It’s 40F, dark and cloudy outside. There will be some light rain this morning and then we’re supposed to drift to partly cloudy skies by this afternoon and a high temp of 45F.
I laughed. Congrats on the job! That’s really great news!
I have never understood the draw where you go to a restaurant to cook your own food. When I go out to eat, it’s because I don’t want to cook or clean up the mess.
boofae, you sound like a really good boss! Good for you for looking out for your employees’ well-being.
I finished the little policy and sent it off to my boss and the SD, but I didn’t hear back from either one of them. On the other hand, my boss had to get on the road to visit another office, and my SD was busy catching up after being in DC earlier in the week. They’ll get to it in their own good time, I guess. If I don’t see some response by Monday, I’ll ping them both again. Normally, I’d just write and send the thing myself, but my boss wanted some input, so okay, I’ll let him do his thing. It just holds things up in my opinion, but whatever.
The pups were up and stirring around 3:30 this morning, so I got up, let them out to potty and brought them back in. I made my coffee, read some of the news, and heard them scratching around in one of their kennels, so I let them out again, and this time Buster took care of number two as well. They’re nice and quiet now, so hopefully, they’ll nap until first feeding time and I can get a shower in.
I’ve got a busy morning: Amazon Go store to return an item; haircut; PetSmart to return two items, Lowes or HomeDepot to get a combo kitchen garbage/recycle can; Costco for more dog food; and Jersey Mike’s for sandwiches to bring home. Seems like there is supposed to be another stop in there, but I’ve forgotten what it is. I’ll probably remember later.
shady, I hope you get your glasses sorted.
I will get that tree up this weekend. I’ll just bring down some of the panels from the pen upstairs and surround the tree. I think I’ll skip the village though. I hope to get a start on the tree tonight, but we’ll see. It’s hard to decorate when you have pups that want to play and they think everything, including your feet and legs are playthings. I’m working on the feet and legs thing, but they’re pups and sometimes forget.
Alrighty, need to finish my coffee and get on with the day. My best to all of you.
Good morning all. I will be AFK for a while. Wednesday afternoon I had some chest pain and went to the ER. The did some tests and admitted to me. Yesterday they did more tests and decided that I needed a heart catheterization.
The results were not positive I have been admitted and I am waiting for a date for open heart surgery
Morning all. Slept to almost 8am, combination of tired and wrapped up in a nice warm heavy comforter. Decided I am going out to break fast today, probably the Sunny Side Cafe, then over to Best Buy for a new power cord for my laptop (so the old one will probably re-appear once I return home). Outside of swimming this afternoon nothing much on the agenda. 42F right now and heading to 65F, tomorrow is supposed to be near 70F, which is pretty good for December, even in N. Ali-bama.
Taters, thanks for the reminder, I haven’t had a haircut in several months (of course, I haven’t all that much hair, either), so might include the clip joint in my morning travel. Have a good day hitting the stores.
FCM, there were a few places I would drive a distance for to get a meal, but not 100+ miles!
boo fae, glad travel went well-there is a certain sense of well-being when that happens. My most ambitious one this year was flying direct from my vacation in February to Antarctica, from the boat I had to make five flights in a row from five different airports, get driven from one airport to another in Buenos Aires, clear Customs in the USA, and have all the flights arrive/depart on-time…and wonder of wonders, it all worked as planned. Glad the trains co-operated with you; are the strikes over with for the time being?
OK, those pancakes and bacon with Orange Juice aren’t going to get eaten unless I get moving. All y’all have a good Firday.
hippie sorry to hear about your health woes, thinking very positive thoughts for you and for a speedy recovery.
metal mouse there are still strikes going on although the RMT union (train staff, conductors, managers etc) have reached agreement on last year’s pay claim. ASLEF (drivers) haven’t reached any agreement yet. RMT have said they need to start negotiations on this year’s pay deal next so I expect more strikes to come from that! ASLEF still have ongoing strikes but since they are dealing with up to 14 different train operators, they’re targeting different operators on different days. And all the unions still have overtime bans in place. At the moment, none of it is affecting me and I only have four more days on campus this year so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Well done on the Antarctica trip though, that is some serendipitous travel!
G’morning, kids! Thank y’all for the congratulations, I’m very excited and still can’t quite believe it’s real… Haven’t signed an offer letter yet, so I’m still kinda expecting the rug to be pulled out from under me.
