GrumpysMonkey

If you are eating dinner in a group, and certain members of the group do not order alcohol (or anything to drink) and other members order multiple drinks (even if they are relatively inexpensive drinks), you do not split the bill evenly among the group.

There really is no good way for those who didn’t order alcohol to speak up in this situation either. Any sort of vocalization comes across as being cheap. Which, to be fair, is often what the non-alcohol drinkers are trying to do… save money. As one who is supremely concerned with saving money these days, I purposely didn’t drink tonight to save money. John did not drink either. But unfortunately, those for whom money isn’t a huge issue often don’t see this as a big deal. Granted, tonight the extra share only came to about $10, but for us, every $10 is important right now.

<sigh>  I should have had a drink.

We all have numerous people in our lives. Friends, family, acquaintances… Since we started on Twitter for Cook Local, John and I have had the opportunity to greatly expand the number of people in our lives.

Some of these people are friends. Some are not. Oh don’t get me wrong, none are enemies, but some of them we’ve connected with and others are merely people we communicate with on a regular basis about food.

Some of these people are ones that we’ve just connected to strongly on an almost immediate time scale. We were with one of those such folks last night. She’s gone to live in Washington, D.C. now (for work) and we were with her last night for her going away party. I can’t really explain the connection. It wasn’t anything in particular, but some people you just know are “good people”. Good on every level. They’ll do anything for you, even when they only know you a little. They bring light into your life.

She is one of those people. Luckily her job brings her back to Seattle regularly. I hope we’ll be able to keep in touch now that her home base is 3000 miles away.

As happens every few months, I get guilted back into blogging again (Hi Stephanie!). I don’t know how long it will last this time, probably as long as I remain relatively unstressed. Though there’s a fair amount in my life to be stressed over (not bad, just busy more than anything). So for those of you who aren’t on Twitter, and who I haven’t talked to recently, here’s what’s up.

Running

We’re doing pretty well with the transition to the VFFs (barefoot shoes). We ran a half marathon on Sunday and today, Tuesday, I’m pretty much back to normal. Running without standard running shoes though presents a lot of challenges. You really need to work on your balance a lot. You don’t have the flat sole of the running shoe to help you balance, so all of the balancing is done with your foot muscles and the stabilizing muscles along your legs. So I’m working out like a madwoman. Seriously, we do 2-3 strength training sessions a week focusing on core strength and balance, at least 3-4 hours of cardio a week and one long run. Some weeks we fit in another short run, other weeks we don’t. We’re working up to the Rock and Roll Marathon at the end of June and then we have another half marathon and another full marathon planned for 2010.

Work

Work is work. It’s never a really good idea to talk about your job online, good or bad, but I’ll just say that my job is going fine. It’s a lot of work (but that’s sort of the point), but I work with good people, have an office with a door, and while I don’t really like the fact that I have to take the shuttle home most days, the shuttle does have Wi-Fi that works sort of well, so I can at least do some work while I’m on the shuttle.

House

I’ll get some photos up sometime in the next week or so, but the house is good. John has a lot of work to do organizing the garage, cleaning out his storage unit, and cleaning the small room downstairs where a lot of his stuff ended up when we moved in. We’re working on organizing the kitchen and the guest room (we have a futon, so come visit) and doing little things like polishing off the light installation we did under the kitchen cabinets and figuring out what to do with the pantry area.

Garden

This is where we’ve done the most work this year. Here’s a photo of what the backyard looked like when we bought the house.

The backyard before

That plant-y, jungly area up top is the old garden. There were seven rose bushes in and around the various plants. Have you ever tried to harvest kale or strawberries while navigating between two large rose bushes? OUCH! Plus, the left side of the photo is west. The bottom of the photo is south. So in the summer, the sun just beats down on the yard. This is great for gardening, but not so much for sitting outside when it’s hot outside and the house (which doesn’t have air conditioning) is too hot to enjoy. The upper area however is shaded before the lower area. So we are in the process of turning the upper area into a lawn/seating area with a place for the grills and for flowers and maybe a small herb garden. The lower area is going to be almost entirely garden.

We ordered three raised beds and John filled them with the 3 yards of dirt we got delivered. We’ve planted them by now, but here’s a little preview of what they look like now.

Beds before planting

The bed on the right is all lettuces and spinaches. The bed in the back will be peas, broccoli, and some other random plants. The bed on the left will be tomatoes, onions, and basil. To the left of the beds will be corn and quinoa. In back of the beds to the right is a peppercorn tree and other places in the yard will have more berries, currants, a yuzu (Japanese citrus), and a hardy kiwi. We still have a lot of work to do down there to get the yard looking “pretty”.

Cook Local

We’re doing a lot of work on Cook Local. So far so good, although we really need to figure out how we can get more local readers. We get a lot of search traffic, which is fantastic, but we need more local involvement. We’ve tried to start forums, but we’re not getting a lot of traffic there. I think that I need John to really try to focus on those a bit more, or really, to focus on Cook Local more. Running the site and cooking and blogging and doing the photos is a full time job that I’m doing in addition to my full time job. Though John has been helping with the cooking more, which is very helpful. But really, while he’s a good cook, I’m really the cook and he’s the community guy, so I think we should both play to our strengths and really try to make a big push for this to get it kicked into high gear.

