I had an important delivery to make but the door was closed. An unusual sign from my extroverted colleague. I cautiously placed my ear against the door, searching for signs of life. Oddly, no sounds emerged, so I leaned in. Not realizing that his door does not function properly, I fell into his office for all 15+ conference attendees to see.
Is it time to go home yet?
My corporate hiatus lasted five months. In all fairness, my new position was an accidental find, one that has been fun and rewarding.
It started as a temporary position, and I had zero intention of becoming an FTE. What changed my mind? The company and even its leadership aligned with my own values:
Not to mention they “made me an offer I couldn’t refuse” [in my Godfather voice].
All joking aside, my hiatus wasn’t a total waste of time. I was able to learn who I am, what I want, and what I value. I learned to ask for help; I even began therapy with an amazing therapist, and with each step, I’m here and stronger than ever.
I’ve been eating extremely well, which is one of the bright spots amid the general quarantine gloom. This helps both me and the local restaurants, so I don’t feel too bad about going out because I want these places to still be around when we reopen.
Taiwanese popcorn chicken was one of the first things on my list:
THIS CHICKEN IS SO GOOD and now that I’m looking at this picture I’m legit thinking about hotfooting it down to the Taiwanese joint tomorrow and picking up some chicken and maybe a mango ice smoothie oh no oh no ? Now that I’ve said that it’s probably going to happen because I have the self-control of a five-year-old.
Mother’s Day weekend was a particularly good time, because we finally had an excuse to visit the new(ish) Choong Man Chicken in Germantown. The curry snow onion chicken was exactly as amazing as I remembered, and the nice people at CM threw in a couple of tubs of pickled daikon. I have a severe weakness for pickled daikon, and this one was particularly good. If you ever want to bribe me, feed me pickled daikon. I wish I were joking.
Not pictured: maguro sashimi from our favorite Japanese place, fried chicken wings, rice, curly fries, Japanese potato salad, and EVEN MOAR DAIKON PICKLES. It was a really good Saturday. Then on Mother’s Day proper we had homemade chili burgers and the leftover CM curly fries, because my mom happened to find a recipe for a copycat Tommy’s chili. We’re not actually sure if this is an accurate copy because Tommy’s is in LA and we don’t exactly have access to LA, but we’ve all agreed it’s amazing anyway.
Celebrations in quarantine have been pretty good so far because we can still pick up nice treats, like these cakes I got for my dad’s birthday:
And the Lindt chocolates I grabbed while I was at CVS, because I’d just read that damn Chocolat book and it really made me want chocolate:
And these adzuki donuts and mini stroopwafels, which I picked up by chance because that’s just who I am as a person. I didn’t even know stroopwafels could be that small but they’re really good so you sure as fuck won’t see me complaining ?
Rounding out the post with more pics of the Senior Nap Manager, because obviously I don’t photograph her enough.
Good night, world. x___x
Well, here we are.
It’s been 27 days since the office shut down, 21 days since my last post, 12 days since Maryland was ordered to shelter in place, and 10 days since I last wore shoes. Today it occurred to me to mark the first day of quarantine in my work planner, you know, for posterity or something.
Don’t come after me if they don’t get better, I’m just speculating.
I can’t say the quarantine has drastically altered anything that I’d normally be doing, since I have no life and weekend staycations are my jam and I’m that person who makes up excuses to avoid going out, but I do start to go slightly bats when I can’t drive off whenever I want, so I now have planned excursions every couple of weeks. This week Jennicorn and I took advantage of Krispy Kreme’s Be Sweet Saturday and went halfsies on a box of donuts, because we’re adults and we make excellent decisions.
I have no idea who needs to hear this right now, but Krispy Kreme is running a quarantine deal where if you buy a dozen glazed donuts on a Saturday you get a second box for free. Jennicorn agreed to split the cost of one box, so we each ended up with a dozen donuts for five bucks. I also got to see Jennicorn face to face when I dropped off the donuts at her house, which was really nice. As a card-carrying modern-day suburban hermit who was social distancing way before it was cool, I sometimes forget how nice it is just to hang out, even if you’re six feet apart and separated by a door.
