The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

The Mongolian Death Cold is going around at work, to the point where one of the people who had it stayed in her office on Tuesday and conducted a meeting by speakerphone into my office, where the rest of the people who were supposed to be meeting with her had congregated. (I had volunteered my office, and went to lunch since it wasn't a meeting I was involved in.) I'm debating whether, if I get the Mongolian Death Cold, I should put a sign on my office door designating it as a plague pit.

This week has been something of a trial, although yesterday was better than Wednesday. I don't want to bite anybody any more. (I am, however, debating exactly how nasty I want to be about the security deposit, which I still haven't got. On Monday it will be 30 calendar days since I moved. I'm debating whether I want to include a photocopy of the signed lease, with the relevant section highlighted, or whether I should save that for a second letter if the first one doesn't produce a check within a week. I'm also debating whether I really want to go to small claims court if it comes to that. It would be a tremendous pain in the neck, based on what I've been reading.)

Lily has abandoned the curio cabinet, and figured out that food and cat toys come from me. If I have food, she'll stick her head in it as soon as I put it down, or eat it from my hand if I stop moving and stay that way. Otherwise there's an invisible force field two feet from whatever piece of me is closest to her. She'll eat and wash and roll around on her back waving all four feet in the air in my presence, as long as she's two feet away. Not bad for a cat who wouldn't come out of the back of the closet less than two weeks ago.

I think I want to go out for dinner tonight, but I don't have a clue what I feel like having for dinner.

Hooray for door curtains! While I do know that it would be very difficult for the guys working on the vinyl siding next door to see diagonally all the way through the kitchen and into the bedroom, it makes me feel better to know that now there's a curtain in the way and they really can't see anything.

Thanks to whuffle's advice and sewing machine, I now have curtains for all the doorways I want them in (bedroom door, bedroom not-really-a-door, office and living room).

Also thanks to whuffle, I have a long set of shelves to use as a counter if I can ever find a butcher block to fit them. They're 14" x 41 3/4", and as close as butcher block tops get is 14" x 48". I suppose I could take a saw to a 48" butcher block, but I don't really want to get into carpentry just now.

I've decided that having put up with living space I don't particularly like for four years in two different apartments, it's worth it to me to spend the money to have things the way I want them and have a home that feels like home, instead of like a place to keep the weather off self and possessions. Hence the door curtains and bookcases and so forth. I even have the money to spend at the moment.

From the Department of Schadenfreude, my upstairs neighbors in Roxbury apparently moved out too. I don't know specifically why, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was for some of the same reasons I wanted out.

From the Department of Redundancy Department, it amazes me how happy it makes me to be back in this apartment again.

Off to buy a wireless router so as not to kill myself tripping over the ethernet cable in the hallway.

When I got home on Friday, somebody had been in my apartment. I can tell when that happens because I lock the deadbolt but not the knob. If the knob is locked, somebody else has been in the apartment. Nobody showed up on Sunday. Therefore, the showing that was supposed to have been on Sunday was probably on Friday. Is it Saturday yet?

The other thrill I could do without on Friday was the shooting I heard on the way home. I knew what I was hearing, but I was hoping it wasn't that. I haven't seen anything in the news about it, and I didn't see it myself because I was halfway up Gardner St. and whatever went on was on the corner of Malcolm X and Columbus, where I had been five minutes before.

I got a fair bit done on Saturday, to the point that it was 11:00 on Saturday night and I had just taken my contacts out when I remembered skreeky's party. Oops. Mostly I bought hardware on Saturday: tension rods for door curtains, poles and casters for Metro shelves, and stuff like that. Then I waited around for a bus for 45 minutes, and came home and packed some more stuff. This must have been a bus-free weekend as well as a tax-free weekend, because on Sunday I also waited 45 minutes for a bus.

Yesterday was supposed to have been cleaning day, but I only got as far as cleaning the bathroom. Mostly because I can't find the floors anywhere else just now, and I didn't want to deal with cleaning the oven. Cleaning the bathroom involves inhaling enough chemicals; I didn't want to cope with oven cleaner on top of that. However, the bathroom (except the floor) is clean.

