midweek check-in *YAWN*

The new assistant boss FINALLY started working this week. It was a good 2-month process from the time we stopped taking applications to getting through the hiring process to actually getting a person in house. She's fitting in nicely while we've been training her up. Classes start up again next week for the spring semester, so we'll be running on all cylinders shortly.

I've been feeling a bit restless with the downtime from tutoring and hoping my tutor schedule fills up nicely with the start of the new semester. I did get a lot of decluttering accomplished during the break. And I'm sure I can find more to purge. Seems like there's always more.

In other projects, I really want to get started on painting most walls of the house. EVERY wall is "rental white", as our house was a rental when we first moved here. Seems like a good after-purge project.

I'm off work today and have a few errands to take care of. It's crappy windy today, but wind seems to be the main weather phenomenon without rain and snow and whatever else the east coast is getting. I was reading reports of high risk for downed power lines and power outages in some parts of the country and thinking how we don't typically have that problem. Our powerlines are underground, so power outages are usually caused by some freak thing like a squirrel getting into a transformer box.

Now I probably just jinxed it, and our power's going to go out... Well, we do have a lot of neighbor squirrels.

Let you go

I've taken today and yesterday off of work since I'm still dealing with this dang cold. I feel okay, actually. I'm sure I could perform my "job duties as assigned" just fine, but I'm still a bit congested and scratchy and don't want to sicken my coworkers. Our work setting is an open "corral", so not much for social distancing. I explained to Boss that I wasn't quite fit for humanity just yet.

As such, I've been feeling a bit restless while holed up at home. But The Great Declutter of 2024 has been going quite well.

On Monday, I tried to drop a couple of bags of donations at ARC,  but they had stopped taking donations by the time I got there. Fine, I drove over to Goodwill, which turned out to be closed for New Year's Day.  So I came back home and scheduled a pickupplease.org truck. They're coming next Wednesday.

In the meantime, I've been working on filling up more stuff for the truck. I think I've gathered about all I care to donate right now, and the rest of the crap is going in the trash, unworthy.

I'd thought myself a minimalist, but still had much to answer for. For example:

• Handfuls of panty hose?? I rarely wear panty hose. Much of it must have been from my corporate working girl days 27+ freaking years ago. I've been schlepping that along each time we've moved?
• Extension cords. So. Many. Extension cords.
• Cinch sacks - from employee orientations and road race paraphernalia, cinch sacks are/were the handout of choice for so many. Be gone!

I also happily sold a couple of items through Marketplace: a fully waterproof backpack we hardly ever used and a double-wide computer monitor I haven't used since downsizing to just a laptop. Both items sold quickly and went to, I believe, good homes. 

• I met with a young "dude"  at a pizza place downtown to exchange the backpack. He plans to use it for rafting - perfect.
• A young dad met me in a nearby parking lot for the monitor. He said he has the same model already, so now he'll have double-double! 

Everybody's happy.

Lastly, I've been chipping away at this 1000-piece puzzle from step-MIL that we started on Christmas. Claude Monet. 

So much sky. So much water. So many pieces look alike. I hate/must finish it!  

Damn you, Monet!

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Linking up with [John] for Mama Kat this week for the prompt:

1. Share something that you worked on this week.

moving on

Okay, holiday season is over. Time to get on with the business of getting through the winter. 

The break was nice, but I was ready to get back to work yesterday. As it was, we only gave four, count 'em FOUR tests the whole day. And it was only for two people because one guy did three tests. Talk about easing back into it. 

Boss had closed a bunch of things down, however, "just in case", so it was expected. I'm off today, but the schedule looks to be back to normal now.

New Year's Eve and day were non-events here. I think I was in bed by 9pm on Sunday. Plus, Magnum was down with Man Flu. Now, a few days later, it appears that I've contracted it as well. It feels like... a head cold.

