edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-07-15 08:30 pm
Entry tags:

wherein Liz travels through the Canadian great plains

I decided to leave on Monday instead of Sunday, so yesterday I drove from St. Paul to Winnipeg, where I visited a botanical garden and had dinner (a delicious gourmet cheeseburger accompanied by an interesting local hard cider) in their attached café/bar.

Today I drove from Winnipeg to Regina, where I visited a natural history museum. Unfortunately both restaurants located within a block of my hotel are temporarily closed (probably due to roadwork) and I didn't feel like driving anywhere, so for dinner I ate half of a dubious pre-made turkey sandwich (thrown out: 1 slice of bread, raw onion, raw cucumber; eaten: 1 slice of bread, turkey, "swiss" cheese, lettuce, tomato) and one dubious pre-made pork "empanada" (I strongly suspect this began life as a Cornish pasty recipe, somewhat inelegantly repurposed), both purchased from the dinky café attached to the hotel lobby. Two dubious empanadas remain, lurking in the hotel room mini-fridge.

So far driving in Canada has been an interesting experience. I am glad that Google Maps has switched to tracking my speed in kph, because trying to read the kph part of my car's spedometer is, shall we say, challenging. Also, did you know that in Canada you have to pre-authorize the dollar limit of your gas payments? Wild. And there are no rest areas on the Trans-Canada highway in Manitoba or Saskatchewan (can't speak for any other provinces), so you have to look sharp for gas stations or fast food restaurants at each tiny gathering of stuff beside the road if you want a chance to stop -- and settlements are few and far between on the prairie.

Anyway tomorrow I should reach the gathering place in Alberta, and I am told that toward the end of the drive the landscape becomes excitingly vertical instead of flat. :D
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-07-10 03:51 pm
Entry tags:

it is good that I never wanted to be a travel agent, because I would SUCK at it

Trip planning is HARD, you know?

I will be leaving on either Sunday or Monday on an approximately 2-week trip. The main point is a gathering of fandom friends in western Alberta, but I have planned my approach so as to have time to do One Thing in Winnipeg (Manitoba) the afternoon of my first travel day, and One Thing in Regina (Saskatchewan) the afternoon of my second travel day. Then the gathering, and on Sunday the 20th I will head to Drumheller to visit the Royal Tyrell Museum.

I THINK I have my itinerary roughed out for the following week.

-Monday 7/21, drive south across the Canada/US border to Glacier National Park, hike an easy trail

-Tuesday 7/22, drive west to Yakima, WA; no stops planned

-Wednesday 7/23, drive to Olympic National Park, hike an easy trail, look for banana slugs, etcetera, then overnight in Forks or Oil City

-Thursday 7/24, drive south on US-101 and stop at some point to get out and dabble my feet in the Pacific Ocean, before heading inland and stopping short of Portland, OR, probably in Beaverton; might also visit Tillamook Creamery if time permits

-Friday 7/25, drive to Boise, ID, possibly stopping at a winery or two along the Columbia River valley (more research needed)

-Saturday 7/26, drive from Boise, ID to Bozeman, MD, skirting the western edge of Yellowstone en route; might stop for photos but more likely will just drive on through

-Sunday 7/27, drive from Bozeman, MD to probably Dickinson, ND, with a stop en route to sightsee in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and hopefully see some bison and/or prairie dogs

-Monday 7/28, head home to the Twin Cities; no stops planned

This feels generally doable to me. None of the driving days are excessively long, none of the activities are excessively strenuous, and I will return home before August. Now I have to research national park admission policies and also start making motel reservations. Argh.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-07-02 12:26 pm

wherein Liz has moved!

Hey, quick update: I am IN MINNESOTA!

More specifically, I am in my parents' basement, because apparently this is my current millennial life milestone to hit. *wry*

Anyway, the U-boxes were delivered on Monday, we sorted and packed Tuesday and Wednesday, and then decided to order a third U-box because my dad was uneasy about the weight limits. So on Thursday the delivery guy (who is also apparently the local warehouse manager) picked up one box that we had completed and dropped off an empty replacement. We finished packing both boxes that afternoon and moved on to packing the cars and cleaning. Friday morning the delivery guy picked up the two remaining U-boxes, we finished cleaning, and I turned in my keys to Landlord Dude in return for my security deposit refund.

