Catchy Name Needed

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 WildernessChancellorsville** 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.)

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!)

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.

 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.

I do hope we're not about to get invaded by Daleks. That would kinda mess up my plans to play Diablo for the rest of New Year's Day.

Also, before I forget, thank you to Richard and Jennifer for running Holidailies again (and I hope you manage to banish those nasty Daleks)! And thanks also to Jette, whose idea it was back in the day!

I don't normally make resolutions, because I just forget all about them by the end of the week, but this year I have one that I need to take seriously. As everyone who was around to hear about it endlessly at the time knows, I got certified in medical coding a few years ago, and then I happened on two part-time jobs that I liked - neither of which had anything at all to do with it - and so never got a coding job. I did keep up with my required 48 hours of continuing education (I know that's kind of a lot, but it's because I ended up with two certifications - one more intended for physician offices and one for hospitals - thus I have to do twice as much!) in 2011 and 2012 - it's 48 hours every TWO years. And in 2013 I slacked off. I didn't mean to, I just did, because that's how I roll. I am a procrastinator. So not only do I have to make up for that, but this is the year when I probably need to get a coding job if I'm ever going to, because October 1st is when ICD-10 finally is going to happen, and supposedly a lot of older coders are going to retire rather than learn a whole new system. As near as I can determine from what I've seen so far, there's nothing particularly difficult about it, it's just different, but you know how some people are about change! So the big window for getting a job exists, at least in theory, and also there is a possibility that my bookkeeping job (which like most jobs with small businesses, is contract work) is going to end at some point. In any case, it has come to stress me out unduly and it's probably best that I move on fairly soon, whether it ends or not. So, studying needs to ensue, both to catch up on the continuing ed, and to learn ICD-10, and also just to catch up in general, because I got certified, what, almost 4 years ago? and I am rusty. It's a big resolution, really, as far as the amount of work that needs to be done, but I've got to knuckle down and do it.

(Good news for those of you that enjoyed this little feature, though: the "medical term for today" entries might well be making a comeback!)

We are home from Dallas (again). I have to say the drive seems much shorter with some company. I think Rob enjoyed the trip, too, so that's good. I took my test, and I basically have no idea if I passed or not. I might have or might not have - I did a good bit of educated guessing, here and there, and it all depends on how well I guessed! If not, then I do this again later, although hopefully I'll be able to do it without another trip to Dallas, because I am very tired of that drive.

What with the intervening holidays and all, I don't know when I'll find out if I passed or not - sometime the end of next week, maybe. Before that, I have another job interview - for an OB/Gyn coding job, this time. I think that might be a very interesting job.

Oh, I did get over being sick in time for the test, thank goodness. I was still sucking on cough drops the whole time, but at least I wasn't sneezing and hacking and all that. Wednesday morning I was still feeling bad enough that I briefly considered trying to reschedule, but I really, really wanted to get it over with, and happily, it all worked out.

We went to the grocery store on the way home this afternoon, and oh my god, it was a zoo. Now we are home watching Doctor Who specials, and I am very happy to be here. I've spent so much time running around in the last week that home feels like a giant treat.

Happy new year, y'all!

Funny for today: Ricky Gervais singing a lullaby to Elmo:

[That link is bad, but try here. Or just google it!]


(That is Elmo, right? You can tell I don't have kids.) (Found on The Daily Dish.)

Also from the Daily Dish, the crazies are out and they're all running for public office:

(That's not the first example of this I've seen. There was also the guy who said we ought to be more worried about Democrats than about terrorists - I think that one is running for Congress.)


I've been reading yuki_onna 's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - it's very entertaining. It's a long YA story (in 24 chapters) which is entirely up online. (There's even audio!)


Added: I dug further down the Daily Dish website and found the other quote I was talking about:

"Walz" is the poor schmuck this fundamentalist is running against.

I got laid off. So did my boss, and about half of the rest of my department.

I'm okay, just very tired. I will have more to say later, probably!