Seismic Twitch

It is now 3 am and I’m doing what I promised. In about 1/2 hour I’m going to have a shower and a cup of coffee (not together). An our after that I’ll be headed to work. Why am I going to be going to work at half-past two damned early in the morning? Because I’m going to Calgary with my co-workers. As I’ve mentioned before we are going to Calgary for the half-way house association’s AGM. Surprisingly enough the big boss, the owner, is also going to the AGM. I don’t know if he’s going to stay for the entire time or if he’s just going to be there for the business part of the AGM, but either way, it’s a surprise. He’s not shown any interest in that part of the business before. Anyway, I’m packed. All I have to do is get my pillow into a bag and I’m ready to go.

Bran and Boy picked up the new Midsomer Murders DVDs. I tried watching them tonight but I was too busy. I did manage to finish the monthly and quarterly reports. I also got my daily work done and some other little bits of work that will make the work of the co-worker who is working my shifts easier. After I finished my shift I cleaned out the chinchilla cage, made sure they had food and replenished the water in both the hedge hogs and the chinchillas. That should keep them ok until I get back on Friday. On that day I’ll feed them enough to get them through to Saturday or Sunday and come in and do the weekly, more thorough cleaning.

I have the hiccoughs and they’re being really annoying.

I got a reply from Student Loans today. I can’t remember if I told you about this adventure before. In Canada a person who owes Student Loans can get interest relief if their income is low enough. The debtor has to apply for this relief every 6 months and can do so for up to 5 years. For the past 6 months I’ve made reduced payments because our total family income was low enough. Now that Bran is unemployed one would expect that that would give us more relief, right? Not so. It turns out the entire bureaucracy known as Canada Student Loans came to a screeching halt on my reapplication for interest relief. Why, you ask? Because I dated the form August 31 instead of September 1. Yeah. So I refaxed the application with the correct date on it and they have given me total interest relief. I make no payments for 6 months. We’re still paying off Bran’s, but we can afford his. In February I’ll apply again (because the winning the lottery thing isn’t working out as ideally as I would like) in February for the March 1 deadline. This time I’ll remember to put March 1 on the application.

This weekend I went through my email for my Wicked Witch Jewelry thing. While going through I was reinspired to take up the production of decorative metal and stones. I got two new books on working with wire and one about Native American beading (that’s the name used in the title) which includes templates for 3 different moccasin patterns. I downloaded the application for the Sundog Artist Society as well. I can join them for $10 a year. Then I can apply to have a table at the Sundog Craft Faire that’s held yearly in December. I’m way to late for this year and I have no inventory. However, I can build up lots of supplies for next year’s Faire or perhaps the year after that. The Sundog is one place where people don’t expect to pay puny sums for work done by crafters, unlike the Fringe where I was competing with people who imported really cheap jewelry from China and India. Part of the work I’ll be doing is making rings and bracelets and maybe some neckware from wire.

My left wrist has been sore lately. It has the same sore feeling as my right wrist did when I had tendonitis in it. If it’s not better by next week I’ll go in and see the doc about it.

Let’s see. What else have I been up to lately? For the life of me I can’t think of anything.

So there you have it. I might update from Calgary but don’t count on it. I can’t seem me lasting very long tonight after supper. Tomorrow night might be taken up spending time with my co-workers. Then again, I might beg off and watch some movies (I’m taking the Midsomers with me) I think that after my shower I might watch the remainder of the movie I tried to get through at work.

I know it’s already tomorrow, but working evenings shifts my day a bit and tomorrow won’t be until I get up in the morning/afternoon. I’ll do an entry after work tomorrow (therefore being Wednesday) because I’m tired right now and don’t want to type much. I need something to keep me awake tomorrow night. We leave to Calgary at about 5am on Wednesday morning and I have to have something to keep me awake.

Later.

I don’t know what was different from the two entries I made before. The only thing was that I divided it in half. Nothing was changed except for a little bit of editing to make it more current and it published. Yet together it wouldn’t publish. Weird.

The soup was delicious. I could have added a bit more curry to it, but then the taste of the squash would have been overpowered. I was also going to put in sliced red pepper, but I forgot. It would have made a nice addition. Perhaps when I put my lunch together tomorrow I’ll slice up some pepper and plonk it in and it can reheat with the soup for my supper tomorrow. For those of you who eat legumes, some chick peas or lentils would go well. Rice would also be good with the soup.

Today it got to 30 C outside. I didn’t go out and I’m quite content with that whole concept.

