postings of a professional redhead

Sometimes, I really wish I was able to type out all the ridiculously funny stuff that goes on at the lunch table in the cafeteria here at The Man & Big Brother, Inc. However, the rule is, “what happens at the lunch table, stays at the lunch table.” That doesn’t mean I can’t give you a few out-of-context stories…

Sardonic Manager: “Oh you won’t believe what happened in the 8:30 this morning. So Dr. X [random managerial-type who likes to stir up trouble and INSISTS on reminding everyone he has a PhD] got on the call – late, as usual – and starts pounding on Louis – and suddenly all we hear is CLICK! He totally hung up on us!”

Disbelieving Manager, to Louis: “Did you really hang up on them?”

Louis, through a bite of banana: “What, I want to take it up the ass first thing in the morning?”

Other gems include:

“We can find defeat in the jaws of victory!” – on winning a major contract, but being told it’s a “lean year” and there is now a hiring freeze, with possible layoffs on the horizon.

“If you look at this engine, you will turn to salt!” – suggestion to reword the official proprietary notice.

“We’re considering hiring an armed guard for the engine, 24/7. If we can’t get an armed guard, we’ll just send over Paperhurts and tell her we’ll cancel her World of Warcraft subscription if she lets anyone looks at the engine.”

And my favorite by far…in response to a threat of being laid off (half-jokingly): “I’ve got one word for you: vested.”

It’s been a busy past few weeks. This weekend will be the first I will be home in five – first two away I was in Las Vegas, then I was in Vermont, then New Hampshire, then DC, and finally this weekend – East Hartford. Home, sweet E-Ha!

Ploman and I will be attending the Podunk Bluegrass festival on Saturday (look for a tall blonde guy with a short redheaded me if you’re there) and I’m totally psyched. I grew up listening to the folk and bluegrass that my grandfather grew up listening to, and was one of a few in my house in college who actually knew the words to traditional Irish folk songs. I once dated someone who used to hate when I would take advantage of their fabulous XM radio to put on the bluegrass channel; of course, since then, last.fm has made my need for bluegrass easy to sate, but there is nothing quite like seeing someone live, on stage, sweating buckets while wailing on a fiddle.

In home news, the kittens are sick. Mischief refuses to take his pills. I have tried every trick known to man to get a pill in his stomach; first, crushing it and hiding it in wet food. No, he’d rather go hungry than eat that food. Then, putting it in with tuna (which usually can get that cat tap dancing on the ceiling), but again, he refuses to eat such tainted treats. I bought pill pockets – no go. Crushing it up, mixing it with water, and trying to give it to him in a syringe? I anticipate the deep cuts on my arms scarring. Shoving it down his throat? Not without breaking his jaw and losing one of my fingers in the process. There is no doubt in my mind anymore – that cat is a black Siamese, and like most Siamese, he’s loud, obnoxious, needy, and part rabid tiger. The baby kitten will be seven weeks old in a few days, but no one really wants to play with him due to the massive ringworm outbreak he is currently suffering from. I finally got an oral anti-fungal to go with the liquid I’ve been putting on his skin, but I really feel bad for the little guy – he’s super friendly, very affectionate (if you pet him, he purrs…but if you pick him up, he sounds like an outboard motor) and totally playful, but I feel like I have to wash my hands ten times every time I play with him or give him any love. Of course since I cannot get a pill down Mischief’s throat, he doesn’t really play much the past few days, so I’ve been on “keep the kitten occupied” duty, and well…my legs have the scratches to prove it – he seems to think climbing up my bare legs is just SUPER fun!

Between taking care of sick kitties, multiple camping trips, and taking care of a sick me, my house chores have reached critical mass. I may have to invoke Operation: Red Wagon this weekend if I have time. Operation: Red Wagon is when I borrow my next door neighbor’s red flyer in order to haul tons of crap from my house down to the dumpster. It’s just too damn hot outside to make multiple trips down there, and this way I can wash the kitty litter boxes with the car wash hose instead of in my shower for once. There is nothing worse than finding out first thing in the morning that not all the litter grit was washed down the drain when you cleaned the pans the day before…

This past weekend found Ploman and I trekking up to Tuxbury Pond to pitch our tent on my good friend [and hero] Terry’s RV plot. It was a little more posh than Ploman was used to – the formal dining room enclosed in a screened-in gazebo, the flushing indoor air conditioned toilet, and the [very chlorinated] pool all seemed to go against his (and to an extent, my) camping instincts. I’ve been RV camping plenty of times with my aunt and uncle down in Florida, so I have no issue with it. To me, camping in an RV is almost like going to a hotel, except you get your own kitchen, and there are usually a lot more fun things to do at an RV park than at a hotel. The Okeechobee KOA, for example, has a golf course, pool, tennis courts, game room, bar, nightly concerts, and llama farm next door.

