I haven’t been feeling very “me” lately.

It’s probably because this month has just been lousy. When things get lousy I get lazy and eat food that’s bad for me, I stop doing things I enjoy and end up sleeping and watching TV. Although these things feel right at the time, they end up just making me feel more lousy in the end. When I went to the doctor a couple weeks ago I learned I had put on 6 pounds. That’s no good.

Now I have a week off of work, I hope that I can fix myself in that time, and maybe this cold will finally go away!

Enough depressing stuff.

Tonight we’re going to Michael’s grandparent’s place for the traditional italian seven fish on Christmas Eve dinner. Mmmm seven fishes.

I love Christmastime, and it’s the first Christmas in our new house! The first Christmas with little Caligula!

So I’m thinking about what I want for Christmas. It may seem late for that, but since we don’t actually celebrate Christmas as Christmas, why be on time? It’s just an excuse to buy a new toy. After talking to a friend of mine who recently got a palm I remembered… hey I want a PDA that reads digital books! So that is now my quest, to find a good one for under $200. I don’t need all sorts of bells and whisles, just the ability to hold a few books in text format, decent battery life, and I’d appreciate the ability to sync it up with linux (although having to boot into Windows wouldn’t be the end of the world). And I want to buy new, none of this ebay stuff, I don’t have time to deal with problems that might arise from such a purchase.

Any suggestions?

My nose won’t stop running, I keep getting sinus headaches, I’m coughing my lungs out, everything aches.

Goddammit I have a cold again!

Even worse, this week is a crazy busy week at work because of the holiday, more calls to make, less time to make them. Oh and if I call in sick to work my co-workers will hunt me down and murder me for leaving them with so much to do :D

Today we had the lamest office party ever. We had to provide the food (except for some cold cuts, which the boss complained were not given to us on a discount because we bought in bulk). And since we’re so busy, we needed to work the whole day. Bleh.

Now I’m gonna go watch Nova *yay*

Last night’s dinner at La Famiglia Ristorante was great. I wasn’t so sure how it’d be, because I have only casually met a couple people from that office, and I’m horrible shy with people I don’t know. We got there a few minutes early, only one other guy was there. Soon enough more people arrived, and we enjoyed a few glasses of Chardonnay from the open bar. I got to meet some of the people Michael works with at the company. Had to sit down often though, heels were a horrible idea! We encountered two other women who were complaining about how their shoes hurt their feet, sheesh. Dinner was amazing, and so was my bottomless wine glass (which made walking in heels even more of a challenge). We got to go down to the wine cellar and it was huge, they said there were over 20,000 bottles of wine, ranging from $10 to well over $1000. Nice. Dinner was delicious, and we had good company at our table, it was fun. I sat next to a guy from the New York office who told me all about how much New York has cleaned up since 9/11. Later in the evening I tried some Grappa in a cute little grappa glass, which I had tried before at a friend’s house, but this had a bit more flavor to it, wow it’s some crazy stuff! Dessert was nice too, it was all nice. I guess I was quiet for most of the night, so my shyness did show up, but I had a nice time. We left a little after 11, and I was pretty toasted. Yay for bottomless wine glasses! And so ended my first corporate office party.

Today I spent the day making cookies (which I took pictures of, but they’re unaccessable at the moment). Made some Sugar Cookies and some Christmas Sand Tarts. Yum yum! Then I made some spaghetti sauce, which we had with dinner. It was a good day, and I was happy to get a lot acomplished that I kept putting off. Never did get around to doing Christmas cards though. Oh well.

While I was thinking about Christmas cards, I also decided to start looking around for some stores that made prints of digital photos. I’d heard that pharmacies are really trying to make their digital processing services more popular, and I ended up on the CVS website. It’s pretty cool, you can either go into the store with some sort of digital media (flash card, floppy disk, cdrom, even some photo taking cellphones) or submit the digital photos online with a nice little form, and then go to the store to pick up the photos the next day. This page explains it. And for only 29 cents per print! I’ll get some nice photos together and try out this service.

We got our first accumulated snow tonight!

We have a nice fire going downstairs, I am going to go down and enjoy it for a bit.

*wanders off*

Tonight we’re going to a company dinner provided by a company Michael does work for. The dinner is being hosted at La Famiglia Ristorante in Philadelphia, and we need to dress formally.

Dress formally? Egads, I haven’t done that in years!