This morning’s breakfast was awesome! I was really hungry and trying to think what I could make that would be tasty and filling. Having cereal taken off my list of things I can eat makes having a quick breakfast difficult. So I decided to make something on the fly, so to speak. I peeled and cubed a small sweet potato. I put it in a bowl with a little water and some butter, covered it up with a microwave lid thing and zapped it for 5 minutes. While that was being nuked I sauteed some mushrooms while I brewed up a cup of coffee. After the sweet potato was done cooking I smashed it up with a fork and plopped it out on a plate. I layered the mushrooms on the sweet potato and covered the whole thing up while I lightly scrambled some eggs in brown butter. Lightly scrambling is easy. I prefer to not break the yolks until the eggs are partly cooked, then I break the yolk and mix them around a little. When the eggs are just set enough to flip them over (first I quarter the circle of egg) and then after about 10 seconds I put them on the mushrooms and sweet potato. On top of all that I dumped a nice generous amount of Pace Chunky Salsa, in this case, medium heat. It was extremely delicious. Next time I make it I’ll change one thing. The mushrooms will be on the side rather than under the eggs. They made making sure that I get sweet potato with each bit of egg hard because the mushrooms were more firm and made the soft potato squish out from underneath.

I don’t have a lot planned today other than to fold the laundry that was done earlier in the week, ironing a few tops for my trip to Calgary this week and beginning to get organized to go. I’ll also do some dishes, I think. Maybe. Maybe after a nap. I wasn’t really ready to be awake when I woke, I was hungry.

I went through my email for Wicked Witch Jewelry and I downloaded some free patterns and bought a couple of others. It made me itch to get back to making stuff again. I have to tidy a place that I can work exclusively on the stuff. I have a little movie player, I have ear phones/buds. I’ll have Bran help me get the desk in the dining room cleared off and get the stuff out from under (if we can) so that I can actually sit at the desk. I just talked to Bran and he’s agreed. But it’s not going to be this week. I just don’t have the time nor the energy this week and then I’m away for three days. I think I’ll close my Etsy shop. I never got sales there anyway. I’ll have to figure out something else. Maybe I’ll just make jewelry like mad all year long and just sell at the Sundog Handcraft Faire next December. The nice thing about the Sundog is that people don’t expect to pay extremely low prices for stuff. When I did the link up for the entry I also checked around it. You have to be a member of the Sundog Arts Society, but that costs only $10 a year. Then I’d have to apply to be an exhibitor and they do a jury selection of people who can exhibit. Hey, it can’t hurt to try, right? I have two months coming up where I’ll be doing not a whole lot but recovering.

It’s now late afternoon, 5:20 roughly. I am now making supper. I’m making a yummy squash soup. So far I’ve sauteed 2 sliced onions, one carrot sliced on the bias, and about 1 Tbsp garlic in bacon fat (you can use vegetable oil) and added Mrs. Dash as a seasoning. Then I added the two medium to large squash and two litres of chicken stock. I also added a nice Tbsp of curry paste. I might add more, I haven’t decided. I’ll let that all cook together for a while and then see if the wand blender works (remember it stopped when I was trying to make mayonnaise the second time). Then I’ll add a can of chopped tomatoes (I like pieces of tomato in the soup rather than whizzing up the seeds because they’re bitterish) and some shrimp. I’ll cook the shrimp and then add coconut milk. I wouldn’t mind having spinach, but we don’t have any. The nice thing with spinach is that it will cook with the heat of the soup in each bowl rather than adding it to the soup and having it turn all nasty.

Laundry is all folded and put away. Yay! Bran has been puttering in the living room so it’s getting tidier.

There. Hopefully the publish button will work and I won’t get that error.

I don’t know why but when I tried to publish this at least three times before it didn’t work. I did a test publish and it worked. Then I tried again and got an error.

I didn’t do up a post yesterday. I even did things. Really!

First off Bran and I headed to the SPCA to see if we could find kitty a cat tower for the bedroom. She likes to snooze on a sheet that was neglectfully left after it was washed (thereby creating the need to launder it again) that was placed on Bran’s dresser. This spot enables her to sleep in the bedroom without being endangered by Bran’s long legs on the bed. She could sleep on the foot of the bed on my side, and does sometimes, but she prefers his side of the bed. Anyway, we went to find if there was something we could get for her a small cat tower for his dresser. Sadly the SPCA was closed so we headed off to Early’s to see if they had anything adequate. Well, they had some lovely cat towers but they all would have been too large for the space. Those that weren’t too large were just for cats to sit on, not sprawl out and snooze. Then Bran found the perfect thing. It’s a made of braided banana leaves. I have to describe it to you because the online store doesn’t have it. It looks like a round basket and it sits on a small round stand that makes it stable. It came with a pillow which I covered with a sheet we don’t use. It’s easier to launder the sheet than the pillow. She has used it…twice that we know of for certain. I think that’s because it didn’t come with a box for her to sit on. We also got her a crinkly ball but she pretty much ignored that from the get-go.

