Working Wednesday, August 10, 2021

~ Jenny

I’m trying to work, but it’s so damn hot that I get about ten minutes in and then go lie down next to the fan. Must do better.

What did you accomplish this week?

63 thoughts on “Working Wednesday, August 10, 2021”

  1. I say this the night before, having just staggered in from Beauty and the Beast rehearsal: BE OUR GUEST GOES ON FOREVER, AND HAS MULTIPLE SECTIONS, WE HAVEN’T EVEN DONE THEM ALL, AND THEN THEY REDID HALF OF IT TONIGHT. SOOOO DAMN TIRED.

    In other work: knitting/crocheting a jacket and a scarf, working on the Encanto skirt hem.

    In day job: a bunch of drama involving people having financial holds and having to redo an order because 480+ documents were mistakenly marked the wrong way 🙁 I think Excel screwed me on that one.

    So ded.

  2. I made a big pot of chili over the weekend so I wouldn’t have to worry about throwing together lunch every day for work this week! It feels great!

    1. What do you like to eat along with the chili? People seem to have many possibilities; we tend to put it on a bed of rice. My neighbor insists it must go on spaghetti. I’ve heard people put it on top of various meats (like a chili dog), but that seems like overkill to me. Always looking for new ideas, though.

      1. In the Good Ol’ Days (pre-diet), I didn’t make chili, I bought Campbell’s Firehouse or Roadhouse chili and dumped the can in Bob Evans Macaroni and Cheese, ergo, Chili Mac and Cheese. It was mahvelous! It was also a lot more carbs, calories, and sodium than a human should… enjoy the hell out of. (I didn’t reach 300 pounds eating tofu.)

        These days, a scoop of chili is good on scrambled eggs. Or two scoops on brown rice. Or spread on Pepperidge Farms Very Thin Wheat Bread. Or on crackers. Or straight up by itself.

      2. We eat it in a bowl with chopped onions, shredded cheese and diced avocados (when we have them).

        If we’re feeling fancy we have cornbread on the side.

      3. Honestly, for me, it depends on the chili because there are several different flavor profiles you can go for. This was just a simple, basic chili, but I put quick-pickled red onions, cilantro, cheese, scallion, and a squeeze of lime on top. I also like sour cream. I almost always eat my chili over rice, but I’m not opposed to eating it with pasta! But then it would feel more like a meat sauce to me

        1. Taco style with a small bed of shredded lettuce, small scoop of beef or white chicken Chile, grated cheddar or Mexican blend cheese melting over the top. Next top with chopped tomato, avocado and sour cream. Or over rice with toppings on the side. That way you can add more chili.

      4. Because of this discussion, I got a hankerin’ for chili. I made it with 96% lean ground beef, shallots, red bell pepper, fresh red fire peppers from my gardens (insanely hot), diced tomatoes, tomato paste, seasonings, then dumped half a pound of it on Ben’s Brown Basmati Rice. It needed more salt, but sodium is not on my diet, so I made do.

          1. It was delicious! Except the shallots got up my nose, to the point where I was breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. I expected that from the hot peppers – they really are insanely hot – but not from shallots. I thought of shallots as mild onions, and they aren’t. Of all the things Arghers put chili on, the closest I can come up with (besides rice) is potato sticks. I have lots of potato sticks, and they’re very salty, and very crunchy.

      5. Nachos …with cheese and sour cream, in wraps with some veggies, on baked potatoes, use it for the base of a pasta bake

      6. I serve it with corn bread. And with many toppings (cheddar, scallions or onions, cilantro, tortilla chips…)

  3. We spent the last two days without water during the day whilst having all the pipes in our house replaced (many leaks in the crawlspace) and a tankless water heater installed.

    Oh the joys of living in a house built in the 40s. But…doubt that we will need to do this again in our lifetime.

  4. This past week I made some more progress on my quilting UFO challenge. I started off the summer with 5 tops I wanted to complete – to the top stage, not necessarily finish. After this past weekend, I’ve got one left.

