Stupid Tired

[before]

We keep waking up soooper tired. So tired that even when we wake up after 7 or 8 hours in bed, we feel like we could sleep all day. I wonder if there's a carbon monoxide leak somewhere, but I'm too tired to find the detector.

I was so tired this morning that after looking inside two different boxes of cereal only to see the bags inside closed up with a "chip clip," I had toast.

It was way too much work to reach inside the box, undo the clip and unroll the plastic bag. Not to mention having to find a bowl, pour the cereal into it, then walk ALL THE WAY over to the fridge - christ, I'm exhausted all over again just thinking about it.

The painting of the soon-to-be-former-blue room has taken nearly a decade, when you include all the years I've wanted to paint it but never made the time. Since before we moved in I've wanted that sad, dreary color sandblasted off those walls.

Well, it's finally happening. After two years off & on - mostly off - as of today we have:

• stripped the window trim & doors (done two years ago!)
  
• spackled four hundred tiny cracks in the plaster walls and ceiling
• built a proper frame for the access "door" I made to repair the wall the plumbers cut open years ago to fix broken shower pipes
• sanded more than we wanted to (mmm... lead paint)
  
• made & vacuumed up enough dust to clog the estuary
• ripped out all the window caulking (something we get to redo when we're done painting - yay!)
  
• TSPed top to bottom (though, not the ceiling, 'cause who gives a shit if there's stain on the ceiling - there's nothing up there I need to look at)
• slapped two coats of primer all over that goddamm room

This room has been the worst - way worse than a much larger room where we removed all the wallpaper. Not sure why. I think there's a ghost in there that really loves that shitty color.

Everything takes five times longer than you think it will and now there's a part of one wall where the old paint started peeling up as soon as the primer hit it, so we have to go back & scrape all that off as best we can without destroying the 100-year-old plaster, then hope the primer sticks.

But - BUT - once that's done, the new paint is going up. A warm, inviting, cozy color... dare I say it, something pleasing to the eye. I'm not sure I'll believe it until I see it, on the walls, in real life, instead of tiny paint chips taped onto the wall.

Then, we're gonna move a Barcalounger in there and I'm going to curl up in it and sleep there for seven years.

Stoopid Time Change

I don't understand why we keep doing this. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stoopid, and obviously, it's making me cranky.

The cats are pissed, too. They have regulated stomach clocks that do not just automatically adjust. Now we're tired, cranky AND have to watch our backs.

The only good thing that ever happened as a result of "falling back" was many, many years ago when I was first living in San Francisco.

I'd been to an almost all-night Halloween party the night before and ended up sharing a cab home with some guy who thought he was coming home with me. Too much beer can make a lot of things seem real.

When the cab got close to my neighborhood, I told the driver to pull over, got out and sprinted through Park Merced - where everything looks the same - and easily lost the guy with plans for a slumber party.

Upstairs, face down on my bed, the last thing I remembered from that night was wondering how I got inside my apartment. Seems I'd forgotten how keys work when you put them into the lock and turn them the right direction. Seriously, seriously drunk and impaired.

Woke up later that morning with an awful hangover and realized I was late for work. The job I just got back at another store closer to school - that morning was my first day back. And I was late. Awesome.

I called the office and the phone rang and rang and rang. Holy shit, it must be so busy they can't even get to the phone. I'm screwed, I'm screwed, I'm screwed, I'm screwed. No, no, no, no, no - what a colossal blunder.

Standing [slumped over] in the shower, I realized - holy shit, FALL BACK. I actually got there on time. Since then, I haven't had any use for standard time.

Lameness

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of exchanging emails with former coworkers - people who made it incredibly easy to find humor in every minute of the workday. We used to laugh all day long. Even our emails to clients were laced with humor.

Laughing at these emails made me realize how incredibly lame I am now. My emails at work are all businessey and no fun at all. Nobody needs all that dryness. It's chapping. What a drag.

But this is what we get to work with: I supplied a requirements outline to project manager in another group so she could give us the details of her project. It's a basic excel spreadsheet of questions, designed to make it easy for folks who have never documented requirements to simply fill in the blanks.

What I got back was a spreadsheet full of one word answers:
No
Yes
June 30
No
No
Robert
Yes
No

We're all very excited about this project. From the requirements alone, it sounds amazing. Can't wait to see it go live. Seems the person who filled it out, instead of putting the answers in the column labeled "Description," replaced all the questions with their answers.

Then there was the time a month after I started when HR sent me an urgent email telling me I needed to supply proof of citizenship ASAP because they didn't have copies of my driver's license and SS card in my file.

I called them and asked what happened to the photocopies that were made the day I started. "Oh, we don't know, but we're sure nothing's happened to them." Seems the woman who hosted our orientation on my first day abruptly left the company and they couldn't find any trace of the photocopies she made that day. Of our driver's licenses. And social security cards.

A few months ago we decided we should ask Facilities to install blinds in the window of our usability testing lab as it's very distracting during testing to have people walking by, gawking at our test subjects. Facilities told me that room had not been approved for blinds.

Apparently there is a Blinds Czar and this person did not deem this small room worthy. I asked how we could obtain a favorable decision from His Lordship, but before I could press the Send button on the email, a large black bookcase was delivered and set up in front of the window, almost blocking the view, but not quite. Why bother installing blinds when you can just block the window with a bookcase?

In an effort to obtain a good ergonomic set up, a coworker wanted to bring in his Aeron chair from his home office. He emailed Facilities for information and instead of supplying, say, a form to fill out to document this chair as his own, they told him not to bother. They ordered a brand new Aeron chair for him.

Another coworker enrolled in the 401k program and set up automatic deposits into the account. Except the money isn't in the 401k account, nor is it still in her paycheck. Much like the photocopies of our driver's licenses & SS cards, HR is sure everything is fine. They don't know where the money is, but they're sure everything is fine. Not to worry.

There's more - much more - but if I told you everything, you'd start to think I was making this up.