The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

Yesterday we had the second nor'easter in a week. Today I am one of five people at work. Possibly six, but #6 said he was coming in at noon and I haven't seen him yet. Unfortunately #5 was the Vice Dean, so #4's proclamation as senior member of the office that all early departures would be fine is null and void. DRAT, says I, because I haven't had anything useful to do since 9:30. Everything useful I could do requires somebody who isn't here.

Turns out the feline digestive drama was probably because of loud weather. Last night's weather was awful, but less loud, and everybody's dinner stayed where it belonged. Thank goodness.

Apparently we're getting a delivery from Flour for breakfast at work tomorrow. It was supposed to be a surprise, but my boss gave them my phone number, so the surprise for me will be seeing what it is.

Today is one of those days in which I can't stop hearing, even if I'm not listening to anything in particular. And since the Drama Llama is having a very loud verbal diarrhea day, I'm really annoyed and trying not to take it out on anybody. He's lucky there's a closed door between me and him, even though I can hear him very clearly through it. Thankfully he's taking a four-day weekend starting tomorrow, so it will be quieter in here then. I just have to get to then.

I made beef stew on Monday night and put turnips in it, just to see if I liked them that way. I do, but the whole thing came out too sweet on account of also having carrots in it. Lesson learned. And I made the Smitten Kitchen peanut butter cookies again on Tuesday night, and this time the cookie dough part came out very dry (as dough; it was fine when baked) and I had four extra peanut butter balls at the end. I don't know what the hell happened there. But anyway, I took the cookies to work yesterday and none of them came home again. We were swimming in sugar yesterday between the cookies, the spontaneous office treats, and cupcakes for teatime. I postponed the planned carb abstinence until today. (Especially because I wound up in charge of the logistics and food and cleanup for the IPE session yesterday, and the food was pizza, and I wouldn't have had any lunch if not for leftover pizza. I was too busy running around finding extra tables and chairs and making the online quiz work.)

The other night I woke up three times, and the first two times I thought I had woken myself up snoring, but I couldn't reproduce the noise when I was awake. The third time I figured it out. It was, in fact, snoring, but it was Snip snoring, not me. I'll have to record her doing that someday, because it's very cute when it's not waking me up. Lily doesn't snore, but I make it my mission in life to make her go Mrrp? when I wake her up. It happens about twice a year. I think it's her feral upbringing; the less noise you make, the less anything knows you're there. She's awfully good at making less noise. Except when she's running up and down the hall, and then it sounds like a bowling alley. How does seven pounds of cat sound that heavy?

The Director of Admissions had the flu last week and the Director of Student Services has it this week. That means it's coming around the office in my direction, and I don't want it. And I did get a flu shot, but this year it seems to mean you get the flu for a week instead of two weeks. If you don't get the adenovirus that does lay you out for two weeks. I find all of that highly uncalled for.

My New Year's resolution, a month and a half late, is to not fix the copier unless somebody asks me to. Let them figure it out themselves, or not. Unless it's making a noise I can't stop hearing.

Christmas was about as low-key as it's possible to be, which was nice. I brought two pounds of shrimp home because shrimp cocktail on Christmas Eve is as close as we get to the Feast of the Seven Fishes. And at this time of year I can get big shrimp for a semi-reasonable price from Whole Foods and they're usually tasty. Which they were this year, but they were very hard to peel when cooked. (Having discovered that, I peeled the other half before cooking, and they behaved much better.) I think maybe they'd just molted and were hanging onto their shells pretty tight. Anyway, we also had the traditional BLTs for Christmas lunch and the traditional rib roast for dinner, and that was all good. To the point where I would almost get a small rib roast myself for New Year's, because I don't feel like cleaning the oven after roasting a duck.

My mother encountered a knitting pattern for beer bottle cozies and decided I needed a couple, so I now have hand-knitted beer bottle cozies, one blue and one variegated. She said they only took a couple of hours apiece, but they go on four needles, which was somewhat of a pain in the neck to start. They double as cat hats, which was highly amusing for me and somewhat confusing for Snip when I got home. I couldn't get Lily to stay in one place with her head at the appropriate angle.

