Category Archives: Work

Back in the saddle

Redneck, Rural, Rustic

I’m at work.

Last night a tree crushed one of Brett’s many trucks. I’m a bad wife, I suggested he’d be less traumatized if I were hit by a tree. (I’d be more sympathetic if he didn’t have so many trucks.) The storm was awesome. I barely slept at all.

I can swallow without pain. When I open my pill bottle, it smells like eggs. I am not sure how I feel about this.

I am now certain that men cannot taste their food. Two specific images will serve to convince you of this as well:

1. Last night I made Brett a steak in a dry pan, and I did not season the meat at all. He said dinner was fantastic. (I normally season his steaks carefully, sear them in cast iron, sautee them with onions or mushrooms, and deglaze the pan with beer or wine or cognac and butter.)
2. Once I made gratin dauphinois for Joe. He put sri racha on it before tasting it. I have never forgiven him for this.

BBQ

Domestic Goddess

For dinner last night I made tuna steaks, and new potatoes and mushrooms in the BBQ wok. I love my BBQ wok. If you don’t have one, get one. They’re amazing. You take any combo of chopped veggies, toss ’em in some marinade (olive oil, salt, and pepper is often more than adequate) and throw them in the wok on the grill. They come out tasting amazing.

Since it was so blisteringly hot, I went to lie down in front of the fan after dinner last night and fell asleep before eight.

I woke up at midnight and ate six Frootie Ice pops on the porch in the dark, with two of the dogs lying beside me.

Lazy Girl Tanning

Domestic Goddess

I should be doing housework, but I’ve learned something: housework always needs to be done. Always.

I have a husband who works construction, a cat, and three dogs. My house is old. I live at the end of a gravel road. In Iowa. There is never a moment when I can say, “My house is clean,” because there’s never any such moment. My house will never be clean.

But I! I can most definitely be tan.

tanning.jpg

(Yes, it’s difficult to take your own picture.)

Nature

Redneck, Rural, Rustic

Walking through the laundry room, I heard something scratching inside the furnace. Bindu heard it too. We went to investigate.

I determined the sound was coming from behind our 50-year-old gas furnace’s removable panel. I put my hand on the handle, and Bindu stationed herself at my feet to catch whatever might fall out and munch its head.

I pulled the panel off… and a bird flew out.

I have no idea how it got in there. Sometimes things come down the chimney and end up inside the wood stove, but how an entire adult bird came down the chimney and ended up inside the access panel of the damn gas furnace I will never understand.

After bonking into a few windows, the bird finally found the open door and flew out to blessed freedom, and probably a much-needed brunch of bugs.

I wonder if it will blog about the experience.
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Migration Halted

Geek

So the new server I told you about, with the missing modules? The one goblinbox was migrating to? Well, that’s cancelled.

The ISP had failed to install something, and wiped the entire box in the process of fixing the problem. This so enraged Keef and Liz – they’d each already moved all their clients – that they yanked the box altogether and are looking for another place to locate the server. And goblinbox won’t be moving for a bit. Can you see my relief in between the pixels?

My desk

Work

mushatwork-sm.gifHere’s the Mushlette sitting at her desk, eating her lunch. No, apparently she did not brush her hair at all. (I think hairbrushing is highly overrated, and I blow it off on a regular basis.)

Click to enlarge image

On the wall is a hand-drawn poster, actually a diagram, of our Fairfield COLO, complete with terms like “ITS loop pair” and “DSLAM” and “DSL Splitter” and “ATM switch,” that Qi Liang drew for me. I loved it so much I taped it to the wall, and he thought I was nuts.

This photo is courtesy of Frazer, my favorite crazy Internet engineer, who just walked up to me with his beat-up old digital camera and took my picture. (After I grabbed it, looked at it, and gave it back to him, of course.) I suspect the photo’s blurriness is due to fingerprints all over the lens.

Recovering

Redneck, Rural, Rustic

I’m uploading pics of my new tattoo in the background, but since I’m on dial-up out here in the sticks, it’ll take forEVer. And yes that is my ass crack, thank you. (If you’ve never had a tattoo: the reason it looks like this is that it’s new, which means it’s still a little swollen, and it’s shiny because one keeps a new tattoo covered in ointment for a week or so, so that the skin doesn’t dry out and scab off. The tattoo above the new one is several years old.)

I slept more than five hours in a row last night, which speaks volumes for how fatigued I was after our whirlwind Chicago trip. Yay! And my GOD I had so much fun. Have I mentioned how much fun I had?!? I HAD SO MUCH FUN!

