Psychotomy

I’ve gotten into the habit of taking K out every night when I get home. We’ll pass when it’s raining bad or exceptionally cold, but I think I’ve taken him out for a walk ~55 of the last 60 days or so. we walk up to the lake and around part of it. doing it daily, he stays down enough that it’s reasonable in the evenings. It works better than him going into trot when we throw the ball, and it gets me some exercise.

Speaking of which, between eating better (we started making up weekly, now monthly, menus) and the daily walks, i’m stayng around 212 right now. it’s not great, but it’s better than 3 years at 220. and despite my doctor, it’s a start.

current habit in motion is 1L of water a day. I’ve managed it about 5 of the last 7 days, so it’s going to be another week before I get the 10-in-a-row for building a habit. But I’m working on it, and I really do need the water.

Posted in: fitness, k-line by attriel /
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Des keeps growing and growing. and growing.

Kiir posted his stats on her blog from his last checkup, and he’s kept growing.

He’s figured out how to walk. He’ll take a few steps to go between the sofa and the desk, or the table and the chair, etc. He actually managed a string of about 8 the other day, before stepping on uneven surface and sitting down.

He also figured out how to push the cushion off the ottoman and climb onto the armchair i play from. he then figured out how to climb THROUGH the ottoman, without taking hte cushion off first. The ottoman, thus, is now on the other side of the room. I had to put a few boxes of books in the corner to hide off that space to keep him from playing with cables and the like.

He then figured out he could push the cushion on the chair, and climb up under it. Then stand up and reach the keybaord. Cushion is fitted, though, so it doesn’t work great. he ends up frustrated and angry :/ Of course, yesterday he climbed up on one of kiir’s scrapbooking cubes, and they’re really not THAT sturdy. He was trying to use it as a point to climb into her lap :o

He’s currently sleeping on the floor in front of hte sofa. we went for a walk with the puppy :o

Posted in: PI by attriel /
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I just haven’t felt like posting much lately.

The crypto blog is still waiting for an update from november (partially b/c i’m like 10% through and it’s HUGE, so i was trying to think of how to hone it down and keep it detailed) ; kitchen dragons is behind half a dozen recipes from January.

There’s been a bunch of things I wanted to post here, too, and just didn’t get to

Of course, i’m about to run this update right off the page by making various other updates, but whatever

Posted in: general by attriel /
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(lak is hindi for 1000) (actually, it probably transliterates as laak or laak or something with an h maybe)

So, we started our 8-week beginning conversational hindi course last week at the community college. my parents love it , b/c they get to babysit des by themselves for two hours :o

I ran into some old friends. “D as in ‘the’” … “th thh th and thh” … “th dh” … “sha and sha” (actually, after a few roundabouts, he told us to just use the same sound for both, which makes it hard to distinguish)

these are some of the problems that have plagued me for 30yrs. americans (english in general i think) isn’t structured around that many sounds. (th thh are palate and th thh is gum ridge … i think; th and dh are actually repeated palate and ridge, and it’s just hard for me to distinguish b/c there’s a lot of implied letters)

In fact, during the cleaning (see other post), I found Teach Yourself Hindi, Hindi for Beginners, the three Kindergarten Hindi Primers we got from relatives in India, and some ‘First 100 Words in Hindi’ that looks like it has wordfinds and crosswords in hindi alphabet. I think the shelf may have my mom’s Teach Yourself Hindi tape. I found two Hindi software programs, and somewhere we have Rosetta Stone (supposed to be par excellante, but it didn’t seem to be helping me). I have 30 years of failure at hearing the differences in letters . 30 years of A is for Pomegranate (Anar). 30 years of primers and self teaching materials that have failed to teach me Hindi.

Maybe 31 years will be better?

Posted in: hindi by attriel /
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Can’t keep this!

…

well, hell, now i feel compelled to find the words to the song and do up at least a verse or two … bah. if i had that kindof followthrough it wouldn’t've been three weeks sincei last posted.

