This morning Richard and I got up, donned our spandex shorts and bright red t-shirts, filled the Camelbaks with water, loaded bikes and all associated paraphernalia into the car, and set off for Sacramento to take part in our second Ride Against Hunger.

The mantra of the day – at least for every one of the participants who had taken part last year – was “at least it’s not as bad as last year”. Because last year, as my long-term readers may recall, the ride was hallmarked by 30-mile per hour winds, and what should have been a lovely ride was actually not so fun. Last year we spent most of the ride alternately blessing (when it was behind us) and cursing (when we rode into it) the wind.

As if to make up for last year, this morning the weather could not have been more perfect for a ride. It was just chilly enough when we started to encourage everyone to get riding so we would warm up, and what wind there was was only a slight breeze – just enough to cool off a sweaty cyclist at a rest stop, but not enough to act as a deterrent during the ride.

Perhaps last year’s wind scared them off, but it was a bit disappointing to see significantly fewer participants this year. Still, it was an enthusiastic crowd of us who pushed off from the starting line at 9am, and meandered through the streets of Sacramento until we climbed an overpass and took to the river road. And without the wind to keep us preoccupied, we could actually pay attention to the sights we were passing – adorable houses, and then out into vast fields of farmland and flowers.

Richard and I initially signed up for the shorter ride (16 miles) since we haven’t had much time (or motivation) to go riding in the past few months. But when we hit the first rest stop, we were feeling so good we decided to go the full distance. Especially since there was no wind!

I recognized Bev the moment I saw her, mainly because she tends to post pictures of herself on her journal. But I think I would have recognized her even without the pictures since she was the only one wandering around with a camera glued to her face (grin). We chatted a bit, and then all eventually got back on our bikes and got back to the all-important business of pedaling.

It wasn’t until the way back that the lack of cycling practice really started to hit Richard and me. It was more than a teeny bit obvious to both of us when we actually had to stop and walk our bikes up a short (but admittedly rather steep) hill. And I wasn’t sure if I’d actually make it over the overpass coming back into town without having to stop because by the time we only had about 8 miles left, my legs were burning and all the nerves in my butt had long since given up and gone into hiding, waiting only until I shifted on my seat to remind me how sore I was. We got a little lost on the way back, since they hadn’t clearly marked the route (lucky for us I had grabbed a ride map at the starting point!), and from there it was just steady pedaling, one foot after another, head down, with only one goal – to reach the end.

The wind finally did kick in today, but not until we had already returned home. We both did crash for an hour or two for a short nap, but to my surprise, I am not nearly as sore as I expected to be. All that working out at Curves has, if nothing else, at least paid off in better cycling performance.

We made it back to the starting point in one piece, but Bev wasn’t nearly as lucky. Her karma apparently decided she was overdue for her first big cycling accident – ouch!.

It’s been a calm and quiet week at work. With one of the estimators now gone, there are only four of us there fulltime, and the two college interns only come for a few hours on the days they are there. Add to this the fact that the noisiest of the lawyers downstairs is moving out and it’s made things almost peaceful.

The lawyers downstairs, by the way, are some of the loudest people I have ever not met. They yell – to each other, on the phone, even in normal conversation. They are always arguing. I suppose this is a lawyerly thing to do – the constant need to bicker – but it would be so much nicer if they would at least try to do it in a more civil volume. It has reached the point where one of the principles at our office broke down and complained to the landlord. We don’t think they have any idea how loud they are, but surely pesky little things like client confidentiality might just be a concern when your upstairs office neighbors can hear nearly every word of every conversation you shout to your coworkers each day.

But anyway, back to the peaceful and calm week it’s been. I’ve mainly been rummaging through file trees and tracking down project information to store in one of the databases I created. It’s not as easy a task as it might sound, but at least it’s kept me busy up til yesterday, when I drove down to our company’s office in San Francisco and managed to inadvertently jump head first into lots more work. Actually I’m a little excited about it – it means more database tweaking; new tables, rearranging indexes. All the little things that make a nerd girl happy. Plus there’s the added bonus that I managed to find the office in San Francisco without having to backtrack or circle around the maze of one-way streets or otherwise get lost. Not bad when compared to my usual (infrequent) treks into the city.

