weird white gunk some people put on their noses and the young and vain do not slather their faces with white gunk. But I've used moisturizer and stuff pretty consistently. It's a shame my skin isn't better now.
Having a mixed heritage means you get weird skin. I've never been able to find a foundation cream that matches my skin color. I usually wind up with something that makes me look pasty or is weirdly gray or orange. Given the option, I usually tend toward the pasty. (Gray hairs are bad enough, I have no intention of flaunting gray skin.) Although I've been known to blend shades to try and get something closer to reality.
I was digging around in a kitchen cabinet last night and stumbled across the blender. We haven't used it in so long I'd forgotten it was there. The problem with kitchens isn’t so much that they lack counter space (although they do, for people who own lots of gadgets and appliances) as that they lack accessible cabinets. The ones in our kitchen are either at knee level or above shoulder-level, reaching almost to the ceiling. The high ones are nice for storage for things you rarely use, but useless for daily access. The lower ones are just black holes. They're, like three feet deep. Anything that hasn't been used in a week gets shoved to the back and you have to get on your knees with a flashlight to find it. I've thought of installing some kind of barrier to keep things from sliding out of sight but the truth is the cabinets are packed full and I don't know what I'd do with the stuff.
I have, as I've said before, quite a lot of stuff. I'm a stuff kind of person. I don't mean knick-knacks or decorative bits of trash that just sit around and gather dust. I have very little of that kind of things. I mean books and DVDs and VCR tapes and writing materials and drawing supplies and (now) yarn and crochet hooks and knitting needles and suitcases and bags of various sizes (for overnight trips, day trips, carry-ons for long trips, etc.)
I have albums. I haven't listened to albums in decades. I don't even listen to music except at Christmas, so why do I have fifteen CDs and 30 cassette tapes?
I have a double bed, so why do I own a set of king-sized, bright red sheets? I'm going to Goodwill them. Someone, somewhere, has a desperate need for bright red sheets. I can just feel it.
I'm feeling ambivalent about the job hunt. (Translation: I keep forgetting to look for a job in the evenings.) It's not even just that I don't like job-hunting. I know it takes forever to get interviews and that I need to start now if I want to be interviewing by April. I just haven't been able to remember. Somewhere around my apartment is the paper copy of my resume I stumbled across (lost the electronic version in the Big Laptop Crash of '06) that I need to get keyed in. I know where to search (jobing.com, monster, craigslist) and have the sites bookmarked. Why, then, when I get home in the evening, does it never occur to me to go look? I don't mean I'm too lazy or that I'm not in the mood, I mean the idea of searching for a job literally never crosses my mind.
Brains are a weird sort of a thing. Mine resolutely refuses to retain any information not personally of interest to me, even if it's something technically "important" I should be dealing with. Like auto insurance. Remember in December, when I discovered I'd let my policy lapse? What kind of moron doesn't remember to pay their insurance? Anyhow. I just thought about it and I can't remember if I did everything I needed to do to make sure it's set up on automatic payment from now on, so I had to leave the agent a voicemail asking him to call me.
It's a lack of mental discipline, I think. I can remember the things I really care about (aside from "ordinary" incidents of forgetfulness) but I almost never remember things that are "boring" to me. I accept the necessity for insurance. I approve of the concept of insurance. I just think it should be dealt with without my active participation. I need (what's left of) my brain free to think Beautiful Thoughts. Or just, you know, thoughts. To track all the threads.
I have one thread that floats around, pondering The Novel That Will Never Be Written. (I'm still lost in the joy of world-creation.) I have one thread that worries about my mother. (As she, and I, get older, this becomes a more constant refrain.) I have a thread that's remembering the book I'm reading currently (Sharpe's Havoc, Bernard Cornwall) and wondering what's going to happen next. I even have a thread that thinks about work. (You know. Occasionally.) There's the blog-thread...the little voice that's taken to writing mental blog entries out of everything that happens to me during a day. (Be glad that one doesn't have access to the fingers. Talk about boring....) There's a lot going on in my head.
I don't really have a lot of processing power left over for tedious adult things. If I won the lottery, I'd give most of the money away, but I'd save enough to hire someone who needed a job and it would be their task to do the grown-up stuff and leave me free to dink around. (Yeah, I have the R.C. for that now, but she doesn't get paid for it and I'm not really pleased with myself for dumping most of the "chores and bill-paying" on her.)
I dinked around yesterday during a conference call. In spite of the fact that I was sitting in a room with Bernie, I got bored and started drawing. (I need a lot more practice with pens.) I drew a nice thistle, a heart, a table with a bowl of cereal on it, and crummy flower (roses are harder than you think), a really bad tulip that looks sort of like some other kind of flower I can't remember at the moment, and a q-tip.
You'd think stream-of-consciousness would be more linear than this, but it's not that linear, is it? I mean, I'm just typing whatever pops into my head next and it's really boring and all over the map.
I guess that means I should go do some work.
____________________________
*Yes, it's a quote. From a James Blaylock book.
Bernie has a mailing he wants to do today. He was pretty wound up about it on Tuesday, when he first mentioned it. There are 40 postcards, you see. We'll need labels and to put stamps on each of them. In Bernie's world, this seems to constitute a major project. I actually considered getting all dithery about it, just to show solidarity, but I decided against it. I'm not really a dithery sort of person and if he has a list of names and addresses he's going to send me, how much dithering can this possibly warrant?
I'm wearing jeans today. This is noteworthy because it makes me hot and cranky in this overheated office, but I'm tired of ruining my good clothes packing up stuff around here. I've been wearing jeans every day this week but have actually managed to scrape out only about an hour to pack things.
Sigh. The R.C. left early this morning. 10-day business trip for their annual conference. I hope it goes well. All of the snow days we had really stressed her organization out since they were falling farther and farther behind their deadlines every day. Let's all take a moment to wish her a good meeting.
