Random and Rambling

So, last week was Hell Week for most of us at work. The husband and I played tag-team all week, staying up all night handing the baton back and forth. Your turn!...your turn!...yours!...allllll yours, buddy…pssst, hey, you awake? Ya, you need to do that next thing now…

There are actually distinct advantages to the two of us working together like this – both of us slept easier when it was time to sleep, because we didn’t have to worry that the next guy wouldn’t get in touch with us the instant things were ready for our next step. And we never had the problem of “crap, I’ve called, texted, emailed, paged and still nothing…guess I have to escalate up the food chain to get somebody to start that next thing!”

The person we needed was, like, four feet away, the whole time.

Which is kinda cool. And not something you’re going to get…you know, outside the military or a snow-bunker research facility in the arctic. Or possibly the space station.

But I digress.

Around midnight Tuesday, I was starting to feel a little less than fresh. I left the house four and a half hours later, on about three hours of sleep and knowing that, after putting in a ten hour day in the office, I was going to rush home, grab something to eat, and plop back down in my increasingly uncomfortable office chair so that I could combine the mind-numbingly dull task of watching jobs run (ooo, row counts! fascinating!) with frantic spurts of activity (done! OK! I have twenty-seven minutes to completely validate that, which gives me fifteen minutes to insert any changes that need to happen before the next step fires!) until about 1:00 a.m.

I had more than a few moments, from midnight Tuesday through about, oh, 4;30 p.m. Friday, when I found myself counting to ten.

Repeatedly.

Also, I would like to pause a moment in order to bless the name of the guy who invented the delete key. FOR LO, I have been spared having to issue many apologies last week by this most miraculous of inventions…which hath permitted me to undo snarky commentary regarding the intelligence, education, and even ancestry of others and replace them with milder responses.

…sigh…Yeah. It was a long week.

But, it went well. Nothing blew up. I jumped into my crummy not-even-an-hour window three times to massage some things back where they actually belonged; one of the applications I’m supporting right now is a little bit…ahem…delicate (pronounced: buggy as @*^&@).

It can get confused if you hit it, rapid fire, with changes over consecutive nights. It also wasn’t built with an eye toward data conversions…it expects things to remain the same pretty much always, and has to be carefully taught what each new thing is and how to handle it.

So when you hit it with multiple waves of converting data over a four night period (followed by a fifth night when you add unrelated new things to it), well.

Best that somebody who knows about its tricky little ways is sitting up to handle anything…unwanted.

In related news, it hit me, really hard, that I’m the only such person still around right now. And that there is no way in @*^&@ I’m going to be able to train somebody new to do, um, any of it.

Whenever I try to think about how I would go about teaching somebody brand-spankin’-new All This…my brain locks up.

I got nothin’.

And when I then add in trying to train somebody to do this stuff while also finishing up the whackity-majillion things I absolutely, positively, without fail MUST finish up…ohmygah.

I almost feel a little sick to my stomach.

And then I sit back and try to envision a way by which we can circumnavigate the multiple policies that are standing firmly in the way of either another contract extension or a conversion to full time employee for myself so that I don’t have to deal with All This Crazy…and I ask myself, I ask, …wait, WHY did you WANT that, again…?

And I have no answer for myself. I really don’t. I don’t know why I want to stay so much; it’s not all that rational, come right down to it.

It’s just that I look around at this team of people and I think…they not only need protecting, they deserve it. Which I know makes no damned sense. They’re grownups. They can take care of themselves. They did so before I arrived, they will do so long after I’m gone. They will be fine.

But…{kicks at dirt}…it’s just…this system is so…high visibility. It does stuff that does stuff, you know? And then people, hard-working, diligent people who care deeply about their work quality but who had no reasonable way to see this ugly thing coming…get yelled at.

And that’s so damned unfair, it half kills me.

But, not a whole lot anybody can do about it. Corporate policy exists to protect the corporation from lawsuits and other unpleasantries, and should not be “always, unless of course you’d really rather not in which case, do as you please,” you know?

So, I’m just going to have to do the best I can to finish “everything” (knowing full damned well I won’t in a million years be able to), and then have faith that everything will turn out fine regardless. Because it will. That’s kind of how these things tend to go.

Meanwhile in other news, I (finally) went to the dentist this morning. Where I was promptly informed that a) yes, I have indeed broken one of my back molars, b) wow, AWESOME decay patterns, and c) eeeeeeyeah, no, we can’t just fill that sucker, you’re gonna need a new crown on that bad boy.

Wooooo, how awesome is my life?!

And then his assistant informed me that the reason one of my other teeth was reacting (ahem) negatively to the acid cold water she was spraying all over it was because, QUOTE, “well, he just removed some tartar build up in that area.” END_QUOTE

Now, friends…I really should have argued with her. Because you know what? That was not the first time that dumb tooth has reacted (ahem) negatively to hot and/or cold. Or pressure. Say, the pressure of drinking oatmeal.

That tooth…is on the fast-track to a root canal, y’all.

But I did not argue with her. Or point any of this out. Partially because she was just so smugly convinced that I was an ignorant buffoon who had no idea what the difference would be between recently-un-tartar-build-up-ed tooth sensitivity and impending-root-canal sensitivity…and partially because this would undoubtedly have resulted in the nice dentist being summoned back into the room to “investigate” what was going on there, which would have involved more pain, and you now what? @^*&@ it, I’m OUTTA here!

…yeah, I…um…don’t really…enjoy my trips to the dentist too terribly much…

…but, now that I’m home and the Motrin is wearing off…eeeeeyeah, I…am probably…going to have to…mention…this stupid tooth…when I go back…Friday…for that OTHER thing that isn’t going to be fun plus will also be rather expensive…

…ugh…

In happier news, I went to Stitches Saturday! And I will do a better report later, but for now the highlights:

There was yarn. Lots of yarn. I didn’t actually buy a whole lot of it because I haven’t used a whole lot of it since last year and, you know, at some point one does have to say one has enough of something.

There were also books. And I showed a lot of restraint there, too. Which is miraculous and not at all related to my current stash of knitting books, which consists merely of three of every knitting book published in the last fifteen years of so. (Kidding! It’s not that extensive! I only have a couple…hundred…of them…)

And there were all kinds of tools. And I bought a couple of them. Like a new Knit Kit, because my old one got played with by the Denizens, and they yanked the tape measure out past its breaking point and broke the counter while trying to fix the tape measure (what, with a rock or something?!) and then ‘somehow’ the little door on the back cracked off plus, where is the little crochet hook? Um…oh, there was something there…?

And I also bought some itty-bitty circular needles, which I’ve been wanting to try about forever for sock and sleeve knitting, but hadn’t actually bought yet. And I started a sock with a set of 9” 3 mm needles, and you know what?

I like it. It’s a little awkward to get used to, because the ‘needle’ part is so much smaller in length, but the smooth and switch ‘just keep knitting around and around’ is triple awesome. Plus – zero jog.

I like.

The other thing I like is, I brought Boo Bug with me. So far of all the kids, she’s the only one for whom knitting “stuck” enough to get past about three rows of garter stitch. She’s been making a scarf for quite a while now, and while it is something that she puts down far more than she picks up…well, you know what? The scarf has been growing, and she really-really wanted to come with me this year.

I was expecting a lot of whining and complaining within an hour of arriving, but she gamely trudged through the whole market – half of it twice – and stood around while I went “blah blah blah! Blah blah blah! OHMYGAH, I KNOW, RIGHT? BLAH BLAH BLAH!!” with other knitters.

And then she tried a drop spindle, and she liked it, and bwahahaha.

I WIN.

It was awesome to have her with me, exploring all the different stuff in the marketplace. She even bought some yarn for herself, and a couple books.

I may not be able to teach somebody how to work our relationship-ownership-application at work, but by Gah, I can teach a ten year old to appreciate hand-dyed wool.

I’m not completely hopeless, y’all.

I think that’s about all the catching up for one week. (Good grief, really? What is up with that lately? It’s like I hit Monday night and vroom! It’s Monday morning again!)

Only five more weeks before I’m cut loose from this contract. I wonder if I’ll have more time then…or less…?

An idle moment between storms

Yesterday, I pretty much worked from 7:30 a.m. right around the clock to 4:00 a.m. Then I slept in until 9:00 (well…stayed in bed until 9:00…I was awakened by a non-work text message at 5:30, and then by the nanny [pause to bless her and all her descendent unto the end of time, amen] getting the Denizens off to school, and then by a work text message to the husband at 8:00 [note that he too was up until about 3:30 in the morning for this same exercise], and then my hip decided to be angry and poke-poke-poke at me…but by golly, I stayed in bed until 9:00!).

And then I had a very slow breakfast. And lots of coffee. Lots of coffee. And then I logged in to work at 11:30. And then I worked until 4:30. And took a couple hours away to do other stuff. And then I started checking stuff. And now I have a few hours to catch some shut eye before the next round of checking stuff.

And then, after I’ve dotted the last ‘i’ and crossed the last ‘t’ for tonight (tomorrow morning?), guess what?! I have to immediately hit the road for the office. BECAUSE (ohmygah, get this) (it only gets funnier the more I think about it), I have an in-person interview.

