Off to work.
{{{{{kai}}}}}
{{{{{Pie}}}}}
{{Kai and family}} I’m relieved to see you’re offline at 5 AM-ish our time. I hope it means you’re sleeping well enough. I have been thinking about you and I continue to send my wishes up the coast.
LiLi, what an adorable wee one you have! His outfit is tres cute, particularly the sweater. I love the powder blue and brown together.
Wimps are the ones who don’t get their butt into a Y in the first place, like me. So, my congrats to you, Pie. Maybe more people who never went to flea markets before will do so now because of the economy? I love them and regardless, I hope your cookies sell like hotcakes! 
Bobbio, I’m in woodstove country and I did not know of that technique, so thanks!
I think the fog misunderstood my post yesterday because it hung around all day. I did not get my walk in the sun but I was active and puttering about. I did get a nap in, resulting in a 4 AM wake up. That’s a push forward of about 2 hours, which I’m happy enough with. I’m choosing to call par with a mulligan on goals met yesterday.
I’m going to check up with my friend Tee to see if I can do anything, even sitting with her so her fiance can get out of the house–neither have family in this province. Or take their puppy outside and play her out a bit. Something!
Our weather forecast has completely changed. Yesterday it said sun for the next 4 days; today it says the next 4 will be cloudy. Which is okay and much preferred over Arctic outflows and snow but I just hope spring is just a month away, as normal. I’m really ready for some sunshine.
I’m back at work. Thank you all for the well wishes for my Dad. He’s very glad to be home, and slept 4 hours in a row in his own bed! That’s pretty good for him - he usually only sleeps 3, in the bed. He sleeps a lot in his chair, too. 
{{{kai}}} - Honey, I’m so sorry. This is so hard for y’all, I know. You’re in my thoughts and prayers.
As are you, {{{Pie}}}.
gotta get some stuff released before my engineer has a panic attack!
Smooches!
In the greater scheme of things this is more of a minor complaint, but it was still quite annoying at the time. Complicated Roommate was supposed to come back from British Columbia yesterday. I drove all the way to the nearest airport (an hour and a half away), waited around for thirty minutes, paged him, and finally decided to head home because I didn’t print out the itinerary he had sent me. D’oh. I called Air Canada when I got home and found out his flight had been switched to Thursday, not Wednesday. Which he forgot to tell me. And I had already taken the day off. And his phone had been disconnected and he wasn’t answering his IM. :mad:
So I finally called in work and arranged to come in last night to make up my hours, called out of work for today, and went to work. CR finally called me at work around 7 and apologized which is the main reason he is still alive today. He confirmed that he would be coming in Thursday morning and promised to pay for the half tank of gas I burned up on my futile journey.
I get another call from him last night. In the middle of Rachel Maddow’s interview with Bill Cosby. Telling me that due to fog, all his flights had been cancelled and the earliest flight he could get was Sunday. :mad:
Please admire my restraint at not using Language to describe my feelings. I made it very clear that I wasn’t picking him up and, for all I cared, he could walk home. He arranged to have his cousin pick him up instead. And he’s still paying for my gas and a dinner at the local Awesome Mexican Place. He doesn’t know about the dinner yet, but that won’t be a hard sell because he hasn’t had any decent Mexican food in over a month.
So I was faced with a decision: do I say “hell with it” and go in to work today anyway? Or do I keep the day off? I was planning to take next Thursday off for my birthday, which I can’t in good conscience do now. So I, being in my right mind, decided to keep the day off and went to sleep. When I got up this morning, I realized how to make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear: pretend today is my birthday. So I declare today January 22. Next week we will have January 15. This works better for me because I get paid today and I can get that Harvey Birdman Wii game I’ve had my eye on.
Heck yeah! 
PM me and we can set up meetin’ places & such. Wierd doesn’t deter me; most of my friends are on the left side of sane on a good day.
(((((Kai)))))
(((Pie)))
That’s all I remember right now. More later. Must Work.
Yeah, I got offline here long enough to play a mind numbing couple of hours of jigzone. Everyone else in the house is asleep, my “job” is to watch over my loved ones. I’ll catch a few zzzz’z after getting the kids off to school and skiffman off on his way to Old Harbor to meet up with his skipper.
