Greetings from Frozen Ice World! It's terribly cold today, and then it's supposed to melt and refreeze midway through this week, and so watch this space for further whining about slippery conditions. (Or maybe it'll melt the thick layer of ice that's currently covering the city, and make it all better? I'm going to hope that it'll melt it and make it go away.)
I'm also fighting a constant headache, and typing this in a hurry, as a 5 year old climbs all over me, asking me when I'll be done and pay attention to her.
How are things where you are?
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55 comments:
Ouchy head! Yikes on ice! This totally sounds like a video features day, QWP. xoxo
The mid-sector of the North American continent is celebrating Martin Luther King day today, and my personal guess is that most of us are still rooting for justice to roll down like a mighty river. There's a lot of "I can't even," given recent events and the fact that the fireplacing leader is celebrating on a golf course. For at least the 95th time since he became our fireplacing leader, less than a year ago. Because hey, he recorded a video message, how much do those people want? My fabulous congressional rep went out to the local food bank to help bag food for families in need -- that's what I want. Or, you know, stop trashing everybody who isn't you, plus most of the rest of the world -- that would be cool. /end rant/
My nearby cousin's coming for dinner! There will be BBQ, rain or not.
QWP, tomorrow I will be joining you in the ice whine. Predictions are for widespread road problems all day tomorrow. Our school district has not canceled yet, but I fully expect that they will. I was on the phone with my brother when the cold front came through there, and my SIL had to go chase things that were blowing out of their back yard and over the fence! I have *so much* to do this week, and much of it requires concentration and sustained thought. Having Baboos around is not conducive to concentration and sustained thought. Sigh.
W/AW: We have finally found a place for the family trip/celebration of my parents' 50th anniversary this coming summer. The W is that it was more money than we were hoping to spend.
W/AW: whine of more money applies here too, but we have put down a deposit on a puppy.
Stay safe tomorrow, esperanza! Ice storms are awful. And solidarity regarding having to get things done while surrounded by rambunctious little ones.
AW: Mr. Q is home and has taken over dealing with E
W: that child is absolutely wired this afternoon. And keeps making this high-pitched meow sound that pierces my skull, even when she's in the basement and I'm upstairs.
Mama needs some quiet time, QWP! Sounds like Esperanza will need some tomorrow, too.
What's with all the ice? Sending non-slip thoughts.
AW: I'm using a fancy jar of yet another mole sauce to marinate the chicken -- something santa brought, and nobody wanted so it's all mine mine mine! My sweetie and cousin can bond over the BBQ, with chicken and pork. Zukes can either be BBQ'd or steamed. I'll toss a salad and cook pasta (fettucine of 2 colors); both go with anything, is my theory. Chips and guac for appetizers.
Sorry about the sore head, QWP, and I do hope you don't get the ice later in the week. We're in winter wonderland world here today, which is pretty to look at but not great for driving.
I hope you and esperanza both get some quiet time!
Yay for the upcoming 50th plans esperanza and for the puppy!!!! So exciting!
kathy, the "I can't even" just keeps coming... sheesh. The BBQ meal sounds lovely. Enjoy your visit with your cousin!
W: You remember last week when my part of the country was placed in a massive Region for the new church structure? Today there was a nationwide consultation via you tube to ask the commission about their rationale for the boundaries. Many people in our Region asked why it was so large.
The response (I wish I was making this up): "It's a big country."
*facepalm*
Sue, I'm scratching my head about that answer. Like, it's always been a big country. The land mass hasn't changed since we added Newfoundland in the 1940s. That doesn't at all explain the redistricting. (I suspect that the real answer has to do with cost savings via staff reduction, by providing less support for more remote regions?)
Sue, a colleague and I were talking about your situation, as we shared only a 3 hour car ride. It was fine, but I would not have wanted to share a 12 hour car ride with her.
School has indeed been canceled for tomorrow. Widespread freakouts (people buying groceries in apocalyptic quantities, etc).
AW: I forgot! We had a visitor yesterday at church, who spoke mostly Spanish. I understood him! And we had a conversation! And...then he asked for money. We couldn't pay his rent, but I bought him a tank of gas and gave him the food we'd collected for the food pantry that morning, and some fruit we had for snacks.
Oh, Esperanza. You have a generous and caring church. xoxo
Sue, yeah. What's new about it being a big country? Seems like support for well populated areas, not so much for those at more of a distance -- who need support, too. Another solution could have been more equitable geographic boundaries, and more staffing where there are more people, no?
Cousin's doing better, recovering still from being knocked off his bike and concussed all to heck, and (big stress) he might be getting close to settling the divorce thing. Clyde growled at first, because my cousin came in through the *front door* -- but fell in love, and after dinner and many dog kisses, actually fell asleep sprawled across my cousin's lap. Yeah, that's how mean this dog is. ;)
How wonderful that you could have a conversation with your visitor, esperanza! I'm glad you were able to help him too.
