Habits are both hard to break and hard to form

Still haven't gotten the hang of posting on a regular basis, but I doubt anyone is concerned about that. Regardless, I'll sum up the last few weeks in bullet-point fashion.

• Was in Boston all of last week, attending Greenbuild. Huge, massive convention for the tree-hugging hippie types such as myself. Some great speakers & presentations, however my hotel wasn't really comfortable (avoid the Hilton Financial District) and the weather was frigid.
• Week before was in Raleigh for AASHE. Really not relevant to me, but then this was just a scouting mission to see if we would want to exhibit there next year. Conclusion: nah.
• Re-decorated the basement at home, converting it from the cat-pee-palace to potential guest suite. Got the carpet 99.9% pee-free thanks to a carpet shampooer and multiple enzyme products, and now am working on the bathroom down there.
• Mom is coming out here for Christmas, hence the guest suite in the basement. We're having Christmas at our house which will be interesting, but since there's only 6 of us I think it'll be good. Salmon & lobster chowder for dinner!
• Service guys at the house today checking out our furnace... just got a call from B that there's a massive crack in it, and since it's 20 years old it'll have to be replaced. GAH! Landlord will not be happy I'm sure, but considering the thing hasn't been functioning properly since last winter it's probably a good thing we found the problem at all.
• Jake ate an entire crock pot of homemade beef stew. The mound of shit in the yard was atrocious.
• Off to Cleveland tomorrow for the holiday... may take time to look at a new car while we're there. The Mitsi is just not cutting it & I'm afraid of something happening in the middle of a snowstorm this winter.

Now that THAT'S over with...

All I have to say is, time will tell. Considering that he & his staff are already backpedaling & trying to convince people that "this will take time" is kind of indicative of the type of president he'll probably be... the type that talks a lot of smack but won't be able to back it up. He'll get the liberals' hopes up about "CHANGE" and all this unicorns-and-rainbows bullshit, but I think there'll be a pretty strong backlash when the country is still in the shitter in 4 years.

I won't go so far as to side with the conspiracy-theorists who think that he's a terrorist in disguise with a horrible hidden agenda, but I do think that we're in for some unpleasant surprises.

***

Back to my own personal ranting, we seem to be having some "communication" issues with our web designers. We don't have in-house designers, so it seems to be kind of hit-or-miss when if comes to them understanding what exactly we want. We can break it down into short, simple, single-syllable descriptions in a bullet-point list, and they still manage to either screw up or just not do half of it. Even when that list is only 2 points long! I have a massive data entry project that I can't start yet because the "It's ready to go" email I received yesterday afternoon was completely not true, as both of the problems we'd discussed yesterday morning were still in blatant evidence this morning, and all 3 of my emails to them today have not been answered. Heads shall roll, very soon.

***

In more pleasant news, I will be getting my own work laptop so that I no longer have to haul my 40-lb brick of a slow-as-shit personal laptop along with me on work trips. This also opens up the possibility of working from home on the aforementioned massive data entry project! Copy-pasting text and entering recycled content data would be made all the more exciting if I could do it in my jammies with a cat sitting on my keyboard.

Eighteen pounds of pure lovin', plopped right in the middle of whatever you're doing.

You'd think they'd want the process to be easier

I got up a little early this morning so I could vote before going to work. My polling place was in my neighborhood, only a couple blocks away, so it was easy to get to... but that was all that was easy about it! B's registration apparently got lost or mis-processed at the BMV (he had some issues with his driver's license being renewed this year too so we think it got screwed up then), so he had to file a provisional ballot. I was sent to the wrong district table at first, then had to switch lines, and then didn't get any direction whatsoever after that so I had to go back to get my access card for the touch screen, then the stupid screen rejected my card. When I finally got into the ballot screen, I couldn't advance to the next page because the active part of the screen was about 1 centimeter square, so I had to keeping hitting the "Next" button over & over until I found the sweet spot that actually worked. On top of all that, the room at the steelworker's union was about the size of our conference room at work, and hotter than hell, and loud as hell too. All in all it was just not a fun experience. But at least it's done.

Among Other Things...

I haven't been sleeping well lately. I blamed my pillow at first, that it was too thick & gave me a kink in my neck. So I switched to a flat cotton pillow, but I still am having a hard time. I never seem to hit the REM-stage of sleep, I wake up a lot during the night with a sore shoulder or my arms have fallen asleep, and I feel addled & lethargic all day long. Even on the weekends, I can't seem to sleep enough, and I'm horribly unmotivated to do anything at all. Is it all related somehow? Would a good massage or the use of my "white noise" player solve it? Is it a mental thing? Or am I just lazy & unmotivated, and looking for an excuse?

This weekend, I had intended to clean out the gardens and flowerpots of the frost-shriveled veggie plants & annuals, but this stupid lethargy made me waste the decent weather. I like taking time just to sit & not do anything but rest & relax, but there's a point where it feels like laziness to me. I've definitely hit that point and moseyed right on past it too.
***
There's a management shift happening at work, and a good one too I think. The president (whom I've mentioned before) is passing the torch to my current boss (the GM), and I'm being moved to the Marketing Department (if you can call it a department; there's 3 of us in it). So the current prez will still be considered "CEO" but won't really have much to do with the operation of the company anymore beyond some "market opportunity" stuff, and my current boss will finally be in charge where he truly belongs since he does it all already anyway & is much better at it, and my new boss is still cool and much more accessible, and will be easy to work with. Plus there is a distinct chance that I'll get to move to a REAL office, instead of the Pit of Despair! I think that's the most important thing out of all of this, of course.

Poster Boy for I'm Not Sure What

B cleaned the kitchen AND the bathroom this weekend. And I sat on my ass like the lazy bitch I am.

It wasn't until last night that I realized that he was totally using cleaning as a procrastination tool, to avoid working on the 10-page paper that was due on Friday, that he told his prof he would have done today, that still wasn't done as of this morning.

But would I have yelled at him, told him to put down the sponge and go do his homework, if I had realized his ploy sooner?

That, my friends, is a difficult question.

I don't think our kitchen has been this clean since before we moved in.