fox

Nobody, boss included, wants this, but it's not impossible I will be laid off in a month's time.
My mother's mental acuity is slipping; my brother thinks he may think it's worse than I think it is because I see her every week and he, although he talks to her every day, only sees her in person every few months. Likewise the director of her assisted living facility has just returned from a short vacation and called my brother yesterday to say if they were seeing her for the first time now, they'd think memory care rather than assisted living was probably the best place for her. Put another way, the call scheduled for the three of us tomorrow afternoon is definitely going to be about how it's time to plan to move her over to memory care when a place in that wing opens up. She's not going to like that, of course, but I was surprised by how strongly I didn't like it—the wave of NO that I felt in my whole body, a physical wash of Kubler Ross denial. It was something. Rationally I know it's happening and I know keeping her safe and getting her the best care is going to involve changes and adaptations and so on, but wow, the fact that the ego and superego know that didn't stop the id going MOMMY!
On the up side, one of my favorite co-workers came in to talk about a work thing yesterday, in the course of which conversation I mentioned #1☝️, and at the very suggestion that the big boss might let me go, favorite co-worker said "Jeeesus Christ, he's lost his mind." That doesn't affect whether or not I'll keep my job, but it is good for the ego.
My brother's mother-in-law is also not well, so my sister-in-law is going out this weekend to help her (because her sister, who lives near their mom, happens to be away this weekend), meaning my brother is going to have to bail on a family wedding; he and I were both already going to leave our families behind, as the bride is our cousin's daughter and our spouses nor kids don't really know almost anyone up there, so now it looks like I'll be the sole representative of my mom's node of the family tree. (The bride's-grandmother's-sister node is often not well represented, I'm sure.) My nephew is almost 15 and would be perfectly safe in the house by himself for a couple of days, but he wouldn't be comfortable with it, and of course it's right for his father not to know that and ditch him anyway. I said "You could bring him with you?"—but a last-minute plane ticket and an extra guest the caterer hadn't known about, nah; I said "You could ship him to my house?" (because the prince would love, love having an unexpected visit from his cousin, oh my gosh)—but even as I said it I went on to say that wouldn't really be fair to spring on Himself, outside of a true emergency—I could totally say "Listen, Nephew is coming to stay with us next weekend," and Himself wouldn't say "Why wasn't I consulted about this?", he'd say "Oh my God, what's happened?!" In short: My brother is staying home with his kid this weekend, which is the right decision but a bummer all around. (The much, much bigger bummer being that my sister-in-law's mother is doing as poorly as she is.)
The other bit of up side from yesterday is that when I got home from work and told Himself that my sister-in-law has to go be with her mom so my brother can't go to the wedding because nephew, etc., almost the first words out of his mouth were "He could come stay here?" ❤️❤️❤️ He went on to have a whole text-message conversation about that with my brother while I went to pick the prince up from day camp, and the end result was the same (my brother is staying home with his kid this weekend), but the fact that Himself went directly to "I can take him" without even the merest hint of a suggestion from me made me so happy. SO happy.
Only then I went to pick the prince up from day camp, and on the way home I started feeling a sort of light-headed vertigo feeling that does happen to me sometimes—most recently on the way home from grocery shopping on Saturday—but usually just for a split second, which I don't like, especially when I'm driving, but it really is normally less than the time it takes to blink twice and I don't think an awful lot more about it. Yeah but: Yesterday it came on partway home and didn't go away. I was able to see clearly and concentrate on the road, and my reaction time was fine with respect to signaling, steering, braking, all the things you need to do to drive safely, but it was absolutely terrifying and the minute we got home I told Himself about it and insisted that he do the driving this afternoon (and maybe all the driving until I know what the fuck is happening to my head?!). He suggested maybe my blood sugar was low and asked me to eat about a teaspoon of sugar straight, which in his experience is like a shot of adrenaline, so I did, and nothing happened. I ate a little dinner, though I didn't have much appetite, and that didn't help. I drank some water and that didn't change anything either. Took my blood pressure: 128/86. No fever. I emailed my doctor to tell her this whole tale and conclude with "?!!!?!??!?", and Himself said if I wasn't planning to take an Ativan at bedtime he really thought I should.
[gestures at the world in general and at our federal government in particular]
Someone in one of my Discords mentioned that in a recent protracted panic attack of theirs, one of their main symptoms had been vertigo, which reinforced Himself's Ativan suggestion. I told my usual Tuesday evening dS-watching Discord that I was going to bail and go to bed early, and they offered to punt this week's episode to next week, and I said no need to do that because of me (the responsibility of everyone else's plans changing because my stress levels are making me crazy was also kind of stressful), and they said hey look, everyone who isn't Fox is fine with shifting to next week, decision made, off you go, feel better—and that made me cry a little, people being nice to me, which just goes to show that taking Ativan and going to bed early was the right decision.
Reader, I took the Ativan. I made up a little song to the tune of "Sodomy" from Hair, and then I slept soundly for the whole night. And this morning I feel—well, none of the stressy things have changed, but I feel like I slept well and I know I'm going to be making dinner this evening instead of driving on the freeway with my son in the middle of a dizzy spell, so that's a little better.
Here's my song:

