multipurposegoddess

Hi DW/LJ! I keep mentally composing posts, but it is hard to find the time and energy to actually, you know, post them. This may be a little incoherent, but that's better than nothing, I hope.

Work is going okay. There is a little bit of reorganizing going on - one of the managers in my department is moving sideways into another department and they aren't replacing her, and one of my co-workers is leaving for a job with the county. They are replacing her, but a new person won't be able to pick up all her work, she was kind of specialized. I'm a little worried that I'll get more on my plate and I haven't fully mastered what I already have, but that's the way it goes, I guess. I won't be under the manager that hred me any more, which I am a little bummed about because we worked well together. But I've worked with my new manager on a couple of small projects and those were fine, so I'm sure that will work out.

This Wednesday will be one year since i started at Meyer as a temp. Pretty weird. Good weird, on the whole. Time has slowed down a little - it was zipping by super fast for a while there. I still feel like it was just 2005 not very long ago, but last March being a year ago seems about right. So.

I had a super scary allergic reaction last Monday. I went running, listening to my Zombie training app, of course, and shortly after Maxine told me I'd done two minutes of warm up walking, my arms were itching enough for me to wonder if I'd used the wrong kind of soap, but it wasn't too bad and usually that is irritating but bearable. Well, it just kept getting worse, but I thought there was a water fountain at CIty Hall (about a mile into my run) where I could wash off my hands. I couldn't find it, maybe it wasn't there, and by then my legs started itching, but the fastest way to get home and do something about it was just to continue my run and just head straight home. About halfway home I started feeling like  my tongue was too big for my mouth and my throat felt swollen which is what realy tipped me off that this was an allergic reaction for real. I didn't have trouble swallowing or breathing, but it was worrisome.

Made it home, hopped in the shower which did provide some relief, but could not find any Benadryl. By the time I had looked for it enough to decide that i just needed to go to the store, the soothing effects of the shower were pretty much gone. I really should have gone to Urgent Care or the ER at that point, but I had my whole Take Benadryl plan and wasn't thinking clearly enough to change it, so I put on a dress that wouldn't touch my skin in too many places and drove to Rite Aid where I bought every type of allergy medicine they had and several lotions and a Diet Coke, popped two Benadryl in the parking lot (and noted the time so I could tell if I was just being impatient or if it wasn't doing any good), went home and consulted b.org for advice on What Drugs Interact With Benadryl. After an hour, all my symptoms were better but not gone so I took Claritin.

I kept taking Benadryl and Claritin the rest of the week and saw my doctor this past Monday for a follow up. She advised me to carry Benadryl with me, prescribed me an epipen just in case, and set me up for an allergy test for common allergens plus almonds (because I know I'm allergic to almonds, but I didn't eat any that day and while I am also pretty sure almond pollen makes me congested I've never had the itching and swelling form pollen before, just contact (soaps made with almond oil, for instance) and those incidents were much milder. I've gotten the raw results but not her interpretation - Class II levels (which the internet tells me means Moderate Allergy) for a bunch of tree and grass pollens, and almond, and walnuts (which is a surprise, but is something I ate before running) and potatoes (which I didn't even know was a common allergen but is also something I ate that day). If I have to give up walnutsI will be bummed, as I do rely on a variety of nuts for snacking purposes and have been looking forward to making leek and walnut tarts. If I have to give up potatoes I will be really bummed because potatoes are fucking delicious. I have been hardly eating them at all because low carb but when they show up in my CSA I enjoy them mightily and part of being able to take not eating them very often while dieting is knowing that I will not be on this diet forever and can welcome potatoes back into my life and if that is not true, well, it's not good. But I don't really know that yet, maybe I just have to be careful during Spring and restrict how often/how much I eat the things that the test is positive for. IDK

Meanwhile, I am still all into custards. I decided just yesterday to go ahead and splurge on a whipping siphon so I can explore the wonderful world of foams and airs from a molecular gastronomy standpoint. I love whipped cream, and mousses, and yeasty bread (which is technically a foam) and souffles and meringues and so forth, so I am excitied to see what happens when you make those kinds of textures with different flavors. I've already got a bag of xantham gum and I am not afraid to use it. And I am semi-obsessed with deviled eggs. Between those options, the magical noodles made out of tofu, and good old salad I 've got some decent variety in my diet.

