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Archive for February, 2009

Lovely bureaucratic crap

February 27, 2009 Kay Lynn 2 comments

I hate bureaucracies.  You can never get them on the phone.  I just spent seventeen minutes on hold to have a conversation with someone that lasted all of 36 seconds.  And that was the second time I called!  I had to hang up the first time because a client came in and I had to help them.  Stupid bureacracies.  And they have horrible hold music.  At least the IRS plays Tchaikovsky.

In other news, it’s Friday!  Yay!  In better news, I get to go home in 16 minutes!  Double yay!  In rather less exciting news, I have a horrible headache that only seems to be getting worse, despite the Excedrin I took with my Dr. Pepper.  And now my tummy hurts.  Stupid headache.

I am so looking forward to the weekend.  I was looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow morning and working out when the sun is up, but now I’m going bridesmaid dress shopping in Cedar Rapids, so I had better just get up at the crack of dawn again so that I can get everything done that I need to get taken care of before we leave.  Except for visiting Aunt Melissa.  That will have to wait till we get back.  Hopefully this time I won’t get overheated and lightheaded.  Then again, this time I won’t be all doped up on cold medicine. :)

Happy Friday, all!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Iron skies

February 26, 2009 Kay Lynn 2 comments

So today we had a thunderstorm.  In February.  Every other time we’ve had a thunderstorm in February that I can recall, that’s been bad news.  The first time I remember it raining in February was back in 2007 when we had that horrible ice storm that knocked out the power for nine days.  Those were not fun times, my friends.  It probably rained in February last year, too, because we had quite the ice storm then, also.  Actually, last winter period was pretty much an ice-fest.  They were talking rain/freezing rain/sleet for here today and lots of snow for the northwestern part of the state.  I heard on the radio this morning that some places in Minnesota received over a foot of snow between then and last night; evidently it was falling at the rate of about two inches per hour.  That’s a lot of snow!  But they can keep it because I certainly don’t want it here.  I’ll have enough to deal with on my way home if the temperature drops like it’s supposed to.  I’ve heard the roads in the country are already starting to slicken up a bit.  It’s supposed to drop down to 17° tonight, so I’ll have lots of fun on my way to work tomorrow.  Maybe I won’t be able to make it in and I can have another three-day weekend.  I think I would be okay with that.

*sigh*  I am so tired today.  I stayed up way too late last night (yes, 11:00 p.m. is late) and got up way too early this morning.  I am so not a morning person.  In fact, not a morning person doesn’t even begin to cover it.  As I said this morning, if people were meant to pop out of bed, we’d all sleep in toasters.  I think I said that yesterday, too, but oh, well.

All I want to do is go home and collapse on the couch.  Instead I get to go home, putz around for a bit, and then head right back out the door for parent-teacher conferences.  *sigh*  I am so unbelievably glad that tomorrow is Friday.  Five o’clock tomorrow can’t come fast enough.

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

The pint-sized buzzkill strikes again

February 25, 2009 Kay Lynn 4 comments

Oh, Rachael.  Whatever will I do with you?  This morning she came downstairs and the first thing out of her mouth was, “Did you just get on that?”  “About twenty minutes ago,” I replied.  “You look really tired,” she pointed out.  Gee, thanks!

Ay-ya, I am not for waking up before the sun.  As the great feline philosopher Garfield once stated, if people were meant to pop out of bed, we’d all sleep in toasters.  I am a lazy slugabed and proud of it.  My alarm clock is far from being my friend.  Why must mornings come so early?

I anticipate a lot of whining until I adjust to this new thing called exercise.  I am in lousy shape and I hate working out, plus I like to whine about it, so…Sorry in advance!

In other news, I just had a rather unnerving experience with a traveling meat salesman.  You know, those guys who go door-to-door selling frozen steaks and chicken and seafood?  So this guy stops in and wants to know if I eat good steaks every now and then.  “Sure, every once in a blue moon,” I replied.  He seemed to have a little trouble making his sales pitch, like his voice didn’t want to work or something.  He was kind of a big guy and was standing freakishly close to my desk with this intent stare.  I finally told him I wasn’t interested in any steaks.  He countered with their offerings of chicken and seafood and I shot those down, too.  He stared at me then and asked if there was anyone else he could talk to, as if the closed doors and lack of other people in the office weren’t clues enough.  I told him no and then he left as quickly as he arrived.  It was weird, I tell ya.  Besides, I prefer the safety of purchasing my meat from either a store or a meatlocker.  I just don’t trust those traveling salesman.  How do you know the product is being kept at the right temperature?  With my luck when it comes to these things, I’d buy some and then end up horribly sick with E. coli or salmonella or something and die.  Since I want to postpone dying for as long as humanly possible, purchasing meat from the back of a truck from God-knows-where just doesn’t seem like the brightest thing in the world to do.