And to think a couple of bitter thoughts that she's going to miss this weekend's storm. (What is it with the weekend-only storms?) It isn't supposed to be a big one, though. A couple of inches is all.
Okey-dokey, then. Bernie arrived with his little pile o'postcards. Not surprisingly, things are not quite what he claimed.
He doesn't actually have any names or addresses. He has a booklet with partial information (and it took me a while to convince him that city, state, and zip codes do not constitute sufficient addresses for snail mail) and I have to go online and find mailing addresses and actual contact names.
"So," I said, "You don't have addresses."
"I have addresses," he insisted. "You just have to go and find them."
He capped that off by making me stand in the doorway of his office while he dialed an overseas call.
"In case I have a problem," he said.
If you have a problem dialing the phone, I can't help you, I thought. But I stood there anyhow.
Seriously. Is it me, or is he a lunatic?
I was going to be surly about the 'no addresses' thing but then I decided it was too much trouble. Instead, I'll bury 30 minutes or so of personal surfing in the project.
You know what I don't like? I don't like people who routinely use speakerphone to make calls.
Why do I never see these stories in the major media outlets?
Cheap, safe drug kills most cancersPosted by AnneZook at 01:48 PM | Comments (6)It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.
Read nothing of general interest this weekend, watching nothing of importance, and thought no great thoughts.
In fact, I spent most of yesterday crocheting. I thought thoughts, but nothing significant.
I think that some days, your brain just needs to go into neutral and rest. Not sleep-REM-rest, but processing time. My company is moving to Boulder, I've decided not to commute 3 hours each way every day, I'm not sure what I'm going to do for a living from here on, I'm worried about my poor, old widowed mother (they finally got their power and water back after a 2-1/2 day outage last week), my car is making a funny noise every time the temperature goes below 25, which is happening on a daily basis right about now, etc., etc., etc. I had plenty to process.
I did a bit of searching on the job sites one day and found--nothing at all.
Okay, there were a couple of free-lance writing/blogging things, but let's be honest and admit that I'm not qualified.
One of them was looking for a "young, fun, hipster" who was "in the know" about everything happening in Denver. Which so does not include me and even if it did, I'd scorn to work for someone who wants to hire a "hipster" in 2007.
Another was looking for someone who writes the funny. I've always thought that I might develop a knack for humorous writing, given any motivation but then again, if you're going to be funny, you're probably just funny.
Someone else was looking for people who want to be food writers, to go out, dine in Denver, and write up their thoughts. You have to know more about food than I know to be convincing at that.
In the arena of "unclear on the concept"," one nitwit was searching (under the heading of "editor") for someone to produce blog content for him/her. I checked the site and it's just a personal blog, which means the ad was tantamount to asking someone to write in your diary for you.
(I'm not seriously thinking I'll find a job writing--I was just discouraged by the lack of interesting possibilities in all of the Serious Job Fields and doing some idle surfing.)
An hour's unsuccessful searching isn't that big of a deal, though. It's sometimes taken me five or six months to find jobs in the past. As far as that goes, I tend to get more jobs through friends and networking than job ads, but the economy has been so bad for so many years that my other small company-preferring friends are mostly all in the same boat I'm in right now.
In other news, this weekend's storm only amounted to about 5" - 6" in our neighborhood, which isn't bad. This morning's commute was slow but the R.C. and I both made it safely to our respective offices. (Her meeting is coming up and she's leaving town in a few days so her company absolutely could not afford any more "snow" days.)
I went shopping on Saturday and blew through one of my holiday gift certificates at Borders, bought more yarn (largely of the wrong colors than what I needed), ate lunch, and did a bit of tidying in my room. The mound o'stuff on the drafting table is no longer threatening to avalanche all over the floor but, having now shelved all of those books, I see that I’m once again running out of shelf space and it's time to clean out the old collection.
On the way to work this morning, I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Thinking Women Vote Republican" and I decided that was fair. After all, there's no particular reason women can't think about freedom and equality and decide they're against them. "Stupid" isn't an exclusively male prerogative.
For those of you who might be newish to this neighborhood, DDIAMFTTS means, "Downtown Denver Is A Lot More Fun Than The Suburbs." It's an acronym I created when I started in this office, four or however many years ago. I'd worked in the suburbs since I moved to Denver and I had no idea how much more entertaining it would be to be downtown.
Karpenters in Kilts! Weird bus advertisements! The Powerball billboard, rising and falling each week, making people who are not me rich! Eight or ten restaurants within walking distance, if I want to have lunch out! Drunks, druggies, and homeless waifs on every street corner! Yes, that's the flavor of Downtown In the Big City.
But. Bernie's made his decision and he's going to move the office to Boulder. It's just not gonna happen for me, okay?
I'm okay with him assuring me earnestly that his public transit commute "to Market Street" is just under an hour every day, but that's from the time he hits the bus stop in Boulder to a place three miles from this office. He's never said how long his whole commute is, so mine would be that, plus the hour or so it would take me to ride MOPT to Market Street, so we're talking two hours minimum, plus however much time I'm going to need to find and ride a bus between the drop-off point and the actual office in Boulder.
I'm not spending four+ hours a day commuting, not even if I'm working from home a couple of days a week. I mean, it's okay for him - he can show up here at 9:30 and leave for home at 4:00. He expects me to be in the office for a minimum of 8 hours a day.
I haven't told him definitely that I'm not planning to follow him on this expedition but I'm going to need to do so on Monday. Which means that a chunk o'time this weekend will have to be devoted to reading the Help Wanted ads. Shudder.
Except that Buehler swears he has "something cooking" and he's threatening to hire me himself again some day soon.
These people love me ever so much more than I love them. (Well, Bernie doesn't love me. I think it's been bothering him recently--he keeps coming into my office and telling me in tones of wonder that this or that client has been saying glowing things about me. He doesn't get it.) It's very flattering, but Buehler's wife Has Money and he can afford to dink around casually and almost part-time at running a business. I do not Have Money and I need a real job that's going to last more than 10 or 11 months.
