Author: Average Jane

Since I’m leaving for the airport in less than two hours, I was planning to lift the "20 Random Things About Me" meme from Cagey rather than try to think of a post topic on my own.  As it turns out, I’m too fried this morning (pre-coffee, you know) to think of a single thing about myself that I haven’t already mentioned in this blog before.

Instead, I’ll set about gathering the stuff I need for the trip (iPod Shuffle, iBook, DVDs, earbuds) and the stuff that it would be nice to have (clothing, toiletries, shoes).  Maybe those lists are switched around.  Maybe not.

I’ll be back Monday – have a good weekend!

I don’t know how it took me so long to realize this, but I’m working on some sort of throat-oriented illness.  For the last week or so, I’ve been aware of a weird feeling in the back of my throat when I swallow, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I finally looked in the mirror to see what it might be. 

Ewww!  Red spots all over the back of my tongue!  My throat doesn’t exactly hurt, but I can sense the potential.  I have no idea what it might be.  Strep, maybe?  Whatever it is, I’m not looking forward to dealing with it over the course of two plane rides within three days.

The kicker is that my doctor’s office can’t get me in before I leave town for my grandmother’s funeral.  I suppose I can always go to an Urgent Care clinic tonight if I think it’s necessary.  Unfortunately, that’ll be a little tough to squeeze into my schedule with my cousin spending the night tonight so he can travel with me and my sister to Florida on Friday morning.

I know there’s never a good time to be sick, but does it HAVE to be right now?

Well, back to the trivia for which I’m usually known…

Monday was my first day at the new office.  So far it’s going really well.  I never thought I’d say this about a cubicle, but my cubicle is AWESOME!  I have a big desk, a visitor’s chair, a place to hang my coat, lots of space for my files, books and snacks, and a huge, brick pillar in one corner for a visual break from all the grey.  The high wall is magnetized, so I’ve hung up all my photos and other office-y decor.  The other walls are low and/or glass, so it’s easy to see out.

One thing I hadn’t anticipated:  I was used to putting my feet up on my CPU (don’t freak out, IT people), but now that I have a laptop, my knees ache from the lack of a footrest.  I may have to buy a small ottoman to put under my desk.

One other drawback:  my parking lot is two blocks from the office and it’s already starting to sleet and snow a little bit this week.  The lot is downhill from the office, so at least the uphill climb is in the morning when I’m theoretically energized from the previous night’s sleep.

One gigantic plus:  the vending machines sell energy drinks!  Yesterday I decided to forego my usual Red Bull and try SoBe.  It tasted good – inoffensively citrus-y compared to Red Bull’s "cherry cough syrup" flavor – but the energy kick had more of a slow build.  Nothing happened at first, but after a while I realized I was having a difficult time sitting still, and eventually I wondered how long it might be before one of my neighbors came over to snatch my Slinky out of my hands and fling it across the room.  The good news was that I got a lot of work done.

It’s quite a culture shock to go from a company of 17 people to a company of more than 350.  It’s all I can do to remember the names of the people I’m actually working with right now.  The other nice people who introduce themselves to me this week will no doubt need to do it again sometime.

On Saturday night, my grandmother passed away.  She was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease and we’d known for about a week that she didn’t have much time left.  The last time she left Florida to visit the family in the Midwest, it was obvious that she had no idea who we were or where she was.

Back in 2002, well before my grandmother’s dementia became evident, I wrote down and sent her some of my favorite childhood memories of visiting her house.  I’m now very glad I had a chance to share them with her while she could still appreciate it.  Here are some excerpts:

I remember…

• Playing BINGO at your house, complete with tidily gift-wrapped prizes.  I even remember one of the prizes:  a tiny bottle of pikake flower perfume.  To this day, I still love pikake scent.
• Crafts on the kitchen table.  A lot of them involved beads, as I recall, including various Christmas ornaments.  For a while after the craft that involved crocheting beads onto stretchy metallic necklaces, I had a little business going, making and selling necklaces to my friends in elementary school.  Someday that skill might save me from the poor house, you never know!
• Speaking of crafts, who could ever forget the Beaded Fruit set you gave me for Christmas one year?  I know my mother never forgot – at least not until years later when she finally finished vacuuming up beads, sequins and straight pins from the kit!
• Sitting in your TV room drinking cran juice and eating Oreo cookies – what a combination!  I still consider both cran juice and Oreos a special treat.
• Going to your house on New Year’s Eve and getting to drink a glass of real champagne.  I still have the pictures we took to show my parents, posed with lamp shades on our heads.
• Baking at your house.  The jar of silver nonpariels in your cupboard sticks in my mind, mainly because as a child (and even now), I never understood who would eat such a thing.

My grandmother had a tremendous influence on me in many ways.  She was a newspaper reporter who, along with my late mother (also a reporter and eventually an advertising copywriter), encouraged me to pursue a writing career.  She handed down recipes from her mother and grandmothers that I still cook today.  Whenever I write an article, make a home-cooked meal, play a card game, take care of my houseplants or read a mystery novel, I’ll always think of her.

I only have to work a half day today because of our move to the new office.  Around noon, they’ll pack up our stuff and take it away, but apparently it’ll take long enough to put it all where it belongs that we can just go home.  Woohoo!

Naturally, I’m going into the office extra early to make sure I get all my work done.  Don’t you hate people who do that?

I’m really not even going to take advantage of the time off.  I’ll probably head to my dad’s office and catch up on some of the work he has for me there.  Sigh.

