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Today I spent $1329 of the $1400 stimulus check on a new mattress, box spring, mattress cover, and delivery including removal of the old ones. But the new mattress won't have a trench down the middle, and won't be so thick it requires deep pocket sheets. It arrives on Easter Monday.

Meanwhile, test results came back and Quirk has roundworms. Topical worm medicine is a beautiful thing (it was pills last time I had to do it), but it has to go on the back of the neck, and the minute you touch Quirk anywhere aft of her eyebrows, she sticks her chin toward the ceiling in bliss and the back of her neck disappears. But I tried, I really did. The medicine got on her, somewhere, and I hope it hit skin. The vet comes on Tuesday to give Quirk her distemper booster shot and get the blood she didn't get from Lily last time because I was so worried about other things. I suppose I could have admitted defeat and waited for her to hold Quirk while I put the dewormer on, but I feel like I don't deserve to own cats if I can't do things like that myself.

I think Lily's sense of smell is screwed up. She's quite interested in mealtime, but she doesn't acknowledge food unless she's looking at it, and she won't eat much even if she is looking at it. At least she was eating enough for the last three weeks or so to stop looking quite so skinny.

Gods, I need something to do other than work and sitting around obsessing about being a terrible pet parent. It's hard on the brain in several directions. I can't concentrate hard enough to embroider these days.
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Lily is not eating very much, but she's not ready to let go yet. She has two bad teeth that refuse to give up and fall out, and I wish they would, because I think that's the problem (or at the very least not helping). Having them pulled would mean putting an almost-15-year-old cat with kidney problems under general anesthesia, and Dr. P is good with my not wanting to do that.

Got my $1400 stimulus check, and am taking the BC Easter vacation (Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Monday off), so I guess I can go mattress shopping. Hooray? Mattress shopping feels like used-car shopping to me. I think I know what I want, though, and it's a matter of going down to Mattress Firm in Coolidge Corner, which is where they sell what I want, and persuading them that that's all I want. The regiment could probably invest in a new futon mattress someday too, but that's at the end of the "not now" list after new office rug and new quilt. Quirk isn't doing the quilt any favors either.

And I really need a plasterer to fix the office wall, and a plumber and a tile guy to at least replace the tub/shower faucets and replace that square foot of tiles in the middle of the wall, and if I won the lottery I'd have the entire bathroom re-tiled. I'm probably going to have to win the lottery for the plasterer anyway. AND I'm not sure how long it would take to fix the wall, and I don't think it would be a good idea to try to be doing my WFH job while the wall's being fixed. So I'm in about three minds on the subject.
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I seem to have come out of the depression I was in for most of last weekend, at least in terms of not wanting to do anything, which is good. And I don't hate absolutely everything the way I did on Monday, which is good. Lily has new prescription food, and ate half a can of it this morning, which is good (although she still has time to decide she hates it, so I'm not dancing in the streets yet). She's supposed to eat two teeny cans a day according to the Royal Canin feeding instructions, but she isn't a foie gras goose, and I expect her stomach has shrunk some while she was starving herself, AND I don't want to be either throwing away uneaten food or cleaning up barf if she eats too much.

I'm still annoyed at the ten million projects that keep arriving on my doorstep, because the list never seems to get any shorter. I sent off a massive spreadsheet that took me a week of data entry, and then got handed rearranging the curriculum map again. I arranged the guest lectures for the faculty search, and then got handed a list of files the dean wants for a meeting next week (which I am not the only person with access to, but I'm the one who can find them fast). I sent off the CODA reports to be somebody else's problem for a minute, and got handed an honorarium payment to arrange. I sent off the Visiting Committee report, and got handed a data collection project from five years of graduation surveys. Job security is one thing, but I'd like to stop being in the Other People's Research Data Supply business. It takes a while to compile data in massive spreadsheets on a 16" laptop.

