The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

Not feelin' it today. I'm trying to substitute caffeine for enthusiasm, but I'm not sure it's a good idea. I'm at work in the first place because I feel better than I did last night.

Yesterday was performance review day, and it was much less of a production than it ever was at HMS. Thank goodness. The upshot is that I am an extremely capable individual, and I should go to the ADEA meeting in February (which is in Boston this time, but they would have sent me even if it wasn't) to see what other schools are up to, and I should go to the Harvard career road map course in the spring (because naturally the fall session conflicts with the HSDM faculty development day I do all the logistics for).

The rest of yesterday was taken up with the curriculum task force meeting, the oral physiology course design meeting, lunch (finally) at 2:00, and various other things. I'm not sure how I managed to walk home last night, because by the time I got home, my last brain cell had escaped through my left ear and I was exhausted. Went to bed at 9:30, which was an hour later than I really wanted to, but I was enjoying watching Lily enjoy the lack of humidity.

I slept reasonably well, and reasonably long, but I'm just out of oomph today. And coming in to find that five of the 12 emails I accumulated overnight are Major Undertakings didn't help either. (Revise two articles for the JDE, revise one article that hasn't been submitted to the JCT yet, research and rent furniture for the faculty development day, and find 4 postdoc students to tutor Craniofacial & Neck Anatomy in October. None of the above are much fun.) The family joke about "with your shield or on it" is getting a lot of mileage this week from all sides; I guess it's one of those weeks over several states. At least today is Thursday, so the end is in sight, more or less.

I made a minor tactical error in scheduling my voice lessons this fall for every Sunday at 5:00. I may have to (finally) invest in a DVR, because otherwise I'm going to miss a lot of football games. Silly me. (Yes, I like football. But apparently I don't like it enough to think about it in August when asked whether I'd rather have voice lessons on Sundays at 3:00 or at 5:00.) Insert wry comment here about joining the 21st century, and the fact that a football game on a DVR will only take an hour to watch...

The calendar says today is Monday. So does everything else about it. Lily decided to keep me awake from 4:15 to 5:30 this morning for no particular reason, it's hit-in-the-face-with-a-hot-washcloth humid, the bus took about half an hour to get from Route 9 to Francis St., my email is full of things I don't wanna deal with, and my vacation is still two weeks away.

On the positive side, however, the weekend was lovely. I woke up on Saturday morning feeling like doing something silly, but got the grocery shopping out of the way first. Along about lunchtime, I figured out that the definition of "silly" could be "get a frame put around the arm tattoo", and found a place that does walk-in appointments for small tattoos on Saturdays. So I got myself all psyched up for that and went down there...and was just barely too late to have the tattoo done and still make it to my voice lesson. That left me with all sorts of extra adrenalin and nothing to let it out with, so I went pelting off to Coolidge Corner and calmed myself down by wandering through the bookstore. I bought a book on the Borgias and went pelting off to the park around the corner from the voice studio, and sat there in the shade with no shoes on for an hour or so, reading about 15th century church politics.

The voice lesson itself went fairly well in that we figured out what to do about what I'm doing wrong now. And then at the end I became the billionth person on the planet to try singing Let it Go, and we had to stop after the first phrase because it turns out I can sing the lowest note in the song as originally written. It's the first time I've ever heard "You have an F!" in an educational context and had it be good news. (I didn't know it was an F, because we had one set of music and one set of just lyrics and I was the one with the lyrics.)

I was waiting for thunderstorms on Saturday night and we never got them. It's disappointing when the whole back half of the state is under a bright red band on the radar map, and by the time it gets here, it's either so broken up that all we get is rain, or it breaks north and south and we don't get anything. I'm sure it would make Snip happy if she could read weather maps.

Lily is going through one of her "wake me up, demand attention, settle down for five minutes, jump off the bed, sharpen claws on box spring, jump back on the bed and demand attention" cycles. Unfortunately she does it between 4:15 and 5:30 AM, which is less than ideal. She usually gets over it in less than a week, but I wish she wouldn't do it in the first place. She started on Saturday night and continued last night.