Had the stock market not tanked.... Were I only dishonest enough to have invested in defense stocks when I knew we were going to invade Iraq....
Your 50s are supposed to be your "peak" earning years. If I could only convince someone to "peak" my salary back to what it was a year ago, I promise I'd save and save and save.
Sigh. Like many of us, I had a dollar figure in mind for my total retirement savings. Before the Big Crash, I was well on my way to making it. Now I'm thinking I might have to take half that and like it. (As long as Bush doesn't actually manage to bankrupt Social Security, I won't be living under a bridge, but that's not saying much.)
I laugh when I remember that I used to plan on retiring at 59 or 60.
Life is hard.
I'm pretty much over this week's big task. I received 9462 database records - a file full of duplications and records that need merged and other records that need data moved or reformatted, and I'm going through it line-by-line, trying to clean it all up.
It's an (a) boring; and (b) eye-straining task that I have to focus on just enough that I can't do anything else at the same time, but it doesn't even begin to engage my actual brain.
Also? I'm quite certain that some of the people on this list are, in fact, queens and princesses (it's that kind of database), but some of them are just playing make-believe and they should stop acting like they're still eight.
People should think when choosing their email alias. It says more about them than they might realize. I mean, I've never quite been able to come up with an email alias myself (still working on it, after 12 years online), but I'm sure whatever I eventually settle on will be better than hermajestytheprincess when I am clearly neither.
Other things that are not cute are variations on the word "catnip" and anything with "joyjoyjoy" in it.
Sheesh.
The other night, a friend of mine dreamed she moved in with a feckless but very attractive man who borrowed all of her money and stole her shampoo.
That same night, I dreamed that the loaf of bread in my cabinet got moldy and I couldn't eat it.
I really need to get out more. Either that, or find some new hobby (yeah, I need another one of those going right now) that does more stimulate my brain. (Because, user and thief? Yes. But, attractive man!)
Thanks to the R.C., she who can always be counted on to produce what's needed, I spent last evening sitting near a deluxe, humming humidifier, then I set my own little unit up in my bedroom and humidified myself while I slept. I'm fairly sure I've staved off the worst of the cold.
I felt good when I woke up this morning too.
But I need a new humidifier. Mine takes about 5-6 hours to run through a tank of water (it's a very small one) and I don't really think I can take many experiences of being woken up at 4:17 a.m. to hear it straining and groaning to empty its tank .
I was wondering why I stopped using that thing. I mean, it takes a siren going off close by to wake me up once I've gotten to sleep, so the fact that this machine invariably jerks me from a sound sleep when the tank starts to empty gives you a clue as to how loud it is.
I'm already worried about replacing it, of course. I never know what to do with rejected appliances of the kind that there's nothing wrong with but that I just don't want/need any more.
I generally Goodwill such stuff, but I have a lurking distrust for Goodwill. I mean, yes, I donate a ton of stuff to them anyhow, but it bothers me. I wonder how much of what gets donated actually makes it either to the poor or the stores. I wonder how much of the money they make in the stores actually goes to the poor. Stuff like that.
Begin Handicraft Section -
I'm still of two minds about the new shell pattern, but I've started an afghan using it anyhow. I feel sorry for whoever winds up getting a baby blue afghan, but it's going to be very pretty, so maybe that will console them?
I have a couple more skeins of a middling-expensive medium-blue yarn and I've decided to start another afghan (in the old, "easy" pattern) using those. It's going to wind up being a little pricey, about twice what I usually spend to make one, but it's going to be beautiful. I have no idea what I'm going to do with that. Donate it, probably. (I seem to spend a lot of my life donating things.)
I've finished four scarves and tonight we experiment with fringe! Me, I'm not a fringe person, but others like fringe and it looks absurdly easy to do, so they're going to get fringe.
Those are for friends. When those are finished, I'll make a few more scarves for, yes, donating! Or (the thought suddenly occurs to me) I could inflict them on family members who live far enough away that I can avoid recriminations. I wonder what colors Rapunzel and Pippi might like? Or the L-i-K-S?
/ End Handicraft Section
Begin Artistic (hah!) Section -
Nothing to report.
Except that if I don't do something about the masses of stuff piled high on that drafting table in my room, there's going to be an avalanche one of these days.
/ End Artistic (hah!) Section -
I have too many hobbies going at once. I'm reading three different book series, trying to teach myself to knit, crocheting, and doing a computer thing that's too involved to go into. I can't seem to work in time to practice sketching every day and drawing, like any skill, requires daily practice in order to attain any level of mastery.
I'm hopelessly behind on the internets sites I really want to read on a daily basis - I get to them about twice a week and then have to do a marathon to get caught up. Personal email is a lost cause--I never get anything answered in less than three days.
And don't even ask me about writing - I haven't had a chance to touch the file with the novel in it for three months.
I need to get organized.
There's job stuff I wanted to talk about, but that will have to wait for later.
Does my turkey sandwich taste nasty because:
#1 - I know how often people get food poisoning from cold cuts and I'm having a psychosomatic wig-out
#2 - There's actually something wrong with the turkey
#3 - I ate so much turkey the last time I was on the diet that my taste buds are still on strike
#4 - I hab a code and duhthig tastes good
#5 - Some combination of #1 and #5 #4 that takes both my health and my overactive imagination into account
I wish I hadn't forgotten the dill pickle slices. Those really disguise the flavor of turkey. I do have apple slices, but those are for "dessert" and not for putting on the sandwich. (I've decided it's the turkey. The apples taste delicious so clearly the turkey is poisoning me!)
Yes! I have a cold! Expect to hear whining. (If I felt really sick, I'd curl up in a corner and whimper, but as it is, I just intend to do a lot of complaining and demand sympathy.)
