Disorganized Finishing

We had a houseguest this weekend. A most delightful and awesome houseguest, the kind of houseguest that is not merely welcome, but the sort where you wish things like he would buy the house next door, and maybe his wife won’t notice if we just KEEP him. (I think she’d notice. And also, she could totally beat me up in a fair fight. Which is why I wouldn’t fight fair, bwa-hahaha.)

He brought all kinds of good things with him; good memories, good conversation, fun times, and last night we went out to dinner with him and a bunch of other people we haven’t seen in way too long – the old gang, cutting it up.

…until almost midnight…

NEEDLESS TO SAY, I did not catch the 4:49 train this morning.

Or the 6:09.

In point of fact, it is miraculous that I managed the 7:09.

And then I was heading for the shuttle and had a moment of confusion because it recently changed so that now instead of the 54 I take the 53, which used to be the “wrong” one but now it isn’t the wrong one and in the couple of heartbeats that I was going all autopilot to the 54, the 53 slammed shut the doors and took.off, soooooooo, I went ahead and got on the 54 whiiiiiich now takes approximately 3.5 hours to actually get to BART.

…but at least I got a seat, which it is looking like the people at the next station (which is where the 53 is now going all expressly) are not going to get.

So, I’ve got that going for me.

Plus, I spent more than half of the weekend going, “Blah blah blah blah blah!!” at our guest (the lucky devil) instead of tending to my usual anti-Chaos pre-next-work-week business, and then worked from home yesterday (which means I didn’t have to get my commuting act together until this morning, after said late night) soooooooooo, ahem, yeah.

I am more than tad discombobulated this morning.

How bad is it? Yes, well, let’s put it this way: I am wearing a dress today.

That’s right. Girl. Clothes.

Because, my usual attire is…well, I’m not sure where it is, actually. But where it is not is in my closet where I can find it. But the dress was there, and clean, and hanging up and all like that (because I have never actually worn it before, ahem) (yeah…had to cut the tags off it this morning) (huh…hope I got all of them, come to think of it…), so I threw it on and then there was this farce about shoes (oy), and since I have no full length mirror in the house, I have no idea if the “look” I have thrown together here is even marginally OK.

But, it’s what I’ve got soooooo, I’ll just have to go with it.

Welcome to my life, people.

But! I did manage to finally remember to grab my new laptop. Which is not the new laptop the husband bought for me a while ago.

It’s actually a very old laptop that has been re-re-re-re-re…hang on a sec…{counts on fingers} re-re-re-purposed.

SEE, the new laptop was…too big. It was heavy, and awkward to carry around, given that I had another laptop with me as well. A bunch of the function and number keys were in the “wrong” place for me, and I was having a remarkably (ridiculously) hard time adjusting to it.

So reluctantly, I gave it back to the store and the husband and I went back to the drawing board…and just as the fun and games were really ramping up again with the I dunno, netbook or notebook, or maybe a tablet thing, he had one of those a-ha! moments.

“What about that little machine?” he asked, pointing at the rather large paperweight sitting on the table – having recently been regurgitated from a long-forgotten box of Laptops That Only Need A Little Work To Function Again.

One $69 hard drive later, this older Dell is more than sufficient for my needs. Woot!

Now, a large of the reason that this extremely obvious option didn’t occur to us was that we are shamefully disorganized – things just kind of get shoved wherever they’ll fit instead of somewhere logical (ha!) or accessible (hahahaha!), and also we have so much crap potentially valuable bits of this and that (one of the dangers of the LBYMs lifestyle: You hold onto stuff because it “might be useful.” Which is fine up to a point, that point being the point at which you can’t get into your garage anymore because you’ve got so many boxes of cables, plastic parts that don’t fit anything you currently own but might be useful, you know, if we should happen to get another circa 1952 refrigerator someday! and the like).

