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oh stuff

ritaxis: (Default)
Wednesday, November 28th, 2012 01:50 pm
In no order, of importance or chronology

1. Last physical therapy appointment yesterday. I can do so much more than I could a year ago, and my physical therapist gave me a few even harder things to do. I'm still working on loosening the muscles and flexibility and strength, but I'm also working on balance and stability too.

2. I have an interview Friday for a job that pays 175% of what my old one did. It's a lot more work, including things that are hard for me (a lot of deadlines, and a lot of conversational Spanish), but it's good work.  My housemate does the same work, and she's overwhelmed, but she's been moving and also dealing with some other personal stuff. Also, the job has insurance benefits.

2a. There's a job to apply to in Bonny Doon. That's actually worse than Scotts Valley. Anyway, it's half-time. It could end up costing me more in transportation than it pays in wages. (There's a story as to why there's a bunchof those names up there, having to do with a guy named Scott, but I never remember the details)

3. As for Nano, I think I will get my fallback goal done: I'll get to the end of the battlefield stuff. I planned to get to the end of the draft, but this has been really, really difficult, and I have been doing more research and problem solving than word piling.

3a. the last third of the book keeps getting more complicated . . .

4. Irreproducible recipes:

Steamed broccoli, shirataki (noodles made from tofu, very nice if you're going low glycemic), tomato sauce, cheese, heat it all up and there you go.  Irreproducible because the particular tomato sauce is made of sad elements in the fridge.  Hint: two anise seeds is more than a quart of tomato sauce can support without large amounts of other things in it. You'll be balancing flavors for hours until you give up and say it's good enough to eat.  I thought Italian sausage has anise in it, so it would be nice in a sauce too? But it was wrong. Anyway, I did prevail and I am eating this now.

5. (or 1a?) I have something to wear to the interview, because at Thanksgiving I snaggled up some of my stepmother's clothes.
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youtube is the curse of the unemployed

ritaxis: (Default)
Friday, November 9th, 2012 05:51 pm
I have been taking care of business, but I could be doing so much more if youtube did not have clips of the Watersons from 1965 or all of Gid Tanner's ouevre (including a lot of songs I can't listen to anymore: somebody better put new songs to those tunes, eh?).

Mostly this week I've been clearing the medical decks while I still have insurance, and trying to figure out what to do about the flood insurance.  My agent called the company, but there's no such thing as an installment plan for flood insurance.  Why the hell not? Do they want people to lose their homes over something like that? My agent, who is wonderful, by the way, if you need insurance in Santa Cruz check out D and R -- suggested I call the credit union that has my mortgage and talk to them.  I will do that.

Naturally, I do not have credit cards.  I have never thought it was safe for me, and seeing the kind of trouble that other poor people get into by having them, I believe that I have been correct, but it's an option I don't have now.

Next week will be all about the getting new work, I guess.

Another thing I did was finally get my tags -- my car's been paid for and smogged for a while, but as usual they never mailed my tags.

My physical therapist thinks I'm progressing well, and I lost two pounds, but this not-working life is too sedentary.

And by the time I am finished tonight I will have written another two thousand words or so, which will mean six thousand words in nine days, which is much better than four thousand in eight.
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late start

ritaxis: (Default)
Friday, November 2nd, 2012 08:42 am
Yesterday I was working on the downstairs bedroom so I don't have to live in a dump for the next year and so I will eventually be able to clean up the living room too.

So I wrote one sentence.

Today I brought the word count to 1.7K+, which is better.  I'm sort of speeding throguh drummer's training camp.  Tomorrow I'll get him chosen by hsi first unit, and the next day maybe have his first battle, and probably on one of thiose two days the conversation with the older drummer about how they're already dead, so they may as well see if they can save their comrades, and by the way, we fuck around a little too.

I was looking for more about military drummers, but there's not a lot more to be found, so I'm making up a lot of stuff whole cloth, and hoping that it makes sense.

