serinde

(This was yesterday, actually.) I did much much better, and without hurting my wrist. Still a very powerful workout, and if I can manage going three days a week, I think it will do well by me. The question is, what sort of workout to have the other two days? Running, elliptical, or weights?

I find that I can budget for aikido, and intended to start going again next month, but I wonder if it might be prudent to wait til the turn of the year and not try and add Yet More Exciting Complication to my life when I don't even have a base routine yet.

Now that it's Officially Fall, the open-recreation classes have started in the gym; and today I went to yoga for the first time. The instructor explained to me that it's somewhat intermediate-level, but they do get a lot of beginners, so I could just follow along at my own pace & do what I could, and feel free to rest if something was outside my comfort zone.

I did manage to keep up, if barely. I have definitely had A Workout. I also may have done something unpleasant to my bad knee, though I'm not sure what's responsible, exactly; but it's only sore and aching, not STAB STABBITY OW, so it's probably okay.

The instructor teaches Mon and Wed, and I hope to generally make both classes, as duties permit.

There is, unsurprisingly, a lot of crossover with certain aikido principles.

The house declutterization is going well, cum diligentia. (And as soon as I finish my tea, I will be going there again for more-of-the-same.) I think it should be ready to show for next Sunday. Hey, by the way, does anyone want STUFF? We have a lot of STUFF which will otherwise be gotten rid of in as expeditious a manner possible. Books, furniture, supplies, just random STUFF. Let me know if you want any STUFF and we'll see if we can help you.

I now have a Bitchin' Pimpmobile. It's a '93 Buick Century, but it looks like it rolled right out of, I dunno, 1978. And the interior is pristine (and deep cherry red), enhancing the pimptastic feel. Steve gave me first pick of which car to have, and it was probably unwise to choose this one, but it tickles my fancy. It has a very smooth ride--not performance handling, no, but predictable--and it's amazingly spacious, particularly the trunk. It also did yeoman's service in yesterday's post-hurricane weather.

Took a break from PACK PACK PACK PACK last night as nedlnthred had gotten us tickets to the Big Event of Montclair (!) this week, to wit the Amanti Vino Pig Roast. The food was excellent, the wine was amazing, and the historic house was droolworthy. Afterwards, we met up with Beth's friend Donna and a bunch of her friends at a local pub about two blocks away. I am getting the first glimmers of that whole Being The Only Non-Parent At The Table And They Talk About Their Kids Constantly discomfort that she spoke of when she was dating J. They all did seem like lovely people, I hasten to add. But the convo kept drifting back to offspring-comparisons. Yerk.

Last week was, work-wise, pure steaming hell. It was the first week of classes AND the last period of (late) registration, and an awful lot of the little darlings wait to the last minute to register (which, to be fair, my student minions warned me was the case), and even the ones who were registered, if they had registered before July (which you can, for some odd reason) and now needed to drop or change a class, well, they of course did not have their New Special CUNY Username & Password. Therefore, all week long, the help desk averaged a line of 15-25 people with a half hour hold queue. Oh, and we had people calling off work. Yay.

This should be over and done now, so unless there is indeed fresh hell, that portion of the world should be calmer. OTOH, the furniture for the student worker pool should be arriving today, and be assembled, and I don't know how much of my life that is going to eat. (I am also not looking forward to dealing with $OVERBOSS, who had got it into his fuzzy head that the only thing this project plan needed was furniture. So now he will be expecting a labor pool to magically appear, which it won't, because it is still missing a bunch of requirements, which were in the submitted plan. Whatever.)

Simultaneously, we have obtained a deadline for when the house must be in tolerable shape for showing to prospective buyers, and it is Soon. And we have achieved that frustrating place where you have worked like dogs and packed up inhuman amounts of shit (and thrown away a fair amount, too) but the house is still cluttered. Thus, I will be spending most evenings trekking up there to make clean.

I owe a number of people email or other responses, and will try to do that this week. Mgmt. Apologizes For Any Delay.

Mr. Scuzzy is exhibiting the same initial symptom as Tux was, namely the constant runnings to the catbox with little result. The Internets tell me that either he's constipated, which is easily fixed by OTC medications, or that he has some kind of urinary tract issue, which is an OMG VET sort of problem. Based on last weekend, I'm inclined to put my money on #2, and thus nedlnthred is kindly delaying her weekend departure for an hour so we can run him up to the vet.

It's been a long day, and part of a longer week. I was supposed to go up to the house to pack more STUF, but neither Steve nor I were up for it at all (he's been having wretched allergy attacks at night, and is badly sleep-deprived), so we postponed. Instead, I have come home, scritched kitties, had a drink while sitting on the porch & watching the sun set over the ghetto, and made dinner.

The dinner, thus: Based on a Nigella recipe, to wit "Lentils with Italian Sausage". Which we had no sausages, but rather a lot of kielbasa, so this is the Polish version. The flavors are good, but I wanted a more stewlike item, and the lentils are still a bit on the crunchy side. We have set half of it back on the stove with more liquid to see what happens. (Meantime, nedlnthred made cookies.)

