You're Doing It Wrong

This morning I swear I saw a woman driving and applying eye make-up at the same time. What a moron. If there was an accident and I ran over to administer first aid and the first thing I saw was a mascara wand sticking out of some idiot’s eye, that would wreck my entire day.

The bus smelled like burned plastic when I boarded this morning. I double checked that I knew where the emergency exits were and how they worked. Of course there was a traffic accident and the bus smelled the entire ride. I guess I just spent 45 minutes breathing toxic fumes. Oh well, my retirement account is underfunded anyway. Not like I want to live forever.

As I seem to say every week, I have a super busy week ahead of me. Bob is taking me to Sigur Ros tonight (his idea, I don’t know anything about them) and he has tickets for Art Spiegelman later in the week. Plus I have to go to yoga because my workout routine has completely disintegrated since CW and that one class a week is the only thing keeping my butt from overtaking the planet.

Bob said Great Big Sea is coming to town and I don’t love seeing live music any more but I wouldn’t mind seeing them but the calendar is too overloaded already. My point being, lame posting will continue.

Here’s my old office last week before I packed up to leave. I wanted to highlight that little orange sticker on the window because it has the dates for Clarion West and I put that up there way back when I first thought about applying so I could figure out if the dates would work. It’s been up there ever since and I hated to take it down.

Here’s my office after we’d packed up and loaded out. We didn’t take everything.

Not related to work but related to life: I’m kind-of despairing about all the things I want to do vs. all the things that might be possible given the time and energy I have. I keep thinking that one more weekend is all I need but it never works out that way.

I’m sitting on at least a half dozen posts, some with photos, but we’ll see. I’m going to stop whining for now.

I have some roasted tomatoes that I need to do something with. And I need to wind down so I can fall asleep tonight.

I did write almost all day so that’s good.

I’ll have photos of the new office later this week.

When Mom and Dad were here we did a Bob’s Red Mill run and I got two giant bags of grains and legumes. I got about 5 pounds of black beans because I didn’t shut the handle down fast enough. I can’t believe I forgot to buy flour. I also bought nuts for granola making supplies. This house is well stocked.

Pumpkin Ale
I love this stuff and would be drinking one right now if I had the sort of life where I could drink beer for breakfast. Instead, yogurt and blueberries and off to work.

Still in the thick of a very busy and tiring week. Have moved to the new office. Lots of unpacking, reorganizing and equipment dealings remain.

Photos to come.

Filing
See that box on the right? That’s filled with filing for one client.

That stack to the left is a mere sampling of the filing I’m doing on another project. I’m not even including that to illustrate my current woe. I just couldn’t crop it out properly.

I’ve been meaning to tackle that box, to at least go through it and make sure nothing has fallen between the cracks, but I haven’t had three seconds to pour the contents onto the floor since, uh … December 07.

I finally caved and bought some bulbs. They kept extending my coupon. It expired on Friday. Then it was good through the weekend. Then it was good until Monday at midnight. Rather than buy several $25 bags of 50 bulbs, I bought fewer fancier ones. I want it to be worth the tulip bandit’s while. Altogether I think I got about 50 which I will no doubt be bitching and moaning about in a month when I have to plant them.

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I might have already written about this. For almost my whole checking-account possessing life, which started when I was 16, I balanced my checkbook to the penny every month. I can’t remember when but in the last year or two, I balanced and if it was within $5 I wouldn’t worry about it. Now I’ve started to round up and round down to the nearest .50¢ for all the entries in my checkbook. I don’t think I’m properly conveying how major this is for me to be so lax about my checkbook. And I think this is personal growth. Is it really worth it to spend an hour trying to find .17¢?
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I bought new yoga clothes and I wore them for the first time last night. The top is awesome but the pants felt like they were falling down the whole time. By falling down I mean my buttcrack was getting some air. Jeez, when I was a girl pants came up and covered your entire bottom.
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If you’re a Coen Brothers fan, I highly recommend Burn After Reading. I saw it with my Mom and Dad over the weekend and we all enjoyed it. Really great performances from everyone.
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I’m not watching Heroes this season. Nothing you say will make me change my mind.
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One of my notes looks like it says “order owre.” I have no idea what that means and it’s annoying me more than it should.

I have been so busy the past week I’ve barely had time to pull up my pants.

I’ve lived in this area for closing in on 20 years and I’ve never had any interest in going to the zoo. However, today my mother-in-law (epic zoo volunteer) took us to see the baby elephant and he was so freaking cute it hurt. Sorry I didn’t get a cuter photo but he didn’t do something really cute until I put the camera down. Also, it was a wait in line and shuffle through type of thing so not like I could gaze all day at his ever-loving cuteness and wait for the perfect shot.

Today’s featured topic is a tour of my home desk area.

Against the back wall there’s a giant Attack of the Clones DVD promotional banner. You can see half of Yoda’s head at the top. Standing in front, a full size C3PO cut-out and C3PO wears my Star Wars purse from Bolsa Bonita (she has some similar purses in stock right now, if you’re envious.)

My computer lives on an anthro cart. They aren’t cheap but they look nice and when the world turns into The Road the good guys will be pushing these along instead of grocery carts. This thing is sturdy. Someday the top shelf will need to be cleared off for a printer but meanwhile, on the left is a giant box filled with Karuk related research. The box on the right is filled with craft-stuff from the fifteen minutes I thought I was going to get into crafting. Now it’s stuff I’m never going to use, but can’t bear to get rid of, taking up space. On top are my two boxes of critted manuscripts from Clarion West.

I can never remember exactly what computer I have but it’s a Mac and it’s big and shiny and I love it. It is surrounded by tons of crap including zillions of notes scribbled on scrap paper, stickie-notes and index cards, my iPod, a spindle of CDs and a spindle of DVDs and craft gloves that I wear to support my mouse-hand wrist when typing and highly recommend.

The music stand thing on the left has a paper with a bunch of Mac short cuts on it because I can never remember them. It also has a couple things on it that I want to learn on the computer but never get around to, like things with sound files. When I returned from Clarion West, Bob had left me a picture of William Gibson to watch over me and he does.

My chair is a $50 craigslist special. Over-crowded bookshelves are self explanatory. On the end of the tall bookshelf I have tons of hooks that I use to organize camera cords, charging cords, earbuds and a spare pair of glasses. Hanging from the ceiling is one of those cool paper shades hanging on a light-bulb. I use that in the winter so I can see what I’m doing during yoga practice without having to use the overhead light.