Ativan,
Lexapro,
Gabapentin,
Buproprion,
Doctor - what pills am I even on?
Medication
Can be fun!
Join the Holy Order Pharma Sutra,
Everyone!

You're welcome.

So in the fun time that is my life, remember how this new job fell in my lap around Christmas time and I moved over to it on February 11? And then also remember how a lot of unelected teenagers and crypto bros and so forth did a hatchet job on the entire federal government in the spring? Yeah so my new workplace lost millions of dollars in grants, and three people in areas other than mine have been laid off, and yesterday the big boss sat down with me and said he's just not sure they're going to keep having enough work for me to do, and another month from now when my probationary period is over he might not be able to keep me. This is a heads up, not a genuine notice, because it's conceivable they might find a way for it to work out - for one thing, I'm the only one who does what I do and they don't want to go back to having nobody do it. I proposed a couple of solutions, one being to bill most or all of my work to overhead rather than making people put me in as a line item in their project budgets as they're doing now, because the latter has them (a) putting me down for as little work as they can as they're suuuper carefully husbanding their resources and (b) not giving me work until the very end of their process, so I'm sitting around waiting a lot of the time, whereas if I were overhead I could work with people collaboratively and iteratively and not burn up their budgets, so I'd be busier and the products I work on would be better. (Seems like a slam dunk to me, but the overhead money has to come from somewhere, I guess, so maybe that's not as much of a solution as I think.) Another is to bust me back to 60%, which would free up two days a week and still pay more than I was making at my old job.

My old job, by the way, was not allowed to backfill my position - they made someone an offer, which she accepted, and then they had to pull it, and also cut a part-timer and one of two people in the other role they had two of, so they're down to bare bones and no matter what happens to or with this job I can't go back.

So that bites! I had a little cry about it and then activated the bat-signal (emailed my former grandboss and other references), updated my resume, googled some shit, and today I have applied for one (1) job. It's easier to get into a lifeboat from the deck of the ship than from the sea. Maybe I'll aim to apply for one job a week as long as I still have this one and bump it up if it gets where I need to. Also updated my LinkedIn, which I haven't actually even looked at in many many years, but I guess people are still using it?

UGH.

i was so ... stressed

I did it: Earlier this week I saved all my personal stuff from my work computer on a thumb drive, made sure it worked on my personal computer, and scrubbed the work machine clean; today I forwarded myself the last of my emails, migrated my browser tabs, cleared my cache, and set an auto-responder saying (basically) "Um . . . bye!" Monday I will drive in to drop off the laptop and peripherals and pack out my office, and Tuesday I will go to the new place. (Unless the weather is so crappy on Tuesday that I work from home on my first day. They sent me a computer by courier this afternoon just in case.)

It's a long time since I've changed jobs; last time I left a job I hated, and nine months before that I got laid off from a job I liked, and before that I left a starter job to go to grad school—so this whole thing of choosing to leave a pretty good job where I've been fairly happy with co-workers I love is new and exciting . . . in a sort of Sondheimesque way.

i was so ... anxious

About a month ago, a few of us went for coffee between Christmas concerts and in the course of the conversation about networking and jobs and whatnot one of my fellow singers mentioned that a friend of hers works at an organization related to the one where I've been working for 10 years and is trying to hire someone there to do what I do and long story short, today I gave notice and in two weeks I start at that related org for approximately twice my current salary, better medical insurance premiums, and an office with a window? It's a lot to process and it's all happened really fast and I'm very sad to be leaving ellen_fremedon and the rest of my team, but because the orgs are related I think there's a decent chance I'll still see a lot of them and everyone has been super encouraging and happy for me. I'm sort of hoping in the next couple weeks I go back to sleeping soundly and experiencing less digestive turbulence.

i was so ... hopeful

Himself's aunt came over from the UK for Thanksgiving and asked for my pecan pie recipe. I've made that pie in the UK twice, once successfully and once not, and the difference was the availability of corn syrup; when I couldn't get it, I tried to cook down brown sugar to substitute, and either I didn't boil off enough of the liquid or it just doesn't behave the same way, because that pie never did set properly. Tasted fine, but it was soup.

