Getting Things Done. Not Exciting Things. But Things. Done.

On Friday, I started making a list of things I could do over the weekend, since without a list, I tend to drift through free time and that is pleasant but unproductive. Sadly, life requires productivity some of the time! Thus, list.

I did pretty well at the list. Probably the biggest one was that I bit the bullet and booked my flights to Syracuse, choosing neither the way-too-short nor the ridiculously long layovers, and also reserved a rental car. I went directly through Budget, since the last two times I've rented a car, it's been from them, but the lines to pick up were silly-long, so I'm hoping their claim that it's quicker that way will come to fruition; stay tuned.

In other news, so far the being-without-a-dishwasher situation isn't as bad as I was afraid it would be. We're taking the time* to figure out exactly what we want, which after the obvious (I assume that all new machines made these days will do a decent job of washing dishes) are that it be quiet, not the most expensive, and Mom wants it to be white. 
*The we-assume-no-one-will-carry-it-up-five-flights-of-stairs time, that is.

For the noise question, I watched a video on relative decibels in order to see how much difference it really made (this one, chosen at random, but gave me the info I was looking for). Essentially, all the new machines will be quieter than our old one (which, as a reminder, Mom got in 2009), so we're not super worried about the decibels. Wanting it to be white is actually helpful at narrowing the field, since stainless seems to be much more common. So we'll go from there. We stopped in at Lowe's yesterday to look at what they had, and see if any design features in particular struck as us being important, and agreed that the only thing is we don't want a handle that sticks out; the kitchen is not big enough for that, and neither of us is interested in having perpetual bruises.

I will leave you for today with this from Lowe's:

Love a rainbow!

But Wait! It Gets Worse

Here’s what I already hate about getting dental work (in today’s case, two crowns):

• Painful; I am a real wimp about my teeth especially 
• Sitting still, not one of my strong suits
• Sensory overload; I have an oversensitive gag reflex, and all the hands and tools in my mouth are very overwhelming 
• Expensive, even with dental insurance 
• And I have to make myself go, even with all of that.

But on top of that? Adding in ten flights of stairs is just the icing on the cake.

However, I did leave (almost five hours later) with a question for you: why do you think there's a power outlet in the ceiling?

You Can't Get There

It's time for a game we've played before, folks: Why is it so damned annoying to book decent flights from Ft Myers, Florida*, to Syracuse, NY?
*RSW is my closest airport, an hour away. Next closest would be Punta Gorda, but flights from there go to smaller cities instead. Fort Lauderdale is easily two hours away, not counting rush hour and accidents, and the last half hour is through ungodly east coast traffic. And even from there, there aren't many nonstops.

(You may remember my mother's "I-grew-up-in-Syracuse" answer: They don't make it easy to get there because they know no one goes to Syracuse unless they have to.)

There are essentially no nonstop flights. There are and/or have been some on bottom-of-the-barrel discount airlines, the kind that fly one flight a day, a few days a week, but not on 'real' airlines.

Layovers are either ridiculously short (I saw one for 34 minutes!) or insanely long (no one wants to spend 6 or 7 hours at JFK). I want a layover that's long enough to be realistic, meaning probably 90 minutes at the very least, but not more than three hours. Ideally not more than two hours, but you can't find that, either.

Flights tend to either leave at 6 AM, or get in after midnight---and how could they help it, after that 6 hour layover?

I want to go. I want to visit my aunt and go to Apple Festival. But I have to gripe a bit before I get over this annoyance and book the least bad itinerary I can find.

Stupid travel industry. I need teleportation.

Oh Noooooo

Our dishwasher died the other day: the cycle ran much shorter than it should have, there was water still in the bottom, and while it did drain when we told it to, it then would not start a new cycle. From Mom's records, it was installed in 2009 and expected to last 10-15 years, so it's right on schedule.

HOWEVER.

Can we really expect the service people to carry a new dishwasher up five flights of stairs? Probably not, right? I mean, it seems unlikely to me. Which takes this right from annoyance into disaster, within the class of first-world problems. 