Oh, no, not for me in re: a new job…no-no-no, for my replacement in this one.

I KNOW, RIGHT?!?!

…there must be triple the irony points that I will be interviewing this poor sap candidate after pulling two all-nighters in a row, and with the third all-nighter staring me right in the eye as I’m doing it…

…I only hope I don’t scare him off by being any combination of excessively tired, distracted, being pinged every eight seconds for one real quick thing or appearing extra hag-like…which I have to admit, I rather do right now.

Ugh. Bleary eyes. Not attractive. My eyeballs look like canned cherries that are way past their use-by date. Nice.

Anyway! Needless to say…we are in the throes of the last big data migration for the overall project this week. And in the way of Such Things, most of the action is taking place in the wee hours of the night because, inexplicably, users get a little testy when we ask if we can, you know, close down their relationship management tools for, I dunno, 2-3 days.

Picky, picky, picky.

The prolonged drama is courtesy of the President’s Day Weekend, which was a fantastic weekend to pick for this, doancha think?!

Half of the systems were closed…the other half were not. This stuff ran, that stuff didn’t. This is coming in Monday, that is coming in Tuesday, and the other won’t saunter by until Wednesday.

And for every single new inflow…Your Faithful Correspondent over here has to babysit all night. I have this one (1) tiny window of opportunity to actually intervene if something is going wrong.

And…I am literally the only person around with the know-how to actually do it right now. Which both scares the @^*&@ out of me, and stiffens my resolve that nothing, nothing, is going to get by me this week.

I will be damned – that’s right! actual cuss-word damned! – if we are going to trip over our own shoelaces right at the finish line here…there will be NO freakin’ emergency wee-hours calls with 47 people dragged out of bed to discuss the massacre and jab Fingers of Blame™ at my boss and/or my team on MY WATCH.

Thus have I spoken…thus shall it be. Hail Pharaoh!!! {clashing of cymbals, waving of palm fronds, drinking of fruity beverages}

Sigh.

It’s going to be a looooooong week.

Wake me when it’s over, ‘kay?…yawn…oh hey!...my schema finished snapping…gtg, ttyl!

The Garden Report: February 19, 2012

The next few weeks are the part of this whole “I’m going to grow things!” exercise that I have to admit I like the least: The part where I emerge from my cozy little den, blinking in the crisp light of late winter / almost spring, to find that, for the most part, my empire looks something like this.

Aw, @^*&@.

This, friends, is the finest crop of organic weeds in the entire San Joaquin county. Yessir. We knows how to grow’em, we does.

…sigh…

Now to be honest…this is nothing new. I have had this annual groan-fest every year since we bought the Den. Every year, somewhere between February and March, I start dealing with the weeds and make all kinds of sweeping vows. This year (I will declare, solemnly, with the air of a knight pledging to do something all heroic and some junk) I am going to stay on TOP of this, even in the winter!

And then, well, it starts getting cold…and rainy…and there aren’t that many weeds anyway…aaaaaaaaaaand so I kind of…you know…whatever.

A few weeks ago, there were, eh, a handful of tiny weeds out here. But then we had a couple warm-ish days. And some rain. And then I looked out here the other day and went, “HOLY @*^&@ ARE YOU EVEN KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW?!?!”

…and then I thought of a few thousand other things that were way more important right now…

…and then I spent some time hoping they would, I dunno, feed the cutworms and die off…

…and then I finally motivated myself this weekend to get out there and deal with mah issues.

Pretty much ready for duty.

And this is what my city yard waste tote looks like now.

…again…

I still need to finish fixing the drip system along this row. We had a blow-out back there last year that we never fixed, so the manifold (the sticky-up-y bit where the tubing joins) needs to be replaced and then, of course, somebody has to sit around for, like, a hundred hours, clipping tubing, doing battle with the inline drippers, capping and then installing All That onto the new manifold.

I got the manifold done today, and about a quarter of the tubing. And then the husband said, “Hey, are you going to help me with the lemons?” …ugh…

I’d been leaving them on the tree until the last second, because, well, um, because…well, officially, because I wanted to extend the season.

Unofficially? Between you and me? Because…it’s a bumper crop this year. We had counted to 400-something before our minds shut down and we stopped counting.

…just…shoot…me…

Lemons don’t last well off the tree. I now have to do something with all this. The vast majority of them will be zested and juiced. Which is hard on my hands. I seem to recall a couple years ago when we had this level of crazy-awesome gifting from this amazing little tree, my hands didn’t bend right for a week after I’d done that. I am looking forward to it in almost the exact same way I look forward to seeing the dentist.

But, darned if I’m going to waste them. I go through a lot of lemon juice with all the canning I do (aside: if you’re planning to do the same, using home-grown lemon juice instead of ‘Real Lemon’ or what-have-you, invest in some pH strips to make sure you’ve got the right acidity…it matters a lot, and varies wildly in “fresh” lemons and their juice…you need it to be between 2.4 and 2.6 pH to be ‘right’ for home canning!), and the kids are very into lemonade and so forth.

But still…sigh…maybe if I ignore them for a while, they will process themselves…?

Oh well. Worth a shot. Moving on.

Something new this year (or, newly finished) is my compost system. The husband started building this for me last season, and then it sort of sat there more or less half done-ish, and then, the poor fool made the mistake of a) noticing that I was taking some time off around our anniversary and b) thinking this would mean we would/could go somewhere fancy and romantic.

Hahahahahahahahaha! I know, right? We’ve been married fifteen years, you’d think he’d know better! So instead of going somewhere expensive and sophisticated and so forth…we went into the backyard and he finished this.

Awwwww! Best. Anniversary. Present. EVER.

It has three bins with removable fronts on them – those slats lift out so that short people like me can get in there without a whole lot of drama.

The first bin is where the ‘fresh’ stuff goes.

After it has cooked down about halfway or so, I turn it into the second bin.

Eventually, the stuff in the second bin looks a bit like this – at which point, it goes into the third bin to finish up.

When I need “more dirt and/or compost” somewhere, this will go through the wire mesh sieve – what falls through is finished compost / dirt, and what won’t go through trots back to the first bin for a second ride through the whole process.

Most of the beds are empty right now, waiting for it to get just a little warmer, a little more reliably. Right now we’re in the unchancy bit; our “average” last frost happens around February 9 or so, and it has started getting warmer and warmer during the day…but, funny thing about California (which is, after all, a bit of a ‘dessert’ state). We will be nice and warm during the day, but then overnight we plummet. It got up to almost 60 degrees out here today, but will probably drop down to around 34 overnight, and if you dig your hand into the soil, even at the warmest time of the day…it’s still pretty cold underground.

Seeds don’t like to germinate when it’s cold. It’s kind of a thing with them.

So instead…I’m starting them in the bathroom. Because nothing says “country chic like turning your master bathroom into a greenhouse! Am I right?!

Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart!!

Now mind you, this is actually inconvenient. I like having a few plants around the bathtub – not the entire bathtub area including the bathtub itself covered in the things. BUT, it is also hands-down the single best place to get seeds started…it is sunny during the day, and gets nice and warm in there even when it’s not so warm in the rest of the house. It’s also a relatively high-Tama-traffic-area, so the plants have a much better shot at not dying from neglect.

Which is a thing that can happen to just about any living thing in this house that doesn’t make me trip over it regularly.

So I’ve got…a bunch of Roma tomatoes in some of the flats, and about five each of Cherokee Purples, yellow Jubilee, and Homestead (smaller beefsteak-type) tomatoes. I’ve got watermelons, butternut squash and pumpkins. There’s a ton of red onions, too. Jalapeno and bell peppers. Broccoli, cantaloupe and cucumbers. And brussel sprouts, which I’ve tried to grow three times now, only to lose all of them to one stupid thing or other. (Rampaging kids, a falling tree (!!) and Bug Attack of Doom + 10.)

A lot of these things could technically be direct-sown right now, but I am having a helluva time with Something chewing them down to the root out there. (I’m strongly suspecting it is slugs or snails…it might be earwigs, but frankly their numbers are way down this year, soooooo, I’m really thinking snails and/or slugs.)

And, I have had abysmal results with direct-sowing broccoli since the beginning of my gardening days. So I’m going to grow them inside until they are nice, big, hardy little transplants, and then I’m going to give them an extra-long hardening off, and I’m not putting them outside until everything is just right for them.

And then they’ll probably die anyway. But I will have given it my best effort.

Meanwhile, things are starting to slowly pick up. The artichokes are taking off – I had cut them right down to the ground to overwinter. You wouldn’t know it, looking at them today.

Some of the onions I thought had failed are actually doing just fine now.

The “dead” blackberries are also starting to look alive.

And then, there’s this.

The little 5-in-1 stone fruit tree has thrown out a couple of these showy pink blossoms – I looked out my kitchen window the other evening as the light was fading, and could see them from clear “over there.”

Those are the moments when I know there is hope for me yet. Sometimes I wonder if I’m losing my ability to believe in magic; I wonder if I’ve become, you know…a grownup.

