When karma runs over dogma

I had possibly the least-productive day at work in my entire life to date yesterday. We’re not talking about one of those days where you flit ineffectually from one thing to another, dabbling your little pollinators into various stems without picking up a whole lot of useful things to bring back to the hive.

We’re talking about the kind of day where you literally keep catching yourself…basically sleeping at your desk.

With your eyes open.

Or mostly open, anyway.

The kind of day where you just sort of become aware that you have been sitting there, as if in a trance, staring bug-eyed at the same…wait, what IS this even?!…for the last…uh…undetermined amount of time…and you can’t even remember why you had this document open in the first place.

I did a bunch of the things I normally do to perk myself up when Such Times are upon me.

• standing up and working for a while
• walking around the room while on meetings
• Fiddling with things
• because, have you MET me?
• which I’m sure is not annoying or distracting for other people on the call
• …oh hai, yes, that was me NOT being on mute whilst I dusted mine shutters during thy speech, kind sir…
• …aaaaaaaaand, NOW that was me not coming OFF mute before launching into mine own speech, ha ha ha…ahem…so, to recap the conversation I just had with MYSELF apparently…
• brisk walk around the garden
• without a jacket
• at 6:45 a.m.
• it was a tad chilly-ish
• and still I could not call myself ‘awake’
• drank as much water as I could force down
• the first thing I always think when I’m tired is, “Am I dehydrated?”
• correction: the first rational thing I think
• because there are typically a few irrational things I tend to think first
• ermahgahd, maybe it’s CANCER! or…that THING, you know, that WEIRD thing? the one that person had in that show that one time?
• …you mean the swamp-fever thing that you could only catch by being directly bitten by a mosquito who had dined within the last three hours on the ultra-rare, only-five-left-on-the-planet booah-booah bird, which is only found in a 0.25 acre range in deepest, darkest Africa? That thing?
• …um…yes…?
• …oooooookay, alternatively, perhaps you are merely dehydrated? shall we try a nice big bottle of water before we order in an EMT with a side helping of insanely rare serum?
• …yes, please…
• ate a banana
  • my go-to cure for just about everything, such as:
    • “I think my blood sugar might be a smidge low”
    • “I am hungry but I do not have time/inclination to eat a meal right now”
    • “I am not hungry but believe that I should be”
    • “I so totally want to eat my own body weight in sugar right now, omg, the craving, it is overwhelming, I can’t TAKE it, I MUST EAT ALL THE CANDY, ALL OF IT I SAY, MWAAHAHAHAHA!” 
• ignored my ‘official’ task list in favor of ‘interesting stuff’
  • sadly, this can work wonders for my energy level
  • “Create a .bat file for an AutoSys job to execute? zzzzzzzzzzz…”
  • Figure out some way to automatically handle archiving and record retention management using just meta-data containers and a batch_id column which may or may not have a direct 1:1 relationship with date-of-load information? …you have my undivided and suddenly wide-awake attention…

None of this worked.

Like, at all.

Even while I was being physically active, I was still just dragging. I’m pretty sure I could have crawled into bed and actually gone back to sleep.

Even with Captain Adventure exploding into the room about every fifteen seconds because did I mention he’s on spring break? and that Grandma brought him an Easter basket? and that he was an ANIMAL during the Easter egg hunt and appears to have cornered the market on candy-bearing plastic eggs?!

Sometimes, I’m sorely tempted to just dump all his candy onto his bed and say, “Go ahead. Eat all of it.” Just to get it over with, you know? Eat it all, get horribly sick, not have the “every few minutes, I suddenly remember that I have chocolate I could be eating MOM! MOM! MOM! MOM!” thing.

But I digress.

It didn’t take long for me to start feeling guiltily aware that I was very much NOT pulling my weight right then. And that this was probably not going to change: It was just one of those days, when some combination of Things was coming together in a perfect storm of I should probably all kidding aside just go back to bed right now.

And I thought to myself, You know…you should totally just send out one of those “I’m not feeling too well, I’m going to call it and take the rest of the day off” emails, and log the rest of the day as PTO.

Because to me, this would be the honorable thing to do: I am providing exactly zero value to my employer, I am apparently completely incapable of shaking this whatever-it-is off right now, and therefore my presence is at best a waste of resources, and at worst could actually set our projects back if I were to do something really stupid while in the throes of this General Malaise™.

And then I thought, …oh…wait…ugh, no, I really CAN’T, it’s the day after a holiday…

This is one of those Policy things: While it is not exactly “forbidden” to call in sick the day before or after a holiday (whether an ‘official’ corporate day off or merely one of those ‘“everybody” is doing something for it’ ones), it is…discouraged.

And if you do it x-many times (I have no idea how many, I’m not really in the category of person who needs to know or keep count of Such Things; thanks to our robust work from home policy and ability, I probably only have 2-3 days a year where I even consider using a sick day – it has to be pretty bad before you can’t prop yourself upright and work from home, you know?), it becomes something you will be scolded about, OFFICIALLY.

So much of my career was spent as an hourly employee – and a fairly pricey one at that – that to me, it doesn’t matter whether it is Tuesday, Christmas Day or Doomsday: If I’m not pulling my weight because I’m sick, extremely ‘off’ or whatever, I need to not be billing the client for that time.

I need to leave, and save whatever budget they have for when I am on my game.

It is a matter of both ethics, and long-term returns. If you’re working on a project and they keep going, “But what are we spending this money on? Because we keep signing checks without seeing a whole lot of finished stuff…”, you get a certain reputation, you know? Whereas being able to finishing things up on time and within budget gets you a different reputation.

As tempting as it may be to ‘front-load’ your hours when you’re working on an hourly basis, I’ve found it paid me better over the long term to make sure my clients were always getting the benefit of my best heavy lifting, you know?

So it felt really, really weird to be saying to myself, “Well, yes, I am completely useless today. Buuuuuuuut, I really shouldn’t call it a sick day and keep my inability to tie my own shoes on my own time, so instead I’ll just sit here faithfully moving my mouse around and failing to actually accomplish anything. Because that’s the right thing to do right now.”

Weird, and unpleasant.

I wonder how much of that is just old habit dying hard for me, and how much would still be true for me even if instead of pretty much going straight into that hourly-based-and-therefore-extremely-focused-on-productivity-per-hour-purchased consulting all those years ago, I had trudged into Corporate America, and been in this same ‘I get paid the same no matter how well or poorly I do my job’ sort of position.

I think it’s just me, because…well…this too is my life. Everything I do. The fun stuff, the work stuff, the stuff I really wish I didn’t have to do, the have-to and want-to, the easy and the hard, the pleasant and the unpleasant.

It’s all…me. Who and what I am. So I don’t want to go about things all half-arsed just because I deem them “not as important” or “boring” or “not what I want to be doing right now.”

So what if it isn’t the part where I get to drink champagne out of a dress shoe? (aside: ew, no, I’ll take a glass thank-you-all-the-same…the desire to slam down a drinky-poo or two now with extra foot-sweat really has not seized me yet.)

It’s still going into my little ‘What I Did With This Life’ book, you know? So I want to do my best, and get to the end of the day looking at my score and at least saying, “Good effort.”

Not all swings are going to knock the ball out of the park; not all pieces are going to be masterpieces; not every day is going to be super-crazy productive. But I don’t like a day that makes me feel ashamed of my lack of effort, or that ends with me not even able to say, “Hey, you did your best, you tried.”

It makes me feel more like a loser than even my worst belly-flops and brilliant-idea-that-wasn’t-so-brilliant-actually.

But, I will have to accept at least a certain number of ‘working through the meh’ when it comes to Mondays, Fridays, and days-before-or-after-holidays.

’Cause HR (bless their hearts) would rather I sit there and be a stump than use up 8 hours of my ‘float’ time to do it on my own time on those days.

If only, if only, if only

After a large number of very rant-worthy things continued going down at work for lo these many months, I finally dusted off my rolodex, sharpened up my internal job board searching skills and got busy.

I was then a bit surprised to find myself on the receiving end of a very nice internal transfer offer, almost immediately. It’s a nice promotion for me, and more importantly puts me back into the development chair – whereas to be honest, lately, it’s felt a lot like I was a line cook at McSpeedyNoms Burgers and SQL Code or something.

Your job is to SHUT UP and CODE FASTER. We have ITEMS to deliver. NO, DON’T STOP, DON’T THINK, DON’T ARGUE! Just DO it, and if it proves to be a crap-decision, well, a) it’s not our problem, it was the requirements and b) we’ll go back and fix that in a future release.

I really can’t be like that. Doing stuff I know is going to hurt the app, stuff that is going to get me paged out of bed to deal with the inevitable failure, stuff that is going to make existing problems worse and render our app that much less usable for folks…it burns me.

