Spinning on that dizzy edge

I make so many imaginary posts in my head that sometimes I lose track of what I've actually written here, and what's gone to the internal slush pile.

Things I did not mention: ( new job, new salary, same company, current stasis )

While that's going on, I'm still in WTF land with my body. ( Still no period or news )

I think this much whine needs some wine. Later, gators!

...where by "outer space" I mean the vacuous cloud of nothing between my ears.

I was just thinking back to last year, where I was navigating between a bunch of story commitments, and planning Christmas shenanigans, and not having my cabana boy at home, and dealing with the Emperor's hard transition in school.

Now, I defaulted on the only story I've been interested in writing, my husband is home again (did I mention he got laid off a few months back? Yeah. Good times. In the good news/bad news vein, he's making almost as much from unemployment as he did at his job, which points out how grossly underpaid he was) and back to being my alternately surly/smiley cabana boy, and the Emperor is bored with daycare but not in active danger of being kicked out.

At least the Christmas shopping is almost finished. Oh! And the Space Battle Tree is all done, so we can pose the Emperor by it and get this year's holiday card knocked out.

Since I turned 36 this year, which is rather an arbitrary age except that it means I've been out of high school for as many years as my age when I graduated, I decided I really need to start taking better care of myself. I did my doctor visit for a full check-up, got mildly reproved for my cholesterol levels, and was referred to a dermatologist and the sleep clinic for other questions.

So this past weekend I did my sleep study and proved to their satisfaction that I have severe sleep apnea. (I might post my Frankenstein's monster pic of me all wired up.) Let me just say that calling it a sleep clinic is kinda like the misnomer of a speed zone - there was a minimum amount of sleeping involved. Anyways, I'm now waiting for my very own CPAP machine, and hopefully many restful nights will follow.

In other news, Creation is trying to kill me. I have no other explanation for why they scheduled David Hewlett, Joe Flanigan, Jason Momoa, and Rachel Luttrell all for the Vancouver con, and me with the not being able to go. (My TEAM!) I swear, if David Hewlett hadn't agreed to attend the Chicago one next August, I'd be really tempted to go postal. I shall clutch my receipt for my Gold ticket (SQUEEEE) and wait and hope that they add more non-Universe people.

I have been utter crap at following people on DW and LJ. My stalker lists (where I get things emailed so as to avoid the awkward friending dance) are beyond full, and I have no hope of ever catching up on my actual flist. My abject apologies for missing any huge life news and/or chiming in beyond late to your posts. Meanwhile, as a personal challenge to myself, I'm going to try to post more than once a month. Dammit.

No joke, I brought an entire grocery bag full of Trader Joe's snacks to work a few weeks back. Now I've got the munchies and I don't want any of them. The apple and orange sitting on my desk look equally unappealing. Stupid afternoon snack attacks.

I love Wikipedia in all its timewasting allure. Today's featured article on Gropecunt Lane was no exception. Zod bless the zany yet practical street naming schemes of the Middle Ages.

Cafeteria. Cow-orker. With the insidious political presumptions. ( Can we quit it with the socialism mudslinging? )

I'm up to thirteen entries in my fic list. I'm not normally triskaidekaphobic, but leaving it sitting at that number is making me slightly uneasy. Now I have an Star Trek crack!fic and RPF battling it out in my head for the next spot. Hm.

I can almost smell Friday from here. Sweet, delicious Friday.

The husband just called me for the umpteenth time since he started working at his current job, emotionally strung out because his boss is a vicious asshole.  Said boss chose to blame a tech's failure to show at a client site and a cascade of other departments' failure to notice it on my husband.  Said boss forced my husband to fucking sign an HR complaint that he is insubordinate and derelict in his duties.  This is the second such piece of bullshit the Boss has perpetrated on Husband in the past couple of weeks.
( Pertinent details and bile )

I advised my husband to get the fuck out of there for today and go home, and tomorrow set up a meeting with Boss' Boss to talk about what Husband can do.

Anyone have any suggestions for framing the conversation in a productive (and hopefully job-retaining) way?  I've already told him that I'm behind him quitting, but I don't know if that will be any kind of effective, for lack of a better word, threat to improving his immediate situation.

Any and all help would be appreciated.

Seriously, for a Monday, today was beyond tolerable and well into satisfactory.

( When Mondays don't attack )

( The chocolate is also cursed )

( I am not a merry maid. )

( Pacification Elimination Renumeration )

Oh, and just to top off this ramble...a link from inlovewithnight. As she put it, Presidential politics as a D&D campaign. The campaigners campaign and complain. samwize and garrity, you two especially should check this out.

And now I really must be going.

I picked up a cold at the family gathering this past weekend (it was worth it, though - lots of quality hanging out and the niece loved the grab-bag of clothes from the last swap). I feel like a human lava lamp as my sinuses slowly fill up and then drain. I think I'm losing brain power with every tissue I use.

