Working Wednesday, November 11, 2020

~ Jenny

The biggest working news for me is that my internet is working again. (It went out last night. Argh.)

What’s working at your house?

50 thoughts on “Working Wednesday, November 11, 2020”

  2. The social center where I volunteer has its 10th anniversary this year, so we want to publish a cookbook with recipes from our international cooking group. This week, I’m working on the page edits. It’s slow going because we can’t meet in person due to the lockdown, so I have to mail every page to our graphic designer who is an Iranian refugee and it’s sometimes difficult to explain the changes. But hopefully, we’ll get it done in time so we can sell it before Christmas. Wish me luck!

  3. I took an extended weekend. Thursday, I spent most of the day prepping for a quilting retreat. Friday, I drove to Virginia and started working. Saturday was almost completely put towards sewing, and I finished off a bit more Sunday morning before heading home. I took Monday off too, so after doing some overdue yard work and hauling the debris to the curb, I spent much of the rest of the day sewing too. So far, I’ve got three out of four different sections of a quilt ready to go.

    https://www.instagram.com/p/CHbCtYWFj1X/

    Last night I also finished up the mosaic blanket. I really like how it turned out.

    https://www.instagram.com/p/CHb1LtVhRVU/

    Since I already have multiple links, what’s one more. Two years ago we took out an old boxwood and replaced it with an October blooming camellia. Last year, it didn’t do much, but it’s covered with buds and blooms this year.

    https://www.instagram.com/p/CHbCMVqlEfj/

    It’s back to the work-a-day grind now! I’ll probably be a while putting that quilt top together.

    1. I am working on the same mosaic blanket. Still have a bit to go before I am ready to do the edge. Yours is gorgeous!!!!!

  4. Went to a sandy beach to pick up drift wood (for Christmas decorations). It was a sunny warm day with that long November light. We mostly sat with our backs against the warm sand ledge, then went and found an outdoor sandwich. I spent this morning clearing up things in the yard, this is our last warm day, it appears.

  5. Just trying to get back into my exercise and Italian routine after spending several days strung out on CNN, MSNBC, and NYTimes (and yes, constantly updating online news platforms do feel like a drug to me, personally). Somewhat successful. I did mop the floor today, so there’s that. It’s rainy, so a perfect day to putter around the house, but I also want a nap. . .

  6. Back when I was working, Wednesday was called Hump Day. Sure every other day had a label but not as special. Today also happens to be Veteran’s Day. I knew that and earlier this week bought a card for my son to commemorate this day. So what did I do so far today, I called the library and spoke to a machine and said I was coming over to get my books. It’s interesting to note that the voice did not mention that it was closed. And then I drove down through town to the bank to deposit a check and only realizing when there were no lines my folly. So I turned around and went home where I will not wait for the mailman.

    Last night for dinner I made my version of stuffed pork chops. I seasoned the chops, browned them off and placed them in a baking dish with sliced pieces of apple on top. In the pan I poured in some chicken stock to loosen the bits and added some jarred gravy and little frozen pearl onions to make a sauce. I made a batch of stuffing and mounded at least half a cup in each chop, Poured the sauce over all and covered with foil and baked for 45 min. to one hour at 350*.

  7. The wooden privacy fence for the dotter’s back yard got painted white. That’s not why the dotter divorced ex-SiL, but it didn’t help. Yesterday, she rented a pressure washer and now all but a few very resistant slats are natural wood again. She owns a sander, so they won’t survive. A whole lot of building a wall and make the back yard great again jokes went through my mind, but the woman was holding a pressure washer so I wisely kept my mouth shut.

    She also washed sections of the house and it looks better than it has for years. Then she started hanging Christmas lights. She decorated for Halloween/Autumn, now she’s skipping Thanksgiving. She says, “I want to enjoy the decorations for the longest possible time.” I don’t argue. My own decorations are up. (Three USB Christmas trees, under ten inches each.)

  8. So not a Working Wednesday topic but Subterranean Press has annouced 2 new Ben Aaronovitch books. Thought y’all might be interested!

    1. Oh, I am! Thank you. I really enjoyed the last one and I want to know about the twins.

  9. I’m the result of two soldiers meeting on a snowbound troop train one winter night outside Boulder in 1943. His series of cars had come from Minnesota, where he’d been teaching city recruits how to ski and avoid freezing to death while fighting enemy troops somewhere in Europe. Hers had come from Nebraska, where she was grumpily doing recruitment work to get more young women into the WAACs. (She really wanted to get assigned overseas instead, which was why the grumpiness.)