But of course, my trying to put on the brakes was immediately met by having the items I’m going, “Waitasecond, guys, this is going to…” about being snatched over to somebody else to “help” me, who would immediately and with a lack of thought and/or understanding that was beautiful to behold would just do it for them.

In some ways, this is the gotcha of having a team largely populated by contractors: Of course they’re willing to do the dumbass thing you just told them to do quickly and with a big smile, even if they do know up front it’s going to lead to having to work all night during their on-call rotations.

They are paid hourly, you idiot.

It does not pay such a one to fight hard and be unpopular because of it in order to have a well-running application; especially when there is no harm to you for doing the wrong thing because you can honestly say you did exactly what you were supposed to do, see? Because, requirements said.

Can’t call somebody incompetent when you’ve removed their ability to even use any competence they have with this kind of crazy-cake development method.

Plus, knowing how to fix what inevitably broke before it even broke the first time? Elevates them to frickin’ HERO status, instantly.

It’s like the wins just keep coming, ain’t it?

And yeah, takes one to know one: I spent a looooooong time as a consultant / contractor. You don’t have to like the game, but it is how it is played…and contractors who do try to “take ownership” and “own” design and tell the people who sign their checks that they are being dumbasses…are not going to collecting those check for long.

No matter how carefully they phrase their objections so as to avoid actually calling anybody a dumbass. 

But I digress. Rantingly.

Anyway, this was about a month ago – which at the time seemed like an impossibly long time, plenty of time to do anything I could possibly want to do in terms of hand-offs and knowledge-transfers and other such things.

Uh-huh.

I have exactly three more days of work-time left before I am technically no longer working for this group. And I still have a pile of stuff up to here that hasn’t been handed off, talked about, or otherwise settled in any way.

And there are still a few folks who are very much NOT OK with me leaving.

A few of them are downright annoyed about it.

And a few others are slightly panicked about it. Which is why both last week and today so far have been spent stopping a lot and going, “There, there, no, it’ll be OK, c’mon…you guys can totally handle this, I don’t do that much around here…”

I can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen after I leave; while I’m pretty sure the answer is “nothing, everything will just keep on keeping on, just like it does today,” there’s a part of me that worries that it really won’t.

That this is cutting the team just a little too deeply; that we really are losing “the last” developer on the team who has the intensity to really stay on top of everything our beautiful – but rather demanding and occasionally irrational – application gets up to night and day.

I’m sure I’m wrong. It managed before I came along, I’m sure it will manage after I’ve gone too; and while I’m leaving her a little bit light on the seasoned backend developer / DESIGNER side, well, they weren’t going to let me be that for her anyway.

What will be will be, whether I stay or whether I go.

But of course, all I could ever really do was stand on the sidelines pointing out the cracks and saying, “Right there. There. We need to fix that. That’s a load-bearing wall, you can’t ignore cracks in it. Hello? Is this thing on mute? SEE THAT? RIGHT THERE? THAT IS BAD, VERY VERY BAD, WE NEED TO FIX THAT NOW…what are you doing? that’s going to make it worse, not better, what is wrong with you? hello? you’re ignoring me, aren’t you…ooooookay, and now the DBAs are hollering at us because the damned thing just erupted into flames and fell over…can we please fix the…what are you doing? No, you can’t just slap a patch over it, we need to…holy snot rockets, you’re gonna just patch it so it looks OK, aren’t ya…never mind ME, what do I know about anything, I’ve only been doing this shit for a hair over fifteen YEARS now, what could I POSSIBLY have picked up about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to relational databases…sure, why not, just go ahead and add more RBAR, ignore the space issues, who cares about how the tempdb is doing, WHATEVER, IT’S JUST A RENTED CAR, RIGHT?!”

{rips up resume and throws confetti out window – MAZEL TOV!}

{…sulks…}

My team, I will miss. Dreadfully. And the application, too, because there were so many interesting things we could have done together. We shoulda coulda woulda, if only if only if only.

But I won’t miss any of the things that kept us from doing it.

Not even a little tiny bit.

Onward!

The ‘Only Happens To Me’ Files, #2,721

I swear, sometimes I really do ask myself why I ever leave the house. It sometimes feels as though every time I go forth amongst my fellow man, if there is even one person who wakes up that day thinking, You know what? I’m feeling EXTREMELY random and am in the mood to SHARE this randomness with someone!, they will be brought into my path in order that I will be left staring after them muttering, …what the @^*&@ just happened THERE?! to myself.

Which is itself prone to making people stare at you.

Anyway, today was apparently clearly you are not knowledgeable about that sort of thing day. Which is to say that not once but twice, someone mistook me for a member of the common buying-plastic-wrapped-baked-goods sects.

I am starting to develop a complex about it. I may have to start dusting myself with flour before I leave the house, in order to make it obvious that I do, too, bake.

Myself.

With ingredients. Such as flour, sugar, water, milk, eggs, yeast…

The first time, it was over muffins.

Yes. Muffins.

When I bake muffins to put in the freezer for breakfasts, I use mini pie pans – like these guys. They’re bigger than a typical made-in-a-muffin-pan muffin, but still smaller than the typical bakery muffin.

This frequently leads to the understandable assumption that I purchased the muffin somewhere “downstairs” – at the Starbucks or one of the neighborhood bakeries or something like that.

Which I would, if I weren’t a) cheap and b) picky.

So this morning I grabbed a muffin out of the freezer and took it with me for breakfast. As I was warming it up at work – at Too Early O’Clock – a lady I’ve never met (possibly because I’m only in the office maybe once a week, and almost never on Mondays but this week is special that way) came into the kitchen, looked at it in the microwave, and remarked that she didn’t know such-and-so place was open that early.

I rejoined that this had come from my freezer, not such-and-so place, ha ha ha.

She looked me in the eye and said, “No it didn’t, they sell those.”

So I looked her in the eye and said, “They may sell muffins, but they don’t sell these, because I made these.”

This is where things get slightly surreal.

“No you didn’t. You probably can’t even say what’s in them.”

{reseats bifocals on nose} Challenge. Accepted.

“Flour, sugar, salt, butter, baking powder, plain yogurt, juice and zest of two lemons, half an average nutmeg, ground, and a sprinkling of raw sugar on top for the crunch.”

And she looked me in the eye again and said, “See, that just proves they came from such-n-so. That’s what it says on their label.”

And then she wandered away, while I stood there thinking up all kinds of snappy comebacks that really shouldn’t be said in an office environment.

But then I shrugged and chalked it up to being Before Coffee o’Clock logic at work and went on with my day.

Now, fast forward several hours. I’m waiting at the ladies room after a meeting because why is it that we ladies so frequently seem to be standing around waiting like this, and these two youngish gals are doing the, “I know, you know?” thing about this and that.

And then one of them started going on and on about you know, that thing, you know, somebody was talking about it earlier and it was that THING, you know, the one with the stuff and the other stuff?

And quite a bit of this later, she finally put together enough keywords for me to go, “Oh. She means a cream puff. Mmmm, cream puffs…”

Shortly after which, they suddenly (and inexplicably) included me in the conversation by abruptly asking, “You know? Those things with the cream and the soft dough stuff and there’s chocolate on top of it or something? Not the round doughnut things, the other ones.”

I said, “Cream puffs.” Mmm. Cream puffs.

“Yeah! Cream puffs! Those things! They’re, like, in croissants or something…but not like a normal croissants, it’s, you know, different croissant dough or something, maybe they deep fry it…”

And I went like this: (o_O)

For a second, I toyed with the idea that maybe she really was talking about the ‘cronut’ thing. But, no, what she was describing was definitely a good old cream puff, not one of them fancy newfangled cronut doohickeys.

For evidence, I submit the following:

Cronut:

Cream puffs (with omg, recipe!)

(Hmm. Source blog appears to be in a state of hibernation at present. This is sad. People who post things like this which make me sit up and go, Ooo…toasted coconut cream puffs, you say?! This sounds like happiness in puffy toothsome choux crust and I must make it IMMEDIATELY-ish…need to continue posting things. Many, many things. I – nay, the WORLD – needs these things. NEEDS. THEM. I have spoken. Make it so. Hail Pharaoh.)

But, partly by way of making SURE I was right so that I could sleep well tonight, and partly because I can’t seem to resist spouting off valuable bits of worthless information sharing knowledge with people, I then explained the difference between croissant dough and choux pastry.

Also known as, the difference between a cronut and and a cream puff.

They looked at me as if I had just proposed that the space station had been built by the snake people from the planet Thsssslphfffbbt and that human kind were being replaced with doughnut-rejecting androids.

The first one said, “Noooooooo, I’m pretty sure it’s exactly the same dough. You must be thinking of something else, because, they’re like, exactly the same. I think maybe they just deep-fry the croissant dough or something.”

And the other one said, “Yeahhhhhh, plus I don’t think there’s any yeast in croissants and definitely not a lot of butter, because they’re really light and I’m sensitive to gluten so if they had yeast it would really bother me.”