So I looked in my closet. Being more geek and girly, I don’t have lots of clothes, or many pairs of shoes of shoes, so I had to frown while going through my closet for something to wear.

I have two dresses.

This one, which I wore for graduation (under my white graduation gown). It’s definately a spring/summer dress with it’s spaghetti-string straps.

And this one (boy was I chunky in high school!), which is white with pink flowers. Definately a spring dress.

I have some skirts and a blouse I wear for job interviews, but I worry that’s not formal enough.

It’s a week until Christmas and I need to go to a clothing store. AAAAHH!!! I hate malls/shopping as it is…

Wish me luck.

Working in an office with a bunch of women is an interesting experience.

In the past it’s either been retail work, which had plenty of women, or an office populated by men (when I was doing web development work). So when I first got this job I wasn’t sure what to expect. Sure I had heard stories about the sometimes giggling, sometimes bitchyness, often gossipy world of such offices, but surely those stories were exaggerated.

Nope.

It’s amusing when someone comes in, mutters “I’m in a bad mood” and everyone in the office works to stay out of her way. It makes me chuckle to see how easily giggling fits can break out when people are quitely talking in a corner for too long. But it’s the gossip that’s most noticable, and what prompted this post in the first place.

I won’t deny that gossip is sometimes amusing, I share the same human interest in things that are none of my business as everyone. But it’s the extent to which these women go to talk about other people that amazes me. One gets up to go to the rest room, she comes back to someone telling something about someone else and eagerly says “ooh what’d I miss?” Someone walks through the office and the next thing I know it’s some gossip about him. And about each other! I have heard some sort of dirt or snickering comment about everyone else in there, and all that makes me think is “gosh, what do they say about me?”

Being submerged in so much silly gossip is a bit mind-numbing.

Oh, and remember a post a few months back where I talked about the music there? Awful adult contemporary stuff. Well it’s gotten worse, now they listen to a rap/R&B station half the time. The other day it just got to be too much.

“<Co-Worker> can you do me a favor?” I said.

“Sure, what?”

“Change the station please, it’s making my ears bleed.”

As I expected, that brought a few chuckles, but now each time they want to “punish” me (like when they found out I was going on vacation between xmas and new years, and leaving them all there to do work) they change it to that silly rap station. Oh, and they make jokes about my ears bleeding now too.

Luckily the work is good, so I am not driven insane by all this. And I can come home and read.

Read. Lately I’ve been reading Spam Kings, it’s a story about spammers and anti-spammers. It’s interesting to read for “historical” value, I didn’t know much about the history of the spam wars before I picked it up, but most intriguing to me is how it’s written. It’s told as a story, and in it has normal quoted dialog like in a traditional story, but the dialog is lifted from emails, instant messangers, and newsgroups. It’s really surreal. Can you imagine a newsgroup posting of yours, or a part of a journal entry, or something you said in IRC put into print like that? I suppose it was inevitable.

*wanders off to bed*

Happy 1st Birthday Caligula!

First off, thanks to everyone who commented on that last entry, it helped.

On Tuesday night I talked to my Aunt Elaine about my father’s passing. I also let other members of the family know, so I spent a lot of time talking online as well. My sister Heather is taking it hard of course, she’s been with him through everything.

Wednesday morning I went to work. I guess since I have never had to deal with the loss of someone close to me I didn’t know what I needed. I woke up that morning and said “Call out of work, why? So I can just mope around all morning? There is nothing I can do at home.” After a few hours at work I realized that each time I stopped being busy I felt like I was going to fall apart. Oh. That’s why people take a few days off work when they lose someone.

I needed some moping time. Moping is sometimes good.

I ended up leaving work around 1pm, my supervisor gave me her home phone number just in case I didn’t want to go in on Thursday. I’m thankful to have a temp job that’s so understanding and supportive, she even told me I could take the rest of the week off.

I got home and some flowers were delivered to me, from a couple of my friends. How sweet! I might have been feeling all disconnected, but flowers do help somehow. They’re pretty and made me feel good to know that people care enough to send flowers.

Michael made a fire in the evening, and I spent some time reading. I talked to a friend on the phone, then spoke to my mother (turns out she didn’t know until 1pm on Wednesday, Oops. Most of her family knew before she did…). I spoke to grandparents (mother’s parents), and later talked to my Uncle Dan (my godfather). They were all pretty upset, but it was really nice to hear from them.