I also got a small contribution to the prescription scuba mask fund, assuming I'll need one (assuming I can't wear contact lenses under a regular one, which would be considerably more convenient; I don't know if they can grind a scuba mask to correct both nearsightedness and astigmatism). Guess I'd better start being religious about losing enough weight to make a wetsuit possible by May. I was going to do that anyway, because part of the mental sludge I'm cleaning out over the break is about remembering that just because it's food and it's available at work doesn't mean I have to eat it. This fall was just awful for that, for several reasons including impostor syndrome (which I still have) and accreditation.

Other mental sludge involves deciding whether I sing with the chorus this spring or not. I'm really inclined not to, because I looked up the music and I just Don't Wanna. I'll go to the committee meetings and take minutes next semester, but I don't want to go through the rehearsals and pleas for donations for a while. Having fun singing is more important to me than I thought, and chorus hasn't really been much fun for the last year or so. I guess that's a decision.

I wish Stumptown Coffee would put out coffee with cream but no sugar in it. The stuff with sugar in it has too damn much sugar in it. I somehow forgot that and bought it again anyway. That'll teach me to go shopping when thirsty and uncaffeinated...

I want to go back to Sunday morning and start over.

Saturday was lovely. I managed to walk the Brighton-Brookline Village-Coolidge Corner-Harvard and Comm-home loop and then walk to Whole Foods and back, and still had enough energy when I got home the last time to want to go out again and see Thor: Ragnarok. And while I was down there, because I went on the bus and had about an hour to kill between buying the ticket and going into the movie, I went to Target and bought three little Star Wars Lego kits for the toy drive at work. The movie was amusing, which I was expecting, but I'm curious to see whether we get Mark Ruffalo in future movies or whether we only get the Hulk.

In other news, I've found crunchies that Lily will eat (hooray) for $11/lb (sigh), but Snip seems not to like them (hooray again). Snip doesn't like anything that used to have feathers on it, but is fine with anything that came out of the ocean, so I need to order a case of chicken-based wet food for Lily when I order Litter Locker liners next week. And I should see if I can exchange the unopened 5-lb bag of Snip's crunchies for a smaller one. (I seem to remember that Lily took a while to come around to anything that didn't come out of the ocean, too. And then she discovered rotisserie chicken, and hasn't looked back since.)

Sunday wasn't terrible for me personally, but I could have lived without lots of the Patriots game (which they won, but the first half was pretty putrid and Gronk made a completely inexcusable boneheaded move on a defenseless player in the second half). I got a largish chunk of embroidery done, and adopted a crockpot from my sister who got an Instant Pot instead, and made stock out of the turkey thighs I roasted last week and froze. I don't know how the stock came out; there was still enough flavor left in the meat after three hours to make me suspicious. if it's as bland as I'm afraid it's going to be, I'll throw it out because there's only about a quart and a half of it anyway.

This morning the bus got to Gardner Path and we all got kicked off because the bus was trying to fill up with smoke. I knew I wasn't going to fit on the next bus, so I walked the mile or so to work despite a massive temper tantrum from my inner four-year-old, which doesn't WANT exercise first thing in the morning, and minor grumbling from the ex-blister on my right pinky toe. Hopefully, having started the morning like that, the rest of the day will be better.

This weekend has not gone according to the plan I had for it, but no real disasters have happened.

I decided to do something different in terms of containing the Hairy Beasts for the vet on Friday. I lured Snip into the bathroom with cheese and shut the door on her, and stuffed Lily into the big carrier in the office. That was so easy that I ended up with Snip trying to dig her way out of the bathroom under the door and Lily singing me the Song of the Miserable Feline simultaneously for half an hour (the vet was running ten minutes late and I had given myself 20 minutes to contain the cats). So we were all a little frazzled to begin with.

