Friday

I have my feet up on the coffee table, a cup of chai next to me, and a tiny dog curled at the end of the couch.*  The sun is shining. I'm in the middle of a good book, and I'm still wearing my pajamas. I just hit play on a pandora station.

This is about 1000 times better than putting on real clothes at 5:30 am, or any time ending in am, really, and going out to spend money I don't have.

There really isn't anything I want to buy. There are some things that I need to buy: a plane ticket to the Mitten for Christmas, Aquaphor for that eczema spot on my neck, mouthwash because mine is running low, a haircut. But nothing that I really want. Not badly enough to go to a store especially for that. 

I'm perfectly happy here on the couch, annoying my friends by sending them job postings. (Now that I have a job that I love, I am that annoying job search evangelist: "Just try it! You'll like it!" They are going to get sick of me really fast.)

* I am dogsitting. Not my dog. Bonus: this house has central heating. Luxury.

smoke and fire

There is a steady stream of smoke rising from the back of my oven. It's not a good sign. I know what's happening - I did not allow the crushed cookie crust to dry completely, and I also broke it when I took the tart pan out of the oven by pushing on the underside of the pan so the edge of the crust fell off, and the honey part of the tart is dripping down onto the bottom of the oven. (T., this is why a tart pan isn't always the best idea...)

Okay, I have come up with a solution. The tart pan is now sitting on baking sheet so that the honey does not drip down into the heating element. 

The stove is sill smoking like mad. It's a little worrying that the smoke detector has not gone off, because the air is hazy.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The smoke detector in the hallway just went off, but not the one in the kitchen. Admittedly, the one in the kitchen is hanging behind a straw hat that is pretty tightly woven. (Don't ask me why we have a straw hat hanging over the smoke detector. It's been that way since before either my roommate or I moved in.)

Thanksgiving dinner at my friend's house starts at 5:30 pm. It's 4:47 now, and my food is not fully prepared. I think I'm going to be the tardy one.

P.S. No actual fire so far. Just charring.

better, theoretically

The good news is that today, at the end of week three of the new job, the second full week, I am not quite as exhausted as I was two weeks ago, at the end of the first full week.

I mean, I'm still sitting on my bed all bundled up. I still didn't run the (one) (single) errand I meant to run this evening (to get sparkling water, if you must know). But I feel like I maybe could have run the errand. You know, if I wanted to. If I wanted to get up out of my warm bed and go out into the cold, I could have.

Eh-hem.

even earlier

I never knew how much I could appreciate a rainless commute. Driving home this evening in the Not Rain, I was positively buoyant about the traffic. Who cares? At least I'm not hydroplaning between a truck and the concrete under a bridge (that happened this morning at approximately 5:56 am). 

I thought getting up at 5:15 was bad. This morning I got up at 4:15 so that my coworker and I could meet in State City and get to Universe City by 8 am. 

So that was fun.

I'm not quite sure I'm coherent right now.

commute

This commute is all well and good until it's pouring down rain and the highway is flooded and getting home takes double time. 

I'm trying to hold out with this car for a year, but when I'm driving next to a triple trailer semi on the highway, focusing with all my might on the yellow line because it's the only thing I can see, feeling like a bug about to be squashed, in a tiny car with airbags that don't work, I question that decision.

midweek day off

(Oops. I wrote this on Wednesday and then wandered off and forgot to post it.)

I am becoming militant about conserving my bedtime. Even last night, when I knew that I didn't have to get up early this morning (Veterans Day: the holiday I never knew existed until I started working closely with government bodies and suddenly they were all closed one day in November), I was in bed before 10 pm and slept for 10 hours. 10 hours is my new normal when I don't have to get up at 5:15 for work, apparently.

My roommate started a new job on Monday, so our apartment is basically the land of early-to-bedders these days: dark and quiet by 9:30 pm.

In addition to sleeping for ten hours, I slept in my down jacket last night. I didn't really intend to, but it was so cold when I went to bed that I left it on, and then when I woke up in the night, the air was still so cold that I decided to keep it on.

If this keeps up, I'm going to need another down jacket for the days when I have to wash this one. It's just that I refuse to turn the heat on unless it gets below 40 degrees F at night or doesn't get up to 50 degrees F during the day. (This is an arbitrary rule that I made up last night.)

When I woke up this morning, it was not quite 8 am.

There is a remarkable amount of day when you get up before 8 am.

So far, I have done such exciting things as dishes and preparing a bunch of forms for my law school's loan repayment assistance program. Also I made chai* for tomorrow and switched two of the ink cartridges in my pens from black to blue.

My life is so exciting.

* Two years ago, the year that I worked in downtown Gone West after moving back from Universe City, I got a chai at the bucks of star every day. The other day, I read somewhere that chai from the bucks of star has 42 grams of sugar in it. Wot. Clearly I cannot drink it ever again unless I'm road tripping or about to go on a hike. Homemade it is, both by necessity (my new office is not close to any coffee shops) and for my health.

space

After 10 good hours of sleep and a Skype call with T., whose boys were running around playing with some toy named Peso (don't ask me; I am out of the loop on the pop culture of small children), and some errands, I came home to do something I haven't done in three years:

I made sweet potato enchiladas.

That doesn't sound like a big deal, I know, but it actually is. It's a big deal because it means that I have the mental space for something other than survival, and apparently it's been three years since I had that mental space.

Of course, I have forgotten most of how I made them, and I think I probably should have gotten Cuban style black beans and medium enchilada sauce and caramelized onions if I wanted them to be just like I used to make them, but there are eight cups of cheese and a metric ton of freshly ground black pepper in those two pans, so I'm sure they will be delicious. (They are made of CHEESE and corn and sweet potato and enchilada sauce. They can't help but be delicious.)

truck

Whenever I start a new job, I end the first week feeling like I've been hit by a truck. It's all the new information coming at me, trying to settle into the corners of my brain.

I started a new job on Monday, and I started the long commute again. I'm getting up at 5:15 am, now, because I want to be a little early and the commute is a little longer (by one exit/three highway miles/two minutes per google) than the one I was doing earlier in the year.

I feel like I've been hit by two trucks.

Last night, I went to an event in downtown Gone West. I was a little late (thank you, traffic in this crazy city), and afterward my roommate, to whom I had offered a ride home, was chatting with someone, and I just stood there swaying.

When I got home tonight, I leaned over to put something in the recycling bag and almost tipped over.

So I made some hot chocolate and climbed into bed with my computer. 

The hot chocolate is gone now. I'm trying to summon the energy to go brush my teeth and all those necessary life tasks. 

And then I'm going to sleep for ages. Possibly ages and a half.

Needless to say, this is not going to be one of the NaBloPoMo posting-daily kind of Novembers.