Cats

Finally, a couple of cute cat pictures.

Binky

Wingnut

Unfortunately, that would sabotage my training plan. So instead I’ll just tell you that I want to punch a wall, rather than actually doing it. Safer, though not exactly as cathartic.

Universe, can I have a break now please?

The past couple of weeks have been insane. I’ve realized that I really need something in my life. (Don’t get all excited, I’m not talking about a baby). What I need is help. Unfortunately, there’s no one type of help I can put my finger on.

I suppose an assistant would be about the right term, but said assistant would have so many duties! I need someone to pick a business card company for me. I need someone who could do dishes and clean up my kitchen, but not require me to clean ahead of cleaning. I need somone who could organize my house for a couple of hours so that I could then vacuum (because of course, with the Dyson now in my life, I WANT to do the vacuuming, I just don’t have time to clean the floor enough to be able to vacuum). I need somone to plan out my day for me and keep me on task.

None of these duties would be every day of course. Some days I’m very capable of staying on track. Other days I’m very capable of cleaning the kitchen. But there are so many days that I need one thing or the other and I certainly can’t write a job description for any one thing.

I need someone for maybe 5 hours a week, who would do whatever I needed done during those 5 hours. Think I could find someone like that who’d work for English Muffins or a loaf of bread? Yeah, probably not.

So now I’m not sure if Target should be on the list or not. I still suspect they should be, but I’m confused.

We complained about our order using the online form. It wasn’t even much of a complaint. Here’s the text that we sent them.

We recently ordered the Dyson vacuum cleaner during your sale as the only local store that had it in stock wasn’t easily accessible on a busy weekend and ordering online was going to be easier.

When we placed the order, the delivery was scheduled between Feb 25th and Mar 1st. All was well and good.

Today, the delivery shifted into April 7-8th, which isn’t as acceptable. We could have found the time to make it down to a store 40 minutes away had we known that was going to happen.

That store still has some in stock. Is there any way we can get our online order shifted to the brick and mortar store at the same price?

We got no response from them. None. Yet yesterday, I got a shipping notice. The vacuum has shipped. While I’m happy that the vacuum has shipped, I still find this poor customer service since I’ve gotten no response to my message.

So Target, thank you for shipping my vacuum. I’m happy I won’t have to wait until April. But if you want your customers to feel like you value them, please consider responding to customer emails, even if it’s just with a simple, “we’ve shipped the vacuum, sorry for the inconvenience.”

Target has made it to my list. My “I don’t want to shop you any more list”.

Last week they had Dyson vacuums for 20% off. That’s a big savings and we wanted a Dyson. So I looked online, and the Dyson we wanted was available to be shipped within three or four days. The model we wanted wasn’t available in the local stores, as they were all out of stock.

So we placed the order online without a problem. Delivery was set for February 25th through March 1st. Great!

I look today at the order status and it says “delivery between April 7th and April 8th”. Um, WHAT? They slipped the delivery date over a month and didn’t even update us. No email, nothing.

Well, if we’d known that, we would have driven 40 minutes to a store that DID have the vacuum in stock last week when it was on sale. Of course now it’s not on sale. So now we’ve got to wait over a month for a vacuum we could have had this weekend simply because their website decided to changes dates on us AFTER WE’D PLACED THE ORDER.

There’s not much of a point to this post. Other than just to get it out there.

I want to write.

I want time to play games.

I want time to sit on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, and crochet while watching a movie.

I want a weekend at home that doesn’t require cleaning.

I want to write again for pleasure, for myself, for no reason at all.

I want a day, or a week, or really, more than a week, that isn’t scheduled. That isn’t filled to the brim with work and posts and chores.

Yes. I am OK. I am just tired and overworked and unsure that will ever change. I work more than most people realize. I love my life. I love my work. But sometimes I just want a break.

I’m contemplating trying to blog every day this month both here and on Cook Local. You see, it is NaNoWriMo again (national novel writing month) and every year I lament that there’s no way I’ll be able to participate. i just don’t have the time.

But I think I can blog every day, even if I just short little posts. I’ll use it to get back to my personal blogging, and to do more with Cook Local. I’ll try some new things, try to build a community around Cook Local, and just get into the habit of writing more. I really want to get back to writing for pleasure (and not just for the blog). I’d like to get back to writing fiction.

But onto today’s post. Things that annoy me. I’ve decided that over the next year, I’m going to try to get rid of the things that annoy me most in my life. (No, John isn’t going anywhere.)

The first of those annoying items is gone as of today. We purchased a chest freezer and now the freezer attached to our fridge can be easily opened and closed. We can find things in it and we’ll actually have room for ice now! Yay!

Our sink

Next up is the kitchen sink. We need a new faucet because the current faucet it way too short and ends up spilling onto the backsplash all the time. It isn’t long enough and the water ends up running onto the division between the two sinks and getting everywhere. Plus, I’ve got to lean way far forward to get to the faucet.

I could use some help though. Anyone have an idea as to what to do with this area behind our sink? It collects water and gets very dirty. We’ve taken to putting a dish towel behind there all the time to sop up the water.

Also, any ideas for faucets that would work? We’d love one that is high and curved or one that has one of those extensions that can be used by hand.

Yes, this is still my personal blog. I’m just going through some design ideas for Cook Local and I need to test them.