And now is wine and Much Ado About Nothing, which is also comfort food. Lord, I love how Kenneth Branagh can carry off the lines! (Particularly compared to The Keanu {though his half-naked massage scene is pretty}.) (I love this movie, but the costumes are shit, even if you figure they're actually doing Shakespearean-age rather than the putative time period; oh well.) And also working on a core class project with Dr. Nick: hurray for Google Docs. I, for one, welcome, etc.

Last night, went down to get a Popsicle, realized it would be impossible to eat while playing CoH, and made a cocktail instead. This, in my head, is what passes for logic.

Take a double handful of very ripe raspberries, and about 10 mint leaves. Muddle the bejesus out of them with about 3/4 oz. white rum and a splash of simple syrup. When pulverized, strain into flute and fill up with the last of the bottle of Prosecco your housemate did not finish t'other night.

It's tasty, beautiful, and potent. JUST LIKE ME!

...

I'm not good at the self-affirmation. But it was a good drink.

Busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Work is full of the ulaeulaeulaeulaeulaeulae, but there is progress hidden in the madness; I hope to get a moment to post about that before it's entirely stale. elibalin and I went to the New York Classical Theatre tonight, which is to say we followed them around Central Park as they put on "Misalliance" by George Bernard Shaw. Most excellent, again, as was their show we saw last summer. And outdoors on a beautiful night, so what's not to like? Before that nedlnthred and I made a lightning raid on David Byrne's art installation Playing the Building, which is that he took the ancient Battery Maritime Building and rigged it so that when you play an antique miniature organ in the middle, you are playing the sounds of the building itself. It was about to close, which necessitated the haste... It was amazingly cool, and I'm most glad we went. Apparently the building (a glorious old Edwardian structure, royally trashed in the interim) is about to be turned into a luxury hotel. But supposedly they will be restoring what they can. That's something.

Rest of the week included great kindness from sedai, caelfinn, and Mr. caelfinn, who I shall be enjoying Burning Man vicariously through; dinner with cobrawoman and sweh at a fine, fine Greek place recommended by spride; a humblingly miserable clothes-shopping experience which I shall perhaps post about if I ever get two more seconds; and a Bryant Park Movie (at last!! and the last of the summer, at that) with elibalin followed by crashing at his place so that I could get a sense of how long it takes to commute from thence to Hunter. It's about the same as commuting from Beth's House for Wayward Women, and far far better than from Fair Lawn. And I do love what I've seen of the neighborhood, and I could maybe even afford a 2BR apartment there. It's just so friggin' far from sweh.

nedlnthred is off to the shore this weekend, and I might have gone (it looks like it will be glorious weather), but I'm feeling really dragged out and have opted to stay home. Generally of late I'm trying to live by the tenet "the only regrets are the things that you don't do" (hat tip to vikingtim), but the beach is not going anywhere, and I think I'll feel 10x better for puttering locally.

...cos I am awfully tired.

Saturday: much errand running and whatnot, and then a Very Most Excellent Concert consisting of Motorhead, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest. Hope to post about that separately.

Sunday: had a really good, really long (I ran from full charge down to dead-battery) phone convo with Mom; which I hadn't actually talked to her since the effluvium hit the whirlyblades, and so was long overdue. Then went ballistic with the mop and the bleach on the back bedroom that is currently housing the four cats formerly curated by dariodevil--we intend it to be the media room when it stops smelling of cat butt. (One of them, it's either Tux or Scuzzy, doesn't like the style of catbox currently in there and is pleased to do his business right in front of it. I think I've sorted that, but now there are hairballs.) Great strides were made, if at the cost of vast exhaustion. Also I realized I forgot the audio/visual cable for the PS2. Bah.

Monday: met sweh down t'pub and gibbered on his shoulder for awhile. Also he tried to explain radians to me. The diagrams he made in my notebook are incomprehensible to me sober.

Tonight: thought I would pick up Lurch from the mechanics, but it turns out he needs bigger magic that will take much longer, so went home for therapeutic baking--whereupon nedlnthred and I found that all the flour, and sundry other items, in her cabinets were infested with flitty moths. I marshaled a successful campaign to eradicate them from this particular region (nearly falling off the counter a few times, and both of us getting multiply mosquito-bit since the back door was open to help with the bleach smell), but it was a Pyrrhic victory with a lot of civilian casualties. Then, feeling this was more than sufficient effort at the end of what was a really wearing work day for each of us, we watched Part One of the A&E Scarlet Pimpernel, to which I can only say that the memory of Leslie Howard is in no way endangered.

Work: All of our hojillion senior-citizen students have been told Blatantly Wrong Things about the computery bits of registration. Helpdesk drama ensued. More about this another time, too, probably.