I'm going to be very unhappy if Aleve doesn't work for me any more. The stuff I took at 7:30 this morning has worn off already.

I met my incipient cat yesterday. She's very pretty, although still very much not sure about people. She spent the entire hour and a half or so under the bed, but I did manage to get her to come close enough to touch her, and I did get purred at. She thought my necklace was a perfectly acceptable cat toy (I took it off to see if I could get her to come out from under the bed after it).

My home internet connection is going away this afternoon, despite the fact that it was working again when I got home last night (which means somebody was in my apartment without telling me, for at least the second if not the third time. This annoys me.). I have to cancel the service anyway because I'm going back to RCN when I move, so I might as well do it now and get it over with. After the last week or so, Comcast would have to pay me to get me to go back to them.

This is the long way of saying that if you really want me to know something on a weekend, or a weekday evening, call me.

Next time I have a day off, I'm taking the day off. Yesterday was nice, but it wasn't hardly restful at all.
( In which our heroine gets lost, unlost, fogbound and disconnected )

I'm not compos mentis enough to do much of anything today, which is of course why I'm spending the day writing letters that Must Be Flawless before they get sent.

What is it with me and parades? Over the course of my living in Boston, I've been caught by the Allston-Brighton Day parade twice, the Roxbury Puerto Rico Day parade once, and today I got caught by the Brookline Flag Day parade. Which was charming, in its way, but two hours later when I wanted to go home and then waited another hour for the bus, I was less thrilled with it. (Particularly since, during that hour, three buses went by in the other direction. I know the 66 only runs every 20 minutes at most on Sundays, but it's just plain cruel to wait for an hour in one direction while the buses seem to be running just fine in the other.)

The really annoying bit is, I could've walked home in an hour. I'm physically capable of it, but my brain complained very loudly about the fact that it was hot and I was wearing jeans and carrying groceries besides. I'm annoyed with myself that I listened to it. I should've just cranked up the iPod and gone anyway.

I'm all for the mosque they're still building down the block finally getting going, but I really did not like the beg-a-thon going on down there today. It involved an extremely loud sound system, and the sound bounced off enough buildings between here and there that all I could really hear was a loud human voice. I couldn't hear what it was actually saying. When the loud got really annoying, I went out, and that's when I found out what was going on. While I was waiting for the bus, the man with the microphone was trying to get $100,000 donations from the crowd. By the time the bus got there, he'd come down to $10,000, and got three. (That's the number of litanies of "May Allah bless this person..." he went off on, anyway.)

What I went out for (other than to get away from the loud) was a research trip, mostly. I was looking for door cloths, or sheets, or something, because I have half of an idea and I want to see if the other half will work. The answer to which being, not for cheap it won't. I'm better off buying fabric myself and borrowing a sewing machine for an afternoon, or buying twin sheets and picking seams out. I was sort of looking for curtains like I had once, and I know they came from Urban Outfitters, but that was a while ago and Urban Outfitters' entire stock of everything has suffered an attack of the Galloping Uglies since then.

Since I was in Harvard Square, I decided to go off on an Expedition. I wanted ricotta salata to go with the leftover barley stuff from last week and I knew Formaggio Kitchen was around the dentist's office somewhere, so I went hiking off up Concord Ave. Next time I should look up the address first. (Anybody who knows me probably knows where this is going by now.) I was, of course, walking down the wrong street. So now I know where the Fresh Pond rotary is in relation to Harvard Square, and I did find the Hi-Rise Bakery, which has some truly evil chocolate shortbread sandwich cookies. I bought two on the way back to Harvard Square.

Having struck out finding Formaggio Kitchen, I decided the next best place to look for ricotta salata would be the Shaw's in Brighton. I'm slightly ashamed of myself for taking the train between Harvard St. and Brighton Ave., but in my defense, my feet hurt, and I didn't want to deal with Yet Another Set of Blisters. I struck out at Shaw's too, and got disgruntled and went to the Super 88 because I wanted fruit.