Speaking of diets, down almost 90 pounds. One day this week the Wii told me I was Overweight instead of Obese, which was kind of nice in that odometer showing a lot of zeroes way. I'm oretty much at the weight I was wen I got married, which means a lot of the clothes I had packed away fit me again. Most of those are appropriate for warmer weather, on account of how I bought them in New Orleans, so I haven't been able to bust too many out yet, but soon!

Hm, I feel like I am forgetting to talk about something. Oh well, I can always post again.

I wish paying the mortgage every month didn't reduce me to tears. It's such a stupid thing. I still haven't gotten my escrow refund from when I refinanced and just thinking about trying to jump through whatever hoops there may be to get it unfailingly makes me cry, and the thought that I am letting them steal ~$3k from me because trying to get it back is so frustrating is even worse. Argh. On top of that, which has been ongoing for months, I recently increased my 401K witholding in the hopes that I will someday actually be able to retire, and that made my take-home for my first paycheck of the month (I get paid semi-monthly) less than my mortgage payment, which is kind of okay short-term, I have savings and I can rationalize that what I am really doing is transferring money from my savings account to my 401K , but it is still anxiety-making. My budget is such a mess and I just don't have the wherewithal to fix it right now. Fortunately, I do have a cushion of savings, still. I would like to have this figured out by 2014, but that's coming up soon and I don't know when I'll be able to focus on this shit. Meanwhile, of course, I am throwing money away on stuff I don't need, which is depressing to contemplate.

Money. Argh.

In happier news, I have gone from a size 24 to a size 14 in the last year, and my stash of Clothes I Would Like to Fit Into Again now fits into one plastic bin. I need to figure out what to do with all those now too big for me outfits - some I would like to take in and keep wearing but probably a lot of them I can see if the new consignment shop down the street will take or donate somewhere. I have at least one suit that's never been worn because job hunting didn't really go like I expected it to.

Also pretty happy news - I have a week's worth of breakfasts in the fridge, and 5 days worth of lunches and dinners. I've got everything I need to make salmon cheesecake, and two small pumpkins to eat up, so that's a few more meals. My produce box & eggs will be delivered Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. All told,  I think I am okay to avoid grocery shopping until next weekend. That's always nice.

Work is fine. October is our busiest month and I'm kind of not looking forward to things slowing down. Like there won't be enough for me to do? I don't know. There's always more analysis I could be doing, I don't think that's really a danger. I do run out of brain, sometimes, and want things to do that I don't really have to think about, and that may be in shorter supply, but that hardly seems like it's worth worrying about.

Anyway, four-day weekend at the end of the month, so there's that to look forward to. One of those days will be taken up with Thanksgivukkah, but that still leaves me an extra day of Getting Stuff That is Not Work Done, hopefully.

Jesus, I need to reset this fucking day and I cannot think of a way to do that. This is so stupid, to be all upset about paying bills when the bills are, in fact, paid, WTF, self?

I mean, sure, my life is meaningless and there's not really anything to look forward to, getting through today just means I get to try to get through tomorrow, but that's true all the time and it doesn't usually ruin my mood.

Not "upon further reflection" because said reflection is ongoing. Hey, why leave it implied when I can spell it out?