This weekend:  writing, writing, writing, laundry, hosting a jam at a music store with my band, writing, maybe a just a wee bit of TV, writing, writing, writing, stewing a hen to make chicken and dumplings, writing, writing, and more writing.  All plans subject to abrupt change and the effects of extreme laziness.

Have a lovely Friday and weekend!

I received this e-mail yesterday in response to my New Orleans post from September 1st and wanted to share the news:

Hi.
I was searching through our web stats tonight and stumbled across your blog.
Thank you so much for providing a link to our site!  I thought I’d
take a moment to give you a few updates.

We’ve
been open since October 3.  The hotel sustained minimal damage.  The
French Quarter, as a whole, fared well.  About 40% of restaurants have
reopened or will reopen by December.  A few won’t open until April
due to basement flooding and looting.  The Gumbo Shop (one of my favorite
restaurants, not only for the good food, but for their reasonable prices) is
scheduled to reopen December 1.  A diverse list of bars and nightclubs are
open and offering live music.  There are a few local musicians that have
vowed never to return to the city or won’t return until cat-5 levees are
built, which is disappointing but might open the way for undiscovered talent willing
to help renew our wonderful city. 

Thanks
again.

Sincerely,
Holly
Campo

Hotel Villa Convento

616 Ursulines St
New Orleans, LA  70116
504.522.1793, fax 504.524-1902
www.villaconvento.com

I started a round of super-duper strong antibiotics yesterday and I can only conclude that one of their side effects is freaky, vivid dreams.

I woke up this morning from a dream that managed to conflate:

• Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
• Austin Powers (who gets murdered in the dream)
• Training at my new company
• Two guys from a band that used to open for an old band of mine

…and probably a bunch more stuff that I’ve already forgotten about.  Thank goodness I only need to take three doses!

Last Friday evening, I finally broke down and let my hairstylist color my hair.  I was tired of ending up with inconsistent color, auburn when I wanted brown, and glimmers of grey roots every time I did my own color.

It turned out beautiful, shiny and even.  One little problem:  it’s quite a bit darker than I expected – a dark brown that’s almost black. 

I’m very pale, so of course my first impulse was to steer away from black clothing and wear more makeup.  The "no black clothes" thing couldn’t last; black is my primary clothing color.  I’m already running out of the darkest lipstick color I have, so I’m going to have to make a Target makeup run soon.

As someone who works in a creative industry and plays in a band, there’s certainly nothing stopping me from keeping this haircolor for a while.  Still, I always wonder if I’m ranging into "look at that old gal trying to look like a teenager" territory.  I guess I’ll just have to trust my friends and sister to let me know when I’ve crossed that line.

There’s nothing like a self-imposed writing deadline to make a weekend seem really, really short.  Especially since it means I now have only three weeks in which to write 50,000 words.  Sigh.

So what in the heck was I doing with my precious writing time?  Well, writing song lyrics.  I swear, it’s like pulling teeth.  On Saturday morning, I listened about a bajillion times to the two songs I’d promised I’d have ready for Saturday evening’s practice.  The first one started to develop some depressing lyrics about friends of ours who died.  I tried to force the song to be about something else, but it wasn’t happening so I went ahead and finished it.

That left me with one more song to do.  After I played it over and over, I saw how it could be about an auto race, except that it had an instrumental intro that didn’t fit in with that theme at all.  I went ahead and wrote the car race lyrics (I even did some research!).

The band liked both songs and we’re dropping the out-of-place intro to the racing song.  I told them we could use the intro  when we do the long-form version of the video for MTV, but that it doesn’t make sense otherwise.  (If you’re new to this blog, that was a joke.)

Practice lasted hours.  We watched the DVD from our October 22nd party.  We ran through all our songs and worked on trouble spots.  We went out for barbecue, watched a couple hours of VH1 Classic Metal Mania, and mocked or praised the bands as needed.  We also tried really hard to think of a good band name, but we’re still drawing a blank on that.

So what was my excuse today on Sunday (you caught me post-dating)?  Pure laziness.  I slept in, watched football, goofed around online, recorded some vocal tracks over instrumental versions of the new songs and basically enjoyed a beautiful, fall day. 

It is possible for me to catch up on the novel?  Maybe.  Once I get going, I can spew out an awful lot of verbiage.  (See http://averagejane.blogs.com, February 2004 to present.)  Tonight is free and clear…as long as I don’t get distracted.

Of all the work I meant to do this week, only my actual job duties are on schedule.  While that’s a good thing as far as it goes, I still need to write a bunch of song lyrics by tomorrow afternoon, really hit my NaNoWriMo project and do something about the deteriorating state of our household’s tidiness.

The good thing about my novel writing delay is that it’s helped me think of a different angle on the story than I’d originally had in mind.  I’ll see how much I can accomplish over the weekend, which should get me geared up for more evening writing throughout the coming weeks.

Since my husband is still hobbling around on crutches, I’m going to have to load the Jeep with band gear tomorrow by myself.  That is, if I can get the Jeep to start.  I think the battery just needs a jump start.  If it’s something worse, I guess I’ll need to figure out a Plan B.

Speaking of busy, I need to get out of here early this morning and pick up our cat from the vet.  The Boy’s kidney infection relapsed as soon as his antibiotics ran out, so I’m sure I’ll have another gigantic bill awaiting me.  Once he’s back home, I need to run by my dad’s office, prepare and send a quick letter, then it’s off to my actual job. 

Is it wrong that I’m looking forward to my Christmas vacation already?