goblinbox.com

In which it’s totally off the hook and I’ve been walking around grinning like a lobotomy recipient.

I haven’t posted for five days ’cause I’ve been busy. *waggles eyebrows* Yes: busy. In the Biblical sense of the word, if you catch my drift.

There has been sleep deprivation, giggling, endless (good) conversation, strange continuities (owner’s manuals and stair-counting), driving around aimlessly, endless location jokes, belly cramps from laughing, a few bars, a couple restaurants, wine, vodka, and couches, floors, and beds. And while there won’t be more details on that front (because don’t EVEN get me started, I’ll never shut up) I will say this: OMFG teh yum.

I really need a chiropractor, though. Damn.

In which the Internet seeks to educate me.

My employer’s web site offers live chat support, so literally anyone can come along and open an IM session that pops up on my desktop.

This is the best one EVAR:

In which I am bested by a John Deere push mower.

This is a TRUE STORY! You may laugh at me now.

In which I do a gig I feel good about… and drink WAY too much wine.

Yesterday I came home on my lunch break and took a shower and put on jeans and cute shoes. After work I came home to drop Bindu off and smear on some mascara. By seven I was at the Sapolil Cellars tasting room on Main street. The joint was packed.

The owner hugged me and pointed to my co-worker, KJ, whom I’d invited to come. (He’d been sick earlier in the week so I didn’t think he’d show, but there he was.) I sat with him for a bit and then the gig started. He and I ended up hanging out all night and having a freakin’ blast, going to the sorts of events we wouldn’t normally go to. (As he said later, “I haven’t had this much fun in Walla Walla in years. It’s like we went to another town, man.”)

RB and Cookie played a couple of tunes, then I went up and joined them. We did a good, long set and then took a break. It was early enough that it was still light out. During our second set, we had a keyboardist and a harp player sit in, and people were dancing by the end. We even got called back for an encore. All in all, a good gig. And the cash money at the end didn’t hurt, either. (This band pays me. I love it.)

A., the owner’s daughter (whom I adore because she’s funny as hell), kept pouring me wine so by the time we left the joint around ten I’d probably downed at least an entire bottle if not significantly more. I prudently put my grandmother’s car in the garage and caught a ride with KJ. We followed A. to the Flying Trout tasting room. The wine there was served in beer cups instead of stemware, the crowd was younger, the decor was minimalist industrial basement, and the DJ utterly failed to impress me. I ran around drunk and friendly and probably annoyed the hell out of many innocent (read: less drunk) people.

The truth of wine being that I adore people when I’m wine drunk and love to accost them and talk to them about themselves, but I never shut up long enough for them to do so. Hah! It’s amazing nobody smacked me. Srsly. I had SO much fun!

There was a couple in the crowd dressed in snow suits. The guy had goggles on, and would push them up onto his forehead only when talking. I asked the girl why she’d decided to wear a snowsuit to a tasting room, and she said it just seemed like the thing to do. I met a skater dude in his late 40’s with tons of ink and got him to take his shirt off for me. I scattered two other conversation groups merely by approaching with my mouth running. I saw one of the chicks who works at the Starbucks I go to. I saw A., the chick we’d followed there, once.

After that it gets blurry. I bought some Cheetos at a convenience store at some point, but they were too gross to eat, and I could not now tell you what store it was. At one point I thought I’d lost my wallet but it was easily found in KJ’s car. I didn’t get to bed until the sky was beginning to pale in the east.

The first time I woke up today I didn’t dig it that much, so I went back to bed and didn’t really start my day until six in the evening! I called RB and apologized for not answering when he’d called earlier in the afternoon, checked in with Becca, tried to eat at Rosita’s (closed Sundays) and ended up with a 7-layer burrito and a huge raspberry iced tea. Went to RB’s, listened to a bunch of Wilson Pickett, and discussed our set list for next weekend at the Balloon Stampede. (We’ll be on the Pepsi stage from 5 to 6:30. Come see us.)

Now I’m home and the dogs are sleeping on the rug. I have a couple of episodes of Doctor Who to watch, and several movies to choose from. I think I’m gonna hold the couch down, lest it suddenly decide to float away, and rest up for tomorrow: I have to do laundry and mow the lawn.

In which I have the house to myself for a week.

My grandmother left today for a trip to Detroit with her bowling team. I get to bring in the mail, mow the lawn, feed the dogs (they’re getting dry kibbles and water and none of the other shit they’re used to), and drive her car while she’s gone.

It also means I get to go home on my lunch breaks and let the dogs out to pee. My lunch break is between 3 and 4, and I just got back.

