Digging out

Wow.

Ya know…?

Man.

Yeah.

Today, as not-exactly-promised by the good doctor, I was feeling a lot more like myself. Enough so that I emerged out of my bedroom, walked into my kitchen, and said, “!!!!!!!!!?”

Because holy crap, people. You would not believe the state of this place. It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder what really would happen to these maniacs I live with, if I weren’t around to keep things going.

The bathrooms are in an advanced state of funk. The laundry is still piled up on the dining room table. There is a thick layer of dust on everything. There is crap on the kitchen floor that I’m pretty sure was there last weekend as well.

I’m also fairly certain Captain Adventure hasn’t bathed since I got sick.

The garden is in a pathetic state. The seed potatoes are sprouting merrily on the hutch. The craft table was buried beneath half a ton of stuff that nobody wanted to deal with, soooooo, they brought it up here for me to deal with, later.

The words, “Go put that on mommy’s table, honey” are starting to give me a nervous tic.

Most of the time, I really enjoy my lifestyle…but I have to admit, it’s long on hard work and short on convenience. And when I get behind on things, man, it’s a killer.

And I am behind. Way, way behind.

I should already have things in the ground – I don’t even have three inches that are clear of weeds. I should be ordering a couple cases of canning jars, I still haven’t test canned anything with the samples I got. I should have soap curing, I should have made butter today, I didn’t make bread, I didn’t rack up stuff for dinners this week, which undoubtedly is going to end up meaning either that we’re going to be eating spaghetti with butter sauce or out of a greasy bag at least once this week.

I’ve got stuff waiting to be dyed and stuff I need to weave and stuff I need to wash and stuff I need to put away. Stuff that just needs a nip here, a collar there, a few buttons sewn on. Fabric that needs to be cut into strips so it can be sewn into a rug.

…and work-work to be done, to boot…and I’m behind there, too, thanks to three and a half days out sick…which also leaves me light in the paycheck…argh…!

“Insult, I’d like you to meet my good friend injury – injury, insult!”

Feh.

I know it is a self-inflicted and needless madness; that we have a supermarket less than two miles away and the fact that I won’t have onions ready to harvest in my yard for six long months doesn’t mean there can’t be onions sooner.

It’s just…well. I don’t want to be buying these things when I know I should be able to walk out into my backyard and yank them out of the ground. Heh. It’s like the reverse of the old saying: How will you keep them in gay Paris, when they’ve touched the generous earth?

How will you get us to love what is fast and convenient, when we’ve had the rich satisfaction of growing it from a seed…with blisters and oaths and wondering what went wrong…

It’s funny, really; sometimes, I really wish I could just drop it, and live like everybody else. Watch more TV. Sweat less. Buy things that are ready to use. Get bread in plastic bags and zucchini grown in Mexico – waxed and precious like museum pieces, finely sprayed with water every so often for maximum freshness and to give it that dewy-fresh look that is so appealing to the eye.

But the minute I stomp out in a defiant, I’m a modern woman, dammit, and I have a PAYCHECK and should not have to stoop to Such Things huff to buy-not-make, well.

I don’t get much past the produce section. I look at a stack of perfect, precious carrots, uniform in size, prettily stacked, looking like they’ve never seen a bug’s foot.

It’s an amazing sight to me now, those perfect carrots and flawless onions. I might have one carrot in thirty that looks like something from the supermarket; the rest are oddly twisted, stunted, coiled back around on themselves thanks to the heavy, fertile clay that resists all attempts to lighten it up. And yet at the same time, I think about how the cost of a single carrot would buy the seed for a hundred of them; three onions would buy me a hundred and fifty starts.

And when I pick up a loaf of bread and look at it, I’m taken aback by the way it feels. So soft and squishy, so impossibly light for its size…and when I flip it over and read the ingredients (which you should never do with packaged foods, trust me on that) and find myself trying to puzzle out what polysodamawhichitmathide might be…eh…well…

…maybe I’ll just head on home and start some rising, and be grateful for the tremendous convenience of pre-ground flour…

I have things I want to do this coming year; things that last year I think I got wrong, or could have done better. I want to plan the garden better, and plant it more wisely, and tend it better. I want to be more organized, and less wasteful.

And now I’m two more weeks behind. After a couple weeks where the weather chose to send us sheets of rain on our weekends – and beautiful, sunny weather all week when I was trapped in the office – and the husband’s social life keeping him safely away from helping, well.

I’m not just behind. I’m impossibly behind, and I’m not sure how I can possibly catch back up again.

But there’s really only one thing to do: Keep going. I might not get to do everything I want to do, but it won’t help to sit around moping about it.

So I just keep at it, one small thing at a time. Clean the bathroom, make some soup for dinner, do what can be done and try not to worry too much about all the rest.

And try to be patient with myself, and with time, which never seems to give me enough of itself in a given day, and with life itself…which manages to be so complicated in its simplicity.

Well isn’t that special…

So I saw my doctor yesterday, and he gave me a whack of stuff for my assorted grievances.

There’s a codeine-based cough syrup for the rib-cracking coughs, and a butt-kicking antibiotic that allegedly does in five days that takes a lot of antibiotics two weeks to accomplish. Namely, it kills everything in your whole body…and then lets nature sort things out, you know, later.

And some promethazine. To encourage my stomach to let food happen instead of tossing it straight back up.

I was skeptical. And irritated, because the cough syrup also contains promethazine; which means that I have to do math and keep track of when I took what, and how much of what I took and cumulatively speaking, how many mLs of this-or-that have gone into my system.

Which is a bit harder to do when one has been pounding back the codeine, jest sayin’.

But I was needed to believe in it. My body had been rejecting food for eight long days. I was hungry, exhausted, strung-out, light-headed and beyond irritable.

I needed food. Actually? Not just food. I needed food, dammit.

So I took one of those little pills and, while giving it a little time to work, tried to balance believing with all my SOUL that these little pills would work with a reasonable amount of caution.

It is my firm belief that what any medication will accomplish relies heavily on what we believe it will. If I do not believe that a sleep aid will help my insomnia, well, it generally doesn’t…if I do believe it, it could be nothing more than a tablet of pressed powdered sugar with a little yellow dye added, and it’ll work wonders for me.

But at the same time, chemistry can’t always be overruled by what my brain thinks should be the case. If I swallow antifreeze while firmly believing that it is no more harmful to my body than Gatorade, well…yeah. Still gonna die.

Chemistry can be mean that way.

So I sat there telling myself, firmly, that this was going to work.

And by golly, it did.

It took every last ounce of self-control I had remaining to me not to plow straight into the refrigerator and not lift my head from it until every last scrap of edible material had been sucked into my newly-quiet stomach.

And then I napped. Hard.

This is where I’d love to say that I got up this morning and was feeling so much better that I dug out all the weeds in the garden and did the laundry and put away the dishes and then worked a regular full day before heading off to run a marathon to raise money for abandoned sea turtles.

Eh…not so much. I’d kind of hoped that maybe I’d be feeling a lot better sooner, but apparently my doctor’s guess of two to three days before I started seeing much improvement was more accurate.

I still felt really bleh today. Some of the medication has raised (ahem) other issues, the rest of it makes me a marvelous combination of tired, listless, and brainless.

And doesn’t work on my cough. Makes me more cheerful about my cough (codeine + me = giggles), but I did absolutely zero work today of any kind.

Too busy coughing, you see…

I’ve dozed off in my chair. And played a video game. And tried to read, although my eyes are still kind of fuzzy on me. And tried to work on the cardigan, but what I needed to do kind of needed my eyes not to be going all fuzzy on me every time I try to focus them.

As things turned out, I have a sinus infection, a probable GI tract infection, the possible distant rumblings of a urinary tract infection as well, and a possible if not probable case of pertussis, a.k.a., whooping cough.

Astonishing. Shouldn’t be, but nevertheless is, somehow. I mean, I know I’m not young and that by extension this would mean that vaccinations I have not had “boosted” since I was a child are likewise old. And I know that they can lose efficacy over time. And I even knew that we had a fairly ugly round of pertussis going out here.

And that it was crazy-contagious.

What I hadn’t known was that sometimes, even if you are fully and recently vaccinated, you can still manage to contract pertussis. It’s a virulent, fast-spreading, easily-caught bacteria; it lives a long time outside the body, and has a million ways to get there.

And it hitches a ride for quite a while before you have any inkling that you’re sick; I was probably highly contagious for days before the first symptom hit me.

It’s a wonder any of us survive, you know? A testament, really, to the human body’s ability to take care of things on its own.

Most of the time, anyway.

You know, except when it doesn’t, and instead lets every bacteria it meets just come right on in and make itself at home, breed, fill up all the available spaces, dude, my parents are, like, in Malibu, come on in and PAR-TAY…

I was assured that I should start feeling a lot better in two to three days. And instructed to stay away from people for five days, giving the antibiotic time to kill off the bacteria enough that I won’t be spreading this thing any further than it has already gone.

…sigh…

Well…could always be worse. All things considered, I actually got off pretty light here, and should probably just count my blessings and be glad that…oh…

…OH…

Wait. I forgot something. Yeah. The cough syrup? Yeah. Grape-menthol flavored.

Grape. Frickin’. MENTHOL. What demented lunatic came up with that as a good way to make this stuff palatable? I’ll tell you what kind: A sadist, that’s what kind.

That’s it. I am officially the most abused person in the history of ever.

(Lord-Lord, it is nasty, seriously, abysmally nasty…it is like sucking down used antifreeze, mixed with crushed grape candies or something…UGH…!)

