Reviews, Recipes, and Random Slices of Life

1. Strained a muscle in my back yesterday. Now hurts lots whenever I try to bend over at a certain angle. Did I mention I have a baby to pick up and carry around a lot? Or that because of breastfeeding said baby, it's not like I can go whine to my doctor for strong painkillers? Should I try to stretch it or should I try to rest it? I DON"T KNOW.

2. Getting to be official church members and getting Cassius welcomed in and etc. are stressing me out. I don't know what needs to be done, but it sounds like it might need to be done by next week. Grr.

3. (And worst) The tile wall/faucets around our bathtub has been leaking enough that we got a wet-through spot on our kitchen ceiling below. Phil has attempted to fix this with silicon caulk. This attempt is not working and looks terrible. It seems everything may need to be re-grouted. Or we may need to rip out the walls, put up proper cement board (seems like the previous residents didn't, given that the tiles have too much give to them in certain areas), put in new faucets etc., and put up some sort of other surround. We don't know what to do, how to fix it, or how to make it look less than awful. We don't have the money to do so either. We're pretty much miserable about this. Not showering isn't the answer, either.

4. (The last straw) All my ink cartridges for my printer are now failing to work, the night before I have to go to my writers group. I wanted to print critiques out, damn it! Instead I'll be reading from my laptop and then emailing people crits. Grumph.

This week (and weekend, alas, judging by progress), I'm working from home on a day job project. Yay, right? Except that I still have to bus into downtown to work 1 hour at my regularly scheduled day job. Grr. Ah, well, I'm using the bus time in as research time--reading circus books and soon encyclopedias about daily life in the 1870s. And then I bike home afterward, so I get a little bit of exercise squeezed in.

Still. Is annoying.

Also, it's eliminating my writing time. Maybe today I'll hit the quota for the day job early enough that I still have some time to write before my brain turns to mush.

I do not like waiting-to-find-out. It may be one of my least favorite things ever.

I have a lot of waiting-to-find-out these days. Personal health stuff, family health stuff, major writing project stuff, minor writing project stuff....

I hates it, Precioussss!

Yesterday, cvalenti* opened up my computer and prepared to install the new power source to make my computer capable of booting up again.

Alas, it turns out that the problem was not the power source, but the CPU fan. So we ordered the part and it should be here by UPS soonish. Unfortunately, then my computer decided to stop staying on or booting up.

Laptop docking station to the rescue! My laptop is now hooked up to the docking station balanced on top of my defunct desktop computer, all surrounded by a nest of cords that must be seen to be believed. I'd take pictures, but the place where I organize my photos away to is currently out of it.

All this so that I can continue to work from home on a day job project, and also so that I can do writingy stuff. (The amount of typing I do, working at my desk with a real keyboard that's at the right height and a real monitor likewise is pretty essential.)

* On the entertaining side, I did feed cvalenti a meal in which everything had vegetables in it: broccoli and onions in the chicken divan; zucchini, squash, cucumber, and green beans in the "seasonal vegetable"; and fennel in the cake**.

** Which was very tasty, being a banana-fennel cake the documentation of which will occur eventually (with pictures).

You know, a long rambling post where I write about where I'm at and what I'm doing and all the other things I think friends should know about each other but all too often don't these days. I encourage you to do one of these posts, too! I miss knowing these things about my friends (Twitter and Facebook have added a lot of little detailed information, but I think they've taken away some of the big picture).

( Read more... )

x-post from Livejournal to Facebook, as it is sufficiently significantly updatey--

I do not like being in car accidents.

Last night, Costco was having its annual corporate member renewal thing. They feed you li'l smokies and meatballs and pizza and cake and give you some sales pitches. If you renew then, you get a (humongous) apple pie and some cash back. So Phil picks me up from downtown after work and we sally forth into rush hour traffic.

Traffic slows to a halt. We're stopped. Then there's a tremendous crashing and our car's flung forward and it feels like a huge hand just punched me in the small of the back and between my shoulder blades. The back of my seat flops down, so it's from a recumbent position that I watch us slide forward to smack the car twenty feet ahead of us.

Everybody's pretty much unhurt (though my back is sore), so insurance information is exchanged and we limp off our various ways. The entire rear bumper is cracked and dangling down from the back of our car, including the license plate, so Phil jerry-rigs a bumper sling out of my scarf to hold things together, and we proceed to Costco. Our car isn't really that driveable at the moment, what with dangling license plate and non-functional seats (Phil's is also permanently reclining, if not flat like the passenger seat one). We're looking at $?? to repair it, or $1,000 - $2,000 for a new-to-us car. We have liability-only insurance, so ours isn't helping out, but we can file a claim with the other guy's insurance, though we'll have to do it on our own. Fun times.

This morning, we had $1,000 apple pie for breakfast.

Why yes, I am having an immune system response to the flu shot. And to the tetanus booster. And having blood drawn + painkillers has made me a bit lightheaded. And I've been staring at the computer screen doing data entry for a day job project all evening.

On the other hand, looking at the snow outside, I'm quite happy I'm working from home tomorrow.