Month: October 2017

My Halloween post

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I got a nightlight for our bathroom last week.  The light switch is as far from the door as possible (because that’s convenient in a bathroom).  It’s in the far corner, on the other side of the medicine cabinet, and it shares a wall plate with the outlet.  It’s a rocker switch, so every time we reach blindly in the dark to turn on the light, we risk shoving our fingers in the socket.  I figured I could solve the dark problem and the outlet problem by buying one of those nightlights that covers the unused socket.  I found these cool-looking clear ones that glow in colors in the dark, and I got the red one because I read that red is less disruptive to your sleep than blue or green. I didn’t take into consideration that a red nightlight might disturb my sleep in other ways.

Now the bathroom glows red like a portal to hell.

Seriously, every time I get up in the middle of the night, and any time I notice the glow down the hallway as I’m drifting off to sleep, I’m half expecting demons to show up.  I’m not sure blue would have been any better – then I’d imagine the not-friendly kind of alien.  And if I’ve gotten green…I don’t know – maybe dark fairies?

I might be replacing the nightlight with baby-proofing outlet covers soon.

How did I miss this?

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A friend of mine at work casually dropped into conversation that he’s seeing a screening of Monty Python and the Holy Grail followed by a Q&A with John Cleese and WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY LIFE THAT I DIDN’T KNOW THIS WAS HAPPENING?

It’s totally not okay that I didn’t find out this was a thing until the tour had passed me by.  I am bereft.

But YOU don’t have to be.

Here’s the tour schedule.  (Hint: it’ll be in DC soon and Louisville the week after.)

I need you all to go and have a wonderful time because I need to live vicariously through you.

Why can’t I dream about Disney World or having superpowers or something?

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I wish my dreams were a little less realistic, maybe a little more fantastic.  I tend to dream about mundane things, often close enough to my daily life to make me unsure later if I dreamed it or if it really happened.  (Did I pick up my prescription or just dream about it?  Are we still out of milk?  Maybe I only dreamed I got some from the store.)  Other times, my dreams are too close to real life for comfort, like the other night when I dreamed about work.  I dreamed about specific tasks I had to do this week, actual real documents I have to write or review – I feel like I should charge the customer for the hours I was sleeping.  The only unrealistic thing about it was that I was in the office with my coworkers.  (Maybe that counts as a nightmare.)  I suppose last night’s dream was a little less like real life.  I dreamed I was taking a walk in the woods and I found two bear cubs, and they were adorable and playful and they followed me home even though I was trying to leave them in the woods, and then their mama bear (even though one was a panda cub and one was a red panda cub, the mama was a big brown bear) was in the room, and I was trying to edge past her to get away, hoping she’d be focused on the cubs near the opposite wall, but she saw me and she chased me, and yeah, okay, that dream was nothing like real life.

I am a fascinating person

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I’m not going to talk about work.  Instead, I will tell you what’s new!

(What’s new?)

Um….we joined a gym!  Again, but for the first time since we moved.  Our gym is less than a mile from our house, and it has oodles of cardio and weight machines and some group classes (although mostly at times I can’t go to because of work) and a scary half-circle-shaped room that’s always dark for spin classes – I’m not going near that.  (Spin classes have too much yelling.  I don’t want to be yelled at all, but I feel like if you’re going to yell, you should at least turn the lights on.  It’s weird.)  And they have 5 or 6 heavy bags, so we can resume our boxing workouts.  Yay!

I lifted weights (and by “weights”, I mean “lightweight dumbbells” – let’s not get crazy here) for the first time in months (since May?) yesterday morning, and I am paying for it today.  It’s the good hurt, but it’s still a hurt.  Oh, and then I sliced my finger on the edge of the sugar container lid that John chipped earlier this week, so that hurts too.  I did NOT bleed in the sugar.  (Much.)  At all!  For reals.  The sugar is not contaminated.  (Much.)  At all!  (I’m sorry -can’t help myself.)

So let’s see…what else is new?

Hm.

Well.

I guess that’s all.

I need to exercise some self-control

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I have all the dinner regrets.  That’s not true – I have some dinner regrets.  We ordered takeout pasta, and it was really good, and I ate too much of it, but it was so good, and have I mentioned that it was really good?  But I’m so full I’m sneezing.  Like, a lot.  Can’t stop sneezing.  I mentioned that to Corey a few years ago (that I sneeze when I’ve eaten too much), and he said he sneezes when he’s hungry.  So maybe Mel sneezes while she’s eating?

Let’s be honest – my mood was already fine

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It’s a rainy, kind of dank, dark day, but two things just happened that brightened my mood.  First, I got this ridiculous, totally incomprehensible email from a customer:

“It looks like we do not have production turned on. So I need to get your metadata chicken figure production”

Total autocorrect fail, and it’s making me laugh.  Metadata Chicken Figure is the name of my new band.