I did get promised some king crab, yay! This was after Cat’s stack caught fire. She put it out exactly the way BBBobio suggested, while simultaneously dealing with a rapidly rising flood in the “basement” (glorified crawl space) and a car which would not start. I am not certain what’s up with her car, but we have gone from temperatures in the low teens and below, with a lot of snow and ice, to temps in the 40’s, and water lines are popping all over town. She had a hose and a pump draining her crawlspace, courtesy of a mutual guy friend who lives across the street from her. Skiffman has a water pipe issue under the East Wing, but it’s just a matter of re-flanging a bit of copper tubing, he’s gonna wait until he’s home from crabbing so I don’t have to deal with keeping the water flowing.
We are in the eye of a storm, which has the weather guy predicting 90+ mph winds. Oh yeah, and snow.
Medicinal York Peppermint patties have helped me get through the night.
Still numb though, and not comfortably so. Here’s hoping for some good news from Anchorage today.
Anyone still watching The Deadliest Catch might be interested in the fact that the f/v Incentive is a Kodiak boat, with a Kodiak crew. Watch for Dougie, he’s a buddy of ours.
Big poofy blanket hug falls gently over the MMP!
Laterz, when I have an update.
You make most excellent lemonade, too. Oh, and
[INDENT]H A P P Y
P R E (T E N D)
B I R T H D A Y
S P A Z Z I E
!!![/INDENT]
Kai, your body is likely releasing a bunch of hormones from all this stress which will make you crave carbs. Try to get some protein in, if you can. Deadliest Catch is must see TV in our household. The new seasons air a bit later in Canada but we’ll definitely be watching. Here’s wishing the Incentive a good season ON THE CRAB! Hunker down and stay warm, Kai.
{{Pie}}
Nava, you must come to Toronto someday. We do get muggy hot days in the summer, but the weather is absolutely glorious in June and September, and usually good in April, May and October (though sometimes unpredictable).
Spaz, happy substitute birthday! Enjoy your day off… may I suggest that you celebrate by sleeping in, shuffling around the house in your PJs, eating cereal for lunch, and watching lots of bad TV (mostly because that’s how I’d like to spend today, but my boss seems to think “it’s too cold” isn’t a valid reason not to drag my sorry butt into the office) Also, CR deserves much wet trout action for his dumbass behaviour.
On that note, I guess I’ll go and get some work done. Blargh.
Can’t keep up. HRH suffering from severe post-vacation separation anxiety - hard to type with a toddler hugging your arm!
{{{kai}}}
{{{Pie}}}
I will dedicate the weekend (or rather, the time not already allocated to shopping, finding a housemaid and cuddling HRH) to uploading vacation pics and writing Monday’s OP.
I’m going to check out the local Indian restaurant’s lunch buffet and bum around the house. It’s a plan!
The flight plan fiasco isn’t CR’s fault (except the forgetting to tell me Thursday, but if I had read the itinerary more carefully I would have picked up on the change). As long as I get a free-to-me gas tank fill up I’ll be happy.
kai, I suggest crab as an excellent source of protein. And York peppermint patties are a wonderful medicine. Get all you can.
Happy (pretend) Birthday, Spaz!
And Happy 1st Birthday, Nat!!
{{{{kai}}}} I’m so sorry to hear about Lucy.
Hi, Dotty! Tell us all about your vacation when you can!
We woke up to frozen pipes this morning. Ugh. Fortunately, we caught them *before *they burst and KT thawed them out with the hair dryer. Whew!
I read on the American Gerbil Society’s website that you can put a cup or can into the gerbils’ tank and when they crawl in to explore, cover the end and get them out that way. So I did that and managed to get them both out between last night (Enthalpy) and this morning (Entropy). Once they were out, I got them in hand long enough to verify that they are indeed both girls. Whew on that front too! They both seemed to enjoy exploring the small couch we have in the office. I think they’ll take to the idea of being taken out of the tank pretty quickly. They do move WAY faster than the hamster though! We’re going to have to keep a very close eye on them. (I didn’t always do that with the hamster… after a couple months of watching him, we realized that he really wasn’t going to do anything. He just stumbled around the room a bit, stopping to groom every once in a while or attempting to dig in the carpet. That was it so it was pretty easy to let him out, go do some stuff and come back to find him more or less in the same general area. It probably helped that he was getting old by that point too. The girls though… I don’t think I’ll be able to let them out of my sight for a moment! Who knows what trouble they’d get into!) They really are fun though.