Anyway, on Sunday I got some useful things done, to wit: vacuumed the living room and the pantry, did laundry, and made apricot crumble again. (I should see if this recipe is any different points-wise; I used half a pound more apricots, half as much sugar and twice as much oatmeal as last time. The sugar and the oatmeal probably cancel each other out, though.) After that I decided to be outdoors for a bit, so went down to Marathon Sports for more socks and then to the Public Garden for my birthday swan boat ride. I always enjoy that, even though I don't quite know why. After that I came home again and pretty much merfed around for the rest of the day.

This morning (after not giving Lily flying lessons, tempted though I may have been) I discovered that Snip had dropped her puffball in the water dish. Which rendered the water undrinkable on account of the puffball being in it, and also made the puffball untouchable on account of being wet. So I fished out the puffball and dried it off a bit, and provided fresh water and breakfast, and all was right with Snip's little furry world. Silly beast.

Things have gotten steadily better since Wednesday. The blueprint meeting is fed and as assembled as I can make a Wednesday morning event on a Friday afternoon. Today was also ODE Cleaning Day, so we've all been filling up recycling bins like mad. There's room for everything under my desk now, and I put my foot right through a space that used to have a box in it and was shocked at the fact that my foot didn't hit anything. Permanent labels for the new boxes containing tutorial cases is on the After Wednesday list (assuming the post-its don't fall off before Wednesday). Now if the dust would just settle again so we could all stop sneezing...and I mean that literally; people were disturbing things with dates in the 1990s on them, and it got dusty in here. Fortunately it's Friday, so the dust will have two whole days to find new homes.

I might be doing a duet with the other "older" voice student sometime this winter. (He's old enough to have a daughter getting married, so older than I am unless he started parenthood pretty early.) That could be fun, depending on what we end up singing.

I have officially lost 15 pounds and my coworkers are starting to notice. One of them brought in Munchkins since it was Cleaning Day, on the theory that I could have a Munchkin without going completely off the rails. I thought that was very nice of her, but declined anyway because I was already eating Cheerios. I actually like Cheerios, which is probably a good thing but strikes me as slightly silly sometimes. Is anybody over the age of 10 allowed to admit they like Cheerios?

All the various weather forecasts seem to think that I should have gotten all of my indoor stuff done yesterday and today so as to be able to enjoy the outdoors tomorrow. I hope they're right. I still have some indoor stuff to do, but it's not going to take all day. I went out this afternoon just for the sake of going out, and didn't quite blow away even though it was extremely windy. I'm being promised 70 degrees tomorrow, and I want every single one of them. I also want to be able to take the quilt back off the bed.

I definitely needed a long weekend. My voice lessons have moved from Saturday afternoon to Thursday evening, and last Thursday I was so burned out by the time I got there that the lesson plan went right out the window. Instead I spent 45 minutes singing every song previously performed by Julie Andrews that we could think of and had music for (I Have Confidence, Hello Young Lovers, Getting To Know You, I Could Have Danced All Night, Wouldn't It Be Loverly, and a couple of others I've forgotten), just to cheer me up. Hopefully next Thursday will be better, because I won't have any performance reviews next week. I had the yearly one with my boss on Thursday and the monthly one with the office manager on Friday. Ugh. I've decided there's no "up" where I am, since I'm still junior staff after seven and a half years; if I want to go up, I have to go elsewhere, so I'm starting to look fairly seriously for an elsewhere to go to. (Why am I thinking about work when I don't have to?)

This morning I was made aware of the cat beard phenomenon, and it got a decent-sized snort out of me. I am not going to try it with either of the Hairy Beasts, though. Lily would probably go for it, but she's having an outbreak of "the herp" (viral conjunctivitis, which I think is related to Snip's URI last week), so her life is tough enough at the moment. Snip is completely the wrong color to be a believable beard, since she has spots, and besides I don't think I could get her to stay in the right position for long enough to take a picture.

Normally I would take a three-day work week and be grateful for it, but I didn't really want one the way I got it. It was nice that I didn't have to try to get to work on Friday, absent the T, but it turned out to be the most boring exciting day I've ever had. I checked on the news about once an hour. After the lockdown was lifted, I went for a walk just because I could. And then I went into a liquor store for beer and they had a TV on, and that was when I found out about the second shootout and all I could think was "Damn it, here we go again." I can understand Brighton being locked down, since it's conceivable that he could have gotten here from Watertown, but I think locking down all of downtown Boston was a bit excessive. My boss lives in Watertown and one of my coworkers lives in the area that got searched. I bet there will be some stories on Monday.

