I mentioned in my last post that I had started volunteering with an animal rescue – which is a bit of an understatement because as is typical for me I threw myself into it with wild abandon and very quickly went from “just” fostering “a few” kittens to having a finger in waaaaaaaaaaaay too many pies. At this point, there really isn’t much going on at the rescue that I’m not involved in to one degree or another and during the height of kitten season I had as many as sixteen cats and kittens in my home. (That…was nuts. Fun! But also nuts.)

It’s been an amazing experience. I had no idea what-all went on behind the scenes in the animal rescue world, from the sheer volume of “unwanted” pets in our sleepy little town to the downright insane costs involved in upgrading them from ‘unwanted’ to ‘beloved pet.’

One of the things I found the most surprising was that the adoption fees only cover about half of the actual cost to rescue these babies. Like everybody else who has forked over $100 or more to adopt a kitten from a rescue, I assumed that my fee was actually more than the “true cost” of getting that kitten into my hands.

After all, the animals themselves are usually free, right? Found in boxes and bushes, sent over from an overwhelmed city shelter, turned in by people who do not want a bunch of feral babies living in their garage – how much could it possibly cost to feed them for a month or two, get them fixed, and get them up for adoption?

It’s true that if everything went absolutely perfectly for every single rescued pet, we would at the very least break even and possibly even make a few bucks on each adoption. (At least on the cat side. The puppies are a whole different level of expensive, and I doubt we’d be able to even break even without pricing 99% of our adopters out of the equation.)

But we’re a rescue. We’re the people the city shelter will reach out to in desperation when they have pets come in that they aren’t equipped to save themselves – the ones who are too young to survive without specialized, round-the-clock care. The ones who are injured and need expensive surgery or other extreme care to recover. The ones with psychological issues, born to feral mothers or having suffered at the hands of “bad” owners, who need a lot of extra time and effort to turn around.

While we do sometimes get those “perfect” kittens who come to us healthy, happy and well-adjusted…they’re the exception, not the rule. Most of them come to us at the very least suffering from upper respiratory and/or eye infections, heavy parasite loads, and malnourishment. 

Far too many of them come in with even worse problems; Cherry Darling is a perfect example.

We have no idea what happened to her leg before she came to us (our best guess is that she tangled with a car), but it was bad and the leg had to be amputated ($1800 even with a rescue discount). It took about six weeks for her to recover (roughly $400 in supplies and medications), and to receive her spay operation ($70).

Her adoption fee? Still $135, just like every other kitten her age.

There is an elephant in the room on this deal, a question that everybody is thinking but is reluctant to put out there: Is it worth saving kittens like her? Wouldn’t it be better to simply put them down? Sure, euthanasia isn’t free so we’d still be “losing” between $200 and $500 bucks on that deal depending on which vet did the deed, but, isn’t that better than throwing over two thousand dollars into saving her?!

Believe me, we are forced to ask that question over and over again…our decision making process is exactly the same as it would be for our own beloved pets and the primary question to be answered is what is the expected outcome?

If they are going to be able to fully recover and live long, healthy lives then we will choose to fight on.

If all we’re doing is buying them a little more time that is going to be full of pain and misery…we will authorize the vet to let them go.

But I understand where people are coming from when they think we should be more focused on minimizing the cost – the world is full of big problems, and there are always more needs to be filled than there are dollars to throw at them. And with so much human suffering, is it right to be spending hundreds or thousands of dollars to save just one (1) kitten?

I can respect those who disagree with me that it is worth doing, but would humbly submit that saving companion animals is also saving humans – not in a direct physical way, granted, but, well, hear me out.

I facilitated over five hundred cat adoptions last year – I’ve seen over and over again how uplifting and healing it can be for people to welcome a furry ball of unconditional love and trust into their lives. I’ve seen people grinning from ear to ear, or even breaking down into tears of joy as they clutched the pet they’d just adopted to their hearts.

I often get updates after they’ve gone home, too. So many stories of kids who have found it easier to cope with distance learning with their new kitten purring on their lap while they work, of lonely adults who feel less isolated and alone with their kitty sleeping in a bed on their desk while they work, of families drawn together by sharing the duties around their new puppy.

And for me personally, well, there’s this guy.

Tagalong here was also one of the “expensive” kittens whose cost to rescue way exceeded his adoption fee. He came into rescue at only two weeks old, and not only needed to be bottle fed every few hours around the clock for a couple weeks (kitten formula runs $25 for a 12-ounce cannister of powder, so it adds up in a hurry when we have to bottle feed!), but also needed stitches for a leg wound.

He then came down with a raging case of calicivirus that ultimately required three rounds of increasingly intense antibiotics to treat the side effects of the virus, and several trips to the emergency vet for things like spiking fevers, astonishingly intense diarrhea, and nasty infected mouth sores that made it impossible for him to eat or drink.

Was he worth all that extra time and money to save? I’d say so, because he rescued me from an intense grief over losing my sweet little Pooh Bear the previous year. I’d never had such a deep emotional bond with a cat before she came along, and just couldn’t get over suddenly losing her to feline infectious peritonitis at only nineteen months old.

There was a lot of ugly-crying, and every time I thought I was finally past that phase of grieving…nope, suddenly thought of her and here come the next round of waterworks…

And then suddenly, here was this foster kitten crawling into her spot at night. Insisting that I arrange the sheets into a little ‘nest’ for him, just as she had always done. Suckling on my shirt exactly as she did. Following me everywhere I went. Interjecting himself into every moment of my day as if he thought it was his sacred duty to do so.

He didn’t “replace” her – but he definitely filled up that big empty space and make me feel whole again.

There are two sides to rescue: The animals who are in need, and the humans who need them.

By caring for the former, we are also caring for the latter.

It’s worth doing. 

Every year...

Every year, I get the notification that the domain registration is due for this all-but-forgotten blog domain. 

Every year, I go through the same thought process: Should I even keep this? I haven't blogged anything in literally years, maybe it's time to just let it go. 

And then I go ahead and pay it, because I can't stop believing that eventually, I will get back to blogging again. 

OK. Y'all. I just wrote 68 words, and was interrupted five times. FIVE. People shouting to each other right outside my door. Coming into my office with announcements. Asking me if I bought the stuff from the place on the link that they sent me. Weaving complicated webs of who is going where and with whom and for how long. 

That settles it. I have to keep this Den of Chaos domain. It isn't just a cute little phrase, it is my entire life condensed into three little words. 

So. I suppose I should try to catch things up a bit... 

All but one of the Denizens are now legally adults, but are all still living here with us...which brings its own set of challenges as they appear to have stepped into Krazy Glue and have been unable to leave the nest. One of the most frustrating things about the COVID-19 fiasco has been that my daughters who had just discovered their wings got them clipped right as they were learning to love being able to soar on their own. 

"Go forth, my children, and enjoy your freed-...wait, no, come back and stay put..." 

I left my job with MegaBank almost two years ago due to a very long and complicated list of reasons, and have been volunteering full time with an animal rescue since shortly after I turned in my badge. 

Over the course of 2020, I was able to upgrade the technology for the rescue, redesign the website, digitize a decade worth of paperwork, facilitate over five hundred cat and kitten adoptions in 2020, fostered thirty-two kittens, and took over the role when our treasurer left us. 

I really wish that more people could have this kind of "gap period" experience, especially people like me who have "expensive" skills. The barrier to entry for most itty-bitty nonprofits isn't the price of the software or hosting, it's the salaries of people like me to set them up and maintain them that puts them out of reach. It's been an absolute delight to spend my days doing not only what I love to be doing, but for a cause that is near and dear to my heart.

Plus, I get to have kittens in the house almost all the time. #LiterallyBestPerksEver.

Volunteering also did wonders for my burnout, which had gotten really bad before I left MegaBank...but before you jump to conclusions, it wasn't my job that did it to me. It was the home front that had worn me down to the point where I just didn't have a drop of fuel left in the tank.

If I'm honest, I'm still smoldering a bit. It took a long time for my burnout to start mimicking depression, so I guess it is only reasonable to expect that it will take an equally long time for me to regain my energy and interest in doing things, but, well, patience has never exactly been my strong suit.

The garden is in ruins. The house isn't much better. I have a lot of work to do if I want to get things back to where they were back in 2016, before the burnout started eroding away both my physical ability and emotional interest in keeping on top of things. 

Guess it's time to roll up my sleeves and get going. I know what I want my life to look like, and I'm not going to get there by sitting here grousing about the steps not doing themselves.

When all else fails, try killing everyone with toxic fumes!

Sooooooooooo…Tuesday morning, I tried to murder everyone in the house with poison gas.

True story.

SEE, what happened was, I had cleared out a bunch of way-too-old jars of food from the old pantry – you know, the home canned kind.

Which meant that I had a ton of those Tattler reusable jar lids and gaskets that needed to be cleaned. And the way I usually do that is to plop them into a saucepan of boiling water for 3-5 minutes.

