Catchy Name Needed

Adventures in aging

2025-12-07T00:53:45Z

I was so busy talking about my car getting stolen, earlier this week*, that I forgot to talk about the other thing that happened to me, and that was that I had a fall at work. I hate admitting to this because it makes me feel like an old person, but then I am an old person, relatively speaking - well, I'm Medicare-eligible as of a few months ago, anyway. I don't really think the fall had anything to do with being old, in particular - I was picking up at closing time - somebody left a pair of shoes, for god's sake, on the gym floor (what, did they leave barefooted?) and so I was holding the shoes and I kicked a basketball out of the way, and then I lost my balance and went down and landed on one wrist. It could've been way worse, nothing was broken, but my left hand is still pretty sore two weeks later. Also, since I was out in the middle of the gym floor and nobody else was there and I couldn't put weight on that hand, of course, I had to wait for somebody to come help me get up, which is extra-embarrassing. (That's the part that really makes me feel old.)

Also, since I'm left-handed, I couldn't even really write for several days, except right-handed, which came out looking eerily like a 7-year-old's handwriting. Typing worked ok, and driving was mostly ok, I think because driving is mostly a right-handed skill anyway. (I'm actually sort of ambidextrous for a lot of things, but writing is not one of them, clearly.)

*The theft was not earlier this month, it was a couple of months ago, now.

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On "vacation"

2024-12-22T00:52:55Z

I'm off until 2025 (which sounds good but is all of, what, 10 days?) but I'm part-time so of course I don't get paid, either. I'm not complaining, though. I did tell them I'd work if they needed me to, and I did my time working weekends and holidays when I first had this job.

UT just beat Clemson, and they're going to the Peach Bowl against Arizona State. This playoff thing feels a little weird to me, but the old bowl system, where all the high-ranked teams played one bowl game each and then some guys voted on who was #1 - that was pretty weird too.

I'm re-reading the Expanse series, mostly because I was reading my old journal entries from when I was reading it before. But I checked and I haven't re-read it since 2021 - was that when the last book came out? It may have been. So it's been three years, and I'm really enjoying it so far. I'm almost to the end of the second book. I don't know if I'm really going to read the whole nine books right now though.

I'm not doing so great at writing daily. Maybe now that I'm home for the duration I'll do better!

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Did I say "flaky"?

2024-12-06T07:19:56Z

(written earlier today)
So it's 4 in the afternoon and I'm at work and I just realized I completely forgot about writing a Holidailies entry when I got home last night. Never thought about it once. I remember being distracted by something-or-other - probably a game, but I barely remember. So I pulled a page out of my work notebook and I'll write an entry here, I guess, to post later.

I guess I can talk about work! I don't really know that I have talked about that here in a while, and while we're a small group at Holidailies so far, I assume that at least some of the people reading don't know/don't remember all my job history. My job is not terribly exciting, by any means, but I mostly enjoy it. I work at a university gym part-time, and I have for a good many years now - 12 or 13 years, maybe? I got laid off from this same university back in 2008 after the big hurricane hit here - that was Ike, and I think a few of y'all probably do remember that at least vaguely because it was kind of big drama at the time!. I tried picking up another career and that never really worked out, but while all that was playing out I took this little part-time job where my husband worked, and I'm still here and so is he. He's full-time and can retire at some point before too long. Actually, I can too, I worked full-time long enough to be retirement-eligible, but I don't know how much money I'll actually get. I'm not even thinking about that yet. Maybe when Rob retires.

Whoa, I just went down a rabbit hole (it's pretty slow here today) and started reading my Dreamwidth/Livejournal entries tagged "work" all the way to back before Ike - I certainly talked quite a lot about my old job! and some about this one, too. (And some about the other part-time job I had for a while in there, which I practically forget about now.)

All the hurricane stuff reminds me that in the car going to see Wicked the other day with my sister and her friend, we started comparing hurricane stories. We were talking about how it's easy to remember the big storms like Ike, for the most part, but it gets hard to remember all the little ones - they all tend to blend together. When you've lived on the Gulf Coast for years like all three of us have, there are a lot of the little ones (and a good many medium-size ones) - you go, now wait, which one was that? Beryl? Harvey? (Those are just the first two that popped into my head. Beryl was the most recent one around here. Harvey was the one that dropped a shitload of water on most of greater Houston and made a huge mess, back a few years ago. It wasn't that strong of a storm, but it sat over our heads and rained for days and days.) (I really remember Harvey pretty well because where we live has creeks all around and we couldn't get out to get to work for several days.)

