So in the Spoonflower calendar contest I came in 2nd. So close but so far! I'm happy about 2nd, I liked my design and I really like the winner's design as well. Both of us went with birds, she did far more birds than I did.
Go here to see all the entries. Mine is calendar by vo with 413 votes.
I know it's not quite Thanksgiving yet. But today I had a lot of grateful moments. I was grateful that I didn't rush, rush, rush to work. I was late and I did it on purpose and didn't freak out (like I usually do because I HATE to be late for anything).
I was thankful because one girl brought in a ton of homemade biscuits and gravy and jam and 2 different kinds of butter and we ate in a big group of chatting, laughing, reminiscing humans. We were a light crew today, maybe 8 of us in the office. The officemate did a great service for all of us.
A note about this officemate. She is a mom of one of the kids who works with the athletics dept of a local high school. Every week during the season she delivers a boatload of food to the team (from a local restaurant). After they've eaten she used to bring the leftover food over to my house and put it in our mailbox. So for about 6 wks once a week we had great food delivered right to our house at no cost to us. She ate with the team and since she is on weight watchers she didn't want the leftovers at her house. How generous of her right? I am very thankful for her thinking of me.
I'm thankful for the rest of my officemates. Even the ones that make me crazy. I was very thankful that today only 1 person was in the office who makes me crazy (the other one was off) and today she was ok. Maybe it was because I got her to do something outside her comfort zone (because it was the right thing to do) and she did it and got many thank you's from her direct reports. It was nice to see her direct reports happy today.
I'm thankful that my husband got me coffee at the store. Heck, I'm happy he goes to the store on a regular basis since I don't like going to the grocery store. Now if only he ate food that was more to my liking. bhwhahaha.
I'm thankful for both of my kids; tonight we three hung out in the kitchen chatting and that was really good. It does happen more than just tonight, I just had lots of big love and thankfulness for them tonight.
I thought alot about T today. How I have a lot of friends from a lot of different times in my life and his dying right now has crystalized how much people mean to me. Yes, even the crazed people. They give me something to compare and contrast against. I don't always come out on top if I'm truthful but the times I realize I've erred are times to be thankful for.
More tomorrow.
T died today. Around 3 p.m. His mom called me.
I miss him. It's hard to believe he called me on Sept 5th telling me he'd lost the ability to walk. In the 6th he found he had melanoma tumors everywhere.
He declined from there.
Less than 3 months from dx to passing.
I wish I'd lived closer to him. As much as it's a difficult thing, the true blessing is he's not in pain anymore. He was a good friend and that is the biggest blessing.
T - be easy.
Ye gawds I was nearly in an accident coming home from work. I'm tooling along minding my own business in the right hand lane.
There is an intersection by the big hospital that is always a mess this time of night. The left turn lane always gets filled too fast so cars in the left lane get blocked from going forward to the light.
So tooling along in the right lane where it is totally clear I see this van that realizes it's stuck in the line with all the cars wanting to turn left. Surely the driver sees me, my lights are on, it's fully dark and the second I came up to his back quarter panel he starts to move into my lane to get around the car in front of him.
I LAID on my horn. Blasted him loudly. He slammed on his brakes fast...but still he was into my lane over a foot. The right hand lane people have nowhere to go because there is a curb right there, no driveway. Good thing my car is thin enough and I'm a good enough driver to pull right but still not hit the curb.
He came within inches of hitting my front left panel and door. The good thing is he didn't move once I passed and the three cars behind me went around him since he was not legal and we were.
Sheesh.
Today is weird that I feel sick, like feverish but I don't have a fever. I dunno. Weird. I'm also experiencing restless leg which I haven't had in years.
Did I mention I went to the neuro and no MS? If I haven't well, yay for me, no MS.
Did I mention that I scheduled my deviated septum surgery? Jan 25th. I have almost a complete blockage within the right side and significant blockage on the left. The right is due to the deviated septum, the left has significant swelling of the turbinates. So yes, I am having turbinate surgery along with the septum fix.
He doesn't use packing so I am very happy about that. He uses splints. Still will be uncomfortable but I won't have to feel that horrible unpacking feeling everyone tells me about. Ick.
We got our tickets to see the Ellen show...we're going during the 12 days of Christmas giveaway tapings. Yahoooooo.
That's the news o the week.