So on my lunch break Tuesday, I dumped them into a saucepan and put them on the stove and carried on reloading the dishwasher. (You already see where this is going.)

I only had a somewhat tiny window on that deal, because frankly I have been not only in back to back meetings since about mid-September, but back to back intense meetings where I have had to be (ahem) rather vocal about what was being talked about, because there is a lot of Crazy going on lately, and the Mandates™ are coming from places that neither know nor care about how those Mandates™ are going to impact what we do, because what we do is very a-typical of what most applications in Wholesale do, and, well…we’re a round peg, we just don’t fit into square holes.

For bonus points, we’re one of those round pegs that support an awful lot of external structures. If we trip over our own shoelaces, we can potentially pull down nine other applications as we fall, and give literally tens of thousands of users across all those applications skinned knees and bloody noses.

Which, you know: Not on MY watch, dude.

Soooooo, yeah. I’m a bit protective of our little patch, and take a very dim view of people who have no idea what they’re doing tugging on the loom upon which our tangled web is woven all willy-nilly. And not skipping any of those meetings, because that’s always when they try to just casually slip something I’ve already flicked off the table back onto everybody’s plates.

But then as I was wildly shoving dirty plates in the general direction of the dishwasher, I got a text message from one of the kids saying she was ready to be picked up, and, knowing that my next meeting was starting too-shortly thereafter, I naturally immediately dropped everything, grabbed my keys and ran out the door.

Then came skidding back through the door two seconds before the next argument meeting was to start, and jumped straight into that and was fighting with someone within about three seconds flat and then I kinda-sorta completely forgot about the blasted canning lids and gaskets bubbling away on the stove…?

About 30-40 minutes of verbal sparring (“RULES!” “REALITY!” “RULES!” “REALITY!”) later, I hear the husband yelling “WHAT’S BURNING?!” from the other room, and then my brain went, “OH, that reminds me: You’ve got a bunch of plastic boiling on the stove, you might wanna go check on that.”

{face-palm}

Friends…there are no words for just how bad the fumes those hard plastic canning lids put out when they are, you know, on fire.

I’m not just talking about the smell (which for the record was incredibly awful), I’m talking fumes that even in the furthest reaches of the house were setting eyes watering, throats burning, and lungs protesting.

Definitely “get the heck outta the house, now” levels of bad.

Naturally, I did not just immediately vacate the house. hahahahahaha, no, silly, THAT would have been the SENSIBLE thing to do!

Instead I grabbed the now-very-offensive (and also spewing white clouds of toxins) pot and ran it out to the backyard, then ran through the house flipping on all the fans and slamming open all the windows, and then I scuttled out of the house to join my shivering family on the driveway.

…my eyes were watery for hours…

…but then again…it did get me out of meetings for a bit…

…hmmmmmm…

Yeah. At the end of all things?

…Worth it!…

(Not really. I’m still a bit mad at myself about it. But, nobody was actually hurt so I’m sure I’ll get over it. Just, geez, Me, of all the fool things to do, forgetting and letting the water boil away until the plastic was doing the boiling? Not your finest hour, honey…)

What I Want vs. What I Actually Buy

Our espresso machine is on the fritz. It can still be coaxed into producing that sweet, sweet elixir of life, but, the writing is definitely on the wall.

In neon.

THE END IS NIGH…

This…is not OK, people.

SO NATURALLY, I am on Amazon this morning checking out new espresso makers. Because I am not about to allow civilization itself to utterly collapse around here.

…let the (mind) games…begin!

Hmmmm, this Saeco is awful sexy…

…fully automatic, programmable, self-cleaning?!?!, oh, keep whispering those sweet nothings to me, baby…oh, but, also two THOUSAND dollars, ummmmmmm, yeah-OK, er, NEXT…!

Ah! KitchenAid makes an espresso maker?! A red one that looks like something out of a 50s pop-shop?!?! Tell me more, Oh Brand I (Mostly) Trust and Am VERY Fond Of!

….aaaaaaaaaaaand, $839 dollars. Ahem. Moving on…

{repeat that basic scenario of going “ooooooooo! aaaaaaaaaah! wait, how much? er, um, what else do you have…” about three hundred times, until eventually…}

“…yeah, so, um…thanks for spending, like, two hours showing me every single thing you have, Amazon, and if you’d just, you know, toss one of these into a box and send it on over, that’d be greaaaaaaaat…”

…yeah, I’m going to end up buying exactly what I bought ten years ago, and for exactly the same reasons.

• Gets the one (1) job we want it for done
• Has a modest footprint on the counter
• Doesn’t have a whole lot of fancy doohickeys to break / lose / not-get-snapped-back-in-place-just-so-resulting-in-a-huge-mess
• Does not require a degree in physics and/or mathematics to figure out how to use it.

{face-palm}

Still, I find these exercises in mental gymnastics a bit fascinating because honestly? Just like anybody else, I’m attracted to what is shiny and new. I am very interested in things that are “modern,” things that would make me feel like I was being pampered, things that would say, “Life is showering all the blessings upon me, for lo! I am its favorite child.”

And it always, always amuses me when I engage in these kinds of “wants all the super-fancy things => spends ridiculous amounts of time arguing with herself about allllllll the possibilities => ultimately settles on something much less expensive than originally desired that gets the core job done” exercises.

Left to itself, my basic nature would be much more on the hedonistic, instant-gratification side.

I am impulsive. I am also impatient. I want things now, and I want to put as little effort into getting what I want as humanly possible.

I am also more than a bit reckless, to be honest. Because in related news, I am also a hopeless optimist, so, in my mind? Things will always work out.

…they just…will…somehow or other…

In other words, my basic nature is a manufacturer’s dream. I am exactly the kind of person who is already screaming “SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!” before they’ve even gotten to slide two of the sales pitch.

But, over the last twenty years, the core habits of the LBYM lifestyle have become engrained in me. I don’t even “have to” make myself stop and walk through the steps involved – it just happens.

It is literally just as automatic for me to start bumping up what I actually need and what I value the most against what I’m proposing to purchase in order to scratch that itch as it is for me to be captivated by the sales pitch in the first place.

And to start challenging myself whenever I try to insist that I neeeeeeeeeeeed some feature I do not currently have, and have not even thought about as a thing I needed before I saw the advertisement about it being A Thing.

AND asking myself whether or not I’d still be content with my choice if, say, the washer/dryer went out next month instead of “probably at some point between January and May of next year” like I expect them to – would I then resent the blasted coffee maker if having spent the money on it meant I couldn’t buy the new set I really wanted? (…ohhhhh, heck yes I would…I would despise that new coffee maker if it had taken cash I desperately needed two months later for a “really good” new washer/dryer…)

It still amazes me that I can be that way. That I, of ALL people, have the ability to stop myself when I see something shiny and pretty and awesome and approach the problem with, you know, cold, boring old LOGIC instead.

Which is why I still firmly believe that pretty much anybody can learn how to live below their means.

C’mon: If someone as reckless, impulsive and overly-optimistic as me can get to a point where that kind of “whoa up, there, cowgirl, let’s reexamine this here deal a bit, run it through the old sanity check right quick, because this has ‘I might regret this later’ written all over it” thing is as automatic as the “ooooooooooo, that is so cool and so shiny and I want it real bad!” impulse that triggers it?

Anybody can.

True story, y’all.

True story.

Knock-knock, Mocha-Fudger

OMG, YOU GUYS! I got a Knock-Knock Mocha-Fudger for Mother’s Day!!!! (<= fair warning, The Bloggess uses the actual-grownup words – if you’ve got a little one reading over your shoulder, might want to save that hysterical and oh-so-relatable read for nap-time).

IS HE NOT GLORIOUS?! IS HE NOT THE MOST MAGNIFICENT GARDEN ACCENT FEATURE YOU HAVE EVER SEEN?!?!

I love him. He made me laugh so hard, and I want to put him somewhere that I can see from my office window, so that I can burst into hysterical giggles at random all day long – preferably during long, boring, ever-so-serious meetings.

I also got this last night from Boo Bug, who made it herself.

I just about fell out of my chair when she brought that in. I even saw the cookies being baked, but didn’t think they were for, you know, me! Let alone going to be turned into this!

Just, wow.

Mother’s Day is supposed to be all about gushing about how much we love our mothers, and how much they love us, and talking endlessly about everything they have and continue to do for us.

And IMHO it is very important to do that, because frankly an awful lot of What Moms Do is all about little everyday things that nobody ever thinks much about, or even notices get done on a regular basis – unless, of course, it doesn’t get done.

But you know what? For me at least, what I get from being a mom is a lot more than what I give.

For me, being a mom is a privilege. It makes me a part of the future. What I give to my kids will keep on going long after I’ve left this world; some of what I’ve taught my kids will be taught to theirs, and so on and so on down through generations to come.

Plus, I find that hanging out with my kids is better than all the anti-depressants in the world whenever I’m feeling kind of bleh – which I have to admit seems to have been happening an awful lot these last couples years.