So. For a pie whose filling's ingredients are butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, pecans, and dark corn syrup, if you couldn't get corn syrup of any sort, what would you do? I've been thinking about using brown sugar instead of white and golden syrup instead of Karo. (The aunt said "oh no, golden syrup is such a sticky mess," and I had to point out that corn syrup is as well and that's sort of the point.) Any more expert bakers have other thoughts?

Himself is heading out of town for a couple of days this week, so although I usually go to the office Tuesday and Wednesday I'll have to be at home this Wednesday and was waffling about whether to make my second in-office day Monday or Friday. Ultimately decided I might as well get it out of the way, and then promptly forgot about it, so when he woke me up this morning and said "Weren't you thinking of going in today?" all I could say was UGH. But I did, I got up and dressed for going in and got all the way to the train and went to lock up the scooter and realized I didn't have my lock, because I didn't have my bag, which meant I couldn't even haul the thing in with me and charge it at the office because I didn't have my computer. Sigh. Scooted back home, picked up the work bag, and did it all again.

I've been fighting off a sinus cold thing and I think it's making me stupid.

The prince is super invested in MLK Day—they cover it at what I assume is an age-appropriate level in his elementary school—so I promised him we'd go downtown to see the memorial tomorrow. Meanwhile I’ve been in day job hell since the week before Christmas, which unicycle-juggling kind of has to end this coming week but not before a couple of rounds of testing the absolute limits of what can possibly be considered "the last minute." I did several hours' worth of work last night and some more this morning, along with solo parenting through grocery shopping and laundry and parkour yesterday afternoon because Himself has been at a conference (days only, thank god, so he could take over bedtime when that was one of the last minutes), and today we fetched my personal computer back from the Apple store and got the special cupcakes and now we're home listening to the wind howl and I am so tired it's hard to hold my head up, but the kid is not hocking me about wanting to play video games before the prescribed Time For Screens: Instead, he is signing New Year's cards (the one ball I bobbled this winter, but we'll have them sent before January is out). ❤️

i was so ... exhausted

Early last December we got a submission that we had to send back for further edits; my colleague said "here are the things that will need to be changed to make this publication accessible," and I said "also I have marked up everything in here that does not comply with our style guide." The PDF had 240 comments in it.

Last week we got it back from where it had apparently been sitting in someone's email (either they never sent it or the project manager never got it) since late last December. They'd made all (or possibly all but one) of the accessibility changes and, at first glance, not made the style guide changes. When the PM queried, they said they had so done the text edits, what was I talking about, could I please mark in the ones I thought they hadn't done; so I opened the last-December file on my right screen and the last-week file on my left screen and clicked through all 240 comments one at a time, re-marking them in the new file as necessary.

When I was through there were like 97 comments in the new file, so fair enough, they had apparently done as much as 60% of the text edits, but in my defense there was no rhyme or reason to which ones they'd done and which ones they hadn't done, and they hadn't done any on the first three pages of the thing, so I maintain my first impression was fairly accurate. Sent that back.

Today the PM reported that the authors said these comments were new, that is, not present in last December's markup.

Friends, the way my blood boiled. My own boss said that was obviously ridiculous because it's not that hard to see that they missed things, but of course I'm not worried that he thinks I'm half-assing my work; I'm mad that the PM, our customer, may think I'm half-assing when it is in fact Not Me Who Is Half-Assing Anything. (And also a little mad that when this thing is done it's going to have our logo on it but still be ugly as fuck. I don't know why we haven't been allowed to shove it into our design template but only to edit the text—or apparently to call for edits to the text and have those calls ignored.) I'm a goddamn professional is all I'm saying, and if we put this sucker in our design template, we'd get it right the first time and not have to do three rounds of edits and no you're still not understanding the points any of us are making.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, my mother called me today—Wednesday—to let me know that if I was planning to call her tomorrow for Mother's Day, she's going to have company between the hours of X and Y, and the fact that tomorrow is Thursday and Mother's Day is Sunday may or may not even have registered with her? Hard to know. As it happens I'm busy almost all day Sunday myself, so I might not have called her anyway, our family never having been too fussed about Mother's Day one way or the other, but now that she's brought it up I expect I have to.

Sigh.

Also, last night the prince, who is six, made himself cry asking about my dad.

