Weirdness: It’s what’s for dinner

Lately, I haven’t had a lot of energy in the evenings for making anything particularly interesting for dinner.

Actually, I think that sentence should probably be a lot shorter. it should probably read, “Lately, I haven’t had a lot of the energy in the evenings for making to make anything particularly interesting for dinner.”

Tonight, though, I had just enough left over to indulge a case of The Sillies that hit me and throw together something to keep the Denizens guessing a bit. Which is pretty much my primary goal in life, second only to giving them plenty of things to tell their therapist about in years to come.

I take these sorts of duties very seriously, so! Step One: “Sushi” rice

Now, I’m not an expert and I probably do it all wrong, but, this is how I make rice I intend to use in rice balls or rolled-up-sushi-like-things. Inside this bowl is three cups of CalRose rice (family of six, remember, plus inevitable neighbor-kids whose parents never, ever, feed them, no really, like, NEVER) (unless I’m making something gross for dinner, like palak paneer [spinach with “weird” homemade cheese that is, $DEITY my witness, made only of milk + lemon juice] or curry lentils, in which case their mom is Julia Childs and they just remembered she’s making a twelve-course pizza extravaganza or something like that) (but I digress). This is a readily-available white rice, medium-grain, that cooks up plump and sticky – perfect for molding into things like rice balls, sushi or just flat-out molding because it’s fun in a lunchbox. Why the heck not? I do not see any laws on the books that says lunch has to be ‘serious’ just because you’re an adult. And molding little devils complete with black pepper dyed horns and red pepper flakes for eyes, and possibly a screaming jalapeno-round for a mouth, to go with your 5-Alarm Texas Chili bento seems only natural to me.

But I digress. Again.

This rice needs to be rinsed a few times in cold water before you cook it. I rub it gently between my hands each time under water; the first rinse is usually like real whole milk, the second rinse is like non-fat milk, and the third, while still a bit cloudy, is usually clear enough that you can see the rice in the water.

After rinsing, I just cook it per package instructions. Which in my case consists of “add 1-1/2 cups water for every cup of rice, drop all into rice cooker, and hit ‘white rice’ button.”

Next, I grabbed some hot dogs and some spaghetti and oh yes, I did.

 

I saw this on the internet somewhere and went, “SQUEEEEE!! I have got to try that!!” I will grant you that it is a bit on the ‘fiddly’ side, but it’s not a bit hard and the look on the Denizen faces was totally worth it.

Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. So. One pot of boiling water with several drops of green food dye in it…

…plus a generous handful of angel hair pasta equals…

IT’S SEAWEED, GET IT?! Because of the not-sushi roll thing?

Shredded carrots (which were still in the ground a few hours ago, which makes me feel all cool and self-sufficient and some junk until I remember that these particular carrots are only still there because I sort of forgot about them and then when I was weeding I was all, ohmygosh, hello there, I forgot about you! and they were looking at me like, …geesh…! and so I made a mental note that they were a) there and b) ready to pull and then when I needed carrots I was all, OH YEAH, I TOTALLY HAVE A BUNCH READY RIGHT NOW, DON’T I! which I rather suspect downgrades my coolness-factor a bit but at this point I’ll take whatever I can get and also rambling run-on sentence crown of supremeness: STILL mine, HA!)  and thin-sliced ham.

Totally authentic “sushi” fillings.

As long as you have “sushi” in “quotes.” (<= loophole!!)

The blue thing there is a silicon baking mat, which I find does a great job rolling rice into those long logs for slicing. I used a knife this time because I couldn’t find my preferred tool for things like this (and also cinnamon rolls, this works a treat for cutting up cinnamon roll dough), which would be unflavored, plain, no-wax dental floss (trust me on this, do not get, like, ‘mint’ flavored floss). Position the floss under what you want to slice, cross it over itself on the top and zzzzzzzzzzzip!! Makes lovely, not-squashed-oval little rounds.

But, couldn’t find it. So I used a knife. So the “sushi” wasn’t really round, it was oval. Which made me think of eyes. Which is why I changed the plating at the last second from being ‘double-jointed squids in seaweed fronds gazing soulfully at the two moons of whatever that world the Wolfriders are from’ to ‘You MUST pay the rent!!’ (Bonus geek points for getting that reference.)

Things to tell their therapist about in years to come: Check. I am the frickin’ MOTHER OF THE YEAR, Y’ALL.

Eldest walked in, snickered, snagged a couple slices of rice-roll, and went back to drawing manga. Danger Mouse made herself a bento to take to school tomorrow to show off. Boo Bug rolled her eyes, grinned, told me it was awesome, and ate every bite.

Then Captain Adventure came in, looked at his plate for a moment, then looked at me sidelong with a crooked smile and asked, “Is it a-posed to be an eye-face wif da mooose-tash?”

And then I died from the excessive cuteness of him, the end.

Ah, the little reminders life gives us

My eyes are killing me right now. I’ve got the font set to about a 400-point size and I’m still having trouble seeing it. (It would likely help if I weren’t doing a reverse-blinking thing where I open them ever so briefly, take a quick glance to make sure I haven’t gotten my fingers in the wrong place and started typing ‘yi[[omh’ and like that, then close them again for a while.) (But then they sting. And ache. And feel like I have rocks in them. Argh!)

I have no idea what’s up with this lately. It started last week, this end-of-day eyeball-aching thing. Feels a bit like I’ve been putting drops of acid into them and then having a game of Don’t Blink with the sun or something.

I can’t decide whether I think I’m just that much more tired than usual, or if I’m not taking care of them throughout the day the way I think I am, or maybe I’m allergic to some perfume or other at the office, or…what.

But that’s not the biggest problem. No. The worst thing of all is that…I have no idea what to do with myself, really.

I can’t knit.

I can’t play a video game.

I can’t watch TV.

Let alone read.

And I don’t really like audio books, either. They tend to give me a headache. Plus I get irritated because I don’t like the way the reader does things. That’s not how I would have imagined she would have said that, I will fume.

And I know I will be even more critical right now, because it’s making me just generally pissy, this whole eyeball-aching thing.

So, well, about all I can do is sit here, with my eyes mostly closed, and listen to the sound of my boredom as it claws at the inside of my head until bedtime.

So many things in life that I never really think about much. Every so often some tragic story will come up where somebody lost their sight or hearing or sense of smell or what-have-you, and for a brief moment I shudder and think, Wow, that would really suck…and maybe I say a few words into the Great Stillness about blessings and strength and other stuff you say when there’s really nothing you CAN say, but you feel you must say SOMETHING.

And then I go back to whatever I was doing. Queasiness over, and another potential realization of just how fragile the life to which I’ve grown accustomed really is, averted.

Being forced to actually not do stuff for an appreciable amount of time because of something – being unable to keep my eyes open, not being able to get up my own stairs when my back is really having An Episode, those times when I’ve popped a tendon in my elbow or wrist and had to take a week or so completely off all knitting needles, keyboards, stirring-of-pots or pulling-of-weeds – well, it’s quite an eye-opener.

Oooo. Ouch. OK, that was a rather unfortunate word-choice, right there. {wince} I think maybe I’ll give this up for now, and resume whining at Eldest about how annoying it is and asking her what time it is now seeing as how the clock is just a big old blur to me right now…

(It’s probably just allergies. I have some suspicions around some rather pervasive scents at the office right now. In related news, I suppose writing my Congressman about drafting up a law banning all perfumes in public places is probably a touch much? Yeah, I…kinda figured…)

Perhaps we should ALL just go with “Smith”

Earlier this week, we had An Incident™ at the high school which necessitated me dropping everything and rushing over there so I could stand around for – I swear I am not making this up – going on four hours waiting to hand over my id, spell my darling child’s name, and wait for her to be summoned forth from the stadium unto my loving arms.

Yeah. It was a thousand kinds of awesome. But what made things truly awful wasn’t so much the process itself, but rather my fellow parents.

YA KNOW…one the one hand, I understand. It was hot and cold by turns out there. The process was painfully slow. And seemed like it was being done in a crazily upside-down manner. And for those who weren’t completely sure that the whole thing was a big old Nothing courtesy of teenagers being stupid, it might even have been a little frightening. (For the record, this was not me. I was so damned certain that it was just a group of teenagers being stupid that if it hadn’t been a) early in the morning, thus Eldest would have been stuck outside in the elements all frickin’ day and b) her birthday, thank you very much, I wouldn’t have come down to get her in the first place. But I digress.)

STILL. Parents. Look at my eyes, and answer me this: What the @^*&@ is wrong with you people?!

