One of the sekrit pashuns of my life is office supplies. I take a ridiculous amount of pleasure in having a variety of pens, markets, post-it notes, notebooks, folders, and containers for storing the same. Because of that, it's rare that I reach for something to help me on a project and find myself coming up empty-handed.
Today, I'm empty-handed, though. I need pokies. I need a handful of little pokies and I can't ask anyone here if they have any or any extra because I know that pokies is not the real name for them, but I can't remember what they're called!
You know what I mean. Most of us cube-dwellers have these fabric walls that you can poke little--pokies--into, to hold up papers and whatnot.
I needed a white board. There's a giant one sitting unused next to my desk but I'm not in the mood to crawl around on the floor to use it. So, I decided to do my project on Real Paper and stick it up on the wall--with pokies--so that I can Contemplate it for a day or so and look for problems.
(Stupid Microsoft thesaurus--I tried checking "pokies" and it gave me "plodding" and "jail.")
Whassat pokie thing called you use to stick papers to your wall?
What a lovely weekend! My head is still all full of the happy-fuzz you get when life has been treating you with especial kindness.
I had plans for the weekend, but they all fell through--neither Meghan nor I were able to convince ourselves that we had the money to afford a trip to a 'show' featuring fancy and exotic handmade yarns. The Argonuts were supposed to have a belated summer picnic, but no one signed up so it was canceled in favor of an in-office party this coming Friday.
Although I had enough "chores" on my list to fill a weekend-and-a-half, I tossed most of them out the window in favor of getting out and soaking up some late summer sunshine. The weather was fabulous, and the shopping equally glorious.
I'm not the world's girliest girl when it comes to shoes--I favor sturdy black trouser shoes with a 1" heel and comfy, shock-absorbing rubber soles. When I'm feeling wild-and-crazy, I go to a 1-1/4" heel. Granted, I need a pair of "dress" shoes for the formal occasions this company has on occasion, but a pair of nice, black pumps would have been perfectly appropriate.
Would have been. Because I do have my girly moments. This weekend, my inner diva came out and demanded that I buy her a pair of black velvet sandals decorated with black sequins and 2" spike heels.
I may and/or may not be able to actually walk in them, but who cares when I feel so pretty? (I'll take a picture of them later and post it up for the girly-girls amongst us.)
Then, on to a clothing store where I was tempted by two shirts. I'm going to wait until payday rolls around again. Then I'll go back and try them on and see if I really like them or not.
After that, off to the bookstore, where I showed amazing restraint. I bought only one book, and that was from the bargain shelves. I paid $8 for a cookbook offering "Easy Tapas Recipes." Poring over it Saturday evening, I found myself marking 15-20 recipes that both looked easy enough for my skills and seemed to use ingredients I either like or suspect I'd like. I'm a big nibbler, so the idea of having ingredients around to make 5-6 kinds of tapas for dinner any random evening is very appealing to me.
Less appealing? The realization that the food won't be as good if I substitute canned/frozen ingredients for some of the fresh ingredients they mention. I live across the street from Whole Foods, though, and any ingredient they can't supply, I can't imagine needing.
And, speaking of Whole Foods.... There's a Chinese restaurant across the street from where I live. The R.C. and I had been talking about trying it for the last year and this weekend we finally remembered and gave them a call. She tried the almond chicken and I tried the garlic beef and the double pan-fried noodles with chicken.
It was--eh. Okay if you dump a lot of soy sauce on it. Unremarkable otherwise, except that the portions were enormous. The R.C. divided her chicken into 4 meals. My two entrees made six meals.
The point of the story being that by dinnertime Sunday, I was in search of something other than Chinese food for dinner, so we walked over to Whole Foods where I bought some very ripe Early Girl tomatoes (for a recipe I want to try this evening) and some fabulous roasted pepper dip.
I tried the dip out as spread for a ham sandwich with mixed results. I think it was the ham's fault, though. It (the dip) would be great with fresh veggies, but I don't have any of those.
I'm thinking there were a couple of the tapas recipes that called for some kind of roasted red pepper ingredient, so maybe I can use it there.