And the first one went, “Ohmygahd, me too! I can only eat really light breads, you know? Like baguettes, they’re fine and stuff, but heavy ones, they kill me, because they have a lot more gluten…”

And I went like this.

Because what I wanted to point out was something along these lines:

• Yeast != Gluten
• “Light tasting” bread != “light gluten” bread
• Shoot, depending on what kind of “heavy” bread we’re talking about, serving for serving the “heavy” bread may actually have less gluten than the “light” one
• For example, let’s say I’m making one loaf of typical ‘light’ white sandwich bread, and one loaf of pumpernickel
• French-style white bread will be all plain old bread flour, at about 14% gluten
• Pumpernickel is a roughly 1:2:4 blend of oatmeal, rye and bread flour
• Oatmeal typically has no gluten, except what it may have picked up by being shipped on containers that once held wheat, or being processed on machinery that also processes wheat
• Rye does have some gluten, but it measures in the so little that you literally can’t wash the gluten out
• Yes. Washing gluten from of flour is a thing
• See: Seitan
• Also see: “Proving” the quality / quantity of protein in a flour
• And bread flour is usually between 12 and 14% protein
• Soooooooooo, the “heavier” bread is actually lighter on the gluten-per-se
• Just sayin’

…buuuuuuuuuuut, I had a pretty good idea of how that conversation would go.

Since clearly I can’t speak to Such Things don’t know the difference between a cream puff and a croissant, or that I buy my muffins from a local convenience store, sneak them home, repackage them in Ziploc baggies and hide them in my freezer so that I can later claim to have made them myself even though clearly I didn’t because I also know that they contain flour, sugar, butter, salt, baking powder, plain yogurt, juice and zest of two lemons, half an average nutmeg, and a sprinkling of raw sugar on top for the crunch.

Yeahhhhhh.

I let it go.

And spent the rest of the day craving cream puffs. Mmmm, cream puffs…

lol, NO

JUST SO WE’RE CLEAR…there is absolutely no point to any of this.

I’m just rambling.

Because I am tired, and really should be taking a shower and going to bed. But instead, I’m writing rambling posts about absolutely nothing at all. Because this makes perfect sense in some alternate reality, I’m sure.

But I digress.

What I wanted to point out is that one of the definite downsides to This Thing I do where I have my hours shifted sharply back in order to better span the gap between our Charlotte (and other Points East) team coming online and our San Francisco team ambling in is that it is frequently rather hard for members of the San Francisco team to really get their arms around just how much earlier I got started.

Like, on average, most of the SF crew starts arriving at about 9:00 our time. But I’m usually starting around 9:30 Charlotte time – or 6:30 our-time.

And given that most days tend to go by in this very colorful blur of meetings and quick-questions and ermahgahd, it’s ON FIRE! moments (translation: what lunch hour?), I’m really ready to call it a day by 2:30-3:00.

Which coincidentally is when the Denizens are starting to need rides home from school and such. <= you see the beauty of this schedule now?

But, unsurprisingly, it is very hard for someone who started work at 9:00-ish to really comprehend that while they may not have started interacting with me until about then, I had already been working a good three hours before they arrived.

And thus am going to theoretically be leaving a good three hours before they do.

Using a little trick I like to call MATH, allow me to illustrate how this works.

6 a.m. + 8 hours = 14.

14:00 hours = 2:00 p.m.

Add 30 minutes for the lunch I theoretically took but probably didn’t, and by 2:30 my-time I’m done.

Now, you add to that the fact that we are currently up to our eyebrows in the project from hell – the project that has about 75% of the team two seconds from rage quitting pretty much 24/7 right now – and I’m not just ready to be done, I’m so done that I redefine the term done because I’m done to the point of SUPER done-ness I mean, really, like, DONE-done, signing off, sayōnara, cya, l8r, XOXOXO, BYE NOW.

Seriously.

If you don’t believe I’m leavin’, just count the days I’m gone, y’all.

Done.

Period.

No, wait. 

!! Done, exclamation point !!

Sooooooooo, if you’re going to start pinging me with ‘can I call you with a quick question’ at 2:35 – both of us knowing full well that the ‘quick’ question is going to take at least 45 minutes of back-n-forth, I’m going to be like this:

Which is pretty much what I did at 3:00 sharp this afternoon, and why I did not respond to the insistent pinging of instant messages about an hour and a half later, although I did make a mental note that the next time I leave my laptop up and running after being technically done for the day, I need to either sign out of that instant message application, or, turn the sound off on the laptop.

Because, Problem Solving: Yet another of my many skills.

When the chips are up(stairs)

Now, I will grant you that I have a…slightly off-beat sort of existence.

I am a person who tends to view the world in a way which evidence suggests is not the way most people do. I can become extremely worked up over things that nobody else would, and then turn right around and find something amusing that causes everyone else around me to grab the nearest paper sack and start self-medicating on CO2.

Which I recently learned is not recommended anymore, by the way. These are the sorts of things you will learn when you hang out with people like me, because we tend to collect such odd bits of information, find them fascinating, and playfully (and incessantly) trot them out whenever we think it might be useful or interesting to others.

One piece of information we seem to find extremely hard to collect is how to tell when such pieces of information might be useful or interesting, which is why we frequently trot them out randomly or at times that only add to the general stress levels of Everyone instead of the intended purpose of amusing or assisting.

But I digress.

POINT BEING, I’m not particularly surprised to find myself living in a house with green beans for curtains, or soaking my feet in strange concoctions to see if they really do improve circulation, or having to go out to the garage and shift a bunch of extremely heavy food-grade tubs looking for the one that has the wheat gluten in it.

Between being curious about if/how it would work and enjoying the experience of the odd situation, I’d be more surprised not to find myself with something weird going on at any given time.

However.

That said.

This one…rather takes the cake.

Now once you get over the stupid fish leering at you from the top shelf there, you might be asking yourself, “What kind of pathetic addict keeps a MASSIVE thing of Nestle’s chocolate chips in her bedroom closet, for heaven’s sake?!”

Ha.

That’s not a bag of chocolate chips. That’s three bags. That big container next to the bag? => The contents of two more bags of that same size.

Or, what was left of them. That’s right: The plot thickens.

So I went out to the garage a while ago for something – I forget what, but it was probably important and I will be very sorry that I got distracted by The Great Chocolate Chip Gate Scandal of 2014™ in a little while.

And as I was opening the cupboard to get whatever it was, I glanced down and saw brown things on the shelf below it and at first I thought it was cat food and was all, dammit, Tim, how many times have I told you, you can-NOT leave their food lying around like this, the MICE will come back!

Because of course I immediately not only blame my husband for such things, but lie to myself about having said anything about it to him more than maybe once. Probably while he was partly or mostly asleep, because that’s a thing I do.

But at that moment, in my mind, I have full-on discussed this with him, in some big board-room kind of place with a large oak desk and serious minions nodding and agreeing with everything I said, at least ten thousand times. Possibly THIRTY thousand.

But before I could really work up a good head of steam on being mad about the possibility of spilled cat food attracting mice, my brain registered the color.

@^*&@ hell, THAT’S MOUSE POOP! @^*&@ IT ALL, TIM, WHAT DID I TELL YOU ALL THOSE TIMES I TOLD YOU, THE @^*&@ING MICE! THEY’RE POOPING! ON MY GARAGE SHELVES!

But as I was composing the angry text he was going to receive soon, my brain – continuing its slow, grinding way toward full disclosure – pointed out that that would have to be one big mouse.

Mouse poop tends to be rather small. And elongated. And very unlike a Nestle’s chocolate chip, really.

Proof:

And then I thought to myself, …wait…

…and I opened the cupboard…

…and sure enough, there was a jaggedly torn open bag of chocolate chips, hastily shoved back into the cupboard.

I promptly hit the ceiling. This has been a repeated problem in the Den of late, and it is really starting to piss me off. I’d thought we were finally past the whole issue: For a good long while, I had to keep everything except the unsweetened chocolate disks sealed up in one of those pickle-bucket style food storage bins – and store the bin waaaaaaaaay in the back, under literally two other tubs full of things like fifty pounds of rice and twenty-five pounds of pinto beans.

But it had seemed to slow down. And the last time I’d picked up those wholesale-sized bags of chips, I’d just quietly put them where they had always gone in the cupboard.

And someone had just as quietly torn into the bag and helped themselves to handfuls of them – leaving the bag sitting open and spilling its contents out, in the garage, you know, where the husband does WOODWORKING and such…

…siiiiiiiiigh…nothing says “home cooking” like chocolate chip and wood shaving cookies, yum!

Naturally when questioned, all Denizens immediately assumed wide-eyed expressions of shocked innocence.

“Good gracious!” they declared in perfect unison. “Whoever would do such a dastardly thing?!”