I have actually been trying, really hard, to fix this situation; over the last couple months, I have been an organizing fiend. I’ve been going through all kinds of areas, one at a time, and really dealing with them; not just getting things to look neat, not just to get an idea of what-all kinds of Crazy I’ve got shoved in that cupboard or drawer, but to actually take everything out of them, really look at them, decide where it “should” live, and then {brace for revolutionary thinking, y’all} put them there.

I KNOW. I should write a book or something. I don’t think anybody in the history of ever has had this kind of crazy-awesome idea!

But it is very, very slow going. I totally know why it is that things have gotten to the level of Nuts that they have; it’s because the only person who actually cares enough to deal with this kind of stuff (that would be me) has almost no natural patience.

So when I’m sitting down with a file cabinet full of old papers from 1996 and deciding what I can scan-and-shred, what I can just shred, and what I’m going to have to go ahead and hold onto…I get real twitchy, real fast. It’s boring, it’s pointless, I have “better” things to be doing, aaaaaaaand then I shove it all back into the file cabinet to deal with “later.”

Which should be pronounced “never.”

It’s very slow going. My bedroom currently looks like a hurricane hit it. Right after a big earthquake. Which came on the heels of a yarn store throwing up in it. And then a classroom of ADHD children visited. And brought a farm-load of dust with them.

Plus I think I could knit a second cat out of all the cat hair. Oy. (How only one [1] cat can produce that much hair is a scientific mystery. If only we could harness this power, baldness would be a thing of the past.)

But you know one of the cool things about this kind of frenzy, where you pull out a bag full of something and say, “No! You will not just shove that back into the cupboard! You will deal. with. it!”?

You finish stuff.

Like…little Dale of Norway “Lillehammer” sweaters that have “only” needed their steeks sewn and cut, and their sleeves set in, and approximately 32,000 stitches picked up around the neck to make the collar.



(Alas, it is too small for Captain Adventure now. I could weep, even though it totally serves me right; you canNOT set aside a sweater for a 4 year old until he is SIX and reasonably expect anything but sorrow to come of it.)

I will have to make another one for him, someday. I do love it so…and it would look so smart on him. Plus also I did a pretty awesome job on the collar – if I do say so myself, and you will note that I do (shameless!):



BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

Like another less-little sweater for a more-bigger sister.



Fortunately, this one was being made a size too big for Danger Mouse to start with, so it does still fit her! WOO HOO!

I’m not as thrilled with the collar on this one, though; these Dale of Norway sweaters do a nifty thing where you do the collar, then purl a turning row, knit another fourteen rounds (or so) above the collar, and then fold that down and stitch it to the inside of the sweater – it makes for a very neat looking finish on the collar, and (if you do it right) a smoother join for the wearer. Win-win.

But this one…I dunno. I just had a lot of trouble getting the stockinette to not pucker around the neck on the inside. (It doesn’t show from the outside and doesn’t bother Danger Mouse at all, but I know it’s there. All wrinkly. And pucker-y. Feh.)



The other thing that has me mildly alarmed on this sweater is…after I washed it and stretched it out on the PVC sweater blocker the husband made for me…I found a couple holes in it. I’m not sure it is actually moth damage; they don’t look chewed so much as like I split the yarn (possibly because I was daydreaming and looking out the window on BART instead of looking at what I was doing with my hands right now, which was actually a recurring problem on these sweaters), hooked only one of the plies with the needle and then that gave way in the wash.

I repaired the holes (pulled out the broken bits and tacked them down on the inside, then used a duplicate stitch to pick up the “dropped” stitches, graft them back together and keep the pattern intact), but now I’m regarding the sweater with Great Suspicion.

Which makes Danger Mouse nervous, because of course she doesn’t know I’m squinting irritably at the sweater as she dashes by, so she’s all, “What?” and I’m all, “WHAT-what?” and she’s all “I didn’t do it!” and I’m all, “Wait, WHAT didn’t you do?!” and it just kind of goes downhill from there.