Whole Foods also had these fascinating, bite-sized pita pockets that I wanted rather badly--just the thing for many of those tapas recipes, but I couldn't convince myself that I'd be able to eat half of them before they got rock-hard.
*Sigh.* I can't even get a head of lettuce eaten before it goes weird. The only simple way to cook for one person is to heat up a tv dinner.
Lemmee see....I'm sure there was more. I got the ironing done and most of the laundry done and the bathroom cleaned and some mending (hemming some too-long t-shirts) started but not finished, but those aren't exciting.
I dunno. Looking back on it, I'm vague as to how I spent the rest of the weekend, but I know I had a really good time.
It wasn't a bit nice to wake up this morning and discover that it was 47 degrees in my bedroom (I slept with the window open) and that it was time and past time for me to roll out of bed and take myself off to my Monday morning job duties.
Hey! Gidget is out today! Why didn't I know Gidget was going to be out today? She sits six feet away from me, and it was too difficult for her to fill me in on her schedule? Communication. Boy, I don't know.*
I'm happy to report that yesterday evening's appointment with HairMan was devoid of the emotional tension I was fearing. It was also 50 minutes, instead of two hours, but more about that in a moment. First, I need to talk about how said appointment was not entirely devoid of weirdness.
I know that many women discuss anything and everything with their hairdressers. They make confidants of these poor people, sharing their life woes and worries. I am not one of those people. From a hairdresser, I want a decent haircut, occasionally a good dye job, and I want these things with expediency.
I do not care if their dog has the mange and I'm entirely uninterested in their feuds with other stylists. I feel no desire to share anything with them beyond the obligatory, how are you I'm fine how are you I'm fine exchange.
What I want to talk about is how quickly I'll be getting out of the chair. What I do not want to find myself talking to my straight, male hairdresser about is women's menstrual cycles.
It's just weird, okay?
As for the aforementioned shortness of the appointment, there were two contributing factors, for both of which I am grateful.
First, it turns out he was shoehorning me into the time when another client was over having her dye job baked in, so although he was slightly chatty, he was on a definite time schedule. Hooray for double-booking!
Second, as I sat there, waiting for my turn, I flipped through a women's magazine I found laying around and found myself reading about home dyeing. The article assured me that the product on the drug store shelves was just as good as what was sold in salons and, in fact, was quite likely to be less damaging to my hair.
I thought about it.
Salon dye - $50 and ninety minutes
Home dye - $15 and ten minutes.
Put like that, the choice seems clear. I mean, yes, sure, there are potential pitfalls, but nothing that really affects me. I'm not trying to go red or any color other than my natural one, so I don't have to worry about brassiness or unexpected color results. I'm not trying to add five layers of four different highlight colors. I just want to cover the gray.
So, when it was time for my turn in HairMan's chair, I denied any intention of dyeing and demanded a cut. And that's all. 50 minutes later, I was out the door, feeling fifty pounds lighter as I realized that self-dyeing means I will never again have to spend a day dreading a haircut appointment.
"Doctor! It hurts when I do this!"
"Then don't do that."
You wouldn't think anyone could write that much about something that didn't happen, would you?
I'm feeling a little embarrassed today. After pitching a fit at Vela yesterday because the 'NutNews files keep landing on my desk 48 hours late, putting me frantically behind with the rest of my work, it's now 11 a.m. on Friday morning and I'm pretty much done with my work for this week.
Later....
Hooray! Vela came by and started a new train of thought for me. Now I have a fun, new project to mess around with!
_________________
* Gratuitous and obscure The West Wing quote
This morning I conducted a passionate defense of the common comma--to the level of creating an entire Comma Defense Network to protect some little guys who were in danger of getting booted from the 'NutNews. This has won me kudos for being funny, when the entire spoof issue of 'NutNews I wrote and shared with Gidget and Vela sank without a mention.* You never know what people might find funny, I guess.
No, the 'NutNews hasn't gone out yet. Yes, it's 10:00 a.m. on Thursday and the 'NutNews is supposed to go out at 3:00 on Wednesday. What do you want from me?