I’m just…well…tired, I guess. My hormones are all whacked out, I seem to boomerang from not being able to sleep to oversleeping, and my mood keeps just whizzing all over the place, because, #HormonesSuck, #CanPerimenopauseBeDoneNowPlz, #GrowingOldAintForSissys.

But my kids, well, they keep me going. They give me a reason to keep on getting up and doing the old try, try again day after day – no matter how hard the Universe is slamming its hand down on the lever trying to flush my whole life right down the cosmic toilet.

They’re full of fun and cool ideas and a unique way of looking at the world. They motivate me. They give me new ideas to ponder, new projects to undertake, a new way of thinking about all the same old problems.

They make me laugh on days when all I want to do is scream, shake my fist at the world, mutter a few curse words and then hide under my desk until the day I die.

They can relight my inner fire whenever it goes out, far faster than I could do it all on my own – with well-placed witty remarks, really bad puns, and the occasional offhand remark that starts with, “Have you ever noticed that…” and ends with me going, “…whoa…mind…BLOWN, dude…”

And occasionally…they even buy me metal roosters for my garden, and give me delicious bouquets made of love (and also cookies).

Yeah.

I am definitely the luckiest, most blessed mom in the world, and I wouldn’t trade a single hair on any of their heads for all the tea in China.

OMG, I still know how to knit!

We took a vacation-as-such in June for the first time in a lot of years; a whole entire week with the whole entire family (plus three friends) down in Los Angeles, going to theme parks, eating way too much food, and just partying as though the world were ending tomorrow.

Naturally, the first thing I said to myself when I realized that I wasn’t going to be up to my eyebrows in working / cooking / cleaning / paying-bills / etc. was OHmyGOSH…I should TOTALLY bring along a knitting project!

And it goes without saying that instead of a nice pair of socks (well, OK, in addition to), I settled on an enormous fingering-weight lace shawl with multiple individual patterns, because what says ‘relaxing activity’ more than THAT?

{beats head on desk}

{why, Me, whyyyyyy do you insist on doing that to yourself?!}

I cast it on in the hotel on a day that poor Boo Bug had to sit out the theme parks due to an upset stomach, didn’t get a whole lot done on the trip because duh, ya think?!, and then finally finished it Thursday night => got it blocking on the bed this morning.

It is so huge that it takes up literally 2/3rds of a king-sized bed, y’all. 100 inches long by 50 inches deep once I had it stretched out and pinned – I had to turn it diagonally on the bed to get the edges spread out correctly, because as I just learned this morning, the mattress is “only” 80 x 76 inches.

I had to get up on a step ladder to take a picture of it, and still couldn’t get the whole thing in the frame. Daaaaaaaaamn.

This is the Spirit of the Southwest shawl, and like all of the Evelyn Clark patterns I’ve done it was a delight to knit up. The lace patterns were tricky enough to be interesting, but not so tricky that I either never finished it, or spent more time cussing than knitting.

I used the #6 needles the pattern suggested, and a yummy skein of Lisa Souza’s Lace in the ‘Mahogany’ colorway that I had been taking out, petting, and tenderly tucking back into its air-tight storage bag for years and years – Ravelry informs me that I bought it at Stitches back 2010.

The shawl ate up a little over half of that jumbo-sized skein, so I still have plenty of yarn left to make a second, smaller shawl in the future. Woot!

{happy sigh}

I have to admit, things like knitting, reading and writing have been badly victimized by my shift from commuting every day to working from home full-time.

Other things have benefited, of course, and the benefits way outweigh the losses, but…well…that was four hours or more, every weekday, that were basically set aside for Such Things.

I couldn’t be paying bills, or washing the kitchen floor, or doing any home-related things while I was on a train, for carp’s sake – about all I could do that felt even remotely productive was read, knit, or write.

But, I’m starting to work my way back to having a bit more balance that way; it’s hard going because I am an idiot with a very poor grasp of the concept that I only have so much energy and physical stamina to put into whatever-all I’m doing all day long, and thus tend to hit the ground running and then just run and run and run until I slam face-first into an invisible wall of exhaustion every evening and end up just kind of existing until bedtime finally rolls around.

But, it is getting better…so hopefully, my poor neglected stash will start feeling loved again, and I’ll be able to enjoy this feeling of having done something cool with my “free” time instead of feeling guilty about “wasting” endless hours watching videos and otherwise farting around on the Internet in those hours between “done working” and “bedtime.”

Here’s hoping, anyway.

Logical reasoning is not always my forte

I like to think of myself as a mostly logical person, who makes decisions based more on math/science than emotion. That I am not easily suckered by things that are clearly trying to play on my feelings to trick me into paying way more than I need to for something that isn’t actually All That Special.

Then something comes along that laughs at that notion and points out that I am not as scientific as I want to believe I am.

Like, say, salt.

We’re not fancy people with highly-refined palates around here, so for most of the things that come out of our kitchen it honestly makes zero difference if you use Plain Old Mass-Produced or Super Fancy Hand-Harvested salt – nobody will turn their nose up at the plain-stuff, or even notice if you switch to the fancy-stuff.

So scientifically speaking, it’s a better deal for me to pick up my salt in 5 or 10 pound bags from Costco than to buy anything “fancy” for us.

Then this happened: A while ago, our weekly veggie delivery folks offered to add a little bag of smoked salt to our basket for an extra $7.

At first I was (predictably) all, “Pfffft, seriously? Smoked. Salt. For seven dollars. Just, wow. You know what? I have a smoker – I could totally make my own damned ‘smoked salt.’ Pffffffft. Whatever, guys.”

But at the same time, I was…intrigued. Just how much flavor would they actually be able to get into salt? What would it be like? Plus of course the smoker is really the husband’s domain, and neither of having any idea what ‘smoked salt’ is supposed to taste like, we’d probably do it all wrong and think we hated it…

So eventually my curiosity got the best of me, and I paid the extra seven bucks to add it to the weekly basket.

It was…amazing. I was smitten with this stuff. At first I just sprinkled it on steaks and such, but then in a moment of wild abandon – and knowing full well that it is meant to be used as a ‘finishing’ salt on things rather than as an ingredient – I used it in some mashed potatoes I was making. #Rebel

Oh. MY. Gahd.

So good. So good. The flavor was not so intense that it made the smashed spuds “weird” on their own, but intense enough that suddenly I had a side dish that didn’t end up as a bland, tasteless side dish for my BBQ roast.

Man, it was on after that. I started using it for all kinds of things. Rubs for meats. Broths for soups. Sprinkled on green beans. Mixed into a ‘basic’ vinaigrette salad dressing.

Pretty soon the little bag was empty, and I was all, “Oh well. It was fun while it lasted…” – but somehow, I found myself circling around the Jacobsen website looking for more of the stuff. Because it is like CRACK, y’all.

Man oh man. They have an awful lot of tempty things. Habanero infused salt. Truffle infused salt. And yes, the cherrywood-smoked salt.

But the tempty nature of their goods wasn’t what got me to take out my credit card and place an order.

What did was watching a couple of their videos about how they go about making their salts.

Dear Scientific Reasoning: You lose.

Dear Jacobsen: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. 

Sigh.

I am a class A-1 sucker for things like this. You show me a guy using a hand tool to scrape the newly-formed salt out of the evaporation bed into a bin to finish drying, and I am hooked. Same thing with candies, if I’m watching somebody laboriously hand-fold the taffy, I’m immediately shoving money at them.

And also making myself sick by shoveling the taffy into my face as fast as I can.

Scientifically speaking, I know that “table salt” is just NaCl – sodium-chloride. Whether it comes from the sea or a mine, whether it is generated by the ounce or the ton, it’s still the same basic chemical compound – what makes one salt taste different from another is actually “impurities,” trace minerals that are hitching a ride with the basic NaCl combination.

So by and large, whether you harvest it by hand from the Pacific Ocean or use an enormous machinated set of pumps and pipes to mine it up from underground deposits, if what you’re making is “plain white salt,” it’s going to be scientifically the same.

And I also know that I could totally make my own “infused” salts. C’mon. Have you MET me? Have you SEEN my pantry, with row after row of Mason jars full of homemade flavored vinegars, vanillas and so forth?!

But emotionally, I am completely enthralled by someplace like Jacobsen, a tiny little company only five years old that goes about getting salt from the Pacific Ocean basically exactly like I did back when I lived a lot closer to it…and had a lot more free time on my hands.

It gets me because I really enjoy that kind of work. Few things are more pleasurable than the feeling of doing something like that for yourself – sure, it’s hard work that nobody seems willing to do anymore, but to me it’s one of the best feelings in the world.

It’s physical. It’s primal. It makes you feel grounded somehow, and super competent at this whole living thing. It makes me feel as though the modern age doesn’t really own me – that I am a part of the same earth my ancestors walked.

And in these days when you look at something in the grocery store and have no idea where it came from, or what’s really in it, being able to say I am 100% certain there is NOTHING SCARY in that, because I made it with these hands is a surprisingly deep comfort.