Luckily the new additions to the database are not requiring a whole lot of complex thought because today my brain has felt as if it slowly leaked out of my ears last night. My boss was home sick a few days this week with a nasty cold and it seems to have jumped ship and come to land in my sinuses, bringing with it a stuffed-up nose, sneezes, and taking away significant chunks of my ability to manage rational thought.

This afternoon I got into the car to go to Curves. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I glanced briefly to my left, and amazed even myself with the sheer girlyness of my shriek. I think only the fact that there were no cars coming saved me from the inevitable accident as I swerved all over the road in response to the sight of the hugest wolf spider I’d ever seen sitting on my window. It took a few heart-pounding moments to determine that the spider was on the *outside* of the window, and not inside the car. And then I spent the rest of the ride eying the spider nervously as it scuttled all over the window.

The logical part of my brain knows that wolf spiders are perfectly harmless. But the fact that they are large and hairy, much like tarantulas, and that they have a tendency to rear up and shake their front legs in a menacing manner when cornered overruled all logic. I had pretty much resigned myself to getting out on the passenger side of the car in order to avoid any way for the spider to get into the car once I opened the door, when suddenly the trip was too much for it and it blew away, tumbling through the air out of sight.

Once it was gone and no longer could scare the pants off me, I felt a little guilty for the fact that it was probably now road kill. But that didn’t make up for those moments of sheer panic when I saw it face to face

Today I am still sore but it is a good kind of sore – the kind of muscle ache you get when you’ve done something really hard, and each time you twist around you are reminded of why it is there. My lower back has the worst of it, but it is no longer the kind of soreness that makes me obsess about how I bend over because I am afraid I am going to throw out my back. Anyone who has ever thrown out their back knows exactly what I am talking about because after you have done it once (and I have done it now three times in my life) you start feeling a little paranoid. The rest of the ache is in my arms and the backs of my thighs, which tells me that at least I was doing a lot of the ‘proper’ lifting technique. I have a feeling that when I get to Curves tomorrow during lunchtime to do my workout I may be feeling those sore muscles a lot more than I am now, but I think I can handle it. Of course I have also just taken some ibuprofen and am anxiously waiting for it to kick in so I can stand up and sit down without feeling like I am a feeble old woman, so it’s possible I don’t know what I am talking about.

There are about 72 large stones and probably the same number of smaller stones left over (although possibly a few more since we didn’t alternate them exactly one to one when building the wall). We knew there would be leftovers when we placed the order, since we had to buy them by the pallet, but hadn’t been sure of the exact number. I am pondering all sorts of possibilities for using these leftover stones but I have a feeling they will probably just sit in wobbly piles off to one side of the yard until we are forced to move them, or until inspiration strikes, or until someone we know decides that they could use a few. Last night when Richard’s parents and little sister where here for dinner, I noted that they would make lovely stocking stuffers for Richard’s family’s Christmas tradition but I got the impression that somehow they would not be all that appreciated. It has also occurred to me that perhaps we could take the drive-by toading to new levels for all our friends and loved ones, leaving small but nicely arranged piles of alternating large and small stones on their front lawns. Perhaps if we paint goofy faces on them first it could start a new craze in decorative lawn art. Or perhaps I should just leave them alone and wait until after the backyard is finished and we start ripping up the front yard (because this is apparently a sickness and it just keeps getting worse!) and find a use for them then.

We were sore enough this morning waking up that if we hadn’t already promised to be there, we would have happily skipped church. But we went to choir practice and sang through the song we’ll be doing for the baccalaureate on Tuesday, and then Richard went home to poke around on his computer while I stayed behind for recorder group practice.