I missed my chance to recycle, too. I carried my little recycle bucket (everyone has one at their desk) over to the Big Bin Of Recycle, but it was gone--already out on the curb, waiting to be picked up. I won't have another chance until next month. (This would be a bigger issue if I generated more than 30 pieces of paper in a month. Still. 20 of those are misprints or mistakes, so I do accumulate a little waste paper.)
. . . .
Later that same not-so-good day
Other mistakes are made, but electronically. For instance, it wasn't ten minutes after I finally got the 'NutNews out before I got the first error notification. We got someone's location number wrong. Two hours later, I got a report of an incorrect file having been linked. Ten minutes later, I got a report of a broken link.
I am so stressed out. It started out as such a good day, too. That only lasted an hour. *Sigh.*
And, to be honest, I'm dreading tonight's hair appointment. It has nothing to do with HairMan's abrupt descent into dating territory. I've pretty much always dreaded these appointments. Granted that he's the one person I've found in Denver able to do a half-decent job of cutting my hair, but he shares a failing that's common (in my experience) with many men. He's never mastered the art of multitasking.
He's incredibly chatty--and when he starts talking, his hands stop working. Thus, a simple haircut which should take 40-45 minutes is never less than an hour and frequently takes more. A cut-and-color appointment requires a two-hour time block.
I have an incredibly low boredom threshold and after I've been in the chair for 20-30 minutes, I'm starting to go mad, even under the best of circumstances.
_________________
* I liked it. In fact, I'm working on a second issue.
It's a banana, okay? I brought a banana in for my mid-morning snack and half of it wound up in my lap. Now, I can't stop thinking of myself as AnneBananaPants. (It's better than Consuela Banana-Hammock, but not by much.*)
I'm making massive, wholesale changes to everyone's marketing campaign this week.
Yesterday I changed stats in ads. (Me, I wouldn't put stats in ads, but I don't steer this boat.) Sometimes, you can't be sure what the webstrainers are going to object to. I came in this morning to find 39 disapproved ads. The software didn't like the amount of capitalization I used. And I'm thinking--okay, but I changed 1,100 ads yesterday and I used search-and-replace, so all the ads had the same capitalization. Why are you picking on these five locations, and only a few of their ads?
I've also been amusing myself by deleting around 20% of each campaign. (The bottom 20%, of course.) I'm eager to check back in a week or so and see if I've improved things, but I doubt I'll be able to see any difference. I mean--if an item isn't performing, removing it isn't likely to have any effect on the remaining, performing items, right?
Still. It will be tidier. I'm a big fan of tidier.
And I'm cleaning up negative keywords. I've decided we're taking the wrong approach with how we filter out search results, so I'm going to try something new. I spent two hours reworking the list yesterday and am anxious to get back to it when I can.
I can't today, of course. I've been whipping through 'NutNews articles most of the day. (I finally got the files at 8:00 this morning, but the webstrainer ad problem kept me tied up until 10:30.) I'm really trying to get this thing out on time every two weeks, in spite of the obstacles. (Lots of obstacles. Like, when I say I "got the articles" this morning, I mean I got most of them. I received the last two at 3:15.) Seriously, if they want this kind of turnaround time, they need to hire someone who actually knows FrontPage.
Over in the world o'politiblog, someone I used to read came over and said howdy! That's nice--it's nice not to be forgotten. (I've been blogging a little over there. (Not that I intend or want to get back into that obsessive habit, but the McCain campaign is just so weird and just, plain freaky that I haven't been able to resist.)
Brooding. I have a hair appointment tomorrow. I'm not really looking forward to it.
I think I remember telling y'all that HairMan acted a little friendlier than I'm really comfortable with during my last appointment? Sadly, I have to report that those who warned that he was Up To Something were quite correct. I was talking to him a few days ago, making this appointment, when he, in the course of casual conversation, asked me out. *Sigh.*
Gidget says, go to the appointment and see if it's weird. If it is, find a new hairdresser.
So, I'm going. Send good thoughts for not-weirdness, okay?
_________________
* Gratuitous Friends reference. Because I can.
Happy birthday, to the R.C.!
Sometimes, the R.C. mystifies me.
Yesterday, I'm getting ready to do a little project and she says, "I think you're making a lot of work out of this unless you're just having fun."