(She did too do it. That’s a given whenever a child randomly blurts out, “I DIDN’T DO IT!” The trick is discovering what she did. Like maybe shoving five travel mugs full of hot cocoa under the upstairs bathroom sink instead of bringing them downstairs to be washed. WHICH SHE DIDN’T DO. AND NEITHER DID BOO BUG.)

(You’d think I beat them bloody, wouldn’t you? The way they struggle to avert all blame, for anything and everything, you’d think I practiced Old Fashioned Spanking-Style Parenting…which I don’t, not because I’m “100% dead-set against spanking, period” but because by the time I’m pushed to the point where I don’t wanna use words anymore, well, I shouldn’t be raising my hand to anybody, let alone a little child…)

ANYWAY. That’s the news, in brief, now from BART, straight from my cluttered-up, hopeless mind to yours. (Wait…waaaaaaaait…here we goooooooo…AND! IT IS UNDERWATER BLOGGING! WOO HOOOOOOOO, UNDERWATER BLOGGING!!!!!)

May your day be free of madness, and may your filing systems be systems…instead of “where can I shove this envelope full of whatever-it-is, AH! There’s a little daylight...!” operations.

Changes and lack thereof

Add a few years, and some things change. Friends move away. Stores close. New ones open. Music becomes incomprehensible, and also bad.

I look around me these days at my kith and kin and see…a lot more gray hair. Laugh lines and crow’s feet. We limp, we grouse, we have a we can’t fathom how the world isn’t going to careen into the abyss of absolutely DOOM in the very near future because ohmygah, the KIDS these days!

“Where we goin’, and why we in this handbasket?!”

Today, I am attempting to clean up my bedroom.

I know. I am the most exciting person alive.

But this is one of those too-seldom done things; our bedroom is not just the place where we crash at night, but is also my home office, and my craft room, and until very recently, my music room.

This means that all roads lead to it. And many, many things travel these roads. And then they pile up on every surface, get shifted from here to there, until eventually I try to grab a magazine and get buried by twenty thousand books and a few balls of Merino and who the heck left a crane in here, anyway…and I say, “Right, that’s it, I need to get some control over this!”

Which brings me to today.

When I yanked out a very dusty box from the back of a cupboard, and found a bunch of pictures. Pictures of me looking like a walrus that swallowed a beach ball (Boo Bug…man, I was huge while pregnant with her, and afterward for quite a while…), pictures of us in costumes for Renaissance fair, pictures of me with my harp, pictures of us in bizarre costumes at the Sea Dogs Halloween party, pictures of my brother when he was still a twerp…

And an envelope of our engagement picture proofs.

(You have no idea how hard it was for Ray [our Awesome Photographer] to get us to quit LAUGHING and look all SERIOUS and THINKY and like we were CONTEMPLATING THE FUTURE and some junk like that…Tim kept whispering things and I’d dissolve and Ray would kind of sigh, and smile, aaaaaaaaand wait for us to GROW UP A LITTLE @^*&@ING BIT…! (still hasn’t happened, but, well, whatcha gonna do…?)

Lots of things change. We’re both a bit…ahem…fluffier…than we were back then. We have our first round of Welcome To Aging crap; gray hairs, diverticulitis, interesting hormonal changes (I hates them), plantar fasciitis, waking up stiff and sore to face what seems like a truckload of therapist-recommended exercises for this or that Sore Bit, and a bewildering array of pills (wait…did I just take your hypertension thingee?...uh…am I gonna die…and if I am, is there time for coffee first…?), and oh yeah, speaking of, in desperate medical need of coffee.

Other things haven’t changed at all.

We still make each other laugh, really hard, really often. We don’t fight, or even argue much; whenever we get in danger of it, I walk away…and he lets me.

We still have tremendous respect for each other, for our individual and combined needs, for our strengths and weakness, too.

I still think he’s about the greatest thing ever.