The whole well-documented elevator situation has been awful, but in a straightforward way, if you follow me. The annoyance has been awful from day one, but it hasn't gotten harder to carry everything up and down. The increasing length of time has sucked, but the difficulty of each individual trip has been the same. The thing is, it requires a lot of coping and planning to handle things that used to require next to none. 

And now we add the fun of hand-washing every dish for a month. I don't know what ancient spirit I pissed off, but I'm sorry already.

Sigh. Anyway. We are soliciting opinions on brands of dishwashers, either ones you love or ones you've hated, and where to get them. So far, some of the advice is contradictory, but I welcome your take on it just the same.

Fucking Hot Flashes

(Yeah, language warning in this one.)

As I mentioned last month, earlier this year* I had switched my estrogen patches for gel formulation, only to find that it wasn't working the same way. 
*Specifically, on May 7, aka the day the elevator broke. What a day.

For those who might not know, there is a shortage of patches this year, in the US at least. An old study that showed their use caused increased heart attacks and strokes was debunked, so more doctors and patients are willing to try them. But since women's health is a joke these days, that doesn't mean more patches are actually available, so they've been hard to get.

I ended up being on the gel for over two months; I messaged my doctor at just under 8 weeks to ask for a patch prescription because the symptoms were returning, and then there was a slight delay in getting the prescription filled, but I was able to get back on it a month ago. However, my damned hormones are still not settled down back to where they were*. 
*Let us not consider that they may not do so easily. Leave me this hope.

• The mood swings, otherwise known as incandescent rage at small annoyances, were my first sign, and have very much not settled down. 
• The hot flashes started off as occasional, but are happening more often. I had one this morning and I, who loves a hot shower, kept turning the water temperature down and down and down. Argh.
• The joint pain in hips and shoulders maybe isn't as bad as it was for a while there. What with having arthritis, it will probably never go away completely, but it isn't awful. Today.

I don't have any conclusions, or anything more to say. Just need to vent, because this fucking sucks.

Twenty Years. Twenty. 20?

The passage of time can be so weird to acknowledge. I was in high school how many decades ago? People my age are grandparents? I'm how close to retirement?* How can I be this old, I don't feel like it.
*Answer: Not close enough

One of those signs is hitting me this month, which is twenty years since I started a blog. How?

My first post started:

And here I am, more than 4500 posts later, boggling at time. And enjoying a good mental wander from pillar to post.

Recently at work, someone was emailing an update on something that didn't get done that day, and wrote casually, "Time's winged chariot and all that." I knew I recognized the quote, but had to look it up. We studied some poetry in I think it was a high school English class, and I remember that I did like the start of To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell:

Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

But the phrase my coworker used comes later:

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near

Quite the thing to throw into an email, though, isn't it?

There's one other quote from this poem that links to something else, in my head:

The Grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Has anyone else read A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle? I read it a long time ago (there's time again), and remember it as a good book.

What Is So Rare

(as a Thursday off work)

When I originally put in for August 6 as a day off, it was so I could take the cat to the vet for dental work. But when I learned that the elevator was in fact not going to be fixed in time, I decided to put off the vet* but keep the vacation day. 
*Not only do I not want to carry his weight up and down the stairs, but I don't think he would like it, and after anesthesia, it seems like a shitty thing to do to him, when we can wait a little longer.

The fact is that other than my Boston trip, I haven't taken much time off this year, just a day here and a day there, and taking more is both good for my mental health, and also a shame to waste the vacation time---no, wait, that's almost a joke, I never waste my vacation time. But even if I take off time around Thanksgiving and Christmas, I still have days to spare, and no plans to use them.

So, I kept Thursday off. I slept in a little, took the morning easy, then went off to the chiropractor and to do some other errands. I also made time to sit in a cafe with a treat and bound off the shawl I was knitting, more to come on that, but it was good.

Getting up for work today was not exciting. But I got through the day, and now I have the weekend! Pretty good deal all the way around.