The most beloved item, at least from her point of view, is the small laser-type pointer. She loves that little red dot and has spent a fair bit of time chasing it. Alas, it’s not built very well. I had to take it apart and put it together several times when the on/off button got pushed in too far and then got lost inside. The button has to be continually pushed in order to make it work and I found that to be hard on the fingers. Discovering how much she loves chasing the dot has made it necessary to go shopping for a better pointer for her. That will probably be found in Staples or Office Depot. Chances are they’ll be much better made than the toy we got.

We also picked up some chinchilla treats. I picked out some little munchies, timothy hay chunks and meadow grass. They have huge bags of chinchilla pellets as well at way less than it would cost at one of the pet stores. I think the bag they had (other than the small bags I had to otherwise get) was about 20 kg (that’s about 44 lbs). When we get that I’ll have to package it in large zip lock type bags to keep it fresh. That said, they’ll go through that fairly quickly. Anyway, this big bag will cost about the same as buying it on mail order and having it shipped here. It’s not that the food itself is expensive, but that shipping is wicked expensive. The best thing about discovering the less expensive pet foods was discovering that Bran’s CFCR membership entitles us to get 10% off our purchases at Early’s and other places around town. Paying less is always a good thing.

After we did the pet stuff we went to the Co-Op and Bran bought a couple of car washes, one for him and one for me. I was going to clean my truck this weekend but we’re in the midst of a fall heat wave. The idea of being inside an automobile in the sunshine when it’s in the high 20s and low 30s doesn’t fill me with any kind of good feeling. The prediction for next weekend is mid teens. That will be much more easily handled by my easily overheated self. After I’ve got my truck all cleaned I’ll use the car wash ticket.

Then we headed to a grocery store to get some lettuce (I was making breadless BLT rolls) for lunch/supper. We also got some apples, some low sodium chicken stock and the Disney move Tangled.

After that we went to the recycling depot and dumped off our paper/cardboard recycling into the bins. Bran noted that since I’m done with school I go through a whole lot fewer sheets of paper. That is certainly true.

Last night I spent time reading comics (which include a Jughead comic we picked up last week at the grocery store). I realized that I’m an bit anal when it comes to reading comics. For them, especially ones that have a chronology, I have to read them in order. Since I’m still waiting for Dominic Deegan book Battle for Barthis I can’t move on to the next book. I’ve tried. I just haven’t been able to. So instead I started rereading Bruno by Christopher Baldwin. I do recommend that you go read it or, if you can afford it, order the books so that you’ll always have a hard copy of it. It’s a multi-year story of a smart, sensitive, depressed woman named Bruno. Really, I recommend it highly. The comic is complete and therefore no longer updates, but Christopher has graciously left it up (including complete archives) for people to read. He also did a comic called Little Dee. I thought that Little Dee was done as well. I just discovered that it isn’t so I’ll be going back and rereading it as well. That’s awesome!

I spent the last two days doing month end reports for the Centre. I did around 15 or 16 reports today alone. Yesterday I did 6. Having those out of the way will be a huge help to my supervisor. When we return from Calgary all she’ll have to do is add some detail of the last week and they’ll be complete. This means that I don’t have to go in on Sunday in order to do my own reports. I’ll be able to get them done on Monday and Tuesday evenings while I’m there.

That’s what my day was. I found out that I need to read one of the books I own. I can’t even tell you the title of the book. Yeah, there’s nothing like confidentiality to make the day complete.

Boy, Bran and I will be going out for a fish supper tonight. I’m not sure that I want that.

In a while he’ll be home, we’ll eat and I’ll probably lay down for a bit of a nap. I’m feeling a bit tired.

Of the week that is. The problem with this week is that there is a pile of month end to do. I have to go in on Sunday to work on my own month end. Then on Tuesday evening I’ll finish up my stuff by finishing the stats and printing out the reports. I’m going to be about 4 or 5 hour working on Sunday. Yeah. I’m thrilled.

Today was supposed to be a fairly relaxed day with me doing reports and another co-worker (one of the weekend workers) getting to know the weekday routine. Thing is, she’s only worked nights alone. She trained during the day, but that was a while ago. So I had to teach her the phones again, how to page, how to log correctly, and so on. Since she’d worked only nights she didn’t have to do meal counts so I had to show her that. And it never failed, the minute we got into something she needed to learn, the damned phone would ring. It was enough to make me want to scream a couple of times. Happily she’s had her day of learning and tomorrow she has to do the shift on her own with minimal help from me. I was only able to get 5 reports done today and I have 8 more to finish tomorrow. She’s ready whether she likes it or not.

