HFCS: effika’s blog

I’ve locked my keys in my car enough times that I keep my house keys and car key separate. I keep a spare car key in the apartment, which I should be able to get to since my house and car keys are separate. This system worked very well when I was in college and just shoved my keys and wallet in my pockets, my bookbag obviating the need for a purse.

Now I keep my keys (house and car) and cell phone stuck on a carabiner hooked to my purse. I taught food handler class today, and took my carabiner off my purse and inside with me. When I came back out to my car I neglected to attach the loop back to my purse. When I got home, I clicked my car key onto the carabiner, grabbed my purse and knitting, and cringed as I watched the locked car door slam shut with my carabiner (+keys +cell phone) on the passenger seat.

I walked slowly upstairs. It was drizzling and chilly, but not bad. I could sit here on the balcony, warm and dry, and knit until Jay came home. Except that I was hungry. I decided to be proactive about my fate. I had my wallet, plus a grocery store, a drug store, and several fast food places less than a half mile from our place, and it would be trivial to get some grub. I walked downstairs, and found the drizzle was trying hard to turn into rain. I dug in my purse for my umbrella, then remembered I that I attached it as well to the carabiner before food school today (just in case it rained!). Indeed, it was there on the seat with my other needed items.

Waiting around until ~9pm when Jay comes home and can let me in our place seemed like a really bad idea about then. Jay was at work at the library on campus, and I decided to pay him a visit for his house key.

I ran to the bus stop near our house— across the street and down a block— to the covered bench that sits in the middle of an appartment complex. Now that the semester has ended, the bus only comes once an hour. I had 20 minutes until the bus. The rain blew into the bus stop shelter, and by the time the bus pulled up I was shivering. The inside of the bus was warm and dry, and it was only sprinkling when I got to campus.

Jay fixed me up with an umbrella, his house key, and a couple of dollars for the vending machine before he had to get back to work. Dinner was a packet of Wheat Thins (fiber! salt!) and a bag of generic fruit smilies (200% RDA for vitamin C!) before heading back on the bus. I arrived inside around 7pm, having spent 2 hours in transport or waiting for it, all because I was on autopilot when I got home.

Finally got myself the spiffy new Wordpress (and 22 days late! Shame on me.). The dashboard is a nice update. Very modern. I’m hoping I’ll pick up design again and give the blog a new look. I’ve been all sorts of creative with the fiber arts lately, so maybe my improved color sense will let this place not look like a winter wasteland. I also will probably need to get a new site (and logo) in place soon for the professional branch of the school’s improv troupe, and it couldn’t hurt to dust up my skills here first.

This weekend has had gorgeous weather. Friday was not a great day, but Saturday and Sunday have been wonderful. I am glad I was able to have a great time with friends (and food and drink) out in the wonderful weather we’ve had (even if I got a mild sunburn on only part of my neck).

I really feel like this Spring is an inspiring Spring, one like I haven’t had in years. I’m even jotting down thoughts I think would make good blog posts! I can’t promise updates more than once a month, but I’ll try to get reach at least 2. :-P

I need to get back in the habit of posting. It just seems a lot harder to pour everything out into a weblog when I’m no longer an angsty teen hating my professors. :-)

My taxes are done, and for the first time I owed the government money. It will be more than balanced out by the economic stimulus check I’ll get this summer, so I suppose that’s OK. Instead of spending it on frivolities I’m going to knock out a chunk of my student loan debt. (Do you guys see how boring I’ve become? 3 years ago I would have totally had an awesome plan for spending it all on hazelnuts and chocolate.)

And do you guys remember that poor computer I used to have, the one where the capacitors blew out on the motherboard? Jay’s been using it, as both his post-2002 computers broke down. It was working pretty well until a month or so ago– now ALL the capacitors are blown out. It’s turned writing papers into a game of roulette. Not surprisingly, his 1998-era Compaq runs fine (if slowly due to the crap that’s been lodged into the Win98 install).

At work I’ve been given an extra set of duties as “back-up web coordinator” as they switch over to a modern CMS. Our actual web coordinator for my area is our health educator, who has a job description that fits such duties perfectly. I am, apparently, the only person in the building who knows anything at all about HTML, so they tasked me to help her. Apparently I’ve helped her so well that they want me to work on other division’s sites too. This would be awesome if it meant that I would get extra pay, but instead it just means that I have to squeeze my inspections into an even smaller time frame.

Many of you know I knit, but most of you are probably not interested in it nearly as much as I am. I have decided to keep this blog free of knitting as much as I can. Instead, I talk about it on my Ravelry account. If there’s calling for me to post more (even if it’s about knitting socks) I might start letting some of that spill over. Also I take pretty pictures of my projects (and sometimes flowers) and put them on my Flickr account. I might put in one of those little distracting Flickr boxes on my sidebar, but I’d want to redesign the site for that. I think I want to redesign the site anyway, but I’m lacking the inspiration.

Valentine’s Day was pretty good, if spread out over a week due to work schedules. I made us dinner (chicken with a pineapple, ginger, and garlic sauce) and we watched Casino Royale. Later, Jay paid for the development of some of our favorite photos and the frames to place them in.

So, as you guys may or may not know, I deal in that ambiguous realm of retail food safety. One of the perks of this job is having an entire city as my domain. I’m just not sure how much of a perk this is going to be when later this week I’ve got to watch 2,700lbs of recalled beef get buried in a landfill. It turns out that the school district for my city was exclusively supplied with beef from Westland/Hallmark Meat Co.

I guess I should pick up some camphor to overwhelm my nose. At least it’s not high Summer.