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 [New Post] Missing his furry little face - via #twitoaster http://bit.ly/bUixuD3 months ago from Twitoaster Just met our new supreme overlord (i.e., VP). He seems nice, and more importantly, he seems to know his shit.3 months ago from Echofon |
Last night, I got a phone call from Amelia while I was doing laundry. She was calling to tell me something very important: “I got into Harvard! So you can come and visit me in Boston next year!” Hell yeah, I will! I congratulated her profusely, and when we hung up, I did what any proud parent would do. I called my mother to interrupt her dinner with friends to tell her. And then I texted Jordana because she was working. And then I tweeted it. Rick told me that he was having a hard time not shouting it from the streets, and I said “I basically did. I tweeted.” And now I’m blogging it because it hasn’t gotten old yet, this telling people how phenomenal my kid is, and because I don’t want to yell it on Facebook until she does. Hey, world? She’s pretty fucking awesome. Last week was…well, it was chaos. We’re in balls-to-the-wall mode on the audits at work, and 900 of them have come in. I should add that’s 900 graduate audits, which are processed by me. I have a helper because of the hand problems from the snowboarding, but I’m still doing the audits. Ouch. Speaking of the hand problem, I saw a hand doctor last week. He took x-rays and didn’t see anything broken, so that’s good. He says it’s a joint that’s prone to injury and sometimes he sees people who have the same problem as me just because of writing. So basically, the writing I do all day aggravates it. He prescribed a thumb spica (basically a thumb immobilizer) for while I sleep. Trouble is finding one. I think I have to go to a surgical supply store for it. Fortunately, I’m on spring break right now, so I have some spare time. I had forgotten the joys of spring break as a student. Sure, I still have to work, but no classes and almost no homework? It’s brilliant. I say almost because I still have to come up with a first draft of the major assignment in my research class – a twenty page paper. I’ll need to get plugging on the researching again this week, but I basically took the weekend off for mental health. Went shopping with Lori, bought little bento supplies (because bento is my new obsession – I think it will help me with portion control and not getting bored with the lunches I pack), went into several Asian food markets…I should have had my camera with me, the picture opportunities were something else. Maybe I’ll go back next weekend on photo safari and pick up some ingredients. There’s some more to tell, but I’m waiting a little bit to get more details. In the meantime, I’m going to wrap my hand with an ace wrap and get working. This year, with my federal tax refund (since my state refund hasn’t come in because my governor is a tool and is holding onto everyone’s refund to fill a budget deficit, but that’s a rant for another day)…okay, let’s try this again. This year, with my federal tax refund, I was very responsible and I paid off my credit cards entirely. I was mostly out of debt anyway because of the unexpected bonus of student loan deferments since I’m a part-time student now, but it felt excellent to get rid of that last bit. And then I thought “Hmm, I still have some cash left over. I want a new toy.” I hopped on CNet and looked at toys, because we all know Julie likes the tech, and that’s the best place to find out what tech is awesome. About this time, my TV set started getting lines across it when we turned it on, so part one was solved. I would get a new TV set. A new flat panel Hi-Def LCD TV, because they are the wave of the future (the part that I could afford with said refund, at least–no 3D TVs for us). And then, clicking around CNet, I started thinking “Well, my DVD player is from the dawn of time, perhaps I should upgrade that too.” And I decided to get a Blu-Ray player, because they too are the wave of the future. Rick took me to Best Buy in Pittsfield one weekend, and then he left while I asked the people there five million questions. To be fair, he had not done the CNet research, and he thought it was going to be an in and out shopping trip. But goddammit, I was going to get the best TV and Blu-Ray I could afford. And I did, because at Best Buy, they are amazingly reasonable and sometimes cut you deals when they’ve just sold the last TV in the model you want and you tell them you have a price ceiling. This is a sucktastic picture of our new setup:
