broken?

So, my physical therapy has been going well. Yesterday my therapist, the awesome Mark, told me he thought next week would be my last week of PT. We discussed light up shoes and how we wanted to see them. The Man Who Lives in the House wants me to get some. I worked on employee performance reviews. I came back to work and typed up the review for the employee who wouldn't be at work today. I then gave her her review, a glowing review, I might add, which she proceeded to then argue about because the one very minor "needs improvement" aspect I put on there she took issue with, because apparently the "one time it happened" (it was several) it had only happened because I hadn't thanked her for going to a meeting.

I'm sorry, perhaps I am a bit clueless here. I know I have only just turned 30 years old, but I have been managing employees since I was 22 years old. Perhaps there was a paradigm shift sometime, the nature of which I was unaware. Please enlighten me if this is the case, because I will take full responsibility if I am wrong. I need your help here, all one of you loyal reader.

Compliments aside, am I supposed to thank someone constantly for DOING THEIR JOB? And if I don't, does that mean they get to treat their supervisor in a generally nasty manner and refuse to do another aspect of their job?

Please, let me know. Leave a response in the comments.

Ok, so after that, carpool buddy and I stopped at Sweetwater again and partook of the four beers for $5 deal. When I finally staggered home, I started to turn and realized I was going to twist my bad ankle, but I wisely managed to catch myself.

And caught myself wholly on my good ankle.

Which buckled under me.

And I think I broke it.

Have I mentioned that the name of my quartet is the Calamity Janes?

total lunar eclipse tonight!

Go to The Astronomy Picture of the Day today to see what part of it you can see, if any. Here I will see all of it, beginning at 9:14 PM EST. The Man Who Lives in the House swears he will come home early so we can take our telescope and go to the field near our house and watch it.

The Man hates parties and is indifferent to Halloween except to see me dress like a slut. Therefore I drag him to parties every year. This year will be no different. This year's party has a theme of Bad Sci Fi Movies. Karen is going as Devil Girl from Mars.

I am going as Frankenhooker.

Karen and I have decided that The Man needs to go as Dr Forrester. Ok, technically it's not bad sci fi, but it's tv about and featuring bad sci fi. It all works.

The only problem will be how to deal with the fact that The Man has a beard. But I guess that will make it funnier.

Lest you think I'm completely lacking in morals...I am. Here are our costumes from last year.

From left to right, Janetta as a gogo dancer, Maureen as Princess Leia (as Jabba the Hutt's slave), yours truly as Captain Hooker, and Karen as Bettie Page. This is my quartet. Don't we look innocent?

Making his debut on my blog...

Here's The Man Who Lives in the House as The Best Pirate Ever!

And here's one where you can see why Karen was doing a nipple check on me all night long.

Based on the clothing I have purchased for this year's costume, I think Karen will be doing similar this year.

vote early and often

Except in Georgia and Florida.

Early voting in Georgia began yesterday. We planned on going over to vote today and avoid the mad crowds next week, but a few things stopped us.

First, they've already lost votes in Fulton County. And in Florida, where my aunt nad uncle and cousins all voted last week, and are adamant that a certain incumbent not be reelected. While I live in a state that supposedly is already called for the incumbent, I still believe that my vote counts, no matter which way I vote.

Second, the lines yesterday were more than three hours long for early voting in Fulton County, where I live, particularly in downtown Atlanta, where I planned to vote, because I work about one block away from where the early voting is.

Third, the voter registration database went down several times yesterday, which makes me nervous.

However, I would like to try to vote early, because people who are known to vote in a specific left-leaning slant have been finding their names mysteriously not on the voter registration lists. I know I have an FBI file. I was once a Maoist. I was a member of Revolution Now! I carried a Little Red Book, although I considered (and to an extent, still do consider) myself to be a Socialist and not a Communist. I was and may probably still be registered as a Republican in New York State because one has to be to get a job at the racetrack in Saratoga Springs - it's actually a question on the application which goes not to the New York Racing Association and American Racing Association, but rather to the Saratoga Springs Republican Party. The Republican Party requires the high school and college students and high school teachers who work summers at the track as bartenders and waitstaff and security guards to join a union for exhorbitant fees, the benfits of which are a pin and a summer picnic in which even underaged members can get smashing drunk before seeing Jane's Addiction and Nine Inch Nails at the first Lollapalooza.