Other than the quarantine, life has been going pretty much the same as usual. My main hurdle so far has been learning to telework, which I’ve honestly never done because I’ve never been essential enough or permanent enough to be trusted with company equpiment. I normally wouldn’t be teleworking even in this job, but in this case we had no choice, so I’ve spent the better part of the last month trying to figure out how to balance work and life without getting them tangled, and it’s been a trip. The biggest problem was that it took a while to get used to the idea of being barred from the office, because my first day of telework was an unqualified disaster. Everything in my life seems to like to stack up at once, so the week we went into quarantine was also the week I was telecommuting for the first time in my life, setting up my new work laptop, trying to figure out how to get the server to work, and shipping three difficult projects, none of which seemed to want to die a quiet death. I’d pulled all my files off the server and loaded them onto the laptop beforehand and thought I was ready, but then I actually got started and realized that between the server, the volume and complexity of the edits, and my wi-fi speed, there was no conceivable way to ship from home. This did not have a happy ending: it ended with me running to the office around noon on Monday after spending thirty minutes trying to open one file, and then staying at the office till 10 pm and getting in the cleaners’ way. Then on Tuesday I told myself I was going to stay home for the whole day, but my resolution cracked like an egg when I realized I’d completely failed to package a crucial InDesign file while I was in the office on Monday. Since I’d been allowed to go in on Monday, I sneaked back in on Tuesday afternoon and got in the cleaners’ way again. On Wednesday I finally figured out how to get around the wi-fi problem and stopped going into the office for every little emergency, which means I’ve been pretty much camped out here for the last month.
I still haven’t completely figured out the work-life thing, partly because there are currently zero degrees of separation between my bedroom and my office, but mostly because I had eight projects shipping during the first three weeks of quarantine. This past week was much more relaxed; those eight projects all got shoveled out the door, so I was able to slow down and take it easy for a bit. It’s a lot easier to balance work and life when you’re not working late every night and I get to wear sweatpants to work and have a nice lunch if I feel like it, so things aren’t too bad right now. I’ve also gotten to spend more time with my new coworker, the Senior Nap Manager.
Teleworking isn’t always the greatest, but the Senior Nap Manager keeps me on track and reminds me to take every day as it comes. As frustrating as work can be, I keep reminding myself how lucky I am to have a steady job that lets me work from home. I can’t imagine what kind of trouble I’d be in right now if I hadn’t found this job, if I’d been working at Papyrus up to the day it went bankrupt. As much as I complain, I’m still glad to be here. I’m glad to be part of a team that works hard and doesn’t mind when I prank them on the team forum, which I did last Wednesday. It took a little while for the joke to sink in, but they got it eventually. ?
PSA: Always check your pockets. I left my violin in my pocket on laundry day and she shrank in the wash. Worst. Day. Ever. ???
And now, since I’ve run out of things to say and I do kinda miss going out, here’s a couple of pics from the last time (I think?) I was in a restaurant:
……….I really need to clean out my phone.
Welcome to adulthood. You get excited now when you use your day off to buy a new keyboard and go to the Korean market.
That keyboard was not cheap!!! ?? Unfortunately I really needed a keyboard with a number pad, which makes life a lot more pleasant, and even more unfortunately my new computer did not come with one because Apple really knows how to soak you for every penny. Of course the real tragedy here is that I decided that I needed an expanded keyboard and immediately ran off to buy one but we won’t get into that ORZZZZZZ
Anyway, the reason I ended up at the Korean market was that I’d stumbled across a recipe for ganjang guksu (Korean soy sauce noodles) and wished to try it immediately but did not have somyeon noodles. My brother was moving home from Atlanta that weekend and our parents had driven down to help him move and I had the run of the kitchen, which is a polite way of saying I should probably never be left on my own ever because shit like this happens:
It was really good.
I was also left alone with Her Imperial Majesty Empress Zuri, who was Very Displeased with the snow that showed up around the same time as her late-night walk. It was only a few flakes, but she has spindly legs and almost no fur and overall it wasn’t a good experience for her.
On the bright side (for me), I caught her using the sleeping bag I bought her for Christmas! I’m not actually sure she knows what it is or how to use it – it took her a while to get used to it when I first put it out for her, but after a couple of hours she curled up inside it and we couldn’t get her out. Since then I haven’t really seen her use it, but suspect that she uses it as a substitute for a human lap when no human laps are available (i.e., when we’re all out of the house). Since that was its intended purpose, I suppose it’s worked out.
