the everyday adventures of sabrina

I Hate My Job.
I Hate My Job.
I Hate My Job.
I Hate My Job.
I Hate My Job.
yyp ad nauseum.

stayed home sick from work today. haven’t actually felt particularly well since last week some time, i think — nagging low headache, sore throat, suspicious aches — and today was filled with an expanded amount of malaise so i just gave up and stayed home.

of course i couldn’t stand to stay in the house all day so finally around lunchtime i decided to go for a short walk around downtown, despite my middle-class white-girl guilt complex that if i’m too ill to be at work i’m too ill to be anywhere but my bed. picked up my new contacts, which i’d been putting off for a while. then stopped off at the library on the way home. i like the library, but i never get to visit it because — and i don’t understand this — the harold washington library has ridiculous hours. closing at 6 PM on weekdays: it’s stupid. it’s the main branch of the chicago public library; really, i don’t feel that it’s asking too much to stay open until at least 8. so i went to the library. sick enough to stay home from work for fear of inadvertently breathing germs in the general direction of my coworkers, but the arts reference open stacks are fair game. i’m a hypocrite, i suppose, but at least i’m up-front about it.

still feel like crap, but now i feel like crap and i have a book, so i figure i’m doing all right really.

i got far too much spam over this weekend. someone should totally fire the puremessage admin.

oh, wait.

*facepalm*

it is 64°F in my office. i did finally remember to bring a sweater hoodie in, so i’m wearing that over my t-shirt, but i’m still cold. stupid workplace crack-addled HVAC system. i find it somewhat disturbing that i should have to order a space heater from the office manager because the a/c is consistently cranked up so high that i have to run to the ladies’ john to run hot water over my hands just so i can type.

also, everyone’s out of the office today. it feels like it’s just me here. sure, there are other people here and there in their offices, but nobody that i actually work with is here. it’s depressingly lonesome.

i wonder if it would feel less lonesome if i wasn’t so cold?

…oh, and my mom’s surgery got bumped ’til tuesday. someone at the hospital apparently clued in that maaaaaybe they shouldn’t take non-critical cases in when there’s a hurricane taunting the region and there might be some actual emergent cases to deal with. way to work that out, medical professionals!

the house i own in texas is in an area which is expected to graciously welcome hurricane rita (or what remains of it) sometime saturday-night/sunday-morningish.

and my mom’s going in for gallbladder surgery tomorrow morning, which should kick her out of the hospital just in time to have the storm all up in her face.

i’m not feeling stressed and out-of-sorts, no no.

my desk phone is not a fax machine. i really wish you would catch on to that.

love,
sabrina.

nicely done last night, joe crede!

now, just everybody don’t let buehrle fuck off for six innings again, rowand please work hard on sucking less, and someone please tell me why we didn’t get mccarthy back a week ago instead of waiting until thursday’s game.

three somethings, actually:

first off, the easy one: the two-tasselled hat, from hip to knit. this is actually my second try at this hat — the first time, i had this gorgeous, gorgeous, amazingly soft, fabulous yarn, an alpaca/mohair blend, deep maroon, so nice … and so soft that the design virtually disappeared. (that is, incidentally, the project i spent my most recent day at the mechanic’s working on. — cast on to ready to bind off, except i wasn’t sure i wanted to finished it, in four hours!) so, this time i made it in some lamb’s pride bulky in a blood red i’d had left over from making my jayne cobb hat, together with a ball of beautiful loft merino bulky-weight yarn, to achieve the super-chunky weight the pattern called for.

flat, so you can see my sexxxy cables!

and as modeled by my lovely candleholder, so you can see how it might look actually on my head.

but one project was not enough for me, so i finished off another item, which i cannot post because i’m hoping that it might be something knitty would be interested in posting. so i shall simply say that i made it out of some yarn my friend kim and i kool-aid dyed, and it has potential to be cute once it’s blocked but at the moment it looks a bit like an easter-colored cloche for a 12-year old.