Snip got her rabies shot and her front claws trimmed, and swore about both. We got her done and let her go, and then I brought Lily into the bathroom in the carrier and let her out. She doesn't swear; she just gets stoic and sits in my lap waiting for it all to be over. But she did not like having blood drawn, and veins in both front legs collapsed because she refused to relax. She got her blood pressure taken and her rabies shot, too, and then I let her go and paid my $714. After which all three of us were completely frazzled and Lily came back into my lap and washed me for a while. I had sort of half-formed plans to go out and buy new pillows (maybe that will help the neck muscle spasms) and maybe go see Ragnarok, but when the adrenaline wore off, I wasn't going anyplace. Besides, it was cold and windy and I didn't feel like dealing with the weather if I didn't have to.

Yesterday it was still cold and somewhat windy, and I spent the day keeping an eye on Snip because of the way she reacted to the rabies shot. The lights were on, but there was nobody home in her head. She did everything slowly but didn't sleep and wouldn't eat, and spent a lot of time staring into space. She did finally start coming around at dinnertime, and this morning she was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed again.

We did get just enough blood from Lily to determine that her thyroid level is perfect, but she needs to be fed more protein because she's a bit too skinny under the fuzz. I can do that.

Since I hadn't managed to do anything productive for two of the three days, today I had to get off my ass and go grocery shopping. I'm on a quest for frozen rhubarb for Thanksgiving pie purposes, but Boston doesn't know from frozen rhubarb as far as I can tell. Fresh rhubarb is a spring thing, so I'm not expecting to find that. Anyway, no rhubarb, but I did get high-protein wet food for Lily (which she seems to be in favor of, all right) and a new round of soup bones. Having used up the mediocre stock, I wanted to make a better batch. So I came home and roasted four pounds of chicken backs and made two-hour stock (which I still have to strain and skim) and did laundry. At least I'll have apples and tea and clean underwear for the week. I still need new pillows and smoke detector batteries, but I can deal with that sometime this week when I'm not going to chorus dress rehearsals. Or sometime next weekend.

I've been trying to remember what I did between Thursday, when I got back from Falmouth, and Monday. As far as I remember, on Thursday I didn't do very much, except I did take a nap in the afternoon on account of having slept in twin beds in Noank and Falmouth and not sleeping as well as usual because I kept finding the edges of the mattresses. I remember falling over and thinking "Big bed!" and stretching out, and being happy about it.

I have no idea what I did on Friday, so I suspect I didn't do anything important. That might have been the really excellent embroidery day, though, because I did do some embroidery sometime between Thursday and Monday.

On Saturday I gave up and called RCN, and was shocked to find that they would send a technician on Sunday. I don't remember what else I did on Saturday.

On Sunday I was embroidering again when the technician came at about 3:00, looked at what I had for equipment, looked at what I was supposed to have for internet service, asked me what I was paying, and was aghast at the answer. He said I should call the customer loyalty department and ask for more service and less bill, because the service I was supposed to have is so slow it isn't supported these days. And the price for more service is lower than the price I was paying. I know good advice when I hear it, so I called on Monday and got double the internet speed for $30 less.

On Monday I had fun stuff on the list. I did note that the light outdoors was weird on account of the eclipse, but I didn't bother trying to look at the eclipse itself; I contented myself with looking at the crescent-shaped holes in the shadows on the sidewalk. And I went off and bought myself a $350 Olds Ambassador trumpet, because damn it, why not? When I got it home I broke it out and managed to play a C, a G and a D very badly. I printed out a fingering chart, because I already know how to read music (at least in treble clef); I just need to know how to make the notes. My embouchure needs work, though.

Yesterday I had my GP appointment at 8:15, which of course meant I got there at 7:20 and the office doesn't open until 8:00. Under normal circumstances I would have gone in search of coffee, but I decided not to in case of fasting blood test. I didn't want to have to come back again for that. So, appointment (I need to lose weight, but I knew that) and blood draw, and prescription refill, and no shingles vaccine until I'm 60 but go get it pretty much the minute my insurance will cover it (I had a raging case of chicken pox at 16), and then I went off to breakfast at Cutty's and coffee at Caffe Nero in Brookline Village because I hadn't been to either place yet.

