Climbing the Third Stair

This was a stressful, strenuous week at work, mostly because I had an employee quit without notice early on. This happened to be one of the rare cases in which I sympathized with the necessity that led them to that decision, but it still left me with a lot of slack to take up. I don't think I was as successful as I could want, but what is done is done. Now I have the work of finding a new employee on top of all the other things I need to get done, which has resulted in my canceling my semi-plans to go to the Chicago Kotei. (The Evansville TO has already suggested I go to his instead.)

There is a serious snowstorm heading my way. It rained early this morning and has stayed cloudy all day, and tonight it will start snowing. Accumulation predictions have been varying wildly, but I'm expecting at least 5". In preparation for being snowed in I bought a bunch of rose-scented cleaning supplies--I know I have to do a lot of housework this weekend, so why not make it as pleasant as possible? I should make a list of all the things I need to do: this will be depressing, but experience shows that I get more things done when I have some kind of plan in place.

My landlord got over today and looked at my fridge. He said the freezer was fine (which I knew) and the compressor seemed to be working fine so that the problem seems to be in getting the cold air into the fridge part. For investigating that he's going to need to shut it down, which means emptying all the stuff out of the freezer. Also, he can't get back to the project until next Monday. This would at first seem Really Bad, as it leaves me without a fridge for the next few days, but happily there is a work-around. The apartment downstairs is empty this week so I am going to use its refrigerator.

Having my refrigerated food downstairs might seem like an inconvenience, but I already go up and down stairs so many times in a day I don't think I'll notice it much. Instead I've chosen to regard this as a golden opportunity to take care of all the dill seeds that scattered around the bottom of my fridge that one time a pickle jar shattered.

My domestic woes were softened by my first bean harvest of the season. Last year I got no beans at all, so this was doubly nice. I had my second dinner with beans tonight, with enough left over to go with lunch tomorrow. Thus far I have been picking from my bush beans. My Kentucky Wonder poles have been been blooming heavily this week, so assuming the heat didn't freak them out too much (a sizable if, I admit) I should have beans next week from them. I've never grown pole beans before, so I am looking forward to seeing if they are as tasty as claimed.

I'm cranky this evening. A huge snowstorm (by which I mean, "is expected to affect 30 out of the 50 US states, plus parts of Canada") is beginning a slow roll through the Great Plains states tonight, which means when I get off work Tuesday and try to go deposit my check I will be hanging out on bus stops with snow, blowing snow, and high winds. Lovely, just lovely. Also, I am in that week out of the month in which my body cannot eat enough fat, salt, and sugar, and since I have a sinus headache that won't quit (thanks, I suspect, to the previously mentioned storm) I don't feel like hopping on my exercise bike and outracing my cravings. Crank, crank, crank.

On the bright side, I had a fairly pleasant weekend. On Saturday morning I made a visit to my favorite thrift store (St Theresa's, for you curious Lincoln folks) and found a lamp for my living room. In my slow, steady campaign to turn it into a space I can actually entertain company in I had determined that I really needed more light, and once I got my new purchase home and plugged it in I saw how right I was. The place is downright cheery at night now!

While I was there I also picked up a new coat, a new denim skirt (my old one is getting too big to wear: it's starting to slip down around my hips), Aristotle's Politics, and The Modern Family Cookbook, copyright date 1961. I love reading old cookbooks, and seeing what has and has not changed during the years. Aristotle will, like most light-weight paperbacks, probably go into the bathroom for reading in the bathtub.

The rest of Saturday was taken up in laundry and reading; I finished the Sayers book on Dante. I think I might try to read it again before I have to take it back--it had some insights into the structure of the poem I had previously missed. I'm also now interested in tracking down her translation both so as to see how she handles the text differently from Ciardi and also to read her footnotes.

Tonight I need to cook something or I won't have anything to pack for lunches this week. Also, I'd like to get a little more embroidery done; I did a little when I first came home and was waiting for the aspirin to kick in but I am wondering if I could finish the outlining of the bird tonight. He's about halfish done now, but I suspect the tail feathers are going to vex me.

Friday morning my landline at home failed, which means I have no internet. This is annoying for a number of reasons, not the least of which is I have a policy of protecting important files by uploading them and emailing them to myself. Also, I can't check the weather anymore. How can I get dressed if I don't know what the weather is like?