LET’S REVIEW SOME OF THE TALKING POINTS I TOOK AWAY FROM ALL THIS, SHALL WE? 

• We get that you are not happy to be dragged away from whatever you were doing to stand in lines.
• Everybody feels that way.
• So, shut up already.
• Cutting the line is way not cool
• Trying to do it repeatedly becomes exponentially uncool
• WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TRYING TO PULL, JACKASS.
• SERIOUSLY, STOP IT.
• Dude. While I understand your feelings (and even privately agree with them), saying, “I tell you what, @^*&@, you try that again and I-a-gonna bust you UP” to the woman as she is being escorted to the back of the line after trying a THIRD time to cut the line…is a little much.
• Mom, please tell me you did not just call your kid on his cell phone and ask him to attempt a breakout, and then argue with him when he said it was a way bad idea, and point out that there was a hole in the fence right next to you.
• I mean, you realize that’s an automatic three day suspension, right?
• PLUS, you understand that when they go over the list and realize that he a) was here BEFORE the incident and b) WAS checked into the stadium but c) was never check OUT of it…he’s automatically a Person of Interest to the cops, right?
• You think this is inconvenient? Try explaining why your kid pulled that particular stunt, in the middle of All This.
• But please let me know before you do. I wanna sell tickets.
• When a school is in lockdown, things like pesky rules are not going to be ‘bent,’ let alone ‘broken’
• This means trying to pick up your neighbor/friend/cousin’s kid when you are not officially authorized to do so? Is not happening.
• Yes, even if you can prove you live ‘right next door’
• Yes, even if the kid “totally knows who you are”
• Yes, even if you have some female voice on the phone saying “I am his mother, and I approve this pickup.”
• Yes, even if you can produce ID with the same last name on it.
• I know there aren’t very many people named “Rodriguez” in California {pause to roll eyes}, but this still doesn’t authorize you to take a child off a school campus in the middle of a lockdown
• Or any other time, for that matter
• Also, quit arguing about whether or not you “have to” produce identification before picking up your child.
• This is nothing new or special
• You have to produce this any time you pick up your child during school hours.
• Dentist appointment? Please show me your driver’s license.
• Funeral? Driver’s license, please.
• Note: the “please” is optional
• Why on earth you think the school being lockdown means rules should be looser than otherwise is beyond me.
• Also, you’re holding up the line
• And I’m-a-gonna bust you UP for it in about two seconds
• ‘Cause my feet hurt. Really badly.
• And we won’t even get started on the back-cramps.

BUT MY PERSONAL FAVORITE OF ALL THE ATROCITIES I WITNESSES DURING MY THREE-SOME-HOURS OF LOITERING AROUND THERE, the one that had me struggling sooooooo hard not to bust out laughing right there in front of God and Everybody (which likely would have gotten me punched in the face by numerous people who saw no humor in anything by this point), was this little farce-in-three-movements.

Tired Teacher (TT): Okay, so, what is the child’s name?

Idiot Mother (IM): Sam Cardoza. (<= totally not his real name)

{TT beings flipping through New York City Phonebook Sized book of forms and such}

TT: Um…what’s the last name again?

IM: Cardoza.

TT: Erm…how do you spell that?

IM: {shouting to make it clear she thinks TT is a moron for having to ask} SEA-AY-DEE-OH-ZEE-AY.

TT: …and, he is in the tenth grade, correct? (<= also not his actual grade level)

IM: YesssssssssSSSSSSSS!!!! {tone says, “You are a moron, of course he’s in the tenth grade, what other grade would he be in?”}

Me: {thinks: aaaaaaaand, are you QUITE sure he goes to THIS school…?} snicker!

{They both shoot me a dirty look. I try to appear that I’m sneezing. I fail. I don’t really care, but I attempt to appear as though I do and return my attention to my knitting.} {well, duh, I had my knitting with me. it is the only reason the false alarm didn’t turn into a national news story about the insane woman who went all bat-poop crazy while standing in an interminable line to pick up her kid during a lockdown at a high school. Film at eleven.}

TT: So, he’s not in my book…um…lemme just…

{pow-wow ensues amongst all the desks, effectively bringing all pickup to a screeching halt as all books are being checked for one Cardoza, Sam (or Samuel, or Sammy, or Starts-With-S) }

TT: Can you write the name down for me? (Clearly, she is hoping she’s still got the wrong spelling or something)

IM: {sighs from somewhere about three feet under her toes, glares at TT, glares around at everybody else for good measure, scrawls something completely illegible on a scrap of paper and flings it at TT}

{TT’s face assumes a look of absolute despair. Nobody could possibly read this. Even a pharmacist would be all like, “Dude. Can you do that in Latin or Greek or English, instead of, what are these, hieroglyphics?” MEANWHILE, somebody with that “I Am In Charge Around Here, $DEITY Help Me” look approaches. Let’s call her IC for short}

IC: {brightly!} {ooooh, you’re good, IC, very, very good…} What seems to be the problem here? 

{explanation of the non-existent Sam Cardoza ensues. IC looks pained. She prides herself on knowing all the kids in the school, this kid is not ringing a bell. She has failed in her personal mission.}

IC: Ah, so, are you sure he’s in the tenth grade?

IM: {EXPLOSION!! already told her and KABOOM! and furthermore and KAH-POW!! and another thing WHAM-BAM-SMACK!}…and I will call his father and…his father’s name is Singh-like-the-big-shot-guy-Singh just you wait…!

{there is a silence you could cut with a knife at this point…a long, desperate silence while TT is undoubtedly controlling her urge to leap up from the table and strangle the life out of this crazy person, broken only by choking sounds coming from Yours Truly because I am about to die laughing…}

TT: {quietly, and with truly admirable professionalism} Ah, here he is…under SINGH…!!!!!!

{signing out happens while I marvel at her ability to leave it at that…I might have been shouting, “OH, SO ACTUALLY, ‘CARDOZA’ IS SPELLED ESS-AYE-ENN…?!”}

{Sassparilla Singh, a.k.a. Sam Cardoza, is summoned from the stadium, received by his now-flustered mother, rolls his eyes in classic teenager-boy fashion at her hopelessness, mutters something about ‘gawd, mom!!’ and slouches off in her irate wake}

And, as I stepped up to product my ID so I could finally rescue Eldest from the elements…I happened to glance over and catch TT’s eye.

“Fun day at work, huh?” I asked her, practically gnawing my lip off trying not to laugh.

We looked at each other for a moment, appraisingly…and then we started laughing so hard we could hardly stand.

The Denizens think I’m crazy, and disorganized, and otherwise hopeless.

Ha. At least I know that their last name is Grasselfofferphlepinocks, and that Eldest usually goes by Serdingawinginer.

(Which is, sadly, not that far off what was actually called into the stadium. They mangled it so badly that I whipped out my phone to text, ‘Um, ya, that…is supposed to be YOU, babe’ because I couldn’t imagine she would realize it otherwise.)

I blame MacGyver

YA KNOW…there are things I do that, in retrospect, I look at and just kind of…shake my head, tiredly, and shrug, and wonder aloud what I’m going to do with myself because, really now…why?

SUCH AS finding myself with a bunch of terracotta pots I’d like to use to start some broccoli, and I have nowhere inside to do this, but we’re still in the time of year where we ‘boomerang’ a lot, temperature-wise.

It was 43 degrees when I left the house this morning. It was 74 when I got home half an hour ago, 69 now, and on its way to  a guesstimated low of 44 tonight. California: We ARE a desert state.

It isn’t actually the 40-somethings that worry me – it’s the occasional, usually abrupt, dips further down that tend to kill off things I try to start outside this time of year.

Which is why I found myself wishing I had some kind of greenhouse-ish thing I could use, YOU know, something with a cover (and not weed cover because that, I’ve got), and then I could use the old ‘milk jugs full of water’ trick to bump up the temperature just a bit if I needed to and waitaminute, gimmie that busted-up old white plastic patio table, and also one of the sprinkler-type end-of-line deals…oh, and the clippers, AND the clicker (which is what we say when we mean ‘a fire starter with a trigger’)…

…aaaaaaand, uh, that plastic thing that came off that broken thing, YA, PERFECT! {RUSTLE-RUSTLE-RUSTLE-clip-ffffffffst-shove-hold-two-three-four-five-six-SET!-tug-tug-TIE-TIE}…

…HEY LOOK, IT’S A GREENHOUSE! SORTA!!”

