May your day of lurve be happier than this gaggle of adorable pandas (lookie here for article and more pics)

We are off to ski! See you on Monday
C

This morning in my groggy state I rolled out of bed in the dark and- as per my usual routine- attempted to get dressed for work without turning on any lights (sleeping nerd).

Socks on, pants on, Shitstomper boots on. And then I’m standing there in a haze fumbling with my belt. And fumbling with my belt. What the heck??? Why won’t this thing fasten? What the heck is wrong with my belt?

Ahh, screw it. It’s 4am and I need to be at work in half an hour, so I don’t have time to be standing here messing around with this- grab my lunchbox and out the door I go.

Get to work and we have a call right away, so we quickly stock the rig and rush off. After the call (and after coffee) I am in Starbucks and go to pee. AGAIN- what the heck is wrong with my belt? Seriously, why wont this thing work? Agggh. I fumble clumsily for a minute trying to make it fasten and finally look down in frustration to figure it out.

What I discovered- apparently, I have lost so much weight that I have run out of holes in the belt. I can’t tighten it any more! So every time I’ve been trying to put it on it just slides and no holes to close it. I’m going to have to take the drill out tomorrow and drill some new holes in that sucker. (No, I am NOT going to buy a new belt because that thing was like $50. It’s this crazy industrial woven leather cop-type belt that you can hang a lot of junk off of.)

Little surprises like this are a very fun part of shedding weight!

Featuring a cappuccino as big as your head!

Actually, it’s not alllll that lazy.
On the itinerary:

• walk Linus
• grocery shopping at the Farmer’s Market
• putter around a coffee shop with Nerd
  
• run 6 miles
• write birthday present thank you notes
• mail birthday present thank you notes
• cook hard boiled eggs to eat for the week
• cook quinoa to eat for the week
• write and mail a check to my dentist (yes I am still paying off my massive dental surgery from this summer! ack.)
• brush Linus
• yoga from 6:00-7:30
• write up a blog post about our ski trip
• respond to all emails in my inbox
• plan this week’s workouts
• take a shower
• cook spaghetti and ground buffalo meatballs for dinner with homemade sauce using up all last week’s leftover veggies
• respond to all PMs in my TGR inbox
• call my Uncle Joe to catch up and see how he’s been
• put away the pile of laundry
• wash my work uniform

I’ve got a pretty busy week ahead.  I’m working 5 days!  While that doesn’t sound like a lot, it’s 5 12-hour shifts, so a much longer week than usual (normally I work 3 12s and pick up an extra shift if possible).  Plus, I have an EVOC Driving Course for work on Friday!!!! Hurrah!   Very psyched for that class. Not only does it look crazy fun, but I get paid the whole time I am taking it.  Woot!

ROCK ON, MY SOUL SISTER!!!

Here are a few photos of Linus sitting on a bench, just for you.

Oh yeah, I went there.

I worked the 5am-5pm shift (with CRAZY call volume, btw… I thought Sundays were supposed to be slow?! wth?!) and then showered up at the station, met E at Caltrain and we headed over to my company Christmas Party, which was wonderful.

Picked these reindeer ears up at CVS between calls today. u like?

ps- i won a flip camera at the party as part of our raffle! yay flip video camera aside, I am really loving work so far!!

*Dog wishes it was Bedtime Snack for Three … though he did get a Greenie after his bath tonight, so life isn’t all that rough in Corgi Land.

These are the “duds” from the batch of cookies I made to bring in for my first day at work tomorrow. Certainly didn’t taste like duds, however they were the least aesthetically pleasing of the bunch.

I better get to bed; getting up at 5:30am for work! aye!
ps- speaking of spending time in bed- I started a really great book this weekend, Up Country, on recommendation by my mother (she gave it to me to read about two years ago, lol… just getting around to it now- I had a lot in queue!). Vietnam War thriller, so far (125 pages in) it’s GREAT. Why did I let it sit on my bookshelf for two years before reading!

I ran this idea by Earl, and while he liked it, he killed my buzz (so darn practical, that one!) citing things like “development costs” and “price per unit” and decided this wouldn’t be realistic for us to develop… so if any of my beloved readers would like to oversee this into fruition, please doso

Basically, I think it would be a great idea for someone to make a LARGE LCD screen which could mount on the wall in your kitchen, connect to the internet and display recipes which you can follow along while you cook. That way, you could pull up any recipe online (where there are zillions) and never have to deal with printing it out or the printed recipe getting covered in water, flour, oil, what have you as you toggle back between checking it and your cooking.

Ideally, the screen should be large and bright enough to read from the other side of the kitchen (while your hands are covered in say… chicken guts) so you can just glance over and see what temperature exactly you need to set the oven.   Also, the screen itself should be oil, water, grease and fire resistant.   The operative word here is “rugged,” so when inevitably you do get it gross from cooking, it’s an easy clean up.