Well, we've had another weird thing happen at work. The staff meeting was horrible. Positively negative all around. (love that alliteration!)
First we're told nobody will ever get a Exceeds Expectations as an overall ever again. I look around the room and I see out of 20+ people 3 people got EE. One of them was the violent man. Hmmmm, how did he get such high marks for interpersonal skills when he is such a verbally nasty man to work with? Hmmmmm? The Big Boss tells us the boss above her was appalled at so many people pushing back on their reviews. Interesting comment since we are allowed to write anything we want on our reviews if we don't agree with the comments. It means nothing to push back.
The next topic was to tell the entire group that for now on all of us must look at the 3 supervisors as extensions of her. If they tell you to do something, just do it. Management believes in their abilities and we must obey them. You must do what they say even if they are not your direct supervisor. We can question but if they still want us to do what they told us to do we must obey.
Yes, the word obey was used quite a few times. Along with the word "must".
The staff is in an uproar, everyone is mocking her behind her back...also the supervisors for needing their mommy to reprimand the children.
There has to be a different job available to me somewhere. The atmosphere there is like a staph infection.
The husband and the daughter went to the store (actually a couple of them). They got some groceries. Maybe 6 bags of groceries and some sodas.
My husband usually gets groceries and he puts away the frig stuff but leaves stuff in the bags and they sit on the floor. Why he does this is beyond me. If a bag is left on the floor long enough someone will come by and drop trash into it.
We don't have a recycle bin, just paper bags sitting out on the floor awaiting paper trash. You see how things can get confusing if there is a bag sitting out. I'm pretty sure over the years something perfectly good has been tossed out.
I guess he thinks if he bought it someone else should put it away. I don't really know, that's a guess. Read on for clarification.
I go to the store, I put everything away.
When the two got home from the store the hub brought in one paper bag from Trader Joes. The daughter brought all the other bags in plastic bags (all 5 hung on her arm). The both put their bags on the ground.
She asks her dad to go out and get the 2 twelve packs of sodas out of the car. He says No. She says "Would you please? I brought all of these bags in (points to the 5 bags) and you only brought 1 inside. " "No, I brought in MY stuff and nothing in those bags belong to me" he says. "Some of that is yours!" says the daughter. "Show me, show me what is mine in there!, says the husband.
I am listening to this and am amazed that 2 people are actually having this discussion. One fully functioning adult and one soon to be an adult in less than a month.
I told them I could not believe what I was hearing...OMG. I guess the husband heard what I meant because he went out and got the sodas out of the car.
I really, really hope when I have and exchange that doinky that I hear myself and do an about face.
I've been semi-without a computer lately. My one year old pc blew the power unit. I slid under the wire with the warranty and sent it in to be replaced just 2 weeks before the warranty expired.
I hooked up my old pc - OMG it's like crawling instead of running. You could have a birthday waiting for anything to load on that puppy.
I have a second computer that I THOUGHT was broken. It was given to me and lo and behold the sucker is pretty clean and hardly has anything on it. I cannot believe it was given to me. It's a Gateway - Pentium 4.
So I hooked it up and today started loading it with software. My graphics program (I heart that the bestest) and ding dang it if doesn't have a 9 pin port so i can use my Wacom tablet again! Ye haw, drawing graphics will be so much faster and easier.
So now what I want is to clear a space over there --------> on that desk against the other wall so I can put this one over there and the one I bought last year can go here. All I need is a big flat screen monitor.
Of course I'd also like to get PhotoImpact 13 software and a new Wacom tablet. But since I know I can't afford those things I have to make do with this old stuff.
I also hooked up the printer and realized I didn't have the software. XP won't just recognize the printer without the software. My Vista pc did tho (at least I think it did, I don't remember installing it). So off I went looking for the install file and drivers.
I found this on one page and it made me laugh out loud: "Please confirm your driver selection!! If the wrong driver was downloaded and installed, The installed driver may cause your cmoputer problems."
Oh yes, apparently if you install the wrong driver you'll have spelling problems. bwhahahaahaha. I did not download from that site. Figured if they had typos they might also make mistakes with their files. No cmoputer problems for me!
I talked to T tonight. He's barely conscious. I told him some things...it's your birthday (he said, "I know"), that I loved him (me too) and told him it would be ok, if he were tired he could go to sleep. That wherever he is I will be thinking of him. That he made an impact on me from that very first day I called him to come in for an interview.
