Pointless something whatever of the day:

Yeah, I'm that tired.

If you'd called me at 2 am (which would have been a neat trick since my phone wasn't on) you would have found me reading Wuthering Heights. And again at 3 am.

I don't even like Wuthering Heights. I was trying to bore myself to sleep.

By 4 am I just gave up and watched my Craig Ferguson recording. Sort of. I stared vaguely into space and the recording played.

To top it all off, we had a notice to be out of the parking lot by 8 am today for maintenance, whatever that means. Probably just leaf sweeping since I don't think that there are any lines that need painting. Either way, it means the inconvenience of fighting three buildings' worth of cars from the apartment complex trying to find space to park on the street, or leaving an hour earlier than I normally do.

So I left the apartment at 7:45...



Sigh. You have basically two choices when you have to leave an hour early if you're me. You can either wander around one of the early-opening grocery stores pretending that you have an hour's worth of shopping to do, or you can go to a fast food place and pretend that you have an hour's worth of sitting to do while you dawdle over some variety of egg sandwich. I didn't manage that part so well today, to be honest. Between the homeless people and the retirees, the place was packed. I only lasted about twenty minutes before I just had to get out of the noise.

And sit in my car.



Yes, seriously. It was a fantastic morning.

Ah well, enough whining for today. And hopefully some sleep tonight. At the moment I'm just considering it an absolute triumph that I managed to NOT get my fruit salad mixed up with my hummus at lunch. And that I remembered to put on pants before I left the apartment.

Pants. Always a good thing.





I think that I'll stop typing now, if that's ok with everyone.

So that sucks

First, I will try to get a few newer photos this afternoon. It's kind of breezy out there at the moment, though, so I hope everyone likes fuzzy.

And now I suppose I should explain the post title, right? Well, I'll try not to be too moany but it hasn't been the best few days. Nothing major, don't worry about that. I'm just in moany  mood.

First off, do you know when it's not a good time to have a plumbing issue in an apartment whose management company is notorious for putting off repairs (as in, I once spent three months -- MONTHS -- with a broken light switch in my bathroom)? How about the day before a four-day weekend? Yep. Wednesday night I noticed distinct dripping from the valve handle of my toilet. Turns out it was dripping alllll the way down the intake line. Fan-effing-tastic. Immediate change in my weekend plans, because I was figuring on having to spend my time bailing my bathroom until Tuesday. Still, ever hopeful, I made the call to the caretaker first thing Thursday. Got the answering machine, of course. Waited all day for a phone call back. Nothing. Got home from work expecting my bucket to be full... and died of shock.

Ok, so not quite died. But still. To see a dry bucket and a new line and valve connected up? I wondered if I was still living in the same place.

Weekend saved, right?

Not quite. I realised I had work to do on Saturday, so I gave Dad a call to let him know that I wouldn't be in until Saturday before supper. No problem. Turkey (we don't generally do our big meal on the actual holiday day) should be ready about six. Ok then.

Except that I felt kind of blah on Friday. And then I felt more than blah on Saturday. Did a little work at home, but never made it to the centre. It took me until after four to convince myself to drive into town, and it wasn't a pleasant experience even then. And supper? Oh yeah, that was a fantastic idea. Got through about half a plate before I just couldn't do more, and then spent the rest of the evening wondering if things would even stay down.

They did, in case anyone wondered. But again, not a pleasant experience.

Today? I'm pretty tired because I didn't sleep worth crap, but what food I've tried has sat better. Twenty-four hour bug, I'm guessing, but such fantastic timing. Once I'm done with this I'll see if I can finish last night's dinner (which went into the fridge plate and all yesterday. Couldn't even be bothered to put it in a container) and then we'll see how we go from there.

And this is way more than you needed to hear about anything. At least it's words, though. I'm sure you noticed the lack of them this week. No real reason except laziness and moaniness.



Is too a word, spell check. Or at least it is for the moment. Later, all.

Oh, I have thoughts

I don't know how many of them will actually make it into the post, though, because one of my current thoughts is that I have a massively ignorant truck for a neighbour at the moment. Downstairs neighbour, even, which lets you know the extensive effort it must have taken for him (I'm assuming him, just because) to be so annoying to me and probably everyone else in every apartment anywhere near him.