Last weekend was “Massively Cleaning Weekend” Mom in law was up to help me organize/clean. spent friday evening buying stuff, sunday day too. most of saturday, sunday evening, and monday morning were me doing this that and the other fucking thing trying to clean up, clean out, and generally make the basement functionally useful.

mom boxed the books whilst I went through the big room and tried to break things down to get more space to work and piled up boxes to get them out of the middle of the floor. later i put in an overhead garage rack in the unfinished room, and DAMN that wa a pain in the ass. the water drainage pipes run through where i needed to go, the power line to the stove runs through where i was putting in a screw (i stopped a good 1/4″ from electrocuting myself, i think), and i spent most of 4 hours sitting on top of hte freezer in the basement so i could reach the fucking ceiling. ARGH. and then, to top it off, the suitcases didn’t fit as nicely as hoped (the aforementioned pipe). got a decent amount on it, but not as much as i’d've liked

monday was me playing in the attic trying to organize thigns a bit and put down boards to provide “flooring” to put boxes on, at a later date. b/c during that whole stacking of boxes thing earlier? the boxes i knew were going to the attic or such, i put those on the bottom. that way we could get to the rest of them … oops.

The basement bookshelves produced ~20 boxes of books, maybe more since hardbacks pack badly. ~1000 books. Which is actually less than I thought there were :o At this point, 5 boxes are packed for donationware, ~8 boxes are back on the shelves already.

Beyond that, the unfinished room and the big room produced a huge pile of trash. I snapped a few pics before I took it out last night, i’ll try to get one up. To give an idea, it took me an hour to haul it all out for trash last night. That was actually last night’s contribution to cleaning. I took all the crap out :o

tonight was moving the 6 boxes of unsorted books upstairs, and 4 boxes of D&D3e books/etc (and some AD&D stuff) to go to the attic this weekend.

Posted in: general, house by attriel /
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So, it’s been ~15 months since I left my old comfortable job. I’m on my third employer since then (i LOVE contracting, it’s so stable!), fourth health insurance (wtf) … and i’m not sure about the whole thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think staying would have been a good plan. I wasn’t going anywhere in that job, and no one had any interest in my advancing. I was a useful commodity, but if I got more prominence or more money, the company wouldn’t've been able to get as much markup on me. And the pay change was certainly nice.

But my new job? I’m not really getting anywhere there, either. First off, the job & title I was hired to? the job belongs to someone else (which I knew) and that doens’t appear to be changing (which it was supposed to change). So I’ve been doing oddball “other tasks as assigned” jobs. I have one project that i’ve been working on for over a year b/c it takes an average of 3 months to get a response to any question. time from initial question to as-meaningful-as-it-gets response, that is.

then i started getting in with security to do scans and shit. except most of their operation appears to be FISMA-esque, in that they do a lot of paperwork and boilerplating and very little actual scanning. To Wit: I did a scan in november. I did the report in two days. It’s been waiting a month now for the “team lead” to approve it before I can give it to the people to fix whatever is on it. he “hasn’t gotten a chance to look at it yet”, he says, as he left for two weeks. I’m not allowed to change the process or scan style or anything b/c it’s not how it’s done and we’d need a crapload of authorizations. I need half a dozen signatures on a justification for a piece of FREE software. And I’m not allowed to mess around and try it out first, b/c I need the approve before i can do anything with it. WHEEEE

when we changed ownership, there were basically three branches. design, code, and db. i was (am?) db and did probably 30-50% of code under code lead. after the transfer, I don’t know if we have design anymore, db kinda got dropped (since i didn’t have any dbs i suppose it makes sense) and we got a new code lead. i like him, generally, but in terms of level I’ve been dropped down to “general monkey” . I spend almost more of my time covering for someone else on the team (who has needed to be out/home/whatever half a dozen times int he last month? i have a baby boy and i’m not home that much lady!) than i do on any coding.

I’m not real sure I like my new job, after 15months. Hopefully it’ll change up some, get better. Otherwise, I may be looking again, a year from now. Because whilst we need income, I need to be having fun at my job or I’m going to go nuts. And not in a good way :/

Posted in: work by attriel /
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So, last night it was my turn to not feel well :/

We were supposed to be going to a NYE party at a friends, we were packed in the car and ready. and i ended up having to scrap the whole plan b/c i was sick and spend half the evening in the bathroom :(

went to bed at 8:30 or so, feeling better today, so hopefully whatever malicious and vindictive bug it was is only a 24hr flu kindof hting. hopefully :/

Posted in: general by attriel /
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So yesterday kiir wasn’t feeling well, so I stayed home so she could rest and I’d watch des.

