Spinning on that dizzy edge

SERIOUSLY. My customer DB turned out to have a nasty surprise in it, and so I found myself compelled to keep working on it. Until 10 PM. SELF, YOU CHOSE POORLY. At least I was catching up on my YouTube watching in the background. (kouredios, that Dan'n'Phil pumpkin carving was ridiculous and delightful. The guts!hair as the crowning touch! *dying*)

( Candy fail, family grief, kid progress, tired )

So yes, I would welcome some nice long stretches of boring. But first we have to get through next week. I swear just having the robocalls and email and text barrages come to an end would be a relief, but I am nursing a small sprout of hope in my heart for better.

I hope you all have a glorious weekend with lovely weather.

I am sitting here at work unable to actually DO any work, as our site-wide internet connection is totally jazzed up due to a virus attack. I can't connect to Google or any of the actual things I'm supposed to be doing, and I can't pack up and go home because Outlook is trying to repair itself from whatever fiendish knot it's tied itself into this time, going on hour 2. (Outlook and I have an ongoing battle, where I insist that it both send me my emails and keep track of what it's sent, and it petulantly refuses to do so, leading me to having both the desktop version and the web app open at the same time while I try to keep everything in sync myself.)

But in a delightful turn of events, for whatever reason both Dreamwidth and AO3 are not blocked, so I am happily going through and reading through all my open tabs of posts and fic that have been lingering for a shamefully long time.

Theoretically I should feel guilty about this, but damn, my field of fucks is still fallow.

May your days have a similar bonus of lemonade from lemons!

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!

Are the flying pigs having snowball fights in hell? Because I seem to have made it through an entire regular TV season without a single one of my shows being canceled. That hasn't happened since...EVER. I even watched multiple new shows this year, and they all made it through. I don't think it's my tastes that are changing; either the networks are relaxing their standards for demographics and audience size required to renew, or *GASP* the masses are coming around to my way of thinking.

This includes: Castle, Grimm, iZombie, The Flash, Arrow, Agent Carter (:D :D :D), Agents of SHIELD, and Once Upon a Time. I'm not counting Glee because its end has been planned for a while.

Spoilers ahoy!

( Once Upon a Time )

I am loving everyone's delight in Mad Max: Fury Road, both fannishly and critically. ( Links and fannish adjacent thoughts )

In flashback news, I've been watching Alias. Bless that zany early 00s show; I have to shake my head every time Sydney skulks through her missions in her all black spy gear...with a belly shirt, so her abdomen flashes through like a beacon whenever she moves. So stealthy!

Confession time: I loathed Kennedy in Buffy season 7. Her storyline, her designs on Willow, the lackluster performance by the actor...everything. So I take a certain amount of catty glee (I will admit to being an awful person sometimes) to seeing Iyari Limon in an irritable bowel medicine commercial. Heh heh heh.

Speaking of commercials, have you seen Kristen Bell and her husband Dax Shepard hawking Samsung appliances? They legitimately made me laugh; I watched the whole behind-the-scenes thing, because I love watching KBell in action, being loose and comfortable with herself, and HAPPY.

I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron, because it was necessary as a MCU fangirl. I'm still deciding if it's too late to post a reaction piece about it, because about 2300 words poured out of me when I sat down to watch an AHEM copy.

I've got a business trip next week to visit the main office. Airfare was ridiculous for traveling that week, so my coworker and I will have to drive 1.5 hours to a podunk airport, take a hop to Chicago, then over to the Twin Cities, meaning a day wasted in travel each way. But I'll get to have dinner with heresluck, which I am very happy about, and lots of down time to catch up on shows. I'll be packing Lost Girl, Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries, Doctor Who, Orphan Black, plus some movies for my Big Idea VVC vid...and going into the office at some point. :)

I hope you all have a lovely weekend!

The stress levels are similar, but I have maintained the "no crying" rule at work, through complete lack of documentation, crappy conference calls, debugging other peoples' bad code, and general all-around pressure, where a lack of planning on their part is constituting an emergency on mine. Which is like my favorite thing ever!

Plus the Emperor slapped a friend at recess yesterday, and then compounded the issues by pretend hitting today. Forecast calls for an in-school suspension.

I am keeping my eyes on the prize, which is the weekend/end of my goto shift, and the potential to see Hayley Atwell, Jason Momoa, a bunch of "Orphan Black" actors, and lots more interesting people at C2E2. It's a bit of a drive for a one-day thing, especially if I wind up doing it solo, but I think it would be worth it.

Hi! How are you doing?

Both literal and metaphorical!

In the ongoing war on my bank account that is home ownership, the sewer line backed up into our house Saturday night, requiring an after-hours repair with a large price tag. It did cover a camera inspection of the line on Monday, but the Roto Rooter guy tried to parlay the alarming results into pressuring us to sign up for a replacement of the line right away, to the tune of six grand. Yikes! We balked, and I called for a second opinion, who said that the line did need to be replaced, but not at crisis, OMGWTFBBQ speed. The plumber recommended by them gave us a ballpark figure over the phone of several grand less. Here's hoping that holds true.

I was off Friday, and worked from home Monday and Tuesday to deal with the dirty details, so today was my first day back in the office for almost a week. After what happened today, I'm tempted to stay home as much as possible.

I overheard male manager J talking to my male coworker S about female coworker C. J complained that C was being really grumpy and obviously therefore needed to get laid, and "jokingly" asked S to "take one for the team", but if he couldn't do it, J would have get one of the other single guys in the department to step up.