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April update

2022-04-23T05:50:08Z

We're planning to go see The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which is not something I thought I would ever want to see. But... the reviews are good! And... Pedro Pascal! So yeah, we're going. (I have to work on Sunday, and Rob is off on Monday AND Tuesday - because Tuesday is my birthday - and so we're going Monday night.) (Rob has so much time off built up that he's been taking off nearly every Monday in order to burn some of it.)

We saw the Fantastic Beasts movie last week - it was pretty good, certainly much better than the last one, if not nearly as good as the first one, still. Before that we saw Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was a hoot. We both really loved it, in all its wacky weirdness.

I got my hair colored this week, it is part (or rather most) of my birthday present. I'm not sure how much I'm in love with it, honestly. It's very close to my original natural dark brown and I'm not sure it suits me as much as it used to. I think I may want to go lighter next time. But I haven't even washed it yet (I'll probably do that tomorrow) and it may lighten up a bit and I may decide I feel differently. We'll see. (Also note that I was the one that requested this color, so it's not the stylist's fault if I don't like it.)

I mentioned that I have to work Sunday, and the main way to work - in Galveston - is down the freeway (I-45) which is closed southbound all weekend. There's a huge freeway-widening project going on which has been going on for several years and is not supposed to be done for at least a couple more. It's driving us crazy. (I was driving both of us one day last year, and we almost got mowed down by a semi when the lane we were in suddenly vanished. Stuff like that.) Luckily there is an alternative route, which is the old pre-freeway road to Galveston, and I guess I'm going to have to go that way. (I hate going to Galveston on the weekends and our boss knows that, but somebody quit and somebody else is on vacation so I just have to suck up and do it this time!)

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Movies seen in a theater in 2022

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
Everything Everywhere All At Once
The Batman (twice)
Cyrano
Belfast
Spider-Man: No Way Home (twice in 2022 plus once in 2021)
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (also one we'd seen in 2021)

...and Rob also saw:

X (which apparently is a horror movie about people trying to make a porn movie, thus the title)
The Cursed
Scream

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Reading material

2021-12-05T10:02:12Z

The last Expanse book* came out last week, and I had pre-ordered it so I already have it, but I haven't started it yet. I decided I need to read the two books before it first.

(*so the authors say, apparently they have a contract to do some new series after this!)

For those of you who don't read these, this new book is the ninth book in the series, and they fall loosely into three trilogies. (Or, I don't know, book 4 always feels sort of like a semi-standalone to me, but 1-3 definitely more or less go together and so do 5 and 6.) I re-read the earlier ones this year already (1-6, that is) but I decided to stop there and wait until closer to time for the new one. I got through #7 a few days ago - that one's called Persepolis Rising - and I'm still in the early part of book 8 - Tiamat's Wrath. I don't really know why I feel like I must read the new one the minute it comes out, anyway, but I keep feeling like I'm "late" - it's silly, really. Besides, I actually had pre-orders for two books that came out that same day, it turned out, and I did read the other one practically on the spot, because it was a romance novel and I knew it'd go fast. (Mary Balogh, Someone Perfect, if you want to know!)

At work the other day, I read a chapter or two of a book I found on Kindle Unlimited - something called The Dublin Trilogy and the first book was The Man With One of Those Faces (I may be capitalizing that all wrong, sorry). I think that's a hilarious title, and the book is pretty funny. We'll see if I manage to finish it. Actually I have a rule - which I was obviously breaking - that I'm only allowed to re-read things I've already read at work, and not read anything new, on the theory that I'm less likely to get heavily involved with something I've read before. My work involves a lot of interruptions, but we're allowed to do other stuff when it's slow. I've been re-reading Shelby Foote - The Civil War: a narrative, which is three big volumes. That seemed to be something I was less likely to get too involved with - I know how it ends, after all. I have actually gotten through the first volume and on to the second one, although actually the second one might be more dangerous at that because I'm to the point in 1863 where the big stuff is coming up - ~~The Wilderness~~Chancellorsville** and Vicksburg and Gettysburg.

I've also been reading more hard sci-fi, which is the Foreigner series by Cherryh. I have read a bunch of those before, but it had been at least a couple of years. I'm probably only reading 1-6. This one also falls into loose trilogies, as far as I've read, but I got bored with it after the third or fourth trilogy where it quit being hard sci-fi at all, really, and became stuff about atevi politics. I think I looked on Amazon and there's something like 17 books now, and I think I just can't, unless somebody who's read them wants to make a case that they get better again at some point!

(I really bounce around between multiple genres - I like hard sci-fi and I like fairy tales and I like at least some romance - particularly Regency romances, if they're well-written. I went on a big kick of reading mysteries earlier this year and I've even read some contemporary romance, which I normally rarely do. I've read some police procedurals lately as well.)

