Made it!

Whew - a whole month of posts! It was harder than I thought. But mindless blather will carry one through even the driest of days.

I'm hoping that having done NaBloPoMo will inspire me to post more frequently the rest of the year.

We'll see ...

Camp Chaos part the second

And so today I've got front porch deck demolition going on (bang bang saw bang bang) *and* I've got the plumbers back to fix a pair of leaks in the pipes above out brand spanking new water heater.

I remember when we moved from College Park to Bowie we decided not to buy one of the older houses in Bowie because of all the upkeep. The house we rented in College Park was older, and our landlord had to be losing money on the deal, given all the work that he had done on it. We were often knee-deep in contractors.

But our home-improvement-free years in Bowie must have given us a false sense of security. Or amnesia. Take your pick. I won't say we didn't come into this with our eyes open, but come on.

At least now we can afford it, even if sometimes I completely don't want to.

I keep reminding myself this truly is all about quality of life.

And not having the UPS guy fall through our front porch. Really, really not.

Does this mean my writing is obscure?

(via Snay)

I can has pain releef?

This weather is the pits. The barometer is dancing up and down, and the relatively high wind is dancing on my head. I've had this headache now for 3 or 4 days, and I'm sick of it.

On the upside, at least I can go home and take a nice hot shower. Aaaahhhhh .....

And only 3 more days of NaBloPoMo ...

Camp Chaos

Tis the season for chaos Chez elsie.

Our water heater died yesterday, so we've got plumbing crew in working on that. Luckily, it was a neat death - we just lost the pilot light. There was no flood or other nastiness. But the thing was 11 years old, so it was time.

As a result, the kitchen is a disaster. We roasted a chicken breast and made sage dressing last night, and I'm reluctant to wash dishes in cold water. I'm also too lazy to heat water on the stove to do dishes. Hubby & I are a little grimy as well - we both could use a nice, hot shower.

We're waiting on people to come and redo our front porch in Trex. I can't wait to see what the mail carrier will say when confronted by our mailbox on a porch that no longer exists.

We're in the middle of furniture rearrangement that got derailed with Hubby's back injury. (He's doing better now.) Two rooms are in moderate disarray. Unfortunately, one of them is the living room - the first thing you see as you come in the door.

We've got Xmas presents all over the dining room. We did the bulk of our "out in the world" shopping on Saturday, and have no good place to store the stuff. We also bought a fake Xmas tree, whose box is sitting along with the other disarray in the living room.

Welcome to my world of chaos!

Favorite things together

Two of my favorite things came together tonight: Keith Olbermann had a voice cameo as himself on the Simpsons. Plus it was a Sideshow Bob episode, which are always my favorites.

Yay!

UPDATE: and here's the video - although it really helps if you know something about Countdown ...

Almost missed my deadline

Just got done watching From Dusk til Dawn & Batman and Robin - two of the worst movies I've seen in a long time - and I almost missed posting today.

But this just squeaks in before midnight, so my NaBloPoMo streak is intact.

Whew!

Not brave enough

I *almost* went and braved Black Friday this morning, after dropping Hubby off at the train station.

But I chickened out. I couldn't face all that consumerist frenzy, or all those crazy people, that early in the morning.

Intensely thankful

I'm thankful for many things this year, but right now, in the moment, I'm most thankful for two things: a mother-in-law who stepped up and took on cooking for this holiday after her son (my hubby) was injured and couldn't cook; and for a food program that kept me from food coma this year.

Thank you both.

A whole lot of nothing

Yep, this is a post to say I have nothing to post.

Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving.

My geeky laugh for the day

If Microsoft had designed Gmail ...

(giggle, snort, guffaw, wince ...)

Feeling testy

Today is one of those days when I really resent still being in my current job. I'm tired of being the universal solvent, of being the solution to everyone's problems and needs. I'm tired of being blocked from my dream job by bureaucratic asininity.

(I'm amazed that Blogger didn't complain about the spelling of the word asininity ...)

I'm tired of being reminded that I have a very weird skill set and that it's keeping me from finding a new job.

I'm tired of my head aching, and my heart, too.

Bah!

Head on fire

Woke up this morning with a migraine. It's one of those where I feel like my head is an overfull bucket, and if I don't walk v-e-r-y carefully, I'll spill my brains all over the floor.

It makes for good posture, but not much else.

More when I don't feel so god-awful crappy.

From a recovering packrat

OK, I'll confess - often on my days off, I'll watch Oprah. There I've said it.

Now let me say this: Peter Walsh is my hero. I watched yesterday's episode about a couple with hoarding problems, and was extremely moved. The wife had managed to fill their 3,000 sq ft house with so much stuff that what was left after they threw away all the true junk filled a 10,000 sq ft warehouse.

