Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Jay: A Study In Sadieness
Jay: Happy Birthday
To blogger Kelley of Suburban Blight.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Deb: Overheard in our house, Gilmore Girls Edition.
Me: Is he on CRACK?
Jay: Well, he can afford to be…
Deb: Just for the record, #417
There is little more infuriating than flipping through random blogs to kill a little time and finding yourself reading a non-alerted spoiler for a reality show you’ve wasted 8 or 10 or 12 weeknights of your life on. Particularly when it’s in the context of the blogger telling everyone what a loser she is for watching it even once but she was sick and bored and hey, my friend says that his friend says that so-and-so wins. For some reason these friends of friends are never wrong, you know?
[This is the bit where I admit that I watch America’s Next Top Model with a love bordering on obsession. Ahem.]
[This is the bit where I say that if this makes me a loser, I’ll wear the big L proudly.]
[This is the bit where I’m all amused with how irritating this string of asides is, really.]
Anyway, my favorite spoiler story of all time has to be the one that one of my college professors loved to tell, about The Empire Strikes Back. Her sister got to see it in advance of anyone else in the family (opening day, IIRC) and when asked how the movie was at dinner that night blurted out, “Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s DAD!”
Heh.
Jay: Happy Birthday
To blogger Jeff of A Little More To The Right.
Jay: It’s Always Something
(Written much earlier. When I tried to post they were doing server work that affected BB, so I had to hold it for later.)
I just love the confluence of awkward cashflow and things coming up that need the cash I’ll have in a week or two. Or three.
We have the opportunity to buy a minivan for $500 that runs well, has high yet gentle mileage, has an almost perfect body and a nice, clean looking engine, and is known to need certain work soon that even if it runs several hundred bucks would be worth it.
Amazingly, as of 36 hours ago, it was not gone yet, even though I’ve already waited nine days and counting to get paid uncharacteristically late and then let it take two business days to clear and be officially available, since it’s all electronic now and can be cleared almost instantly so we still have old-fashioned “gotcha” waits.
I can just eke out enough to buy the car and probably get by for groceries and sundries, if the new, much larger month I billed Thursday is paid within the net 15. Mind you, not only do they almost never exceed that, but also they usually pay within a week. So I plan to call the bank on their “two business days for local checks” thing today, despite knowing that they once overdrafted me on the third or fourth business day. Which was what led me to ask them exactly, eventually. And for what it’s worth, it was as Bank of America they said two days to my face, and as Fleet that they did the three or four day thing. We all know Fleet was the height of evil and Bank of America is just the best.
So in the midst of this, yesterday I broke a tooth.
Doh!
It’s not even especially painfully, though I have felt sort of nauseated or like I’m coming down with something ever since, and it’s ever so slightly temperature sensitive.
I wasn’t even aware I had one in sufficiently bad condition to do that. But there it is. Next to last, upper right molar, with a gaping, jagged hole about 1/3 of the tooth in size, facing the back and scraping my tongue raw. It was Deb I was worried about sending to a dentist soon, not me.
We were going to look for a dentist more local than my old one, who is in Duxbury, and try to find one who would be especially gentle with Deb. I could go to mine. I’ve basically blown off going for a few years, I think since 2001 but I could be remembering wrong, since I stopped being able to afford it, after I no longer had dental insurance to make it less unaffordable. That and I’d had all the major work caught up. My first year back to the dentist I had five root canals. Later I had more. And lots of crowns. In fact, it was the $2500 to buy the previous van that decided eliminated my plan to replace a pulled molar with an implant. Glad of it, too, because I don’t miss the particular tooth at all. However, the one that broke is the focal point of most of my chewing, which is overwhelmingly right-sided. But I digress. Heck, that tooth is the one that forced me onto the blood pressure treatment train and landed me with my current doctor. And they still had to give me a valium to make the BP low enough to pull the tooth. I am not sure how extracting this one would work, even if it would be the low cost solution.
What I really want is to be able to go in and say “look at this tooth… no, this one, ignore the rest, what can you do about it and what will it cost?” You go to a dentist and they want to do the cleaning and then the checkup and then make a list of all the teeth that could use any attention and line you up for a series of appointments to work on every last one.