I have no idea where I got a cold. If I knew the incubation period for the germs, I might be able to figure out where I was during the relevant time frame but lacking any such scientific information, I'm going to blame Mallory. She has a cold and she gave it to me. (Okay...so she lives a thousand or more miles away. What's your point?)
As always, a lovely weekend in spite of, as in recent days, less-than wonderful weather. Friday's snow moved out Saturday morning but the next storm moved in on Sunday. Total accumulation less than two inches, though. Temperatures are set to skyrocket to 15 today. Wooo!
I saw on last night's news that it's supposed to be 81 in Honolulu today, and I don't want to hear about it from you Hawaii people. :) I like living in Denver. Although I'm starting to see the R.C.'s point of view. She wants to move to Arizona, where it's warm. Turns out that they're having a massive ice/snow storm in Missouri and all plans of moving there to be of assistance to our poor, old, widowed mother seem even less enticing in the face of reports that they're telling people that if their power goes out, just deal with it, because it won't be back for two or three days. Of course, it also turns out that they're having unseasonably cold weather in Arizona as well, so....
Anyhow. Saturday was a reasonably beautiful day, with temperatures hovering around 7 and tons of sunshine, so the R.C. and I went out and did a bit of frolicking.
The Container Store, a place where I could spend a fortune if I didn't exercise restraint, for under $20! That's not bad. A plastic holder for 'zines and half the cost of a neato plastic carrying case where we can stash the holiday wrapping paper. We've been using a couple of oversized boxes for years, but that was always meant to be a stop-gap solution. Tonight I'll transfer the rolls to the new case and let's hope everything fits.
No, we have not put the Christmas stuff back into storage yet. This is a thing that's always done by New Year's, but this year we've had so much snow that the narrow drives in the storage facility are still near-impassable.
I finished A Secret Atlas, by Michael Stackpole. I've gone off Stackpole.
WARNING - GROSSNESS
Out of the blue, the love interest for the heroine turned into an assassin with a penchant for S&M techniques and the next thing I know, I'm reading about how she's been drugged so she can't pass out but has to watch in a mirror while this guys skins and disembowels her.
Seriously. Out. Of the blue. At the beginning of a chapter, Stackpole drops in casually that these two are now lovers and, oh, by the way, they're having pain-sex and before I can decide whether or not to stop reading, I'm at the point where they're describing finding her head on a "pile of meat" that, it turns out, is what's left of her body.
/ END GROSSNESS
Normally I donate or recycle books I don't like but this one may hit the trash can. I was seriously annoyed. I like the world and I like the concept of "mastery=magic" and the main characters are all interesting (except for the now-dead woman). I was looking forward to exploring it all some more, but now I'm just grossed-out.
So, the hunt begins afresh for a new fantasy series to read. In the meantime, I've gone back to Pratchett to take the nasty taste out of my mouth.
I have a new Alexander Kent to read as well, so I'm still good for books (in case of another blizzard) but I was really in the mood for a new series. :(
And now, the annoying bit. Crochet! Knitting! Yarn!
I hit Michaels this weekend, too. I know I was going to go to some specialty store and buy really cool yarn, but I've decided to wait and see whether or not this mood to make things lasts before I start spending that kind of money. Michaels has some interesting yarns, though.
The R.C. bought one almost-suede-feeling yarn that's really thick, for a scarf to match her purple winter coat. The yarn is difficult to work with and it was expensive, but it's going to make a really warm scarf when I'm done. (I was bummed last night to realize I'd made a mistake in the pattern about 70 rows ago, but I've already torn the thing out three times, so I'm a little tired of starting over on it. On the other hand, it was kind of expensive yarn, at $6/skein, so it deserves to be handled more carefully than grossly obvious mistake-making.... I may yet pull it all out again. Also, she bought three skeins but I'm thinking she's going to need three more to make a decent scarf length.)
Against her advice, I also bought a really pretty soft white yarn that's all nubbly with bits of pastel colors. Sadly, when I started working with it this weekend, I realized that, when worked into a pattern, it looks like nothing more than like baby blanket material. I'm going to make it into a scarf anyhow, but I don't love it.
I learned a new crochet pattern this weekend, a shell pattern. My first experiments were ghastly, but I persisted and it got better. I'm making a--sort of a thing--maybe it will turn out to be a "lap blanket" or something, I'm not sure, using it. It's going to be pretty, but I'm not so sure it will be warm. I might tear it out now, before I get too far into it, and make it wide enough for an afghan anyhow, though.
I also bought knitting needles. Thanks to Meghan and her knitting group, I was afire to try knitting again.
Now I remember why I gave up knitting. I suck at it.
I printed off two different sets of instructions for "casting on" (that's how you make the first row, before you have anything to actually "knit" with) and couldn't understand either of them. After some fumbles, my fingers remembered an old "twist-and-wrap" method for getting a single strand of yarn onto a needle, so I started there, just so I'd have something to practice on. It works, although it wouldn't do for an actual pattern. It makes a nasty, raggedy first edge.
Doesn't matter though, because my next five rows of actual knitting weren't much better. Shudder. It's really ridiculous, how bad I am with my hands. I do know that these things require practice and I'm sure I'll try again, but crochet is so much faster and easier....
I have no ego about these things. If I'm bad at something, I'm willing to admit it and move on to something else.
Which brings me to another "bad at it" hobby that I'm not planning to drop, so I'm already contradicting myself but without guilt.
Sketching!
Since I got new drawing toys for Christmas, I've been itching to get back to practicing sketching. Up until now, the whole crocheting-knitting thing has been taking precedence, but this weekend I dug out my drawing supplies, brushed off a year's worth of dust and starting sorting things out. I didn't quite get to the point of doing any drawing, but I will. I'm even more exciting to see all of the interesting bits and pieces of--well--of stuff that I accumulated back when the fit first came over me. I'm firm in my intention to figure out reasons to use all of those gadgets and whatnot.