My tax refunds came through this week, and since tax refunds are traditionally mad money, I invested in a somewhat fancy burr coffee grinder. The teeny blade one I have doesn't grind all the beans, and I think I bought it in 2003 or so anyway, so I don't feel too bad about the upgrade. I just hope the new one will fit on the butcher block with the coffee machine. We shall see, I guess. (Update: it does! And so does the coffee can, in case I can't fit an entire can of coffee in the grinder.)
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It's been a week since I posted anything, because I've deleted a couple of rants. I don't want this to become a journal of rants.

On Saturday night I got something jammed in the gum behind my last left-hand lower molar, and I think I got it out, but it was angry enough to require Advil Monday and yesterday. Today it seems to be annoyed rather than angry. I'll take that. Especially since I don't know when I could get it seen by anybody at HSDM.

It's not a trend yet, but Quirk is sleeping on top of the office cat tree, right out in the open, for the second day in a row. It's nice to have a cat hanging around in here with me, without feet on the laptop. And it's gratifying that Quirk has decided I'm non-threatening enough to be slept at.

As of February 4, my taxes are hanging around in the ether. I decided I didn't mind if they hung around for a week, and I wanted them to come off the "don't forget to do this" list. I should be getting my usual refunds, which is nice.

I've gotten fascinated with excavator videos on Youtube, drawn in by one that was on another site and captioned "Who do you call when your 22-ton excavator is sunk up to its cab in mud? This guy." When in doubt, go play in the dirt (or the mud) with heavy machinery. And the guy who extracted the 22-ton excavator is damn good at it, and I end up learning things about geology and physics and things like that. In one of the videos he says that his sitting there doing nothing while the state police are inspecting a dump truck he's supposed to be filling with rocks is costing the job $400 an hour. I wonder how one gets trained to run excavators? I could have a post-retirement career...

For now, though, I have to go make the university visiting committee happy, and make CODA happy, and make the Dean happy in terms of hoops I have to get the faculty search candidates to jump through. I'd rather go play in the mud with heavy machinery, though.
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I want a gold star for my forehead, because I received a document yesterday "for review" that needs to be formatted in a specific way, and was so badly done that the only way to fix it was to nuke it from orbit and start over. I did that this morning and sent it back with very clear instructions as to how to finish it, and managed not to actually say "That was really inspiredly fucked up, and you obviously didn't understand what you were supposed to do, so here, don't touch ANYTHING except the highlighted sections. And you owe me a bottle of Advil."

Then I got an email that says the University Visiting Committee wants a report, pretty much yesterday, on "remote learning, curricular changes, Curriculum Committee votes, data on student feedback (class of 2020 graduation survey results on our responsiveness to Covid), etc." So I slapped together five pages of everything up to the etc. (which worries me, because I can see "etc." turning into "But what about..." several times), and the Visiting Committee owes me a gold star for my forehead and a bottle of Advil too.

I suppose I should think about what, if anything, I want for time off this spring. I used to take a week in March or April back when life made sense. I do know I can't get all the way to July without taking a week off somewhere. But I've also burned out the bulb in my brain for today and I can't think about anything in a straight line until tomorrow. So I will not be doing my taxes or signing the financial documents I have to sign and mail back, today, either.
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It is very nice that certain names aren't showing up in the news every day these days. I can't say I was losing sleep over the previous administration, but not reading about them several times a day is relaxing.

The book that's coming by tortoise, also known as book rate mail, has another week before it's officially late. I doubt there's anything I can do about it if it is late, because there isn't any tracking available either. So I'll just sit around and wait, and hope it gets here someday, and doesn't get delivered next door or downtown or somewhere. Apparently one of my credit card bills took a detour and went back to the post office before it got to me, because somebody wrote the correct address in great big numbers on the envelope. I like getting bills on paper; it reminds me to pay them, and I have a physical record in case the internet goes kablooey.

On a semi-related note, if you're going to send me a phishing text about a debit card, it won't work if it's supposedly from a bank I don't have an account with in the first place.