It's Saturday morning, okay? I'm surrounded by paint pots, paint trays, paint brushes, paint rollers, edgers, spackle, spackle knives, and the other essential accoutrements of A Job Around The House.
What part of this does NOT look like I'm having fun?
Friday night, I stripped the bathroom room of all moveable objects. I washed the walls, sanded them, washed them again, and let them dry. (Then I cleaned the counters and the floor - each covered with a fine residue of paint dust.) (And then I mopped the floor because the workmen in a few days ago to replace a missing shower tile have completely trashed out the entire bathroom.)
Saturday morning I trekked across the street to the Helpful Hardware man at Ace.
"Give paint," I demanded. "Give brushes and rollers and toys."
"Give money," he said, handing me a bag full o'fun.
(Ohmigod. I have more to say about my Painting Adventure, but I'm being distracted. It's the R.C.'s birthday and, in spite of the Six-Month Frugality Plan, I bought her a digital camera. she's finding identifying the parts complicated. Camera. Battery. USB cable. Optional A/V cable.)
Bathroom.
I spackled! I spackled over nail holes. I spackled over that corner where the last, inexpert paint job left a long, peeling bubble of paint. I spackled that embarrassing spot where I got too enthusiastic applynig hair dye last year and threw a glob at the wall. I spackled places that didn't need spackling just because spackling is fun and it's a funny word.
I resanded the spackled places with a nifty, six-sided sanding block the Helpful Hardware Man recommended. (A wonderful invention. Single-sheet sandpaper always makes me worry that I'm about to start a fire.) I rewashed the walls.
I masked! Painting tape, two kinds of masking tape and an entire newspaper later, I felt confident I'd covered any surface potentially in danger from my hit-or-miss painting technique.
I painted! Big roller. Barrels o'fun teeny roller. Paint brush. Special edge protector for those tricky bits hear the ceiling.
(Right now, I'm deeply regretting my decision not to open camera box and charge it all up for her and get it ready to use. I can't believe anyone can make such a production of charging a battery and inserting it in a plug-and-play device. *headbang*)
Bathroom.
Watching paint dry? Is more fun than people think. If it's your paint job, it can be fun!
I Pledged the woodwork, hot-glued the loose part on the little wall shelf, cleaned the metal-work, and wiped down the mirrors. I cleaned the counters, and swept and mopped the floor again.
I re-imported all the previously mentioned moveable stuff. Shelves, pots & bottles, stacks o'towels, etc.
The new, bamboo-pattern shower curtain I purchased last week looks lovely. The towels and bath mats chosen to go with the old, faded yellow paint and the yucky yellow shower tiles and the icky "gold-tone" linoleum counter-tops look fine.
Bottom line? 24 hours later, I have a bathroom covered in clean, white paint, looking and smelling fresh and joyful! (Except, the ceiling looks dreadful.)
Among the other lessons learned? Next time, a quart of paint will probably be sufficient. Should I decide I don't need the remainder of this gallon for touch-ups, I'm going to have to take the 7/8 remaining back to Ace for proper disposal.
I tried to get the R.C. to let me do her bathroom, but she's not enthused. Sometimes I don't think she knows what a good time is.
(I'm so glad I also gave her a book for her birthday. She's reading it for a while, letting the poor camera get on with the job of charging itself for use.)
Posted by AnneZook at 11:21 AM | Comments (7)Yesterday, one of the Argonuts Afield sent me, for reasons I wasn't quite sure of, a copy of a quote for a customer. He asked what I thought of it.
Clearly it was the product of an attempt to create a template to use when sending quotes, so I understood his desire for a second option. Such a thing could be very useful, but this attempt was a mess.
But I was generous--and gentle. I merely told him that it was "ok" but that if he planned to use the template in the future, I'd have suggestions.
He wrote back to say, "The future is now."
I sent back a smilie-face and, "Okay, you asked." I pointed out that using three different font styles, four different font sizes, three different font colors, and dark gray background shading in table cells that had 8 pt black text in them weren't ideal design choices. I asked if his 13-line signature block was all entirely necessary and if there was a way to include a "text version" of the email for people not using html email.