Cutty's was good, but too far out of my normal weekend range to make it a possible destination for breakfast. Caffe Nero was good too, and I will definitely keep it in mind because they're starting to be everywhere. Following that I went to Walgreens and Trader Joe's and home. When I got home I decided to be a good kid and schedule the mammogram so as to get it over with, so I did that and it turned out to be for this afternoon. Hooray, I still have Thursday to go whale watching (bought the ticket yesterday) before I go to the eye doctor on Friday morning.

The tape they put on the gauze in my elbow-pit after the blood draw gave me a really impressive set of red marks exactly where the tape was. I probably should have taken it off before I went to the drugstore, but I try not to leave biohazards in other people's trash cans, so I kept it on until I got home.

I should not have read my work email on Monday, but I was trying to keep ahead of all the junk mail and FYI-type messages that get overwhelming if I look at two weeks of them all at once. That's how I found out that CODA has added a subsection to 2-23e (control of pain and anxiety) regarding substance abuse and effective immediately, which means we have to add it to our self-study now. They couldn't have waited until after our site visit? Never mind, I'm on vacation, damn it.

I'm really sorely tempted to drop a towel over Snip and cut her front claws. In my imagination, it works a lot better than I suspect it will in reality. Most likely I would need another set of hands to keep her in the towel.

Lily has trained me to give her cat treats with her morning thyroid pill (sniff at pill pocket in dish, give me a "That's all?" sort of look, act disinterested until she hears the treat bag open, look interested again, dive in as soon as the treats hit the dish). I don't actually care if she won't eat the pill without treats, as long as she eats the pill. Heaven forbid I ever have to give Snip pills twice a day. She'll turn into a dirigible with legs if she gets that much cheese.

Computer is going to repair shop tonight, because I brought it to work today to see if it responded better in air conditioning, and it doesn't. It's probably either a two-minute fix or something that requires taking the entire laptop apart.

Accreditation documents are going to printer on Monday for sample copy, which means they are going for final copies either late next week or the Monday after next.

Both cats are shedding like mad, which I can't really blame them for because this is not good weather to be covered in fur and hate water. But I wish the rugs didn't look like disaster areas. They wouldn't be so bad if I had gotten off my overly large backside last weekend.

Standard 2 is finally about as done as it's going to get. It's a shadow of its former self at 250 pages, because I reduced all the tables to 10-point font and doing that shortened the damn thing by 20 pages.

Now that I have spare brain cells again, I'm thinking about scuba certification again. It may have to happen next summer after chorus is over, though, because I need 14 hours of pool time and however many hours of classes and I can't squash all that into August. Maybe next summer I won't look like ten pounds of bulk sausage in a five-pound bag when I put on a wetsuit, too. There WILL be Things Done About That.

I seem to have had a 48-hour virus on Friday and Saturday, because while I've had muscle spasms, intractable headaches, unhappy intestines, heartburn, and a couple of other various symptoms before, I've never had them all at once before. There were maybe two hours of Saturday when I didn't have a headache, and I missed the March for Science. Fortunately, when I woke up on Sunday, I felt positively human again. And the weather was better on Sunday besides.

Petco persists in not having the right kind of dry cat food, because their suppliers seem to persist in not having it. I bought some regular indoor dry food, as opposed to the fancy indoor dry food, and since it's the same brand I hope it doesn't upset things too much. Snip will probably eat it if she figures out that that's all there is, and Lily will eat anything as long as it pretends it's poultry-flavored. (I have got to get video of her eating her morning thyroid pill; she really does act like she's eating chicken-flavored peanut butter.)

The embroidery is going like gangbusters lately. I finished page 4 and put a reasonably good dent in page 5 yesterday. I still can't decide if I want to cut down the linen once I get one complete row of pages done. It would be nice if I didn't have to wrangle the entire half yard all the time, and I have masking tape that's younger than Lily so I don't have to argue with it so much when I want to bind raw edges. But cutting fabric with completed embroidery on it gives me the blue creevles.

