Daily

• The tight sweater was NOT for my female boss. Remember I work with mostly guys? It was to keep their eyes off my cold sores. I believe it worked.


• There's a temporary project manager sitting in my aisle at work. Holy smokes, she has the MOST grating voice of anyone I've ever heard. Super high pitched, talks in baby talk and talks ALL.THE.TIME. Everyone in my aisle are now wearing headphones and doing our best to ignore her. Bless her heart. Meow.


• I'm testing out lots of low-fat sugar free ice cream recipes. Tonight I made chocolate, using almond milk, chocolate SF pudding, 2 scoops of protein. I added something interesting to make it 'almost' like my beloved Dreyers fully loaded chocolate peanut butter cup ice cream. I mixed peanut butter with splenda and spread it thin on a plate and stuck it in the freezer. It froze quite nicely, so I broke it up and threw it in the "ice cream" (hardly can call it ice cream, right?) That peanut butter mixture was a most excellent idea.


• The spider bite isn't fully healed yet. I'm going to end up with a bit of a hole in my leg. I'll spare you the pictures. The bruising is almost gone, and it doesn't really hurt much- so I think I've passed the worst of it.


• Cameron and Kathy just moved into a new place and got a new washer and dryer. Kathy emailed me today to tell me that the washer and dryer arrived yesterday and Cameron was in 'heaven' doing laundry. Yup, he's a chip off the old block. He's as serious about his laundry as I am. He does his mommy proud.


• Tomorrow I'm going to be VERY VERY thankful that we have central air. Seems silly in Seattle(ish), but I'll bet we sleep better than those without it. It's supposed to get over 100 degrees tomorrow. YUCK and ICK. This old gal doesn't dig hot weather.


• I'm looking forward to a quiet weekend. I went grocery shopping after work tonight in hopes that I don't need to leave my house. I need to finish editing the wedding pictures and get them out to the kids before they celebrate their 25th anniversary.


• Next week's gonna be an interesting one at work. I'm tired of typing, so I guess you'll just have to wait to find out.

I hope not.

The power went out yesterday for a couple of hours. This is not a good thing when you telecommute, as you can imagine; especially when your husband (who will remain nameless) forgets to put the battery in the generator. Sure, I could probably figure out how to do that but I have a habit of doing awful things to myself like electrocution, almost losing limbs with power tools and things like that. I just wasn't in the mood to test that out.

Anyhoo- one thing I didn't think about with the power outage was my alarm radio. I rolled over this morning to look at the clock wondering how much time I had left and EEEEK! Seems that the volume was reset to zero, so I woke up with quite a start. It was 20 minutes after the time I'm supposed to get up. That got my adrenaline going in overdrive.

I knew that there was NO way I'd be able to make up that 20 minutes and make it to the train station on time. I have everything timed to perfection when I"m getting ready in the morning- no dilly dallying built into the schedule. Up at 4:40, take a shower, wash my hair, wash my face and brush my teeth. I'm out the door at 5:20 in perfectly coiffed hair and makeup to perfection (only to be smudged and smeared by the end of the day, of course). Most of that time is spent on my hair, by the way. Really it's a miracle I look presentable with the amount of time I give myself.

ANYHOO.... my face felt funny so, before my shower I looked in the mirror. To my dismay, I have a nice grouping of cold sores taking over my face. Not on my mouth, mind you. On my chin. It's just down-right ugly and right now the little colony is slightly smaller than a quarter.

LOVELY!

I'd considered calling my boss to tell her that I was going to work from home out of vanity, but decided that I already had an extra day at home last week due to the spider bite so I didn't want to push it.

I cowboy'd up and drove in to work this morning, herpes face and all. Traffic was better than I'd ever seen it and I was sitting in my office chair at 6:15. Wow. I really made record time (so there was a plus this morning.)

Last time I had herpes face, my boss told me that it was distracting. Hmmmmph. So, I paid extra attention to my hair and makeup and wore a form fitting thin sweater in hopes that all of that would detract from my face. I'll let you know how that goes.

Meh and Feh.

I learned something new the other day. In the deer population, the boys and girls don't hang out together except for 'special' occasions. 'Special' being the type that produces the cute little fawns.

I've lived here for about three years now and have only seen does and fawns. I knew there had to be a stag or two out there, otherwise we wouldn't see the fawns.

See? I'm smart like that.