(True story: The speech therapist actually cited this sort of phrase as one of Captain Adventure’s “challenges” at school. He can be a little [OK, fine, sometimes a lot] hard to understand due to his lisping/oddly-enunciated speech patterns anyway, and then he actually does use words like ‘dastardly’ or ‘preposterous,’ which are “unexpected” in day to day conversations with nine year olds because our world is a sad, sorry sort of place, and then people sort of glaze over and wander off because they can’t place what he’s trying to say.) (But I digress again.)

So I went “WUH WUH WUH! WUH! WUH WUH WUH! AAAAAARGH! RAWR! HISS! WUH! WUH WUH WUH WUH WUH WUH!!!”

And they went, “Uh-huh, oh yes, mother! Of course mother! Anything you say mother! Although we still can’t imagine who would do such a thing! We will of course obey your commands, dearest mother!” {innocent eye-batting}

Uh-huh. They think I was born yesterday or something. That I was never a kid myself. That I never did the same exact thing with The Lady My Mother: “Make appropriate noises until she gets tired of yakking, shuts up, and goes away, and I can get back to whatever I was doing before she went all nuts on me for no reason, geeeeesh…”

ANYWAY.

So I went to the closet where I keep all my larger plastic containers to find something I could put the now air-exposed chocolate chips into. And as I was digging around looking for a right-sized container…guess what I found?

Yeah.

Another torn-open bag of chocolate chips. Hastily shoved into the back of the closet, precariously balancing on the backs of a bunch of Mason jars.

“WUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH?!?!?!?! WUH WUH WUH!! RAAAAAAAAAWR! WUH-WUH-WUH-WUH-WUH!!!!”

I poured the two opened bags into a big container more commonly used for cereal. And I got the unopened bag from the highest kitchen shelf where I’d hidden it behind the icky brown rice and boring unsweetened coconut. And I hauled all that chocolate upstairs, and put it into my own closet.

In order to get to it now, they have to enter the veritable lion’s den. During the day, they have to get past me as I sit here working. And any other time, well, this floor is pretty creaky up here, so anybody walking into that closet while I’m, say, in the kitchen? ==> gonna be heard.

Your move, Denizen. Your move.

(Now watch: I moved the nail polish from that shelf to a lower shelf in the bathroom where I also keep the extra soap / toilet paper / etc. for the kids, because it was bugging me to have it in the same cupboard with food. I’ve got five bucks says I’m not going to be able to find a bottle or two of it when I want it next, because one of the girls will have pirated it off. Betcha.)

Yet another day of working and whining

I am so irritable right now that arguably, I should simply continue to refrain from any communication with the Outside World and just…smile politely a lot.

It’s one of those periods when there’s a perfect storm of work and personal crap, you know? I’ve got the flu and there’s all kinds of drama and then work is just…oh fer frick’s sake, people…and I find myself biting back all kinds of remarks that are just best left unsaid.

It’d be different if I had deserving targets. But I really don’t; nobody is stupid and nobody is incompetent and nobody is just being obstinate. Everybody is just trying to do their job as best they can under very trying circumstances.

Still.

I have to say, as a general rule, I am almighty tired of a couple things.

I’m a bit tired of being nagged half to death about the status of items that are pointless because no way in HELL this thing is going into production in two weeks.

Also, I rather wish folks would quit trying to “help” me accomplish more than can be done by pulling in other people to take on tasks for me. Half the time they don’t know how to do it, and the other half they’re going to need so much “knowledge transfer” time that I could have done it myself in less time than I spent talking about it, PLUS, they then did it exactly wrong sooooo, I just have to drop everything at the eleventh hour, scurry over there, and do it my damn self anyway.

And a lot tired of explaining the same things over and over again, only to have the same person react as if I just threw a rattlesnake onto his desk three weeks later, when he finally gets around to looking at it for the first time.

Extremely tired of having items failed by the QA team with vague ‘it didn’t work, please do the needful’ comments on them. Five…hours…later…they give me a customer claiming that this is the one they tested with and it didn’t end up right…and I look at it and go, “Dude, there is nothing wrong with this, see? You tried to update the social security number to ‘aardvark.’ That’s not a valid SSN, man.” “Oooooooooh, but, it should update it, because I was logged in as ‘admin.’” “nooooooo, it shouldn’t, because in addition to not being a valid SSN, ‘aardvark’ is also not a number. The field only accepts numbers. Even an admin can’t make aardvark be numeric…” “No, it should be updated. Because I logged in as admin.”

{head-desk} {head-desk} {head-desk} {head-desk} {head-desk}

And don’t get me started on ‘being a senior developer.’ Wait. Let me rephrase that. Being the senior developer.

Sometimes, I honestly wish I could rewind and go back to being less experienced. Or that I had some kind of instant mind-meld like technology by which I could simply infuse what I know into the minds of others. Because I am getting damned tired of my own team staring at me with ‘deer in the headlights’ expression when I’m saying something that to me, is not only really old news, but pretty basic.

Plus, I have nobody I can bounce ideas off of at work anymore. The best guy for that left a couple months ago, and the next best guy for that left last month, and that leaves me just the Internet when I’m wondering if I can solve this or that problem by doing such-and-so esoteric thing that I read about this one time on SqlServerCentral…

Of course, I say that, but what I am reading “for fun” right now? Ahem, well, something about SQL Server 2008 internals…

There really is no going back, I guess; it’s like the more I know, the more I know I don’t know; and then the fact that I know I don’t know kind of bugs me, and I find myself thinking I’ll bet if I just understood HOW this works a bit better, I’d know what to DO about it…and the next thing you know I’m up to my eyebrows in Little Known Facts™ about how the query optimizer actually works.

AND MOST OF ALL, the thing I am the most sick of and ready to just haul off and clobber the next person who displays it…is this kind of thing. Which seems to be how an awful lot of our management and business types react to any information that isn’t what they wanted to hear…

 

Curtains, at long last!

I’ve been meaning to share this: I finally have semi-decent curtains in the master bathroom!

These are Kentucky Wonder pole beans, which produce lovely fresh green beans.

IF! You can get past this phase.

My goodness, however did THAT happen (THREE TIMES ALTOGETHER, I MIGHT ADD!), I wonder quietly to myself…

…ah, I see…

Belief and Possibility

New Years is a funny sort of thing. Considered in a vacuum, it’s an entirely pointless exercise. There’s nothing particularly special about January 1, you know? It’s just another day on a calendar Mankind created as a way to know whether or not you should be mad at someone for not being where you wanted them to be at a given point in time. Darn it, this whole ‘three sunrises from now’ thing is just too vague…I KNOW! I’ll put NUMBERS on it!

There is no New Year Fairy who comes along at midnight on New Year’s Eve to wipe away all the things that block us; there is no astrological event which resets the natural world in any way; there’s absolutely nothing about New Year’s Day that should cause any of us to feel that things can or should be any better going forward than they were the day before.

But, nevertheless…there is a kind of magic to it, born out of our common consent. Collectively, we choose to believe that there is, too, a magic at work in the flipping from one calendar year to the next.

A “bad” year can be put in the rearview mirror, and need have absolutely NO influence on the new one. Resolutions can have more power at this time of year than any other. Even if we have met with failure in years past, this year does not have to be shackled to them.

It is a new, unspoiled thing. A blank canvas, ready for us to draw with ever more experienced hand the life we want for ourselves. Because we said so.

It’s completely silly. Childish, even.

But, human belief is an incredibly powerful thing. When we believe something is possible, no matter how enormous a task it may be, if we really believe we can do it…we will. As long as we do not succumb to doubt, as long as we are willing to keep getting up after we’ve taken a fall, as long as we see these failures not as hard-stops but rather as learning how not to do that totally possible thing – we will do it.

And, if we all really believe that there is a magic to the beginning of a new calendar year – then, there is. Because we just made it so.

So, happy 2014, y’all: I hope your new year is made of all the things you dream; that you will have, do and be all the things you dare to believe possible for yourself; and that doubt will just shut up for a change and let you be awesome as you go into it.

The 2013 Curmudgeon Season has officially begun!

This has been floating around the Internet lately – and I think it sums up the season rather brilliantly:

I would definitely be that second one. To be honest, I’m beginning to wonder if my body somehow stores up all the Curmudgeon I possess throughout the year, and then releases it in one desperate purge triggered by the overly-early and enthusiastic start to Retailamas.

I mean, there it is…early-October…it is still 80-90 degrees outside…I’m sweating and just want to pick up some lousy thing or other I was just informed will cause World War III if it is not brought to some event or other tonight…and OHMYGAH, CHRISTMAS! JINGLE-FRICKIN-BELLS! GIVE! GIVE! GIVE TO EVERYONE! GIVE ALL THE THINGS TO ALL THE EVERYONES! If you don’t buy everyone the Things, you are a bad person! You can ONLY show gratitude and affection and prove you are NOT a soulless demon – possibly even a REPUBLICAN! - by BUYING CRAP. So, BUY THE CRAP! BUY ALL THE CRAP! 25% OFF! 50% OFF! DID I MENTION THAT YOU ARE AN IDIOT IF YOU DO NOT SNAG THIS BARGAIN?! YOU MUST BUY THE CRAP, BUY IT, I SAY!!!