Boy, I'm dating myself. 'Twas the summer of 1991, and I had just graduated from high school. I was about to begin college at Smith College on a full scholarship, having turned down Bryn Mawr, Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Duke. I stayed for two months before transferring to Skidmore where I was much happier.

Getting back to the above. I figure it doesn't matter what I'm registered as, because nobody knows what I do in the voting booth.

I had to buy four new tires this weekend. There goes $500 better spend on yarn.

cheap, good beer

Yep.

$5 at 4:20 PM on Mondays and Thursdays gets you a pint glass and four pulls of your choice at Sweetwater Brewing Company. My carpool buddy and I stopped, despite my first session back at the gym since February scheduled for 6 PM, with a new trainer this time since my former trainer has long since left. Was this a good idea? Probably not. Was it a beautiful 72 degrees and sunny outside? Oh yeah. Did I do it anyway? You betcha. Did my lips and tongue and teeth go numb after the second beer? Yep. Did all pain go away halfway through my third beer? What do you think? I was a half hour late for my session but I worked out anyway. Triceps and biceps. My arms are killing me today.

Good times.

Responses to reader comments:

I love my Honda Civic Hybrid. The bass in my quartet has a 2004 Prius and she loves it. Hers is very fancy schmancy and has a GPS and tells her when to turn. Her car also looks like a hybrid car. My car looks like a real car and the only thing indicating that it's a hybrid on the outside is the word "hybrid" on the back of it and the fact that the antenna is in the middle of the roof, much like the Ford Focus.

I have no pain drugs. They won't give me any. Thanks for the sympathies. The physical therapy is actually making my knee hurt worse.

I have read the Death on Demand series, although I prefer Carolyn Hart's Henrie O. series. I have read Dick Francis, because most of them take place in my hometown of Saratoga Springs. I love Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte Pitt books but haven't gotten into her new World War I series. I have read the Harry Potter books, except the most recent one; The Man Who Lives in the House and I are stalled somewhere about halfway in the middle and never picked it back up.

I know Frances is a woman and Francis is a man, I just didn't know which one was the hurricane.

I have to shop for my Halloween costume this weekend. I'm going as Frankenhooker.

hygiene shorts

Bet that header got your attention.

Not Mom's advice to wear clean underwear in case you have to go to the hospital. (And by the way, my mother would never have given me such advice, nor has she, nor will she. She did, however, tell me which numbers my subjects fell under in the Dewey Decimal System, give me free legal advice, and answer all of my questions about Jane Eyre at the age of 8, so I didn't fare too badly.) I'm talking about those 1950s educational short films that are so wonderful to watch, about Little Tommy having good manners and the GE Princess Phone coming in a rainbow of colors!

I've added a link on the side to Rick Prelinger's collection at the Internet Moving Imgae Archive. I met Rick in 1996 when I was a student at The University of Michigan. He was already well-known for the Prelinger Archives, the first archives of ephemeral films. I was honored and terrified to be asked to write an introduction to his talk at our school. (At the time I was in full-training mode to become a moving image archivist.) After the talk, I ran into Rick at the original Borders - in Ann Arbor, once the epitome of the independent bookstore, now the world headquarters of Borders and Waldenbooks - and he and I looked through the episode guide of MST3K, for me to discover that he had provided the majority (if not all) of the short films to that show.

I was in love.

My friend Mark, with me at the time, told me Rick had said I was "wonderful" but I never heard such a thing.

I ran into Rick again at the 1996 Atlanta conference for the Association of Moving Image Archivists. The conference was at the Omni at CNN Center, and Rick told me it was the first time he had ever spent the night in the same building that had a McDonald's and a Dunkin' Donuts. He invited me to parties with "bigwigs" in the field who threw their cards in my face and ordered me to contact them in March when I was jobhunting, even while 50 other students at the conference attempting to network never got anywhere close to the chances I got.

I fell even more in love.

I ended up getting drunk at a blues club with some of the other students and hooking up with some young buck who worked at The Academy and who wanted me to go to the Oscars with him that year. I turned him down.

I never saw Rick again.