It is an interesting sound, listening to a room full of recorders, especially when most of the players are still working out the basic stuff. At one point it was noted that we sounded not unlike a calliope – one rather out of tune. To our credit by the end of the practice session we had at least managed to tune the calliope, but I’m not sure we will be progressing beyond that rather unique sound for a few more months. Still, not everyone can claim to be part of their very own makeshift carnival instrument on a bimonthly basis.

Now that the wall is built, Richard is happily taking computers apart across the desk from me. In fact I probably don’t want to know exactly why he is doing this. And I really ought to get off the computer myself and tackle the stack of presents downstairs so that we can find the breakfast nook table. I now have – among many other things (including the coolest clock ever for a cat lady!) – a nice stack of lovely new books and if I get a little bit more cleaning done around this house then I will feel a bit less guilty when I commence reading.

First of all, I think it is important to note that there were exactly 556 stones sitting on those three pallets in our driveway.

Secondly, it is also important to note that half of them weighed about 22 pounds each, and the other half weighed 12 pounds each. This is according to the little brochure we got from which we ordered the aforementioned stones. Earlier in the morning I did ponder bringing one each of the large and small inside to weigh them, but by this afternoon I didn’t want to lug any stones any further than absolutely necessary. Perhaps tomorrow. Or perhaps I’ll just take the brochure weights on faith because really, all that matters is that they were heavy! You can do the calculations if you’d like, but that’s an awful lot of pounds of stones we lugged around today between the two of us.

We got up this morning and decided that the first thing to do was to move the stones from the driveway to the backyard. We took our handy little dolly which turns into a hand truck and loaded it up with stones, and then dragged those to the backyard and unloaded them, and did that a few more times before we decided that we could stop for breakfast. Then we went back outside to lug more stones from front to back. At this point our wonderful neighbor poked his head out of the garage, eyed the stones, returned to his garage, and after a series of loud whirring and thumping noises, emerged with an extremely heavy-duty hand truck which he brought over for us to use.

I think if I hadn’t been so sweaty and dusty by that point I might have kissed him, because with both hand trucks, we were able to move those stones a lot faster than we’d anticipated. While Richard loaded his truck with the smaller stones, I stacked the big ones and toted them to the backyard where I deposited them in wobbly little piles.

Then it was off to the hardware store to procure twine and gypsum powder and gloves. The gloves were a definite must, since by this point my poor hands were starting to get more than a bit shredded and I’d already managed to drop one stone across two fingers, offering up the requisite blood sacrifice to our project (heh).

We used a combination of gypsum, twine, and tent stakes to mark out our circle, and then commenced to laying the stones. And amazingly it went one heck of a lot faster than either of us had expected! We did three layers and by then it started to actually look like the picture of the walls in that brochure I mentioned earlier so we took a break for lunch (leftover fajitas from last night and they were just as incredible today as they were yesterday!) and then went back outside and did the final three layers so quickly we were actually done by about 2 in the afternoon!

Then of course we came inside and took extremely long showers to scrub off the grime and dust that had accumulated in layers of several inches thick (okay, I exaggerate, but not by much) all over us (the dust got everywhere. It was in my *bra*, people. Euww!), and then we promptly fell onto the bed and crashed for about two hours so that we could at least pretend to be vaguely human when Richard’s family arrived to bring me birthday presents and take us out for a birthday dinner.

I am stiff and my lower back is just sore enough that I am treating it with extreme respect and being very careful about bending because the last thing I want to do is throw it out. We haven’t even begun to figure out how much dirt it will take to fill the bed. And except for a few random ideas (there will be something larger in the middle, and I want a few things that will ‘spill’ over the sides as they grow, and all the herbs which are not doing so well in my kitchen window are going to go out there and then there is the little matter of my desire to eventually plant an obscene amount of bulbs) we are still a bit unclear as to what we’re actually going to *plant* in it once the dirt is in place. Plus there is still the little matter of laying the flagstone path around the bed itself, which will also involve us planting stuff between the stones and thus, unlike the wall, require actually digging. But right now I am just so disgustingly proud of what we managed to accomplish today that all the rest doesn’t matter one bit.