    I started the week taking time off from work – ostensibly to be prepped for a colonoscopy. I knew I would not be fit company on the clear liquid diet, so I went to the long arm shop and quilted the log cabin quilt I’d finished a few weeks ago. (I was busy and had to be polite, so I wasn’t concentrating on anything else, or dreading the evening.) It was a good plan. I finished the binding of the quilt on Friday evening.

    On Saturday, I opened up a bin to tackle a complicated border treatment for a quilt I started as a mystery project in 2018. It took all weekend, but I think it turned out well. (Lots of thinking, sewing, ripping, rethinking, jiggering, easing, cursing, more thinking and distraction with other activities, like watching movies.) I included a closeup of the corner – I think I did the miter matching pretty well. Now I can think about a back for this sucker and getting it into the pile to be quilted.

    https://www.instagram.com/p/ChE-FVhu-hx/

    So, one more top to complete by Halloween for my challenge. This one too has a complicated border print treatment. But I’ve conquered this one, so maybe the next one won’t be as hard.

  5. Great news: Went to an opera in upstate NY yesterday with close friend from college days who is dealing with sorrow over death of business partner. The opera was hilarious (a mashup of Rossini pieces as a farce) and talking with my friend was heart-warming.

    Bad news: She’d tested negative for covid in the am, but positive in the pm after she got home. I have surgery scheduled for tomorrow. Right now I tested negative, but I don’t know the surgeon’s policy on being exposed. We’ll see.

      1. Thanks, Deb! The surgeon has given me the go ahead for the surgery. Yay! Frankly, I’m sure I’ll come down with covid over the weekend, but I cared about getting the surgery done.

  6. Monday was the first new job shift. It went okay but I might have a problem with a co-worker. Right now I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt and going with the idea that she’s just someone who is not great at training people/uncomfortable with new people. Paul’s not completely convinced this job is a good idea, the store seems to have a lot of staff turnover, so if I tried it for 6 months and quit he wouldn’t really be upset with me.

    Yesterday I worked in the yard and got a bunch of fiddly little jobs done. We’ve had a pile of bricks beside the greenhouse for ages and I finally got them all set out along the edge of the garden fence and the spot where they had been cleaned up. I’ll need Paul’s help with a few things and then the back yard projects will be “done” for the year. There are 1-2 more things we could do but they aren’t super important this late in the season.

  7. I have begun making use of the grout brush I bought, cleaning some of the kitchen and bathroom floor tiles. It isn’t as painful as I’d expected, so will keep going. I work in little spurts, not trying to win awards for productivity or a completely finished room.

  8. I managed to kill my truck and my DVD player all in one day! Tada! Not my best day. Waiting to hear what is wrong with the truck, which wouldn’t start, and then did start. Perverse beast! The DVD player doesn’t recognize that there’s a disc in it. Blind beast! It’s old. The truck is 18 years old. I’m old. Now, I have to wade through the DVD possibilities. This is not my area of knowledge, and sons are very busy, after a week of vacation with each other. Sigh.

    1. Jan, I’m crossing fingers that a new filter or something minor will get your truck starting every time.

      Is the DVD player in the truck or at home? Those things don’t last as long as they should.

      Good luck!

      1. Elizabeth, thanks for the good wishes. The truck needed some maintenance, anyway. Whatever it costs will be less than monthly payments for a newer vehicle. The DVD player is in my house. I found a nice one for under $80 online. I haven’t heard from the repair guy, yet. It’s just odd that both died the same day.

  9. I’m madly trying to finish the first draft of the current nonfiction book before I leave for vacation tomorrow. (Spoiler: It’s not going to happen.)

    Also I need to finish cleaning my house (since the friend I’m visiting is going to be driving me home and finally meeting the “new” batch of cats–she hasn’t been here in about 6 years, so I want the place to look semi-decent) and pack for the trip. Which doesn’t, thank all the gods, involve flying.

