• Today’s goals: Get registered for ice skating class, get to Sox game by first pitch, try not to strangle anyone due to choking resentment. #
• Quads unbelievably pissed about hilly workout last night. For reals. #
• My god, the line for skating lessons is UNREAL. I got here 15 mins early and i am number 166! #
• They just told us to check the whiteboard THRU THE EVENING to check for classes to fill up. Evening?!?! #
• My god. This is bedlam. Or possibly hell. #
• I wonder if the parents would notice if i started tripping the little angels. #
• I made it thru the signup line! Now i’m in the line to pay. Totally missing the first 2 innings at this point. #
• Oh, and, i finished my book, so now i’m just trapped here in line with my exhausted patience. #

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sorry the blog has been so absurdly neglected (absent the odd moblog now and again) lately. have been somewhat busy this summer. also, twitter has sort of stepped into the role of delivering random missives from sabrina — anything i’d like to remark on, in 140 characters or less. i’ve just switched them around a bit so now rather than having the blog update twitter when i’ve blogged, twitter will update the blog with my tweets.

(ObSnarkyObservation: The pecular dialect of internet and especially Web 2.0 usage is getting more and more self-absorbed. I sincerely doubt that my grandmother could make sense out of that last sentence there, and she’s relatively tech-savvy.)

anyhoo. so some stuff got rearranged at work and i no longer have to wear the very large hat, which is both good and bad. (fewer meetings! less paperwork! lost opportunity to help mentor or guide people in their careers. surprisingly i am much more disappointed by the latter than i thought i would be.) i’ve seen a few movies, none of which have disappointed me yet (which is pretty good for your typical summer flick season). a couple weekends ago, watched the entire fourth series of doctor who in a weekend while knitting (got about 50 rows of lace done in those 11 or 12 or so hours, which is pretty good for me, especially considering i hadn’t quite gotten the pattern down and kept having to rip back 6 rows at a shot). gave very serious thought to buying a new pair of red chucks. did sufficiently punishing labor on the elliptical yesterday that my quads are pretty bitchy with me this morning. have continued to resist the siren call of the jesusphone (chiefly due to massive annoyance at apple’s being a complete dick about micromanaging everything about it) despite having old friends email me out of the blue for advice with theirs because they expect that i was in line on day 1. still like drinking coffee. so, in other words, status quo.

perhaps i shall have some more to say later, but as for now, today is v. busy, tomorrow is packing, thursday is roadtrip for a weekend getaway, and monday is return roadtrip. so we shall see.

• Unexpected fire alarm! 13 flights of stairs down fraught with “is this a drill?” Exciting! #
• Rick Santelli, why have you forsaken us?!?! #
• Questionable shoe review: “…[these] Mary Janes, which despite their textured finish are both fully waterproof and bubblegum scented.” #
• Am currently traumatized by stumbling across http://billeeblue.com/ on public access tv. The show’s even worse than the site. #

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i am a good girl. i have a clothing budget and i try to stick to it. sometimes i fail but this month i have not yet failed. and i wanted SHOES. pretty, pretty shoeses. so i went shoe shopping on zappos.com (who have never let me down in the arena of online shoe shopping). and i found a pair of shoes i loved and that i wanted to take home and pet and call them george and they were so cute and so wonderful and i loved them and i wanted them and i decided to go ahead and buy them and that is why in the two days i took to check over my budget and make sure i really wanted them they sold out.

are they not super fantastic?

and so i decided that i was not going to give up. i searched piperlime and nordstrom and macy’s and all of them had them but not in my size. and i grew despairing and wailed with impotent rage, until i found that … amazon apparently sells shoes. (seriously, who knew.) and they had my size! and they will arrive at chez niqui on tuesday!

SHOES SHOES HAPPY HAPPY PRETTY SHOES DAY TO ME!!!! SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOESSSSSSSSSS!
*beams*

Dear White Sox:

Knock it off, you weenies. I am not amused by your continuing to lose like losing losers. Especially to the damn TWINKIES.

