Luddites Unite!

Okay, so I dropped off the daily blogging train right at the homestretch. I forgive myself. The combination of sick and busy does not lend itself to interesting self-reporting.

This mystery illness, which may or may not exist, has manifested itself thusly: tired all the time, but unable to sleep in all weekend or get to bed before midnight on a school night. Baffling lack of appetite, which is a sad reality on Emma Bake Sale Day. Occasional bouts of phlegmishness, coughing, sniffling, sneezing, then periods of total calm. And the inability to concentrate on anything for more than ten minutes. Even wedding talk.

Speaking of, pretty much as soon as everyone left the house on Friday (well, really when I woke up Saturday), I realized, we've got a wedding to plan. Thanksgiving was the last big thing in between. Now it's December and that means Goals to be Accomplished. Clayton sent us the engagement pictures he took when we visited his family in Colorado in October; I put some of the best up here. I'm so completely thrilled with these photos and amazed by Clayton's talent. Austin's going to use these shots for our Save the Date cards, which we'll mail this month. I've been keeping myself busy tracking down addresses and updating the guest list with the wedding tools on Martha Stewart Weddings. I always say, that Martha, she's crazy, but she keeps me organized.

I've got Thanksgiving photos to share too, but the engagement pictures maxed out my Flickr account for this month already and I'm having trouble figuring the damn thing out. I even tried to pay to upgrade to a Pro account and it appears to have timed out or failed somehow. Flickr seems to be the prevalent choice for photo sharing, and I like the ease of linking directly from iPhoto, but I don't understand why it keeps directing me to my (nonexistent) Yahoo inbox. Annoying. I'll figure this out tomorrow and share photos of the feasting from Friday.

my face is failing

Success = Thanksgiving. Hands down, the best Thanksgiving we've ever hosted. I got so much of the cooking done ahead of time, had a killer game plan in place for today, and never got frazzled or stressed in the kitchen. We had the house sparkling clean by 11 am (that's mostly credit to the Boo, he worked his butt off the last two days) and the cooking schedule was so well organized I even had time to watch an episode of 30 Rock in the middle of the afternoon. Complete master of my menu domain.

Fail = sudden onset of cold/sinus/mystery illness symptoms. As in, spent the entire meal blowing my nose every two minutes and sniffling. Where did this come from? I've been feeling a tad feeble the last four or five days, just some sore throat and tiredness, but this new development came up fast and hard, precisely as our guests started arriving. My face appears to be disassembling to a liquid state.

My point here is that I've got pics and menu details to share of today's big feast, but right now, Sudafed and I are going to bed. Goodnight, sweethearts.

the lies I tell to my diary

Sorry friends, you're looking at another half-ass post tonight. I'm in the throes of a battle of wills with my iPod and my poor decrepit iMac (aka The Jukebox). Why won't they talk to each other? Why won't they be friends? GAH.

I need my own personal Reggie for nights like these. Austin doesn't seem too concerned about my technical problems. I have important mix cds to make!

mental note to self

You know how they say you pay for what you get? And you get what you pay for? This apparently applies to appliances. This morning we were stuck at home with the FOURTH (fruitless) repair visit for our refrigerator. Our huge, nice, posh, glamorous, nearly brand-new refrigerator, the one that we would never have been able to afford if we hadn't bought it at the Sears Scratch and Dent store. A 25-cubic foot Whirlpool fridge for under a grand? Lucky us! Right?

Ugh. Today we had the pleasure of being informed by the repairman that the replacement part that we'd received (and had to wait a week to have installed) was unnecessary and not going to fix our problem. We also got to listen to him get in a bitch-fight with the tech support on his speaker phone. Then he called his supervisor to rat out the other combatant in the verbal squabble. Charming. He (and the tech support, and the supervisor) was stumped by our fridge's inability to maintain a proper temperature, and decided to blame the problem on faulty wiring in our electrical outlet. This is entirely likely, since there has yet to be an example of UNfaulty wiring in this house, other than the new outlets installed by my dad, but are you telling me that it took the FOURTH VISIT before someone checked the outlet? So now we have to bring in an electrician, have the outlet repaired (or have it confirmed that the outlet isn't the problem) and then sit tight for another two weeks until our next service appointment. Awesome.