I responded with, “I can provide my metadata chicken figure production, but not until I receive your grounded sailboat muppet configuration.  I’ll need to make sure they match.”  (No, I didn’t.  But Grounded Sailboat Muppet is the name of my autobiography.)

THEN I saw this picture on Tom and Lorenzo.  It’s the hipsteriest hipster picture that ever hipstered.

Let us count the hipster ways…I get to 7 without even trying.  I am amused.

Minor technical note

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Some of you have noticed that my cover photos have been changing.  Thank you for being observant.  🙂  Wordpress introduced a change a while back that lets me select a bunch of pictures to use as header photos, and then the software selects randomly among them.  Every time you visit or refresh the page, you’ll get a new picture.  Fun times.

When I first started doing it, it let me crop pictures so they wouldn’t take up as much room, but the cropping feature isn’t working anymore, and I’ve decided not to worry about it.  But that’s why some of the pictures are really big and some are narrow strips.

I’m also considering another theme change, but I’m very much in the “Hm. Maybe I should look at other themes” stage still.  I haven’t actually started looking.  Baby steps.

My refined palate makes life SO difficult. Harrumph harrumph harrumph.

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We haven’t had great luck with restaurants these past few days.  We did go out for Italian for John’s birthday (yay us for going out!), but the food at the restaurant we picked (which was supposed to be a good one) was just okay.  Then for lunch the next day, well, we had brunch the next day, but even the bottomless mimosas couldn’t make up for dry fried chicken with boring gravy over biscuits (the biscuits were fine).

But yesterday, we were downtown in the evening to check out some synthesizer stuff for John, and we had dinner at this Korean place I’ve had my eye on.  THIS place is good.  No cooking at the table, but hey, that’s less work for us.  I had bibimbap and John had bulgogi, and everything was really good.

I am relieved.  A string of disappointing restaurants is almost as bad as a string of disappointing books.  But really, it’s a sign that I should go to the grocery store.  If I’m going to be disappointed by a meal, it might as well be one I cooked myself.

The Mute Little Toaster

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Our toaster oven has lost its ding.  I don’t know exactly how old it is – it’s definitely not the one we got as a wedding present, but I can’t remember when we replaced it.  Possibly as long ago as the Portsmouth house, which makes this toaster oven around 12-14 years old.  I think that’s a reasonable life expectancy.  Of course, I say that as if the fact that it doesn’t ding when the timer is done means it doesn’t toast bread.  It still works!  It just doesn’t cheerfully alert me when it’s done anymore, so I have to pay more attention to avoid cold toast.  Life is hard.

Donuts and milkshakes and (maybe) Italian food, oh my!

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It is John’s birthday!  For Birthday Breakfast, I brought home Dunkin Donuts AND Starbucks because I am a devoted wife, and also because I can easily pass by both places on my way home from running, but definitely more because I am a devoted wife.

Dunkin Donuts has renamed all of their donuts for Halloween, and I am totally here for that.  I got the Wicked Chocolate for John and the Boston Scream for me.  I was tempted by the Ghoulish Glazed, but I saved my extra sweet calories for my ridiculous Starbucks coffee.  John also went ridiculous for coffee today – I got him a white chocolate frappucino, which was made even more of a milkshake than usual because I think they forgot to put any coffee in it.  Milkshakes and donuts for Birthday Breakfast!

Birthday lunch was brilliant blissful buttery birthday banana bread, although that was a near no-show last night.  I got all the ingredients out, realized I didn’t have brown sugar, threw a tantrum inside my head because I REALLY didn’t want to go to the store for the 39th time this week, and figured out that we barely had enough normal sugar to make it work as long as we didn’t need it for tea or coffee today AND (pause while I breathe) I knew we wouldn’t need it because I had the Birthday Breakfast plans all figured out.

Dinner tonight is still TBD, since John is still working, but we’re thinking some Italian place in Federal Hill.  Or, if he works too much later, we’ll abandon the silly idea of going outside (which, let’s face it, is crazy talk), order in something delicious and stupid, and try again tomorrow night.  WE’LL SEE.

Definitely not talking about work. Nope, no sir.

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Someone I work with is thinking about moving and asked me about working from home.  She’s done it for a day here and there over the years, but now she wants to move out of state.  She was wondering if it was hard to get answers from people or if I went nuts if I didn’t get out of the house every day or if I ever regret not coming in to the office and seeing everyone.

