« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »
May 30, 2006
Freedom of sorts
Well, the menagerie is safe at Cascade Kennels over in Woodinville, and rather than cleaning all afternoon, I took the opportunity to relax a bit. Looking to go to sleep soon as well, and it's barely 11pm. I adore our little furchildren, but it's been almost a year since I've had any sort of break from being the primo caregiver for them.
Tomorrow we can look forward to fire alarm tests sometime between 8am and 5pm. I'm fairly confident that we'll not be first on the list, but I'm just hoping that they actually get everyone done tomorrow instead of rescheduling us for some other day. Thursday, I'd really like to take a day off and go somewhere. I'm just so exhausted, lack of sleep, too much work, etc.
Posted by jodikins at 11:06 PM | Comments (0)
Containergasm
So, I promised a glowing review of the niftiest container EVAR!. Fit & Fresh has a line of amazing containers that stay chilled for up to 6 hours. Although I work from home, I thought it might be nice to have a few of these around -- I was intrigued by the picture in the Bartell's ad, and by the price, $6.99 each. The concept is that each of these modular containers has a thin freezable ice pack that snaps in the lid, which is neat enough. What blew me away was the design of each container.
The Salad container is a small cube (it looks like it holds about 3 cups of salad), and built into the lid is a compartment which has a knife and a super spork (slightly longer tines than say your average KFC spork). The cover on the utensil set locks in a dial on the top of the lid. This is the.... Salad Dressing DISPENSER! With the lid off, as you fill the bowl with salad greens or pasta or whatever you're putting in your salad, there's a compartment in the lid with a little plastic snap lid that holds 3 Tablespoons of dressing. Pour the dressing in, snap the dressing compartment closed, secure the icepack (which doesn't cover the dressing portal) and snap the lid on the container. When you're ready to partake of your salad, remove the knife and super-spork... then turn the dial on the dressing dispenser to Open... and the little hatch inside the closed salad container opens, dumps the dressing down, and the you can shake the container for maximum dispersment! And if you're wondering, the whole thing, sans ice pack, is dishwasher safe, and it's only two pieces (everything in the main top lid is hinged so, no losing the little dressing container lid).
After I unwrapped the container, I spent a good 15 minutes playing with the salad dressing dispensing apparatus, and just generally basking in the glow of such a well thought out product. I also picked up two other larger containers and a drink cup by the same folks, but describing them in detail would be just way too much excitement for me today :)
Posted by jodikins at 6:45 PM | Comments (0)
May 28, 2006
Exhaustion
Quite a full day today. We did the radio show and it was okay. My microphone stuff hasn't arrived yet so I sounded like crap, but other than that it was fun. Dingo was kind enough to listen in and keep us company for a while :)
Let's see. I went to Bartell's in search of the Shed-Ender. I was forsaken on that, but picked up a few other items. Late tonight, Richard and I went grocery shopping and he actually went in with me, hah! It was time to get my 10% off one trip, so we made it count. Stocked up on a bunch of stuff and the total was just shy of $350 pre-discount. QFC is once again on my shitlist, however. Today is May 28th. They had packages of ham hanging up that expired on May 20th. Umm. EW. They need to hire someone to go through perishable items and pull things that are expired. Richard was making fun of me for checking the dates on everything from cheese to meat to bread products, but damn it, food is too expensive these days to pay good money for something that's pre-spoiled for my convenience!
More tomorrow on the BEST CONTAINERS EVER!
Posted by jodikins at 2:31 AM | Comments (0)
May 27, 2006
Your ass is grass
Dear SprintPCS collections department,
As much as I love hearing my husband repeat the story of why we will not be paying you $714.23, because you in fact will not accept the return of the phones nor refund the $600 that we paid for these phones and cancelled our contract for when we found zero service in our home, it is a violation of the FDCTA to call us at 5:15AM. Ever.
While your delightful offshore debt collections team cannot distinguish timezones, nor are they clear on the laws of this fine country of ours, I'm fairly confident that the FTC does not accept either one of those excuses when deciding to fine you and or prosecute you for violating the FDCTA.
Unfortunately, I'll have to be polite and wait until Tuesday morning to make a call to the Attorney General and the FTC regarding your violations. And you can bet I won't be calling at 5:15AM.
