Today I worked my first full eight-hour day at my new job. During lunch I spent twenty minutes walking to and from a post office that, oddly, doesn’t accept mail or sell postage.

This morning Samson ate some other dog’s poop and threw it up on my carpet. Of all the kinds of vomit, poop vomit is near the top in terms of horrible smelliness.

And now I’m home. Working all day means that, well, not much else happens all day. I’m sure the rest of you have figured this out already. Makes for boring blog posts. Sorry about that.

Today, two weeks after moving in, I finally turned my couch around to face away from the wall. You can tell that I don’t have a lot of company over.

I also unpacked a box and a half of kitchen stuff, until I had enough assorted tools and ingredients to cook dinner. Baby steps.

Every day? Every day I have to write something?

Today my dad and I drove from Amarillo to Houston. It took about ten hours, and it was pretty much the same drive it’s been all the previous times we’ve made the same trip, which is . . . many. We ate lunch at Cracker Barrel, which, if there was ever a place that was the same at all times in all places, would be it. Everything is just as I remember it from twenty years ago, and nineteen, and so on, from the checkers to the restrooms to the maple sugar candy, except that the golf tees in the little triangle puzzle are made of plastic now. But the sameness is their shtick, so, you know, mission accomplished.

Now I’m home and ready to go to bed. Samson is farting up a storm over here, in case you’re wondering what that smell is. Christ it’s awful. Oh, but speaking of dogs, John sent me this picture a few days ago: panda dog! Hope that brightens your day a little.

Are you all (those of you who eat at Subway, at least) aware of this problem? Every Subway I’ve ever been to, even after the supposed “fix” in July of last year, has arranged their cheese in the obviously sub-optimal “overlapping corners” fashion. I really think it has to be some kind of conspiracy, or at least part of the training, because it would never have crossed my mind, seeing those triangles and that bread, to lay them out the way Subway does it.

Tonight my dad and I stopped at a Subway in Clayton, New Mexico, on our way home, and our Sandwich Artist put those cheese triangles on that sandwich the sensible, obvious way. And it made my whole day. Way to go, Clayton.

Snowboarders. They remind me of hipsters, but without the irony. They also seem to enjoy a general camaraderie, instead of the special uniqueness that hipsters cultivate.

This afternoon I shared a gondola cab with a trio of snowboarders. (Boarders? Riders? As as skier, I’m too square to keep up with the terminology.) One of them, my hand to god, used the word “gnarly” without a hint of irony. As in, “They went out to [some cool place], but they couldn’t do anything gnarly because there wasn’t enough snow [or something, I forget exactly what she said].”

Earlier in the day I overheard another boarder use “gondy” for “gondola” and “pow” for “powder,” again, completely seriously. This must be what it’s like for people who come to the South and hear us say “y’all” like it’s no big deal.

In related news, I skied today for the first time in almost four years. Good snow, decent weather, and I didn’t fall down: a good day.

What did I do today? Oh right, I started a new job. It’s my third part-time job, and it puts me at around 35 hours a week total, which is close enough to full employment (minus the health benefits) that I’m no longer overcome with shame and despair when someone (my parents, say) asks what I do for a living.

This one’s more or less a legal job, in that I’m doing some research to support the development of new legal-type software. And when I say “legal-type,” I don’t mean software for legal typesetting (how awesome would that be?), but rather software that helps businesses do things that they might sometimes pay lawyers to do. How’s that for vagueness?

Anyway, my job today consisted of looking up information online to enter into a big empty spreadsheet, and that, seriously, is an enjoyable way to spend six hours. Plus, the office, unlike most, was not teeth-chatteringly cold. What more could I ask for? Again, seriously. This is not sarcasm. The job is a good fit.

Oh, and have you seen this new video of an awesome superconductor demo? Physics does some pretty amazing things. I mean, there’s everything in the universe ever, which is pretty neat. And also superconductors.

(Also also, watch the video that comes up in the top left when that one finishes. Zoom zoom!)

Hey look, it’s the first day of NaBloPoMo! Instead of writing a whole new post for the occasion, I’ll publish this old draft I’ve been saving in the hopes I’d someday fill it with more content. That counts, right?

For one of my three part-time jobs, I translate engineering reports into documents that managers and the IRS can read. The firm I work for has many clients, so I get to skip around and see reports from all kinds of industries. Usually I have to Google a few terms of art per report to understand what’s going on; this is the best part of my job. So far I’ve learned a tiny bit about molding plastic parts for car interiors, packaging peanut butter, assembling wooden doors, and a bunch of other fun-sounding things. I try not to burrow too far into Wikipedia, but, you know. Here are some crumbs of knowledge I’ve picked up along the way.