In March 1997, I was looking for a job and Rick had one open, and I didn't have enough self-esteem to apply. I might have gotten it, I might not have. But I wish I had applied.

Rick's archives was purchased by the Library of Congress and now a large number of his films are available online at the link on the right.

Go on, you know you want to.

wednesday, post two

Just some quizzes I took I've seen around the blogs. I won't post the images here, but here are my results.

On the What Kind of Girl are You? (people, I went to Smith, albeit briefly, we're WOMEN), I am both the Indie Girl and the Progressive Girl.

While I do drive a hybrid car, I would never have a mutt dog. I'm a breeder. I am way more of the Indie Girl.

On the What Kind of Knitter Are You? quiz, I am, like Amie, a Knitting Goddess.

Naturally.

I changed my profile picture on Blogger to a closeup from the same picture. My hair is not long anymore. It is not the naturally auburn color anymore, but is currently black and red-fuschia. That picture is three years old. I feel like I look so young there. Must be because I just turned 30.

some days I feel like Plutarch.

Bonus points to the first person who gets the reference. Googling or other search engining not allowed.

I was reading Harlot's post about coming home from being away and finding mysterious electronic things everywhere, coffee mugs upside down, and the knives put away where the small spoons should go. I have determind that she and I are married to the same man. And really, has anyone ever actually seen Joe and The Man Who Lives in the House in the same room at the same time?

Have I actually seen The Man Who Lives in the House lately?

Does The Man even live in the house anymore?

Not much incentive to finish the sex gloves, despite the fact that I have two fingers left. I'm not the one who gets turned on when I wear them, after all. I'm ignoring the fact that I was designing them for my brother's girlfriend's fashion show and I'm on a deadline. Deadline, schmeadline. Plus also in the show is this cheerleader I went to high school with who was a total bitch to me because my brother was the popular jock and I was the goth (in the pre-goth days of the late 80s) drama club smart one. How all of these people ended up finding each other in San Francisco when we all went to high school about 30 miles north of Albany, New York is beyond me. My brother's girlfriend was at my parent's house for the holidays last years and she saw my prom pictures. She and I wore the same dress to the prom - purchased at the same boutique in downtown Saratoga Springs. So anyway, I don't feel pressured to finish the gloves, and I think my bamboo DPNs have actually long since fallen out of the stitches in my alpaca knitting bag (bought by my brother's girlfriend who went with my brother to Peru in July and actually managed to drag him to an alpaca farm, and bought me 25 hanks of alpaca yarn. Ah, she will make a great sister-in-law someday. My brother was only interested in climbing Machu Picchu).

Then I have a newly developed problem wherein my wholly indoor cat has fleas. Fleas! They're driving me crazy! Where did they come from? He doesn't even go outside! And they're all over the place! I have some yarn on the bed of the guest bedroom (ran out of room in my Elfa bins, of course, my stash is so large), and the cat is freaking curling up with the yarn. What to do?

So I hop on over to Rabbitch's blog where she is having a flea problem, an ankle problem, and has the flu. She claims I'm just trying to one-up her with my ills.

Has anyone ever seen Rabbitch and me in the same room at the same time?

I thought not.

Speaking of Superman, does anyone else watch Smallville? What's up with the introduction of Lois Lane?

unendurable pain.

Last July, I got a stress fracture on my ankle while walking across a flat parking lot. I did not turn or mangle it in any manner, but it broke nonetheless. I was unable to wear a fabulous pair of Pradas I purchased in San Francisco for my birthday dinner because I was in an air cast for six weeks.

I was Not Pleased.

The pain of this fracture has never gone away. Never mind that it happened two days before my 29th birthday, and that stress fractures in and of themselves are not usual in someone so young. My doctors decided I was premenopausal. This would make sense because I have some doctors who think I haven't really become menstrual yet. Perhaps I have skipped an entire step of womanhood.

Nonetheless, the pain of my ankle became excrutiating last week, and my ever-present limp became noticeable for the first time to everyone else around me. Unfortunately, it also made the pain of a knee injury I got in 1996 while living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, unbearable. Said knee injury occurred while I was walking the two blocks from my apartment to a class while attending graduate school at The University of Michigan. I fell on the ice on the law school campus. A law professor watched me fall and laughed at me, and walked on, leaving me there.