I have to keep reminding myself that, as I stayed home from work yesterday, today is in fact Tuesday and not Monday. My biggest accomplishment today will be catching up with my flist. I am so glad that I'm in the screen mockups phase of the project, rather than any coding. Trying to program right now would be the electronic equivalent of operating heavy machinery: chance of crashes = HIGH.

Wow. I'm not even on the good cold medicine, and I'm all floaty and stuff. If my comments make less sense than usual, you know why.

I'm thinking of trying a neti-type sinus wash tonight. The intarwebs tell me I should use a combination of 1 quart of water to 1 teaspoon of non-iodized salt and 1 teaspoon baking soda. Any of you have other recipes to share?

All I've got between me and the weekend is finishing up this damned yearly review. I am so damned tempted to copy and paste everything I put down last year and see if they notice. (Because waiting for the code elves to finish it by leaving it out on my desk hasn't worked so far.) My reluctance to finish this is buttressed by several reasons: of course I think I'm fabulous, so are you going to trust my opinion on how well I think I did? The boss doesn't seem inclined to take my word for anything else, so why should I care about this? The biggest reason still is that I wasn't supposed to still be here - where's my shiny new job?

Speaking of shiny new jobs -- the husband's interview went very well. Thanks for all the well-wishes. We should hear something on Monday. (Please, oh please!) We're trying very hard not to jinx the chickens before their teeth are hatched...or something.

In other random good news, I won a contest I didn't even enter! A while ago, I ordered slippers from Treadders.com (really comfy booties - the Emperor loves them - highly recommended for all small sproggen). At the beginning of September I got an email from them, announcing a contest for their customers from the past few months, and all we had to do was see if our randomly assigned number matched the MegaMillions results. Whaddya know, I won! Free shipping on 10 free pairs of booties, one from each size they offer, with a bunch of different designs. Granted, the Emperor will only fit into a couple more sizes, but we can stock up for the next kid.

Dammit, where are my code elves? *sigh* Back to the review.

It's not been the best of weeks so far. I had hoped that I'd have long, leisurely stretches of no one bothering me here at work so I could write up some of my con recaps. (Salaried status has to have its perks sometimes, right?)

Instead, I've been doing clean-up work in someone else's code for a major project that got released over the weekend. Each program that I've fixed in a speedy and efficient manner (having been interrupted every half hour or so with "This is high priority - are you done yet?") has been greeted with a "Now do this one." No "Thank you.", no "Good job!", just "Next". In between I've been treated with contempt, like I'm the idiot who wrote the broken code in the first place.

It's ridiculous how draining this has been; I've arrived home every night feeling mentally exhausted and beaten. I'm trying to formulate a suitable "you moved my cheese" response, like "I feel that I perform better when you positively acknowledge my efforts before assigning me new work", but I'm afraid that halfway through the statement I'd lose it and snarl "Didn't your mother teach you to say thanks, fuckhead?!"

But hey, at least I still have my job, right? Seeing as the news just broke this morning that a part of our printing business is being sold to another company, so about 16 positions were eliminated with no notice and token severance.

I've got to get out of here, and soon.

( Support Our Zombie Troops )

( Not to be scrambling the eggs )

( Motivated and derailed in only 2 hours! )

( PWNED by my madd SQL skllz )

I've had a knot in my back for the past several days, right at what I call the crucifixion point - where the line between the shoulder blades crosses the spine. What I wouldn't give for a long massage...

Tomorrow is the husband's birthday, and I found a brilliant gift for him. Now I'm battling the "I want to give it to him NOW!" instant gratification feelings. (Must Wait!)

TGTF, for birthdays and BSG.

I may have mentioned once or twice that I don't like my job. However, upon further reflection, I realize that what really drives me to despair is my coworkers.

Exhibit A: The project I'm working on has been a nightmare from day one. It's been four years since the last update, due to various department politics and feuds. The guy who wrote and maintained it was pre-emptively pulled off it, so another guy with little Visual Basic experience could do the bulk of the programming. (Brilliant!) As a result, the program has been buggy and unreliable, and the rest of the team has had to pull long hours and work weekends in testing and fixing. I'm all for teamwork, but I resent like hell having to put in extra effort to fix someone else's mistakes (especially because if I were submitting such crappy code, I'd have had my ass chewed off). I've started referring to this as sweeping up after other people's elephants.

Exhibit B: I hate the word "perception". It is the perception among my (busybody, fishing-for-faults) coworkers that I do nothing but surf all day. (Never mind that the majority of them are checking their stocks, email, sports scores, and weather reports whenever I walk by.)

Evidently now, it might now be the fucking perception that I'm involved with my coworker Chad, because I sit with him at lunch and we went to the convention a few weeks back with our friend Candi. (One guy sniped that "of course you guys have to sit together at lunch - you always do!", and another commented that it was convenient that Chad and I both had errands to run today at lunch. I would have laughed off the first, but the second put my hackles up.) It has nothing to do with the fact that we're both geeks who watch the same TV shows and most of the rest of people we work with are conservative, sports-watching, gossiping Republican assholes.

I desperately need to get out of there.