    Her end of the dining car had long lines waiting in the corridor for tables to empty; his had very few, so when a table opened up near his end, the porter showed him to a table as she watched with increasing frustration. She complained, he volunteered to share the table with her, and over dinner they discussed the war, their respective branches of the service, and (apparently) poetry, which led to correspondence during the rest of the war and eventually to marriage, a cocker spaniel, and me.

    None of their three daughters ever joined the military, but it was enough of a personal heritage to make me particularly dislike our (Yay!) outgoing president’s history of getting a totally bogus draft deferral based on fictional health issues. Only one of the many many things that are making me celebrate this election, despite the raft of things still to be ameliorated.

    1. With you on the personal heritage. My parents met in a bomb proof (think bunker) on Aberdeen Proving Grounds (in Maryland) the home of Army Ordinance, in 1943. My mother drove ammunition trucks. My father tested bombs, although he longed to be deployed overseas. He was a private first class. She was a sergeant.

      Last year I subbed for the President of my college and the Provost at the ROTC commissioning ceremony, a few days before graduation–an honor.

  10. I’m not working today, hahahaahah! Day off!

    That said, I am taking a workshop right now on making your stories funnier. And I have play rehearsal tonight, so there’s that.

  11. I took yesterday off so I could get my car under coated (rust-proofed) for the winter. I went for a hike before the car appt. and raked leaves after the appt. When I was done, I looked up at the tree the leaves had come from and groaned. It still had more than half of the leaves on it. During the course of the day, more leaves came down which I raked up in the evening. It rained overnight and now my yard is again covered in leaves and the tree is almost bare. Fingers crossed the village will come around again (they came through the day before this particular tree started shedding leaves and picked up all the piles of leaves already raked) to pickup leaves as I have a long caterpillar of leaves along the front of my property again!

  12. I finally got back to writing after taking most of October off to do other things, since anxiety was keeping me from concentrating anyway.

    It’s a slow return to daily writing, but I knew it would be. It takes time to build up the mental muscle, and any progress is better than no progress.

  13. I’m hating the day job, and the fact I’m probably going to have to do it for ever. I’m doing three hours every morning on the nihilistic Romanian novel and then an hour and a half at the allotment, followed by some garden design.

    Not doing: fiction writing, photo editing, sorting out my gardening research, connecting with friends.

    1. Oh don’t start people listing “not doing.” Especially don’t start me. That’s just a black hole of doom.

          2. I went there. I came right back! 😏

            SEP herself wrote a character who embraced the chaos.

            I’ve decided I AM the chaos that’s happy to be embraced! 😎⚡

          3. I’m optimistic and ridiculously cheerful and I feel right at home here. (Not so sure about mentally balanced. Maybe a tad on the manic side?)

    2. A while ago, I grumbled to a friend about my not-doing list and he told me he was surprised by how much I was doing. That was a bit of an eye-opener. I feel the same about you, Jane – you seem to me to be getting a lot done.

      1. Why? Just because she bought a house, completely redid the inside and the outside, planted a whole allotment, had a zillion friends over safely during a pandemic, walked and photographed most of England, and edited about a hundred books? She’s British, they do that.

        1. You wally! But I’m feeling better this morning: the sun’s lurking and I’ve decided to walk through the woods with my camera.

  14. The highlight of my week was discovering I had inadvertently run the electronic key fob for my car through the washing machine. Since I managed to lose the spare last year, this left me with no way to drive my car. I ordered a new one from the dealer, which will cost over $300 and two hours waiting while it is programmed. Ouch!! I’m afraid I will no longer be able to tease my husband about leaving his gas cap at the gas station two times in a row.

    On the plus side, I get a new key on Monday. On Tuesday, I expect I will find the key I lost over a year ago. Life is full of these little ironies.

  15. I took four cats (3 of them 3 years old, one of them 1 year old) to the vet today. All at one time. This definitely counts as work, right? Just yearly checkups and shots, but the kitten got 2 shots (rabies and distemper) to everyone else’s one, and is clearly not feeling well. Which freaks me out, after so many sick older cats, and her pal Harry Dresden having a very bad reaction when he was young and got his two shots together. (Bad reaction meaning not eating for days, high fever, five days at the vet and almost dying.) So now I’m working at not fretting, and trying to start Cozy #3, without much success.

