Thursday, July 06, 2006

dilly dallying

I'm supposed to be typing. Well, I am typing, but I'm supposed to be typing something very specific, namely a transcription of an audio file that is queued up and waiting for me to stop putting it off and do my work already. It's funny, because yesterday when I was muttering and slamming things around and frustrated about the whole tenant/back surgery/work/money/everything thing, I was thinking what a great time it would be to have a transcription job come in. Then about five minutes after I had that thought I checked my email and there was a message from the guy who hires me to do this stuff. It's a small job but every little bit helps make me more sane. So yay.

The only problem is, I didn't buy any Jolly Ranchers today (after our last frightening non-tenant experience, we're being VERY careful not to spend any money until it is actually in our hot little hands. This even extends to Jolly Ranchers, since if I stop off at the store to just buy a $1.70 bag of candy, our bank account will inevitably be at least $20 lighter after I've checked out. Hey, admitting I have a problem is the first step toward healing, right?). I think this is why I can't get motivated properly. I have a few left over from my last job, but they've been around a while and humidity and Jolly Ranchers don't play well together. So I'm a little afraid to look at them.

Also, in the 'ha ha very funny God' department, we have had six serious calls about our apartment today, and I had to tell every one of them that it was already taken but thank you very much. That God, he sure has a sense of humor.

Also, I used the weedeater today. IT WAS FUN, and I did a good job. And what a feeling of empowerment! Any time I saw a thicket of tall weeds today (and living where I do, this is not at all an uncommon experience), I would think, I could weedeat that. Before, weedeating was a mystery, an enigma, a task best left to my betters. Now I have conquered. Next up: the chainsaw. (or... maybe not. Some things a clumsy girl just shouldn't try. But then again, it's not like T's going to be using one anytime soon.)

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

I AM WOMAN HEAR ME ROAR part 3

Ah, the joy of gold-member referral stats. How would my life have been complete if I hadn't known that someone found my diary after Googling for "pee for ages"?

With that out of the way, I have to say that I have conquered yet another Tim-Allenish household job. My refrigerator had been leaking for years -- the water from the automatic defrosting cycle would, instead of going placidly down its little pipe into the evaporation tray in the back of the fridge, leak down into the fridge, through the two openings intended to be air vents to allow the cold air to circulate between the freezer and the refrigerator. I don't think I could have made that any more complicated-sounding, but I can try if you really want me to. Anyway. What this meant was that I had to have pitchers under those vents to catch the drips or else wind up with puddles of water in and around the refrigerator. I finally (after two years or so -- this started, of course, just after the fridge's warranty ran out) got fed up with this and called a repairman. He said it would cost us $60 for him to come out and run a wire through the pipe to clear out whatever's blocking it. My pupils dilated -- I could feel an I AM WOMAN HEAR ME ROAR moment coming on -- and I began to plan my attack. I emptied the fridge/freezer, defrosted it, found the drain tube, and ran an altered plumbers' snake down it -- and our refrigerator is now potty trained, so to speak. I have informed my husband that I will accept payment of the $60 in bookstore expenditures. :)

Gee, I wonder what Google hits that paragraph will eventually rack up...

Being the Master of the Leaking Fridge helped put me in a better mood yesterday; this was helped along by the fact that I am having an almost nesting-style organizational surge. I have cleaned all the fingerprints and goop off the fronts of half of my kitchen cabinets and drawers (I'll finish this tonight); I moved some infrequently-used-but-really-important stuff from my kitchen to the kitchen in our apartment next door, so that I could reorganize my cabinets; I bought and installed new shelf liner which involved much pleasant organizing; I designated a spot inside a cupboard for my husband's lunchbox/briefcase which will hopefully help us to keep countertop clutter under control. I do still have to clean out the catchall cabinets above the refrigerator (what designer's quirk, I wonder, caused them to make that cabinet without a door?) and under the sink. But overall I'm very pleased with the progress I've made toward a Susan-ish uncluttered airy kind of house, even if we are going to be stuck with the 70's-bachelor-pad-style knotty pine walls. I can at least improve what we have, even if I can't have (sigh) perfection. ;-)

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Monday, January 19, 2004

paintball and procrastination

My New Experience For The Month was playing paintball on Saturday. I've only been watching/hearing about/spending money on my husband's paintball habit (well, it's money HE earns; I don't complain) since 1994; totally reasonable that it would be ten years before I joined him, right? It was... interesting. (which means, I sucked, but perhaps not as badly as I thought I would). As I kept repeating in the days leading up to Saturday (starting about Tuesday when T simply announced that It Was Time and that I would be trying paintball that weekend, no excuses), I do not sneak well. I am, well, like a galumphing ox or something -- I'm bulky enough that I can just dominate anything in my path (except for the corner posts on beds; they always win in their frequent confrontations with my thighs), so sneaking has never been an issue. The result of this lack of skill was that in the first FOUR of the six games played on Saturday, I did not fire a single shot before I got hit and went out of the game. Pathetic, no? By the fourth game I was sneaking a bit better, and even making and executing some bare-bones strategic plans (about as skilled as those I make and execute while playing chess, which is to say, a maximum of two turns ahead, and not very subtle), but stupid things kept getting me out before I shot at anyone. Even in the last two games, I never did take anyone out or capture the flag or otherwise cover myself in glory, but I did have a decent time. The area where we played is basically a hanging valley on the side of a steep hill, and I did enough hill-walking to make my legs very, very angry with me the next day. I admitted to T that I was glad he'd convinced (coerced!) me to do it, which of course meant that today he had to go buy me a paintball gun. Hmm. At least it's a used one.