Everything else may be going to hell, but at least I know that THIS MARINADE was made with 100% Real Things…therefore obviously, EVERYTHING is going to be ooooookayyyy…

Somehow, the idea of my salt being made that slow, labor-intensive way makes me…happy.

Not quite as happy as it would make me to do it my damned self, but, close.

Which makes the higher price tag worth it, even though scientifically speaking, that’s absolute nonsense.

Oh well – I guess it just proves that I’m still, you know, human. That there are things I value more than math, or money…that I’m not in too much danger of becoming a heartless, soulless machine who always does the best-for-my-bottom-line thing even if it isn’t the best thing for the emotional well-being of myself and others.

So I guess I’m OK with my occasional outbursts of irrational, unscientific decision making.

Yup.

Uh-huh.

Soooooooooooo…if Jacobsen could just get that comparatively-insanely-expensive jar of cherrywood-smoked salt here, like, now-ish, that’d be greaaaaaaaaaat…

(Seriously. It is like crack. But, you know, in a good way.)

Father’s day, and EVERY day

It seems a bit unfair that these kinds of things only get posted once a year, because being an awesome dad is definitely one of those “every single day in every single way” kinds of things.

But at the same time, I suppose it would get a bit tiresome if I went on and on and on about how awesome a father the husband is all the time.

Because he is an awesome father, every day.

There’s all the usual “good father” stuff: When they were small, he would sing them awake in the morning with silly songs he made up on the fly; he would settle them down for the night with stories made up from words they would toss out to him.

And he faced even the nastiest of diapers with unflinching strength.

And we used CLOTH diapers for quite a while, gang. <= +500 Amazing Points for dealing with that added Nasty Factor.

He takes them for haircuts and dentist appointments.

He watches really lame movies with them.

Runs them to the mall when they want to meet up with friends and Mom is all, “Nope, no way, huh-uh, I have so damned much to do today plus you have no idea how tired I am because blah-blah-blah-40-minutes-of-whiny-lecturing…”

But that’s just, you know, the everyday-life stuff.

There’s so much more, the things that they don’t even realize he does for them…yet. But someday, they’re going to look back and realize just how much he did for them, and they’re going to realize just how much of their self-confidence and self-love come from these things.

Things like holding them accountable for their grades and behavior not in the “because it is all about me, and I don’t like it” way, but in the “because you are smart and capable, so, don’t act like you aren’t” way that reinforces the message that above all else, he believes in them.

Telling them they can too do or be something when they felt like they couldn’t.

Listening to them and giving them both his council, and his permission to disagree – so they never had to be afraid to tell him what they really-truly believe, or how they felt about something…because they instinctively knew that even if he didn’t agree with them, they wouldn’t lose his love and support.

He showed them what a good man – a good person – looks like. Loyal to his friends and family. Incredibly honest. Strong in all the right ways. Protecting and providing for his family without demanding constant worship for it.

He has taught them that being loving and respectful toward his wife does not mean trading in his man-card and becoming some kind of emasculated, subservient creature. That having an equal partnership can work, and work well.

And that no matter what they might see on TV or hear from their friends, it is not “just the way men are” for them to raise either their voice or their hand to their family, even when they are really upset about something.

I wish every kid could have a guy like him for their father; I truly believe the world would become a much better place if they could.

Happy Father’s day, honey. You really are a kick-ass dad, and the best husband a wife could have.

Apparently, delivery people do not appreciate porch snakes

I think…Sir Geoffrey of Doughnut has given up.

Oh. That’s our gopher snake.

Yes. We named the snake. Because for a while there, he was hanging out on the porch rather frequently, and eventually it started feeling rather rude to keep calling him, “AHHHHHH!!!!!!!” or “Git, dammit” and such.

So I started calling him Geoffrey and the kids a) wanted to call him Doughnut and b) felt that a name like ‘Geoffrey-with-a-G’ required some kind of knightly title, soooooooo, we compromised.

ANYWAY.

He hasn’t been out on the porch for quite some time now.

Probably because of the delivery lady.

SEE…a couple weeks ago, I was sitting here at my desk wrapping up my work day when suddenly…I heard this positively bloodcurdling scream that sounded like it could have been coming from inside the house.

Needless to say my curiosity was piqued.

So I jumped to my feet, ran to the front door and threw it open.

There’s the big old truck, and a lady huddled on the far side of it screeching and hollering and pointing, and I looked where she was pointing and there’s Sir Geoffrey.

And he was PISSED. I don’t know if he was dozing and she startled him awake, or possibly stepped on or very near him or what, but man, he was putting on a real show before I even opened the door.

Usually, Sir Geoffrey is a real chill dude. I have a habit of going through doors like a bull charging the red cape, so I was constantly launching myself out the doorway and then realizing that I was practically stepping on him out there – and he’d never gone into that kind of performance for me. Shoot, half the time, he’d just sort of raise his head a little bit, regard me sleepily for a moment, and then give a shrug of his non-existent shoulders and hie it for the rosemary bushes before I could go get the broom to shoo him off.

“Oh. Hey. How’s it goin’. Some weather we’re having lately, huh? Welp! that’s enough chit-chat for me today, later!” {slither-slither-slither}

If you’ve never seen a gopher snake doing their best defensive show, it can be…quite the experience. What they do is a really good impersonation of a rattlesnake. They wriggle their tail like they’re rattling, and simultaneously make a hissing noise that, depending on the skill of the actor, can sound an awful lot like a rattlesnake. They suck in air to make themselves look bigger, coil up and raise their heads like a viper, and even – get this – flatten their heads from their normal ‘capsule’ shape into a more triangular shape.

For bonus points, they don’t back down readily, either. They’ll often keep up the show until you leave, and even make strikes at you all viper-style.

I could be wrong and I’m too lazy to Google it, but I have a hunch it comes down to the fact that they are not particularly fast moving snakes: They aren’t going to be able to outrun much of anything, so their best chance at getting out of the situation alive is going to be making the predator run for it.

This probably works really well on things like hawks, coyotes and other such predators…but with man, well, we go get the shovel and KILL the bastard.

Which is a shame, because honestly-truly, they are a good kind of snake to have around. We’d be hip-deep in rodents without them, and given the choice I’ll take a gopher snake over {shudder} delta rats ANY day of the week.

But I digress.

So there’s Sir Geoffrey, and he’s all, “I am a scary rattlesnake! You’d better run! Seriously! You’d better! Watch as I flatten my head and make it all triangle-shaped! Ooooooh, so scary!…why are you not running yet…?”

And the delivery lady is still screeching and carrying on, so I reassuringly yelled, “Hang on, I’ll take care of it!”, grabbed my broom and started sweeping the porch.

Sir Geoffrey and I have an understanding, see. He figured out real quick that if he didn’t skeedaddle, the broom would start sweeping right under his tail.

So he gave me one last really disgusted look…slithered lazily off into the rosemary bushes, where he skulked for a moment before making his way along the house and zip! under the fence into the backyard.

The Great Snake Menace thus resolved, I turned back to the poor delivery lady and hollered, “IT’S OK, HE’S GONE NOW!”

She stood up, executed a perfect Picard Maneuver™, and hollered back, “OH no, I am not going anywhere near that thing! You come over here and get it!”

I can’t say that I blame her at all.

So I obediently trotted over and collected my box of vitamins and told her about Geoffrey: that he’s just a harmless gopher snake, he won’t hurt you, more hiss than bite, blah blah blah.

She was not one bit convinced.

And I tell you what: When she put that van in gear? She lit out of the court like she had topped it off with jet fuel that morning. Vroom!

…and I haven’t seen hide nor hair…er…scale of Sir Geoffrey anywhere in the front yard since.

Or that delivery lady, come to think of it.

…hmmmmm…

The San Joaquin County Wilderness Report

So, I was in the bathroom (because where else would I be) when suddenly Eldest came bursting in going, “Mom! Mom?! – there’s a snake on the porch. A big one.”

I took a moment to contemplate this information.

We don’t actually see very many snakes around here anymore. I probably see a lot more of them than anybody else in the house, because I spend more time out in the yard – and mostly what I see is the flick of a tail skedaddling back under the fence into the ranches on the other side.

And they’re almost never more than 1-2 feet long from tip of tongue to whip of tail.

So I was chuckling to myself a little bit as I dutifully tromped downstairs to observe the “big” snake, wondering to myself why it was that just about every human ever has categorized any snake big enough to be seen with the naked eye as being “big.” 

And then I looked out the front window and thought, Dang…you know what? She’s right. That’s a decent-sized snake right there.

I’ll admit that for a moment, I hesitated.

I’m no herpetologist and thus to me, the difference in body markings between a harmless old gopher snake (which was what I was pretty sure it was) and a super-scary-must-call-animal-control-and-scream-incoherently-until-they-send-somebody-out-to-deal-with-it rattlesnake are not “totally obvious at first glance.”