On day seven…

“Hi, you’ve reached the office of Dr. Awesome. If this is a life-threatening emergency, please hang up and dial 911. Otherwise, please leave your name, number and a brief message, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.” {beep!}

“Oh. Uh. Yeah, hi, uh, I think I might need to maybe make an appointment? Yeah, because? I’ve sort of had this thing for a while now? Like, it’s been over seven days, and I think it’s actually getting worse instead of better? But still, I think it’s just the flu so maybe it’s just a waste of time. I dunno. But it isn’t getting better. So, yeah, I think I should probably make an appointment. So, uh, here’s my number, and, uh, yeah. Lemme know if I should come in.”

That’s right. If you look up the word ‘forceful’ in the dictionary, you’ll find me listed there.

Under ‘antonyms.’

{face-desk}

I don’t know which is sadder: How long it takes me to call the doctor in the first place, or how conflicted I still am about the “need” to go.

On the one hand, seven days is a long time to be under the thumb of a germ. It’s just not letting up, not at all. Oh, it acts like it’s going to; I feel better in the mornings and think, A-ha! Finally! I’m getting better!!, and then, right about now every afternoon, WHAM. Covered in sweat, chilled one second, baking the next, whole body feeling like it’s being beaten with sticks, stomach cramps, sinuses exploding, etc. etc. etc.

Also, I haven’t managed to hold onto solid food since last Sunday night. This morning when I put on my jeans, I thought the gap between the waist and my body seemed a little more…generous…than usual: Twelve pounds have come off me since last Monday morning, when I felt just fine and had no idea I’d be kneeling in front of a toilet in a BART station by Monday afternoon.

…if only it were the kind of weight loss that would actually stick, you know? Because sadly, as I suspect we’ve all experienced at one time or another, losing weight this way is usually a very temporary sort of thing. Within hours of hitting the feeding trough again, I’m sure those pounds will be right back around my middle again.

Which seems bitterly unfair. I mean, not that “diet and exercise” are a particularly easy way to go, mind you, but still…this has been a miserable, rotten, lousy, no-good, wretched week for me.

Seems really unfair that the only good thing about it isn’t real, you know?

…feh…

But, on the other hand, long duration alone does not change the fact that it is probably just the flu. (In point of fact, it rather confirms that it is just the flu…as opposed to a really bad cold or something.)

Which means that going to the doctor about it is likely going to mean handing over $200 to hear the words, “Go home, go to bed, rest and drink plenty of fluids.”

BUT…at the same time…well. Much as I don’t think I am suffering from anything more dire than possibly a new sinus infection that is just starting up (…yeah…owies…), the fact remains that this has just been going on a while too long.

And wouldn’t I feel like a proper jackass if I were walking around with pneumonia or, or, or I dunno…Legionnaires disease…or…something?

Yeah. I would.

Even though I’m totally not.

I don’t think, anyway.

(On a related note: Do not ever attempt to look up your symptoms on the Internet in an attempt to determine for yourself whether your lungs are “crackly” enough to warrant a trip to the doctor. Holy crap. It’s either just a garden-variety flu bug, or…flesh-eating bacterial meningitis with raging coccidioidomycosis double-pneumonia radioactive cancerous nose job with a side of jelly-dipped bacon!!!)

(…wait, what?!…)

On the eve of the big deploy

I have read, and damn near committed to memory, just over 600 pages of business requirements documentation.

60 pages of it seven times, due to “one last” change being made to it by the business team.

I have received 1,400-and-a-handful emails about it.

And written about 300 replies.

Plus over 6,300 lines of testing code.

I believe I have written more code to test this thing than was needed to, you know, make with the magic.

I have sat through a lifetime and a half of meetings.

A lifetime of which had nothing whatsoever to do with anything to do with my part of the project.

And naturally, not been invited to the scant handful that I really ought to have been around for.

In the name of getting it right, I have made so great a nuisance of myself to the business analysts, partners and development team that it is a wonder they are still speaking to me.

Fortunately, I can make scones. This, I find, goes a long, long way toward making people forgive you for sidling up to them going, “Yeah, uh, about this field? Should be a varchar. You’ve got an int. Oh. And you’re missing a source. Oh, also…?” fifteen times a day for two months.

Found three more bugs today.

Was not amused.

Thought about not reporting them.

Because, you know…really? The night before freeze? Really?!

Got a little (well, more than a little) irritated that nobody else had, because come ON, people…have you, or have you not, likewise been testing what we’re sending you…?

Realized that most probably, my irritability had more to do with a climbing fever than actual irritation.

…by golly, 102.7 and rising, yeah, that’ll make ya pissy all right…

Dosed up.

Dug back in.

Tomorrow? There’s a go-no-go meeting.

I do not appear to be invited to it.

So I don’t know when it is being held.

Chances that I’m going to get an !!!!EMERGENCY!!!! phone call at some weird, random time tomorrow morning or night to dial in, Now!!!!!, to explain something?

Extremely. High.

Chances that this is situation normal?

100%, kids.

Either way, we’ve gotten through it. Whether we go or not, we got through this psycho period.

I think we did good.

And I further think…that I am going to bed.

This haul has been long, and it isn’t over yet.

I’m looking forward to the end of tomorrow, and a return to (what passes for) sanity around here…

…where I have the flu, and Captain Adventure has a sinus infection, and the girls have been cycling in and out of school like it had a revolving door all week…

When the plague strikes

Well. This has been a splendid week so far. Monday started off just fine, just another day, off we go, working, la la la…

By 4:00, I was so thoroughly wretched that I was beginning to wonder if I was even going to make it home; only the fact that really, I didn’t have a whole lot of other options got me through that homeward journey.

And Monday night was even more wretched. My “usual” night time back pain was intensified by what I can only presume is the flu; I spent the whole night with my back cramping up, throbbing, and otherwise feeling like there was a thirty pound monster chewing on it.

Here we are at the end of Wednesday, and while in some ways I’m definitely much better…I’m still going to be working from home tomorrow, because I’m still feverish and coughing and ugh.

…and I’m not alone…

Today, I had three of the four kids home sick with me. Two of them are either not-really sick or not-very sick, but Captain Adventure has been laid out with this thing.

A couple hours ago, he wandered into my office and stood there staring at me for a long moment.

“What’s up, buddy?” I asked, looking up from my oh-so-important view testing.

“Iiiiiiiiiiii…welllllllllllll…I wannit to be unsick now,” he announced.

And then waited.

For me to…do something.

Oh, man…!

About every half hour since then, he has sought me out to announce that he is still not unsick.

And there’s really nothing I can do about it, other than to gather him up onto my lap and rock him, saying all those inane things you say to small children who find themselves bewildered by these sorts of things. …I know, it’s not fair, it’s no fun being sick…that’s my good boy, poor baby, sweet heart…

Nothing else to be done, really; when medicine doesn’t work, the only thing left is touching, cradling, crooning and loving.

…and wishing that one could buy “unsick” in convenient tablet form at your local pharmacy…

So swiftly fades the triumph

"Bind off 4 sts beg next 4 rows, end row 18 of diamond cable. Bind off all stitches."

Oh, GLADSOME tidings! The second sleeve - viola! - eet ees FINIS!

Aglow with triumph, I poured myself a congratulatory gulp of peppermint tea from my thermos.

It always makes me feel EXTREMELY civilized and even vaguely refined to "take tea" while on the train...and if I've actually been able to restrain myself at lunchtime and NOT eat my pastry (or candy, or whatever-all else I grabbed for tea-time), so that I'm sitting there all, "Why yes, my good man, I *am* having tea and scones with freshly made lemon curd - isn't EVERYONE?", I might even work up a slight case of superiority.

Oh, don't worry...the instant I do, I'll either drop the cup of scaldig hot tea in my lap, sneeze with a mouthful of chocolate, or discover I haven't so much as a TISSUE on my person...right after I've gotten caramel on my hands.

Danger of me actually maintaining an "I'm sooooo vastly superior to most people" attitude: Very Low.

But I definitely had it, sitting there in the gently swaying train car, smirking at the FINISHED second sleeve - the hardest part of the sweater, really...the part where the new project smell has worn off, and every irritating habit of the pattern, yarn and needles stands out in violent relief against the sexier, newer Unknown of other patterns flickering across Ravelry...

But there it was. THERE. IT. WAS.

Second sleeve. Done. Project? Right behind it. Shoot! Might even toss it off this weekend, ha ha!

Congratulations, kid (I told myself), NOW you've got it (literallly) made! A little blocking, a little seaming, and SHAZAM! You're Queen of the Needles, baby!

After a bit more cooing lovingly at the sleeve and shameless self-flattery, I flipped open my binder with a casual, devil-may-care gesture for a quick preview of coming attractions.

"With smaller needles (those would be #2s), cast on 227 sts..."

..wait...what?

Two...HUNDRED...and...?

That's the collar. The two buttonbands? Another 175 each.

I...think...I need...to go...lie down...

Ah, triumph...so fierce to arrive, so swift to fade...

(But the second sleeve? It's done. So. You know. I have THAT.)

(sent from my Treo)

The day this was

Some days are just…I mean, there are times when…you know?, and it’s like…wow…really?

Yeah.

That was today.

First, I missed my usual train. 4:49 came and went without me this morning. So, whatever, I’ll catch the 6:06. {time passes} Oooookay, on my way, I’ll just grab my…keys…keys…keys…where the @^*&@ are my keys…why are my keys not on the hook, GAH!, are they in my jacket pocket…jacket…jacket…OH COME ON ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!...

Missed the 6:06, too. But, I found all my accoutrements, so, you know, ready for the last train. Fold some laundry, make another coffee, la la la…but, just to be safe, I set a timer so I wouldn’t space out and miss The Third And Final Train in all the huff and bother as the Denizens were being pried from their beds and thrown into the merciless grinder of their little lives.