Is it quitting time yet?  I’m as tired today as I was yesterday and all I want to do is go home.  At least today things seemed to go a little easier with the elliptical.  Then again, I put the resistance on the lowest setting.  But the time seemed to pass a little faster this morning, despite still not having anything to look at but a dark and empty stairwell and a wall.

Oh joy of joys, it’s 3:37 p.m.!  Only one hour and twenty-three minutes left till quitting time!  I suppose I should get some real work done now…

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Modern torture devices

February 24, 2009 Kay Lynn 3 comments

I have discovered that torture devices are alive and well in the 21st century.  I had a particularly close call with one this morning.  It taunted me with its promises of better health and weight loss and for thirty agonizing moments, I succumbed to glorious images of a new and improved me.  Then, hot, sweaty, tired, and in pain, I wondered incredulously what the hell I had been thinking.  Obviously it had some sort of mind control powers that it failed to mention or it would probably not have succeeded in keeping me in its clutches for as long as it did.  In future, I will know better than to heed its siren song and fully intend to steer clear of it and any and all like devices.  What is the device of which I speak, you may be asking yourselves, so that I, too, can avoid them?  The answer, friends, is simple: the elliptical machine.

Yes, I have begun in earnest the workout regimen that I’ve been promising to start for at least the last two years.  I somehow managed to break free from the lovely warmth and comfort of my cozy bed at 5:45 a.m. this morning and engage in an arduous workout.  By arduous, of course, I mean that I set the thing to level 2 and spent thirty minutes whining about being bored, thirsty, hot, cold, tired, and sick while struggling to breathe through my nose for the first time in days.  That’s right, folks, I’m a pansy and a whiner.

But of course you already knew that.

My goal is to get into better shape and lose all the weight that I’ve gained over the last year.  Ideally, this will happen prior to September 26, but I suppose that’s too much to hope for.  Maybe I can just lose most of it by then.

I still hate mornings, though, and getting up at the ass-crack of dawn is sooooooooooo not my idea of a good time.  In fact, working out in general is not exactly my idea of a good time, in case you couldn’t tell.  I love riding my bike and going swimming and taking walks, but those are all rather difficult to do in the middle of winter.  Oh, sure, I could join a gym and do all of those things inside, but then there would be no mosquitoes to swat away, no sunburns to deal with, no bratty kids to shoo out of my way in the pool, no excess of heat and humidity…Why haven’t I joined a gym again yet?  Oh, right, because then I would miss out on enjoying nature.  Because I’m such the avid naturalist and all-around outdoorsy type.  Right.

Maybe in my dreams.

Rachael cracked me up this morning.  She came downstairs as I was about halfway through my half-hour of torture and sat down at the table to watch me, positively enthralled by what she saw.  Whether it was the idea of me working out or the fact that she had no idea what it was I was doing that kept her attention riveted on my ever-reddening face, I’m not sure.  “You look tired,” she said.  I gasped my agreement.  “I would be done now if that were me,” she continued.  I stared at her for a moment, not sure whether to laugh or cry, then told her to go play.  Greg told her that people don’t like to be observed while working out, which is true for me because I’m always afraid I’ll look like an idiot, even when I’m the only person around.  I asked him if he heard what she’d said and he replied that he hadn’t, so I told him.  He laughed.  Then he came out and said that I didn’t look as bad as he thought I would.  Apparently that’s supposed to mean that I’m in better shape than originally thought, despite the fact that I get winded running up the steps to the clerk’s office at the courthouse every day (I’ve been doing it for three years now, so you’d think I’d be used to it, but you would be wrong; and lest I make it seem like that’s a small amount of stairs, there are somewhere around two dozen steps just to get into the courthouse, then three more flights up to the clerk’s office).  I could probably have phrased all that better, but my brain seems to have fallen asleep from all that exercising I did this morning.

