Sunday, October 31, 2004

For Halloween, I did the candy handing out. Mike and Russell dressed as ninjas and Genny, my princess of all that is pastel, was a pink flamingo ("Amingo") because she got fixated on that color and just HAD to wear it. I usually costume up, but this year, I just wore a Halloweeny t-shirt, had my usual scary hair, and a dirty house. That was scary enough without a mask, I think.




Work is hard.

I am thinking that I will only be working until we leave for Florida. I like the place and the people, but I do not think I'd like to be an office lacky indefinitely, I'm also not organized enough to enjoy it. I can do it, but I'd rather be home sewing.

Mike says we should wait until we see what his raise is. I'd really appreciate it, if his company would finally bring up reviews, so we could find out what's up on that score. We could really use the pay increase retroactively, in fact. And I would like to make a decision as to whether or not I'm going to continue doing all the shit I do making as much shit-for-wages as I do.

Mostly, I'd just like to sleep -- delicious, luscious, scrumptious napping under warm blankets in the wintry night.

I'm also worried about getting my incompletes made up, which will be well nigh on impossible to do while I'm working. I'd need a week of NOT working to do them. I'm thinking maybe I can work it out to get most of the stuff done on Thanksgiving weekend, though that's cutting it close and I realistically need to do my research well before that.




Thursday, October 28, 2004

I am a Super Geek scoring at 45.6% geekiness.

Be totally fucking afraid. I sure know I am.

Friday, October 22, 2004

The new job...

I am glad I don't think of this as a career. It's eerily not a career and certainly not something I want to spend the rest of my life doing, but for now, I feel happy to be at work making money doing stuff I can handle.

It's not overly stressful, though, I am tired at the end of the day, which has made for a skimpy love life. Mike told me he thought he could pencil me in for 915AM tomorrow morning. Cross your fingers!

Tomorrow, though, I'd like to drive up to Apple Hill in the morning and get some apples before it snows in the passes. I just want to get out of town, to be honest, and I think I'm going to try to whirlwind clean up tonight, and I'll work on laundry tonight and Sunday, so the guilt factor doesn't flare up wildly.

Monday, October 18, 2004

I like the guy at the temp agency. He was funny. I called after my first day and asked if we should discuss tomorrow that I plan to take two weeks off at Christmas time and he said that he thought I should wait a few weeks. I giggled and said,"Oh, so I have time to make myself indispensable, huh?" He laughed and said,"Pretty much!"

The boss is kind of a persnickety German kind of guy. He goes into extreme detail on everything -- which is kind of German and kind of Engineer. He told me that when the lights in his office are off he is not in. Then he told me that when his door is closed that he doesn't want to be disturbed and when it's cracked, he's just shutting out noise.

Um, duh. I was trying hard not to burst into hysterical laughter. Both because he must think I'm retarded and because it was so expected of a German engineer. The other guy there was looking at both our faces and saw my eyes glinting, I know. I was trying to look away, but he was in the only place I could look.

I haven't yet told him that I have had 5 and a half years of German that I can't fucking remember to save my soul, though weirdly enough, I can get myself through most German magazines. I just can't speak/understand any more. I know he speaks a bit, but today he used Ersatz and all I could remember is that I thought that it meant sentence, but he had said paragraph in English, and that's not the plural that I would have expected (sentences), so I pretended I had no idea what he was talking about.

I'm a little embarrassed about abandoning my German heritage, so readily, but I still love sausage and mustard, so that should count for something!

Friday, October 15, 2004

I got a job today.

When asked in the interview what I would plan for a career, I said I don't think that way. My career is my family. I want a job to support them.

Duh.

The shit you have to go through for $12.50 an hour.

