Tales from the Den of Chaos

Seedlings, SQL and Strange Dreams

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:26:00 +0000

Man. I feel as though time is just – telescoping. The days are passing in such a blur, it’s hard for me to fix the passage of them.

Did that happen last weekend? Or the one before? Surely I still have enough time to get this or that done, wait! What day is it again? How can it be February already?!?!

And then somebody sends me an email saying, “Dude, are you sick or something? Where are you?” and I go…huh?…

I don’t know that I have ever had quite this…frenetic…a pace, at the end of a contract. Usually when a longer-term contract is coming to a known end, there’s a long, slow ramping down…more and more tasks get finished, or handed off to other people…and I have less and less to do, or be responsible for…until by the time I get to the end, well, I’m usually working rather short weeks and most of my daily grind consists of sitting around knowing stuff. Others do the work, I’m just there to advise when they get stuck.

But this time…whoa nelly, it ain’t like that. Nossir. Instead of ramping down, as Dawg is my witness, things are heating up. I’m not doing less and less, I’m doing more and more.

And then I look at everything that I absolutely, positively, no matter WHAT must get done before that fast-approaching date of March 30, and I find myself torn between being grumpy as hell about having to go, and halfway to desperate to not have to go.

Can’t I just get, say, another 90 days? I think I could get ALL of this finished, if I had 90 more days… (<= this would be a lie…because in 90 days, I would probably find / be gifted with another 900 days worth of work…this is how these things always go…)

Probably in large part because I’m working myself into a tizzy about how All This is going to a) get done by me before I have to go and b) continue being done by somebody else – somebody new, GAH HELP US, I’m having a lot of trouble in my “free” time with disengaging.

And also sleeping.

A lot of trouble with that, lately. Too many thinks, not enough off button.

And then, of course, because I’m working up a fine case of sleep deprivation, I’m starting to become various combinations of grouchy, incoherent, irrational, and other fancy terms that boil down to a real pain in the arse.

Sigh.

Well…anyway…I have beets starting to come up!

And one (1) pea plant!

Plus, when I was moving the blueberry bushes to a sunnier spot, there were some surprise Blue Nile potatoes to be had. I’d thought I’d seen a potato plant in that bed a while ago, but then I’d thought I must have been wrong because it had “vanished.” Well, it didn’t “vanish,” it died off – and the potatoes kept just fine in the ground.

Last weekend I planted ten sweet potato slips (not sure how well they’re going to do, but, we’ll see). I moved the blueberries, pulled up a million more pounds of weeds, watched my husband drop five tons of tree branches right onto my onions (!!), pruned the fruit trees, and walked around my little empire just touching, touching, touching.

Feeling the dirt between my fingers, cold in some places, warm in others. Clay here, sand there. This bed, perfect. This bed, hmm.

And then it was getting dark and cold, and it was time to come in, wash up, and get ready for the week to start again.

Sometimes, my life feels like a very strange dream; like I’m moving between two different worlds that know nothing of each other.

One moving at a crazy and artificial pace, where my mind is constantly revving and racing, where I’m expected to just know, well, everything. It’s exhilarating and exhausting and wonderful and awful.

And the other, well. It moves at a languid, unhurried and unrushable pace. It will be what it will be, and it will be that when it will. Even if I apply my human cunning to the problem and make all conditions ideal…a seed will become a carrot at its own pace. It will not germinate even one day sooner no matter how much I want it to…it will not reach its full size an hour before its time. It’s awe-inspiring and humbling and frustrating and satisfying.

I dreamed today that, having gotten a really weird result from a coalesce statement and wanting to know, uh, why it had done that…I learned about data type precedence, coalesce and isnull statements, and how those three things actually function, in the dark and secret underpinnings of SQL Server. I dreamed then that I shared this with the tiny, tiny fraction of the developer team that shares my curiosity about Such Things. And that we spent about half an hour animatedly talking about it, and that it led to wondering how similar things played out in Oracle, and then there was Googling. It was awesome, and it felt incredibly good to have that interaction, to use my mind in that way, to learn something cool and useful and kinda secret, too…the dream chooses to ignore that it’s only ‘secret’ in that most people really could not care less, and therefore they don’t know and don’t wanna know.

I dreamed today that I dug my hands into soft earth, my skin analyzing how moist it was, how it held together, how it crumbled – I need to adjust the drip system here, and here and here, probably need a higher-flow bubbler at this end, too. I dreamed that I noticed my nails were, once again, ruined, and that I had a hopeless amount of dirt under them, and also that I had thoughtlessly rubbed mud on my favorite vest. And that I didn’t really care. That I stood and looked around this whispering, hope-filled place and breathed in the smells – of dirt, finished compost, the neighbor’s horses. It was cold, there in the dusk, and my nose was running…but the dirt sang promises of spring and I felt slow and timeless, like an oak tree that stands and watches for countless unmoving years.

Such strange and disparate dreams…but I suppose, they balance each other. Either one on its own could be in danger of plunging into a world that was sharply skewed, and completely unreal.

Perhaps that’s where my balance actually is – in the center-point between the two dreams, each pulling the other back from its height or depth. Without either one, I could be left too high or too low, lost and unable to find my way back down to where real, or reasonable, is.

Or perhaps…I think too darned much, about very random and esoteric things. And should really just go to bed and try to sleep all this philosophy-stuff off.

{yawn!}

Blueberry of happiness

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:40:00 +0000

This is my dehydrator in action! Blueberries from last season I had dried were rehydrated in boiling water for about half an hour before being folded into muffin batter...which was then topped with a brown sugar struedel before being baked and if you'll excuse me...I have something I really need to get back to right now...

NOM!

Wherein I definitely need a keeper, and possibly a chauffeur

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:04:00 +0000

I took Thursday, Friday and Monday off work – you know, “vacation” days? So naturally, I am now thoroughly exhausted.

Instead of spending my time away from the daily grind sipping tea with my pinkie in the air and perhaps nibbling a scone or two while pouring over books about fancy lace knitting, Your Faithful Correspondent was doing things like…yanking up so many weeds that she literally couldn’t budge the wheeled yard waste tote to the curb.

Plus some cleaning. And a lot of stuffing the remaining freezer space with things to eat. With a side serving of doing the initial run at the 2011 taxes (there’s some fun times, let-me-tell-you) and also trying to get on top of the pile of papers I’m told I’m supposed to read and understand and (here’s the corker) respond to in some way.

…ugh…

Naturally, I was still dashing around like a crazy person Sunday night trying to do just one more thing. I didn’t get to sleep until almost 1:00 in the morning.

Then, when the alarm went off at 3:30…for some unknown reason…I found it incredibly hard to, you know, get up.

In fact, I found it impossible. I didn’t pry myself out of bed until 6:00, when I had to because it was time to start motivating the children.

At 6:30, Vanessa the Great (our nanny) arrived to take over the child-motivating, and I sat down at my corporate laptop to sheepishly admit that I would be working from home that day – because one of the awesome things about my commute is that it is extremely time-of-day sensitive.

If I leave by 4:30 a.m., I will be in the office by 6:00. If I leave at 5:00, it will be around 7:30. If I leave at 5:30, we’re looking at 8:30. And if I leave at 6:30 in the morning…eeeeeyeah. Um. I will be there…eventually. Probably. (But I do always make sure pack a lunch, dinner, a change of clothes, plenty of water, signal flares, a portable toilet…just in case…)

And then…well. See, the downside of working from home for me is that it is entirely too easy for me to just kind of keep going. Which I did. From 6:30 a.m. until 10:00 p.m., with one (1) dash downstairs between meetings to make another coffee and microwave a bowl of Spanish rice. And frankly, at 10:00, it was a bit of a struggle for me to disengage, already.

I’m kind of between a rock and a hard place right now; somehow I’ve become that person for a couple of our applications – the “only one” who knows how to figure out why something is happening, and whether we should do anything about it, and what to do about it. So when things start going wrong somewhere, wellllllll…there’s only one person who can set it right and dammit, that’s ME.

The minute I opened my email, I was already in trouble. I was in Email Jail and it wasn’t only successful batch reports and cute pictures of kittens. Curses.

We have a Big Visible Thing coming up next weekend (which may cause “my” applications to do all kinds of bizarre, unexpected things), and there were questions around that from the testers.

PLUS there’s this other Big Visible Thing (which “my” applications have the most amazing ability to completely screw up due to such ‘unexpected’ things as it being a Monday) (Dawg mah witness, sometimes I think I’m just dreaming some of the crazy-arsed crap that goes down in this so-called system of mine…it’s like I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole or something!).

And I’ve got a whack of questions in my inbox from folks about why this is that and that is this and where did that go and I can’t know whether it’s something scary or something eh, whatever until I’ve looked at it…which takes time and speaking of time…holy crap, now it’s almost 11:00 and I’m still sitting here staring at the wall visualizing the data lifecycle in my head trying to figure out where and why as we go through this huge Magic Loop of ours we would have dropped that override because honestly, it makes no sense no matter how I look at it…GAH, STOP, DISENGAGE, REPEAT! DISENGAGE!!!!!

(You know what would help me a lot? Not caring. If I could just not care about people on my team looking bad and/or our data being Total Crap and/or screwing up downstream systems and having them look bad [followed of course by us looking bad, AGAIN], I’d get so much more sleep. Curse you, sense of honor and responsibility!)

But eventually I wandered to bed and fell into it.

And then we come to this morning.

My alarm went off and I – having sworn on a stack of holy writs in front of about forty witnesses that I would so do, amen – rolled out of bed with what might be called a hint of resentment and proceeded to perform my morning dressing ritual.

Which consisted first of standing in the middle of my closet with a blank expression on my face going, “Duuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh…” while staring at all the clean, pressed, ready-to-wear garments all around me because wait, what do I do with these again…?

Having finally selected something that didn’t really go together but who would notice anyway and pulled half of it on, I realized that my armpits were an offense to God and Man and that really, for the good of humanity, I needed to remove that layer of clothing and apply some deodorant.

So then I…wait. I must preface the next scene of this farce with the following: At the time this took place, I swore myself to secrecy. I will NEVER tell a living soul this happened, I promised myself. This is because I take myself way more seriously in the first hour or so of being-awake than I do the rest of the time, and felt it might damage my image if I revealed what had happened.

A few hours later, I remembered that I really don’t even have an image, so, what the hell – this is kinda funny, I oughta share it.

So I yanked off the first layer of shirt-stuff, opened the cupboard, grabbed the deodorant out of it and rubbed it vigorously on my stinky armpits.

It felt weird, like I had forgotten to take the cap off it or something. Gah danged stupid why can’t they make these things easier to…wait…that’s…oh…

Yeah.

It wasn’t deodorant.

It was a bottle of prescription medication. A bottle which is a) maybe a quarter the diameter of the deodorant and b) a circle, whereas the deodorant is an oval and c) so not gonna help with my stinky problem.

{head-desk}

And then I finished dressing, made coffee, got in the car and drove myself to the train station. And the whole time I was driving, I was nervously aware that if any of the police officers I was undoubtedly passing along the way knew that they were looking at a car driven by a woman who had attempted to de-stink her armpits with a bottle of prescription anti-inflammatory medication…well, they would have Just Cause for pulling me over, don’t you think?

Now, I told you all of that so I could tell you this: I’m pretty sure I need a keeper. And probably also a chauffeur. Plus also to go to bed about, um, now-ish.

G’night!

