Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

First: It’s snowing. In October. In SE Pennsylvania. This is absurd and wonderful. I thought the storm-mongers were being alarmist as usual, but it’s really snowing. Maine Girl says it’s really snowing – been going steady for half an hour. It started as big, wet flakes and now it’s a steadier, smaller snow that seems dead set on accumulating. If we’d had a hard frost (or any frost at all), the snow might have a shot. But as it is now, it’ll be lucking to hang out on fallen leaves for a few hours. The weather folks say less than an inch of accumulation which seems reasonable now that I’m seeing it come down. According to WHYY, this is the first snow forecast for Philadelphia in October in 30 years.

Second: It was 58 degrees in the house and snowing outside when I got up this morning so I did turn on the heat. I’ll probably turn it off again when it warms up outside later next week. The basement was nice and warm when I went down to make sure the furnace came on. And I’m enjoying living in a house that actually retains heat rather than leaking it in every direction. But it’s been cold overnight all week and it’s 36 degrees out right now, so I caved for the sake of my marriage. Plus we got a propane delivery yesterday, so my last excuse disappeared.

Third: Ever notice that “yippee” and “yipes” have some significant overlap?

1 full-time and a nebulous number of part-time days left until D-Day.

Work is crazy. Insane. Non-stop zoom. My lovely, well-behaved, STABLE processes are tossing me bugs left and right. People are coming out of the woodwork to give me “quick” things to get done before I leave. My own to-do list was not insignificant either… At least I’m running in some sort of exhausted zen state that gives me logic superpowers so the bugs are getting handled with relative expediency.

It could be worse. I could have been put on bed rest last month.

Despite work being busy, and me being totally exhausted, things are going well. If I went into labor right this moment, things are ready enough for the kid. Especially since I wouldn’t tell the Fop I was in labor until after I finished packing the bag for the hospital. (Yes, I’ve been putting it off all month. Are you surprised?)

The past week or so, it has almost looked like real Fall outside. Now snow. In fact it’s still snowing and things are starting to turn white. (I might need to take more pictures.) I win.

I’m a bit of a weather tracking nerd, I’ll admit it. In my Mac’s dashboard, I tend to track places I work with people, places I’d like to go and places I’ve been. That’s Portland, MAINE in the upper left at 100 degrees. Concord, NH. Glen Mills, PA. Toronto, Ontario. Eau Claire, WI. Key West is certainly looking appealing and Vancouver, my beloved Vancouver, BC? 63 degrees. How civilized. Now that it’s after 11 p.m., the temperatures here are down in the low 90s.

Pennsic prep is necessarily abbreviated this year. Laundry is on-going but I think most of the Pennsic stuff is clean at this point. The humidity may be at 65-75% but it’s hot enough that stuff is still drying quickly in the sun out on the back porch. I have achieved footwear that is more supportive than my usual little medieval shoes and shouldn’t kill me in the heat. I wouldn’t call these shoes subtle or say they’ll blend in all that well, but they’re not sneakers. I’ll be taking sneakers too. Must keep feet happy.

I’ve got a vague plan for food but nothing involved. I have a bunch of eggs to use up so there will likely be cookies. (OH NO!) And Pennsic is always better with Chex mix (at least it means I get my salt).

So, yes, crazy week at work. Pushing probably a little too hard to get stuff done and yet it doesn’t feel like hard enough… Worried about vacation coverage so I’m already planning on checking email lots. Stressing about stupid stuff. Getting interrupted by other stuff. Not being able to prioritize due to conflicts. I’m ready to shut up and reboot my job. Even if I check my email 3 times a day at Pennsic, I will enjoy the time off immensely. I need it.

heat, packing, pennsic, weather

I decided that the photos needed a model to add some perspective. Enter: Little Yellow Poppet to help by providing a reference for scale! (A reference photo for scale of the little yellow poppet can be found here.) Poppets are curious creatures in many ways so it seemed logical to take one out to the garden. There are no buds showing yet, but it’s still early and chilly at night. (The lows tomorrow night are supposed to be in the lower 20s. No, I will not be knitting bulb cozies to keep the plants warm, but it did cross my mind.)

It’s nice out, spring-like even. I have to admit that I don’t recall what the plant is in the second photo. Possibly a poppy? I recall it’s something tall but that’s all I remember for certain. At any rate, soon there will be daffodils everywhere, and that’s the important thing! I should probably trim back the rose bushes soon too so that they’re a little more tame, at least until their growth spurts hit. I also need to start seeds this week or weekend. Tis the season for green and growing! And garden clean-up… not to mention general spring cleaning. Oh, and taxes.

