I made a tactical error.

I let my girlfriend live.

Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m not angry at her. It was just a mistake to allow this sleeping together thing go on for three nights in a row.

See, last year my girlfriend quit being able to cope with the ultra-hard mattress I chose when I bought a new bed. So she got a twin long sleep number bed, and started sleeping in it. While sleeping in separate beds was a little weird, it was, ultimately, most awesome for both of us. She got a bed that didn’t hurt her back. I didn’t have to share my bed with someone who kept turning over all night because she couldn’t get comfortable. We both got sleep. And since we shoved the two beds right next to each other, we could still hold hands as we went to sleep, even if curling up with one another required one person switch beds entirely.

It was a somewhat odd, but functioning solution.

Until Tuesday.

Tuesday night, in the middle of the night, I awoke to my girlfriend screaming in her sleep. I finally managed to awaken her from a horrid nightmare she kept having. Because she was upset, she crawled into bed with me so I could hold her. It was fine. I hate to be alone after nightmares as well. We fell asleep in bed together.

Wednesday morning I was tired, but I found out we got the house on the way to work, and that information made me so manic it didn’t matter.

Wednesday night she talked about how nice it was sleeping together, and how her back didn’t hurt at all. So Wed she crawled into bed with me and fell asleep. At one point in the middle of the night I woke up and was irritated because I couldn’t quite get comfortable with her there, but rolled over, found a good spot and went back to sleep. Unfortunately I had to get up and go into work early because I had to deal with some business calls that involved the East coast, and they needed to happen in the morning, Eastern time. So while I slept okay, I was still sleep deprived, two days running now.

Last night we were both tired. My girlfriend wanted to go to bed early. I wanted to go to bed early. She was in her bed. I was in mine. When she said she wanted to sleep with me again, I tried to be neutral about it. She replied “Normal couples sleep together.” I refrained from pointing out that she was the one who hated my bed. I refrained from saying “no, I need to fucking sleep.” I refrained from doing a god damn thing to make sure I got the rest I needed. I just said “okay” and let her climb in.

Now, admittedly, I’ve been feeling a little weird about the part where we don’t share a bed. I do like holding her and cuddling her. Also, the part where I lost 100 pounds has made it so we both fit in bed a lot better. It’s possible for both of us to be in bed and not touch. But because it was cold, she kept snuggling up. Which 1) kept making me get too hot, and 2) meant I could feel every movement she made.

Because I kept getting hot, I kept scooting over. She kept following me. Because I could feel every damn movement, I kept waking up.

Who really knows though. I may well have slept like shit *anyway*. And I know me. Just because I was aware of her when she woke up doesn’t mean she ever actually did anything. But when I’m tired and sleep deprived, I will happily blame anything that comes to my attention, regardless of whether or not it actually deserves that blame.

We were in bed, lights off, by 10:30 PM. By 5:15 this morning, I was furious, and she could tell. She offered to move beds. I told her she could if she wanted. (Subtle? No thanks…) I think she did move. But by then I was so wound in frustration that I gave up and got up.

Like I said, I know me. When I get that worked up, it takes me about an hour to wind down enough to go back to sleep. And then I oversleep and make myself late for work.

I got ready, fed the dogs, went in and told her that I loved her and that I was going to work. In a sleepy voice she asked if it was her fault. I looked at the clock. 5:45 AM is no time for honesty.

“No baby, I’m just awake, and I figured I might as well go into work. Go back to sleep, and I love you.”

I even sounded like I meant it. And I did. I do love her. And I really did decide I might as well go into work. Through all of this there have been no questions in my mind about the validity of those two particular statements.

Which is why letting her live falls into the category of “tactical error”.

We got the house and we’re moving to Oakland!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

I’m supposed to be doing something today, but I have no ambition. My boss doesn’t seem to either. (At least we’re well matched.) I gave up my rights to use most of my major bits of equipment today (I misread an email and thought I’d be spending a whole day in planning meetings again), so I guess I’ll work on getting caught up on my lab notebook. Sitting at my desk and doing massive amounts of cutting and pasting sounds more like kindergarten than work, and that seems rather appealing.