Happy feet, a favorite thing

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:48:00 +0000

Y'all know how I am in the kitchen, right? During the work week, I probably spend less than 30 minutes altogether in there, but on most weekends?

I practically have a cot under the kitchen table to sleep on. I try to remember to SIT! DOWN! whenever I can - while peeling or slicing or whatever - but usually the angle ends up being awkward or something...so I pretty much end up logging anywhere from 10 to 14 hours on my feet in the kitchen at least ONE of my precious, fleeting two days of glorious, catch-up-on-everything weekend. Sometimes BOTH days, when I've got enormous quantities of garden output to process or something.

And then I wonder why my hip and back hurt so $&#%*#ing much on Monday. GEE I WONDER WHY.

I had been looking at those "professional gel mats" that suddenly started showing up everywhere, but had shied away from the $70 - $149 price tags. (Go figure.)

How much could it REALLY help, anyway? Maybe some nice $5-10 gel inserts would be just as good. (They are not. Mind you they don't HURT [for the most part, except when the fit is so bad in the shoes that they throw my entire body off], but they are NOT a cure for being on my feet way too long at one go.)

A while back, Costco had these mats for (if memory serves) $15. I circled them about three times before finally deciding that for $15, it was worth a try.

Oh.
My.
GAWD.

When this wears out (which it will, all too soon - it really wasn't designed for the heavy use I'm putting it through), I am SO investing in the biggest, most industrial gel mat I can find.

I'm already watching for sales, yo.

My Monday Morning joint pain is so much better (well, with a little seasonal adjustment for the cold / damp weather, which tends to add some Owie Points regardless), and even better, my weekend use of pain killers (aside: I only WISH they ACTUALLY killed it...not to whine or anything [warning: whining ahead!] but I am HEARTILY tired of the achy-joint thing!) use is way, way, WAY down.

Which makes me happy in a hundred ways.

Thank you, Cheap Little Floor Mat. You are one of my favorite little things. I will mourn when you go to the Great Floor Mat Hereafter.

Answers, in no particular order

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:22:00 +0000

I have probably the worst track record in the Blog-O-Sphere for answering questions in the comments. I told myself I was going to be better about that. And then I promptly wasn’t.

And now, I’m just randomly answering all the ones I remember. How awesome is that?

So, item number one: The blue baby sweater. The pattern is, delightfully, a free one. Buttery Soft Baby Set, courtesy of Lion Brand yarns.

To answer another question, well. Normally, yes, I’d block the pieces before I seamed them. The main reason I didn’t bother with that on this one is that I’m using ac…(c’mon, girl, you can say it…deep breath…) acrylic yarn.

(Blech…ack…yuck…hang on, I have to go brush my teeth now…)

OK, so, silliness aside: The reason I’m using acrylic is because I’m doing this knitting for one of the charities my knitting group, Knitting 4 Children, supports. This group has been all but dead for a couple years, but lo!, in the last month or so it has sprung alive with a vengeance.

Which has been wonderful, frankly. I’ve had a bunch of little sweaters all done except for running in seams and adding buttons for a long, long time now. Meant to, was gonna, etc. etc. etc., but just never actually did it.

But after having been prodded, I spent some good quality time over the holidays watching anime, drinking hot beverages and finishing some things up. And then I cast this little sweater on during our knit-a-thon a couple weeks ago, honoring the group’s founder – alas, no longer with us (although I’m pretty sure she’s watching from her spot with the angels, and approving the sudden rebirth of her group).

But to return to the point, it is fairly common when you’re knitting for charities that cater to newborns, especially preemies, for them to request / require no animal fibers. And occasionally, they will even request no cotton, either. The reason is simple: A lot of their tiny clients have extreme health issues…the last thing anybody needs is to find out that this poor little thing, already struggling to keep breathing, is allergic to wool and has allergy-related asthma. Or breaks out in hives all over their precious little head or something.

Also, acrylic can hold up to rough handling – like, say, going through sanitizing-strength washing, and/or a harried mother with forty things jumping up and down on her last nerve, who may be driven to tears by instructions to “hand wash, lay flat to dry.” (Ask me how I know about that part. Ahhhhh-hem.)

So – this and many of the other baby articles to follow will be made with acrylic, or cotton. Both of which I have in ample supply, although the cotton is mostly natural / white and will require some dyeing before I’ll be ready to use it. Oh, DARN the luck.

(Yeah, again, as the mother of four children…I don’t really like WHITE articles of clothing or blankets. I mean, they’re sweet and all for that newborn, and who doesn’t love a lacy, pure-as-the-driven-snow-white blanket for those early pictures or baptism or what-have-you…but on a day-to-day basis? Yeah. Just sets you up to feel like a bad parent because ohmygah, this thing is stained / dingy / otherwise no-longer-WHITE-white. Because even tiny babies have a way of instantly covering everything they come in contact with in sticky / yucky / weird-colored blech, somehow.)

Completely unrelated but randomly coming back to mind for no apparent reason (from, like, last summer) – dried zucchini.

This really is one of the simplest food preservation deals out there.

Wash produce
Peel if desired
Slice or dice as desired
Spread evenly on trays – not touching will speed things up tremendously
Dry until done, which can be determined either by The Touch-And-Yeah-Feels-Pretty-Dry-To-Me test (unreliable and potentially dangerous) or, By using a fancy table of various fruits and vegetables showing how much of their weight is water. Requires that you weigh before you begin and then requires a little math to figure out how close you’ve gotten to that 80-95% weight loss (!!!)…but is a much more reliable way to know it isn’t likely to mold on you, even though you stored it 100% right (you’re pretty sure, anyway)

And then, you can use them in a variety of ways. The slices in the picture I actually drenched in some vinaigrette first, and we ate them like potato chips. Untreated slices can be eaten like very chewy chips, and they and larger dices work well in soups (especially pureed ones – the texture won’t be anything like the original vegetable, but the flavor is usually good enough that you aren’t playing the “is that a chunk of potato, or zucchini?” game)…smaller dices can be tossed into a salad as-is, or rehydrated first with boiling water.

And this was never a question, but should have been. Holiday cherry recipe from the book Canning for a New Generation.

Ohmygah…fabulous. They’ve had a good long time for the spice flavors to deepen, and just wow. Insanely good. So are the honey-ginger apricots. This book is a real keeper, if only for adding some unusual twists to the usual suspects.

I think that’s ~~all~~ the most pressing random items for today.

I think.

Wait. I think thinking is what gets me into these messes in the first place.

Never mind. That’s it. Good night, and may your God go with you.

Kindred (anonymous) spirits

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:51:00 +0000

I was directed to a little piece called Storytelling on the San Joaquin County Office of Education website, which begins thus:

I have been accused, anonymously no less, of not being able to make a point without telling a story. This accusation is supposedly based upon my previous Outlook articles. This is totally inaccurate and I am actually offended by the accusation.

And it then goes on to…tell a few stories. Because of course it does.

I snickered so hard I almost hurt myself. And then I wished I could call the guy up and say, “Dude. C’mon over for a beer or something. You’re my people, bro!”

Because, well. Y’all know how I am. I can’t even tell you what time it is without doing it in parable form somehow.

Mostly that would be because I like stories personally. I like to observe things around me. I like to focus in on something tiny and commonplace and make a story out of it; I like to notice the weird things, the gloriously red-headed, the magnificently out of step. I like to make of my daily life the stuff of novels – even though in point of fact, my life is only slightly less ordinary than Everybody, and a lot more ordinary than many, many others.

I like to have fun with the words, to see if I can’t paint a picture with them that recreate in the listener’s mind the thing I was seeing.

Which I also feel is a good skill to have, for someone who can’t draw a line even if given a ruler and whose most focused, dedicated attempts at art class resulted in the teacher sighing sadly and announcing that she had never, no never, had a student who could not be taught before now…(yeah, that was an awesome day at school)

Stories also can teach hard things very gently. Let’s face it, a lot of what I have to teach isn’t very fun. It’s a combination of hard work, restraint, more hard work, and how about a little extra work while we’re at it?

We don’t like that truth. I don’t like it one bit. I always want to equivocate, when these sorts of Facts are glaring at me from under the bed at night with those big, red-rimmed yellow eyeballs. Above venom-dripping fangs. And a nametag that reads, “Hi, my name is Bob! Ask me about life insurance!” {shrieks in horror}

And I will definitely start tuning it out when somebody walks up and says, “Hey, if you wanted to get X, you need to Step 1, then Step 2, and then Step 3.”

And then, having tuned them out pretty well…I’ll proceed to the forgetting stage. What was the second part again? Wait, first you…wait, what was the first part…? OH WELL.

…maybe a nice $6 latte from SuperMegaCoffee.com will help me remember what it was I was supposed to do in Step 1…

But stories on the other hand…I like to use them when I’m trying to teach things because lessons are ~~boring~~ prone to being a hint on the accusatory and/or bossy side. YOU should, YOU ought to, YOU need to, YOU shouldn’t, YOU mustn’t.

Stories, on the other hand, don’t generally accuse the listener of anything directly; the story may sit a little uncomfortably when it touches too close to home, granted, but at the same time…I’m not saying you should, you need to, and if you don’t, these Terrible Things™ will befall you.

Instead, here’s a story about this thing that happened to somebody. (Probably me.) (Because when it comes to stories about doin’ it all wrong, HA! I win, baby!!)

Stories lead gently down the path. They make the lesson obvious without slapping anybody upside the head with it. They have a wonderful way of sticking long after we’ve all gone our respective ways – unlike most traditional lessons, which have a way of evaporating from our brains five seconds after the final exam.

Sometimes, stories will even do this miraculous thing where, months or years later, having merely been entertained by it at the moment all that time ago and not having thought of it even once since…you suddenly have a need for that particular story’s lesson.

And then, after having hidden silently in the back of your mind for all that time, it surfaces and presents the words, the thoughts, the feelings, the light and scent of fresh air, to lead you out of the darkness.

Sometimes, my loved ones become a little (cough-cough) annoyed by my habit of answering even a simple question with something that just about begins with once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived an earnest and hardworking shoemaker who had but one child…

And I frequently do have to bring myself up short in normal day to day conversations, when I catch myself about to launch into some possibly amusing but definitely way too long monologue about said shoemaker’s child (or whatever).

And yeah, I’ve even been accused of not being able to make a point without dragging a story into it.

But I humbly submit to The Tribe the following: My point was remembered for a long time afterwards by most of the people listening.

Was yours?

Checkmate, Mr. Just State The Facts. Check and mate.

Monday and the weekend went fast!

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:40:00 +0000

This weekend vanished with alarming speed, leaving way too much undone. I still haven't gotten the spring transplants started, there are still areas of the house that make me shudder, I haven't even GLANCED at the taxes yet, and furthermore...I got very little knitting done this weekend. MEH.

But, I was able to start seaming this little guy on the train this morning. So, things are looking up a bit, huh?!

They're baaaaaack!

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:44:00 +0000

Last night, I mixed up dry ingredients, covered them with a towel, and left them on the counter. And I mixed wet ingredients in a different bowl, snapped the cover on, and left it in the fridge. Then I figured out my delay start function on the oven and went to bed.

This morning, I mixed them together, poured them into my jumbo muffin tins, put them in the oven, started coffee, went upstairs and got dressed and GUESS WHAT?!

It's like a magic trick! There were lemon yogurt muffins for breakfast! Hot, and topped with their light crunchy nutmeg and pecan topping.

Ah, little lemon tree - do you know, CAN YOU KNOW, how much I cherish your fruit...?