Today things are back to normal around here. People are belting up and down the street at 40 mph like always, and I haven't heard any sirens today. I went to my voice lesson and made another large breakthrough (yay!), and then went grocery shopping like always. Trader Joe's had milk and yogurt and alcohol and produce, but no spaghetti. I guess that didn't get delivered yesterday.

It seems there's a corollary to the "I think I sound funny when I listen to recordings of my voice" phenomenon. When I cut out the vibrato and sing in such a way that I think I sound squeaky, I don't, and I am in fact doing it right. If you ask me, I sounded like a Muppet, but my voice teacher thought it was excellent. I guess that's why I'm taking lessons.

Is anybody else having issues with Adobe Flash Player version 11? It installed itself this morning, and immediately after that, most of the web pages I tried to load caused the computer to give me the Spinning Beachball of Death for a couple of minutes apiece. I disabled the Flash player and the SBOD went away.

Shockingly enough, Saturday was a B-flat day, although the break between my chest voice and my head voice was very broken. I sounded like a teenage boy whose voice is changing. However, once I got past those two notes, it was all good. Given that, and the fact that we've figured out that I don't run out of air when I don't use vibrato, it was a really good lesson.

Today my sinuses finally decided to drain. Thank goodness. Breathing in is good, but breathing in AND out is better. And not having to be within six feet of a box of tissues at all times is a revelation. Now if I could just convert some oxygen into energy, and stop feeling flattened at the end of the day, I'd be in a much better frame of mind. Last week isn't really a fair comparison, though, because we had P&R. That always flattens me, Mongolian Death Cold or not. This week should be better in all sorts of directions. I'll be rather disappointed if it isn't.

I finished the geisha over the weekend, but I'm going to wait on getting her framed until after I do my taxes. Framing embroidery falls under "mad money", which is what I'm allowed to do with part of any tax refund I get. A couple of things have changed since last year, though, and I'm not sure I'm going to get any refund at all this year. I probably make too much money now that my student loan is paid off and I can't claim the interest deduction. (But I did sign up to have the loan-payment amount put in my retirement account before taxes, whereas I used to pay the loan from what I took home after taxes, so we'll see what happens.) However, all that tax stuff has to wait until I get the W2 and the "yes, I have health insurance" form. For some reason, the insurance form annoys me more than anything else that has to do with taxes. Why can't they just have a checkbox for "same insurance info as last year"?

In cheerier news, the days are getting longer. It's only sort of medium-dark blue out at 5:00 these days, instead of pitch black. Only another couple of months until the clocks change again and I can get indoors and upstairs at home without turning the light on.

In more cheerful news than the last post, I'm in the process of roasting a chicken which I stuffed with cut-up lemons and fresh rosemary, and then squeezed another lemon over and sprinkled with garlic powder, salt and pepper. In short, it smells good in here.

I also found a new thing that makes me stupidly happy. (Not only is he a superior tenor, but I find him pretty scenic besides.) These guys are also responsible for this bit of silliness, which cracked me right the hell up when I heard it for the first time last year.

And speaking of music, we decided to have fun with the voice lesson I had yesterday, and I absolutely knocked "O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion" out of the park in a couple of places I shouldn't have been able to do that in. I win!

AND, I wasn't positive this would happen today, but the second of three loads of desperately-needs-washing laundry is in the washing machine. At this rate I might even remember to get the third load out of the dryer before it sits there for two weeks. (Been known to happen, especially if the last load isn't the one with all the underwear in it.) Clean laundry is good, but it's better if you can actually find the shirt you want.

I walked into my voice lesson today ready to resign from the recital next weekend and eat the $50 performance fee I'd already paid. Then I allowed myself to be talked out of resigning because there will only be six people singing, including me, and that's just enough to make renting the space worthwhile. I did put my foot down, though; I am not singing any more German art songs in recitals. Memorizing German takes up WAY too much of my brain space for several days. I got a pat on the head for having it memorized, though. Just don't ask me what it sounds like. (The high note sounds like an untuned oboe, in my opinion. I wasn't in particularly good voice today.) Fortunately the second song is much lower, much shorter, and in English.

