Category: NoJoMo

Thanksgiving leftovers — what do you have, and what are you doing with them?

I had a random thought.  It’s not like there’s turkeys in India, but leftover turkey might lend itself to an Indian arrangement.  I mentioned this to my wife, who also cooked the turkey, and she started looking through the Intertubes.

Turkey Tikka Masala it is.

I think I’m about to go downstairs to get some.  The scent has been wafting up the stairs, now, for about an hour.  Considering I’ve been sitting at this keyboard, pretty much since 8:00 this morning, I’m ready for the break.

Problems with some work stuff.  Ugh.

I stayed up waaaay too late last night, and have been feeling it today.  I actually doubled my typical coffee consumption.  But I’m fading.  So food, and sleep.

I think I was getting tired when I started copping up this month’s prompts into drafts, because today’s showed the following:  Small Business Saturday. Write about small businesses you frequent.

Since I rarely go anywhere these day, and Sarah wasn’t feeling well, we only ordered delivery from a local restaurant.

I have almost a reflexive, at this point, resistance to chain restaurants.  There are some exceptions, sure, but it is a bit of bigotry that I have.  Yes, this is influenced by the podcast to which I am listening right now.

Football

The Saints are the best team in the league.  It’s been awhile since I could say that.

But they’re playing the sort of football I learned when I played in high school in the early-90s.  It is fascinating to see teams that are having linebackers line up in the backfield because they don’t have a fullback on the roster.

The Saints, Patriots, Eagles, and Cowboys are all doing the same sort of thing.  The question is whether one of them can beat the fast-strike offenses and 3-4 teams that are so abundant in the league today.

That Monday night game with the Rams and Chiefs was entertaining, certainly.  But a team that can hold on to the ball for more than two minutes at-a-time can beat either of them.

In other not-so-interesting news, I found a place I really want to look at to live.  The big question is whether parking, or lack thereof, might be a deal-killer.

We shall see.

So, today is a free-write day.  For whatever reason, my place-holder for this entry was, again, that thing I didn’t want to write about yesterday.

I’m still very much driven the past few days on figuring out next steps.

Thanksgiving was okay, though, in full consideration, we are so out-of-sync with what some family members think and/or want.

The only option is to not associate.  With the freedom to associate, comes a freedom to choose to not.  If I don’t meet your expectations, that’s fine.

If I ask you not to tell me how to live my life, I’m free to avoid you.  So, instead, force me to live my life the way you think I ought, and use men with guns to prevent me from leaving.  Venezuela, much?

Got a little distracted reading a discussion about whether passenger rail should be taxpayer-funded.

It is, largely because politicians want to show it off to constituents.

I didn’t participate in the “discussion,” because, well, what I think doesn’t matter.  Because I don’t believe exactly as you do, I’m a Commie, or a Nazi.

So I leave;  I still can.

Sarah kind of shared the same sentiment with me while we were discussing this.

So, what do I envision?  Go hole up somewhere in DC, and just be about each other.  The plan to do that is coming together.  It might take awhile to get there, but that’s where we’re headed.  I think.  Just me and Sarah.

Nobody likes you when you’re twenty-three.

I feel much the same about the prompt I selected.  I need to pay closer attention, perhaps.

For the particular prompt I’d selected, it was something I used this past summer, and originally in 2012.  Do my views change?  Sure.

Some things are more closely-held than others, but, yes, I can see the arguments.  (Note:  that doesn’t mean that I’ll ever say anything good about the 3-4 defense.)

On that note, it was nice seeing the Saints help the Failcons do what they do last night.

Not a ton else to say today, though.  I’m tired by this past week, and am looking forward to a full weekend off for the first time in I don’t know how long.

Apologies for the digression;  the point of the changing idea.  Yeah, I do update my views on things..  Sometimes, an issue will really make me angry, and later I won’t care.  That speaks, however, to the idea that those aren’t the times to make laws.  Next week, you might not care, and you’ve locked things in perpetuity.

Tomorrow is Small Business Saturday.  I probably won’t be shopping, as I’m in a place where I can’t easily get to a small business.

I want to get to a place where I can.

So.  To plan.

Thanksgiving

So, this is going on, and I sorta got to cook a turkey here.  My mom came up, but my SIL’s family cancelled their plans, so it was the five of us here.

Not really enjoying the football;  maybe the Saints’ game tonight will be better.

Neither Sarah or i is excited to work tomorrow.  Thankfully, I probably will only have to do about three hours.  I have two projects that I haven’t been able to do because people are working, and I couldn’t schedule an outage.

One of them is very straightforward;  I will kick it off after I get the tough one started.  There’s a time-consuming step that’ll probably take longer than the whole operation of the easy one.

Wish me luck on that.

But I”m stuffed, and want to go watch football, so that’s what I’m going to go do.

Write a bit about what you do in a “normal” day. What do you do? Where are you? Are you satisfied with your current situation?

Generally, I wake up sometime before 0600.  Bathroom, fill water cup, swallow morning pill allocation, swallow pills, go down for coffee, shower, stagger to the keyboard, and start working.  Sometime around midday, I’ll go grab something to eat.  More work.  Wait for my wife to come home.  Eat.  Watch TV.  Sleep.

Today, though, I only owed three hours for the pay period.  Considering that I probably have about six hours of work to do Friday, I thought I needed to quit early.

