Subtle Glow

At 6:30pm tonight the sidebar gadget on my computer indicated the temperature here in Oceanside was thirty degrees. With the big fat ‘F’ for Fahrenheit…
Thirty degrees. As in 30.
I know I’m a little chilly - I even had to put on my fuzzy slipper socks. But thirty degrees, to me, seems rather unlikely. Considering I checked the weather service and it is now not only 10pm, but also 50 degrees. Hmmm. Less sunlight, yet warmer by over 20 degrees. Possible or not?
My question to Windows Vista is this: Where exactly in Oceanside is that temperature measured? Somewhere along the bottom of the ocean, perhaps?

Other news: back from the cruise. Tons of fun. Pictures, and even a video (!) will be coming along soon enough. I know you can’t wait.
Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Question of the Day: What is your favorite dish on the Thanksgiving table?

Some call it stuffing, some call it dressing.  Whatever.  My family has *the* best concoction used for this dish.  Seriously, it’s got chicken, veggies, bread cubes, and even a bit of some spice.  Sometimes, after the big Turkey Day is over, it actually serves as a meal in itself.  We don’t stuff the bird with it - instead bake it until it’s a little crunchy in some places.

Definitely my favorite.

We are cruising to Baja this Thanksgiving, so I will have to find some other time once we get back to create some “leftovers” of all the good stuff.  Including the stuffing.

I am hoping that today goes better than yesterday. While clearing dinner dishes at the end of the day, I had a eyelid twitch or forty-billion. It was that kind of day.

The kind of day when technology tries to kill you, by making you want to die. It does this by crapping out. Things like a mysterious refusal to recognize the ethernet cable, and then refusing to find a wireless connection that is any faster than 1 MBPS.

ONE, my friends.

After I peeled my face off, I thought things would get better. Except I was very very wrong.

OH, with the HATE and IRE for the shortcut methods that have been wrought upon more technology, producing utter crap and rendering it useless to me or anyone else who had plans to use it.

Follow this with a laughable excuse for a meeting… oh let’s not get into that. In a moment of delirium (had not a drop to drink!) I signed an email to a colleague and a consultant with the following:

Bright and early tomorrow… can’t wait to see what the day will have in store! I’ll be mainlining the espresso shots - why waste time with all the sipping?

So, uhm, let’s just hope tomorrow is much, much better.

10PM PST - UPDATE:  The end of the day is here.  It was a much, much better day.  Much.

Want to see the fun project I did over Labor Day weekend?  No?

Too bad - I’m showing you anyway. In case you need to do it on your next long weekend.
First, you have to get rid of these ugly things:

Then, gather the necessary materials.

1. Hardware supplies:

2. Liquid Refreshments:

3. An extra set of Helping Hands:

Once you have all of that ready to go… you can begin!  Then, after a while, you have a little bit of this:

And this!

The helping hands come in to have a look:

At which point you need more of this:

And that is really how well you are focusing now, but that’s ok because you still end up with this:

I don’t know what bug bit me but I have been cooking.  And baking.  I made homemade bread.  Twice! In two four days.

Tonight, I made chicken burgers with barbecue sauce and garlic french fries.

I have this nagging reminder every so often that I need to find my chili recipe (no beans or beef in my chili - yet delicious!).

Maybe it is the time change (I mean, pretty much everything gets blamed on that anyway, right?) or the current moon phase or the temperatures have dropped FIVE whole degrees, which means that winter has arrived in San Diego.

Anyway.  I don’t know what has triggered it, but there it is.  Now that I have made a loaf of white bread and a loaf of wheat bread, I’m starting to think of all the other yummy kinds of bread I can make.  Like cinnamon rolls.  Or french bread, or some other kind of rosemary something-or-other bread.  The kind that goes well with red wine and sharp cheese.  Delicious.

I used to track the finances for all capital equipment (any furniture, equipment, etc. that cost more than $1000, basically) at one of my former jobs. This included furniture and fixtures - including every desk/workstation/cubicle configuration.