HIM: Did your dad pass away?
ME: Yes, he did.
HIM: Were you sad?
ME: Yes, I was very sad.
HIM: How much did you cry?
ME: A lot.
HIM: How much did your mom cry?
ME: Probably even more than I did.
HIM: [sobbing]

🙄

On the up side, we bought the last available instance of the car we wanted in the (extremely generously defined) metro area and possibly on the entire eastern seaboard. So that's fun.

( cut for cancer again (still not mine) )

( So now )

Sigh.

i was so ... okay

Oh FFS next Monday is a federal holiday, which means yet another long weekend. The last time I worked five days in a row was . . . I have to look at my calendar to see when that was. At least this week that's because this is my short week on my 9/80 schedule, so Friday is my day off but my kid will still be in school. (Not that he won't whine about it, because that's apparently what we're doing now, but never mind.)

I am looking at my calendar now, and indeed:

Week after next: Day off Friday

Next week: Holiday Monday

This week: Day off Friday

Last week: Snow day Monday, kid home in quarantine Thursday-Friday

Last week of December: Holiday Friday

Third week of December: Holidays Thursday-Friday

Second full week of December: Half day Wednesday to get the kid his second dose of the vaccine

First full week of December: Day off Friday

End of November/beginning of December: Yes, that week I worked a full week.

So granted in a normal four-week month I work two five-day weeks and two four-day weeks; this year I will not have a full week in all of December and January.

i was so ... exhausted
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1475968.html

The prince, who is four and a half, can climb into his own car seat (he's been able to do this for ages now) and, in a recent development, do up his own buckles.
He cannot (yet) (fortunately) undo the buckles by himself.
But he's committed to the scientific process, and having seen me undo the buckles, even doing so very quickly so he can't make an in-depth study of the process, he's almost figured out what he needs to do; still more fortunately, his little hands are not yet strong enough to do it.
Nevertheless, yesterday I had to tell him I was not going to start the car until he stopped investigating the chest clip (which will be easier to undo than the lower seatbelt-style buckle). Hands absolutely off the clip. The car will not move until your hands are in your lap. Thank you.
"I wish I had a seat belt," he said, pronouncing the t's very thoroughly, after he saw me buckle my own seatbelt. I pointed out that he did have, that's what his straps and buckles are, and he was pleased to hear it (rather than insisting that he wanted a shoulder-and-lap arrangement like mine, thank god). "What's it for?" It's for keeping us safe, which is why it has to be tight enough to touch us, because otherwise it couldn't catch us in a sudden stop. And I stopped the car a little more suddenly than I usually do at the next stop sign, so he could feel a little bit of what that's like (and I also pointed out that my bag tipped over and my phone fell on the floor). And that is why we never, ever take the seatbelt off when the car is moving, unless there's a really big emergency; normally we don't unfasten it until we get where we're going and the car is turned off, got it? "Got it, Mommy." [whew]

Last time she was here, the cleaning lady told me the bag in my trusty 20-year-old vacuum was full, and I made a note to find the replacement bags ... somewhere ... and promptly forgot about it until she arrived again today.
Fortunately, she also brings her own vacuum. (Plus we have another vacuum in the house, but I don't think it's as good. It is Himself's lighter and more maneuverable Dyson bagless and it just doesn't vac the way the 1999 Hoover does.)
So I went to the Big River to order more vacuum bags and realized I don't actually know what kind of bags the thing takes. Looked all over the object and could find no label with this information. Seems like a biggish oversight. The tires on my car tell me what pressure to inflate them to; shouldn't the vacuum tell me what kind of parts it takes? (Given that they're not entirely standardized, which is also silly.)
Hoover dot com has a live chat option that wasn't working, so I had to call on the phone. Fortunately I didn't have to wait long, and the young woman who answered had to go do some research with all the details I was able to give her, which didn't include the actual model number, because I couldn't find that either.
Almost as soon as she put me back on hold, I did find the place on the vacuum where it tells me the bag type - inside the bag holding area, in raised print that's almost necessarily in shadow, so black-on-black and hard to see. But I found it.
And then waited for her to come back so I could thank her for hunting up the information for me. (Which her conclusion lined up with what I found myself, so that's good.)
Several months ago, I leaned back too far in my desk chair and fell over backwards and was not at all hurt and thought the chair was undamaged also, but it turns out the screw housings holding the headrest on its stalk had cracked in enough places that last week when I was trying to adjust the headrest it just came off in my hands.
The chair still works fine, but I miss having a headrest, so I'm contemplating which new chair to get. Just when we're on the cusp of probably going back to the office 40ish percent of the time seems an odd time to invest in a particularly nice desk chair for my home, but.

i was so ... okay
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1468078.html

I am a professional with several postgraduate degrees but I have literally just spent work time providing the kind of telephone tech support I normally reserve for my mom. (Now what menus do you see across the top of your screen? Okay, good, click on that.)

Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1459387.html

In general the prince has been handling the weirdness of all three of us staying home all the time pretty well. He misses grocery shopping, which we customarily do together on Saturday mornings and right now his dad is generally doing on his own on Fridays, but mainly he's been pretty cool given that he's three and can do almost no self-entertaining. :-P Specifically, for the past week - once I figured out that he needs lunch earlier on a "school" day than on a weekend, which makes total sense given the relative waking up times and processes - he's been totally cooperative about lunch and naps, which has been a huge relief.

Not today. Lunch was okay, but he pretty much refused to nap and in the end only slept because I sat in the rocking chair and held him the whole time, which I haven't had to do for like a year and a half. He woke up a couple of hours ago and I still have a crick in my neck and I'm all groggy, though a storm blew through here for a while that might have also had something to do with that.

I wish I knew when anything at all would be back to anything resembling normal.

i was so ... groggy
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1458729.html

I've been working from home since March 12, but for the first week (March 16-20) we kept sending the prince to day care, because it was open and they didn't have clusters of more than 10 people and the slight veneer of normalcy was good for all three of us. We had some anxiety about it, but. (It was the only place he was going, and I wasn't going anywhere at all once I'd gone to the pharmacy one time; Himself has been doing the grocery shopping alone rather than en famille on Saturdays, and we haven't seen the in-laws since March 8.)

On the 22nd they got the news that a parent of a kid in another classroom had tested positive. The parent nor the kid hadn't been in the place since the 13th (though who knows when the test was administered, for the results to come in that Sunday), but that was the push we needed to finally get all the way out of the pool. We made a child-care-plus-work-from-home schedule and started keeping him home on the 23rd. I've been able to work eight hours a day while Himself looks after the prince, and Himself gets about four hours to himself while I look after the prince. But Himself is starting a new job on April 21 (or, stop presses, maybe sooner), so we'll have to think of something else.

The new Families First act, which expands paid sick leave and FMLA and includes taking care of a minor whose school or day care is closed because of the 'rona as a reason to use those types of leave, kicks in tomorrow, and effective yesterday the day care did indeed close for the foreseeable future. Himself will not be eligible for family leave even under the new law until he's worked at the new job for 30 days, but I've been at my job for five years and haven't used FMLA since the prince was born, so.

And today I learned that while under the new law I'm entitled to 80 hours of extra sick time at 100% of my normal salary (up to some maximum that I think I'll max out, but whatever) - that is, two weeks - and 400 hours of extra family leave at 2/3 of my normal salary (up to some maximum ditto whatever) - that is, 10 weeks - I don't have to take that time all in a block. I knew intermittent FMLA was a thing, and it turns out I can use both the sick and the family leave intermittently as well - which means Himself and I can swap eight-hour and four-hour blocks and be covered at almost all of my salary and definitely all of his new salary for 24 weeks instead of just 12. And if things are still not back to normal by then, well, Himself will qualify for FMLA himself by then? And also, we'll have other problems by then.

Dear god I hope that's long enough for things to be back to some semblance of normal.

i was so ... anxious
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1458631.html

Okay, fair enough, it is in fact snowing at a clip that would have made getting to work and school challenging (and, in this town, unsafe). So kiddo is home from day care - but because Himself had already arranged a bit of "staycation" (a word I loathe, but it is what it is - three days of Not Working but not actually going anywhere), he's giving up one of his days off to majority-parent so I don't have to burn a vacation day on child care. And as I don't have but a fraction of a day's worth of vacation time in the bank, having used them all up on the furlough, I appreciate it.

