Weekend!
Having passed through the second of the three gates, I’m girding my loins to prepare for the battle of girding my loins to prepare for Halloween decorations.
But I suppose I need to get through the “Christmas in July” events before I start thinking about that.
The big event this weekend is the “Toxic Waste Removal Event!” where we will be able to take our “Is silver cleaner supposed to be that color?” kinda stuff from under the back of the sink and plop it in the hands of a grimacing volunteer. “When did we buy silver cleaner? We’re not ‘hey, wanna buy some silver cleaner and clean our silver?’ kinda people.”
Other than that, we have a Saturday full of running errands to the Costco, the Petsmart, and other “has it been a month already?” kinda places followed by an evening playing board games and discussing the whole events of the week with friends in a basement.
And Sunday, dear Sunday, should be a day spent in complete and total indolence (and laundry) to make up for the hectic day before.
Which, seriously, sounds so awesome even though it feels like it is forever away… but I know in my heart that it will be here before I know it. Just like Labor Day.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Photo is “Footrace finish line, 1925” from the Seattle Municipal Archives, used under a creative commons license)
Well, last weekend had a bit of excitement in the middle of it. Namely that our entire neighborhood had to be evacuated due the the hills immediately behind us being on fire. Nothing says 4th of July like taking the dog and cats to a hotel at 12:30am.
So, sleep, glorious sleep. And I am supposed to go look at an old bicycle that I was going to look at last weekend, but for obvious reasons didn’t.Report
You’re in the Bay area, right? I was down in the LA area two or three weeks ago. That San Bernardino fire was HUGE. Really eerie driving out east on I-10 what with smoke haze reflecting an orange glow for something like thirty or forty miles. Glad you’re okay and your home survived.Report
Thank you @road-scholar ,it was a small fire, just so much smoke it was hard to breath. Mostly worried about the animals.Report
Oh gosh, I’m glad you’re alright!
There are a lot of fires up north now – nowhere near threatening us personally, but the air is often pretty hazy.Report
Working as usual, as in two out of every three weekends on average. Getting used to my CPAP machine. Criminy that’s an expensive little piece of technology. Even with insurance it pretty much cleaned out my FSA balance. (Note to self: Up that next year.) Some weird dreams right before I wake up to the sound of air hissing past my ear.
Turns out I have sleep apnea bad. Tech doing the sleep study said I quit breathing 90 times in the first hour. Snoring louder than anything he’d ever heard. Apparently my brain stem has been trying to kill me for the better part of the last twenty or thirty years. (I was first diagnosed in the nineties.)
So my “sleep number” is 19 out of a possible 20. Meaning I have to strap that mask on tight, lest I wake up to air hissing and whistling all over the place after it gets cranked up full-bore. On the plus side, I’m not waking up all miserable with headaches anymore and it feels like I’m actually getting some rest at night. Maybe I’ll actually live a little longer. Yay!Report
Dude, have you had REM Rebound yet? That’s something else.
I love LOVE *LOVE* my CPAP.
I can’t believe how awesome my sleep is now. I hope you can get used to it soon.Report
Jaybird,
I had to Google that. Hmm… that’s interesting. I don’t know that I was really sleep deprived in that sense. I mean I seemed to always wake up remembering a dream so I assume I was getting at least some REM time. Whether I was getting enough of it or whether it was “quality” REM sleep, if there even is such a distinction, I couldn’t say. I certainly wasn’t getting enough oxygen at night — sorta like low-grade CO poisoning — so I’m generally feeling better on that account.Report
My wife finally got diagnosed — hers was very bad as well (bad enough they aborted the test halfway through and started testing her on CPAPs). She managed 45 minutes on her first test night with a CPAP and was the most rested she’d been in a decade.
She LOVES hers. Like if it died, I’d be stuck wherever and whenever scraping together the cash to buy a new one and have it overnighted. Or trying to find an open medical supply place that had one.
It is expensive. I think the box+ the required monitoring popped out at close to 1000. (I still get mad about the monitoring. I had to pay for it for six months. Why? So my insurance would pay for the device. But I hadn’t met my deductible yet, so I paid for the farking device. But they wouldn’t drop the monitoring requirement. I spent HOURS on the phone on that).
But after getting one, her blood pressure dropped some, her migraines went almost entirely away, and she stopped falling asleep mid-sentence and also wasn’t nearly so cranky.
Sleep’s important.Report
At least the doctors know how to treat you.Report
The W-Situation seems somewhere close to being resolved. Lain is starting to naturally find other ways to sit. It was really actually a surprise how responsive she was. Maybe we’re away from the Terrible Twos to where she wants to please us again.
We discovered that Clancy’s car registration was never renewed last year. There was a big to-do last year with that car and our inability to get a Queenland title. It turns out that while we did everything else so that we could renew it, we stopped short of actual renewal. It further turns out that our initial registration was oddly only good for nine months.
