You know you've been doing too much travelling...

...when you don't think to check the date on the milk before pouring. My morning coffee ritual consists of pouring my mug at least half full of milk, adding a bit of sugar, nuking it, and only then topping up w/ coffee. I definitely wasn't awake this morning because it wasn't until I got to that last step that I noticed the consistency of my skim milk was more that of buttermilk. Bleah!!! Thank goodness I'd just bought a fresh gallon of milk, so I still had milk for coffee.

Not the news I wanted...

... but not unexpected, either. Once again I'm not getting promoted to the next GS grade. Sigh. The demographics are absolutely killing me; those of us stuck in the bottleneck have to do at least twice as much as anyone at other grades to break outta that logjam. Frustrating, discouraging, demoralizing (fill in other adjectives here)... I can't help but think of what the Red Queen told Alice (chapter 2, Through the Looking Glass): "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

At least this year all of my managers seemed concerned about helping me break out of the logjam for next year. My first-line manager has a pretty specific plan and the next level up offered to help me work on my package to play up the things I've done that make me stand out. This is the first year I've ever gotten any feedback that would actually be helpful, though of course I won't know just how helpful until we go through this exercise again next year.

OK, enough whining. Now I can quit wondering "is this the year?" and get back to work.

Something to look forward to...

Got some new DVDs today: Galaxy Quest and, as a splurge, the entire first season of The Muppet Show! Now the hard part - deciding which to pop into the machine first...

Dreading my performance "feedback" session tomorrow.

The dreaded moment comes tomorrow - I get the "feedback" on my annual exercise in futility; um, I meant, my performance review. For those of us paid on the government's General Schedule, "promotion" refers to getting raised to the next GS level w/ a concomitant salary increase. (The paltry annual "cost of living" increases don't keep up w/ inflation and pale in comparison to what Congress votes themselves every year.) At my agency, promo money has been very tight for the past several years; our chief of staff professed herself "delighted" that of the 71 people at my GS level in my organization, they would be promoting 7 or maybe even 8! At this point my number of years in grade exceeds my grade, hence my reference to the annual exercise in futility. Nothing quite so demoralizing as being told "sorry, we wanted to promote you but ran out of money before we got to your name." Not very helpful, either; "work on your proofreading" or "you need to work a bit faster" I can control, but I can't do squat about how much money Congress allots our agency for personnel and how the higher-ups then divvy it up among the organizations.

So after all this time, I'm looking forward to getting tomorrow's session over with. No matter what they tell me, they aren't gonna like my reaction. If they didn't put me in, they'd better make sure there are no sharp or heavy objects within reach! If they did but I got weeded out along the way, well, I won't be happy. And even if the news is good, it's been too long in coming. I'll have to try to look pleased while thinking, very loudly, "it's bloody well about time!!!!"

Not whining about this new toy

Will wonders never cease - got new cellphones for the Chief and me and am not complaining about having to learn how it works. (See November comments on figuring out how to make my iPod and digital camera do their tricks.) Yes, I admit it did take me several minutes to figure out how to enter names into the Contacts list, since the user's guide doesn't tell you the trick to getting past the first letter assigned to each number on the keypad, but the rest of it really has been pretty easy. Once I got the letter thing down, I got my entire family's phone numbers entered in about 10 or 15 minutes, have already changed the ringer (the default setting was really, really obnoxious!), gave the Chief's phone a test call, and changed the wallpaper so we can differentiate our otherwise-identical phones at a glance.

Lesson learned - forget the Verizon Wireless store! I went there first, waited 45 minutes, then had to leave before seeing a salesperson because I had to be somewhere else. After that other business was taken care of, I went to the Verizon "kiosk" at the Circuit City about 2 blocks north. What a difference! Far more ambient noise and visual clutter, but the helpful and pleasant Carla was able to take care of me right away. I was able to settle on a model, get the new contracts (another 2 years!) signed, the new phones programmed, and get on to my next errand in less time than I wasted in the Verizon store.

"We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog..."

Did you miss me? ;)

With any luck at all, work will now get back to normal - no more intensive (and intense) traveling and something resembling a more normal schedule and workload. (8-hour days and 5-day weeks would be lovely!) To celebrate what I fervently hope is my last business trip for a very long time, I'm taking off the whole rest of the month. I'll probably spend a lot of it getting caught up on things like laundry and maybe even doing some baking, partly to mark the return to normalcy; I will definitely be making my annual pilgrimage to the local nursery for annuals.

