When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year, which includes posting regular updates. It’s a new month, so here’s the next report!
So, how did I do…? Continue reading A new month, a new goal kick
Tag Archives: personal
I would lose my head if it wasn’t attached
There are so many topics I want to write about now, but most of them are so outrageous that trying to figure out how to reasonably discuss them will take too much time from my other writing, so I’m instead going to write about how forgetful I am.
This story requires a little context. I’m not a morning person. At all. I consider myself exceedingly lucky to have worked most of my life in jobs that don’t demand that I be at my desk precisely at 8:00:00 am ready to go. While I have a lot of flexibility in my schedule, though, I still have to get to the office within a certain window each day.
My poor husband is not any more of a morning person than I am, but his work requires him to be there earlier than, frankly, I even want to be awake. And I have such a hard time getting up in the morning, that I have a three-level alarm system to get me moving. My husband is usually leaving for work about 15 minutes before the second alarm in my system goes off, so I’m usually still in bed at least half-asleep when he comes in to kiss me good-bye.
Monday morning I stayed in bed until the third alarm went off, so I had almost no time for anything to go wrong in my getting-ready-for-work routine. After I had eaten, packed my lunch, showered, gotten dressed, packed my backpack, I was getting all of my pocket stuff together: phone off charger and into one pocket, watch off charger and on my wrist, keys in another pocket, and wallet–
My wallet was not where it ought to have been. Now this is no cause for panic on its own, because I am one of the most absent-minded people on the planet, and despite decades of trying to teach myself to always put things in consistent places so I can find them, the reality is that I misplace either my keys, eyeglasses, phone, shoes, hat, et cetera nearly every day. So when my wallet wasn’t where it belonged, all that meant is that I needed to check the five other places where it sometimes gets left around the house. That only took a couple minutes, no big deal, usually.
Usually.
My wallet wasn’t in the usual places. So I started looking underneath things, pulling out drawers and packs, poking into the pockets of coats in the closet, pulling pairs of pants out of the hamper and checking their pockets, and so on, and so on, and so on…
Throughout this process, I am getting increasingly angry and frantic. At first I was just muttering under my breath, “Where did I leave it?” Which soon became “Where the f– did I leave it!?” Soon I was no longer just muttering. How could I do this to my self again?
About forty-five minutes later I had turned over every corner of the house, when it finally occurred to me to check the car. As soon as I think of the car, I know exactly where it is. On Sunday, after we’d finished grocery shopping, we took the car to the automatic car wash. Because we had been planning to do that, as I was getting in the car in the grocery store parking lot, I pulled my wallet out of my pocket and set it on the inner console, because wrestling with my pocket to extract the wallet so I can put cash in the little machine at the car wash after I’m belted in is not fun.
I ran out to the car, my mind boiling over with the recollections of the times our car has been broken into, along with all the recent reports (both in the news and from neighbors) of overnight car prowls in our neighborhood.
I got to the car. Relieved to see no broken windows. There, sitting on the console, is not only my wallet, but a very visible wad of the bills the car wash payment machine had given me as change. I unlocked the car, retrieved the wallet and money, locked the car again, and rushed back inside.
I was running quite late by then. Fortunately, I had no morning meetings on Monday, and no one anxiously waiting for me to handle any emergencies when I got in.
Tuesday morning, I tried to get up and moving sooner. I had one meeting before noon, and I was feeling a little worried about something else going wrong.
My worries were not misplaced. I couldn’t find my keys. I tore the house up, again, checking all the usual places. The wallet has only four or five usually misplaced locations; the keys, unfortunately, have about thirty such places. Once I had checked those locations with no luck, I pulled everything out of my backpack and felt around in the bottom of its compartments before I gave up and called my husband to see if he remembered seeing my keys at an unusual spot. He had not.
We haven’t gotten any extra house keys made since the new doors were put in (I just keep forgetting), so I didn’t have any way to lock the deadbolt behind me. My husband told me to just lock the lower lock and get to work.
I hadn’t spent as much time looking, but I had to catch the next bus if I were going to make my meeting. I didn’t run the almost half-mile to the bus stop, but I walked really fast. Which wasn’t entirely easy, because my hasty re-packing of the backpack had left things cattywumpus in there, and I had an uncomfortable lump in the middle of the pack pressing into my back the whole way.