(What you can’t see here is, I insulated the underside of the table with a combination of newspaper, really old felt, some filthy wool batting I found lying around, aaaaand I’m not actually sure what-all else because I was just sort of grabbing random stuff at that point to make it thicker.) (It is a sickness, people, a SICKNESS…) (Oh, and, I use the clicker to gently warm up the cut end of the drip hose; it’s slightly tricky the first couple times, but once you get the hang of it [pronounced: quit MELTING the hose] it’s a really fast and easy thing to do, and it makes it a lot easier to get the drip dealies into the line [particularly for those of us with achy hands that like to go all weak at the worst possible moments], and then if you put a little pressure on the softened hose as it cools back down, it makes an excellent seal that is less likely to be dripping water where you don’t want it to go.)

I totally blame MacGyver for this kind of thing. Even though to be honest, I almost never actually watched the show back in the day, it just sort of imbued the American psyche or something. And now I do things like amuse myself in waiting rooms by thinking of fifteen ways I could use objects in the room to simultaneously ward off a terrorist attack, inform the President of the plot, survive the Zombpocalypse, repair a broken pair of sandals and put together a three course meal for six people.

Or put together extremely odd looking contraptions out of things that arguably should have gone to the city dump months or even years ago, but which we kept either ‘in case’ or due to sheer inertia until I suddenly decided I had a use for them again.

It is how we roll.

Anyway! In other news, I am about as sore as I have ever been in my whole, pathetic life right now! Because in other other news, I finally wandered out into the yard to see what the lay of the land was.

And mostly, it lay like this.

…sigh…

Every year, I go through this.

EVERY. YEAR.

And every year, I say to myself, firmly, “NEXT YEAR, I SHALL NOT ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN!!” And I make all sorts of plans whereby, in no more than a few minutes a week!, I shall maintain order throughout the winter yea verily right through the coldest, most-frozen months!, I will stay on top of this and there shall not be the annual weeping and gnashing of teeth over the waist-high weeds, leftover dead-things I never cleaned up after the first “surprise” frost, etc. etc. etc.

And I fully believe that I will, too.

But then winter happens. And I go out one or two times in defiance of the cold, and my hands and/or hips and/or knees go into Super Tilt mode and then I say welllllll, OK, it’s a LITTLE too cold for this today, I’ll just table it for now and pick it up next weekend when it’s sunnier…at which point I have not merely taken a step onto that slippery slope, but flung my cardboard down on it and done a running-start belly-flop onto it while screaming “COWABUNGA!!!!!!” at the top of my lungs.

Possibly while wearing cut offs and a tank top.

Which are the absolute best attire for cardboard sledding down a slippery hill. Because you get the coolest, most long-lasting scars that way, which makes the storytelling later totally awesome.

But I digress.

Mind you, it wouldn’t really matter all that much if I did get out there every weekend all winter; the weeds don’t start coming up until right around the first of March, and then they don’t come up slowly but rather in a way that defies all logic.

One minute, there’s just enough to make you go, “Huh. I’m going to have to get out there and deal with that soon…”, and the next weekend bam! You’re at tigers-could-be-living-in-it-for-all-we-know levels of weed encroachment.

Fortunately, I had a couple volunteers for the first bit.

(The shorter one was in it because he realized that since his turn on the computer was to start ‘after I’ve finished weeding out here,’ it was in his best interest to hurry things along. Well played, sir.)

As we cleared weeds, we found that some of the seeds from the last planting had over-wintered, sharpened their elbows and gotten into the game.

After we’d cleared that bed, my forces withdrew to amuse themselves with things like games and homework (the tall one has a ludicrous amount of that), and I continued on to this.

NOW, as I started diligently working my way down this fence, I looked at the delicate fronds you can see in the bottom left foreground there and thought to myself, wow…I wonder what THOSE are, they look EXACTLY like carrots!

And that was because…

…oh…

CHECK THIS OUT. This is after I’d removed all the weeds.

I have no idea how they got there. None. I suspect that what we’re seeing here is the result of a packet of seeds getting blown off the patio table, and then scattered down the fence line; I know I didn’t plant them there, because most of them are waaaaaaay too close to the cement (and therefore pretty far from the drip line), and are incredibly random in placement; there are also just a few spread out into this little bed, and even a couple right up against the fence.

Really feels like a wind-sow to me. Particularly given this.

Uh-huh. On the left side, too. Got to have been some Seeds Gone Wild action. {Insert ‘sowing wild $plant’ joke of choice here.}

And I’ll take it, because this time of year, I’ll take anything I can get, really; we’ve got a few carrots I “stored” in the ground over the winter, and some onions that could be pulled early and used in a pinch, but overall…this is the hardest time of year in terms of gratification.

A lot of this.

Not so much of this.

(This was a few weeks ago. The lemon tree was feeling enthusiastic again this year. I swear, if I show that tree any kindness, give it even half the recommended fertilizer and a passing nod in the general direction of correct pruning care, it goes nuts like this.)

Last year really wasn’t a particularly good one for the garden. We had some ugly pest invasions, a lot of water issues (broken valves, leaking pipes, drips-that-don’t-drip, etc.), me working too many hours (and then being so damned tired that suggestions about the garden needing to be looked to resulted in snarling and/or snapping and/or heavy sighing and vague grumbling but no action taken) and so forth and so on.

I have high hopes for this year, as long as my body can keep up with the demands being put on it; it’s really protesting this weekend’s endeavors, and pitching quite a childish fit about it to boot. It’s actually pretty funny to watch me trying to do things like, say, get out of bed in the morning, or get out of a chair after I’ve been sitting for a while.

Which reminds me. I’ll bet I could totally engineer myself a set of handrails for our bathroom out of PVC left over from the last ‘reroute all the sprinklers’ adventure…

Reality may not be my strong suit

This week is turning out to be one of the sort where I feel as though time is holding its breath; like it is watching a particularly delicate maneuver being performed and doesn't want to risk disturbing the players involved.

Which is a poetic way of saying, "is it over yet?!" (How about now? Now? What do you mean, 'it's only Wednesday,' it has GOT to be at LEAST friday by now...)

When I'm not being irritated by it, these sorts of weeks fascinate me by driving home how very odd a species we are.

Night / not-night wasn't good enough for US, oh no! We had to put rules on time, break it up into standardized blocks so we could utterly disregard what sun, moon, stars, weather or our own bodies told us and be able to say we should be here or there, doing this or that, because! 9:00, dude!

I love us so much for that kind of thing, you know? Our breathtaking arrogance charms me, little insignificant specks of carbon saying, "Now see here, Natural Order, we have decided this thing you do with the days-get-shorter-then-longer doesn't work for us, so, here's how it's gonna be..."

We are magnificent in our flippancy, are we not?

None of which changes the fact that, on this Thursday, I feel as though it should be Saturday at least. The restless nature of Spring is seeping into me, pricking my mind with the notion that I have so very much more to do today, while my body insists that the day has already dragged on far longer than it should have already and that the last thing needed would be anything else.

Which I suppose is just another variation of the human tendency to reject Nature's reality to substitute our own; I'm not quite ready to accept that the relatively (physically) lazy days of winter are nearly over, and soon my 'free' time will begin disappearing into endless weeding and mulching and planting and harvesting and processing and otherwise not having much free time at all.

I know I will enjoy it once it's underway...but for now, when I'm still enjoying being "forced" to stay indoors by wind or rain or cold, I must admit that every time I look outside and think I really should think about fixing the beds or checking the drip lines...I find myself feeling strangely more tired than I was when the thought first occurred to me...

Down and dirty

I planted strawberries this weekend. And also some broccoli. It was the first planting for the new year, which means it was damned hard work.

I am sore in muscles I hadn’t heard from since…well, about this same time last year. I was moving slowly and without a lot of enthusiasm today, I can tell you; but it’s a start, and it will get better.

I have to believe that, or all is lost.

The bed where the strawberries went was a mess; that whole side area was, as always at the beginning of the season, covered in weeds that somehow manage to spring up to waist-high in what seems like a matter of hours. Plus there was all kinds of wind-blown debris, plastic bags to leaves and everything between. Toppled over wood. Cardboard boxes from some point when the husband was moving things around in the shed, and skipped the step where he put the boxes back into it.

So they sat out there, in the wind and rain and sun, becoming a nest for earwigs and spiders. Lovely.

A few weeks ago, I hastily turned some almost-finished compost into that bed; yesterday, I finished actually working it in, and topped it off with some of the precious “finished” stuff.

It never ceases to amaze me, compost. I suppose someday it’ll be old hat enough to raise no particular emotion from me, but at present…every time I work with it, I find myself amazed by the small miracle it represents.