    1. I used to get a “family discount” if I brought all of the cats in at once. But when that was no longer available, it was no longer necessary to try to herd them all at the same time. You’re definitely a superman to accomplish that! Hopefully Miss Diana is doing better today.

    2. Yes, working at a vet’s I can confirm that taking four cats to the vet on the same day counts as work!

    3. I feel for you on the worries. It’s so frustrating, not being able to EXPLAIN to them why it’s necessary to go to the Bad Place with Dogs and Needles, and not being able to hear from them on what hurts or what they really really need from you.

      Does your MC or her best friend/sister/neighbor/mom/gay brother etc. have a cat you could put through the same situation with the same worries? I’d like to read that as a situation in a cozy — it’s a thing that any pet owner would identify with.

  16. I had today off which means I got to catch up on things like grocery shopping. Tomorrow I’ll be back to counting provisional ballots with my fellow Election Board members.

    It was gorgeoous out Monday and Tuesday when we were stuck indoors. Today rain. LOL

    1. Thank you for your elections work! I know many of you are getting rations of agro right now, and I just want you to know how much I appreciate your diligence.

  17. We had a very fraught day Monday scrambling to get ready for website launch announcement for Tuesday. Tuesday had such a busy day responding to requests for access that when I had a chance to take a break, I couldn’t figure out why no working Wednesday post (apparently I had already worked hard enough for it to be wednesday). Today I am finally getting caught up…. now I just want someone to BUY something from the website that people are asking to access, and professing to admire. Sales, damn it! ahem, that is, I am so glad people like it.

        1. Oh.
          Somebody is trying to buy my cottage, and I am so far resisting, but if something fabulous like that came up and I had three million to spare (wait, that’s in pounds, isn’t it? Never mind).

  19. Still chipping away at the getting-rid-of-stuff, but I did get my living room floor touch-ups done, and the rugs unrolled, so the living room looks about a thousand times better!

    And I’m doing a mini-NaNo – committed to writing every day this month after slacking off for too long. So far it’s been great, and I woke up this morning thinking about a scene I wanted to write, which is a good sign.

    1. I’m so glad to hear I’m not the only one who has been slacking off. But now I might as well wait until January because December is just too busy already.

  20. Chicken noodle soup from scratch. The chicken was already cooked and purchased egg noodles so maybe it all from scratch.

  21. Veterans’ Day is special for us, too, as my parents met in 1945 when they were both in the Navy and stationed at Mare Island, California, a submarine base. My mother was an electrical engineer and worked on the radio and sonar equipment on subs, my father was a civil engineer and worked on the wharfs there. They were introduced by a mutual acquaintance who informed my father that my mother was replacing Miss Jackson, and my father said that if they needed to replace Miss Jackson, the war effort must be going worse than anyone was admitting. He then invited her to lunch in San Francisco to assist him in choosing a bracelet for another girl, which she did!

    Her identical twin sister had joined the Navy at the same time and was in communications and cryptography, stationed at Hunters Point. One evening at the officers’ club, a gunnery officer from the Pennsylvania won a jackpot and the winnings spilled to the floor. Aunt Ruth helped him pick them up, and the way he reported it, “then she helped him spend them,” which she continued to do until he died at the age of 100 in 2019.

    Our favorite story happened right after her sister was married in November 1945. They honeymooned in San Francisco, and my mother went there and had lunch with them. Mother had an errand at Hunters Point, so my aunt asked if she wouldn’t get something from her room in the Waves’ Quarters as well. Mother said Fine, and went on to Hunters Point. She was just at the door of the Waves’ Quarters when a man said, “Ruth! Where’s Jim?” My mother said, “Oh, I’ve left Jim,” and whisked herself into the Waves’ Quarters, where the man couldn’t follow her. She visited her friends, picked up Aunt Ruth’s little something, and when she left the building, six or seven officers from the Pennsylvania were hovering at the door, there to beg Ruth to give Jim another chance . . . .

  22. I did a heap of cleaning and a little bit of gardening and went for a guided geology walk on the hills nearby. It’s a very extinct volcano and was fascinating to see different bits of the volcanics. And a highlight was this flower growing out of the rock face:
    https://www.instagram.com/p/CHezZCIl7Qx/

    And I did more drawing, a few casual portraits of friends and more on Rosie:
    https://www.instagram.com/p/CHexoS3FhOq/

    It was a pretty productive week really but exhausting.

    1. Your heliohebe’s a new one in me – and sent the Royal Horticultural Society’s website into shock when I searched for it. I always find it so exciting to come across beautiful plants like that in the wild.

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