And then, while up to my eyebrows in Very Important Adult Things, looking up from rinsing the dregs of my third or fourth cup of Certified Grownup Coffee© (now with extra bitter nastiness!) (sometimes I suspect it is the bitterness of coffee that actually wakes me up, not the caffeine), I see a tiny flash of pink – the first flash of color on sticks that played dead all winter.

And I feel like a kid on Christmas morning, when magically there are a thousand boxes – no, a million boxes!! – under the tree.

The magic is coming again. My empire will be fruitful. And vegetableful. Living, and giving life…rewarding my work with food.

The same old magic trick that we’ve seen since our kind crawled onto land.

Amazing that something as old as time…never gets old, for some of us.

Abracadabra!

Seedlings, SQL and Strange Dreams

Man. I feel as though time is just – telescoping. The days are passing in such a blur, it’s hard for me to fix the passage of them.

Did that happen last weekend? Or the one before? Surely I still have enough time to get this or that done, wait! What day is it again? How can it be February already?!?!

And then somebody sends me an email saying, “Dude, are you sick or something? Where are you?” and I go…huh?…

I don’t know that I have ever had quite this…frenetic…a pace, at the end of a contract. Usually when a longer-term contract is coming to a known end, there’s a long, slow ramping down…more and more tasks get finished, or handed off to other people…and I have less and less to do, or be responsible for…until by the time I get to the end, well, I’m usually working rather short weeks and most of my daily grind consists of sitting around knowing stuff. Others do the work, I’m just there to advise when they get stuck.

But this time…whoa nelly, it ain’t like that. Nossir. Instead of ramping down, as Dawg is my witness, things are heating up. I’m not doing less and less, I’m doing more and more.

And then I look at everything that I absolutely, positively, no matter WHAT must get done before that fast-approaching date of March 30, and I find myself torn between being grumpy as hell about having to go, and halfway to desperate to not have to go.

Can’t I just get, say, another 90 days? I think I could get ALL of this finished, if I had 90 more days… (<= this would be a lie…because in 90 days, I would probably find / be gifted with another 900 days worth of work…this is how these things always go…)

Probably in large part because I’m working myself into a tizzy about how All This is going to a) get done by me before I have to go and b) continue being done by somebody else – somebody new, GAH HELP US, I’m having a lot of trouble in my “free” time with disengaging.

And also sleeping.

A lot of trouble with that, lately. Too many thinks, not enough off button.

And then, of course, because I’m working up a fine case of sleep deprivation, I’m starting to become various combinations of grouchy, incoherent, irrational, and other fancy terms that boil down to a real pain in the arse.

Sigh.

Well…anyway…I have beets starting to come up!

And one (1) pea plant!

Plus, when I was moving the blueberry bushes to a sunnier spot, there were some surprise Blue Nile potatoes to be had. I’d thought I’d seen a potato plant in that bed a while ago, but then I’d thought I must have been wrong because it had “vanished.” Well, it didn’t “vanish,” it died off – and the potatoes kept just fine in the ground.

Last weekend I planted ten sweet potato slips (not sure how well they’re going to do, but, we’ll see). I moved the blueberries, pulled up a million more pounds of weeds, watched my husband drop five tons of tree branches right onto my onions (!!), pruned the fruit trees, and walked around my little empire just touching, touching, touching.

Feeling the dirt between my fingers, cold in some places, warm in others. Clay here, sand there. This bed, perfect. This bed, hmm.

And then it was getting dark and cold, and it was time to come in, wash up, and get ready for the week to start again.

Sometimes, my life feels like a very strange dream; like I’m moving between two different worlds that know nothing of each other.

One moving at a crazy and artificial pace, where my mind is constantly revving and racing, where I’m expected to just know, well, everything. It’s exhilarating and exhausting and wonderful and awful.

And the other, well. It moves at a languid, unhurried and unrushable pace. It will be what it will be, and it will be that when it will. Even if I apply my human cunning to the problem and make all conditions ideal…a seed will become a carrot at its own pace. It will not germinate even one day sooner no matter how much I want it to…it will not reach its full size an hour before its time. It’s awe-inspiring and humbling and frustrating and satisfying.

I dreamed today that, having gotten a really weird result from a coalesce statement and wanting to know, uh, why it had done that…I learned about data type precedence, coalesce and isnull statements, and how those three things actually function, in the dark and secret underpinnings of SQL Server. I dreamed then that I shared this with the tiny, tiny fraction of the developer team that shares my curiosity about Such Things. And that we spent about half an hour animatedly talking about it, and that it led to wondering how similar things played out in Oracle, and then there was Googling. It was awesome, and it felt incredibly good to have that interaction, to use my mind in that way, to learn something cool and useful and kinda secret, too…the dream chooses to ignore that it’s only ‘secret’ in that most people really could not care less, and therefore they don’t know and don’t wanna know.

I dreamed today that I dug my hands into soft earth, my skin analyzing how moist it was, how it held together, how it crumbled – I need to adjust the drip system here, and here and here, probably need a higher-flow bubbler at this end, too. I dreamed that I noticed my nails were, once again, ruined, and that I had a hopeless amount of dirt under them, and also that I had thoughtlessly rubbed mud on my favorite vest. And that I didn’t really care. That I stood and looked around this whispering, hope-filled place and breathed in the smells – of dirt, finished compost, the neighbor’s horses. It was cold, there in the dusk, and my nose was running…but the dirt sang promises of spring and I felt slow and timeless, like an oak tree that stands and watches for countless unmoving years.

Such strange and disparate dreams…but I suppose, they balance each other. Either one on its own could be in danger of plunging into a world that was sharply skewed, and completely unreal.

Perhaps that’s where my balance actually is – in the center-point between the two dreams, each pulling the other back from its height or depth. Without either one, I could be left too high or too low, lost and unable to find my way back down to where real, or reasonable, is.

Or perhaps…I think too darned much, about very random and esoteric things. And should really just go to bed and try to sleep all this philosophy-stuff off.

{yawn!}

Blueberry of happiness

This is my dehydrator in action! Blueberries from last season I had dried were rehydrated in boiling water for about half an hour before being folded into muffin batter...which was then topped with a brown sugar struedel before being baked and if you'll excuse me...I have something I really need to get back to right now...

NOM!

Wherein I definitely need a keeper, and possibly a chauffeur

I took Thursday, Friday and Monday off work – you know, “vacation” days? So naturally, I am now thoroughly exhausted.

Instead of spending my time away from the daily grind sipping tea with my pinkie in the air and perhaps nibbling a scone or two while pouring over books about fancy lace knitting, Your Faithful Correspondent was doing things like…yanking up so many weeds that she literally couldn’t budge the wheeled yard waste tote to the curb.

Plus some cleaning. And a lot of stuffing the remaining freezer space with things to eat. With a side serving of doing the initial run at the 2011 taxes (there’s some fun times, let-me-tell-you) and also trying to get on top of the pile of papers I’m told I’m supposed to read and understand and (here’s the corker) respond to in some way.

…ugh…

Naturally, I was still dashing around like a crazy person Sunday night trying to do just one more thing. I didn’t get to sleep until almost 1:00 in the morning.

Then, when the alarm went off at 3:30…for some unknown reason…I found it incredibly hard to, you know, get up.

In fact, I found it impossible. I didn’t pry myself out of bed until 6:00, when I had to because it was time to start motivating the children.

At 6:30, Vanessa the Great (our nanny) arrived to take over the child-motivating, and I sat down at my corporate laptop to sheepishly admit that I would be working from home that day – because one of the awesome things about my commute is that it is extremely time-of-day sensitive.

If I leave by 4:30 a.m., I will be in the office by 6:00. If I leave at 5:00, it will be around 7:30. If I leave at 5:30, we’re looking at 8:30. And if I leave at 6:30 in the morning…eeeeeyeah. Um. I will be there…eventually. Probably. (But I do always make sure pack a lunch, dinner, a change of clothes, plenty of water, signal flares, a portable toilet…just in case…)

And then…well. See, the downside of working from home for me is that it is entirely too easy for me to just kind of keep going. Which I did. From 6:30 a.m. until 10:00 p.m., with one (1) dash downstairs between meetings to make another coffee and microwave a bowl of Spanish rice. And frankly, at 10:00, it was a bit of a struggle for me to disengage, already.

I’m kind of between a rock and a hard place right now; somehow I’ve become that person for a couple of our applications – the “only one” who knows how to figure out why something is happening, and whether we should do anything about it, and what to do about it. So when things start going wrong somewhere, wellllllll…there’s only one person who can set it right and dammit, that’s ME.

The minute I opened my email, I was already in trouble. I was in Email Jail and it wasn’t only successful batch reports and cute pictures of kittens. Curses.

We have a Big Visible Thing coming up next weekend (which may cause “my” applications to do all kinds of bizarre, unexpected things), and there were questions around that from the testers.

PLUS there’s this other Big Visible Thing (which “my” applications have the most amazing ability to completely screw up due to such ‘unexpected’ things as it being a Monday) (Dawg mah witness, sometimes I think I’m just dreaming some of the crazy-arsed crap that goes down in this so-called system of mine…it’s like I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole or something!).