Funny. Last night my girlfriend said she was feeling antsy, waiting to hear if we get to move into the house we want to rent. At the time I had patience. Now I find her restlessness has transfered to me: I’ve no interest in work, or the work move, and just want to know if we got the place as well.

Addendum: My interest in the work move just got piqued. Best opening line for an email about a meeting I didn’t give a fuck about EVER:

It seems that I have overstepped my bounds in organizing this meeting.

You couldn’t keep me away from the follow up meeting to this email if my life depended on it. Will it be long? Yes. Will it probably be boring? Yes. Will there be people behaving badly at times and territorial pissing matches? Fuck yes. Will there be open Wi-Fi while it occurs? Yes.

Portable Internet Device: $200
Open Wi-Fi: Free
Spending an afternoon being paid to alternate between discretely surfing the web and watching people behaving badly: Priceless

I finally found a combination of cold drugs that actually work. It involves alternating between Alka Seltzer Cold & Sinus and TheraFlu Severe Cold, and “assisting” each dosage of each with a half dosage of Sudafed Non-drying Sinus. It’s sort of the Tim Allen theory of cold management: it just needs more medication. I guess I shouldn’t be encouraging that sort of thing, but fuck it, it works. Specifically, I think it’ll work well enough that I can actually attend work tomorrow.

In other news, I’ve discovered I’ve gotten kind of wiggy about processed food. This may be a good thing, assuming it lasts for any length of time. I love shows like Unwrapped because I usually find manufacturing processes facinating. It’s not just limited to food items either. I just like knowing how things are made. But lately I’ve found manufactured foods sort of disturbing. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I live on manufactured shakes. Nothing I eat these days resembles anything found in nature.

I miss food that doesn’t taste like artficial flavors. And when I watch shows about processed foods, I feel this self-righteous voice in my head chastizing people for eating this chemical-based crap instead of fresh vegetation. Which is funny, as I recall I used to be quite the processed food offender. Hell, if you look at the crap I drink, I still am. I don’t drink caffiene nor sugar, which means that everything I drink other than water is loaded with chemicals.

This fact now disturbs me.

I also find myself upset and self-righteous about a storage place ad I keep seeing. The ad suggests that people can store the useless junk occupying their over-full garages in storage places so they have room to put their new junk which the next Best Buy ad will try to convince them they need to be happy. All I could think was “perhaps if you just bought less stuff?” This is also terribly absurd as I am a huge abuser of retail therapy.

I feel overly consumeristic. I feel like there’s too much to atone for. I feel like I should be able to hold on to these feelings more of the time, letting them guide me in my actions. And I feel as though these thoughts border on the edge of spirituality.

I guess it’s a good thing I’m Wiccan

Lisa suggested I should put a blog entry with each item I listed in my last post as a title and a couple of snarky comments for each. This seems like a good idea, except for the part where I came down diseased. Now I remember why I quit spending as much time in the hot tub at the Cat Ranch. Every time I go into their hot tub, I get sick the next day. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with their hot tub. I’m pretty sure it’s because I stay in it far too long. (Think 2+ hours.)

Anyway, I’ve spent my day having 15 minute moments where the cold medication briefly fixes everything and I feel fine. In those moments I have delusions of getting my ass back to the LAN party which is where I’m supposed to be. And then the ability to breathe fades, and I spend the next 3 hours & 45 minutes laying around moaning, moping, and mentally cursing the manufacturers of the assorted cold remedies I’ve been taking. Each time I end up switching to a different drug in the hopes that one of them might work, but the reality is they all work about equally well.

There was a point to all this…

Oh. Right. Blog entries.

So anyway, cold medication doesn’t really do as much as you might think to increase general snarkiness. At least not in any creative, amusing way. So hopefully I’ll get back to those later.

And I should go to bed. But I don’t want to. Every nap today involved dreams about my car brakes locking up and the car skidding, or them just not working well enough. Either way I keep hitting the car or cars in front of me. They’re never bad accidents, but the dreams are just stressful. Stupid sick dreams.