Suddenly, I’m the kind of person who goes around snarling “WHAT’S SO DAMNED MERRY ABOUT IT?!” and “When the HELL did ANY of the assorted $DEITIES with fingers in the winter-solstice-ish time of year EVER say ‘go forth and buy cheap plastic crap, lest I smite thee for not being a Goode Persone©’?!”

And then there’s the way my fellow humans turn into crazed herd animals, flocking from one store to the next like starved wildebeest, stampeding and trampling everything in their path.

And taking all the parking spots.

Like, all of them.

And perversely, watching others do this, watching the commercials in which perfect domestic bliss is achieved by doting individuals presenting each other with perfect gifts (conveniently available at extreme discounts at your local StuffMart™ {annoying jingle here}), watching people at the mall in all the various stages of shopping – from giggling excitement to red-faced screaming at exhausted, sweaty clerks because they don’t have whatever-it-is in chartreuse, you don’t understand, my mother-in-law MUST have a CHARTREUSE thingee-mah-witchit, otherwise I am a BAD SON-OR-DAUGHTER-IN-LAW!…witnessing the increasing emotion and pace of the season in action…being jostled while I’m just trying to pick up a couple @^*&@ing gallons of milk, or having my ankles mauled by shopping carts piloted by semi-frantic yet astonishingly inattentive people desperately looking for this only blue and in a size that, or fending off 24/7 attacks on my psyche that are so unsubtly trying to instill that message that I must spend-spend-spend to celebrate…

Well.

It’s enough to cause me to seriously consider throwing three or four pieces of leftover Halloween candy nobody wanted into random boxes I dug out of the recycling pile, wrapping them in Sunday comics plucked out of the to-be-made-into-compost-or-worm-bedding-or-something bin, pitching them under the tree and calling it a season.

Dear Family:

I love you. Truly. I do. But. Screw this whole scene. If you need me, I will be locked in my bedroom wearing headphones and watching old cartoons and stuff, and also knitting things. WITH LOVE IN EVERY STITCH, DAMMIT.

See you in the spring.

XOXO  ~ Mom

What I find peculiarly ironic about this is…I actually do really enjoy the gift-giving. I like to make the people I care about happy, and I am thrilled when that perfect thing comes to me.

Especially because usually, frankly, it doesn’t. Or, it does, but is ludicrous in some way. Like, sure, I’d love to get the husband a vintage Camaro. It would be an awesome present! And also ridiculous! And a great way to show that I am a terrible steward of our income, and probably should never be trusted with it again!

Which then puts me into this spiral where I can’t seem to find a happy medium. And I bounce back and forth between various lame, not-as-good and equally-ridiculous things until I eventually end up buying him a box of raw almonds and a copy of the 1987 tax code at the very last possible second.

Because almonds are great. Especially the raw ones. Because they’re, you know, delicious…yet healthy! And buying him healthy food is like the ultimate in ‘I love you, see how much I love you? I don’t want you to die and junk like that!’ gifts!

And ‘tax code’ is all, like, um, INTELLIGENT-Y and some junk. And I think of him as an INTELLIGENT-Y person! See? See how that…works…? it wasn’t the very last thing on the shelves or anything, gosh no, I HAD A PLAN THERE…!

{face-palm}

Last of the great romantics, especially when under pressure. <= me

The only thing I do really enjoy about the holiday season is stuff like this:

(I know! The cuteness! And this isn’t showing the whole story at all, which is that these two boys were collaborating with their games, and it was so adorable that pretty much the whole world just dropped over dead from it. That’s right. You are all ghosts now, because of the power of the Cuteness these two were putting out. Sorry.)

(This is actually more remarkable than it looks – Captain Adventure never allows another kid to sit that close to him, other than possibly a sister. But they don’t count, because they’re ‘safe’ people whereas pretty much every other kid in the whole world is terrifying and/or annoying and/or unpredictable and really on the whole let’s just not be around them, ‘mkay? But apparently, his cousin was an OK kinda guy.) 

BUT NEVER MIND ALL THAT. Because, knitting. 

This is Fia, which has been growing with painful slowness. In related news, I think I’ve decided that the next time I decide on a must-knit pattern, I should choose something in worsted weight, instead of fingering-for-pete’s-sake. Honestly. Sometimes I really do wonder what is wrong with me…but, I digress.

On BART, watching shows, a couple rows here, a couple rows there…it’s ever-so-slowly starting to look like a sweater-thing. And it is a fun knit, too – difficult enough to be interesting, not so difficult that I want to claw my own eyeballs out, or can’t work on it on the train.

The sleeves are actually already done…that was some interesting construction, actually, because they are knitted together, in the round, with steeks…I’m still not sure whether I like that method or not. I suppose I’ll know my own mind on that after I’ve finished the thing and seen how much effort was(n’t) saved by doing them that way.

I have a business trip coming up next week, all week, including a couple 5 hour flights there and back again, so I have high hopes for getting to the point where I will abandon it for months on end because ugh, finishing be able to proudly wear it give it to one of my daughters, because clearly I have still not gotten my arms around the concept that I am no longer quite as small as once I was.

Also, there will be no time for shopping. Or finding myself having to face the mall for any reason. And then it will be two weeks down, less than two weeks to go, y’all.

I may just survive the 2013 Curmudgeon season yet…

The word of the day is ‘random’

I am having an extremely random day today. One of those days where the overall team is on some kind of mission to hit me with as many things as possible simultaneously, so that both of my monitors are absolutely littered with instant message conversations, none of which have any bearing on any other.

Which of course is how one ends up replying, “NoNoNo, the second one!” to someone asking something like “how many tables are there in production today?”

Which is a tad confusing for the person receiving said message.

On the bright side, this sort of thing is pretty much the status quo for the team as a whole, so nobody is particularly surprised and/or offended that I’ve got multiple conversation going at any one time. And a tendency to fire off the reply to Convo #7 into Convo #3’s window. It’s a THING with us.

But, this general air of interposed subjects also extends well beyond the “inflicted upon me” realms and into my own thoughts; it’s the kind of day where even my own internal dialog is not safe from random interjections of an unrelated nature.

Like, “So, if we want to load this table from here and put it there, then we could definitely that whole bag of winter shirts is just plain GONE, I’ll bet someone accidentally put it out on the curb for pickup by the veteran’s group or something avoid cross-contamination between the application tier and the analysis tier and wait, what just happened there…?”

It’s making things a touch more challenging than is typical for me. Go figure.

I figured I just had to muscle through the work day, and then I’d be more or less safe, with only the interjected thoughts about missing bags of winter clothes, whether or not the “big” coffee maker’s filter had been emptied before it was put back in the hutch and like that. Because they would be the only thoughts I had to contend with, and all the work thoughts would just go ahead and put themselves on hold until tomorrow.

Ha.

So right after I had shed the work-day and arrived safely home, Danger Mouse skittered sideways into my room, shouted something that sounded like “OHMYGAH YOUTUBE SEARCH ‘DOGE MEME’ COMIC SANS MUCH COLORING WOW!” at me, and ran out again.

Leaving me to ponder a) ??“doge”?? and b) wut?

So naturally, I went to YouTube and put in ‘doge’.

I was still puzzled.

Then I let the auto-fill finish to ‘doge meme.’

And then I was all, “Ohhhhhh, heh heh…Easter egg…but…why…what the heck is a doge, is that a breed or something? I still don’t…get it…”

So I Googled it. Many pages later, I was still confused. Because, wut?

ALLOW ME TO REVIEW WHAT WE HAVE ALL LEARNED TODAY.

a) I am old,

b) and also out of it,

c) I have neither a Reddit nor a Tumblr account, so naturally

c) I still don’t really get it, BUT ALL THAT ASIDE,

d) the winter clothes are definitely straight-up missing, like they were abducted by aliens or something,

e) so, I have precisely two (2) long-sleeved shirts to my name right now

f) the filters are fine, it’s just that you have to actually turn the heater on for it to do much

g) yes, I forgot that

h) and that other thing

i) dentistry sucks

j) I may now begin greeting people by saying, “What up, my doge?!”

k) which will naturally sound utterly ridiculous coming from me

l) and if I had a social standing, it would likely be ruined by it
m) I now have a better understanding of what the everlastin’ heck people are doing in Trade Chat on Warcraft, because “friendship, so much loving, wow” has been really perplexing me as it goes by

…sigh…I think I may go take a bath or something, before I hurt myself with all this randomness…

Keeping mum and WOW, that’s purple…

I feel as though it has been a loooooong time since I’ve posted anything. Possibly because it has been a long time; and an even longer time since I posted regular things.