And I’ve got a whack of questions in my inbox from folks about why this is that and that is this and where did that go and I can’t know whether it’s something scary or something eh, whatever until I’ve looked at it…which takes time and speaking of time…holy crap, now it’s almost 11:00 and I’m still sitting here staring at the wall visualizing the data lifecycle in my head trying to figure out where and why as we go through this huge Magic Loop of ours we would have dropped that override because honestly, it makes no sense no matter how I look at it…GAH, STOP, DISENGAGE, REPEAT! DISENGAGE!!!!!

(You know what would help me a lot? Not caring. If I could just not care about people on my team looking bad and/or our data being Total Crap and/or screwing up downstream systems and having them look bad [followed of course by us looking bad, AGAIN], I’d get so much more sleep. Curse you, sense of honor and responsibility!)

But eventually I wandered to bed and fell into it.

And then we come to this morning.

My alarm went off and I – having sworn on a stack of holy writs in front of about forty witnesses that I would so do, amen – rolled out of bed with what might be called a hint of resentment and proceeded to perform my morning dressing ritual.

Which consisted first of standing in the middle of my closet with a blank expression on my face going, “Duuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh…” while staring at all the clean, pressed, ready-to-wear garments all around me because wait, what do I do with these again…?

Having finally selected something that didn’t really go together but who would notice anyway and pulled half of it on, I realized that my armpits were an offense to God and Man and that really, for the good of humanity, I needed to remove that layer of clothing and apply some deodorant.

So then I…wait. I must preface the next scene of this farce with the following: At the time this took place, I swore myself to secrecy. I will NEVER tell a living soul this happened, I promised myself. This is because I take myself way more seriously in the first hour or so of being-awake than I do the rest of the time, and felt it might damage my image if I revealed what had happened.

A few hours later, I remembered that I really don’t even have an image, so, what the hell – this is kinda funny, I oughta share it.

So I yanked off the first layer of shirt-stuff, opened the cupboard, grabbed the deodorant out of it and rubbed it vigorously on my stinky armpits.

It felt weird, like I had forgotten to take the cap off it or something. Gah danged stupid why can’t they make these things easier to…wait…that’s…oh…

Yeah.

It wasn’t deodorant.

It was a bottle of prescription medication. A bottle which is a) maybe a quarter the diameter of the deodorant and b) a circle, whereas the deodorant is an oval and c) so not gonna help with my stinky problem.

{head-desk}

And then I finished dressing, made coffee, got in the car and drove myself to the train station. And the whole time I was driving, I was nervously aware that if any of the police officers I was undoubtedly passing along the way knew that they were looking at a car driven by a woman who had attempted to de-stink her armpits with a bottle of prescription anti-inflammatory medication…well, they would have Just Cause for pulling me over, don’t you think?

Now, I told you all of that so I could tell you this: I’m pretty sure I need a keeper. And probably also a chauffeur. Plus also to go to bed about, um, now-ish.

G’night!

Happy feet, a favorite thing

Y'all know how I am in the kitchen, right? During the work week, I probably spend less than 30 minutes altogether in there, but on most weekends?

I practically have a cot under the kitchen table to sleep on. I try to remember to SIT! DOWN! whenever I can - while peeling or slicing or whatever - but usually the angle ends up being awkward or something...so I pretty much end up logging anywhere from 10 to 14 hours on my feet in the kitchen at least ONE of my precious, fleeting two days of glorious, catch-up-on-everything weekend. Sometimes BOTH days, when I've got enormous quantities of garden output to process or something.

And then I wonder why my hip and back hurt so $&#%*#ing much on Monday. GEE I WONDER WHY.

I had been looking at those "professional gel mats" that suddenly started showing up everywhere, but had shied away from the $70 - $149 price tags. (Go figure.)

How much could it REALLY help, anyway? Maybe some nice $5-10 gel inserts would be just as good. (They are not. Mind you they don't HURT [for the most part, except when the fit is so bad in the shoes that they throw my entire body off], but they are NOT a cure for being on my feet way too long at one go.)

A while back, Costco had these mats for (if memory serves) $15. I circled them about three times before finally deciding that for $15, it was worth a try.

Oh.
My.
GAWD.

When this wears out (which it will, all too soon - it really wasn't designed for the heavy use I'm putting it through), I am SO investing in the biggest, most industrial gel mat I can find.

I'm already watching for sales, yo.

My Monday Morning joint pain is so much better (well, with a little seasonal adjustment for the cold / damp weather, which tends to add some Owie Points regardless), and even better, my weekend use of pain killers (aside: I only WISH they ACTUALLY killed it...not to whine or anything [warning: whining ahead!] but I am HEARTILY tired of the achy-joint thing!) use is way, way, WAY down.

Which makes me happy in a hundred ways.

Thank you, Cheap Little Floor Mat. You are one of my favorite little things. I will mourn when you go to the Great Floor Mat Hereafter. 

Answers, in no particular order

I have probably the worst track record in the Blog-O-Sphere for answering questions in the comments. I told myself I was going to be better about that. And then I promptly wasn’t.

And now, I’m just randomly answering all the ones I remember. How awesome is that?

So, item number one: The blue baby sweater. The pattern is, delightfully, a free one. Buttery Soft Baby Set, courtesy of Lion Brand yarns.

To answer another question, well. Normally, yes, I’d block the pieces before I seamed them. The main reason I didn’t bother with that on this one is that I’m using ac…(c’mon, girl, you can say it…deep breath…) acrylic yarn.

(Blech…ack…yuck…hang on, I have to go brush my teeth now…)

OK, so, silliness aside: The reason I’m using acrylic is because I’m doing this knitting for one of the charities my knitting group, Knitting 4 Children, supports. This group has been all but dead for a couple years, but lo!, in the last month or so it has sprung alive with a vengeance.

Which has been wonderful, frankly. I’ve had a bunch of little sweaters all done except for running in seams and adding buttons for a long, long time now. Meant to, was gonna, etc. etc. etc., but just never actually did it.

But after having been prodded, I spent some good quality time over the holidays watching anime, drinking hot beverages and finishing some things up. And then I cast this little sweater on during our knit-a-thon a couple weeks ago, honoring the group’s founder – alas, no longer with us (although I’m pretty sure she’s watching from her spot with the angels, and approving the sudden rebirth of her group).

But to return to the point, it is fairly common when you’re knitting for charities that cater to newborns, especially preemies, for them to request / require no animal fibers. And occasionally, they will even request no cotton, either. The reason is simple: A lot of their tiny clients have extreme health issues…the last thing anybody needs is to find out that this poor little thing, already struggling to keep breathing, is allergic to wool and has allergy-related asthma. Or breaks out in hives all over their precious little head or something.

Also, acrylic can hold up to rough handling – like, say, going through sanitizing-strength washing, and/or a harried mother with forty things jumping up and down on her last nerve, who may be driven to tears by instructions to “hand wash, lay flat to dry.” (Ask me how I know about that part. Ahhhhh-hem.)

So – this and many of the other baby articles to follow will be made with acrylic, or cotton. Both of which I have in ample supply, although the cotton is mostly natural / white and will require some dyeing before I’ll be ready to use it. Oh, DARN the luck.

(Yeah, again, as the mother of four children…I don’t really like WHITE articles of clothing or blankets. I mean, they’re sweet and all for that newborn, and who doesn’t love a lacy, pure-as-the-driven-snow-white blanket for those early pictures or baptism or what-have-you…but on a day-to-day basis? Yeah. Just sets you up to feel like a bad parent because ohmygah, this thing is stained / dingy / otherwise no-longer-WHITE-white. Because even tiny babies have a way of instantly covering everything they come in contact with in sticky / yucky / weird-colored blech, somehow.)

Completely unrelated but randomly coming back to mind for no apparent reason (from, like, last summer) – dried zucchini.

This really is one of the simplest food preservation deals out there.

1. Wash produce
2. Peel if desired
3. Slice or dice as desired
4. Spread evenly on trays – not touching will speed things up tremendously
5. Dry until done, which can be determined either by The Touch-And-Yeah-Feels-Pretty-Dry-To-Me test (unreliable and potentially dangerous) or, By using a fancy table of various fruits and vegetables showing how much of their weight is water. Requires that you weigh before you begin and then requires a little math to figure out how close you’ve gotten to that 80-95% weight loss (!!!)…but is a much more reliable way to know it isn’t likely to mold on you, even though you stored it 100% right (you’re pretty sure, anyway)

And then, you can use them in a variety of ways. The slices in the picture I actually drenched in some vinaigrette first, and we ate them like potato chips. Untreated slices can be eaten like very chewy chips, and they and larger dices work well in soups (especially pureed ones – the texture won’t be anything like the original vegetable, but the flavor is usually good enough that you aren’t playing the “is that a chunk of potato, or zucchini?” game)…smaller dices can be tossed into a salad as-is, or rehydrated first with boiling water.

And this was never a question, but should have been. Holiday cherry recipe from the book Canning for a New Generation.

Ohmygah…fabulous. They’ve had a good long time for the spice flavors to deepen, and just wow. Insanely good. So are the honey-ginger apricots. This book is a real keeper, if only for adding some unusual twists to the usual suspects.

I think that’s all the most pressing random items for today.