And then the husband called out, “What’s the timer for?” and I yelled back, “Oh, I set that so I wouldn’t miss my train!”, not realizing that it was going off, and furthermore that he was turning it off. (Why it was that he didn’t say something like, “Oh, well, shouldn’t you be going then?” is another rant for another day.)

And then? I missed the last train.

And then I said…well, what I said was…it was kind of…something like…“Gee whiz, I appear to have missed the very last train from Here to There for today. Well! Shuck-y darn! That's rather annoying, don't you know!”

In related news, we’re going to need to repaint the laundry room. The paint appears to have blistered in there. Huh. Go figure.

SO NOW, I’m going to be hitching a ride with the husband – after all the Denizens are safely dropped off at school and the rate determining step, Captain Adventure’s bus, has arrived and trundled him safely off. This is happening over an hour later than it used to happen, which is one of those ‘good news bad news’ deals: On the one hand, the kid gets to sleep in later. On the other, the husband can’t get into the office before ten o’clock.

TEN. O’CLOCK.

It is…not convenient. Important Note: I am smack in the middle of a Very Large Project, with lots of moving parts, and I’m supposed to be testing and so forth, and it’s kind of important and we’re really hitting crunch-time here, and there’s still a lot to do plus I haven’t finished my testing-automation tool yet and I really want to get it done because otherwise the paperwork is going to be a @*^&@ on this thing and TEN O’CLOCK, REALLY?!

So, an hour later, we got in the car and started driving. Where “driving” actually means “parking, with occasional changes in location.” Because that is what 580 is like in the morning. Pretty much from 3:15 a.m. until, uh, well, I assume it clears up at some point.

Never seen it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Over an hour after that, we arrived at BART. Where there was no parking. None. Not a single space, anywhere. So he dropped me at the curb and went off to Starbucks to wait for the 10:00 lots to open.

And I got on a train and headed in.

Somewhere along the way…I apparently suffered a major head injury or something. Because somewhere between Lake Merritt and Embarcadero, I completely forgot that I work downtown, and entered some kind of reality in which I was going somewhere all vacation-y. So I’m sitting there, on the BART train, knitting, looking out the windows, people watching, daydreaming about chai and lemon scones and junk like that, and then…Embarcadero station was behind us and I was all, “WAIT!!!!!! BACK UP! I WORK BACK THERE!!!!!!”

BART train operators, it turns out, are not very customer service oriented. Guy wouldn’t back the train up for me.

Jerk.

So, I got off at Montgomery a fully irritable downtown wage slave. Grumbling to myself all the way, I marched up the long familiar hallway, went through the turnstiles, up the little escalator, down the other little hallway, and slapped my badge against the reader.

{slap!} {thunk!} (<= this {thunk!} noise is the sound the door makes when it is NOT going {click!}, which is the sound it makes when it is saying, “Hi! I see you have a valid access card! Why don’t you come on in, get some coffee, put your feet up, make yourself comfortable!”)

Huh.

{slap!} {thunk!}

Wha…?

{slap!} {thunk!}
{slap!} {thunk!}
{slap!} {thunk!}
{slap!} {thunk!}
{slap!} {thunk!}

Oh, COME. ON! Now my @^*&@ing badge isn’t working?! SERIOUSLY?! You’ve got to be kidding me, I have a meeting in, like, ten minutes, and this stupid badge won’t work…!!!!!!!

I was standing there rubbing it up and down on the reader like I thought it was a winning scratch-off or something when it suddenly dawned on me that I was in the wrong building.

…oh…

Yeah.

Haven’t worked at One Post for four YEARS.

Ahem.

I’ll just…take my little laptop bag and go, shall I…?

And I did. Right up Montgomery Street, dragging my case behind me and headed for…

…for…

…uh, Tama…?

Yooooooooooou…haven’t worked for MegaBank / SBCM waaaaay up there on California Street since, uh, yes. Well. It’s been a while, babe…

{face-palm}

A sensible person would have gone right back down into the BART system, gone home, wrapped herself up in bed and refused to come out for a few days. But Your Faithful Correspondent is made of sterner stuff than that, ha ha!

…plus I had meetings, and hand-offs, and a mountain of testing still to be done and our tester is still way too green to actually handle it yet so the part of the lead QA tester will be played be me (as well as the lead only data(base) analyst and general ‘how does this work again?’ person) (and the single point of failure information for a hopefully-soon-to-be-retired system and why it does the downright Satanically bizarre quirky things it does), AND I really-really need to corner one of the BA’s and demand answers because the specs outlined in A-BRD-sub(b) do not match what is called for in B-BRD, which is a downstream of A and which should therefore simply be an expansion of what is in A-BRD, but instead it’s like…well, it’s like…

…it’s like A-BRD says, “OK! And for B, we will only give them apples!”, while B-BRD says, “OK! And in terms of what we will get from A? It will only be peaches!!”

This is what we in the industry call, and I hope you will forgive me this highly technical blurb, A Problem. (We also call it a few other things. But the paint has already taken a beating around here so let’s just leave it at that, shall we?)

So I really need to back the BA into a corner and force her to give me a straight answer. Apples, or peaches? Pick one. One of these things is not like the other…

Crap. Now that’s stuck in my head…



GAH!!!!!!!!!

…sigh…

Figures.

That’s the kind of day this was, y’all. One of those missed-train, wrong-way, absent-minded, meeting-packed, apples-to-peaches-and-then-a-brain-worm-attacks-you kind of days…

THEN, while demanding Answers from the BA fixing the BA’s knitting (yes really), my cell phone goes off, and it is the school demanding that we trot straight over to pick up Danger Mouse, who has a sore throat.

So I text the husband, who has finally acquired a parking space and is on his way into the city. And I tell him to turn around, to which he replies…well.

Let’s just say BART has a paint problem now.

To comfort him, I promise I will shoot for the very first train home.

…y’all see where this is going, right…?

Yeah. I barely caught the last train, and only managed that by bordering on being rude to a teammate. (But seriously, DUDE, please to note that I am dripping with heavy bags and backing toward the door with an anxious gleam in my eye. Quick lesson in Social Skills: This is where you say, “OK, obviously you need to go – we’ll pick this up tomorrow, shall we?”. Not, “…just one more quick question…” where ‘quick’ should be pronounced, ‘crazy, convoluted, multi-tiered and otherwise requiring about a twenty minute lecture on the intricacies of account and entity types, and how we assemble them around here.’)

And then I got home. Ah. Peace and relaxation at last…for a little bit anyway, until I got a text from our new nanny (did I even get around to telling y’all that we found one? Bet I didn’t…it’s been That Way around here these last few weeks…) saying she has a sore throat and probably can’t make it tomorrow.

…and since The Husband took one for the team today, it’s my turn to stay home tomorrow…

…which is probably just the Universe’s way of saying, “HAHAHAHAHAHA, heh heh, OK, no, seriously {giggle-snort!} {hiccup} no, really…why don’t you have a nice lie-in tomorrow, say, until 5:00! You’re welcome! And don’t worry, it’s not like I’m {shhhhh! shhhh! c'mon you guys, shut up, she’ll hear you!!!} plotting anything…”

That’s the day it was. And what a day it was. And I’m not that sorry to be putting it to bed now, either.

Good. Night.

Underwater Blogging Returns!!!

You may have noticed that the volume of posts took an abrupt dive shortly after I started working; this happened for three almost simultaneously-occurring reasons.

One, I went back to work, which inexplicably limited the amount of time available to me for such things. Go figure.

Two, my personal laptop died. It was a pretty boss machine, in its day; but that day was many days ago. It took approximately four years to boot up, the stand-by mode no longer worked, it locked up when asked to multi-task (you know, like, “please have Outlook and Word open at the same time”) and so forth and so on.

And then three, The Powers That Be at MegaBank said, No using the Internet for stuff like blogs.

Well, crud.

They are actually very generous with their policies at MegaBank. You’re allowed to jump onto Amazon to buy that birthday present you forgot to get for your charming daughter, due DAY AFTER TOMORROW, ACK! those little sundry things you just don’t have time to trot down to CVS Pharmacy to pick up, seeing as how you’re so busy working and all. And you can check your personal webmail and stuff like that (but no attaching files because, duh: It’s a bank, dude!

And by the way, yes, they are logging every.single.keystroke in on that machine.

But the kibosh was officially laid down on posting to blogs. Feh.

This essentially shut me down, blog-wise. I have a million and one fascinating things to share every day of course (quit laughing), but my methods of getting them out there to you now consist of my Treo – which I still find astonishing because I am using my PHONE to POST THINGS to the INTERNET - or, waiting until I get home after a fourteen hour day of working, commuting, child-wrangling, cooking, cleaning, updating, bill paying, gardening, canning and I’m sorry, but what was that other thing I meant to do today…?

So for the past year, I’ve been dithering around about getting myself a new, portable method of computing.

You know, like, all mobile and some junk. It has been…well, really annoying for my husband, I suspect.

I started with netbooks. All I really need, I said to myself (and my long-suffering spouse, who had to listen to this waffling), is something that can handle Word, Excel, and Internet. That’s all I need. Those three things, and I can handle 95% of our household business, and my favorite forms of entertainment, to wit, reading your blogs and writing for mine.

Well. 80%, anyway.

Maybe 75%.

And they’re relatively inexpensive, and they’re light, they boot fast and have super-long battery life and hey, it would get the job done.

Mostly.

Except…well There’s no onboard optical drive. Which I use a lot, so I know I’d end up buying an external drive and lugging it around with me everywhere.