Do Not Buy Up High in a One-Elevator Building

When my parents were condo-shopping 30 years ago, they had a list of features they wanted: Three bedrooms, two baths, a garage, a view of the water, and a short walk to the beach, as well as two bridges if on an island (my dad did some business travel, and didn't want to miss his plane if there was a bad accident on "the" bridge). This condo ticks all those boxes, and I can't blame them for not having the foresight to insist on a building with two elevators.

However, in hindsight, yeah.

We got another update yesterday.

As a refresher, here is the timeline so far:

• May 7: The piston breaks. The first estimate is that it will take "about 30 days" to fix.
• May 9: In an update to include the cost, we're told it is "a 10-week process," which means mid-July.
• May 26: There was an owners meeting to discuss costs, but no change to the date.
• July 20: The updated, updated estimate is now August 10, based on 2 weeks for shipping and a week for installation.
  
  
• August 3: Now they say the piston won't even be completed until August 21, which combines with the 2 weeks for shipping and a week for installation to give an updated, updated, updated guesstimate date in mid-September.

As I replied to the condo board president, "Is there any reason to believe them now?" (He didn't have a real answer, not that I expected him to. I did specify that I'm not blaming him for this, although I will tell you that I did not appreciate him saying, "I'm as upset as you all are!" He's upset in theory. We're upset in reality. These two things are not the same magnitude.)

If it gets pushed out again, we'll be getting into time for the snowbirds to start coming back. I wonder if they will, or if they'll delay until it's actually working again? Maybe not the people who are one flight up, but more than that?

I'll also tell you that the first neighbor who tries to laugh, ha ha, at how annoying it was is going to get the bitchiest bitch face ever from me. I might start to find this funny in 2032. Maybe. 

Maybe not.

Bookishly Happy

A few months back, one of my favorite authors announced a special edition set of one of her series, one I loved, and I decided I wanted to own it. 

The author is AJ Sherwood, and she writes many different series, some with slight overlap, usually but not always fantasy, and I love (almost all of) them. She is very prolific and regularly updates on social media regarding where she is with which projects, which is also fun to follow along.

The series in question is a romantic fantasy trilogy, kind of: the first two books are in order and focus on one couple, and then the third is kind of a companion piece alongside the second, with the main focus on other characters. I've read it multiple times and own the ebooks, but not print copies. Until now!

From here, be warned, there are spoilers for the contents, which included some ephemera and a surprise item.

The set arrived in this fun box:

Pretty inside as well as out.

The books themselves had tissue around them, and a seal.

They had actually bumped around inside the box, tearing the tissue, but no damage was done to the books.

Spines:

Painted edges (at top and bottom as well):

Lovely dust jackets:

But also pretty under the cover:

The backs of the dust jackets as well.

I am happy to say that the books also feel nice. Do you know what I mean? The covers (both dust jacket and book) are smooth, the paper is good, and the font size isn't too small. (Yes, all things that I have found not always the case.) They make me happy to hold.

The set had a postcard of the covers, as well as one with a list of Ren's Rules.

One of the main characters is a man of very few words, which is why the rules include:
Rule One - When giving orders, said orders must be more than a location.

Rule Two – Grunts are not answers.

Rule Three – You have to at least try words before relying on gestures.

Rule Four - You’re not allowed to argue with just one word.

Something else that was included kind of puzzles me. Not in a bad way, but in a "what even are these" way. Each book has an accompanying sheet of, well, not quite tissue paper, but sort of? I mean, what is it?

It matches the painted edge:

And it fits neatly inside, but, really? What is it? I guess you could use it as a bookmark, though I would rather use the postcard, which is a little stronger.

Anyway! The books are also signed:

And have a couple of fun notes on the copyright page. Villains ARE a different story!

And of course, the typos are there on purpose. Boo to AI!

The chapter pages are illustrated:

And there's a map of the countries as well.

This is the first thing I saw when opening the box.

Opened the vacuum bag and found a blanket of the cover images!

Which made for a very cozy reading experience.

All in all, this set made and makes me very happy.