Technically, he ain’t perfect or anything close to it; not going to be on the cover of Perfection Made Flesh magazine any time soon.

But he’s perfect for me.

And I still love him like crazy-mad. And still think I will for the rest of all time.

Even if he does have hair that is always about three seconds from going all goofy and stick-y-up-y.

Newly Rediscovered: Pre-Sliced Bread is COOL!

OK, first of all: Is everybody sitting down? You’re not, like, standing on a bus reading this on your Android-whozit-thingee?

I’ll give you a second to get settled in a safe position.

Ready?

I bought bread last week. At Target. I KNOW! The apocalypse (which I just spelled in a CRAZY weird way, what the HECK was THAT?!) (seriously, like, I went with apocolapse…and I have no idea why because yeah, I know it isn’t spelled that way…), it may be here…

That’s the first time in…wow. You know? I really don’t know how long it has been since I last bought bread in a store like that. I’ve bought Boudin sourdough (because of course I have), and I’ve bought the occasional box or bag of bagels or croissants, but when it comes to “sandwich and toast” bread…I think I might not be exaggerating when I say it has been years.

My homemade bread spoils me; it costs me a hair over a dollar to make two one-pound loaves, you know? And since I’m a compulsive spreadsheet addict, I know this. Furthermore, a loaf of bread will vanish in less than one meal around here; so, I’m not looking at one loaf of bread, I’m looking at two or even three.

And we’ll still be out of it in what seems like mere moments.

BUT. I was tired and still not feeling too great and had too much to do, so I bought this bread at Target. Plain old bread-bread. Normal bread, like everybody has.

Fast forward to later that day, when Danger Mouse comes tripping in and says, “Can I make a sandwich?”

We said, sure, knock yourself out, kid.

She climbs up to get the bread, dumps it out of the bag, regards the jumbled up slices with great surprise and then chirps out, “Oh, WOW! It’s already sliced! That’s cooooooooool!!”

This just in: Sliced bread? Is coooooooooool.

The latest in chic bedding

Oh, you guys thought I was exaggerating about the stash enhancement? A little coloring of facts, perhaps, or poetic license?



I would be embarrassed, except that ohmygah-ohmygah-ohmygah…it’s yarn!!!

And I’m thinking maybe I’ll just leave it right here on the bed. Because what we’ve got here is mostly super-fine Merino, with some cashmere blend and a little alpaca and a lot of Lisa’s beautiful sock yarns…two kinds this year…one the good old Sock!, and the other a new-to-me-anyway BFL (Bluefaced Leicester). It’s a slightly finer gauge than the Sock!, and has the feel of a yarn that is going to be a great combination of soft but hard-wearing.

What’s kind of funny is, as I was unloading all of it and going, and I’m gonna make THAT out of THIS and THIS outta that and OH YEAH, that’s gonna be etc. etc. etc.…I suddenly realized that…this year's haul…and may I remind the Gentle Readers that I went out the door Friday morning saying, “No sock yarn! No laceweight! For carp’s sake, get some good old fashioned worsted, some DK, some sportweight, some nice thick stuff!!!”…

99% of all this is fingering.

ALSO, I still suffer from that short term memory loss problem. After finally finishing the VIP sweater, I was swooning on the couch, fanning myself and gasping, “Never again! Never will I subject myself to knitting a whole adult-sized sweater in fingering weight yarn! I choose life! LIFE, I TELL YOU! I CHOSE IT!”

Fast forward about three seconds, and I am enthusiastically pulling bag after bag of fingering weight yarn out of the box going, “Ooooooooh, yes! And this is going to be a cunning little Fair Isle sweater in two tones of gray – super-fine gauge of course as this is fingering weight yarn! And these? TWO adult sweaters, one that is mostly rust with some brown and the other that is mostly brown with some rust! In super-fine gauge because oh look, more fingering weight! And eeeeeeeee! Four kids sweaters that are sort of match-y but also different because there are five different coordinating fingering weight yarns, see?!”