Listen, I know it's the time of year when the college students are moving into the building and that it's possible that this person has never lived away from home before, but c'mon. Common sense, right? Even if you have nowhere to be and have the leisure to be playing with the audio after midnight doesn't mean that we're all in the same boat. Night before last I wasn't sleeping (yeah, where have you heard that before?) when around 12:30 the distinctive thumping of house music started. House music? In your one-room apartment after midnight? Really? Last night I was especially tired and was sure I'd finally get some proper sleep, when what I can only figure was one of those very cinematic video games started playing. And went on and on and on and was still going strong when I finally got to sleep sometime around 2 am.

Idiot. Headphones, ok? And you've probably guessed that this person isn't actually a truck. Just play rhymes with and it'll make much more sense.

----------

In other annoying news, I decided to wear my hair loose in the back today rather than ponytail it for the first time in months, and boy is this never happening again until I get a haircut. I have about a two year growth on this ratty head of mine just now, and to feel it all over my shoulders and getting caught up between my back and the chair is really frustrating.

My two fans have heard this before many times, but I'm not all that fond of my hair. It's very fine and very straight (those ads for shampoos that will flatten your curls bemuse me a whole lot), and on top of that it grows very fast. So, fine hair that's just going to grow out of a style anyway doesn't get styled much. I usually at least pin it in front (like it is right now), but lately I've just been tying the whole mess back and ignoring it. Except today, and I wish I hadn't suddenly decided this morning that the clips would be fine on their own.

Stupid hair.

Stupid lack of sleep.

Stupid trucks.




I think that I should probably stop typing now, before everything else becomes stupid.

Really quick post to let the blog know that it still exists

Sorry all -- it turned into a bit of a week, and since I don't actually want to write a long, whingey post I'll just ask if I've really had 342 colds already this year or if it just seems that way...

Anyway, back tomorrow hopefully.

I shouldn't make any promises, though.

Pointless photo of the day, even quicker version:

Yep. I'm tired, grumpy, not feeling especially well, and still have another planetarium program yet to do this afternoon.

Maybe we'll talk about pennies tomorrow.

Or not. We'll see.

Oh nooo...

I may have lost my knife.

You don't understand. This is tragic. I always have my knife with me. I use it for things. I've had it forever (or at least since I was... in university? High school? I think I was a teenager still when my parents gave it to me), and Victorinox doesn't make that model anymore.

That knife has been used in the field, around work, to... um... open wine bottles at a conference when no one thought to bring a corkscrew...

I'm very knife dependent.I know that it probably sounds weird for someone like me to carry around a knife, but it's a tool. It gets used daily. It goes in my pocket every morning. It's not in my pocket now.

What'll I do?



Well, I suppose I'll be looking very carefully around the parking lot, my car, and my apartment parking space to see if it got dropped sometime this morning. Then I'll check my key bin to see if maybe I just forgot to put it in my pocket (HIGHLY unlikely). And if all else fails?

I guess I buy another knife.



It just won't be the same, though.

All of this knife trauma (bet that's the first time you've heard that phrase without any actual injuries being involved) has kind of killed the original intent of this post, so I think I'll just end by explaining the pointless photos. On the top, a couple of the dead plants on my balcony. There are lots of dead plants on my balcony, since I purposely do minimal cleanup in the fall. And why? The photo on the left -- taken through a screen door and a window, in case you were wondering about the muted colours -- explains why. Wildlife loves dead plants in the winter. I constantly get chickadees and nuthatches checking for leftover seeds. They go to my feeder too, of course, but they always check out the plants first. Natural foods are always preferred, because birds aren't as silly as humans.

There was a pair of Downy Woodpeckers on the balcony when I took this photo, but the female wasn't terribly cooperative so you're only getting a look at the male. You can tell by the red patch on the back of his head, if you wondered.

Nature in the city. Always a good thing.



Too bad it can't bring back my knife.

It's too early

I have no recent photos.

There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main reason is that when I look out the window right now I see white (well, ok, and some puffed-up birds in the bushes looking kind of peeved). White depresses me.

It's too early.