(I feel richer than Midas right now, and tremendously clever for having thought to do it this way. What a marvelous scent to finish waking up to this morning!)

Money Monday: January 16, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:29:00 +0000

I went to Costco this weekend. Which I really didn’t want to do, because Weekend + Costco = 12-layer Crazy Cake, but, we were out of eggs, flour and sugar.

Let’s be honest here: A lot of us “peek” as shopping carts wheel past us. I too can be fascinated by the choices others make. And sometimes I wonder why somebody buys what they buy. The answer is usually really simple: Because they don’t know there’s an alternative, nor do they WISH to know, so, ZIP IT, CRAZY LADY.

But as I was charging around snagging things off the shelves and racing for the finish line, I bumped up against somebody who was stunned to discover that a) #10 cans of tomato sauce existed and b) they were significantly cheaper than the 6-packs of the same exact brand.

This week, the #10 can of S&W tomato sauce was $2.49. They also had a 12-pack of the same stuff for $6.99. A #10 can holds 106 ounces, making the cost per ounce about two cents. The 12-pack of 14.5 ounce cans comes to 174 ounces, or four cents per ounce.

Which calculations were done on my phone while a fellow mom looked on in wonder. We then discussed the various uses for “that much” tomato sauce, and how to manage what you didn’t use that very day when you opened the can.

The idea that you could simply take a few quart-sized Ziploc bags, put 2-4 cups of sauce in each one, lay it flat in the freezer, and have a minimal-footprint supply of frozen spaghetti sauce ready to go…was revolutionary.

I had a new best friend. She followed me around the warehouse watching every single thing I put in the cart, and wanting to know how I used it, how I stored it, why this not that, etc. etc. etc.

It was a stern reminder for me, actually. I tend to think of a lot of things as “obvious” that really aren’t…until somebody else points them out.

Like…yogurt. A lot of us like yogurt, as a snack or in recipes. Did you know it’s super easy to make at home? Seriously. This is all there is to it.

At the store, buy one small tub of plain, unsweetened yogurt; you want the kind with live, active cultures. I haven’t found that the starter yogurt having gelatin added hurts anything, but definitely no sweeteners or vanilla-flavoring! I generally grab the store’s generic plain yogurt, which runs about fifty cents when not on sale. (You can also buy yogurt starters if you either want different flavors or can’t find a yogurt that pleases you in the store – Cultures For Health has a variety of easy-to-use starters, both the kind you can perpetuate [e.g., make another batch from the batch you just made] or direct-set [you have to use fresh starter for each batch].)

Take the yogurt out of the fridge and set it on the counter to move toward room temperature. If you have an electric oven, turn on the oven light; if you have a gas one, the pilot light is probably enough to keep it at around 100 degrees (you can check that with an inexpensive thermometer) (I have two…because I have two malfunctioning ovens, awesome!!).

Take four cups of milk, and heat it to scalding (just starting to bubble around the edges, but not outright boiling); let it cool to between 90 and 110 degrees (you can put your [clean!!!] finger in it without yowling).

Stir the now-room-temperature yogurt into your cooled milk. Cleanliness is key here – make sure whatever container you’re using is super-clean, because what you’re going to do next is let it ferment for a good six to ten hours in your ~ 100 degree oven…prime temperature for all kinds of things to thrive, yogurt and otherwise. You do not want harmful bacteria to be joining the yogurt’s party!

Shorter fermentation results in a less-tangy end product; I usually go with ten full hours, which usually makes for a particularly tangy yogurt. Because I am a wild thing that way.

Then, carefully move it from the oven to the fridge – don’t stir, shake or otherwise agitate it! I’ve discovered through trial and error (mostly error) that if I don’t agitate it, I end up with a nice, thick, creamy yogurt. If I can’t resist the temptation to stir (or taste-test) it, I get a runnier version. It’s not bad, exactly, but I prefer the yogurt to resist the spoon a little bit when I’m using it.

You can also use a crockpot – preheat it while you’re scalding your milk, then mix the milk and yogurt in the crock, turn the crockpot off, put the lid on and wrap the whole thing in a nice warm towel for the duration.

I’ll stir in some fresh or frozen berries, homemade preserves, honey, vanilla or whatever for the ones that are snacks, and leave the rest as it is – set aside about half a cup of it for the next batch and you can be making homemade yogurt for a good long while. When you start getting “runny” or “flavorless” batches, it’s time for new starter…I generally get a good two months of weekly batches out of each $0.50 tub.

To me now…that’s so obvious.

But I was stunned when it was first pointed out to me a couple years ago that it was that easy to do.

Come right down to it, nothing I do is particularly hard, or requires skills only attainable after twenty years of meditation on the Holy Mountain.

It’s easy, practical stuff…it just takes time, and curiosity. The ability to laugh off your mistakes helps a lot, as does the ability to look at something from a variety of angles.

If you can do that, a lot becomes “obvious” that makes other people go, “Whoa, wait, what? You can do that? REALLY?!”

Which is a deeply satisfying feeling, by the way. Just sayin’.

This week’s meals are largely about getting large, bulky things out of my way in the freezer; we’re still down by one freezer and I need to clear some shelves so I can cook breakfasts and lunches ahead again!

Also, there is a lot of spinach going on right now. I just harvested thirty POUNDS of the stuff this weekend. Yoinks!!!!!

Monday: Leftover Extravaganza! (a.k.a., everybody forage, mommy is busy having a What Do You Mean I Hafta Work Tomorrow?! episode)

Tuesday: Balsamic-glazed pork roast, roasted red potatoes, spinach

Wednesday: Lamb roast, “Turkish” rice [rice with peas, slivered almonds, and other horrifying things in it] [the Denizens are not fans of ‘mixed up’ foods, but, they’ll just have to deal]

Thursday: Roast Chicken, [hopefully] Blue Nile potatoes [rogue potato plant ready to dig up – here’s hoping it actually has potatoes attached to it!], more spinach, yay!!

Friday: Beef Soup (crockpot, because I am always lazy on Fridays)

Saturday: Chicken pot pies

Sunday: Beef empanadas, Spanish rice

oooo, SNAP!

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:22:00 +0000

It finally happened.

I was knitting away on the baby sweater on the train...and the woman across from me (after staring for a good long while in that way people do when they're working up the nerve to actually - GASP! - talk to a stranger)...well, she leaned over and...and she asked me...she asked...well, what she said was...

...it was...

"Is that for your grand-baby?"

Ooooooooooooooh, SNAP!!!!!!!!!

So I hit her with my bifocal case and limped away, dragging my stupid rolling bag that I have to use because I can't seem to manage carrying a backpack like a twenty-something anymore without setting off my hip something FIERCE and could somebody please just KILL ME NOW...?

...sigh...

Oh well. It's still a cute little sweater, isn't it? And if I were actually expecting a grand-baby, I would totally make one for him, too.

Money Monday: January 8, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:21:00 +0000

Bet you didn’t know that Tuesday is the new Monday. I know. I too am shocked at the things that don’t make the main newscasts in this country.

Ahem. Yes. Well. The weekend got away from me a little bit – there’s a Thing at work that was supposed to go into a testing environment, but then the main partner who is forcing us to do all this in the first place was all, “Oh, wait, hang on, we’re not actually ready!” but I had all this code that wasn’t ready to go, but also couldn’t exactly be dropped, and…it was just a weird weekend.

Then last night got away from me.

And tonight is about to do the same; I had one of those away-from-home-for-sixteen-hours days today. Awesome.

Anyway…I didn’t have any Stunning Revelations last week; I think the most interesting thing for me last week was the realization of just how much certain things I never really took into consideration as Particularly Big Deals have impacted our ability to really get our feet under us.

Mind you, when placed into a pool of average people – I’m relatively sheltered from a lot of the stuff that has absolutely slammed the general population. For example, I realized this weekend that what I pay for flour has gone up by 23% in about two years time. Which for someone who does as much baking as I do is a pretty frightening figure.

That’s right. I’m paying $1.83 more per month for flour. Somebody call the Red Cross! Get this woman some aid, STAT!

As line items, they don’t really hit my radar. I’m aware of them, but they don’t hit me in the gut and make me feel sick, you know? Irritated on occasion, granted, but not devastated.

But at the same time…milk has gone up 40%. A dozen eggs 43%. A tank of gasoline that used to cost $23 is now $34. The monthly penalty for gas and electricity has gone from $205 to $355 – and not because we’ve suddenly gotten all crazy with our usage, which has actually stayed flat or even dropped over the last four years – and yet never does this result in a lower bill, somehow.

Meanwhile, the husband is not only earning less, but handing over far more of his pre-tax-so-at-least-there’s-that income for health insurance.

None of which is news. None of which surprises me. I’m (cough-cough) more than slightly aware of even slight fluctuations in the prices of things I buy regularly, and am one of those people who will walk away from darn near anything when it trips my oh-so-sensitive Too Expensive O’Meter.

I can’t even say I was surprised to add up all the columns and realize that the husband’s net paycheck can’t cover even the non-discretionary budget items on its own. Slightly bummed out and a little bit riled up, but at the same time…

…at the same time…

Y’all have no idea how lucky I feel.

We’re going to have to keep on working hard and keeping a tight rein on things; there won’t be any big vacations, or new cars, or indulging in iGadgets and maid services.

And we’re OK with that. It’s a road we’ve walked before; sometimes because we had to, sometimes because we wanted something that was otherwise beyond our means. We already have a profound sense of why…and it has nothing to do with being punished.

It has everything to do with continuing to pursue what we really want, and having a better chance of actually getting it, by letting go of things that don’t really matter to us – things that are just shiny, or cool, or fun, but that we’re going to drop forgotten on the floor in an hour’s time, bored and looking for the next fun thing.

I did come away with a couple action items; we are indeed spending too much on pre-fab food, and I also definitely need to quit being lazy about how I categorize things. I suspect an awful lot of stuff is getting dumped into “groceries” that doesn’t belong in there, but I’ve just been too lazy to actually break things out or even think about what I was actually buying – let alone taking the receipt out of my wallet and reviewing it.

The other thing I want to do is figure out if there is any way I could pay off at least one of the debts remaining from the Great (Under)Employment Fiasco™ next month. I think it might be possible…but it may require a fairly intense display of tightwad prowess, a healthy dose of Being A Damned Grownup For Once (nooooooooo, not THAT!) and extremely on-top-of-things organizational skills (…uh oh…) because there would be a bit of Financial Alchemy involving shuffling the virtual envelopes containing the savings goals for things like property taxes, annual car insurance premiums and stuff like that in a kind of shell game – all of it to be fully settled as if nothing had ever happened before April 17 when the income tax returns have to be filed and the bill (if any) paid in full.

Meals could have gone better last week; early in the week, I charged out to get the necessary ingredients out of the freezer and found the key to it had gone AWOL. I couldn’t find it anywhere.

This was what might be called a major setback; you can imagine how frustrated / angry / freaked out I was, with thousands of dollars in food right there in the garage…and me not able to access it!!

After having torn the house apart about five times (including a thorough search of the trash cans and every pocket of every pair of pants I could lay my hands on), I thought to look behind the freezer itself; sure enough, somebody (me) had left the key sitting on top of the freezer instead of putting it back in the cupboard, and somebody else, though warned with increasingly foul language not to EVER do so (husband), had come along and shoved mass quantities of boxes, totes and other paraphernalia onto that same freezer top (the chest freezer is proving a real challenge on that front – everything from baskets of clothes to power tools keep being piled up on top of it! ARGH, QUIT IT!!!)…thus knocking the key clean off the freezer and into the spider-webbed darkness behind it.

