kirabug’s idea files

Thursday I found the living room and my desk. Now technically I have two desks - there’s the new computer desk, and there’s the old do-all-the-mail-and-stuff desk. The old desk was buried under a stack of paperwork about two feet high, prior to Thursday.

It took all day (and I mean ALL day) but I processed about six months of filing, including creating new empty files for 2008, cleaned my desks, took care of all the paperwork, and put away everything in the household financial category.

It also generated about three bags of trash and the breaking down of a ton of cardboard (Amazon is my friend, but the other side of Christmas usually looks like I’ve been running a warehouse), which was too bad because trash is usually picked on on Thursday at 6 AM. So everything I’ve processed since then has to sit out in the trash closet until Monday when they come again.

Yesterday Nighthawk wasn’t feeling well, so instead of continuing the decluttering, I played Final Fantasy XII for eight hours or so. I’m now about to break 160 hours, and and on my way down to the Feywood for the first plot-related time. I’m also around level 60. Yes, I’m doing way too much, and yes, you probably could have beat the game twice in the same amount of time. But I’m happy.

Yesterday evening my kid sister and her awesome boyfriend came over and picked up an old G3 450 Mac that we always said we were going to donate to a school but didn’t actually accomplish until after the schools said nothing lower than a G4 please, a PC case we’d never gotten around to using, about six or eight games, and an assortment of other oddball things that we didn’t need but that college students are always glad to take for free. As for me, I was just happy to get them out of my house.

After that, I went out for drinks and snacks and dessert with my friend Steen and we had a great girls’ night out over at Applebees, land of the half-price appetizers after 9pm. Their mini-desserts rock, too.

JessieDog wasn’t feeling well last night and wouldn’t settle down in the bedroom where my nice warm husband and nice soft bed are located. Around 4:30 I brought her downstairs and by 5:30 we were curled up together on the sofa fast asleep. I love the time I spend with her cuddling like that but would have loved it more if it hadn’t been on what’s rapidly becoming the sofa from hell.

Today I putzed around the house for a little while, and then decided that my back and knees weren’t going to recover from the sofa that rapidly, so I might as well wreck them further. I emptied every single cabinet in the kitchen including the food cabinets, and cleaned out the refrigerator. The entire first floor looked like a kitchen had exploded.

The thing about two people living in a house as compared to five, is that with five people there’s always someone who’s eventually desperate enough to eat food before it spoils. With two people, you buy something because it looked delicious at the time, but three days later it doesn’t sound as good or you get invited out instead or whatever. As time goes by, that food doesn’t necessarily leave (especially not dry goods) but it doesn’t get eaten either… and eventually you don’t have room for the new food you do eat, but there’s “nothing to eat” in the house either. That’s when it’s time to audit the fridge and cabinets, and that resulted in a bag of disgusting items exiting earlier today. (I’m pretty sure that Thanksgiving’s egg nog had reached the Bronze era of tool development.)

JessieDog managed tog get herself trapped in the maze of stuff four times during this process.

Once the food was put away I was able to weed through the equipment zoo and pull the duplicates — cake pans that had been replaced with new silicone, a coffee maker that had bit the dust, the foreman grill being replaced by the cuisinart grill, four basting brushes… That was the easy stuff.

Then I had the hard decisions to make. Do I really need four glass casserole dishes? Why keep a peanutbutter stirrer that I’d never use? How many coffee mugs are too many? Would Mom and Dad use these six bottles of spices that I accidentally bought twice faster than Nighthawk and I? Where’s the dog now?

Having put away the mass majority of the mess, I took a nice interlude to my folks’ place, where we enjoyed plum pudding and played killer bunnies with all the expansion decks for the first time. That rocked.

Then, returned home and put away the rest of the kitchen, took out the other two bags of trash (the trash men are going to have a coronary on monday), straightened up outside, boxed up six boxes (small ones) of the kitchen supplies I no longer need so they can go to my siblings and/or goodwill in the near future, hauled everything upstairs for storage, and finally sat down.

My house is as close to clean as it’s going to get for a good long time. And that’s good because my back and knees will kill me if I do much more than that.

It’s totally liberating, though, to be able to find the things I use. Most things didn’t move at all, but those that did were either moved to reachable locations, or disposed of altogether so I can reach things. I can find things. Things aren’t crushing other things. Every food item in the house is currently edible. I don’t have three bottles of cinnamon. The dog can find the floor. There are files for the filing, and there aren’t boxes stacked in front of the filing cabinets. All the computers are actually being used actively.