For want of huge Honeycrisp apples (TJs hasn't had them for two weeks now), I bought three pounds of mandarin oranges. Partly because I didn't see any obviously ugly ones in the bag (there's always at least one moldy clementine per flat and you find it after it's already spread to its neighbors), and partly because I had a craving for orange juice. I hope they aren't all as hard to peel as the first four were. I'm somewhat daunted by the idea of eating three pounds of mandarin oranges all by myself, and I don't know why; I eat three pounds of cherries in two days in cherry season. Cherries don't need to be peeled, though.
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I ordered new saucepans even though I need new underwear somewhat more, on the theory that lack of new underwear isn't going to poison me. Old flaking nonstick saucepans might eventually. No idea when they might arrive, of course, but at least I ordered them. (Farberware stainless steel with glass lids. I cook by sight a fair bit and overcooked vegetables aren't my best favorite thing.)

Quirk has discovered the kitchen, and spent most of Saturday standing on her hind legs watching food TV out the kitchen window. Yesterday she spent most of the day in one of the kitchen chairs (probably having tired her legs out), and I moved her litterbox from the office into the pantry because she already knew Lily's was there and they've been using each other's anyway. And I really wanted to vacuum the office rug, because she wants to dig through the litterbox down to the earth's core, and sweeping the rug wasn't adequate. But I couldn't vacuum with Quirk in the room. I also moved her crunchies dish into the kitchen. She seems to be willing to eat pretty much anything, fish or poultry or the crunchies she came with (Hill's, which I'm weaning her off of because they're too expensive to be corn-based) or Lily's crunchies, and seems to be taking it all in stride digestion-wise. Thank goodness.

Yesterday was also Annual Shredding Day, since Quirk wasn't in the office. I shredded the 2019 utility bills (I keep them for a year, ever since the one time Eversource undercharged me for four months and then sent a massive bill, and I couldn't do anything about it because I'd thrown away the bills after I paid them) and Snip's insurance and vaccination records. I shredded a very old rabies tag by accident because it was taped to a piece of folded-over paper, but the shredder dealt with it quite well. I suppose since it will shred credit cards, I shouldn't have been surprised; rabies tags are thinner even though they're aluminum. But I should have been paying more attention to what I was shredding in the first place.
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Well, it was going to be a good week, and then I went to pay bills on Sunday night and discovered that yet again, somebody who isn't me has ordered Netflix on my credit card. So I called the credit card company and they basically said (with an accent that was hard to understand over the phone) go away and don't bother us, call Netflix. Which I did, and Netflix was most apologetic and blocked the card from any further usage, but I'm annoyed at the card company. If that wasn't the card with the longest history and the highest limit, I'd cancel it entirely.

Today was furnace maintenance day, which led to a lot of clanging around in the ductwork, and led me to diagnose furnace maintenance day rather than mice in combat boots. But since the heat wasn't going to come on and it's cold and wet out, I went and shut all the storm windows for the winter. I try to hold out for November, but it's not going to get any warmer in the next four days.

I did get to have bibimbap for lunch, though, because the H Mart bibimbap kit is good for about three bowls. And I had exactly enough rice left to make three bowls. So I get to have the last one tomorrow.

I stopped buying alcohol in mid-July, because I could see it becoming an expensive pandemic-related habit and I don't need the calories. But I'm sorely tempted to go buy something fairly strong for the election results. The question is whether I'll be drinking it in celebration, in which case it should be something I like, or in despair, in which case it should merely be something strong (and should really probably be Blithering Idiot, if I can find any.) Zombie Killer will do for celebrating; it's not as strong, but I like it and the name would be somewhat apt.
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TGIF, with bells on. I'm glad it's a long weekend, because I'm done with this week in general and work in particular. I'm tired of being a responsible adult in a pandemic election year and worrying because I haven't gotten my mail-in ballot yet, and worrying about getting a flu shot, and worrying about my parents and COVID and Thanksgiving, and all the other things I either have to worry about doing or desperately wish I could do and can't bring myself to, these days. Like going to Marathon Sports for sneakers, or to the French bakery in Allston, which would be expanding the bubble of places I allow myself to go (so far, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Star Market, Petco, Brookline Booksmith, and the dive shop), and I shouldn't do that before Thanksgiving (see "parents and COVID"). ARGH.

