Metro does not make my commute shorter

With the nuclear summit going on in DC today and tomorrow, I decided to avoid the road closures and additional delays by taking the metro to work.  I drove to one of the western-most stations with a parking lot, left the car there, and took the train in.  It was kind of nice to let someone else be in charge of the actual driving, but since it added a half hour to my commute (each way), I don’t think I’ll be doing this regularly.  And today was a light traffic day, according to the news.  It seems everyone took the opportunity to work from home.  Wish I could have done that.  Kind of impossible with my job right now, though.

I got home around 6 and spent a very pleasant half-hour or so hanging out in the backyard with the dogs.  Riley actually fetched the ball.  Only three times, but still.  Then he decided that he’d be most comfortable stretched out on top of me, so I fought him for blanket space until I gave up and went inside.

I have no interesting thoughts tonight. Here’s what’s going through my mind (word for word, practically):

I’m SO tired.  Go to bed.  Why are you still up?  Don’t you have to get up early?  Again?  So go already.  Stop typing.  Why does the dining room look so clean?  Oh, John swept.  Man, that makes quite a difference.  I bet if I dusted it would look even better.  “Hey soul sister, ain’t that mister mister on the radio, stereo….” Ohmygod shut up already and go to bed.

We can thank Spokeit for putting the Train song in my head, although lately that hasn’t been hard.  I hear it everywhere, and while it seems like it’s in danger of being overplayed, I still like it.  But “shut up already and go to bed” is the part I’m going to listen to, so good night.

Somebody stole my sandwich!

I wish I was kidding.  I mean, who does that?  I spent today and yesterday in a really nice new building in Crystal City, teaching a training class with a coworker for backup.  I brought my lunch yesterday (turkey sandwich and an apple), but I ended up getting something else at a deli downstairs.  Today, I didn’t bring anything, since I knew my lunch from yesterday would still be in the fridge.  I had a lot of work to do during the lunch break, so with about 20 minutes to go before class started up again, I went to the kitchen to grab my lunch.  Before I even left the kitchen, I looked in the bag and saw my apple, but no sandwich.  WTF?  I checked the fridge.  No sandwich in the fridge.  Who would steal a homemade turkey sandwich?  Maybe something from Subway, but a stranger wouldn’t know how I make a turkey sandwich.  What if I put something weird on it?  Or what if I had to take medicine with food and I’d mixed my mystery medicine in with my sandwich?  WHY WOULD SOMEONE STEAL MY SANDWICH?  Or why only the sandwich and not just throw the bag and apple away or something?  I don’t get it.  I can’t imagine stealing someone’s lunch like that.  Maybe if it was packaged, like a Smart Ones frozen meal or something.  But something homemade?  It wasn’t even exciting.  Turkey with mayo on bread.  How exotic.

So I had an apple for lunch.

All I can do is complain

This is a problem.  But I need to get it out of my system.  Feel free to skip this post.  EVERYTHING SUCKS.  That’s a little harsh.  LOTS OF THINGS SUCK.  I have to get up absurdly early (5am is absurdly early) to get to work, where I have to stand all day in dress shoes (I’m going shopping this weekend for better shoes), and the only time I have to run is in the evening, which sucks both because I ache from standing all day and because it’s been unseasonably warm these last few days, and running in the heat is NO FUN.  The weather will cool off around Friday, so I have that to look forward to.  But I didn’t get home until after 6, and I didn’t get back from my run until almost 8, so we only just finished dinner (it’s 8:45), and it’s basically time for me to go to bed (after I shower) so I can get up at 5am tomorrow and do it all over again.  THIS SUCKS.  And the alternative to the DC commute thing is to be out of town for weeks and weeks on end.  NOT OKAY.

There is one thing I can do to try to make things better, and that particular thing will start happening over the weekend.  And next week.  Soon.  I just don’t expect change to happen quickly.  UGH!

Well.  I feel better.  Thanks!

Roaming the Internet when I should be outside

Thanks to this post at Three Word Chant! (punctuation theirs), I think I’ve found my new favorite place to go for a chuckle.  Check this one out.