**I just caught myself on this mistake several days late. The Wilderness and Chancellorsville were two Civil War battles that happened about a year apart, in Virginia in 1863 and 1864. I should have thought to check, really - they were fought on basically the same ground, or at least overlapping ground. The one in 1863 is called Chancellorsville (which is a town) and the one in 1864 is called The Wilderness, which was literally a wild area near Chancellorsville. (The South won the battle both times, but Hooker was in charge in 1863, and the army retreated afterwards. By 1864 Grant was in charge, and he did not retreat afterwards, but kept his troops moving forward.)

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At work

2021-12-04T05:01:41Z

I'm writing this at work. It's slow. There are people here but nothing's going on that requires my attention, at least for the moment. We close at 9 on Fridays so it'll be time to start closing up before I know it.

Writing is a less expensive way to pass the time than what I was doing before, which was browsing Etsy. I bought a beaded bracelet and $40 worth of candles before I knew it. Oh well, I missed the Bath & Body Works sale that they always have in early December (it was today, but everything online was sold out before I thought to check), and I'm sure I would have spent at least as much there if I had had the chance. And hey, on Etsy you're (presumably) buying from a small seller, so that's good. (For the record, I bought the candles from From the Page, which as you might guess is book-themed.)

I was late to work because the traffic stopped dead about half a mile from my house and stayed that way for darn near 15 minutes. By the time it finally got moving whatever the problem was had been solved, apparently - that is to say there was no wreck to be gawked at or anything. But that kind of thing is pretty unusual in my little suburb. Getting to work involves getting on the freeway, for me, but by the time I finally got to the freeway the traffic there was problem-free.

My sister is sending me text updates on the progress of the unpacking. She says she's totally exhausted at the end of the day each day but she's also enjoying the process. I guess we're going to try to go check in person this weekend at some point.

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Pandemic talk

2020-12-14T06:32:57Z

I saw an article the other day that talked about international pandemic slang (it's here but it's behind a paywall, I think I got to it from a newsletter or something!). It was pretty interesting - mostly it had to do with workplace slang. I am not in the work-from-home world so I don't know much about this stuff - I hadn't even heard the English-language ones like "zumping" for firing (or breaking up) via Zoom. Some of the international ones were pretty intriguing. In Japan they use kubikiri - which literally means decapitation - for being laid off. In China a slang term for firing is chao yougu, which means "to fry squid." They said it comes from workers living in dormitories rolling up their quilts when they left. (I'm unclear on that one, I guess a fried squid curls up? I don't eat seafood other than just fish so I have no idea, but it's still interesting. Apparently it also gets used for quitting - you can say "I fried my own squid" in that case.)

Anyway, I started trying to think if we had any pandemic slang of our own. I really can't think of much, other than that we talk about "the old world" for life before the pandemic. (I doubt we're the only ones to use that, but for my workplace, I think that partly came from a presentation about a software update we all had to sit through where they kept saying "in the new world" regarding the new version. We used to make fun of that a lot.)

(That makes me think of a phrase that stuck in my head from somewhere: "But that was long ago, and in another country." I tried to look it up and all it comes up with is Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, which isn't the same quote. I don't know. I may be conflating some things. I certainly never read The Jew of Malta though!)

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Not-quite-quarantine life

2020-12-06T10:39:40Z

I saw a couple of people do that meme about quarantine, and I kind of feel like I'm quarantining, more or less, but really I'm not, not entirely. We're "essential," we weren't given a choice, as far as work goes. We are masked all the time at work, and mostly distanced and behind plexiglass, and our department is not open to the public but we're open for university employees and their families. I don't feel unsafe there. We've been reopened for what, over six months now, I'm pretty comfortable with it, on the whole.

We do go out some outside of work, too - not a whole lot, but we have been to movies a few times and we go out to eat once every week or two, to the places that we have found are careful about distancing. We are very careful about wearing masks outside of work, too, although of course you can't wear them to eat. Honestly most people around here are pretty good about it. This may be Texas but we live in the suburbs, it's highly populated and there's a lot of pressure to mask.

Earlier this year, when Rob was working the evening shift and I was working days, I bought the groceries. Normally he buys them. I didn't mind doing it but now that the stores are staying open later, he's gone back to doing it, and honestly I'm happy to let him. If there's someplace people are going to flagrantly go unmasked, it's probably going to be Kroger or Walmart or HEB. And I'm the one with the co-morbidities. (I've lost forty pounds over the last couple of years, though, have I even talked about that? So that helps a good bit, but I'm still overweight and borderline diabetic, etc.)