Last year's "stop-gap" pansies faked me out; all but 2 of them not only survived the winter but thrived. I haven't the heart to rip them out when they're so bushy, bright and flourishing, so I'll probably only get a couple of impatiens plants to replace the pansies that didn't make it. (Unless someone would like to suggest another colorful gap-filler that's compatible w/ pansies?) The apartment complex behind us finally took out the enormous, 4-story-tall tulip tree that was so rotted it had become a major hazard. It'll be interesting to see how the additional sun affects how the dogwoods and other trees do this year. All those crocuses I planted last fall bloomed and faded while I was on the road, but the Chief got pictures for me. The new daffs seem to be doing well so far; I think it's still too early for the allium to make their appearance.

The ground has settled very unevenly in the wake of last year's plumbing excavation, so it looks like we'll soon be buying a lot of dirt and filling in all the uneven places. Much of the grass seed didn't come up, so that'll have to be taken care of, too; neither one of us much likes seeing all that bare orange clay. Ugh!

Enough procrastinating; time to start unpacking...

Another technological baby step

I had a nice bit of birthday money to spend so I actually bought an iPod today. Not the Nano; I wanted the additional storage. 30 GB is probably overkill, but given how much I want to load, I doubt it would take me long at all fill up the 2 or 4 GB available on a Nano. As for why I shelled out all that money, I figured it was a much more efficient way to take my music on the road with me than my Walkman, travel speakers, and a stack of audiocassettes. (Yes, I admit it - I even own LPs that I bought new, not from a thrift store.)

Now to figure out how to get this thing working. I'm impatient - I want to know how to use my new toys (the iPod, my digital camera, etc.) without having to go through the learning process. Not that I resent the owner's manual, I just resent the time it takes to figure out how to make my new toy do its tricks. Ah well, enough whining. As a former supervisor used to say, "Suck it up and drive on."

Thanksgiving in Florida

... just feels weird. 80 degrees and gorgeous on Thanksgiving Day? No, it's supposed to be cloudy, dreary, and maybe in the 40s. Actually, the weather was perfect just about the whole week we were there for Thanksgiving w/ my snowbird parents. The only hard part, of course, is leaving those balmy 80-degree temps to return to a clime easily 50 degrees colder! Brrrrrrr!

I'd been so preoccupied with other things that I'd never considered the possibility of seeing hurricane damage. My first reality check was as our plane was landing and I spotted an entire housing development with bright blue roofs. "How interesting and what a pretty, tropical color," I though to myself. This is Florida, after all, where the houses are often painted in bright colors - why should the roofs be any different? Then I noticed other onesie-twosie blue roofs, and the penny dropped fully when I saw partial blue roofs. In other words, I was seeing tarps covering damaged or destroyed roofs.

Once we landed, we hardly saw a single tree that hadn't lost at least some of its foliage; some had been stripped entirely, though not as many had been snapped off as I'd have thought, given all the wind damage. Broken or missing signs, piles of storm debris, boarded windows in many of the buildings, hand-lettered "Yes, we're open!" signs on otherwise empty-looking buildings - Wilma left not a block untouched, though a few buildings apparently survived relatively unscathed. What also surprised us was how long people had to wait to get power restored; waits of as long as 2 weeks weren't unusual!

All in all, it makes me realize just how very lucky we were to survive Hurricane Isabel a few years ago with only a 2-day power outage and some demolished bushes. It could have been much, much worse!

Domestic is all well and good but...

Can't wait until things at work settle down so I can get back to auditioning, rehearsing and performing. As it is, all I have time for are domestic pursuits - playing in the mud, planting bulbs and pansies, making the occasional pot of soup, baking, and too little reading. I enjoy all these things, but they don't get me out of the house and connecting with others (sorry, giving the cashier my grocery coupons doesn't count). And while the larder's full and the laundry's getting done (and even folded!) fairly regularly, I've been feeling kinda boring. After all, no one cares that I'm caught up with laundry & grocery shopping, and most folks aren't really all that interested in my little spurts of gardening - it's not like I'm breeding rare, priceless orchids or anything else out of the ordinary.