I found that link because I’m in the middle of organizing my bookmarks.  Again.  (And that means I have to go to every single bookmarked site to see if I want to keep it.)  When I organized them last time, I put all the blogs I read in one folder, in alphabetical order.  When I have free time, I go through the list in order.  But I’ve had so little free time lately that I haven’t been getting far down the list, and I’ve inadvertently been missing some of the sites I used to read daily just because their names start with letters in the second half of the alphabet.  Then I feel bad for neglecting them because that reminds me of always being stuck at the back of the line (for lunch, for assemblies, for field trips) in the elementary school because my last name started with an S.  Now my last name starts with a B, but that hardly matters ’cause no one asks us to line up in alphabetical order anymore.  Anyway, I’m over that, but I don’t want to treat my favorite blogs the same way.  So now, my favorites are in a Daily Blog folder, separate from the rest.  Yes, I play favorites.  And I need to update my blogroll, but that will have to happen on a day that’s not so beautiful.  Because why am I inside?  It’s gorgeous out there!

I have to shower (ran six miles this morning – go me!) and then go to the library.  I need books on CD for my super-long commute (now that I’m not carpooling anymore).

Also, I am totally losing my mind.  There was something else I planned to write about, but I have NO idea what it was.

Censoring myself

I discarded a post that went into detail about the annoying verbal habits of a coworker of mine.  SO annoying.  But that’s the sort of thing that can get me in trouble, work-wise, and I decided not to post it.  I’m applying the lessons I learned from Dooce.  Who was in town yesterday, incidentally, because she was invited to participate in a forum on workplace flexibility at the White House.  She planned an informal get-together last night, and much as I would have loved to be there to meet all these people I’ve been chatting with, the timing didn’t work out for me.  Sad.

You know, it’s hard to avoid writing about work sometimes.  I just deleted a couple of sentences about John’s work situation.

Well, since I can’t manage to think about much else, I’m going to quit.  We watched an episode of Castle tonight, but it took nearly two hours to get through it.  We took turns pausing it to vent about the day.  We do feel better, though, and we were able to finish the episode.  (Oh no for Beckett!)   I love that show.

Oh, how I ache

It was a beautiful spring today, all budding green trees and cherry blossoms, but by the time I got outside to enjoy it (and run), I was one big ache from standing all day.  I can handle the talking all day (not much of a stretch for me, plus I drink lots of water), but standing ALL DAY LONG in heels (even low ones) makes me ache all over.  The only shoes I want to be wearing for that long, while standing, are my running shoes, and I think even that would get achy (ache-y?) after a while.  So running this evening started out pretty rough.

The cops were out in force when I left work today.  All the way down Constitution Ave, they were ticketing cars parking along the curb.  (Parking there ends at 4pm for rush hour.)  I saw one woman dash across six lanes of traffic, in the middle of a block, to plead with the officer writing her a ticket.  For a second, I thought she had to be crazy to run across Constitution like that, with so many cars on the road, but then I realized rush hour is the best time to do it.  We were all basically parked.

I spent a few minutes during my run this evening playing with a neighbor’s dogs.  This neighbor lives at the opposite corner of the neighborhood from us, but I run by their house most days, and I’ve met their dogs a few times.  Vader is the sweetest black lab.  Adorably friendly, low energy, nice dog.  Their other dog is an energetic yellow lab named Xena, who was the most adorable puppy.  I know, they’re all adorable, but she really was.  So when I went by, Vader met me at the top of the fence.  He jumped up to reach me and licked every part of me he could reach (mostly my arms,  but a few swipes of his tongue got my neck).  Xena, though, proved herself to be the smartest dog I have ever met.  She had a tennis ball in her mouth, and when she jumped up and put her paws on the fence, I reached for it so I could throw it for her.  She pulled her head back and jumped on the fence, and then crouched down in the same spot, put the ball on the ground, and rolled it to me in between the slats in the picket fence.  I picked it up, threw it, she fetched, and on her way back, she jumped on the fence again (kinda bounced off it) like she was marking the spot, dropped down, and rolled the ball out to me again.  We did it over and over again until I decided I need to keep running.  So smart!

And that reminded me of the little girls I met last week when I was running with the dogs.  We were coming down the sidewalk towards a little girl and her dad, and when she saw Roxy and Riley, she ran behind a tree and told her dad she was scared.  I slowed to a walk and reeled the dogs in, but as we got closer, she crept forward.  I stopped and asked her if she wanted to meet them.  She looked at her dad, who said it was okay, and she came over.  She shied away from Riley (he’s way too big for little kids, even though he loves them (to EAT! (Except not really.  The eating part.  He does love them, and he’s pretty gentle.))) and went straight for Roxy.  Now, Roxy doesn’t care about people as a rule, but she doesn’t mind being petted by kids, so she just stands there.  Tolerating it.  She’s the perfect size, though, so kids always want to pet her.  It’s her destiny.  Or her doom.  Or, you know, just something she has to deal with.