I think.

Wait. I think thinking is what gets me into these messes in the first place.

Never mind. That’s it. Good night, and may your God go with you.

Kindred (anonymous) spirits

I was directed to a little piece called Storytelling on the San Joaquin County Office of Education website, which begins thus:

I have been accused, anonymously no less, of not being able to make a point without telling a story. This accusation is supposedly based upon my previous Outlook articles. This is totally inaccurate and I am actually offended by the accusation.

And it then goes on to…tell a few stories. Because of course it does.

I snickered so hard I almost hurt myself. And then I wished I could call the guy up and say, “Dude. C’mon over for a beer or something. You’re my people, bro!”

Because, well. Y’all know how I am. I can’t even tell you what time it is without doing it in parable form somehow.

Mostly that would be because I like stories personally. I like to observe things around me. I like to focus in on something tiny and commonplace and make a story out of it; I like to notice the weird things, the gloriously red-headed, the magnificently out of step. I like to make of my daily life the stuff of novels – even though in point of fact, my life is only slightly less ordinary than Everybody, and a lot more ordinary than many, many others.

I like to have fun with the words, to see if I can’t paint a picture with them that recreate in the listener’s mind the thing I was seeing.

Which I also feel is a good skill to have, for someone who can’t draw a line even if given a ruler and whose most focused, dedicated attempts at art class resulted in the teacher sighing sadly and announcing that she had never, no never, had a student who could not be taught before now…(yeah, that was an awesome day at school)

Stories also can teach hard things very gently. Let’s face it, a lot of what I have to teach isn’t very fun. It’s a combination of hard work, restraint, more hard work, and how about a little extra work while we’re at it?

We don’t like that truth. I don’t like it one bit. I always want to equivocate, when these sorts of Facts are glaring at me from under the bed at night with those big, red-rimmed yellow eyeballs. Above venom-dripping fangs. And a nametag that reads, “Hi, my name is Bob! Ask me about life insurance!” {shrieks in horror}

And I will definitely start tuning it out when somebody walks up and says, “Hey, if you wanted to get X, you need to Step 1, then Step 2, and then Step 3.”

And then, having tuned them out pretty well…I’ll proceed to the forgetting stage. What was the second part again? Wait, first you…wait, what was the first part…? OH WELL.

…maybe a nice $6 latte from SuperMegaCoffee.com will help me remember what it was I was supposed to do in Step 1…

But stories on the other hand…I like to use them when I’m trying to teach things because lessons are boring prone to being a hint on the accusatory and/or bossy side. YOU should, YOU ought to, YOU need to, YOU shouldn’t, YOU mustn’t.

Stories, on the other hand, don’t generally accuse the listener of anything directly; the story may sit a little uncomfortably when it touches too close to home, granted, but at the same time…I’m not saying you should, you need to, and if you don’t, these Terrible Things™ will befall you.

Instead, here’s a story about this thing that happened to somebody. (Probably me.) (Because when it comes to stories about doin’ it all wrong, HA! I win, baby!!)

Stories lead gently down the path. They make the lesson obvious without slapping anybody upside the head with it. They have a wonderful way of sticking long after we’ve all gone our respective ways – unlike most traditional lessons, which have a way of evaporating from our brains five seconds after the final exam.

Sometimes, stories will even do this miraculous thing where, months or years later, having merely been entertained by it at the moment all that time ago and not having thought of it even once since…you suddenly have a need for that particular story’s lesson.

And then, after having hidden silently in the back of your mind for all that time, it surfaces and presents the words, the thoughts, the feelings, the light and scent of fresh air, to lead you out of the darkness.

Sometimes, my loved ones become a little (cough-cough) annoyed by my habit of answering even a simple question with something that just about begins with once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived an earnest and hardworking shoemaker who had but one child…

And I frequently do have to bring myself up short in normal day to day conversations, when I catch myself about to launch into some possibly amusing but definitely way too long monologue about said shoemaker’s child (or whatever).

And yeah, I’ve even been accused of not being able to make a point without dragging a story into it.

But I humbly submit to The Tribe the following: My point was remembered for a long time afterwards by most of the people listening.

Was yours?

Checkmate, Mr. Just State The Facts. Check and mate.

Monday and the weekend went fast!

This weekend vanished with alarming speed, leaving way too much undone. I still haven't gotten the spring transplants started, there are still areas of the house that make me shudder, I haven't even GLANCED at the taxes yet, and furthermore...I got very little knitting done this weekend. MEH.

But, I was able to start seaming this little guy on the train this morning. So, things are looking up a bit, huh?!

They're baaaaaack!

Last night, I mixed up dry ingredients, covered them with a towel, and left them on the counter. And I mixed wet ingredients in a different bowl, snapped the cover on, and left it in the fridge. Then I figured out my delay start function on the oven and went to bed.

This morning, I mixed them together, poured them into my jumbo muffin tins, put them in the oven, started coffee, went upstairs and got dressed and GUESS WHAT?!

It's like a magic trick! There were lemon yogurt muffins for breakfast! Hot, and topped with their light crunchy nutmeg and pecan topping.

Ah, little lemon tree - do you know, CAN YOU KNOW, how much I cherish your fruit...?

(I feel richer than Midas right now, and tremendously clever for having thought to do it this way. What a marvelous scent to finish waking up to this morning!)

Money Monday: January 16, 2012

I went to Costco this weekend. Which I really didn’t want to do, because Weekend + Costco = 12-layer Crazy Cake, but, we were out of eggs, flour and sugar.

Let’s be honest here: A lot of us “peek” as shopping carts wheel past us. I too can be fascinated by the choices others make. And sometimes I wonder why somebody buys what they buy. The answer is usually really simple: Because they don’t know there’s an alternative, nor do they WISH to know, so, ZIP IT, CRAZY LADY.

But as I was charging around snagging things off the shelves and racing for the finish line, I bumped up against somebody who was stunned to discover that a) #10 cans of tomato sauce existed and b) they were significantly cheaper than the 6-packs of the same exact brand.

This week, the #10 can of S&W tomato sauce was $2.49. They also had a 12-pack of the same stuff for $6.99. A #10 can holds 106 ounces, making the cost per ounce about two cents. The 12-pack of 14.5 ounce cans comes to 174 ounces, or four cents per ounce.

Which calculations were done on my phone while a fellow mom looked on in wonder. We then discussed the various uses for “that much” tomato sauce, and how to manage what you didn’t use that very day when you opened the can.

The idea that you could simply take a few quart-sized Ziploc bags, put 2-4 cups of sauce in each one, lay it flat in the freezer, and have a minimal-footprint supply of frozen spaghetti sauce ready to go…was revolutionary.

I had a new best friend. She followed me around the warehouse watching every single thing I put in the cart, and wanting to know how I used it, how I stored it, why this not that, etc. etc. etc.

It was a stern reminder for me, actually. I tend to think of a lot of things as “obvious” that really aren’t…until somebody else points them out.

Like…yogurt. A lot of us like yogurt, as a snack or in recipes. Did you know it’s super easy to make at home? Seriously. This is all there is to it.

At the store, buy one small tub of plain, unsweetened yogurt; you want the kind with live, active cultures. I haven’t found that the starter yogurt having gelatin added hurts anything, but definitely no sweeteners or vanilla-flavoring! I generally grab the store’s generic plain yogurt, which runs about fifty cents when not on sale. (You can also buy yogurt starters if you either want different flavors or can’t find a yogurt that pleases you in the store – Cultures For Health has a variety of easy-to-use starters, both the kind you can perpetuate [e.g., make another batch from the batch you just made] or direct-set [you have to use fresh starter for each batch].)

Take the yogurt out of the fridge and set it on the counter to move toward room temperature. If you have an electric oven, turn on the oven light; if you have a gas one, the pilot light is probably enough to keep it at around 100 degrees (you can check that with an inexpensive thermometer) (I have two…because I have two malfunctioning ovens, awesome!!).

Take four cups of milk, and heat it to scalding (just starting to bubble around the edges, but not outright boiling); let it cool to between 90 and 110 degrees (you can put your [clean!!!] finger in it without yowling).

Stir the now-room-temperature yogurt into your cooled milk. Cleanliness is key here – make sure whatever container you’re using is super-clean, because what you’re going to do next is let it ferment for a good six to ten hours in your ~ 100 degree oven…prime temperature for all kinds of things to thrive, yogurt and otherwise. You do not want harmful bacteria to be joining the yogurt’s party!

Shorter fermentation results in a less-tangy end product; I usually go with ten full hours, which usually makes for a particularly tangy yogurt. Because I am a wild thing that way.

Then, carefully move it from the oven to the fridge – don’t stir, shake or otherwise agitate it! I’ve discovered through trial and error (mostly error) that if I don’t agitate it, I end up with a nice, thick, creamy yogurt. If I can’t resist the temptation to stir (or taste-test) it, I get a runnier version. It’s not bad, exactly, but I prefer the yogurt to resist the spoon a little bit when I’m using it.

You can also use a crockpot – preheat it while you’re scalding your milk, then mix the milk and yogurt in the crock, turn the crockpot off, put the lid on and wrap the whole thing in a nice warm towel for the duration.