In one division, there were easily a couple hundred employees, packed in sardine-style to these modular workstations and performing rather monotonous duties day in and day out. Not the most envious of jobs, unless you’re really in to that thing.

Still, a co-worker of mine expressed dismay when she happened to glance at a listing of their existing capital items.

“CUP holders? They get cup holders included with their workstations? Hmph. Must be nice. I can’t believe they actually bought desks with built-in cup holders. You know it had to cost more than the regular desktops, and with all the people they have in there, that really adds up. Hey ——, did you see what they have in the other building? Look at this. CUP HOLDERS!”

I’m sure to some it did seem kind of frivolous.

I had been over to that building to help the auditors verify that we really did have some of the assets listed on our books. The workstations were just large enough to allow someone to sit or stand in front of them. The top of the workstation had just enough room to hold a monitor, with a little workspace left over for any related paperwork they had.

Down underneath the “desk” was a small shelf, which held the computer. In all, they were very modest workspaces. Again, not a whole lot to be envious about.

I didn’t bother to share with her that there were no cup holders to be found. In fact, my predecessor had mis-spelled the asset description and the cup holders were actually CPU holders.

It was a shelf.

Just goes to show though, people will bitch about almost anything.

I’m just saying, and this is directed at no one in particular, that some things just need to be Let Go.  Sometimes it’s all you can do to acknowledge that there’s nothing more you can do but to accept things for what they are, because you will never be able to change them.  Sometimes you have to realize that despite all else, you really are doing good.

Sometimes, people just prefer to be unhappy and dissatisfied.  Sometimes people even make a conscious choice to be that way.  It does not automatically place responsibility on you to do try to find creative ways to change this.
So, to go through the exercise again and again of trying to come up with an answer to WHY things are the way they are, just accept it and move on.  Move on to something that is actually a productive use of time and resources.

Let It Go.

That’s all I’m saying.

I recently attended a baby shower, and looking back I think it was the first baby shower I have attended - since my own baby shower…  almost a decade ago.

Some things never change.

I do think I nearly missed being pelted with twenty tiny plastic baby figurines (part of a game… oy the baby shower games. don’t ask.) at one point where we (naturally) talked about our own labor and delivery stories.

First, a question.  Why do people insist on telling the most horrid and scary stories about their own experience with something (typically medical, typically physical, typically painful) to people who are past the point of choosing NOT to go through the same experience/procedure in the very near future?

It is not limited to pregnancy/labor/childbirth either.  Wisdom teeth, gall bladders, kidney stones, etc.

Are these the same people who don’t understand how to watch sad movies with others?

But, back to the near-pelting.  In my attempt to tell a less scary, less horrifying rendition of labor and delivery stories, I shared that my labor was about 6 hours start to finish - with barely a contraction that registered at all, much less anything painful.  My son was breech, and my water broke before any other labor began (I was asleep in bed - it was all very tv sitcom with the sudden sitting up and exclaiming “I think my water broke!”), so that’s pretty much all the laboring I did.

Some people would see that as the green flag of easy labor to be had.  But me?  I figured why tempt fate?  Why push the universe for a repeat performance?  Why test the waters to see just HOW BAD it could get?  I certainly didn’t feel the need to prove anything, and if I got a pass this time, maybe I’ll just take that and keep going on about my own business, thankyouverymuch.
But from the looks of steel across the table - I swear I could literally hear ‘YOU BITCH!’ hurtling through the crackled air between me and the others who overheard - I should have told a more horrifying version of the tale.

I might be exaggerating a little bit, but there was definitely a double-take as I recounted my experience.  I guess I’m out of practice for these things.
Oh well. I hope that the mother-to-be overheard, and if she did I hope it helped make her feel a little more at ease - even if it was just for that instant.  Not everyone has scary stories to tell, and those that do need to keep their sharing to a minimum.  Or wait until the woman has her own story to tell already.

This morning I dropped my brother off for his first day of work.  Look at us - all grown up stopping for coffee and carpooling to work.  It does a big sister proud.

Hope you have a great day at work today bro!