Hugs and kisses,
- me
Posted by jodikins at 5:36 AM | Comments (0)
May 23, 2006
Gimme a break
Well, after suffering through my final turn up, I was finally rewarded this afternoon with confirmation for the menagerie's boarding next week. Tuesday through Friday at noon, we'll be furchild free. I'd like to say that we have tons of fabulous trips planned for then, but alas, some work will still need to be done. My goal is to take most of the 31st off, come home, do my end of the month project in the evening, and then take all of the 1st off.
Tomorrow I'm going to focus on laundry. Gbic has a vet appointment at 2 to get her stitch taken out and to get her kennel cough vaccine updated, so that should be pretty quick. Things should be relatively quiet on the work front, thankfully.
Posted by jodikins at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)
Coming soon...
Linda's been intrigued by internet radio shows -- her husband hosts one each week and it seems like he has a lot of fun doing it. So we talked about it a bit and she said that we totally should do a show together. At first I said hah, no way. I mean really, wtf would I talk about? But, I had some downtime tonight, and she convinced me to come listen to one of the shows... and I liked it. It's not a huge deal, I'm sure that next to no one would listen to it, and it might actually be fun :) So, I invested in a podcasting kit, which will hopefully come later this week, woo!
I've never been one to even listen to talk radio, with one glaring exception: Love Line. It sucks since Adam Carolla left, but Dr. Drew is still a good draw most nights. Over the years, I've become fairly good at the whole armchair being Dr. Drew and Adam -- listening to the calls is a good example of Blink (the Malcolm Gladwell book) in action. Split second assessments can sometimes be more accurate than months of research. Learning to listen to such a limited interaction with a person, yet nailing accurate predictions about their lives from that tiny sample -- it's all just fascinating. Umm, not that we'll be doing any of that on our little internet radio thang... :)
Dinner with Avi last night was great company-wise. The restaurant sucked though. The food was not great and the service bordered on atrocious. Oh well, yet another example of how Seattle doesn't DO ethnic very well. Avi and Richard talked lots of business and it was entertaining to say the least.
I'm still trying to see if we can board the animals for a few days next week. They'll be doing fire alarm testing on Wednesday, and I really don't want the animals around freaking out for that. And if I work really hard and play my cards right, we might be able to sneak in a day trip or two while the animals are away, woo! God knows I could use a little break.
Posted by jodikins at 1:07 AM | Comments (0)
May 19, 2006
TGIF
Well it was a crappy end to a stressful week. I'd been cranky yesterday and combined with the work stress scheduled for today, I started off the morning picking a fight with Richard for breakfast. The day progressed down a shit-slide from there. The first turn up I had scheduled for the morning took an hour and a half and was just a mess. I went upstairs for a cry and a nap, then came down for my second turn up which was also a bloody hell mess. The only thing to be thankful for is the fact that I only have one more of these stupid turn up calls to wade through next week and then I should be done for a while. It doesn't help matters that Richard's been in a funk this week as well, and he's cranky too. Wheee! Finally we talked it out this evening and hugged and made up and I cried some more.
I'm in the process of cleaning for Avi's visit on Sunday evening (I presume), and I whipped up a batch of oat bars -- still in the oven but smelling great. Tomorrow I want to go on a tour of the kennel we want to start boarding the animals at. We got a notice this week saying that they'll be testing the fire alarms on the 31st, and that animals should be "secured". I'd rather just board them for a day or two than put them through that stress in their home. Gbic's stitches come out that Monday, so everything should work out well.
Tomorrow we need to do some cleaning and lots of laundry. Tonight I'll work on a meal list and grocery list for sometime this weekend.
Posted by jodikins at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2006
Better
Feeling a bit better today. My side is still somewhat sore, but I felt tons better after we went to the gym last night. We're horribly out of shape, but I did half a mile on the elliptical, and did about 10 minutes on the treadmill (30 mins of total activity). While that sounds incredibly pathetic, it's actually more activity than we've done in 6 months, basically. Start small, aim high. Or something like that :)
In other news, we've been dealing with what qualifies for heat in the Pacific Northwest. It's been a bit on the warm side (86+ for the past two days) but the nights cool off and it's fairly easy to trap some of the cold overnight air in here. The AC helps in the bedroom, but nothing wretched at all.