And having done all of that, I can enjoy the last three days of my weekend knowing that I’ll be going into the new year lighter and more ready to face the world.

After I sleep, that is.

So Nighthawk’s home and slowly regaining his voice, still nowhere near 100% but a lot better than he was a week ago. (Well, not a whole week ago. Exactly this time last Monday they hadn’t made the first cut yet and he was feeling fine. But, you know, a week ago by say, 1:00.)

It’s a good thing that he’s feeling so well, too, because our heater just quit and he’s sitting at home under a massive pile of blankets waiting for the repairman.

The freakin’ heater was only just installed in June-ish, so I’m a bit perturbed. It does explain why we’ve spent the past few days noticing that the heater seems to run an awful lot and it still seems cold. I don’t think the ice building up on the outside of the condenser was exactly an advertised feature, either.

At least it’s almost sunny out….

Today I learned:

• When you describe your symptoms to your OB-GYN’s office and they say, “Oh, we want to see you right away!” they really mean, “Unless you changed insurance recently and we don’t take your new stuff. Then you can kiss off. Or pay out-of-pocket. Your choice.”
• Cheddar cheese ramen is very hot and very filling, but won’t be enough food to get you from 12:30 pm to 9:30 pm. Two cans of coca cola and a reece’s fast break are also required.
• HP computers boot too damn fast for you to spot the “press this for boot list” key if you don’t know where to look on the screen.
  • It’s worse if your co-worker is yelling to press “delete” because that’s what his computer at home uses but the ones at work use f-9.
  • PC users are used to this kind of bios crap. Mac users hold down the C key when they want to boot from CD. We’re spoiled.
• Even though the PS2 port for keyboard and mouse are the same shape, PCs get really pissy when you get the two plugs confused.
• Even I can install Windows XP.
• When you call your boss at 9:30 at night, he doesn’t expect you to tell him that you’re just now leaving work, especially if your shift was supposed to end at 7.
• The steak sandwich place closes at 10. Domino’s does not.
• Sometimes Friday can feel like a week unto itself.

On Philly Future someone linked to a website pleading the Phillies to fire Chris Wheeler from the Phillies announcing team. Why? Because it’s been leaked that the Phillies are talking about putting Wheels on for all 9 innings of each game, and moving Larry Anderson to strictly radio annoucement.

Now, an argument can be made that in some ways, Chris Wheeler is a better “announcer” than Larry Anderson. He’s got an extensive memory of Phillies history and current events around the league.

But really, his ability to announce isn’t the part that is up for debate in the minds of most Phillies fans I know. The part for debate is whether he’s actually worth listening to. I can’t tell you how many years I’ve spent listening to games and hearing Wheeler complain about a decision the umpires made or a choice the manager made where Wheeler was just plain wrong, and anyone who was capable of seeing the replay on their television was capable of seeing it. Wheeler is too often a complainer and a homer and an idiot.

Larry Anderson, on the other hand, has never pretended to play the role of the full announcer - he’s an excellent color commentator, leaving the announcing of balls and strikes and such to Harry Kalas or Scott Graham. He’s frequently played the same role for nationally-televised games — never asked to be the announcer, but providing color to broadcasts for Fox Sports when the Phillies have played. He’s fun to listen to.

Phillies fans like Anderson. We’re not so hot on Wheeler. For that matter, rumor has it that those preferences follow for the staff in the booth. I’m strongly hoping the Phillies organization thinks hard about the decisions they make for staffing the booth this year — they won’t drive more people to the stadium by annoying the hell out of them at home.

So I was writing - but I didn’t start until after 10 and sometime around 1 an old friend popped online to say hi, and well, one thing led to another and the next thing I know I’m reading his blog until 3 am. I can’t say I followed all of his writing - seeing as I’m not up on either the latest political scandals or on off-Broadway theater - but he’s still very well-spoken and entertaining. Oh, and he linked to this and this which I thought y’all might find interesting as well.

On a totally different note, the web usability geek in me was amused at the serious cognitive dissonanace I hit when I first started reading Matt’s blog, because he’s using the same Blogger template as my friend Ginia and the two couldn’t be much more different. So, backgrounds and fonts and such really do make an impression - guess I’d better get off my butt and finish tweaking the design and layout for this place. The forum template I’m desigining is functional but essentially a disaster.

And it’s obvious that I’m rambling at this point (I think I’m allowed; it’s 3:20 am after all), here’s a quick wrap-up of the Thanksgiving holiday for those who are interested.