I'm glad your visit with your cousin went so well, kathy. He's dealing with a lot of difficult things (concussions are so awful) - I'm sure he was delighted to have a good evening with family, food, and a "mean" dog. ;)
The dire ice predictions have not come to pass here, but they have just a little bit to our south (which is still in our school district, so I suppose it's justifiable to have canceled school). The police are saying that bridges and overpasses are icy, but our street is almost completely dry. We'll stay put today, but oh how I could be using this time differently...
Yay about no ice at your personal street, esperanza! Hope the baboos can self-entertain part of the day so you can do stuff.
I'm going in for another round with a legal research provider, which is charging me a bundle for something I don't want, don't use, can't afford, and want to cancel -- plus, earlier in the month they screwed up my billing, so I ended up with a problem potentially affecting my credit. I was supposed to be contacted a week and a half ago by my account rep, and zipperino from her. It is not possible to list the ways they have failed to earn my trust and loyalty, while still taking my money.
Ugh, I hope you can get your account cancelled, Kathy! What a nuisance.
Hooray for avoiding the ice, esperanza! I hope you manage to get your work done in spite of the presence of the Baboos today.
AW: I'm completely alone right now (sorry, esperanza!), and don't have any appointments today during preschool.
W: my house is in complete chaos, and I have zero motivation to start dealing with it. Where do you even begin?
Is there stuff you can pick up fast, to make everything look neater? I mean -- toys where they belong; laundry to a bin; stuff in a cabinet; etc. Every tiny thing you can put on a list is something you can cross off!
Sadly, that leaves you with stashed things after a while, but those things are not on the list for today. ;) Maybe I'm not the best household organizing consultant, but this can get you through the day. Feeling accomplished!
I ended up taking the opposite approach: I found all the stashes of paper and cardboard that needed to be sorted and recycled (including piles of packaging from the Eye-key-ah order), and slowly started to reclaim my office (which has recently become a hiding spot for junk). So, the house is still pretty chaotic, but I reclaimed my office.
Reclaiming the office totally counts as a Really Big Thing! Yay!
Two hour delay for school tomorrow. I think it's prudent, and I'll take it. I was starting to fret about the Baboos waiting for the bus in single digit windchill readings. We are...not equipped for such weather.
That seems really prudent, esperanza. And a good way to deal with those in the school division that still have ice.
I should clarify that by "reclaimed my office" I mean that it doesn't have junk all over the floor, and a few things have been filed. There are still piles of things on most surfaces, but it's a start.
I follow the pile system, too, QWP, which I thought was working fine for me. Then I lost, for at least a month, a report that someone else needed. Lost and forgot about it entirely. I thought I had returned it to her, but it was lurking at the bottom of one of my sensible piles. Yikes!
I have a filing cabinet, and I don't know why it seems SO HARD to put things directly in there! (Okay, part of the problem was that the room got filled up with other junk, and it was annoying to go to my filing cabinet.)
Just popping in for a quick hello before I finish my planning for tomorrow.
Yay QWP on reclaiming the room!!!!
Sue, so sorry about the headaches.
Glad school systems are being prudent esperanza! (We are likely to have school tomorrow despite snow)
Hugs to all!
--Neighbor Lady
p.s. Old school whine: my hands are so dry that I have a jillion little paper-cut-like cracks in them. ANd then I use Pure11... and .... Owie!!!!
I know that whine too well, NL! This time of year + the need to keep them very clean = awful hands. Tonight, I'm going to slather the backs of my hands in V@s3line, to see if that helps.
QWP-- me too! and then I wear socks on my hands while I sleep. Hope it helps!
-NL
Dry hand hack: I have some lanolin (yes, still) that I used when nursing Mini and pumping for Sweet. It is heavenly when my hands are in the state you describe, NL. It works better even than V@sel1ne. And it apparently never goes bad, and a little bit of it goes a long way.
OMG-- I totally fogot about lanolin!
Thanks!
--NL
Lanolin! I still have a tube of that, kicking around.
Ugh, kathy, I hope you can sort out that account. What a pain.
esperanza, I'm glad the worst of the ice and snow missed you. Delaying the start of the school days seems a wise choice.
Well done, QWP!
I hear you on the dry hands, NL.
AW: I actually had a really good night's sleep last night.
At 9AM, when the bus arrived, the wind chill was 7. Seven! This does not happen here. Thankfully, the sun is shining, and that helped.
Hooray for good sleep, Sue. It makes such a difference.
Google informs me that 7F is minus 13, almost minus 14 Celsius.
