Mayer Pooped Again
This entry has nothing to do with Mayer and his ferocious cat poop. Maybe one day I’ll tell you about that.
This year holidailies is getting all hard and stuff. They are making me totally work just to stay in the portal. Every week they are kicking out people who haven’t posted the required number of entries. So far I’ve made it past elimination round the first, but the second is right around the corner and I need to somehow come up with four more entries before wednesday morning. Yes, yes totally doable if I would just stick to the daily post rule. I KNOW.
I’m pretty sure the only time I’ve actually come close to writing the requisite 20 entries for the month was the first year that holidailies existed. I didn’t know better, that there were rules that really I *didn’t* have to follow. That the world wouldn’t come crashing down if I didn’t comply with daily entries. Since that year, though, I’ve been great at testing the world and its walls.
I think because I usually stop writing halfway through the month (I’m not kidding anyone, it’s usually sometime in the first week that I stop writing) I haven’t noticed the part where I get kicked out of the portal and moved to the “holidailies at home” contingent. I think that if I *knew* I was getting kicked out, I would have made more of an effort. But by that time I had given up so completely that even checking the website and reading other people’s entries was ego-crushing.
Anyhow, this year they’ve made it even easier. There’s a link on the holidailies website that takes you to writing prompts. Now I have no excuses.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (1)I Got the Job!
Today is the last weekday I get to lounge around in my underwear. It was my last chance to sleep in and take full advantage of being the only one in this house who has no weekday obligations. And here it is, before 9AM and I’m sitting in front of the computer. (Usually I can stretch the sleep-in until at least 10 or 1030.)
I haven’t been sleeping well. I have to wake up every few hours to pee, like an old lady. And it seems if I don’t press the ‘v’ key hard enough, my words turn into Korean. So because of the not sleeping, I’m usually pretty tired in the morning, making sleeping in a total breeze. Maybe later this morning I’ll have a nap.
Yesterday the job I was waiting on phoned and offered the job. It’s a good thing, too, because it was driving me crazy thinking that after dangling it in front of me, after acting like they really liked me, that they didn’t want me. I’m not sure what the holdup was – I’m sure it takes some doing to get authorization for new hires or something. Maybe they spent a day calling my references. In any event, I’m starting monday morning.
I quit coffee again. I forgot to write about it the first time. I quit coffee earlier this year because I was concerned that my body was dependant on it. After a couple of days of headaches, the pain was gone. I felt better and slept better. I got out of bed and didn’t have to un-grog myself. I liked the idea of not having a coffee craving every afternoon at 2PM. Then I started working at a job that wanted me to be there by 7:30. 7:30, and it wasn’t like it was close to my house or anything. Obviously I started drinking coffee again. But I don’t think I was as needy that time around, because when I would take a day off here and there, there would be no withdrawal headache.
Then I quit again. For the most part I don’t even miss it anymore. The first time I quit, I had a hard time dealing with mornings. With the ritual gone, I felt like I was supposed to be doing something – something other than sipping water from a nalgene. I longed for a warm cup of coffee, if only to warm up my chilly fingers. Eventually I learned about decaf, but even that isn’t worth it most days.
I think I’m extra sensitive to caffeine. Yesterday I got a decaf peppermint mocha latte at starbucks in the afternoon. That evening I had a lovely caffeine headache. So I’m thinking either the girl missed the “decaf” part of my order, or the small amount of caffeine in the drink was enough to upset my head. I didn’t have trouble falling asleep, so I’m leaning towards the latter.
Anyhow, my point – other than to avoid being kicked out of holidailies, like I manage to do nearly every year – is that 1. I now have a job. and 2. I have successfully quit coffee, but am afraid that now that I am going back to work, I will once again fall back off the wagon. I’m pretty determined, though. Lots of people get through life without caffeine. All those mormons… I’ll let you know how it goes.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments OffA visit to the tree lot
No news on the job front. Today’s second interview went well (I thought.) But then, all the interviews I’ve attended in this round of job-hunting have been good in my opinion.
We got our Christmas tree this evening. Yesterday afternoon Jim and I went to the tree lot to take a look at the trees. See, they don’t post prices. You have to go to the lot and ask. They have tree lots everywhere, but these aren’t exactly things that are advertised, so you have no idea if the lot across the street is charging less than the lot that you’re at. Then you factor in the cold – no one wants to be out for extended amounts of time in this temperature. I was a little nervous about this sort of marketplace, assuming that the trees were priced based on the sort of car you drove up in, and the shoes you were wearing. I think maybe I’m paranoid, and that the tree people change the prices as we get closer to Christmas. After we came home for the evening, we realized that we had forgotten to go back to the tree lot and pick out a tree. So we had to go back today. (Of course, I was curious to see if the price had mysteriously changed overnight. It didn’t.)
They sell trees here differently from the way we do in Hawaii. Back home, they have these refrigerated containers that the trees sit in at night. In the daytime they haul a bunch of trees out of the container to sell to people. They cut the strings off and fluff them out so that people can look at them. And then when people select their trees, they run them through a netting chute, which makes the tree easy to transport.
This is my second tree in Calgary. Last year we put it off to almost the last minute and we ended up getting it at home depot. They don’t cut the string off the trees there so you have to spin the tree around, looking for bare spots through the squished up branches. We ended up with a nice tree, but I couldn’t really understand deciding on a tree without actually seeing it.
Tonight’s tree lot visit was neat – all the trees are unstrapped and fluffed out, so you totally know what you’re getting into. This tree lot made it easy on us – I guess they only order one height range of their trees, so most all the trees were one price. AND they stand on these neat metal stands so they aren’t smashed up against each other. We ended up getting a Scottish Pine tree, which I have dubbed “Scotch Tape Pine.” No photos yet. It’s still sitting in a bucket of water, having some pre tre-stand drinkies.
The best part of the tree-lot visit? The tree vendor wished us a Merry Christmas.
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