Whatta Fiasco

I’ve seen better weeks. And worse. I’m just as glad to see it done.

Last night we went to a free lecture put on by the business school. We were meeting downtown for some pizza as big as your head. I got back in town sooner than I had expected so decided to take a quick run through the library to grab a book I’d looked up in the afternoon in the online catalog. But the parking lot was full. Then I had visions of flaky buttery palmier dancing in my head until reason snapped back into place and reminded me that I was about to eat a slice of pizza as big as my head.

Instead, I took advantage of it being Thursday night (shops open late!) and stopped by the comic store a block down from the restaurant. Now, in addition to having met my weekly quota of roasted garlic, I have a stack of comic books to read and only two more to go before my Cerebus buying days are over. I’m going to miss going in there every three or four (or six) months and having the gal behind the counter know who I was and pull out my comics for me without even asking. The first issue of Cerebus I ever bought (#61, and if you’ve ever seen Mrs. Tynsdale-Clyde’s Tea you won’t have forgotten it) was at this comic store, although it was in a different location and was owned by someone else. That was almost twenty years ago. I might have to look around for another title to read. As much as I’ve enjoyed this Dave Sim adventure, there’s got to be something more interesting being produced these days.

The lecture after dinner was not nearly as good as I was hoping. It was no surprise to find the speaker an unrepentant Republican. We are talking about a business school event after all. It also wasn’t surprising that the speaker had a pleasant and vibrant speaking style. The surprise was how much of the content was regurgitated party line spiel strung together higgledy-piggledy, all the way down to the we tax you from the time you get up until the time you go to bed speech. It was still a good evening out.

Tonight’s the first fencing practice we’ve had in a week because of weather issues. I’m still feeling kind of iffy and won’t be up for a lot of hard work, but I’ll be there tonight and (knock on wood) tomorrow because they’re currently predicting up to fourteen inches of snow for us by Monday. Fourteen. And if the snow shows up as forecast, it isn’t melting anytime soon either. I need to remember to make it to the grocery store before Saturday night. And the library. Just in case.

What a strange week, and not always in a good way. In spite of having taken Monday off, it feels as though it ought to be later than it is. Surely tomorrow is Friday, right? Having the last three fencing practices canceled because of weather might have something to do with the weirdness too. I miss it and now I have to wait until Friday.

In amongst all the schedule bending, hubby and I have had more time together than usual, and it’s been nice. Tonight’s the night we normally would have made some time for each other, so we went ahead and did it again. We went and saw Paycheck, and it was a better film than I was expecting. It’s very John Woo and the plot got a bit too tidied up, but you could still see the Dickian bones underneath. Clever and reasonably well paced. Playing ray guns with neurons in order to erase memory was a giggle. The display effects stolen from Minority Report were an interesting choice. (Thank goodness they didn’t cast Tom Cruise in this one. I’m not an Affleck fan, but he’s a much better choice as a PKD protagonist; ordinary man in a fucked up world.) And don’t tell me you could look at Uma Thurman’s hairdo and not think of Blade Runner because I just won’t believe you. So, it was fun.

Purely as an aside, how long do you think you would last as a top-notch programmer if every time you did a job worth being paid for, they erased your entire memory of the project? Not very long at all. Too much of what makes you a programmer good enough to be worth paying to go through that is what you learn on a project. Not that anyone’s ever offered me that much money for programming (keep on dreaming) but the principal holds. When you hire someone to solve a sticky problem, you’re hiring creativity that’s built on experience and the ability to learn on the job when there’s no one who can teach you. Otherwise you just hire the teacher. Or someone with a big enough wrench to beat the hell out of your problem until it goes away. If you don’t have any memory of your best creative work, it gets very hard to improve and if you don’t improve, your competition will. Still, it’s a minor nit. I’ll have to go back and read the story to figure out who to blame that one on.

After the dinner we found a steak place still open. The little sirloin was good, but steak just doesn’t taste as good if you haven’t spent the entire day fencing. If nothing else, I’ll get some good steak in Texas come March. That’ll be fun.

I’m in a better mood today. I’m not sure I have a lot of reason to be, but having friends with a sense of humor and remembering that I have one too helps. A lot.
I spent the better part of a very cold weekend in bed feeling sick and getting lots of reading done. James White’s science fiction is a definite thumbs up. Karl Popper dissecting Plato is an eyeful. I knew from reading The Republic that Plato was a less than savory character in some respects, but Popper puts all those flaws into historical perspective.