In this case she had to resort to the sleeping bag because I ran off for a few hours in the middle of the day and didn’t return until almost dinnertime. Everything always seems to stack up on the same damn days, and on this particular weekend Heather and I had already made plans to visit Historic Savage Mills, doggie or no doggie. I was mildly concerned that I might come back to find little doggie gifts on the floor, but luckily that didn’t happen and we still managed to see a lot of fun stuff.
This trip was a definite improvement over the last time I visited Savage Mills, (1) because I had company and (2) because we saw a lot more and also got food.
If you offer me a hot sandwich with ham and melted cheese, the answer will always be yes. :3 My favorite store (after the bookstore, of course) was probably the one with these rubber stamps, which took me straight back to the 90s:
I really wanted to buy stuff at this store but I’ve always been terrible at traditional media so there wasn’t much point. We also saw this hysterical sign outside a bridal consignment shop:
and of course it wouldn’t be a shopping trip if I didn’t pick up at least a couple of new books ?
It’s officially 2020.
And in honor of the saying, “Hindsight is 2020,” I have some shit to say.
It’s the year of the rat, and with any luck we can treat this as the official start of the year instead of January 1, because my year began well enough and then started sloping gently downhill after the first week. 2020 hasn’t been particularly convincing so far, but the year of the rat got off to a solid start with the help of one of my favorite cooking blogs. If you don’t follow them already, gtfo my blog and go take a look at them because they’re seriously amazing.
In case anyone is wondering, this was the crispy scallion ginger salmon I was planning to cook for New Year’s dinner for the better part of two weeks:
And this was the I-Really-Really-REALLY-Want-Fried-Noodles-So-I’ll-Make-Those-Too-Because-This-Is-My-Dinner-Goddammit gai see chow mein that got added to the menu at about 11 a.m. yesterday morning because I make good life decisions:
Look, I can’t help it. They were delicious. They wanted to be made. My mom loves these noodles so much that she was stealing them by the handful and eating them straight off the platter before I’d even put the sauce on them. I have a jar of homemade chili oil in the fridge that goes really well with fried noodles and needs to be eaten. I’m Cantonese. I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY FOR MYSELF.
Anyway.
I was going to call this post 2019 Social Round-Up, but I Went Out and Didn’t Die seemed like a much more appropriate title. Picspam and my 2019 social calendar are behind the cut.
I am, as I’ve said, an incompetent resolution-keeper, but I’ve made a big 2020 resolution that I hope I can keep: to write on this poor lonely blog once a week, or at the very least twice a month. I’m trying not to make promises I can’t keep (e.g., “use LA Fitness membership”), so I figured I’d better not commit to a weekly posting schedule when my department is currently bracing itself for the usual springtime projectpocalypse.
Anyway. I was going to have a whole post on New Year’s day about my new 2020 planners because I’m gross but then I went off on a boondoggle about books and ended up writing too much, so the planners got pushed back. Today, though, I’m home early from work because of the first snow of the season (and also hoping that the lame Maryland weather can keep its shit together long enough to stay properly cold for the next couple of months) and I don’t have anything else to do, so here we go!
BN’s stupid stickers aside, LOOK AT THESE PRECIOUS BABIES OMG (I told you I was gross ?) The big one lives at work, but the little one gets carried around in whatever bag I happen to be using. Last year the planners all went on sale before the new year, so this year I stalked BN’s planner shelves for the better part of the last week of December and discovered that the dated planners were 50% off when I caved and went to buy the little one and it rang up at the sale price. Then I went back to the shelf and found out that the big planner I’d been keeping an eye on hadn’t been sold out like I thought; it was merely hiding behind another planner. When I went back through the line I ended up plaguing the same cashier with my dumb planner stories, because life can occasionally be cute. ?
idk why llamas are suddenly in vogue but I hope they stay that way because these planners are literally everything I ever needed. I’m a nut so I waited till literally New Year’s day to finally peel off the stickers BUT IT WAS SO SATISFYING. The only thing that kinda makes me sad is that my last two work planners had a nice little chart in the back that I could color-code according to how good or bad my days were and my current work planner doesn’t have that, so the studio must have discontinued it, but I suppose you can’t have everything. On the other hand it was kind of a pain to color in a little box every day (I know, I know, I’m embarrassing) and I often forgot and had to try to guess how I was feeling for several days in a row, but now I don’t have to worry about that!
