Last Wednesday, as I was ill and dazed from my intake of Dayquil, something important happened: The first Challenge was issued in the Amateur Gourmet Survivor competition.
I was driven out of my lethargy and whinery by adrenaline. In a few short, post-work hours, I visited Bed Bath & Beyond; Home Appliance; Uneeda, the butcher around the corner; Pickwick Liquor; the local library; Emile's Candy; Pizzaiola; Starbucks; and, of course, many others I now forgot. I had an astoundingly fun time, worth the price of entry even if I didn't make it in.
I had my photos done by 11pm, with my entry due by midnight on Wednesday. I could post a day later and lose some points, but I also knew that Thursday would be spent by yours truly in the Garden State, and I don't mean at the movies, either. Wednesday was do or die, for me.
Unfortunately, the digital camera battery gave out at around 10, so the last handful of photos were on my phone. I selected them all in the phone, and clicked "Upload." And waited. And waited. And got... an error. I did it again. And again. I hit resend enough to risk the dreaded "Pac-Man Thumb," to no avail. At 11:30, I called Sprint technical support, who told me in a really friendly and helpful fashion that the error I was reporting did not, apparently, really exist.
One photo got through, slowly. Then the error. Another photo made it up.. The tension in the air was thick enough to cut with a mandoline. Preferably one featuring safety rails.
At 11:50, my upload finally completed. I scrambled to import the pictures into Snapfish. Some of them did not import quite correctly, as you can see in the album. With minutes to spare before losing a potentially-crucial ten points, I posted.
Today, the Amateur Gourmet tallied up our marks, and...
I'M IN!!!!! I'm so excited. This is going to be the most fun thing I've done for Internet glory in, well... around three years....
My kitchen is: Not fit to be thoroughly photographed, that's for sure! I tried ti do some serious cleaning and didn't have the strength, today, but hopefully tomorrow I'll be back to myself.
Sasha has had an oopsie today at daycare. Apparently, she was climbing into her seat at the table to play with the Blue's Clues clingies, and fell. So she hit her eye, she has a couple of tiny scratches on her eyelids, probably she'll get a righteous shiner, and she's home with me the rest of the afternoon.
One of the really wonderful things about our daycare provider: She's a terrific worrier. She immediately called me and asked if I could come take a look at Sasha, and maybe bring her to the doctor, just in case, well, you know.
I arrived to find a happy Sasha, eager to tell me about her misadventure. At the mention of doctors, she flew into the same kind of fury-driven panic as though I had told her no more Elmo for the rest of the day. And honestly, she seems fine, so I called the pediatrician (just to be on the safe side) and she concurred that some ice was all we really needed.
However, having darkened the door at daycare, it was no longer possible for me to go home alone. Fortunately for me, there is now a nap going on.
Sasha has been climbing more and more lately, so I'm sure this is just a tiny sample taste of the joys I can expect as the year progresses. The number of scratches and bruises Sasha sports at any one time now has been growing at a respectable clip.
My kitchen is: Smelling very strongly of garlic-butter. Which was nice last night, but now I really wish it would stop.
Earlier this week, I went to my employer's home to do some preliminary work for a project we're doing on the Left Coast next week. While there, I had to make use of the facilities, because, well, that happens when you chug Diet Coke all day like they announced they stopped making it.
I wandered into the bathroom, closed the door, and lifted the lid to the toilet. The lid went FLYING and *CRASH clattered to the floor. "Ouch," I said, although the injury was more psychic than physical.
My boss was in the next room over, and heard the whole thing. I walked out and explained to him that I had, er, broken his toilet. Here we commence the laughing. The laughing continued for some time.
He was able to fix it with just a small amount of effort... and then asked if he could tell my co-worker downstairs.
"Sure," I shrugged. Why should I mind?
But... then he mentioned later about telling the story to one of my customers... which means he'll tell it to ALL of my customers...
Oh, the indignity. Remind me next time to cool it on the soda.
My kitchen is: Very bad, as these things go. I simply haven't had the internal reserves to draw on for cleaning up this week. I don't suppose any of you wants to come over and clean my house?
So yesterday, Sasha put in a request for me to grow a third breast.
Let me preface this by saying that Sasha has always been an enthusiastic nursing baby. Many of you are familiar with this aspect of her personality. Even now, habit dies hard, and she finds it very comforting to stick her hands down my shirt. I never expected to feel so assaulted by my own brazen, octopus-like child.
Yesterday, Sasha spent the day at home with me, suffering from a little cold. Sometime midway through the day, I decided it was high time for a Nap. We provisioned ourselves well with a big bottle of soy milk and a half a dozen or so stuffed animals, and marched upstairs to settle down into naptime.