HOWEVER. There are good things, to wit:

- My missing regulator has turned up, so I can go get it tomorrow. Mostly that means I can bring all the other parts back down there and ask somebody who knows what they're doing to watch while I put them all together.

- My favorite uncle had his 45th and last radiation treatment today and I sent him a silly congratulatory email, and got a silly response.

- I fell down an internet rabbit hole and discovered one of my favorite madrigals at the bottom, so now I know it's by Monteverdi and called Ecco mormorar l'onde.

- I'm halfway down page 18 of the embroidery pattern, because page 18 is only one column (roughly a thousand stitches, and most of them are black, which means I don't actually have to stitch them). The pattern is 36 pages, so after page 18 I'll be really halfway done, instead of perpetually almost halfway done.

- I've decided the pet insurance isn't worth $1200/year, so I have that much I'm not spending in October. And Lily is still firmly convinced that little red laser pointer dots Must Die, so if I can't keep her off my desk any other way, I can break out the laser pointer and she has to go kill it.
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How is it not October until tomorrow? It's been September for six or eight months now. I think it's partly because of the two or three repetitions of "no, wait, still not opening schools until later in September" in the news, and now they've finally run out of September. Meanwhile the school I work for has been chugging along (albeit slowly) since July. But that's different. Next week we get to use a whole 20 chairs in the 40-chair teaching practice, instead of the 12 we've been chugging along with. And I still get to stay home until who knows when.

I want a 90-minute massage, which I can't get yet for public health reasons, and I need to do some foundation garment shopping, which budget-wise I can't do until December. I'm keeping an eye on the budget again because I'm supposed to be saving money to buy this place in a few years. September was cat food on credit card bill month, October is kneeling chair on credit card month and November is vet bill on credit card month. On the other hand, I've taken out the usual weekly walking-around money three times in six months, so I should be OK if I spend some hitherto unspent walking-around money on foundation garments in October. I do have to stop spending so much on groceries, though.

Today is St. Jerome's Day. St. Jerome is the patron saint of translators. I always at least notice St. Jerome's Day because I did so love translating, but I couldn't get to the point of making a living at it. Maybe if I'd had a previously unknown rich uncle when I graduated from Kent State I could have, but that's for another timeline, or a different universe, or something. (Been reading too much alternate-universe fiction lately.) I had to pay the bills, and eat, so I ended up working for Harvard. Not that working for Harvard isn't fun sometimes, but I don't love it the way I loved translating.
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After Getting Things Done on Saturday, I did a fair bit of not much yesterday except reading a couple hundred pages of a book I bought after grocery shopping, and watching a couple of football games (sometimes reading and watching games at the same time, in the case of boring football). It was too humid for embroidery.

I thought we were past "this web site won't work with your browser," but I had to call Jabra customer service and clear my cache and cookies in Firefox only to find out their online store doesn't work with Firefox anyway; it wants Chrome but will settle for Safari. And then I had to remember all my various logins in Firefox again. GRR. This was work-related, so I had to do what I had to do. But GRR, anyway.

Before that, and semi-work-related, I ordered myself a kneeling chair because I've had one before and liked it, and it was the short way to end the Great Chair or Chair Cushion Quest. I threw a little more money than I really wanted to at the problem, but it wasn't very much more than I spend on six weeks of prescription cat food, and the chair will last a lot longer than six weeks.

Lily's got some sort of intermittent gait issue with her left hind leg, possibly soft tissue injury or possibly arthritis or possibly just Aging Ain't For Sissies. I'll have to ask Dr. P about it on Cat Herding Day, which this year is November 12. Which gives me exactly 13 days afterward to isolate myself before Thanksgiving, so as not to possibly bring COVID down to Noank. I wish I didn't think about that so much. I wish I didn't have to think about that at all.

Memo to self: put "flu shot" on the list for mid-October.
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It's Thursday, only it's Friday, because for once a holiday fell on a Saturday. Friday the 13th falls on a Monday this month, but that's beside the point.