Normally when I work from home lately I do it in the family room with the TV on. Several months ago I had a chunk of time with hardly any work to do no matter where I was, and locking myself in the spare bedroom where my desk setup is would have just made me unspeakably bored. (Plus for a week or so we had guys in here fixing the wall where the chimney had been leaking for years.) But with the boy home all day I can't really park in the family room and tell him I'm working - so I'm up here in the work room. Which I haven't used in months and is coated in dust. :-P

On the corner of my desk up here I've got some of Himself's childhood homework, which his mother had saved these 40 years and which I made him let me keep. Apparently they had a weekly-or-something assignment to write about their feelings, and I am utterly charmed by many if not most of his declarations of why he felt happy or mad (those being the main two feelings he ever wrote about). One of these days I'll transcribe as much of that as I can for the prince. ♥

i was so ... working
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1453698.html

Some years ago, almost exactly halfway through the year of my father's final illness, I was (in addition to my dad being terminally ill) having a Difficult Time at Work that basically boiled down to the fact that, especially given how little I was paid at that job, it was pretty upsetting how little of a shit anyone seemed to give whether the work I was doing even got done. The Difficult Time culminated in my dissolving into sobs in a meeting with two bosses and a third person senior to me and being unable to stop for more than an hour. I did eventually cry myself out and make my apologies to my colleagues, and part of the reason I stayed at that job another year and a half (until I was laid off - I don't know if, in a world where they had the faintest idea how to manage funds, I'd be there still, but I wouldn't have left when I did if I hadn't had to) is that my main boss replied to my note to say "I suspect you are like me: more an Elinor than a Marianne, which means it is particularly surprising for us when life makes it hard to hold things together."

At my present job, we've been hanging in there for the first three weeks of the present government shutdown, but we're being stop-worked at the close of business today. I have enough vacation time - which we're being required to use, though not allowed to use sick time - to get me to the end of the pay period, so the check that comes on January 25 will be normal, but starting next Wednesday I'll be on LWOP until (unless) we come back to work. And there's no back pay for contractors, of course. My salary is a smaller share of our total household income than some people's who are affected by this nonsense, but although Himself is the majority breadwinner it's not like I just work for fun money; we're going to have to make some spending adjustments while I'm not getting paid. We are not right up against the limit of our means, but change is hard and uncertainty is even harder.

The level of eff-it (a coinage that I'm actually pretty pleased with as a modification of "level of effort") on my team is pretty high. We're all at work today, wrapping things up, but the impulse to take a sick day - because saving it wouldn't hold off the LWOP at all - was pretty high. Only none of us did. I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, I had two main reasons for not calling out today. First, the feds I work with and for are just as upset about being required to cut us loose as we are, and in the week they'll survive without us (that is: they're going to run out of money this time next week, so it's not like they're keeping themselves essential at our expense), our work won't get done, which they also aren't crazy about. Likewise my actual employer, the contracting company, doesn't like having to bench us; they don't make money when we're not working, either. So a sickout wouldn't hurt anyone who actually deserves it. And second, taking a sick day today would feel pouty and petulant. As I said to Himself in the car this morning, the only thing I can actually control in all of this is my own behavior, so I'd like that to be exemplary.

And then I immediately thought of the Dashwoods. "Do you compare your conduct with his?" - "No. I compare it with what it ought to have been; I compare it with yours."

i was so ... okay
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1452531.html

Today is my first day back at work since the prince was born. Himself and I left the house at the same time this morning and walked to the end of the block, and then he turned left to take the baby to his mom's and I turned right to go to the train, and as soon as I crossed the street I felt a little sick to my stomach.

I'm feeling much better now. Also, the fact that my user accounts at work had all dried up and needed to be reauthorized but the new computer I'm supposed to have isn't here yet is pretty annoying. Now that my account works and I'm on the computer that I can't do any work from, it's more amusing. :-P

i was so ... okay
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1434909.html

I read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child finally this weekend and enjoyed almost all of it very much. ( bit spoilery )

I am knitting things for the baby. I'd say I'm about 3/5 through the thing that generally flies when I bother to work on it, but I finally had the needles and the yarn and the markers in one place and the time to begin working on the second thing, which it turns out takes forever. I have 15 weeks left before the baby comes and I'm already thinking the idea that this blanket will be done on time is laughable.

I've been in a protracted argument at work, apparently, about capitalizing things that aren't proper names. (I'm against it.) Everybody I actually work for is on my side, partly because I'm right and I have no fewer than three style guides to back me up but mostly because I'm the one they pay to know this stuff and the people arguing with me are not. Like I have all these good defenses for doing it my way plus the concept of my letting you get on with what you're an expert in and your letting me do the same. Fun times.