(I stayed in my parents' hotel room Wednesday and Thursday nights, since we packed my bed on Wednesday.)

Then we drove from Ithaca to the Twin Cities in two days (Friday and Saturday), which was kind of a lot and included two stints on local city streets in downtown Chicago because of a nasty traffic jam on I-90. My mom kept going through stoplights just as they turned yellow so I had to follow on red; it was extremely stressful. But we made it!

I have spent the past few days changing addresses with assorted companies and getting my license, car title, and car registration switched from NY to MN. Today I may or may not see about getting a local library card and visiting a Verizon store to see if they can clear some unwanted apps off my phone (I would do this myself but they came pre-installed and don't seem to have a delete option) and also ask about international calls to/from Canada. Also I will try switching my car insurance and AAA membership to MN -- I couldn't do either of those before I got my car paperwork dealt with.

We have been eating down some food brought from my fridge and freezer, since my parents' freezer was very full already. I have seen Vicky briefly when she picked up Alfie (her dog) Sunday evening -- my parents were watching him while Vicky and some friends were staffing a booth/table at a local Pride festival. Also my dad had a colonoscopy yesterday, my mom had a cardioversion this morning (for her afibrillation), and my aunt should currently be getting knee replacements. It has been a medically exciting week!

I believe I still have one refill left for both of my prescriptions, and my Ithaca pharmacy said that although they can't mail medications, I can have a Minnesota pharmacy contact them and they can transfer the authorization. So that is a relief, though I should still find a local primary care doctor sooner rather than later.

Oh! And signups for the 2025 Narnia Fic Exchange are open until July 11, so if you have any interest, please check that out over at [community profile] narniaexchange!
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-06-22 10:57 pm

why is moving so much work???

I have successfully emptied my filing cabinet into two boxes!

Admittedly the first box was not sorted or weeded at all, but that's because that drawer contained all my folders of Things What I Have Written and I knew if I so much as cracked one open I'd lose the entire day. So nope, directly into the box, do not pass go, do not collect $200, I'll sort it in Minnesota.

The other two drawers got sorted with extreme prejudice and I chucked a good 2/3 of the papers. A small victory by size of box, but a very large victory by amount of psychic weight I have consequently shed. :)

I'm trying to do a little sorting of the GIANT ACCORDION FOLDERS my mom kept for every goddamn year of my life up through... I think the end of elementary school? Anyway, I did weed all the preschool materials some years back so those are just in nice normal file folders, but the best I managed with the TWO massive kindergarten accordion folders was condensing them down to ONE massive accordion folder. Which is not nothing! But I do need to weed more strenuously when I have more time to be selective and also to ditch some items after taking well-lit photos.

...I think I will tackle 1st grade after I eat some dessert, and then I might call it a night.

(I have been trying to finish all paper-sorting tasks today since recycling gets picked up at about 4am on Mondays and I would like to get as much nonsense out of my apartment as possible.)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-06-15 10:05 pm

drive-by update!

1. I had a uterine fibroid embolization on June 4. This is a minor surgery that basically murders a fibroid by cutting off its blood supply. I had to stay in the hospital overnight for observation, since blood clots can be Bad News and this procedure essentially creates an artificial clot -- they needed to make sure it didn't hare off and cause problems.

My sleep was very disrupted for about a week thereafter, and I had some minor side effects as well as discomfort, but I am now pretty much back to normal. It will take a month or two to see if the slow withering of the fibroid fixes some problems I was having.

2. Friday the 20th will be my last day at the rental company. I am trying to get a certain set of tasks complete before I leave, but Lawyer Man keeps yanking me aside to work on stuff related to our imminent website revamp, which is frustrating. I am 90% sure I will not be able to finish everything I want to wrap up, but such is life.