It’s not generally very pretty when it starts out. Crushed up eggshells, and onion skins. Grass clippings. Tea bags. Shredded junk mail. Fireplace ash. Apple peels. Bits of pie crust. The bones from a beef roast, burned in the fireplace along with some of the wood from the trees we took out a couple years ago, and pulverized with a mallet. Vines. Weeds. All kinds of crap.

Waste, come right down to it; things that ordinarily would have been tossed into the tote to be put out on the curb on a Tuesday night, to be hauled off to the dump.

Instead, it’s probably gone into the tumbler for two weeks of intense burn-down.

(This gets really hot, comparatively-speaking – breaks tough things down super-fast, so fast that it will go from “almost too full to get the lid on it” to “I thought you said this was full, but it isn’t even a quarter full!” in about a week.)

And then it starts the ride down the bins, from right to left…about a month in each…

(Moving day! Bin two to bin three, please…)

…until it comes out like this.

And that is not only loaded with nutrients, but is of a nearly-perfect texture – it is light, and loamy, exactly the sort of environment that invites roots to stretch out and get cozy. It breaks up the clay that persists in surfacing throughout the yard, prevents it from turning back into the near-concrete it would like to be, locking its precious minerals away from the growing plants.

It’s just dirt. But it’s our dirt, in ways that go beyond deeds and titles.

Now. If I could just figure out how to plant an ibuprofen tree for the backache that comes with all this poetic dirt-making…

Watching the space

Several months ago, a tired, run-down and empty building put brown paper over all the windows, hiding its plans from the outside world. A sign went up that said, simply, Watch This Space.

Almost every day since then, I’ve stopped at some point during my daily grind to stare at it. Sometimes there were rustlings behind the paper. I’ve never seen a person come or go, but sometimes I hear them moving around in there, scraping sounds that could be furniture…or somebody applying drywall…or…something…

Sometimes, the door is cracked open and I can peek inside and see…well, not much, really. Paint brushes on top of closed cans; a floor covered with neatly taped newspaper; ladders leaning against walls and looking oddly abandoned; that kind of thing.

Watch This Space, the sign confidently says.

So I watch. I watch, and wait, and wonder what it will be. When it will be.

Some days, I’m sure it will soon be something amazing; I think of the miracles fresh paint and carpet can bring about, how the application of human ingenuity and affection can breathe such life into mere things, and I look at the brown paper and the Watch This Space sign and envision Boutique d’Awesome, which will have more amazing, almost magical things than can I can imagine.

Other days, I find my attitude to be a bit less sunny. I stare at the motionless place, the hasn’t-actually-changed-in-all-this-time building on the run-down street in this economically depressed town and find myself certain that whatever it was going to be, whatever it thought it was going to become…it hasn’t got a prayer. It’s going to just stay nothing, forever.

 It’s just going to stay like this, promising…well, promising nothing.

 An instruction to “watch this space” doesn’t actually promise a damn thing, come right down to it. Shoot, could just be a big old joke, you know? Let’s pretend we’re going to come up with something GRAND, and see how long we can keep people stopping to see if it’s there yet, hahahaha!

And then I’m rather annoyed, because I feel like I’ve been played.

Except that the next day, or the day after that…well…I’d swear I heard something that might have been somebody installing…ovens? Or moving a piano? An Irish accent, or the chime of crystal.

Definitely there’s…something…coming soon…probably…maybe…

So I keep watching the space. Maybe today. Or tomorrow. Or next month. Almost certainly by second quarter this year, don’t you think?

Sure.

It’s probably pretty close to ready. Almost has to be.

I just need to…be patient. Give it the time it clearly needs. Have a little faith.

A little trust.

Except, it’s taking longer than I’m used to waiting.

And I don’t like that empty building. It’s creepy, and unnatural. And…kind of sad, too. Like it wants to be something glamorous, or meaningful, or useful, or…something.

Something that bustles, instead of just sitting there trying to work up the energy to finish what it started.

It wouldn’t bug me so much if it weren’t my own mind I’m talking about here. Which has been just kind of…sitting there for about three months longer than forever, insincerely muttering “…working on it…” at me every time I’ve asked how things were going, whether it had anything, you know, to share with the class.

It really does feel like I’m a run-down building trapped in some kind of infinite loop of any second now, I’m going to have a “ta-da!” moment, and then you’ll see, I’m pretty sure whatever-it-is that I’m trying to finish coming up with is going to be pretty cool, and you’ll be, like, WOW, and I’ll be, like, I KNOW, RIGHT?! and then…we’ll be HAPPY and BUSY and ENERGETIC again, instead of this weird, tired, EMPTY, I-just-wanna-siddown-and-stare-at-something-that-doesn’t-WANT-anything-from-me thing…

It doesn’t even have the decency to be something dramatic like depression, or significant psychological event, or anything else I could, with a straight face, use as an excuse for the overall meh-ness I’ve been exhibiting for a while now.

OH no. It’s nothing new, it’s nothing meaningful…arguably, it’s even a good thing, a part of a natural cycle of feast-and-famine that puts me in a state of (sorta) rest.

I’m usually a person who can find ways to complicate her life without even trying, and be convinced that it’s a hundred kinds of awesome. But every so often, for no apparent reason, well, my little ship rushes headlong into the doldrums and the sails go pfffffffffth*flutter*flop and, well…there I am. Stuck. Sitting there. Rocking on becalmed seas, waiting for a breeze that feels like it will never come.

I never see it coming. It always bewilders me. No matter how many times it has happened to me throughout my life, I always find myself dumbstruck by its advent. What the…?! Whaddya mean, ‘Don’t know, don’t care, don’t wanna, leave me alone, I’m tired’?! C’mon, let’s do…SOMETHING! Let’s…make…maybe we could…you know what would be cool? Huh? you know what would…c’mon, work with me here, I can’t finish that sentence without you, Creativity, let’s go, OFF the bench…c’mon!...HERE we go…!

And it’ll make a half-hearted effort, rustle some papers around, get out the brushes and the cans of paint, set a ladder against the wall, point at a few items that might do with a makeover…and then while I’m not looking, it just waddles off to the nearest chair, plops down, and flips on a video game or starts a new anime series or buries its nose in a book and refuses to look up.

You know we REALLY need to get the seedlings started for the spring planting, right? I’ll ask.

{grunt!}

Hey. HEY. Talkin’ to you here! I was thinking of casting on a vest or something. What do you think? Maybe I could make…something…you know…vest-y…with YARN?

{shrug!}

So! Um! How about…you know that thing you were…there was, it was, like…? You wanna…?

{glare!}

…sigh…ooookayyyy, maybe not…

Now, I know how this will go down. Just when I think that this time, maybe it’s really forever; maybe I used up the very last of my energy somehow, maybe I’m just all dried up, maybe…oh perish the thought!...I have become a grownup, and this is how they are, you know, just all go to work, come home, yell about chores and homework and dishes and go to bed so we can get up and do it all again the next day…right when I’m starting to say to myself, you know, it’s probably a good thing, because, it IS rather restful, you know, this whole ‘I don’t feel like doing anything, I’m just going to sit here and do NOTHING instead’ and after all, you really SHOULD act your age, because being a goofball is a bit…ahem…well, YOU know, at YOUR AGE for heaven’s sake…you could at least PRETEND to be mature now and then…right about then, as I’m reconciling to being just kind of blah and deciding it’s just fine by me…I’ll suddenly hear myself thinking…

…ever so quietly…but oh so brightly…

…oooooooo…you know what would be COOL…?

And ten minutes later I will be happily overcomplicating my life again, up to my elbows in projects no sane person would ever undertake, complaining about things being crazy then turning right around and going, “How cool is this!” like it makes perfect sense to carve smooshed-together bars of almost-used-up soaps into blobs that look like squashed zucchinis and insisting they are ‘obviously’ walruses and such.

But until then…well…there’s really not much I can do, except believe that something is happening behind the papered-up windows and shut doors, and wait patiently to see what it is.

Watch the space, and wait for it to become a sign.

Aaaaaaaany day now…

(Seriously, any time now…NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING, BUT, KINDA BORED OVER HERE…)

(Patience: not my strong suit)

And now, midair blogging!

Apparently in the years between 'the last time I flew' and 'now,' the human race has made a few evolutionary steps...like having Wifi available at 30,000 feet.

I just spent the last hour and a half playing Warcraft FROM THE PLANE.

I had to do it, just 'cause I COULD.

I'm on my way home from a business trip to Charlotte, NC; I think it was an excellent trip and am very pleased with how much I learned while I was there...and can't WAIT to get home. While four days can hardly be considered anything like an EPIC amount of time away from home, it was, juuuuust enough for the internal grumbling to start.