Cookbooks are a pain to use in the kitchen- they fall all over the place (cookbook stand is on my xmas wish list, but cookbooks come in so many inconsistent shapes and sizes, how well really could any of them work?) and get wet, stained, flour on them, you end up breaking the spine by accident, etc etc. Also, as wonderful as they are for reading and inspiration, cookbooks are becoming a tad irrelevant with so many great varieties of recipes on the internet. I still adore cookbooks, and think they’re really fun to read, however trying to read and follow along with small print in a book without getting it gross while you’re cooking and your hands are all wet and dirty can be a challenge.

Right now if I find a recipe I like on the internet and am using it to cook with, I chose from the following options:

1. print it out on my own printer and bring that to the kitchen. Drawbacks to this: waste printer paper, required effort to print, 1 sheet of paper gets gross quickly and is hard to use more than once. If you really like the recipe and want to use it again, saving multiple sheets of separate paper can be disorganized and hard to reference in the future.
2. leave recipe on computer, run back and forth from kitchen to check it between steps. this is what I generally do, although it’s a bit annoying especially if you are cooking more than one thing at a time.
3. sometimes I do a bastardization of #2 and it involves me staying in the kitchen cooking and yelling across the apartment to Earl “HEY, REAL QUICK CAN YOU CHECK FOR ME ARE THESE ONIONS SUPPOSED TO BE MINCED OR CHOPPED.”  This method at least has the fun benefit of amusing me and bothering him while he’s trying to get work done. 

Hence- we need a big screen hanging on the wall with easy to see LARGE printing!

Think of your target markets- you could sell it to private homes AND industrial kitchens.  I’ll look forward to seeing this product on the market soon… and won’t even ask you to send me royalty checks.

ps- update on the car: it needed a new cam sensor and crank sensor… wasn’t TOO spendy but combined with the tow ended up setting us back $540 total.  Just another month in the life of a used Jeep Grand Cherokee owner, I suppose.  Probably getting time to put El Jefe out to pasture in a year or two, though in the meantime will try and eke as much use out of the vehicle as possible.  Picked her up from the shop yesterday (we really like our garage, btw if anyone in SF is looking for an honest shop that doesn’t rack up the price on unnecessary fixes) and she’s running fine now… which is great because I’ll need her to get to MY FIRST DAY OF WORK ON MONDAY AT MY NEW JOB!!!!!!!  whoooo

My schedule next week looks pretty good- I have 4 12s: Monday, Tues, Fri and Saturday.  No 24hr or 36hr shifts right away at this place- unlike my last EMT job.  Apparently they don’t want rookies taking the 24s.  Imo this is very smart and makes a lot of sense- the longer shifts can be REALLY overwhelming and physically demanding, especially if you aren’t used to it and run calls all night (which ALWAYS happened to us, plus my old place my shift had a standing 4:30am dialysis run for the same guy MWF, so even if we were back at station and had no calls around, say 1am, it was futile to try and catch any high quality ZZzzs because we knew we’d be heading out to pick him up 3:45am) – seems much more sane to let employees get used to the job first and then have them take on the longer shifts- heck, even a 12hr shift running calls all day and transporting heavy and/or very sick people is a bit of a shock for anyone coming from a cushy office environment.

Man I am so excited for my first day!!  I think I am going to resort to my old tricks and show up with a bunch of cookies to share with my new coworkers; hopefully they’ll provide social lubricant and help get things started off on the right foot.  Apparently I’m the newest hire by SIX MONTHS and the ONLY new hire right now… *gulp* … so looking like I’ll be stuck with the rookie moniker for a while [mentally prepares for a few months of licking boots].

Fuck my life.

So this happened tonight:

That was $140 (plus $20 tip) just to get the Jeep towed from where it broke down in SOMA to our garage in Cole Valley.

I’m sure it will be at least another $700 minimum to fix whyever it wouldn’t turn on.

Uuuugh. Need car to get to work. Need work to pay to fix car. Help, trapped in a Cartesian Circle of poverty and suck. FML.

I learned over on TGR that Noah, a five year old from South Lyon, Michigan, is nearing the end of his battle with neuroblastoma. Noah’s family is celebrating Christmas early this year-next weekend- as they think he might not make Christmas. Noah’s last wish is to receive Christmas cards from all over.

Earl and I just wrote up a card and mailed it out. If you’d like to send Noah a card as well, his address is:

Noah Biorkman
1141 Fountain View Circle
South Lyon, MI 48178

For more information, you can read the TGR thread here, skeptics can verify this on snopes here, and watch this touching video about Noah and his story here.

So, go ahead- send out a card and make his day. Such a small amount of effort for a great kid. Here’s to a brave little guy.
ps- cancer sucks the fat one!!!

All things considered, I could think of worse ways to spend a chilly Friday evening.