I’ll stir in some fresh or frozen berries, homemade preserves, honey, vanilla or whatever for the ones that are snacks, and leave the rest as it is – set aside about half a cup of it for the next batch and you can be making homemade yogurt for a good long while. When you start getting “runny” or “flavorless” batches, it’s time for new starter…I generally get a good two months of weekly batches out of each $0.50 tub.

To me now…that’s so obvious.

But I was stunned when it was first pointed out to me a couple years ago that it was that easy to do.

Come right down to it, nothing I do is particularly hard, or requires skills only attainable after twenty years of meditation on the Holy Mountain.

It’s easy, practical stuff…it just takes time, and curiosity. The ability to laugh off your mistakes helps a lot, as does the ability to look at something from a variety of angles.

If you can do that, a lot becomes “obvious” that makes other people go, “Whoa, wait, what? You can do that? REALLY?!”

Which is a deeply satisfying feeling, by the way. Just sayin’.

This week’s meals are largely about getting large, bulky things out of my way in the freezer; we’re still down by one freezer and I need to clear some shelves so I can cook breakfasts and lunches ahead again!

Also, there is a lot of spinach going on right now. I just harvested thirty POUNDS of the stuff this weekend. Yoinks!!!!!

Monday: Leftover Extravaganza! (a.k.a., everybody forage, mommy is busy having a What Do You Mean I Hafta Work Tomorrow?! episode)

Tuesday: Balsamic-glazed pork roast, roasted red potatoes, spinach

Wednesday: Lamb roast, “Turkish” rice [rice with peas, slivered almonds, and other horrifying things in it] [the Denizens are not fans of ‘mixed up’ foods, but, they’ll just have to deal]

Thursday: Roast Chicken, [hopefully] Blue Nile potatoes [rogue potato plant ready to dig up – here’s hoping it actually has potatoes attached to it!], more spinach, yay!!

Friday: Beef Soup (crockpot, because I am always lazy on Fridays)

Saturday: Chicken pot pies

Sunday: Beef empanadas, Spanish rice

oooo, SNAP!

It finally happened.

I was knitting away on the baby sweater on the train...and the woman across from me (after staring for a good long while in that way people do when they're working up the nerve to actually - GASP! - talk to a stranger)...well, she leaned over and...and she asked me...she asked...well, what she said was...

...it was...

"Is that for your grand-baby?"

Ooooooooooooooh, SNAP!!!!!!!!!

So I hit her with my bifocal case and limped away, dragging my stupid rolling bag that I have to use because I can't seem to manage carrying a backpack like a twenty-something anymore without setting off my hip something FIERCE and could somebody please just KILL ME NOW...?

...sigh...

Oh well. It's still a cute little sweater, isn't it? And if I were actually expecting a grand-baby, I would totally make one for him, too.

Money Monday: January 8, 2011

Bet you didn’t know that Tuesday is the new Monday. I know. I too am shocked at the things that don’t make the main newscasts in this country.

Ahem. Yes. Well. The weekend got away from me a little bit – there’s a Thing at work that was supposed to go into a testing environment, but then the main partner who is forcing us to do all this in the first place was all, “Oh, wait, hang on, we’re not actually ready!” but I had all this code that wasn’t ready to go, but also couldn’t exactly be dropped, and…it was just a weird weekend.

Then last night got away from me.

And tonight is about to do the same; I had one of those away-from-home-for-sixteen-hours days today. Awesome.

Anyway…I didn’t have any Stunning Revelations last week; I think the most interesting thing for me last week was the realization of just how much certain things I never really took into consideration as Particularly Big Deals have impacted our ability to really get our feet under us.

Mind you, when placed into a pool of average people – I’m relatively sheltered from a lot of the stuff that has absolutely slammed the general population. For example, I realized this weekend that what I pay for flour has gone up by 23% in about two years time. Which for someone who does as much baking as I do is a pretty frightening figure.

That’s right. I’m paying $1.83 more per month for flour. Somebody call the Red Cross! Get this woman some aid, STAT!

As line items, they don’t really hit my radar. I’m aware of them, but they don’t hit me in the gut and make me feel sick, you know? Irritated on occasion, granted, but not devastated.

But at the same time…milk has gone up 40%. A dozen eggs 43%. A tank of gasoline that used to cost $23 is now $34. The monthly penalty for gas and electricity has gone from $205 to $355 – and not because we’ve suddenly gotten all crazy with our usage, which has actually stayed flat or even dropped over the last four years – and yet never does this result in a lower bill, somehow.

Meanwhile, the husband is not only earning less, but handing over far more of his pre-tax-so-at-least-there’s-that income for health insurance.

None of which is news. None of which surprises me. I’m (cough-cough) more than slightly aware of even slight fluctuations in the prices of things I buy regularly, and am one of those people who will walk away from darn near anything when it trips my oh-so-sensitive Too Expensive O’Meter.

I can’t even say I was surprised to add up all the columns and realize that the husband’s net paycheck can’t cover even the non-discretionary budget items on its own. Slightly bummed out and a little bit riled up, but at the same time…

…at the same time…

Y’all have no idea how lucky I feel.

We’re going to have to keep on working hard and keeping a tight rein on things; there won’t be any big vacations, or new cars, or indulging in iGadgets and maid services.

And we’re OK with that. It’s a road we’ve walked before; sometimes because we had to, sometimes because we wanted something that was otherwise beyond our means. We already have a profound sense of why…and it has nothing to do with being punished.

It has everything to do with continuing to pursue what we really want, and having a better chance of actually getting it, by letting go of things that don’t really matter to us – things that are just shiny, or cool, or fun, but that we’re going to drop forgotten on the floor in an hour’s time, bored and looking for the next fun thing.

I did come away with a couple action items; we are indeed spending too much on pre-fab food, and I also definitely need to quit being lazy about how I categorize things. I suspect an awful lot of stuff is getting dumped into “groceries” that doesn’t belong in there, but I’ve just been too lazy to actually break things out or even think about what I was actually buying – let alone taking the receipt out of my wallet and reviewing it.

The other thing I want to do is figure out if there is any way I could pay off at least one of the debts remaining from the Great (Under)Employment Fiasco™ next month. I think it might be possible…but it may require a fairly intense display of tightwad prowess, a healthy dose of Being A Damned Grownup For Once (nooooooooo, not THAT!) and extremely on-top-of-things organizational skills (…uh oh…) because there would be a bit of Financial Alchemy involving shuffling the virtual envelopes containing the savings goals for things like property taxes, annual car insurance premiums and stuff like that in a kind of shell game – all of it to be fully settled as if nothing had ever happened before April 17 when the income tax returns have to be filed and the bill (if any) paid in full.

Meals could have gone better last week; early in the week, I charged out to get the necessary ingredients out of the freezer and found the key to it had gone AWOL. I couldn’t find it anywhere.

This was what might be called a major setback; you can imagine how frustrated / angry / freaked out I was, with thousands of dollars in food right there in the garage…and me not able to access it!!

After having torn the house apart about five times (including a thorough search of the trash cans and every pocket of every pair of pants I could lay my hands on), I thought to look behind the freezer itself; sure enough, somebody (me) had left the key sitting on top of the freezer instead of putting it back in the cupboard, and somebody else, though warned with increasingly foul language not to EVER do so (husband), had come along and shoved mass quantities of boxes, totes and other paraphernalia onto that same freezer top (the chest freezer is proving a real challenge on that front – everything from baskets of clothes to power tools keep being piled up on top of it! ARGH, QUIT IT!!!)…thus knocking the key clean off the freezer and into the spider-webbed darkness behind it.

Fortunately, the insanely large-headed and bright-red-haired Power Puff Girl keychain was relatively easy to spot in the garage…this weekend, when I was finally home in daylight hours.

Hopefully, I’ll be back on track now with making more meals at home; I’ve got nothing particular going on this weekend (don’t tell anybody, for GAH’S sake!), so hopefully I’ll be able to get ahead on some meals enough that the number one obstacle for me, which is coming home so dog-tired I can’t even think about food, let alone fiddle with it, can be overcome by virtue of said meals being oven-ready. Go to the freezer, take out the casserole dish…

This week is turning out to be mostly a “put random ingredients into skillet, heat through, and serve with rice or noodles” kind of deal.

Gah, I hope I can get my feet under me a little better next week…

Money Monday: January 2, 2012

Happy New Year, one and all! And before I get all mercenary and self-absorbed with the money-thing – may 2012 bring peace, love, joy and plenty to you, one and all!

The last quarter of 2011 went by in a blur for me. It was definitely a one damn thing after another kind of quarter, both at work and at home. But in the back of my mind, the fact that my current contract expires on March 30 keeps repeating over and over. Not that I’m counting or anything, but there are precisely seven more paychecks coming before this chapter closes and the Next Big Thing begins.

I started looking at the numbers during the Thanksgiving holiday, but quickly abandoned the project when I realized that I was not coming at it from a particularly good head-space; I was moving fast into either being angry, or silly; playing the blame-game about every last penny spent or deciding that every last penny spent was vital, absolutely a non-starter for things to cut.