The weather doesn’t explain why I’m looking at the world and asking, “How is it only Tuesday?” Lots got done yesterday and today, but apparently not enough to speed me through to Friday. I started Monday with a sleep debt so that’s probably the real problem here. More sleep tonight and then maybe it will be Friday when I wake up. Right? I don’t want to hear any silliness about having to sleep for 48 hours in order to wake up to Friday “tomorrow” morning.

gardening, photography, poppets, weather, work

Whee!
Butter meter: 8+ pounds used. Sugar meter: 15+ pounds used (which is a little frightening, honestly, because I might need more). Flour meter: Almost 15 pounds used.

I’ve finished making buttercrunch, teacakes, and gingersnaps. The dough for the cardamom sugar cookies is ready to be rolled out. I’m going to pick up a chocolate-melter for the peanut butter balls, it’ll make the process much easier. Or at least less prone to failure. I haven’t significantly burned myself yet… but speaking of dangerous, sugary messes…

PSA: The recipe for Never Fail Fudge on the back of Marshmallow Fluff container has CHANGED.

The horror! For some reason I find this vaguely offensive and irresponsible on the part of the Fluff-makers, if only because I made my shopping list based on the old recipe and bought the wrong size cans of milk. The new recipe uses 10 oz of evaporated milk instead of 12 oz, and uses 16 oz of Fluff (the whole container) instead of 12 oz. Everything else is the same. I made one batch with the new recipe. I used the wrong pot and sugar boiled over everywhere. (I actually had to switch pans mid-boil.) I think I’ll do a comparison experiment between the new and old recipes because… why not?

I had these semi-high hopes of getting an extra couple of hours this afternoon to get some additional baking done, but that was not to be. Work is kicking my butt. Why does this time of year always ramp up so ridiculously? It seems projects and planning always are super active in December. Ah well. Next week will be less chaotic – maybe I’ll steal a half-day off one sometime in there. Right now I have a headache from dealing with too many sales guys today. When it goes away, I’ll run a couple errands and maybe pick up some soup and salad for dinner.

Then… baking.

baking, marshmallow fluff, never fail fudge, random, work

Extra tunes in honor of Halloween! A different sort of monster today… with Lego.

The work trip to Virginia was productive… and provided more reasons to go to Virginia for more work. Figures. It’s a 2.5-3 hour drive depending on traffic and time of day. I may try to do down and back in one day next Wednesday.

I came back last night to a very sick Fop. Poor Fop.

For the record, 2 years ago I worked for Pfizer and I’m still trying to get my spam filter to recognize the pharmaceutical spam again.

I have many photos of Crown… I will get them sorted and put up a couple of sets (the short set for quick browsing and the extensive set for procrastination). I had a lot of fun taking pictures with the big lens and the day was gorgeous. The final fights were disappointing and did not, from my personal perspective behind a camera and as a non-fighter, seem clean, decisive or honorable on the part of the victor. As a former coworker was fond of pointing out, with a certain wise tone, “This too shall pass.” I was impressed by most of the rest of the day though. I saw some incredible fights and watched people with great skill have a great deal of fun. (For the uninitiated, this Crown event was the crown tournament for the East Kingdom in the SCA. The fighters wear medieval and renaissance reproduction plate, chain, leather and plastic armor and compete with various rattan weapons to become the next King or Queen of the East. When I post photos, this explanation will make more sense.)

halloween, monster, monster mash, music, random, work

Ceiling collapse part one: wee hours of Saturday morning.

Ceiling collapse part two: noonish today.

My office is cleaner than it’s been in ages (except the inescapable gritty dust which is driving me nuts) and about 2/3s empty.
Plaster’s a bitch to clean up. I now have a large space of missing plaster in my ceiling that is vaguely reminiscent of a Peep.
I’d say I love my old house but today it was aiming for me. Monster Cat may have been hit with some of the bits too… poor cat. Tasha and Tenny were in my office at the time of the collapse… neither has been back since. Can’t say I blame them…

I did have a great customer service experience with my old-old insurance company. As the rep put it, there was a “goofy enrollment termination problem” that I confirmed to be resolved with multiple phone calls in June 09. After spending easily 15-20 hours playing phone tag with half the planet.

Hahahahaa… it’s apparently not resolved and no one contacted me after that. Bill was helpful, made all the phone calls that I made a year ago, and generally left me feeling like this issue might actually get resolved without me having to take a cricket bat to any computer systems. (Actually the problem was human incompetence at the insurance company and a dermatologist’s office, but anyway…) It’s a good thing Bill was so helpful, or this could have been a very different post… from jail.

My Mini Clubman’s speaker was fixed 3 weeks ago and looks like it might stay fixed. Fingers are crossed.