We were going to go to my sister's for Christmas, she invited us a while back, but we've called it off. It just seems like really bad timing. And I don't mind staying home, to tell you the truth. I don't think my sister and her husband are going out, so it's more that we're a danger to them than that they're a danger to us, and I just don't want to chance that.

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Pandemic catch-up post

2020-08-17T05:32:58Z

I apparently haven't posted here since that week I stayed home sick back in March. Man, that seems like eons ago. Usually I think time goes whooshing by incredibly fast, but pandemic time seems to have changed that. The first couple of months, especially, seemed to crawl by. I've heard other people say that too, but I wasn't even cooped up at home all the time, so I found it a bit surprising. (I'm sure I said some of this way back when, but I'll repeat it since I'm sure not everybody remembers what I said months ago!)

Our workplace closed for two months. Our immediate workplace, that is - but since we work for an academic medical center we are automatically "essential" employees. I ended up working something similar to my normal part time hours, in the mostly-empty building with maybe three to six other people, doing spreadsheets and later working on setting our software up to do what we needed to do for the way we are running now that we're open again. Rob ended up working in the hospital on the mainland, screening people coming in and out of the building. He did it for, like seven weeks. He kind of enjoyed it for a while, as a change of pace, but I think by the end he was totally ready to come back.

So for those of you who don't know this already, where we work is a gym. We had to shut down because it was in the orders the governor gave for the initial shut-down, in the middle of March. In May Texas started opening up again, and we got the go-ahead to open in mid-May. Normally we are open 7 days a week, about 360 days a year, from very early in the morning until late at night. (In the old world I think we were only closed about 6 hours in the middle of the night, at least on weeknights.) In the new world, we still open very early in the morning, but we close earlier at night, and we're not open at all on weekends. The first couple of weeks we were at 25% capacity and then we went up to 50%. We doubled up on housekeepers and so far so good. We work on a reservation system, which was the thing that I mentioned that I worked on setting up. People complain about it a lot - I complain about it a lot - but it does work. And there's no Covid running rampant here like there's supposed to be in Houston. There are cases, but they're pretty scattered.

Life is kind of gradually seeming more normal. Normal, except with masks, I guess? We go out to eat once in a while - cautiously. We go in stores occasionally - but I've always bought a lot of stuff online anyway. (My Amazon profile says I've been buying stuff there since 1999.)

Rob is buying a new car. And my sister came down here last week and bought a house, no less! In our old home-town, which is pretty close to me, and that's what seemed to have been her motivation. (She bullied her husband into it somehow.)

I put the UT icon on this post because I heard this week that both UT and A&M are going to try to play football. I don't see how you can do socially distant football, but I guess we'll find out.

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6 feet away

2020-03-21T07:27:25Z

I spent the day today working at a hospital I'd never even been to before - but it is part of the same hospital system Rob & I both work for, and it's the closest one to where we live, so that part is nice. I was supposed to be screening people for Covid symptoms, but actually I didn't do all that much, because there were a lot of people at the desk, and everybody kept chiming in before I got anything out. ("Have you had cough-fever-bodyaches-difficulty breathing?") But I'm presumably going back next week so at least I know the drill of working there somewhat now. Rob spent the day at a different place doing the same thing. The facility where we normally work is closed, being "nonessential" and potentially hazardous as far as being a disease vector, to boot, but all of the employees at the hospital system are considered essential and we just get reassigned to do different things, as long as we don't get sick. (My understanding is that if we actually get sick, we will get paid even if we don't get sick leave, which I don't since I'm part-time. I haven't heard that officially though.)

My boss would have liked to have kept me for spreadsheet-making purposes, actually - that's a really useful job skill in a lot of places! I told her if I have any hours left - which is probably unlikely, really - I'll come in and work one day next week. We have to keep track of how much money we are losing by being closed, for one thing - I think they need it for FEMA. I believe we went through that after Hurricane Ike, too, as I recall. Probably Harvey, too, although somebody else must've done the spreadsheets for that one. (We were stuck at home with flooded creeks between us and work for a solid week, some of you guys may recall.)

I do have a scratchy throat but that's just my usual allergy crap. Every time I have the tiniest symptom I over-analyze it, I imagine everybody is doing that. But anyway, we're hanging in there so far. Running low on toilet paper, but hopefully we'll find some before it actually runs out and we have to resort to Kleenex, heaven forbid! (I do have a lot of tissues of various brands due to said allergies, so I guess that's a pretty good backup in a pinch.)