Shower not hot enough. Food not spicy enough. Food too spicy. Ran out of books to read. Wireless too slow. Stupid chair too 'bouncy.'

Etc, etc, etc.

Plus, of course, the eerie quiet; the inescapable feeling of having forgotten something that comes with being away from the family. The same constant noise I complain about when home becomes, in its absence, a feeling not unlike being watched, or that maybe you left your keys on the table at the restaurant.

Only, not so definite. Just a vague feeling of Amiss, the sense that not all is where it ought to be...and the slow, steady realization that what is out of place is...you.

It will be good to get home to my Chaos; to be made irritable by the noise and the mess, the constant mommy-mommy-mommy, the daily dose of nonsense and need.

Don't tell them I said so, because it would really wreck my cool, 'eh, whatever, you're-ok-I-guess' thing...but I surely have missed those Denizens of mine.

Yeah...I really kinda have...

Perhaps I shall call it The Round Tuit...

'Course, if I were going to call it the "round" tuit, I really should be making it, uh, a CIRCLE-ISH shape, instead of a bunch of long RECTANGLES sewn together. And "square" tuit really doesn't have the same 'hehe, see what I did there? Because I finally got aROUND to it?!' punch. BUT AT THE SAME TIME, I don't WANT a *round* blanket - I want a *square* one.

I know. I too shudder at the life-or-death Drama of this. Although I'm sure I will be RICH after selling the rights to my life's story to Hollywood.

Ahem. Aaaaaaaanyway - you know how after you've made a pair of socks, there always seems to be JUST ENOUGH yarn left over the you can't bear to (gasp!) throw it away, but at the same time there really isn't enough to DO anything with it, so, you put the micro-ball of scraps into a box or bag somewhere for, like, eight years, and then it gets to the point where you've tripped over the box one time too many and so you say to yourself, "Self! That's it! The time is NOW! I'm going to just...cast on 40 stitiches and knit strips in plain garter grabbing whatever random ball comes to hand as each one runs out until it is GONE!"?

Point. Reached.

Miscellaneous

As I’ve been pondering the changes we’re making and the budget changes I’m going to undoubtedly be making because of them, one thing that keeps coming back into my mind is how bizarre it is that having a reliable, same-every-time paycheck is…foreign to me.

I’m not accustomed to approaching a budget the way the vast majority of Americans do: Being able to say “I can count on this much money coming in, on the following days…”

For me, budgeting has usually been done with more of a high/low estimation of what I would probably be bringing home – trying to guesstimate for each month how many days I wouldn’t be paid for due to somebody being sick or the company being closed for a holiday, trying to keep a read on how likely it was that the project would be continued following the latest round of budgeting by the client, and so forth.

The idea of having two paychecks that will arrive at exactly the same times each month for exactly the same amounts…is a little hard for me to get my arms around.

But I suspect I’ll get used to it.

I’m almost to the point of actually doing stuff at work; up until now, it’s all basically been “research” – reading through approximately 32,000 pages on various Wiki libraries about which parts go with what parts by huh-now?! methods.

I’ve been enjoying the relatively free time while it lasts. And trying to make my work-day eight hours and then HARD-STOP.

I need to get into the habit of not attempting to do “everything” myself; and of making sure I split my attention more evenly between work and home.

And also I need to take better care of my garden. Last year was a pretty rotten one, all things considered; and it was entirely because I didn’t put in the same effort I had before, choosing instead to allow myself to be dragged into all-night coding “parties,” working over weekends on projects I knew were doomed to failure no matter what I tried, but, gamely wading in and trying anyway.

It’s going to be another interesting year.

Can’t wait to see where it leads us.

Your Earth ways are strange to me…

Can anybody explain this to me? Where “this” is “fashion sneakers”? WITH HEELS?!?!

(Sorry the picture is so tiny – I can’t seem to make it bigger without making it so grainy you can’t SEE it at all!)

This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like a complete alien. I look at this and think, “OK, so, let me get this straight…”

Our species has cunningly designed footwear with an eye toward being fleet-and-sure of foot – for sports, for running, for walking, etc.

This footwear is, on the whole, comfortable and receives the enthusiastic approval of many podiatrists.

It has widespread acceptance as a go-to choice for everybody from actual athletes to soccer moms carting said athletes around to folks like me who wear them to the office an awful lot (largely to avoid the aforementioned podiatrists, who while being lovely folks on the whole get rather pricy in a hurry when one has bunions but insists on wearing heels that accelerate the time it takes for them to go from ‘unsightly but painless’ to ‘aaaaah, I can’t put any weight on my foot, aaaaaaaah!, the pain, the pain!!!’).

For bonus points, many of them are even machine washable (which granted is a noisy business, but after session #329 in the garden banging sounds from the washing machine is a small price to pay in exchange for not having what feels like the ground-up remains of the Rock of Gibraltar between your toes).

And those that aren’t machine washable are still generally of a material you can plunge into a sink of warm soapy water, scrub with a nice nylon brush, and then set in a warm place to dry. Hallelujah.

So naturally, somebody looked at this very popular, nearly-perfect thing we had created and said to themselves, “You know what this needs? HEELS. Plus buckles that don’t actually BUCKLE anything. And also they should be leather. Yes. That will be the perfect shoe.”

{…squinty-up puzzled-face…}

Sometimes, I really do wonder about this world I live in…

Some or all or none or maybe it was five…

I took The Denizens to the mall today, because I a) had been told, many times and by various people, that they were “out” of wearable clothes and/or shoes, b) was finally confident that that big check I’d eventually received was fully through the system and not still in a state where it could theoretically still bounce, and c) had apparently lost my damned mind.

We can start this little adventure at get-outta-bed-o’clock, when I announced to the female Denizens that we were going to undertake this. I should have known right then what was going to happen, because they immediately all began talking at once…about the anime store, and the book store, and every OTHER store which does not carry clothes.

Hmm. So I assumed my best Mom Expression and said, sternly, “We are going to get clothes and shoes for school. I need you to think about and/or go through what you have, and figure out what is missing.”

Uh-huh.

Eventually, we got out the door. And then we got lunch.

During the playoff game.

On the bright side, the sound of my girls hyperactively singing various anime theme songs and arguing the fine points of fighting styles (arcane and otherwise) employed by various characters went unheard thanks to the fairly constant shrieks and groans from the fan-base.

Meanwhile, I was grilling them about what, exactly, they needed.

This met with limited success.

Apparently, my girls are completely unaware of what clothes even are, and are therefore quite perplexed by questions such as “how many long-sleeved shirts do you own?” or “Do you have shoes that do not let rain-water in?”

{blank stares} “Oooooooo, well, yes, except, I can’t wear the {pants, shoes, jackets, shirts, socks, etc.} because they’re {too small, have more ‘hole’ than ‘crotch,’ no longer have soles, etc.}”

{rubs temples}

“OK, look, new rule: If you can’t wear it for any reason, that counts as not having it…”

“Oooooooo. Well, then I don’t have any pants…”

“YES YOU DO, YOU HAVE THOSE ONES YOU WOULDN’T LET ME BORROW LAST WEEK!”

“NOT-UH, THOSE AREN’T THOSE BECAUSE THEY HURT MY LEGS!”

“THAT’S NOT WHAT YOU SAID LAST WEEK, BOO!”

“THOSE AREN’T EVEN THE SAME ONES!”

“YES. THEY. ARE!”

“NO. THEY. AREN’T!!”

“YES. THEY…”

“EVERYBODY SHADDUP RIGHT NOW OR SO HELP ME GAH I WILL TURN THIS VAN AROUND AND WE WILL JUST GO HOME AND YOU CAN ALL WEAR PAPER BAGS OR PENCIL BOXES!!”

THEN, we got to the mall, where we immediately went into JcPennys  Macys  Target  Old Navy  Barnes and Noble.

Where we proceeded to spend almost half of what I’d mentally set aside for clothes on things like…a Japanese dictionary for Eldest. A “read and build with Legos” book for Captain Adventure. A journal for Danger Mouse. The latest installment of Drama for Boo Bug. And a fistful of knitting/spinning/fiber-arty magazines for me.

…sigh…

This is my fault entirely. I know how I am. For me, walking past a bookstore is exactly like a recovering alcoholic walking past a bar at happy hour; or a former smoker standing outside with coworkers who are having a smoke.

That peculiarly delicious ink-and-book-paper smell is worse than crack for me. It suspends all common sense, my ability to perceive the passage of time, even my sense of purpose.

Upshot being: I should never, ever, ever say to myself, “Eh, let’s just cut through the Barnes and Noble on our way to where the clothes are.”