( This digression got longer than expected... )
Anyway, why did I think I needed to make that aside? I'm not sure now. But the main point I wanted to make was in regard to RV shopping - I've looked at craigslist and confirmed that there are a LOT of cheapish RVs for sale and I don't have to jump on this particular one right now, and I think the sane thing to do is to find a job, see what I can do about making my income and mortgage coexist peacefully with refinancing or something (if necessary, I suppose it's possible I will make enough money to just keep paying the note, but I have never made that much money before so it feels pretty impossible) and THEN go shopping for Back Up Plan Hit the Road (hopefully while I still have enough savings to make that easy).

So. Plan.

You may have noticed that the first step was "get a job" which is something I should have been working on all this month but haven't. At all. Partially because I don't want to de-purple my hair, it's very pretty right now, even with the roots showing. I thought it would fade more, but this dye is really as good as Candace said it would be. But mostly because OMG I hate looking for work so much more than actually working. I have kept many a crappy job for way too long because that whole selling yourself to employers thing is such a drag. Ugh. And right now I feel like I could keep up with some sort of job if I could do it while keeping my head down, but no way could I cope with interviewing and all that.

So I am confessing that here in the hopes that admitting it will help me just get over it already so I can at least work on my resumé. I can do that without taking a shower or anything, so, come on self, get with the program. Worry about what you will do with the resumé after it's all put together and shiny. You can revise, it's allowed.

And you have coffee, now, so - no excuses.

Goodness, it's been too long since I posted. No reason, really, just been busy and the trees are trying to kill me with their pollen, or so my body's immune system thinks.

I've been pondering important questions like - do I need to reread the Hunger Games before the movies start coming out? Game of Thrones will be starting on HBO soon, should I find my copy of A Clash of Kings so I can read along? That was pretty rewarding for the first season. Will I ever be able to quit watching Grey's Anatomy (probably not, though it would probably be better for my mental health if I did)? Now that I've figured out what I don't like about the US version of Being Human, is that reason to stop watching it or a more complex reason to keep watching? Why won't NBC put Community and Parks & Rec on during the same hour again, was that just too good an hour of comedy to be allowed to exist?

Important stuff.

Also actual stuff that I need to get done that I am procrastinating RIGHT NOW (moving the bees, smogging the cars, etc etc.). And got a Nike+ FuelBand which I am "calibrating" for a couple more days as an excuse to keep being lazy about exercise a little while longer. But, you know, whatever, that stuff will do whatever it does. I should check whether my e-subscriptions have been delivered.

 I think I found a place for my island. It kind of expands the kitchen into the living room passed the natural border, but I am okay with that. I'm gonna wait a while before filling it up in case there is awkwardness that I'm not seeing yet, but I'm hopeful for having more storage.

In further kitchen news (I am so close to being able to concern myself with other rooms/tasks. So close. But not there yet), I bought a Cuisinart Blend and Cook Soupmaker because a million years ago I had a blender with a heating element in it and looooved it. I lost it in one of the many involuntary possession purges in my past and missed it, so when I saw this modern version, I splurged, even though I already had a perfectly good blender that just didn't have heat. It was, in part, one of those things that I knew H would have encouraged me to treat myself to if he were alive, which does tend to fuel my more extravagant retail therapy.

Anyway, I used it today to make carrot soup. Y'all, making soup in the Soupmaker is awesome, especially for a person with my limited chopping abilities. And the soup is darn tasty. Validation.

 Got my phone back yesterday, woohoo! Took going to the Genius Bar, them trying to restore and failing, replacing it with a new iPhone, going through the authorization process with Verizon instore with the SIM card tray poking out, pushing the tray in and having the phone wanting to be authorized again. Oops. The Geniuses didn't know what to do about that and advised me to take it to a Verizon store. Which I did, and the guys there were totally confused about why I had a SIM card (I kept saying "because that's what the Apple store gave me" but he kept asking) - turns out I can just take it out completely. It's in my wallet, so if I'm going to travel internationally I can get it authorized and use it outside the US. Apparently,

Whatever, I have a phone again and restoring my apps from the iCloud worked a treat. I apparently missed no calls at all, which is kind of hilarious. Now I need to get my phone-based reminder-driven routine back on track.