I feel bad going to my old dentist after blowing her off once we got down to semi-annual checkups plus anything those might lead to. She’s definitely of the above school. One time in 1993 I had a totally rotted rear molar that just needed to come out. I was able to go down the street in Billerica, where I worked, see a guy who looked at it said “yup, it’s rotted” and pulled it for a grand total of $50. That was great! But I’d like a little more thought to go into this one, because it’s not clear to me it’s that gone. Though the extent of the damage implies needing a crown, and those were running I think $500-600 each when last I got a few.
Anyway, work calls! I’m late anyway, and now there’s a near-emergency incident waiting for my attention.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Jay: Bread Recipes
Last night my thoughts turned toward making bread, which I have never tried. We were running low on the store stuff and cash is tight, yet we have all the ingredients to roll our own.
Except an easy, foolproof recipe.
The easiest one I found online was disconcerting because it didn’t list butter as an ingredient, but referred to adding the butter in the directions. Doh. Based on a much more complicated recipe I saw that included butter, my guess was 2 tablespoons, so maybe I’ll find that again and try it.
This is probably moot as an immediate need, as I do have enough cash to buy bread at the store on my way home today, even if I do have to wait until at least tomorrow afternoon to be able to get real grocery money. Yay for delayed cashflow. Still, I really want to start trying it, both for the sake of bread, and for homemade rolls.
So… recipes anyone? Just pretend I’m Jeff or something.
Jay: Snow and Sleep
Today we are having our first snow of the season, which looks like it’ll be insignificant, but is sticking to the trees and grass in a most picturesque way.
Sadie was utterly fascinated at the window for a few minutes.
However, she’s far more fascinated with the diagrams of how things go together in my old Reader’s Digest Fix-It-Yourself Manual. She sits examining those and running her fingers over them. Well, until she moves on to shredding a Christmas sale flyer. At least she understands the difference and shreds the correct one.
In other news, Valerie slept!!!!
The two of them went to bed the same time, a bit after 8:00 as I recall, in our new routine we were hoping would help. Which Sadie is oddly mature enough to have grasped and gone along with, to the point of getting each of their dollies the first night, giving Valerie hers and showing they each had one, and making sure Val’s doll got into her bed.
Valerie only screamed for a moment before sleeping, or at least calming herself. Then she slept until 6:00 AM, at which point she nursed and went right back to sleep until I found her quietly standing in the crib at 9:10. And looking sleepy for a change in the morning, rather than wired and wide awake.
Yay for breakthroughs! Let’s hope it lasts. Boo for snow! But hey, the sun’s already starting to come out, nobody will need a shovel, and it’s pretty until it all falls or melts off the trees.
Jay: Happy Birthday
To blogger and noted pool player and computer gamer Ninjababe, who these days is more of a narber* over at this place. She’s very happy, and that’s the important thing.
*NARB = Not a Real Blog :>
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Jay: British English?
I keep trying to type “Outlook” and leaving off the k, resulting in “Outloo.”
Then I realized that must be British for outhouse…
Saturday, December 02, 2006
Jay: Valerie Today
Jay: Sadie Today
Friday, December 01, 2006
Jay: Argh
I keep starting to write commentary on what’s happening with work in the post-apocalyptic post-upgrade world, then having to abandon it because I’m just too busy. It’s very annoying.
After just about four totally unexpected hours today working on a crazy problem initiated by someone (quite reasonably) thinking she could make a setting change to Outlook 2003 herself, I now have to go into work this weekend and spend what I expect to be 2 - 8 hours more on the same problem. Which wouldn’t be worth it, except that it affects the owner of the firm.
And I was already feeling guilty that I planned to take the weekend off except maybe a little research into problems like unstable profile behavior in XP on a 2003 network. Instead I get the same result without the free time.
And the setting the user tried to change was something that was supposed to have been set by the employee of the company we outsourced to who did the bulk of the work on the project, when we split going around to all the machines to make some changes. That’s at least two he left incompletely configured.
I have 41 items explicitly listed in Outlook Tasks, mostly for the big client, not counting really major stuff coming up in the next two months, not counting the odd items that come up as I go and the routine stuff, not counting everything I’ve no doubt forgotten, that combined won’t even think about being less than 80 hours of work.
It’s basically just there, as much of it as I want, and much less of it that will become moot after a while if delayed. The promise of the upgrade - really a series of upgrades that will take us at least to February - is to need me less. I knew that would be more eventual than immediate, but I had no idea how much.
Can you say continuity in light blogging?
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