Actually, maybe y’all will have some perspective on this… I’ve never negotiated a salary before? So my contact, Drew, is the Assistant Director of this library system (and is the person who previously held my new position.) He’s not HR. When he emailed me the position details Wednesday, he said: “The salary range runs from this-to-that. If you wanted to suggest a salary above the bottom of the range that would be entirely understandable.”
Then yesterday on the phone he reiterated the above and then said: “We’re very flexible with negotiating compensation for senior management.”
So like… He’s basically just telling me to ask for more money, right? He said to send in an email with my numbers. So I asked for the middle of the range and also for an up-front 8k to help me relocate. That was about 10:30 am and I didn’t hear back yesterday. I’m choosing to interpret this as a good thing, because… “No” is a fast and easy answer to get, right? Like, if he took my thing to HR and they just said “impossible, can’t do” then I probably would have heard back quickly? If it’s taking time, maybe that means they’re working to get approval for it… I don’t know how any of this works!
Anyhow, that’s where I’m at today. Fretting and waiting to hear back.
I’m very sorry to hear about the hospitalization hippie, I hope all goes well and you’re back with us soon.
Well, then. Here’s what I did. I minced the turkey breast meat with a 6-inch chef’s knife. In the meantime, I finely-chopped a bit of yellow onion and sautéd them in a bit of olive oil. I added the meat and mixed it up. Then I added some McCormick taco seasoning and some water, then let it simmer until the water was reduced. I warmed up some Carb Balance Whole Wheat tortillas and rolled up the meat mixture and some shredded Tillamook Medium Cheddar and fried them in corn oil. Mrs. L.A. dipped hers in sour cream, and I dipped mine in a mixture of sour cream and spicy taco sauce.
In years past, I’d mince, season, and simmer turkey meat (no cheese) and roll it up in corn tortillas to make turkey taquitos (or ‘turkitos’, as I called them) and store them in a zip-top bag in the freezer. Then we could pull a couple/few out whenever we wanted and fried them in oil and eat them with green taco sauce. I prefer taquitos to flautas, but the supermarket doesn’t sell low-carb corn tortillas.
Going to be a slow one today. The wife has an appointment later to address her skin rash (again). I’m urging her to get a dermo referral, but she’s stubborn.
Other than that, it’s just exercise session; and I have to mount the wife’s new hair dryer on the wall, as the other one crapped out yesterday.
Hippie, take care and we’ll all be thinking about you. Hope the surgery goes well and you’ll be back reporting to us soon.
Niner, I think your asking was probably a good thing, along with the up-front moving costs. If you know what your bottom-line is (how many $$ you’re going to need to make a good life for yourself there), then asking for more is a pretty good idea, if you get it hooray, if not, it’s still a good wage and you can increase it by good performance.
Of course I may be wrong, I worked for the US Government and you don’t negotiate a wage with them, you get what everyone in that grade/level gets.
boo fae, we don’t seem to have that many strikes, especially for transportation issues, anymore (or I just don’t notice them). Keep on rolling along.
No haircut, the place I go to has shortened their hours drastically and didn’t open until 10am (got there at 9:40am), so may have to try another place sometime (can go quite awhile without a haircut). The pancakes were good, they only serve two, but both take up the whole plate, so I;m pretty well stuffed.
Bagels were sort of a bust. The location is the actual bakery, and there’s no storefront. Missed the fine print that I should have ordered 2 days in advance.
However, it smelled good, and I’ll be ordering bagels to be shipped here.
That said, the bagel bakery is in a former factory, that is now being used for start-ups. In addition to the bakery, there’s a coffee roastery, fudge place, etc. And there’s a little shop that sells a lot of the products. So we have 2 different bags of small batch roasted coffee, a post card of the place and coffee fudge. So we still found something to buy.
And then the Christmas market. We bought anise cookies (I resisted the temptation to buy more molds), chocolates from two different stores, fingerless gloves (offices are cooler, due to cost savings and hubby’s been complaining his hands get cold), eclairs, a Nideltörtli, and a piece of Schlesischer Mohnstriezel (something similar to poppyseed stollen, but so much better).
Except for the Mohnstreizel which is made in Germany, everything was made in Switzerland.