3. I have two U-Haul U-Boxes set to be delivered to my driveway on Monday the 23rd. My parents will arrive later that day, and the goal is to have the boxes packed and collected by midday on the 26th, and for us to hit the road no later than mid-afternoon on the 27th.

Then I get to crash in their guest room and go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa for a bit.

4. In July Mom and I will return to Ithaca for my surgery follow-up appointment, and probably also to close my Ithaca bank accounts. Later in July I am road-tripping through western Canada en route to a fandom friends' gathering, and then road-tripping home by way of Washington and assorted bits of the northwestern US, because why not.

Then I will do a bit more AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, and in August I start looking seriously for a new job. New housing will follow, since it's easier to rent an apartment convenient to a job location than to find a job convenient to an apartment location.

5. I have been sorting through boxes and bins of stuff that I have not touched for literal decades, and holy shit I have been clogging my apartment and my life up with so much nonsense. It will be good to start over on a cleaner footing.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-04-26 12:36 pm

wherein Liz is ill

I started feeling a bit off on Thursday afternoon, collapsed into an unpleasantly feverish two-hour nap immediately upon arriving home, and then continued to sleep badly after dragging myself up to eat a minimalist dinner. So I took a Covid test Friday morning and yeah. :(

I was very short on supplies since I'd intended to buy groceries Friday evening, but I was able to get some basics via Instacart (which is now incessantly advertising at me, blargh), and I have been sort of sludging along between naps and large glasses of Ocean Spray cranberry-pomegranate juice, which I honestly cannot recommend highly enough. Delicious stuff.

So far it's been about the same as my first go-round with Covid, which is to say it's like a bad cold and/or a mild flu: upper respiratory gunk, sore throat and cough, utterly drained, everything aches. Fortunately the fever seems to have been a one-off incident during the onset -- thank you vaccines for mitigating that!

I had tickets for the Cayuga Wine Trail's annual Wine & Herb Fest this weekend, but obviously that is OFF the agenda. Instead my goal is to not miss more than one additional day of work, since while this seems to be conforming to the way upper respiratory gunk usually hits me and I expect I'll feel a bit better tomorrow, I will probably still be exhausted and sore all over on Monday, plus of course there's the contagion concern.

I suspect I was infected during my end-of-tax-season Sunday brunch treat for myself, since nobody else in my office is ill and that was the time I was around a bunch of people unmasked in close quarters for a good length of time. Ah well. I rolled the dice and luck was not with me. *sigh*
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-04-23 07:25 pm

cross-stitch experiments

I decided to try swapping out some colors in a cross-stitch pattern I designed this past winter, and after filling in enough to get a good visual sense of how they would fit in the overall design... nah, I was right the first time.

So now I have to snip some knots and unpick a bunch of stitches, but hey. I have learned something from the experience.

The unpicking is going to be so tedious, though. *sigh*
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-04-18 11:34 pm

tiny update

Survived tax day. Was utterly useless at the rental office the following day, but I did manage to do some actual work on Thursday and Friday.

Packed a couple more boxes of books. Probably ought to assembled some more empty boxes and start sorting through clothes and kitchen paraphernalia.

Hmm. I should probably also weed my filing cabinet. I am 100% sure I don't need to bring all those papers with me to Minnesota.

But tomorrow is mostly for unwinding. I will resume productivity Sunday afternoon, after treating myself to brunch.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-04-11 03:41 pm

bits and pieces of the moving process

On Tuesday, Landlord Dude asked if he could drop by my apartment on Wednesday or Friday to take some photos for use in advertising the unit. I said Wednesday was no good, but Friday was fine.

So I did NOT put off my laundry another week and instead washed everything on Wednesday, as well as tidied a bit. Thursday I did more tidying, put away all the clean laundry, and also baked snickerdoodles for a memorial service because I promised to do that a couple weeks ago and didn't remember until Thursday morning. (This is how me promising cookies for memorial services always goes.)