In other news, the sinus infection that’s been threatening for so long finally hit with a vengeance on Friday and I spent Saturday on the couch.  I spent most of Saturday morning asleep.  Yay sleep!  We went to Ankeny this weekend and did lots of wedding planningy type things, such as picking up my wedding dress.  YAY!!!!!!  Then I (accidentally) got super-drugged-up on cold medicine and Excedrin and felt like a space cadet all of Sunday.  A word to the wise: Don’t mix two Nyquil liqui-gels with three Excedrin and a muscle relaxer.  Bad things will happen.  It was much less fun to go shopping and try on pretty dresses in my drug-induced fog than I had originally anticipated.  But I still have to have it bustled and there are still other dresses to pick out, so I suppose I can deal with it.

Yay wedding dress! :)

I finally got around to sending my cell phone in to be fixed.  I guess I procrastinated a bit with that.  You would think I would have gotten it taken care of right away and I did try to do just that, but then I got lazy.  Now I have to wait four to six weeks for my pretty pink phone to be usable again.  Stupid phone breakage.

And in laptop news, we finally gave up on waiting for Dell to send the cds they promised to send.  They kept pushing back the ship date and when Greg called to find out why, they told him they had the cds in stock (and they weren’t on back-order like he’d been told before) and they didn’t know why they hadn’t been sent out.  *looking very earnest*  They promised to send them out right away, overnight even.  They still never arrived.  So we finally managed to get them to send us prepaid shipping labels and we shipped it back to them.  Once they’re satisfied, they’re supposed to send me a new one with the right operating system on it.  It will probably be another month at least before that happens.  Stupid Dell.  Their computers are great, but their customer service really sucks.

My God I’m tired!  I blame the early rising this morning, the muscle relaxer I took after my lovely warm shower, and the stupid sinus infection that won’t go away.  And by won’t go away, I mean that the two doses of antibiotic I’ve taken haven’t managed to banish it yet.  WORK FASTER, MEDICINE!  I WANT TO BREATHE!

*sigh*  In the meantime, I suppose I had better get back to work, although I’m really not sure what it is that I’ll do to pass the time and keep from falling asleep.  I felt rotten enough yesterday that I toyed with the idea of calling in sick today so that I could stay home and rest up from the weekend, but I’m a goody-goody, so here I am.  At work.  Where I’m supposed to be working but am blogging as a way to put off doing anything even remotely productive instead.

Happy Tuesday!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Ugh…

February 20, 2009 Kay Lynn Leave a comment

The cold has hit with a mighty vengeance.  I feel like crap.  Can I go home now?  I’m tired, weak, achy, and my nose feels like it was attacked with sandpaper.  My throat is killing me, but I refuse the Vicks.  If you’ve had it, you know why.  I’ll just take my lovely honey-lemon Halls cough drops.  The menthol makes me numb.  Yay numb!

Speaking of numb, my brain seems to be feeling a bit on the numb side today.  For instance, I could normally come up with a dozen different replies to a comment battle on literary theory/politics that I saw yesterday, but today my brain refuses to come up with even one that sounds halfway intelligent.  Actually, my brain refuses to come up with anything that sounds even halfway intelligent today.  I think it must have started the weekend a day early.  How I wish I could do the same!

Hmm…I should probably look up the phone number for David’s Bridal so I can schedule an appointment for this weekend.  I keep forgetting to do that.

*sigh*  A nap sounds thoroughly entertaining right now.  My neck is so stiff!  I just want to lie down for a while.  And maybe not get back up for a week or so.

But I suppose I must attempt to work; there’s still two and a half hours left of the day, after all.  Thank God it’s Friday!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Another Thursday in the trenches

February 19, 2009 Kay Lynn Leave a comment

How I wish today was Friday!  I’ve already had a short week but every day just seems to drag on and on and it seems like Monday was ages and ages ago.  I can’t wait till tomorrow night!  Yay Fridays!

In other news, I’ve been working on a new short story.  I hope to have it finished by the end of the week.  It’s a take on one of the stories I wrote in high school that has some promise (if I can dig through all the soap opera-y crap to find it).  It primarily involves two of the main characters, but there are mentions of two others.  I should really get to working on that again.  And the one that I wrote toward the end of high school.  I had that on my flash drive and so I took a look at it yesterday, but it was an old version and I knew I had changed some things in it, so when I got home last night I plugged in my old laptop to find it there and it had the old version, too, so I ran upstairs to get my slippers and then I ran down to the basement to find my hard copy (because I hand-write everything and type it up later) and sure enough, there was everything I remembered writing that I couldn’t find on my computer and wow, this must be a record-setting run-on sentence.  (Normally I’m totally against those because they’re incredibly annoying, but every now and then I feel the urge to be silly and use one.)  So instead of working on my new story last night, I ended up rereading the old one and all my revisions.  I think once I get this new short story finished, I’ll go back to working on the other one.  It has less crap to dig through.