Just to add to the grossness of this, J is C's manager.

I could not believe what I was hearing - I mean, I could, because J is infamous for getting away with shit like that for literally decades, but I'd never been present for such garbage. I had to walk around the building to calm down, then I talked to S about the situation. He was similarly disgusted, so I got his blessing before bringing it up to our manager M. M promised to talk to the big boss about it, while trying to keep our names out of it (because our department has a delightful history of firing people who complain about the work environment). So we'll see what happens.

Does anyone know a good way to call down a meteor strike to hasten along the passing of the current crop of dinosaurs?

The Emperor's 10th birthday has come and gone. His school district doesn't close for the Columbus Day holiday, but instead schedules a couple days near the end of October for teacher in-service and conferences, which has meant for several years now that he gets a 3-4 day weekend for his birthday.

This year, he decided that he didn't want a birthday party like last time, where we rented a tumbling place for a couple of hours and invited his class. Instead, he wanted a sleepover with three of his friends. Two out of the three couldn't make it, alas, but one did, and they had a fine time.

Most of my spare time of the last few weeks has been spent in service of the Emperor, either working on his Halloween costume or planning and executing his birthday weekend. I took Friday off work and drove him over to an electronic game store so he could pick out a Nintendo 3DS and a few games, then spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up from costume construction. Saturday morning I got up and made pancakes for him and his friend. Today I spent most of my time making cake layers from mixes (he wanted a half-yellow, half-chocolate cake) and chocolate buttercream frosting from scratch. Seven sticks of butter plus cocoa and powdered sugar can't be wrong; I've got several cups of frosting left over in the fridge to go on top of whatever can be dipped in the bowl. Since I didn't want a towering monstrosity, I only made one layer of each flavor and used the rest for cupcakes, which will go into my work tomorrow (not that they deserve it).

I love having a functional oven again. The previous one had been dying for years and couldn't hold an even temperature, which was death on baking stuff. But now...mwah hah hah! I may even get around to making my former overload levels of holiday cookies.

Ugh, I do not want to go back to work tomorrow. Everyone I work with is being extra-irritating, and I just want a break from the "one more thing"s that never seem to come with any kind of gratitude. At least there will be a cupcake to brighten my morning.

I literally just had to leave the lunch table before I started yelling (louder) at the regular jerkwad.

I came into a conversation about raising the minimum wage, which I knew was trouble from the start, and the only place left to sit was next to the douchenozzle. Another of the coworkers said, "I'm sorry, but I don't want to pay more than I already am." (This, mind you, from the woman who has two adult children and two grandchildren living with her, because her offspring are being paid minimum wage and can't afford their own place.) I offered that people who make more money need less assistance from the government, and therefore the government has more to spend on other programs, and maybe even could lower taxes, and that Seattle is having a great result from raising the minimum wage. The asshat immediately came back with "Well, why don't we raise it to $60,000 dollars? A $100,000!" I tried to ignore him, and he kept saying "Why not $100,000!" I said something to the effect of that he wasn't even trying to have a good faith discussion about it, and he insisted he was, and told me to justify why not.

So in the interests of saving my sanity and my voice, I grabbed up my food and stormed away with a "I am not getting into this with you."

I am still shaking with how angry I am. I am so fucking tired of the conservative "I've got mine, fuck you" attitude that prevails around here.

ARGH!

Oh, sense of confidence in my ability to do my job - thank you for returning, and never leave me again!

Today at work was the first time in way too long where the list of requests to be tackled in the next development cycle all looked like tasks I could handle. I'm finally getting comfortable with this project. PHEW! Today was also the first day in a week where I didn't bring my work laptop home, and I have greatly enjoyed my time of sitting on the couch and being completely unproductive.

Well, not work productive, anyway. The Emperor and I have been listening to the audiobook of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" in the car and at bedtime, and this afternoon we pulled out the Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7 again and started up a new game.

That, plus the gorgeous fall weather, has put me in a great mood. :D

I completely oopsed on posting the past few days, with stuff and life and things.

So have a list of random and sundry good things!

1. Tonight's dinner was hot dogs and mac'n'cheese (one of the Emperor's favorites), with sides of canned chili and leftover fries and onion rings. I made myself a hot dog with chili, cheese, and onion rings, and it was trashily delicious.

2. At long (LONG) last, I think I've conquered this project at work that has been driving me around the bend. It involves mapping a hierarchical series of categories and items to an Excel file, with recursion to handle a variable amount of nesting. My brain is resistant to that kind of looping, so trying to get the logic to work for it has been challenging. I am so relieved to have a sample file to send off for approval.

3. I was watching a VVC streaming show the other day, and fan_eunice's Hoping Machine came on. From across the room, the Emperor asks "Are you watching that Harry Potter vid again?" It's been months since we've been through his playlist of favorites, and yet he can still ID the vid by a few bars of music. :D

4. My visit to the main company office has been scheduled for the second week of October, from Monday evening to Friday afternoon. It will be a great opportunity to get some face time with my team members and to enjoy a hotel room all by myself. I'll miss my sweetheart boys and dog, and I'm certain they'll really miss me. It will be a useful reminder to my husband of how much Emperor wrangling I do.

5. Festivids is coming! The anticipation is delightful; it's in the execution where I get unhinged.

6. I might actually get to bed at a reasonable time tonight - so, seeya!