Sasha sprawled on me, as is her way, and decided to count my breasts as a soothing pre-nap activity. She does love to count things. "One... two," she said.
I nodded. "Two."
"THREE FOUR FIVE!" she added, with gusto.
"No, honey, just two. Now go to sleep."
She took her bottle from her mouth and pouted. "I want three," she said. Cue tantrum here.
"..." said I.
My kitchen is: A little untidy, yet. The cold got to me today. In mere moments the weight of Nyquil will render me incapable of typing, so what makes you think I'm doing any housekeeping?
My back-door neighbors have, for the last few days, been slowly but surely dismantling their fence between our yards. Their fence was no great shakes, mind you, but it was tall and opaque. The fence on our side is a sad, short, and completely transparent chain-link affair.
This concerns me.
For one thing, their yard is not very attractive. They have no grass. Instead, they have white gravel, and a vast expanse of brick-paved patio. The mere foot between our yards could just as well be the a yawning gulf between Earth and a rocky, bricky planet, such as Mercury. Or maybe Mars, Mars is redder.
As their fence comes down, slowly, a few boards at a time, I find myself fending off some significant anxiety about my growing loss of privacy. When I work at my desk, which is all day and many evenings, that fence is always in my peripheral vision, protecting me. Without it, I can never feel completely comfortable. Any little thing I do could be observed.
Is it still safe to pick my teeth? Or wear my pajamas all day? Will these neighbors be judging me based on how poorly I take care of my fish, now that this information is available to them? Can I confidently play in the kiddie pool without fear of blinding an innocent stranger with the glare from my pallid white skin?
It may be that they are planning on putting up a newer, better fence. This would be tragic in its own way, because it would make our remaining fences look even sadder and more pathetic than they already had.
My kitchen is: Not bad, not bad. It got the complete spit & polish on Monday, as we had a guest over, and it takes at least a week for entropy to really set back in again...
Not far, now, my little Smurfs.
Yeah, sorry 'bout that. Things are a little ugly in here now. You'll ust have to deal, because I'm having some problems working out my moblog situation.
Let's summarize: The first posting method I found involved making a procmail recipe to filter pictures I email to myself from my phone through a perl script. This seemed like a lot of work, so I looked for a better (read: lazier) way.
I found a variety of third-party services that would do the hard part for you, and automatically post to your moblog. Of these, the first one couldn't extract the photo from Sprint's picture mail format. (They send a URL, not an attachment. Suck.)
The second one could extract and post the picture, but it kept the pic on their own server AND required text in the body of the post... as well as appending a big ol' sig promoting themselves. This would be OK, except that it looks really awful in my sidebar. I toyed with finding code to strip out the extra text, but decided that would be, uh, too much... work. Do you see a trend here?
The third service I tried, after a bit of tweaking, could actually post the picture! No caption required! And it added a tasteful linkback to its own home page, but nothing outrageous. The only problem? Couldn't get these photos to show up in my sdebar at all, because they used some weird relational pathing in the img src tag. Suck.
So I'm back to gool ol' procmail and a script. This way, I don't have to give anyone a byline after every photo! I found a perl script that allegedly snags the photo from Sprint and uploads it! Except I can't actually get it to, well, work. Permissions, disappearng scripts, addled procmail recipes... I think my latest problem is corruption of the ^M characters from briefly residing on a Windows machine. But I will overcome!
My kitchen is: Do you really even have to ask? I mean, come on, you KNOW what I've been doing all day!
...please try again later.
I'm trying to get a moblog going, and more particularly, a sidebar to it here. Things could get a little ugly for a while. Sorry.
But hey, when it's all done, it's going to be way easier for me to post pictures, and you all want that, right? Right?
Yeah, I know, I didn't post for weeks on end.
It was an exciting few weeks, filled with air travel, a 30th birthday (mine!), and more 15-hour workdays than you can shake a stick at. Mind you, I make no representation of your stick-shaking skill. I'm just saying.
So far, being 30 is pretty good to me. I'm at a stage in my life where I'm finally breaking free of some of the shackles of my military upbringing. Like, I don't need a superior officer to give me permission to do stuff. I can just... decide! All on my own! And then go do it! And it's OK!
This is combined with the realization that doing things exactly the right way is nowhere near as crucial as doing them at all. Housework, exercise, writing, or anything, really. Perfectionism and excruciating planning aren't good allies.
And so I've begun DOING a lot of things. I've got a lot of fun personal projects cooking, and if I don't keep them all from boiling over, well, I haven't set the kitchen on fire, yet, either. (How's THAT for stretching a metaphor? Take THAT, Strunk & White!)
My kitchen is: Dark and lightningy. Also there is coffee sitting on the burner, so I'm going to go drink some.