By the time I got to the bus stop, One Bus Away indicated I had about seven minutes until the bus arrived, so I sat on one of the benches and contemplated the pros and cons of trying to straighten out the contents of the backpack. I felt the lump in the center of the back of the pack… and it felt an awful lot like keys.
This backpack has a weird little elastic pocket on the back panel of the main compartment. It is odd shaped and in a spot that’s difficult to get into, so I never use it. Monday afternoon the weather had been very warm, so before leaving the office I had shoved my jacket and my keys on top of everything else in the main compartment before walking home. When I reached home, my husband was already there (as usual), and the door was unlocked, so I hadn’t needed my keys to get into the house. The keys had apparently worked their way into the pocket, not sliding down all the way into it until after I took the pack off when I got home.
I felt like such an idiot.
Wednesday morning, for whatever reason, I woke up, fully awake and ready to get out of bed, about a half hour before the second alarm went up. So I was puttering around the living room and kitchen when Michael needed to leave.
He came downstairs and asked, “Where are your keys?”
I walked over to the coffee table, pointed to my keys, wallet, and hat. “That’s the wrong question,” I explained. “If my luck keeps running badly, today it will be something else entirely. My glasses, or my phone, or—”
“So, where are they?”
As I was gathering my glasses and phone, he started listing other things. “Where’s your jacket? Your iPad? Your headphones? Lunchbag?”
I asked him why he puts up with me. He just laughed and kissed me good bye.
How I learned to stop being a jerk and love the wish list
Some years ago (on another blog) I said some extremely stupid (and dickish) things about wish lists. One friend brought the dickish aspect to my attention, and I felt like a complete heel. As well I should have. I didn’t say what I said merely because I was a jerk1. I had reasons for feeling the way I did. But like any emotional baggage, we are seldom aware of just how off-kilter our perception is thrown by carrying it… Continue reading How I learned to stop being a jerk and love the wish list
A most excellent man
We’d gathered at a friend’s place for gaming, and we were reminded not to turn on a particular light switch because the fixture needed replacing. My husband, Michael, pointed at it and said something along the lines of, “Is there a hardware store nearby?”
“We were going to get someone to come in and—” the friend began.
Michael had already pulled a multitool from his pocket and was checking the wires. “Naw, this will take me a couple minutes, tops.”
Michael and the friend walked to a nearby store while the rest of us set up food and reviewed what happened the previous gaming session. When they got back, Michael set to work.
One of the other friends there looked at me and said, “You’re married to MacGuyver!”
Before I could answer, another one of the friends there said, “You’re just now figuring that out?”
Fixing some badly mangled wires and installing a new fixture is not a super complicated task, obviously (though the number different kinds of things my husband can repair, refurbish, or build is a quite impressive). No, the extraordinary thing is how blithely and eagerly he jumps into such tasks, and the fact that he’s always got a number of tools, spare parts, et al handy.
Sometimes I think he physically feels pain when he sees a machine not functioning correctly. He certainly empathizes strongly with people who are struggling with a device that isn’t working properly. I’m constantly finding computers, phones, or other gadgets stashed around the house in various states of repair he’s got in process. When I ask, about half the time he says, “so-and-so needs a better computer/phone/iPod so I’m trying to get them something newer and more reliable.”
When he doesn’t have someone specifically in mind for a device, he says, “I figured if I get it fixed, I’ll start checking around to see if someone could benefit from the upgrade.”
And those are just a few of his more obvious sterling character traits. I’ve written a few times before about what an incredibly sweet, kind, smart, talented, knowledgeable, skilled, patient, and funny person my husband is. And I am hardly the only person who thinks he’s awesome.
I hope you have a happy birthday, Michael. You’ve more than earned it!
Why I hate hay fever reason #5912
Because of all the corporate mergers, selloffs, partial acquisitions, and so forth, you can’t go to a drugstore or pharmacy section of the grocery store and quickly find a familiar medication. For instance, when you’re suffering a particular set of allergy symptoms that you know used to respond best to Comtrex. You may find boxes labeled Comtrex on the shelf, but now instead of having he ingredients that used to be found in Comtrex, they contain exactly the same ingredients that used to be found in Tylenol Cold.
