I may have mentioned that the doctor told me I have "anxious bladder" - that's why, supposedly, with the Zoloft I'm able to sleep through the night and not get up to go to the bathroom (unless I've drunk quite a lot). Can you imagine what "anxious bladder" means when faced with an interview? I had to pee a half hour before the interview, I had to pee right before the interview, and even so I felt as though I had to pee DURING the interview. Yeah. :)

This morning, in total contravention of all my intentions re the 'spare' room (between the bathroom and the hall) becoming the exercise room (you can see my weights and foam roller stacked behind the chair), I did my stretching in the kitchen. Mostly because I wanted to start out with dancing to get my blood moving, and that's where there's the most space. I chose "The Great Curve," by the Talking Heads, as it was the first really long song I found that I thought would be good to dance to, and it did serve the purpose of moving my blood. :) I'm still sweating. I read the other day that itchy legs when out in the cold is caused by capillaries in the skin being unused to working, therefore if you do aerobic exercise more often you won't get that as much. Weird. Not that I should really need more reason to get aerobic exercise than that it's good for the heart and lungs.

Tomorrow is my Uncle's memorial service, so I'll be getting up early and taking a long drive. I was hoping to convince myself to do some baking today so I'd have something to take with me as an offering for the family get-together and also so I would have something I could eat. However... yeah. For some reason I could not get myself to bake. OH! I just remembered someone told me about a new gluten free bakery in Portland, on Forest Ave. I wonder if I'd be able to find that this morning before work if I left right away? I guess I'll be going! Erm, anyhow, will be good to see family and especially Florida Auntie, who I called the other day. Man, can she talk. I was on the phone at least an hour and barely got twenty words in. :)

Yesterday was my interview for the higher level training position. Pheobe advised me to review my resume and practice some of the sorts of questions that people ask in interviews. Personally I can never imagine what those might be, they always take me by surprise. I nearly always have walked out of interviews going, "what kind of a question was THAT, for heaven's sakes!?" So, I tried to prepare. My idea of preparation was to take a dose of Zoloft the day before (which was supposed to be my off day, if I'm weaning myself down), sleep late the day of the interview, and floss my teeth. We shall see!

If I don't get it I hope Skipper does. Or PC. I just hope KA doesn't get it - there's something off about that kid. He always seems to talk a good game and have all the book answers, but I get the impression that his understanding in the situation, something about his comprehension, is lacking. Maybe it's just that he's young and cocky. Skipper used to be a flight instructor, and was a fighter pilot in Vietnam. HardCore* was quite surprised by that, as he said he always had the impression that fighter pilots are all alpha dogs, but Skipper is one of those beta wolves - he may have been alpha in his time, but now he's content being the experienced consultant.

It was a hair-raising interview. During the second part of it I was given a topic and had to organize a presentation in 20 minutes. Oddly, I actually think I did much better on that part of the thing. I'm glad I hadn't known about that in advance; I would have freaked. Honestly, I'm not at all positive that I want the position. I get the impression that Pheobe stresses. But it would mean mid-day hours, and maybe I could get more sleep that way. Although granted, getting to sleep before 11 is difficult with our upstairs neighbors. Last night they left a huge fan going in their bedroom (it sounded like a single engine prop plane) - they've been having a lot of renovations done up there, so something was curing I guess - and had sex loudly and for a long time in their living-room, which is right over our bedroom. And them having sex is really not something I want to think about, let alone be entertained by.

--------------------

*HardCore has left us! I should have posted about his going away party, last Thursday, but for some reason I've been just so inconsistent about writing anything, lately. I'll miss him. *sigh* His name was still on the manning report on Tuesday. :P Although he sounded almost like he meant it when he said we should get together.

Aquatic deer and ancient whales

Isn't she cute? In a sort of tiny, vicious way. Are those her little fangs, sticking down? (At least I'm guessing it's a she, because they mention having caught a pregnant female.)