At least I will be able to afford Orlando for Christmas, though I have to negotiate that with them. :)

Thursday, October 14, 2004

I interviewed with a temp place today, but they wanted to talk to the client I worked for NOT the employment agency and I felt kind of weird and uncomfortable about it. I called and warned the woman and I called and warned the employment agency, but it seemed weird. I also am going to have to make myself a "fat" suit until I get my weight off more. I have that gorgeous Macy's suit, but am too fat to wear it. I found some nice patterns online today and I think I'm going to just buy my fixings and make myself a suit. I have some nice lightweight wools at home, but either I don't have enough yardage in any one or it's just the way wrong plaid. I can't bring myself to do the mauve houndstooth, the orange, or the blue striped. I just want a plain navy blue suit. Period.

On the kid front, Russell was trying to lobby to go to his best friend's house tomorrow and I told him he wasn't going any where because he's grounded until that damned room is clean. It was odd how all of the sudden two big bags of trash came out of his room, however, they were initially covered with the sleeping bag. He wanted me to check his room and I asked him if the drawers were closed to his dresser and the clothes on top of it were hung up. He told me no, so I told him that I didn't have anything to check.

He's got a half day tomorrow, so he'll be working on that dutifully tomorrow afternoon in anticipation of getting to go to Charles' house when he's done.

Mike also found nothing but junk food wrappers in his clothes while changing loads and said something about "No wonder he's been sick all the freaking time -- he's eating a lot of crap." I agreed. I got up this morning and made everyone eat a good breakfast, cheesy eggs, slice apples, ww toast with homemade jam. I figure eggs aren't the best thing, but it's solid and it'll get them through until lunch time.

I'm thinking about making fake cheese blintzes tomorrow -- you can use lowfat ricotta or cottage cheese with a little cream cheese (low fat) and you mix in splenda, cinnamon, apples, and put it in a tortilla and pan brown it on a bit of oil on a teflon pan. Usually, we drizzle a little maple syrup/honey on it for the kids or use jam to add sweetness.

It's hard getting up early, but I'm hoping it will pay off. I miss my garden. Jack Frost ate my garden.

And to top it all off, I am by far the meanest mommy in town.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Well, half the room's floor is clean and clear. The freaking closet pole bracket broke last night, so the closet dowel full of my clothes hit the floor. And there it sits.

I asked Mike to make necessary repairs and he looked at me with that spouse in the headlights look, which usually precedes running him over with a large moving vehicle. I have to get the ladder tomorrow and see if I can raise the shelf a foot myself and if so, then I'm going to start fixing it myself and cussing him out simultaneously.

Should be fun.

Otherwise, not much happened other than I discovered just how much I overspent in Vegas. No, I don't want to talk about it. I am contacting temp agencies all over the place for jobs. I found a temp to perm admin. assistant job part-time that pays $15 per hour. Gone are the days I wouldn't cross the street for less than $100. Now, I'm willing to drive across the county for $15.

I'm a whore through and through. Of course, due to my advanced girth, I'm going to have to make a run to the JCPenney outlet store and see if I can find the makings of a suit that will actually fit because I'm chunkier than I used to was thanks to the thyroid problems this year.

Yeah, it's coming off, but dude, it's taking a while and Vegas put on 5 pounds. Yeesh! Tonight, I just did housework, though and my sugars are 95 as I head to bed -- good for me!

These days I'm on a cocktail of actos and metidate. I tried skipping the metidate one night and I woke up rather sugar logey with a 130. I used to get by on the actos. Apparently, with my extra weight, that's not happening any more. Dammit.

Thank God for my life now, despite diabetes and some of the hereditary ravages of age, I've got a good life.

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

People ask me lately how I'm doing and I couldn't even define that entirely. My asthma is kicking my ass because the rabbit brush is in full bloom and my body has about run out of defenses. I've got a lot of housework to do and I've been revamping my room.

Today, I took out all the clothes from my side of the closet that don't fit. I have a portion of Mike's closet devoted to my clothes that I haven't even begun to consider -- mostly because it's buried behind shit and is a bitch to get to.