I hate that he is dying and I won't see him again. I thought of him today as I stood in the kitchen at work. I missed seeing him sitting at the table eating his lunch, cracking sarcastic wit at me. I miss running into him in the hallway on the way to the restroom. Him standing at my desk laughing.
To think just 2 and a half months ago, he was all of that and now he is on his deathbed.
At 53.
I hate seeing my paycheck go from the whole amount to hardly anything once I pay the mortgage and the cell phone bill. Because I have nothing left but money to buy gas for the car. I allow myself a whopping 20 dollars per week for incidentals each week of the month. That danged cell phone bill is killing me. 250.00 a month now.
Yesterday I went to Harbor Freight and bought myself a 4.99 metal hole cutter die set. And a 1.99 teeny hand drill to drill holes in soft wood. I needed the metal hole cutter because I have some 8 gauge copper wire that I want to make bookmarks out of...ewww awkward sentence. In any case, I wanted to cut a hole in one end to hang beads.
I made one yesterday but DANG! 8 gauge is hard to hammer and I don't have any good metal files. My dad had bunches but I don't know what happened to all of his tools. When I did hammer the end wide enough to accomodate the hole, the cutter cut a hole too large so it broke. Hmmmm.
Plus I need an anvil. My FIL had this small block of metal, about 3 inches by 5 inches that I could have used but I can't find that either...if we ever had it. I can't remember if I saw it here or maybe at the MIL's house. If it was there, it is long gone.
When I was at Harbor Freight I saw they had a dappling block. I want one of those (hahahah, even tho I don't have any metal sheet or way to cut metal - I NEVER have the right tools or materials). Well, I did read a review of the HF dappling tool here. I guess it's a good thing I didn't have the money to buy it eh? Thank goodness for blogs, blog authors and research.
I do wish there was a place in town to teach me what I need to know about working with metal and had the tools for me to play with.
My dad was a cook in the air force. He was a very good cook. Not a chef certainly but a cook. Pretty much short order was what he knew instinctively after all those years.
My mom also cooked but she had a different expertise. She did Japanese. Did it well too since she WAS Japanese.
But back to my dad. Every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas we'd have roast turkey. With all the trimmings. Yum. The best turkey ever.
He always cooked it in a big brown paper bag. You prepped it, stuck it in the bag, put it in the oven and didn't open it til it was done. And it was always perfect. Every time. Tender on the inside, crispy skin (which btw, I used to eat but no longer).
My husband usually does the cooking (or used to, now he rarely cooks). But he always makes the turkey. He scoffed at me and the brown paper bag method and will not, he refuses to even try the brown paper bag method. He used to tell me that no way that would work because it would catch on fire. Hrumpf, ours never did. I stopped asking him to do it that way many years ago.
But this morning I thought about cooking turkey and thought I'd go look at recipes. Look: Paper Bag Turkey is crisp, brown and juicy every time. Once you learn how to cook a turkey this way you'll never go back to basting. and Roasting a turkey in a brown paper bag is a method not many people are usually familiar with so here are the steps on how to make it. It's pretty easy and fun too. It is easy but I'm not sure that last thing - it being fun to do is exatly accurate. Putting something into a bag and putting it into an oven isn't exactly my idea of FUN but to each his own.
Nowadays I'd use either parchment paper (to make my own bag) or a roasting bag (much easier than constructing a bag). I have visions of bulk brown paper bags on the floor of a warehouse and icky things crawling on them.
That said, maybe I'll offer to do the turkey this year.
I tripped and fell yesterday. Dang it. Hurt myself too. Banged up my right knee, the inside of my right elbow, my left knee is grazed and my left ring finger knuckle is all purple. The worst of it is the elbow - if it lands on the arm of the chair it hurts like a mo-fo. I think I bruised it really bad even tho the skin isn't all that purple. I can't straighten my right knee, it makes me yelp if I do.
A fall day isn't supposed to mean fall on your hands and knees but apparently I had to make it one. I tripped on the ding-danged power cord for the laptop. Had I been barefoot instead of wearing Ugg boots I might have felt the cord on my leg but I didn't. I had no idea how I fell until after I fell and I couldn't get my right leg to move. Sigh.
So I am also having trouble with the keyboard on this laptop. I have to keep backspacing to correct my typos. This is how I am really typing if I don't backspace.