After I stopped laughing at that last part, I could truthfully say that the only issues I have with work are about the work sometimes, not the working from home.  And for the record, it’s no harder to get answers from people than it is in the office when they disappear from their desks and you can’t find them, and I mostly DO get out of the house every day, so that’s not an issue, either.  It’s really helpful to be able to walk away from the computer sometimes – I needed a lunchtime walk outside to recover from some of the things that happened this morning.  It’s all fine, all taken care of, and it had nothing to do with where I was, which is nice to know.  I mean, it sucks that the same annoying thing would have happened no matter what, but it’s also reassuring to know that I would have gotten the same response face to face.  I’m not being treated differently because I’m not in the office.  John wasn’t able to say the same thing about his last job.

Pesky pedestrian pickles

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The most recent two pictures on my phone right now are of pickle jars.  I accidentally bought sweet bread and butter pickles the other day, but I didn’t realize it until I took a bite of one at lunch today.  I don’t hate them, but I MUCH prefer dill pickles, and when you’re expecting to taste dill and you get whatever that sweet taste is instead?  SUPER disappointing.  (My Twitter world agrees.)  So I went back to the store today, the third day in a row, but not for that.  Well, not only for that.  Friday is John’s birthday, so I needed wrapping paper, a card, and, most importantly, a Carvel ice cream cake.  He LOVES Carvel ice cream cakes, so I’m off the hook for baking every year.

I also bought bread and pickles.  Dill pickles.  Aaaannd that’s my new secret agent name.

Speaking of baking, I have two overripe bananas, so during one of my 16 trips to the store this week, I picked up flour and baking soda, and now I need to make banana bread.  Maybe I can convince John it’s birthday banana bread.  Buttery birthday banana bread.  Blissful buttery birthday banana bread.  Brilliant blissful buttery birthday banana bread.

Owning a cat

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I made John watch the videos of The Bloggess putting her cats in this astronaut backpack thingy, and he was like, “Isn’t that kind of cruel, to force them into the backpack?”, and I was like, “Dude, that’s what you do when you have a cat.  You dress it up in clothes, you drape it around your neck like a stole, you sit it in your lap and pretend it’s a drummer, you laugh when it sits in the kitchen chair and looks like it’s ready to eat dinner with you, and you hope it doesn’t claw you when you try to scratch its tummy.”  That’s cat ownership in a nutshell.

There are too many things to learn

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I want to do too much.  We went to see Against Me! – I came home wishing I still had my drumset so I could practice.  We went to see Colin Hay – I spent the evening planning to come home and play my ukulele.  I saw a poster for a dance school – I want to find adult tap classes.  We saw horses over the weekend – I want to find a new barn to pick up my lessons.  I want to learn French.  I want to learn Welsh.  I want to learn sign language.  I want to take piano lessons.

I’m a little overwhelmed by the number of things I want to do, so I retreat into reading.  That’s easy.  I already have books.

Another concert surprise!

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John is lucking out this year for his birthday.  How likely is it that this many bands he likes are nearby right now?  AND, lucky for me and our budget, these are bands it’s cheap to see, not like giant rock bands who sell out stadiums and whose cheap tickets are $100 each.  We’re going to see Colin Hay (for the second time) tonight, again as a surprise for him.  (It’s not exactly a hardship for me – I really enjoyed it last time.)  The show is in a town south of Boston, so it’ll be a little easier to get to, and the vibe is going to be COMPLETELY different.  For one, it’s in a theater, not a club.  Second, we’ll have seats that we’ll actually be sitting in, and third, the crowd is likely to be a lot older.  More sedate.  Not that the crowd for Against Me! was young, exactly, but I do expect the number of piercings and mohawks to be lower.  And probably no shouting.  And I think moshing is highly unlikely.  But you never know!

I wanna rock and roll all night and part of every day

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This is not how weather is supposed to work, Providence.

Weekends are for sunny days so we can enjoy them!  Get it together, RI!

In other news, the concert last night was a LOT of fun.  Against Me! was fantastic, and I would see them again any day.  They need to choose better opening acts, but oh well.  It was a small club, and it wasn’t packed, but most of the audience were serious fans who pushed in close and sang every word.  (I only knew a couple of songs that well, but give me time.)  I like being packed in with a ton of people all focused on the stage, all singing together, but we ditched the crowded floor after a few too many close encounters with moshing idiots.  Who knew punk fans would ignore the big NO MOSHING signs?  Silly me for assuming they’d be rule followers.  The balcony was much safer but it had zero energy.  I brought my own, of course, and they played my favorite song, and hey – it took us less than an hour to get home in the middle of the night.  We were totally exhausted this morning, naturally.  I was actually dizzy for a few seconds when I got up, but an early bedtime tonight ought to fix that.  We are party animals, yes we are.

The revolution was a lie

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Tonight, we will test just how convenient it is for us to live approximately an hour from Boston. And we will test if we’re really approximately an hour from Boston.  I’m willing to bet we’re not, at least not around 4:30/5pm on a weekday.  But still!  We should get there quicker than we were able to get to Portland.