I arrived way late to the planner party because even though I’m a stationery geek and I loved the idea of having a planner (because I love notebooks and never seem to have enough of them), I never actually bought one until January 12, 2018. For anyone impressed with my super specific memory, I should probably mention here that I actually thought I bought it in August 2018 and literally the only reason I know that I bought it in January is that I wrote it down.
Because apparently I somehow knew – and I actually do remember this part – that I would want to know exactly when I got on the planner bandwagon. Of course, having bought the planner, I then proceeded to leave it at home the following day. As for why I finally hopped on the Organized People train, I was working at Papyrus, the planners were right across the aisle from the registers so they were literally staring me in the face, they were all 50% off, I really wanted a cute little booky thing to carry around, and the one that I picked was SO FUCKING CUTE.
I mean okay one of my friends said it looked like a Bible but even so it was absolutely perfect ? On a slightly less shallow note, I actually did have a good reason that I’m pretty sure I came up with after I bought the planner, which was that I was using Google Calendar to keep track of everything and it occurred to me that I was very much not okay with Google having my entire social calendar and work schedule in the palm of its algorithms. Then at the end of January 2018 I started my current job and realized I was going to need some way of keeping all my work projects straight, and gleefully trotted over to the BN next door to buy a work planner. The rest, as they say, is history.
I will:
I will not:
358 days stand between me and the end of the year. LET’S DO THIS THING!!!
A couple weeks ago I said the rubber trim on Hector’s door was coming off and I was going to get it fixed within the week or bring shame on my ancestors.
WELP I may be a little bit late in updating but I actually got him fixed last Saturday so YAAAAAAYYYYYY NO SHAME 😀 😀 😀
Saturday was also the day I found out that bread actually does come in a can. For context, I started writing a story about six years ago in which I stated that bread in a can is not A Thing:
“Is there any bread around? Does that come in a can too?”
“No, I haven’t seen canned bread before, but there’s some in the fridge,” Fire Shadow said, nudging the fridge with his foot.
WELL APPARENTLY I WAS WRONG BECAUSE I WALKED INTO SAFEWAY AND THERE IT WAS SITTING ON A SHELF LAUGHING AT ME and if you’re wondering why the dude is called Fire Shadow it’s because there were four dudes named Shadow running around and I needed some way to tell them apart and the girl he’s talking to is asking about canned bread because she comes from a world that has not yet invented canned foods or refrigerators. It’s a weird story.
and then I was on my way out the door and the Safeway got the last laugh like literally why is this my life ??
It’s been a bizarre couple of weeks. First there was the week before last, which produced the worst Wednesday I’ve ever had. Then there was last week, which was generally all right but contained an unpleasant surprise. Then there was this week, which actually was fairly normal but also made me dream about two equally delicious bowls of noodle soup with two different kinds of noodles sitting right in front of me omg why did I have to wake up from that WHYYYYY WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY ???
Also I was sitting at my desk this afternoon completely minding my own business when I was suddenly ambushed by the realization that I don’t always remember to draw my tail? Like I thought about it for like five seconds and then completely forgot about it in the pic right above this paragraph? I have literally no idea what’s wrong with my brain sometimes #headdesk (On a brighter note, I’ve been reading about a mythical thing called a Milk Tray for years because it pops up every few months in Bridget Jones’s Diary and today I finally got to actually try a Milk Tray because my boss brought one to work to share with the design team and I am now a fan because chocolate is LIFE. And also I think I might’ve just definitively outed myself as an American, in case that wasn’t obvious already.)