...a little more weeding, then went to the Farmer's Market in Portland and got dill and three different thyme plants (all creeping varieties, but with white, purple and lavender flowers) which we think we'll plant in areas we just weeded as a ground cover, and later toured the back yard a little and realized that there's bamboo encroaching. Crap. I guess I know what I'll be doing. Forever. I'm sure my neighbors would not be pleased with me if I used the salted earth method, but that's the only way to get rid of bamboo, from what I've read. Just kill the crap out of everything and let it be dead for a few years.

Had some sun before and between two absolutely drenching thunderstorms, but it wasn't raining during the fireworks in the evening so I'm sure the crowd was happy. We discovered we could see the fireworks from our bedroom window if we stand on our bed, and we watched for a few minutes.

A partial list of what we got at the booksale last weekend... at least, so we think. It could be everything, but it doesn't seem like it's enough.

Familar Quotations - John Bartlett
Hunter of Worlds - C.J. Cherryh
Annals of the Time Patrol - Poul Anderson
The Day's Work - Rudyard Kipling
Time and Stars - Poul Anderson
Metropolis - Thea Von Harbou
Three Men In A Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
Parable of the Sower - Octavia E. Butler
Six Gun Planet - John Jakes
Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat - Harry Harrison
Memory - Louis McMaster Bujold
A Passage to India - E. M. Forster
Left Hand of the Electron - Isaac Asimov
Ringworld Throne - Larry Niven
You're Only Old Once - Dr. Seuss

Yesterday we had some four or five hours of sun, and everyone was outside being joyful. I'm positive that the beaches were crowded; the upstairs neighbor told me she would be going. We gardened, so now I'm the proud possesor of a tramp-stamp sunburn. :) Short shirts and bending over in the sun to weed means a stripe of red just above the waist band of the pants. We're still sore from the work.

Now off to Portland, where I have arrainged to get rid of the locks we changed out from the doors when we moved in.

Yeah, these are not actually what you'd call scones. They're gummy. The guy at Sun Oriental Market warned me that glutinous rice powder is too gummy for bread, but I've used it before in cornbread, so I figured it would work. Maybe it's the way I cooked the oats.

I'm going to eat them, though, because I didn't eat anything else. And hey, they're oats. And maybe it's just because I'm so damned hungry, but they taste okay.

Guess what? It's raining. Not heavy misting or light drizzled, but more of a heavy drizzle with occational pour. How long has this wet weather been going on? How long is it going to go on? I don't really mind it, myself, but it's getting people down, and it's really not right for this time of year around here. And there's no climate change going on at all, just ask the conservatives.

This morning I've taken this recipe for Scottish Oat Scones:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Scottish-Oat-Scones/Detail.aspx?prop31=3
And tweaked it...

Of course I'm using a substitute for wheat flour - a mix of potato starch & flour, tapioca flour and glutinous rice flour. And then it calls for rolled oats, but I wanted to use the steel cut. Regular rolled oats take five minutes to cook in water for breakfast cereal, but the steel cut oats I have had a 30 minute cooking time. So... I cooked them as if I were making regular oatmeal (and didn't quite make it to a half hour, I think, because I was afraid if I tried they'd just be dried out lumps on the bottom of the pan), and then put the oatmeal into the scone recipe.

I thought that with that much water (in the oatmeal) it would need less milk, but it seemed to need just as much to be able to pick up and form into balls. However, 15 minutes cooking time doesn't seem to have been near enough, they're still quite soft and whilte. I'm giving them a few more minutes to see if I can get some browning.

If this works I'll be amazed.

Have arrainged for the disposal of our excess clothes hangers. It involves meeting a stranger in a coffee shop. Sounds rather clandestine, doesn't it? "You'll know me. I'll be carrying 120 coat hangers."