Then this morning I ran a dustmop across a bunch of surfaces and tidied a couple more things.

Hopefully he will get decent photos!

He also mentioned that he will have to start showing the apartment, which is fair. I do want to get some of the stuff I have been boxing up (or collecting for donation) OUT prior to any strangers tromping around, but that's not really under my control, so whatever.

Three more days at Not the IRS (Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday) and I will be DONE!!! for the year. I don't know if I want to do taxes next year in Minnesota -- on the one hand, I do enjoy the work, but on the other hand, it is a logistical pain in the neck and runs me ragged for 3.5 months of the year. Ah well. We'll see how job searching goes in general before I make a decision on that front.

(Apparently my dad has said that he expects me to live in their basement for 2 to 12 months, which seems like a reasonable range. We all hope it's closer to 2 months, but he suggested that it would be fine for me to lurk in their basement and finish a BA in accounting while doing taxes on the side rather than dive straight into the job market. TBH I would prefer to have a steady job and do school on the side a couple years from now when I am eligible for cheap in-state tuition rates, but. Y'know. Who can say what will make the most sense in six months? *waves hands at the general state of the world*)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-03-31 04:40 pm

wherein Liz is tired

As the end of tax season draws near (REMINDER TO US CITIZENS & RESIDENTS: file your taxes) I start to feel like cloth worn a bit thin. It's not that I am failing to get enough sleep, or to carve out some time for activities I enjoy, but I basically spend three months working 7 days a week, and even if some of those work days are pretty short (4 or 5 hours), that is still a long time with no true break.

Ah well. Two more weeks and I'll be down to just the normal 40-hour 5-day business week grind.

Then I can swing back into planning and preparing for my move to Minnesota. *sigh*

I have decided to take the entire month of July as a vacation, during which I will road trip to Canada to meet some Narnia friends, possibly also road trip around the Pacific Northwest, and spend a week or so loafing at the family cabin. Absolutely NO work thoughts or housing search thoughts until August.

...I do want to do a bit of preemptive job hunting during April and May, though. If I can get something lined up in advance, that would relieve my mother's anxiety in a BIG way -- and the less stressed she is, the less she will inadvertently stress me. (That is particularly important since I plan to crash in my parents' basement (yes, ha ha, I know) until I have a job and an apartment lined up, and I know from long experience that I react badly when Mom frets in my direction for too long. I prefer to avoid snapping at her, so anything that reduces her reasons to worry is a plus.)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-03-09 11:32 pm

fidget toys for grownups (more or less); also some moving progress

I went to a chamber music concert this afternoon and remembered to bring my cross-stitch. I adore chamber music, but it is often difficult for me to focus through a concert without drifting. It occurred to me last year that concerts would probably be similar to podcasts and audiobooks, in that having some kind of physical task (fiber craft, cooking, household chores, driving, etcetera) might eat my distraction and let me pay attention to the music.

This is indeed the case! But it requires me to A) have a project that I don't need to be paying VERY close attention to (that is, not a lot of counting stitches) and B) remember to bring the project to the concert.

Anyway the concert was lovely and I made some good progress on my current cross-stitch project. :)

-----

In unrelated news, I have notified Landlord Dude that I am moving out in mid to late June. The next step is to work out how to hire a storage pod and where to put it. It is not entirely clear if my driveway would work (unpaved, narrow), and if not, whether I could get permission to either drop a pod in the street for a few days or use a couple spaces in the parking lot kitty-corner of my house. So that's a bunch of research and also a small adventure with a measuring tape waiting for me.

I will also continue sorting and discarding 15 years of accumulated stuff, as one does.

And then I think I will notify the rental company of my plans around March 28, which will leave them two full months (plus some fraction of June) to hire and start training a replacement.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-01-29 10:05 pm

wherein Liz has a nightmare

Got my last tax document yesterday so today I filed my taxes. \o/

I also had an actual client despite the vicious snow squall that blew through the area from 5 to 6pm, so that was nice.

-----

And now for something completely unrelated to work!