Anyway. I could dwell all day on the many many dream noodle soup bowls I haven’t been allowed to eat but I don’t want to talk about it, so I thought I’d do a quick(ish) post on something happier:
I got a new car! (Translation: I am leasing a new car because I can’t buy one outright.) About three months ago I drove my ailing first car to Williamsburg instead of asking one of my friends to drive because, I don’t know, I’m crazy. She started smelling like gas on the way down, she smelled like gas while we were putt-putting around Williamsburg, and she smelled like gas the whole way back. She spent some time with my mechanic when we finally got home, and after about a week he told me I was looking at a bill of at least $1,500 – $1,800 to fix everything that was wrong with her, and that she was so old that it wasn’t worth the cost of repairing her. In the end he made her drivable again for a much lower cost and warned me not to take her on the highway, and she limped along for another month before I finally got over the whole I WILL NEVER ABANDON MY PRECIOUS BABY thing and realized I didn’t actually feel safe driving her.
Rest in peace, Veloce. You were the best little car I could ever have asked for. You stuck with me through two years of college, three years of grad school, four apartments, fourteen jobs, and a lot of violin lessons, and ferried me and my friends to all kinds of places both in and out of Maryland. I don’t know what Honda has done with you, but I’d like to think they fixed you up and placed you with a nice owner who’ll be less demanding than I was. I knew I couldn’t keep you forever, but I still miss you. ?
On that note, it wasn’t exactly a straight path to the new car, (1) because I historically don’t do well with big changes, (2) because Veloce was the first car and quite frankly the only one I ever wanted to drive, and (3) because I was 99.99999999% convinced that I didn’t have the money to get another car. It also didn’t help that I was so accustomed to Veloce that there always seemed to be something wrong with the other cars I’ve driven over the years: The pedals were too loose. The cars felt too heavy. (Yes, that is literally A Thing with me.) The dashboard bulked weirdly behind the steering wheel and blocked my view. (That one felt slightly more legit. I am not a large person.) Between the time I took my little car to the mechanic and the time I finally said goodbye to her forever, there was a brief adventure with a rented Hyundai named Samwise, who was heavy but worked well, and about a month of window-shopping, procrastination, and denial. During the window-shopping phase I visited CarMax and FitzMall and drove a few of their cars around, but balked at both the expense and the strangeness of the different cars and ended up ghosting the sales reps because me and my little car were going to be together forever and ever and EVER. By the time I finally stumbled into the Honda dealership at the end of August, I knew I was never going to find another car I liked and I was going to be driving Veloce until her floor dropped out and she turned into a four-wheel land raft.
Then the salesman brought out Hector.
I was looking for either a Civic or a Fit, so we test drove both. In the end the Civic won because it was small enough to suit me (albeit not as small as Veloce, but nobody’s perfect) but still more powerful than the Fit, which felt like a golf cart. For anybody wondering why he’s named Hector, it’s because of this handsome SOB:
Full disclosure: I asked for a blue car because I was already thinking I wanted a blue Civic so I could name him Hector the Honda and I already knew the color was called Aegean Blue and Eric Bana is, like, the perfect Hector and the car matches the blue dresses the Trojans wear in the movie and it seemed like fate so yeah I’ve been driving Prince Hector of Troy around for almost two months now and oh gawd I know you’re judging me.
Even fuller disclosure: I usually call him Hector. Or Heck. He only gets the full title when he’s doing something naughty, like letting the rubber lining on his back passenger door flap loose. Ahem, Prince Hector.
I somehow got paired with an incredibly patient salesman, which was very lucky because I’m pretty sure I came across as borderline neurotic (read: basket case). I wasn’t originally planning to lease a car that day, given that I was still pretty stuck on my old car, but they kept lowering the price so after a few rounds I caved, handed over Veloce, and drove home with Hector. The only thing is that the change from Veloce to Hector was very abrupt, and I wish I could’ve had more time to process everything and say goodbye. If I’d known that the trip to the Honda dealer was going to be the last time I’d ever drive Veloce, I would’ve paid more attention. I was about five seconds away from becoming that weirdo who hugs their car in a public parking lot.
I wasn’t joking about that passenger door rubber liner thing and I’m going to have to take him back to the Honda dealer TRAGEDYYYYYYYY but I keep forgetting to set up an appointment 🙁 If I don’t come back in a week with photographic evidence that I’ve gotten my door fixed, leave me a comment telling me I’m bringing shame on my ancestors.