The good news is, as with all the other visits, the fridge is plenty cold and making ice like a champ since they reset all the operations. It will probably work for another week or so and then start warming up. We threw away two garbage bags' worth of food out of the freezer this morning (last summer's peaches, sad). I dearly, sincerely wish we'd just not bothered with the bargain-hunting and just bought a perfectly fine appliance from Home Depot for the same price and infinitely less trouble. Lesson learned.

I wouldn't call it an epic fail...

...so much as just an inevitability. I did not avoid that shopping binge I mentioned on Thursday. I went straight to TJ Maxx after work on Friday and basically got a new wardrobe. It added up to seven new tops, a dress, gym shorts, workout pants, a sweater, a woobie, a corduroy blazer, a Wonderbra and a picture frame for less than $200. And I didn't stop there. Hauled it to the Mills today and found a new pair of jeans, four pairs of earrings, and three pairs of shoes. The upside: I got all of this for approximately one-third of what I would have spent if I'd been paying full price for anything. Or to put it another way: it's a good time to shop right now. At the Maxx I was gleefully throwing $3 shorts and $6 shirts into my cart, giggling to myself and snickering, "Why not?! It's THREE DOLLARS." I tried on eight pairs of jeans at the Gap and luckily the only pair I liked were also on clearance. $19.99, thanks. I was handed an "additional 20% off" coupon when I walked into Off Broadway, so I made off with two pairs of flats for half-off, and a sharp pair of Puma running shoes for $40. Fair enough, right?

And I didn't go to any movies, so that's like $25 I saved (per movie) by not getting ticket, popcorn, sour patch kids, etc, right? I will accept all assurances of justification from anyone who is offering them.

I've also just been unforgivably lazy. I literally didn't leave the house yesterday, or even take off my pajamas. I slept until ten, putzed around on the computer for most of the afternoon, and watched the Kiera Knightly version of Pride and Prejudice while eating pasta with butter and parm, aka my Single Girl meal of choice. The movie was really great, by the way. It's funny how you get over how ridiculous Kiera's face is after you watch her for like thirty minutes. After that movie was over I flipped over to catch the second half of Beautiful Girls, and then the last three-fourths of That Thing You Do. That put me to bed after 1 am, what a party girl!

Today at least I got dressed, met some of my favorite girls for brunch (at Margot, which was amazing, of course), then managed to get all our groceries for the week for $70 (including detergent, when did detergent get so expensive?!). I suppose that victory led to my error in judgment that was the fateful trip to Shopryland. Having had trouble leaving Kroger for less than $200 lately, maybe I ended up just about breaking even.

But really, the overarching significance to this weekend comes in the form of missing my boyfriend like a lovesick middle schooler. I'd like to think, as a woman with a free and independent will, I could handle a long weekend of just taking care of myself. Turns out, I'm completely addicted to the luxury of always having Austin within earshot (or IMshot). I talk out loud to myself a LOT when I'm alone. I feel like I'm forgetting important things. I start to believe that all of our pets are moping around and blaming me for doing some unspeakable thing that has sent Austin away forever. I assign ridiculous significance to the most benign things, like folding (his) socks or making (our) bed. The way I'm mooning about and wishing I could hear his voice, you'd think I was still in the first blush of new love, instead of creeping up on a five year anniversary (we met five years ago, to the day, tomorrow. Crazy, yeah?).

I suppose the good side is that I'm blogging for the second time in a week. It's reassuring to know that if you give me something to complain about, my college concentration-in-creative-writing tendency towards hyperbole and melodrama reappears with a vengeance. It just goes to prove my frequent assertion that most of the time I'm so happy that there is nothing to write about. And that is okay by me.