I'm going to need a second job, because I've agreed in binding, but un-notarized, writing to buy this building in 3-5 years. It needs to be assessed for real, not just drive-by, because the inside is not worth $1.1 million. I would believe $800K or so. But $1.1 million is what some developer paid apiece for three triple deckers at the other end of the street. I wish the pandemic would reduce housing prices to somewhere sane. If I ran the universe...

So anyway, my ideal second job would be piece work like the Dachau transcriptions, that I can do from home for several hours at night. One of my cousins had an editing job like that for a while, but the company she worked for isn't hiring right now (I checked). And it's hard to find actual real jobs like that, because so many piece work from home job listings are scams, or MLM, or some other thing that will never actually make me any money.

I could, conceivably, save $100K in 3-5 years by putting my starving grad student hat back on, or at the very least by cutting my weekly walking-around money in about half and cutting down the grocery budget and canceling cable and taking Two Dots off my phone and not buying new books every weekend (when that can happen again; the bookstore is theoretically open, but apparently I'm not ready yet). I don't have to start from $0, at least, because I do have a savings account with five figures in it.

Having said that, though, I am sorely tempted to throw the budget out the window next week and order more takeout sushi than I actually want, in celebration of my birthday. I don't know how much sushi counts as "more than I actually want" considering I don't seem to have an off switch where sushi is concerned. And I haven't had actual good sushi in quite a while. My taste runs more to Genki Ya than O Ya, at least, and Whole Foods would have done in a pinch before it got too expensive to be as mediocre as it is.

I thought it was lunchtime, but it's meeting time. I wish this version of Outlook made a noise when somebody invites me to a meeting.
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I wish we'd had yesterday's massive thunderstorms on Friday when I felt like breaking things. But at least we did get the massive thunderstorms, so I feel better. Or at the very least less scrambled.

Long story short, sometime in the next 3-5 years I have to come up with $200,000 or so to put a down payment on this building with. A $40,000/yr second job would be the quick way, but my ideal second job would be something like the transcription project that I could do from home, and I don't know how likely that would be. Data entry, maybe?

The plan has always been for me to buy this building, but there was never a timeline before. Now there is, so I need to get my hat and pants on and make it happen. The less money I have to borrow, the better.

Yesterday was probably not Lily's favorite birthday ever, since we had five or six thunderclaps that scared me, never mind scaring the cats. But she got real chicken scraps for dinner, and that's one of her favorite things in the universe, so it wasn't all bad. And Snip got the chicken cat food mush that Lily would usually get, so that was fine with her too. As of September 15 I'll be living with two official teenagers, so sometime in the next 3-5 years I will probably have two very bad days. But not yet.
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On Friday morning a house on Snow St caught fire, while it was pouring rain. The house is still standing, but is all boarded up and there's been a lot of pounding and sawing going on all weekend. I hope the pounding and sawing means it will be repaired, rather than torn down and replaced with a couple of townhouses.

The worst thing about the current state of the pandemic is the conflicting information. Stay home, but go outdoors and get exercise, but don't do it anywhere you can't keep six feet away from everybody else. Order takeout to keep the local economy going, but keep in mind you're putting the cooks and delivery drivers at risk to die of COVID-19 just because you don't want to cook. Go to the grocery store instead, but keep in mind you're putting the cashiers and shelf-stockers at risk, and stay six feet away from everybody else in the store. Don't worry, statistically nobody under 60 dies of COVID-19 and you probably already had it. But you have it now, and you're asymptomatic, so you're Typhoid Mary. But we won't test you unless you have symptoms. Et cetera. I don't want constant conflicting information to be the new normal.

Hauling home two weeks of groceries on Friday and then doing four hours of spring cleaning on Saturday made everything hurt yesterday. I would very much like a 90-minute massage, which I won't get for who knows how long. I should start doing pushups or something every time I feel like having a snack, because I won't get to walk home from work for who knows how long, and I can feel stress eating becoming a default setting in my head.

At least it was open window weather yesterday and today. Finally. Of course, it will be 55 for the rest of the week, but at least there were two consecutive days of spring. And watching the Hairy Beasts get drunk on oxygen and chase each other all over the place never gets old.