It's too early for me to be scanning the road reports (Um, Dad? Probably not coming down the highway this weekend). It's too early for me to be adding in scrape-the-windows time to my work commute (which, granted, is only about six minutes in good conditions. But still). And most importantly,

IT'S TOO EARLY FOR THE WEEKEND LOW TEMPERATURES TO BE BELOW -20C.

 Yes, I said -20C.

First full week of November.

That, my friends, just sucks.

Oh, and for any of my two fans of the American persuasion: Celsius - Fahrenheit conversions. Sorry, but I'm just too lazy to do it for you today.

Which brings me to: it's also too early for me to be thinking about hibernation. I can't go outside in those kinds of temperatures at the best of times (that is, when my stupid allergic to cold body has had weeks, if not months, to acclimatise), and this certainly isn't the best of times as far as all of that is concerned. Frankly, it'll be tough enough for me to get in to work at -12C tomorrow.

Keep that in mind if I don't seem to be here tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next day...





Sigh. Look, I know that in the scheme of things (hellooo Hurricane Sandy survivors and what you're dealing with) this is a fairly low number on the Scale of Suckage. I'm not so self-absorbed as to thing that there aren't far worse things. But all these it's too earlys add up to the possibility of a very long winter, and the prospect isn't the best thing for my mental health.

Which, by the way, had been pretty good earlier in the week. Do you suppose that pissed off the planet in some way? I'll fix you, honey. Let it snow let it snow let it snow...

Ah well. What can you do but whinge and dig out? Blogging may be pretty sparse in the next few days, but then you're getting used to that by now.

Back to work for me...

NO, I DO NOT FEEL BETTER

Just saying.

Ok, so maybe I'm a little ticked off at the moment because I took a few days off from the world to try to get this cold to move along a little faster, and it most patently hasn't worked.

That's not fair, is it? Rest, fluids... my butt. Colds just last as long as they're going to last, and I don't think that it matters a single bit what you try to do about them.

And yes, I'm sounding like a five-year-old. I don't care. I've given up on trying to coddle my cold, and I'm giving up on the non-whinge policy about it as well.

Um, anyway.

I should probably explain that along with the whole cold thing I'm also in the middle of putting together our quarterly newsletter here at work (well, of course for work. I certainly wouldn't do it as a hobby), and it always puts me a bit on edge. Hard to get submissions in; hard to motivate myself to do the editing. Every quarter, yes.

I guess what I'm saying is that you should probably be expecting this to turn into the pointless complaining blog rather than the pointless blather blog for at least a couple of days.

Hey, at least I'm warning you, right?

Personally, I think that was very kind of me.



*cough*

I promised a post, didn't I?

That might be a problem, since I'm in a bit of a topic dry spell. It seems like anything I post today would be a work whinge or an allergy whinge or a sore wrist whinge... does the world really need any more whinging?

By the way, I know that I say this every year when I post a similar pointless photo, but doesn't newly-sprouted rhubarb look a lot like green brains?

Maybe it's just me.

Erm, not that I look like green brains. Or that I'm newly-sprouted, for that matter.

Ok, how's this for a topic: I'll talk wrist but I'll try to make it as minorly whingy as possible. Will that work for anyone?

I really am dry here, folks.

I'm currently in the process of finding out that it's probably too early to be typing without a brace on, but I really didn't want the fun of hitting the ALT key repeatedly again just for a blog post that probably wasn't going anywhere anyway, so there it is. It feels... weird. And wrong. My wrist has got used to the security of being splinted up, so being without its protection is telling it to start complaining even if it's not really all that sore.

Yet.

It will be.

I should make it clear that this is a minor (emphasis on minor) sprain, so it's not all that bad compared to others I've had. I mean, at least I don't feel like my hand is going to fall off, so there's a blessing.

And for anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating about the limb-falling-off feeling? Well, that just makes it obvious that you've never had a bad sprain. Which, yay for you. Seriously. With my experience, given the choice between a bad sprain and a break, I'd take the break every time. Well, nearly every time. Obviously there's some things that I'd really very much rather not break. But bad sprains? Still not fun.