So I’ve been on the phone with the DMV for the last couple days, and am going to need to call them again tomorrow. I also had to go to the tax assessor’s office today. Which is the polar opposite of our DMV. The lady there really wanted to know our situation and to help. So while I complain a lot about the public servants at the DMV (and they are really bad here), I feel like I should also applaud the good ones.Report
The mouse trap worked! On the first day! Glad I checked. Let the mouse out into the woods.Report
You realize that mice don’t often hang out alone?
Right now a grieving mouse-spouse is contemplating revenge… Expanding the family might just fill that bill.
(Seriously, from my experience if you get to ’em relatively early in the infestation, you may not have to dispose of more than a few… You may, however, get tired of being humane about it.)Report
One might even speculate, if one is pessimistic about it, that the quick success might suggest a larger rather than smaller infestation. I recall a time, when we were having the problem, near the peak of the glorious war, that I put out a trap at night, turned off the light, and heard the telltale snap! before I’d hardly taken a step.Report
Trap is back online for the next one.
We had the first a little while back, and nothing noticeable since until yesterday. Last night the trap went out and this evening there it was.
I am prepared to stop being humane. For all I know, I’m putting it out in the woods to starve anyway.Report
@will-truman
Either starve of be prey.Report
“The vengeful Big One has cast me out into the darkness, where soon I must perish. I pray that my sons will avenge me.”Report
“I shall sing the songs of my people while I await dawn.”Report
Yeah, did some looking into it. Looks like they’re resourceful and adaptable… but also easy pray.Report
There are no atheists in mouse holes.Report
Damn things are cute, too.
My brother found a nest of mice in a desk drawer at work once and took the babies home. He managed to keep one alive, and kept it as a pet for almost six years. It used to ride his large dog. It was adorable. Still a mouse, though.Report
Second mouse on the second day.Report
You should be tagging them somehow, to make sure this isn’t just mouse #1 come home again.Report
I thought about seeing if I could clip an ear or something. In this case, the second mouse was noticeably a different one than the first one.
If I start getting suspicious, harsher measures will be taken.Report
They don’t have much of a range, so if you take them a sufficient distance, they probably aren’t coming back. Hell, why would they? There are plenty of nice, warm, food-filled homes between the woods and your place.
On the other hand, maybe you just have really, really good food to a mouse. And they do have a strange sort of OCD, which leads them to follow the same path every day at pretty much the same time (which is why they’re pretty easy to catch).Report
We live next door to the woods in question.
The good news is that they ran off in the opposite direction.Report
Dude, you have a car, right?Report
Yes, but with a little girl getting in the car and going somewhere is an ugh thing.Report
Here’s what ya do: Drop the mouse off in the field next to the ice cream shop. Now everyone’s happy.Report
Just give the mouse a toy motorcycle. They’ll know what to do.Report
I thought about seeing if I could clip an ear or something.
“What have they done to you, Vincent?”Report
Three days, three mice.Report
One is a loner, two is a couple, three is an infestation.
Might be time to call in Delbert McClintock.Report
Mouse ran right past the parting gift cracker.Report
In the hypothalamus’ four F’s, fight and flight come before feeding.Report
Friday night we are going up to Denver to watch some laser Pink Floyd with some dear friends. (Hoping Jay remembers this and it does not come as a shock to him when he reads this comment!)
Saturday Jay is having the day he described, but I’m working an 8.5, fortunately it’s over early enough that I still get to game.
Sunday is my first real “weekend” day and I play to spend it recovering from Friday and Saturday. Then I don’t work Monday or Tuesday either. And for once I have NO appointments on Monday or Tuesday. Yay, summer reduced hours actually feeling like reduced hours, she said hopefully!
Oh, and the silver cleaner is because I have… 2? 3? pieces of silverware that my favorite gramma gave me when I was a kid, and at one point they were really tarnished. In case any of you were dying to know ;).Report
Wait, Laser Floyd is tonight???Report
Yup.Report
Reason #87 to become a blogger: Facilitated communication with spouse.Report
If I go to the office tomorrow, there’s a neat-seeming sound installation thing at a gallery downtown, that I might check out at lunch or after work. But, if I can work the day from home I probably will – the office is full of stale big-building air and generally a couple degrees hotter than outside thanks to a struggling 50 year old A/C system, and it’s been around 30 the past few days (so, like 85 F or so). If I can take my laptop out in the shade of the yard and work shirtless instead, I surely will. Which reminds me, I should make a pitcher of iced tea for tomorrow.
Music in the park on Saturday, nominally an afterparty for the festival we went to last weekend.Report
Working my second job for 36 hours straight. Luckily I get to sleep there and Junior is with his father this weekend.
I got a new first job, so maybe I won’t need to work the second job so much…Report
Congrats on the new job!Report
36 hours straight!
