snarkalupagus

oh, for pete's sake

"Pete" is not the word I would prefer to use, but I'm actively trying to clean up my vocabulary.  I actually had written a post (yes, I had...don't look at me like that), and then the compose editor fritzed out and I lost it.  Typepad and I might be coming to the end of a long relationship. 

buried, but not dead

Tomorrow, after a day of running at supersonic speeds in the office, I am taking my beloved Floyd through the car wash for one last salt removal before I drive him home, take the plates off, and send his title and lien release to the Rescue Mission and arrange a tow.  I have loved every mile I've driven in that car, but the ones I've driven lately have been accompanied by increasingly odd sounds from his clutch and increasingly frequent episodes of the engine revving without any accompanying burst of speed, as the gear he's in sort of slides around.  His transmission is pretty much all sweet spot and not much gear anymore, and there's no future in dropping a grand on a new one for a car with 310,000 miles.

On Saturday morning I will be picking up a new (to me) Subaru Legacy sedan, and making calls to see where the best prices are to be had on ramen noodles by the case.

we interrupt this jet stream

Crazy week.  School is good, and as soon as I post this I have to go read about a hundred pages of my accounting textbook.

However, I did stop and get off the hamster wheel long enough to do something very important:

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/donate/haiti-share.cfm

I believe in Doctors Without Borders and the work they do; they have lost a large number of staff in the earthquake, but they're there, helping and healing.  If you have a minute, and a dollar, please help.  Haiti is a poor nation in the best of times; when one-third of its total population is suddenly without what meager resources they had before this disaster, it is dire beyond measure.  (Don't get me started on Pat Robertson.  The God I believe in cursed us with ignorant fools like him.)

adaptability

School is going fine--the classes (Financial Accounting and Strategic Management) will be interesting and as long as I can muster the discipline to spend an hour or two every night on it, the work shouldn't be too bad.  What was interesting (but unsurprising) was how by the end of the orientation events yesterday, I had absolutely no desire at all to be social with the other people in my class.  For an extrovert, I cannot even begin to explain how much I hate a cocktail party with a roomful of strangers.  If I have one person I know as a home base, I'm totally fine and the life of the party.  But until I get over that hump, I would rather stick napalm-dipped needles in my eyeballs than deal with those situations.

brink

School starts tomorrow...I have schedules and maps to print and still don't know what I'm wearing, but right now I'm going to go to bed.  My sexy new Dayrunner (heee...it amused me just to type that) and the printer can wait till morning.

force-flex

HP stopped by for a drink earlier after leaving a holiday party (I love when the holiday season extends out past New Year's Day) and I was very focused on sitting on the sofa on my butt doing nothing but working on finishing the Belle's Christmas present and watching the Giants get annihilated. I told him that I was looking forward to getting back to normal--it feels like I've been off for a month, not just ten days, and without a set schedule I start getting a little lost after a while.

Then I said that for the first time, I'm a little nervous about how I'm going to fit it all in--school starts next Saturday morning (getting to the SU campus by 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning in January is not my idea of a great time, as the odds are exceedingly high that the city's going to be blanketed in lake-effect snow...the up side is that no one's usually driving at that time on a weekend morning, and I don't mind snow driving when there aren't any other idiots out there attempting it).

I've been feeling more and more pressed for time over the last few months...much of that is my own doing, getting the bathroom done and working too much and being too tied up in some stuff to pay attention to other things. This blog has really suffered--not that the internets is really losing much by me not blathering as often, but the snark/stress relief aspect of it has totally evaporated.  I think, "Dang, great idea for a post!" and then something comes up and it never gets written. Several of my important relationships have also suffered because I haven't been as present as I should be for people. I'm incredibly lucky in that most of those people have been very forgiving, but the feeling that I'm really pressing my luck by not performing the rectal craniotomy that's overdue is growing.

I don't make New Year's resolutions--I try (with varying degrees of success) to improve myself all the time, not just in January. But I want to go into 2010 feeling like I'm connected with my life and all of the people in it, which is not something that's been the case of late. I just wonder how to make 24 hours more elastic so that I can jam more into the days as they fly by. Maybe Business Accounting will help...or perhaps Strategic Management.

good problems

Being too busy and too happy to write lately is a good problem.  I like having good problems.

flash

I am still alive, but haven't had any time to write about it.  Herewith, a (rather dim) photo of my Christmas tree, just to prove it in lieu of words.

o hai agin

Yep, still here, but currently sitting on the sofa in the rearranged living room, sucking down water to try to sober up so that I'm not hung over for work tomorrow...HP came over for dinner and I had probably two more glasses of wine than was really wise.  Dinner was good, though (boneless pork chops stuffed with cheese, apple, spinach, rosemary, and garlic, steamed broccoli, and roast garlic mashed potatoes...whenever I PMS, I crave garlic, and he wasn't complaining), and the bathroom passed his muster, and the Giants won, and before he got here I cleaned out the garage so I can park in there again and returned poppasnarx's lawnmower, Shop-Vac, and jigsaw, so all in all, it was a successful day, even if I did zero desk work. 

Good to know that I can still muster up a hella run-on sentence, too. 

yawn

I'm still here...well, actually, I'm in Denver at the moment, getting ready to go to bed so I can get up long before the ass-crack of dawn to return my rental car, take the shuttle to the terminal, and stand in the TSA line for an 8 a.m. flight from Denver to Detroit in the middle seat (I'd take a window seat further back in the plane, except I only have a 35-minute layover and have to get from concourse A to concourse C in Detroit, which is a nice long walk, and which means that a middle seat toward the front of the aircraft means I have a somewhat better chance of making my connection.  I'll be having a little word of prayer with the travel agent when I get back to the office). 

So...goodnight.