At least the house is relatively clean, and I've finished all the laundry, and have meals planned and pantry stocked for the upcoming week. I still can't shake the feeling that I've been rather pointless when given two whole days of no obligations. After those first couple of months of seeing almost constant visual progress on house projects, this last month of laziness seems especially wrong. There are so many small and dumb things I could accomplish if I just sat down to do them, like reorganizing my vanity table or my closet. These things bug me every day but I keep refusing to waste precious sloth time on them. Austin is no help here; he is tolerant of my laziness to the point of being encouraging (Delaney: "I didn't even brush my teeth today." Austin: "Good for you, babe.").

The other thing hanging over my head is the continued shambles in which my work inbox remains, and I'm heading in tomorrow for most likely the busiest day of the month. I stayed late on Friday clearing out pressing Billing issues that had come in that day, but many more have come up this weekend and I still remain permanently behind on my bigger project of tracking cancellations. I intended to put a few hours in tonight but so far, I've just been blogging. I tell myself, there's not point in getting burned out by working from home all the time, but the truth is, I'm horribly inefficient when I'm in the office. I have the dual timesucks of working with a gigantic group of good friends, and an inbox that needs (literally) constant maintenance.

But I'm probably not going to be too hard on myself. I'm going to go enjoy a bowl of Golden Grahams for dinner, in my peaceful six-sleeping-pet living room. I'm going to resist the temptation to play another round of that damn Blox game while trying not to call Austin every ten minutes to tell him I miss him. I'm going to hit the sack early tonight because I can expect the dogs to rouse me sometime between 6:30 and 7 in the morning. I'm going to force myself to get up and get to work early and then kick absolute ass at my job that I love until it's time to go pick up my Boo and go home for penne with vodka sauce.

Clearly, I have nothing to complain about.

the bitching, the moaning...

I find that during this month of daily blogging, the thing I'm talking about the most is... daily blogging. Okay, not talking so much as whining. Like this was anything other than a voluntary experiment, and like anybody on the planet would care if I quit today. I'm not going to, and posts like last night's make me think that I should keep going as long as I can, past Nov 30, keep pushing until the habit is more fruitful and less forced.

But what I want to know is, WHO decided November was the month that we all had the spare time for finding significant thoughts to blog about every day?! I'll tell you who, whoever They are: They don't have to do anything on November 22 other than show up at Their Aunt Janice's house and mutter about still being seated at the kids table well into Their late 20s. They sigh about the two-hour trainride, or having to sleep on an air mattress in cousin Leslie's room. They bristle at Their family's continued lack of understanding about the tenets of the vegan lifestyle, and that They aren't trying to hurt their Nonna's feelings when They refuse turkey for the sixth year in a row.

They certainly AREN'T putting themselves through the (again, entirely voluntary) paces of planning a twenty-one dish extravaganza feast for 17 people. They haven't spent the entire weekend trying to plan out where 17 people are going to sit in Their suddenly-tiny house. They don't have several Google documents sorting out which dishes are going to go on which serving plates and the specific order that each step of each recipe will need to be completed and at what exact time. They aren't having anxiety dreams about a back-talking turkey that insists on still being frozen at 3 pm on Friday. And they haven't been spending the last several weeks not bothering to do a scrap of housekeeping, with the excuse, It's all going to get dirty again before Thanksgiving, so They'll just do a death-con deepclean on Thursday* and in the meantime feel queasy every time They consider just how much scrubbing, dusting, vacuuming that is going to entail. And They certainly aren't missing Their #1 sous chef** with a feverish panicky itch, and occasionally bugging her on IM to run menu pairing theories by her that are probably making her die a little inside that she won't actually be here to enjoy the fruits of La Bete Noir decision-making labors.

The truth is, you know I LOVE this. This is the kind of stress I thrive on, the pressure to complete a project that is entirely complete-able. And the end result is something that I can look back on with pride for the next 362 days. I just wish I didn't have to work this week, duh. What a waste of perfectly good listmaking time.

Now back to picking out the high points from seven different stuffing recipes and rewriting the whole thing at least twice.

*(the level of filth in my house would seriously make you question whether I can somehow infect you with grubbiness just by reading this)
**this is not meant to imply that I am anything less than THRILLED at the prospect of having Megan join me in the kitchen this year. She just knows she has big galoshes to fill.