Anyway, I "worked" with Sarge and Boss yesterday. We did a bit of tidying and updating things with all that free time. In discussing our New Year's reveling, theirs was as boring as mine. I mentioned my start of "The Great Declutter of 2024", and Sarge talked of painting his basement. Party animals, I tellya.

We did talk of "the old days" when we could go into work the following morning after a night of drinking. In my younger days, I'd worked at a hotel restaurant. Some mornings, the sight of the empty booze bottles from the bar the night before could make things a bit rough. Sarge told us that he'd worked on a garbage truck for a while and recalled collecting garbage while hungover. Ugh, yeah, that would've definitely been worse.

Now, here we are, cleaning house and painting basements. Did our younger selves see this coming?

in conclusion

Aren't blogs handy? Before blogging became a thing, I'd never journaled or kept a diary or any of that stuff. Who knows how much I've forgotten??

But with blogging, we can dip into the archives an unearth all kinds of boring things. Let's recap 2023 on this new year's eve, shall we?

January - learned about the formation of pornographic ice

February - noped out of winter bike-to-work

March - did my last Tortoise-and-Hare race for the '22/ '23 season

April - went geocaching, thinking to restart, never to geocache again for the remainder of the year.

May - involuntarily listened to a family fight while dining out on Mother's Day

June - yessed to summer bike-to-work

July - partied with step-father-in-law for his 90th birthday

August - encountered a man in a public bathroom, only to realize "he" was a bearded woman

September - became a scribe for a college math student with cerebral palsy

October - completed all but one of the 31 inktobers

November - completed another year of life on Earth

December - gonna go make some fried rice, I think

See ya next year!

saddle, sorting, and needles

A saddle, in geography, is defined as the lowest area between two peaks. I think of the week between Christmas and New Year as a saddle week. This one's been pretty productive... mostly.

• I've been doing some tidying, which I have since learned is a tradition in some cultures so as to start the new year with a "clean slate". I went through some boxes of stored goods while grumbling under my breath, thinking it was "junk" we've been storing for our kids. I was all ready to unload it upon them, only to find that it was mostly our stuff we never unpacked when we moved here four years ago. Ooops.

So I'm sorting through that, determined to rid us of "stored stuff". If we're gonna use it, it should be out among the living. I did find a few kid things, so my grumbling skills weren't totally a waste.

• Christmas here was a pleasant low-key affair. Meego and Wolfgang came over for food, gaming, dog walking, puzzle building, etc. And we speaker phoned a bit with Chaco, who relocated to the DC area for work not long ago.

Speaking of food and storage, while I was doing some actual cooking for Christmas, I came upon this little cast iron skillet I "won" back in 2020. As I remember it, the nursing home where I was working at the time had daily random drawings for staff to select a gift from a pile o' stuff during the days leading up to Christmas.

My name miraculously came up, and I selected the cute skillet, I think mainly because it was nicely portable for bringing home on my bicycle. It came with a small packet of brownie mix for making one round brownie in the pan. I remember making the brownie on Christmas, and the 5 of us split it into teeny tiny brownies. 

If it'd been a marijuana brownie, I doubt it would've had much affect after divying it up 5 ways. 

The skillet then got stashed with its larger siblings, hardly thought of again. But this week, I saw someone on reddit, who had received such a skillet for Christmas, asking what to use it for. The overwhelming response was "an egg!!"

Omigosh, it's the perfect vessel for making a one-off poached egg. I've been doing that in the days since the discovery while needing to chip away at all this damn leftover Christmas ham.

• Also this week, I visited that physical therapy place about my fritzed foot. They'd offered a special promo, so I partook. But the foot's been feeling better, and I figured I'd listen to the assessment, then likely continue to treat it myself. 

Welp, that didn't happen. The good Dr. uncovered weakness in my right hip - not a total secret to me - as likely the root of my problem and mapped out a good sense plan of attack.  After the initial treatment hurt so good, I'd plunked down the HSA card and paid for six sessions. 