Also, it's very typical of me that I lost interest in the whole thing just at the point where I was starting to produce recognizable sketches of real things, but I'm also firm in my intention of getting back to this and sticking with it this time.
And that's about all I had to say at the moment.
As in, it's 1 degree outside. I'm not sure how far into negative numbers the wind chill is. A lot, that's for sure. (It's -15, according to the local news sites.)
And, yes, it's still snowing, but only in a half-hearted kind of way. If we got more than an inch out of this storm so far, I'd be surprised.
I have two plants that sit on the credenza by the window in my office. I think the cactus might not survive the cold air radiating off the 4' x 3' windows. (But then I tell myself that it get cold in the desert....)
And now, a very rare cut-tag for those who don't care about family matters. But heavily edited because you really don't care about my stream-of-consciousness wig-out at the idea of moving to Missouri.
Now that I've given up on Gemmell, I've moved on to the rest of my To Be Read shelf.
Last night, I started A Secret Atlas, by Michael Stackpole.
We're meeting a lot of characters and everyone naturally has their own agenda and their own secrets, but I'm tracking it all so far. It's an interesting premise - the idea that you can develop a level of expertise in almost any pastime that so far surpasses the average that it actually allows you to achieve and use a kind of magic power. The idea that you can excel at some discipline to the point where the expertise creates a kind of feedback loop--sustaining not only your abilities but conferring long life.
It's new to me--and that's what I like in a fantasy world, concepts that are new to me. For instance, for the family the series is written around, they seem to have a genetic inclination toward cartography, and the best of those in the family achieve that magic level. (There's some phrase for it in the book but I don't remember it.) Like many contemporary fantasy authors, Stackpole is drawing from Eastern cultures to world-build, adapting both language and customs for his imaginary societies.
I've always rather liked that trend. It gives an interesting tinge of "the other" to the cultures while still retaining a recognizably human framework overall. I'm getting just a wee bit tired of it, but that's Gemmell's fault, for being clumsy (I do hold a grudge, don't I?), not Stackpole's.
This is the first in a series and the characters aren't quite as fully developed as I'd like, but I suspect Stackpole had to skimp on that to make room for the rapidly developing and apparently very complex plot he's working on, so I'm willing to hang in there for a while. In my experience, fantasy authors focus on fully-realized characters with complex and well-explored emotional lives, or focus on really complex worlds and plots -- but you rarely get both.
I have no doubt I'll get the sequel, Cartomancy, when I finish this one (Or before. Holiday gift certificates need to be spent!), just to see if he can keep up the pace.
I have a bad case of Yarn Envy. Last night, my friend Meghan invited me to visit her knitting group, remember? Turns out, and I'm surprised, that knitting is in. It's trendy!
Me, I don't knit. I'm left-handed and it doesn't take many knitting experiments to teach you that mittens with rosettes on the palms of your hands are not only impractical, but they look stupid and then your teacher gives you a bad grade.
I could do simple patterns, of course. Articles with no definite "front" or "back" to them, like scarves or afghans.
I know how to knit. It's just not something I considered when I started making things again. Crochet is so much faster. With crochet, I also stick to one, simple pattern. I've done one pattern a million times (you get to those numbers by making a bedspread) and don't have to think about it any more, which is a plus. I'm too lazy to learn anything else. (I crochet right-handed, so patterns aren't a problem. I just lack ambition.)
I knit left-handed. I crochet right-handed. I use chopsticks left-handed. I use scissors right-handed. I sweep and mop left-handed. I chop right-handed. I eat left-handed. I drink right-handed. It's a wonder I don't have schizophrenia.
But that's not what this conversation is about. It's about my newly developed Yarn Envy.
Last night, Meghan's knitting group all had simply gorgeous hand-made yarns they were using for their projects. I felt like a poor stepchild, sitting there with my plain gray commercial yarn. I mean, it's going to make a lovely scarf against a red, blue, or black coat, and it's a nice, soft weave, but I felt like a peasant.
I need some fancy yarn. I yearn for rich, primary colors. I lust after vibrancy. I pine for soft and knobbly textures.
Common sense tells me that no one I know would wear a garish scarf, but then it also whispers that my "garish" is someone else's "bright and lively" so I'm torn.
Also, I must have knitting needles! I long to knit again. I don't know why. Maybe the variety of patterns. (The internet must possess a site that converts patterns for left-handers. It has everything else.)
Also, I'm aware that I can inflict only so many scarves on my loved ones before they cease to love me. I'm doing scarves for the three friends I think I can force them onto right now. I could probably get away with dumping a second one on each of them without putting too much of a strain on our friendship, but then what do I do with the rest of them? It takes 3-4 evenings to crochet a scarf, so I need to slow down (knitting is slower!) and I need lots of victims recipients. Frugality balks at the idea of using $10-$15/skein yarn (at 3-4 skeins per scarf) for giveaway projects. But even poor people like to have nice things, right?
I have Yarn Envy. I must think of a rationale for spending a fortune on ridiculously expensive yarn.
What do you do when asked to read a "draft" of new website copy written by your boss/company marketing person and it's just not good?
The first draft I read, I gritted my teeth, corrected some punctuation errors, asked for clarification in two places, and moved on with my life.
Now I have a new draft, this one approved by Bernie's boss (Buehler is Bernie's boss), the version they worked on together and it's--worse. Not only does Bernie strive, for reasons I've never understood, to avoid clear language, dressing phrases up in frequently made-up "jargonese" but he just writes badly. (Okay, yes, my syntax is sometimes torturous--but I do that on purpose. I'm not here to communicate, I'm here to amuse myself.)
He capitalizes words Quite randomly, fails to find and follow a single narrative path (yes, that matters on websites), and has about 25% of the "design" talent he thinks he has. (There are eight font colors, at least two typefaces, and five different font sizes in the draft website he sent me.)
My knowledge of punctuation is rudimentary, but his is positively primitive.