I would walk 500 miles

I learned today (something that should have been obvious, but, well, wasn’t to me) that my phone will die if it spends an entire day underground.  For the second day in a row, my cell phone started the day fully charged, but by 4ish, when I leave the underground room I’m spending every day in, it has already turned itself off because the battery died.  You’d think I would have figured it out after the first day, but no.  How hard is it to figure out that if a phone spends nine hours searching for a signal, it might run out of battery power and die?  At least it’s not as final as that.  That’s why we have cell phone chargers.  But I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll turn off my phone when I get there tomorrow.  Problem solved.

I watched part of Benny & Joon tonight.  I really like that movie.  And Aidan Quinn looked good in it.  Big blue eyes.  Early morning tomorrow (that’s going to be an unfortunate habit before long), so I’m off.

Riley is dumb

Riley has shown this behavior before (probably last spring), but I think he’s getting dumber.  I took them for a walk this evening and on our way back, he attacked a fake bunny.  A ceramic bunny that didn’t look real.  At all.  And when I pulled him away from it, he charged the one right next to it.  FAKE BUNNIES.  Come on.

Today improved dramatically.  Once I headed home for work, anyway.  This morning, I was late picking up my coworker, Gabriel (not his real name) , because it foggy.  And rainy.  And DARK.  And traffic was kinda bad.  Then I couldn’t find his apartment, again because of the dark.  And the fog.  And the rain.  But we got to DC in good time (I think the fog (and the rain (and the dark)) kept everyone home.  Or it’s spring break around here.) and had plenty of time to get ready.  The day went fine, nothing major to report, and I’m very happy to be home.  Although I did wonder why I was getting more congested as the day wore on, and then I remembered that I didn’t take my medicine this morning.  Any of it.  Because it sits next to my bed and it’s usually the first thing I do in the morning, but it was really early and very DARK.  And I was trying to be quiet and leave the lights off and get ready in the hallway so John could sleep.  I was gone before his alarm went off (at 6am).  Too early?  Yes.

Update: Post title changed because John felt “Riley’s an idiot” was too harsh.  🙂

How NOT to waste a Sunday afternoon

Hmm.  Well, that really depends on what you consider a waste of a Sunday.  And I think that entirely depends on what sort of weekend you’ve had or what kind of week is coming up.  For me, this Sunday, wasting the day would have meant doing nothing.  If you know me, you know that I consider doing nothing on a Sunday (or any day) to be one of the best ways to spend a day.  Normally.  But I have a very busy, somewhat stressful week coming up, with a long commute at either end of the work day and very little time to get stuff done.  Today, not wasting my Sunday meant being productive.  So I went to the grocery store (Wegman’s, of course) to stock up for the week ahead, went to Staples to buy a laptop bag for work, got my car cleaned out, paid the bills, filled out the census form, and did what little picking up was required to put the house back into the shape it was yesterday morning.  That part was easy; Jess and Chuck aren’t that messy.  And now I’m done with all of that and I can spend the rest of the day doing whatever I want.  I think.  And what is that?  I think it’s reading.

But first, I’ve seen a few movies recently.  John and I watched District 9 last weekend.  It was not at all what I expected, but that could have been because I didn’t see any previews or read anything about it before I saw it.  It was interesting, certainly, and gory enough for three movies, but I can’t say I want to see it again.  We watched Dean Spanley and then Stardust with Jess and Chuck last night.  I think I really liked Dean Spanley (it was not at all what I expected – took me completely by surprise when I started to see where it was going), and I think I’ll like it more when I can see it again.  Jess performed her magic to get our DVD player to play her Region 2 DVD, and we’re very impressed.  Stardust is one I already knew I loved.

I’m a little chilly, so I off to take a nice warm bath, read my book, and…I feel like there should be a third thing to keep the rhythm of the sentence going, but I can’t think of anything.  🙂  My goal for the evening is to not stress out about tomorrow.  I’m as prepared as I can be.

Cleaning up

So now the bathrooms are clean, the guest room beds are made, and upstairs is vacuumed.  I still need to clean the windows and dust.  At work (need I say it was another long day?), I basically cleaned out my entire desk.  I threw out what I could, but everything worth keeping is important enough to actually have with me in the training classroom.  So it all came home with me today.

I’m meeting Jess and Chuck around noon tomorrow in Chantilly, but there’s stuff I need to do first.  Sounds like I need a list.

  1. Lord & Taylor is having a shoe sale.  I could go on Sunday, though.
  2. Buy a laptop bag (for work) at Staples.  I’ve found the one I want.  That can wait until Sunday, too.
  3. Get my car washed, inside and out.  I think the place I go is closed on Sunday, so I have to do it tomorrow.  I’ll be carpooling next week, so my car should be in good shape.
  4. Dust.
  5. Clean the windows.
  6. Go to the grocery store.  I don’t even know what I need to get yet, but I won’t be able to feed Jess and Chuck if I don’t go.