Fortunately, the insanely large-headed and bright-red-haired Power Puff Girl keychain was relatively easy to spot in the garage…this weekend, when I was finally home in daylight hours.

Hopefully, I’ll be back on track now with making more meals at home; I’ve got nothing particular going on this weekend (don’t tell anybody, for GAH’S sake!), so hopefully I’ll be able to get ahead on some meals enough that the number one obstacle for me, which is coming home so dog-tired I can’t even think about food, let alone fiddle with it, can be overcome by virtue of said meals being oven-ready. Go to the freezer, take out the casserole dish…

This week is turning out to be mostly a “put random ingredients into skillet, heat through, and serve with rice or noodles” kind of deal.

Gah, I hope I can get my feet under me a little better next week…

Money Monday: January 2, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 23:30:00 +0000

Happy New Year, one and all! And before I get all mercenary and self-absorbed with the money-thing – may 2012 bring peace, love, joy and plenty to you, one and all!

The last quarter of 2011 went by in a blur for me. It was definitely a one damn thing after another kind of quarter, both at work and at home. But in the back of my mind, the fact that my current contract expires on March 30 keeps repeating over and over. Not that I’m counting or anything, but there are precisely seven more paychecks coming before this chapter closes and the Next Big Thing begins.

I started looking at the numbers during the Thanksgiving holiday, but quickly abandoned the project when I realized that I was not coming at it from a particularly good head-space; I was moving fast into either being angry, or silly; playing the blame-game about every last penny spent or deciding that every last penny spent was vital, absolutely a non-starter for things to cut.

And I always call December a ‘no budget’ month – which is not < I>entirely true because of course I still have a budget…but I try not to set goals and get all nit-picky while Christmas shopping is in its final days.

It’s just not worth it, you know? I’m going to make myself crazy(er), which by extension means making the whole family crazy, and in the end it does no good – I’m too discombobulated to do good work on that front until after the tinsel and eggnog has been retired for another year.

Which leads me to today, the first Monday of the new year – when indeed the eggnog has been drunk, the Christmas tree de-ornamented, and I’m staring down a new ‘season’ of this full-body-contact sport called Life.

Thanks to the initial pass at number-crunching I’d already done, I’m already uncomfortably aware that we’ve got a lot of…um…fluff in the budget. Monthly charges for this-n-that, So Forth and So On and Miscellaneous Expenses.

When I find myself wondering why I never seem to have any money at the end of the month – this is the stuff that answers the question. Seldom anything Big! and/or Dramatic!...usually a bunch of little stuff that adds up over the course of the month.

But, a lot of it kind of settles in under the ‘sacred cow’ category for either myself or the husband; things that we may acknowledge are adding up to significant amounts of money, but which we will argue, vehemently, aren’t “that” big a deal and/or provide “that” much value in return for us.

It’s particularly hard for me to bring up things that are “his.” He isn’t a guy who is constantly charging out there buying thousands of dollars in power tools or gun safes; he has pretty sane and steady wants, and very seldom runs up saying he neeeeeeds this or that or the other thing.

Lately, he’s been talking a lot about one of our Someday Wouldn’t It Be Awesome If items – which is to move to a place with a little more land around it. Not 160 acres in the middle of nowhere or anything like that, but maybe five to ten acres within reasonable distance of the Amtrak line back to the city.

Prices are really good right now, and will probably stay that way for quite a while to come; but we’re in a really bad position to take advantage of them. We’re upside down on the current house (ugh), still paying things off, and every single month I’m ending up practically at a net-zero in terms of income v. expenses.

Last week, we got to have a dinner out; it’s rare for us to have more than a quick walk out for lunch on the days we’re both in the office, and was a great treat to be able to talk about anything for more than a few minutes without being interrupted by a child or a coworker.

Finally, on the drive home, I asked the tough question: How much do we really want that house on a little land? Because (I continued, awkwardly), when I looked at how we spend our money lately…it would appear that we value things like monthly massages, nail appointments, cable TV and tablet network plans way more than we value that Someday Awesome home on a few acres of range, where the deer eat the broccoli all day.

Plus, it simply won’t be possible to keep spending this way when I’m not working – even if it is only for a few weeks while I look for the next contract.

Just sayin’.

{awkward pause goes here}

After a moment of prayerful consideration (or possibly mourning for the Impending Budget Cut Victims), he opined that we should indeed look at where we are currently spending, and consider each line item’s importance in that way: Is this monthly expense more important than being able to make that move we keep saying would be Awesome?

Which leads me now to my task for this week: This week, I’m going to pull together a spending report for the last three months. Ignoring the things that are Christmas / Holiday spending, I’m going to get an idea of the average monthly spending for everything from cable to haircuts.

And then, I’m going to look for areas where we could cut back – without treating anything as a sacred cow, without whining about how we neeeeeeed this or that emotionally, or how it’s such a good deal, really, when you think about it.

We’re hurtling toward a period without my income; whether it will be brief or prolonged, we have no way of knowing. Sure, I have a skill set that is in demand and fairly highly paid; and usually, as long as I’m willing to make that long commute, I don’t have a lot of trouble finding a new contract.

But nothing is guaranteed. (Including my willingness to make the commute. Ahem.)

We need to make sure we’re ready to handle it, whether it is short or long in duration. We need to be able to get by on just the one income, and it would be ideal if we could not merely get by, but also put by – if we can reduce our spending enough to also be saving, we’ll be able to get to that bigger goal that much sooner.

And also…I need to do much better on the “dinner” front. Holy smokes, meals have gotten weird around here. Frequently, “dinner” equates to “forage in the fridge, find something to eat.” Between the family not eating together and the tendency for the “snack” foods to be substituted for “actual” foods by parents and kids alike (oops), we’re eating unhealthy and expensive junk instead of more cost-effective, actual food.

TO WHICH END…I propose the following menu for this week. (Wish me luck. I need to get this all assembled and ready to go today, or it will not end up on the table during the week!)

Monday: Pork chops, gratin potatoes (leftovers from the weekend) and corn (also leftovers)

Tuesday: Lemon chicken breasts, rice and spinach (from the garden – good old California!)

Wednesday: Meatloaf, mashed potatoes and peas and carrots

Thursday: Spaghetti night (woooo, easy!)

Friday: Beef roast, roasted potatoes and green beans

Saturday: Beef pot pies (leftover roast)

The changes time brings

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:08:00 +0000

Once Upon A Time, I would have been GRAVELY disappointed by any Christmas gift that wasn't some form if entertainment. A toy, or a book, or maybe the latest Elfquest graphic novel.

But when torn away wrapping revealed clothes, backpacks, shoes, socks, new hats or sheet sets? I would wrestle onto my face the forced, insincere smile every child who blessed with a Lady Mother who believes - strongly - that Manners and Other Civilized Behaviors should be observed at all times learns to produce, and shove the words "thank you very much, it's lovely!" between my teeth.

Oh sure, OCCASIONALLY a grandmother would hit one out of the park with clothing...like the orange-sherbet colored Gunnysack my dad's mother bought me one year, a color NOBODY ELSE would have picked for me and also, eww, a DRESS, have you MET me?!?! - but I LOVED. IT. MADLY.

It was SWIRLY. (And probably hand-wash, line-dry. The poor Lady My Mother...in my memory [notoriously faulty this far back as it is] I wore that thing as often as I could for months.)

And I remember one Christmas very early in our time together when the husband bought me a vacuum cleaner.

We needed one badly - the hand-me-down first-apartment one had begun to SMOKE, and was so old that the trusty vacuum repair shop, the only place in twenty-five miles with replacement bags and belts, shook their heads sadly and led us to the displays of newer, reconditioned, WORKING ones.

And we had no money. We were broker than broke. We were, in fact, smack in the middle of the days that led to my current faint dislike of Ramen noodles. (I have largely gotten over the ACTIVE DESPISING of them, though.)

I had told the man this was what he "should" get for me. I had practically bought it myself. I gave him NOTHING ELSE for suggestions.

And I liked the vacuum. It saw heavy, best-daily use for ten years before it too began smoking one morning.

And yet...on that Christmas day...I was...disappointed, somehow. I wanted...a toy, or a book, or something GOOD.

I don't know what happened. I don't know whether it should be hailed as a sign of growing maturity or pitied as a symptom of lowered standards...but this is what I got for Christmas this year, and I didn't bother to wrap it, but yanked straight put of the box when it arrived and put it straight into service.

Six quart bowl and extra power, baby! Woot!

And I consider this to have been a Most Satisfactory Christmas Indeed.

And now, if you'll excuse me...I've got some double-batches of rolls to make...

On the exhale

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 22:14:00 +0000

Yesterday, I dodged a few raindrops to grab some spinach out of the yard for lunch. It’s the only thing growing out there right now to speak of; there are some onions slowly getting bigger under the lightly-frozen-each-night ground, some rogue potatoes that hid well enough to be missed when I dug up “all” of them and then cheerfully sprouted and sent up plants ha ha, you think you know so much, human!, and of course the blackberries and fruit trees are merely sleeping…so I can’t really say the garden is “dead.”

But in terms of the daily work, the every-weekend-I-am-out-there, up to my armpits in dirt or mud or dust or all three, the constant messing with compost and weeds, the eternal battles with the bugs and birds…the garden is dead right now. Everything from it is safely in jars in the pantry, or lying in state in the chilly garage on newspapers or nestled in sawdust, or the freezer or already eaten.

Of course, just as that sigh of relief was beginning, the holidays hit. Aw, crap-apples. Breath sucked in, I plunged into the shopping and buying and cooking and cleaning and cleaning and cooking and cooking and cleaning, and what do you mean, you’re hungry, you JUST ATE, and cleaning and last-second holy crap, I forgot to buy X for Y! stuff.

And of course, there is a lot of coming and going. And traveling. And receiving travelers. And all the other joy-filled accoutrements of the festive season.

But now…we have arrived. It is Christmas Eve. Whatever I’ve forgotten – is forgotten for good this year.

The last thing has been received from Amazon.

The last trip to the supermarket has been made.

The stockings are ready to be filled.

Gifts have been found for all the kids. Nobody got unfairly left out. Nobody got overly showered.

The food for the holiday meals is ready to go. The guest list is set. The days off work are settled (and arguably too few in number, but, hey – it is what it is, and I’m lucky to have a job so, no complaints from me, thank you very much!).

And that sigh of relief that got stuck halfway is finally on the way out; for the next few weeks, I won’t have much more on the chore list than a “normal” working suburban mother of four with a monster commute. (Ahem.)

There’s still stuff that needs to be done out in the yard, but it isn’t urgent. I can go ahead and decide that it’s too cold, or too dark, or too eh, whatever today. I can focus instead on inside-stuff, on getting things fixed, cleaned, organized. Flipping through seed catalogs, redesigning next year’s garden over and over and over again.

Goofing off with the kids.

Goofing off without the kids.

Playing Toontown en masse via the three paid and three free accounts we have.

Getting buried to the neck in art work from four very artistic children who have two whole weeks off school and a craft closet that is better stocked than some Michael’s stores.

Listening to a long explanation of why this-or-that Skylander is vastly superior to this-or-that other one from Captain Adventure.

Watching Boo Bug’s knitting grow.

Watching Danger Mouse master anime drawing.

Reading the manga Eldest is creating.