There exists an instrument called a swellometer*, whose name reveals a difference between engineers and physicists, I think. Physicists will go full-on Greek or Latin when they make up names for things; engineers, being more practical, I suppose, aren’t afraid to throw a little Anglo-Saxon into the mix.

An individual stalk of bamboo is called a culm.

There is an engineering unit called pound-force. My physicist’s eye first read this as pounds multiplied by force, which makes little sense because pounds already measure force (weight is the force of gravity pulling you towards the earth). But Wikipedia tells me that no, in engineering-speak, this unit should be read as “pound (the force kind, not the mass kind).” Apparently pounds are sometimes used to measure mass—who knew? Also, how confusing.

Related Wikipedia knowledge: When you use pound to mean force, the preferred unit of mass is the slug. At least it’s consistent: a slug is the mass that a pound of force will accelerate at 1 ft/s^2.

Oh wait it gets better: There’s also an version of the slug that uses inches instead of feet, called . . . wait for it . . . a slinch. Or slugette. I prefer slinch.

———
* Upon further research, the swellometer appears not to be a measuring instrument at all, in spite of its name. It’s more like an apparatus that causes wood to swell, after which the swelling is measured by an ordinary micrometer. I’d call that a swellifier. Swellator?

Anyway, you can see why a job like mine exists. Engineers, however rigorous they may be in their measurements and spreadsheets and 3D models, can be a bit imprecise with language.

I’m cutting back on my anxiety meds, from the already-low “trial dose” I’ve been on for the last year or two to half that. I’m pretty sure they don’t even make pills in the size I’m now taking. It’s weird that I need that tiny bit of medication every day to feel normal, but thems the breaks.

And I’m sticking to it this time. I’m in therapy now (the free kind the school offers, but still) and an anxiety-and-stress group (also at school). I don’t feel like I’m making much progress in either of them so far: I’m not sure my therapist understands why I’m there, and none of the people in my group are like me (i.e., physical symptoms for no apparent reason).

I’ve been keeping a chart of my moods and all that, as my therapist recommended, and that’s going okay. It’s given me an excuse to track my weight, which is something I’ve been planning to do for a year but had never gotten around to doing. The goal of the chart is to help me figure out why I get sick, so I can make it stop without meds. But because I’ve been on the meds the whole time, I haven’t been getting sick, so the chart hasn’t produced any great insights so far. The only times I’ve felt sick are in the couple of days leading up to getting on a plane, and when Sam woke me up in the middle of the night to go poop and I was all disoriented. No surprises there.

And that’s why I’m cutting my dosage, to induce the sick feeling so I can try to figure out what triggers it. The dosage changes are supposed to take a week or to to take effect, but I’ve only been cutting back for two days, and I first noticed an hour ago that I was feeling a little unsettled. Finally, some data for my chart! A change in the dependent variable!

I am also reminded that the sick feeling sucks. When I’m not sick, it’s easy to visualize myself handling it with grace. When I am, it’s a different story. Anyway, it’s manageable so far. Let’s see if I still think so in a week, when the levels of whatever-chemicals-this-regulates in my brain have dropped to their new normal.

Skip a day here, three days there . . . at this point, I’m in it for the participation ribbon. Way to make it to the starting line, champ.

What with all the wedding planning, taiko, mediating, writing a seminar paper, and getting ready for the holidays, I hardly have time to nap for three hours a day. But I MAKE time, goddammit, because I apparently have some kind of sleep disorder. It’s called “being lazy.”

The wedding planning, by the way, is getting serious. When are you supposed to send out invitations, again? Eight weeks out? Ten? Six? Because we’re coming up on nine weeks tomorrow, so I should probably look into ordering some. Same with a photographer—gotta get us one of those. We’ve tried two so far and been disappointed both times.

We have a big meeting coming up on Tuesday with our wedding coordinator (where by “our” I mean “the venue’s”) to talk about flowers, food, cake, ceremony, decorations, and twenty other things I haven’t even thought of yet. I’m excited to nail down so many big details in one fell swoop, but I also have a lot to prepare before the meeting. Most of my inspiration photos and other vague hints of ideas are in a folder in my computer. I should probably print out the good ones and put them in a binder or something.

Nine weeks!

You know what I love? Surplus baked goods from the grocery store. Today I discovered a rack hiding behind the doughnut case that was chock-full of day-old cinnamon rolls, loaves of bread, and pie halves, all deeply discounted.

I returned my full-price frosted cookie and sprung for a discount-rack black cherry pie and half-dozen cinnamon . . . somethings. Because let’s face it, grocery store baked goods aren’t the finest delicacies, so an extra day won’t hurt them much, and I’m a sucker for a discount.

I mean, I didn’t really need the five hundred calories’ worth of cherry pie I just downed, and it tasted pretty much like cold canned cherries and frozen pie crust, but it was only eighty-nine cents! How could I pass up a deal like that?