Sigh...I am feeling horribly guilty just now, because I spent too much money on the damned "claw machine" at work. This is the machine filled with stuffed animals, where you maneuver the claw and it lowers and either grabs the animal or doesn't. For a long time, I've had absolutely awful luck with the thing and suffered weeks of disappointment, until I finally gave up entirely. Well, that all changed tonight. I saw a chanukah teddy bear that looked easy to grab. I tried it with $2 and actually won it, my very first win! Woot!!!! Well, I came home with it, and my kids got excited and wanted to try, too. Back we went to the store. I won 4-5 more animals and got pretty danged good at it. These are the bigger animals, too, not the little beanie baby sized ones. Then I got the coveted Chocolate Minnie Mouse, a collector limited edition not available for retail sale. You can only get them by winning them. I wasted a lot of tries on the Mickey Mouse, which I would have gotten, except that it was attached to another animal which has a velcro hand. I didn't mean to spend as much as I did. It's just that after so much failure, it's SO danged satisfying to actually win, and to win repeatedly like that. We got a total of 8 toys.

When we got home, we lined all the animals up for Charlie (the baby) to pick one. He's almost a year old, and I swear, as bright as my others have been, he seems even smarter. He sat back and looked at them all in turn, and then reached out and picked one, a Russ denim patchwork bear (he seems to like patterns) and it was obvious that he understood that the one he picked was his, and the one he liked best. He's been playing with it all night, happily. I'm really glad we let him pick, because I was going to give him a different one, and give the one he picked to one of the other kids. Seeing him so happy helps temper some of the embarrassment of my newfound addiction.

Honestly, if I can just get the Mickey (to match Minnie) and the tree-stump house with a little squirrel in it, I'll swear off the thing entirely. :blush:

My computer's been down for over a week, thanks to my boys apparently infecting the machien with a virus. Anyway, now we have Linux instead, so no more virus worries. Unfortunately, I don't have Opera installe as a browser yet. Netscape and Konqueror both suck. I can hardly read wat I'm typing here, due to messed up font size, so please bear with me on th etypoes and misspellings.

Thanksgiving: I had it yesterday. Today I worked. I made:

A free range turkey, stuffed with oranges and cranberries and fresh sage from the garden, and orange and cranberry juice. I used an oven bag for the first time. (If you're wondering, I didn't really have any trouble with the bag, but it seemed sort of artificial and disagreeable in general, sort of like a condom. Just a nasty layer of plastic in the way, if you know what I mean). Um....I failed to realize how very lean my free range turkey was. It wasn't fatty l;ike th efactory-farmed ones. I also forgot to use at least a stic of butter, which I normally do. The result? A well cooked but too-lean turkey (honestly, I didn't know that was possible, but it is).

Potatoes: organic Yukon Golds. The gravy was tart (like oranges and cranberries) but a lot more flavorful than the usual bland smeary brown liquid. Again, it could have used soem fat. I never thoguht I'd be one to cpmpalin of a lack of fat in anything.......

Sweet potatoes: I sauteed them in butter and olive oil instead of baking them.

Green bean casserole: the old classic, but I added more mushrooms.

and cranberry relish, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin ice cream, and black olives.

The garden: I just planted about 300 or 400 flower bulbs. Maybe that's an exaggeration:

40 mixed daffodils
30-50 pheasant eye narcissus
24 fosteriana tulips (mixed colors)
24 mixed dutch crocuses
3 seedlign grown red daylilies
1 Charles Johnston daylily (also red)
peppermint- mayeb 5 plants
marjoram- 2-3 plants
lemon balm, 1
3 frittilaria persica
1 frittilaria raddeana
24 drumstick alliums
24 allium (do't remember name of species, starts with 'O' an dhas lots of letters)
24 tulip turkestanica
12 tulip clusiana "Cynthia"
3 eremurus "lemon chiffon"

I think that's all. The worst of it was digging up the huge rocks that kept cropping up eveyr time I tried to dig a hole for a bulb. The soudn of the shovel hitting rocks, eeeek!!! It started snowing as I was finishing up.....

I was going to write more, but I can't see what I'm writing and it's irritating beyond belief. Work, I've been a bitch, but am makign a serious effort to behave myself. I think half of it is that the days are geetting so short up here. At 7AM it's still dark, and it's dark again before 5PM. Some days, I hardly see any daylight at all, and it isn't even winter yet. I thought about sugggestign full spectrum lights at wrk, but seriously,. what are the odds of that happening? And yet, it's affectign us all. The short days make us crabby and teaful and depressed.....ugh.

Now I'm wondering whether the doctor is right. I answered the phone today at work, the lady on the other end had a voice like a knife, and my ear started right up hurting again. The notion of going through life with permanent hearing loss (OK, so I got a little upset) really pissed me off....especially since there really isn't anythign I can do about it. How could I prove it? Without a test before the incident, there's nothing to compare it's current state to. I have no real way of proving (even if an appreciable effect could be proven) the source of the damage as being the balloon incident. I can't afford to do anything about it. In short, I'm a nothing, and because I'm a nothing, she can get away with having fucked up my ear, if it is in fact damaged. The whole thing just makes me furious, in the sense of a white rage that all but blinds my vision (literally). She had no right....

