Misleading feeling

About 1 pm today I started to feel like I could do everything.  I could do ALL the work.  But it turns out that I had had caffeinated soda with lunch.

My physical fitness is overpowered by my snoozons

I did my morning chores last night.  I packed my lunch.  I laid out a set of workout clothing, and I packed work clothes to change into later.

I had such good intentions.

I didn't get to sleep particularly late, but when the alarm went off in the dark this morning, there was just no way I was getting out of bed without a life threatening emergency.  Going to the gym to work out was so far down the list, it scrolled to another page.  I hit the snooze button for an hour.  When I finally did get up, I barely had time to get to the office on time, let alone go to the gym first.

However, I am undeterred.  I have a plan.  Somewhere I have this gadget that will slowly turn on your light at a predetermined time.  That way, when your alarm goes off, it's not dark!  It's like sunrise, only more so because it's right there in the bedroom.  I can defeat my own stupid inner caveman.  The inner caveman what says "Tiger  in dark.  Tiger bad.  Stay in cave."  That one.

Now all I have to do is find the gadget, and a lamp that will work with it, and I'm golden.  Or sweaty.  Pre-buffed.  Yup.  Just you wait and see.

Achievement unlocked: napping

I finally got a nap today.  I'm not sure how long it's been since I've had a nap.  Weeks if not months.  I fell asleep on the sofa with my shoes on.  Andy the cat was pinning me to the sofa by way of my lap.  DeLee and I were supposed to go out today, but she got some horrible bug bites while we were hiking on Saturday so she was taking it easy and trying not to scratch them.

After I established that we were not, in fact, going anywhere, I wandered into the living room.  I wasn't really thinking nap.  I wasn't thinking much of anything.  I sat on the sofa and invited various cats up to get petted.  However, being cats, they snubbed me as soon as they realized I wanted to pay attention to them.  So I was just reclining there, not thinking about very much, when zzzZZZZZ.

At some point Andy curled up on me.  And then later I felt chilly and took off my shoes and dragged a blanket over me.  Of course Andy left while I was in the shoe-taking-off process.  Only Dori has the fortitude to stick around for that.  But as soon as I was reclined again, I felt the weight and needle pricks of a cat navigating his way around a prone body.

I fell asleep again only to wake up sweaty.  There is no middle ground.  Some day I will probably discover clothing which will keep me comfortable, neither too chilly nor too warm.  Guaranteed the clothing will be too expensive to afford, fragile, ugly, or all three.

So, basically, I got nothing done today.  I haven't left the building.

Although, I *did* swap out the air filter up in the attic.  I think it's the first time this year, which is ridiculous.  What's more ridiculous is the athletic routine required to swap out the filter.  A) I'm not tall enough to reach the rope to pull down the attic door.  B)  Once you get up there, you have to duck walk under a roof support.  C) Once you've gotten under the support, you have to edge across a couple of wobbly boards spanning the chasm over the front hall.  And then of course after you've swapped out the filter you have to reverse the process in the opposite direction.

I wanted to take a look at our gable fan, which has gotten insanely loud, so I didn't reverse the process right away.  First I clambered over the ductwork (which thank goodness can hold my weight, because there is no way to just step over it), then held onto the rafters as I stepped from beam to beam.  The gable fan, is, of course, at the far end of the attic.

I determined that the gable fan is all rusty, but that's not why it's loud.  One support was screwed into one of the 140 year old vent louvers, which has finally come loose after a couple of decades of stress from the fan vibration.  Now whenever the fan comes on it rattles that louver, and the vibration transmits itself throughout the structure of the house.  Even JD's closet door vibrates, at the other end of the house and one story down.  It's delightful.

Still I figure it's time to replace the fan, and we'll attach it to something more solid.  I spent some time shopping online for a replacement fan.  They all look pretty much the same, but the price ranges from $45 to $400+. It's crazy!  How am I supposed to figure out which one to get?  My googling hasn't led me to any independent reviews which might help me decide.  There are actually a bunch of attic gable fan websites, believe it or not.  They aren't helpful.  They say things like "attic gable fans reduce your electrical bill by reducing the heat load in your attic!" as if this were news.  But actually comparing different fan manufacturers?  Not so much.

The most expensive fans have 10 year warranties, and the cheapos have 1 year warranties.  I really would like something that would last 20-30 years as this one appears to have, but I guess people don't really build stuff with the intention of having it last anymore.  I mean, how would that benefit them?

So my Labor Day was spent napping and not buying anything.  You're welcome, economy.  Anytime.

I think I got some pollen wedged in my synapses

I had an idea on the way home and I was going to tell you about it but the truly astonishing (I'd say exceptional but it really isn't, although lord knows *I* take exception to it) amount of tree sex going on in my head is preventing coherent thought from happening.  Although apparently it isn't preventing run-on sentences.

It's been three days of tree sex now and frankly I'm tired of it.  Oh sure, it's pretty.  I like flowery external sexual organs as much as the next girl.  But every time I sniff that delightful fresh spring air, it feels as if somebody has hit me in the temple with a hammer.  My legs feel like I am wearing lead shoes while, simultaneously, my arms feel as if balloons are attached to them.  And, of course, I'm dumb.  My thoughts bubble up and then drift off into the void without connecting with anything else first.  Several times today I thought of something, started to tell someone, and then forgot what the thing was before I had gotten three words out.

Anyway, the idea.  I remembered it again.   First, let me tell you what it felt like.  (If I still remember the idea after that, I'll tell you.  Otherwise make something up.)  Do you ever get an idea, and then you're immediately embarrassed that you only just thought of it?  This happens to me all the time.  It's as if I have stepped in poop, and complained about it all day, and tracked it everywhere, and then finally after eight hours it finally occurs to me to CLEAN MY SHOE.   (I would like to say that this particular example of a late idea would not happen, but with all the tree sex going on I can't really make extravagant claims like that.)