Can you imagine? I can, because although I've never gotten to that point, I definitely have had packrat tendencies in the past. I'm pretty well over it now, and am instead in de-acquisition mode, try to live well within the limited storage space in my current house.

But back to Peter.

He's the organizer on the TLC show Clean Sweep. He works with the people whose houses are being decluttered to help them understand where all the clutter came from, what psychological needs are driving all the acquisition. He's a genius. And what he did for the couple on Oprah is beyond description. He got to the heart of the compulsion, and made the wife understand that she had a choice to make everyday of her life: her stuff or her life.

I sat on the sofa bawling my eyes out, for her pain, and for her epiphany, and for her joy when she saw what her house looked like without all the disastrous mess.

It's stories like this that make me reaffirm my packrat-ish recovery every day of my life. I think of it as "lightening the load" - like losing weight, only this is the weight of stuff.

All I can say is, wow. And thank heavens people like Peter Walsh exist.

Dry

Well, it took 15 days of daily posting to make me run out of things to say.

I'm in the midst of grinding through a project for work that puts me on my (hopefully someday) new team temporarily, and the project is large enough to be daunting. Hence my working on it on what's normally my day off.

Anyway, I'm glazed over from staring at my computer screen, and I've got 2.5 more hours to go.

Bah - it's better when I just don't say anything on a day when I have nothing to say!

Firming up

I had planned to do my sugar detox right after Thanksgiving, but the cardinal rule is never do the detox when you're stressed. Since the universe keeps lobbing obstacles at me, and my stress level is clearly measurable, I'm putting detox off until at least January.

My plan is to use the intervening time to firm up my program. I've gotten very sloppy, on every single step. My breakfast no longer contains a brown. My journal is filled with half-empty days. I'm still doing 3 meals a day, but am not being careful about my protein & carb levels. I'm haphazard about taking my vitamins, and Mr. Spud has all but disappeared from my evenings. I'm doing ok with browns at lunch and dinner, but really need to refocus on that.

So now I'm back to Step 1. Starting tomorrow, for at least a week, I'm going to simply focus on breakfast. Once that step is back on track, I'll move on.

This is just too sad

The 'Winners' of the Wired News Saddest-Cubicle Contest - it doesn't get any worse than this ...

Backseat driver

Reading Tarakuanyin's post about sequel dreams made me think about my own dreaming.

For most of my life, I've had dreams about being in a car, sitting in the passenger or back seat and realizing suddenly that I'm in control of the vehicle, or I'm supposed to be. I have to steer the car from wherever I am, because for some unknown reason, I simply can't move to the driver's seat. Never in any of these dreams have I crashed, but the sick feeling of fear and helplessness as I struggle to control a car from the wrong place never changes.

Anyone who knows me knows I have always had control issues. Big, ugly ones. Ones that cause me to be a royal obnoxious whiny pain in the ass.

I think it's interesting that in the past year, the number of those dreams has reduced considerably. I can't remember the last time I had one. Given my current work situation, I'd expect them to come back. But so far they haven't.

Maybe I really am learning to let go, to know when I can (or should) have control over a situation, and when I can just let things happen as they will.

Or maybe my blood sugar and brain chemistry is sufficiently balanced that I don't have the same fears I once did.

Or maybe it's all of a piece.

Wonderful remnant

One of the things I still have from my days in Weight Watchers is one of the older versions of the Zero Point Soup recipe. It's a wonderful beef tomato broth with various lo-cal veggies in it as well as garlic, basil, & oregano.

This weekend I turned it into minestrone with the addition of a couple of cans of kidney beans, a cup of frozen peas, and some cooked brown rice pasta shells. I went overboard on the pasta, not knowing how much the shells would expand on cooking.

But other than that, it's pretty damned delicious. It's one of those flavors that just latches on to your taste buds and goes ahhhhhh ...

Something nice on these cool, damp, (finally!) fall days.

The Prestige

Hubby & I watched The Prestige on DVD this week. What an amazing movie. On a very base level, there's the pleasure of having Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale on the same screen.

But this movie is a lovely dark tale of duality, obsession, and magic. David Bowie plays a wonderfully creepy Nikola Tesla.

I enjoyed the movie so much I bought the book it was made from, and also did something I rarely do: I bought the screenplay. The last movie I did that for was American Beauty, which touched me in very different places than this one, although now that I think about it, they're not that far apart in some ways.

Small favors

I sit here today very very glad I didn't commit to doing NaNoWriMo this year.

This has already been a highly stressful month - I can't imagine trying to write another 30-day novel on top of that.

I guess things do work out for the best.

I just wish I could figure out what all the slamming doors the Universe is handing me really mean ...

What's the message here?

Lately all my spam is of the penis improvement variety. If I were to believe them, I'd think they could make my non-existent penis the size of Mount Rushmore. What a miracle that would be!