…there goes the ‘relatively light and inexpensive’ part, and the long battery life…

And then there’s the small matter of all the software I would inevitably want to load onto the thing. Quicken, a full version of Office including Microsoft Acess, SQL Server and Management Studios, maybe Expressions for web development, definitely I’d need the tool packs I’ve gotten through the years for Excel, the statistical add ins and ow, I just bonked my head on the RAM limitations…

Soooooo, now we’re looking at laptops.

…and hence the cost starts to spiral up, because I want this and that and that and this and it must be able to blah blah blah, and for only fifty dollars MORE, I can have…

Pretty soon, I’ve built myself a $2,200 laptop that can handle the computing needs of NASA and play the Really Boss Video Games, it weighs as much as a hippo and requires a case that cannot fit under any train seat (and might just break the luggage rack if I tried to use it) and then I get all pissy and snarl something like, “Oh, I! GIVE!! UP!!!!!”

(Keep in mind that I don’t do this quietly inside my own head. Ooooooh no. I involve my husband in every last thought along the way.) (FOR OVER A YEAR.) (It’s a wonder I’m not divorced, y’all. Seriously.)

These last couple months have been particularly brutal on me, free-time-wise. While I seriously doubt anybody else really keeps tabs on these sorts of things, my available writing time has plummeted to about half of none at all. I’ve also had increasing trouble keeping up with paying bills in a timely fashion (oops), returning emails, and all that other home-business kind of stuff; we’ve been in the middle of a fairly significant project at work, which is a large part of the abrupt removal of free time, but it’s also a matter of not being able to put off other domestic chores any longer.

So I’ve been looking even harder.

But still not buying anything.

Because when it comes to spending money on something I want, but can’t prove to myself that I need, and/or can’t pinpoint a quantifiable, concrete return on investment for, I freeze up.

And then I talk it to death. And weigh options. And network about it (“What do you think of these? Here, look at these technical specs…whaddya think? This, or that? I mean, this has more RAM, but that has less storage, BUT!, this one has onboard wireless, except I don’t need that really since I already have this other thing and will want to use it instead, soooooooooooo…?”). And so forth, and so on.

…and so on, and so on, and so on…

Until finally, someone (*cough-husband-cough*) says, “Right, that’s it. The end. I’m done listening to this.”

And then comes home with a laptop.

Which he quite nobly did not chuck at my head.

Which is why I am back on the blog this morning, from under the San Francisco Bay!

Woo hoo, underwater blogging!

...now with more knitting…


remember this? Still working on it…on the second sleeve now, so only about 2,700 hours remain…ought to be done right about the time the recipient and I are entering a nursing home together…memo to me: fingering weight yarn + twisted seed stitch + adult sweater = 12-layer Crazy cake…

Not so long ago…

I needed a small binder, and I needed it fast – the kid who had only just remembered she absolutely HAD to have one, BY TODAY!, was supposed to already be on her way to school. So I grabbed one out of my cupboard, pulled out the contents and handed it to her, dumping the papers into my drawer to deal with “later.”

Turns out they were our financial reports from 1995.

Wow.

The first thing that struck me was that our entire combined monthly income back then is less than one (1) biweekly paycheck for me, alone, today. And there, I get to enjoy a smug moment of self-congratulations – it wasn’t too long after these pages were printed that I sat at my fugly old kitchen table, sick and tired of the constant battle to keep the net income above the net expenses, and mapped out what I intended to do about my pathetic earning potential.

Made a good call when I circled “database stuff” as something that paid insanely well and was likely to be the kind of thing I’d be good at, and tolerant of…and an even better call when I dove in, worked hard, went to school, put up with ‘junior’ titles for a while and iced that cake with the continual reading of way-too-many articles and whitepapers to keep myself technically current even when my full-time job for six months straight consists “only” of herding children and growing carrots said children refuse to eat. Yay me!

But of course, the next thing that struck me was the way that, month after month, the bottom line was a negative number. By a couple hundred dollars. By a couple thousand.

Again and again and again, a simple, one-word category: Car. Month after month, one or the other of our broken down, sad excuses for vehicles, dying on a road somewhere in the middle of nowhere, requiring towing and fiddling and Dire News about how it would cost $X to keep the blasted thing on the road another month or two. (There comes a point where it is “obvious” that you’re throwing good money after bad on a car…that point came, and went, and still we kept throwing hundreds a month into “one last” repair on the truck and the van…ugggggghhhhhhh…)

Account balances on the credit cards, ratcheting inexorably upward… $29,000… $33,000… $40,000…

…interest payments, $400…$500…$800…

It’s strange, really, to look back over that kind of paperwork. It’s just numbers, a bunch of dot-matrix (remember those?!) printouts…income items, $150 for playing at a wedding, $68.05 for sixteen brutal hours of performing at a fair, $35 for spending three hours cutting up coupon books (yes way).

Expenses…$370 to fill up the cars. $735 for rent. $360 for groceries. (Really? For two people who never ate at home?) $580 for eating out. (Which really does make me ask myself again: What groceries?!)

So many things that I look at now and just shake my head. For gosh sakes, I say to myself. What in the HELL was the MATTER with you?! It’s so obvious! I mean, just look at the numbers!

…they have “unsustainable lifestyle” stamped allllllllll over them…

But it took a remarkably long time for The Obvious to dawn on me; and longer still for me to do anything about it; and even longer than that to actually be effective with my efforts; and yet-still-longer before I realized just how good the lifestyle is to me, the deep feelings of satisfaction, the hard sleep you have after a long work day, the simple gratitude you develop for things people forget are awesome.

Like being able to grab butter out of the fridge – no milking or churning required. Having a freezer to store your food…and a pressure canner to help avert botulism. Microwaves.

Homemade. Cheese. Danishes.


…deadly…!

Ah well. At least I eventually cottoned on, huh?

…and figured out how to make Danishes…

…mmmmmm…cheeeeeese Daaaaaaaaaaanish…

Suddenly, it’s easier to plan the next few months

So, Wednesday morning I’m sitting there at work, working. Which is a thing I do when I’m at work.

It’s kind of expected.

So, I’m sitting there coding away like I had good sense, and our departmental manager-types are all in a phone meeting, and they're talking about budgets and resource-management and all kinds of Manager-Type-Stuff; we're in a "hoteling" style layout, which means there are no offices, cubicle walls or even flimsy dividers between our desks.

Every word spoken into any phone on the floor is going to be overheard by every ear within at least a six-desk radius.

So the “budget” and the “resources” and we’re all grabbing our iPod earbuds because the conversation is getting loud, and then suddenly all the managers are grabbing their stuff and dashing for a meeting room. Whew.

Then, about five minutes after they’ve all vanished…my laptop started acting up. Couldn’t run a query. Email kept prompting me for a password it refused to take. Couldn’t access the Sharepoint sites. Couldn’t even look at my own Reporting Services stuff.

My first thought was that I had a network issue. Some kind of weird ‘server is down’ thing; or maybe because I just changed my password…?

…and then I thought, …wait…budget + resources, which is a code word for head-count…?, and I looked at my information in Outlook.

I was a zz.Name. A. Zee-Zee. Dot. Name, people! That generally translates to, “Don’t let the door bang you on the butt on your way out, Terminated One!”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Seriously?!

Now, I try very hard not to jump to conclusions. It had seemed pretty likely that I would actually have my contract extended, because frankly we’re in the middle of some stuff that it would be very hard for them to get done if I were to walk out the door; they don’t have another me, somebody who can handle the trickier analysis questions, understand what the system is doing and why, and all like that. They have a ton of business analysts, and enough QA testers to fill an entire warehouse, but database analysts?

…I might be the only one on the floor, come to think of it…there’s only one other “pure” data analyst, too, and the poor guy is positively swamped trying to keep up with all the stuff that gets dumped on him…

But still. I’m not a cheap date, either. And if the budget is tightening, well, I’m sure the line item that is the invoice from my agency isn’t exactly under the radar, you know?

When my manager emerged blinking into the daylight, I moseyed over to her desk as casually as I could manage and said, “Ya, uh…my access suddenly got cut off? Sooooooooooo…is that, you know, some kind of…? Or is there something you need to, um, tell me…?”

“Oh!” she said, and blinked a couple times. “Oh. Crap. It’s probably my fault…wait, I thought we had another month…are you just dead, or what?”

“Uh, yeah, completely shut out. Well. I get email, and IM still works, but I can’t get to any of the shares or the servers or anything like that.”

“Crap. I gotta get on this call. You call them, find out what I need to do, and when I get out of this meeting I’ll expedite it.”

“Cool. So, I’m not fired or anything?”

{blink-blink}

“No! I’m extending your contract. Wait. Didn’t I already tell you that?!”

“Heh. No.”

“Crap. Well, I am.”

“Sweet! OK, I’ll call the Access Dudes.”

And I did and a lot of huff and bother later, they told me that “somebody” saw “something” that morning and decided I needed to be shut off immediately. (What it was, nobody could say. And I can’t imagine what it might have been; I’ve worked for MegaBank off and on since 198{achoo!} – I know better than to do just about anything on their wire, thank-you-very-much.)

And then they told me it would take two to three business days to get my disabled access re-enabled.

To which I said, “!!!!!!!!!!?” because We. Only. Have. One. Week. For. Initial. UAT. Testing. And. Test. Plan. Submission. You. JACKASS! (<= I didn’t say that part out loud. That would be how not to get the nice Access Dude to switch your user ID back on. Unfortunately, he was based Elsewhere, or I would have used the single-best method of getting what you want from the Technology Team, which would be baked goods.)

Then my manager got on the horn with the same guy and said “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

And then he said, two hours.