And speaking of laptops, so much for mine.  The one I got for my birthday is kaput.  Greg called Dell’s customer support and they said we couldn’t return it.  The cds they were supposed to send out are on backorder till the end of the month according to the website, but in stock according to the supervisor Greg talked to Monday morning.  That guy said he would ship them overnight on Tuesday and we should have them by Wednesday.  They never showed up yesterday.  I would really like to use my new computer, stupid Dell guys!  Make with the cds already!

Okay, that was my whining for the day.  Except that my throat and the roof of my mouth are really sore and I wish they weren’t.  I don’t want to catch another cold!

And now I suppose I should get back to doing actual work…

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Elusive

February 18, 2009 Kay Lynn Leave a comment

Fleeting, darting,
Here now,
Gone.
Here again!
Or not.
Grasping, desperate, almost there.
Slipping through the fog,
Stumbling, clumsy, groping through the mist.
Fleeting, darting,
Searching, grasping,
Gotcha!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Spring…it has to come eventually

February 17, 2009 Kay Lynn 2 comments

And it sounds like I’ll be craving it a lot this week.  I heard on the radio this morning that today is supposed to be the warmest day all week.  Oh joy.  Maybe I’ll just start my honeymoon a little early and take a mental trip to Vegas, where it’s got to be warmer than it is here.

Didn’t work.  I’m still cold.  I’ve got layers on and I’m cold.  I have a sweater on over a medium-weight short-sleeve shirt and I’m seriously contemplating getting another sweater.  I have one in the other room, the one with the microwave that could provide me with a yummy cup of tea.  Or hot chocolate.  But probably tea.  Unless I make some Crystal Light.  But why would I do that when I’m cold?

Okay, so it’s settled.  I’ll be having tea.  But should I have constant comment, pear-flavored white tea, regular old black tea, or tension tamer?  So many choices!

I’m going to try another experimental Crystal Light flavor if I ever warm up.  Raspberry lemonade.  I hope it’s better than the cranberry apple.  It sort of grew on you after a while, but I won’t be buying it again.  I was sorely tempted to buy some Country Time Strawberry Lemonade, but I resisted.  It’s oh-so-good, but I don’t need all those extra calories.  After all, that’s why I gave up pop.  I know, I know, what a shocker.  Worse is that the last time I had a Dr. Pepper (my favorite kind of pop), it didn’t even taste good.  I had my first pop in several weeks yesterday and it tasted awful.  I guess that means I’m officially done enjoying pop.  Oh, I’ll still have one every now and then (pizza just doesn’t taste as good with anything else), but I think I’m done actually loving it.  Sad.

Speaking of sad, my plant appears to be dead.  The miniature rose bush that Greg bought me a couple weeks ago is all withered and wilted and looks like it’s ready to kick off any minute now.  I almost started crying when I saw it this morning.  Apparently no one thought to water it yesterday while I was gone.

I took yesterday off so that we could have family pictures taken and run some errands.  It was really nice having a day off to enjoy with Greg, especially since yesterday was his birthday and I got to spend all day with him.  We had some engagement pictures done, too.  I can’t wait till they’re all back!

Hmm, I suppose I ought to get back to work.  After all, that’s what I’m getting paid for.

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

I reject your reality and substitute a Star Trek episode of my choosing

February 14, 2009 Kay Lynn Leave a comment

Because seriously, that flair is just awesome.

Ho de ho ho…It’s Valentine’s Day!  Yippee!  Except I don’t get to go out and do something fun.  On the other hand, all the places I would want to go out to will likely be packed to the gills tonight, so I guess that makes a nice quiet evening at home all the more enjoyable.  Plus I’m going to do the cooking, so I know it will turn out awesome.  If only the kids will eat it and not throw a fit…Please, oh please, let them not be picky tonight!

I have now nearly won the war on laundry and am rather excited.  Now I just have to wage war on the dust and conquer the cobwebs and vacuum and buy Valentine cards and…eesh, my day went fast and it’s only 10:40 a.m.!  With all that on my to-do list, I doubt I’ll get to do much else today.  Hopefully I find my motivation soon or it’s going to be a long day.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Categories: Stuff and nonsense

Flurry

February 13, 2009 Kay Lynn 4 comments

Dancing, swirling,
Prancing, twirling,
Flitting, falling
Freely.
Spinning, leaping,
Jumping, floating,
Spiraling, diving
Down.

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Categories: Poetry, Writing