Oh, I forgot! I got myself some steel-cut oats, the type that take a half hour of simmering to cook. I got them because I wanted to make cookies or scones or something nice, lumpy, foodlike and baked (but not overly sweet) to munch on with tea. But, the only recipe I've found thus far was on the back of another steel cut oats package which claimed you could cook their product in only five minutes, yet gave no explanation as to how this was possible. If those oats cook in five minutes, though, I'm not sure I could use exactly the same recipe for the ones which take a half hour. Possibly I could, but just leave them soaking overnight in the fridge? Anyhow, I didn't buy that package, I bought the half-hour type. Which were much more expensive. Mainly, I suppose, I bought them because they had the lovely tin. I figured even if I didn't buy more oats to refill the tin, I'd like to use it for something else.

Anyway, my point being: Share with me your recipes for baked goods made with steel cut oats!

Whi is it that sometimes Firefox asks me if I want to save the tabs I'm working with and sometimes it just warns me that I'm about to close all my tabs? Is there any way to encourage it or fool it into letting me save the tabs for my next session?

Saturday we had Indian food and ice cream with Littleredhead and Groundctrl - which seems to have become our yearly tradition around the Curtis Library Book Sale in Brunswick. Always awesome; my only regret of the day was having to part from them.

But part we did, so that we could go on to accomplish Many Things, which mostly involved buying stuff for the new place... starting with a few CDs at Bull Moose Music. :) So now we have second hand Led Zepplin (Physical Graffiti, which both Eor and I used to have copies of and lost) and Shonen Knife (Genki Shock - a completely random pick of mine because they had a song on there called "S*P*A*M" and I want to know if that's a cover of "Spam" by Save Ferris). (At the book sale we got some Weird Al Yankovic and Soul Music as read by Tony Robinson, along with... well, a LOT of books. I can't list them off, but I know I went through the Sci-Fi section like a tornado.)

My unruly memory has also made a blur of what we bought and what we've been getting done, but I know it's a lot. I know we didn't get home until 7pm on Saturday, with armloads of stuff, and we stayed in mostly on Sunday, getting things put away and sorted out, erecting more shelves, etc. Slowly this place grows more like a home.

Today is my final day for getting the old place cleaned, so I have to be motivated and organized. A lot to ask, seeing as I did 'motivated' all day yesterday, and doing it two days in a row is usually completely out of the question for me.

The 'music' listed below is actually a lie, at this point - it's what I was listening to Saturday night when I started this post. Then I realized it was 10pm and I was falling asleep.

All sitting around in the breakroom this evening watching Larry King talk about Michael Jackson on CNN...

Me: Is it just me or when he said how sad this was, did he seem as though he was barely keeping from laughing?
Moose: I think you're right.
Larry King: He loved people, he loved children, he loved little boys...
All: *nearly fall over laughing*
(various): Almost to a fault!
Moose: Kids, put your pants on and dial 911!
Three minutes later, Mainertoo walks into the room.
Mainertoo: What are you all still doing here? You don't want to go home, you want to see more pictures of Michael?
Moose: You missed the best part! *relates the 'little boys' line*
Mainertoo: He did not say that.
Moose: He did!
Mainertoo: He did NOT say that!
All, in chorus: He DID!

My theory is Michael just wanted to upstage Farrah Fawcett.

I liked jigsaw92301's entry for today. He got all four of his wisdom teeth out, an experience I had two years ago.

HardCore will be done July 3rd - he got a job with the government agency which follows up complaints about employment practices, so he'll be investigating and confronting businesses about how they treat their workers, and will get to work from home when he's not actually visiting the job sites. (It amuses me that the government enforces such things in the private sector but not for their own workers.)

Duffy's application for the air traffic controller job has finally gone through (it's been at least a year, probably longer) so he'll be leaving to go to school, first, and then will be going back to California, where he went to high school (and, I think, a year of college before he got sick). He'll be reporting there August 5th, I believe, so I imagine he'll be done a few days before that - probably the last week of July.

It sucks to lose people I really like, and two within a month... bleh.