Work is busy, despite my hopes that it would slow down this week with my developer on vacation, and resembles a full-time job more and more each day. I have mixed feelings about losing my free time but I’m generally enthusiastic about the flexibility and paycheck.

It’s hot. It’s really hot. I have popsicles. Pomegranate popsicles. I win.

house, lath, plaster, summer,heat, work

Thank goodness for the chai otherwise my trip to the bookstore would have been a total loss.

Is there a decent technical (as in technology) bookstore in the Philadelphia area?

The computer and technology sections in the big chain bookstores simply do not have the kinds of books I need. Nothing on cloud computing, CRM (specific apps or in general), or anything else beyond “Outlook for dummies” and “How to crash your computer in 3 easy steps.” I seem to remember the section being more useful the last time I needed something… I didn’t even see anything on SQL or even MS Access on the shelves. (No, I was not looking for books on these topics until I wondered if there was anything vaguely technical or useful to someone actually working in the tech sector.)

So I’m turning to Amazon and ordering 4 technical books sight unseen. This actually bugs me more than buying fiction sight unseen since useless technical books cost more than bad fiction books. And there are a lot of very useless technical books out there! Thank you, everyone who has ever written an intelligent, honest review of a tech book on Amazon! It’s not as good as thumbing through the book myself but the reviews are incredibly helpful when I can’t thumb through them.

In other news, I might have scared a poor man with his kids in the children’s section. Soured by the uselessness of the tech section, I wandered over to the kids’ books for bright colors and toys. The dad in question eyed me warily… probably because I was scowling and I had wild, rainy-day hair tumbling over a black hoodie sweatshirt and black t-shirt. I’m glad the grouchy geek look can still scare the parents of young children.

I almost bought a small walrus though. That counts for something.

Amazon reviews, books, bookstores, technology

So back at the beginning January, I got a terrible, terrible cold that basically took me out for 3 weeks. I was mostly better by the last week of the month but still easily tired out, coughing, and terribly behind at work.

The last weekend of January was fabulous! We drove up to NH for my birthday dinner at the Best Mexican Restaurant Ever (Hermanos in Concord, NH). My brother, Kirsten and the fabulous Juli joined us and riotous time was had with pitchers of white sangria. Birka happened to be the same weekend, so my birthday trip included shopping and medieval fun. Saturday night we went back to Hermanos with another bunch of people, though not the full bunch we expected due to Birka deciding to that Ian should spend the rest of the weekend in a weakened and miserable state. He recovered admirably, but missed out on the best Mexican food ever. The intrepid cat wrangler, Violet, took over the felines for the weekend. It was a fabulous weekend!

Why, yes, we do go to New England for Mexican food.

February brought work and snow. Lots of snow. There are still itty bitty little snowbanks around as evidence. I had a great time shoveling, feeding the wee little electric snow blower and generally frolicking when I had time. Clearing the driveway was fun. Without a good place to put large piles of snow, I ended up packing the snow into some serious fortification walls between the driveway and the sidewalk. Unfortunately, the aforementioned January sick put me behind for work and having to spend serious time moving snow during the week took away from my time even more… which turned out to be okay because the developer is behind too (mostly due to our requests, I’ll admit) and while I could have used another week to get documentation done, it was done in time for training.

Yeah, that was pretty much February – snow and work.

Training was this past week. Monday night I was at Staples at 9 pm making copies. I was delighted to learn that particularly awesome photocopiers have the option to 3-hole punch your copies automatically for you. This saved some serious time! Tuesday we flew off to the Sales meeting in Florida, which was not as warm as anyone expected. Down right chilly! And populated with people 2-3 times my age. I delivered some training for the Sales team, and while, I would have preferred a little more focus, everyone has seen the material now, has a really detailed User’s Guide and can probably pick things up quickly once we start using the system.

Also, I could very easily get accustomed to working in a villa with a view of the ocean. The photo here I took from my iPhone from the balcony of our room. (There are more, from a better camera, but this one was handy.) I saw a dolphin one day while I was prepping for training. I love watching seabirds nose-dive into the water for fish too. Certainly beats the view of the church.

Airport security is indeed still a joke. An old, annoying, stupid joke told by someone who has drunk the kool-ade.

I have almost finished my first pair of socks for adults. (I’ve made wee baby socks before, but not adult-sized socks.) They’re far easier than I expected, despite having messed up the heel. I’m smart though! I messed up the first heel and realized it, and then messed up the heel the same way on the second sock. Perhaps I’m feeling overly clever about that but go me!