Thursday I ended up staying home. I puttered around most of the morning, made some cookies in the afternoon, my first time using my spiffy new mixmaster. It was an ok day, mostly I just needed the alone time to think. I recieved flowers from work in the afternoon, that was nice. Also got a few more books for the Philly Chix library.

Friday I went back into work. It was a decent day, I kept busy. That night we had some friends over, had a few beers and pizza. I had fun, needed to have some friend time.

Saturday I spent reading almost all day. I’m reading Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series for the first time, it’s pretty good.

Today… I dunno. Perhaps I’ll try and fix Gentoo. It’s being bad and crankie with modules. This might be my fault. Bleh.

My father passed away this evening. My aunt called me on my cellphone when Michael and I were in the car, coming home from work this evening to let me know.

He’d been ill for quite a long time and I knew this day was coming, but nothing quite prepares you for when the day actually comes.

I’m upset… I’ll write a more coherent entry about this eventually.

I was sick this week, but I’m getting better now. Yesterday I came home from work a couple hours early because I felt crappy. Most of my problem is a sore throat and sinus headache, some congestion. I guess this is my first cold of the season. I slept most of the day today.

I finished reading The Mists of Avalon last night. I really enjoyed it. Then I went to watch the miniseries last night. Ugh! I don’t think the book should have been made into a movie. The characters of the book needed to be too deep for a movie to accurately portray them. In the book you felt affection for all of the characters, but in the movie they needed to speed up character development so there were clear cut “good guys” and “bad guys” .. that really made a mess of the story. And the ending? Oh boy, they changed that and made it all wrong. All of Mordred’s character was wrong.

So I got to thinking, are there any good “King Arthur” movies out there? Sword in the Stone was good, I recall there being a musical of Camelot, but musicals tend to be silly. There was First Knight, with Sean Connery in it, but that was not great. Then Merlin, that crappy tv miniseries. Apparently there was a movie made in 1981 called “Excalibur” but it didn’t get great reviews (that I’ve seen anyway). Someone needs to do it right sometime. Maybe take T.H. White’s book, and the Mists of Avalon, and put them into a nice movie.

We got our Christmas tree. We were searching for a place where you could cut down your own, so we ended up going to Varner’s Tree Farm in Collegeville. It’s a great little place, but they stop going out to the tree fields at 4:30 (reasonable, since it gets dark after that). So our options were: 1) get out of work early one day and go 2) come back on Saturday (when they are crazy busy) or 3) just pick out a pre-cut tree. We decided that the 3rd option was the best. The real reason I wanted to cut down our own was so it’d last all through december, and so many of the trees you buy in parkinglots and at stores have been cut for a month or more already. We figured that trees bought at a tree farm wouldn’t have been cut for that long, so it’d last. We got a nice, full 7 foot tree that looks really nice in our livingroom.

Since vacation and then being sick I haven’t had time to reply to emails, what a mess my inbox is! I should get to replying…

*wanders off*

Last night we got home from our trip to New England. I was exhausted, but I found enough energy to wash the new sheets we got from L.L. Bean.

We left home on Wednesday morning. First drove 202 through New Jersey, which wasn’t so bad. Then up 287 to 87 to 84. Ugh, I-84. 84 goes up through the major Connecticut cities, and so the traffic on that most busy travelling day of the year was a nightmare. We didn’t arrive at my Aunt Meg’s house in southern New Hampshire until after 6:30. My aunt had our beds ready for us though, and we were able to get to bed early.

Thursday we went over to my Aunt Elaine’s house and Michael got to meet some of my other cousins. We couldn’t stay long, but it was nice seeing them.

We went to my cousin’s apartment for Thanksgiving dinner, got to see my grandparents. My grandfather is 85 now, and starting to show his age, he doesn’t talk nearly as much as he used to. But he and my grandmother are still doing well, it was very nice to see them. It was great to see everyone, and introduce Michael to this much more sane and intelligent portion of my family. My sisters also came down for dinner. Annette is crazy!

sister Heather, aunt Meg, sister Annette, cousin Melissa, Grandmother, Grandfather

We got back to my Aunt’s house around 8 pm and went to bed.

Friday morning I got up at 3:30, intentionally. We left my Aunt’s house by 4:30 and drove up to Freeport, Maine. Freeport is the outlet store capital of Maine, it’s almost always swarming with tourists. So we figured that if we’re going to go to such a black hole of commercialism on Black Friday we should probably get there early. Our only destination was L.L. Bean. We were there around 7 and there was no crowd, yay! We ended up buying a couple bags of clothes and some new bedsheets and a big goose down comforter. I love that store. We left a little after 8 to head down to South Portland, Maine to see my sisters.

