RC: how’s lovely Denver?
JF: fun
JF: quite nice I like it here
JF: plus there has been a week long 16-18 girls volley ball tourney
JF: the hotel has been filled with them :D
RC: aw man
RC: you get nubile horny volleyballers at your HUPO
RC: I got the gangs of long beach
RC: no fair!
JF: I couldnt go to the pool for fear of perving on volley ballers
RC: I say go and perv
RC: as long as you don’t touch :P
RC: cause, you know, jailbait and all that
RC: but not looking would be a crime against masculinity
JF: yeah
JF: I got invited to some party on the 6th floor yesterday with the winning J18 volleyball team
JF: was crushed in a lift with them
RC: you poor poor man
RC: my heart bleeds for you
JF: I know, the horror.
RC: did you go?
JF: I didn’t go
RC: tsk tsk
JF: 20 super excited scantily clad volley ball girls is not a party I ought to be going to.
RC: dude. that’s a Penthouse Forum letter right there waiting to happen :)
JF: ? they publish stories like that?
RC: clearly you’ve never read the articles :)
RC: seriously though, I’m old enough to remember a time when porn came in hardcopy
RC: how sad is that?
JF: hard before use?
RC: bad, bad pun
RC: no cookie for you
JF: har har har
Katy and I have built-in hand puppets that seem to have a life of their own. They can be quite opinionated (Katy’s hand is quite adamant that Rhianna is a skanky ho festering with chlamydia and herpes). We;re not entirely sure when they came to life, nor are we really sure if we’re completely sane or not.
Still, they seem harmless and making them talk at the dinner table seems to wind Mel up to no extent, so it’s all good.
My therapist tells me that I need to work on becoming more spontaneous and stop worrying about all the bad shit that can happen in the world. I need to “feel the fear and do it anyway”. I need to accept that I can deal with consequences when they happen, if they happen instead of making a big mental mountain out of everything.
As such, I am taking the first steps in finally seeing if/how I can become independently mobile. I have sent off the paperwork to get my provisional license from the DVLA and will be booking a motorcycle driving course by the end of the month if all goes well.
So, from my last few posts, you’ll have noticed that I was a bit busy in the kitchen last weekend. I made won ton soup for Saturday lunch, chawanmushi and dobinmushi for Saturday dinner and we went completely mad for sunday dinner (and our Valentine’s day feast) by making a 3 course meal of baked Camembert fondue starter, t-bone steak with mushroom sauce and baked potato entrée and a dark chocolate tart for pudding. Calories be damned, we needed it.
The food was good but the health was bad. I had a horrible throat for most of last week and now it’s moved upwards to my ears. I think I have some sort of ear infection because my left ear was completely blocked yesterday and every time I coughed or hiccuped, it felt like I had a rusty nail shoved in my lughole. Yay, fun times!
It would seem that I have been lax with my blogging in the past few weeks. Besides one or two events, there hasn’t been lots happening (which might have explained my silence. Or maybe I’m just lazy and/or addicted to Farmville).
My mom came for a week to visit us. And by us I mean the beastie. She basically threw us out of the house one day so she could have him all to herself. Katy and I were able to have a nice pub meal at the Red Lion and go see a movie (though it would now appear that I’ve forgotten what we went to see – this is me getting old). I do remember that Katy really, really, really enjoyed her bacon double cheeseburger from Burger King :) Pictures will be up as soon as I can get them converted and properly formatted.
My mom had asked for a nice roast and some profiteroles for her birthday, so I happily obliged. The roast rolled shoulder of pork took 6 hours to roast, but damn if it wasn’t nice :) The in-laws and Stu came over for the day to say hello. It was a nice day. The weather was rather unimpressive so we weren’t really able to give my mom a proper tour of Saffron Walden, though she did like the weekend market (and especially the sausage burgers from the Giggly Pig). I did manage to use the power of the for-sale list at work to snag my mom a cheap ipod and load it up with her favourite music for cheap. That reminds me that I need to ask her if she’s using it or not.
Speaking of which, I’m saddened to say that my trusty Shure E3C earphones finally died a death. I had to buy myself another pair of earphones. I got S-Jays and they do live up to their potential. Still, they’re nowhere near as good or comfy as my Shure. Having said that, they’re a fifth of the price so, you know, there is that to consider. Still, I will mourn my old faithful buds.