Then I went out to lunch with my folks, checked out the Creek Monkey Tap House in Martinez. Nice place, really good fries. They offer 5 oz pours, which are probably supposed to be for tastings but turned out be a nice amount of beer for me to have with lunch, really. I never got the hang of pints that aren't Guinness.

Today I am all tuckered out from interacting with the world so much yesterday. I have moved the kitchen island thing back out to the garage (it'll move back out to the patio eventually) as it is just too big for my breakfast nook. Oh well. I really just wanted the cupboard space. And I think moving it to a different spot on the patio will be better, anyway.

I have what looks like a lot of cupboards in my kitchen, I just have to figure out how to make it accessible and useful for me. Packing up some of my excess dishes and glassware should help, I've gotten a good start on that.

I've been working on it for a while, now. I was seriously doing absolutely nothing for a time, which was a grief-stricken thing, I know, but also instructive. I learned, for example, that I can do very very little and be okay with the results. Chaos and uncertainty, not so bad. Also, that doing nothing at all is attractive in a way that doing very little is not - it's like free versus costs a penny.

Anyway, I'm up to 20 minutes of being productive at a time (22 starting tomorrow!), and I just learned about the Pomodoro Technique which is apparently built around 25 minute stretches of focussed effort, so I'm looking into that. Of course, that's supposed to be 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of rest and then more working, and what I currently do is 20 minutes of work followed by 40 minutes of not working, or way more resting than that, so I'll have to figure out what I'm currently capable of. But it's promising. At some point not too long from now I'm going to have to be able to get through an 8 hour day of doing something that someone is willing to pay me for. It is not quite as unimaginable a feat as it was a few months ago, but I don't think I could do it two days in a row, much less 5, right now.

I use Omnifocus to organize my To Dos, and I'm kind of locked into it just because I have so much in there already. There are times, like right now, when my To Do list is just something I look at and think "look at all the stuff I'm not even going to try to accomplish today", but other times it is satisfying to get through some serious backlog, so I'm sticking with my hundreds of overdue tasks. It doesn't bother me, all the not completed to dos I have hanging over me, which is it's own kind of problem, probably, but I am okay with the consequences of that so far as I can anticipate them, so that's all right.

 I was trying to go to a barrel tasting/bottling/farm tour in Napa today, but I managed to screw that up somehow (I don't know if I went to the wrong place or got the time wrong or what, but clearly mistakes were made. By me, I am pretty sure) so I salvaged the driving time by going shopping at Whole Foods. The one in Napa might be the closest one to me, an dit is certainly the closest one I can get to without having to pay a bridge toll, so it is kind of surprising that I haven't been to it before, but I haven't. That made me all wistful and sad. Whole Foods was our regular grocery in NO, and for some reason we'd shop there together more often than not (whereas one or the other of us might run to Winn Dixie, or Raley's or TJs out here) so being amongst all the familiar signage and what not hit me with the sense memories pretty hard.

Anyway, in my driving around I was listening to To The Best Of Our Knowledge, as I generally do. I had years of backlog of TTBOOK piled up in iTunes, for some reason, and so it has become my standard driving podcast (if I try to listen to the same podcasts on different iPods, as I would have to do for switching between some activities, I get lost and frustrated. If I was actually ever caught up I suspect this would be less of a problem, but while I am slogging through extensive backlog certain activities get certain podcasts. And listening to music while I drive is, frankly, dangerous so the radio is right out). I find it highly uneven, some episodes are practically unlistenable or make me very angry, but others are great, it just depends on who they are talking to. 

The one that came on today was "A Good Death?" (from 2008, you see what I mean about backlog?) which I'm sure added to my melancholy mood. In one of the segments, the interviewee mentioned that the big question (or a big question, or maybe just a question, I wasn't listening all that closely, really, there was traffic to be negotiated) is once we realize we have this limited span of life how do we not waste any of it? Which is one of the things I think about a lot, though for me it takes the form of 'What is important?'.