We fully intended to go grocery shopping last night in preparation for this evening’s dinner. But we had a friend come over – a woman I worked with at The Company To Be Nicknamed Never, who also worked at Benthic Creatures with us (although while Richard and I ran screaming, she is still there). She is one of those amazingly cool people that I liked the first moment I met her and not just because she is just as much of a cat maniac as I am. We’ve been trying to schedule a time to get together for weeks now, but hectic schedules kept getting in the way. So last night was finally it. She came over, and while Richard did his nerd thing on her laptop and her palm pilot, we talked, and pet the cats, and reminisced about Benthic Creatures and laughed and suddenly it was after 11pm at night! So we hugged our goodbyes and she drove off and Richard and I realized we’d never gone to get our groceries for my birthday dinner and hastily concocted a backup plan.

This involved us leaping out of bed at 6am this morning, throwing on our clothes and zipping off to the grocery store, where I took a slight detour into the bakery to get coffee and pastries and he wandered the aisles gathering peppers and onions and apples and four pounds of pork loin. Then it was back home and a hasty smashing of garlic and pouring out of ingredients and slicing of meat to get the marinade together, and Richard set up the coals on the grill in the coal-lighting chimney, and somehow we managed to find the extra few minutes to pack lunches before dashing out the door to work.

I never know quite how to handle birthdays at work. If I say something about how it is my birthday, people then feel obligated to do something about it, and that makes me uncomfortable, as if I’m fishing for something. So while I mentioned it at Curves (and got kudos for actually working out on my birthday), I didn’t say a word at work until the end of the day, when I eyed the clock, pondered the fact that we had people coming over for dinner far too soon after we normally get home, and decided that my birthday was as good an excuse as any to duck out fifteen minutes early.

A few weeks ago we went to some friends’ house and they made us the most amazing fajitas I have ever eaten. Naturally I asked for the recipe, which led to us heading for Chevy’s at the first opportunity to buy the cookbook, since that’s where it came from. The pork is marinated in a mixture of pineapple juice and soy sauce and cumin and garlic, and then grilled and sliced thin and served with a mixture of red peppers, white onions, bacon, and apples. And the final touch is just a dab of red pepper jelly (the recipe is also in their cookbook).

We made huge quantities of that pork tonight for my birthday dinner, along with a huge pan of the onion and pepper and apple filling. And after I fed it to my parents and my sister I think we probably managed to sell a few more cookbooks for Chevy’s. It really is that good!

My mom made me the most amazing chocolate cake – dense and rich and smothered in dark chocolate frosting. After we were done I cut off a slab to save for Richard and I. It will be breakfast tomorrow morning. And perhaps after the last few entries you’d think that planning chocolate cake for breakfast might be a bad idea. But this is because I have neglected to explain one very important point.

Sitting in our driveway as I type this are three pallets of extremely heavy stones. Let me say that again. They are extremely heavy. I cannot lift a single stone with one hand. And tomorrow Richard and I will somehow cart all 500 of these stones into the backyard, there to arrange them into a wall for a raised bed that will most likely be about 14 feet in diameter. I think both Richard and I have been spending a lot of time after seeing those pallets, trying to convince ourselves that this really isn’t suddenly a bad idea!

Cross your fingers this nice weather holds, okay? Because I do not relish lugging extremely heavy lumps of cement around the yard in extreme heat. We are going to earn that cake tomorrow. Oh yes. And we will have fun doing it. Yes. Fun. By golly. Fun!

Last night, after I posted the entry, I got myself calmed down and I went off to the Admin Council meeting at the church. I did really well all through the evening and even managed to hold it together after one of the attendees (who also goes to Weight Watchers) asked me how I’d done at weigh-in. She wasn’t being nasty – she’s an incredibly sweet lady and she was asking out of curiosity, and also as a topic of conversation. I made some inane reply that somehow managed to refrain from any bit of snarkiness or tears and then I went home and dug the remaining coupons for meetings out of my purse and gave them to Richard and said. “Here. You can use these. I can’t use these anymore.” I still intend to stick with the healthy eating plan and there is no way I am going to quit working out. But I think right now I should focus on monthly measurements where the focus is more on BMI and overall fitness than on numbers on a scale. I can worry about the rest later.