I mean, OK...trying to calm down here....if it's just my jaw, then why does it hurt whenever I hear a sharp, shrill, or loud noise, and only in that ear, and for an extended period of time afterwards?

I am upset. I wear glasses, have a bum hip, Asperger's, teeth going bad, but one thing I did have was very sharp hearing. I guess I've still got my IQ and keen sense of smell. :sigh:

Alright, alright....I will TRY hard not to obsess about this anymore......

I've been seriously out of line. Too crabby, too irritable, too bitchy, too quick to blame people. Maybe I'm just over-stressed. I should find a better way of dealing with the stress, maybe working out at the gym, or meditation, or perhaps if I take up dancing again.....or maybe the St John's wort.

All I ever seem to do is to either work at work or drive around pickign kids up and working at home while they scream and fight and make messes, or sit and listen to Tim telling me why we should get back together while I look at the messes and feel miserable for standing there listening to him instead of cleaning. There is absolutely nothing fun in my life unless I can manage to have fun at work. Pathetic.

My ear is fine. There's a little fluid behind it, but most of the problem is apparently due to TMJ. In other words, the joint of my jaw is right up there next to my ear, and it's inflamed or sore, and it's so close to the ear that I mistook it for an earache. The doctor said that he sees 2-3 people a week with the same problem- they think they have an ear infection, but it's TMJ instead. My mom has TMJ, and I had trouble with it as a teen. My jaw still gets very sore easily and even threatens to dislocate under certain types of stress. So that's all it is.

My ear still hurts, and it's been hurting all day. I finally told one of the bosses (not the big bosses, but the guy right under them) that I am going to go to the doctor for it. He says that if it turns out to be caused by something work-related (such as the balloon being inflated at an ear-splitting rate) and not coincidental (an ear infection aggravated by the noise) then the stor will make a claim and pay for it. All day long I have been on edge and cringing from loud sounds and trying to protect that ear, using the other ear for the phone, etc. It might be that it wasn't her fault at all....but if it wasn't the balloon, then why didn't my ear like that before she did it? I actually had a friend at work tell me that essentially, my sudden onset of pain following the balloon incident was psychosomatic...honestly, if anyone other than her had said that, I'd be pretty displeased.

and I voted....

What else...I am deluged in work (at home). I wish I could hire someone for just one day to help me deep clean this place. Actually, that isn't the way I'd do it. The ideal sequence of events would be:

(Me) Go through most of the items and throw out the garbage and donate the usable stuff that I don't want or need.
(Me) Sort the stuff that only I can sort, such as papers and really special personal stuff.
(Me and hired help, for a day or two) Deep clean the place.
(a pipe dream) Shampoo the carpets
(mega pipe dream) Get rid of carpets altogether and get something cleaner.
(Finally) Set in place a system to facilitate ease of organization and maintenance, hopefully enlisting help from the children for at least a few of the smaller chores. The oldest ones are 11 and 13, seems like they could at least make their beds, throw away graded homework papers, and keep their clean clothes off the floor and put dirty ones in the laundry. Is that asking too much?
(Another pipe dream) A kitchen table. I really, *really* want a kitchen table! It feels primitive and dirty to sit wherever and shovel the food into our mouths seperately as we do. We need a table. I had no idea they were so expensive.

But yeah, first, I need to get rid of all the stuff I don't want.

My flower bulbs are here! I don't have the bed ready for them yet, though. Also, some of the bulbs I was looking forward to the most (Oriental lilies on sale, the absolutely adorable "Jumblie" daffodil, and nectaroscordum) are out of stock. These were sort of crucial to the plan of the bed. Besides, I was really excited about them! :( The bed is going to be a burgundy-red color scheme, with sparse amounts of pale greenish-yellowish-white (sort of a moonlight yellow) allowed. I'm also trying to keep at least some of the foliage in the dark greenish red range, such as peppermint. Oh! If they smell good, that's better, because this bed is right next to the front door (which I don't use right now, but hope to).

Tenative replacements:

Lilies: Black Beauty, Black Dragon, Speciosum Rubrum, or Moonlight.

Narcissus/daffodils: Jenny (same shape as Jumblie, slightly bigger, not so cute, but paler yellow) or Thalia (very fragrant, grew it at my children's father's place where it is still quite the knockout- I just love Thalia). Tete a tete is another option, cute, small, but very yellow and lacks the reflexed petals which Jenny does have.