We then stopped at the pseudo-Mexican restaurant for ribs, Casear salad, a Nada Colada (pina colada without alcohol) and a Cinnamon Apple tequila. Not fancy cuisine, but we enjoyed it anyway.
One bowl recipe, recommended by Moooom? Yep, printed. Might make it tomorrow. Freezer’s getting a bit empty, and I prefer to have some baked goods for when I don’t have time to bake something fresh.
Wow. She sounds like a good person to have on your team. When’s the big day?
Hippie, I hope all goes well with the surgery.
This morning we also had French toast. The recipe is from Cook’s Illustrated, but we use Pandoro, which is from Italy. When we lived in NJ, I would get challah, but that’s not easy find here. Sometimes I can find brioche bread, but Pandoro’s easy to find around Christmas and Easter.
I know I missed a lot of people, so hugs to those who need them.
Congrats niner! I did a one year gig at an academic medical library, but academia is not my thing. Good for you for asking for relocation $. Moving isn’t cheap. Let us know what they say.
Today is a gorgeous day in no. Illinois. Sunny, breezy, lower 50s. A perfect autumn day cuz it’s still autumn. Going out to lunch then home to start Christmas cards.
Many positive thoughts on the way. Heart surgery has come a long way and is pretty routine to everyone except the patient. I hope everything goes well.
We stopped by BIL’s place to get some documents so I can set up his rent on auto-pay. He informed us he’s not taking his meds. I predict he’ll be thrown out of the apartment in less than 6 months unless his social worker can talk sense into him. He told us flat out he doesn’t trust those guys with the medical degrees… But FCD has washed his hands of him, and I can’t blame him. Still, I’m setting up the rent account for the interiim. Maybe the social worker is a miracle worker.
I made some egg salad - tomorrow we’ll all gather here for lunch, then drive to Kent Island. Eating out would be too $$$ for 7 of us - especially over there. So this works out. Besides the egg salad, we’ll have ham, turkey, and cheese for sammiches, and chips on the side. Not a bad lunch.
Meanwhile, I have a little time to kill before we have to pick up MIL and TX SIL to go to the light display.
Hi all, mid-afternoon as I poke into the MMP for the first time today. A bit gray, and 70-something out there. After too much party yesterday I slept ~10 hours and have been a contented lazybones ever since. Don’t feel bad, just have little ambition.
This evening we have an individual dance lesson and then a group lesson but otherwise the day has been, and shall continue to be, dedicated to doing my best swampy imitation of enlightened slothfulness.
Once I get this missive on the wire it’s off to mini-groc.
My late first wife did take my last name. Mostly because although mine is no picnic, hers was worse. My new wife has kept her birth name when we married. In fact she switched back to it after her divorce, having taken her first husband’s last name when she got married the first time. And no pushback from me on any of those decisions.
First Wife’s Mom was born in the 1920s but aspired to the social attitudes of the upper crust from the 1880s; she’d have loved to have been a Vanderbilt shaking her pince-nez at all and sundry.
Not long after first wife and I were married, she received a hand-written letter from her Mom. Addressed to Mrs. HubsFirstName HubsLastName. Mom’s sentiments are full of gushing support for daughter’s new life. Mom was overjoyed to have her daughter be married: the aspirational dream of every woman everywhere.
My wife’s wry comment:
Not only has Mom discounted my JD and my career to nothing, my own mother has reduced my separate existence as a human to a single “s”. In an abbreviation no less.
Wife was genuinely pissed, but understood that sort of antique thoughtlessness just came with the territory.
I suppose Christmas sweaters have always been sort of silly, gaily decorated in ways that the typical winter sweaters in blah shades of grays and browns are not. At some point some comedian poked fun at them as ugly, and the idea took off with the young and irreverent set. I think “Garish Christmas Sweater contest” might be a less pejoratively judgy name.
Way back when Western style shirts were in style for non-cowboys, and were often brightly colored prints I won an ugly shirt contest at a bar. I hadn’t intended to and wasn’t exactly happy about it either. Mortified more like in my less-confident (read “highly self-conscious”) youth. Comics gotta pillory something and that night was my night. Bastards.