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A Gathering of Two

2019-12-02T13:54:26Z

I mentioned in the last entry that it was very very slow at work Wednesday night. People who don't normally stop to talk were asking me what we were doing for Thanksgiving. I kept saying, "Oh, we're just having lunch & then going to a movie." A couple of people - ones who don't really know us - seemed to think that sounded like we don't have any family or something and thus it was something sad. (They didn't say that, of course, I just got that feeling from the way they replied.) In fact we don't have any family who is local, any more, and we're prevented from going very far by the fact that we usually end up working on Wednesday night just like we did this year - but the truth is that we like it that way. We still do the family thing at Christmas - and we did the family thing for years at Thanksgiving, too, but we're stopped - and we both agree that we really don't miss it. Christmas and Thanksgiving are too close together and it's too much stress. We do a meal that's a little more fancy than what we normally do, and we go to a movie. There's always some good movie or other to see, and we think it's pretty perfect, really.

So this year it was Knives Out. If you don't know about it already and you like mystery-type stuff, you need to go see it. It's very good. Plus, it has Chris Evans and Toni Colette and various other actors we like, and Daniel Craig doing a variation on that crazy accent he did in Logan Lucky and showing off his hammy side again. Lots of fun.

(I'm going to have to do a movie catch-up post - but not today.)

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First movie of 2019

2019-01-02T07:30:24Z

1. Bumblebee

I really liked Bumblebee a lot, quite honestly. I'm the wrong age to be nostalgic about Transformers - I was a young adult in the 80s - but they surrounded that with all kinds of other 80s nostalgia, and it's been well-established here that I love me some 80s, so that part made me happy. And it was well-made, so that always helps.

I'm starting to think I might ought to go back and see Aquaman again at some point, and see if I was just being cranky about it. That was right when I started getting really sick, so it's entirely possible. And it was awfully pretty to look at (and I don't just mean Jason Momoa).

But before I can do that I have to go back to work. I don't mind the work itself as much as I mind getting up earlier, darnit.

Does anybody else think 2019 just sounds more futuristic somehow? (I also pointed out to Rob that it's only one year now until we know what to call our decades again!)

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Terrific Thursday

2018-12-21T07:53:11Z

Have you ever walked through a door just in time to see another car hit your car? That's what happened to me earlier tonight. Luckily it turned out not to be nearly as bad as it looked. This guy (who I know by sight because he parks by us and apparently gets off work at exactly the same time we do) kind of sideswiped my car - he was trying to back out the wrong way, basically - the spaces are slanted one way and he wanted to go the other way, so he swung wide and my car was in the way. He has a pickup and my car is really low, so he probably couldn't really see my car very well - which doesn't make it any less his fault. Anyway, we opened the door to the parking lot just in time to see it happen. It looked pretty bad. But amazingly, it really did very little damage. Rob said he could see a couple of little fine scratches, but I couldn't see anything wrong. My car is ten years old so a couple of scratches more or less don't worry me. (I just hope it doesn't look a lot worse when I see it in the daylight!) He was very apologetic and I wasn't going to go to the trouble of filing an insurance claim for invisible damage.

I got home and there was a box of nail polish on the doorstep that I'd been feeling guilty about ordering, and I decided that I earned that nail polish (for my trauma, more or less) and I wasn't going to feel guilty about that one any more. It was cheap nail polish, actually, but it's really pretty and amazingly, none of the 12 polishes was broken despite being really really badly packed. (Amazon is notorious among nail polish people for just throwing bottles of nail polish into boxes with inadequate packing materials, and then being shocked when they arrive broken.) This one came with a dozen polishes in a plastic bag stuck into a way-too-large box, with like a couple of little cushiony things thrown in - not enough to make any difference whatsoever. Are they extra-frazzled because it's almost Christmas? The only thing that saved it, I think, is that the plastic bag that the polish was in actually was the right size. (Amazon needs a big button when you order where you can say, "I don't need this til after Christmas, thanks." They do have something like that for some things, but I've wanted it a couple of times in the last week when it was not offered to me.)

We have to work tomorrow, then we're off til after New Year's. Woo! Apparently the students are mostly already gone, because things have been dead the last couple of days. Tomorrow it's going to be even slower, presumably.

I had a doctor's appointment today, and it went okay, but she ordered blood-work because I hadn't had any in a while, and they took about a pint of blood out of me, it looked like. - Ok, well, it was five vials, it probably didn't actually add up to a pint, but still. And my old doctor had retired, and this was the first time I'd seen my new one. I was a little worried about that, but I really liked her, thank goodness. The other one was my age or a little older, and she talked to everybody like they were kindergarteners. It drove me crazy - I think she gave me flashbacks to my mom the elementary school teacher.

Anyway, the day could have gone a lot worse.

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