I'm getting back into cooking tonight with some spicy Korean chicken, rice and green beans -- really looking forward to that. Other than that, I've decided that I've stockpiled too much jam, so I think once things cool down a bit, I'll be making sweet yeast dough and rolling up some jam mock-danishes.
Posted by jodikins at 7:29 AM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2006
Guilt
Rationally, I know that getting Gbic's teeth cleaned was the right thing to do. Emotionally watching her coming out of the anesthesia for the past 6 hours has sucked. Despite my guilt, the vet reported that the cleaning went well, and no major problems found. While they had her under, they removed a few skintags, and ran some bloodwork on her. Everything is normal and happy, or within range for her phenobarbital.
I'm still feeling crappy, still with the pain in my ribs/right side. I started freaking myself out this afternoon with the power of google and "self diagnosis". Ya know, the site is called WRONGdiagnosis.com for a damn reason. So, after panicking about gallstones, gallbladder disease, liver infection, liver cancer, leukemia, pelvic inflammatory disease and endometriosis, I went upstairs and stretched. Hrm, seems the pain goes away if i stretch and am in good posture. Shocking. In the absence of... well, death, I guess, and lack of acute pain, or intermittent pain, we're back to the pulled muscles/slept funny diagnosis. I was scared enough to eat better today, hopefully I can keep that up.
It was warm today, bordering on hot. For the most part we stayed cool inside. Finally got some heat build up in the evening, but as soon as the sun went down, I opened the screen door and we're busy sucking in the cooler air to store for tomorrow.
Gbic's still a little unsteady on her feet, and she's alternated between silence and puppy whining since we got home. But, she had some food and some water, and even went on a little walk so I'm sure she'll be much better by morning.
Posted by jodikins at 9:24 PM | Comments (0)
Another lazy weekend
After all the early mornings and late nights, I think that we all needed to take some time and just settle down and sleep. So, today and yesterday, we slept in til 2pm. The rest of the weekend was spent doing absolutely nothing :) I'd cooked enough for an army so we had leftovers all weekend. No baking, nothing more than nuking. Tomorrow morning we take Gbic in to get her teeth cleaned under general anesthesia, so another early morning (need to drop her off between 7am and 9am).
I called my mom to wish her a happy mother's day, and found out that they've been having torrential rains and the basement of their new house started to flood. Given the 11 inches of rain they've had since Thursday, I guess they should count themselves lucky to only have had an inch of water in the basement. They went with everyone else this morning and bought a sump pump at Home Depot and have been trying to keep up with the water.
Other than that, my back pain is back -- I think the long term solution is to get back into light weight lifting to start toning up my muscles around my core.
Posted by jodikins at 1:11 AM | Comments (0)
May 13, 2006
Brown Sugar...
*ding* What is things that make a dog barf, Alex? Uhh, yeah. So. dinner last night was great, but man alive, I cannot eat that much food anymore and it really made me sad, heh :) Today I spent a bunch of time cooking, and when we went out to do some last minute grocery shopping, Gbic decided to pull down a bag of brown sugar off a low shelf and start munching away. She only ate between half a cup and a cup of it, but a couple of hours later, it started to not agree with her. And it started agreeing on the rug. In several places. Apparently massive sugar consumption is dehydrating to a dog, so she'd been drinking a LOT of water. And then proceded to spew that up with that horrible mucous that I can totally relate to. She barfed three times before Rob got here so I went online and got scared that she might have the dreaded BLOAT. I called the vet and the receptionist took down my information and asked the vet if we should bring her in or not. Gbic had been kind of moping a bit, and when I took her outside she spewed in the grass, and she just wasn't animated at all. The receptionist called back and while I was on the phone with her, Rob arrived and Gbic started howling and dancing around. So, we agreed no worries there. Took away her food and water for a bit to make sure that she wasn't going to over-indulge and puke again.
Posted by jodikins at 12:57 AM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2006
Where have I been?
Wednesday already, wow. Let's see, Sunday I baked and relaxed some more. Monday we got up early and stayed up and did work and later I boxed up baked goods. Tuesday got up early again, ran boxes to the post office since the APC was full when we went Monday evening, and basically stayed up all day. Today, up early again, and a brief nap in the chair (if you're not laying down it doesn't count as sleep). Went to Costco for the first time in months, and frankly, I just don't like the original Costco in Kirkland. The store seems to be small (judging by the amount of items on my list that they never seem to have), and I always feel just cranky when I leave it. I think next time I get the urge to hit Costco, I'll try the one in Woodinville or Issaquah.