It was taken with my Droid on one of the awful rainy days last weekend when I was supposedly writing papers but was instead rejoicing in the new Hi-Def hookup DirecTV had just given me (which in itself is a story for another day). I had no idea that electronics could all plug into the internet these days. I purposely bought a Blu-Ray player that could do that because I wanted to be able to watch my Netflix instant queue on the TV, but did I know the DirecTV and even the TV would be internet-friendly as well? I did not. Color me happily surprised. I could go into raptures over this TV since I’ve had some time to become acquainted with it. Channels that aren’t HD are a little annoying, but those that are? I felt like I was in the room with Ugly Betty last night, people. The picture is that good. Just for all that is holy don’t ever watch Kathy Lee Gifford or Trump’s hair in Hi-Def. There should be a warning included in the TV manuals about that. Kathy Lee was the first thing I saw in HD and I literally screamed “GAH!” (Pyotr, the DirecTV guy, thought this was very funny.) The awesome thing about this is that I am using the opportunity to get rid of a bunch of small electronics. VCR, DVD player, component stereo set, all are getting donated to Goodwill as soon as I can get Rick to drive me over there. I haven’t used most of it in a while, so it was a good chance to declutter. New tech and housecleaning in one, totally win-win. Paper writing is not my favorite. I had two papers due this week, one for each class. Actually, the one that is due today wasn’t so bad as it was an interpretive paper. This is my interpretation of an interpretive paper (ha!): “Here are my primary sources. Here is what I think they mean. There is no wrong answer, because it’s interpretive. The end.” So I wrote five pages on Confucius as an innovative thinker in about five hours, not counting the time I spent writing my outline and compiling my sources. Finished late last night, I don’t think it’s all that bad, and I do believe I should get bonus points for using “Confucius said…” in the very first sentence. My paper, the five page fortune cookie. The other paper was…well, it was rough going. Ostensibly I was working on it all weekend, but the weather gave me a serious case of depression and I had real writer’s block as a result, to the point where I was considering dropping my classes because I was convinced I wasn’t going to get the paper done and then I would fail the class and oh my god! The sense of impending doom I have when I’m depressed is unbelievable. The good thing that came out of it was that I wasn’t going to let myself sit on my ass if I wasn’t writing, so I cleaned the apartment. The only two things still left to clean are the microwave and the stovetop, because I got everything else, even the medicine cabinet. One could argue that this was a form of procrastination, and one would be partially right. On the other hand, hey, clean apartment. I did eventually get a handle on what I was doing, largely because one of my classmates and I compared thoughts on Facebook all weekend. And when we spent Monday night’s class discussing our papers, I started to feel like I might have gotten it right (it was not an interpretive paper, so it’s harder to judge). The depression has passed with a lot of help from the beautiful weather yesterday. The thought of no more paper writing for two weeks is also a wonderful mood-lifter. I’m just not going to think about the first draft I have to crank out after that right now. The wind here is fierce today. I live across from an expressway, which means no houses across the street to block the wind. I’ve gotten used to the windows rattling in storms over the years, but today the whole house is shaking, and I’m not exaggerating. I just looked over at the baskets where I keep my yarn, and they’re shaking because the house is shaking. I wonder if “My house blew away” would be a good enough excuse for not getting my papers written? I have a post in the making, but since it involves tech and another person (i.e., is out of my control entirely), I don’t want to post it and run the rish of jinxing the whole thing. Instead, I will sing the praises of my new favorite show “Who Do You Think You Are,” which is on NBC, I think Friday nights. (Due to the “set it and forget it” nature of DVRs, I no longer have to remember what night anything is on, and often don’t. The DVR is doing for TV what a contact list has done for phones. Soon I won’t have to remember anything.) At any rate, this show takes a different celebrity every week and tracks down their ancestry. Since most of us couldn’t tell you who the hell our great-great grandfather was, we can get vicarious thrills through their discoveries. (Okay, I get a vicarious thrill, your mileage may vary.) For instance, last week, Sarah Jessica Parker tracked down relatives that participated in the gold rush and others who were arrested for witchcraft in Salem in 1692. I got chills. Chills, I tell you. She had no idea her relatives were so rooted in such historical moments, which sort of makes you think (okay, it made me think, again, YMMV) “Hey! My relatives could have been involved in important things in this country’s history!” When the semester’s over, I’m seriously considering paying money to ancestry.com to figure out if they were. My favorite part of the whole show, though, was that they use historians to tell the celebrity about the parts of history in which their ancestors were involved. My jaw literally dropped when I saw who was explaining the Salem witch trials: Mary Beth Norton. Her name might not mean anything to you, but I’ve had to read a number of her works over my academic career, so to see her on TV lent the project an extra air of legitimacy for me. I was prepared to be a hater when I TiVo’d this show, or at the very least a meh-er, but I came away loving it. Can’t wait to see what comes next! Rick and I are in the car, listening to the radio, when a diet program ad comes on. It is a diet program I have never heard of, and they seem to be marketing to a particular demographic because the woman is talking like this (I cannot even begin to type the accent, but I think you’ll get the picture):