Tulips: Burgundy Lace is an extremely attractive looking fringed tulip. So is Swan Wings, but that's white, so I'll probably wait until another bed for it. Tulip Wilsoniana, a species tulip, is very red, has nice form, and is also small and cute at only 4-6" tall! (itty-bitty!!!) Tulip Sylvestris, another species tulip, is yellow-gold with a more graceful shape than other tulips and pendant buds. It's also fragrant, so has a better chance. Too bad it's not red on top of the rest of its attributes.... I might get Tulip Tarda (another species) even though it's yellow with white centers, simply because it's tough, little, cute, and fantastically inexpensive. We really need to stick with the red, though.... Burning Heart, a larger Darwin type tulip, is cream-yellow streaked and flamed with red. I've grown this one before. It was distinctly satisfying to see. It has enough red to go with the scheme, especially if combined with other all-red tulips, such as Madame Le Feber, a fosteriana type, which is easier to perennnialize than standard tulips.

Hmmm.

Or, I could just double up on the fritillaria persica, which I already have 3 of.... Groan, this is SO hard, I love plants!!!!
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I am seriously pissed off with the "assistant manager" at work. I put that in quotes, because she seems to have distinctly forgotten the "assistant" part of it. This woman has a huge power trip going on, and there's nothing I can do about it. he knows that I have Asperger's, she knows that I have sensory issues, and she's pissed at me, because I'm completely uninterested in kissing her ass. There is no rule that I have to like her, and I refuse to pretend that I do. Oh, I'll jump through the hoops and do as I'm told, but as far as I'm concerned, this is all a formality. I know who the real manager of the bakery AND Deli is, and she's a sight more competent than this bitch is. I just keep my mouth shut when the A.M. is around. It's very easy for me to go off in my own little world and think and just work, and I get more done that way. Oh, right, so Asperger's...well, today she purposefully squeaked and squawked a mylar balloon she was inflating because she knows that I have a *particularly* keen sensitivity to that noise and find it almost unbearable. I mean, she made the thing SCREAM. It caused a physical pain, and my ear still hurts. What a fucking cunt. This female cuts me NO slack for anything aspie related, including stims, but she goes out of her way to exploit the weaknesses. I hate her. She is so incompetent as a manager that I really cannot comprehend why they haven't fired or at least demoted her. We just lost hundreds of dollars worth of food a week ago thanks to her laziness and self-interest (the refrigeration went down and she didn't move the food to a working cooler). She never, ever works on a day off or goes the extra mile, even when there is some huge monetary factor like that at stake. Oh, the food was lost, but she got out on time, that's what counts, right? She gets to see her soap opera, so all's well that ends well...for her, at least.

It isn't that I want her position, either. In fact, I think it should go to the person who should have had it in the first place- the worker who has far more seniority, kindness, and competence, who never wrongs anyone and whom everyone loves. I am not exaggerating, either. She really is that nice. We often don't agree, but we always get along, she definitely knows what she's doing, she bails the A.M. out when the shit hits the fan and the A.M. is cozily at home resting on her day off while we cope frantically, she does it uncomplainingly, and she has a way of putting us in our place without offending us, which frankly, is really damned hard- I have no idea how she does that. This woman is the epitome of a dedicated employee...I can't understand why she was passed over for the other gal, who hadn't even been there a year when she was made manager, while this one had some 5-6 years of seniority.

Oh, here I am griping about work and it's close to midnight. My ear is still throbbing. I don't dare say anything about it, because nothing will happen except she'll hear that it bugged/hurt me, and she'll take full advantage of it in the future.

Ah, and tomorrow is voting day!!! Woo hoo! Vote those jerks out of office! Steve Elgar, you have my vote!

My house is a mess. Some of it is due to the fact that I simply haven't had time to clean it. I was so sick on my last day off that I could hardly care for the baby, let alone clean anything. However, I also think that at least half the problem (no, it's got to be more than 50%) is the direct result of my yard-saling, thrift store frequenting propensities, which were compounded when I joined up with TIm. So I've been categorically whittling away at the possessions that aren't worth keeping. I've acquired a reputation as a "high maintanence woman" at work, due to my White's boots, which bemuses me considerably, because I've never thought of myself on those terms at all. My sister was high maintanence, I went dumpster diving (as a teen). But maybe there's some wisdom to being choosy about what material items you allow to accumulate around you, because after all, you're the one who has to pick them up and clean them. If I'm going to clutter my life up with *stuff*, the less of it the better, it should last, and I should enjoy looking at it and handling it enough that the daily chores of keeping up with it are less odious.

On that note, I bought myself a new set of dishes, blue glass, for less than $10. They are so pretty!!! And, they are slippery so they don't make nasty unpleasant sounds when I handle them, like some of the old ones did, eeek! I'm getting rid of the old ones (to the thrift store, not the trash). I will enjoy washing these. Eventually I want to get ALL cast iron or stainless steel cookware, no teflon or aluminum at all. No plastic utensils- bamboo or stainless steel. Perhaps a set of stainless steel silverware that matches for a change.

Another thing I splurged on was a really cheap full length mirror. Using this mirror, I tired on most of my clothes last night. Many of the ones that I wear all the time make me look fat, chunky, thick waisted, shorter than I am, or even more androgynous than I am! I got rid of all those...about half my clothes.

I think I'm going to be pretty discriminating about what I buy from now on. It's such a pain to get rid of it.