He prefers vague but grandiose-sounding promises to a clear description of what we actually do. He didn't bother to make the corrections I sent him in the first draft, so he's still promising, for instance, that we'll show up on-site and do 100% of the day-to-day running of one system--and we don't do that.
As a different but still worrying problem, he promises things we can't begin to deliver. He shows a "branded" version of a machine we own one of, offering vague promises of all it can do, when he's never actually seen it in action. (He "branded" it himself, running a label through the printer so he could put our logo over that of the company that makes the equipment. This is not illegal. Just--a touch misleading. Borderline dishonest.)
He promises another delivery mechanism that, to the best of my knowledge, neither he nor Buehler actually knows how to use or where to get.
The mind. Boggles.
First off, avaunt ye minions of darkness and chaos! In spite of all you could do, I have won my way through to the goblin castle! (Extra points for anyone who can name the movie that quote came from.) And, while I'm at it, nyah-nyah-nyah to the forces of law and light! You had your chance to whack me with a big, fat ticket for driving on expired tags and you missed it. I am now smugly, complacently, thoroughly legal!
I need gas, though. I'm driving on fumes. That, along with dropping a package off at the post office, are today's lunchtime chores. This appears to be one of those times in my life when things around me are decaying and expiring faster than I can keep up with them.
Second off, hooray! That's for the storm that's supposed to roll in here tomorrow and linger until Saturday. They've downgraded our forecast and are now saying we shouldn't get more than four inches in the city. (We went to the grocery store last night and stocked up anyhow. Just in case.)
Third, the diet. I am wiping the slate clean of the first nine days of this month and beginning again. Sigh. I have, as always, been doing exceptionally well during the days and eating like a pig every evening.
For example, last night I had half a pan of lasagna and yes, admittedly the box said there were only two servings in the pan, but the point remains that someone on a diet shouldn't be eating lasagna at all, much less in "normal" quantities. (I brought some for lunch today, too. Hee! But a much smaller portion.)
Fourth, I'm ready to give up on Gemmell. Some of you know that I've been trying to work my way through his Drenai books. I finished another one last night (Waylander) and contemplated the series for a while, trying to figure out how what happened in this book fit in with the rest of the series and why it mattered.
While I freely admit that in the last chapter or so, they made mention that two characters were going to reproduce and produce a figure of major importance to the overall storyline, I also have to point out that they and their "love storyline" were far from central in the book, leading one to expect that something else of major significance was taking place.
In the end, I decided that one could expect that, but one would be disappointed. I'm not buying any more of his stuff. I've read half a dozen books by him and I'm always let down.
Next up on the reading list is Saylor's Rubicon. I have no fear I won't enjoy that.
After that, I have Ray Bradbury's Farewell Summer waiting, but I'm hesitant to start reading it. Dandelion Wine was such a seminal book for me that I'm afraid of tarnishing the magic with a possibly less-than stellar sequel. Admittedly, Bradbury has almost never, ever, disappointed me, but I'm still somewhat afraid.
I have LeCarré's Absolute Friends waiting, too. It's been waiting for seven or eight months now. I'm not sure why I haven't read it yet. I've read and been fascinated by 20 books from this author. I took an entire class on him while I was in college. Why have I never followed through on reading this one? It's a mystery.
Also, thanks to the holiday generosity and extreme good taste of my friend, Mallory, I have Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet waiting to be read.
It's all very exciting and I'm almost sorry that we won't be getting snowed in again any time soon. I have a lot of reading I could be doing.
I'm meeting a friend for dinner tonight. Meghan's involved in some kind of monthly (weekly?) group that gets together and does knitting. And stuff. I think. It's called "stitch and bitch." I don't really know what they bitch about, but I brought my latest project (another scarf), so I can "stitch." It's not knitting, it's crochet, but I doubt if they kick me out for that reason.
And that's pretty much it for excitement since yesterday.
You know what I think this blog needs? It needs a theme. It needs to be about something.
Okay, so we have five "rack" servers, four of which we want to sell off. These were all bought 4 or 4-1/2 years ago.
I've complained about these before, they're the machines that Bernie is convinced he can sell for 60%-70% of the purchase price, in spite of their age (and let me point out that they're all at least a year older than he was remembering). The ones he thinks are still almost new because the components have been sitting largely idle for four years.
Today I finally find a live human being at MegaCorporation where we purchased them, and she's in the Small Business department, so she can find and send me electronic copies of the invoices showing the prices we paid and the exact configurations for each machine.
I spend 1-1/2 hour putting these into a spreadsheet so we can see how much the machines differ from each other.
As it turns out, at least one of them differs significantly, having dual processors and a lot more line items with mysterious numbers attached to them on the invoice than the other machines. All (and this is important) are clearly labeled, "No OS, No Windows 2000," though.
Bernie is annoyed that there are no serial #'s on the invoices, to help us out. I nobly refrain from pointing out that at the time they purchased the machines (when the invoices were generated), it was just an order. No specific machine was as of yet associated with the purchase and thus no serial number would have been available.
Instead, I tell him that all of that would have been on the paperwork shipped with the machines and that paperwork is mysteriously missing.
I explain to Bernie that I have looked for this paperwork many times and not found it. He goes to look himself and triumphantly brings me a folder full of payment information for six other machines in a different year. I reject it, explaining that I've seen those papers and they have nothing to do with the case at hand. He insists on standing there and reading me bits off the papers until he's forced to concede that a $600 payment-in-full receipt is unlikely to be associated with the purchase of a $4,000 server.
Then he decides we need a different approach. We cannot, of course, tell from looking at the cardboard boxes these servers are stored in, tell which specifications go with which server. Bernie suggests we open a cardboard box and look at the actual physical hardware.
I mention that I've tried that, pointing out the box that's been open for the last month, and found nothing helpful tattooed on the outside of the metal frame of the server but tell him he's free to look for himself. He does so (leaving the box open in the middle of the main pathway in and out of the office) and finds nothing, of course.