Any of my two fans who've been here long-term will know that I have a continually screwed-up ankle because of a very bad sprain back in Grade Nine (which, frankly, is long enough ago now than I care to even think about). That's how I know the feeling that your foot is somehow not connected to the rest of your body. It's very, very weird, because it's before the real swelling and the real pain sets in. It just feels utterly and entirely wrong. This is wrong, I know it's wrong, I shouldn't be walking on this wrong, but my idiot gym teacher can't be bothered to check to see if anything's really wrong wrong, I mean.

And I'm not going to go into the idiot gym teacher thing again. I'll save that rant for a time when my wrist isn't already starting to ache from being unsupported.

Incidentally, anyone who's never had to deal with a continuing injury after a sprain has also never had to deal with a life, of itchy, stinky braces. Which, again, yay for you. I hate braces, and I can currently smell that wrist brace that's beckoning from the other side of my desk all the way over here. It's delightful, I can assure you.

TMI? TDB.

Anyway, done with typing for now.

And it did end up to be a post, right?

Yay for me, this time.

Lack of post of the day:

Ok, this is why: I'm busy, I'm allergic, and (according to Captain Obvious at the walk-in clinic) somewhere along the line I've picked up a sinus infection. Here's how that went down:

Me: I think I might have a sinus infection.
Captain Obvious (pressing down on aforementioned sinuses): Does this hurt?
Me: YES.
C.O.: You have a sinus infection.

Yaaayyyyy...

Anyway, this too shall pass (and remember, kids, as the Alberta Government says: Not All Bugs Need Drugs. Or something like that), and I might find time to post properly by about... um... Wednesday?

In other words, don't expect much from this week.





Wait a minute, the more observant of you are saying now, what about the more-pointless-than-usual photo, then?

Acetaldehyde, aspirin, and ethanol. Ethanol looks kind of like a bad model of a dog, don't you think?

Um, Dee? That didn't really help much.

Oh, I'll explain it another day. Wednesday, maybe.



Outta here for now.

Another flower

Because flowers aren't snow.

And I don't have any new photos at the moment. or, rather, I do... but they're still on the camera. They're likely to stay there for a while, too, since I really shouldn't be mucking about with that sort of trivial nonsense at work, and I don't know if I'll make it into my Dad's place this weekend.

The photos aren't of snow anyway. I've had enough of snow.

We got a fair bit the other day (which is fanTAStic, especially this time of year) and it's messed things up enough that at least one of the surrounding counties cancelled their school busses today to avoid the impassable rural roads.

March is a stupid month to have snow days in, if you ask me. Of course, I don't imagine that the students are complaining.

This snow plus the inanity of my apartment's management company also means that I'll be taking a cab to work tomorrow morning, which sucks. Let me set out the picture here so that you can all be snitty with me: The management company doesn't really believe in snow removal. Ordinarily we'll go an entire winter without having our parking lots cleared, because naturally we can all just beat things down with our tires, right? So with every freeze and thaw things become more of an ice rink (seriously. I often have to wear my ice cleats just to get to my car in the morning), and when everything melts in the spring all the water runs into the divots created by the cars, and we have seasonal lakes to park in. This happens every year, and I know I've whinged about it here on the blog before so I'll just leave that part for now.

Next part: Even this management company can't manage to ignore the massive amounts of snow making life difficult in the parking lot at the moment, so they've decided to clear it. On the rare occasions that this happens we're told to find somewhere else to park all day (since they apparently can't tell their contractor exactly when to come. Contractor's fault, probably, so there's one little thing I won't blame on the management company. See? I can be fair). Or we're threatened with tag-and-tow if we don't find somewhere else to park, rather. No big deal, since I'm generally at work during the clearing time.

I don't work at night, though.

Which makes it a pain in the youknow that they've scheduled the lot clearing for overnight. I should mention that I've been living there for nearly twenty years (sigh. It hurts even just to type that) and they've NEVER done a nighttime clearing. And now, somehow, they expect everyone to find spots to park on the (uncleared, snow-filled) street all night. Like that'll happen.

I should mention here that this doesn't affect just my building. Oh no. They're doing all the lots in three-building complex at once, so three buildings' worth of people will be trying -- and failing --to find parking on the street.