So even though I’m fairly sure I’d have a better chance at being struck by lightning twice in rapid succession while clutching a winning Super Lottery Ticket in one hand and tickets to Hamilton in the other than to walk outside and find an actual rattlesnake on my front porch – well, let’s just say it would be just my luck to confidently stomp outside to clear off a “gopher snake” and end up in the ER explaining over and over again how I’d managed to take a rattlesnake bite right on the nose.

So I took my time and observed for a bit until I was 200% certain that what I had on my porch was in fact a gopher snake.

And then I spent a few more moments pondering what I wanted to do about it.

I mean, I couldn’t just leave him where he was – it’s a high-traffic area, with a lot of kids pounding to and fro all day and night. The last thing I wanted was for one of the precious little snowflakes to go fleeing home screaming about a “huge” snake, summoning their fathers out with shovels or what-have-you to “dispose” of it.

But at the same time, I didn’t want to really scare him off.

Basically, what I wanted to do was shoo him in the direction of the back yard – because given my preference, I really would like him to stick around.

They eat gophers, y’all. And mice, rats, pigeons, squirrels – just about all the various varmints that like to get into my garden and destroy every last thing growing in it.

And a snake that size? Yeah. He’s a friend.

So I got my trusty broom, went out onto the porch, stood well back from his business end and started sweeping a few inches behind his tail. Snakes can be remarkably delicate, actually – what we consider a “gentle nudge” can really hurt them, so I didn’t want to, you know, actually nudge him with the broom.

He did not like this. He gave me a warning hiss (have you ever heard a gopher snake hiss? it is impressively loud), and pulled back like he was going to take a big old bite out of that broom.

So I pulled it back and we stared each other down for a minute. Then I swept a few more times a little bit further away from his tail and he was all, FINE. Be that way. I didn’t want to be on your stupid porch anyway…

…aaaaaaand he pushed on over to sulk in the rosemary bushes for a little bit while I went back inside and we all peered at him through the window.

Once he was sure the coast was clear, he casually made his way along the front of the house and zip! under the fence into the backyard.

Yessssssssssss!

I hope you find fertile hunting grounds back there, my friend – please, take two gophers, no, no, I insist…

I was starting to think it would never come…

I have never been so glad to see 2:00 in the afternoon arrive as I was today.

Close the books on this one, boys, it’s quittin’ time on a Friday…

These last several weeks have been a constant rollercoaster ride, but this week took that madness just that little bit further.

For one thing, my boss was off doing all-day boss-stuff in a different state for the first half of the week, which coincidentally was right when ALL HELL was breaking loose across ALL the tenants.

Nothing I couldn’t handle, Dog be praised, but it was exhausting. It was one of those weeks where it felt like everybody was just sitting there, gazing intently at the screen, waiting for my little light to go green indicating I was online.

{ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping!}

Same thing when I tried to grab even a few minutes to stuff some food into my face.

{ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping!}

Eighteen messages blinking forlornly at me. “hey, when u get back, PING ME. URGENT.”

Plus, the meetings. OHmyGAHD, the meetings. I honestly think I spent about 85% of my time in meetings from Monday through the end of Thursday.

Many of them meetings that were not on my calendar when I first got to work in the morning.

In related news, I absolutely despise That Thing where you’re sitting there minding your own business, possibly thinking, whew, finally, a little BREAK in the meetings, I can ACTUALLY get some WORK done now, I’ve got, like, 45 whole minutes until the next one starts!,

…and then suddenly, a meeting reminder pops up as the ‘new email’ sound goes off and that’s right, somebody just dragged you into a meeting that is already going on, which is NEVER good news…

And. It.Just. Kept. Happening., all week. AND-AND-AND! Why were they dragging me into it? BECAUSE! They wanted me to just walk in and basically do presentations about increasingly esoteric parts of systems I don’t technically work on.

{throws laptop across the room}

I’m sorry, we are experiencing some technical issues, please try again later…

And then there was all kinds of Denizen Drama – “come get me I’m sick,” dentist appointments, “can you give me and a few of my friends rides to everywhere, and then back again?” and “hey, can my friend come over because {long, sad story about how her parents can’t even right now and she needs food, shelter and the loving presence of a benevolent parental figure so why the @^*&@ would you have them come HERE, you little twerp?!…er…I mean, of course, darling, I’d be delighted to pretend to be a benevolent, loving mother-figure…}”, AND, being informed of Major School Events the night before they happened, which naturally is after I agreed to swap on-call duties for that night which is why EVERYTHING blew up about half an hour before I was supposed to run him over there for The Big Event…

{rubs temples}

Sometimes, I really do question my life choices. And those times usually coincide with exactly this kind of thing, where something happens in production and I have to drop everything and rush around like a crazy-person dealing with it.

It makes it really hard to maintain a consistent work/life balance, you know? When the system is crashing, I can hardly tell ten thousand users who are trying to provide services for hundreds of thousands of customers that they’ll all just have to lump it, because I’m busy right now.

I coulda been, like, an accountant. Or a bartender. But ooooooooh no, I wanted to go into IT…

All of which was capped off by my boss casually tossing out, “Hey, so, this bunch of boss-stuff that I currently do? Yeahhhhhh, I’m gonna need you to start taking that over for me. And also this stuff. Actually, we need to talk, because I have some plans for you and I think you’ll really like it because, well, there’s a lot of growth opportunity if you want it but anyway, we’ll talk later…”

…and then vanishing so we never actually chatted about it.

Great.

It’s either nothing, or it’s huge.

…I’ll just sit here coming up with increasingly unlikely scenarios all weekend then, shall I…?

Sigh.

Yeah.

I’m really glad this week is over now.

Turn off the alarm. Bring on the junk food.

I am beyond ready.

Meanwhile, on Lifestyle of the Poor and Stupid

Y’ALL…I am having one helluva run lately.

EXHIBIT A, from last month (and the only one I have pictorial evidence of):

Now, what I would love to be able to report is that, say, I came out from doing the grocery shopping and just found the side of my van smashed in like that.

Or that somebody rammed into us at a stop sign, because they were doing something really stupid like trying to text a selfie to themselves or some-such.

Or even that I just came out one morning and found that Homer had gotten into a dispute with another minivan over females (there is a rather sexy Corvette across the street that I suspect may be going into heat).

But this is not what happened.

What happened was…I hit a tree.

I

HIT

A

MOCHA-FUDGING

TREE.

…I just…can’t even…I have been driving for a bit over thirty years. I have by my rough estimation driven almost a million miles without a single “at-fault” accident to my record; six vehicles that were each over 200K miles before they went to the great Car Hereafter, adjusted down a bit in deference to the fact that most of them were also driven by the husband for at least some of those miles.

AND, I have been driving ‘extra long’ vehicles like full-sized or minivans for over twenty of those years. It’s not like I am not keenly aware of how much more vehicle there is after the driver’s seat has passed something. Or new to the peculiar geometry involved in piloting same, where the rear of your vehicle has a nasty habit of turning not exactly independently of the front end, but definitely on a different trajectory than you might expect.

But, I misjudged my clearance of that stupid tree. It’s planted right at the edge of a rather narrow driveway (like, “parking lot => sidewalk => let’s plant the tree HERE, literally IN the CURB!”), where you have to make a very sharp right turn to get onto the street. And I thought I was clear of it, but, well, I wasn’t.

For bonus points, at the time? I thought I’d bumped the tree. You know, lightly. I winced and thought, Ugh…more scratches…well, hopefully they’ll buff out, but, you know, eh, they’ll be in good company, poor old Homer has TONS of dings and scratches already…

Then I got home, walked around and looked at it, my chin hit the driveway and I may have uttered a few choice words that peeled the paint even more. And then I was all, “I can’t call the insurance company. I just can’t. There is no way I can say the words ‘I hit a tree’ and live…the embarrassment will kill me…”

But eventually I did  and about a week later…

…it never even happened…

Right around the same time, work was a massive fireball of insanity. We had two releases back to back, we just started using this “automated” deploy tool that involves branching and merging and more merging and nobody really knows how to use the thing because training? naaaaaaaah, it’s INTUITIVE, and the Mandate™ is START USING THIS, IMMEDIATELY!, sooooooo, we did and inevitably, somebody really screwed it up.

…so then after that 2/26 release, the code in production was this weird meld of the 2/19 release and the 2/26 release and ?????????? release (October, I think) that had somehow gotten ported into the branch for 2/26…ugh, what a mess.

We’re still finding little…Easter eggs…all up and down the stack. Most of them minor irritations, but a few of them really, REALLY bad.

Like, deleted almost ALL of the profitability records, and mangled the ones it didn’t delete levels of bad.

{beats head on desk to ease pain}

Meanwhile in other news, our Sharepoint site – the entire site, calendars, wiki pages, documentation, ALL of it – vanished. Because another group decided to move it.

Well, parts of it.

Secretly, they were hoping nobody would notice and they would be able to allow everything they didn’t move to delete itself after seven days.