Back to the first point, even before I read Cursed Child (by the way: we're pronouncing that "Cursèd," right? I certainly am. The whole title flows better that way), I was inexplicably back again in a HP place. I have this sort of six-page draft of the beginning of a thing in the HP world I was writing - comprehensively non-canon-compliant now, of course, but it is what it is; the one where Harry ends up with Snape, Bill Weasley ends up with Remus Lupin, Hermione marries a boy she met at university, and Ron's long-term girlfriend is a descendant of the Borgias - where eventually the Weasleys find out what happened to Random, who was between Charlie and Percy, which Bill has known all along but it's a protected secret and he hasn't been able to tell but Remus worked it out and they end up having to tell the family because Reasons. It's been sitting there on my hard drive for ~~at least five~~ it looks like about nine years, with a major overhaul maybe five-ish years ago, and hanging out in a gmail draft since last summer because I don't feel as comfortable having fan stuff on this computer as I've felt at other jobs. Anyway, lately I've been trying to achieve the velocity to get back to it. Maybe soon I will.

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1427852.html

We can has cabinets! All our kitchen cabinets are in. Next week the tile is coming for the bathroom floors and also the countertop people are coming to measure and do the things countertop people do. The bathroom vanities won't be here for four weeks, but everything else should be in place by then. Fingers crossed the whole operation will be done by Labor Day. It's been a long year and I want my stuff back from storage.

Also, I had my annual review today and it was entirely positive. Got my raise, effective August 1. Huzzah.

The knot in my shoulder is flaring up extremely unpleasantly. Himself had a knead at it a bit ago and it seemed to help; I'll ask him to do it again before we go to bed, because seriously, the shoulder is so kinked up that my elbow is cramped and the fingers of that hand are tingly.

i was so ... okay

It's been a pretty good weekend. Yesterday we made good progress on house stuff - chose all our kitchen and bathroom fixtures and the kitchen sink, so the only decisions we have left to make about the house are counters, bathroom vanities/cabinets, toilets, tiles, ceiling fans, siding, and paint colors. ... Okay, so that seems like kind of a lot now that I put it that way. But still: progress!

They came and disconnected the air conditioner (the condenser unit) and moved it to the back of the yard, so now the foundation guy can come dig in the back yard and start putting down the new foundation. IT HAS BEGUN AT LAST.

Today I sang one Mass with the Catholics and then we went to dim sum brunch with our usual dim sum crowd, which was awesome. Grabbed our last couple of groceries on the way home and then we popped down the street to look at the open house in the place that's been built in the few months we've been living here. (When we moved in it was a hole in the ground and now it's a great big house for sale. It had a couple of nice features but was basically meh. I'm sure it'll be fine when someone is living in there.

Called my mother, changed into my jammies, started the laundry, vacuumed the rug in the entryway, saw that the person who's been parked in front of our house for two days was leaving! (I think it was the grandparents belonging to the young family across the street. They've got a young kid and even younger twins, so it wouldn't shock me if the grandparents came to visit as many weekends as possible.) I asked Himself to move my car into the spot, since I'd already changed, and he did, so now the curb in front of our house is filled with both of our cars and his motorcycle, which is as it should be. (Someday we will have a driveway. And we'll even park in it, unlike the people next door to us. Sigh.) I ♥ him.

And then while the laundry was running and we were watching the Packers-Cowboys game, I got two hours of work done that will make my upcoming week more pleasant. I am so pleased with both this and with Himself's moving of my car, and so pleased that I am so pleased by these things and likely to remain so. Yay for things that are so relatively easy and improve my day so comprehensively!

i was so ... happy
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1406951.html

Christmas concerts with the big chorus are done. Work is at a manageable dull roar for the moment. ( Well, except this one work thing. ) I got my work Secret Santa present on time and my Secret Santee was very pleased with it, including my make-do wrapping job (masking tape inscribed with "THE SCOTCH TAPE IS HIDING" (block print, you see, so nobody could recognize my writing)--because our scotch tape must be in a box somewhere and there wasn't time to go out and buy more. I got presents for my side of the family ordered and shipped. We don't have presents yet for each other or for Himself's side of the family, but that's all a much less fraught prospect because my side is the only one with a four-year-old. I booked our hotel for New Year's, so a road trip is in our future.

My Yuletide is on 1069 words (yay over the max) and I ~~swear I will finish it this afternoon~~ JUST POSTED, WHOOP WHOOP.

I'm up in the Catholics' choir loft twice on Sunday, three times next Thursday (well - midnight Wednesday and then twice Thursday morning), twice next Sunday, and twice the Sunday after that, so that'll be a nice bundle of stipends. Mama's got to pay the contractor: our house addition plans have been approved ~~(although not yet issued)~~ (and just issued this afternoon, whoop whoop) and I am long past ready to roll. The place where a great deal of our stuff is in storage has been acquired and we're not sure we like the new ownership's terms of service, so we might be getting our stuff back and cramming it into the rooms we're not using ... which will make the building work more exciting, but hey, excitement's what it's all about, right? We'll see.