Things have been brewing with Katy’s employers and we’re investigating options on that front. I don’t want to say a lot more because I’ll start swearing at them again. Bastards and fucktards, the lot of ‘em (well, most of ‘em anyway). Katy’s looking into other avenues, but returns on investments haven’t been all that good. Still, there’s no harm in sending feelers out.
The staff association at work organized a group jaunt to go see Varekai at the Royal Albert Hall last weekend, so Mel and Pam came down to look after the beastie. It was the first time that somebody else than us put him down for the night. Mostly, they did a good job save for a few details and something that bugged me a bit but… meh. No harm no foul, but still a silly thing to do and leave it at that.
The beastie’s been a handful for a few days now. He’s caught a cold and is now a snot monster. He’d been coughing a bit for a few days now but it really went full-blown over the weekend. He’s not been too bad, sleep-wise, in the last night or so so we’re hopeful that it’s not going to last too long. He’s really getting mobile now and can take one or two tottering steps before falling face-first on something or someone.
Katy got some maternity back-pay so we were able to pay off the last of the xmas credit card. We still have a bit left over and we’re itching to buy stuff :) Katy wants to get a Wii and Wii Fit but they seem to be out of stock everywhere I look. I bought a NAS for home backups (mostly because I realized that all of my MP3s, documents and the digital pictures from the last 5 years only exist on the home laptop and a few scattered CDs or DVDs).
I’d like to get a new phone (I’m lusting after the googlephone), a new camera, a camcorder. Thing is, I already have stuff that covers those roles and most of it still works perfectly fine so I can’t really justify the expense. Katy wants a Tassimo and a KitchenAid. The KitchenAid is something that we’ve both been lusting aftet for years now, but it also means that we’d be cooking more cakes and pastries and that’s really not a good plan at this point in time. I’ve put on a helluva lot of weight in the last year and I need to start shifting it before bad things happen.
Besides that, not a lot. Work is work. I’ve reviewed two papers and submitted one. Barring any incident, I should have another first author paper and a few more associated author papers to add to my CV. I received notification that I need to have my end-of-contract review meeting with the powers that be before the end of April. I’ve already fixed a nasty bug in the PRIDE mapping job and I’m in the process of testing code that I wrote before going on holiday that will hopefully make the current PRIDE webapp more responsive. Florian’s buggered off to Costa Rica for a month (not that I blame him) so that means a lot of work’s been dumped on me. The good news is that we have a new team member starting in a few weeks and we’re holding interviews for another position in the coming week. So, busy busy busy but good busy.
Rui from work bought me some japanese cooking supplies from an asian shop on Mill Road so I’ll be able to start playing around making chawanmushi and dobinmushi, as well as wonton soup and spring rolls. Watch this space.
A new year has come, and I’m as tired now as I was before the holiday rush.
Plans got muddled because of all the weather and health issues. I caught a cold just before the holidays and the beastie caught it off of me just a week before Christmas. He was snottyliscious up until a day or so before the big day but it cleared up and wasn’t an issue. We were supposed to go to Costco to buy some of the last-minute stuff but with the roads in the state they were in and with the beastie under the weather, we went to Tesco instead. I cooked a ham and a ribeye beef roast. I made a very decadent chocolate cheesecake and a brussel sprout and bacon tart. We decorated the Christmas cake. Katy’s parents and uncle arrived on the 24th and stayed until the 27th.
There was food. Much food. The table was groaning under the weight of all the meat, cheese, condiments, pickles and sweet stuff. The pantry is still full of biscuits, booze and yet more condiments and chutneys. I’d made this crazy plan for the big Christmas meal, and yet dinner was still one hour late. The food went down a treat though. The turkey was lovely and the sausages we bought from the market stall were really, really nice. I’m amazed that 5 people managed to eat 3 kilos of turkey, 1 kilo of beef, 2 kilos of ham, 18 sausages and a pound of bacon in just a few days, not even counting the sausage rolls, scotch eggs and pork pies… Like I said, too much food!
Katy’s Christmas cake, at last reckoning, cost about £50 of raw materials. It is made with about 2 pounds of various dried fruit, half a dozen eggs, a pound of sugar and 3/4 of a bottle of Cointreau. Then you add the royal icing and various decorations and you get a cake that will stun a small moose with the sugar/fat/booze trifecta. Katy already has several orders for such cakes next year. Might be an interesting sideline :) I have to say that I’m rather proud of that cake because, even though Katy supervised and directed, I’m the one that made it because the beastie, generous creature that he is, had incubated and amplified the cold bug into something that really hit Katy hard.
