I'm Running a Sh*tshow, Part 1

We're moving!

No, not the Siamese Kitten and I. She and I are staying put in our fourth-story apartment for one more year, waiting to see if the housing market calms its tits enough to allow the possibility of moving on up in 2024.

To be honest, I believe the Siamese Kitten is currently living in her final home. She is in her sunset years, and I think she is feeling the loss of her brother the Chongers almost as much as I am. She remains snuggly and feisty and full of surprises. But...well. 

The concept of the Rainbow Bridge is
kind of schmaltzy, but it's there when you
need it most.

But that is not what this post is about.

My IRL office is moving. Not just moving. Moving into a space twice as large as our current space. That is a gut renovation. And combining two separate companies into one following an acquisition that quite frankly has been a nightmare. That's a whole other post. Possibly a book, or an MBA class case study. Seriously. Whoo boy.

I envy people who are able to believe Office Space
is fiction.

Drunkards, guess who is in charge of this shitshow?

My boss and I, purely by serendipity, are like two very oddly shaped jigsaw puzzle pieces that just fit. He is extremely savvy, a strategic thinker, supremely drama-averse, and a master of giving people enough rope to hang themselves. I, on the other hand, am ingenuous, a tactician of the highest order, fascinated by drama, and I deeply distrust the noose otherwise known as "opportunity."

(This is actually a running joke between us...He'll approach me and say, "I have an opportunity for you," which always means I'm about to have some difficult and/or distasteful task offloaded to me. But we both understand the euphemism and acknowledge that I'm banking points every time I run with it, so it's all good.)

We complement each other, and we work together really well. And for better or for worse, he likes to challenge me. So he's made me the acting CEO of Operation Spend $2,000,000. Yeah. Me. Who never had a thousand bucks in the bank until she was in her 50s and who is quite frankly awful at managing people, places, or things.

But super good at nouns.

To my credit, I understand the stakes here: I cannot fail. It's not that I'm too big to fail, like an American bank or airline. It's literally that I'm too small, scared, and insignificant to fail. If I screw this up, I take the fall. And by "the fall," I mean "the ability to pay my rent and my bills, because I'll be screwed like a turtle on its back with no other turtles to show up and flip it over like you see in those adorable videos."

It's not a pretty thought, is it?

I am rising to the challenge, I think? And in the next few posts, with your kind indulgence, I'll outline some of the humorously terrifying (terrifyingly humorous?) ways I'm handling the day-to-day adventure of managing contractors, vendors, landlords, corporate overlords, grumpy co-workers, and one extremely pissed-off custodian who hates my guts.

If you're so inclined, tune in and take notes. There's definitely a TED Talk in here somewhere.

Next up: Mental labor vs. physical labor, and why I'm not good at either.

I've Been Humming "I Am Woman" All Day, You Guys

Today I made lunch for Precocious Daughter and me.

We had tasty swai fillets cooked with fresh ginger and Thai peppers. And sweet, delicious jasmine rice.

Oh, and beans.

BEANS THAT I GREW MYSELF FROM OTHER BEANS.

If you're wondering if I'll ever tire of using this image,
then you don't know me very well.

You guys, I've been harvesting beans from my bean plants for the last few days, blanching them in small batches and bagging them until I had enough to make a couple of servings for me and PDaughter.

Today was the day.

I guess for people who are perennial gardeners and are used to growing their own food, the act of eating something you've raised from a tiny nub is pretty non-dramatic. I mean, seed + water + sun + time = food. No biggie, right?

It's not rocket surgery. Or witchcraft. Nope, not at all.

But I've never grown my own food in my life. And while I'm a decent cook, I rely very strongly on my ingredients to be, you know, tasty, in the way that I expect them to taste. I trust, for example, that when I buy green beans at the store, they've been well raised and harvested at the right time and processed so that they'll be fresh and appropriately bean-flavored when I cook them at home.

Except this time, I raised the beans. And for all I knew, I could have done everything wrong and ended up with some horrible organism that looked like a green bean but tasted like ass and carried typhoid.

Honestly, this did not seem an unlikely outcome when I decided it was time to actually eat the little green bastards over which I'd fretted and toiled since May. I mean, right off the bat, it took me five months to grow two servings of a food that supposedly has a growing cycle of 45 days. I guess the Texas heat had something to do with it, but also it seemed perfectly plausible that I had spawned some kind of death-legume riddled with disease...or at least, not tasty.

PDaughter and I had already agreed that just having beans to harvest counted as a tremendous success, and if they turned out to be inedible it wasn't the end of the world. We would simply scrape them into the garbage disposal and never speak of them again. I didn't mention the part where I would cry into my pillow for a week. I'm the mom, I have to be strong like that.

Fuck off, failure-beans.

I decided to cook them simply: with garlic, butter, salt, pepper, and some slivered almonds. I boiled them for a minutes, then speared one on a fork to taste it.

It was perfection.

One perfect bean.