At least I’m not traveling yet.  If this were the last weekend before all the travel, I’d be way more anxious and making many more lists.

My computer, thanks to John, is now running perfectly with its new hard drive and shiny new Fedora operating system.  And I get to use my pretty pink laptop with the nice keyboard.  (It’s really a pleasure to type on this keyboard.)

I think the condition of the house has been holding me back.  A half-clean house, so close to being mostly clean, makes me feel like I’m more in control of how and when I exercise, what I eat, and how I feel about myself.  You know?  If the house is clean, then I’m successful, and I have more energy and more enthusiasm for exercise.  But we still have too much clutter.  How do we get rid of all this crap?

Small accomplishments

I got up when John got up this morning, but with no intention of going to work early.  I’ve learned my lesson.  It was raining, so I couldn’t run, but I had a whole hour, so I read a little while eating my breakfast, and I CLEANED THE KITCHEN.  Not the whole kitchen, but the counters, sink, and stove.  So now, even though I still have a TON to do when I get home, I can at least walk in the door and see one clean corner of the house.  It’s better than nothing.

I must be crazy

Am I an optimist or an idiot?  I know which one I felt like this evening.  I had two days’ worth of evidence that going to work early was not going to mean I could leave early, but I decided to give it another try.  I was at work by 8am today.  Again.  It was almost 6pm before I left, and I worked through lunch.  (Like I usually do.)  So I’ve officially given up.  Or, according to Einstein, I’m insane. Of course, my schedule changes completely starting on Monday, so it hardly matters.

Man, that was negative.

My hard drive arrived yesterday (yay!), so I installed it when I got home.  That part was ridiculously easy.  It shouldn’t even be called an installation.  I unscrewed the old one and screwed the new one in.  Done.  Of course, I was still missing an operating system, but John downloaded Ubuntu for me last night and burned it to CD, so I popped it into the CD drive .  And ran into errors.  Pages and pages and constant scrolling of errors.  John came home, burned me a new CD, ran into more trouble, and has spent much of the evening trying to figure out why I can’t install Ubuntu on my laptop.  Eventually, he gave up.  I just watched him install Fedora instead.  I’m installing Linux; I really don’t care which version.

Heh.  John just named my computer Flyza Minnelli.  (Do you watch Modern Family?  You should.)

SO much better

I’m still sniffling (and snuffling) and coughing, but so much less, and I feel SO much better.  I ended up working later than I planned (again, I know), but I still had an hour of daylight when I got home, so I went for a short run with the dogs.  It felt really good, and I feel really good.  I thought it might never happen again.  I didn’t do any cleaning tonight, though – wait! Not true.  I cleared off the island.  But there’s a lot more to do, so that’s how I’ll be spending the next two evenings.  Probably.  I should.  I’m sure I will.

No internet again today.  I miss my blogs.  It seems a little ridiculous to think that I may have to set aside dedicated internet time the same way I set aside exercise time or reading time.  But hey, if that’s what it takes…

Lately, I’m getting all my news from the POTUS Sirius radio station (110 – “Politics of the United States for the people of the United States”) in the mornings and a handful of Washington Post headlines throughout the day.  Not as well-rounded as I’d like, but that takes internet time I don’t have.

I just made a resolution to stop complaining about not having enough time to play on the internet.  Starting…now.

Our local WETA channel is showing Ed Sullivan’s Rock and Roll Classics, a DVD set they’re trying to sell.  It’s something I’d love to have, but for now, it’s making it really hard to turn the TV off.  John is glued to the screen, and I keep running back and forth so I can actually see The Turtles or The Young Rascals.  I’m ready to settle in for sleep, but PBS keeps pulling me back in.  Such a bad influence.

Allergies suck. And blow.

Who likes to get to work early and then work late?  I do!  (Brown noser.)  And my throat hurts.  I’m pretty certain I can blame this on allergies and the change in the weather.  But it SUCKS.  So much.  And even when the ibuprofen is working and my throat only hurts a tiny bit, it hurts a lot when I sneeze.

Enough of that.  I spent about half of today reminding myself that it wasn’t Friday.  I thought yesterday was Thursday, too.  But tomorrow really IS Friday, and that’s nothing but good.  John is running the error checking/scanning thing I couldn’t find the other day on my poor broken laptop, but it looks like it froze in the middle of it.  So much for that.