She got this nasty chest cold that turned into a worse ear infection. The chest cold part kept her awake for days on end because she was coughing so much during the night. It was so bad that I ended up sleeping on the couch a couple of nights. I’d been sleeping on the guest bed until her parents came but we found that she was tossing and turning and couching so much that it would have been useless for me to stay in bed if I wanted to get any sort of sleep. She was scheduled to work over the holidays but her employers, charming people that they are, called her unreliable because she called in sick one day and cancelled her overtime. Have I mentioned just how much I like her employers? They’re really nice people. I hope they DIAF, but that’s just wishful thinking. Anyway, the coughing went away, but when blood-tinged stuff started leaking out of her ears, it was time to call the emergency docs on boxing day to get some antibiotics. She’s back at work today but she’s still not fully recovered. Her hearing is still partially gone and her sinuses are still giving her massive headaches :(
Still, the holiday spirit made an appearance. In between bouts of eating and drinking, we opened lots of presents, wore silly hats and played with the beastie. We’d decided to make the holidays a TV-free zone as much as possible so we plugged in the ipod and listened to oldies and carols.
Santa was generous, given the times. I got salt and pepper mills, some Robert Welch signature knives and a knife sharpener, a Le Creuset cast-iron casserole, some chocolate, a new cologne and a book. I also got lots of DVDs, and a shiny-shiny new DVD player that can read divX files off a USB stick :D Katy and I bought ourselves Bud ducks. She got the bestest present ever though. She got a tin!!! OMGWTFBBQ!!!eleventyone! She also got lots of l’Occitane stuff, some chocolate DVDs, more ducks, two terrapin garden statues and a really funky japanese-themed statue. But the tin really was the most commented-on gift :)
Beastie, again, was spoiled with presents though, this year, he actually preferred to play with them than with the box they came in. Most of them make noise, but that’s ok cause it’s not too aggressively cheerful. Mel and Stu actually spent more time playing with some of his toys than Ben did :)
We had a few quiet days between the end of Christmas and going to to Leicester for new years. I had a doctor’s appointment and the beastie had his immunization jabs. We took down the Christmas decorations because, without the mountain of gifts to keep him away from the tree, the beastie discovered that he had direct access to it and was always trying to eat parts of it. The drive up to Leics was uneventful, even though the weather was starting to turn ugly a bit.
Things in Leicester were pretty much of the same. We managed to sneak some adult time and went to see Avatar and Sherlock Holmes. Both were very good and I’m surprised that I enjoyed the Holmes movie. I was expecting to hate it, but surprisingly I didn’t. MORE FOOD! Jeminie and Stu came over for new year’s day. Katy’s uncle Michael and auntie Minal came to pick Jeminie up later in the evening and they said hello to the beastie.
We brought in the new year playing Carcassonne and then went to bed. We watched some of the fireworks from Katy’s bedroom window. The mood turned a bit weird just after new years day. There was a strained vibe in the air and it never really went away. The oldies were alternatively sniping or sulky. I think people were overdone. Katy’s been stressing about her back to work meetings and the beastie has been a handful since we’ve been back. He’s gotten used to constant attention and always being picked up and always having food thrown at him by the oldies to keep him quiet. It’s back to the normal grind now and he’s less than thrilled.
Speaking of the beastie, he now has almost a full set of teeth and is almost at the point of standing up by himself and taking a few steps. He can cruise along furniture and can stand up if he’s holding on to something. He can also climb stairs like nobody’s business and seems to derive much glee from doing so.
All in all, we had a good time. A much better time than I expected to have, and a much better time than we had this time last year. I still remember having a mental breakdown and crying in the front room with Pam asking us when we’d be ready for dinner. So yeah. Less tears, more laughts.
Still too much food. I can say that I am truly processed-pork-product’ed out.
There are only 4 days until xmas, and part of me is happy about that. But not as big a part as I’d like. There’s too much angst in the air. I spent all of yesterday cooking xmas fare. I made a beautiful maple syrup bone-in ham and a really tasty beef roast. We have food and drink to feed a small army. All the presents are wrapped and the house looks very festive. I should be basking in all of it. I should be looking forward to the holidays and time off from work and being with family.