and the last FO, or “finished object” to you non-knitters out there (and non-soapers as well — i must say that “FO” in a context where it blatantly did not mean “fragrance oil” confused me pretty well for a bit there), is this messenger-style bag, also felted.

flipped up the flap there so you can appreciate my mad kool-aid dyeing skillz, although photoshop appears to have eaten some of the color intensity.

as felting (washing knit wool items in hot water to make them shrink and get fuzzy) allegedly results, i am told, in 15-25% shrinkage, i made the strap extra long for this bag. before felting, you can see in this photo, the bag actually comes to my knee:

(dig my fuzzy flannel pjs? they’re, much like my tasselled hat, sexxxy!)

after felting, the bag portion of the bag was marvellous and perfect in its shrunken size and fuzziness, but the strap remained… generous, we shall say:

it’s above the knee now… but not by a whole lot.
(the cats saw the camera out and naturally assumed that their respective presences were required for assistance.)

so i’m going to have to, i think, cut the strap and sew it down to make it shorter, as i don’t really like the tie-a-knot-in-it look. alas. it’s particularly perturbing because i had actually run out of the kool-aid yarn and ended up ripping much of the flap in order to retrieve enough yarn to make the strap — and you thought that maroon color block was just me being fashionable and clever, didn’t you? — and i could have had at least another row in color on the flap if i’d shortened the strap. though i do think it turned out pretty cute, all things considered.

so that was my weekend. and now i’ve got no WIPs to work on, just new things to start out working on. er, well, choose to start working on … i have so many things to do and i don’t know which is next. but, Stitch ‘n Pitch is at sox park tuesday and i’ve got to have something to knit on while My Guys are showing cleveland that sorry, this is not their Major League year. so many things to knit, so little attention span to choose which ones!

but it served its purpose, as now i can use tags instead of writing shit out. HOORAY!!!

friday five:

1. Who is your mobile phone provider, and how many minutes are in your plan?
cingular, who bought out at&t wireless, and with whom i’m less happy despite the “evil empireness” of attws (and besides, i’d have to say that SBC^WCingular are just as empirey and certainly rather evil). i have no idea how many minutes are on my plan. a bunch. also unlimited internet access, for my laptop.

2. What program do you primarily use for instant messaging?
aim, for personal chatting, for no particular reason. jabber, at work, because we’re required to use it. jabber clients apparently all suck.

3. Who do you send and receive text messages from most?
oh, various friends. dan and rachel, i guess.

4. What area code do you live in?
312. though my mobile’s in 847, just because i’ve had it for years and years and i got it when i was working in skokie.

5. What year did you first get an e-mail address and do you still use it?
fall 1992, and no — bradley.edu!heartland!sdownard’s been dead for years.

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in other recent quiz results, i am most like “Charlie” on The West Wing, i am merino wool, and i have a high IQ. but we knew that already!

Cingular!

i forgot to actually make this post readable, back in, uh, May.

it’s probably incomplete and that’s why i never posted it, but, meh. i was tired of it being the only post in the /main/mustang category, and wanted to consolidate the mustang under /main/hobbies anyways.

oh: weekend before last, some minor work was done. the carb’s already pulled off, but we pulled out the old battery (entire battery shelf enclosure is rusted out, going to need to replace that), pulled the ignition coil, distributor and cap, all the spark wires, and some other stuff. next steps are to get rid of stepbrother mark’s engine that’s been sitting gathering dust for like four years in dad’s garage — it’s some GM thing (a 305 maybe? god knows what it came out of) that i don’t think anyone’s even pretending mark cares about rebuilding anymore — so we can use the “engine rotisserie,” as i fondly refer to the stand. pull the engine out, pull the valve covers off, and get at the heads. no doubt this will require the world’s largest vat of WD-40. man, i love WD-40. most useful general-purpose household and mechanical lubricant ever invented. i hope someone got a nobel prize for science for that stuff.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain!
— Arthur Weasley in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