Me? I'm leaving my car at work. I've been offered a ride home this afternoon (THANK YOU!), but tomorrow morning it's cab or walk, since the city busses don't run to the Nature Centre.

How stupid is that, by the way? I work at a nature centre and I don't even have the option of doing the save-the-planet thing by taking mass transit to work.



Aaanyway. The car's having a sleepover at work, the cab company gets my business tomorrow, and that bloody parking lot better be cleared by the time I drive the car home again.





AND STOP SNOWING, ALREADY.

Sheesh.

Oh, and if you thought this was complaining, just wait until you hear about the next few days. We're supposed to be well above 0C, so all that snow will be looking for a place to melt to. I anticipate a lot of discussion about windshield washer fluid and ineffectual wipers....

Pointless photo of the day:

It's snowing today.

We'll probably get 20 cm or so in all.

I don't want to put snow on the blog just now, so I'm not going to rush out and take a picture.

Thus: flowers.

Remember flowers?

I wish I was looking at flowers right now through the office window, instead of snow.





Yep. I officially have nothing. It was one of those "working at work" kind of mornings, and I didn't get a chance to think of anything to blather about. Except snow, but... flowers, right?





stupid snow

Well, here's yer snow...

Sigh. That's what fifteen-to-twenty (never did hear the final tally for this area) cm looks like. And below you'll see the tracks I left when I came out to take the photo.

Doesn't exactly put me in the best frame of mind.

Well, that, and that fact that my head still isn't working right, which is why I stayed an extra night at my father's place rather than drive back yesterday. No choice today, though, although I'm very seriously wondering how I'm going to deal with tomorrow's early morning, cold, and double planetarium when I'm not sure if either my voice or my brain will be working.

And did I mention cold? Yeah. -26C this morning, apparently. It's supposed to warm up (in fact, I'm planning to wait until it warms up at least a half-dozen degrees more before I leave. Hear me, temperature?), but tomorrow morning's supposed to be below -20C again. Hmmm. Non-working head, non-working voice, early morning, and likely hives from the cold? Sounds like tomorrow's going to be freaking AMAZING.

I may not bother to blog. You probably won't want to be bothered with my mood if I do.

Anyway, that's all I've got for today. Time to go find some lunch, and then convince myself at some point this afternoon to hit the road.

Oh, one other thing. Oscars? Boring. Clothes? Needed colour. Guys? For the most part ok (I love you and your smoking jacket, Christopher Plummer!), but a few of you still need the bow tie lesson. But at least I've already found two different websites diametrically opposed to each other in their picks for best and worst dressed, which is all I really look for after an awards ceremony to make me happy. I get sort of an unreasonable thrill when one so-called expert picks a best that is absolutely another's worst. Shows how absurd the whole thing really is, and I like that sort of absurdity.

The blowing of the nose

Today's pointless photo is not of my nose (or of the blowing thereof). You're welcome.

Sorry for the unexpected absence this week. I mean, I was expecting to not blog on the weekend, but I wasn't expecting to wake up on Saturday with a throat raw enough to be worried about strep. It's not strep, if anyone was psychic (or psycho) enough to be worrying with me. It's very obvious from the sinus headache (AND THE BLOWING OF THE NOSE) at this point that I have a cold.

Again.

Well, come to think of it this might actually be my first cold of the new year (and I made it all the way into February? That'd be shocking), but still. Why the bloody nose hell whatever do I have to catch every single cold that comes along?

Almost makes me think that I like colds. I don't, but it could almost make me believe that I'm somehow subconsciously seeking colds out.

Ah well. What can a person do but work from home for a couple of days in the hopes that this might decide to be a short cold (is there such a thing?) and then give up and come in to work to cough (and blow the nose) instead?  My head's kind of wishing that I'd thought of a third option, to be honest, but you've all had colds so I don't think I have to continue to the point where I'm starting to describe the joys of snot.

You're welcome, again.

I don't really have a topic for this post, in case you haven't quite figured that out yet.



Is it time for an anyway?





Yeah, I think so. Type at you tomorrow, if I can find my way through the mucous.