On Sunday I enjoyed hearing the Lawrence Men’s Chorale plus a local barbershop quartet. Even when it’s not top notch work, there’s just something special about the sound of live voices singing harmony. And watching Ms. K. flirt with the barbershop quartet was worth the price of admission.

On Monday, while I was home sick, our web server decided to play sick too. Hardware problems always seem to happen when I’m out on a Monday. But things are mostly back to normal now.

And we had our old cat, Beowolf, put down today. He could be a pain and I don’t ever want another long-haired cat, but I’ll miss him.

Let’s just say that things have been stressful this week but not entirely bad. There’s still too much up in the air to deal with, but we’re dealing with it. And I’m working hard on not taking on responsibility that isn’t mine. Can we take that as a given? I don’t want to have the life of a not quite forty year old woman getting squeezed between trying to help a disabled adult child become independent and helping to maintain the dignity and independence of a mother-in-law who is on the downward slope and probably headed for rough waters before it’s all done. And I still have to find time for myself, my husband, my family and friends.

This is not where I want to be, but it’s where I am. It’s just going to take a little longer before I can write about it coherently.
For now I’m going to go enjoy my weekend.

It was a pleasant weekend for the most. Saturday evening was sushi with good company followed by more good company and some excellent dessert wine. I also picked up several pointers for books to track down in the nearish future. (A side effect of having friends with good taste is that one risks developing tastes of one’s own. The Beringer’s Nightingale is well suited to those who like their mead and have a little extra cash.) All the conviviality and good food resulted in a punting of the planned contra dancing but I’ll get to it one of these days.

On Sunday I was up at four-thirty in the morning in order to drive to Lincoln, Nebraska to spend the day in an unheated gym at the Icicle Tournament. At least the temperature was still (nominally) in the double digits so we couldn’t see our breath inside the building. It sounds horrible, but once I got warmed up, it made for a nice day of fencing. I nearly bailed on going to this tournament. There were reports of an icestorm up that way and I was anticipating having to call the trip off without having to feel guilty, but the ice was confined to tiny snow banks and I’m glad I went. So as not to keep you on tenterhooks, I didn’t win any bouts in either the women’s or the men’s events. There was only one brief moment during the men’s pools that I found myself upset at realizing I had just come in last in the women’s event. Again. But then I got back to the business at hand and had a good time.

In spite of what my scores and win-loss record looks like, I did some very good fencing on Sunday. And I came within a whisker of winning a bout (we went to overtime) where there were people I didn’t even know cheering for the quality of my touches. The combination helped get me through the rest of the day and some very tough competitors. And a former clubmate who has moved to Lincoln was noticing (again!) that every time she sees me fence, I’ve gotten better. And I could tell based on the way I was feeling at the end of the day (not completely wiped out!) that my fencing was better, but it’s nice to get outside validation every now and then. I can also tell it was a good tournament because I have ideas for more things to work on.

On Monday I slept in and then spent most of the day reading, followed by crazy cooking with Ms. K. and her parents. It made for some quality adult time, aby time, and even a little bridge. And the food was much better than it looked to begin with. Ah, the joys of trying new recipes!

Now if I can just shake this trying to come down sick feeling. Yuck. My throat hurts.

The mother-in-law situation? Not so good. She’s completely confused by the statements she’s been getting from the hospital. She’s convinced that they want her to pay thousands of dollars, when what they really say is that her insurance is going to cover nearly all of it. She also had forgotten again about the surgery she has scheduled for next week. This is going to be getting more difficult.

In the better news department, I had some whole milk, cream top yoghurt that was extravagant and decadent and amazingly good. What do they mean by cream top? When they put the whole milk mixture in the cups, most of the butterfat rises to the top the way cream is wont to do, making a rich layer on top of the yoghurt. If you want low fat yoghurt, you can skim this layer off. Oh, silly person. Life is too short and you don’t eat this way every day. Just stir the layer into the rest of the yoghurt and have rich and creamy concoction that will knock your socks off. Or at least the vanilla flavor was that good. It was also organic, with the tang of live cultures, and sweetened with maple syrup. I’ll have to try some more flavors over the next few weeks.