We met up with my sisters at my father’s place. Since my father is in the hospital they stayed there together (Heather normally lives down the street, but Annette lives 2 hours north). It’s not a bad little place. After talking for a bit we all headed over to Maine Medical Center, where my father was.

My father does not look good. I was glad that my Aunt Meg had prepared me, and happy to find that he’s stilly clear-minded, even though he’s quite tired. It wasn’t easy though, so I made sure that we’d be spending a lot of time with him. Throughout the day we stopped back at the hospital every few hours to visit with him.

That evening he got very tired around 6pm, and we went up toward Grey, Maine to meet our online friend, Morgana. Maybe we didn’t know as much about her and her husband as we should have (like a last name? their age?). But hey, we’ve talked online a lot, she’s very nice, a linux geek, and lives in a house in Maine! So we drove up to their place, and wow. Wow. They live in a huge old farmhouse that they’ve completely renovated. It’s beautiful! And they have something crazy like 120 acres of land. Their kitchen is beautiful and Morgana is an amazing cook. So we had some delicious crab cakes, then some very tastey steak and mushrooms, potatoes, spinach… yum! We talked and then watched a few episodes of Coupling until late. Best of all, Morgana and her husband are amazingly cool people. It was an excellent (I am going to break out a thesaurus in a minute to find more synonyms) night, and a great break from all the family stuff.

Morgana, Bob, pleia2, Michael

Saturday we met He
ather at 9:30 at the hotel Michael and I were staying at. My mother showed up too (and caused some unwanted trouble that I won’t get into here) with her boyfriend. We all then drove out to the storage facility where things from the house were being kept. We hat to go through it to find out if we wanted anything, see what could/should get thrown away, etc. I got a few boxes of nice books (perhaps I’ll write an entry about the stuff I got at a later time) and an ocean painting that hung above our fireplace when I was growing up.

We stopped and saw my father at the hospital around 11, then went out to lunch with my mother. My mother and Annette left to go home after lunch (apparently my mother had to work in the afternoon), so Michael and I headed back over to the hospital. We spent the day there. My father suggested I leave when he felt tired, but I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time to spend with him, so I picked up a Reader’s Digest and sat by his bed while he slept. If he wanted to talk I was there. I’m glad I spent that time there with him, I got to do a lot of thinking. Eventually my father got his dinner and we decided that it’d be best if Michael and I got going (we needed dinner too, and my father was quite tired for the night). It was hard leaving, knowing how sick my father is, but it was getting late.

It was Saturday evening and we still hadn’t had our lobster dinner! We wanted to go somewhere nice. Surprisingly, many of the lobster places around Portland cater to families, which means they’re relatively inexpensive and crowded with kids. We didn’t want that. So I suggested the Snow Squall, a nice place that I’ve been familiar with since I moved to Maine (we actually lived in the attached apartment/condo complex when I was very young). So we got there, sat down, and looked at the menu. No lobster. Ack! The waiter understood our disappointment, and we thought we’d try somewhere else. We left and went to one of those family-friendly places. When we went to sit down a paper football landed about 6 inches from my foot. Guess what? We left! Lobster or no, the Snow Squall had atmosphere we needed that evening.

We got back to the Snow Squall feeling quite silly. The waiter was very nice about it, and we started looking over the menu when the waiter came by and informed us that they had a couple 1 pound lobsters in back if we were interested. Nice! (yes the waiter got a huge tip) So we ordered a bottle of white wine and each got our lobster. It was a perfect dinner. For dessert I ordered a crazy “cheesecake” dessert that was flavored with Creme de Cacao and Kahlua. Ever gotten tipsy from a dessert before? Hehe. It was great. After dinner we went back to the hotel and went to sleep.

Sunday morning we got up and left by 9 am. The ride home was nice, we didn’t take the way through CT and NJ. Instead we took 95 t0 495 to 290 to the Mass. Pike to NY Thruway, to I-88 to I-81 to the Northeast Extension on the PA Turnpike. Mile-wise it’s longer, but there was barely any traffic (except when passing the I-84 exit, I hate that road!) and it was nice and scenic. We got back home by 7ish. Went out for dinner, then picked up Caligula from Michael’s mother’s. We got home and snuggled in our brand new flannel sheets and down comforter.

It was a good trip.