The following quote is in today’s New York Times Food Section, “Eating an entrée is too many bites of one thing, and it’s boring.” It is attributed to a chef in an article that argues that the entrée is on its way out as the centerpiece of an American restaurant meal.
This is so stupid I can’t even form a response.
Before I get started, look what the person I’ve been married to for 11+ years wrote on his blog.
“Typically, my tastes are more towards hard bop than the free yangy stuff. In most circumstances, I’ll pick out George Coleman and Harold Mabern before innovative saints like Ornette or Albert Ayler or even Rollins and Coltrane.”
I don’t even know what that means.
***
It’s hard to feel good about how I look in winter.
My hair gets out in the damp and turns into Sideshow Bob. My skin isn’t great to begin with but now it’s washed-out gray and blemish-city. I had one of those giant volcanic under-the-skin red zits on my chin over the weekend that erupted under a mole which made the entire lower half of my face look like a potato. And not in a good way.
Then there’s the holiday overeating and the giant layers of clothes so I feel like I’m waddling around like the Pillsbury Doughboy.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror the other day and thought, “Honey, you could pass for ten years older.”
This morning I woke up at 3am fretting about getting to work. Today is driving day.
We’re in the middle of a wet and windy storm. I don’t think it’s stopped raining since Saturday and not the usual PACNW gray mist rain but plinking on the roof and forming a wading pool at the end of the driveway rain.
As I lay there in the dark, listening to the wind whip the rain against the window I tried to figure out the best strategy. My coat keeps my top dry but usually from the knees down I get at least a little damp and I didn’t want to start my day with wet feet.
I thought maybe I’d wear jeans and old shoes and bring a separate bag with work pants and dry shoes and socks and then change when I got here.
Then I tried to imagine myself walking from the parking lot to the office in the dark and pouring rain carrying my purse and my lunch and my bag of dry clothes. I decided, screw it. My health, safety and convenience is worth $12 today. I parked in the building. I also have a giant package ready for mailing and wasn’t sure how I was going to transport that so parking close today solved another problem.
Police motorcycles line up outside the courthouse.
The best advent calendar, ever.
Rain outside the office.
I can’t imagine actually putting this check in the bank. I like it sitting here. Of course it’s already spent so I’m going to have to break down one of these days.
I never dealt with my technology issues. I’m bumbling along with the same hosting. Mostly I wasn’t in the mood to deal with it plus it’s paid for until June and I’m sure there’s fine print somewhere about getting any money back. It would be like buying a new car because you didn’t want to fix a flat tire. But I expect I will be in the market for a new host next year. Or the next time I’m mad at the current deal.
My beloved Tribe who sent me my absentee ballot on the Friday before the Monday it was due in the tribal office managed to send me a birthday card one full month before my birthday. Yay. Today Siskiyou and Humboldt counties. Tomorrow: the world.
Bob and I planned to go to Bob’s Red Mill this morning because last time that was on the agenda I ended up being laid up with the Lindsay Lohan flu. This morning there were snowflakes. The weather report said the storm was here. We went back and forth and decided it was stupid to drive to the other end of town when the weather was acting up. I managed to avoid crossing the river again.
We’ve spent the entire day puttering around the house and I’ve been doing computer projects all day and my massage person would strangle me if she saw what I did to my neck today.
I pulled up a nice reminder of summer earlier this week and then had technology problems and swore at the webhosting but now I can make it work.
This post sounds like it was typed by a crazy person. Sorry.
I was going to do a NaBlo wrap up but I don’t have much to say. I thought it was harder to discover new blogs and while I did have lots of new commenters, I didn’t notice any uptick in traffic. I added about a dozen new blogs during October when I was checking out the groups on ning and I love them all and they’re all staying for now.
I’m going to deal with my hosting later today and figured I’d better post now because if there’s any sort of snafu who knows when I’ll get this working again.
Yesterday one of my nerd news feeds said that The Golden Compass was going to be sneaking into theaters a week early and I could possibly see it today. I was lying in bed awake at 4:30a (because why would my body let me sleep-in on a day when I could?) and heard the newspaper thump on the front doorstep and the first thing I thought was: wonder what time Golden Compass is playing.
(Aside: I just pulled up the cast list on imdb.com and Ian McKellen plays the voice of Iorek Byrnison. Lord of the Rings. X-Men. Da Vinci Code. What hasn’t this man been in?)
Turns out it’s only on two screens and they are both on the other side of the river and on the outer reaches of town. After this week I dread the thought of getting into the car. I’m not even going to do a Trader Joe’s run and my wine supply is dangerously low. Although I would do it for GC if it was the theater that’s 5 minutes from here.
I’m having a lot of despair about my transportation situation. On Tue/Wed, 3 out of four travel legs were bogged down by highway accidents. I get to stand in the dark and rain and wait for a bus. Then I get to be damp and sit on a bus forever. It’s not even December, yet.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the first thing I do when I get out of bed in the morning is run to the computer to check my Powerball ticket to see whether I have to go to work.
Driving myself wouldn’t help much although at this point it’s starting to make sense again. I quit driving because parking is too expensive. If Bob picks me up and I’m a half hour late because of traffic so he goes into a restaurant and eats and drinks something while he waits, how are we saving money? Plus now both of us are inconvenienced.