Somewhere along the snowy way, my sleep schedule has been reset. Probably the exhaustion from all the snow removal. I am now going to bed before midnight again and getting up around 8. Without an alarm. This is unheard of for me! Of course, it could be a sign of the apocalypse. I wonder if that means I’m one of the four horseman… which one of them wakes up at 8 am without an alarm?

concord, hermanos, knitting, nh, sca, sleep, travel, vero beach, weather, work

If you have an AT&T voice plan at the $59.99 (or $89.99 for Family plans) or higher price point, you have the “A-List” feature for free! This feature arrived with little fanfare back in September 2009 and I’m sure there are lots of people who have the feature who haven’t even looked at it yet.

What’s A-List? It’s a list of 5 phone numbers (US only) that are free to call or receive calls from. The best part? You can put any national number on the list – land line, cell phone, toll-free number (directory assistance and 900 numbers need not apply).

How to save? Actually use it! Look at your calling habits and pick your most-called numbers. If you spend 3 hours a month listening to the movie times for your local theater, add that number to your A-List! Add your conference call numbers. Add the main line or the primary line that shows up on caller ID when people dial out of your office or your client’s office. Think outside the normal “friends and family” numbers.

If your cell phone is your primary phone line and you max out your minutes, this list could totally save you money! Overage charges are not cheap!

My iPhone is my primary phone line and I use it for work as well as for personal calls. So who’s on my A-List?
- My parents. An hour or several hours a month saved.
- 3 conference call lines I use for work. Hours and hours saved each month.
- My boss’ desk number. Another couple of hours saved.

I can update my list online at any time and changes take about a day to take effect. Many of my friends and family have A&T cell phones themselves, so calling them is already free under the Mobile-to-Mobile feature.

So let’s talk numbers. I have 3 days left before the end of my plan’s month. I have used 1606 minutes so far. Less than an hour of that time is Night/Weekend time (unlimited minutes on my plan). Of the remaining 1550 minutes, 895 minutes have been charged against my Anytime Minutes (i.e. the 900 minutes in my plan). Scanning down my list of calls, it looks like about 45 minutes are covered by Mobile-to-Mobile. Leaving more than 600 minutes covered by A-List.*

10 hours of time I’m not paying extra for! (I’d be saving even more if my developer contact was in the US rather than Canada!)
I am able to maintain a lower cost cell plan thanks to A-List!

As a contractor, I don’t always need more than 900 minutes a month for months in a row. But when my minutes go up, it’s often for conference calls and long calls to the same number. I can manage my A-List to compensate for these peak usage months and keep my plan at a lower level. During the slow months, I accumulate Roll-over minutes that also help compensate for the peak usage months.

I think AT&T was one of the last carriers to add a “free calls to your specified numbers” feature – so if you’re hitting your limit for cell minutes on another carrier, try this with your equivalent plan. Adding conference lines and the main office number (the main, umbrella number that shows up when anyone calls from inside the office) to your free list could save you a serious number of minutes.

So why bother? The next step up from my monthly plan is the Unlimited plan at only $10 more per month… but $10 per month is $120 per year that I’d rather have in my pocket. And even though I’m being reimbursed for my cell phone costs at the moment, that doesn’t mean I will be in the future at my next job… not to mention between jobs.

*If you hadn’t guessed, I’m really not much of a phone person. Most of my calls are work-related.

a-list, AT&T, cell phone, savings, service, work

“There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.” —Charlotte Brontë

Today I accomplished 2 out of the 3 things on my to-do list.
However, during the day, I completely forgot I’d written a to-do list.

I haven’t been grocery shopping in 2010 yet. I’ve run out for milk, tissues and cold medicine, but no real food shopping has occurred between being sick and being slammed at work after being sick slowed me down for 2 full weeks. My little part-time project has exploded in ways that just increase my workload. I’m ending some of my days completely fried. I guess my work life is back to normal, right?

The mini-cats are growing up. They are now truly more mini-cat than kitten. We get glimpses of kitten but their features are growing into cat features. They still haven’t learned that my desk is not actually a wrestling ring. In fact, quite the contrary! And when I’m on the phone my desk is even more appealing as a wrestling ring. Luckily they also like to nap on our desks so we get calm kitten time as well. Tasha is quite the little love bug when it suits her, which is rather more often than it suits Abby. They are still quite content to sleep attached to Tennyson, much to his chagrin. The Monster Cat Containment Systems are getting quite the work out too. We have witnessed many sleeping cat-piles and have wondered many times, “How can that be comfortable?”

I am, indeed, ready for some winter again. Birka is this weekend!!! We’re leaving Friday morning so we can get to NH in time for dinner with my brother, Kirsten and Juli Friday night. This time holiday traffic will not bog us down! This time the drive will be the appropriate number of hours! Right? For anyone going to Birka, we’re in the main hotel and will see you this weekend!

This is all assuming I can survive the week and get to Birka. Piece of cake if nothing else major explodes. Fingers are crossed.

cats, health, kittens, photographs, work