So! I went for a very long walk around the Embarcadero, both to cool off a little bit and to keep myself from being annoying to everybody else. (There is nothing worse than a bored Tama. Seriously. I get really twitchy and talk-y. And if I’m bored when I’ve got a lot to do? Ohmygah. Somebody bring the tranquilizer gun…)

And then I came back and my access was back and I went back to work.

Where I will be until around mid-May. It’s good information to know; it makes planning these next few months so much easier.

Plus, it gets me out of having to put on my Fancy Clothes and going for endless cycles of interviews in search of the Next Big Thing for a while.

Also? Mid-May?

That’s right about the time the first round of produce from the garden starts to come in.

…just sayin’…

Money Monday: January 3, 2011

Happy New Year! Yes, that's right, girls and boys – it's time to start writing '2011' on those checks…which naturally, I personally will forget to do until roughly March…

As we enter this most sobering time of year, when the bills for all our joyous celebrations start rolling in, it's an excellent time to take a step back and put the old daily finances under a microscope, identify where we might be going wrong and take appropriate action; to ask ourselves where we are, and how that compares to where we want to be, and start firing off instructions to the engine room. Five degrees starboard! Engines at half! Steady as she goes! ICEBURG!!!!!!!!

But first, we've got to break the romance we probably have going with our failures.

We humans really like to hold onto our failures. We like to pick them apart, analyze them, get some therapy about them, talk them out, confront and embrace them, own them, write bad poetry about them, and acknowledge them…over, and over, and over yet again. We like to assign, and then reassign, and then reassess and reassign, the blame for every aspect of our lives deem to be less than perfect, bouncing it back and forth from ourselves to our parents to our gummints to ourselves again.

Don't get me wrong: it's important to do that. If you refuse to take ownership of your own shortcomings, won't acknowledge what motivates you to act that way and then take responsibility for the change you want, well, dude.

Nothing can change. The behavior, and the inevitable consequences, owns you, if you won't own it.

BUT. At the same time, there comes a point where you have to let.it.GO.

Mistakes and failures are just…well. They're raw material. A building block for life, and hard-won ones at that. They're also natural, perfectly normal, something all of us experience, something that would be completely bizarre to be lacking, come right down to it.

Failure can become anything. It can become your ladder to the stars, or it can turn into a fence to keep you in. You can make it part of your toolkit, the way to NOT do this or that, or you can build a wall around yourself and then sit in your compound moaning about how you can't possibly succeed because just look at all this failure!

There comes a point, then, at which all that owning and acknowledging and analyzing needs to be released; where forgiving has to begin to bleed gently into forgetting - not the deed itself, but the need for continued blame and examination.

Keep the lessons. Drop the beloved guilt that gives that delicious sting of self-loathing…which in turn allows us to feel that the lack of control over ourselves is all we deserve or can hope for, that success is beyond us anyway since we're such losers and all, sooooooo we might as well wallow in this self-destructive but delightfully easy mess we've made for ourselves.

So! With that out of the way…in the coming week and month, I want to do a couple things.

This week, I want to carefully examine our spending over the last year. I want to get a feel for where we might have overspent, and where I'm probably going to have some deferred spending that will catch up with me soon. I want to make sure that I'm saving appropriately for the "big spend" items I know are coming this year – property taxes, annual insurance payments, the next junior livestock auction and like that. With that in hand, I can begin working on next year's budget…hopefully at the same time wrestling it down so that it all fits neatly within the confines of just one paycheck without sacrificing retirement savings.

At the same time, I want to take a moment to take a look at our regular monthly bill payments and make some adjustments. Last January, I locked down our payments at the then-minimum monthly amounts; there's nothing wrong with that and if I had a regular full-time employee paycheck I was pretty sure was going to be continuing ad infinitum I wouldn't mess with it…but I don't. It's entirely likely that I only have three and a half more paychecks coming on this particular contract, and a big old question mark around What's Next.

It's time for me to enter Dragon Mode and hoard-hoard-hoard these last few paychecks.

The last thing I want to do by the end of this week is think through the garden plans for next year; I want to go through what-all I canned up last season, what we're eating and what we're not eating, list out the things I ended up rushing off to the supermarket to buy all the time (onions, which I have had positively abysmal luck with thus far), and which things tended to end up going right into the compost because we didn't get around to eating them before they became science experiments (people? I can grow the beets…I am practically a magician when it comes to beet-production).

Meanwhile, in a more casual-but-don't-blow-it-off way, I need to think long and hard about What's Next. I have an awful lot of possibilities to choose from, really; things that pay ludicrously well like this contract, but which have the same (well, actually, even worse) Crazy attached to them; things that pay a lot less but which would provide much better work/life balance; things that pay next to nothing but which let me work around the rhythms of the household; things that are big gambles, things that are sure bets.

It's rather a paralyzing mountain of possibilities, actually…which is a double-edged sword of blessing and curse. None of the options suck, really; none of them are 100% awesome, either.

I'm about to give myself a mental whiplash, I've been ping-ponging back and forth so much in my mind. I want to do this, no, that, no, this, no, that, NO WAIT, THIS IS AWFULLY COOL…hang on, it's kinda scary, maybe I want…noooooo, that's too crazy…but!, well, is it any more crazy than this? Or that? Or…?

So I really need to clear my mind, set some things down on paper, do a good old fashioned listing out of the pros and cons of each possibility, and make some decisions.

And then probably some phone calls.

2010 was a psychotic year. I've seldom been so tired for so long; even for me, it was a year of sustained work that…kind of staggers me, when I actually stop and think about what-all went down through it.

The end results were good…more than good. We kicked butt and took names, y'all. In one year, we undid about two year's worth of bad decisions and worse economy.

I'm not sure I can repeat that kind of performance in 2011…but I'm sure going to give it my best try.

What about you guys? Got some high hopes for this year's finances? Jump on in…the new year is feelin' pretty warm from here, and ready for us to start swimming…

Money Monday: December 27, 2010

Wow. A whole year, almost gone already.

We’ve made a lot of progress around here. I’ve used my paycheck like a club. And guess what? Bills can’t duck, really. So if you decide to do something like that, you’ll find that whatever weapon you choose to hit them with will connect.

And if what you’re doing is dedicating almost an entire net paycheck to them, well, that’s a mighty big club, right there.

But it hasn’t just been cash I’ve been using to pay down those bills, either. I’ve paid for it with late nights and long weekends, with heavy lifting and hot stoves, with sunburns and blisters.

With Tylenol, and heating pads, and sometimes a long, long hot shower into which I wept because god-god-god, are you KIDDING me, I have to go do all that again, today?!

I’ve paid for it with all the stuff I didn’t buy for us, with making do and making things last and over-dyeing “ruined” clothing and putting patches in the oddest places.

I’ve paid for it with all the rewards I may well have ‘deserved,’ but chose to give a miss.

I’ve paid for it with creativity that sometimes I thought was about to just run out on me.

I’ve paid for it with exhaustion and the occasional feeling that it was goddamned unfair, really. Everybody else gets to {whatever}, but me? Ooooh no, me, I hafta {whatever}.

In the rare times I had the leisure to think about it much, I really didn’t think it was worth it. Especially in the early part of this year, when progress was painfully slow and it seemed like every month had a “oh, wait, no, can’t make any big payments this month either, because etc. etc. etc..”

But here we are, at the end of the year. The garden is sleeping under a winter cover of weeds; I’ve been focusing on the long-neglected inside lately. Lots of organizing, and cleaning, and finishing up those last few things that needed canning or drying or freezing.

The pantry is bursting at the seams, with sauces and soups, with grains and vegetables. The freezer is still nicely full with Ashley’s steer and Cheyenne’s hog. My laundry room is packed with supplies from EcoStore USA, ready to allow my laundry water to pour back into the garden next year, when today’s rains are long gone and our drought status returns to ‘elevated concern’ levels.

The pace has slowed, considerably. (Recent holiday madness being set aside for a moment.)

Today, I spent a little time looking at what I’ve actually accomplished over the last twelve months with all this huff and bother.

There’s the purely quantitative stuff, sure. We’ve whacked a good forty grand off the outstanding balances, altogether. We’ve got a nice little pile of emergency cash, to tide us over any blocked sewer lines or paycheck gaps.

But there’s something way more valuable we’ve gained, something intangible, something that is hard to really explain.

But it goes like this: Right now, I’m coming to end of my current contract with MegaBank – it expires February 10. I have no idea if my manager has any intention of extending the final three months possible, or if we’re going to be shaking hands and parting ways in seven short weeks.

Thanks to the firm MegaBank policy that says a contractor can only be on deck for eighteen months total, and then must take a six month sabbatical before being eligible for rehire, no other department is likely going to pick me up for merely three months.

Here’s what I’ve gained with all the crazy I’ve inflicted on myself this year: I’m not worried.

I’m really not. My desire to know one way or the other has more to do with curiosity and trying to plan what-all I’m going to plant next year, and when I’m going to plant it, and whether or not I care to go ahead and have lunch with the overly-eager recruiter from Contractors R Us to discuss their client(s) urgent need for a no, really, SEASONED-seasoned database analyst than anxiety about a vanishing paycheck.

I have options again. I have the precious gift of time. The ineffable feeling that is knowing you’re OK no matter which way things fall out.

It’s a priceless thing to give yourself.

And the only way to get it is to give, of yourself, to yourself. To work for you, and those you love. To do things when you’d rather not, because you deserve the ultimate reward you’ll get. To lift your eyes up and look ahead of today, when maybe you’re tired and maybe you just really want a something and maybe it doesn’t seem fair somehow that somebody else has it and you don’t…to focus on the things you really-really want that are impossible today, but, if I just keep working, if I just keep going, if I just keep trying, if I don’t give up on me.