With most of the day now gone, but resolute, I herded my cats kids into the Mall Proper…even though by now, I was coming to the conclusion that there was simply no way any clothes and/or shoes would be purchased, since the feedback I was getting from my adorable offspring was nothing but confusion around the whole concept of dressing themselves, and that they were frankly puzzled by the whole question of “what are you lacking to clothe your nekkidness?”

By the time we left the book store, I had already rather scrapped the plan for the day…it was getting late, Captain Adventure was starting to look a bit strained by all the huff and bother (plus he had that Lego-book thing, which, you know…one really should be able to just rush right home to unwrap and get started when one finds such a treasure as that while out shopping…), and frankly I was starting to flag a bit too. (And had new knitting magazines. Not quite the level of awesome as the Lego-thing, but, pretty darned close.)

Plus I was getting a bit hoarse from hollering, “Stop yammering about {anime, Glee, ringtones, manga, art paper}, look me in the eye, and tell me: do. you. have. ANY. long-sleeved. shirts?!”

So I wasn’t entirely surprised when instead of a clothes store, we they somehow ended up browsing around the anime store going “Shriek! it’s a Hetalia poster!” and other embarrassingly geeky things.

Nor was I surprised to get home and realize that the count of new clothes was zero.

I…think…I’m just going to…hit the Internet.

It’s much quieter.

And a lot easier on my feet.

…oy…!

Different kinds of crazy

The last couple months have been a whirlwind of madness; even for, you know, us, it’s just been…devastatingly crazy around here.

The husband started a new job last week, after having been approached out of the blue by a former client of ours; this set off a lightning storm of rearranged schedules, car issues (since instead of working from home “almost always,” he now has to go into the office “always,” and the nanny is a) sharing a car with her SO and b) doesn’t have a four-kid-sized car to begin with), scheduling issues (suddenly neither of us are home by dinnertime) and so on and so on.

That kind of crazy.

The middleman between myself and the client started having increasingly bad (cough-cough) cash flow issues; what had started out as about a six week lag between “invoice approved by client” and “paycheck” grew slowly…yet inexorably…to eighteen weeks.

That kind of crazy, too.

Right around the same time the problem with the middleman became so glaringly obvious that even I couldn’t reason them away as being “timing issues” around when invoices were approved and when bill cycles were going through, the husband’s soon-to-be-former manager contacted me to say, “Soooooo…what are you up to these days?'” He’d tried to hire me back in February into a very similar position, but we’d been blocked by the whole ‘husbands and wives cannot work together’ policy; the offer being a very good one and the current situation pay-wise being a very bad one (shoot, even the pay rate was rather ‘eh,’ considering that it was less than I made on the W2 contract previous to it and was straight 1099 – so the burden of self-employment taxes, insurance, permits, blah blah blah, was entirely on me), I immediately made the no-brainer call and turned in notice to the client – my last day to be December 21.

That kind of crazy.

To my infinite surprise, they not only countered, but went to astonishing lengths to try to keep me – including fast-tracking an investigation that as it turned out was already underway into said irregularities. Within a week, I was receiving release forms from my former contract, had been told by the gentleman from the accounting team that they would be more than happy to offer me a very very slight increase in bill rate to go direct, said, “Eh, actually, I’ve got this other thing…” and was immediately told “Never mind. You can get the same exact thing they were getting. Now will you stay?” – which brought the nets up to a point where in terms of cash in my pocket the contract was suddenly a sweeter deal and turned my “I have made up my mind” back into “damn, now I have to THINK. Again.”

That kind of crazy.

And of course the move to SCRUM has been exhausting and constant…as the ‘first among equals’ for our team (read: have to have my finger in every.stupid.pie we make) I have been turning in timesheets showing between 50 and 60 hours for the last month, solid. And it shows in my attitude, my red-rimmed eyes, and my blood pressure.

That kind of crazy.

I have been sitting on the fence between the two options since the holiday break (whiiiiiich I didn’t actually get, because since I wasn’t leaving yet while All This was going down, it became the perfect time to work on some things that have proven verrrrrrry tricky to get done thanks to things like ‘contention on the box’ and ‘ack, whaddya mean the server is down?!’), thinking and thinking and thinking until I wanted to scream with frustration.

Both things have their own charms, their own pros and cons. Emotionally I felt like the full-time offer was better; financially, the contract one was. For work-life balance, definitely the FTE…for being continually challenged, the contract…

Trying to choose between them was like trying to pick between two equally-loved flavors of ice cream…until the husband came home with the benefits information for his new job.

Ouch. More than double the premium and the deductibles…spotty prescription coverage…back to That Thing where trips to the pharmacy were $300, $400, $500 a crack…yeahhhhhhh, suddenly, that FTE position with the pimped-out benefits package is worth a lot more than it was a second ago…

So…this coming week is my last week where I am, and I’m going to be starting as an FTE at MegaBank shortly.

In related news, I don’t think I’ve ever had this much drama around something as simple as getting a new job.

And I’m very glad it’s over now.

Kind of like getting a shot, the lead-up was far worse than the actual jab.

This last week is going to be pretty crazy, though.

Can’t wait for it to be over.

…delete-delete-delete…

It has been a helluva week-and-some. And, having written about a fifty page rant about the what-all and where-fors and what-the-#&^!s…it remains a better idea not to go into a whole lot of detail.

I honestly don’t know whether or not the whole situation is going to end in lawsuits being filed, or if I’ll be dragged into them if it does, or…what.

So I’ll have to content myself with the following observations in re: The Recent Drama (now with More Drama). It has been…

• A massive upheaval
• With rather reprehensible-no-matter-how-you-slice-it causes
• Also, stupid causes
• Affecting not just me but up to thirty people directly
• …which doesn’t even begin to count the innocent bystanders who are also taking shrapnel of various sorts…
• In the collective experience of said parties, we have never actually been party to something like this
• Heard stories, but never seen first-hand
• Also, it is stupid
• AND upsetting
• AND has added untold stress to the holidays
• which may be a hanging offense
• because they’re hardly stress-free as it is, am I right?!
• We’ll all be OK in the end
• But it ain’t gonna be fun, for anybody – even the perps
• Not that anybody is all that concerned for them, really
• By the way, did I mention the stupid part?
• …because seriously, The Stupid, it deserves capital letters, that is how Stupid it is…
• In related news, I’m very annoyed with myself for being unable to achieve pure wrath about the whole mess
• Seriously, that damned ability of mine to simultaneously not forgive it one bit…
• …buuuuuuut still “get” how it wasn’t necessarily done with malice aforethought by a mustache-twirling villain…
• …is really annoying when you know you have every right to be “I am going to introduce your face to my knuckles” pissed off
• Just. Sayin’.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, we are two and a half days away from putting this last sprint to bed – and then we have a week and a half of outright shut down. The building is literally closed. Like, locked. Like, I don’t care WHAT your badge says / how “urgent” and/or “vital” it is, you can’t come in until January 3 closed.

I am living for next week right now. I plan to spend most of that time off doing what I consider to be the best thing for surviving everything from work upheavals to Zombpocalypse: I shall knit on, with confidence and hope, through all crises.

(I just cast on a…well, I think it will be a vest. It’s one of those projects, so, I have a rough idea where it’s going but at the same time, it is doing stuff like being fine with being ‘a plain red vest’ but then abruptly deciding on the BART ride home that it must have some black accent around the bottom, like, right now, and that it probably wants some kind of motif above the black accent that may or may not involve birds.)

(I know which pattern it means by that, but I’m not convinced it would actually fit well given the number of stitches and the yarn type we’re working with here.)

(Projects are funny that way. They can be extremely artistic and have excellent ideas about what they could or should become, but their math and ability to balance concept with realistically possible stinks on ice.)

It was a dirty, low-down trick to pull…

…but I just couldn’t resist…

So, it was Boo Bug’s fifth eleventh birthday today. She had been asking for an iPod for her birthday. Repeatedly. It was, in fact, the only thing she had asked for – even though every time she brought it up, I snarled, “NO! TOO EXPENSIVE! TOO DELICATE! PICK SOMETHING ELSE!”

I continued doing this even after I had the Nano safely hidden under the bills in my desk drawer.

Because I am evil.

Oh, you don’t believe me. Read on.

This morning, I had to run to the drug store for the usual two things that had completely slipped my mind until, like, an hour before Everybody was supposed to arrive. (If I ever didn’t do this, I’m pretty sure the world would end.)

As I walked through the door, my eye fell on a floor-to-ceiling display of toys. You know, the kind that are a) for babies and b) really, really cheap.

Not only were they on sale, they had enormous, red-and-yellow, 400-point font stickers on front of them declaring that they were half-price and also buy two get one free.