Today we took the eBay guy’s new toy to ABF to ship it, by way of 1-Stop rental for a box and some bailing wire, but they weren’t open yet. After a call to determine they’d remain not open for more than an hour, we came home and had a nooner (it was actually about one, but Mr. Brett insisted on calling it a nooner anyway) and then I took a nap.

UNTIL SIX.

IN THE EVENING.

Brett had gone out to mow the lawn and failed to notice that I hadn’t gotten up, and he totally laughed at me when I wandered into the living room at SIX P-fucking-M looking all touseled.

I called ABF and they were still open, so we drove back into town and dropped off the pallet, which proved to be rather fun in a redneck way, and then hit the Dairy Bar for malts. And Mr. Brett had a chili dog, which I enjoyed watching him eat almost as much as he obviously enjoyed eating it. “Only thing that would make this better is if it was a foot-long,” he pronounced afterward.

Then we hit Wal-Mart for canning lids and twelve pounds of salt and came home.

The canning lids were because Brett wanted (me) to pickle some asparagus, and the salt was for the asparagus patch. Aparently some old farmer dude told Brett in a bar recently that salt will kill grass and weeds but doesn’t harm asparagus, and since our asparagus patch looks more like lawn than garden he’s been wanting to give this salt approach a try.

There wasn’t all that much asparagus to pick this evening, so we only did a couple quarts, but I put four asian red hot chilis in each jar along with many cloves of garlic, so this batch should be hot as hell. My previous batches (here’s my first foray in pictures; but I’m much more legit now and I have a big canning pot and everything) were yummy but not particularly hot, and Brett wants some that is, to quote his redneck self, “so hot you need two assholes”-hot.

Now, if our VCR is actually still cabled to the entertainment center, I intend to go downstairs and so something I rarely do: commandeer the glass teat and watch something. On purpose. I’m rather in the mood to see Contact, a movie I adore, and I just happen to have it on video. Hopefully those tatt pics will finish uploading eventually.

eBay, Todd, Chicago, and tattoos

Domestic Goddess

Brett’s home today – no materials at the job site means no work for him to do – and that always throws me totally off my domestic stride. He’s just not supposed to be here when I’m cleaning the damn house. Basically I’ve accomplished nothing beyond making lunch, doing the ubiquitious dishes, putting away the laundry, and dusting half-heartedly.

The good news is that the guy Brett and his partner are working for finally sent money. Er, sort of. He said he’d send an International money order, but he didn’t. He sent a check. So it’s sitting in the account waiting to turn into real money. (I have my doubts that this transformation will actually take place, due to all the spooky crap Brett’s been telling me about this job.) (If the check bounces I will be so poor, yes. But I must admit I will take a certain amount of pleasure in my DH when he goes to the job site and UNDOES HIS WORK WITH HIS TITANIUM CROW BAR.) (He doesn’t like it when he doesn’t get paid. It rarely happens, but when you sign a contract with Mr. Brett, you’d better goddamn pay him what you said you’d pay him. THE MAN OWNS A TITANIUM CROW BAR, for heaven’s sake.)

Brett and I spent quite a while dealing with his eBay auction this afternoon. “Dealing” involved sitting in front of the computer during the auction’s final 40 minutes and clicking Refresh like total freaks. The guy who actually won the auction was suspended from eBay UK shortly afterward, but the next highest bidder purchased it and says he’ll pay via Paypal tomorrow.

If he actually does, I will get to go to Chicago to see Todd Rundgren tomorrow night. If he does not, I will have wasted a little over a hundred bucks on tickets that I will have absolutely no way to scalp since I have them in real ticket form rather than a transferrable e-ticket format.

Let me state right now that if we don’t get to go, I WILL BE SUPREMELY PISSED.

Brett, who is famous for doing absurdly irresponsible shit with money, is still making noises about thinking we shouldn’t go because we’re so broke right now blah blah blah blah BLAH, and I was forced to poke him in the gut and say, “If this were someone YOU love – like B.B. King – instead of Todd, you wouldn’t think twice about going. So shut the fuck up with your quasi-responsible maybe-we-ought-not-to-spend-money-right-now BULLSHIT! I know you don’t give a shit about Todd, BUT I DO. If we get the money, we’re going. TODD IS GODD. And that’s SO final.” He not only giggled, he agreed – because I AM SO RIGHT.

Then, lest we forget how black his heart truly is, he began looking at the Jade Dragon Tattoo web site, because, as I said, he’s famous for doing absurdly irresponsible shit with money.

In a nutshell: we can’t go if the hoist guy doesn’t pay tomorrow, but if we DO go, he’ll insist on getting a tattoo. And women are supposed to be the irrational sex!