In February I discovered I'd had $200K in combined retirement accounts in January. I have no desire to find out what I have now.
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ARGH. I'm getting somewhat sick of being glued to my computer on weekdays just so I can get a lot of email that amounts to placeholders and "we don't know" and have a lot of online meetings that amount to the same. I'd almost rather get permission to read email twice a day and otherwise go in the other room and watch movies or embroider or do pushups or something, because what I'm doing doesn't feel important or helpful or anything. It's busywork, and it's going to go on until at least early May (as of yesterday that's when they say we might be allowed back on campus).

OK, redirected my brain and started editing the hell out of the standard course survey, both because it's needed editing for years and because we have to add questions about going completely online and how that worked. I should probably resist the urge to say something like "We know, but tell us anyway."

I was going to finally order some more shirts, but since clothing retail is most likely non-essential these days, I probably shouldn't bother. I would very much like some new shirts, because several of my old ones all wore out at once, but I can still go outdoors without being arrested for indecent exposure in what I've got. And I don't have to be work-appropriate for quite a while yet. (The financial aid director, who comes to work in a suit every day, was on our meeting this morning in a Ramones sweatshirt.)

On the other hand, I haven't been spending walking-around money on anything but groceries for the last two weeks. I have a lot of leftover walking-around money for when I can walk around and buy things again. Right now "things" is books and coffee and experimental beer and ice cream and flowers and...
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Massachusetts got its act together over the weekend, so now my state taxes are e-filed and my federal taxes are accepted and I'm waiting on my $900 or so in refunds. I'm going to turn that around when I get it and buy my own BCD, because I'm sick of renting BCDs and spending ages arguing with the straps that are too long in places and too short in other places and you don't know that until you try to get into it. I want to set it and forget it. And I want a backplate and wing setup because that's what I trained with, and besides I have little faith in a jacket BCD fitting properly.

I have now watched all of the extended versions of the Hobbit movies, and I like them much better than the regular versions. Even if they are about three hours long apiece. And now the next time I find one on TV, I can start the extended version DVD at the first commercial break and still be done with it before the TV version is over. That works with the LOTR movies, too.

Snip has a new nickname, which she doesn't answer to because she only started needing it this weekend. DP stands for Dawn Patrol (a la Disney's Jungle Book), and refers to her new habit of waking up sometime between 3:30 and 5:00, going insane, and running across me at least two or three times. Which wouldn't be so bad if she didn't insist on stomping on pressure points, with claws, when she runs across me. She might as well be an elephant in that case, because that hurts. I need a massage, but not like that.

I also need a new kitchen timer, by which I mean I love my current kitchen timer (Oxo triple timer), but the 0 and start/stop buttons are tired and some of the other number buttons are getting tired (I hit 3 and got 43). So I need the same thing again, because this one is probably ten years old at this point and is (shockingly) still available from Amazon. Yet Another Thing From Amazon. Sigh.

On a happier note, it's nice out, and I might actually be able to go elsewhere for lunch for the first time in at least two weeks. Also, on Friday night I got through Montezuma in Civ 5, and am now working on Napoleon. I'm halfway through the alphabet and more than halfway through the list. And I think, but I won't swear to it, that Catalina and Civ 5 will play nice with each other now, so someday I might get my laptop to stop urging me to update it. And I managed to change the burned out lightbulb in the hall light fixture without dropping the glass dome on either my head or the floor, either of which felt like a distinct possibility. So hooray.
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The spell is broken, partly because it's been cloudy and/or damp for most of the last four days since I got back. At least I only had 203 emails and only had to actually do something about five of them. And about four or five emails I got on Monday. And this year I laid down the law to the entire third year class about what they need to give me for externship letter requests, because I'm not writing another 40 letters piecemeal this year. If I have to, I'll make one day per week externship letter day.