Okay, first…
HAPPY FIRST BIRFDAY TO GNAT!!!
AND HAPPY ADVANCE BIRFDAY TO SPAZ!!!
{{{{{{kai}}}}}, I am so sorry. I know sometimes it seems you mourn alone even when loved ones are all around. Take care of yourself.
::whimpy, whimpy, whimpy:: It is cold here. I don’t care what y’all say. It is cold. Not frigid. C.O.L.D. So there! ::whimpy, whimpy, whimpy::
Late yesterday afternoon our CFO called an all agency meeting to announce that “one” position had been eliminated. ::crickets:: WTF???
bobbio, that tip is just home-grown enough to remember forever. Bet local sheriff was all proud of himself after that.
Hang in there, pie. You’ll be glad you did.
Tupug
Thank you! I think he’s cute, too. He’s just gone to sleep, lamenting his Bad Mother. I’m about to put together dough for a bazillion loaves of egg bread and cinnamon buns, eat, and then read.
kai, hugs, good vibes, and prayers.
We just went to the library, and as a friend says, “Wow, there are a lot of Filipino women with blond kids around here.” I think I’m one of maybe five mothers I see regularly there. There are at least fifty nannies. So weird. And everyone squints at me to determine if I’m Filipino, and if it’s my kid. Sigh.
{{{Kai}}} When it rains it pours, doesn’t it? 
Crossing fingers for good news from the hospital.
{{{Pie}}} As suggested – can’t you work with the bank/creditors to extend your payment plan? It’s in everyone’s interest that you make money and pay your debts back, after all! Good luck, anyway.
Happy be-earlied birthday, Spaz!!
Boos, Yays, hugs, gropes and trouts to all and sundry as appropriate.
It’s Thursday evening in Tel Aviv – which means that my weekend hath commenced! (well, it will, as soon as I actually skip the joint here in about 20 minutes, anyway.)
D…d…d…at’s all, folks!
My team went out for Mexican for lunch. I’m fuuuuuuuull. ::burp::
I decided to go for a walk during my lunch hour to clear my head and stretch my legs… which is all well and good, but I also forgot that I was supposed to call into a meeting at 1pm and left the office at 12:30.
So guess who waltzed in at 1:45? :smack: Yeah. Good thing my attendance wasn’t required.
Note to self - check calendar. Daily. Possibly hourly.
Happy unbirthday Spaz!
Well, everything is clean and out of the apartment. I just have to turn in the keys.
I was hoping I was only going to have to take one trip from my parents to the dorms, but apparently I have a SHITLOAD of clothes. My backseat is full of nothing but clothes and blankets. My mom says I have more than she does - but it’s all stuff I wear. Yeah, maybe I could get rid of a couple of shirts…
So I start moving into the dorms tomorrow. I got emailed who my roommates are. I emailed them, so hopefully they don’t waste money buying a toaster and cleaning supplies and things like that.
… I have SO much stuff. I can’t believe it. We filled my dad’s truckbed (full-size 30yo Ford), although most of that is stuff I’m donating to the Ventura County Rescue Mission. And I have the pile of stuff at work.
Well, I suppose I should actually be working since I’m at work, so…
taxi, do you have a gerbil ball? (One of these?) It’s a lot better than letting them run around by themselves. They can’t get into Places They Shouldn’t Be in one of these. You may have to tape the top down when you put them in, I’ve had gerbils that can open them from the inside.
Thanks for all the pre-bday wishes. I got Mexican food instead of Indian, the new Harvey Birdman game for the Wii, and four books from the used bookstore. 
Now I chill for the rest of the day.
Happy Pre-Birthday Birthday, Spaz!!
Well, I have a job for another three or four weeks. My team is being split off from the group where we are now and merged with another group. My job functions will go to the other members of that team. The members of this team are. not. happy. about. this.
I better update my resume.
(((Mousie)))
Um, sorry can’t quite figure out fancy coding on this phone yet.
All the good mumper vibes must be helping. I’ve got 3 lunches for tomorrow so far. One was from a new client and one was from a long lost client that ran out of money early last year. She ordered this lunch and 2 others next week. Yes, God has a sense of humor, etc. I think this is my ongoing lesson in perserverance. Everything we want in life comes at a cost. It’s up to us to decide how bad we really want it. (/philosophizing).