It was sweet, and tender, and flavorful, and delicious.

My beans were awesome. PDaughter thought so, too.

And when there were a few left over, I saved them for Drummer Boy to try later in the afternoon. I think he liked them, too. He said he did.

But the main thing is, I loved them. I was so proud of my beanie-babies. So proud that I gobbled them up.

Which is totally an appropriate way to show love to a bean. Really.

Anyway, there are still new beans coming up on my plants. I'll keep harvesting and blanching until I have another meal's worth.

I did it, you guys. I grew edible beans.

Probably I can do anything at this point.

Look out, world.

Bean Growing (See What I Did There?)

Real post coming later, you guys.

But I thought you might like an update on MY BEANS.

I have five bean plants growing in a pot on my balcony.

On Saturday they looked like this:

Four days later, they look like this:

My bean plants are kicking ass! At this rate, I figure they'll be about eight feet tall by Independence Day. Give or take.

I'm so thrilled to have not killed my little sproutlings - even Meenie, my special-needs bean, is thriving.

I reckon I'll have enough beans to feed the entire Internet. Assuming this episode of remarkable (and uncharacteristic) green thumbery continues. Does anyone know who the patron saint of beans is? I might to say a novena or something.

More pictures coming as my babies grow.

Birthday Monkeys

I've had a really nice birthday.

I bought myself a bottle of good vodka. I saw (briefly) my sweetheart. I had a very nice visit with my sister (aka my hero).

I was supposed to write a birthday song today.

But that didn't happen.

Instead, I rediscovered something I wrote last fall, when I was on shingles-enforced hiatus from this blog.

I thought I might create an illustrated story about monkeys.

And the I forgot about it.

But I found it on my Google Drive today, and it charmed me the way it charmed me when I first wrote it.

The thing is...I'm not an artist. So the "illustrated" part of my story needs outside intervention.

So I thought I'd start a Kickstarter campaign so that I can entice a professional illustrator to make monkey art for my little story.

And here's where I thought I would include a link to said campaign.

Except that I need to provide some additional details to Kickstarter before they'll publish my campaign. And frankly, I've had too much good quality vodka tonight to jump through all their hoops.

In any event, tomorrow I'll finish crossing the t's and dotting the i's and make my Kickstarter go live.

Do you think you might be willing to contribute a few bucks to help me illustrate a sweet little monkey story?

Absolutely no pressure. But it's a cute little story, and it might make a cute little storybook.

By tomorrow you'll be able to judge for yourself.

And to those of you who wished me a happy birthday...thank you a million times over. I'm so embarrassed. Love you.

Think monkey thoughts until tomorrow, OK?

Yes, Pecan!

This is my last post about Thanksgiving until next year, I promise.

Regular readers know by now that I no longer eat sweets. I didn't give them up, per se; I just stopped wanting (and being able to tolerate) sweet foods. I don't know how it happened, because if I did I'd be writing this on a much more expensive computer...or dictating to my hot, overpaid personal assistant.

photostock/FreeDigitalImages.net

Not too overpaid...wouldn't want him to be able
to afford a shirt.

Anyway, I made a pecan pie for Thanksgiving. Precocious Daughter likes pecan pie, so I made one. I make sweet things all the time, knowing that I won't be eating them. I just put that part of it out of my mind and do it anyway, because I'm so freaking loving and giving that way.

foto76/FreeDigitalImages.net

Also, if you're sewing designer jeans in a Bangladeshi
sweatshop for 12 cents a day, you don't want to think
too much about whether they'd make your butt look good.
It's like that.

But last night, after sitting around digesting a massive turkey dinner for a few hours, I decided I wanted a little something more to eat. And what I decided I wanted was a slice of my pecan pie.

I don't trust pecan pies where the pecans are all
neatly lined up. Seems like witchcraft to me.

I cut myself a small sliver, put it on a plate, and steeled myself for the disappointment of not being able to handle more than one bite.

And then...a miracle occurred.

Sort of like the miracle of Joey Ramone, in that nobody knows
what the hell that has to do with anything, Bono.

My pecan pie was delicious. And I loved every delicious bite. Maybe the nutty topping and the flaky crust balanced out the sweet, gooey filling and made it palatable to me. I don't know. But let me tell you, the second slice was every bit as good as the first.

Probably I should not start baking pecan pies every week. My body is better off without sweets, after all. And I don't actually miss them that much. But I can see me polishing off at least a pie a week, if it continues to taste like heaven in a glass plate the way my Thanksgiving pie did.

Not great for my waistline. Still, it gives me hope for the future.

Hope and change, baby. If that's not something to be thankful for, I don't know what is.

Even Einstein Was No Einstein

I was working on another post tonight. But this message is more important. It's directed at one person, but I'll bet it's true for a lot of you. So it's for you, too.

And also this.

The only real failure is failure to try. I'll never give up on you if you never give up on yourself.

I love you.

That goes for all of you, but especially for one of you.