Plus about fourteen pairs of socks. Some assembly required.

…and seriously? I’m…really not sure…where I’m going to, you know…put all this. I’ve kind of overstuffed my available storage areas and Space Bags can only do so much…

…hmmmmmmm…

…maybe I could convince the husband that this is the latest trend in bedding? The ultra rustic (by which I mean ‘still in raw material form’) “look”?

(Dear $DEITY please let me get about 62,000 times faster as a knitter, amen.)

(p.s. thank you for sending me a husband who thinks my yarn addiction is ‘cute’ and loves hand knit socks and reacts to large boxes of yarn by yelling, “DIBS!!!” and putting in orders for sweaters and stuff instead of, you know, having me committed to a sanatorium or something, amen)

A teaser and a VIP

Whew! OK. I think I am mostly recovered from my Stitches experience. I may have…overdone things…just a tad. Eeeeeeyeah. Ahem. Just a wee little tiny bit of perhaps a slight excess of…exuberance…may have been experienced by Your Faithful Correspondent.

Which may have resulted in a tiny bit of…stash enhancement.

And a hint of reference material collection.

Two phrases which should be pronounced, “Holy crap, woman, did you leave any books or yarn for the other attendees?!”

…well, uh…they…should have been faster off the mark.

But I can’t really show you much at the moment. SEE, I got to the end of the day, and I was dragging my cart behind me, and had all these bags piled up on top of it (stop laughing) and then I got my coat and the bag I had checked earlier back from the Girl Scouts (OK, seriously, stop laughing) and then I was all trying to get All That out of the marketplace to the lobby and it was like, I need five other people and possibly a MULE right now, and then I was attempting some kind of crazy-advanced packing technique and also attempting to bend physics to my will in such a way that hauling all of this three long blocks, in an impressively cold and soaking downpour, and then stacking it alllllll up on the ACE train for the long ride home would…work.

I do not want to discuss just how much volume of stuff there really is, here. ALTHOUGH I MUST POINT OUT, yarn is…you know…fluffy. Sooooo, it’s not like I had this kind of volume of marbles, or lead bricks, or…like that.

It was yarn.

Yarn is fluffy.

It always looks like a lot more volume than it really has, is what I’m getting at. Just because it may have seemed like I had the entire national output of Australia in my bag doesn’t mean I actually did.

Far from it.

(Peru, maybe, but not Australia. Let’s not be silly, people!)

Ahem, anyway. So then as I sat there, with time ticking away and my need to figure this out becoming more pressing by the moment – the last ACE train was due in about half an hour, and it wasn’t going to sit there waiting for me if I hadn’t gotten my backside over there to the station on time – I said to myself, said I, “Self! There is no way this is going to work. Your back is on its way out, your hip is already crinkling and grinding, you can’t take any more Stuff because you’re going to have to drive yourself home from the station in Tracy in the rain no less, this is way! too much volume to be dragging on there in the first place – you’re going to be taking up, like, eight seats at this rate! – and furthermore what do you have against UPS, anyway?!”

So I went over to the UPS store, looked the nice man in the eye and said, “I wanna ship some stuff home to myself.”

“OK, no problem!” he said brightly. “So, uh, how much of…all this…will be going?”

“As much as we can fit into a box,” I said grimly. And he then grabbed a small (well, maybe medium) moving box and started cramming yarn into it. The man was good, people – he understood that yarn squishes and was not shy about packing it right on in there.

The box was bulging.

And I was a pretty interesting shade of crimson because apparently, I left my self-control at home Friday. CURSE YOU, NEWTON’S YARN COUNTRY (Cashmere merino blends, superwash of all kinds, angora, cotton, etc. at 50% off!!)! And also Yarn For Sale and your blasted (but oh-so-delicious) downsizing sale! PLUS ALSO I’m not too thrilled with Solvang Village Spinning or the Sanguine Gryphon - go and check out their patterns. They have a lot of funky-cool stuff for knitters that might be looking for something that isn’t “just another sock” or “yet another stockinette sweater.” (Their Fall 2010 patterns? “Our Steampunk line.” Cooooooooool!)