I began to giggle to myself. OH yeah, it MUST be done...

I combed that toy section looking for the most perfectly awful thing I could think of for my Boo. Something that would horrify her, but be juuuuuuust close enough to reasonable to have her thinking that dear Gah, her mother REALLY DID buy THAT for her birthday present.

Finally, I found it: A set of My Little Pony knockoffs, with horrifically cheap little brushes and other accoutrements and grins on their horse-faces that were all like, “HI! WE ARE SO HAPPY IT IS RIDICULOUS HOW HAPPY WE ARE! WE ARE GOING TO BE CHEERFUL LIKE THIS, LIKE, FOREVER! BECAUSE HAPPINESS IS OUR THING! GROUP HUG!!!!!” – because, of course, your average fifth grader is all about the fake My Little Pony with enormous plastic grins.

And I left that damned ‘half off / buy three get one free’ sticker on the front of the box.

Also, I got the kind of poofy-princess gift bag your average five year girly-girl type old would die for, and the fairy-castle tissue paper.

And a super-sized Kit-Kat bar. And a super-frilly blue ribbon. Which I stuck more-than-a-bit off-center onto the candy bar before dropping it into the wadded up tissue on top of the ponies in the bag.

And then…I waited. Like a malevolent spider tending the web. I watched her open her friend’s present. I watched her pull out the new pajamas from Grandma (who also had gotten her an iTunes card, which I’d hidden in the office with the Nano).

And then…then…she picked up the bag. An eyebrow raised over the Princessy Princess of All-Star Pinkity-Pink Princess (now with more princess!) bag, but she made no comment.

She pulled out the candy bar, and looked at me suspiciously.

I attempted to look innocent while inwardly choking half to death on laughter.

She pulled out the Plastic Ponies.

There was a long pause.

“Oh. These are…really cute…” she said politely, surreptitiously peering into the bag. Empty. She made a couple more passes at acting like she liked the stupid things, before zinging me with a typical example of Boo Bug humor.

“Oh. And they were on sale,” she observed, drily, tapping the ENORMOUS sticker.

“Ooooooooooh, no! Did I forget to take the stupid sticker off?!” I shrieked.

“Ya, I think you did,” she smiled serenely. Zzzzzzzzzzzing!!

Now, the really awesome thing is: She actually bought it. For the, like, thirty seconds that I let her suffer before bringing out her real present, she actually thought that her poor, obviously-not-altogether-with-it mother had really bought her a $6.99 $3.50 set of cheap plastic not-my-little-ponies, complete with unusable brush and three-pronged comb.

MWAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! HAHAHAHA!  HA!! HAHAHAHA!!!!!! {gasp-sputter}.

Oh, yeah. Giving the Denizens things to tell their therapists about in years to come…it is my mission in life…

I’m rather proud of her, though. I suspect in that moment when she was looking at this thing and thinking that this had to be in the top ten worst birthdays of all time, she was half-ready to ask for a divorce from this whole family. And when I was eleven, I’m not sure I would have handled that sort of disappointment so handily; at best, I would have pulled an immediate and thorough disappearing act.

But she handled it so beautifully, with grace and good-nature and by the way a side-helping of teasing me right back.

Heh.

Yeah. I like the woman she is growing to be. Sweet and spicy. Kind and (a little) sarcastic.

Loving but don’t mistake her for an emotional boot-scraper.

That’s my girl.

Happy birthday, kiddo. Hope you enjoy being able to listen to your music, without arguing with your sisters (or your parents, for that matter) about whether it is cool or lame or too loud or too soft or theirs or yours or anybody else’s.

Random Observations and Ramblings

I just realized today that the difference between ‘sleeping’ and ‘speeding’ really isn’t as LARGE as previously thought. IN POINT OF FACT, it is only two (2) letters!

I realized this shortly after I had fired off a “dude, you are, like, ON FIRE today!” comment to one of my team members who has been generating not only emails with questions that kept making me furrow my brow and go, “Hmm, that’s a damn good question, right there…” but also emails that said things like “OK, the stored procedure usp_something_something_something is on DEV. Your review would be appreciated.”

He immediately returned fire with “if I am fast, YOU are a speeding bullet!”

And I began to ponder my day overall, most particularly the actual, MEASUREABLE output of it, and found myself grousing that I was more of a sleeping bullet.

And then I went, ‘Oh. Hey. Never noticed that before.’

Which actually pretty much sums up the whole day, because it was that kind of day. A day full of useless bits of valuable information, spinning my wheels, answering the same question over and over again, asking the same question over and over again, and otherwise just kind of sitting around watching paint dry.

With occasional bursts of incoming hurricane.

It began with the annual IEP meeting for Captain Adventure (who is mainstreaming for a large part of his day [with an aid to protect/guide him] into a “regular” third grade classroom, and overall doing very well indeed).

This was followed by the usual fumbling around with forms and things that urgently needed to be done, like, right-now afterward.

During this fumbling around, I had a random blast of actually remembering something and realized that a) I hadn’t remembered to pay the property taxes due in three days (!!) nor the registration for the van due in four days (!!!) plus there was this stupid $25 bill from the doctor that has been sitting on my inbox for, like, two months (!! overdue embarrassment !!) AND THEN there was the registration for the Civic and I had this moment where I thought to myself if this, too, is due in, like, eight minutes, I WILL scream…but then I remembered that Al’s Rendering Unto Caesar isn’t due until February and was all …whew…but then I actually LOOKED at it and the words “SMOG certificate” jumped out at me and then I may have snarled something unladylike, hurled it back into the inbox and turned instead to my work laptop, which seemed like a much safer proposition at that point.

And then I fired off about half a dozen emails in rapid succession.

Then I watched a data load not go very fast.

And then watched a calculation process also not go very fast.

Interspersed with episodes of trying to work on the same paragraph of the design document even though it was becoming QUITE clear that merely THINKING about this document causes EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD to think of something they need to URGENTLY message me about.

And then I became somewhat frozen with indecision over some really minute details.

Then I spent way more time than I probably should have trying to come up with a gentle way to break it to somebody that I couldn’t “just” take “only” a couple hours away from sprint-tasks to join meetings about something completely unrelated to it. It’s like a RULE or something.

And no, next week won’t work either.

And…no, actually…there isn’t a gap, of any sort, between sprints…it’s just “finish on Friday / right back in on Monday.”

And then I spent a few minutes cruising the job boards on my phone, because this is a seriously not-sustainable deal right here.

And then I got to the end of the day with that peculiar blend of feeling exhausted because I hit the ground running and never stopped…but at the same time, when I look back and try to point out what I actually DID, I’m all, like, “…uh…well, there was…I did the…{whining tone} do all the emails about things like field types count?!?!”

NOT IN SCRUM, THEY DON’T. If it ain’t an official product backlog item task, it doesn’t count.

So, officially? I didn’t accomplish a damn thing, all day.

And my SCRUM master is going to be giving me Scowl Face tomorrow.

And I’m going to be all, like, “Wah-huh, not mah fauuuuult! I did stuff! And also other stuff! Plus, it’s like, you know, meh-meh-meh-wah-wah-wah!”

Sigh.

Another completely unrelated thing I realized today is that I currently have a perhaps unhealthy love for bento boxes. They’re just so…efficient. Particularly the “grown up” ones that are basically designed by people who are thinking to themselves, Hmm. What would be able to hold a lunch capable of sustaining a human being for an eight hour work day, but yet fit neatly into a backpack or briefcase…

It’s cunning in the same way that vertical gardening is cunning: You have relatively narrow boxes, that stack. Each little box would be way too little, but put two or three of them on top of each other? Awesome.

All held together with simple little bands or ties, or fancy wraps that require way too much intelligence for someone like me to deal with, so, rubber band, please.

AND THEY CAN BE INSANELY NOT-EXPENSIVE. Like, less than five dollars not-expensive. {swoon!}

They can, of course, also be insanely not not-expensive. Like, $200+ not-not-expensive. And I will look at those hand-carved, hand-painted works of art and think, Wow. That’s just…SO amazing…and then I ponder eating off it and promptly turn back to the versions with sloppily-by-comparison cranes or cats or Pokemon stenciled onto them.

Or nothing at all. Just a set of black or brown boxes with a plain black elastic band to hold them together. Simple, unassuming, and opening up to reveal a startling amount of food.

People with more time and/or talent can get all artsy-fartsy with them and carve little animals out of carrots and some junk. I just pack them with rice and hard-boiled eggs and random bits of leftover meat and stuff like that, then add slices of red bell pepper or parsley fronds or encircle the lunchmeat with Cheez-Its (yes, I really did that once…bento boxes have a way of encouraging such behavior somehow…) and pretend it’s fancy.