I spent pretty much the entirety of last night sweaty and overheated, to the point where I took off my pajama pants and kept shoving my comforter half off my body. No idea what was going on there, but I suspect it was the cause of the deeply unpleasant nightmare I had.

The dream was loosely based on Stephen King's Pet Sematary and ~helpfully~ featured my own nuclear family in the starring roles. (Context: Pet Sematary is one of the few books that I deliberately set aside rather than finish, not because it was in any way bad -- it's very well written -- but because I could tell EXACTLY where the foreshadowing was leading and I decided I did not want to go there. I stand by this choice.)

I am a semi-lucid dreamer, which meant I was aware that I was dreaming, but I am not a fully lucid dreamer and was therefore unable to successfully derail the dream or force myself awake. Any minor alterations I managed just fed back into the narrative, which of course made the whole thing worse.

When I did finally wake up, I experienced what I am pretty sure was a type of night terror/sleep paralysis. I will swear to any god you like that I saw the translucent, ghostly form of Catherine Tate (yes really. no, I have no idea why) hovering over me and rippling like smoke in the air, and I knew that she had caused the dream, and if she touched me I would get sucked right back into it. And I couldn't move. Couldn't even blink.

In the back of my head part of me was calmly cataloging this, all "This is a night terror, you are hallucinating, ghosts aren't real, there is a perfectly rational scientific explanation for this experience," but that did sweet fuck-all to convince the irrational gibbering occupying the majority of my brain for that handful of seconds.

Anyway I did eventually manage to blink, and then blink again and sit up and wake my phone to create a bit of light. And then I spent about 45 minutes reading about ancient Mesopotamia in hopes that I could create enough of a mental/emotional gap that my brain wouldn't attempt to recreate the same dream when I went back to sleep.

This mostly worked -- a bloodthirsty reanimated cat did appear in my next round of dreams, but my family was not involved and the emotional weight was gone.

I devoutly hope the experience will not repeat itself tonight.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-01-14 11:28 pm

assorted daily stuff

I had a dentist appointment this morning to fix an old filling that had gone bad. We were also initially scheduled to do a second filling at the same time, but the dentist decided that since one of the affected teeth was in the upper right quadrant and the other was in the lower left quadrant, doing both fillings would potentially leave me with no good chewing surfaces if either tooth was sensitive after the Novocain wore off.

So now I have a THIRD appointment scheduled for January 28. *sigh*

On the bright side, the filling replacement seems to have gone well and I am not, in fact, having any pain. I also got the dentist to shave down the little scraggly bit on the filling she replaced a couple weeks ago, so it is no longer snagging food, my floss, or my tongue. \o/

Other things done today:

1. Completed a renewal lease and made good progress on creating a key plan for the 1st floor of one of our largest buildings.

2. Uploaded a batch of my 2023 Three Sentence Ficathon fills to AO3.

3. Refilled my blood pressure meds.

4. Bought groceries (and upon getting home immediately realized several items I forgot, so I made a new list)

5. Prepped for laundry tomorrow.

6. Wrote one (1) Three Sentence Ficathon fill.

And now I shall go to bed. :)
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-01-11 11:43 pm

tax season opens

Had my first shift at Not the IRS today. It was a little weird, as first shifts always are -- occasional computer glitches, figuring out what new nonsense has happened to the physical office, etcetera.

On the computer front, I could not log into the full version of our calendar/appointment program in Chrome, so I had to do that in MS Edge which is always annoying. Also apparently our NY state forms are not yet ready for efile, so I had to put my single client's state return on hold until that's ready in a week or two. *sigh*

On the physical office front, there was a leak in the roof sometime during the offseason and a portion of the drop ceiling tiles rotted and fell in. Fortunately this was over the desk we don't use because we never had proper equipment for it anyway! Unfortunately it looks incredibly cheap and unprofessional. Also the toilet in one of the two bathrooms is broken and we completely ran out of paper towels. *deeper sigh*

On a related note, the toilet paper holders in the currently functional bathroom are one of those annoying designs that doesn't have an internal rod -- it's like a paper towel holder where there are two arms that swing shut and each have a little disk that is supposed to slip inside the roll of paper. Except they were designed for a wider roll than the cheap-ass ones corporate currently authorizes us to buy, so the paper is always falling out.