It's +1C here! We're warmer here! How often does that happen?
Actual temperature was 18F, it was just the wind chill that was ridiculous. But that still makes you warmer. Weird.
To continue the weather commentary, forecast for Saturday is 71F/21C
Oh, that's a pretty big jump, Esperanza!
Two more days until Grace and Frankie is back!
Ahhh, I'm so excited for another season!
We're having big jumps in temperature here, considering that it was -40 (both scales) a few days ago. That big swing might account for the debilitating headaches I had for a few days.
I'm babysitting three of my friend's kids (her youngest has a 3:30 appointment, and so I'm watching the older three for a little while), and is it weird that this is a massive break for me? Days at home with an only child are frequently very long days, wherein she demands a lot of attention, and incessant questions. Now, I have supper in the oven, and am sitting with my feet up, while they're all playing hide and seek in the basement.
Not weird! We always found that there was much less trouble when we had "extras" around -- the kids would play and entertain one another, the problems and whines were rare. Sure, sometimes something would go sideways; but it was all manageable. This evolved into some "trade" agreements over time, where it was totally fine for another family's kids to come over so they could have a little time off, and vice versa. Oh, those were fun times.
My friend (who has four kids) offered that she can also babysit E, if I ever need to drop her off somewhere. She says that her kids are also easier to manage when an extra is around! (Seriously, they were all so cute: when it was just E and the four year old, E just toured her buddy around, showing him all her toys. Then the older two arrived, they all inhaled a bunch of food, and they took off to play hide and seek.) I'm glad they live so close to us.
The other thing is that kids almost always behave better when they are with somebody else's parents. IMO.
W: Been aching and dragging all day -- dosing with advil, applying the heat wrap, etc. And then my beloved came home with Man Sickness. Made an executive decision to go settle down early tonight, let the dog handle things for now, and go buy a lot of soup tomorrow.
Oh dear. Man Sickness. I agree that the dog can handle this for tonight.
That's awfully cold for your part of the world, esperanza!
Yay for extras, QWP. I always found extra children in the house to be super helpful in minimizing the "I'm booooored" moments.
Yikes, kathy! Sorry to hear the dreaded Man Sickness has entered your home.
AW: Last evening a member of our Board called to declare today a snowshoeing day. He and his wife and another person are going out to the bush to snowshoe and they've invited me along. It's a perfect day for it. -10C now, but warming to -2C later on, light snow. WooHoo!
W: I have a LOT of work to finish up this morning.
That sounds fun, Sue -- the snowshoeing, not the work.
Well, he stayed home and is feeling better. Alas, I'm not feeling much better today...
Snowshoeing sounds like fun, Sue! How nice to be included!
W: I had way too much stuff to do today already. Then, a church member texts that she is in the hospital because there was a FIRE at her house last night. She's already on oxygen all the time, so they took her to the hospital for her breathing. She's pretty much back to her normal (which isn't great) and will be discharged to her daughter's house. But, I felt like I needed to go see her in the hospital (I was already in Church Town), and that took a good chunk out of the middle of my day. Sigh. So it goes.
Snowshoeing! Now I wish I'd had to presence of mind to spend this preschool afternoon on my cross country skis, instead of watching TV and eating crackers. (The weather is so nice here, too!)
Esperanza, I'm glad that you went and saw the church member, but understand the sadness about lost time. (I'm currently inwardly whining that I've given up the next three preschool evenings to appointments, babysitting, and helping at a special preschool event, even though it's all good things that I'll be doing.)
The Man stayed home today, and is feeling better. The Dogness is currently frantic, because The Man is in the house and not glued directly to the dog he so clearly needs, right now, woof! Woof woof!!
I, too, am under the weather. Bleah.
Fortunately, the CVS has low-sodium chicken noodle soup -- which the big fat supermarket has been out of lately. The CVS makes me crazy sometimes, but I can also get things like hand soap and advil and toothpaste without waiting 20 minutes for someone to unlock the cabinets at the supermarket. (Seriously, they are all locked up, an entire aisle of normal products that people need!)
...your supermarket locks up the toothpaste, hand soap, and ibuprofen?! I'm so confused right now. (A lot of grocery stores around here have a pharmacy otc section that locks when the pharmacy is closed, and so that would include the ibuprofen, but toothpaste? Soap? All the time?)
I have a five year old who is surprisingly similar to The Dogness, in terms of clingy behavior when Daddy is in the house but busy doing something else.
W: child was a grumpy handful, who had a lengthy meltdown in the late afternoon. And we're having to have serious talks about how she thinks that she can threaten to do bad things, so long as she doesn't actually do them. (She's pushing boundaries HARD right now.)