Lsst night Bob did the most awesome job of cleaning our cage in Ashburn. I still can't believe how nice it looks! Thanks to his tireless efforts, I can now spring into bitchsmack mode and demand a new IM :) More on that at a later date.
Let's see. Tomorrow night Richard and I are having our anniversary dinner a day early at Daniels. Haven't been there since we took Sarah there in October, and I'm counting on having a much better experience this time around :) Friday is our actual anniversary, and Rob is coming down from Canada and we'll have a nice dinner at home.
Monday we're taking Gbic in to get her teeth cleaned under general anesthesia. I hate to do it because I know it will be a lot of stress on her, but we were giving her belly scratchies Monday night and I noticed her teeth were just horrible. Tartar, red gums, brown spots, gray teeth, yuck yuck and yuck. Poor girl :( Since she's almost 7 years old, hopefully some preventative care now will save her some pain later in life.
Posted by jodikins at 3:04 PM | Comments (1)
May 6, 2006
Ahhh Saturday
After the crazy end of the week, I've really been looking forward to the weekend. While the weather isn't as nice as it was the past few days, I'll take cloudy with occasional light drizzle for a Saturday. We got up early this morning and took the car in for an oil change. Then we went grocery shopping, and then home for a 3 hour nap for me :)
I took some time this evening to make my to be baked list, and it's all very doable for tonight/tomorrow. Banana nut bread, coffee cake, rice krispie treats, snickerdoodles, and some matzoh crunch for Linda. I hope I can get that to work for once -- ever since the initial resounding success, all other batches have been crap. I'm going to try reducing the cooking time for the caramel part, and cut the baking down in the oven.
Other than that, I'm starting to catch up on the general housework that got neglected last week when I felt like crap. I'm trying not to get too giddy about the anniversary coming up, but it's really neat :)
Posted by jodikins at 7:49 PM | Comments (0)
May 5, 2006
Feeling 34
Last night we dealt with a complete hardware failure and subsequent chassis swap from 9:15pm til 7:30am. I'm officially too old for that crap. Though that's not really fair, I mean, I made it through the night okay. The subsequent hourly phone calls from 8am on were what killed me. Oh well, at least it's Friday.
I was at least productive last night -- got lots of cooking done and even found time to clean up afterwards. Spaghetti and meatballs, extra meatballs for meatball subs that got tossed in the freezer, some chewy matzoh crack, and the dough for snickerdoodles (and two test sheets). This weekend, I'll make banana nut bread finally and a few other items to send out to folks.
Linda's surgery today went well, but turned into an inpatient procedure. Hopefully her doctor was able to clean out all that endometrial tissue that was making her feel so crappy all the time. My dad's colonoscopy on Wednesday went okay. Three polyps removed, and we're waiting to see what the lab results are on them.
And it's one week til our first anniversary. It's nice looking at how far we've come in a year. The move out here, cleaning up our lives, and really working together even more.
Posted by jodikins at 8:38 PM | Comments (0)
May 2, 2006
You know you're old when...
You do a bunch of small things that kind of tweak your back over a couple of days, and then you go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning with pain radiating across half your body. You think that surely you are going to die, is it an appendicitis? Nope... no pain when poking there. Gallstones/gallbladder infection? Nope... no pain there either. After ruling out several other dire self-diagnoses, I happened to put my hand up on my ribcage on my back. Holy flaming hell the pain in that one spot... on my back, up fairly high (i.e. nowhere near my kidneys). So, I got Richard to massage that and work on my back, and he found a similar flaming pit of hell pain spot closer to my spine on that side. Oddly enough, when pressing down on either spot, the radiating pain across the rest of my body stopped. Richard grabbed an Icy Hot patch and smoothed it across the two pain spots and I went to sleep for a few hours. The 'I'm going to die' pain went away, replaced by the dull throb of the back pain.
Needless to say, it was a light day. I managed to get up and shower at 1pm, did some more work after that, but I've been pretty ginger with myself. I warned Rob that the house would not be clean when he comes to visit tomorrow, but that it will be cleaner than he's seen it :)
Posted by jodikins at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)