Around lunch, K kept barking and wanting to go out. I’d take him out, he’d wander around for five minutes, usually with Des inside screaming about abandonment issues. Then he’d look at me like i was a nutjob for bringing us out here. go figure.

Anyway, it started getting on my nerves. A LOT. Eventually I just snapped and screamed at him to shut up. Which scared Des, didn’t make K stop, and apparently woke Kiir up. After yelling, however, I realized that I was being irritable, it wasnt’ just K at fault. So I put on my jacket, I put on Des’ pants and jacket and put him in the stroller, got K’s leash and puppy treats.

And I walked the impossible walk! I took them both up the street and over to the lake. K only went around to the pavilion, but since he was then tired for the rest of the evening, I’m OK with that.

This afternoon we three did it again. Des isn’t terribly impressed by the whole thing (that might be b/c I keep ending up with his hood over his eyes). K’s leash keeps tanglging under the wheels, and my hand starts to hurt from gripping the leash and stroller.

It’s difficult, it’s complicated. And I’ll grant that I may be the only one with the height and experience with K to pull it off. But I walked the impossible walk!

Posted in: k-line, PI by attriel /
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Des has been grabbing hair again of late. So last night, kiir pulled one of the scarves over her head. then i suggested she tie it, so she could use her hands again.

So, she’s sitting there with this red scarf folded (triangled) and then bonneted on her head … and …

attriel: you look like little red robin hood
kiir: Little Red Robbing Hood?
attriel: Uh, yeah! You steal from your rich old grandmother!
kiir: and give it to the poor?
kiir: Poor, not whore!
attriel: You steal from rich grandmothers and give it to whores!
attriel: This is such a blog post

Thinking on it now, I’m not sure it was really that funny. But we about died laughing at it at 11:30 last night :o

Posted in: general by attriel /
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It’s christmas time, in the city …

Des’ first christmas was, basically, everything you’d expect. In the morning, I peeled and cooked and mashed 10# of potatoes. Since Des was going to be eating stuff, we decided we wanted real potatoes instead of flaked (and kiir doesn’t like flaked, but this was all about des!). And my mom doesn’t mash potatoes since “we did 5# for 3 of us and fought over the last spoon” or whatever … so I made 10# for 10 people. yeah, it’s not quite as much as she was indicating we’d need, but I figured it’d be enough. The night before I’d made the Sweet Potato and Apple casserole, twice as much as usual to fit the # of people.

Get to my parents, and my grandmother and aunt are both there so Des gets some time playing and showing off for them before my other aunt and her brood arrive. Then it was gift time! we got some neat stuff, and des had twice as many gifts as anyone else (duh). We took him four things (including a motorized train that sings and makes animal noises and that K despises with a passion). Then he got a few things from my Grandmother & Aunt, mostly hand made crochet and knit stuff. My other aunt gave him some toys. My parents gave him toys and books and stuff. Amusingly, I think the only plastic made in china stuff he got was from us :o

My dad kibitzed and finally got to put out cheese & crackers right after everyone got there. Which was amusing, since half of us were still eating my grandmothers yam buns when he started putting things out :o but it kept eveyone happy, b/c they were allowed to give des Cheese and saltines. Kept people from t rying for hte yam buns (mmm, sugar and nuts, TWO things he doesn’t need a lot of yet) he got a little fussy after a while, all these people and i don’t wanna sleep i might miss something but i’m soooo tired. kiir got him to take a nap by laying with him on the bed upstairs.

That worked until we set the stove on fire. Fire alarm woke him up (gee, duh). he sat at dinner, had some fish, some broccoli, some yams, some apples, mashed potatoes, bread. he had some of almost everything :o he probably would have had more, but he needed a diapser change and we decided not to put him back in my hichair (mmmm vintage!)

I went home with about a third of the potatoes, and my mom kept the second (untouched) dish of yams. I think i can scale back some, maybe :o

Posted in: PI by attriel /
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