    1. Yes, thank the gods, is right. My son flew with his family to Arizona, and one flight was cancelled twice, rescheduled, and then rescheduled a day later. For the trip back, the flight was delayed. It was a nightmare, but they did get to their destination, both times.

      1. Omg. Flying tomorrow, back on Sunday. I’m so worried this is gonna happen to me and I can’t decide whether ti bring my work laptop or not….

  10. It’s Wednesday already? Dinner with the dotter threw me off, especially the flat on the way there. The outcome of that is that it will cost me over $600 USD for four new tires, mounting, balancing, alignment, yada, yada, yada. Car ownership is not a pay-once-and-forget system, even without the cost of fuel.

    But I didn’t cook yesterday and dinner is still stuck to my ribs, so to speak. What I need to do is harvest some lettuce – I mean, the lettuce needs harvesting – and prepare a huge salad with hard-boiled eggs and bacon and crouton garnish and hot peppers and sweet peppers and carrot slivers and onions or maybe scallions and my home made dressing over it all. So that’s what I’ll do.

    And I just read chapter 125 of Variations where Memorial High puts on The Sound of Music, first of three shows, to much applause. Steve plays Rolf and sings the Sixteen song. His girlfriend Jasmine is Maria. Angie is Mother Superior. A good time was had by all. Two more nights, or a night and a matinee. Loving the coincidence of Jennifer in Beauty and the Beast. Art imitates life and vice versa.

  11. My daughter and her partner will be visiting us at the end of August from England in a complicated itinerary that involves I think 9 flights and checking a clarinet. I have some anxiety about this. I did manage to persuade them to take the train to NY and back. I think everyone I have talked to about taking planes this summer had some complication from lost luggage to cancelled flights to 2 hours waiting to deplane. One friend ended up spending 52 hours to get from Ithaca NY to Seattle Wa and had to take an Uber to get her luggage from the other airport in the city.

    I’m starting to catch up on office work that was piling up when I was sick with an undiagnosed infection. It won’t help that I’m leaving work early to go to my moms 85th birthday party and taking Monday off to celebrate our 35 th anniversary but … priorities.

    1. I should add that we did make it to England and back with our luggage; the first leg of our trip back was cancelled the night before but we were able to get rebooked on a (very early morning) flight and still make our connection. So if you do have to fly, check your plane status regularly and try to check in as early as they allow. It’s feasible. It’s not fun.

      They keep talking about the summer. I suspect it may get somewhat better this fall but it will take months and months to hire and train all the new staff they need.

    2. Maybe suggest to them that jazzing up their luggage might help to find it if it goes the way of all lost luggage. No one could do it better than Jenny did, (The Pig!!) but that’s an ideal they could aim at.

  12. I am out in the suburbs with the cats and although I am enjoying the change of scene, carrying all my stuff out here almost killed me. I have friends coming to dinner on Friday so my project for the next 2 days is trying to find out what is on sale this week and making a menu to fit and figuring out where Jessie keeps her cookware.

  13. It’s been too hot here to work. I finally decided to pause the second draft I’d been working on (for me, second drafts require figuring out all the hard things, like character names and descriptions, that I skip, using placeholders, in the first draft), since I didn’t have the necessary focus. So instead I huddled in the one air-conditioned room and did some brainstorming for a new project, which is always fun and requires less focus — in fact, focus is exactly the wrong thing to have when I’m trying to be open to new ideas. It may not be what I intended to get done, but it’s better than getting nothing done at all.

    But the heat finally broke last night, and for the first time in what feels like forever, I emerged from the bedroom this morning to find that the rest of the house is the same temperature as the bedroom instead of twenty degrees and quite a few percentage points of humidity higher. Which is fortunate, because I have about two weeks left to do the final, polishing draft, of a novella in time to get it to the editor by September 1st.

  14. What am I working on? For a while there, not melting. Watering containers and flower beds and making iced tea.

    But thank Heavens, it 68 degrees here this morning! Phew. Our house heats up like an Easy Bake Oven, but it doesn’t cool down until the weather really breaks. I got up and cleaned the house, it wasn’t worth doing it until it cooled off.