So once again, LAN season has rolled around. Everyone is play Team Fortress 2, but I’m tired and not focusing, so instead I checked my backlog of blogs. Ici is still updating damn near daily, which reminds me that my own blog could use some love. But I never quite know what to say.

Which is silly. There’s shitloads of things going on in my life right now.

The brief run down would be:

• LAN party weekend!
• I’ve lost 100 lbs now.
• Work is moving Feb 15th.
• My girlfriend and I are looking to move to Oakland.
• I’ve taken up embroidery.
• I did genetic typing on my aunts and they have some uber-rare allele that seems to be Portuguese in origin.
• I have turned into a Coach whore, and bought another used, leather Coach bag as a reward for 100 lbs.
• I spent all day photo copying the labels from the Happy Mutant Handbook onto sticker paper, and labeled random items in the sample prep lab accordingly. (my favourite would be where I labeled a box of 100 vials of blood with a sticker that said “contents may have expired during shipping”.)
• The cops raided a house at the end of the street, guns drawn and everything. Ah, life in Pittsburg!

So that’s what going on in my life.

Oh, and who knew embroidery could be subversive? I’ll get ambitious and post pics later.

So today I walked into work, refilled my water bottle, sat down at my desk, read the second email in my in box, ran out of my office and spent the entire rest of the day in moving planning meetings.

I’ll be spending tomorrow in much the same way.

On the plus side, turns out my $25 bag o’ joy from Buffalo Exchange is an honest-to-god $400 Coach briefcase from the 90s.

Who knew?

So Ici has been blogging daily since the new year started. I know that doesn’t sound like much (since it’s what, the 4th?), but that would be more posts than I’ve done in the last 6 months.

So I decided I should post something. And once again I have absolutely nothing to say.

Let me think.

I’ve lost 89.2 pounds. And I should want to talk about that. But I don’t find I have a lot to say. I’ve switched from eating to shopping, which I really can’t afford. I have actually discovered I like clothes shopping, but there’s no point in buying a lot of clothes because I’ll just get too small for them. I do like the change though.

Work is getting really stressful because we’re getting ready to move next month. But there’s not really that much to say about that either.

Life is good, my relationship is good, the electric bill because of all the reptiles is obscene, and I spent too much on Christmas, but it was a lot of fun.

Christmas was rather amusing… My dad’s family was wonderful. My mom’s family was a train wreck. Even though there was no actual family gathering planned for that half the family, names were drawn. Apparently I was the only person who actually figured out how to get the presents to the people my girlfriend and I were chosen to give gifts to. My mother and her sister have decided that my cousins no longer get to be in the gift exchange because they didn’t get gifts from them this year. Please note: they have screwed other people in the gift exchange before, this was just the first time it was the two of them.

My girlfriend got screwed too when my uncle got her a gift, but then told her it would cost her $50 to have it. Then when he tried to install it, he broke one of the plastic pieces on her car. In the end the installation didn’t work out, so he never really gave her anything. (I told him what to get her: a bloody Starbuck’s gift card. Those make her obscenely happy.)

But really, other than the fact that my uncle is a tacky little fucker, none of this is that big a deal; most of this just shows the bad blood that happens to be running through the family right now. Funny. All the deaths in my dad’s side of the family brought everyone closer together. Grandma’s health issues seem to be slowly tearing the family apart.

I should care, I really should, but I don’t. Whenever I get sucked into doing anything with that side of the family I usually regret it, and this slow degradation means I never have to see them all in mass. Frankly, it just seems like a bonus.

New Years was special: my girlfriend got the flu on New Year’s Eve, The main sewer line backed up on New Years Day, and last night’s storm blew a chunk of the fence down in the back yard. But A is better now, and we don’t have to pay for the fence or having Roto Rooter come fix the sewer line.

And may I just say, I was pleased with my Roto Rooter experience. They said someone would be here in an hour, the guy was here in 20 minutes. He had the house back up and running in 30 minutes. It was very nice.

I don’t really have any New Year’s resolutions. I do have 2 goals though:

1. No unplanned hospital stays.
2. Fewer trips to the emergency room.

Granted they’re not exactly things I can control, so perhaps it’s more of a wish list. But a girl can dream.

Happy New Year, y’all!