To realize that what seems like a sacrifice at the moment is actually an investment in tomorrow.

It’s been a hard year. But a very, very worth-it year, too.

I’d do it again a hundred times.

And then I’d make a mint selling my memoirs, because I’d be a hunnerd and forty{COUGH!} years old and still out there with a shovel digging up sweet potatoes and c’mon, that’s gotta be worth something, right?!

Today and every day

This Christmas came upon me in that way things often do when you’ve overloaded yourself with Things To Do: It seemed like the dishes from Thanksgiving weren’t even dry yet, and suddenly I was up in the middle of the night wrapping presents because hel-LO, Christmas Eve, and where did YOU come from?!

It did not help that the last two weeks have been full of the kind of stuff that tends to make you neglect even basic personal hygiene, let alone things like ‘decorating the house’ or ‘planning large meals’ or ‘shopping for presents.’

We had a rather important code deploy that went into integration testing on…wait for it…December 22. T’was the deploy before Christmas and all through the team, not a partner was idle, not a voice didn’t scream… (I know. I do not have a career in rhymes.)

I did not (technically) work on Christmas Eve…but I’ve still got forty hours billed for the week. So needless to say, I skidded into said Christmas Eve sideways and cussing. Because much to my surprise, it actually showed up on December 24! I mean you know REALLY. After all, the aforementioned deploy was supposed to have an initial deploy on December 15 (for internal tech team only), but that didn’t happen and then we were supposed to get our deploy on 12/20 but guess what? That didn’t happen either. Nor did the 21st, or the 22nd.

So it seems rather indecent of Christmas to show up right on time. It’s like Those People who don’t get the memo that you’re supposed to always be about twenty minutes (a.k.a., “fashionably”) late to social gatherings, and instead show up Johnny-on-the-spot to everything.

Therefore, this Christmas has gone by in a terrible rush. It has gone by with a huge sucking noise, in a blur of light and movement and noise. (Ooooooooh, the noise!)

People came and went. There were outings. There was cooking – lots and lots of it.

Then on Christmas Eve as we were shutting off the lights and heading for bed (at one in the morning, thank-you-very-much, HO HO HO), we had no cookies for Santa…because I didn’t get around to them. So I dug through the larder, found some tortilla chips and a jar of homemade salsa, broke out the ‘good’ cordial glasses and filled a dark green one up with Goldschlager for the jolly old elf.

I mean, hey. Everywhere he goes, milk and cookies, milk and cookies. A little jalapeno and cinnamon schnapps would make a nice change of pace, don’t you think?

And then three minutes a few hours later, {thud!} {scurry-scurry!} {WHISPER! WHISPER! WHISPER!} {knock-knock} “Mommydaddy? It’s Christmas!”

Really? Never would have guessed…

And then there was this kind of implosion. Time took off like a runaway horse. There were presents, and shouting, and running, and candy wrappers on the floor. I made pancakes (I think…at least, I was rinsing maple syrup off a bunch of plates this morning, which usually means something like pancakes happened), and then I was making all kinds of other things. Pumpkins became pumpkin pie (and a lot more pumpkin puree, too). A black-bottom pie was also made, because otherwise The Lady My Mother would disown me. All the little sweet potato “fingerlings” from our sweet potato harvest a couple weeks ago became a soufflé (next year, I don’t care if the kids do hate it, I’m putting the bourbon in…it was OK, but kind of bland without it).

A six pound rib roast from the steer Ashley raised (a very bright-eyed young lady in the Future Farmer’s of America, whose steer I bought at the junior livestock auction at the county fair this summer) went into the oven and became a juicy roast.

Here’s the funny thing: I didn’t plan well (or arguably, at all). At 9:00 this morning, I was still deciding what-all I thought I was going to get done. (A lot of things didn’t. Like, 98% of the cleaning that really ought to be done before you have people in your home.)

Two weeks ago, I didn’t have a single present purchased.

But this morning, there were presents under the tree, neatly wrapped in coordinated paper – each Denizen with his or her own design. (This helps to avoid mistakes when you’ve got a pre-literate or extremely excitable kid in the brood…we can show Captain Adventure which paper is ‘his’ and turn him loose without a whole lot of fear, whereas otherwise every time you take your eyeballs of him for even a second, he’ll be ripping into somebody else’s present in hopes that it’s his.)

This morning, I had a good rough idea of what I was going to be making, but no actual plan; what time which thing had to be in or out of an oven or on the stove, what order to do things in, and not a single slice of celery done in advance.

But a few hours later, we all sat down and ate ourselves silly.

And there was laughing and talking, and talking and laughing; the children were happy with their new toys, and everybody found something they liked at the table.

Christmas happened without a lot of planning and coordinating on my part, and it turned out great.

That’s what happens, I guess, when distinguishing a “special” day from a “normal” one becomes difficult, or impossible. Every day we laugh. Every day we love. We ignore each other’s dusty blinds and bland potatoes, we laugh and talk and drink our wine and admire the children’s artwork.

So when Christmas comes, there’s no man-made stress added to it. No terror in the event the wine got corked, or the roast comes out burnt, or the pie crust is inedible. No what will She think if the napkins aren’t folded just so, just right, or the coffee isn’t hand-picked by monks.

We’re the same bunch of nuts on Christmas as we are on June 5.

Which leaves a lot of room for the sacred to creep in, really, in all the moments freed up because we don’t need to feed each other’s neuroses.

So…may the returning of the light at this solstice-time warm and bless you, may the lengthening of days uplift you, may you see the hope of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that in each added moment of light we gain as we begin the slow climb from winter’s dark to summer’s light; may your God be with you, and bless you, and keep you well.

I hope your days are blessed, one and all, yesterday and today, tomorrow and always – Christmas day, or doomsday.

Hwyl fawr!

t’was the toy shopping before Christmas…

In honor of the impending holiday celebrating unbridled greed, gluttony, family dysfunction, mounting debts and other psychoses this most tender and sacred of seasons, I went shopping for Denizen Christmas presents last week.

I had a list! I’d checked it twice! (Actually, I’d been checking it compulsively for two weeks. It wasn’t so much a ‘list’ as a ‘solid block of ink written in a Top Secret Code not even I could understand anymore.’) I knew exactly where I was going, and in what order!

So! I saddled up and headed out and I came home four hours later with a minivan so heavily loaded it was practically popping a wheelie from all the weight in the back-back-back.

That’s right. Fully loaded.

…with fifty pounds of flour! Fifty pounds of sugar! Twenty-five pounds of brown sugar! Shampoo! All kinds of canned goods that were on sale! Plus a few household items (like a silicon oven mitt to help me with that pesky ‘pouring boiling hot water out of boiling hot Mason jars while canning’ thing) I’ve been circling for a while, purchased with 40% off coupons, THAT’S RIGHT!.

…but…uh…not a single…you know…Christmas present.

Not.
Even.
One.

{face-desk}

SEE, this is why I should not ever, under any circumstances, be the one who does the frivolous shopping. I should just go to the bank, take out all the cash I have hoarded up for this most spendy festive time of the year, and just hand alllllllllll that cash to the husband, saying, “Go. Shop. Buy. Whatever.” And then I should retreat to my knitting chair and refuse to look up until it’s all over, and the receipts have been shredded or burned, and the children are all lying around the house in a state of advanced post-excitement lethargy.

Turn me loose on basic necessities, and I am all over it. I can fill up a pantry in nothing flat. I can whip through re-outfitting the kids with new jeans and shirts and whatnot like it was nothing. I can pounce on things like carpet shampooers and nail guns.

But ask me to go blow perfectly good money on useless crap spread holiday joy and cheer by sprinkling my loved ones with completely unnecessary fun and exciting crap-crap-CRAP! toys that will undoubtedly be left allll over the floor so that I’m constantly tripping or treading on them OHMYGAH, would it KILL you people to pick up your blasted Lego’s once in a danged while?!, and, well, obviously?

I have some issues.

Although it’s actually kind of layered issue thing. On the one hand, yeah, I don’t like spending what always seems like insane amounts of money on plastic things that go “beep!” for a couple days before ending up in a landfill somewhere because somebody left it on the hall floor and then I stepped on it.

But then, for added Crazy Points, I also don’t like to cheap out on these things. I’m not going to buy each kid four Dollar Tree toys and pretend it’s the most awesome Christmas EVER!

Merry Christmas, guys! That’s right! I sprang for four whole presents, for each of you! Imported presents! All the way from China! FANCY!!!!!

…just don’t put them anywhere near your mouth, and we’ll have ourselves a rare old fun-time with these bad boys…

And I do want to shower them with stuff at Christmas. I don’t do it the rest of the year. Shoot, half the time they get nothing-or-close-to-it for their birthday, for Pete’s sake. So when we come to Christmas, well, I would like to actually get them stuff they want, stuff that is cool, stuff that makes them go, “AWESOME!!!!”

…except that it always seems to be, you know…pricy. (Go figure.)

And then I end up in this endless cycle: “I’m not paying forty bucks for that! What’s this, hey, it’s cheaper! Oh. Ugh. Lame. Geesh, I can smell the lead paint from here. Back to this thing. This is cool. It’s COOL. It is boss and wicked and whatever other word means ‘groovy’ these days. But…forty bucks. Really? Forty bucks? For one toy?”

And then I’ll stand there like one of Those People in the supermarket, who will spend hours squinting at the nutritional information on the box of Ding-Dongs. And you just desperately want to slap the box out of their hands and yell, “BAD! They are bad for you! If you’re worried about nutrition in any way, shape or form, BAD! BAD! BAD! Step away from the Ding-Dongs! Here! Bag of apples! Box of oranges! Now, git!”