First, I forgot to take pictures. My apologies.

Wednesday I made the mashed potatoes and the sweet potatoes, an act that was punctuated by my overheating my favorite Corning dish empty on a burner I thought I’d shut off and then attempting to pick up the superheated ceramic - which resulted in a small burn on my right hand and my favorite dish in razor-sharp shards all over the kitchen floor. But since it was superheated, they were melted to the kitchen floor. High quality linoleum in the kitchen, obviously. I’m still damned pissed at myself for the carelessness, but have stopped beating myself up because I’m the only one hurt and that’s minor.

Thursday was Thanksgiving itself, which went off pretty much without a hitch. Alton Brown’s turkey brine recipes are excellent, by the way. My family and Nighthawk’s converged here to eat and I think everyone had a pretty good time.

Friday, both Nighthawk and I felt run over by a bus - exhaustion, stress, etc. and slept in late, accomplished nothing. Sinus/migraine all day, possibly dehydration, hard to tell ’cause I can’t concentrate through the pain to analyze it.

Now it’s 3:30 Saturday and I need to sleep. By Tuesday (my next day back at work) my sleep schedule will be total hell. Whee.

So a few weeks ago the arch of my right foot started to ache — not all the time, but sometimes when I walk on it funny or I’m on it too long. I stopped exercising to give it a chance to heal, but it’s been two weeks and healing has not accomplished itself according to plan. Went to the doctor today and he’s diagnosed tendon pulls with a possible very small fracture as well. X-rays were accomplished before work and all it theoretically going according to the new plan: advil, and heel cups in my shoes.

Of course it doesn’t help that the heel cup, while probably helping the tendons quite a bit, are making the bone ache like all hell.

What’s annoying (outside of the pain and inconvenience) is that I can’t walk the dog. But maybe that’s a blessing in disguise, considering that she’s currently scheduled for a specialist appointment later this week for a bad shoulder.

Anyway, today’s afternoon forecast is slightly grouchy with a chance of grousing, well on until morning.

It’s been a long, strange week. Most of them are.

I’ve spent a good part of the week angry at the Phillies, as I imagine anyone in my position would be. When they’re winning the wildcard for the first time in a damn long time, I let my hopes grow. And of course, when the Phils drop three to Houston, and are suddenly in third place for both the wildcard and the division, with a two and a half game gap in September, it concerns me. They’re breaking my heart, and I knew they were going to break my heart (they haven’t been in the playoffs since ‘93) and I let them in anyway, and now they’re breaking it. So of course I’m going to call them heartless bastards when they give up a two-run single in the seventh. (I’m telling you, they’re playing the bullpen too hard — why the hell can’t we get some starters who can play more than 5 innings in September? And now we’ve lost Padilla for God-knows-how-long…It’s been a long September and there was reason to believe maybe this year would be better than the last.)

I watched them play while cooking dinner tonight, cursed a bit, then we flipped through the channels for a while, and landed on AMC, about a minute and a half in to Field of Dreams. Now I’ve seen The Natural more times than I can count, and though I’ve never seen all of Bull Durham, in order and complete, I know enough to mutter “eight and sixteen… how did we ever win eight?” under my breath when the going gets tough. But somehow I’d never seen Field of Dreams for more than ten minutes even once.

I won’t tell you about the movie. You’ve either seen it, and know how it makes you feel the grass between your toes, or you haven’t and there’s no way I could describe it any more than I could describe how ghosts in a corn field turn into a baseball movie. Watching it is playing wiffle ball in every yard we’ve ever owned. It’s learning how to score at my brother’s little league games. It’s standing on the mound - any mound - and listening to the air crackle around you. The smell of the leather, the rough feel of the bat, the sound of the dirt and the taste of the air. Doesn’t matter who’s playing, or at what level, or what time. The choice between a fastball and a curve, between a pitch and a throw to first, between an all-out run and a head-first slide. I breathe baseball.

And it took a movie about a corn field in Iowa to remind me of that feeling you get when the sting of the Eagles’ season end is still fading, and the grass is green for the first time. The sky is so blue that sometimes, it doesn’t have to be about the pennant. Sometimes, it’s about the curve of the blue plastic seats at the park, and the hot smell of suntan lotion on my husband’s neck, and the sound of Harry Kalas calling a long fly ball.

Boys, I forgive you. Even if you manage to come back this season and make it to the playoffs only to break my heart again… I’ll still forgive you.

Try to win a few more next year, huh?