Being astonished that these children are mine; how I could possibly have produced such superior little minds is beyond me, really.

Catching up with friends and family, through cards and email, blogs and even text messages on the phone. Seeing pictures of kids that have grown ten feet since last I saw them. Hugging people I only see once or twice a year – if even that.

Catching up on email, catching up with clutter, catching up on sleep, catching up in general.

One of the gifts I get from my self-inflicted crazy: I appreciate stuff like that way more than I think I would otherwise. It’s so rare to have this luxury of time, I savor it like a fine vintage wine when I get it.

I hope you all are having very merry and relaxed holidays, too, and that your Crazy is well-balanced by Blessings. Thanks for hanging out with me all year, and for sharing your lives with me. You're a great group of people, y'all, and I feel honored to be among you out here in the wild, wild Internet.

Then again on second thought…

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:15:00 +0000

So, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was something of an herbalist. By which I mean, my pre-parental-phase apartment was like a medieval apothecary’s lair. Dark bottles full of mysterious liquids, some sweet and airy like fairy kisses, some unctuous and reeking of…urine of night mare or something.

But once the husband moved in with me, I got rid of most of it; while I didn’t have anything eye-of-newt or “two drops of this will KILL YOU” lying around, I did have things that could cause…ahem…intestinal distress or other unpleasantness if taken incorrectly.

And there’s this thing people do with herbal stuff, where they assume herbal = 100% safe and/or “I can go ahead and take fifty-seven cups of this, it can’t hurt me because after all, it’s just herbal.”

And I wasn’t comfortable with having the herbal-rookie boyfriend crashing around deciding to try something labeled “headache – six drops in tea” with some weird bunch of letters on it that was actually my code for “go light on the drops and use a tea with ginger in it, otherwise your stomach will go bat-poop crazy on your poor backside” and then put a SQUIRT of it into his COFFEE or something because if six drops is good, well hell’s bells, a DOLLOP must be better.

So recently, I’ve started adding some herbal goodies back into my life; still no eye of newt or Deathly White Mushroom Spore or anything like that, but some powdered mixes and stuff to work on joint inflammation, appetite issues (I ain’t got none) and (ahem) aging female stuff; between the cost of supplements and my hippie tendencies, I’d just kind of like…things I understand. Things I could, in a pinch, grow, dry, powder, and blend myself. Without a prescription, without having to go through the “Oh, is this for female troubles? Because ya, {long involved story in front of God and everybody about her own female troubles} and I was wondering about this stuff…” conversation at the register.

It’s awesome living in a smallish town, you know? We do that stuff, chat at the registers and lots of folks have no problem at all digging right on into yer personal beeswax and sometimes, I find myself thinking, YA KNOW… back in Da City, ain’t nobody woulda said nothin’ about nothin’ and yet here I am, discussing whether or not comfry is good for irregular periods right in front of this poor, squirming, oh so very male truck driver.

ANYWAY. So I’ve been ordering my herbs from a favorite old source, Rosemary’s Garden, with a few fill-ins on the side from here and there. (The one problem with getting more and more and more “into” this kind of thing is, you find yourself going, “Yes, but, do you have the kind that is grown on this particular slope at such and so a time of year?” – which is ludicrous in some ways but, possibly due to the power of suggestion, you are nevertheless convinced that ONLY this very-specific thing will do. I can’t justify this in the slightest. Really. I just can’t.)

Now, at first I said, bravely, “Don’t bother with all that capsule-this and dissolve-powder that, I’m used to herbal teas and rather enjoy them even when they’re a tad different or bitter or what-have-you, I’ll just brew it. That would be simplest. And cheapest. Yes. Let’s do that.”

Yeah. Um. Some of this stuff tastes like…well, night mare piss. And sometimes they’re…stinky.

As in, if I tried to quietly make myself a cup or small pot of this at work, I would clear the whole building out. All thirty-three floors of it.

AND, the one blend I use most smells perfectly pleasant (whew!), but sets off my gag reflex big time when in tea form. I’m not kidding, even though it smells fine or even pleasant, and doesn’t exactly hit the tongue badly, I get about two swallows in and I’m gagging.

But, it works pretty darned well. So I said, said I, “OK, well, fine. I’ll just switch to capsules, whatever.”

And then I went looking for empty capsules…because of course I'm too damned ~~cheap~~ thrifty to discard what I have and just buy pre-filled capsules, are you crazy? AND FURTHERMORE, I have no intention of doing that going forward because price-per-dose of the raw materials is, like, less than a nickel BUT the price-per-dose is damn near a dollar if it is pre-capsuled.

Pffft. Like I can’t handle filling my own capsules…used to do it all the time, back in the day, yessir, and that was after I walked five miles in the snow uphill both ways barefoot, with nothing but a baked potato in my pocket to warm my hands…

Ahem.

Yes.

Well.

Empty gel capsules aren’t exactly hard to get (my local health food store had them, bless their hearts), but, you will get some mighty odd looks if you walk into your neighborhood pharmacy asking for them. And this is where Tama once again demonstrates that her familiarity with the drug cultures is somewhere between ‘none’ and ‘what are we talking about again?’ – I’m all, “Oh hai, ya, do you have, you know, empty capsules? That I could fill with herb powder?”

And the pharmacist is all, {eyebrows crawling clear to the back of her head}, “Nooooooo, we don’t…carry…anything like that.”

Took me three failed attempts and three rounds of wondering why they were looking at me like I had sprouted five heads to realize that waitasecond…California… “herbal powder”…ooooooooooh, they think I’m using…ooooooooooooh!!!!

I live a very sheltered life, really, you know?!

ANYWAY. When I finally hit the health food store looking for capsules – where they immediately knew what I was talking about and that I meant no really, pleasant-smelling-but-somehow-still-nasty-tasting herbal powder I can’t get past my gag reflex, instead of nudge-nudge-wink-wink-herb-powder-heh-heh-heh – she immediately handed me an enormous bag of maybe 200 capsules, each approximately the size of the Chrysler building.

I set them down disdainfully.

“Don’t you have anything in more of a, say, 00?” I asked with the air of someone who knows what the @*^&@ they’re talking about – which, thanks to Wikipedia, I sort of did. But not really. Because she immediately fired back.

“Wellllllllllllllllll…what are you filling them with again? Umhmmm…{knowledgeable pause, setting a long-fingered hand gently on the discarded product with the air of a wise woman} You may find you prefer these in the long run, because the standard dose for that in powdered form is roughly a tablespoon, is it not? The 00 will require between ten and twelve pills for a single dose, whereas these would be only three to four…”

Now friends. It has been many, many years since I messed with any of this, you know, myself. And I happen to know she’s right: The single dose is going to be roughly a tablespoon of the fine powder version - which is a lot to be cramming into capsules at one time.

But. Do I take the nice lady’s advice and tell myself that, after all, it would be four pills versus a dozen and I would probably be happier overall with filling four (4) capsules, not twelve (12), two to maybe three times a day? And that on the whole, I'd rather have to grimace down four super-sized pills (which would be exactly like taking two large vitamins at once, four times) than repeat the two-large-vitamin swallowing thing SIX times? Practice a little humility and try what somebody who actually deals with this stuff about every day recommends?

Shoot no.

Of course not.

That would have been intelligent.

Instead, for some bizarre reason, I decided I had to act like I No Really knew what I was doing. So I politely insisted that nooooo, I would really rather something more in the 00-size.

She smiled pleasantly, took back the Chrysler-building-in-gel-capsule-form, and handed me a nice bag of 750 00-sized capsules. (For point of reference, these are about the size of a ‘large-side-but-still-standard’ vitamin pill.) (The other ones are, like, something you would use to medicate your horse. Swear.)

And I went on my smug way, confident that I had shown my clear empty-gel-capsule-filling and self-knowledge superiority.

Uh-huh.

A couple hours go, I filled a dozen of the damned things for my pre-dinner dose of digestive + nervous system + joint tonic.

I am having second (third) (fifth) (thirtieth) thoughts about those super-sized gel caps. These 00’s are much smaller than they seem in the bag. My fingers have grown somehow larger. Plus I can’t see what I’m doing. AND YES, I’M WEARING MY GLASSES.

…or would be, if my Gran hadn’t thought they were hers and taken them home with her at Thanksgiving I DON’T WANNA TALK ABOUT IT, OK?!...

{sob} My life, I could almost hate it sometimes…

(But I’m still not buying pre-filled capsules. Because cost savings, people, EXTREME cost savings…)

Knitting sugar

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:42:00 +0000

I can't put my finger on why EXACTLY, but every time I pick up this sweater to work on it, the word "confection" comes to mind.

Dear Life: Seriously, knock it off already

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 06:39:00 +0000

If I didn’t know better, I would swear that somebody is just messin’ with me right now. Like, there’s some kind of Top Secret Experiment on, to see just how many things can be piled on top of me before I completely lose my cool.

We had the windshield crack on the van – like, from side to side. Thanks to insurance it was only $200, but it had to be a crack big enough that we needed a whole replacement…not a small crack that would have been filled free.

The car then developed a slow leak in one tire. Which we ignored, refilling the tire whenever it got too low, until it became a less-slow leak. And then we ended up with a whole new set of tires, because the ones we had were (as it turned out) fairly old and weather-beaten and also had slow leaks here and there.

Apparently, if you park a vehicle outside 24/7 for six years (or so), it can cause wear and tear on the tires. Who knew. (OK, yes, I did know that. What I hadn’t really understood was the passage of time part. I thought those tires were “pretty new, maybe what, two-three years old?” right up until they proved they were manufactured in 2001, and hadn’t been purchased since the new owners took over in 2004, soooo, were probably installed somewhere between 2001 and 2003-ish. Oh.)

Both of my ovens are now completely unreliable. They might heat up to the temperature you ask for…then again…they might not.. And if they do, they might not stay there. They might simply slowly lose heat, or they might drop a hundred degrees and then hasten to make amends.

This does not work well with a lot of baked goods. Which I make a lot of. Especially in times of stress and duress. Because nothing says everything is going to be JUST FINE like bread-stuffs. Copiously spiked with chocolate. And possibly butter. Or filled with dried cherries, apricots and cream cheese. Or…you know? I’m going to go ahead and stop now. (Tart cherries canned in Plain Old Water were on sale last week. I know, right? That’s, like, a supermarket miracle. Those suckers are never on sale, and the sugar-infused ones just don’t make pie quite the same.) (Wait, I thought I said I was going to stop a minute ago…)

The ovens too are “old,” as defined by Sears. I’ve had them repaired three times since we bought them, and each time was a greater ordeal. At this point, I suspect new parts are produced by monks living in Siberia, who hand-craft each part out of recycled inner tubes only in the brief Siberian summer, making five of them total each year.

And one of the burners on my gas range stopped working. I eventually got it working again through copious use of ~~cuss words~~ exotic tools (like unbent paperclips, wire brushes, pocket knives and chopsticks), but now I regard it with Great Suspicion because it still acts a little…funny, sometimes. Doesn’t want to light, or only wants to throw flames around three-quarters of the burner. Hmmmmm…

Plus the dishwasher – which has never done a particularly good job washing dishes – now does even less of a good job.

Yes. We have to wash the dishes before we put them in the dishwasher. If we do not, we end up with whatever was on each dish evenly sprayed on every other dish, and then baked on. For meals that last a lifetime.