i need to buy the shop manual for my car. i never got around to buying it. i know, i know. and now my front driver’s side window regulator is … sort of doing its own thing. it mostly goes down when i tell it to, and it mostly goes up when i tell it, but sometimes it takes multiple repetitions of the instruction, and sometimes it changes its mind mid-movement and either stops or, more frequently, outright changes direction. it’s been happening more and more frequently. i tried to have the mechanic look at it a couple of weeks ago when i took it in for a tune-up, but the twits scheduled me too late in the day — which is a story for the next paragraph — and they never got to it.

so, i had scheduled the maintenance for a friday, and since it’s way out in suburbia and i was going to have to sit there the entire time (no car loaners, and even if i’d gotten one i’d have taken two of the four hours of the maintenance just driving back and forth from the dealership), i asked for an afternoon appointment. noon, 12PM, for what they estimated to be a four-hour service. okay, fine.

until i showed up at 11:45, and i was infomed that the service guys were at lunch from 12 to 1, and they weren’t sure they’d be able to complete my scheduled service before 5 when they go home (the service department is “open” until 7, which is a cruel and infuriating lie — i’m sure they mean that you can pick up your car until 7, but bog help you if you want any work done after 5), much less look into my two other issues, the window and the squeak in my rear left suspension. you mean i showed up at noon so that i could sit on my ass for an hour while your mechanics are at lunch, and you’re not even sure you can “get to me” before they go home because the appointment was so late in the day? you go to hell — you go to hell and you die, mike haggerty volkswagen!

so i sat down as they finished playing Jaws and then played it again on the DVD player (i don’t even like Jaws), listened to my Eragon audiobook while i knit. i had brought my laptop and DVDs of my own to watch, but i’d forgotten the damned power adapter so i couldn’t plug in, and using the DVD would run the battery down too quickly, and they refused to play my DVDs despite me being the only person in the waiting room because apparently the dealership owner is “very picky” and quantum leap (“is this PG?” quantum leap? are you shitting me? it’s just about as freaking G-rated as a prime-time tv show in 1989 could be! all it needed to be more child-friendly was a talking animal!) isn’t pre-approved for waiting room non-offensiveness (but we can shred beachgoers, that’s all right). so i sat, and i knitted, and i listened, and i occasionally muttered “we’re gonna need a bigger boat” sarcastically to myself in my head.

anyways, they finally came and got me — turns out, i magically did make the deadline before the guys went home, which is a good thing because i was prepared to be pissed if i’d taken a day off work to go sit in a dealership waiting room while they didn’t even fix my car because their scheduling people are morons, but they only got to look at the mysterious squeak (they replaced my rear brakes and cut the rotors down, which they thought was the cause of the squeak, but it turns out, not so much — they said they checked and it was okay, but i still think it’s the suspension), not look at my wack-ass window regulator.

so, fuck it, i’m going to buy the manual and see about fixing it my own damn self. i’m not afraid of no steenkin’ power regulator which is probably a module that snaps into the electrical system somewhere. i have my own metric wrenches and i am not afraid to use them.

we have spent all day intermittantly (a) blocking ips in ipf and (b) cleaning crap out of the mail exchangers’ queues as someone dumps thousands of dictionary-attack addressed phish scams on us, totally killing the poor directory server with sheer volume of queries.

*spit*

irony: if they would deliver their phish more slowly, we totally wouldn’t care (‘cos it’d be trapped by the spam filter).

when i can’t have my favorite spam, i do at least appreciate the truly well-randomized ones:

Date: Fri, 09 Sep 2005 05:03:27 +0300
From: Josefina Crabtree <hzrvddag@yahoo.com>
Subject: fw :

Internet in 1837 It’s O.K. Harry Potter

Can you help me? in 1951

O.K.!!