Too Old Tuesday

It seems that pretty much every few months a new reminder comes up that I'm not quite as young as I used to be.

Sometimes it's something obvious, like my back actually hurting after doing yardwork. That one I could ignore, because I'm doing more yardwork than I've ever done in the past. So I can't compare two equal examples to see what's worse. And, thus, I can't blame aging on the new back fun.

There's the non-annoyance of not being carded when I go out and order a drink. Of course, what's strange about that is that I never really got carded when I was under 21 (I always kind of looked like I was 25 - it was weird), so that's not a change. These days, though, it kind of would be nice to at least be asked from time to time for my ID.

But the worst of it is dealing with the after effects of a night's activities. Last night I didn't drink. I didn't go out. I didn't even have a big dinner. And, yet, I've been paying for it all day. What did I do? I stayed up until 12:45. Working. That's right. I wasn't having fun. I wasn't carousing. I was just sitting and working on my laptop. And, yet, when the alarm went off at 7 this morning, I thought I was going to die. I have no idea how I'm still awake after 10 tonight. I almost fell asleep at my desk at about 3. And I haven't had any caffeine.

What happened to the days when studying until 2 and getting up at 7 for classes was normal? And when am I finally going to hit the point where - supposedly - I'm going to need LESS sleep each night?

After all, if I'm going to have to keep dealing with the non-fun stuff about getting older, don't I at least deserve that?

Year the Sixth

I'm kind of taking today off from Blogging, but not for the usual "Oops... I got busy" reasons.

Today just happens to be the Sixth Anniversary of the first time I met Christopher (and we had our first date - pizza, beer, and a movie at my place).

We spent today slightly more classily: mid-morning breakfast from Patisserie 46, errands, last-minute massages at the Day Spa in Edina, some puppy time, dinner at the meat-lovers' paradise that is Fogo de Chao, and an evening of collapsing.

And, you know, sometimes life *is* that good.

Mulch Ado About Nothing

Obviously, this posting is not about Hurricane Irene - which is doing massive damage along the East Coast of the US right now. And it's not about the wedding Christopher and I went to earlier today. It is, however, about Mulch.

It's about something like 275 cubic feet of Mulch which Christopher and I had delivered to us by our yard guy, yesterday.

I think I've mentioned that we had our house-adjacent landscaping pulled out earlier this year. At that time, they cleared out all of the red lava rock that had been in the planting beds. Then we painted the house, had the beds newly edged, and decided that our last step before next year was simply to get some mulch down on it.

It's kind of amazing how much mulch it takes to cover planting beds on two sides of a house. When it was covering half of our driveway, it kind of looked a little like Big Bird's friend Mr. Snuffleupagus had decided to take a nap in the yard. Gradually, I got it moved around the yard and around the house.

By the time I was done, I'd mulched the planting beds around the house. The beds at the back of the yard. The area along the north side of the house (which no one sees), and the willow tree in the back yard.

I'd also mulched two pairs of socks to the extent of deciding it was easier to throw them out than to try to clean them.

So now we have mulch in the planting beds which - hopefully - will help our new landscaping plants grow next spring. And, in the meantime, it will (again, hopefully), keep any new weeds from coming up. Because if I did all that work and anything comes up randomly through the mulch... well... I'm not going to be happy.

And, thus, although you probably thought I'd forgotten it, we have the "Mulch Ado About Nothing."

Brain-Fry-Day

Alright. It's Friday. It's 3:34pm. I've got 1h26m left of my workweek. And I have absolutely ZERO desire to do any more work.

It's been one of those weeks. Before the work changes which have come up (which I'm still not really talking about), I was assigned a rather massive freelance edit from work. Normally not a problem, and a nice thing to add some extra cash to the wallet. But, when the work changes go into effect in the immediate future, I'll be unable to get paid the extra cash for stuff like that. Which means that I had to finish said edit before Thursday just to be safe.

It wasn't bad when I thought the edit only had 186 pages (not entirely sure where I got that number), but it became worse when I found out it was closer to 400 pages.

Oh. And one other group I freelance for sent me that piece which I figured would take 2 or 3 hours which actually took 8 hours - and much of last weekend.

So I kind of had to crank out that big edit in my evenings this week.

And then there's the whole idea of trying to train a new hire at work this week. Thankfully, only part-time yesterday and today, but - still - trying to do my own job AND train someone else to do basically the same thing... kind of hurt my head. I've been having to do enough work to stay caught up, while also NOT doing work so that I could make sure that there were things I could use for training. (So far, the training is going well - although my inbox is a bit ragged.)

Which leads me to the next however long I'm here. Trying to maintain my inbox. Trying to stay awake. Trying to remind myself that leaving work more than an hour early would probably be a bad thing... (Right?)

Wemille Wednesday

Today is the last day in my office for the person who - quite frankly - has been keeping me sane for the past 2 years (we both became full-time at the same time). Christopher and I have joked about that whole "sanity" thing from time to time, and she also knows that it's how I feel. But she has gotten a new job away from this office - where we frequently have to have "luncherventions" to keep people from shooting their computers, or their co-workers.

And, yes, her departure is going to mean a bit of a move up in the office world for me, too. So, good news for her AND good news for me. (Although - until my change in status is solidly official I'm not going to say much more about it.)

It's a strange day, though, and it's been a strange couple of weeks. We've become good friends - and so it's hard to imagine not being able to send messages and chat all day during the drudgery of the workday. Luckily, over the past few months I've been trying to expand my work-friend base, so I won't be left eating lunch in a corner or anything.