But old Killjoy over here noticed by 5:35 a.m. the very first day after they pulled this stunt, OH YES I DID.

And was on the horn screaming, “YOU WILL PUT IT BACK, ALL OF IT, RIGHT. NOW., DO YOU HEAR ME?!?!” by 5:38.

…geez, woman, people in China can hear you, calm down…

MEANWHILE, the Happy Hooligans were busy smashing the current branch of our handy-dandy, super-intuitive, this will make it so that NOTHING will EVER go wrong again during a deploy software.

Which then took about four days to untangle.

In the meantime, both my desktop and my laptop pitched massive hissy-fits and demanded maintenance. NOW.

{most of a precious weekend day spent running diagnostics / removing ancient software / reviewing the whackity-gazillion things that had inserted themselves into “on startup” loading} (on the plus side, both machines now boot in a fraction the time they used to take, and neither has given us a blue screen since)

Then we had an exhausting two-for-one event last weekend, with a BCP (<= “business continuity plan”, a.k.a., “let’s pretend that our production servers all simultaneously exploded and we had to switch over to the backup servers in the farm that is about 850 miles away from them!”) exercise and a huge patching event that rolled through darn near every server in Wholesale, and I was online an “extra” twenty hours between Friday night and Sunday afternoon.

Which was why my boss collared me Monday morning as I was pulling my favorite pot on my head so I could go joust some more windmills and said, “Hold it! You. Pick a day this week, and take most of it off.”

So after consulting the calendar, I picked today. I logged off by 9:30 in the morning, got my nails done and my bangs trimmed, and even got myself a treat at McDonalds on the way home.

It’s a beautiful, sunny day out here today, the birds are singing, the puddles from last week’s storms are all dried up, it’s not too hot and not too cold and I was thinking to myself, “Sweet! I still have, like, four hours before I have to pick up the Denizens! I can start working on the backyard, turn the water on and find all the busted manifolds, start rebuilding the beds we tore apart for the construction last year…it’ll be fantastic to get outside!”

…oh, but first, I’m going to clean this kitchen, ye gods, what a DISGUSTING mess..!

Scraped the first plate, flipped on the disposal, aaaaaaaaaaaand…[BLURRRRRRRRRGGGGGGLEEEEEEEEE!]

Water came welling up in the other sink. Nasty, blackened water with all manner of ick in it. Way more water than seemed even possible. Like, not just the water that I had put into the other sink, but like there was some kind of “let’s divert the creek water into that sink over there!” amounts of water.

I let out a screech that could be heard from space. Turned off the water and stood there watching in horrified fascination as the water continued to rise in the other sink. Breathed a sigh of relief as it started to ever so slowly stop rising and start draining again.

…and then I heard the unmistakable sound of a waterfall coming from under the sink. Threw it open and sure enough, the water wasn’t draining out the pipes, it was just happily creating a new lake for all its muck to splash around in under the sink.

You know those moments when you just kind of stand there for a second, mesmerized by something that is unfolding in front of you even as another part of your brain is screaming, “QUICK, YOU IDIOT! GET SOMETHING UNDER THAT! DON’T JUST STAND THERE WATCHING IT! MOVE-MOVE-MOVE!!”?

…but you can’t, all you can do is just stand there, like this?

Yeah.

Totally one of those moments.

About an hour later, there was a poor, underpaid-no-matter-how-much-he-makes guy currently rooting around under my nasty swamp-imbued kitchen sink forcing cables and jets of water and large machinery that goes “RRRRRUM-RUTTA-RUTTA-RUTTA-THUMP-THUMP!!” through the pipes that exit through the back of the sink.

Because hahahahaha, no, of course it wasn’t a “simple” case of the trap being full! Hahahahahahahahaha, no, it was some BIG, REALLY-SOLID clog somewhere MUCH further down the line!

{pours rum into soda, takes a very large sip}

Well, I was going to go work outside in the garden today…and I actually still could get an hour or two out there if I really wanted to…but frankly, I kind of don’t.

The deploy I’m not technically attending starts in an hour, the Denizens are popping in and out of my office like sideways jack-in-the-boxes, and I feel way more frazzled and on-edge than seems reasonable right this minute.

Like I expect to look over my shoulder and see an actual, living tiger staring at me meaningfully.

GAH!!!!!!!!

Oh.

Wait.

That’s just the cat.

Who is now meowing loudly because I glanced her direction, which hopefully means that I’m going to drop everything and feed her. Like, right-now.

Sigh.

My life, man. It’s just a never-ending cycle of thrilling adventure lately…

…you had ONE JOB…

For some reason, I have been really bothered by something lately. Not like, you know, my whole life’s focus has narrowed down to this ONE THING kind of really bothered, but still…bothered.

And it’s this: Somewhere out there, right this minute, someone is being paid actual money to come up with a subject line for an email campaign.

And that person, after due consideration, is going to come up with something along the lines of, “HURRY!!! ONLY FOUR MORE DAYS TO SAVE!!!!!!”

Or, “You won’t BELIEVE the DEALS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

…really…? That was your best shot?

…really-really…?

Maybe it’s just me, BUT…well. Put it this way: I have a handful of half-arsed rules set up in Outlook to catch “obviously spam advertisements” that my gray mail tool can’t seem to identify. 

The out-of-the-box gray mail scanner gets maybe 10% of the junk.

My handful of rules get about 85% of it.

Which is another whole rant, ESPECIALLY if we factor in how often the ‘professionally designed by actual email-coding-people’ scanner MISSES the spam but decides one of my ACTUAL HUMAN FRIENDS is CLEARLY a dangerous entity who needs to be BLOCKED…but let’s stay on topic for now.

Every time I take the fast-scan through the junk folder my rules automatically move those things to, I get perversely irritated about not the fact that they exist in the first place…or the fact that I feel obligated to at least glance at them in case I accidentally shunted aside an actual email from an actual person…no.

It’s that the thought inevitably occurs to me: Somebody was paid to come up with a subject line for that spam, and proceeded to come up with one that was so cookie-cutter that my half-arsed Outlook rules could identify it immediately as being, well, spam.

You had ONE JOB, man: Come up with a subject line that would catch my attention and make me go, “Huh, that might actually be worth opening…”

…and you came up with “HURRY!!! ONLY FOUR DAYS LEFT TO SAVE!!!!!” (<= two string-based rules broken, “starts with ‘hurry’”and “more than two exclamation points in a row”, tsk-tsk-tsk…)

Now granted, it wouldn’t be easy to come up with an endless supply of clever, interesting subject lines for such campaigns. There’s only so many ways to say “we are having a sale on stuff! you should totally check it out!”

And also there’s the fact that I often fail to remember that not everybody in America shares my interest in language.

I mean, I use words like ‘obfuscatate’ in work emails. <= exactly like that, with a hyperlink to the definition so nobody has to ’fess up if they have no clue what it means.

BUT, the one thing I do know is that everybody else is just like me: If you’ve ever bought even one thing online? => you’ve got a zillion-and-five spam emails coming a week. 

I cannot possibly be the only person who has become downright glassy-eyed about it. Or the only person who doesn’t even pause to look at which retailer is sending them. The subject starts with ‘Hurry!!!’? nope, we’re DONE here…{delete}

C’mon guys. Hire some people who know how to make words sing. Give some aspiring novelists a day job. Give ME a break.

And who knows? Maybe you might even get one or two more of the elebenty-gazillion people whose inboxes are bloating up with these things to actually open it, if only in the hopes that the ad-text won’t be the usual blend of ‘exciting’ ‘fashionable’ ‘best prices of the year’ every other ad has been for the last forever plus fifteen years…

My new hobby is apparently keeping the neighbors guessing

Soooooo…I’ve needed to make a Costco run for a couple weeks now. We were out of sugar, salt, baking powder, peanut butter – pretty much all the basic building blocks of modern life.

Plus we were also dangerously low on coffee. Hel-LO, just found a little MOTIVATION…

But as usual, I kept finding it remarkably hard to actually get around to doing it.

It is, after all, not exactly a “quick” and/or “easy” trip for me. Everything is heavy, it always ends up taking a full two hours (usually more like three) no matter how carefully I plan the invasion shopping trip, and then I end up with a dangerously overloaded cart that creates a minor panic as I approach the checkout lines because, well, they see me rollin’, they hatin’… 

Eventually it got to be so ridiculous that I once again tried to figure out how I could do the fax-n-pull thing. I mean, c’mon: They’re always telling me that I could and should just fax my order over, and they’ll pull it all for me, and then I just show up, pay and lug it all home. It would save a ludicrous amount of time and aggravation for me.

While I was clicking around looking for the instructions-which-do-not-exist for doing this, I stumbled on an interesting little bit of not-at-all-recent-news: Google Express offers delivery from…Costco.

…o rly…?

Now, I will admit right up front that I initially looked at the $4.99 charge for the delivery and balked out of pure habit.