    Rehearsing for a joint recital on Sunday, I’m singing a Duke Ellington group: In a Sentimental Mood, Say Nothing ’til You Hear From Me, and It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got that Swing (Doo wat doo wat, doo wat doo wat, doo wat doo wat). Fun!
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxfMRhyzu3g&ab_channel=Magbalans

    Cleaning up my desk area, bookkeeping, stuff like that.

  15. Yesterday morning I picked blackberries — they grow wild around here — and in the afternoon I made quarts and quarts of blackberry juice. Today I’m making blackberry jelly. Thankfully, the heat wave has passed.

  17. I went to the dentist to pick up my partial. Yikes. I was supposed to put it in today and see if the last adjustments are enough. Putting it off until tomorrow because my mouth is still sore and I don’t want to drive back to the dentist if I can’t get it out of my mouth.
    I’ve done some writing.
    And some laundry.
    Otherwise just keeping cool.

  18. I’m launching book 4 in the Candlewood Falls series–Wilde Treasures–and trying to catch up on all the household chores I’ve been neglecting while trying to launch this book. Oh, shoot…I forgot to move the laundry to the dryer to have a clean karate gi for class tonight…Got to go…

  19. Taking a Monday off always means packing three days of work into two, but I’m basically caught up with the day job. This was supposed to be a quieter month, and I did have a quiet *week* but it looks like the rest of August will be a nonstop shitshow.

    Very much looking forward to our week in Sedona (coming up soon), dreading what the work inbox will look like when I get back. We need the break, though.

    Garden work: not happening in this heat. I went out over the weekend for very basic tidying-up and watering … cleaned and refilled the hummingbird feeder today during a mental-health break … should water a couple things, but they’ll just have to wait till morning. All I want to do right now is pour a shot of Empress 1908 and go sit in front of a fan with a book.

  20. Another fun-filled Board of Elections meeting. Although they do seem to be getting shorter.

    Another meeting tomorrow (township commissioners; I do like to keep an eye on thongs) and a dentists appointment on Friday. The rest is just keeping the house and yard in order.

  21. I got home from Kalamazoo Michigan at 11 on Sunday night and started work on jury duty at 6 AM Monday morning I just did 2 twelve hour and one eight hour day. And I’m done. I want to sleep. But it was great fun. I think it’s going to be a good series. Should be out in December

  23. I just got done telling everyone I was taking yet another week off so I could go visit my parents, driving from Michigan to Arkansas, to avoid getting infected on a plane, which I couldn’t do earlier due to my eye infection. And then my 82 year old mother texts that she has just tested positive for Covid, and has a fever, headache and runny nose.

    Father at least is negative so far, likely not going to be able to go see them for some time now 🙁

    1. You took the week off, everything is already set up for it, Maybe go on a road trip anyway, have a nice break

  24. I went back to work post-plague, and survived three days of the new full time hours. The idea of working the same number of hours across fewer shifts, with no splits, is still sort of baffling to me. I’ll get paid fewer overtime penalties, but for no more split shifts I will happily make that trade off. I’m hoping that the rest of the year gives me an opportunity to settle into the new roster and see if it’s better. We do have a few more staff now, and fewer disrupted flights, but all it takes is one pilot with covid and the whole week goes to hell, so we’ll see how it unfolds.

    Two days off now to rest some more. I was going to try to be productive around the flat, but I think I’ll spend it in a cuddle puddle with the cats instead. They appear to approve of this plan.

  25. We are at the true tail end of our busy period, which meant one last push today.

    Then I came home and worked on my homework for the class I’m taking in two weeks. I got one bit done and a rough draft of the other one. I was going to send them in as is, but realized tonight that they are not due until Friday, so I have a chance to work on the 2nd one a bit more. It needs it. But I will be done before the weekend and have a glorious slow week.

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