It’s not that things are actually that boring; or even that they’re that busy. It’s more that most of the things that are going on around me that consume my attention and make me want to write posts right now fall into one of my self-imposed Forbidden Categories.

Such as…

…problems of friends and family, which are – and I hope you will forgive me for saying this – none of Da Internet’s business. (And frequently none of mine either. Not that this stops me from being a constant source of advice or from picking the situation apart from On High like I know something nobody else does about it, but, you know – that’s different.)

Or…

…me whining about Various Vicissitudes, about which little to nothing can be done in the near-term and which I will then proceed to be touchy about if – imagine the thought! – someone were to dare suggest potential courses of treatment. (I comfort myself with the thought that this proves I am still a girl. It’s NOT about the nail!!)

Then there’s also…

…too-specific things from work. Wherein Various Parties might recognize themselves and not think my words particularly kind, helpful or true. (And would undoubtedly be right, because I would be angry blogging while in grips of massive frustration and/or exhaustion.)

All it tied up with a My, But We DO Have A Case Of First World Problems™, don’t we?! ribbon.

…siiiiiiiigh…

Oh! But, there is this: So, Danger Mouse has been having some rough times in the getting decent grades department. And also, my little geek desperately wants to go to Comicon in March, right? (Yes, the one in Washington state. Not the one here in California. Because she wants to “fan girl” with her friends who live there. And I’d argue with her about it, but a) I wouldn’t win and b) says the woman who took a train all the way to Salt Lake City so she could fan-girl over a Harlot, for carp’s sake. He who liveth in a glass house…)

So I’ve been hearing about this Comicon thing for a fair while now. She doesn’t want anything for Christmas, her birthday, her next eighteen Christmas/birthdays, she just wants to go to Comicon.

With me. ONLY I will do. I must be the one to take her. Because I am the “cool” parent to bring to these sorts of things, since unlike that other parent, I know who Vic Mignogna is, and am more or less aware of at least some of the “good” currently-airing anime season, and can appreciate both the art in comics, and giggle like a fourteen year old at the fart jokes.

Plus, I tend to sort of fit in when we go to things like this. Only I’m, like, old and some junk? Which somehow apparently grants some kind of bonus status points for the kids I’m actually with, because apparently said kids are so cool that even old people will be brought into the light by it.

Or something.  

But I may be in a lot of trouble. Because while we were picking up the black hair rinse for Danger Mouse, we paused a moment at the more…flamboyant colors.

And somehow – I’m still not quite sure how exactly (although I believe it may have something to do with my completely unreasonable ban on hair dyes that are permanent/super-chemically/do-not-rinse-out-after-x-many-washes in nature) – I sort of made a contract with the devil pact with her. If she can show me the A-grades by the time Comicon 2014 rolls around in March…I will not only take her, but bump her ‘has coolest parent on the floor’ status by applying this to my hair.

Not hers.

Mine. My 40-achoo! year old head? Lusty. Lavender.

  

Yeahhhhhhhhhh.

Lusty Lavender.

{meditative pause}

That’s…going to be…I mean…I’m just envisioning…the first time I show up at the office after having applied this…

{another meditative pause}

…but shoot, in for a penny in for a pound…might be time to start shopping the steam punk and semi-goth stores on Etsy I sneak into from time to time like a married man surfing those sites, so I can pretend I might be the sort of woman who could and would pull that kind of ‘statement’ off…

(Note the “game face” on the kid. She’s not fooling around here. She wants my Boring Brown to be Lusty Lavender when we are Comicon-bound. Hoooooooooboy…)

Stopping to pet the flower

I have a severe case of under-motivation today.

A large part of it is because I was supposed to be taking a vacation day today but then stuff-n-reasons later I’m not, but while I said ‘nah, no big, nothing I can’t do later’ at the time that I un-took the day, I’m secretly more than a wee bit vexed about the whole ‘I might as well save my PTO for actual time OFF because I know what’s going to happen here, y’all are going to be calling/paging/texting me with one stupid thing or another the entire time so, fine, I will simply reschedule it’ thing.

Particularly since the #1 reason I decided not to take it…was then removed as A Thing due to someone else quitting.

Grumble-grumble-grumble.

The next biggest reason is, I have absolutely nothing in my work-life right now that I am finding particularly interesting. I KNOW. MY LIFE IS SOOOOOOOOO HARD, DEAR GAH, WHATEVER SHALL I DO, ONE WHOLE MONTH WORTH OF DEPLOY CYCLE IN WHICH I DO NOT HAVE SOMETHING FAAAASCINATING TO WORK ON.

I keep telling myself to get over it, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Instead, I’m getting more and more disgruntled about it. Probably because I know we have plenty to do in our overall queue that would be very interesting and/or exciting indeed…and yet…here I am.

Doing documentation. And, oh, let us not forget the thrilling item where I get to…insert a row into a mapping table.

Woo-frickin’-hoo, y’all.

Then there’s the fact that it is Halloween. And I haven’t gotten any of the decorations out, and it feels decidedly not Halloweenish around here right now. And I would have done all that today, but, please see rant re: not on PTO right now, above.

Which is a bit of a pattern, really. Milestones keep happening…birthdays…seasonal changes…anniversaries of various sorts…and I keep saying things like, well, OK, it is what it is here and there were Reasons and stuff…but for {next milestone}? I am SO going to have things more…TOGETHER…than this…

And then it doesn’t work out that way. Because, reasons.

So that’s another reason I’m just kind of meh about the whole concept of working on stuff I should be doing today.

But mostly? I blame Fleur.

Because, this.

Oh, I’m sorry, is my napping and not giving a @^*&@ about anything out of the corner of your eye for your ENTIRE workday BOTHERING you?? Gosh, well, no fears, I won’t go somewhere ELSE to be so relaxed, I’ll just stay RIGHT HERE so you can vicariously bask in the easy-going-ness of my life while you’re answering stupid questions about Things and doing Boring Stuff like a good little mindless minion. YOU’RE WELCOME.

She started regularly curling up in that chair last week, and has apparently decided that she really, really, REALLY likes that chair as a napping place throughout the day.

You know, saving up her energy so that she can run wildly through the house with her sister all night. Because she’s still a kitten, and just like human babies, depriving adult humans of their sleep is the prime directive for her.

So she comes in here, and she jumps up in that chair, and then she looks at me with something approaching interest…and yawns.

And curls up.

And sleeps.

And every so often, she sighs, stands up, stretches luxuriously, turns around, and looks at me again. And then falls back over in a kind of swoon.

Wow. Your life is REALLY boring, human. Really. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Think I’ll go back to sleep now.

It’s extremely distracting. Because she is so darned cute that I desperately want to stop everything else and just pet her (which would also annoy her no end because Schilling is our cuddle-bunny, while Fleur is more of a loner-chick).

And it’s annoying, because she’s parked right in the corner of my eye. I don’t even have to turn my head to see a sleeping cat.

And it makes me sleepy.

Which makes me feel even less motivated to do anything, other than write long rants about my cat being overly relaxed and pissing me off.

To which she sighs, stands up, stretches, winks at me, turns around and flops, smirking, back into Napdom.

…smirk!…

That’s it. I’m so going to pet her now. And serves you right, too, Fleur Fatale, you WICKED temptress…!

The more things change…

So, wow. An anonymous tipster reminded me that it was ten years ago today that I wrote the last of a series of long-winded posts on The Motley Fool’s Living Below Your Means board. It was my way of giving back a little bit to a community that had seen me through some of the biggest, hardest changes I have faced so far in my life.

When I first started scouring those boards and articles for help I was still coming to terms with a lot of things; I was just sure I was doing pretty much everything wrong, financially.

I had no choice but to get better at it…but I was sure worried that I simply wasn’t capable of it.

I’m having trouble with the concept of it being ten years since I wrote those. It doesn’t feel like ten years. Or like it’s been fifteen since I decided to change course so dramatically.

But at the same time, it does in a way. Sometimes looking back feels like remembering a movie about somebody else’s life or something. Did I really do that? Did I really feel that? Really? Because…I just wouldn’t now. So it’s hard to fathom that I did, back then.

It’s almost surreal to go back and read those things again. Remembering those days – both the ones I was writing about, and the ones I was writing during.

A lot has changed. A lot is the same. There has been water, and it has gone under the bridge, and over it on occasion, and once or twice it has swept the thing clean away.

I’ve had to learn some new tricks; I’m still learning new tricks, actually. And the definition of what I want most continues to be a remarkably changeable thing.

But other things haven’t changed at all.

I still stubbornly believe that every single one of us has within ourselves the capacity to have, do and be anything that we want; that our biggest blockers don’t come from Outside Forces, but rather from our own lack of belief in our own power.