I've been poking at Frank's old laptop but it's probably a paperweight. I have some time before the surgeries anyway: I've moved back the first one to May, so I have more time to work out the finances and strengthen my legs before hand.  There's no reason not to, I'm not in much pain at all and I really am getting stronger.  Yesterday Kevin the physical therapist decided I was ready for a new set of exercises which are as he says "efficient" -- meaning they are difficult, painful, and tiring. I should be proud, but I'm sore. I mean muscle sore, not emotion sore.

Also, that cracked tooth finally shed the cracked bit off, and now I have three teeth with chunks out of them.  At my age, my mother had three teeth, though, so that's an improvement.

Also: tomato sandwiches.
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Boom

ritaxis: (hat)
Wednesday, September 26th, 2012 09:11 pm
Dropped the boom on Yanek. Now he just has to flop around a bit before he's marching away with the other "recruits." The chapter will end in drum training camp, which I cannot find any references for so I'm making it up whole cloth.  So glad this is a fantasy. I figure they drum and drum and drum, mostly.

On another front, I witnessed the most amazing tantrums today.  We think the child in question is having tooth and tummy discomfort, but all we know is he was doing the back flop and the kick and lash and screaming. The most amazing part was when I had laid him gently on the floor to keep him from launching roughly there off my lap.  He put up his hands -- like he wanted me to pull him back up, which is not unusual -- but as soon as he got th8em, he pulled himself half up and tried to launch himself as hard as he could on the floor.  I stopped him, making his descent softer, but it made him even angrier.  Later he was still doing it when we were outside (he stopped long enough to eat snack, at least) and he threw himself backwards in the sandbox: while he was ltying there, he threw sand in his own face.

Tyke is seventeen months old.  He has a lot of new words, but apparently not enough.

On another front, I can carry a box of groceries up a short flight of stairs putting one foot in front of the other like a normal person now, instead of having to step and place the right foot on the same level as the left before proceeding. Nine months of physical therapy! And also, I can squat to clean a thing on the ground, instead of getting down on my butt.  Nine months! Of physical therapy! MRI in late December, pre-op early January, first surgery late January or early February.  I have to log some paid work time between the surgeries or I have to pay a thousand dollars a month COBRA payment to keep my insurance, so the second surgery will be in mid-May.

My friend who has had a different type of knee replacement says the thing to watch out for is not going back to work too early.  Can't be helped. But at least at my job I have a boss and coworkers who will help me do whatever is the least wrong we can figure out.

On yet another front, I spent last night listening to Warren Zevon on youtube and tonight listening to the COon Creek Girls.  It's kind of hard to find much of them.  And you have to get the early stuff, and not "The New Coon Creek Girls" or videos with (TRIO) in the description.  After a while it's inevitable: you must ditch the girls and start listening to Grayson and Whittier.
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European architecture question(s)

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Wednesday, April 11th, 2012 04:34 pm
So you've got a block of buildings with an open space in the middle. It might be buildings from the Middle Ages that just survived till the present day, or it might be ones from later on, but you have the same thing, tenements (or rowhouses or apartments, whatever) all tightly closed around a space in the middle.  In back of all those buildings, whatever direction you come from.  What do you call that space?

I've been calling it the yard, though in my brief European forays I do not seem to have noticed that anybody in particular seems to think of it as their yard. When I was in Prague I didn't visit any apartments in a block like that, I just passed by them, and I could rarely see through the passageways into the (yards).  The passageways clearly went right through the buildings to the back, but they were usually closed off by gates.  The few yards I could see looked kind of underutilized: not landscaped, but not full of either stuff people were using or garbage either.  I saw a couple of trees, but they looked like weed trees. 


For that matter, what do you call a block like that?  Sometimes it looks like the whole thing is one thing, other times they are obviously not.  And what do you call those passageways?

I did get to visit a very pleasant Soviet-era apartment building (panalok), and an apartment carved out of a neo-baroque former film studio, and a dormitory(kolej) in  a former Soviet-era motel.  So I have seen what some of the cheap housing in Prague looks like, but not all of it.

On another front, I had my last physical therapy of this run (and no doubt I will have more of them in the future), and while I took today off work as a preemptive move, I did not stay up all night with pain after the deep tissue massage.  Rather, I woke up now and then to a highly annoying but by no means unbearable single point of pain.  Win!
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