(((Kathy a.)))) Hope you (and your beloved) feel better soon! I recommend matzah ball soup! It's magic!
So sorry about the boundary pushing, QWP!!
esperanza, I am sorry that your day went a different direction than you planned, but I know your parishioner was comforted by you being there!
I am feeling very whiny about wasting time this evening at what was billed as help with navigating college financial stuff... complicated forms, deadlines, etc. all suposedly explained. Turns out it was an hour long infomercial seminar with no real information, but just telling people what they would need in a company who helps coordinate that stuff for you (not for free!). But, hey, no fear, the company running the dumb seminar is there to help!! Bring them all your financial info (W2s, tax forms, bank statements etc), then they'll look and decide whether to accept you as a client.... and only then.... not after my hour wasted tonight.... will they supposedly give you any info. So annoying!
/end rant/
Anyway, I am off to bed, but sending you all hugs!
--Neighbor Lady
oooh, NL, that kind of stuff steams me! You are right to be whiny. I'd just be mad.
W: cancer diagnosis that friend got was not the horrifying one I had thought; it's rare and possibly more horrifying. She claims to be hopeful. I'm glad she can hang on to that. Her mother beat melanoma, so she's definitely got some fighting genes in her.
W: EIGHT hours after I paused my work to come home and meet the bus, I'm finally getting back to it. My two jobs are clashing horribly this week. I could see it coming on the calendar, but whew.
Ick, NL. The college financial aid stuff is a pain, but if I could stumble through it, you can too!
Oh, Esperanza. So sorry about your friend. Fireplacing cancer.
Feeling better today, and my beloved headed off to work. It's sunny, but cold for here (don't laugh -- 40's F; could hit 30's tonight).
I'm making lentil / veggie / meatball soup in the crockpot. Cheated with pre-made quality chicken meatballs (Adell's), and a bunch of pre-chopped firm veggies from TJ's. Added chopped onion and bok choy, diced potato, sliced celery, broth and spices. Just feels like the right day for this kind of soup.
NL, one of these days, I need to learn to make matzoh ball soup! Because, yum.
It's been a few since I did the FAFSA, and I believe I complained mightily at the time. The problems I remember were technical, like inputting all this info they wanted and then poof, it would disappear and I'd have to start again. (I partly blame them for making it complicated, and partly blame my own tech ineptness.) I'd be upset about the infomercial, too! YOU will still need to gather the info! And it doesn't make a huge amount of sense to pay someone else to input it for you. IMO. My daughter did her own last year for law school -- not a dependent this time -- and she had no real problems with it.
QWP, yeah. Apparently my local supermarket gets a lot of shoplifting? But it's ridiculous. A few years ago, they combined 2 local branches of this chain into one giant super-store, but it's not staffed decently, and so they do stupid things like lock up the toothpaste, soap, and advil. Also baby formula, which makes me sad.
The soup is good! Watched last night's grey's anatomy, and it is a big walking ad for domestic violence intervention. Made editorial suggestions on daughter's writing sample, and she is OK with them! Now, Grace and Frankie!
Oh, and also -- daughter had a wonderful restorative visit to the animal shelter today, where she fell in love with everybody, but especially this one puppy, and a bright orange one-eyed lover of a cat. You see? Excellent therapy! Her first summer application has been sent, too.
Well, the government is shut down.
AW: unlike last time, my employer is not furloughing me (I am not and have never been a gov't employee, but I work for gov't contractors).
W: The folks I'm working with IN the gov't ARE being furloughed. This is going to affect a whole bunch of things having to do with funding for 1500 of the poorest school districts in the nation.
To sum up: Republicans are unable to govern and I can't wait for November.
Liz. Grrr.
My son's storage unit is closing because people aren't paying their rent. His kayak is coming to live with us for a while. There's probably some room near the excess furniture we still have from SIL, I guess. SIGH.
He also works not directly for the government, so they won't be shut down unless it goes on a while.
I'm rationing the Grace and Frankie, season 4, because they released the whole shebang all at once. Wasn't that excited about Ep. 1, but am now through Ep. 2, and am again hooked on all the characters. Especially the leads, natch. A person needs some Tomlin and Fonda to pick things up.
Hooray to all those marching today, and all in solidarity!
Date dinner tonight.
Hope today's going well for everybody!
Heartened to see some more marches today, also. Not so heartened about other news, but we'll see.
We need some more certified copies of a court order about my husband's conservatorship for his disabled sister -- so I'm taking the train up to the county seat in a couple days, know exactly what I need and how to get it; it's a cute town with shops and cafes; and wifi both on the train and in the courthouse. The dog's got daycare that day, yay. Maybe I do not get out enough, because that day sounds satisfying. Plus, I'll take a book.
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