Further, I know for a fact that doing that I did back then – stop, think it through, plan, and then do what I’d dreamed up – was the best thing I ever did, for myself, for the family, for the ever-expanding network of people who rely on me to more or less have my stuff together on a day to day basis.

And that it still is. That whenever I remember to stop, and to step back from the situation and survey it from as much distance as I can manage at the time, and to do my best to trace through all the various paths and possibilities, pick out what I expect to be my best shot at getting out of the mess quickly and with the least damage done…I come out way ahead versus the times when I’m too busy running around with my hair on fire screaming that the sky is falling to notice that the door was standing wide open that whole time.

And that if I don’t also take that same pause on a regular basis, even when I think everything is going just swimmingly and there’s no reason to do so, I have a way of wandering way off my desired course; or of not realizing that it’s not actually going where I want it to go.

It can be a darned hard thing to do, taking that step back from a situation to consider it without actively reacting to it right immediately then; just walking away from it for a bit so that you can look at it without the wild swirling of emotion, the smoke of panic and choking gas of disappointment clouding your judgment. Your instinct says to just keep throwing energy at it. Just keep digging. Keep running. Keep doing exactly what you’ve been doing…if you stop, you’ll lose ground…!

But, lose ground to what? or on what? Where are you digging to, and is it even where you really want to go?!

How many of us are caught flatfooted by that question! We’re on the treadmill, running with all our might – but what do we hope to accomplish, what will be the signal that we have won this endless footrace? What is it you want to have? To do? To be? When you get to the end, when you break the ribbon…what does the trophy say on it?

“Congratulations, you ran really hard for a really long time and, uh, we all…admire that, we guess…”?

How much better it would be to know what all the huff and bother is for, huh? To be able to say “I really don’t want to do this right now, but, it is how I am going to get this glorious, shining thing, so, suddenly I’m not as bothered by this have-to thing I’m doing…”

I think the only difference in my feelings on the whole subject is an addendum, which would be…for gosh sakes…make sure “enjoy the journey” is on the list as well! Life is far too short and uncertain to have all your goals, all your “and then, I will be gloriously happy!” events in the distant future, and nothing but hard work and drudgery in the now.

Now is where life actually is; this, this right here, right now, this…is your life. Not in {20, 30, 50} years, when you’ve {retired, saved a million bucks, acquired a mansion and the servants to maintain it, etc}.

It’s here. It’s the meetings you have at work. It’s the commute. The bagel. The people you encounter as you go about your day. It’s the feeling of your favorite shirt when you put it on. Sunsets. Sunrises. Making your home a welcoming, comfortable place for yourself.

It’s in your laughter, your tears, your exhaustion, your exhilaration, you, ALL of you, you RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.

Love yourself now, too. Be kind to yourself now. Don’t steal all the good things from yourself now, in the name of having something “better” much-much later. Honor yourself however you can, while you do yourself the even greater honor of believing that you can also have the bigger, shinier things.

I still totally believe you can.

And I’m still totally ready to clap at your parade when you do.

Onward!

Cool read – The Revolution Of Every Day

On my ever-growing list of Stuff I Meant To Blog About But Put It Off Because I Was Tired is to tell you guys about Cari Luna’s new book, The Revolution of Every Day.

In the midnineties, New York’s Lower East Side contained a city within its shadows: a community of squatters who staked their claims on abandoned tenements and lived and worked within their own parameters, accountable to no one but each other. With gritty prose and vivid descriptions, Cari Luna’s debut novel, The Revolution of Every Day, imagines the lives of five squatters from that time. But almost more threatening than the city lawyers and the private developers trying to evict them are the rifts within their community. Amelia, taken in by Gerrit as a teen runaway seven years earlier, is now pregnant by his best friend, Steve. Anne, married to Steve, is questioning her commitment to the squatter lifestyle. Cat, a fading legend of the downtown scene and unwitting leader of one of the squats, succumbs to heroin. The misunderstandings and assumptions, the secrets and the dissolution of the hope that originally bound these five threaten to destroy their homes as surely as the city’s battering rams. The Revolution of Every Day shows readers a life that few people, including the New Yorkers who passed the squats every day, know about or understand.

I’d been looking forward to this one ever since I heard that it was to be published. I’ve enjoyed Cari’s writing since the long-ago days when her blog was called Dogs Steal Yarn, before her two children were even one Thumper. It feels very…warm, and real. She manages to avoid That Thing where the written word loses the human connection to the person issuing it; she keeps the inflection, the emotion, the weight.

I was not disappointed. Her characters fascinated me, and gave me a window into lives that are so unlike my own; passions I will likely never have, logic that feels alien to me, ideals that are at once completely counter to my own, and yet I feel sympathetic toward them.

It made me think. It stayed with me, and had me mulling over Things for quite a while after I’d finished the last page.

I like that in a book, and frankly not many give me that anymore. Thumbs way up, Cari – well done.

The List

The Denizens like to leave me lists of things they believe I should immediately rush out and buy for them.

Apparently not long ago, Boo Bug was listing “strawberries” as a needed item, and Eldest was going “tea! tea! tea! tea! tea!” until finally Boo wrote it in, with of course, the obligatorily snotty “happy?” after it.

To which Eldest replied…

Oh, and on the strawberries? We’re going to need to have a chat, because it wasn’t that long ago that I brought these home.

Yeahhhhhh, that was an all-day event to get those all processed and into the freezer. And then those kids went through them in about half of nothing FLAT, because, SMOOTHIES.

Meanwhile, the pureed peaches, nectarines and so forth (from the stuff in the boxes behind the boxes of strawberries)…is…well. Not exactly “untouched.” But there’s still SOME of it left!

…and I’m not quite emotionally prepared for dealing with another enormous amount of strawberries, is the thing…

Tattler Reusable Canning Lids On Sale in October

For the month of October, Tattler is running a 10% off sale for their reusable canning lids. Great opportunity to try them out if you’ve wanted to but shied away from the price: 2 dozen each of the wide and narrow mouth lids and gaskets are on sale for $35.16, down from the normal price of $43.95. And shipping is free, woo hoo.

If you haven’t wanted to try them because you’re saying to yourself, “I obviously did not read that correctly, because, reusable canning lids?!” – no, you read that right: Tattler makes reusable canning lids. I’ve been using them for, gosh, going on three years now for most of my canning…at this point, they’ve definitely paid for themselves.

Quick product review, what I like about them is:

• I never find myself out of lids when I’ve got 300 pounds of rapidly-decaying tomatoes on my kitchen counter…and allllll the local stores have stopped carrying them in favor of Christmas ornaments
• This has actually happened to me more times than I like to think about
• Yeah, I can mail order…but that doesn’t help the tomatoes already rotting on my countertop…sigh…
• I’m protected from the occasional price-gouging that goes on in Such Times, when there is only one place that still has canning supplies, and they know it, so suddenly that little box of 12 throwaway lids is $6 or some crazy thing
• After you’ve opened a home-canned jar of something, the same lid and gasket (<= the key selling point here!) make resealing that jar and sticking it in the fridge a bit less…leak-prone…thing to do than reusing the same one-use lid for the same purpose
• At least it is around here, because the Denizens are infamous for rummaging through the fridge like starved boars on a forage, knocking things over and not righting them again
• …don’t ask me how many times I’ve found a formerly-almost-full quart jar of some sauce or other lying on its side in a vast puddle of its own innards, quietly dripping all down the back/sides of the thing and making everything in there stick to the shelves as if Gorilla Glue had been applied to their bottoms…
• I no longer have to suffer that twinge of guilt one suffers these days when one casually tosses something onto a landfill-bound pile
• Which means that I no longer suffer the hot flash of anger that I’m made to feel guilty about something like that
• Which further means I am spared the worry that perhaps I need counseling, because show me WHO is saying that you SHOULD feel guilty about this…methinks you are perhaps just a TOUCH defensive/paranoid on this count, my dear…
• This increasingly-indented-cycle-of-psychosis actually goes on for quite a while, so, let’s just stop here, shall we? yes, do let’s… 
• They are Zombpocalypse Compliant. Extremely important right there: We will still be able to can produce, even if WalMart is overrun by zombies.  
• OMG, WAIT, I THINK THAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED!!!!!
• …sorry, couldn’t resist…

What sometimes irritates me about them:

• They have a learning curve! You do things a bit differently when you use these, and at first? The seal-failure rate is dreadful – it gets better with practice, but y’all should know going in that you may have a session or two of redo ALL the jars before you get the hang of it
• They have a higher seal failure rate than the ‘traditional’ throw-away versions – very careful handling / making sure you wipe the lips of the jar with vinegar etc. will get this to reasonable rates, but inattention to detail will be punished more severely with these reusable lids than their throwaway counterparts
• They take up more storage space – the plastic lids are bigger / heavier-duty than the one-use ones
• The gaskets loooooooove to get separated from the lids
• This may be a Den of Chaos thing more than anything else – The Randomizer lives here and takes great delight in moving things to inappropriate spots on me
• I hesitate to give away a jar of something to someone who doesn’t can or who might not return them to me, since they aren’t exactly cheap – kind of like the difference between giving out something in a take-n-toss container versus your good Tupperware, you know?
• Oh yeah, almost forgot: The gaskets also make awesome cat toys, which means that if you have cats, they will be constantly pulling a Mission:Impossible on you to get at them (she said, picking one up off the floor under her desk, a-HEM…)
• Samantha Schilling and Fleur Fatale are insisting this is in the wrong section and should be in the ‘pros’ one
• But, as they lack typing skills, ha ha, I win

How superstitions are born

I woke up this morning feeling as though Andre the Giant’s evil twin had spent the night stomping on my throat. My head was pounding, my back was screaming, my hip was on fire, my sinuses were trying to lay claim to parts of my head normally reserved for my brains…and I thought to myself, Gah damn it, EVERY TIME I go into the office, I get SICK!