I have heard that when other people get ideas they feel happy, or proud, or smart.  I am only embarrassed.  Possibly this means I am incredibly arrogant.  I may have been faking humility to myself all these years. 

Or, maybe, I'm kinda slow.

Anyway.

My idea is that I should get off my duff and start writing.  I started this blog last year with the intention of writing it for a year.  To make sure I had the endurance to write a book.  In retrospect, that's ludicrous.  I could have been ACTUALLY WRITING A BOOK. 

I can thank eArThworm for this revelation.  She gave me a lovely compliment yesterday.  She said she wished I had something to write a book about.  I think that's what she said, anyway.  It was along those lines.  It got me to thinking.  I had a fairly interesting thruhike, I thought.  What with the dead guy and the tick and the stubby legs.  But I didn't finish.  Who would want to read about an unfinished hike?  Because I was originally going to write about my thruhike, which ended up being only a reeeally long section hike.

But hell, that Bill Bryson guy didn't finish his hike either, and I hear his book did pretty well.

This morning I reread some of this blog (of which there is rather a lot, now) and I crack myself up.  (Yeah, probably erring on the side of arrogance.  I'm going to have to given up my pretense of humility.)   I'm thinking I'll just keep doing that, writing things that I like.  Except I won't immediately set it all free on the Internet.  I'll hold some back.  And then, eventually, perhaps it will coalesce into something that somebody might want to read all at one go.

May have taken longer to write than to do

Oof, Internet.  It's been kind of a long day.  Usually I have some time to sit and relax at some point, but 13 hours in I'm just now finding the time.  Still, it's been good.  Today's the first day since that first suspicious scratching of the throat that I feel healthy.  And that is a delicious, intoxicating feeling.  Delicious and intoxicating sounds like a piña colada to me.  Or a nice apricot beer.  Perhaps today was an apricot beer day.  I believe I shall think of it that way.  Not that I've had anything to drink.  Alcoholically speaking.

I almost got something done at work today.  I thought about it for a while, and I did some things that go oddly together (exported NFS from OSX, mounted it onto VMS) but was defeated because I forgot you can't backup the system disk of a VMS machine while it's booted from the disk.  So now I'm working on options.  The VMS machine in question is nearly dead, and may or may not be responding to console.  We don't have a vtterm, we have a laptop that fakes being a serial console.  So maybe the laptop isn't working right, or maybe the VMS machine isn't working right.  Either way, I'm kind of up a creek.  Perhaps I'll find a way to make it work tomorrow.*

I got to go for a walk with my work walking pal today, and that was very fine.  (I missed our talks while I was hiking this year.  I'd be hiking along, having hiked five hours already, and think "Gosh, I wish I could go on my daily walk."  Which always cracked me up.  )  The weather was perfect for walking, and it felt great to get out and move.

The afternoon was one of those where a line formed outside my cubicle.  We only have like six employees now, so I thought the days of the cubicle line were over.  Wrong!  Once you have visitors it is possible.  Maybe I should have let Joe put in one of those "take a number" machines after all.

It's nice to feel needed?

You may not be surprised to hear that I didn't linger.  As soon as my eight were up, I boogied.  All the problems will still be there tomorrow.  I'm afraid I'm past the days where I wish to stay late to fix problems that aren't endangering human health or spacecraft instruments.  Likely they'll make more sense when I'm rested, anyway.

JD took the old man to the vet.  They needed ... samples.  For testing.  Now, Trouble is not a helpful, easygoing cat.  People who know him do not generally volunteer to pet him.  They have to restrain him pretty thoroughly to work on him at the vet's office, sometimes, because that cat will cut a bitch.  And if you restrain him in every way possible, he will use his last defense.  Which is to pee on you.  But in this particular instance, that works in the vet's favor.  All they have to do is irritate him a bit, and he'll provide a sample.  The vet tech stands ready with a ladle.  I didn't ask what they did to get the sample and I don't really want to know.

Anyway, while that was going on I decided to go for a jog.  I started Couch to 5K Week Two today.  I wondered if I should redo Week One after my snotfest, but apparently I'm good with Week Two.  The jogging felt nice and I was dang perky afterward.  I really need to start doing it in the morning, but I am just so not a morning person.  I regard morning exercise as cruel and unusual.  JD says it works for him because by the time he's awake enough to notice how awful it is, he's just about done.  But I fed horses in the morning for years and it pretty much always sucked, and I noticed.  So I don't think that will work for me.

After I arrived back at the house, all sweaty and perky, my love took me out to a Chinese buffet for deliciousness.  They were treated to the sight of a middle aged sysadmin in spandex.  I'm sure their optic nerves will recover by tomorrow, though the twitching may take longer.

Then a quick zip by the grocery (where they no longer carry frozen french rolls, which makes me very sad) and finally home.  Day wasn't done yet, though.  We had to fold and put away all the laundry and straighten up the house.  Tomorrow the cleaning fairies stop by.  They have much better luck if they can actually find the floor and kitchen counters when they get here.

And after that (I'm nearly panting just listing all this) I went through the last 18 months worth of photos, trying to find something reasonable of Pluto to submit to the annual calendar.  I haven't been around much this year, so the stock of photographs is pretty slim.  I hope the calendar elves like one of the two I selected.

And now, Internet, I can relax.  The only problem is I am freaking AWAKE.  Dang healthy jogging.

*This nerdy interlude brought to you by the fine folks at NASA.