The closest that I’ve ever had to deal with that was being stuck at work during a snowstorm and, lemme tell ya, I thought that that was the worst ever.
Good luck!Report
Thank you. I do respite care for a family with a child with a severe developmental disability. Awesome family. I’ll be staying the weekend at their place while they’re in Alaska. I did a week, 7 days and 6 nights, for them once. That was a lot.Report
@miss-mary
Congrats on the new gig!Report
You know how whenever you run across a new word or phrase, you always hear it again within a day or two?
My daughter just started doing respite care as her second job.Report
This week was really rough. I am not sure if it should count as rough or not but it was emotionally draining.
I had an interview on Monday. I was called back on Wednesday and asked if I was still interested in the position and whether they can go ahead with reference checks. I said yes of course.
I also applied for a job at another firm and it turns out I know someone there so they forwarded my CV to the office manager which might expedite the hiring process.
But there is a part of me that feels fucked if I don’t get the job for the Monday interview. This might or might not be true (see my other connections) and I guess things have gotten slowly better. I am getting better at getting interviews instead of having CVs disappear into ether though many still do disappear into ether.
I spend a lot of time alternating between “34 is pretty young. I can still have a brilliant career. Gene Hackman was a door man until he was 38” and “WTF am I doing with my life? I am 34 and potentially still trying to fight in a career whose recovery was anemic at best.”
These mood swings can happen several times a day.
A lot of people I know are way more confident about my career than I am. My family sees my freelancing as “You have been working as a lawyer pretty consistently in a tough economy!” I see it as “I have been treading water in the middle of the Pacific and being told to hope for a lifeboat to come sometime in the future.” At the same time I see that job notices often requires experiences that don’t come easy to freelancers and I wonder how am I supposed to get those experiences? Why should I start my own practice just to get those experiences just to get a job?
*I am still not into the idea of starting my own business. I can’t quite psych myself into it it. The costs are very high and it could be a while before it provides income. I already feel far behind my peers. Starting my own firm does not feel like a way to accelerate catching-up. It rather feels like the opposite. I also resent people with jobs who tell me to “take the plunge” because it is a damn big risk to start a business and it seems rather clueless for a person with a job to say “take the plunge” as encouragement.
I am starting to look at non-legal work in stuff like compliance but I seem to be in competition with people a decade my junior and/or people with a few years of experience.
So knock on wood that I get one of these jobs.Report
Zazzy took the boys out of town for the weekend so I tackled some housework yesterday and am heading down to JC to help my buddy with some wedding prep and then gonna drink by his roof deck pool. Then a night out there or in Manhattan. Huzzah!
Spent a couple days in the city with a dear friend helping facilitate workshop on the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood ed.
Preparing to move in a week! Yonkers, here I come! (Again!)Report
I’m spending time with a friend who just had her knee replaced Monday, and will have the other replaced next month; just to give her husband a break to go do errands and hang with his buds.
While she can walk with a walker, she can’t walk a lot yet. So it’s a lot of time sitting with her leg up, and she needs sitting sort of things to do.
So I thought you’d like to know: one of the things the hospital recommended is (drumroll please,) coloring in color books. It’s calming, they told her.
Yeah coloring books. I had great fun shopping for a selection of more-adult books on Amazon last night.Report
@zic Coloring books are great. I find them helpful for similar reasons and also just ’cause it makes me happy. If she runs out, let me know if you want more recommendations, I have a “wish list” a mile long on Amazon :D.Report
I would welcome recommendations. I’d like to find a physical catalog — she doesn’t have internet at her house, she lives out in the unorganized territories of Maine; a town without a local government, and not much in the way of public services beyond electricity and snow removal at the road on a low priority. A catalog to look at together would be nice.Report
@zic, both my wife and daughters love the adult coloring books as well. Mrs Scholar prefers to use colored pencils, adult daughter is into markers, while the young one persists in crayons. Really these things are fine line art and a well-colored page is worthy of being displayed on a wall. Have you seen the ones printed on vellum? Colored in with crayon they look like stained glass when backlit.
I’m not sure if they have a catalog devoted specifically to coloring books or if it’s about art books more generally, but Dover Publications puts out such a catalog.Report
@zic @road-scholar Yep, the Dover catalog sounds like a great idea.Report
In a couple of hours I’ll be hopping a plane to Glasgow to spend a week with my best man, and attend the British Open. I saved for 2 years for this trip, and I can’t wait!Report
@slade-the-leveller That’s so awesome! I hope you have a great time.Report
I’ve never been to Glasgow, but Edinburgh is one of my favorite cities, so I imagine you’ll have a fabulous time.Report
Have fun!Report
I bought a Motorola Sliver II specifically because it was supposed to have AVRCP support. Which maybe it does, but what’s the point in AVRCP if you have to start/stop media will the device? Guess I’m going to be putting the Pebble to the test.Report