{head-desk}

My problem there, of course, is that I don’t want to “just” replace them. Oh no. What I want is…well. Something simple, and reliable, and it doesn’t have to be, you know, gold-plated or anything…but…well…maybe…just…{all in one breath} a pair of industrial wall ovens [at least one of them convection] plus a separate bread oven WITH humidity control and then for the range eight burners should do just fine only one of them has to be that dual-type where you can have either two regular sized or one GINORMOUS burner, and of course if you’re going to have THAT you really NEED to go ahead and replace that remarkably crappy refrigerator with maybe a walk-in restaurant-sized deal PLUS I could surely use two or even three dishwashers and a walk-in pantry with maybe a climate-controlled area that can be a ‘root cellar’ would be nice.

Hey. They can be either Viking of Wolfe – I’m not picky or anything. And, yeah, I guess we’ll have to go ahead and build a new addition onto the house, because I have no idea where we’d actually put all of that otherwise…

I am only about $27,999 short of the $28,000 I’d need to get those appliances. And we don’t discuss the cost of an addition, because I’ve already had one nosebleed today and don’t need another one. (Captain Adventure, who didn’t mean to – he was just throwing back his head and my nose got in the way. Ow.)

The husband’s commuter card won’t work. The money is there, but it won’t auto-load. We suspect there’s some kind of algorithm going on there where they’re trying to match months to each other or something. Argh.

Then the health card got suspended. Because $2.19 of one of the dental bills wasn’t “verifiable.” Wha?

Then we had the tri-annual psych exam for Captain Adventure. Which went pretty well, except that the psychiatrist says that while he’s super-extra-crazy smart and that this will probably help him blend in a bit, he’s actually more obviously autistic-autistic than he was three years ago. He’s going to go with the old method of scoring, though, which still drops him into the higher-functioning category. But in a few months, he expects, he would have to use this other one, which would drop him squarely into this bucket. Which is a hard bucket to get out of, so, let’s keep him in this one as long as we can.

And then we get the call that he has been deemed ineligible for services because he is too high functioning. Frankly, they’re right. We don’t actually use any of their services, precisely because he is too high functioning for them. We don’t need respite care for him, he doesn’t require intervention services from them, and pretty much, most of what they have to offer is stuff we have no use for because he just doesn’t need it.

The one thing that has me wincing is that we’re also losing that third party observer when we have school-stuff to deal with; because dudes, it can be hard to know whether something is a good idea or not. And right now, there’s naturally a lot of effort being poured into how do we NOT have to pay for anything. Budgets are tight, blah blah blah.

So it’s been nice to have somebody who actually knows both how this stuff works, and Captain Adventure, to call and say, “Hey, they wanna do this – is that crazy? Or the best idea in the history of ever?”

Kids: 1. Mommy: 0.

Danger Mouse is having a rough time in middle school. Epic. Fail. She’s smart, but soooooo ADHD. Without the teacher looming over her, she is back to kindergarten in terms of her ability to keep her business together. And naturally, she’s got a teacher who is a bit…less than proactive about giving us advanced notice about what-all is going on with her. We can’t get her current assignments from him, so we’re stuck trying to winkle that information from her…and since the whole problem is that her brain was dancing with squirrels in the Rainbow Princess Palace when the assignment was being written on the board…yeah. Problem. And, he doesn’t update the post-mortem in a timely fashion either, sooo, we “discover” that she’s failing when it is way too late to do anything about it.

Kids: 2. Mommy: 0.

THEN, Boo Bug got her usual winter cough. She has gotten this cough every winter, right when the heaters first start coming on round town (not that I have any suspicions around sources, mind you), without fail, since she was six weeks old. This year, though, she started complaining about it hurting to breathe, or that her tummy hurt, and that made me go, “…dude, wait, wha?”, so I dragged her to the doctor, who promptly slapped about five thousand kinds of inhalers into my hands, each with its own complicated set of directions, and now I’ve got an asthmatic in the house. And I’m supposed to get my carpets professionally cleaned and also my duct work, plus I have to run, well, pretty much everything through the washing machine, which should be set to “kill.”

But at least we already use the Extra Tiny Holed Filters for the central system, and change them regularly. So, there’s that.

Kids: 3. Mommy: 0.

Then Eldest came along and…wait. {thinks for a minute} Well. Other than being able to wear my clothes much better than I do, and causing the coffee to disappear faster than I expect lately (she doesn’t actually drink that much of it – she just likes making it, it’s her father and I that are ~~benefitting~~ suffering on this deal), Eldest has actually been really low maintenance all year. Good grades, good behavior, careful with her allowance money…the only thing I had to go, “ARRRRRGH!” about all year was that she was showing some anime to Danger Mouse that was…ahem…slightly questionable for a younger audience.

But only slightly and in a way that probably shot over Danger Mouse’s head like a rocket ship already at 45,000 feet.

So, Kids: 3. Mommy: 1. A come-from-behind victory is still possible! Woot!!!

My hip doesn’t like the change in the weather, which is throwing my sleeping patterns off. My back keeps getting thrown out over Silly Stuff, like reaching down to pick up a ball of yarn off the floor or something. (I can shovel. I can vacuum. I can vigorously scrub the walls and ceiling in the kitchen [don’t ask]. But picking up a rubber band, or a 2 ounce ball of baby yarn? {crrrrrack!!!} What the heck, Me?!?!)

The husband is trying to get coworkers to come here for a potluck chorus rehearsal. Here. I told him he is only allowed to have people over if he makes sure the house is clean, dammit. (Not merely clean. Clean dammit. I was very clear on this point.)

Prediction: There will still be piles of laundry on the dining room table, the drying rack full of Unmentionables will still be in the middle of the music room floor (!!!!), the children will have pulled every object from every drawer in the Den, and there will probably still be dishes from the weekend marinating on the counters. Betcha. (I will be leaving tomorrow at about 4:30 a.m., and won’t be home before about 7:00 p.m.. The rehearsers are arriving at around 5:30. In the Absence of Me…yeah. This place is going to be a wreck.) (MAYBE…I just won’t come home! That’s it! I shall run away! To somewhere tropical! I’ll change my name and dye my hair and no one will ever be the wiser, bwahahaha, it’s BRILLIANT, brilliant I tell you, MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!)

And also there is all kinds of stuff I’m supposed to be doing for this same potluck. I do not have time for any of it. I shall have to invent the time. Fortunately, I have magic powers and do that sort of thing all the time.

Unfortunately, I usually wake up before I derive any actual good from all my magic workings. Curses, foiled again.

AND THEN, our nanny tosses off casually that she has an interview this morning. And then she got the job. And it’s “only” on the weekends and “only” impacts her a little bit on Fridays and Mondays, which we already had to arrange for one of us to be working from home on due to her school schedule.

And I swear to Dog, I had A Moment.

I want her to have this job. It’s better for her in terms of building her resume and all that. And we know full well we’ll lose her fairly soon-ish; she’s gotten her phlebotomy license, after all, and is about halfway through nursing school. This isn’t a Forever Job. This is a ‘get me through school’ job.

But I’m still just kind of…pouting. And feeling a bit sorry for myself. Don’t I have enough on my plate right now, Life? Seriously? Can you please just STOP with all the Drama for a while?

We need to get this into production by December 8…and this by December 6…and then the initial round of testing for That Really Big Huge Thing starts on January 9, so, you will have the whole thing recoded and ready to go by then, right…oh, and don’t forget this and that and the other and what the heck is this QC item…?

WORST OF ALL…I need to go to bed. There is no time to make cookies or tortillas or pies or anything. I will have to bear up without any fresh carbohydrates to see me through. WHEN WILL IT STOP, THE PAIN?!?!

(Oooooh, probably around…March 30. You know, when this contract expires and I’m no longer employed? So, um, yeah. There’s…that.)

(Seriously, I think…I need another Advil…)

Next, on Geriatric Adventures

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 22:30:00 +0000

I almost got into an accident on the way home from the optometrists today. Totally the fault of my new – and dreaded – bifocals.

SEE, I was driving along? And then I glanced down at the gauges? And they were, like, sharp and clear and easy to read?

And then I was so distracted by the Look At Road Signs, Look at Gas Gauge, Look at Road Signs Again, Look At Speedometer game that I almost drove off the road.

Bifocals: They are dangerous.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m still way getting used to them. I’m having to learn how to hold my head so that I’m peering through the right “half” of the lens for whatever-all it is that I’m doing.

Reading labels: Looking down.

Reading store shelf tags: Looking up.

But I have to admit, I did not expect them to be so…cool.

Nor did I fully understand just how…wide the variance was, between my long and short distance vision.

I knew that I constantly played the “glasses on, glasses off” game – off to look at your face, on to read your presentation, off to drive, on to shop. Except off again to see the BIG signs. But then on again to read the tags. Argh.

And while I was getting them tweaked around to more or less fit me, I was grousing that they were going to be worse than before. Worse, I tell you.

ALL YOU PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM? You are crazy.

They suck.

Then I started driving, poised to rip them off my face if they proved distracting.

But they were fine. Actually, it was very nice. I generally rely on my keen sense of direction rather than street signs , because, uh, I can’t see them all that well. With or without my glasses.

Now I could see them.

And then when I glanced down to check how fast I was going, it really was kind of startling. It was so sharply focused – where I’m used to just kind of knowing that around there is the 40 mph mark – that I really was driving a little distracted for a minute there.

Glance up, glance down, glance up, glance down…

Yet again, I am astonished by the cleverness of my species. Of all the things to figure out, you know? Not only mashing two different prescription strengths together in the first place, but to then figure out how to do it so that there isn’t even the barest hint of a line between ‘reading’ and ‘distance’ – that’s danged clever.

Y’all were right. They’re not bad. They’re actually really neat, and exactly what I needed.

Still don’t like that part, though. Because inside my own head, I am still maybe…oh…twenty-six. Maybe. Occasional downgrades to eleven, especially when I’m playing Toontown and some kid is mean to me, like, saying my hat is dumb or that I’m not using the right gags or something (What? I only play it to make sure it remains a suitable environment for the kids. Because I am a crazy-awesome and devoted mother that way.)

I have no choice when it comes to growing old. Unless I manage to get myself killed off earlier somehow [not high on my “to-do list,” thanks], it’s kind of inevitable for me. But growing up…that I can resist until the bitter end. And I intend to be one of those ultra-embarrassing-yet-oddly-cool grandmothers someday.

With a motorcycle.

And bifocals with big, purple frames, possibly with little bug wings coming off the sides of them. Because how awesome would THAT be?!

I know. I’ll go away now, and let you ponder the awesome of enormous purple-framed bifocals now with big old bug wings coming off the sides of them.

Why Tama will never make it in fashion design: Exhibit One…

Multi-Linguist Faux Pas

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:54:00 +0000

At Stitches last year, I took a workshop in Continental style knitting. Being left-handed and all, I picked it up very quickly, and it felt very natural - or at least, like something that would fast BECOME natural.

However, as it turns out, it causes the tendons in my left elbow to start screaming really fast, so...I stick with throwing rather than picking.

Except that occasionally, I forget which language I'm speaking, and absent-mindedly work a row or two Continental-style.

My gauge is different when I knit Continental. Not by a huge, obvious amount, which I might possibly notice right away, but by an ever-so-slightly amount that I only notice Much Later...when I'm trying to smooth out a "weird wrinkle" and go, "Wait...is that row of stitches just a little SMALLER or something?!"

I doubt you can see it in this, because it's definitely like that "enormous" face-eating sit only visible to others if they use a microscope, but, yeah. Did it again. There's a "wrinkle" all the way around it, where I sat knitting away in tired, brainless Continental for an entire round and a half.