I am cooking turkey tomorrow.  We’ll see how this goes.

And this is where I’m really overdoing it.

Such a long day, after such a long weekend, and I have so much left to do.

I really just don’t have an idea of how many free hours I’m going to donate this week;  I hope that eventually I’ll reap the benefit of it.

Recap of your year month-by-month.

January:  wintertime in the new place in Norfolk.  I was still working in hell, but I was taking full advantage of the ability to go to and from home on weekdays. at least some of the time.  It was incredibly cold, and it snowed a bunch.

February:  Sarah’s preparations to leave, and I was digging hard looking for a new job.

March:  Sarah came up north, and I continued toiling away in the freezer box where I was.

April:  I got fired.  I also got a replacement job in pretty short order that’d allow me to work from pretty much anywhere after a week’s training on the sinister coast.  It was contract-to-hire until they won the recompete.

May:  I moved north.  I’d heard nothing from the company who’d hired me about preparations for the training on the west coast, so I started looking for something else.  I got an offer on the something else that, while not what I really wanted, would have paid the bills for a bit.

June: After failing to find something different to avoid the job I’d received an offer on, I started there.  This was after I’d finally gotten in touch with the recruiter from the west coast thing.  Turns out they’d lost the recompete, and were scrambling to figure things out.  So I started the job where I’d gotten the offer.  For a change, I had my own cubicle.  But I wasn’t sure that I was really going to like the work.  There was one guy there who I’d worked with before.  I was starting to put some of my experience to use when I got a surreptitious email saying something along the lines of, “I’m not supposed to talk to you, but you need to email this guy.”  While I was composing the email to that guy, he phoned me, and offered me a job with the company that’d won the recompete.  So, eight days after I started at the place I didn’t want to be, I gave notice, and left.  June would have also been my first missed Tysabri dose, and I was not feeling well because of it.  I did see my neurologist at Georgetown for the first time, a week after I’d missed my scheduled Tysabri dose.  The neuro I’m seeing is the lady I’d seen when I came up a couple of years ago looking to be a test subject for whatever MS research they were doing.  She was excited to have me after I’d tried, and failed, to get in with the cutting-edge myelin repair work at George Washington.

July:  Independence Day saw me getting a round of IV steroids. because of the missed Tysabri.  Finally did get the dose two weeks after the round of IV steroids.

August:  See my writings from then, please.

September:  Finally started to get things straight with my medical stuff.

October:  So much work.

And, yeah, this is half-assed.  I’m sorry.  Or not.  My mother is here for Thanksgiving, so I should go be social or something.

What would you do if someone just gave you $1 million?

In a flippant response, I initially typed, “QUIT.”

No, actually, I probably wouldn’t.

I like what I’m doing too much, even after the eleven hour shift on Saturday, and hair-ripping frustration with a project today.  My eyes are swimming, and my shoulders hurt.

But I like it.

This is a good situation for me, far better than the shit I’ve dealt with for the past five-plus years.

Maybe the migration away from that endless streak of bullshit is the reason I’m in such a positive mood?  Maybe it’s also why I have zero desire to visit Norfolk.  Things turned sour so radically that I wonder if they could ever be okay there, again.  I know my wife wants to go back, and I understand why.  I hope she understands why I can’t find the smallest motivation to.

I
Don't
Care

Like Jay Cutler.

What else is there to write about?  I’m not really sure.  The Saints laid a serious beatdown on the Iggles yesterday afternoon.  Alex Smith with the compound fracture in this leg;  ick.  Or seeing the Not-Don’t-Care Bears beat up on the Vikings.

I really still hate the 3-4, but that was a good game last night.

Tonight’s the Chiefs at the Rams.  Could be fun.

If I can stay up.

Eleven hour shifts on Saturdays kinda screw up the the whole weekend.

But I may well not have to work Wednesday, now.  I have stuff planned to work on Friday while most others are coming out of their turkey-induced comas.

What can you do?

What is on your bucket list? (A bucket list is a list of things you want to do before you die)?

This one is really a lot tougher than I thought it’d be when I chose to recycle it.

Do I feel accomplished?  No.  Am I satisfied with what I’ve done?  Yep.

I mentioned one of the things I was looking forward to doing that I won’t be able to do, but I don’t think that it’d be something where when I die, I, or someone else, might think I missed out.

So, what do I want to do?

Experience NYC.  I would like to take the Acela from DC, stay in a grand old hotel, eat at fancy restaurants, etc.  Though Les Halles is closed, I’m sure there’s something worthwhile.

At the same time, after the last few years, I’m really just looking for an opportunity to relax for awhile;  I don’t know that I could do that in NYC.  Or anywhere.

So go from one thing to another, hoping I might get into a position where I can take a breath.

So, with catching up for yesterday out of the way, on to today.

I’m working in the background.  Thankfully, this is kind of a light day work-wise.

Prompt:

Tell about what triggers anger in you or someone else.

This is a really tough one these days.  There’s very little I get too upset about these days.

Some of that is a feeling of futility;  what can I do about x?

Nothing.

Bubuhbut you could do something to force people to do what you want them to do.

Um, no, I have a problem with that.

Live your life as you choose, but let others do that, too.  If you’re unwilling to do that, that’s your problem, not mine.

But how do I convince others to adopt that way of thinking?  I haven’t figured it out yet.  But convincing people is the only thing I can do without resorting to violence.