But I have to say I wonder what the universe is trying to tell me with all those BIG HARD COCK spams ...

Improvement

So, after a little bit of food therapy and a good night's sleep, I'm feeling a little better about my work situation. Don't get me wrong, it still sucks, but I'm a little more philosophical about it.

The fact that I've taken a mental health day is probably helping, not to mention that I have a new pc keyboard at home. It seems like such a small thing, but I spend enough time on my computer that a sucky keyboard (and my last one was that) really eats into the fun.

It's all the little things, like the fact that yesterday's food therapy consisted of french onion soup for lunch and homemade chili nachos for dinner. Time was it would have been McDonald's for lunch and Popeye's for dinner.

So improvements all around ...

Epic fail

I've been trying to figure out how to talk about the thing that's going on with my job situation, but I keep either getting too angry to make sense, or too fearful that somehow talking about it even in this limited public view might bring up legal issues.

Suffice it to say that I've applied for another job at the same place I'm currently working, and that a hiring freeze popped up just as I was about to be hired. I'm now being blocked from moving to the new job by means that are questionable at best, unethical at least, and potentially illegal. Add to this that I haven't been told directly any of the machinations that are occurring, being left to piece things together from trusted sources.

I'm deeply frustrated, and deeply angry, and am starting to look for a new job, anywhere but where I am. I understand that what The Powers That Be are counting on is that I'll be a good soldier, a good cow, like I've always been. That I'll stick around and swallow this wad without complaint or question.

Well, this soldier is going AWOL and this cow has grown a brain. I don't know what will be the outcome of this situation, but believe me, I'm getting wise in my old age. I'm not going to be the cat in the cage.

Not anymore.

Olbermann tears Bush a new one, part deux

Oh, gods, but KO was on fire last night! The story of the firing of acting assistant attorney general whatever-he-was Daniel Levin over his conclusions on waterboarding has KO PO'd.

There's a transcript and a link to the video of last night's Special Comment here. Oh, momma, if the administration doesn't come after Keith for this, then they really are a bunch of cowards.

And the thought of all the Bushies doing hard time for breaking the law warms my crinkled little heart ...

Happy, happy camper

I gritted my teeth and weighed myself this morning, only to find that I've lost all the weight I gained since starting Radiant Recovery.

What a wonderful way to start the week!

Everything smells good

Hubby & I spent the afternoon cooking, and the whole house smells good. It's hard to believe what a comfort it is to have a fridge full of good food, ready to eat. I had no idea, all those years of only cooking infrequently.

Makes me look forward to the week - yum!

Fall back what now?

I'm pretty sure my recent malaise is rooted in the late change from daylight savings time. My body pretty well knows after all these years when the change should happen, so I went right into the post-DST groggies.

I'm hoping this means that I won't react as strongly to tonight's actual time change, but that's probably naive.

Heh, if I sleep til noon tomorrow, we'll know, won't we?

Wiped out

I'm completely flatlined today. The various stresses of the past few weeks have piled on to just knock me flat.

There's been money stress, and house stress, and one big one: job stress.

I haven't written about my job situation yet, mostly because it hasn't been resolved. But stress there is.

I'll try and write about it tomorrow when I have the energy to actually feel how I feel about the whole thing. Today I'm just numb.

Promise redeemed

I've been struggling with my food lately. My eating plan got out of whack earlier this summer, and I've been working on it in fragments trying to get back on plan.

I've been working sporadically on Step 5 since July. Step 5 is all about getting away from processed, refined carbs (whites) and moving to whole foods (browns): whole grain breads and flours, brown rice, beans, veggies. Breakfast and dinner have been good, except for my bad habit of wanting to either eat out or order in for dinner. Harder to get browns that way.

And lunch has just been a disaster during the week. We had a change of cafeteria management at work, and this group doesn't know anything about brown foods.

So it came to me in a flash that if I wanted to do step 5 properly, I needed to start bringing my lunch to work. Duh, right? How simple is that?

So hubby & I are now cooking on the weekends, enough food for dinners & lunches for the week. We're saving so much money on food, it's scary.

My caffeine wean was also successful, so successful that I'm completely off soda. I drink water and herbal tea, with the occasional iced tea when we eat out.

All of this has come together to make me sane and give me the one thing I really wanted out of this plan in the first place: I'm starting to lose weight. I topped out at 205 sometime earlier this year, and as of this morning, I'm down to 195.

All this without doing anything but eating. My body must really be happy with the changes.

I'm happy, too. So happy that I'm thinking about starting step 6 after Thanksgiving. That's the step where sugar goes completely out of the diet. I'm so close right now, doing so little sugar that it should fall out pretty easily.

I remember getting cold sweats and near-panic attacks early on in the program, thinking about giving up sugar. It's amazing what 10 months of healing will do.