How arert you roday? I am just fine and dandy on rrthis really early morning. Hmmm, how come I can't recreate the typing issuues when I wanrt to do it? Now my fingers are hardly even touchinf the rt key. See how I keep hirrtrting the rt key but I also hirt rthe r key? Oooooh.
My hands keep typing both the r and the t key when I just want the t key.
I'm such a dork.
Unbelievable the guy who screamed and put his hands on another employee is coming back to work on Mon after a one week paid administrative leave. Yep, you heard that right.
No HR interview with the girl who was verbally attacked and was restrained from leaving her office. The only people who talked to HR was two bosses who were not even in the office at the time of the altercation.
The staff is up in arms.
We left early in the morning. 6ish. We got on the road and it took us hours to get to Warner Bros. First our driver could not navigate the freeway system so we missed a freeway, turned around and missed it a second time, then I put Los Angeles in the GPS instead of Burbank. I realized pretty quickly after we were getting on the Harbor freeway and we were going due west instead of northeast. Got that fixed. Then the GPS went crazy and made us go thru a little neighborhood and kept telling us to make a u turn. It also kept telling us to turn on streets we'd just passed. The coordinates must have been off by 20 ft or so. See this GPS link.
Arrived, checked in and found we had hours before we needed to be there. Ate and came back.
The show is very well coordinated. Standby guests (which we were) did get in but you only got into the actual taping if a VIP didn't show. If you didn't get in you got to sit in the Riff-Raff room. Which is fun and you do get to hear all the stuff coming from the studio but you're not really IN the studio. Sometimes they turn on the cameras in there so you might get to see yourself on tv. If you have to sit in the Riff-Raff room you get to get guaranteed tickets to a future show.
The line of us standby people snaked into the studio and when we got to the stairs going into the studio they only needed 2 of us. Sus and Terri got into the studio but me and K didn't. :-(
The show staff gave out 3 tickets by drawing numbers to see one of the Twelve Days of Christmas shows. We did not win one of the raffle tickets. :-(
But then me and K were told we were going to be seat fillers for 2 contestants who were doing a game in the first segment. Yay. That was fun, we danced and watched the contest. Then we returned to the RR room.
Then they told us (me and K) that we got to get tickets for a future show. We were given a schedule for the beginning of the year. I asked if we could get tix for one of the Christmas shows. She left and came back with the Dec schedule.
YAY! We get to go to a December show! Fun, fun, fun.
OMG, ya know how I dropped out of book club? I told each member that if they wanted to talk to me to email me. Nobody did (but 2 that had about enough). Ok, no biggie right?
Tonight we were at the bookstore. The husband of one of the eyerollers saw my husband and came over to say hi. It was a regular, "Hi". Then I step from the other side of my husband and said, "Hi Vic".
He blanched and said, "oh hi". Then he said one thing more to the husband and hightailed it out of there. Apparently he's mad at me FOR his wife.
Bwhahahahaha. That made me sort of laugh and sort of feel sorry for them. I didn't do anything to them, I left bookclub. That means I'm the one that loses out on a reading group.
I also think it's weird that someone who has nothing to do with bookclub is mad at me. Vic has no part at all in bookclub. None of the husbands do. My husband could be mad at them for being such jerks all the time but he treats them just as he always has.
Make no mistake my hub is sympathetic to me but he also knows I'm a big girl who can take responsibility for her own decisions...(hahahaha, even tho he likes me to get riled up when he gets riled up, see the Vogel post).
Oh well, they'll get over it or they won't.
Tomorrow I'm going to see a taping of the Ellen show. Maybe. We have the letter but the problem is the letter holder cannot go. We are not sure if the show will let her transfer the seats to Sue who was in the original party.
We're going on faith that it won't be a problem. The original ticket holder is calling to tell them that we are still coming, just that she can't go.
I hope we get in, we're leaving at 6 a.m. to be there at 8 a.m. It will take us longer than 2 hours to drive (Monday commuter traffic) but at least we'll be there early. The taping doesn't start until 1:30. We'll need things to keep us occupied that is for sure.
I think I'll take some knitting. Maybe K can bring a travel scrabble game. No cell phones in line either. Ye gawds. Out of touch all day.
It will be fun no matter what we do or don't do. Wheeeee.
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