I have ordered a 2-pack of cheap plastic spring rods from Amazon and will install them on Tuesday, because I am completely fed up with that and corporate will never in a million years spring for actual new fixtures. $6 is a low price to eliminate a persistent minor annoyance, tbh.

I have another 4-hour shift on Sunday, but last I checked I have no client scheduled. I may bring a cross-stitch project or a book with me, or I may write some Three Sentence Ficathon fills, depending on my mood. We shall see.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-01-06 08:27 pm

winter, blecch

I got to the Collegetown office this morning and discovered there was no heat. We reported this to Maintenance, who sent a guy to fix the boiler... but we still had no heat. So they sent a second guy to come stand on a ladder and stick his head into the ceiling next to the fan, whereupon he discovered that the motor had died. Completely gone. Unrepairable. Needs to be replaced.

When will that happen? *shrug*

So we got two space heaters, which raised the temperature by perhaps 4 degrees Fahrenheit, but it was still miserable and my toes were slowly going numb even though my lovely oversized winter coat was keeping the rest of me warm.

Mom Boss and Aunt Boss left at 4pm and I closed up the office at 5pm, an hour early, because Collegetown is dead as a doornail during winter break and I prefer not to freeze.

Anyway, after 30 minutes at home to eat dinner and toast my feet on the radiator under my desk, I felt much more human and ventured forth into the dark and the cold to belatedly take care of my laundry. Everything has been washed, the air-dry items are home and hung up, and as soon as I hit 'post' I will head back to fold and retrieve the machine-dry items.

I think that is quite enough for one day.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-01-04 11:04 pm

what even are brains? we just don't know

I have a mental stumbling block that hits me a lot on weekends, which is that I sort of halfway get up for half an hour (to eat some crackers and take my meds) and then go back to bed, and by the time I get up "for real" it's nearly noon or perhaps already past noon. And then I kind of don't want to get dressed for just the afternoon, but my brain has Opinions about doing tasks or eating meals before I have dressed, and also about dressing without showering, and it just kind of spirals and I lose the day.

But! Today I gave myself permission to just not shower or get dressed and do stuff in my pajamas. Which meant I got some assorted chores done and by the time 3:30 rolled around I decided I might as well take a shower and at least change my underpants. And then I did more tasks.

All in all a surprisingly productive day, and I short-circuited the weird guilt spiral over sleeping in and being useless.

Brains, man. So annoying, yet occasionally so easy to do an end-run around.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2025-01-03 12:26 pm

welcome to January

Some stuff:

1. Flew out to Minnesota for Christmas and some ancillary visiting -- I left Monday afternoon (12/23) and returned home on Saturday (12/28). The flights out went smoothly, but both legs of my trip home were significantly delayed, which was annoying. Anyway, it was good to see Mom, Dad, Vicky, and Aunt C again.

2. Mom seems to have finally internalized that I am serious about moving to Minnesota this June and is now lightly panicking about logistics and my impending job search, which is... well. I am glad she cares! I am glad she wants to help! But it's also very tiring.

3. I thought I had finished all my Not the IRS paid training by the end of the year, but apparently they lied to me when they said all the training would be in X section of the company intranet. Actually half the training was still on Y section of the intranet (where all of it used to be) so I had to go take care of that portion yesterday. But now, finally, I seem to have ticked off all my mandatory boxes.

4. We rented an apartment to a guy with a start date of January 2 and I wanted to stage/photo/video it before he moved in. However, despite the apartment having sat vacant since FREAKING JUNE, our Maintenance department didn't finish turnover until Thursday morning and then the tenant showed up three hours early, so there went my plans. *sigh* However, I did manage to stage/photo/video a different apartment this morning, which is good because in theory we have someone ready to sign, pay, and move in this afternoon.