He wants to do some "dry needling" - a term of which I've heard for treating sports injuries, but know nothing. I'm about to access doctor google, but it sounds kind of like acupuncture, which I've never had. I'm going for it.

sporting

"Okay, stupid question", I began, "Which ones are the Eagles?"

And so began my experience watching live professional hockey. We went to a Colorado Eagles (farm team for the Avalanche) game yesterday and watched them lose to the Calgary Wranglers. It was much fun, I hope to do it again - maybe not the losing part, but either way...

A few weeks ago, when we got together with Meego and Wolfgang, we somehow got on the subject of hockey. They both claimed it was fun to watch, while Magnum and I had never partaken. We learned that the guy who owns Meego's company is good friends with the guy who owns the Eagles, so employees typically have a number of tickets available to them for free as well access to the company's suite seating.

So Meego invited us to yesterday's game, and off we went. I figured it would be an educational field trip, which it was. Wolfgang got me up to speed with some basic rules - as well as pointed out which team was the Eagles - and I easily got into it. We actually didn't use the suite since the owner's kid was using it for a good sized crowd, but our gen pop seats were quite good.

It was fun watching it live, and the arena was awash with lots of positive energy - never a dull moment. I knew that fights often happen in hockey, but it was a bit shocking to see players haul off and punch someone in the face, live and in real time. 

A good time it was despite the Eagles losing 5-1. But I'm totally new to this and haven't developed team loyalty yet. 

Now here it is Christmas eve already. After watching that hockey game and noticing the players with missing teeth and understanding why, I've had that song "All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth" playing in my head.

I've mentioned here before that I murdered my two front teeth when I was 11 years old. I won't rehash the story now, but the key players were myself, a skateboard, and the street. I remember my loving grandma singing that song to me...
Brother Guano referred to me as "toilet teeth" after I got them fixed because the crowns were ceramic - the material of toilets. 

Yes, a formative time in my life. I imagine the teeth voids are more a badge of courage for hockey players. 

Whatever wished for this season, whether having to do with teeth or not,  I wish anyone reading the happiest of holidays!

a break from this break

• We had our little white elephant gift exchange at work  yesterday - ended up just being five of us as Triple-D was sick, and Star and Kitty had other obligations. I was surprisingly content with what I ended up with - a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, kitchen sponges, and a dental grab bag - HA!

With these work gift exchanges, we try to do them without anyone having to purchase anything. I learned that the jigsaw had been gifted to Party Girl's dad, who has dementia and can do a 60-piece puzzle, tops. I suspect that she did purchase the kitchen sponges - they are new and in the shape of cat faces. The dental grab bag came from Work Study, who informed us that the college's dental assistant program had given them out for Halloween. Who knew?

As to why I ended up with gifts from two people, it's a roundabout story, but suffice to say that I almost ended up with that Zombie book that I brought after things had made the rounds. But Sarge actually wanted the book and traded up to get it. So all's well that ends well, and I don't have to buy toothpaste or floss for a while.

• In other happy news, I went running this morning. My foot had been on the fritz for about a month and a half, but had gotten to feeling better, so I rejoined the weirdos this morning. It did okay, but in the meantime, I had contacted a local physical therapy office that specializes in running injuries.

They're offering a $49 special with full analysis/diagnostics, plus they're office is really close to our house. So I made an appointment for next week, and they sent me a questionnaire which asked typical questions like, "what hurts", "what makes it better/ worse", "what have I tried doing for it", etc... And it also asked something like, "What are my goals from therapy and how meaningful will it be for me to reach them?"

As for goals, I just want to be able to go for regular runs again and make a decent showing at a handful of races - 5K, 10K realm - each year, blah blah... But meaningful? I had to think. I mean, I'm nearly 60 years old. I'd like to be able to leave other 60-year-old women in the dust, but I'm pretty sure I've passed my peak. I came up with something for the meaningful question (all fields had to be filled in), but I realized I could find meaning in other activities if push comes to shove.

I'm off work today, and we're closed all next week. I guess I'll start searching for some meaningful things to occupy my time.