WHICH IT IS! Because, true story, ‘bento’ is a Japanese word! Which automatically translates to “exotic and fancy.”

You know, when you’re an American.

We…tend to view all sorts of things other cultures think of as “um, what? You, uh, know that it’s just a {shoelace, boat, head-covering, comfort food, lunchbox}, right?” as being boundlessly fascinating, and/or cunning, and/or fancy, and/or exotic, and/or I have to put my pinkie into the air and assume a REALLY bad imitation of a British accent whenever I refer to this.

Sigh. Over 200 years old, and yet we’re still like a bunch of obnoxious children who have never been let out into public before, suddenly turned loose in the world’s biggest combination candy-and-toy store, running all over the place screaming, “OHMYGAH, CAN I HAVE ONE? PLEEEEEEEEASE?!?!” about darn near everything we see. (But at least we’re enthusiastic?)

Ahem. Anyway. I now have four of them.

One is a chunky, round ‘Thermos’ like one that I love to death even though it is as graceful and elegant as a rather large cylindrical brick because a) it stacks, four things on top of each other, and b) it keeps things hot for a ridiculously long time, so I don’t have to get in line for the microwave at lunch time.

And also I have three ‘little box suitable for carrying in a briefcase’ styles. Which is up from one because I just got two of them I about forgot I’d ordered (one downside of the inexpensive straight-from-Japan sources, sometimes the delivery time should be measured in geologic time or something)  in the mail today.

And I showed them off to my anime-loving daughters and then cackled wildly because ha ha, I leave before you, *I* get first pick of the new beeeeennntoooos, neener-neener…! (<= I know. ‘Mature’ is totally my new middle name)

Yesterday, somebody at work told me that this funky Japanese version of a dollar store not too far from the office carries a bunch of the “super cute” ones with, like, anime characters on them and stuff.

And I was all, oh, REALLY?! (while staring at my Soul Eater mouse pad, eat your heart out, y’all…)

I sense another example of my ‘maturity’ coming on…ha-ha, that’s right, it IS a Ouran High School Host Club bento box, and it’s MINE, all MINE, BWAAAAAAAA-HAHAHAHAHA!!!!

(They can have the Hello Kitty ones. Pffft. Everybody has, like, five of those.)

(Now, if I could get a Black Butler one? I might actually die from The Happy.)

(AL-THOUGH, a Vic Mignogna one would have such major “only somebody who is REALLY several blocks away from normal would even GET that reference” as to be a super-extra-major Crowning Achievement in Nerdiness.)

(Crap. Now I have yet another life’s mission…to the Internet, AWAY…!!!!)

(From Dei-chan-luv at Deviant Art. Source of all kinds of cool, weird, freaky, childish, good, bad and indifferent fun stuff. Deviant Art, I mean. Not Dei-chan-luv. Any fifteen year old who has a Vic Mignogna collage available on demand for weird people she’s probably glad aren’t her mother EVEN THOUGH HE IS NO LONGER HER FAVORITE VOICE ACTOR, is two hundred kinds of pure awesome.)

(I think he’s still mine, though, at least when it comes to English-dubbed animes. Which I’m sure would open up a major flame war if this were an anime site, but, ha ha, it’s not. Plus, I’m way too old to be all, like, “Squeeeeeee! Full Metal Alchemist + Ouran High School Club + Scythe!!!” in the first place. So. There you are. I’m old. I think Vic kicks arse. Your argument [whatever it may be] is invalid.)

Boring Geek Stuff

So, our warehouse server is sick. VERY complicated story short…the warehouse database got pooched. Like, went red and was inaccessible for TWO WEEKS pooched.

Hilarity ensues.

That was over a month ago. And we’re still not back. We’re limping along on partial processors, blah blah blah. Everything is taking, like, four-five times longer to run than it used to…which when you’re talking about things that “normally” take anywhere from five to fifteen hours to run…is a big deal.

WHICH LEADS ME TO MY ACTUAL STORY. (Which is rather boring, actually, if you’re not…um…me…)

I’m doing some load jobs this weekend, getting some of the stuff that has been ‘on hold’ since this all erupted into a fiery ball of death last month finally moving again.

One of those things is an allocation process I wrote that takes a certain dollar figure that in all reality has no direct relationship to sales, and “allocates” those dollars out to appropriate customer sales according to the weight of said sales – in other words, if Record 1 has $90 and Record 2 has $10, and the amount is $200, Record 1 gets 90% of the $200 or $180, and Record 2 gets the remaining $20.

Only, it’s picking apart over 1.7 billion sales records, couple hundred thousand customers, thousands of suppliers, etc. etc. etc.

It took a lot of fine-tuning to get it working fast enough to be actually usable. And I was rather pleased with it, really, because yeah, I’m THAT level of bad-ass, thank you for noticing.

And then, the box broke. “Tables” became “unioned views across multiple tables on different boxes(!!!),” the bandwidth has the server equivalent of strep-frickin-throat, we have a fraction of the tempdb space, blah blah blah a bunch of stuff that only fellow developers/DBAs are going, “Ohmygah, you poor THINGS!” over right now.

I was sitting there last night glumly watching records that used to process in, eh, six to twelve seconds max…now taking…wow, really, 380 seconds…? And I’ve got 11,000 of these things to go?

…that’s 48 days before this will be done…and that’s tooooooo loooooong…

So I did one of those “stare at the ceiling thinking” things for a while. Debating with myself about pros and cons. Risks and rewards.

Then I changed the part that grabs the sales data so that the destination table is uncompressed before loading, then recompressed to page level afterward. Data and indexes both. And then the allocation process runs against it.

I wasn’t sure it would help, but, I thought it just might. And it did. I’m clicking at 4-10 seconds per item again. Whew.

The reason I wasn’t sure it would work is because this is actually a trade-off proposition. (And this is where it gets really boring and confusing, so, feel free to drop off…but I just hafta share for the, like, two people in the whole world who might find it interesting.) (Plus, I’m just jazzed. Because. IT WORKED. Woot!!!)

So, keeping it way simplistic and not at all tech-textbook (read: for more technically-accurate and complete information on This Kind Of Stuff, I’d recommend hitting up the MSDN books online) …the way a database stores things is kind of like this: Imagine the biggest, ugliest textbook you ever had to haul around with you in school. The words are like the fields in your table. The sentences are the rows in the database. The pages are, well, the pages. The chapters are ‘extents’ – a collection of pages.

Now. Each page can only hold so many words. And in the database world, each chapter also has a limit – at some point, things will spill over into new chapters for lack of room. And there’s only so many chapters that can fit in an extent.

Whenever you’re running a query, the server will find the information you want by drilling through all this information. It will look at what you’re asking for, look at the server-equivalent of the table of contents for the extent and the back-of-book index for the page, and then it will begin to scan through the page looking for the specific information you’re after. (Table-level indexes would therefore be…um…hmm…like the bold words on the page? I guess?)

Just like a textbook, if you’ve got good indexes that pinpoint information as precisely as possible, you can find things faster. 

So. When you compress a table or partition to page level, you’re actually doing two things: First, the rows get compressed (more words per page).

Then, the page gets compressed (more pages per extent).

NOW. Here’s where the tradeoff is: When you run a query against a compressed table, you will frequently find that it burns more CPU and/or has more input-output (I/O) hit. The data has to be uncompressed to be displayed, and that takes a bit of server-effort.

HOWEVER. The finding of the data itself requires less effort and happens faster. Instead of having to scan thirty pages to get everything it needs to return, maybe it only has to scan five.

This time, it looks like the tradeoff is in my favor.

I think this kind of thing is what makes me love what I do so much; what makes me sometimes sit back and chuckle about being paid to romp around figuring out how to shave a few seconds here or there off a process, or get data that is stubbornly refusing to budge to zip across to its new home.

There’s always more to learn.

There’s always more that I don’t know yet.

There’s always a better, faster, more efficient, less painful way to do whatever-it-is.

There’s science. There’s art. It’s frustrating, infuriating, confusing, complex, simple. Things that take only five minutes to fix take five days to find.

The answer to the question “will this help this process go faster” is just about always “it depends…hmmmm…probably…let’s try it and see!”

And for me, all the frustration, irritation, and hours-spent-scouring-through-white-papers-trying-to-connect-the-dots is well worth it for the moment when I can sit back, smirk smugly to myself and mutter, “That’s right, baby. Whose kung fu is best? Mine is.”

Keeps me coming back for more, even when everything else in the average working day is enough to make me scream…