I can actually see floor in my closet. There are still a few hangers, but all the clothes have been sorted through and that which will fit in two sizes from now lives in two boxes that I can safely stow either in the garage or the bottom of my closet until I either fit in them or it seems pretty apparent that's not going to happen soon and I give them to charity.

I'm going to paint a dresser that we've got in the garage and stamp leaves and stuff on it. I treated it with paint thinner today and tomorrow I'll scrape/sand off what I can and then I'll paint it. I think that will become a storage vessel for my seasonal clothing. I'll swap t-shirts for my long-sleeved stuff and move my xmas and winter stuff over. I have several dressers in the garage that I could also broach for the same thing, but this dresser we have is a high boy like the other dressers, so seems more in keeping with what I've already got in the room. The other two are garage sale specials which hardly seem worthy of painting. One is a particle board with plastic veneer and the other one is a vintage metal dresser in two shades of icky mint green. The latter works great, but metal is not something that would look good in this room no matter what color I did -- wrong texture and feel.

Our bedroom is kind of a natural world in earthy colors. We have two red walls and two goldenrod walls (they aren't every other wall, but rather two and two)and I've got lamps and rugs with leaves in the same colors. When I said I was painting it red, people gave me shit about it and said that'd it'd be ugly. It's not, though. It looks really good and I enjoy how dark it makes our room -- like a comfortable cave. All the furniture is wooden. We've even stained boards to pick up the colors in the lamps/rugs. There are pictures of moose (my husband's nickname) and watercolors of flowers, as well as posters of wildflowers. One of the dressers has decorative knobs that are kind of a weathered brass leaf.

The only thing we really have to have NOW is more lighting. My dream would be to have someone come in and make my closet beautiful and organized, but that's a bit out of the budget for now.

Our adjoining bathroom has brown tile, and green and blue sponge paint with silver butterflies and dragonflies, with a sky blue ceiling, and drawer/cupboard pulls that are pewter-looking branches. All of the faucets, the picture frame, the bathroom shelf behind the toilet are all in some version of silvery finish. We'd like to go more brushed nickel all over the place, but we'll get there when we can. To me the bathroom embodies the earth, sea, and sky -- sounds very feng shui, I'm sure, but it's just how I feel about it. Mike wants curtains, and I even bought fabric, but I can't bring myself to cover the night sky -- something I often watch in the *wee* hours. I have a leafy shower curtain with matching sink set in blues and greens, a silvery maple leaf candle holder, and a watercolor of butterflies and blackberries.

Some day, when it's clean I'll take pictures and show you.







Tuesday, October 05, 2004

We are in Vegas. I haven't fully relaxed. I'm exhausted, but yet, I'm not able to sleep. It's pitiful.

Mike is sawing logs and I'm just too tired to sleep.

I keep thinking I could go to the casino, but then I'd have to get another set of clothes saturated in cigarette smoke and I'd just about rather chew glass.

I miss the kids and sincerely wish that we could have sex and time with each other AND play with the kids a bunch. However, our kids are a demanding lot, and we both know that we couldn't get all the sex and time we want with kids present.

Also, it seems like it's hard to talk with them around and all the demands they make and talking is important for us. Ultimately, I feel guilty for having time without them.

I think tomorrow will be better when I'm not so damned tired and frazzle, but right now, I'm homesick.

Friday, October 01, 2004

I got pulled over. I never get pulled over for the usual -- speeding. Not that I don't speed. Trust me, I speed sometimes. When I don't have the kids in the car or anyone else, I drive like a madwoman, although much less so with age and judgement.

However, I always get pulled over for some kind of stupid, unsafe turn. Today, that was the case. I have an unregistered vehicle, but I only got a warning for that. I got the ticket for making an unsafe left turn across the four lane highway.

It's one of those things that EVERYONE does. It's referred to as the suicide lane. They really need a light there, but instead they have cops ticketing people In frustration, after he gave me the ticket, I asked him,"How are you suppposed to get out of there? It's so frustrating!"

It's only $140 and if I go to court I'll probably get something less significant, but yeesh.