Somehow I missed your sixth birthday. Okay, not somehow, really, I knew it was coming up, I just neglected to commemorate it. I neglected to blog for two months. If there was a blog protective services, they would have taken you away long ago, because I am a bad blogger. I can blame it on many things: Facebook. Twitter. Ravelry. Classes. Work. Laziness. But in the end I think I wasn’t sure I was a blogger anymore. The urge to blog just hasn’t been as overpowering as it was in the early days. In fact, I have had only one urge to blog in the past two months, and that was a post on why Ice Dancing and Curling are not sports and should not be in the Olympics. But instead I just bitched it out on Twitter. Blog, on my second attempt at snowboarding I managed to bruise my tailbone. Instead of coming here with this comedic gold, I went to Twitter and Facebook and told thousands of people that I had bruised my ass. Which was awesome, but it could have been a great post. I let you down, blog. Some of my two months of radio silence was trying to decide if I wanted to keep blogging. If I don’t blog as often, is it worth paying for the domain name and the hosting? On Monday, I decided to re-up for another two years, and my goal is to blog more so I am putting that $190 to good use. Little Blog, I resolve to not leave you in the corner gathering dust. So let’s get started with a stupid story! Yesterday, my second visit to the doctor in two weeks (the first, where she diagnosed me with a bruised butt by putting on latex gloves and sticking her finger down my ass-crack to tell me that yes, my tailbone was “protruding more than usual,” apparently left an impression on her–can we blame her?–because she asked if my thumb injury was also due to snowboarding) resulted in a diagnosis of tenosynovitis in my thumb. (Side note: Why, hello, Google Health, and where have you been all my life?) She prescribed a gel NSAID for it. This gel shall now be known as $30 Copay Gel, because that’s what it cost with my copay, which makes me shudder to think of how much it costs without insurance. Anyway, $30 Copay Gel is apparently often used for arthritis according to the Rite-Aid instructions that came with it. “Awesome,” I thought, “so I’m putting Ben-Gay on my snowboarding injury.” I read further. In order to accurately measure the dosage of the gel before you put it on, you need to squirt it onto a dosing card. The instructions clearly say “Put the card down on a flat surface so you can read it.” I relayed this info to Rick and said “It’s really for old people! Because their hands shake when they’re holding it so they can’t read it!” (Yes, I realize this is an extremely age-ist comment, but that’s okay, because Rick, an older person, laid the smackdown on me two seconds later.) “No, it’s telling you to do that so you can read it. You know, as opposed to putting the card down upside-down so the writing is backwards and you can’t read it.” Apparently $30 Copay Gel is for idiots like me in addition to old people. Happy belated 6th birthday, Blog! Your writer is an age-ist moron! 2009 was a blur for me, mostly because I wasn’t blogging. Without the blog to tell me what I was doing when, I’m clueless as to how a whole year managed to slip by me. I mean, I must’ve done some stuff, right? Let’s see if I can remember any of it. Putting it behind a break because there are pictures. Sometimes I’m afraid to do that with Word Press for fear of freaky shit happening and never being able to blog again. Because I blog so regularly these days. But if the opportunity wasn’t there, just in case I wanted to blog, I’d be pissed, I know I would. At any rate, the upgrade doesn’t seem to have borked anything, so that’s good. I’m working on my final paper for my final class (final paper for pre-modern China class was turned in on Thursday). I think I’m going to be okay, since the prof says we should consider everything we’ve done so far in class as a draft, which I take to mean as “fair game, go ahead and put this in your paper verbatim if I didn’t say anything was wrong with it.” Now, I’m adding another four sources and looking for topics that can be researched further, but I still feel okay about it. I really want to ace it, though, because if I do, I could be looking at an A+ on my report card, something that has not happened since…well, I don’t know that it’s ever happened. I’ve gotten plenty of As, even in grad school, but an A+ on anything that wasn’t a quiz that had extra credit questions? No. And if I can get one on this, on the basis of three really good papers on Benjamin Franklin, I feel like I’ll have served him in much better stead than I did as an undergrad when I got a B on my senior thesis about him. Sorry, Ben. Trying to make it up to you… I’m going to get back to that. It’s snowing and gross out anyway, so nothing better to do for the next several hours until the new Doctor Who special comes on anyway. Wish me luck! |
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