Similarly, in the old days, I could buy Tylenol Cold & Allergy, and be certain that is contained an analgesic for the headache, a decongestant for the sinus congestion, and an antihistamine for the hay fever. It doesn’t, any more. Now it contains analgesic, decongestant, and an expectorant (to help you get mucous out of your lungs). Lung congestion is not typically an allergy symptom, it’s a flu symptom. They should have the expectorant in the Tylenol Cold & Flu… but they don’t. What they have in Tylenol Cold & Flu is a cough suppressant, which might also be useful with the flu, but what would be better is the expectorant which is over in the allergy-labeled brand for absolutely no good reason.
And don’t get me started on why you can’t buy a cold or allergy medication containing actual pseudo-ephedrine any longer thanks to misguided anti-methamphetamine regulations that did absolutely nothing to slow down the cheap manufacture of meth. Now we get “Sudafed” (the brand name belonging to the company that first patented pseudo-ephedrine and named by phonetically spelling the name of the active ingredient) that contains no “sudafed” at all, but rather phenylephrine, which clinical trials have shown is not an effective substitute for the vast majority of people.
On really bad hay fever days, as I’ve been having for about a week, what I need is a medication that contains acetaminophen, pseudo-ephedrine, and diphenhydramine or chlorpheniramine (analgesic, decongestant, antihistamine), in a tablet that is a nice, safe dose. And I do mean the safe dose. Back when I could find that combination, the recommended does of 2 tablets every 4 to 6 hours was seldom what I needed to take to get relief. One tablet every four hours was usually perfect.
The closest I found on the day last week I was shopping, was Nyquil-branded “Night Time Cold Caps” which contain phenylephrine instead of the pseudo-ephedrine. It’s close, but much more expensive that any generics.
I can buy plain acetaminophen, plain pseudo-ephedrine, and plain chlorpheniramine. To get the pseudo-ephedrine you have to wait in line at the pharmacy counter, tell them what you want, then wait for them to dig the giant notebook out of the secure location. They will then scrutinize your photo ID, fill out a form, make you read a statement and sign the form before selling you this drug which was FDA certified for over-the-counter sales decades ago (and is still perfectly safe if all you are going to do is swallow a pill every 6 hours as recommended). But here’s the thing: box of 24 generic cold tablets with two of the ingredients I want and one I don’t costs just a little bit less than the stand-alone pseudo-ephedrine. Likewise, the stand-alone chlorpheniramine, and the stand-alone acetaminophen.
In other words, to put together my manual version of the generic tablet that has the right ingredients costs a bit more the three times as much as buying any of the already packaged tablets with nearly the right ingredients. And I have three times as many pills to keep track of, and the real kicker? They often recommend different times between doses. So I’m trying to keep track of one pill that I’m only supposed to take every six hours along with some that I’m supposed to take every four…
The answer is, obviously, to buy the Nyquil branded stuff, which has most of what I want, is more expensive than generic but less expensive than the collection of stand-alones. Which I did. It annoys me that the box is covered with all these dire warnings about taking them at night because they might cause drowsiness. And they there are sold in enormous gel caps, which seem to degrade more than the regular tablets. At least I don’t have trouble swallowing the giant capsules. Unlike my poor husband, who gags on the big gel caps.
Not that the meds are helping as much as I’d like.
Goal check-in for April
I set goals for the year and promised to update monthly. More or less. I’m doing Camp NaNoWriMo right now, so every minute I’m updating this blog, I’m not moving toward my goals with revising my novels, so I’m going to do a truncated check in:
My specific tasks for March were:
- Finish the re-plotting of what was formerly book two into book two and three. Done.
- Keep plugging away on the edits for book one. Almost no progress.
- Write the fight scene I keep procrastinating on. Started it twice. Ended up writing a fight scene for book five instead of book four…
- Write at least four blog posts about things I like instead of rants or critiques. Only managed two! But I also posted a little less often than usual.
- Draw something. Failed miserably.
My bigger goals for the year are:
- Write more, rant less. I mostly did well on this, though the craziness in Indiana and Arkansas (and other places) near the end of the month pushed me more into ranty than I’d like.
- Take care of myself. Did mostly well on this one.
- Enjoy time with friends. I did enjoy the time we spent, but didn’t make much effort to do more than the usual sorts of get-togethers.
- Paint, draw, and make music. The closest I came was making a few new playlists.