Oh well. It's for me...and thus I am going with the theory that I don't generally hold stilll long enough for such a minute detail to be noticed by anyone.

Which feels much better than 'nobody would ever be surprised by my attire being Not Exactly Neiman Marcus.'

In other news, my laptop is taking approximately six hundred years to boot this morning (I think it is installing something), so I have time to tell you my latest Adventures on BART. I know - RIVETING!

So the other morning, I'm sitting there...on the 5:15 train put of Dublin, knitting with my eyes closed. Because there has to be SOMETHING good about five hundred miles of plain stockinette in the round, right? Plus, probably thanks to the Power of Suggestion, my right eye (the one with the blister) has been sore and stingy ever since my eye exam, so I find myself wanting to "rest" it more.

And sitting there with only ONE eye closed while knitting is, IMHO, even WEIRDER than siting there with BOTH of them closed. Be just my luck that the next serial killer would decide I was giving him a come-hither wink or something.

So, sitting there...knitting away on my fat-yarn, round-and-round, plain old stockinette...with my eyes closed.

Suddenly, this cold, skeletal hand clamps on my knee.

I jumped ten feet straight up, let out an ear-piercing squeak, and opened my eyes to find a 390-year-old Chinese lady squinting at me anxiously.

"Are you asleep while you work?!" she demanded.

As always when confronted with these situations, which happen to me, it seems, so often that you'd THINK - wrongly - that I would be downright SMOOTH at handling them, I went, "{strangled nonsensical sounds, vaguely word like, more confused than indignant, while inside my self-esteem is screaming, "Man the cannons! Load the adverbs! View at will - let's show this blackguard what happens to those who dare come against us!"}

(Aside: I'm getting worried. I think my laptop is STUCK. Many of my coworkers have suffered Blue Screen of Death lately...hope MegaBank isn't force-loading something stupid on us here...)

And then, we ended up chatting all the way to Embarcadro. About knitting, crochet, grandchildren, BART train cleanliness, lack of work ethic in Kids Today (ohmygah, bifocals and discourses on the work ethics of the latest generation - where's my cane? Where's my fiber pill? YOU KIDS GET OFFA MAH LAWN!!!!!!).

Very nice older-than-me lady.

Could work on her awareness of Personal Space a bit, though.

OK...time out, laptop. Time for a hard reboot. See y'all on the flip side...and watch out for those concerned old ladies with cold hands and vice-like grips.

They can REALLY ruin a good meditational reverie.

But does it amount to a hills of beans?

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 04:15:00 +0000

It’s a funny thing about this line of work: Everything is interconnected. Really understanding things is seldom simple. A doesn’t just go to B in a nice, sedate line…it probably darts around the world, picking up lint from here, there and everywhere, skitters around getting updated and appended, deleted and re-added, a million times.

Then we get it and do stuff, based on other stuff.

It’s like leaning down from your chair to pick up a cord you see lying on the ground, and tugging on it. Huh. Nothing happened…that you know of.

…meanwhile, three rooms over and unbeknownst to you, an entire house of cards somebody has been working on day and night for five years just fell right over…

What I’m working on right now is one of those things where I’m simultaneously learning something completely new, and bringing everything I already know into the frame to see if the overall picture is making sense.

Also pronounced, “Falling down massive rabbit holes for hours on end trying to figure out how this field, right here, gets populated…”

It’s worse than the ‘one more row’ syndrome. In a lot of ways, it really is like a video game – time passes without me being aware of just how much of it has gone by. I’m constantly missing my trains, because I was ‘just one more thinging’ when I should have been shutting down and leaving.

On the one hand, it’s a tremendous blessing. The days go by fast, I’m not bored, and I’m paid rather well for doing it.

On the other hand…I’m tired. Really, REALLY tired. I don’t realize it until I finally pry myself away – and then it hits me like a truck. I make grandiose promises about all the things I’m going to do to achieve a better “home/life balance,” and then promptly get sucked back into minute little details, until I lose the very last of my brain power, ambition and energy and just kind of slump over in my chair, growling at anybody who comes near me and refusing to budge.

And then my desk at home looks like this.

Yes way.

Which of course, only makes me more grumpy.

I get up too early, and get home too late. I think too much about it. Then I say to myself, “Dude, seriously – you don’t own this. You’re out of here in March. Relax.”

But instead, I end up going, “Holy crap, that’s right, I’ve only got until March to get this thing put to bed!!!!”

Sigh.

I am hopeless.

Really, truly hopeless.

And then I wonder…at the end of the day…will any of it end up amounting to a hill of beans?

First round of kidney beans

Eh, probably not.

But I’ll have fun with it anyway.

Because otherwise, well…it would be no fun.

And what fun is that?

I’d roll my eyes, but it might hurt

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 03:52:00 +0000

I finally got around to getting an eye exam. It’s only been four years, and I’ve only been kvetching about my glasses “not working” for two of them, so, this is practically a new speed record for me.

Ahem.

ANYWAY, so, I made the appointment and then I dutifully trucked myself into the tidy little office where they proceeded to take all of my paperwork and blah blah blah, and then they asked me to read lines and barely kept from snickering when they handed me the card and said, “Just read this as you normally would…” and I held it out almost at arm’s length and then tilted it until it was almost horizontal while lifting my chin up and no matter how I tried not to, still squinted trying to make the little dots hold still and be WORDS, dammit.

For everybody except me, the fact that I was going to be getting bifocals was a foregone conclusion. I know they have no lines. I know nobody else is going to necessarily know I’ve “graduated” to bifocals. I know that eye health and comfort comes first. And I also know that just because you have bifocals does not mean you are contractually obligated to put on silly looking hats or start wearing nothing but muumuus.

{kicks at dirt, mutters} I just didn’t want to hafta NEED them yet…

But, I do. I so totally do. I’ve been doing the ‘schoolmarm’ thing for years, where I’ll yank my glasses waaaaaaay down my nose and then peer up at you over them. This is because I can’t read without them, BUT, I can’t see your face with them.

This is why mankind invented bifocals.

ANYWAY. Having already received this unsettling news, I spent a rather sulky fifteen minutes as my eyes dilated (joy) picking out new frames (fortunately with a great deal of assistance from a more fashionable staff member…I don’t think I’ll look like too huge a dork in the new ones).

And then we started the final phase of the eye exam.

And then the nice doctor went, “Huh.”

And then we went through the “look up, gooooood, now down? Goooooood. Now, all the way to the left…gooooooooooood…” game again.

And then he said, casually, “~~Tragically, you are going to be blind within a month, BLIND, BLIND I TELL YOU, OH, THE GRIEF AND SORROW OF IT ALL, YOU ARE DOOMED, DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED, POOR CREATURE!!!!~~ OK, so, I’m seeing something that might be a slight anomaly between your left and right eye. I’d like to use a stronger dilating drop and see if I can get a better look at it.”

To which I said, eloquently, “Oh, uh, rokay…?”

And then he seared the top five layers of…um…whatever eyeballs are actually made of…off my eyes. And rendered them incapable of filtering any light. Plus put me in this bizarre place where my long distance vision was actually better than usual but my ability to fine-focus (reading, television, KNITTING!!!!!!!) was so badly impaired it was just…not OK.

But at least then he was able to categorically state that it wasn’t this thing, it was this other thing, which is not exactly common or particularly good but it’s also not anything bad per se except that it can be an indicator of something-something-something and that I should use lubricating drops and come back in six months so we could see if it got any bigger or smaller or perhaps built a little house for itself and started homesteading – because the cattle could be a real @*^&@ on your retinas, you know?

(Optometry in general leaves me feeling like a magician’s rabbit…one minute I’m all snug in my warm, dark little hole and the next I’m being held up in front of a shouting throng by some overdressed con artist thinking, “Wait, WTF?! That was a hat?! When did that become a hat?! And what does abracadabra even mean?!?!”) (“Is it better one, or two? Gooood. One, or two? Gooooooood. One, or two, or about the same?” how did he KNOW they were going to be about the same?!?! - sometimes, I half want to lie and say ‘oh, no, two was much better!’ just to mess with him…) (…except that then, I’d end up with Cyclops Vision or something, so, I don’t. But I think about it, every single time…)

Afterwards, as I was ~~complaining~~ mentioning that a) this really hurt and b) like, the diffused lighting felt an awful lot like lightning bolts zapping straight into my brain and c) my ability to read the receipts and stuff they kept shoving at me was what might be termed minimal, he tosses off ever-so-casually that Oh. Ya. Blue eyes tend to be like that, actually. They take the drops harder and more thoroughly, and they also tend to experience more of the unpleasant side effects such as light sensitivity and ‘flashing’…and that sometimes they take longer to shake it off as well. Should be no more than six hours but could actually take a DAY OR TWO, he tosses over his shoulder as he runs for his life…

Only the thought of how much the bright orange jumpsuit would have hurt my eyes right about then kept me from murdering him.

I had planned to be out of the (home) office for about two hours for this. I ended up having to take the rest of the entire day off. I had some delusions at first. I got home and unlocked my work laptop and…a bunch of…ink smears, floated up at me. In a pathetic and useless gesture, I put on my old glasses. Great. Now, it’s even worse.

I read through one simple email. I picked out the words one by one. I began to develop a pounding headache. The light from the screen was torture. The words were twisted, blurry, dancing-dancing-dancing. Dammit.

So I opened up an email and typed in the generic distribution group I use for general ‘administrivia’ messages – when I’m going to be out of the office or have brought cookies to work or whatever. And I typed in a message about my eyes and that I was going to go ~~sulk~~ rest them in a nice, dark room and give them a little while to un-dilate themselves.

And then I proceeded to compulsively try again to read things. Again. And again. And again. And when I wasn’t trying to read? I was pacing. Or, trying to go outside to look at the garden. Which I could not do because the light, the light, it burnssssssssss…!!

Yeah. As it turns out, I’m not very good at waiting patiently for something.

I know. It was a shock to me, too.

Because I’m a slow learner, I then took out my knitting – which is this Bernat Fair Isle Yoke Sweater…which I only just cast on and the pattern for which reads like, “First, do knit-one-purl-one rib forever…then do straight stockinette for forever plus five years…and then it will get mildly interesting!”

I finally settled on this project, after a great deal of indecision, precisely because of its simplicity – because I felt it was something I could continue working on, no matter how tired I was, how dark it was on the train or bus, how stressed out or distracted I was, etc. etc. etc.

So I said to myself, with great confidence, “It’s OK, Self. You can still work on this. Heck, you worked on it all the way home yesterday while staring out the window most of the time! You don’t need to be able to see-see to work on it!!”

And then I learned something. I frequently think I’m “not looking” at my knitting – and it’s true. I can knit in a movie theater. I can watch TV and knit. And I do stare out the train window a lot while knitting simple things.

But.

I also glance, in passing at it a lot. And without these swift glances, I become lost. And once you become lost on a k1p1 rib?

You end up with seed stitch.

Possibly quite a lot of it.

Sigh.

And the whole time, my eyes were burning. And itching. And even indirect sunlight was the bane of my existence.

It was not the best of days.

Plus.

I’m getting bifocals.

{pause to contemplate the emotional trauma}

You know…I never should have gotten out of bed today.

I just shouldn’t have.

Like, love, life

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:30:00 +0000

This morning as I groped in darkness around the kitchen, I made a CHILLING discovery: We were almost out of coffee.