More color

There's something to be said for waiting. The nursery had end-of-season pansies for only $1 each. I bought 10, all different, and planted them as soon as I got home, while there was still a little bit of rapidly-fading light. They're now occupying the bed Chief worked up on Sunday. Since the dirt was already enriched and worked over, it only took about 10 minutes to get all my pansies planted. Can't wait to see how they look in daylight...

Spring color, part 2 of 2

Well, I ran out of bulb-planting time last week - only got the allium bulbs in. Today was absolutely gorgeous - sunny and in the 7os! Chief & I took advantage of the superlative weather to spend several hours out in the yard.

When I wasn't helping him with his projects, I dug holes - LOTS of them! - and finished planting all my bulbs. All 50 daffodils and all 90 crocuses! If you're fortunate enough to live somewhere with real dirt (black or brown, loamy, full of earthworms), this may not sound like so very much work. However, in our area that means digging all those holes in clay and working in some proper dirt and probably some bulb food, for insurance. I think most, if not all, of the Eastern Seaboard must sit on this red-orange clay. Makes great bricks, I suppose, but not something you want in your garden. You really have to put your back into it to dig up your garden and you absolutely have to work in some peat moss, humus, sand, real dirt, or other soil enricher (usually over at least 2 or 3 successive years), then hope for the best.

A few hours into it, I looked at how very many bulbs I still had to plant and thought "I'll have to finish this another time". But when I started planting on the side of the yard where we had the plumbing excavation back in August and realized the clay wasn't nearly as dense there, I started digging broader holes and putting several bulbs in them (one hole got at least a dozen crocus bulbs). So while I planted 140 bulbs, I did not dig 140 holes! However, I did expressly tell the Chief, "If I ever want to buy this many bulbs again, stop me!"

For his part, he dug up a flower bed, sifted the top few inches of dirt through a box filter he'd made himself to get rid of the rocks, roots, and other trash, then dumped the dirt back into the bed and worked in a 20-lb. bag of enriched dirt. This to get it ready for me to plant some color, so I'm off to the nursery later this week to get some pansies as stop-gap color. Come spring, though, that bed's earmarked for impatiens.

He also raked up nearly all of the last of the straw the excavators put down after the plumbing "adventure", bagged up the straw for the lawn trash pick-up, dug up a lot of the dirt and redistributed it (it's been settling very unevenly), put down lots of grass seed, and watered the lot.

Now we're joking about filling the tub with Ben-Gay and marinating our overworked muscles in it. Wonder just how stiff I'll be tomorrow...

Medical maintenance

What a week this has been. In addition to yesterday's mammogram retakes, I went in Monday for a blood test, which came back normal for everything they were looking at (cholesterol, blood sugar - the usual suspects), and this afternoon it was back to the dentist for some fillings. Never my favorite thing, this was worse than usual because he was working on wisdom teeth, so I had to keep my jaw open so wide I thought my jaw would separate. Maybe by tomorrow it'll feel normal again. And I'd forgotten how the anesthesia travels to weird places, like my ear and the bone under my eye on that side.

I guess it's true: after 40 it's all patch, patch, patch.

HUGE sigh of relief!

Got my retakes done today. OUCH! Today I learned that "do over" mammograms involve a smaller plate (i.e., stretching and flattening only part of the breast) and greater pressure. Or at least that's what it felt like. They did both the diagonal and horizontal takes, but the radiologist was able to see enough from those two that I didn't have to do the sonogram. If I'd had a vote, I'd've had the sono first, in hopes of being able to skip the mammo! But the news is good - just fibrocystic tissue, which made for a slightly anomalous initial mammogram, but nothing worse. Nothing serious, nothing scary - we're going out to dinner to celebrate, and I'm hoping the restaurant has champagne!

"It certainly entertained the gapers."

Well, the furnace guy collected a new story this afternoon. We told him we needed someone to go into the crawl space under the house and check the ductwork because we know we've got a hole or break or something there from the raccoon. We told him the story and at first he just laughed in disbelief. "Raccoon?!?"