Turns out? It was an "official" home office template--designed by Vela and, no doubt, the rest of TeamChaos and no doubt with the input of everyone in my department but me (since I seem to be the only person who has never seen it before).
He tricked me into dissing, in writing, the work of half a dozen people here at the home office.
I'm shaking in my boots and not sure that last week's chocolate bounty is going to get me through this one.
And, hey! Last Friday's plan of bribing my way into popularity by putting chocolate candy bars in the reception-area candy dish--then telling everyone it was me what done it and asking anxiously if they felt they liked me better for it--was a success!
Although they all said they already liked me, they also all agreed that they liked me better after eating my chocolate!
It worked so well that I'm told CEOJason was heard telling the receptionist that maybe he'd try it. Sad to be a CEO who feels unpopular.
He definitely likes me better now, too. He chatted with me in the lunch room this morning when we were both in there in search of coffee, and he said he liked my work on the 'NutNews. BtC (Before the Chocolate), he never said anything nice about my work.
Heh.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)Some days, as we've all remarked at one time or another, it hardly seems worth chewing through the restraints.
I overslept (must get new alarm clock with more reliable volume button), there was no hot water (there hasn't been for the last 24 hours), I had to sponge-bath and wash my hair in the sink with water heated in a teakettle on the stove (so very primitive), and then they were doing construction again on the road that leads straight from my home to my office, shutting the normal two traffic lanes + 1 turn lane down to one lane and the traffic to a crawl.
It's probably okay that I can't take all of my clothes off and take a shower because I am so disgustingly fat that I can barely stand to look at myself. Thanks to the NSP (which is not even going that well), I have put on the 5 lbs I took off this spring and now I'm back to needing to take off at least 10 lbs in order to feel good about myself.
And, speaking of the 'NutNews (which I wasn't, at least not at that moment, but which I usually am any more), I just finished this week's battle with the latest issue. I was two seconds away from getting it sent out on time (for a change) yesterday, when two members of TeamChaos (taking advantage of my own, personal ChaosManager, Vela's absence, called a halt to the process.
After an hour of going back and forth, trying to rewrite one four-sentence article into something that made sense, they finally just pulled it from the newsletter. After a frantic interval of deleting, rechecking code, resetting bookmarks, and recreating the printable copy that's always sent out with the html-format email, I got to push "send."
I was working from home. Logging into my office desktop and into FrontPage, then ftp-ing up to the remote website? Verrry slow. Keystroke-by-keystroke slow. Frustration is being someone who types at 100 wpm being forced to type at one keystroke per second.
It was double-frustration day since there was no hot water and no water at all starting at 3:30 in the afternoon. Nothing like not getting to wash my hair to put me into a bad mood anyhow.
Today, I'm grateful for employment in an office where there's hot water when I need to wash my hands.
The more I pay attention to the world around me, the more I realize how few adults there are in the world. Mostly, there are just a lot of whiny eight year-olds who are very tall. I know, I've sung this song before, but still.
They're doing a training class here onsite this week and next, and one of the attendees, we'll call him Smilin' Tommy, is acting like--well, like an eight year-old. A disturbed one. He passed preliminary approval to be granted territory a couple of months ago and then failed to pass the final vetting with Jason and was sent home empty-handed. Smilin' Tommy then got CEO Jason on the phone and told him something that made Jason re-open the closed door.
So, starting at 8:00 this morning Smilin' Tommy is here onsite, in a class of seven people, learning to run a business.
And, by all accounts, he's doing pretty much all he can to disrupt the class and destroy the other attendees' chances of learning what they need to know. Muttering, not too quietly, about how the entire training program is "bullshit" and garbage and keeping the trainers from presenting their material.
I mean, he was sent out of the room. Can you imagine yourself, at the age of +/-50, being so disruptive in a training class that you get sent out of the room like a five year-old misbehaving in kindergarten?
I passed Smilin' Tommy just now. He was in the lobby, outside the office suite, talking to someone on the phone. As I passed, I heard him say, "Yes, obviously I want to cooperate in any way I can, but the atmosphere here is just so toxic."