Pogo volume 6 arrived yesterday. I had completely forgotten about it until Tuesday when I got an email that said "Your Amazon package has shipped" and I said "My WHAT now?" Which is what happens when you pre-order a book in March, which is supposed to be delivered in November, and then gets postponed until after you get back from a foreign vacation in January. So I spent some of last night giggling my fool head off, because that's what Pogo is for, mostly.

My phone case, which wasn't advertised as RFID-proof when I bought it in 2017, appears to have decided it is after going through four airport x-ray machines. Which means that now I have to take my T pass out to tap it, which is not so convenient. So I guess I need a new phone case. I would buy the same one again, except that it is now advertised as RFID-proof, which is what I don't want. I don't really want to order Yet Another Thing From Amazon right now either, though. But I did it anyway. Sigh.

I also need new sneakers, because the air cast chewed up the inside of the right one and walking funny chewed up the inside of the left one. But that's got to wait until February because I bought bathing suits already (although at least the bathing suits were on sale).
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Responsible Adulthood continues to be a pain in the neck. If I had gotten all the legal documents done in October, I would be done with all the financial stuff now. But the credit union updated all its systems software in November, and now instead of transferring my existing accounts, I have to close them and reopen them as a trust. And I can't do anything with the CDs at all. GRR.

So that was Saturday morning. Then I wandered off to the Coop and bought a couple of books, and then wandered off to Saloniki in the Smith Center and had salad and hummus for lunch, which was nice because I needed some vegetables. Then I went home and figured out how to exchange heavy stuff for other heavy stuff: I went out with an empty kitty litter jug and a full container of change, and turned the change into paper money and subsequently into V8 and seltzer and kitty litter. And a new cat bed, because the cheap ones don't provide any padding between Lily and the floor, and she is an official teenager, and the floor is cold. So, new cat bed has a lot more padding between Lily and the floor. She sleeps in that bed all evening and Snip sleeps in it all day.

Unfortunately I waited for the T for 25 minutes on the way home with the heavy stuff. I hate it when it does that. I really hate it when it's cold and windy and I'm thirsty and it does that. So I came home and drank quite a lot of seltzer and decided to spend most of the rest of the day reading books. The Librarian of Auschwitz wasn't quite what I wanted in terms of character development. I bought it because it's a translation, and I didn't find any blatant translatorese in it, which was a bit of a surprise. The latest No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency book for a couple of months now, and it turned out to be just about exactly what was required. (It occurs to me that one of the things I like about that series is there are absolutely no cell phones in it.)

Yesterday I went out for more (different) seltzer and more vegetables, because I wanted to make Smitten Kitchen's pizza beans yesterday, and LTMB and vegetable soup this week (I made the LTMBs last weekend and froze them). So I came home with a case of seltzer, and a cabbage and some carrots and some tomatoes and a bag of frozen spinach. I made an extremely quick and dirty version of pizza beans, because I used three cans of beans and a jar of marinara sauce, and a pound of thawed drained frozen spinach. If I had made my own sauce, it would have been better, but it worked for hot food last night and it will work for lunch this week.

Unfortunately this week got off on a very cold, soggy and grumpy foot. Missing the 7:50 bus was my fault, because I didn't get out the door until 7:48. But the fact that the 8:00 and 8:10 buses never showed up at all meant the 8:20 was a sardine can, and even though at that point I had been standing in the rain for half an hour, I was absolutely not in the mood for a sardine can. So I went down to the Cambridge St bus stop, because it has a roof over it, and stood there for another ten minutes and got an actual seat on the 8:30. Which was a sardine can by the time it got to Comm Ave. I got to work at 9:00 or so with soaking wet feet and a massive case of Don't Wanna. If I hadn't used up all my personal days for the year already, I would have taken one today. At least the Drama Llama decided to be sick today, so I didn't have to listen to him whine when I finally did get here.

I need to go to REI tonight and invest in some more socks. I cleaned out the sock drawer last spring, and now I get to about Thursday and it looks pathetic in there.
dchenes: (Default)
Yesterday I spent the afternoon being a Responsible Adult, with the result that now I have more Responsible Adult tasks to do. Sigh. And I got home from Thanksgiving and brought in the mail and found a jury duty notice for mid-March. Sigh, some more.