Reading back through the entry I am almost embarrassed by the tone, if only because if I were reading this without knowing anything else about me I would get such a petty and shallow picture of the writer. But I have had to wrestle with a rather difficult fact lately – which is that I think I need help. This thing goes far beyond my reaction to the numbers on the scale. This overwhelming feeling of sadness has been crashing down on me more and more frequently lately and I find myself on the verge of tears over the most inane things. And I hate that. I hate crying. I never used to be the crying type.

I have always been proud of the fact that I am always the strong one; the stable one. I have watched people around me fall apart but I’ve somehow managed to keep it together. I was somehow above all of that emotional, hormonal hoopla. I could do it myself, unlike the rest of them. It’s not that I ever discounted the strength and seriousness of true clinical depression; it’s just that somehow I always thought myself somehow immune to that. Not that I was any better than the others; just that it wouldn’t happen to me.

I think the worst part of this has been that I cannot seem to find a reason. Because to my logical mind, there *has* to be a reason. To be so incredibly sad with no reason at all defies everything. I have, by all accounts, suffered with depression before – but at least then there was a very clear cause. After working so hard to get into graduate school I hated it; hated the research, and felt helpless and trapped, with no way out. Changing career paths was my way out. By jumping into something so radically different, I managed to ‘fix’ it all myself. However, this time I cannot seem to find the trigger. A passing comment can be all it takes to set me off. No matter how hard I try to prepare myself for the next onslaught, when the wave hits, I am bowled over and no amount of logic and self-lecturing can make it go away until it’s good and ready to release me.

Tomorrow I turn 34 years old. I could wish for better timing to realize that I may need professional help to get through this, but sometimes life has different plans. It may take me a little more time to work up the courage to actually make the phone call and put something in motion, but I am finally realizing that I cannot put this off much longer. This is something I have to do.

Every year, for quite some time, I have always bought myself a present for my birthday. One year it was the tattoo; one year it was an emerald necklace; three years ago it was the land on which we built our house (escrow closed on my birthday). This year, I may not be able to take out my self-purchased present and show anyone. But right now, finding a way to ‘fix’ myself seems far more valuable than anything else I’ve ever given myself before.

I had this entry all planned this afternoon, after I returned from working out. It was going to be a happy bubbly entry all about how I’ve started actually looking forward to working out each day; how I’m actually having fun when I’m there and how six weeks of going to Curves every weekday during lunch time has had the benefit of improving my cycling skills, to the point that when we went riding on Saturday for the first time in months, I could actually maintain a faster speed for a longer distance than I ever could before.

Yay exercise and better muscle tone. Blah fucking blah. That was before I went to the Weight Watchers meeting this evening and saw, once again, just exactly how I am going absolutely nowhere.

I’ve been going back to Curves now for about six weeks. I expected to gain weight because unlike apparently the rest of the world, when I exercise, I gain weight. Lots of it. This time a whole whopping 4 pounds of it. Go me. Way to really make a girl feel like she’s accomplishing something. The fact that my BMI dropped a miniscule amount (0.2%. Whee.) did little to make up for the fact that that stupid scale showed a number higher than when I’d started after the first month’s measure day.

For the past four weeks I have also dutifully recorded my Points and followed the Weight Watchers eating plan and done my best to drink enough water and eat enough vegetables and fruits. And yes I may not always get the full 5 servings of veggies per day, but I never did back when we were on the plan before. And back then, when I was actually being diligent about the diet (because it *is* a diet, people, no matter what they try to say to pretty it up with words and call it a ‘lifestyle change’), I would actually see a weight loss over time. It was slow coming off but at least it came off, and gave me enough incentive to keep on trying.