I'm so MAD that I don't carry my camera with me at all times, especially yesterday when BJ and I drove off to get his throat checked ('nuther story for another day). There they were... two BEAUTIFUL stags with the most beautiful antlers I've ever seen- alive, anyway. In MY neighborhood. Three years and I haven't seen them.

There were no does anywhere around- just the stags.

So, now I know. To find stags you need to go where the does don't go. That's a good lesson to my single friends too.

I kept my poor husband up all night last night, poor guy. I was apparently having a very active night last night, and I blame that on gardening. I had a feeling it would be a bad night because the jerking around got pretty severe while we were watching TV. I can't begin to tell you how annoying that is.

It seems that any time I stress my self (body or mind) my body or mind pays for it. I gardened yesterday, and I guess that was enough to make me jerk pretty bad all night. I guess that all the jerking also woke me up enough to do some wandering around the bedroom. I was completely unaware of it, of course, which is bad.

Apparently BJ tried to head me off at the pass a few times, by sitting at the stairs; blocking me so I couldn't go downstairs. He didn't want to wake me up unless I started heading down the stairs. Sometimes my wandering around would take a long time, so he laid down in the guest bedroom closest to the stairs hoping he'd hear me if I headed toward the stairs.

I feel so bad for him when I do this, because he really needs his sleep and I'm keeping him from it. I finally was awake enough at 4am where I knew what I was doing, so he let me go downstairs by myself so he could get to sleep.

We decided that tonight, we're going to sleep with the bedroom door closed because it makes a lot of noise when you open it. I'm thinking that maybe we should put a bell or something on the door too. That way, I can wander around the bedroom and bathroom all I want and never wake up BJ unless he hears the bell.

How completely LAME is that? Oh well, I know that it could be a LOT worse, and that's what I keep in mind.

I've had REALLY sore biceps the past two days and now I know why. BJ caught me doing something like push ups, in addition to the 'fake tv watching'. He also caught me laying on my back with my arms straight up in the air, like I was reaching out for something.

I'm just weird. I hope that at the very least, I get some good muscle definition out of this.

Oh hey- I just remembered that it's weigh day. Hang on, I'll be right back....

Alrighty then... I'm down exactly 5 lbs since last Monday, but I lost the first four in the first three days. I'll take it.

The company I work for is REALLY pushing the green concept, which is great. In the kitchen on each floor, you'll find:
1. Paper recycle bin
2. Glass recycle bin
3. Aluminum cans recycle bin
4. Compost bin
5. "Mixed paper" recycle bin
6. Regular ol' trash bin.

That's a lot of bins. In addition to the bins in the kitchen, there are recycle bins for paper, mixed paper, and garbage just about every where you turn on the floor.

Yesterday, a company-wide email went out saying that we're going to the next level of green by phasing out disposable cups, plates, napkins, and utensils.

About five minutes after receiving the email, Favorite Co-Worker (FCW) sent me this:

As additional efforts to improve "green" we are eliminating, pens, pencils, paper and markers. We have made special arrangements with [large office supply chain] for [my company's name] employees to purchase and bring to work whatever supplies they need. Easy Buttons ™ will be at the employee expense. Other steps will be to reduce electricity consumption by cycling AC on every other floor in four hour cycles.

I wrote back telling him that taking away the paper cups worked out great because I was finally able to get rid of the rest of the coffee mugs that I designed and purchased for a summit of 200 people. The summit never happened, and so I've had boxes and boxes of cups taunting me daily. I created a "go green, have a free cup" (I'm paraphrasing) sign and disbursed the cups over four floors.

As usual, FCW and I took the idea and totally corrupted it. Here's the rest of the thread:

FCW: I wonder if we could do that with other stuff. We could take stuff out of cubes, dump it in a box and say - don't buy new, recycle!!! Give a home to this great stapler/paperclip/pen.

Me: I wonder if we can recycle employees that we don’t like? Now THAT would be great! I just don’t know how we’d get them in a box without HR getting all huffy about it.

FCW: That part is easy, just don't use one. Send an email to everyone except the employee you want to recycle telling them that "Gustav" is available for recycling to other areas of the company, give them the floor and cube location. People will wander and check out "Gustav" and he won't know what is going on.

Me: Good plan. Maybe we should also put a sign on "Gustav's" back. You know, in case he's wandered off. We wouldn't want to miss out on opportunities to recycle "Gustav".

By the way, there is no "Gustav" in our department. We weren't picking on anybody in particular, although I do have to admit that I had the Grinch's image in my head as I was writing about putting a co-worker into a recycle box.