The most obvious solution is either work closer to where I live or live closer to where I work. Neither are easy fixes for us at this point in our lives/careers.
Meanwhile, my webhosting upgrade whatever is still messed up and I can’t get my email the usual way but I did finally figure out, when I was searching for an online help forum (which they do not have), that if I login on the hosting site as a customer there’s a place to access webmail. I can’t do jack-crap with the instructions they sent me. I can’t ftp. I also noticed yesterday’s post never showed up in my reader. Is that related?
I called support yesterday and after 10 minutes I was still the 10th person in line so I gave up because I don’t really have time to be on hold for two hours. The help screens are completely and totally worthless and say things like, “Webmail is easy to setup and using your username and password you can check your email from anywhere in the world.”
That is fantastic news. Too bad I still have no idea how to set it up and there’s no HELPful instructions.
Can you imagine if you asked someone to write instructions to make a pie. And this is what you got:
Crust: pie crust is a flaky pastry made from a butter, shortening or other fats combined with flour and salt and sometimes sugar. It is placed in a pie plate in preparation for fruit, custard or other prepared filling and then baked.
Do you feel like you could make a pie from those instructions? When I’m in charge of the world: everything’s going to be different.
I finally figured out that my posts aren’t showing up because my webhosting did their migration or upgrade or giant-pain-in-my-ass that they had scheduled and then rescheduled. Their instructions for entering the brave new world have no relation to anything in reality and I’ve spent the last hour trying to figure out how to set up my ftp in my blogger settings to make it work. You’d think blogger could tell me my ftp is effed up and not that “it’s taking a long time to publish” worthless info. Jeez, it’s like the entire planet is conspiring to waste my time.
Yesterday I made it rain again. I decided to hoof it over to Powell’s to see if I could pick up a few more copies of the anthology with my story in it. The sky did not look rain-like and I clicked the trusty weather icon on the desktop and there was Nothing about rain. So off I went without my umbrella and wearing my non-waterproof wool hat. You can guess the rest. For the second time in two days I had to wring out my panties. Also, Powell’s didn’t even have the book but I’ve learned since that’s available here.
In other news, on Monday night when I got home I had a piece of mail from a lab that performed routine and completely uncontroversial lab work for me at my regular check up in September.
The form letter indicated they hadn’t received payment for their services and further that according to Oregon law, if insurance refuses to pay a claim, they need to notify the lab and the patient in writing. The bill was for $50.
The letter goes on to instruct me to contact my health insurance and find out what’s going on and then call the lab and tell them and if the health insurance doesn’t have a copy of the claim then I need to call the lab with the name and fax # of the representative I’m dealing with and they’ll resend the bill.
For the time and money it cost to waste my time, why not just start by re-billing insurance? Why am I even being involved?
I phoned my health insurance phone tree and after being advised that wait times were longer than usual I went through their website and sent an email relaying all of the above and giving them the lab’s billing department phone in the desperate hope that I can be taken out of the loop on this stupid thing.
My insurance emailed me back and said they had no record of the claim, that they don’t accept faxed claims and to instruct the lab to mail the claim to the claim address. Then I called the lab and they wanted to keep me on hold forever so I hung up and faxed them a note telling them to re-bill. Stupid.
Everyone in the PACNW can thank me for the rain. Usually I make it rain by washing the car.
Yesterday I did it when I took my umbrella out of my bag because all of a sudden I decided it made the bag “too heavy” and besides, it’s been clear for days. During this same frenzy of getting ready to head out the door for work I also detached the waterproof hood from my squall-proof/blizzard-proof coat so I could wear my cute not waterproof wool hat and fuzzy scarf.
I sealed the deal when I was standing in the garage holding a towel in my hands and thinking, “It would sure be handy to have a dry towel in the car but I don’t really need it right now.” Then I put it back where I found it and continued on my way.
I exited the office at 4:30 and it wasn’t just drizzling, it was showering. I no longer park in my building since the parking bastards raised the daily rate to $12 when the lot next door closed so someone can build another office tower. If I ever get the opportunity to time travel I’m going to tell my past self to buy parking lots and then enjoy raking in piles of free money. Now I park about a 10 minute walk away (Only on yoga day. I could, seriously, write a 10 screen post about parking but it’s not worth it. The short version is, I drive 1 day a week and take the bus the other days.) so I was nice and wet when I made it to the car not to mention smelling like livestock. (My wet wool hat.)
It sure would have been handy to have a dry towel for my hands and face when I got in the car. Then there was a stalled car right where I exit the parking lot and for some reason everyone in that lane just stopped. No one went around. No one helped. Everyone just sat there. I’ve never seen anything like it. I finally had to squeeze out between two stopped cars and make a wish that there was no oncoming traffic and drive around the mess.
Added: “Oncoming” may not be the right word. I wasn’t driving on the wrong side of the road to get around. There were three lanes and the lane where the parking garage exited was stopped. So I had to drive across this lane and blindly jump into one of the still moving lanes. If this doesn’t make sense don’t worry. It’s just a dumb traffic story.