After that, it takes me over 15 minutes to try and convince him that we cannot just plug one of these servers in, hook a monitor to it, and find out which machine is which.
I am entirely unable to get him to comprehend that the little pictures on the monitor are provided by a Windows OS and that, without installing Windows, no little pictures will appear. In the end, he just gets mad (I can see him mentally writing me off as "uncooperative" again) and walks off.
Before he walks off, though, he announces that they had installed copies (now four years old, of course) of some software (I'm not really listening by now) on each machine and that he wants $500 added to the price of each server on the resell to cover that expense.
Then my head explodes.
The end.
We had a pretty darned decent weekend.
Saturday I took advantage of the sunshine and largely passable roads to get over and get my emissions test done. I passed and now all I have to do is make it to the Welton DMV office to get the stickers and I'm safely legal again.
It has to be done before Thursday's storm moves in, which means I'm going to have to break it to Bernie that even though we'd had a ton of nonproductive time over the last three weeks, I need an extra hour or two off during the day this week. Sigh.
After that (now we're back to Saturday), the R.C. and I actually got out.
I mean, we got out of the apartment, of the parking lot, and even the neighborhood!
We frolicked off to the wrong store (long story) to buy lacy undergarments (sometimes a gal just needs that stuff) for the R.C., stopping for lunch at my current favorite sushi place on the way (mmm--oyster roll!), swung through the right store, over at Park Meadows shopping center (and that parking lot was a nightmare) where she finally made her purchase, then we went over to Borders where I bought $94 worth of books--stocking up against the next potentially major storm the forecasters are coyly suggesting we're going to be seeing by the end of the week.
We were just like people! Getting out into the world and seeing things and stuff! It was very exciting.
When we got home, I settled in with my new books, and then remembered they were for stashing and laid five of them aside for next week. With the Sharpe books (Bernard Cornwall's series, which I'm working through in a completely leisurely fashion) I have sitting on the "to be read" shelf, I have enough "new" books to keep me amused for a while or a 4-day blizzard, whichever comes first.
I also have yarn to make two more scarves, and all of those gorgeous drawing supplies I got for the holidays. I'm ready to be snowed in!
That was pretty much it for Saturday. It was a nicer day than it sounds, I think. Just the "getting out and around” part made it feel special.
Now. In the ugh department.
What would you do if you got up one winter morning and found a dying mouse on your kitchen floor?
I mean, I know what to do with a live 'un. You scare it off and call the apartment people and demand they put down traps.
I know what to do with a deader. You shudder and avert your eyes and you gather it (hands encased in plastic gloves) into a trash bag, seal up the bag, and trot it out to the dumpster.
Why, then, was the idea of throwing a dying mouse out into the winter snow so repulsive to me? I don't want live (even barely) mice in my apartment but I really don't see that I could have left it laying in the kitchen floor until it was completely dead before disposing of it. And yet--it was alive, and I've never actually killed anything but bugs and the occasional fish (I used to fish frequently. I just never caught anything.) before. The though of actually killing it made me queasy.
After I disposed of it, I had the raging heebie-jeebies for half an hour.
In other good news, and after I got over being queasy, I got the wireless network working on the laptop again! Hooray!
It's a little touchy, for reasons I don't quite grasp, but it's working 70% - 80% of the time, which is pretty darned good. No more riding on lame, dial-up speed networks on that one evening a week I can find an unsecured one within range. When my network is working, I'm at digital cable speeds. Whoosh!
I did a smidge (not more) of housecleaning, surfed the 'net for a while on the laptop, and read a bit. Later, the R.C. and I walked out (so nice to be able to find the pavement--even though there are still huge stretches of roadway you can't see and sidewalks are largely just theoretical) and had lunch. I ordered something virtuously diet, then came home and made up for it by eating everything in sight later that evening. Sigh.
This morning the stupid park-and-ride lot was full because the stupid snow from the last two stupid storms is piled all over the place and also because the stupid people who arrived first this morning just parked any old how, taking up extra spaces and making everyone else do the same, so I had to drive to stupid work through this week's stupid storm. Took an hour.
Sigh. If today's storm tops out at 4" the way they're saying, I'm golden. If we hit 8", I'm going to be in trouble. My little Toyota starts to balk at anything over 6". I get more control, driving in bad weather, because it's a standard transmission, but the trade-off is that I don't have the weight of the automatic transmission mechanism helping to weigh the car down. So, I have more control on flat surfaces, but I run into trouble faster on hills.
The way it's coming down out there, I wouldn't be surprised to see us hit 8" or 10", but they swear the storm is going to move out of here this afternoon, so I'll wait and see.
Among the other things I ran across in last weekend's tidying spree was my hat! I have a hat that has a sort of neck scarf attached to it that I bought several years ago but never wore because, well, I don't really need that much protection while I'm driving. I'd forgotten all about it, but I found it last weekend and then I wore it today, because I anticipated having to stand outside waiting for a train and it's lovely and warm. Of course, by the time I got to work, I had Flat Hat Hair, but whatever. It's a hat!
(I heard from Bernie. He's decided there's too much snow and he's not coming in today. Did you ever notice that it's usually the high-dollar people who don't show up in bad weather? I used to notice that a lot, back when I was a secretary. Offices expect their hourly and entry-level employees to show up regardless, but management seemed to be--optional.) (But, to be fair, Bernie lives in Boulder and that's nestled in the foothills. They usually get more snow than Denver. He says they have 8" already and it's still coming down.)
I'm scrabbling together some stuff I can work on from home myself, making sure I'm working here in the office only on things that I can't work on elsewhere.
(Yes, like blogging. What's your point?)
First, to anyone who's left comments in the last week or so, only to see them disappear? My apologies. I was fighting another major spam attack and I got a little trigger-happy with the delete key. (The attacks were on the political blog, and I've finally just closed all comments on it, but my blacklist spam eliminator doesn't distinguish between this blog and that one.)