…and then four more days went by and the coffee situation was looking a little desperate and the Denizens were whining about there being no sugar and I was using weird things in my coffee because, well, no sugar and I went fine.

It took me exactly sixteen minutes to put in my order.

And then two days later a large truck rumbled up, a burly gentleman wheeled five enormous boxes and two large bags up to the door, tipped his hat and roared off again.

It took me about an hour to get enough time between meetings to nick out to the front door and haul the boxes into the house.

It took considerably less time for the neighbors to have noticed that basically my entire porch was barricaded by enormous boxes.

They were congregated across the street chatting, and then my front door opened and I started hefting the boxes – which were very heavy, I might add – into the house.

All chatting ceased.

They stood there and watched me wrestling the things into the house.

Clearly dying of curiosity.

But probably a little afraid to ask.

I waved cheerfully as I hefted the last big sack into the house, and they waved back…somewhat trepidatiously.

Most of them have shared this court with us for a looooooong time now. They have seen me stringing brightly-dyed skeins of yarn out to dry, watched an enormous greenhouse start to be built aaaaaand then not end up being finished, they have been victimized by my better years of gardening (“someone is at the door” “OMG, don’t open it, it’s the crazy zucchini-lady again!!!”), they witness the continual stream of children pouring in and out of Homer the Odyssey every day after school (because I appear to have gotten a second job as a free taxi service for every kid in the neighborhood), and so forth and so on.

They know I’m completely insane, in other words. Oh, but in a NICE way, hahahaha…hahaha…haha…ahem…

They daren’t ask what in the world I just had delivered.

…but I know they are just dying to ask…

Gold stars and dorky outfits

YOU KNOW THOSE DAYS…when you’re sitting there…in a meeting…and someone says “we want you to do this absolutely ridiculous thing that is totally unnecessary and will have such a high cost in resources that we might as well just give up and go back to carving hieroglyphs onto rocks because it probably would be faster”…and you look at them and go:

…and then you go, “blah blah blah resources etc. etc. performance yadda yadda seriously, man, that’d be, like, ‘can’t even USE the thing anymore’ levels of bad…

And then they go, welllll i mean i doan wanna tell u wat u biz-niz iz, dawg, BUT…!

…and proceed to tell you that they “tested” this hypothesis by comparing something totally different from what you’re talking about (includes Ridiculous Thing, but not most of the whackity-gazillion OTHER things the newer system does) vs. what you are talking about sorta-kinda…in an environment with two users / almost-zero data, aaaaaaaaand…they can prove that there is exactly no performance impact from doing the twelve-pass crazy-cake of repeated-calling-to-the-server-over-and-over-again that they totally NEED to do.

And then they’re all like this because they are so sure they just checkmated you…

…and you’re all like this because up close you it really looks like The Stupids here are EPIC in size, which clearly can’t be true because you know that these are not stupid people…

…and the rest of your team are all like this…

…because they know you’re about to tilt another windmill?

{…puts pot on head, picks up ruler and charges into battle…}

Yeah. Three times this week.

In related news, I feel I deserve a damned medal for not losing my temper OR my patience, and for not laying a verbal smack down on the offender that would have had his ancestors back to seven or eight generations nursing a headache.

It would have been counterproductive…team-destroying-instead-of-team-building…widening the rift between Business and Tech when we’ve all worked so hard to bring us closer to each other…

…BUT STILL, IT WOULD HAVE MOMENTARILY FELT AWESOME.

But, no. I resisted. I minded my manners. I remained cheerful and helpful and go team! as I went about shutting THAT noise down.

Because I…am an adult.

Also because I was successfully Adulting this week, every single day this week, I went straight from work-work into house-work, even though I could totally have played some Warcraft or something instead and nobody would have been around to call me on it.

My kitchen actually looks…not scary. The bathrooms aren’t completely disgusting. There is less dust on things. The carpets got vacuumed. Dinners were made and served before, like, 9:30 at night.

I am so awesome I don’t even know how to describe it right now.

{puts eight gold stars on Adulting chart from Creatively Katherine, who apparently actually does all kinds of creative home-making things that I think about doing, but then never actually do because it requires things like ‘creativity’ and ‘effort’ – and also because my decorating theme these last few years has apparently been “unkempt barn populated entirely by feral animals”}

AND THEN, I went to the husband’s company party and did Social Things, and I even stayed in the room and did social-stuff instead of sneaking out to hide somewhere like I usually do.

{puts another three dozen gold stars on chart}

Which reminds me, this is the outfit I put together for the husband’s company party last night…because I hate shopping for dresses but can spend any amount of time oogling “cool” and “interesting” fashion choices. All of it came from Amazon except that little leather pouch, which I got about ten thousand years ago from the Oberon Design booth at Ren Faire. The husband already had the tophat and coat from his Dickens Fair days, so we got him a pair of goggles to put on the hat, a white vest and cravat, and a new pants and shoes. I think he looked rather dashing.

Yeah. We’re a pair of dorks. But we have an awful lot of fun with it. Also, I suck at doing “solemn” pictures. I just can’t seem to not get the giggles, every time I try. Sigh.

ANYWAY…I figure at this point I have done all the Adulting necessary to completely fill up three of those charts, and therefore I get three rewards, all of which involve loafing, goofing off and otherwise not Adulting.

YAY, ADULTING!

(The outfit is actually very simple and not terribly expensive to put together: One steampunk-ish bodice, a ruffly-shirt, one long black skirt and one long white one, a tie-on “bustle” thing [“…does this make my butt look big…?”], a clip-on hat, and a pair of  “Victorian-ish” boots…the total cost was around $160, which wasn’t too bad for “semi-formal” eventwear. It certainly isn’t “authentic” steampunk, but this wasn’t an “authentic” steampunk event, so, whatever) (I also had a big black lace shawl I knit a few years ago from a delicious wool yarn a very sweet coworker bought for me as a going away present when my contract with the company was up…but I’d shed it by the time we were taking these pictures because it got warm in there.)

I don't wanna shop no more

IMMA JUST GONNA SAY IT (again): I hate shopping for clothes.

The only thing I hate more than clothes shopping in general is shopping for dresses.

And the only thing worse than shopping for dresses in general is shopping for a specific kind of dress.

Like, say, something to wear to a black-and-white “affair.”

…if somebody could just, like, stab me right now, that’d be awesome. I mean, don’t kill me or anything, that’d be bad, but, you know, just wound me badly enough that I can honestly say, “Aww, gosh, I’m so sorry that I couldn’t attend le soiree, but I am just completely laid up right now…”

I’m pretty sure it would be less painful than trying to shop for a new dress.

FIRST OF ALL…when exactly did “sleeves” become taboo? Seriously. It is January, people. I am not going to go prancing around in a sleeveless little confection with my goose-pimples playing peekaboo with $DEITY and everybody.

I am one of those people who starts whining that it feels awfully cold in here when the temperature drops below about 70 degrees, and escalates the whining to a continual, high-pitched drone if it goes any lower than that.

YES, I AM A SPOILED-ROTTEN CALIFORNIA BABY. I AM CURRENTLY WEARING TWO SHIRTS AND A SWEATER AND A VEST AND IT IS A ‘TOASTY’ 65 DEGREES AND EVERYBODY WHO LIVES ANYWHERE THAT HAS ACTUAL WINTER IS LAUGHING HYSTERICALLY AT ME AND I DON’T CARE.

I’m cold, dammit.

If I weren’t also cheap, I would so have cranked up the heater by now.

But I digress.

Sleeveless sheathes of floaty-chiffon = OUT.

SECONDLY, do you know what I do not need? A slit in my dress extending all the way up to my darned crotch.

Just, no.

Nor do I feel any particular need to wear a dress whose entire corset area is see-through. I mean, really now. Nobody wants to be resting their eyeballs on my ever-so-alluring grandma-bras, people. NOBODY.

Oh, there’s a half-way decent…seven-hundred-and-how-many-bucks?!-yeah-ok-no-NEXT!!!

Argh.

Look. It’s very simple: I just want something black and/or white that is pretty but not too short, too revealing, too old-lady-ish, flattering to a body that hasn’t completely given up all hope of being female, buuuuuuut also admittedly has a bit of (ahem) mileage on it.

And isn’t, you know, boring.

Like maybe this. Only in black and white. Because, black and white event, duh.

Or since it’s a kinda formal-ish thing, maybe this one. It’s interesting, right?

Hmm, maybe this is a little…much…

No, wait-wait-wait, this is much better…the collar makes this thing…

…no, I have NOT gotten sidetracked, I assure you I am LASER-FOCUSED right now…

OK, maybe a little sidetracked.

Sigh.


…somehow, stabbing myself to get out of going at all to this thing is starting to sound more and more rational…

After the Summit, there is the descent

After a bit of wrangling, my boss managed to get both of us out to Seattle for the week-long Data Nerd Disneyland SQL PASS Summit. He arrived late Tuesday afternoon for the ‘regular’ sessions Wednesday – Friday, and I got here Sunday so that I could also attend the full-day pre-conference sessions in Extreme Nerdiness on Monday and Tuesday.