Hooray for the Super 88. I ended up with apples and strawberries and ingredients for stirfry and various other things. I did walk back to Harvard St., only because there was no outbound train in sight. For once I didn't get passed by the train two minutes later, either.

I don't know what possessed the bus-taking public on the way home, but the bus was a disaster. People getting on at both doors, people refusing to get out of other people's way, people giving me dirty looks because I couldn't get out of their way for want of anywhere to go...the crowning glory was a man who made a snide remark because the only way I could get out of the way was to sit down, so I got up again so he could have the seat, and then he didn't even want it. GRR. At least I got home eventually.

I've been bitten by the not-cooking bug, so it seems. Last night's dinner/today's lunch came from Blue Ribbon in Arlington (3 hours round trip on 2 buses each way for takeout; yes, I am insane), and tonight's dinner/tomorrow's lunch came from the Super 88 food court. I've tried making saag paneer myself, but the Indian place in the Super 88 food court does it better. Besides, I needed something by way of green vegetables today.

I'm considering the places I could be going tonight, and I really want to go to two of them, but my feet hurt too much for one and my budget hurts too much for either (one involves a cab and the other involves hiking up to the Fenway movie theater.)

I could conceivably get the whole moving vs. flying to Detroit problem settled if I moved on August 18. I should see if that's possible.

Today I got a letter confirming that my loan consolidation is going to happen but hasn't happened yet. Once it happens, my budget for loan payments will be $160 smaller every month. This is a very happy thing. (The interest rate is a less happy thing, but 7.3% fixed is still better than 7.94 that could go up to 8.25.)

I like The Impossible Quiz. They've got about the same sense of humor I do. Pretty much every time I answer a question wrong, it's because I look at the right answer and think "well, if I wrote the question, it would be that answer, but it wasn't me." And then it's the right answer anyway. My only complaint is they're fairly British in places and as an American I sometimes don't get the jokes.

I think my next tattoo will have to have a Zen circle in it somewhere. Going back to Oberlin and getting a phone call there about possible translation work sort of closed a loop I didn't even realize was open.

I really am fairly random today. Thank goodness I don't HAVE to be organized.

Less worried about work, now. Thank goodness, because I really couldn't keep doing that and stay sane. I got read the riot act about a month ago for a string of mistakes I had made since New Year's. I had had a very bad three months that started with my getting sick during Christmas vacation and ended with my grandfather's funeral.

The way my life was going was: get up, shower, breakfast, go to work, battle a constant mental stream of "ohgodImadeanothermistakeI'mgonnagetfired" all day, go home, battle a constant mental stream of "ohgodnotthehallwayodoragain" every time somebody comes down the stairs until bedtime, go to bed, repeat ad nauseam. Literally ad nauseam, because it was giving me a stomachache. The last time I was this unhappy was before grad school.

I mentioned the constant mental soundtrack to my boss, who said that no, I'm not going to get fired. They like working with me. So I feel better.

My shoulders hurt, but my shoulders always hurt because they're always tense. Stress makes it worse, but it never really gets better. However, the stomachache has gone, and that's quite nice.

Would somebody please explain to my brain that it induced my body to eat a pound of chocolate-covered almonds over the course of last week, and therefore my body really doesn't need any more chocolate-covered almonds for the next couple of months?

And would somebody please explain to my landlady that 9:30 on Sunday night is not the best time to call me and demand that I do something about the smell in the hallway (which, as usual, I can't tell is there)? I'm getting tired of apologizing for something she won't prove is my fault, only because I can't prove it isn't.

Grumble.

My landlady turned the heat off on Friday and then took off for the weekend, for the second weekend in a row. I need to go be somewhere warm for most of today because it's 53 goddamn degrees in here and my fingernails have turned blue.

I can't go buy a space heater because I have wall-to-wall carpet everywhere, and every available surface that isn't the floor is flammable.

I am so sick of this, I could scream. (Come to think of it, I wonder if being perpetually freezing since October is why I was sick so much this winter?)