Yesterday I showed up for work at 7:54 a.m. Today I came in at 8:07. What's up with that, I wonder? I don't have to be here until 8:30.
I think it's the MOPT thing. I got on a schedule of getting up earlier and even this week, when I'm not taking public transportation because I can't get to the bus stop, I'm still getting up. (Which is good, because I'm going back to the MOPT tomorrow, or next week.)
So, it's the New Year. We all know what that means, right? That's right! It's Diet Time!
I started on Tuesday and was cheating by Wednesday evening (massive chocolate binge, thanks to the R.C. passing along a truly fabulous bar of 70% dark Belgian chocolate from her own haul), but I'm back on it again today and determined to lose that last 10 lbs. (According to the scales, I've already lost 2 lbs, but my weight can vary by 3-4 lbs from one day to the next, for no particular reason, so I'm not getting all excited about it.) Expect to hear much whining and complaining on the subject in the future.
Especially between now and January 16, the date of my annual physical.
(Except.... Just at that moment, I found myself wondering if my physical is on the 16th after all. Because I just realized that I'm keeping the 16th in my head because that's the release of the new season of Doctor Who, but a little voice is telling me that my doctor's appointment was on a Thursday, not a Tuesday. I should figure that out.)
Office-wise--yes, I'm still here, in spite of all my threats to the contrary. I've more-or-less promised to hang out until the end of February (thereby making my annual trek to California in late February affordable) and am currently avoiding making a solid commitment to stay until June.
I'd love a more stable job with a company that would make a commitment to stay in business that ran past the next 90 days but I really hate job-hunting. Right now, the pain of these two choices is pretty well-balanced and inertia is siding with hanging out here for a while.
Office-wise relating to actual work, I've finished the only survey job on the horizon between now and May and my biggest task, beyond bookkeeping, is cleaning up the detritus left behind by the last 12-14 departing employees, along with the rubble of electronic parts left over from when we use to build the product in-house. I've run across boxes and boxes full of miscellaneous cords and power adaptors and twisty little bits of metal and plastic and I don't know what any of it is for.
Except, I feel fairly confident in saying that we don't really need those 250 little plastic thingies that look like something you'd plug a phone line into. I mean, granted, I have no idea why we have them or what they were used for at such time as we used them but since no one has ever wanted one in the four years or so that I've been here, I feel fairly confident in throwing them away. It's tricky because I work with two major pack rats and if I want to start actually throwing things away, I have to pick my moments. Moments when neither of them is in the office and when they won't return until after the trash has been emptied for the day, for instance.
(On the positive side, if I'm on a diet, it's a good time for me to be getting extra exercise. So, spending 2-3 hours a day shifting around boxes full o'stuff and walking around the office sorting, so that some of these things that are like the others are all in one place is a good thing to be doing. I've already had to come back to my desk and cool down twice today.)
Oh, also, the Pushy Client came back out of the woodwork after two weeks of near silence with a "do it now!" project. I remember the good, old days when a client would agree to give you 72 hours (or, 24 business hours, take your pick) between time of project demand and time of project delivery and mean it. I miss those days. (These are the people who went insane sometime last fall and started demanding 4-hour turnaround. I remember complaining about them at the time, since it was about the same time that DiamondGirl finally stopped doing contract work for us and I had to do everything myself.)
I still haven't gotten my license plate stickers. I'm driving with extreme caution until Saturday, when I'll finally be able to get to the emissions testing station, assuming that the little side road that gets me there has been cleared. Then I can take the MOPT next week and ride the train down to the actual sticker issuing office one day. (Gotta figure out how to get to that office. I know there's a light-rail station there, but I'll need to go to Union Station and transfer to do it from here. It's an adventure!)
You know, this blog could be a more interesting place to visit. I'll work on that.
Happy New Year!
I know. You'd think that if I was snowed in at home for several (more) days, I'd have found the time to make a blog entry at some point, but I guess you'd be wrong.
Not that I was all that screamingly busy, but I had plenty to keep myself amused. Watching it snow, getting caught up on my website work (I spent part of the holiday weekend fighting off some massive comment spam attacks), crocheting scarves for friends, watching DVDs, reading books, messing around with my Christmas presents, doing laundry, cleaning house, doing "year end" tidying in my room, etc. All of the usual weekend stuff, just twice as much of all of it.
And, joy of joys, as I cleaned and tidied and bustled around, I actually found the software for the wireless modem! While I didn't actually get around to reinstalling it, I have high hopes that I'll be able to get the internet access on the laptop up and running again soon. (Yeah, I know. Four days off and I didn't find 15 minutes to reinstall some software? The truth is, I was afraid I'd run into problems. I prefer a perfect, even if just potential, solution in my immediate future to a problem in my lap.)
(Today's Laziness Catalog entry #1 - The woman who got on the elevator on the second floor and rode it to the third floor. It's ELEVEN STEPS.)
No new snow photos. If you want to know what Denver looked like last Friday, take a look at the photos I posted from the last storm. It was all much the same.
At some point, I need to mention to Bernie that I'll need yet another half-day off one day very soon. I need to get the emissions test on my car and get my new stickers for my license plates. Thanks to our two huge, snowstorms, I'm now driving on expired plates. (I'd park the car and take public transportation until I get the problem fixed, but I can't get to the bus stop. There's still a two-foot bunker of piled snow and ice all along that street, covering the entire sidewalk. Starting tomorrow, though, I'm going to park at the park-and-ride and take the train the rest of the way in. No sense in tempting fate too far, right?) It's my own fault, as these things usually are. I've had the little reminder card for two months. I just never remembered to go by the emissions place on the weekend.
I'm not the world's biggest procrastinator, but I'm sure I’m in the Top 100.
Do you make New Year's resolutions? I used to make New Year's resolutions but I never kept them so finally one year I resolved to make no more resolutions and that one I kept.