Bindu is dry-nosed and tired all the time. She’s still bloated and tight in the belly even though Gramma claims to have been reducing her food. She and Chipper (grandma’s dog) are between the two of them drinking well over a gallon of water per day (which is a lot when you consider that the two of them together weigh less than 60 lbs.), and there have been accidents on the rug by the front door.

Though I’ve been playing phone tag with the vet for almost two weeks and haven’t spoken with him directly, I know from one of his messages that Bindu’s got a heart murmur and reduced liver function. She’s twelve years old.

She doesn’t seem uncomfortable - she still barks like hell at the mailman every day - but she can’t walk ten blocks without nearly passing out. Simply trotting up the stairs to my bedroom makes her pant - hard. When I told Gramma that she had heart and liver troubles, Gramma replied, “Sounds like old age. She’s old.”

My dog has become not merely old, but geriatric. I don’t think she’s well, but I don’t know what the problem is and I suspect it might be more than mere age. Having never been faced with an expensive pet health situation, I don’t know what I’ll do if she needs, say, surgery, or heavy meds to survive.

It was love at first sight the day I first met Bindu all those years ago. When she dies, I swear to God I’m going to need to be sedated for a week.

In which I look at my data.

One of the interesting things about using software to count calories is that it does all sorts of interesting math. Behold, my intake from last week:

Of course there are many other things to track, like sugar and iron and fiber and so on, but it is interesting to note I’m always under what (they think) I should have for protein and over on sodium. I mean, WAY over on sodium, holy shit way over.

I don’t worry about the protein. From what I understand, your body has to make it out of amino acids anyway regardless of what you eat, and I get tons of those grazing on fresh veggies the way I do, not to mention that overconsumption of protein has been linked with ass cancer. So. Moving on.

The sodium intake is interesting, though. It’s freaking EVERYWHERE, all processed foods are packed with it, and if you’ve ever read the label on a can of tomatoes (or tomato juice) it’s just shy of astonishing.

All those high-fat days are ones where I ate something nuked. (I work a full-time job, so I eat a lot of TV dinner-type crap.)

Anyway, long story short: being an American and eating well are pretty much mutually exclusive. Even if you try to do it, odds are you’ll fail. Isn’t it fun living in a rich country?

Note: While my fat intake is probably high, it’s not as high as it looks. This is because when I enter things into the software, I often approximate: I might have had homemade potato soup, but I choose a commercially-prepared item which generally has more fat since most of it isn’t actually vegetarian.

In which I remind you to protect your data!

A co-worker just told me a story: While sitting in a restaurant with his wife over the weekend, his car was broken into. The thief got, among other things, his wife’s laptop, and on that laptop was a spreadsheet - unencrypted - containing their full names, SSNs, dates of birth, credit card numbers, the codes and online logins for all their credit cards, and all their account information. Their kids’ information - full names, SSNs, DOBs - was also included.

They drove like bats out of hell to a nearby rest stop, got on wi-fi with his laptop, and canceled all their accounts. But everything the thief would need to perform full-on identity theft for four people was in that spreadsheet.

The moral is this: don’t keep mission critical crap in unencrypted format on a portable machine! And if you must use a password database (which you should, since all of your online accounts should have different passwords), use an encrypted application and protect access to it with a very strong password — one with capped and lower-case alpha characters and numbers and special characters.

On the same co-worker’s advice, I use KeePass for all my secure information, and I keep it on a thumb drive. Once in a great while I print a hard copy and file it, but I don’t keep the info on my laptop.

Be safe, my babies. Because you really don’t want to spend an entire weekend - or two, or more - closing accounts, buying SSN protection, and then being financially crippled until your new checks and credit cards arrive.

In which I get an extra day off to play in a garage.

Saturday I took the day off work so I could do a gig. It was at a private party in a Morton building and it was cold once the sun went down and I schlepped gear and ate nothing but chips and potato salad all freakin’ day, but I still made more money than I would have if I’d spent the day at work. After the gig the drummer took me to the Milton-Freewater Supper Club, which hasn’t been remodeled since 1967 and is all red and retro and tacky and wonderful and I’m totally in love with it.

Sunday Gramma and I had a party basically so there’d be an excuse to make the “real old-fashioned two layer cake with homemade brown sugar frosting” we’ve been talking about for three months. In attendance were two aunts, two uncles, two dogs, two cousins, a second cousin, and two neighbors, and the official excuse was that it was a birthday celebration. The food was good (quiche, tossed salad, a fruit plate, cornbread, and chili) and the cake was awesome. I had a really good time.

I have decided that today will be a big fat movie fest, and I’ve been lying on my bed working my way through an entire spindle of DVDs a co-worker loaned me. It’s fuckin’ sweet.