And of course, Lisa Souza.

Now, because I boxed almost everything up and sent it to myself…I can’t actually show y’all what kind of crazy we’re talking about here. There was only one thing that actually made it home with me, and it was this:



This is Montreaux, which is a laceweight 70% superwash extra-fine Merino / 30% silk blend, in the Amazonia colorway, from Lisa’s booth. As always seems to happen, the photos don’t really do this justice. There is a depth and shimmer to it that I don’t think is coming across.



Highs and lows, splashes of deep green with plays of bright kelly and hints of turquoise. I love this colorway. Love. IT. I also got the same in the sock yarn. Even though I said to myself Friday morning as the train was chugging toward Yarn Heaven, said very firmly indeed, that there were two things I absolutely did not need even ONE CRUMMY BALL of this year, and that was lace or sock yarn. I have enough to last six lifetimes already, I said. Do not need more, I said. You behave yourself (ha ha), and stay awaaaaaaay from the lace, and the sock yarns. I REALLY MEAN IT.

I did pretty good on that, too…until I walked into Lisa’s booth. Sigh.

AND GUESS WHAT ELSE? She’s got a book coming out soon: 10 Secrets of the LaidBack Knitters: A Guide to Holistic Knitting, Yarn, and Life .

Sweet!

The rest of my Crazy Made Tangible should be arriving on Monday. Which will be a lot like having Christmas and my birthday and Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day and pretty much any other occasion on which someone might drop presents in your lap all at once.

ALSO, I got my camera figured out, so, hey look, a cardigan!



I thought I was never going to finish this. All that twisted seed stitch and knit-thru-back-loop cabling, and then the smocking stitch you can see here next to the buttons, with the ‘slip those stitches back and forth, like, four hundred times and wrap the yarn around them’ thing:



…but, I think it made for a very lovely sweater at the end of all things. I made it in the Knit Picks Comfy Fingering , 75% pima cotton – 25% acrylic, machine washable. It’s a very soft and, well, comfy yarn. Easy on the hands and with very good stitch definition – the twisted stitches really stand out nicely in it.

Which is good, because I’d be pissed if all that extra fiddling didn’t, you know, show up.

This weekend, it has been pouring rain. Pouring. So instead of gardening, I’m trying to finish up some of the projects that have been languishing around in the bottom of my knitting bag for about six months longer than Forever…like Captain Adventure’s Lillehammer, which he has by now almost outgrown, and I had to do this weird-funky thing to make the neck big enough for his head.

I only hope I can get it smoothed out enough that it isn’t too lumpy for him on the inside…he can be really fussy about things that poke / itch, and what I did was kind of…fold down part of the shoulder and whip-stitch it to the inside, making the collar wider and deeper than originally planned…but there’s a little extra ‘bump’ right beneath the shoulder bone that I’m afraid might offend him…I may have to put in some extra stitching to keep it from running and then cut it off or something, which would also mean I’d need to add a couple extra rows above the turning row that I can stretch it over that as well as the collar pick-up lump.

…and even so, we’ll be lucky if he gets to wear it once or twice before a) the weather gets way too warm for double-wool and b) he outgrows it entirely.

Serves me right for not finishing it quickly…children grow so fast you can practically hear their little bones creaking, when you’re making clothes for them you must not set it down to do “later” and then walk away from it for a year…(or two…)

Time out for a class

Continental knitting should be a natural fit for me. I'm left-handed, for Pete's sake! But, every time I've triedto figure it out, I've said, "Aw, heck with it!" - my left hand just gets all tangled up and the knitting is all wonky and GAH! HOW DO YOU PURL?!?!