The weekend could turn out a bit on the crazy hectic side. Saturday is booked up with fencing practice, sushi, and contra dancing. And on Sunday I might be heading north to Lincoln for a fencing tournament with the possibility of going to a karaoke show immediately after getting back into town. Crazy. Alternatively, I could spend the weekend laying around reading. Stay warm and enjoy yourselves.

Last night I was a grumpy gus. Low quality sleep. Hungry. Cold. I met hubby at the office after work and we walked over to the Pochi Tea Station for dinner. I keep forgetting what a charming little place it is with its cheerfully minimalistic lemon lime decor and the non-stop Asian music videos with Asian subtitles.

They started out as a bubble tea purveyor with omelette’s and satay appetizer things. Since then the bubble tea has been downplayed and the food menu has expanded. Fat white udon noodles are like happy chubby babies. And half of a hard-boiled double-yolked egg floating on top in the warm broth makes a pretty infinity sign. Double happiness.

For the first time in a week and half, or is it two weeks, we had a chance to talk about our current situations. It was long overdue, but you don’t have that kind of discussion with someone who’s in sleep deprivation and still facing a deadline. No complete answers or solutions, but we are in agreement on a path to take and a goal to shoot for. I’m quite happy with that.

Given a sample size of two, my working hypothesis is that for any given work of nonfiction by Umberto Eco, the first chapter serves as a hazing or filter. If you can make it through the first chapter, the rest of the book will be much more pleasant. Mind you, it could be a good long time before I seek out a third data sample. In the meantime, I’m enjoying how well he lays out the deficiencies of the Porphyrian tree model of the dictionary. It’s a weakness closely related to that of the theory of natural kinds, and that provides a nice link to the Karl Popper I’m about to read that trashes Plato something fierce.

Did you know that, taxonomically speaking, there’s no such thing as a tree?

I need some high quality sleep. I’ll be very glad when this latest coding deadline has passed.

It was a nice, relaxing weekend. Saturday we slept in and then went in for fencing practice. (Huff, puff, creaky knees.) Then it was quick lunch of fish tacos before running back home to get some things done before driving back in for a party at Ariadne’s. Lots of yummy party food (including veggies, hooray) and kids being too cute for words. The cats were freaking out a bit. Discussion of formal kilts, crushed nuts, and dead baby cakes. Home to sleep.
On Sunday we slept in longer than planned and then hubby ran off to pick up Max and drive to Nowhere to get Lisa. I stayed home this time and enjoyed the time to myself. I watched the second volume of Lain, and Ed Harris’, Pollock. Harris does a great job playing Jackson Pollock, but it never rose to the level of a great movie for me. Good, but not exceptional.

Then it was a quick trip to the library and a foiled attempt at coffee and a palmier for afternoon tea. (What do you mean, they close at four?!?) Then out to the farm to have salmon burritos (quite good) and get some time with Ms. K. She’s crawling like gangbusters now and working hard at standing unsupported, babbling all the way.

Hubby made it home before midnight with Lisa. She’s quite happy to be back after three weeks with grandma. Hubby took Louise and the kids out to dinner and they had a chance to talk, which is part of why I didn’t go along with this time. Sadly, Louise is just as stuck as ever, waiting for an unknown guardian angel to drop significant amounts of money on her with no strings attached. Working to save it herself doesn’t seem to be on her list of possibilities.

Welcome to self-imposed failure. Max, on the other hand, has just quit his job waiting tables at lunch time in order to start a light industrial job at nearly four times the pay. He still has some head straightening to do, I suspect, but he’s still making proactive decisions about his life. This is good.

Now we just have to come up with a game plan to transition Lisa to independence and another to help her other grandmother through her last years in comfort. Along with all the other things we want to wrangle out of our life. It’ll be a challenge.

Hooray. I got some much needed sleep last night.

Word is that Lisa is ready to be back at our place, and that her mom is ready to have her come back up here as well. This is both good and bad. It’s good that Louise isn’t going to pitch a fit, and it’s good to know Lisa won’t be unhappy coming back here. It’s not good that hubby’s going to need to have a come to Jesus meeting with Louise on the subject of Lisa’s SSI payments. I have a feeling that’s going to be in the range of spectacularly not pretty. But necessary.

And much to my surprise, Max says he wants to go down there with us when we pick up Lisa so that he can see his mom for the first time in a year. It was good to hear from him and to hear that he’s still employed and doing reasonably well.