{dramatic music!}

How could this have happened? Dear $Deity, HOW?!?!

There was just barely enough left for two scant travel mugs of liquid ambition...and it is my habit to make AND take two Contigos worth with me every day. Which would have made this news of having enough for same a big sigh of relief EXCEPT that there is this SLIGHT wrinkle called "the husband will also want - nay, NEED - coffee this morning.

I waffled for a moment.

Then I left the second for the husband.

And I will now preserve my dignity and the sense of nobility around this by not giving the precise count of how many times I sort of wished I hadn't when my share ran out not only less than halfway to BART, but when I was arguably only a quarter awake.

And then I arrived at the office, marched into the Starbucks, grabbed a bag of coffee and presented my gift card.

And then they gave me a free peppermint mocha. Because they are my REAL, TRUE FRIENDS.

Plus I have a carrot muffin. And it has dried cherries it. And I just started a new sweater that will hopefully get a whack of bulky yarn out of my stash, thus making it look that much less crazy-alot.

So to sum up: I like ny coffee.

I (apparently) love my husband.

And life is good.

An advantage to the early hour

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:14:00 +0000

Even though I didn't notice it for almost an hour, nobody witnessed my demented post-hat-wearing hair.

Or try to steal my apple turnovers.

Which is good. Because I would have slapped their hands HARD if they had.

It’s perfectly logical

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 02:23:00 +0000

So, a couple hours ago I was heading upstairs to deal with the Perma-Pile™ (you know, that pile of crap that, no matter how often or diligently you shovel, always seems to persist in the same.exact.spot?!) in the hallway outside our bedroom door – the very last thing on my extensive ‘things to do instead of having fun on my PTO days’ list.

Yesterday, I slogged through about two and a half (possibly three) hours of anime while (almost) finishing my Galatian sweater. Because I am THAT dedicated to the cause.

Our nanny was here today, because it seems a tad unfair to cause my unpaid days off to result in her having unpaid days off. And besides, it left me free to do other things, like remembering at the last second that I wanted to go to Supercuts for a new “look” (just a little less ‘drowned rat’ and perhaps a bit more ‘can actually SEE because the bangs aren’t actually in my eyeballs, thx’) and get the ^*&@ing tire fixed on Albert the Civic – which I did not actually accomplish because funny story there…SEE, the tires came from Big O. Which means that they will fix or replace them free of charge when These Sorts of Things happen.

Which means that I am taking the car to Big O for the repair, because of course I am.

So I dutifully limp over there on my pretty-much-flat tire (I didn’t want to put any extra air in it, because I wanted to be able to point at the obviously deflated tire and say, “THAT ONE!” and not have them give me the ‘oh goodie, another crazy female who doesn’t know a perfectly fine tire from a flat one!’ look because I’d just topped it off with air on my way over.)

And as I was about to pull into their parking lot, there, in huge letters on their otherwise empty window, was the notice WE HAVE MOVED, and a new address.

Huh. Well. Alrighty then.

So I went the wrong way on Eleventh (because, of course I did) and then I tried to turn around and there was this weird ‘I didn’t see you, you didn’t see me, and then Crazy Happened’ thing that happened in the parking lot I was using as my turnaround spot, and man.

Nobody hit anybody else and all like that, but let’s just say that if a cop had happened to be driving by right when we were doing that fancy little ballet we put on this afternoon? He woulda made his ticket quota for the month.

I strongly suspect that my dance partner hit the accelerator when she meant to hit the brake. And this resulted in her suddenly bulleting at me as I was braking because I was doing the “Ack, there’s another car already in this particular corner of the space-time continuum?!” thing, and then I realized that I was about to get creamed BUT!, I could totally get out of the way if I pulled a kind of 007-Meets-Mario thing, so that’s what I did, however, it was a rural-restaurant parking lot, which isn’t so much as parking lot as a field with lots and lots and lots of heavy gravel?

Eeeeeeeyeah. Looked like Albert was auditioning for a spot on the next Dukes of Hazzard movie or something.

Plus I spilled my imaginary martini. Curses.

a-HEM. Moving on.

And then I went the right way on Eleventh for about sixty nine miles until I found them!

Except!

They aren’t quite moved yet! There are many, many cars in their parking lot and every evidence that eventually there will be a tire shop there…but no actual humans to be found.

So. The tire still has a slow leak.

But it is now nicely filled up, because when I got home I used our air compressor to fill it up. Again. (It will be moderately pancaked in about four-five days.) (Argh.)

BUT WHEN I GOT HOME!, I said to myself, “Self! There is only one thing left on your to-do list, and that is the upstairs Perma-Pile™. GO FORTH AND MAKE WITH THE HOME-FINDING FOR THE PERMA-PILE!!!”

Thus encouraged, I charged upstairs and began putting things away! I put away three books! I removed two bags of donations to their waiting spot in the garage! I put away two mailing boxes, and my seed container.

And then our nanny said, innocently, “Hey. Do you have any good crochet scarf patterns that use four colors of yarn?”

And that’s why the next three hours (and counting) were spent on Ravelry.

And why two of my ‘learn to knit’ books and three sets of needles went home with our nanny.

And why I’m suddenly up to my knees in yarn that has been pulled out of everywhere to be held up against this or that pattern, evaluated for suitableness of both pattern and train-ability, and not put away again after being discarded because the next pattern might be perfect for it.

And why the Perma-Pile™ remains four feet high and probably will stay that way for another six weeks or so.

It’s just perfectly logical, right?

I meant to do my work today…

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:18:00 +0000

I meant to do my work today,

But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,

And a butterfly flitted across the field,

And all the leaves were calling me.

And the wind went sighing over the land,

Tossing the grasses to and fro,

And a rainbow held out its shining hand,

So what could I do but laugh and go? -- Richard LeGallienne

Which would be awesome. But I’m not getting anything done because, sensing that I had the day off work today so I could get OTHER things done, my stomach immediately decided to pull the ‘every time you stand up, I am going to threaten to purge everything you’ve eaten for the last three months!’ gag.

(Actually, I suspect it is either a protest against the higher dose of Motrin my doc has me on lately, or possibly that I should not have eaten dim sum for lunch yesterday. Or both.)

I’m really starting to suspect a conspiracy, though. It’s becoming highly suspicious to me, the way that whenever I plan a day off work-work so I can finally!!! get around to {task list items}, some part of my body will immediately kick up the complaints. My back goes out, or my sinuses get infected, my stomach starts roiling around or my hip does that thing where when I walk it’s all like, “{pop!} CRACK! hobble-hobble numb leg! tingling toes! {pop-pop-pop!}” until I’m forced to sit down and kvetch about it – with many obscenities – for, like, three solid hours or something.

This seldom happens on regular work days, you know? (Possibly because by the nature of my work, sitting down for three solid hours is kind of, um, well, what I do.)

I could understand it if I didn’t really wanna do {task list items}; if it was all like, “Oh, MAN! {heavy, long-suffering sigh!} {dragging of feet} why me, why me, OH ALAS, my life is haaaaaaard…{gnashing of teeth}!”

Because then, well, my body is just helping me out, right? It gets that on the whole, I would rather be playing video games or writing long-winded rants about nothing in particular (what?), or reading long-winded rants about nothing in particular, or giggling at silly cat pictures, or watching anime while finishing something that has been languishing in the ‘too complicated / big / whatever for train knitting’ bucket for six hundred years or whatever.

But these are things I’ve been looking forward to doing. Things that are, to me, either themselves pleasant and peaceful tasks (like being outside in the lovely children-are-in-school quiet tending my garden), or are things that I really-really want to do in spite of their not-so-much-fun-ness because the result of having gotten them done means that the rest of my life is made easier and more pleasant.

So it rather irks me when the long-awaited Day of Not Work-Working arrives, only to be bogarted by something random like a wickedly upset stomach, or back muscles that have chosen this of all days to act out, or Flu of the Gods +10 now with more sinus infection, or what-have-you.

Meh.

NEW SUBJECT!! Have you ever seen a sweet potato blossom?

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet managed to get a shot of one when it’s all the way open – they’re beautifully showy, like morning glories.

Also, you want to see something crazy? Remember this? My ‘found object’ teepee thing?

Um…it worked pretty well.

…I got two small but beautiful pumpkins (still waiting for my bumper-pumpkin year, I guess), and some lovely sunflowers from this patch…

…but the vast majority of all that is Christmas lima beans. They kind of like to hide under all that greenery, so when you’re just looking at the vines you’re thinking, …meh, they aren’t producing much, are they… but then you lift up their skirts a bit and OH. There they are!

Something I really appreciate – as a crazy person with a crazy commute who keeps working crazy-long days because she is crazy – about growing shell beans is…you can pretty much ignore them. Just make sure they’ve got water and let’em go. They are ready when their pods are brown and they rattle when you shake them...as long as conditions aren’t getting too damp, you can leave every last one of them out there on the bushes until you’re good and ready to deal with them.

Which is a nice change from zucchinis and tomatoes, which go from ‘perfect size’ to ‘HAHAHAHA, I DOUBLE-DOG-DARE-YOU TO DEAL WITH ME NOW!!!’ overnight for the former, or end up eaten by Something for the latter.

This wild tangle is all kidney beans. Same thing – just keep them happy until their pods are all browned up and the beans inside rattle, then pick a day to deal with them.

The tomatoes are going nuts with the ripening thing. Finally. I was starting to think they were simply not going to get there, and that I was going to end up either having to do that thing where you pull the entire bush out and hang it upside down in your garage to let them finish reddening or something. But instead, I’m getting to deal with the sudden onslaught of tomatoes, right when I have the least time possible to actually deal with them. (Um, yay?)

This is the new bed the husband built for me a couple weekends ago. I loaded it up with spinach, which is sprouting nicely – and the groovy thing about this kind of bed is, I can easily tent it with some clear plastic in the entirely-likely event that our temperatures start dropping too low even for spinach all of a sudden, creating a kind of greenhouse for the plants in it.

I am contemplating turning this into a small wheat field over the winter; I wouldn’t expect to have massive quantities of wheat from it, but I’d kind of like to try growing the stuff, just to see what happens.

I think that’s about it right now; I just planted some brussel sprouts in the front box, because they are all weird and alien looking and I love to keep the neighbors on their toes, but for the most part the garden is starting to get sleepy as the nights are getting colder and colder. I haven’t gotten around to planting the colder-weather stuff yet, or winterizing the beds that are going to just sit there all winter, waiting for the return of the warmth.

There’s a lot I haven’t gotten around to yet.

There always is.

But I suppose when you’re a person who is going to become enamored by everything, you’re just going to have to get used to the idea that you are never, ever going to get everything you wanted to do, done. The best I’ll ever be able to do is to keep plugging at it, one task at a time, and enjoy the heck out of whatever I’m doing right now.

Which is OK. Because I do enjoy the heck out of whatever I’m doing, most of the time. Plus also I think the tummy-settlers I took a while ago are starting to actually do something.

Woo hoo! I might actually do something today, instead of spending the whole day complaining about what I wanted to do and rambling about what I already did for a while before swerving back to complaining about what-all I didn’t did.

Which is terrible grammar, but I don’t really care. Because when you suddenly realize that your stomach has stopped threatening to kill you if you dare get up from your chair has a way of making you all giddy and daredevil like that. GO AHEAD, JUDGE MY GRAMMAR, I DON’T CARE – BECAUSE I AM (PROBABLY) NOT GOING TO THROW UP TODAY! WOOT!!!