After work Bran and I went to the bank and paid a bill. Then it was off to Costco to pick up something to eat since he’d been doing our taxes (yes, I know they’re late) and didn’t think of anything and I was at work and didn’t think of anything this morning before I left for work. We picked up some Mahimahi burgers. The ingredients are the fish, canola oil and spices. We also got some cod filets, asparagus and mushrooms. I cooked some of the burgers to night for supper. I cut up some tomatoes we got from a friend (garden fresh) to have with the asparagus, fish and mushrooms. As the burgers were cooking I found they smelled profoundly fishy. That’s not my favourite aroma. So when I prepped my burgers I used some of my delicious mayo (and it is yummy) and put the tomato on top. Sadly I could only eat one. Bran thought they weren’t cooked at high enough a temperature because they didn’t brown. Oh well. Boy liked them and ate my second burger while I finished up my asparagus and mushrooms. I’m a bit disappointed, but not terribly surprised. Considering how fishy they smelled when cooking it’s not a total shock that they tasted fishy. Bran prefers salmon burgers.

When I got home I found the second book of Questionable Content. I’m looking forward to reading it as I’m nearly done the first book. I ordered the one Dominic Deegan I don’t have, Battle for Barthis yesterday so it’s on the way here now. For some reason I’m having problems reading the books we have that are after Storm of the Souls. It must be because I’ve been doing that with all the comics I’ve ordered…had the complete sets of publications and read them in order. It’ll be here in a few more days…probably sometime next week while I’m in Calgary for the AGM.

While Bran and I were at Costco we got something else, something that means a great deal to me. We got the complete collection, 18 DVDs in all, of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. Yes, I now have a complete set of the cartoon that helped me survive my pregnancy with Boy. When I came home from my job, an extremely stressful job as a constituency assistant, my brain would be total mush when I got home. Bran would sit me in front of the tv, turn on Rocky and Bullwinkle and I would stare at the television and try to figure out the machinations of Boris and Natasha, attempt to understand the witty repartee of the fractured fairy tales and comprehend the acuity of Dudley Doright and Nell. Yeah, I was pretty fucked up from that job. Bran would bring me something he hoped I’d find appetizing and wouldn’t vomit up after eating. The guys at work find it enormously amusing that I watch Scooby Doo. Wait until they get a load of this new collection.

I’m going to be cooking up some shrimp shortly. I have no idea what to make with it though. There are lots of choices but I’m feeling really, really, really lazy.

Work was work. Nothing special or noteworthy about the day at all.

I’ve already read blogs.

That covers today quite nicely.

That’s why Tuesday is a good day. I was tired throughout my day but I did get the weekly reports complete this morning and caught up on reading the resident profile binders. I swear, there are some residents that I’m going to nail their feet to the floor so that they’ll stop coming and going with such high frequency.

Tomorrow is Wednesday. I don’t think there’s anything special happening tomorrow. However, on Thursday and Friday there is going to be another staff working to learn what the weekday routine is like. This will free me up to do monthly reports and such so that they’re out of the way. The drawback to that is that I can’t slack off much because I’m supposed to be working.

That’s about all I can think of. I”m going to take my comics (see yesterday’s links) to bed and read. There is laundry to fold but I’d rather be sleeping. So that’s what I plan on doing in about an hour.

So sayeth Boy on our way to Costco to pick up watermelons. As we were waiting to turn off the highway onto Marquis Drive there were two semi trailers loaded with military vehicles. The second one was hauling two armoured personnel carriers, the first was carrying something else, but we never did quite figure out what it was. It wasn’t an APC, it was a tank (no cannon, no tracks). We didn’t get close enough to get a good look at it. One unmistakable thing was that it was military issue.

Today was rather low key with me doing only a couple of building checks, no fills and most of the weekly reports. I should have them totally done by mid morning tomorrow. I’ll be taking some reading with me. I started rereading Dominic Deegan last night. I got through the first book and have 5 or 6 more to read to be caught up. Today I got book one of Questionable Content so I’ll be reading that as soon as I get through Dominic Deegan. I do so love my comics. I love the puns that Mookie uses with his characters (all of them) and I want a Death From Above t-shirt some day. The one that says “Don’t kick the Leviathan” is also pretty neat. But the Death From Above is so much a cat.

No one was prepared to make supper and neither Boy nor Bran did any dishes so we went out to supper. I cheated on the diet again. I’ll behave myself tomorrow. I was pouty and would have whined had I thought of it.

That’s about it. I”m tired and will be leaving the reading of blogs to tomorrow after I’m done folding all of today’s laundry.

Yeah, I lead a fascinating life, right?