(My throat hurts when I yawn.  What’s up with that?)

I have nothing internet-y to share with you today.  I’m sorry.  What with getting to work early and then staying late (and actually working the whole time) and then making dinner and spending some quality TV time with John, I haven’t had time to play on the good old interwebs today.  My plan for the next 12 hours is to take my medicine, go to bed with water and ibuprofen nearby, prop myself up on several pillows, and hopefully wake up tomorrow morning with a relatively clear head and non-scratchy throat so I can run.  It’s been several days.  Oh, the humidifier.  Can’t forget to set up the humidifier.

Good news!  Tomorrow’s pollen forecast is low.  Hope it stays that way.  I don’t want to have another of those springs.

Today, I am a noodle

Wow.  Check this out.  It’s a (short) public service ad from Sussex Safer Roads about wearing your seatbelt.  The music, the slow-motion…I got a little teary.

And if you weren’t moved by the seatbelt ad, be inspired by 40 inspirational speeches from movies cut into one 2-minute speech.  🙂

I was searched the internet for inspiration (of the non-movie speech kind) and didn’t find any.  I’m sure I didn’t look hard enough, but I lack the energy.  The guy I trained today took all the energy I had.  He’d leave the room for a break or for lunch or something, and I’d just slump back into my chair.  I got home a little on the early side, so I went for a run, but that didn’t go as well as Tuesday’s run.  I don’t feel invincible today.  I feel like a noodle.  A cooked one.

Another linking post

It’s been a link-filled day.  Actually, it’s just been a link-filled couple of hours, and that includes the time from the morning.  Not much time playing on the internet today.  Lots of time running around a federal building downtown (from corner to corner and up and down nine floors (yay for elevators, but I really wish this building would put in those moving sidewalks like in the airport)) and then lots of time in a cramped room that can barely be called a conference room.  It’s more like a storage closet that happened to have a LAN drop and a phone.  But hey, I’m home, I’ve had dinner, I’ve watched an episode of The Inbetweeners, and I’m about to run away to my room to dampen the sound of the band in the basement.  It’s not fair that I complain about them all the time.  I like them, and they’re good, and I (mostly) like their song choices, but listening to the same songs over and over at such a high volume, in the evening after work when all I want to do is relax (and write run-on sentences), gets old.

Anyway, the links.  Dooce made me laugh again, but I’m a little scared that leprechauns are going to tap at my window in the night.  Also, check out these pictures at Desire To Inspire.  Min, I can see you in this house.  Some of the rooms more than others (the 1st, 6th, 9th, and 12th pictures in particular).

For Mom, here’s a link to a really funny Passover-ish post at Three Word Chant.  Happy almost Passover!  (At Wegman’s, of course, Passover started two weeks ago and will go on for quite some time.  No procrastination for them.)

http://www.desiretoinspire.net/blog/2010/3/10/kate-morris.html

A night off

I’m taking the evening off from the internet, you guys.  I spent all day staring at the computer at work (much more than usual), with NO breaks, doing tedious things (but listening to good music).  Anyway, my eyes have said NO MORE to the computer screen.  So I’m going to strain them a different way and read.

Links within links within links…

The end of the workday couldn’t get here fast enough for me.  Nothing against work, but I really wanted to be home.  And now I am, and now it’s Friday night, and now I have to face a 5-mile race in the morning.  If I can treat it like a regular workout, I should be fine.  I just don’t want to finish last.  Please don’t let me be last.

You know how when you look something up in wikipedia, you end up clicking this link, then that link, then this one over here, and back to this one, until you end up reading an article that has NOTHING to do with the first one you read?  (I know you do.)  That doesn’t happen to me as much out of wikipedia, for some reason.  I tend not to click through, or at least not through as many layers, on other websites.  I wonder why.  Well, I don’t, for whatever reason, but I did today, and I found this blog post about an old Newsweek article from 1995 about how the internet won’t last.

How did I get there?

I’m glad you asked.

I started at the latest post on John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, and clicked on the link there to an article from Laptop Magazine where he was quoted about what technology he uses now that  makes him feel like he’s living in the future.  That article links to the Three Word Chant blog post that found the 1995 Newsweek article (and makes fun of it).  It’s this last link (or the first one, several paragraphs up) that I want you to read, but the Laptop Magazine article is interesting, and Whatever can be entertaining.  Have I mentioned that I love John Scalzi’s science fiction?  I’ve read Old Man’s War and The Android’s Dream, and I really liked them both.  Wish I had another of his books to read now that I’ve finished Ender in Exile