My specific goals for April are:
- Complete Camp NaNoWriMo: specifically, write 25,000 words worth of scenes to make 2 and 3 work as separate books, finish re-arranging the subplots for subsequent books in the series.
- Finish draft two of the Cthulhu Ponies map.
- Run episode three of the Cthulhu Ponies game.
- Complete layout and upload that book to the on-demand publisher.
- Write at least two blog posts about things I like, rather than ranting about things that outrage me.
I’m the Cheerful Fairy (no joke)!
In Sir Terry Pratchett’s brilliant novel1, Hogfather, one subplot3 is that an excess of belief causes the temporary creation of a bunch of minor godlings/fairies, such as the Oh-God of Hangovers or the Sock-eater. And one of those beings is the Cheerful Fairy. She is said to “look just like your first schoolteacher”9 and wasn’t very good at her job. She kept trying to get the wizards of Unseen University to engage in party games and other activities suitable for Hogswatch Night11.
I am once again embarking on a Camp NaNoWriMo project12. I’ve recruited several friends to join my cabin14. I’ve had most success at NaNoWriMo and Camp NaNoWriMo where I had writing buddies to check in with, and sometimes have word count races with. Camp NaNoWriMo is supposed to be a low-key version of National Novel Writing Month, where you either set a lower word count than the standard 50,000 words in a month, or you work on an editing or revising project. So I’m going to try to be more cheerleader rather than competitor with my buddies17. Thus, Cheerful Fairy!
Prepping to go camping
Once again, I’m going to participate in Camp Nanowrimo. Camp is similar to the full-fledged National Novel Writing Month, except they’re much looser on the rules (not that the full rules are that restrictive). Camp Nanowrimo is for doing things such as editing/revising a novel (which you may have written during a previous NaNoWriMo, for instance), or working on a smaller project as perhaps a way to practice for trying to write a full 50,000+ word story in 30 days at a subsequent NaNoWriMo.
I’ve used it in the past to do editing, plotting, and revising. Currently, I’m planning to use it to try to finish splitting a big book that has two many subplots and characters into two less-huge books which I hope will be less confusing. I don’t want to merely cut the book in half and just stop in the middle. I’ve been frustrated at book series that did that. I think I’ve found a way to separate the plot lines so that the first book will come to a conclusion that feels like a conclusion to the plots I’m moving into this book.
I may change my mind. And tackle a different project altogether. It’s not as if I have a shortage of them, after all.
Why do this as part of Camp Nanowrimo, you may ask? It’s helpful to me to have a defined goal, with a clear end date and some mechanism for measuring progress. Or importantly, a mechanism for reporting progress so I have motivation not to goof off. In most of my previous Camps and Nanos, I’ve managed to remain focused and accomplish at least most of my goal more quickly than when I’m just trying to meet my own monthly tasks.
I enjoy bantering with my writing buddies, including cheering them on when they make progress, or racing with someone to see who can hit a higher word count on a particular day.
So, I’ve invited a bunch of my past writing buddies to be cabin mates (a cabin is a group of participants who share a private message forum and can easily keep track of each others’ progress on the cabin web page), and we’ve got a good crowd for this time around.
It’s going to be a fun April!
Never could get the hang of Thursdays
Just as I try not to often post the what-I-had-for-breakfast type of entry on this blog, I also try to avoid let-me-tell-you-about-my-awful-day posts. Besides not wanting to chase readers away with whiny posts, I also feel as if my awful days are never as horrible as other people’s days. I can’t count the times that I have been feeling that I’ve just had a horrific day, when someone I follow on social media will report that a close relative has been diagnosed with a fatal disease, or that they have lost their job, or have been in a car wreck (and they are posting this news from a hospital bed), or any number of other much more serious calamities than my difficulty with a computer program at work. Which makes me feel like an ingrate who doesn’t realize how well I have it.
It’s like most of my bad days are first-world-problems, while many of my friends and associates are mired in real troubles.
But I really do think that last Thursday may have, cumulatively, just barely qualified as a bad day by those other standards… Continue reading Never could get the hang of Thursdays
Tending those goals
When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year, which includes posting regular updates. It’s a new month, so here the next report! Like last year, each goal is paired with some specific tasks based on the notion of trying to replace a bad habit with a good one.
So, how did I do…? Continue reading Tending those goals
Font Folly 