So there I’ll be. In Costco or WalMart or Michael’s or Some Other Place With Toys. With a box in my hands. Staring at it. Like, maybe, if I look long enough, and hard enough, I will find actual real gold nuggets in it…which would totally explain the price tag.

I put it down. I pick it up. I put it in the cart. I circle the store a few times. I put it back again. Circle the store again. Pick it up. Stare at the box as if any second, my x-ray vision will kick in.

This can go on for hours, until eventually I’ll drop it back on the shelf in disgust and slink off with my hands in my pockets, muttering to myself.

Add in the fact that Denizens are still young enough to do That Thing kids do, where the thing they just got done telling you was THE thing, the thing that they cannot exist another hour without, the Most Awesomest Thing That Ever Was™, IT, the thing that will cause them to actually DIE of sheer joy…wait, what? That old thing?

Yeah. So five minutes ago. Nobody wants one of those old bags of “pfffffft!” any more! No! It’s now all about this things which is just so “eeeeeeeee!” and “Ohmygah-ohmygah-ohmygah!” and {swoon!!!!!!}.

{FACE-DESK}

Well…about all I can say is, thank Dog for Amazon. And two day shipping. I think this is the second year that just about everything kid-related has come from Amazon, and I have to say: It’s pretty cool. The stuff arrives in plain brown boxes, and it’s really obvious if someone tries to peek.

But on the downside, the kids have cottoned on to the fact that sometimes, the boxes that usually contain cat litter, books about how to field dress an elk and other such fascinating things might contain presents.

Which led to the scene earlier today, when there was a ring of the bell and four little voices began shrieking, “It’s the UPS guy! It’s the UPS guy!!!!”, and eight little feet went pounding down the stairs and hallways and the poor man was swarmed by this horde of psychotic children in the grips of a pre-Christmas feeding frenzy.

…and he was delivering a carpet shampooer…

Me? Excited. Because my carpets are gross. They don’t look gross and I’m sure that comparatively speaking, they aren’t really that bad…but lately we’ve had a lot of carpet-related disasters around here and I’ve been forced to use my ‘Little Green Machine’ to get them up.

Nothing will call a “dirt” issue to your attention like seeing black water in the tank after you’ve cleaned an itty-bitty section of carpet you wouldn’t have said looked all that bad. And then COIT quoted me something like $27MM to do the shampooing for me and I was all, “Really?!” and they were all, “Uh, yeah.” And I was all, “REALLY?!” And they were all, “Look, lady, you want the carpets cleaned, or no?”

And I was all, REALLY-REALLY?! except they had already hung up on me so I didn’t bother saying it out loud.

So, I’ve been sitting around waiting for a deal to come up…and finally, it did. I got myself an All-Terrain Steam Vac (the ‘all terrain’ part basically meaning that it can do the carpets and the tile / Pergo) for about half price and sat around looking smug about it for, like, two days.

And then I laughed myself sick at my poor, disappointed kids, who were so sure it was going to be something good, but then it was just stupid vacuum…

…especially because they were so disappointed that they wandered off before Mr. UPS toddled back up to the door with the two large boxes full of games and dolls and so forth and so on, mwa-hahahahaha…

Why I love the ACE train, #534

Just heard over the loudspeaker:

"Now arriving Livermore station. Please gather your personal belongings before exiting the train this morning, watch your step while exiting the train, thaaaank you for riding ACE this morning, aaand have a great day. (slight pause) Even you, Ralph."

heh.

I love this train. It's like family.

Groggy, cranky, seat-hoggin' family...
(sent from my Treo)

December showers

YA KNOW…have you ever had the feeling that somebody (possibly Coyote, or maybe Loki) is just messin’ with ya?

Wouldn’t put it past either of them, either.

Today has been that kind of day. The kind of day where one damned thing after another has just gone improbably wrong.

The van is making a weird squeaky noise whenever I make a right turn while applying the brakes. The light in the closet won’t work. Again. One of the other fixtures has a burnt out bulb. I have a replacement bulb. But I can’t for the life of me get the damned cover off the damned bulb so I can replace it. ARGH.

The Dyson? Has lost suction. Excuse me, but WHAT?! (Probably an overly packed washable filter. But still. WHAT?!)

The cat pooped in the Man Cave, again. (HAHAHAHAHA! Ahem. I mean, wow, what a drag, huh?)

Then the phone rang and it was Danger Mouse asking if I could drop everything and rush over to bring her six dollars for the Secret Santa shop.

I said no.

An hour later, she called back to say her lungs hurt (???) and could I come get her. Only after I picked her up did I realize I’d been played. Call first with something trivial to confirm that mom is indeed home and can pick you up, then invent good symptoms you haven’t tried before but that someone else has had good luck with, and call back. Genius.

Soon Captain Adventure arrived home and, having earned his Wii, got busy building improbably complicated rollercoaster rides for marbles. Eldest got home. Danger Mouse enjoyed a miraculous recovery. Then she wanted to take a shower, and I said, distractedly because I was still working on that last official work email of the day, “Fine, go for it.”

{send!}, and I turned to dealing with the precarious pile of crap on my desk. About half an hour later, Eldest came up and said, “Uh, mommy? Yeah. The, uh, the toilet? It’s bubbling.”

NOW…I’m picturing, you know, a couple big bubbles. I start to say something like, “Why are you bugging me about bubbles in the toilet?” Because, really?

But she heads me off.

“No, mommy? It’s really bubbling. Like, foaming?”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!

So I charge off down there and sure enough, the toilet is rabid. It is foaming. It is overflowing. The bubbles, they are legion. It is the single most weird thing I have ever seen a toilet do.

And.
I.
Can’t.
Make.
It.
STOP.

I try the plunger. I turn off the water supply. What the hell did these kids…wait. The…it’s…it’s coming from…wait…now, that just can’t be…

I glanced over into the bathtub beside it.

Foam is surging up out of its drain as well.

Oh…now…that can’t be good…

Now, I am no plumber. But I’m looking at this and I’m thinking that clearly, this isn’t a case of somebody dropping a bath bomb into the toilet. It’s more like…like…somebody is draining a bathtub, and it’s getting down but not out and then it…wait…shower, @*^&@ing SHOWER…!!!!!

So I abandoned the sinking ship downstairs, ran upstairs like I was twenty years younger, and started banging on the bathroom door screaming, “GET OUTTA THE SHOWER! TURN THE WATER OFF, TURN THE DAMNED WATER OFF AND GET OUTTA THAT SHOWER, NOW!!!!!”

Because I am cool and calm and collected at times like these, you see. (Well, and also because Danger Mouse is going, “Whaaaaaat?” in that little reedy-dreamy voice of hers, and the water IS STILL RUNNING!)

Then the bathroom door opens, emitting a tremendous cloud of steam, and I find myself staring at…well.

This is one of those moments where you find yourself really wondering about your offspring.

Because…pee in the toilet.

Sinks slowly, ever-so-slowly, draining an unctuous mixture of mud and silt and debris back down the pipe (awesome, I’m sure that’s helpful).

One of the sinks…had…a…towel…in it…? (what the @*^&@?!)

And, in the tub she was just standing in, a fairly disgusting swirl of thick mud all over the bottom of it. (Eeeeeyeah. I’m thinking it’s a blocked sewer line too. Joy!)

I point all this disaster area out to her, my otherwise intelligent child, and she’s all like, “Oh. Wow. Didn’t notice that. Or that. Or that. Or that either.”

And of course, it was Not Me that did all of it. If I ever catch that little gremlin, I’m gonna string him up, I swear I am…

And then, as I’m just sort of standing there embracing the moment…I realize that it’s almost 7:00, and if I don’t move it I’m going to be late picking up Boo Bug. (Oh yeah…thought there was something missing…)

Naturally, there was some Big Event going on at the school. And I didn’t grab my jacket on my way out the door because I was late and eh, it’s, like, three feet from the van to the center.

Unless of course there’s an Event going on at the school. In that case, you have to park five miles and hoof it in…in the pouring rain…without a jacket…

Ah, December showers. Lovely, icy-cold December showers…they’re so…bracing, aren’t they?!

(I’d ask “what next,” but…I’m scared to…)

You know you take your chocolate seriously when...

..it arrives at your house in 50# sacks. (Newspaper shown for scale.)

It cost $140 after shipping...CRAZY savings over buying it in those little plastic tubs at the supermarket. This will last us between 1 and 1-1/2 years, and keeps just fine when stored in air-tight tubs like the ones I get from Emergency Essentials. After scooping into the smaller "inside" container, a vigorous shake will fluff it up to exactly the same pillowy texture as the Hersheys stuff...BUT, this is "natural process" - it has a stronger taste than most "OTC" supermarket cocoa.

(Go ahead, guess what I've been up to this weekend...yeah, that's right: Battening down the hatches in the pantry, which here means "the garage." Biggest downside of my homesteady/bulk-buying ways has GOT to be that EVERYTHING seems to weigh 25-50-75-100 pounds...oy, mah achin' back!!!!!!!)

(sent from my Treo)

A day can’t be ALL bad when it involves mushrooms

(Unless, of course, you despise mushrooms. In which case, the rest of this little note will probably cause you to need to run for the bathroom.)

My dentist warned me yesterday that today might be a little…rocky.

To which I promptly stuck my fingers in my ears and yelled, “LA LA LA CAN’T HEAR YOU EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE I’M SURE LA LA LA!!!!!”

…which in retrospect may be why I woke up this morning with my jaw a little swollen and a lot painful. I mean, talk about just kicking Fate in the eye and expecting nothing to happen, right? If I’d crawled around trembling with fear and hoping for the best but resigned to the worst, and made all kinds of Arrangements for everything and alerted the media to the potential of me feeling like death warmed over, I probably would have been fine.