Thing is though, I can’t stop thinking about bad juju. The beastie has a cold – as young beasties do – but he’s being a handful and both Katy and I are so very very tired of having to deal with screaming-baby-at-mealtime. It’s becoming a bit too much these days. This too shall pass but, damnit, it’s not passing quickly enough at the moment. I feel guilty about wanting to go to work on Monday morning just to be able to get some quiet time after weekends like this past one. I’m getting over my cold, but much slower than I usually do. I’ve been getting sick more often than I normally do recently as well, and that’s a slight worry. Katy’s picked up what the beastie has and she’s still in the rough part of it, so she’s not feeling grand.
Her work situation isn’t going to get better any time sooner, which is also a continuous cause for concern. Her employers are, for lack of a better word, right fucking bastards. She’s been made to feel guilty any time she takes time off, so now she’s continuously on the knife edge of exhaustion and I don’t see how things are going to get better any time soon. The holidays aren’t going to help a lot either, cause she has to go in to work for xmas cover for a few hours every day. She needs a vacation – but we don’t have the time or the money to be able to do anything. And with the peanut in tow, it wouldn’t be as relaxing as she needs either. So we’re caught between a rock and a hard place. I’d love for her to be able to tell them to take the job and shove it, because they’ve gone out of their way to be unpleasant all throughout her maternity leave and return to work period.
I’m pretty sure that her part-time hours are going to be reviewed to full-time ones. If that happens, after factoring in childcare costs, it basically means that she’d be working full-time and clearing about £100 a month. Full-time hard work for basically nothing. I think I’d prefer her to quit, if that were the case, but that puts us in another difficult situation because it’s better for the beastie to be around other kids than to stay at home all the time. Having said that, we’d need to seriously rework our spending if we were to send him to nursery part-time if Katy weren’t working. It could probably be doable, but it’d be tight, and probably very stressful.
So yeah. Between lack of sleep and disturbed sleep when possible, money stress, job stress, family stress, and stress about being so stressed, the holidays aren’t looking as rosy as I’d want/need them to be. Trying to put on a brave face and being gung-ho cheery sometimes works, and sometimes feels fake and strained. I’m sure that I’m seeing the world through gloom-coloured glasses at the moment and that things are probably a lot better than I see them. I know I have a lot to be thankful for. I think that something fundamental needs to change. I just wish I knew what. Onwards to therapy.
It’s rough goings in the Cote household these days. The beastie was cutting molars last week, so he was in a right grump and he was running a continuous low-grade fever for days. Katy had to take the week off, which really stirred things up for her work (again! gits!!!). I had a few nights of sweaty, fever-ish sleep and I thought that’d be the worst of it, but whatever I have is getting nastier. I sound like I’m a 2-pack a day smoker (which is ironic considering that I stopped smoking months ago). I’m horking up green bits like crazy and my nose is a faucet. I’m so sexay at the moment, it’s scary.
Now the beastie seems to have caught whatever I have because he sounded like a sea lion last night a few hours after we put him to bed. He slept through the night, even though he had a few coughing spells. I didn’t really sleep though, because I was too anxious about him waking up crying. I really need to work on that. It’s rather ironic that I’m so worried about him not feeling well and waking up crying (and waking me up in a panic) that I don’t sleep myself. Yeah, that’s useful…
Katy’s pulled a muscle in her shoulder and is also getting a cold.
The whole household needs a bit of pampering, but it’s in limited supply at the moment.
We had to get Tolstoy shaved because, minger that he is, he doesn’t goom his fur and won’t let us brush him so he gets dreadlocked and it just looks painful. We took him to the vet to get a good brushing under sedation (we have to do this once a year or so) and when we went to pick him up, the nurse said “we had to shave off a bit more fur than expected, but don’t worry, he’s fine”.
We have a poodle. The only things that are not shorn are his head, tail, lower paws and a bit around his ass. The rest of him is gone. His tail is wider than his actual body. The thing is though, ever since we got him done, he’s been like his old self again and has gotten uber clingy. He’s taken to sleeping on the bed with us most every night. It’d be cute if he didn’t weigh so damn much. He’s small, but it’s all muscle.
In other news, the beastie was in a Christmas play in the nursery yesterday. All the small kids were random nativity-esque animals. Ours was a donkey (though the only requirement was to be dressed in grey). We were quite proud of him. He didn’t cry (he seemed to enjoy the attention, in a bemused sort of way) and he clapped enthusiastically at all the right places. Katy could have burst something she was so proud.
Giddy
Amused
Sick
Busy
Tired
Sad
