CafeChatNoir

My nap ran obscenely long, so I went to the market afterwards to try and do something productive to make up for it.

I’m walking down the aisles and I see someone and think, “Hmm, that looks like Mom, but she doesn’t shop here…” and look again, and yup, it’s Mom. I think she was initially as confused as I was when I said “Hello!!”…

Turns out she’d been running errands on my side of town and was getting coffee & biscuits for the dog - about as exciting as my list - such is the glamour life of the single gals in my family. :)

It’s just odd to run into your parents somewhere that they just normally wouldn’t be. Also found myself doing an involuntary scan of my basket to see what I’d gotten so far. Pasta salad, flour, milk. Nice normal, healthy things. *whew* The way my luck usually runs it would be Pop-Tarts, whipped cream, 6 “C” batteries and condoms or some other equally unfortunate combination…

OK, I really need to go get some more things done around here to make up for that nap. 2.5 hours of bliss, but unfortunately, the cats didn’t tend to the wash while I was sleeping…

Took a shower - thinking that would get me up and going. Nope, I’m just all warm, fat, happy & even lazier now. :)

I’ve been up since 9 and have had coffee, a bagel, done some reading and have laid out my budget for 2005, and that’s it.

I’ve got little things to tend to around the house, and I really should make a quick run to the market for some things, but to be perfectly honest, I think a nap is going to come first…

could make the airport such an adventure, LOL.

We get to the airport, Mom gets Grandma out of the car, I toss the bags on the sidewalk, whistle for a skycap (quite impressively I might add) and I’m off to get the car parked. We are to meet back up inside the doors where I dropped them. Except they’re not there when I get back inside.

I find them at the ticket counter (which is nicely hidden) and discover that we can only get one security pass to go to the gate with her. And as we are there the standard 2 freaking hours (and then some) ahead of flight departure, guess who got to kill a LOT of time wandering around the terminal?

Yup. You can only enjoy the people watching aspect of an airport for so long before you start to want to bash your head into a wall from boredom. That, and the TSA folks start looking at you wondering why on earth you don’t seem to be actually going anywhere.

The TSA at Dulles is like a VDOT road crew - if they were all actually working, damn that would be one good operation. Instead, at least half of them are standing around doing nothing most of the time, and when they’re working, they are complete fuckups. Apparently when Mom & Grandma went through security, they took Grandma (in a wheelchair) off to a private room (not necessarily unusual), but then just LEFT her there, while getting pissy at my mother for standing around waiting and not being on her way. (Um, the morons made off with the elderly woman she was escorting - of course she should just move along…)

How on earth that could be as tiring as it was is beyond me, but I’m beat and definitely NOT staying up late tonight…

If Brad & Jen can’t make it, who can?? OK, I don’t really follow this stuff at all, a coworker IM’d me this morning to ask if I was going to go after Brad, LOL. (Too skinny, I’d break him in half.) But, they were a cute couple, and it’s always sad to see stuff fall apart, and I would think it would have to suck to have the entire world know about it.

For your “Awwwwwwwwww” story of the week, A baby-hippopotamus that survived the tsumani waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise. The pics are just precious.

We’ve got a grey, icky, rainy, nasty day out there. Only going out to help Grandma get to the airport and other than that, it’s all inside for me, thankyouverymuch. Looking good for getting the kitchen cupboards cleaned out & rearranged, and some bread baking this weekend. Ham salad sandwiches on fresh bread - how kickass does that sound?!?

Office drama… One person is going PT, and another is going to design. PT person is having day care issues, and if it wasn’t busy season, she’d just be SOL. However, they’re going to assign her “officially” to another queue, so that frees up another FT position our queue can hire for. The gal going to design isn’t going to be a huge loss, cause she hasn’t exactly been participating in the queue lately to have much of an impact. As I told my coworker, we’re better off with her *not* there, than present and not doing anything and just pissing people off.

Thursday night was fun, Tom is still the same whack job he always was, but I am too old to be out hell raising on a school night. I was soooooooo tired yesterday.

Just popped a meatloaf in the oven, had to get the beef cooked up today (was gonna do it the other night, never got to it) - should be come out of the oven just before I have to head out. Another item for which the mixer gets a big thumbs up. Prep time cut by at least half.

Made it to Friday in one piece. Just barely, but got here. To bed now.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/news/82926.html

Also the fact that they didn’t deny it immediately was kinda one of those dead giveaways. :)

Hope Brad & Co made an obscene amount of money off the deal, and it’s enough they can just walk away.

Why? Because the crappy things I’ve seen up close and personal, over & over again with acquisitions is are following:

Companies don’t buy other companies because of “synergies” and other such bullshit. They buy because they have promised someone out there a certain amount of growth, they can’t get there on their own, so they have to buy it. Usually they can’t grow on their own because they suck at what they do, so they’re also trying to buy legitimacy in the marketplace. So you get bought by someone who is desperate and sucks at what they do. The aftermath is not pretty, and most folks from the acquired entity don’t like seeing what they’ve built pretty much destroyed.

It should be interesting to see how this one works out.

Pizza for lunch tastes better when someone else pays for it.

The former manager who is now back on calls full time - I am seeing why she went to management. Keeping fingers crossed that it’s just a matter of her getting back into the swing of things.

I have 2 new people within 10 feet of me in the office now. This is not good for being able to work uninterrupted. As a matter of fact, it’s driving me ever so slightly up the wall.

Worked late again tonight, but not too bad. If things get hopping when it’s time to go, I can’t just up and leave - just ain’t right.