In the spirit of “true camping,” however, we pitched our tent in the yard of the RV. This was not the kind of camping we will get to do next month when we head to Beartown State Forest in Massachusetts for a “real” camping trip - but it was fun, and Terry cooked delicious Persian food, and we toasted marshmallows, drank expensive whiskey, and generally lounged and enjoyed the woods.

Beartown is my favorite camping spot up here - the lake at Beartown is where we shower when we go, and the camping spots are nice – they all have a picnic bench, and a fire pit for grilling and making s’mores, and eco-friendly composting port-o-lets. Laura, Jordano, Ploman, Mike, Catherine and I will all be going, so it will be a good group of people. We’re all taking our kayaks and canoes so we can explore more of the lake than last time – we swam about 1/4 of the lake before becoming totally exhausted from the lack of floating. The mineral content of that lake is quite high, so it smells/tastes/feels good, but it offers no buoyancy, and so you sink like a stone if you don’t constantly tread water.

So a friend (who shall remain nameless) will be undergoing a laparoscopic adjustable gastric band procedure next Monday has been put on a liquid diet of whey protein shakes. Specifically, protein shakes that contain between 15 and 20g of protein per serving, with less than 5g of sugar. For an entire week leading up to surgery. In solidarity with her, I committed to doing the exact same diet – pre- and post- surgery – so we would suffer together.

Well, I have to say, that protein shakes (I picked up the Whole Foods brand, they were giving out samples in the store that seemed mighty tasty) are not all they are cracked up to be. Perhaps it is because I should be making it with some yummy almond milk instead of water, but these nutritious-delicious beverages are completely overrated. Maybe they put crack into the free samples to make us think they taste yummy, when in actuality they taste much as I would imagine a cardboard shake with a little vanilla extract to taste.

The hunger pains are getting more manageable, however – they only last about 20 minutes at a time now. The frequency of flack I’m getting from coworkers for drinking “something that looks like horse ***,” however, is higher than you would imagine.

Would it be totally cheating if I added malt powder to my protein shake?

As I had written last week, I did indeed to to SolarFest - despite having pneumonia. Propped up by 40mg of prednisone a day, 1,000mg of clarithromycin daily, and a whole lot of Musinex-D, Jordan, Laura and I packed up my CR-V and headed to Vermont.

SolarFest was…amazing. I went to some great workshops (Catherine, there was one on food preservation you would have loved), met some lovely people, and enjoyed my time tromping around a horse farm in 95 degree weather. Laura and I volunteered at the “Kids’ Korner” (the name did make me gag a little) where Laura showed off her amazing skills dealing with little munchkins, while I taught the slightly older girls how to make friendship bracelets.

I learned so much, and had such an amazing time, I can’t wait to go back next year. Next year, however, I will NOT be letting Jordan talk me into leaving my solar shower at home, because by the end of that trip, we smelled as ripe as the composting toilets. In the car on the way home we were just about gagging on our own stank, I don’t think I have ever been so dirty in my life! And I’ve been camping in the Florida Everglades, and still…not that dirty. When I got back into town, the first thing I did was take a nice, long, cold shower - I think three pounds of salty sediment went down the drain, it was so lovely, I really have more appreciation for showering now than I did before.

Saturday night there was a bonfire, complete with crazy bongo drum dancing, clouds of suspicious smoke, and lots of handsiness from everyone. Other friends of mine who we had met up with in VT were dancing around the fire, and it was totally crazy. I’ll have to get photos off my camera at some point, though I’m sure some of them will be highly incriminating…

Editing CSS while feeling under the weather, without backing up my webpage, was a bad, bad idea.  Yes, I broke my webpage.  No, I can’t seem to fix it.  ::SIGH::

I can no longer have digg posts or last.fm badges on my page without the whole thing imploding. Anyone else had this problem?