Well. After four weeks of weigh-ins I’ve managed to officially keep off a whole whopping 0.6 pounds. Yes folks, you read that right. Just a hair over half a pound. After four stinking weeks of being on Weight Watchers and six weeks of Curves.

And I am tired of it. I am so incredibly tired and frustrated that I don’t even know what to do anymore. Every time I get off that scale I feel this close to bursting into tears. The rational part of my brain can natter all it wants about muscle weighing more than fat, and how it’s more important to focus on the fact that eating healthier and exercising is really good for me in the long run, and how studies have shown that people who are overweight can be just as healthy as skinny people if they work at it. None of that matters a damn when I’m standing on the scale. None of that changes the fact that the scale reads a number that, according to those wretched weight tables, puts me in the dangerously overweight category. 50 pounds overweight, and it isn’t budging at all.

If I was suddenly losing massive inches around my body maybe I wouldn’t be so frustrated by this whole thing, but I don’t even have that to console myself with. A few paltry quarter-inch losses here and there make no noticeable difference in how my clothes feel, or how I feel when I look in a mirror. And they certainly don’t make one damn bit of difference to how I feel when I step on that blasted scale every week and face the glaringly obvious reiteration of how much of a failure I am, yet again. I am surrounded by people who can manage to lose weight – yes, even with a bit of a struggle and sometimes a few steps backwards, but overall they succeed. Yet here I am, following the rules and even exercising regularly – 30 minutes a day just like I’m supposed to – and what do I get? Nothing. A big fat nothing. Just the overwhelming sense of failure, week after week.

You know, I joke occasionally that if I’m destined to be a fat chick, at least I can be a fit fat chick, but that joke is only to make other people laugh – to cover up the fact that I am hurting inside with each passing week where I see no signs of success. It’s not like I’m trying to be model-thin. It’s not like I’m one of those perky little women who comes skipping into Weight Watchers and loses her 10% body weight, which also conveniently puts her at her lifetime weight because she only had 10 pounds to lose anyway, all in less than three months, and somehow we are all supposed to applaud her as if she had even one idea of how much the rest of us have to struggle. I *am* fat. I am 5’3″ and right now I weigh 185 pounds and no amount of massaging of the data can ever make that a healthy weight for me.

Right now I don’t know what to do. I do know that I cannot keep putting myself through this every week because it is sucking every bit of my self-esteem away. I know that the modern independent woman should never be so wrapped up in a number on a scale, but knowing and feeling are two different things.

I’m so tired of spinning in circles and going nowhere. I have avoided (mostly) talking about this here, so this might come as a little bit of a surprise to my readers, but for the past few months I have been struggling with issues of depression and low self-image about practically everything outside of my job and my marriage. So the last thing I need is another glaring reminder (at least to me) of how worthless I am. Lately it doesn’t take much to send me spiraling down into the ‘woe is me’ cesspool, so this weekly reminder of failure is not helpful.

I’m not looking for pity. I’m certainly not looking for ways to accept my fat and flabby body and embrace my unhealthy weight. I am not looking for platitudes of ‘oh it will get better’, because in my more rational moments I do realize that eventually it has to get better, some day, some year, some millenium. I’m just venting because I am tired of feeling this way and I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know how to make myself not care so much about what the scale says. I don’t know how to go in every week and get on that scale and not come home and cry. I don’t know how to look at myself in the mirror without feeling disgust. I don’t know how to make myself feel better about myself again.

In a burst of creative energy – brought on, no doubt, by the fact that the little far-too-early heat wave has been replaced by much cooler (and windier) weather – I decided that today was going to be another Experimental Meal day. These are days when I rummage through my collection of recipes I’ve ripped from magazines, copied from cookbooks, or found in all manner of unsuspecting places on the internet – then printed up and stacked haphazardly on the cookbook shelf until such a time as I finally get around to giving them a try. Considering that I’m married to a man who usually has no problem whatsoever with playing recipe guinea pig with me, this means we’ve tried out quite a few.