The phone company computer I talked to on Friday claims that they will have whatever it is fixed by Monday afternoon. I can only hope.

From time to time I get curious about what time sunrise and sunset will be occurring, and one of the glories of the internet is that it makes finding this out very easy. I used to use the solar calculator here, but today I found the much niftier one here at the Earth Science Research Lab. The new one is more fun because instead of putting in the coordinates of the place you want the sunrise/sunset times for into little boxes, you drag a little pin around a map of the earth. Also, you can tell it to remember where you put the pin, so you can go back to it later and not have to start over at the beginning. I put the map on Lincoln using a map view that showed eastern Nebraska, and then after cranking up the magnification discovered that I had placed it about four blocks from my apartment. How fun is that? Sunrise calculated not just for my city, but for my zip code. *swoon*

This weekend is the one-year anniversary of my move to my new apartment. It's not exact to the day, but I started to move the day after Thanksgiving last year, so it's good enough. I have decided this means I really need to finish unpacking. (I am so very bad at moving!) To be fair, I'm almost done with getting things out of boxes, it's finding them permanent homes that is the problem. The biggest issue is books, I have more books than bookshelves. I think that one is ultimately solvable--I have an office now, which means I have a place to write and store books--but getting it done when I could be writing or cooking or crocheting or etc is the problem.

I have a bit of incentive now, because I have decided to decorate my place for Christmas. In token of this, I bought myself a poinsettia this week. I may buy myself more, because I love poinsettias and they, like peppermint stick ice cream, are only available one month out of the year. I'd like an amaryllis as well, but that will depend on how my disposable income goes this month. But they are available all winter, so that is not such a problem.

My most recent story has been getting a lot of reaction, a lot of it bad, and it has bugged me more than usual. After finally getting a full night of sleep, I've decided that this was mostly because my day job was really stressful this week and that was hyping all my responses. But I remain irked by the notion that the story was a 'missed moment of awesome'. First off all, the concept smells like something from TVTropes, a website I have rapidly come to loathe. Second, I didn't miss a moment of awesome because I wasn't aiming for it. I do not write awesome. You want awesome, you need to stop reading when you hit my name in the credit line because you will only be disappointed. I've been on the story team for like three years now; shouldn't that be clear to everyone by now?

The sun has risen, my tea is finished: Time for laundry!

Because ironhand asked: Yes, we did get snow Friday night/Saturday morning. I awoke somewhat after 7 am to find the heavens in the snow equivalent of a slow drizzle, and as a result spent the next few hours hanging around my living room in my night clothes, drinking tea and goofing off. (No, I cannot explain the connection there. Either it makes sense to your or it doesn't.)

It stopped snowing late morning and by late afternoon most of the clouds had cleared off. Around 90% of the snow vanished in the resulting sunshine. For those of you not familiar with Great Plains weather, this is pretty typical of late fall/early winter weather.

The snow and its allied cold did in my tomatoes and nasturtiums, as well as the volunteer morning glories. The kohlrabi that escaped my notice this past spring is continuing on as if nothing happened, as have my dianthus, the sweet alyssum, lemon balm, sunflowers, chives, and golden marjoram. The marjoram is surprise: I had always thought of it as a tender perennial, but clearly it is somewhat tougher than I expected. If it can hold on a few days longer I might lift it and take it inside.

I dug up the three bell pepper plants, took them inside and potted them up. I pruned them all to varying degrees, since their roots had all taken a beating and I was worried that they might not be able to supply water to all of their leaves. At present the one I pruned the hardest is looking the best, for all that it is now a stick with a few tufts of leaves. The other two were still somewhat droopy yesterday; if they don't look better tomorrow I'll give them another round of pruning. At this point it will be weeks before I get any peppers off of them, but at least I'll have them raring to to next spring. Besides, plants make a place more livable and nightshades are prettier than scheffelaras.

I had a good weekend, but then any weekend that starts with keilbasa and gooseberry pie for breakfast is going to have something going for it. I don't normally have pie for breakfast (no, really) but I had a whole pie to eat and I had decided to be methodical about it eating it before it went bad. I'd ordered the pie from the deli's supplier on a whim; I had never had gooseberry pie and I was very curious as to what it tasted like and if it was good. ( I ramble like a rose. )

I turned my air conditioning on today. It feels odd to type that--for the years I spent in my old apartment, I didn't have any. This was by choice--it came with a window unit, but I took it out wen I moved in (which was in November) and never bothered to put it back in again. I was on the first floor, and there was a very large tree to the south shading me, so I decided not to bother. There were some very hot days each summer, but I did all right.