Now, I happen to know that my going into the office yesterday has nothing to do with this cold/flu thing having finally swept my feet out from under me such that I landed on my arse with a resounding thud today.

The truth is, I’ve been fighting this off for over a week. I was doing really well until we had our deploy Friday night. I proceeded to stay up waaaaaaay too late, and then had to get up after only about three hours of shut-eye, and then had to stay up until after midnight that night, followed by having to get up altogether too early again on Sunday and then, of course, it was Monday and back-to-work-we-go.

So, the reason I’m taking it on the chin is undoubtedly because, abuse, that’s why.

And if I were to be completely honest, I was feeling pretty blech all day yesterday, too.

I just managed to convince myself that it wasn’t because I was sick, OH GOSH NO, it’s just These People™ are super-crazy-extra-jeebus-n-da-wee-widdle-fishes ANNOYING (<= which was another not so subtle hint that a smackdown was a-comin’: Little Things don’t ordinarily bother me as much as they were bothering me yesterday. I was two seconds from biting somebody’s head off, pretty much all day, usually over nothing.)

But all of that logical stuff is beside the point: EVERY TIME I go into the office, I get sick. THEREFORE, going to the office = getting sick.

This is how deep-rooted superstitions are born, people. Black cats crossing your path…walking under ladders…and going into the office to work.

Nothing good ever comes of any of those.

IT’S TRUE.

ALLA-CAT-ZAM!

I appear to have crafted a Shawl of Cat Summoning +10. Because the instant I started fidgeting it around on the bed to Officially Block…

BEHOLD! LIKE MAGIC! A SINGULARITY OF CATS HAS BEEN SUMMONED!

They have now given it a thorough inspection, and report the following:

1. The edging has very nice chewability; springy, and with just the right amount of wool:detergent flavoring
2. It is delightfully soft and warm, perfect for hooking with a claw or two and dragging over oneself for a quick nap
3. When dragged along the floor, it makes for a truly rousing game of keep-away with a sibling or servant
4. This also causes the servants to make very interesting noises – kind of high and squeaky, with a pleasing note of panic
5. HOWEVER, it appears to cause the servants to behave inappropriately at times
1. FOR EXAMPLE, scooping the Royal Personage off the coveted item
2. While spitting coarse phrases such as “git yer scaly backside OFFA that!”
3. And then dumping the Royal Personage onto the floor in a most ignoble and inconvenient fashion
4. FEH!

Of course, inspections are exhausting…

…yes, so very, very exhausting…

(…sigh…this is how they get away with this crap…look at that sweet little face!!)

Well, THAT went quickly

With work being so darned insane of late, I have really been looking forward to this three day weekend. For almost a month now, I have doing variations on the theme There, There, You Have A 3-Day Weekend Coming Soon.

Imagine my horror to find myself already getting ready to head into the office tomorrow. Wait, I’m not done having a long weekend yet!!

It feels to me as though I didn’t actually have three days off.

Probably because I took Boo Bug shopping on Saturday. Which sounds like such a simple thing to do, doesn’t it? BUT, the reason I took her shopping was because she claimed – and actually seemed to be – completely out of things to wear. And also her shoes were just…wow.

Now, you’d think that taking a kid shopping would mean, you know “get in the car and go shopping.” Hardly the sort of activity that eats a whole entire day of your life. One would think. But having learned a thing or two from past experience, before we got anywhere near the car I sat her down and started a list.

What do you already have, I asked her, pen poised.

Ummmmmmmmm……..

Ooooookay, how about this. How many pairs of jeans do you have?

Ummmmmmmmmmmm…

All right, let’s back up just a little. What would you like to have? What kind of styles are you going for, here?

Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…

Oh for carp’s sake...

Pretty quick, I realized it would simply be faster to have her get all her clothes so we could go through them. She did this in approximately eight seconds.

Uh-huh.

So I went in there and started pulling things out from under the bed, from the desk drawers, the hamper, between the mattress and the bed slats, etc. etc.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that the fastest route would be to simply pull everything out of that den of iniquity.

And then, of course, it’s in for a penny, in for a pound – so we ended up going through everything. There were toys in there from when she was six…and which haven’t seen the light of day since about that same time.

Then eventually, we actually went shopping. And there was buying of stuff. And carrying of stuff. And then suddenly my back went from “the usual irritating” to “Home. NOW.”

So we went home. And I spent the rest of the day alternating between complaining the heat packs in the summer time were evil and how much I was sweating right now, and griping about how it just didn’t seem to be doing anything and whining about my heat pack not being hot enough and demanding that the nearest Denizen take it downstairs and give it another zap in the microwave.

And that was what happened to Saturday.

Sunday, I woke up feeling like someone had been beating on me. I had plans to do some stuff in the garden, but instead I did sitting down stuff. Which was all good, because the sitting down stuff was important too – and I keep putting it off in favor of not-sitting-down stuff on the theory that I can do the sitting down stuff any old time, whereas most of the moving around stuff needs either daylight or a certain amount of rested-ness.

And that was Sunday.

But I’m really not sure what happened to today. Today went by in a blur, as if one minute I was just getting out of bed and the next minute I was saying to myself, Oh. I’d better go to bed, huh…have to get up early tomorrow to go wor-HEY! WAITASECOND, WHAT HAPPENED TO MY ‘LONG’ WEEKEND?!?!

And now I feel disgruntled because it honestly feels like not only a “normal” weekend, but a normal-short one. One with too many chores and not enough goofing off.

Meh.

But, I have to admit – it was a productive weekend, all things considered. The middle two kids now have a pretty clean, open room – with all the old junk out of there, it even seems a bit bigger. The gophers appear to have either given up, or gone deeper underground – no new mounds have appeared, and the only change I could find was what appeared to be an escape hatch on the far side of one of the beds.

Having already harvested the dried bean curtains in the bathroom, we are now on to growing some peas instead.

There are a few changes here. The peas are more vigorous climbers, so hopefully they’ll vine up further and more robustly. Also, these are new planters – they’re much deeper than the original ones, and have better drainage. And of course, these peas are meant to be harvested as they grow, rather than left on the vine to become dried peas – so the vines should keep growing for quite a while yet.

All of which the kittens really don’t care much about.

Peas? Eh, whatever. We prefer to pull all the leaves off of bell pepper plants and then drop them daintily into the bathtub, or perhaps poop in wide planters meant to be growing salads. Really like that last one. So don’t leave such a planter anywhere we can get to. By the way: We can jump almost as high as you are tall, sooooooo, good luck keeping it out of our reach. Mwahahahahaha.

Fleur Fatale (on the left here) recently discovered that she does not like Hot Tamale candies. This came as quite a shock to her, because she had been begging me for one for a long time before she finally got disgusted with my inability to follow simple instructions and simply snaked one for herself.

One chomp later, she was looking at me as if to say, You have GOT to be kidding me! I think…it just bit me BACK…!

Samantha Schilling, meanwhile, is starting to get some reddish brown spots in her coat. They’re hard to see from any distance, but she’s got an amazing combination of stripes and dots going; mostly she’s still like a grayscale copy of her sister, though. She is also proving to be the lovey-dove of the group. She loves to be pet (but not picked up, thank you all the same), and to curl up in or near laps. Or to have a sister get those awkward spots one has trouble grooming on one’s own.

(Yes. This is while the room purge was underway. The entire hallway was pretty much one very large pile of…well…crap.) (And yes, that chair has seen better days. It was my office chair until very recently – and I’d had it for approximately 27,000 years. I now have a newer one that has working wheels and is not wearing completely through on the seat. I feel VERY fancy right now.)

And with that, I need to get to bed, or I’m going to be in a world of hurt when my alarm goes off tomorrow. (Actually, I’m already going to be in a world of hurt. I have officially stayed up way too late for a work night. I need at least one more day of weekend here. Too bad the world doesn’t go according to my little needs, huh?!)