In any case: I'm this close to having made it through December. Bring on January.

i was so ... good
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1405323.html

Today was my fourth day at the New Job, and the third day of walking to and from the bus in the morning and evening. I feel like I understand what I'm doing and am good at it at work - already, which was not the case at Previous/Interim Job for at least several weeks, if not some number of months - and of course it's too soon for walking about 1.25 miles every day to be having visible or measurable effects. But I do feel better. Almost all of a sudden!

We're closing on the house Friday. Things are pretty good.

i was so ... good
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1400875.html

( The first day at the new job was exhausting. )

Today, the second day at the new job was better than the last day at the old job.

I have definitely made the right choice.

i was so ... good

( So, um ... we bought a house! )

( I got a new job! )

( Preparing for the move is, of course, hard. )

I did look in one box in our basement that I didn't know what was in there, and right on the top I found a scarf Himself's grandmother had made him, which we had looked for and looked for in the winter and couldn't find, and he'd more or less resigned himself to the sadness and guilt of having lost it. So that was genuinely awesome.

Corn on the cob for dinner. Hurrah.

i was so ... okay
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1400554.html

So holy crap: I got married. Every day I see the rings on my left hand and am surprised again how different they look than the engagement ring by itself. I am becoming accustomed to not just thinking of him, but also actually referring to him, as my husband - and other people aren't even blinking when I say it. And why should they - a husband is a totally normal thing to have, and they don't know I only got mine a few weeks ago. (It's feeling less odd to hear myself call his mother my mother-in-law. Probably because I've been thinking of her that way for a long time, in the absence of another label.)

We are trying to buy a house. Looked at a half-dozen places a couple of weeks ago; felt meh about all of them. (One, the smallest and cheapest, may be possible iff we pop it up immediately. We're not sure all the work it needs can be achieved for a price we can pay. Or is even possible or desirable, given the size of the lot.) Looked at four more this past weekend, and made an offer on one of them Sunday. Four bedrooms plus an office (so Himself won't take up a bedroom for his office in his three work-from-home days per week, of which I routinely writhe with jealousy, by the way), fantastic kitchen, no driveway but the neighbors said parking is never a problem, good school district. Got outbid by someone who obviously wanted that house way more than we did, so fair enough, back to the listing mines. Looking at a few more this weekend. OOF.

The slice in my finger is much better now. :-)

I e-mailed the doctor because she'd asked me for an update after I'd been back on my good nasal spray for a while; I told her the truth, which was that my ears are less stoppy but I still have a yucky productive cough and a lot of post-nasal drip. So she prescribed augmentin, which I'm on for the next ~~million years~~ two weeks, which means - of course - that I bought all the yogurt in the world. So far both the abx and the yogurt seem to be doing their jobs, but it's too soon to tell all around.

Himself has to go in for another round of surgical fun tomorrow morning. Poor bunny. This has been much worse than one was led to expect when one was discharged from the ER all those weeks ago.

My job has been slightly more bearable lately, but I would still prefer one that either offered more leave OR allowed me to work from home ever, and for a bonus where I could be a little more enthusiastic about the mission (a word I hate, but I know it's a thing all workplaces have). If you know anyplace that wants to hire someone like me - well, please call

ellen_fremedon. But if you know anyplace that wants to hire two such people, do please call us both.

I voted today.

I'm never going to have enough energy to clean up the living room, so this afternoon I decided to try and do one thing per day and see if I can manage to get it tidy before our general leaving-shit-lying-around habits catch up with and overwhelm my picking-shit-up-and-keeping-the-place-orderly efforts. I am ... cautiously optimistic.

We were done with all our thank-you notes, but another present arrived yesterday.

There was a bear on the campus of NIH today, and you really should check out its twitter feed at @NIH_Bear.

Watching a little World Cup soccer, because we are such sports fans. :-)

And how are all of you?

i was so ... good
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1399311.html

Profile

fox

December 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Entries tagged with life: work

in which we probe my outer limits

keeping in mind the nearest exit may be behind you

OOO

update from a whirlwind

roundup

in which my 7yo is pretty great

meanwhile

this week in things that suck

another long weekend coming

meanwhile, adventures in parenting and adulting (which are not always the same)

my life at work

oof

best news i'll hear today

stuff

snow day

"more an Elinor than a Marianne"

back at work

assortment

quick check-in

it takes so little to make me happy

i can do this

hooray

today's news

update of Things

hiiiii everyonnnne

Profile

December 2025

Tags

Expand Cut Tags