Another girl is leaving, too, but I hardly had time to get to know her. She's getting a job with a college, and somehow it's been worked out (or possibly she's just hopeful) that she'll start in housekeeping but move to Security. Apparently their campus Security gets paid better than we do and gets better benefits, as well as a considerably reduced tuition for classes. I should possibly consider this, though a government job is at least fairly stable in these uncertain times. Maybe when the economy turns up again I'll consider making such a move. Put that on my long term to do list.

I realize I'm being completely scatterbrained, but I when I reposted my quickly written little entry from yesterday to my family group I added some more stuff, so figured I might as well repost that stuff here as well...

Previously years when we'd been up Katahdin there'd been so much cloud cover that we couldn't even see how far we were from the top. This time we not only got to the top, we went a little way out on the Knife's Edge just to look at it, before we decided we were out of time and had to start back.

One of the reasons we started back quicker than we might have and pushed ourselves a little hard at first was to catch up with a father and his 9 yr old daughter who had come up Abol trail and were going down Hunt trail. Matt realized that they might have trouble going down over the Iron Ladder not having seen it previously - it's much easier if you went over it on the way up so you know what to expect. They appreciated our help, and the girl did not want to let us out of her sight after that - I think she was afraid she wouldn't make it out without guides. :)

Washington subway crash kills 9, dozens injured
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090623/ts_nm/us_usa_trains_14
"...one train was stopped waiting to get the order to pass. ... The next train came up behind it and, for reasons that we do not know, collided into the back of that train,"

How much do you want to bet the trailing train driver was either on her cell phone or texting? Because this is almost identical to the crash in Boston last year (maybe longer ago?) for the same reasons. Well, for that one they said that she wasn't on her cell at the exact moment of the crash, but she'd just ended a call. NOBODY should be operating ANYTHING while on a cell, imho!

The trip was good, and I can't believe neither of us has blogged about it, yet! I thought Eor would, but all he wrote was about books he read. Probably hoping to sit down and do it all justice at some point in the near future. We made it to the top! Thursday was a beautiful day for hiking, perfect temperature, not even too much wind.

Friday, when it poured buckets, we were safely snug in our camper. Saturday we hoped to go for a flatland walk, but it continued raining and then we ran out of drinking water, so we came home. And Eor immediately threw himself into doing stuff for the new place - shopping for curtains and other stuff we needed (we now have a LOT of glasses, because I had broken all we used to have).

Sunday was more of the same, with him putting up curtains and shelving brackets (and managing to hit his head rather painfully on one) and me running out to exchange curtains he didn't like and track down a particular style he wanted which is in short supply (Battenburg), and cooking chicken parm, and both of us doing a lot of laundry and dishes.

So we now have curtains everywhere but on the front door, which is great! This makes me feel a lot better as far as people looking in (I was feeling a bit like I lived in a fishbowl). The front door is still a bit of a problem. It's got the top and bottom rods, but we can't find any curtains with top and bottom rod pockets which are 31in apart. Wouldn't matter if we had a door, or even a curtain, across the doorway of our bedroom, but if I walk around the end of the bed on my side people could potentially see me from the road. It's hard to remember that when you're getting dressed in the morning!

I'd better get going, now. I have a dr's appointment at 1:30 and hoped to get the cleaning done in the old place this morning. Am dragging ass. Have made apple cinnamon muffins, put away dishes, scrubbed some things that the dishwasher didn't get clean, and started another load of laundry, but in fact have not been as productive as I would have preferred. Have, however, got pretty far into a book called "Corrupting Dr. Nice," (by John Kessel) which is turning out to be a lot more fun than I expected. It's completely crazy sci-fi about time travel with a very Jane Austen style romance woven in.

Also, my Mom has started posting old family photos with notations about who is who, which I'm really excited about!

Apparently last night's discomfort (read 'repeated bouts of whimpering in pain on the bathroom floor waiting to throw up') was heartburn. I've now bought myself some Maalox in fear of that ever happening again. Eor thinks that stuff doesn't work, but if there had been anything at all I could have tried last night, I would have. Goat milk apparently did the trick for me, after a quart of it.