I have to bull my way past my first response, which is that nothing is intrinsically important, really. "If nothing we do matters, then all that matters i what we do" has never meant anything to me.

So, okay, there's relative importance, which is fine and a helpful concept, but there are so many options to be weighed and so few guiding principals emerging it's looking like a bot of an endless process. And is that an important thing to be putting my energy into? Who knows!

In conclusion, I have not reached any conclusions. You see why I don't have a good answer when some asks what I've been up to?

I've been a season ticket holder at the Willows Theatre for a long time now, though I am currently subscribed under my mother's ticket package because that was easiest for all of us this season. Yesterday was a fund-raiser: dinner, silent auction, live auction, and a performance. Before the fact there was not much information about it, except that it started at 4:30, so I made sure to get there before then, just in case.

I ended up buying a couple of pieces of art at the silent action. I didn't exactly mean to - no one was bidding on them and I felt sorry for their empty bidding sheets and thought maybe if I put in the minimum bid that that might make someone want to outbid me, but no one did. So I have a biggish watercolor of sunflowers and a, hm, I think acrylic titled Earthquake that I plan to hang near the crack in my living room (that is from an earthquake, you see, this is what passes for a decorative sensibility in my head). And a bottle of 2009 Coppola Diamond Collection Black Label Pavilion - no idea what to expect from that but some guy standing behind me when I won it at the wine pull commented that it was a good bottle, so we'll see.

Anyway, the whole thing was pretty okay - dinner was tasty and the entertainment was entertaining (though also confusing, for me, it was a bunch of songs but with choreography and stage business but without intervening dialog and it almost seemed like there was a story behind it all but I couldn't quite piece it together. Possibly I was overthinking it) and funds were raised without me accidentally spending hundreds of dollars on a cake or thousands on an Executive Producer credit (the guy sitting next to me accidentally bid $400 for something when he waved at a friend, which was hilarious since he did get outdbid). Unfortunately I couldn't collect my stuff and go until after eleven, which was about two hours after I wanted to leave. That's like a full workday of being out of the house and sociable! Too much.

Fortunately I could spend today in my bathrobe reading murder mysteries and turning a chicken carcass into stock. Still in progress, but I think this is an excellent use of the induction cooker, especially in the summertime. It has the option of setting a target temperature (well, selecting from several potential target temperatures) and holding that temperature for a set period of time, and so far it seems to be doing that without heating up the kitchen nearly as much as the oven or stove would (not to mention that getting the stove to produce the temperature I want is tricksy). Winning.

 As more or less expected, re-entry into normal routing after Vegas is taking some adjustment. It's kind of silly - 3 days and two nights vacation shouldn't take more than 3 days to come back to normal from, but my routine, such as it is, is more week-based than day-based, so it was easier to just kind of take the rest of the week off than shift everything. And actual daily stuff like feeding the critters and getting the mail and like that did happen on schedule.

Anyway, the point is, Vegas was a whole lot of fun. perkins is totally awesome to travel with. We ended up with a nice suite at THEhotel (or is it theHOTEL? one of those), my award-miles flight on JetBlue was longish but fine and essentially free, so most of my vacation budget was available for fabulous dining and a fantastic spa day.

( Somewhat blurry on the details account within... )

Vegas is always so surreal - the lights everywhere and the endless interiors and small details like the patterns of the carpets and the lack of clocks somehow all conspire to make the whole experience outside of normal life. Makes for an intensely vacationy vacation, even when it's short. Maybe especially when it's short.

I haven't done much since I got home - baked bread, made chopped liver, made a bit of a dent on the freezer. The bees look good but I still need to get the queen cage out of the hive, I hope it is not entirely encased in wax already. Picking up the second hive body on Wednesday, I am so excited to expand!