Dudes. Instructor stands there and does ONE knit stitch - slowly, deliberately, and on what looked like #17 needles - and I was all like, "....ooooooooooh! I SEE!"

It's not exactly "as natural as throwing" for me yet, but I can envision a future where it is...and I'm knitting a LOT faster. Woot!

(sent from my Treo)

Live(ish) from Stitches: FANCY breakfast

(Overpriced but tasty) Eggs Benedict, and (also overpriced, but DANG is it good!) coffee. Breakfast of yarn-shoppin', market-session-class-takin' champions, yo!

I love Eggs Benedict. Usually (well..."usually" on the, like, once a year occasions when I'm eating breakfast a) at all, b) in a restaurant that c) is "fancy" enough to have it in the first place), I swap spinach for the Canadian bacon.

But this time, I got the salty, fatty, porky goodness.

Look out, Market...I'm gonna be a fully-caffinated, fat-sugar-and-carb driven ANIMAL in a few minutes....!!!

(sent from my Treo)

On the way to Stitches!

Cast on the What A Character hoodie from KnitPicks this week - Captain Adventure is VERY excited. And also impatient...last night, he came to check the progress. Alas, I had found the sleeve WAY too big (oddly, we breed small children...I mean, I'm on the "little" side, structurally, but with a 6'3" father, I'm a little surprised the Pixie genes have prevailed, ya know?), so pulled it out and started over one size down.

He was Not Amused. holding the pathetic beginnings of the sleeve, he looked at me sternly and said, "Mommy. You need-it to be doing a GOODER job for mine alien-sweth-THER." (he has chosen the grinning one-eyed monster, naturally).

I'm on my way to Stitches via ACE train this year...because I can take my "good" pain medication this way. Last year got a little...miserable that way. Feh. Stupid back! Stupid hip! FEH!

But it has given me a gift today...because it's been bugging me so much lately, I am here now. The rain has given everything that bright, clean look...the creeks are full and burbling along.

The ride through the hills is lovely beyond all reason. My coffee is good and hot. I am knitting on my way to what may be my ONLY yarn-buying trip forthe year.

I have a paycheck. I've made enough progress this year that today, I have disposable income.

Life?

It is good.

(sent from my Treo)

PTO, Codeine and Button Bands

I just logged off for the day a little bit ago. Which on the one hand is, you know, like, wow, really, at 1:30? redefining ‘bankers hours’ much, there?

…but on the other hand, seeing as how I’m ON VACATION TODAY, well, you know…yeah.

See, I forgot to turn on my out of office notification yesterday. So I logged on “real quick” this morning at about 8:30 to do that. And there was this email with a spreadsheet and ‘can you look into this’ and I went, huh…that IS kinda weird…welllllllll, just a real-quick look… and then FOUR HOURS LATER I went, “OK! This is the VERY LAST one-last-thing, and I really mean it!!!!”

I find this to be both an occupational hazard, and continual reassurance that I picked a pretty good career for myself. It keeps being interesting and absorbing and I-don’t-mind-working for me; it’s like doing puzzles. Why does this lead to that? How come X because Y? Where did they get that?

…and then the ‘a-HA!’ and feeling of smug self-congratulations when you figure it out.

Dang, I’m clever…!

Of course, people who manage to completely forget that they have upcoming PTO probably shouldn’t be going around patting themselves on the back for cleverness.

Yeah, I did. I managed to forget all about it for about a week. I blame being sick, and also the codeine cough syrup. Which, especially in the early days when I was also still kind of woozy from fever and lack of sustenance, hit me so hard in the brain that…that…that…well.

You know the VIP cardigan I’ve been working for approximately the last fifty years, give or take an epoch? Well, it’s finished, and I’d love to show you a picture of it, but my laptop won’t recognize the camera card…except to reformat it. “Oh, hey, I don’t know what this is…so, I’ll go ahead and reformat it for you! Oh, I’m sorry, did you want whatever was on that? Yeeeeah, sorry about that…hey! Ouch! Quit banging me against the wall like that, I’m a delicate piece of precision engineering!!!!!”