Now I’m thinking of taking a $20 bill and walking over to Loney’s to buy delicious junk foods. Because I’m not afraid to get deep into the lazy decadence, oh no I ain’t.

In which I accumulate.

Yesterday, my tax refund was deposited into my account. (I put basically all of it into savings ’cause I’ll need it to see Amma in Seattle at the end of next month.) Yay!

Today my PO box contained my new MOO cards! I love MOO cards. So cute. You should get some. And trade with me!

I’ve been starving for a week, just hungry all the time. This morning I took an Emergen-C with my breakfast and am not dying of hunger. Lack of B vitamins, perhaps? I bought myself two boxes and will continue supplementing for awhile longer.

In other news, I’m freakin’ stuck at Free Rice again. (Thanks, KJ. Sheesh. You had to bring it up, did you?)

In which there are both aliens and my ass in the same entry, but I totally wasn’t abducted or anything.

SETI@home sent me a lovely email today reminding me that I’ve been a member since 1999 (!!!)… and that I haven’t returned a work unit in 153 days. The last unit I returned was from my work machine, but my employer made me remove BOINC about a week after I installed it - the bastards - and I just never got around to installing it on my laptop.

Until now! Let the data crunching begin!

New topic. Ready for the segue? Too bad, ’cause there isn’t one! Dieting is, in its fifth week, suddenly getting difficult. My caloric intake has been inching up steadily for the past week, and now I’m closer to 1500 calories - on a typical day - than 1200. I’ve just been hungry lately. (It’s probably the damned curse messing with my hormones.) I seem to have my hideous water retention problem under control though; restricting calories and exercising (well, a little) has the unintended benefit of reducing my overall sodium intake and keeping me from bloating up like a waterlogged corpse.

After losing 8 pounds right off the bat my weight has remained the same for the past two weekly weigh-ins, but I’m still losing inches: there’s just no reason for someone of my height to be walking around with 40″ hips, just none at all, and I’m safely back into the 30’s now and boy does my ass look better. Yay! (Note: If you know me IRL and tell me I don’t need to lose any weight, I’ll smack you, swear to God, right in your face.) (I mean, the whole weight-loss process and the necessity of it just irritates me, but one does what one must.) Long story short, both my dog and myself should be utterly svelte by late summer.

Speaking of summer (ta-dah! a segue!), I’ve got gigs coming up all over the place. (RB is a gig-booking fiend, especially considering that the band he’s booking has never done a show before and is therefore entirely imaginary thus far.) What I don’t have is gig clothes. I have got to go shopping, but I keep giving my money to dentists and veterinarians instead. Maybe I’ll get Becca to use some of her second-hand store fu to help me find a few cool pieces of clothing, before I start showing up to paying gigs in my fucking pajamas. Or maybe I can just get a t-shirt with an alien on it, and wear it to every single gig we ever do, and become known as “that singer with the one alien shirt she always wears.” A gimmick’s a gimmick, right?

In which I’m waiting for the results of the blood work.

Bindu has a heart murmur for which she may or may not need meds. She does not have ear mites, but she did get her ears cleaned. She’s obese - she weighs 36.1 pounds, up from 29.8 six months ago - and has to lose weight. She received a parvo/distemper shot. She may or may not have diabetes for which she may or may not need meds.

They said they’d call me Tuesday or Wednesday.

I spent $150 at the vet today.

I also watched a movie, failed to do laundry, showered, went to band practice, and may or may not have put a scratch in my grandmother’s car with a bush or fence or something while parking (I’m not sure if the scratch was there before or not).

Over all, despite the lack of real trauma, a fairly high-stress day for me. Going to bed early.

Hurumpfh.

In which I stayed up way too late for a school night.

Becca picked me up after work last night. We stopped by her place briefly, then went to Mr. Ed’s for some fries (and to brainstorm about her new career path. That was really the point of getting together).

On our way home, we stopped at Barn Disease. Then we went to the Green to meet a friend of hers. Then we went back to Barn Disease. And then we went to the Blue.

We drank a lot, for a Thursday night. (And I ordered and ate nachos at midnight! Gah! Yesterday was a total wash in terms of calorie restriction, I’ll tell you that.) I made friends with a table of six guys. I saw disgusting images on a guy’s cell phone. I tipped my tender. I laughed. I got home at two.

I did not want to get out of bed this morning.

When I got to work, I got called straight into R’s office for my performance review. (I got a raise!) Performance reviews before coffee are weird.

Tonight I’m supposed to go over to Becca’s; her friend is having a birthday party in the apartment downstairs. I’ll probably go, but right now all I want to do is take a nap.

Mmm, naps.

In other news, I forgot my cell phone at home. I’ve become that person who feels weird without her phone.