So yesterday I visited my wonderful orthopaedic physician's assistant again, and today I began physical therapy on both my ankle and knee, and the weather is bad, so my shoulder, also on the right side of my body, on which I had surgery ten years ago, is aching like a bear.

For those who have never had a first-time physical therapy appointment, let me illustrate, if I may, with words.

First, you repeat everything stated above, even though they have it all down on paper in front of them.

Second, they prod you and ask you where it hurts the most.

Third, upon finding the most painful location, they prod you in varying degrees of pressure to determine "degrees of pain" from one to ten.

Fourth, they prod you in the painful location and then move your limb around in 360 circles, even if it doesn't move that way naturally, so as to determine how much more they can hurt you.

Now I know this will all be good. I know this is all diagnostic. But I can't move the right side of my body anymore. Even my migraine has switched to the right side of my head, and it's confused.

Here's hoping for better weather, or heavy drugs, whichever is fastest.

feh.

Men.

Or specifically, TMWLITH.

Last weekend, whilst dealing with yet another migraine (hence my lack of blogging of late) and wishing for imminent death, he complained that I wasn't helping him with yardword (cleanup from Hurricanes Frances - or was it Francis? - and Ivan). This weekend I promised to assist him in his endeavors, despite the fact that a) I have to do my employee performance evaluations, and being that I am a Federal government contractor, I am not given an office space, and I like to not do these at work so I need to do them at home, and I have five direct reports so it takes some time to do them, in addition to which I have to do my own self-review for my boss, who won't read it anyweay because he is a loser who is wholly unqualified for his job and hates me because I make more money than he does even though I am far more qualified to do his job and I was promised his job two years ago and three other people on the contract are more qualified to do his job and we all have the prerequisite Master's in Library Science to even have his job which oh, by the way, he does not have, let alone a basic grasp of the English language, so how did he get his job anyway? But I digress; b) my quartet is learning three new songs and I need to make learning tapes for them, in addition to becoming familiar with all four parts, not just my own, and attempting to transcribe some of the music in a different key; c) The Man told me last night that his project is due on Monday and he will be working all weekend to complete it; and d) The Man told me last night he is signed up for a weekend Java Symposium, paid for by the large Baby Bell for which he is a consultant, which will take him away to an unspecified place (he hasn't looked up where yet) at an unspecified time (he doesn't know when it is) to take unspecified classes (he hasn't looked at the class offerings to figure out which classes to take yet).

So, who thinks I'll see The Man Who Lives in the House this weekend? Anyone? Bueller?

I'm still experiencing an Eve Dallas withdrawal (Thanks, Lioness, for agreeing with me that she kicks ass!) and I don't know what to do. I'm sure it'll be another year before the next book comes out. I did join booksfree.com, which is like Netflix for paperback books. They send you two at a time. It's been working out for me so far. I'm open to suggestions.

Oh, and The Man has hidden the camera recharger, so I can't post the RAOK pictures or the SSRP pictures or the pictures from upstate New York. This weekend.

i'm a slug.

But at least I freely admit it.

I have now not seen The Man Who Lives in the House for, oh....too long to count. Weeks, anyway. He woke me up last night for sex. Then went right to sleep afterwards. I tend to get introspective and hole up if he doesn't force me out of my shell, so I haven't even turned on my computer.

I did, however, succeed in reading all 22 books of the J.D. Robb "In Death" futuristic mystery series in eight days.

I went into Dunwoody Yarn on Monday and everything had changed! New yarn, new lines, and new display items, and I had only been gone for three weeks! I'm getting reinspired to pick up knitting again, even though I haven't in forever. I think it's the Sex Gloves. I am almost done with the second one, but for some reason there's an internal block preventing me from finishing them. So I've been reading. Five or six books a day.

I did receive the SSRP box on Friday, and there is some interesting yarn in it. I'll go into more detail later this week. I also received a ROAK of two free audio books from audible.com, so I can put them on my iPod and listen to them during my long lunches.

Leya has a couple of posts about her past loves which has made me introspective this October. I guess that coupled with the final settling of my father's estate and the lack of The Man has made me wonky.