But I digress.

So I thought finishing the sweater would be a great use of my sick time. Something that could help me feel productive while in actuality I was sitting on my backside.

Which it was.

Except…well. The button bands.

There were…minor technical difficulties there.

The directions said to cast on X stitches, knit them separately (but not cast them off), and then graft the live stitches to the fronts with a crochet slip-stitch. OK. No problem, right?

Heh-heh…yeah.

First, the button bands were too long…but I didn’t realize this and cheerfully grafted them neatly to the fronts…and up the collar…aaaaaaaand pretty much all the way up to the point where the top button would have been right beneath the earlobe of the wearer.

For bonus points, I didn’t realize this until I was about to graft on the collar and was all, …???...

For even more bonus points…I’d done the one side with the slip-stitch thing, so that side was all, “Zzzzzzzzzzip!!” and bingo, it was removed.

…the other side hadn’t gone so well. The graft just wouldn’t work right. It was lumpy and dumpy and ugly. Sooooooooo…I…did a very neat and also very thorough traditional grafting on it. It was beautiful, and perfect, and absolutely flat and “invisible” and all like that.

And it took approximately three centuries to unpick. {weeping}

This should have been a warning to me, but no. I pulled them out, went, “Huh!”, squinted at the directions again, and then cast on exactly the same way, knit exactly the same band, tried to smoosh it into the narrower space and then went, …oh…it’s too long… because what a revelation this was.

{face-palm}

SO THEN, I said, “OK, you know what? Not feeling the love for figuring out why I have perfect gauge BUT am ending up with a significantly longer button band, I’m just going to be clever [uh-oh] and do it the old-fashioned way, to wit, picking up the button band straight from the front and knitting it!”

Which worked great on the first side.

And then I took a hit of cough syrup, settled back into my chair, picked up and knitted the second button band.

All the way around the right armhole.

And didn’t realize what I’d done until the next morning, when I crawled downstairs in seven kinds of agony, a layering of stuff like “normal” back and hip pain exacerbated by not being able to take the “normal” stuff for it due to the not normal Other Stuff I was taking for the cough/cold PLUS I’d pulled a muscle in my stomach and popped a something-or-other between two ribs with the coughing, so, yeah, owies…and I picked up the sweater…and OHMYGAH, it was like, BIG! NEON! LETTERS! FLASHING! ERROR! ERROR! ERROR!!!!!

It was a see-from-across-the-room mistake, and I just stood there holding the sweater and asking myself, “OK. Laugh, or cry? Or possibly scream like a demented lunatic and hurl it out the nearest window?”

So I folded it, very neatly and carefully, turned my back on it, made coffee, took medicines, sat still for a good twenty minutes with my hands folded in my lap and my head bowed, meditating and breathing and thinking happy thoughts about kittens and lollipops and unicorns and forest scenes and such, until I felt like I’d probably live.

And then I tore it all out – again – and, calmly and as if it had never happened, picked it up properly along the right front, and serenely knit the eight rows with the precisely places buttonholes and cast it off in pattern. And then I attached the collar, and ran in the eleventy-mazillion ends, and finished the buttonholes because Nancie Wiseman would approve (I took a class from her at Stitches West once – it was righteous…she is very nit-pic…no, wait! Knit-picky [hahahahahahaha, I slay me!]), and attached the very cool buttons I got from Brazen Button and I love them because they are steampunk…but not too steampunk.

Like this.

And then I was all yay, me! because it is one damned good-looking sweater.

Which I’d show you.

If my computer weren’t eating the photos off the SIM card instead of uploading them. (But, I’m not bitter.) (OK, maybe just a little.) (Although that fugly picture of me somebody took while I was sick? Not sad about that one getting chewed up, thank-you-very-much.)

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…