Left work at noon yesterday, in the snow, to go to my GP appointment. Got read the riot act about my weight (I knew that) and the fact that I like cheese (which is apparently terrible) and the fact that I haven't had a mammogram since the first one in 2017 (I hate them). So now I have to schedule a mammogram so they stop nagging me about it.

From the GP appointment I went to the estate lawyer's office in Roslindale, still in the snow which was supposed to have stopped two hours before, and signed at least ten different documents including my actual will. Now I have to take my certificates of trust to the credit union and put all of my current accounts in one trust and open another account in a separate trust to put in money for care of any animals I have if and when something catastrophic happens to me. But at least everything's been signed, witnessed, and notarized, so I can cross that off the Responsible Adult list. And I also got a beer out of it, because the lawyer's office had had an event recently (not Thanksgiving, but I forget what) and had some leftover beers, and when I said that I was going to go out for a drink now that all the adult stuff was done, they offered me one of their extras. So I said "Absolutely!" and drank it when I got home.

I had not previously been aware that the 51 bus runs from Forest Hills to Reservoir, but I discovered that last night and took advantage thereof. Walking home from Reservoir wasn't as bad as I thought, because most of the sidewalks had been shoveled and the merely-wet hadn't frozen yet on the really steep parts. I got home at 5:30 or so, which is about when I would have gotten home from work anyway, and promptly fell into my enormous sweatshirt and ate a lot of spaghetti for dinner, partly for warm food because I was cold, partly for spite (carbs are terrible too, of course), and partly to use up the spaghetti.

Tonight is the Dunster House Messiah sing, which would be fun except it runs very late. I don't really want to leave in the middle, which is what I did last year, so I think I won't go at all. Right this minute I want to go home and be warm, because it's not particularly warm in here.

Third responsible adult thing: I have a question in to the vet's office about Blue Buffalo kidney diet. It's the only one I've found so far that doesn't have corn in it. Given my luck it will also be the only one my vet doesn't approve of, or Lily won't approve of it because it only comes in enormous quantities from chewy.com.

How is it only 4:00? Ye gods.
dchenes: (Default)
This is me not staying in bed until Saturday. I did ignore the existence of Halloween last night, though, because HSDM went mildly overboard with it and I was DONE by 3:30.

Sometime earlier this week, the estate planning lawyer I had filled out a bunch of forms for last year called, because I had fallen off their radar and they'd like to get me off their list. So I talked to him again today, and I get to go sign my will and living will and pet trust on December 3, after I get done with my annual physical. I might as well get all the Responsible Adult stuff done at the same time, and it won't hurt to do it before I run off to Bonaire (although the legal documents are going to cost me another $1000. But what's another $1000 on top of pet insurance ($1100) and dive trip ($2600 so far, without gear rental) and vet bill ($whoknows) in October and November anyway?).

In light of the above expenditures, I managed not to buy $100 worth of cookbooks on Wednesday night. I really wanted to, though. I need inspiration if I'm going to stop eating noodles. I eat way too many noodles, because noodles are both cheap and uncomplicated. Memo to cookbook authors, however: cilantro is disgusting, so stop making it a major component of every other savory recipe in the book. I can cope with "garnish with cilantro" because then I just won't, but when the dish has three main flavors and cilantro is one of them, that pretty much ruins it, and I can't always use parsley instead (cucumber salad with sesame and parsley just sounds odd). If I ran the universe, things would be different, that's all.

I think Snip had a 36-hour internal complaint of some sort, which is better as of today. But for the last two days she didn't want to be touched aft of her ears, and she got up for meals and ate them, but wasn't as enthusiastic about them. As of this morning, she's much better; she woke me up at 6:00 to be scritched, and she was hollering for breakfast from the kitchen when I got out of the shower. Much better. Last night she got insistent about cheese, too, so she was probably starting to feel better then. And the sun has been out for most of the day, so hopefully she's charged up her solar cells and will be better until the next time we don't see the sun for a week.
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