But I don't know that any time soon there will be someone I'll want to eat lunch with once or twice each week. Or to talk about both work and non-work for 15 minutes in the garage after work before driving away. Or, frankly, to be able to call a silly name like "Wemille" - a nickname she got because an author sent in a note to her a while ago which, frankly, looked like it was addressed to "Wemille." (In the cases where she is called Wemille, I'm called Mitch. Which is an even longer story...)

So we've spent today sending totally random emoticons in our Instant Messages. And counting down the time until she can fly and be free of here. It's a good day, really.

After all, I got to use the title "Wemille Wednesday" for a blog post. Can't complain about a day like that, right?

No. I'm Not Dead.

Once again, I find myself looking at my blog and thinking "Whoa. How'd I miss another day?" Here's how I did it this week:

On Tuesday, I blogged.

On Wednesday, after a massive couple of days at work (not longer-than-usual hours, just a lot more stuff filling the hours), I came home and collapsed. I thought "Gee, I could do a blog post about something" but couldn't come up with the "something." Instead, I decided to leave it to Thursday.

On Thursday, Christopher was out to dinner with a friend of his, and I needed to do a quick edit. A "quick" edit that I started at 7pm and quit working on at about 11:30pm. And I was nowhere near done. Not even remotely. In the middle of it, I sent an email to the person who sent it to me and asked for some clarification. Then, at 11:30, I sent an email saying (in essence) "This is a lot worse than I had ever expected, and won't be done until the weekend." Luckily, that was for a client I've worked with many times before, and I'm usually really good with their deadlines (they often give me things at 3 in the afternoon and say "We're really in a rush, could we have this by tomorrow?" - and they do), but this time around there was just no way they could have it before the end of the week.

On Friday (last night), Christopher and I made a semi-home-made pizza (we bought a pre-made crust but put Christopher's amazing red sauce on it before we topped it), and watched some TV. His back was bothering him, so he opted to head to bed early - and I decided that sounded like a good idea. I didn't even turn my computer on all evening.

Which leads us to today. Let's see... I sprayed the yard with weed/feed stuff early in the morning, then started a load of laundry to clean the clothing I got weed/feed stuff all over. Then I went out and tackled a return at IKEA (which took 40 minutes - about 35 minutes longer than I had expected), ran an errand at the Mall of America, and capped my errands with a trip to SuperTarget. All of which were packed with Back-to-School shoppers.

I spent the afternoon (as in 5 hours of it) finishing that edit from the other night and doing one actually-quick one as well.

Now, thankfully, it's time to get myself put together and go to a wine and cheese night complete with a "cake tasting" for someone's birthday. Here's hoping I stay awake at least long enough to get to the cake.

Travel Monday/Movie Tuesday

One of the reasons I haven't been blogging as much, lately, is because I've actually been spending some time with Christopher. He finished the last of the classes he was taking at the end of July, and after finishing a round of freelancing, I kind of opted to let it slide for a little bit. The slide, however - for better or worse - is coming to an end this week, so I'll be back to barricading myself in the basement with my laptop again coming later this week...

In the meantime, though, Christopher and I have done things like going out to dinner with friends - in the middle of the week - and going out to one of our favorite pizza joints on a Friday night (which is usually our "go home and crash after work" night). And, on Saturday in the late afternoon, we even did the almost-unthinkable and went to an actual movie. Together.

We'd been getting told to go see the movie for a while. And, well, as much as I believe my friends when they tell me I'll like a movie, I'm always a little leery about seeing movies people tell me I'll love. I tend to get my hopes up too high, and then I get let down. Add in the fact that it was a Woody Allen movie that everyone was pointing us toward. AND the fact that it's set in Paris - so everyone was sure I'd love it - and I was really nervous.

But, throwing caution to the wind and hoping for the best, on Saturday afternoon Christopher and I found ourselves headed out to see "Midnight in Paris."

It doesn't have Woody Allen in it, but the male lead is a disenchanted Hollywood screenwriter played by Owen Wilson - who has the Woody Allen whine down pretty well (for better or worse). He's in Paris with his fiancee and her parents for a pre-wedding trip, and they just happen upon an old professor of hers whom she has a crush on. And, well, we find that maybe Owen is really more in love with Paris than he is with his fiancee.

For the record, I almost said that Wilson plays "the main character," but that would have been wrong. We'd been told that the opening sequence is kind of a "love note" to Paris. And it is a very nice montage of places throughout the city. Parks and buildings and avenues and all sorts of great things - very travelogue-y, but very pretty. And, since the movie all takes place there, the love lingers.

So, anyway, Owen's character is in love with the idea of 1920s Paris, and - magically - finds himself there, where he's swept up in the wake of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and an amazing pantheon of artists and writers. And one especially lovely young woman played by Marion Cotillard (who is, frankly, always especially lovely).

It is a movie about dreams and realities. About love and about passion - two very different things. And, yes, it's a movie about Paris. (Oh, and to prove just how French the movie is, it actually has Carla Bruni - yes, THE Carla Bruni - in it in a really amazing little role.)

Friends of mine who know me well may be surprised to know that I did not shed any tears at the end of the movie. I did, however, a couple of times in the middle of the movie while our "hero" and "heroine" were walking the streets of the city. There was a moment (maybe two), somewhere in there, which felt so quintessentially Parisian that I just couldn't help myself and I found myself longing to be there again.

By the time the movie was over, Christopher and I were both talking about wanting to go back to Paris. But... ah... that danged "dreams versus realities" thing stepped in. Again.

Overall rating: A. Sitting here trying to find things that are wrong with it, I'm currently unable to. But even so it's not an A+, because... well... it's just not. (See it, and I think you'll understand what I mean.)