Which were FANTASTIC. The speakers were excellent, and the information presented…well, usable. Immediately, directly usable on things that have been bugging me for a while now; and a lot of new information for me, which was tremendously exciting.

I’ll be honest, such things are becoming increasingly rare for me personally; when it comes to the basics of my job, anything that falls in the ‘expected knowledge’ for the DEVI – IV range, I not only already know it, I already know it rather thoroughly.

Put it this way: I actually ditched out of a ‘300-level’ seminar earlier today because honestly I was a bit bored (yeah-yeah-yeah, row vs. page compression, c’mon, I know all this…oh, but, clearly I am just about alone in that, because everybody else sure seems to have a lot of questions about it, ugh…maybe I’ll just check the Warcraft auction house app while they all talk amongst themselves for a bit here…) and getting very sleepy / restless, and also between you and me I fall more than a bit onto the “introvert” side of the personality scale so all this networking has been steadily draining me all week.

I mean, I’m a bit a-typical of the breed in that I actually like other people, and enjoy chatting with new people and getting to hear their stories and such – but I do still have that “one way valve” when it comes to interpersonal energy: Always flows out, never back in.

In fact, I often think that it is actually the fact that I do value and care about other people, and am interested in getting to know more of them, that causes the problem for me: I find it impossible to not be keenly aware of allllllll the people who are around me. I’m reading their expressions, tones of voice, body posture and so forth, and can’t seem to help but notice – and then feel obligated to do something about – even the slightest signs of stress or emotional turmoil.

It’s ridiculous and impossible and not technically “my” problem, but, no matter how carefully I try or how logically I explain to myself that I cannot possibly fix every stranger’s problems or help every mildly ticked off person have a better day, I just can’t seem to actually turn off that valve; the best I can manage is to force myself not to actually take action on the impulse, beyond the very small things like letting someone who seems to need a “win” right now go ahead of me in line.

But, you know – it’s OK. I’d rather care too much than not at all, and frankly I have managed to avoid or defuse situations that could have become very-very bad in a hurry precisely because that hyper-sensitivity to another person’s existence tipped me off that they were a walking time bomb of pent-up frustrations and/or sadness and/or rage, sooooooooooo, I wouldn’t really trade it for the sweet peace of typical obliviousness.

But I digress.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, so I’ve already started the process of packing things up to head back home.

It feels good. It’s been a great conference and I’ve had a fantastic time, but I’m definitely reaching the end of my leash in terms of being away from home.

I can handle 2-3 days just fine; 4 days I’m starting to miss the family pretty badly; 5 days and I find myself getting more and more irritable about minor inconveniences and such.

Much beyond that, and I’m probably going to be spending every waking minute grousing to myself about increasingly idiotic non-issues. Probably aloud to myself while scuttling around on city streets trying to find a fast meal that doesn’t give me indigestion or cost me $75.

For example, my internal diatribe this morning in re: the alarm clock in my hotel room, which went something like this:

Gah, I HATE this alarm clock! This snooze button is STUPID-SMALL, and who the hell designed this on/off switch? Damn thing must either need fingers like SAUSAGES or maybe a pair of TWEEZERS to use…also who makes an ALARM clock that goes ‘meep-meep-meep’ like a newborn chick with a sore throat? I’m a developer, dammit, I need something that sounds like a LIGHTHOUSE HORN before it’ll penetrate the ‘I was up until 2:30 in the morning trying to figure something out’ fog!

Yeahhhhh, that’s a pretty strong hint that I am getting a bit past my max-tolerance for not being home.

Still…Seattle is a cool city, even for a California delta-rat like Your Faithful Correspondent; it feels a lot like home for this San Francisco native, but also has its own unique vibe that prevents me from thinking for even a moment that I’m actually stomping around “my” city, or that the water I can see from my hotel window is “my” Bay.

The cities are more like siblings than twins, you know? Similar, but also very unique. Very walk-able, lots of interesting shops and unexpected splashes of color, and Puget Sound is a wonderful place to rest your eyes after a day of staring at computer screens and such. Watching the sun set over the water as ferries scurry to and fro carrying their precious cargo home is somehow a very satisfying way to spend an idle hour. Much more entertaining than whatever the television might have to offer, for sure.

I don’t think I could live here, given that I am solar-powered and prone to “inexplicable” bouts of vague “I dunno why, I’m just kinda blue” sensations when I’m not getting a fair amount of sunlight every day; but it’s definitely a place I could visit again and again without complaints.

And with that, I’m going to get back to packing up all my cords and cables, books and handouts, and other scattered possessions. See y’all back in California tomorrow…

Keeping my eyes peeled

Soooooooo, it’s apple season and I’m cruising the recipe sites for ways to combine carbs and fats and sugars with apple chunks healthy nutritious snacks for the family, and I run across Chewy Caramel Apple Cookies and I’m reading through the recipe and I see in the ingredients the following:

• 20 caramels, unwrapped

And I went, “…wait…”

And I read it again. Yeah. It actually specifies, unwrapped.

For a blissful moment, I snickered as I imagined someone taking twenty plastic-wrapped caramel candies, dropping them into a saucepan and stirring madly to melt them into a glaze.

“Nice cookies, but the glaze has a weird, I dunno, burnt-plastic-y finish…”

Then I suddenly realized: I would totally be that person. I mean, I would love to poke fun at my imaginary noob pastry chef and pretend that I was just far too clever a cook myself to ever do such a thing, but…

…well…

Not terribly long ago, I made this shrimp-rice thing for dinner. You know, one of those “fancy” recipes with the (relatively) expensive sweet sticky rice and Jasmine-hinted blah blah blah almost-a-risotto deals. I was all like, “Yeahhhhhh, that’s right, I could totally win one of those cooking-as-a-full-body-contact-sport deals, ka-POW!” and totally impressed with my own prowess and all…

…until…

…I realized I had made a teeny-tiny oversight in the preparation, which was because I thought the shrimp I bought were already peeled.

They were not.

For bonus points, I did not notice this until I was trying to plate up dinner. So there I was, trying to pick the shrimps out of the very hot and sticky I might add rice so I could attempt to peel them after cooking them.

Have you ever tried to do this? I thought not. It takes a special level of inattention to detail to end up in this kind of situation. And also a high pain tolerance, because hot-hot-hot-OW-dammit-hot-hot-HOT!

I have to wonder: If the recipe I was(n’t really) following had said, “1/2 pound whole shrimp, peeled” – would it have helped? Would it have triggered me to, you know, check, before tossing them into the pan?

I’m honestly not sure.

I just…really believed that the package I bought had said “peeled” on it, somewhere. With the kind of absolute faith usually reserved for the kind of people who would stand there with an actual-literal alien sludge-beast gnawing on their face going, “There is no such thing as alien sludge-beasts! Because they aren’t in the Bible! Ha! CHECKMATE!”

I checked. It totally did not say that. Not even under the big red “50% OFF” sticker.

And yes, I was that desperate for vindication around my unshakeable conviction that those were “supposed” to be pre-peeled shrimp.

I honestly have no idea what exactly goes on inside my own mind sometimes. “Gosh, maybe I had x-ray vision at the time and the ‘pre-peeled’ label was under this one!”? Really, Me?

The tiny sliver of consolation I have is that it did say “E-Z Peel” on the package, which is practically the same as pre-peeled except for the shrimp being TOTALLY NOT peeled at all, and I’m sure it would have been quite an E-Z job if they hadn’t been like red-hot little bundles of super-heated steel nestled in vast quantities of boiling-oil hot sticky sweet rice and finely diced vegetables at the time.

Sigh…well, at least they were deveined.

So, I had that going for me.

In related news, this morning I caught a bug in a system I have absolutely zero direct connection with because I happened to see an error go by in the log files I was checking for another reason altogether.

Over 200,000 records I was scanning with my eyeballs looking for one specific set of keywords => that error jumped out at me and I was all “whoa-whoa-whoa, what?” {scroll-scroll-scroll back up through the text file} “…huh…that’s…a weird one…” {typity-typity-typity} “…ooooooooh, uh-huh, I see what happened there…” {opens new email} “hey guys, you’ve got the framework set up to think Field57 is an INT, it’s actually a GUID, you should probably update that because yeahhhhh, you kinda got blown out of the water last night and got zero updates in your delta, only the inserts and deletes that don’t use that field in their comparison script, you’re welcome.”

This has got to be some kind of super-power. The “ability to simultaneously be a person who will see ‘operand clash’ go by in a blur of fast-scrolling through a log file while looking for ‘XML’ and/or ‘illegal’, and yet, turn right around and be a person who spends a good twenty-thirty minutes enthusiastically stirring a pot of shrimp and rice without noticing the shrimp still have shells and legs on them” power.

Probably one with a big fancy Latin-sounding name I won’t be able to spell.

Betcha.