You see, a year ago August we had gone to bed w/ the kitchen skylight open. In the middle of the night, a juvenile raccoon, presumably smelling whatever we'd had for dinner that night, came walking across our roof toward the source of the aroma and fell into our kitchen because the skylight screen wasn't designed to hold any weight. "Then up on the roof there arose such a clatter, we sprang from our bed to see what was the matter." As we ran from the bedroom into the kitchen, the raccoon ran from the kitchen into the bedroom. We immediately shut the door and called Animal Control. I gotta hand it to them, we had an Animal Control officer there at 4 a.m., probably called from a sound sleep, no more than 45 minutes after the arrival of our unwelcome guest. We told him how said guest had made his entrance, whereupon our officer carefully slipped into the bedroom with his cage at the ready. Guess what? NO visitor! AC officer and Chief moved the bed (and all the shoes and sweater boxes stashed under same) to find the little rotter had pried up a floor vent and crawled into our ductwork! We never did smell it, so we know it didn't die in there. Chief noticed the next time he did yard work that a slatted ventilation grill in the crawl space had a section broken out. Given that and other evidence, we assume our probably rabid little friend took advantage of a join in the ductwork to make a break for freedom and eventually make its way into the crawlspace and thence into the neighborhood at large.

The next couple of times we had the system checked, I tried to get the tech to check for a break in the ductwork but they never did. I think this 3rd time was the charm; Chief even showed the tech where he'd nailed mesh over the grill to keep the critters out, because they've pulled down some of the insulation under the house for nesting or other, more nefarious purposes. Someone's supposed to call us tomorrow to arrange to repair the ductwork. Good thing - with all the gloom-and-doom forecasts about how heating prices are going to shoot up this winter, we DON'T want to be heating the neighborhood, or even the crawlspace!

Spring color, coming right up!

Well, not literally, at least not yet. I took today off work to take care of various business; getting the furnace checked out, running errands and - drum roll, please - planting lots and lots of spring bulbs. How many is "lots"? 175! I've got 35 Allium bulbs - new flower for me; can't wait to see how they work out - 50 assorted daffodils, and 90 assorted crocus bulbs! I absolutely love crocuses - they're my "hang in there, spring is coming!" flower.

I had planted about 200 assorted bulbs (snowdrops, anemones, grape hyacinths, miniature daffs, and crocuses, of course) across the little slope in the front yard several years ago, but most of them quit coming up. Don't know whether disease or insects got them, but now I get to spend a happy couple of hours digging holes and planting what I know will be a wash of color come spring. And because the package tells me the allium comes up in late spring, I'll be getting color for a while - first the crocuses, then the daffs, then the allium. Or maybe the daffs & allium will come in together. I don't care - it'll be fun to see what happens, and what colors and varieties I get.

Maybe it's not so bad after all.

I talked to my doctor this afternoon about the results of my first mammogram. She said it showed some thickening of the tissue, and a "questionable masslike area" but no calcifications, which is a good thing. There was also some "blurring", which is part of why they want to do another, magnified mammo, with a sonogram for independent confirmation, I suppose.

After talking to my breast cancer-survivor mom last night and learning this today, I'm feeling much less worried about the whole business, although I'm still not exactly looking forward to getting another mammogram so soon.

Ladies, do your self exams!

Pray for me!

Been catching up on a lot of medical "routine maintenance" lately - dentist, allergist, mammogram, annual "date w/ the stirrups". No fun, but some things ya just gotta do. Most of the follow-up has been merely tedious (e.g., flu shot, 2 cavities to be filled).

However. I had my mammogram last week and learned today from my HMO that they want to "re-image" my left breast and do a sonogram of it, just for good measure. My mom had breast cancer several years ago, so the implications of "re-imaging" are scarier than I care to dwell on.

I'm scheduled to go back for more pictures next Wednesday. That means a full week of fearing the worst. I'll happily take all the prayers and good wishes you can spare!

Festivals

Reading back, I see I wrote that the fall festival "always seems to get good weather". Not true this year! It was raining steadily when we woke up Friday morning and didn't stop for good until late Sunday morning. The festival parking is in a field, so when Chief asked about going later in the day or even waiting until Saturday, I insisted on going as soon as possible, before the mud got axle deep in the lot entrances. (Trust me, dislodging a car mired axle-deep in mud is not quick, not easy, and definitely not cheap!)