Argh. Minnesota! ARGH!!!

no love,
–sabrina

i have been wanting to get a pressure cooker for a little while, so i can use it to can low-acid foods — things that don’t have enough acid (unlike fruits) have to be processed at a higher temperature than boiling water in order to safely can them, so you have to use a pressure cooker to get the temperature up high enough. anyways, pressure cookers are expensive and i wasn’t quite sure what to do, much less where i would score the money to get one.

so i started scoping out craigslist, and now, poof!, like magic, i have a brand new (to me) 22 qt. pressure cooker in good condition, complete with jar rack and jar lifter, and three boxes of jars to boot!

hooray for people selling old crap they don’t want anymore on craigslist! HOORAY!!!

Dear $RECRUITER,

1. When I respond to your initial cold email with “Please remove me from your mailing list,” the appropriate response is not to re-send that initial cold email with certain sentences removed. You fail at responsible emailing.

2. “I have been trying to reach you for the past few days” — well, obviously you weren’t trying very hard, as I received neither a voice mail nor an email previous to this. You fail at making me feel guilty and thus willing to talk to you.

3. “I would like for an opportunity to get into your calendar as per your availability” — yes, my corporate calendar is on Exchange and that does mean it’s slutty, but c’mon, even it has some standards. You fail at phrasing.

4. “This has reference to the open positions on your company website” — our company web site says “We currently have no open positions.” It’s lying, of course, but that’s only because we’re too lazy to call the web designer. Nonetheless, you’re pretty clearly lying to me here. You fail at not obviously lying.

5. “We have the perfect match resources with the following skill sets mentioned on your company website at a very competitive rate [followed by blank line after blank line].” Perfect match resources? For the nonexistent job postings? Does that mean you in fact have zero resources? Also, I like how you don’t refer to people as people. You fail at pitching.

6. “”[OurCo] is one stop IT Solutions Company. We have helped several organizations such as yours in cutting cost and improving operational efficiencies” [sic].” It’s one stop-IT-Solutions-Company, huh? What exactly is a stop-IT-Solutions-Company? And why would you think I want to stop IT solutions? I like IT solutions. I’d like to see the HVAC guys just try and solve my remote software synchronization issues. You fail at phrasing, again.

7. Your company name is really dippy. I’m pretty sure you just had it made up by a focus group. You fail at naming.

8. Googling your company name reveals that you’re a firm which outsources jobs to India. I have no idea how you decided that my one job posting on Monster — not even currently listed at the moment, by the way — means I am searching to outsource jobs overseas to cut costs. You fail at marketing.

9. You fail a lot, actually.

–sabrina

so my dentist feels that i should probably have come back to have the pain in my teeth investigated some time relatively soon after i had the fillings done. but i felt that going to the dentist only leads to pain, and some pain that could be avoided by simply never eating cold things on the left side of my mouth was better than guaranteed pain (dentist). except i kept forgetting not to eat cold things on the left side of my mouth, and it was getting really really bad, and finally i had no choice but to admit defeat and, after about 18 months, return to the dentist that i’d been so assiduously avoiding. (he’s not a bad dentist; in fact, he’s a pretty good one, and not particularly fearsome. it’s just, tooth maintenance = pain is one of the great inalienable truths of modern life, and i like to weigh in on the side of avoiding pain wherever possible, even if it inevitably leads to being lectured while lying back in a funny chair while a bright lamp shines right in your face.)

words you never like to hear when you’ve gone to the dentist complaining of “extraordinary” sensitivity to cold in one particular tooth: “nurse, get the cold kit out of the freezer!” — not that it was all bad, though. indeed no, the first four or so places he tried were merely slightly cold sensitive. the fifth one had me reflexively curling up in the chair and whimpering, but i didn’t actually knee or kick anyone in the curling, so i figure they got out okay.

in the end, they decided that the fillings i had put in last time were sticking out too far, or something, which led to the teeth being put under pressure, or something, which led to the nerve in one tooth being HEY WAIT A MINUTE QUIT IT ALREADY, or something, so they got the friendly local drill and did a little sanding down, and gave me some sensitive-tooth toothpaste with instructions to let it really sink in… and then they made me my next appointment so i can’t get away again. tricksy dentistses, hurts precious, yesss. :( (but at least they didn’t mention having any more fillings put in — hah!)