Instead, I woke up at 3:35 when the alarm went off and basically went, “…moan…”, turned it off, shuffled to the bathroom for pain medication, and went back to bed.

It was what might be called a slow start today.

And I managed to put in three (3) hours working from home before the combination of owies and prescription drugs for same rendered me a drooling idiot who should never be allowed near code of any kind.

Then, just as I was becoming quite certain that there could be no redeeming value to today…guess what?

(What, Tama, we’re dying to know what snapped you out of your drug-induced haze today…wait…you did snap out of it eventually, right?)

(Yes, and I have the renewed throbbing in my jaw to prove it…why, why does dentistry always have to be so @*^&@ing painful with me? Why can I never seem to have a simple little filling that doesn’t even require an Advil, let alone a regimen of pain killers that require military-like timing?)

(Welll, sweetie, if I were to have to take a guess, I’d say it’s probably because you ignore problems in your teeth until something really awful happens, like, I dunno, your tooth splits in half vertically, and only then will you make the time necessary to have them treated.)

(OK, who asked you?!)

(You did, and furthermore…)

(OH, SHUT UP! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LA LA LA LA LA!!!!!)

Ahem. Anyway. Today, I finally ordered some goodies from Fungi Perfect.

Eeeeeeee! I can’t wait to make the husband get out there and drill a bunch of mushroom plugs into a whack of oak logs…!!!!!!

I’ve been circling this for a long while now. There’s a fairly large patch of real estate in the yard that stubbornly refuses to be good for anything.

In sheerest frustration, I stood there late this summer glaring at the lack of growing going there and started smarting off about how maybe, I should just grow mushrooms in it…

And then I thought…huh, I wonder…

And then (this being me and all), I knocked the idea around for a few months. Researched and thought about it and measured the temperature and the sunlight and compared that to ideal conditions and so forth and so on.

Finally, this very afternoon, I bit the bullet. (Not literally though. Biting and me are not on speaking terms right now.)

And I have four hundred assorted mushroom plugs, for lion’s mane, pearl oyster, and shitake mushrooms coming. Plus (because I couldn’t resist it) a start-up kit for what they’re calling “Espresso Oysters” – which grow in a medium made up of guess what?

Oh. You guessed. Yeah, coffee grounds. I have lots of coffee grounds. I usually split them up between the worm composter, the regular compost and direct application for the lemon trees and acid-base berry bushes, but, you know, hey. I could definitely spare a bucket or two to grow mushrooms in. (Also, think of the Conversation Piece possibilities! “Uh…there’s a…is this…erm…did you know that whatever-this-is has mushrooms going in it?”)

I found this picture on the Red Bay Farm website – this is what my “decorator feature” should look like once they get going.

Only, uh, there’s going to be, kind of…well. More than one log like this.



I'm so excited, I almost don't care that my jaw still hurts! I sure do hope this works...it's one thing to have a book tell you that you've got the right conditions and all like that, but another thing entirely to actually end up producing food at the end of the day.

Word for today: UGH

I woke up this morning aching. At first, I thought it was “all over,” but it wasn’t – it was “just” my back. Unfortunately, the “back” taking up an awful lot of real estate…it surely did feel like it was “all over.”

Ugh.

And, I had a toothache. Which was no big surprise because a couple weeks ago, I had a tooth split in half. On a biscuit.

I mean, seriously. These things simply don’t happen. And yet, there it is. Although at least I have a reason why such a bizarre thing happened: I had a very old filling that I had been warned was kind of loose and leaky and not doing its job anymore. (At least, they tell me they warned me. Honestly, I don’t really remember anything so urgent being mentioned.)

So it wasn’t just, you know, bite down on a nice, soft, warm biscuit and CRACK!!!

But still. A. Biscuit.

Only me, people…only me…ugh.

And then my plan for the day went completely to hell in a hand basket. UGH!!!

I was going to stop working at 10:00, eat something, clean up a little bit, toodle over and be there promptly at 10:30 (you can see where this is going, right?), and then two hours later (!!), walk out of there with a temporary crown and a couple new fillings and go back to work.

Friends…I never even remembered to send the reminder to my team that I had this dentist appointment today. Or the obligatory ‘work from home’ notice we always send to our immediate team members (at the very least) when we’re not in the office. Because I had an email from my boss that had been sent ‘high priority’ and I opened that before I did anything else and then…well, time kind of did this “whoosh” thing?

Yeah.

At 10:30, I was frantically shoving my arms into my jacket (backwards) while asking if they were quite sure it was still OK because after all, I was going to be a good ten minutes late at this point…and even though I’m pretty sure I kept the hope out of my voice, they made me come in anyway. Dang.

Three…hours…later (ugh!)…I staggered out of there $340 poorer, with half my jaw sore from being open all that time and the other half toasty warm and numb as @*^&@. They’d given me a nice full hit of the anesthetic, he’d touched the drill to the broken tooth and, much to all of our surprise, I’d jumped fifteen feet straight up emitting a shriek like a cougar with its tail in a wood chipper and come down with the distinct impression that by golly, that kinda hurt.

So he hit me with about six barrels more of the stuff, which numbed me to the thighs and also set off a wonderful series of full-body twitches because ephedrine will do that to me. Awesome!

Then I came home and dialed into my next meeting. Late. AGAIN.

…and the anesthetic began to wear off…and I was hungry, because I hadn’t eaten anything yet today…and the anesthetic was wearing off some more…and then about fifteen minutes of meeting went by without me because I was too busy calculating how many pain pills I’d already taken for this and that today, adding up the milligrams of ibuprofen and acetaminophen already in my system and are you KIDDING me, how much worse could it get…

And then somebody asked me something. Huh?

And then, just as I was actually engaging with my coworkers and providing input (and trying hard not to sound testy), Captain Adventure’s bus arrived.

There’s some good news.

So I shuffle on out there to meet the bus. Which is loud. And gather Captain Adventure off the bus. And he is loud. There is no hiding the fact that I am collecting an autistic six year old off his bus here, not if I can’t be on mute. (Normally, my work day is over by the time his bus arrives; I start wicked early in the morning so that I can be logging off by 3:00, precisely for this reason.) (And also because it can be useful for my teammates who are based Back East, who otherwise find themselves unable to get anything DONE until almost noon their time, thanks to the time difference...me starting at 5:00 in the morning is a godsend for them, on occasion.)

But $DEITY decided to throw me a bone right about then: He had all smileys on his card for the day, which meant he had earned some Wii time, which meant I could keep on working for up to two more hours undisturbed was allowed to give him the positive reinforcement that is a vital part of his behavioral therapy program.

So I set him up and darted back upstairs to finish out that meeting.

And then suddenly three people all started sending instant messages at once.

Hey, if I wanted to know what branches mapped to this division…
I’m looking for this account, and, um, do you know where…
What the HECK, man?! Isn’t this supposed to be over here?!?!

…ugh…really, how did I become the “best” person to ask all these things…?

But then, It happened. The thing that made me say to myself, firmly, “You are shutting down now.”

One of my esteemed colleagues said in an email, “Gee, I don’t know where she got that number.” And I started to fire back a, “From our staging table, DUH!!” because, what, you think I just make these numbers up?!

But then I looked at it again and went, …wait…um…why IS that number in our staging table?! That’s wrong!!!

The wrong number had been selected. The. WRONG. NUMBER!!!!

…but, we just FIXED that, didn’t we? Yes, yes we did, we fixed it, we totally fixed it, we did the fix, and I’d already submitted the results and…

So I opened my test script file and ran the test again for reassu-HOLY EPIC FAILURES, BATMAN!!

I was practically breathing into a paper bag. Over18,000 errors. EIGHTEEN THOUSAND ERRORS! Where literally two days ago, there were ZERO! HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP!!!!! What went wrong? Somebody done did something! ACK! SHRIEK! SWOON! PANIC!

…must…remain…calm…type…email…to…tech…team…

And then, as I was trying to figure out how on earth this could have happened, since it meant a serious Process Failure, since it meant somebody was doing crap in production that should never, no NEVER be done there like that…it hit me.

Oh. Yeah. Um? Testing period isn’t actually over yet.

Which means that the fix I’d tested in the user acceptance testing (UAT) environment?

Yeah. It, uh, isn’t in production yet.

Heh-heh. Yeah. Test script is gonna fail in production right now. Because the new code won’t be deployed there for another week. Heh-heh. Eeeeyeah. Still gonna be, you know, doing that thing, where it takes the wrong…from time to time…because there was that group-by that wasn’t getting the true min(value)…whooooo! Yeah. Well. That was…exciting…(and also? ugh…)

Once I finished laughing at myself, I shut down for the night and made some cookies.

Because no matter how ugh your day has been, a soft, warm, chocolate-and-peanut-butter chip cookie surely can’t hurt, right?

…crack!*…

(*kidding! haven’t lost another one…yet…)

Why nobody sat next to me today

Ahem. Yes. Well.

You know how sometimes, something is so "normal" to you that you don't ever wonder what it looks like to somebody ELSE?

About six people started to sit next to me on BART tonight, only to suddenly check their downward momentum and plunk down elsewhere.

And suddenly, I looked at my BRILLIANTLY SIMPLE cable-hook-readiness-aid and thought, "...oh..."

Yeah. It, uh, MIGHT...maybe...look like something...weapon-ish.

BUT COME ON!!! I'm knitting a yarn called "Comfy"!! And I am a JOLLY little thing, because I've been listening to Prairie Home Companion on my iPod...so I keep LAUGHING, and LAUGHING, and then I go into these nice little flurries of snickering, and...

..oh...

......wait......

(sent from my Treo)