For reasons of fire containment, other than the elevator shafts and escape stairs, there is no route for air to travel from one floor to another. And those are carefully walled off from the rest of the building and have heavy doors to prevent airflow. So e.g. the warm air on the ground floor may be hugging the ceiling of a first floor apartment and thereby slightly warming the second floor apartment’s floor, but the cool air in the second floor apartment above is also hugging their floor and offsetting that. And so on all the way to the topmost floor, be that 3 or 10 or 27. Each apartment is warmer at the top than it is at the bottom, but there’s no accumulation as you go higher in the building.
What is a real effect is that unlike a free-standing box-shaped house where 5 faces (4 walls plus roof) touch the outside air and the 6th face touches the always-cool ground, 5 of the 6 faces on my box-shaped apartment touch either other apartments above, below, or on the sides, or the building interior hallway at the rear. All 5 of which are maintained at ordinary room temperatures by the various HVAC systems and thermostats in each apartment and in the hallways. Only the front face of my apartment faces out to the outside world.
With the result that unlike e.g. your house which has lots of surface area exposed to the outside temps for rather little interior volume, I may have the same interior volume but only maybe 5-10% as much surface area exposed to the outside air as you do. So neither heat nor cold outdoors has as big an effect. Given the heat coming from lamps and appliances and people, air conditioning is often the bigger need even during nominally cool outside temps.
Here’s hoping! It’s so nice when it works, and so consternating when it doesn’t.
Oh shit! Not good news at all. Certainly better news here in 2023 than 50 years ago, and there’s no reason to expect anything other than a good result and a recovery to improved versus your status today. But still that’s quite a PITA you’ve suddenly inherited. Best of luck and if we can help somehow …
I think you’ve done the right thing and are reading the tea leaves rightly.
If they’re calling you “senior management” already, then even if they’re not quite willing to pay everything you asked, they aren’t going to come back with “Nope, you’ve overplayed your hand. Our offer is withdrawn! Screw you!”
Instead there’d be a counter like “OK, we can do the salary but for [reasons] we can’t swing more than 6K for relocation. How’s that for you? Can we make it up to you with a better medical plan or a higher percentage match in the 401K?” etc.
Sounds totally yum! Nicely done!
As I’d mentioned a couple weeks ago, turkey chimichangas are a family tradition with Her Ladyship & her offspring. We now have all the fixins here, and Daughter has all the T-Day turkey frozen at her house. We’d have gotten together earlier this week to make them had Daughter’s two new kids not arrived to stir everything up. Perhaps this Sunday we can make it happen.
A dermo is about the easiest doc there is to get along with. Weird rashes are not funny when you’re old. Best of luck getting her to do the smart thing.
So not the success you had hoped for, but a different success instead. All the best adventures include that. The rest of your purchases & meals sound positively wonderful!
Oh Mooom!! You (and FCD) don’t deserve this. But congrats on you all getting to the place of “We’ll do our part, and we’re indifferent on whether BIL does his part or not.” It’s a sad place, but is much better than “It’s all my fault I’m not doing enough for BIL to succeed” which is a much worse place for everyone.
Last night I kept dreaming that someone at school stole my purse. I was frantic and kept telling people it was a beige purse. (I do not own a beige purse.) While I was looking for it, Abe Lincoln died. He’d be 214, so I guess he had a long, full life. No info on whether he was killed by a decrepit John Wilkes Booth.
Hippie, I’m sorry to learn about your heart issues. I’m praying for you. (I hope you’re OK with that. If you’re an atheist, just consider it sending thoughts.)
Niner, it sounds like they expected you to ask for a salary at the top end of the range. That being the case, they should happily pay moving expenses. And another YAY, just because I’m still so happy for you.
Oh, dear. Not a surprise, but still pretty sad. What happens if he gets ejected from the apartment? I mean, where would he live? What does he want his life to be like, given that he’ll always have to contend with his conditions?
Also, sorry if I missed some updates, but how is your mom now? And how is MIL?
Thank you so much, but if you partied until I was cute, you’d need a twelve step program afterward.
Lunch, dinner, or both thus far has been packaged noodle soup, improved with fresh vegetables and more miso. This is a writing retreat week, but this is a scheduled break, possibly to be followed by a walk. I’m not sure, though, since although it’s not raining, I’m stuck on a section I’d really like to get drafted before I go to sleep tonight.
well for some people it is an opportunity to cook using fancy stuff you can’t afford or wouldn’t use every day or just cant be recreated at home and you still have staff doing the really boring stuff like chopping and such