No working late tomorrow, as it’s off for pints with Tom & Miriam & who knows who else after work. (T&M being the reason I no longer host parties. I cannot have folks meeting and going off and getting married 5 months later.)

Do dill pickles count as a vegetable? I do hope so…

So far I am unimpressed with 2005. Call me naive, but I was still kind of hoping for some spontaneous breakout of world peace. Or at least inner peace for those of us who could use it. However, at last check, the world was still a seriously messed up place and there are lots of people hurting out there.

It would be much easier if I could stop caring for a little while, you know? You feel bad about something in your own life, and then look out into the world or just at the person next to you and everyone else’s problems are bigger/scarier/sadder than yours. So you try and suck it up, and you just end up feeling worse in the end.

2005 off to a rip roaring start. Didn’t sleep too well, didn’t get up when I really should have, access badge is just gone, had 2 Starbucks cards in my hand this morning to put in my wallet, and I don’t know what happened, except that at some point they weren’t in my hand anymore and they’re not in my wallet either. I did register them last night, though, so that’s something.

I have at least gotten a new badge, and I did at least remember to bring my lunch with me, so it’s not all bad.

Just annoying to have things go haywire first thing in the morning.

So, in an attempt to try make up for the fact that I am a completely & hopelessly scatterbrained, I went to put the calendar inserts in my day runner for the new year and write some things down that I wanted to make note of.

But I can’t locate the day runner. This does not bode well for organization in 2005.

It would be uproariously funny were it not so pathetically typical of me. I swear, Darwin is up there shaking his head and pointing - “that one - seriously, she should have been eaten by wolves by now or something…”

Other than that, a lazy Sunday with a few things done so it wasn’t a complete loss. Laundry, lunch cobbled together for tomorrow, re-organized my bead inventory and came up with some good ideas for the next couple projects.

But I’m seriously annoyed with myself at the disappearance of the day runner…

Edit: Found it. In the cat carrier. Don’t ask, because I honestly have no idea.

Dave Barry is taking a breather…

If it starts hassling for registration, go to http://bugmenot.com for a bogus login. Many thanks to paperpath for letting me know of bugmenot’s existence.

PS, why on earth is someone using a power saw outside my home at 8 PM on a Sunday night?

I sure hope it tastes as good as it looks and smells. :)

Edit: I couldn’t wait any longer and ripped an end off one and buttered it up and OMG it is soooo good!!

2004, you can kiss my cute ass. Finished it off by gorging on Chinese food, listening to Bob Newhart, and falling asleep well before midnight, and then waking up at midnight, seriously considering getting into the car and driving about running over people who were shooting off fireworks. (When the hell did that become a tradition, anyway? Yes, I am officially old.)

2005 started with sleeping in, coffee at Jamie’s General Bean and breakfast at Payne’s next door (terrific throwback greasy spoon in Centreville.)

Finally got a rolling pin last night, and all is right with the world. Bread is on the first second rising cycle, and hopefully will be done and cooled by the time I have to leave for dinner for Grandma’s birthday. (She’ll kick my ass if I’m late, even with fresh out of the oven bread…) I’d forgotten how delightfully violent making bread is! I have no doubt that there is flour on the ceiling. :-D

Some good news coming out of the tsunami - and proof you need to pay attention in school and listen to your elders:
Elders’ Sea Knowledge Spares Some Thais
“The elders told us that if the water recedes fast it will reappear in the same quantity in which it disappeared,” 65-year-old village chief Sarmao Kathalay told the paper.
British ‘angel’ saved hundreds from tsunami with classroom knowledge
A 10-year-old British schoolgirl saved the lives of hundreds of people in southern Asia by warning them a wall of water was about to strike, after learning about tsunamis in geography class, British media reported.

And here come the resolutions…

– Get the house more organized. I’m getting better, but still need a lot of work. The house is OK, but it really needs to get to a point of “a place for everything and everything in it’s place.” Right now it’s more of a “everything at least is stacked up somewhere…” That is just gonna take plain ol’ time & discipline…

– Get me more organized. I suck at time management. I somehow am able to get what must be done, done - but there is so much more and if I had my act a touch more together, I could accomplish a heck of a lot more. I can’t help but think that possibly a tiny less time spent on my butt reading things on the internet may help, but that sounds awfully extreme… ;)

– Take more photographs. I’ve got a great camera and I need to take it with me more places.

– Do more creative stuff. I’ve got it in me, just need to take the time and DO something with it! More beading, knitting, sewing, painting, all of it.

– Read more books. 2004 was probably a lifetime low for books read for me. Must not let that happen again!

– Take advantage of having good cooking tools and cook more!! (That’s already in progress, wheeee!)

– Get back on the exercise wagon to offset the effects of the abovementioned good cooking tools.

– Bed before 11 on school nights. 10 would be ideal. Seriously. If you see me posting after 10, yell at me.

– Just be a better, kinder person in general, despite the fact I am surrounded by dumbasses sometimes. ;) Nah, seriously, just gotta keep paying it forward for the good fortune that I do have, even when it seems like everything sucks.

– Figure out a way to create a 30 hour day, and then decide how I will spend my Nobel Prize money for the discovery. :-D

– Addition: No more sitting my butt down at the computer when I get home unless all the other stuff is done.

– Addition 2: Keep the finances under control. Came out ahead last year (thanks to the market not screwing me, which helped), and I need to continue that.

– Addition 3: Maybe quit smoking this year? Would be a good idea in general, but you have to *want* to, and I can’t say that want has been there yet.

May 2005 bring you and yours nothing but the very best.