I spent most of my vacation last week trying to ignore the fact that I was, indeed, quite sick. I finally got my aunt to call in a scrip for me - she’s a doctor, and decided I had a sinus infection (I thought so too, though I mentioned I thought it was bronchitis seeing as I was coughing quite often). Turns out I’m really not feeling better after five days on antibiotics, so today after repeated coughing (and being told by the nurse in my friend’s dr’s office after driving her for a biopsy this morning, I should go to the doc as my cough sounded “very suspicious”).

I ended up at Manchester Memorial getting a chest x-ray. Long story short, I have pneumonia, and am really worried that I won’t be well enough to work my shifts at the kids hut at SolarFest this weekend (I’m on heavy-duty antibiotics, and am not contagious any more). I also won’t be able to enjoy any hiking or swimming or really, any physical activity, nor will I be able to be around any kind of second-hand smoke without puking up a lung.

On the bright side, I took 10 minutes for every hour I was awake today to do some house cleaning, laundry, and other fun chores I could do around the house - like finally find a new vet for the kitties closer to East Hartford since Mischief seems to still have the upper respitory infection I took him to the old vet two seperate times now. I also managed to clear most of the floor in the computer room - which is the last bastion of boxes that are still being sorted after my big move.  Somehow there were two bags worth of trash hiding in various places around the house, and I washed the litter boxes in the shower, refilled the bird feeder, and watered the little garden on my balcony.  This all in between massive, painful coughing fits.  Which are slowly getting better, so I’m hoping those horse pill antibiotics (and 40mg of prednisone daily for my asthma-exacerbated wheeze) are kicking in and I won’t have to be lame and cancel on this weekend’s trip - Dar Williams is playing SolarFest, and I can’t wait to see her live again!

Happy 4th of July from sunny Las Vegas.

Worst 4th of July, Ever:

I was about 3 or 4. We went down to the Jupiter Inlet for fireworks as usual, and as usual people in the parking lot were drunk and rowdy. One especially drunk and especially rowdy fellow decided to set off some fireworks of his own - from his truck. Inside his truck, which caught on fire, and he and his girlfriend were for some reason trapped inside for a little while. Two cars over from where we were parked.

Best 4th fo July, Ever:

It’s a toss-up between seeing the Hartford fireworks from the 24th floor of the Gold Building when I was about 9 or 10. We were visiting my Grandparents after my Gramps had been transferred up there for work (just like my father would be almost ten years later) and my Gramps had gotten me riding lessons so I wouldn’t miss a week on a horse, and it was a great vacation.

My other favorite was the summer Clarissa and I lived together, we had a giant party with all our Hamp friends, and went skinny dipping in the waterfall at the end of the night, and I took my camera and tripod and took photos of Jocie naked that would eventually land me my first photo show.

This year was good - spent with family in Las Vegas, playing with my cousins, visiting with my Grandparents, and well…getting the first tan I’ve had in a couple years. Us redheads, we don’t brown easy.

Well, I’ve been on vacation in Las Vegas since last Saturday, and I’m here until this coming Saturday!  Which means, I’ve been thirsty since Saturday.  It’s so dry here, my skin is lizardy and I cannot stay hydrated, I wish I had remembered my Camelpak, it would have come in quite handy.  Not to mention that since I arrived in Nevada, my allergies have not stopped being completely out of control.  I’m not sure what it is I am allergic to, but my ears, nose, and throat are completely unhappy, as are both my lungs.

Today we rented a boat and went water skiing on Lake Mead, which was a lot of fun.  I haven’t driven a boat since we had to leave Florida, I forgot how much fun it is motoring around.  Sadly, I couldn’t swim deeper than about fifteen feet today without feeling as though my sinuses were about to jump out of my forehead!

We drove the boat over to the Hoover Dam, where the bypass project is in full swing.  You can see the webcam of the project here.  Basically, they’re building a huge bridge OVER the Hoover Dam, which will hopefully clear up the congestion getting across the dam.  If you’ve never driven across the Hoover Dam, it’s kind of like trying to drive through Disney World - the ability to skip this little tourist attraction will likely start to open up the area on the other side of the dam for development.  Every time I come to the Las Vegas area there are at least two or three new roads/interchanges that have been built, and at least another development in the works.  According to this website, it’s the 11th fastest growing city in the United States.  I once thought I wanted to live here, but after being ridiculously hot and thirsty for the past few days, I’m starting to think there is a better climate yet for me.