Chapter 1505: Wherein Dee whinges on a bit

Remember the part where I said I'd try for a proper post in the next couple of days? Today apparently isn't one of them. I'm in a bit of a mood. My wrist aches, my buggered-up knee is letting me know it's not happy, I have a planetarium show to do tonight (wonderful for both wrist and knee), there's a meeting in the room tomorrow morning so I won't be able to just leave everything and go when I'm done (which SUCKS, just so's you know)... none of this really leads to creative blogging.

Or even the type of blogging that usually happens here.

Sooo...

Is that an improvement on anyway? I'm of two minds about it, to be honest.

Anyway, I'll try to be somewhat more user-friendly tomorrow, I think. In the meantime, enjoy the extremely not-recent photo (it's of high bush-cranberry, for those who were honing their plant ID skills via this blog's incredibly pointless photography) and I'll see what I can manage later.

Later being much later, for any of my two fans who wondered.

I... got nothing

And that's even after trying to give the whole "topic" thing a bit of effort for a change.

Just not into it today, I guess.

It doesn't help that I feel so draggy. I know I've been whining about this for a while now (tooooooo looooong) but I'd just like Whomever's in charge to know that I get the point and I'm done with feeling yucky if that's ok. Don't get me wrong -- I'm definitely feeling better. I've just got that tail-end why isn't this over yet? thing going on that doesn't make me especially good company.

Even for myself. I'm usually pretty good at liking my own company, but I'm sick of myself at the moment. Sad, that.

It doesn't help any that I have a mystery pain (well, more of a dull ache than a pain) that's nearly on the verge of turning me all hypochondriacal even though it's 99.9% guaranteed to be nothing. It's just one damned thing after another, as my grandmother would have said.

No, really. She said that a lot. My grandmother was a bit... different, I suppose.

Anyway. This is plenty of wordage for not having anything to say, so it's time to stop typing before this becomes a post. Leaving...







now.

You know what sucks?

When you're having a massive chocolate craving and all the bookstore at work has is "candy bars"

Candy bars are called candy bars instead of chocolate bars for a reason, folks. There's hardly any actual chocolate in them. Now? I have a sugar rush, but I still want chocolate.

Yeah, that worked well.

Anyway. This is just a quick post (a quick, complainy post) to get me back in the post groove in case I don't get around to making a real post tonight. Today's photo? Same cats as yesterday, obviously, but this time I let the flash do its work.

I kind of like the one in the dark better, to be honest.

But I'm weird that way.

Should I just call it Post Title?

I'm tempted to sometimes, you know. I really am.

This is going to be a non-post, by the way. I'm really tired, my digestive system is decidedly not happy (partly a function of being so tired), and frankly? This would be nothing but a big pile o' whinge anyway so there's not much point.

See you whenever, then.

Pointless I don't feel like it of the day:

Today's Bachelor's Button has NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING. Just so you know.

I'm trying hard not to sound terribly whingy, folks, but I'm in a bit of a bad head space today. Well, no. Not a bad head space. A bad head. I told you yesterday about the two-day headache? Currently a three-day headache with a slight intermission yesterday afternoon.

For a migraine.

Seriously. I stopped at the corner grocery on my way home and suddenly noticed my eyesight going funny. Classic migraine aura for me.

I haven't had one of those godawful things in years, and let me tell you now that I didn't miss them.

Anyway, I managed to get myself home before it hit full-on. Write off pretty much the rest of last night, as you can imagine.

Today? Migraine hangover with a background of the same headache I've been dealing with for too damned long now.

This is getting old.





Aaanyway. This obviously isn't going to become a post, so I think I'll quick before it gets completely pathetic. Maybe next time I'll tell you about my balcony magpie if you remind me to.

And if my head actually works.

Is it all right if I complain about having a headache for a moment?

I have a headache. Woke up with one, which is always such a cheat.

I also have a program in about two hours. A program that, since it's a guided walk, by definition has to be out on the trails.

The trails, which are flooded and swarming with mosquitoes.

Want to make a bet that I end up with a group of people who aren't into slapping and wading?

Ahhh well. What can a person do but roll with it? Well, a person can complain, too. I'm good at that part. As my two fans know all too well.





Has anyone out there figured out yet that I don't have a post topic? Yeah, I thought so. Later then, everyone. I should get back to my prep anyway.

My slapping and wading prep...