And I always call December a ‘no budget’ month – which is not < I>entirely true because of course I still have a budget…but I try not to set goals and get all nit-picky while Christmas shopping is in its final days.

It’s just not worth it, you know? I’m going to make myself crazy(er), which by extension means making the whole family crazy, and in the end it does no good – I’m too discombobulated to do good work on that front until after the tinsel and eggnog has been retired for another year.

Which leads me to today, the first Monday of the new year – when indeed the eggnog has been drunk, the Christmas tree de-ornamented, and I’m staring down a new ‘season’ of this full-body-contact sport called Life.

Thanks to the initial pass at number-crunching I’d already done, I’m already uncomfortably aware that we’ve got a lot of…um…fluff in the budget. Monthly charges for this-n-that, So Forth and So On and Miscellaneous Expenses.

When I find myself wondering why I never seem to have any money at the end of the month – this is the stuff that answers the question. Seldom anything Big! and/or Dramatic!...usually a bunch of little stuff that adds up over the course of the month.

But, a lot of it kind of settles in under the ‘sacred cow’ category for either myself or the husband; things that we may acknowledge are adding up to significant amounts of money, but which we will argue, vehemently, aren’t “that” big a deal and/or provide “that” much value in return for us.

It’s particularly hard for me to bring up things that are “his.” He isn’t a guy who is constantly charging out there buying thousands of dollars in power tools or gun safes; he has pretty sane and steady wants, and very seldom runs up saying he neeeeeeds this or that or the other thing.

Lately, he’s been talking a lot about one of our Someday Wouldn’t It Be Awesome If items – which is to move to a place with a little more land around it. Not 160 acres in the middle of nowhere or anything like that, but maybe five to ten acres within reasonable distance of the Amtrak line back to the city.

Prices are really good right now, and will probably stay that way for quite a while to come; but we’re in a really bad position to take advantage of them. We’re upside down on the current house (ugh), still paying things off, and every single month I’m ending up practically at a net-zero in terms of income v. expenses.

Last week, we got to have a dinner out; it’s rare for us to have more than a quick walk out for lunch on the days we’re both in the office, and was a great treat to be able to talk about anything for more than a few minutes without being interrupted by a child or a coworker.

Finally, on the drive home, I asked the tough question: How much do we really want that house on a little land? Because (I continued, awkwardly), when I looked at how we spend our money lately…it would appear that we value things like monthly massages, nail appointments, cable TV and tablet network plans way more than we value that Someday Awesome home on a few acres of range, where the deer eat the broccoli all day.

Plus, it simply won’t be possible to keep spending this way when I’m not working – even if it is only for a few weeks while I look for the next contract.

Just sayin’.

{awkward pause goes here}

After a moment of prayerful consideration (or possibly mourning for the Impending Budget Cut Victims), he opined that we should indeed look at where we are currently spending, and consider each line item’s importance in that way: Is this monthly expense more important than being able to make that move we keep saying would be Awesome?

Which leads me now to my task for this week: This week, I’m going to pull together a spending report for the last three months. Ignoring the things that are Christmas / Holiday spending, I’m going to get an idea of the average monthly spending for everything from cable to haircuts.

And then, I’m going to look for areas where we could cut back – without treating anything as a sacred cow, without whining about how we neeeeeeed this or that emotionally, or how it’s such a good deal, really, when you think about it.

We’re hurtling toward a period without my income; whether it will be brief or prolonged, we have no way of knowing. Sure, I have a skill set that is in demand and fairly highly paid; and usually, as long as I’m willing to make that long commute, I don’t have a lot of trouble finding a new contract.

But nothing is guaranteed. (Including my willingness to make the commute. Ahem.)

We need to make sure we’re ready to handle it, whether it is short or long in duration. We need to be able to get by on just the one income, and it would be ideal if we could not merely get by, but also put by – if we can reduce our spending enough to also be saving, we’ll be able to get to that bigger goal that much sooner.

And also…I need to do much better on the “dinner” front. Holy smokes, meals have gotten weird around here. Frequently, “dinner” equates to “forage in the fridge, find something to eat.” Between the family not eating together and the tendency for the “snack” foods to be substituted for “actual” foods by parents and kids alike (oops), we’re eating unhealthy and expensive junk instead of more cost-effective, actual food.

TO WHICH END…I propose the following menu for this week. (Wish me luck. I need to get this all assembled and ready to go today, or it will not end up on the table during the week!)

Monday: Pork chops, gratin potatoes (leftovers from the weekend) and corn (also leftovers)

Tuesday: Lemon chicken breasts, rice and spinach (from the garden – good old California!)

Wednesday: Meatloaf, mashed potatoes and peas and carrots

Thursday: Spaghetti night (woooo, easy!)

Friday: Beef roast, roasted potatoes and green beans

Saturday: Beef pot pies (leftover roast)

The changes time brings

Once Upon A Time, I would have been GRAVELY disappointed by any Christmas gift that wasn't some form if entertainment. A toy, or a book, or maybe the latest Elfquest graphic novel.

But when torn away wrapping revealed clothes, backpacks, shoes, socks, new hats or sheet sets? I would wrestle onto my face the forced, insincere smile every child who blessed with a Lady Mother who believes - strongly - that Manners and Other Civilized Behaviors should be observed at all times learns to produce, and shove the words "thank you very much, it's lovely!" between my teeth.

Oh sure, OCCASIONALLY a grandmother would hit one out of the park with clothing...like the orange-sherbet colored Gunnysack my dad's mother bought me one year, a color NOBODY ELSE would have picked for me and also, eww, a DRESS, have you MET me?!?! - but I LOVED. IT. MADLY.

It was SWIRLY. (And probably hand-wash, line-dry. The poor Lady My Mother...in my memory [notoriously faulty this far back as it is] I wore that thing as often as I could for months.)

And I remember one Christmas very early in our time together when the husband bought me a vacuum cleaner.

We needed one badly - the hand-me-down first-apartment one had begun to SMOKE, and was so old that the trusty vacuum repair shop, the only place in twenty-five miles with replacement bags and belts, shook their heads sadly and led us to the displays of newer, reconditioned, WORKING ones.

And we had no money. We were broker than broke. We were, in fact, smack in the middle of the days that led to my current faint dislike of Ramen noodles. (I have largely gotten over the ACTIVE DESPISING of them, though.)

I had told the man this was what he "should" get for me. I had practically bought it myself. I gave him NOTHING ELSE for suggestions.

And I liked the vacuum. It saw heavy, best-daily use for ten years before it too began smoking one morning.

And yet...on that Christmas day...I was...disappointed, somehow. I wanted...a toy, or a book, or something GOOD.

I don't know what happened. I don't know whether it should be hailed as a sign of growing maturity or pitied as a symptom of lowered standards...but this is what I got for Christmas this year, and I didn't bother to wrap it, but yanked straight put of the box when it arrived and put it straight into service.

Six quart bowl and extra power, baby! Woot!

And I consider this to have been a Most Satisfactory Christmas Indeed.

And now, if you'll excuse me...I've got some double-batches of rolls to make...

On the exhale

Yesterday, I dodged a few raindrops to grab some spinach out of the yard for lunch. It’s the only thing growing out there right now to speak of; there are some onions slowly getting bigger under the lightly-frozen-each-night ground, some rogue potatoes that hid well enough to be missed when I dug up “all” of them and then cheerfully sprouted and sent up plants ha ha, you think you know so much, human!, and of course the blackberries and fruit trees are merely sleeping…so I can’t really say the garden is “dead.”

But in terms of the daily work, the every-weekend-I-am-out-there, up to my armpits in dirt or mud or dust or all three, the constant messing with compost and weeds, the eternal battles with the bugs and birds…the garden is dead right now. Everything from it is safely in jars in the pantry, or lying in state in the chilly garage on newspapers or nestled in sawdust, or the freezer or already eaten.

Of course, just as that sigh of relief was beginning, the holidays hit. Aw, crap-apples. Breath sucked in, I plunged into the shopping and buying and cooking and cleaning and cleaning and cooking and cooking and cleaning, and what do you mean, you’re hungry, you JUST ATE, and cleaning and last-second holy crap, I forgot to buy X for Y! stuff.

And of course, there is a lot of coming and going. And traveling. And receiving travelers. And all the other joy-filled accoutrements of the festive season.

But now…we have arrived. It is Christmas Eve. Whatever I’ve forgotten – is forgotten for good this year.

The last thing has been received from Amazon.

The last trip to the supermarket has been made.

The stockings are ready to be filled.

Gifts have been found for all the kids. Nobody got unfairly left out. Nobody got overly showered.

The food for the holiday meals is ready to go. The guest list is set. The days off work are settled (and arguably too few in number, but, hey – it is what it is, and I’m lucky to have a job so, no complaints from me, thank you very much!).

And that sigh of relief that got stuck halfway is finally on the way out; for the next few weeks, I won’t have much more on the chore list than a “normal” working suburban mother of four with a monster commute. (Ahem.)

There’s still stuff that needs to be done out in the yard, but it isn’t urgent. I can go ahead and decide that it’s too cold, or too dark, or too eh, whatever today. I can focus instead on inside-stuff, on getting things fixed, cleaned, organized. Flipping through seed catalogs, redesigning next year’s garden over and over and over again.

