Musings of a marginally sane feline-appreciating female.

The weekend is here. Work is finished, errands have been run, there is leftover Chinese takeout for dinner in the fridge and I don’t have to leave the house again until morning coffee time. For a 3 1/2 day week, I’m knackered – couldn’t wait to go to bed last night, but that may have been due to eating way too much Chinese food for dinner.

And it just hit me that my staycation is week after next. It really felt much farther off, but even if I’m not getting to go anywhere this fall, the time off work will be good. Just need to see if I can’t find a few outdoor things to do to take advantage of the time off. Mount Vernon is having a market fair next weekend, and that has made the list to kick things off. Maybe the weather will cooperate and I can score a patio lunch at the wine bar on the river during the week.

Right now, I’m torn between a nap and starting up some stitching & watching Poirot.

I think a nap with the LilyMonster is going to win.

And I forgot to make a pitcher of cold brew yesterday in preparation, but my brother went and got coffee!!!!!

Lily and I are both very distressed at the lack of daylight at 6AM. Back in my commuting days, I routinely went to work in the dark and came home in the dark. Remote work is so much better in that aspect.

Speaking of the LilyMonster, big props to Chewy – when I told them I had to trash 1/3 of her case of food, they refunded the entire purchase price within an hour. I would have happily taken a prorated refund, and more than anything, just wanted them to know that Royal Canin is sending out crap. (Well, when they’re sending anything out.)

Haven’t heard back from Royal Canin, but they definitely have some kind of production problem on their hands – my brother’s guess is subpar cans vs. dodgy ingredients, which would make sense if cans are the hangup in the supply chain. Ingredient or cooking problems would fuck up the whole batch vs. just part of it.

Gonna talk to the vet to see if we can switch her to Science Diet – I don’t want to have to wonder with every shipment if half of it is going to be unusable, when I can actually get hold of it.

Well, time to go slog through a couple meetings – you have a great day!

Last week I ordered two embroidery floss organizer boxes, one regular size for all my floss and a small one for the floss of whatever current project I’m on.

Well, I got two big ones. The small one is now unavailable on the website.

While I appreciate that they thought that a big organizer box was better than no organizer box, I wanted a small one for a reason.

Amazingly, Walmart did have a small one, and I have $10 in Kohl’s cash that goes into effect tomorrow burning a hole in my pocket.

Stick it to the man! Join a union! Buy union! Support union workers! Don’t cross picket lines! Repeal Right to Work laws!

Google reminded me that 5 years ago this week, I was in Williamsburg – wee bit bittersweet since I should have been heading down there in a few weeks, but fuuuuuuuck the Delta variant.

And I realized looking at the photos, that was the real before times. Mango Mussolini wasn’t in office, coronaviruses were something that only came up among scientists, and this was my last hurrah before rejoining society after grandma & grad school.

And this also means I’m coming up on 5 years back in the working world – it’s been a mixed bag, and quite the example of how utterly different things can be in different departments in the same company. Support – “a few months” of being a contractor that turned into 18 months, 18 months as an FTE, perpetual understaffing, cranky clients, cage matches to get PTO on the calendar, too many on call weekends, ~500 hours of uncompensated OT in 3 years, and shocker – burnout. And from what I hear, nothing has changed since I transferred out.

Engineering? Holy shit. Better pay, better hours, I can take PTO whenever I want/need to, properly staffed, nice distance from clients, and no on call weekends. It’s like night and day. Sure, work makes me crazy some days, but QC is far and away better than support. I still have lottery tickets, but all in all, not too bad.

And in February, I’ll have 4 years as an FTE and my PTO accrual will go up! And I’m already having problems using all my PTO so I don’t lose any, so with *more* PTO stacking up – well, that’s going to be a weird problem to have. And hopefully next year I can go to Williamsburg and baseball games instead of this staycation bullshit.

I hope you have today off and it’s enjoyable.

I mean, I guess if we’re gonna be stuck in plague times, it’s good that the time is zipping by, but it feels kinda like we didn’t even get a summer this year. The spring had so much promise and yet, here we are.

People are still being kinda dumb around here – today as I picked up my Starbucks, there was an elderly gentleman inside, no mask, reading the paper, and COUGHING.

DUDE.

Yeah, I don’t feel at all bad about the fact that I am double masking these days. JFC.

At least I have my stitching mojo back for the fall. Getting the stitching stand felt like such an indulgent purchase, but it makes the work SO much easier and I’ve made more progress in the past week than I have in the past year and a half on the current project. I may actually get some of the Christmas ornaments I ordered last March done for this Christmas!

Good tools really can make a difference. And a little less doomscrolling is never a bad thing.

All my errands for the day are already run, and the rest of the day is just going to be stitching, working on a design for a special ornament, and binge watching murder shows on BritBox. I think I am actually a 68 year old British grandmother.

It’s going to be a lovely day.