I went to the DTP tutors meeting, which involved a lot of discussion about TMJ-related tutorial cases, and now I'm very aware of my jaw. Silly brain.

The six-month Year 2 courses are over! Hooray! Now the Year 2 students can get out of our hair for a month, because they're on break for three weeks to study for and take Part 1 of the national dental board exam and then they've got two weeks for research. Which means they study for a week, take the board exam, and then go on vacation for four weeks. But in any case, they're out of our hair until April 10.

Meanwhile the MMSc got approved, so now it has a brochure and an application form. But that's all it's got; it doesn't have a tuition amount or any actual course content. (It does have a fairly thorough curriculum outline, though. I know because I wrote it. I could teach some of it if I weren't an absolutely terrible teacher.)

Meanwhile, the Year 3 students seem to think going to oral surgery lectures is optional, while complaining that they don't have enough oral surgery lectures. One of the lecturers pretty much went off on them about it yesterday. And for once, a problem with the oral surgery course isn't my fault.

On the home front, Snip was a thoroughly miserable snot factory for two days and then got better, to the relief of all of us. Lily seems to have managed not to catch it, which is also nice for all of us.

I'm trying to declutter my apartment by getting rid of at least one large thing I haven't touched in two years, or one trash bag full of things, per week. Last week I finally got rid of the full-size featherbed that had been living in one of those vacuum storage bags until Snip went mountaineering in the closet one evening and put holes in the bag. And I haven't used the featherbed in at least two years anyway, so out it went, and it felt very liberating. There isn't a lot I can be unconditionally happy about these days, so any little thing helps.

I bailed on the ad hoc chorus committee meeting last night because my brain was DONE by the end of "Let us gird on the armor of light", and I couldn't count and sing anything like the right notes at the same time. That meant I couldn't listen and write at the same time either, so I didn't try. Sometimes enough is enough.

The problem with coming back from winter break and picking up where you left off is that none of the problems have solved themselves over the break, so you're right back in the same rut you left in, if not worse. I don't care who's doing all this scheduling next year, but it is not going to be me. (That's what I said last year, too. Obviously the universe wasn't listening.)

My coffee maker's water level indicator isn't working. It doesn't even have any moving parts, so I guess I can't say it isn't working, but it isn't working as intended. It's got air bubbles in it and I can't tell how much water I actually put in the reservoir, without doing all sorts of math (OK, the top is up to 9, but there's a bubble between 3.5 and 5 and another one in the middle of 6 and 7, so maybe that will be 6? But the coffee maker always subtracts one, so maybe it's 5?). With the result that today I made rocket fuel by accident and had to put sugar in it to make it drinkable. Today is the sort of day that calls for rocket fuel, though.

I have a new recurring dream, but I'm not sure why. It involves going to see a very large model aircraft carrier and having to climb up a ladder to stand on it, and getting stuck at the top because people want to argue with me instead of letting me get off the ladder. And then my aunt shows up and yells at me for something involving somebody else's marijuana. I've had this dream three times now and I haven't a clue what it means.

I keep thinking there's got to be a better way to crush up Lily's pills than doing it on the back of a saucer (which has a rim so the fragments don't go everywhere) with the back of a spoon, but so far I haven't found it. I'm not interested in investing in a pill crusher, because I'm not sure the bits I start with are big enough to crush that way anyway. The problem is mostly getting the teeny amount of powder off the back of the saucer, and remembering to use the "cat food spoon" instead of the "thyroid spoon" on Snip's wet food. Maybe I need to invest in a couple of cheap pill-crushing spoons that don't get used for anything else.

I've sold a piece of embroidery for the first time in my life. It's the blue band sampler from 2012 (the name of the pattern escapes me, but there's a blue one and a red one and I did both. I'll have to look through the archives when I get home). So tonight I have to iron it, but before I do that I have to go to an art supply store and get a cardboard tube to wind it around and a poster tube to transport the whole thing in. Fortunately it's only on a quarter yard of linen, so I should be able to find what I want.