Why are we going to Boston on a Wednesday night?  It’s a surprise!  But it’s a surprise for John, not you, and by the time I publish this, he’ll already know why we’re going, so it’s safe to tell you.  I mean, he knows we’re going to Boston tonight already.  It’s not THAT much of a surprise.

I’m pretty confident he’ll be happy when he figures out who we’re going to see.  Sort of an early birthday present, I guess.

It’s not you, it’s me. Except it’s totally you.

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I’m in a bad book mood again, and (again) I can’t decide if it’s me or the books.  On Saturday, I finished A Taste of Marrow, a novella, the sequel to the hippo cowboy novella I read and loved a few months ago.  Still happy with those books.  So then I started Mariana, a recommendation from Chastity.  It’s sort of a cross between Anya Seton and Rosamunde Pilcher, and I enjoyed it enough (I wasn’t sure I liked it, but then I kept asking John to delay dinner so I could read more of it, so I suppose I did like it.  The very end cheated, though.)  I finished Mariana Sunday night, so it was time to pick my next book.  And that’s when the problem started.

Book 1: John Dies At The End.  This is a book I should like.  Normal (okay, “normal”) guys fighting monsters, saving people, lots of action, lots of humor…no.  It felt like it was trying too hard, the humor felt slapsticky, and I didn’t want to put forth the effort to stay interested.  They made it into a movie, and I can see how it would be a fun movie, so maybe I’ll watch it first (keep your shock to yourself) and then decide if I want to go back and read it.  Maybe it’s me.

Book 2: The Palace Job. I don’t feel so bad about putting this one down.  It’s a heist novel, and I like those, but no.  The writing sucks.  Definitely not me.

Book 3: A Handful of Stars. After giving up on two books in the space of one hour, I figured I’d pick something safe.  This is the sequel to Second Star, a book I liked, so this should be a no-brainer, right?  And yet…no.  I haven’t put it down yet, but it’s not working for me.  Maybe it’s because it’s been so long since I read the first one (I read it nearly two years ago), but I feel like I’m being asked too much as a reader.  It’s either that, or there really are gaps here.  So we’re in space, which of course is fine, since the first book was about the population of a space station declaring their independence, and this book starts with a mission to an asteroid belt to start a mining operation, and oh wait – our main character went on this expedition eight months pregnant?  With twins?  And just as she’s about to give birth (early), her mother shows up out of nowhere, no warning, with main character’s 10-year-old child that her mother created from a donor egg and didn’t tell her about, and she just goes with it?  No fights?  No discussions?  And the 10-year-old is cool with meeting his mother like that?  And her husband is totally cool with it all because he’s perfect, naturally.  And she goes running around a lawless mining asteroid with her infant twins strapped to her a month after the birth.  Of course.  And I have to assume she (main character) isn’t upset about any of this because the story is told from her point of view and I’m in her head and she’s not thinking about it aside from some initial confusion…well, this is ridiculous.

Yeah, I think I just talked myself out of this one, too.  And maybe it’s NOT me.  I am going to fix this by reading short stories by Robin McKinley.  If I don’t like those, it’s definitely me, but I’m not worried.  Really.  I’m not.  It’ll be fine.

Focus Shmocus

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Neither of us felt great this weekend, but we picked a good weekend for it since it was mostly overcast and rainy.  We’re better today, kind of.  It probably didn’t help that we got caught out in it yesterday.  We walked to the nearest grocery store to pick up a few essentials (and breakfast), thinking we’d detour a little to Starbucks on the way home.  The rain wasn’t supposed to start until closer to noon, so naturally, since we were walking, it started early.  It was just sprinkling when we left the grocery store, but it was raining outright two blocks later.  It wasn’t all that unpleasant.  It was a nice change to be out in warm rain.  In Oregon, it only rains when it’s cold out.  And luckily for us, the downpour didn’t start until we got home (barely).  We had to dry all the groceries as we put them away, which was weird, but then we decided we weren’t going to do anything else.  We watched all six episodes of the second season of Happy Valley (NOT a happy show), and I finished my book, and that was it.  Weekend over.  I sat in one chair for about eight hours.

I no longer get Columbus Day off, so today is a workday. Kind of a weird one, since plenty of people took the day off anyway.  Hard to focus.

The Good Place

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I can’t remember if I talked about The Good Place when we watched the first season (which I think was just earlier this year), but it’s a half-hour show on Hulu starring Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, and it’s SO GREAT.  We’ve been watching the first season over again this past week because I was sick and the show makes me happy.  Second season is starting soon, if it hasn’t already.

Love it!  Go!  Watch and love it with me!

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