He's doomed to fail. He's determined to fail. And I can only think that he persuaded Jason to give him a second chance because he has some kind of nefarious plan to wreak revenge on the corporate that rejected him in the first place.
My sympathy is with Jason. He made the right decision in the first place, then allowed himself to be persuaded to change his mind. And now we have a very tall two year-old who, assuming he makes it through training, is going to make life miserable for everyone in every way he can.
But mostly? I'm sort of worried. Because Smilin' Tommy strikes me as the kind of guy who might show up for tomorrow's class with a gun in his hand.
The weekend was good, up until a point. (More about that later.) The weather was gorgeous, I spent a lot of money, and I puttered around the house, and enjoyed myself thoroughly.
Saturday we hit the Farmer's Market early, trying to beat the stroller brigade and the dog walkers. I hear that they don't allow you to bring your dog to Farmers' Markets in California. I wish they didn't allow it in Denver, but at least there weren't any fights or overly friendly, licky doges this week.
I picked up, among other goodies, a pint or so of fresh blackberries. Yesterday, I searched the 'net, found an "award-winning" recipe for blackberry cobbler, and cooked up what I'm not ashamed to say was a delicious pan-full of yummy. (Okay, anything that starts with a cup of sugar and a stick of melted butter is bound to be delicious. But my cooking skills aren't so impressive that I take success for granted.)
I also grabbed a few more fresh peaches. They're now ripening in a paper bag on the kitchen counter. I thought about cobblering some of them, but I'm not really a fan of peach cobbler. Apple or cherry are the cobblers I like. And blackberry, of course, but blackberries aren't a fruit I think about much. (Except that I'm thinking about them now and already planning to buy more next weekend.)
Right next to the Cherry Creek Farmer's Market is a nice, big Bed, Bath, & Beyond store. I needed one of those thingies you hang in the shower to hold shampoo bottles and whatnot, so we wandered in there. I wound up with a basket full of small items (stocking stuffers for the upcoming holiday season--it's never too soon to get started), a new humidifier ($35--that's the "a lot of money" I was talking about), and a new shower curtain.
I have a shower stall, but those are ugly, so for the last six or seven years, I've been hanging a shower curtain over it.
And I have walls, badly painted (20 years ago) in a light shade of yellow that I don't like. So, this coming weekend I'm planning to buy a gallon of paint, a one-short roller and disposable paint pan, and some edging tape, and transform my bathroom into something a little less dire. My new shower curtain is waiting for the new paint job, so I can do an all-over transformation.
I also have a loose tile at the base of the shower. The maintenance guy showed up a week or so ago, looked it over and announced that it would have to wait until they could redo all the drywall behind it. (The drywall I could see has gone all yucky and black. I assume this is an unseen consequence of a roof leak we had a few years ago.)
This is one of those times when you're glad you rent--I'm going to get a pretty-clean shower at no cost!
Or, I will be once the maintenance guy comes back and does the work. He used a plastic shopping bag and duct tape to make a temporary fix, so I could continue bathing on a regular basis. I guess it was optimistic of me to think he'd tell management that the problem wasn't actually fixed, so I'm going to call them myself today.
And then--painting fun!
Workwise, I was on time today. I expected to be late since Jason had made a point of how everyone was expected to be on-hand to greet the incoming training class, and I did oversleep a bit, but I raced through my morning routine and got here with almost 30 seconds to spare. Jason? Was a no-show. I'm thinking about speaking to him about the inadvisability of considering yourself an exception to "everyone."
Today I'm waiting for the next NutNews files. My own personal ChaosManager, Vela, is leaving on her honeymoon on Wednesday and she's making a frantic effort to get everything in the world done before she leaves. I volunteered to do this week's editing, to free up some of her time. (I'd have had to redo any editing anyone else did anyhow.)
I heard yesterday morning that one of my aunts was in the hospital. After surviving a bout with cancer and living for many years with Lupus, she suffered a massive stroke last week. The L-i-K-S found out yesterday and let me know, then she called back in the evening to tell me that our aunt had passed away.
It's almost invisible, you know? The moment when you transition from buying everyone you know wedding gifts or baby gifts, to the day you realize you're ordering flowers for funerals more than any other kind of offering.
Take care of yourselves!