There are too many things rolling around in my brain, and one of them is money, and I wish it wasn't. I have a hard time saving money in the winter because of the fuel bills, and in November/December it's even worse. The Hairy Beasts get their annual vet visit in November, and I travel for Thanksgiving, and December involves Christmas travel and presents and my ATA dues, and this year there's the $750 to the other guy's insurance company via Zipcar. It's not that I don't have the money for all of that stuff, but the fact that $1500 has come out of my savings account in November annoys me because I don't know if I'm going to be able to replace it before spring.

Meanwhile, I've got to lose some weight, and I'm not sure how I'm going to manage that. I eat too much when I'm stressed, and work is always stressful. Not working would be worse. I've also got my father's metabolism, which means I retain every calorie I consume. The obvious answer is "consume fewer calories", but somehow that never sticks when I try it. Maybe I should just come home every night and drink a quart of nice calming chamomile tea and wait two hours before I have any dinner. (No, I'm not serious about that. For one thing, I don't like chamomile tea enough to drink a quart of it.)

For various other reasons, it's been a tough fall to live through, and I'm tired. And grumpy. And cold a lot of the time, now that the sun sets at 4:30. I wish I knew what would make me happy, so I could start doing it.

I'm not sure how much more of this week I could stand, if there were any more of it. Fortunately there isn't.

On top of the fenderbender, on Wednesday night I had to call 911 for a guy at the 66 bus stop. He was so high on something that he couldn't distinguish staggering around in the street (and bouncing off the side of a car) from staggering around on the sidewalk (and bouncing off a store window), and that was after he finished throwing up extensively. I decided he needed some help, whether he wanted it or not. He didn't want any help, but two paramedics and two cops finally did get him into an ambulance, so I hope he got some help anyway.

Yesterday I was absolutely shocked when I got home and nothing unsettling or surreal had happened yet. Zipcar decided I don't owe them any money because I didn't damage their car enough to need repair, and reinstated my account. The other guy's insurance company has six months to decide if I owe them any money. That seems like a long time to me, but I'm not going to spend all my spare time until May worrying about it. Mind you, I'm not driving home for Thanksgiving either.

Now that I don't owe anybody $750 before Thanksgiving, I'm back to paying to sing in the studio recital. This is an informal one where the students just sing for each other, as opposed to a formal one where everybody's relatives show up. (Which reminds me, I should get my suit dry-cleaned.) After having sung solo in public in front of everybody's relatives last April, I should be able to sing in front of my fellow students. I just wish I hadn't come back around to German art songs again, since that's what I did last time.

This weekend: fairly massive grocery shopping, and (at least tomorrow) massive avoidance of Harvard Square and environs. The Harvard-Yale game is at Harvard this year, so the entire area is going to be a serious pain in the neck to deal with. At least I knew about that before I got embroiled in it, unlike the Allston-Brighton Day parade every blasted year...

Part of the reason I was going GRRR so much earlier this week is because, for the third week in a row, I had somebody in my apartment rearranging my bathroom. When the guy came to regrout the shower, he discovered that the toilet needed a new gasket, which he didn't have with him so he had to come back the next week. When he replaced the gasket, he discovered that the mechanism in the tank was dying, so he had to buy new parts and come back again this week. Every time he comes, there's something wrong when I get home; at least one thing isn't where I left it. I didn't know that would bother me that much, but apparently it does. Now that everything is back where I want it, and not likely to go wandering around again, I'm better.

Completely unrelated to the Hallmark holiday last weekend (except that I got the idea last Saturday), this weekend I'm delivering a blueberry bush to Noank. Dad has always wanted a blueberry bush, and the Whole Foods I can practically hit with a rock from home is selling them for $15, and that's about as convenient as that sort of thing gets. Besides, I don't think Dad ever met a berry he didn't like, and he's already got strawberries and raspberries growing in the back yard. We might as well go for the trifecta. I just hope they still have blueberry bushes for sale on Saturday, because I fully expect that if I bought one today, it wouldn't be alive on Saturday. Jade plants are the only plants I'm good at.

I have a choice between learning to sing fast by singing Bizet, or by singing Vivaldi. Having listened to both just now, Vivaldi wins (Qui Sedes, from the Gloria). It sounds like Vivaldi was taking lessons from Handel in terms of how many notes he could cram in before the singer turns blue and falls over (or maybe Handel was taking lessons from Vivaldi?), but that's good. Maybe if I have something to think about besides running out of air, I'll stop thinking so much about running out of air.