And today, aside from a shopping trip to the valley, I filed papers. I hate filing, I really really do. This is how badly I hate it: Anytime I encounter a piece of paper which should be filed away (credit card or bank statements, phone bills, doctor bills, insurance paperwork, stuff like that) I toss it into a drawer in our filing cabinet. When the heap of paper is so enormous that the drawer can't shut properly, I file the papers neatly and in order in their proper folders in the other drawers of the cabinet. As I work down through the stack, it's like an archaeological dig: I'll encounter stuff from this month, then last month, and so on, until at the bottom I finally find out how long it's been since my last filing-drudgery day (in this case, it was apparently sometime in October 2002). And always as I'm going to all this work, I wonder, what are the possibilities that I will EVER need, oh, say, more than 2% of this paperwork? But you know if I threw any of it out, I'd find out very quickly just exactly how necessary it was to keep it all, in some very unpleasant way.


And now there's school stuff added into the mix. I use the same tried-and-true system with completed schoolwork as I do with other filing: pile it in a heap. A big, big heap, full of paragraphs written with many backward letters on newsprint paper with absurdly wide lines, and rough drafts of the Star Wars Episode VII script, and pages of addition facts and subtraction facts and multiplication facts, and preschool papers where the groups with more are circled and the groups with less are crossed out, and artwork of varying degrees of skill but universally unparallelled adorableness, and all manner of other early elementary educational stuff. I have the best intentions of filing this away consecutively by student, subject, and date, but the best I usually end up with is four folders for each school year: [LT] Art, [LT] Academic, [C] Art, and [C] Academic. And generally, there is, again, one big filing day per semester or so. blecch. Procrastination, thy name is Rachel.
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Thursday, January 15, 2004

I AM WOMAN HEAR ME ROAR part 2

First it was the icicle lights. And now, today, I have CONQUERED THE TOILET-PAPER HOLDER. Using a Yankee screwdriver and my own wits, I, and I alone, performed this very Tim-Allen-grunt-grunt installation. We've just started renting the apartment and garage that go with our house, in addition to the house itself, so as to have a guest room, school room (separate from LT's room, poor boy has had just a little alcove for a bedroom for months), shop, additional storage space, etc. And the previous tenants, in addition to taking the refrigerator which is supposed to go with the apartment, also apparently took the toilet-paper dispenser. Well, thanks to my extreme buffness, that is no longer a problem. Oo-rah. Improvise, adapt, overcome.


(of course, we won't mention the fact that I bought a shower curtain and neglected to buy shower curtain rings to go with it. ahem)


So far, that apartment is paying for itself, even if in no other way, by causing LT to adore school. The simple act of walking fifteen feet and up a set of stairs has revitalized his interest in the three Rs in an amazing manner. Of course the novelty will wear off fairly soon, but hey, I'll take what enthusiasm I can while I can take it.

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Friday, November 28, 2003

icicle lights can't beat me!

Today I put up our new icicle lights on the front-facing peak of our roof (even though the neighborhood on the next hilltop over has an excellent view of the back of our house, we don't have a tall ladder OR a death wish so that peak will remain lightless. Sorry guys). I learned a few things (ooh, ANOTHER list! How many lists can I cram into one day?):

• There's a reason that people very irritatingly leave their icicle lights up all year, even though it looks remarkably untidy. This reason is that it would be far easier and more efficient to throw away the icicle lights each year and buy new ones, than to attempt to pack them back up with any semblance of correctness, and get them out again untangled the next year. Perhaps if we could hire the Chinese worker who packed them originally to repack them for us -- but that would be even more cost-inefficient than buying new lights next year. This thought (buying new ones every year, not hiring the Chinese person) has seriously occurred to me. We would build up an enormous store of spare bulbs if we kept the old strings instead of throwing them away.
  
• Related to the above: another possible reason for leaving them up is that perhaps there is the hope that eventually, gravity will cause the little icicle strands to straighten themselves out instead of hanging in very messy-looking (and occasionally gap-creating) zigzags.
  
• It is generally a good idea to check the lights by plugging them into a socket before you spend hours and risk your neck hanging them. Undoubtedly my organized and forward-thinking husband would have remembered this. However, if this thought doesn't occur to you till you're about three minutes from the end of a long light-hanging project, God has a special providence for forgetful individuals which will usually cause everything to turn out OK.
  
• Stepladders lie. Or at least they stretch the truth a bit. When you know enough about a skill or discipline, you know when you can improvise and when you can't. There are some areas where I'm really good at this, like cooking (example: celery seed is not substitutable straight across for celery in a stuffing recipe [hi Toney!]. But you can leave the parsley out of your spaghetti sauce recipe and you won't even notice). However, there are many, many topics and jobs about which I am so clueless that I cling to the letter of the law like a fanatic. Up until today, "THIS IS NOT A STEP" was one of those things. Necessity prevailed, today, however, and I gingerly found out that "THIS IS NOT A STEP", at least on the top level of a folding stepladder, really means, "Don't stand on here unless you absolutely have to. And if you're going to stand here, do make sure that your ladder is extremely stable and that you have a solid structure to hang on to or balance yourself against. Also, no matter how careful you are, if you fall to your death while standing on this surface, your heirs can't sue us." I did NOT fall to my death, I DID successfully get all the icicle lights up, go GIRL POWER!
  

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