Goofing off with the kids.

Goofing off without the kids.

Playing Toontown en masse via the three paid and three free accounts we have.

Getting buried to the neck in art work from four very artistic children who have two whole weeks off school and a craft closet that is better stocked than some Michael’s stores.

Listening to a long explanation of why this-or-that Skylander is vastly superior to this-or-that other one from Captain Adventure.

Watching Boo Bug’s knitting grow.

Watching Danger Mouse master anime drawing.

Reading the manga Eldest is creating.

Being astonished that these children are mine; how I could possibly have produced such superior little minds is beyond me, really.

Catching up with friends and family, through cards and email, blogs and even text messages on the phone. Seeing pictures of kids that have grown ten feet since last I saw them. Hugging people I only see once or twice a year – if even that.

Catching up on email, catching up with clutter, catching up on sleep, catching up in general.

One of the gifts I get from my self-inflicted crazy: I appreciate stuff like that way more than I think I would otherwise. It’s so rare to have this luxury of time, I savor it like a fine vintage wine when I get it.

I hope you all are having very merry and relaxed holidays, too, and that your Crazy is well-balanced by Blessings. Thanks for hanging out with me all year, and for sharing your lives with me. You're a great group of people, y'all, and I feel honored to be among you out here in the wild, wild Internet.

Then again on second thought…

So, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was something of an herbalist. By which I mean, my pre-parental-phase apartment was like a medieval apothecary’s lair. Dark bottles full of mysterious liquids, some sweet and airy like fairy kisses, some unctuous and reeking of…urine of night mare or something.

But once the husband moved in with me, I got rid of most of it; while I didn’t have anything eye-of-newt or “two drops of this will KILL YOU” lying around, I did have things that could cause…ahem…intestinal distress or other unpleasantness if taken incorrectly.

And there’s this thing people do with herbal stuff, where they assume herbal = 100% safe and/or “I can go ahead and take fifty-seven cups of this, it can’t hurt me because after all, it’s just herbal.”

And I wasn’t comfortable with having the herbal-rookie boyfriend crashing around deciding to try something labeled “headache – six drops in tea” with some weird bunch of letters on it that was actually my code for “go light on the drops and use a tea with ginger in it, otherwise your stomach will go bat-poop crazy on your poor backside” and then put a SQUIRT of it into his COFFEE or something because if six drops is good, well hell’s bells, a DOLLOP must be better.

So recently, I’ve started adding some herbal goodies back into my life; still no eye of newt or Deathly White Mushroom Spore or anything like that, but some powdered mixes and stuff to work on joint inflammation, appetite issues (I ain’t got none) and (ahem) aging female stuff; between the cost of supplements and my hippie tendencies, I’d just kind of like…things I understand. Things I could, in a pinch, grow, dry, powder, and blend myself. Without a prescription, without having to go through the “Oh, is this for female troubles? Because ya, {long involved story in front of God and everybody about her own female troubles} and I was wondering about this stuff…” conversation at the register.

It’s awesome living in a smallish town, you know? We do that stuff, chat at the registers and lots of folks have no problem at all digging right on into yer personal beeswax and sometimes, I find myself thinking, YA KNOW… back in Da City, ain’t nobody woulda said nothin’ about nothin’ and yet here I am, discussing whether or not comfry is good for irregular periods right in front of this poor, squirming, oh so very male truck driver.

ANYWAY. So I’ve been ordering my herbs from a favorite old source, Rosemary’s Garden, with a few fill-ins on the side from here and there. (The one problem with getting more and more and more “into” this kind of thing is, you find yourself going, “Yes, but, do you have the kind that is grown on this particular slope at such and so a time of year?” – which is ludicrous in some ways but, possibly due to the power of suggestion, you are nevertheless convinced that ONLY this very-specific thing will do. I can’t justify this in the slightest. Really. I just can’t.)

Now, at first I said, bravely, “Don’t bother with all that capsule-this and dissolve-powder that, I’m used to herbal teas and rather enjoy them even when they’re a tad different or bitter or what-have-you, I’ll just brew it. That would be simplest. And cheapest. Yes. Let’s do that.”

Yeah. Um. Some of this stuff tastes like…well, night mare piss. And sometimes they’re…stinky.

As in, if I tried to quietly make myself a cup or small pot of this at work, I would clear the whole building out. All thirty-three floors of it.

AND, the one blend I use most smells perfectly pleasant (whew!), but sets off my gag reflex big time when in tea form. I’m not kidding, even though it smells fine or even pleasant, and doesn’t exactly hit the tongue badly, I get about two swallows in and I’m gagging.

But, it works pretty darned well. So I said, said I, “OK, well, fine. I’ll just switch to capsules, whatever.”

And then I went looking for empty capsules…because of course I'm too damned cheap thrifty to discard what I have and just buy pre-filled capsules, are you crazy? AND FURTHERMORE, I have no intention of doing that going forward because price-per-dose of the raw materials is, like, less than a nickel BUT the price-per-dose is damn near a dollar if it is pre-capsuled.

Pffft. Like I can’t handle filling my own capsules…used to do it all the time, back in the day, yessir, and that was after I walked five miles in the snow uphill both ways barefoot, with nothing but a baked potato in my pocket to warm my hands…

Ahem.

Yes.

Well.

Empty gel capsules aren’t exactly hard to get (my local health food store had them, bless their hearts), but, you will get some mighty odd looks if you walk into your neighborhood pharmacy asking for them. And this is where Tama once again demonstrates that her familiarity with the drug cultures is somewhere between ‘none’ and ‘what are we talking about again?’ – I’m all, “Oh hai, ya, do you have, you know, empty capsules? That I could fill with herb powder?”

And the pharmacist is all, {eyebrows crawling clear to the back of her head}, “Nooooooo, we don’t…carry…anything like that.”

Took me three failed attempts and three rounds of wondering why they were looking at me like I had sprouted five heads to realize that waitasecond…California… “herbal powder”…ooooooooooh, they think I’m using…ooooooooooooh!!!!

I live a very sheltered life, really, you know?!

ANYWAY. When I finally hit the health food store looking for capsules – where they immediately knew what I was talking about and that I meant no really, pleasant-smelling-but-somehow-still-nasty-tasting herbal powder I can’t get past my gag reflex, instead of nudge-nudge-wink-wink-herb-powder-heh-heh-heh – she immediately handed me an enormous bag of maybe 200 capsules, each approximately the size of the Chrysler building.

I set them down disdainfully.

“Don’t you have anything in more of a, say, 00?” I asked with the air of someone who knows what the @*^&@ they’re talking about – which, thanks to Wikipedia, I sort of did. But not really. Because she immediately fired back.

“Wellllllllllllllllll…what are you filling them with again? Umhmmm…{knowledgeable pause, setting a long-fingered hand gently on the discarded product with the air of a wise woman} You may find you prefer these in the long run, because the standard dose for that in powdered form is roughly a tablespoon, is it not? The 00 will require between ten and twelve pills for a single dose, whereas these would be only three to four…”

Now friends. It has been many, many years since I messed with any of this, you know, myself. And I happen to know she’s right: The single dose is going to be roughly a tablespoon of the fine powder version - which is a lot to be cramming into capsules at one time.

But. Do I take the nice lady’s advice and tell myself that, after all, it would be four pills versus a dozen and I would probably be happier overall with filling four (4) capsules, not twelve (12), two to maybe three times a day? And that on the whole, I'd rather have to grimace down four super-sized pills (which would be exactly like taking two large vitamins at once, four times) than repeat the two-large-vitamin swallowing thing SIX times? Practice a little humility and try what somebody who actually deals with this stuff about every day recommends?

Shoot no.

Of course not.

That would have been intelligent.

Instead, for some bizarre reason, I decided I had to act like I No Really knew what I was doing. So I politely insisted that nooooo, I would really rather something more in the 00-size.

She smiled pleasantly, took back the Chrysler-building-in-gel-capsule-form, and handed me a nice bag of 750 00-sized capsules. (For point of reference, these are about the size of a ‘large-side-but-still-standard’ vitamin pill.) (The other ones are, like, something you would use to medicate your horse. Swear.)

And I went on my smug way, confident that I had shown my clear empty-gel-capsule-filling and self-knowledge superiority.

Uh-huh.

A couple hours go, I filled a dozen of the damned things for my pre-dinner dose of digestive + nervous system + joint tonic.

I am having second (third) (fifth) (thirtieth) thoughts about those super-sized gel caps. These 00’s are much smaller than they seem in the bag. My fingers have grown somehow larger. Plus I can’t see what I’m doing. AND YES, I’M WEARING MY GLASSES.

…or would be, if my Gran hadn’t thought they were hers and taken them home with her at Thanksgiving I DON’T WANNA TALK ABOUT IT, OK?!...

{sob} My life, I could almost hate it sometimes…

(But I’m still not buying pre-filled capsules. Because cost savings, people, EXTREME cost savings…)

Knitting sugar

I can't put my finger on why EXACTLY, but every time I pick up this sweater to work on it, the word "confection" comes to mind.