My new apartment is on the top floor, with no trees tall enough to shade it. (There are three apple trees in the front yard, and I look down on them from my living room window.) When I came home this afternoon the temperature was 91 F (33C) and the heat index was 104 F (40 C) and the first thing I did was turn on the air. I shudder to think of what this is going to do to my electric bill, but tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter and I wanted to get things cooled down overnight.

My garden is in need of weeding, staking, and other important tasks. But between the rain (we got a brief thunderstorm this morning that dropped over half an inch of rain on us in about 30 minutes) and the heat I had no interest in it today.

I did go out and harvest some snap peas for my dinner, which I devoured raw. This shows how very, very predictable I am, because as a child I would wander out to the garden in the back yard, pick all the ripe peas and eat them raw right there. I talked to Mom about this a few years ago and she said that no pea ever made it into the house to be cooked. I suppose I could feel guilty, but--isn't it a good thing when a child likes vegetables?

Despite the heat, if I can get two days running when it doesn't rain I need to go tie up the tomatoes. They are starting to get nice big fruits on them, and I don't want to lose any.

I wonder: Why do my Februarys get so busy?

If you happen to be one of the oh, three people on earth who has been wondering why I haven't been updating, first I was writingwritingwriting. And then I was recovering from writingwritingwriting--I seem to have a limit of how much I can write in a given period of time, and if I go beyond that I quickly become exhausted. (I wonder, is this set for all time, or can I train to increase this amount?) Now I am trying to clear off the backlog of things that piled up while I was writing and then recovering.

The top of that list is "Finish Unpacking From Move". This is because A) I'm tired of tripping over boxes of books and B) Karin and Ami are coming in to town this week, and I'd like to be able to entertain them in a clean apartment. I hope I get the chance to cook a few meals for them; they always cook such wonderful stuff for me when I visit. Over the years they've gifted me with a number of really nice cookbooks, and when I get the chance I like to fix recipes from those books for our meals together. Nothing says "thank you for this cookbook" like that!

Yesterday I had originally planned to unpack/clean but instead I was able to borrow a car and run some of the errands that had piled up. In the course of that I hit several thrift stores looking for house-linens. I think thrift stores are perfect for things like that because while I have a need for curtains and such I can't make myself care enough about them to get expensive ones. As it was, I found a nice set of loose-woven blue-and-white curtains that were perfect for what I needed. For $1. SCORE! Intoxicated by my success, I decided to drop 75 cents on a bed skirt--I'd never had a bed skirt before and the concept was intriguing. I put it on the bed last night when I was changing the sheets and it did look kind of cute. Maybe I should consider getting a bedspread next.

On Friday I went down with another round of sinus issues--I'm not sure what it was, but I felt horrible and was running a modest fever. I stayed home from work which was decidedly unpleasant because that was a store inventory day. *sigh*

However! Sunday I felt well enough to tackle the problem of My Office. The problem was, it was just a room with so many boxes of stuff (mostly books) that it was difficult to walk from one end to the other. After a couple of hours of work, I now have a functioning office space. 'Functioning' in this context means that I have a card table and chair to serve as a desk and I have put up some bookshelves and begun filling them with books (including all of my L5R books). There are still boxes of books strewn about the room, but some of them contain books I want to put in the living room if I can manage it, so it will be a bit before anything gets done with them.

Eventually I'd like to get a real desk, but in the meantime I'm set up for writing. Which is good, because I have a LOT of writing to do this month. L5R projects, catching up on correspondence, some side projects of my own...sometimes I question my sanity. But 'be able to write more' was one of my justifications for getting this apartment, so now is the time to show that is was worth it.

Oh, and I'd like to say something about my card table. It's not what you are thinking of: a cheap rickety metal thing. It's solidly built wood with a nice cherry-like finish--the lux version of a folding card table. It was passed down from my grandmother via my mom. Grandma had been a dedicated bridge player, and I think this was the table she used to set up in her living room when she hosted bridge parties. I guess you could say that gaming runs in my family! When I think of it that way, I kinda want to keep the table as my desk.