Tonight’s experiment was a layered mexican chicken tortilla sort of affair that included far more sour cream than any recipe really ought to have. We followed this with pumpkin chocolate chip brownies, which had just the right amount of rich texture and just a hint of spice, mixed with the gooeyness of melted chocolate chips, still warm from the oven. Experimental Meal days don’t always produce recipes that I’m willing to make more than once, so it was rather nice to end up with two this time, although the layered chicken thing lacked enough oomph that it may have to undergo a few slight modifications first. Those brownies though – yum! Right now the only issue I might have with them is convincing myself to not eat the entire pan.

We got up fashionably late this morning and headed into Davis for what seems to be becoming a weekend tradition – cornmeal waffles with pecan butter. Then we strolled around the farmers market in the park since the weather was so nice and it was such a pretty day. We nibbled samples of cheese, various fruits, herbed oils, and inhaled the delightful smells of fresh produce.

A few bags of cherries, kiwis, and a container of some sort of crumbly yet spreadable garlic cheese concoction called quark ended up coming home with us. I’d never heard of quark before, but at this point I can now tell you that if there is garlic involved, it’s pretty darn tasty when spread on crackers and eaten for lunch.

We took advantage of the wind to do a few loads of laundry, including every single one of the placemats and napkins (which, when all hung on the clothesline side by side, really point out our penchant for things that are blue). While we watched the linens flapping madly in the breeze, we also took advantage of our new sod and flopped on the grass to admire the day. Then, while Richard wrestled with the wind and his laundry, I headed back inside with the rapidly dwindling bag of potting soil to do another round of repotting. All the herbs are now breathing sighs of relief in slightly larger pots – and I am keeping my fingers crossed that they will not grow too much in between now and when I can finally plant them outside. In the meantime, they’re living in the garden window in the kitchen which, for the first time, actually has enough plants to qualify as ‘garden’. Isn’t it pretty?

Of course, this may require some rearranging, since a certain ornery little tortie cat has taken a liking to the garlic chives. Naturally she did this after I gave them all plates of canned cat food whose origin was not exactly clear except that large quantities of fish were involved. Take regular cat breath, toss in fishy cat food, and then top it all off with the essence of garlic chives and…well. I think I’ve said enough.

The power went out at work a few weeks ago, but only stayed out for a few minutes – just long enough for us all to mill around aimlessly, discuss having a rubber band shooting war, and finally break down and call the landlord for the office building. Today, however, the power went out again, and this time it stayed out. There was the usual rubber band battle, and the usual milling about, but then it started getting really old.

Luckily the air conditioner guy had been out yesterday puttering around with vents and temperature gauges and automated timers, so the office was nice and comfortable when the power went out. I say ‘luckily’ because today was the hottest it’s been so far (and not even summer yet!) and when I finally gave up and decided to walk over to the buildings nearby to see if anyone there had heard from SMUD (since calling SMUD only dumped us into a recursive voicemail loop from hell), it was like walking into a sauna. I hate the heat, but what is even worse than dry heat is heat with humidity. Blech.

The rest of my coworkers had things they could do that did not require computers, but the unfortunate thing about being the person responsible for both building databases and writing fascinating articles all about the world of construction is that one cannot really do any of these things without the aid of a computer. So after spinning in my chair a little bit and watering my plants and doodling aimlessly on a notepad, I finally gave up and went home early.

Too bad this didn’t happen yesterday. Yesterday I returned from my lunchly Curves expedition to somehow find myself crawling around on the floor taping down an outline of a body (conveniently modeled – at least the top half – by one of the estimators). I’m still not exactly sure why it was that they all decided we needed a body outlined on the floor, but what the heck. I even got creative and put the bottom half of the body about five feet away. If the power had gone out yesterday, who knows what might have happened. Take several adults with strangely warped brains, a jumbo roll of masking tape, and the possibilities are endless. We could have had little taped body outlines everywhere.