Unfortunately, the weather definitely affected attendance by both visitors and vendors; the crowds were even lighter than we expected, and there were a number of empty vendors' spaces. A shame; this is definitely one of the better shows. It's large enough to be interesting but small enough to be manageable (not like some that cram hundreds of vendors into the county fairgrounds, for instance), and because it's juried, you can be sure that all the vendors make all their own things. No dishtowels reconstituted into a different shape or anything. And what I enjoy almost as much as seeing all the lovely, well-made things is getting the chance to talk to the makers about materials, techniques, what got them interested in (woodcarving, weaving, ironwork...), and so on. Several of the vendors are also re-enactors and wear their period clothing and are happy to explain the old techniques of barrel-making, why they use this particular breed of sheep for the wool in their sweaters, or where they managed to find the tools to make their instruments. Because the people are invariably emotionally involved in their craft, they always tell a wonderful story about it. That was one advantage to Friday's rain - because the crowds were so light, I think the vendors were happy to have someone interested in their work. The woman doing the Swedish weaving (basketweave throws with multi-colored embroidery) was good enough to show me how she did the patterns on the throws, the woodcarver answered my husband's questions about which woods were easier or harder to work with, the woman with the braided rugs was quite proud of the fact that in the past 5 or 6 years she's completed 160 rugs (her goal was 125!) and the cooper shifted easily from telling us the history of the "barn stars" he makes to the barrels he also makes. Well worth the price of admission!

By contrast, the apple butter festival was a disappointment. I think it suffered by being visited so soon after the other. This festival may not be juried. It was certainly more eclectic, with a lot of vendors the Chief described as "aging hippies"; my term was "New Age". As with the other, the rain hurt them; we saw a lot of empty vendor spaces, though we couldn't tell whether they hadn't shown up, or had merely decided to cut their losses and go home early.

And with all the rain, I didn't even pull out my old camera, let alone my new one. Maybe the next time we're out at the cabin...

"Spam" is a 4-letter word.

I really, really didn't want to do this, but may yet be forced to. Lately, nearly all the comments to my blog have been from spammers. This is really irritating; my blog is NOT intended as a place for some anonymous scam artist or self-promoter to make a fast buck. Not to mention that my ego is a little dented; the 2 or 3 readers I have aren't commenting, while the spammers have no qualms whatsover about butting in and making irrelevant, self-aggrandizing sales pitches disguised as comments. I suppose I should be grateful that at least they've been clean. So far.

Please, don't make me use word verification.

New toy!

My digital camera arrived today! Three guesses how I'll be spending the rest of the evening (well, after I bake an apple cake and deliver some "neighbor debt payments"). This is good timing because the Chief & I will be going out to an autumn foliage festival Friday and an apple butter festival on Sunday.

The Friday fest always seems to get good weather, perfect for driving around and looking at the scarlet of the sugar maple farms. I just hope they got enough rain this year to make the leaves turn bright colors before they turn brown and drop off. The festival has lots of crafts workers, furniture makers and the like, and draws large enough crowds that it inspires the neighbors to have little stands of their own for quilts, home-made baked goods, produce, and the like. The apple butter festival is smaller, but equally fun - I want pictures of the HUGE kettles they make the apple butter in. They often let little kids stir the stuff, but have to put them on a stool so they can reach, because the kettles are big enough to hold 3 or 4 toddlers.

I'm hoping the "Gourmet Termite" will be there again, too. The first time I went to the apple butter festival was while the Chief was deployed overseas. Among all the watercolorists, other artists, goodie sellers, and the like was an older gentleman with an old van he'd converted into a mobile woodshop! Calling himself The Gourmet Termite, he made custom signs while you waited. I had him make a sign for our cabin, selecting a sign template from among the many he offered, giving him the text and letting him know the local emergency crews mandated house numbers at least 4" high. While he worked on it, I nosed around the van, which was a marvel of ingenuity. Ship's cabins are marvels of efficient use of space, but this van easily rivalled them for efficiency. He had a shallow set of shelves in the back end of the van that stored what looked like various types and sizes of drill bits, while the body of the van housed his sign templates, paint, varnishes, and other supplies. The Chief would really love seeing the van and talking to the man when he's not busy. Although, come to think of it, I'd have a hard time tearing him away - he might want to sign up as an apprentice! :D