5. I am attempting a habit pledge for Get Your Words Out this year, after not writing much at all for a few years. I would like to get back into writing and I think a habit pledge is more useful for that than a word count pledge. :)

And now I think I will go grab some lunch before returning to work.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-12-05 09:20 pm

this bleepity bleeping cold (or flu! they hit me the same so who even knows)

I have basically spent Sunday through today sleeping with intervals of reading, and I am so tired of being ill. Since I stopped working retail, I get sick much less often, but upper respiratory ailments still tend to hit me like a tractor-trailer. I am distinctly unfond of the experience.

However today I am definitely on the mend -- I had significantly more physical energy and mental focus, to the point where I pulled myself together enough to order Chinese takeout and actually go pick it up -- so I think I will manage to get ONE day at the office tomorrow.

I might then do a make-up day on Saturday to catch up on photo and video editing (I think tomorrow will mostly be emails and advertising updates), but if not, oh well.

I am also considering signing up for Get Your Words Out in 2025. I think that I will go for a habit pledge rather than a wordcount pledge, because what I need to do is build writing into my daily routine. We shall see.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-12-02 03:41 pm

ah the joys of travel

Thanksgiving was lovely, but unfortunately I caught a nasty case of traveler's crud (not Covid!) and spent Sunday sleeping, drinking excessive amounts of tea-with-honey, and doing things that required no thought or energy (aside from driving to the grocery store to purchase more fruit juice, tissues, and NyQuill).

I also let Mom Boss and Aunt Boss know I would not be at work today, and have thus far spent Monday doing approximately the same as Sunday, though at least today I managed to dress in actual day clothes instead of just putting my pajamas back on.

I don't really feel up to a walk longer than about two blocks, but I may take a small drive shortly just to get out of the house.

I am currently undecided about whether to go to the office tomorrow. I think I will let Mr. Geniality know I may be out, and then decide in the morning based on how well I sleep tonight.

Bodies. Ugh.

...

Probably gonna take a nap soon. I am exhausted.
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
2024-11-25 10:30 pm
Entry tags:

Thanksgiving logistics

Tonight I have been prepping for my flying (...pun retroactively intended) Thanksgiving visit to Minnesota.

Context: we used to do Thanksgiving at my parents' house in New Jersey. This worked because A) tradition and B) it was halfway between Ithaca and DC. Then Vicky moved to Minnesota, but we still had east coast Thanksgiving because my parents still had the best house. (Also we randomly did Thanksgiving in my apartment twice over the past 15 years, but that was a logistical pain in the neck so it never caught on.) Then our parents finally retired back home to Minnesota, but! Instead of Minnesota Thanksgiving we did a few years of Chicago Thanksgiving because that's where my Aunt C lives and it's drivable from Ithaca in a pinch. (IIRC we had also done Chicago Thanksgiving once previously while Grandma D was still alive but was no longer able to fly -- Aunt C picked her up from Iowa and drove back to Chicago, while Mom and Dad picked me up from Ithaca and we drove west. I don't recall how Vicky got there.)

Anyway, this summer Aunt C retired back home to Minnesota, so now family holidays are in Minnesota and I am traveling by plane because I am not driving 20+ hours for a two-day visit.

The point of this story is that this afternoon it occurred to me that, given the short duration of the visit, I might not need to pack a suitcase -- instead, I could get by with a backpack and a tote bag. This would be preferable since then I would NOT need to planeside check any items and therefore wouldn't need to wait for any such items to be returned on the jet bridge after landing. That is important because I have a RIDICULOUSLY tight connection on my way west Wednesday afternoon/evening, and anything that saves time could be vital.

So far this plan seems to be working out in practice as well as in theory, but we'll see how the final few items fit.

Also the weather in Minnesota is proper wintry so I will be wearing my new winter coat to the airport and stuffing my all-purpose black hoodie into my backpack. Oh! Which reminds me that I must remember to bring my scarf and some gloves. Yes. I will go add them to my packing list.