Planning ahead (not)

As usual, it is the night before I leave on a trip and I am still puttering around and packing at some ungodly hour. Oops.

Oh well. I don't have much to do in the morning except get myself to EWR and then the correct gate, since I've already checked in online and printed out my boarding pass. Once I'm seated, I can pretty much pass out on the plane.

On the other hand, you could say that I'm not really spectacularly late -- Oh no, I am merely adjusting my body clock to Vegas time, where it is a mere 1am, prime time on The Strip.

Actually, I didn't do too badly during the day cleaning away stuff (I can see the floor in the living room now!) until I went to meet my friend Jen (belated birthday dinner) and then my friend Laura (preemptive goodbye drinks, as she is leaving for the Foreign Service before I get back from Vegas). Those activities did rather take up, oh, 7 hours (but they were VISE -- Very Important Social Engagements). The MTA didn't deposit me back on my doorstop until almost 11:30pm.

Speaking of goodbyes, I thought I'd bookend this post with photos of the late Frontier Casino (RIP).

Time to go finish packing and taking care of various odds & ends.

Back on Saturday morning. Bye!

Viva Las Vegas!

Friday was my last day in the office for 5 weeks -- woohoo! So okay, I stayed till 10pm finishing up projects and closing out all of my 1st quarter billing, but I didn't really mind since I am outta there! (Did I mention I won't be in the office for 5 weeks?)

On Sunday, I am off to Vegas with my friend Sam and his sister Sarah. I will also get to meet his dad (!) who has decided to join us in our revelry. Hmmm... It'll be nice to see Sarah again though, as she is no longer paid by her employer to gallivant down from Boston for work (i.e., that particular client engagement ended & I think her current project is in...Cleveland? Not sure, but I'll find out this week).

It's been so long since it was warm (what DOES 73 degrees fell like again?) that I wound up calling my friend Margaret to ask about appropriate clothing. The ironic thing is that both Vegas and HK has the same temp, but with diametrically opposing levels of humidity. Oh boy.

So as part of finding appropriate clothing, I was digging through my warm weather gear and discovering many dresses and tops which will join the pile of shorts destined to get the hell out of my home, probably in another vast haul. Last time I dragged 4 giant sacks of clothes to Housing Works, and 4 even larger sacks to Bottomless Closet (plug, plug, plug -- I really like them AND they make it easy to contribution, unlike some places).

Last night (and this morning, and pretty much any time lately) my laptop is running so freakishly slow that I am losing my mind. There is even a lag as I MOVE MY CURSOR. I fear that I have picked up lots of damn computer cooties. I hate it, and wonder if the Geek Squad will clean out my 'puter for me when I come back from HK. I've already looked up some of the gazillion processes and killed several (no, I do not need the Dell Media Experience running in the background ALL THE TIME) but still...hate it. Hate the lag.

When my mom called this morning at 9am (why do moms never wait till, say, 11am??) and woke me up, I was thirsty so I staggered out through the living room and into the kitchen for a glass of water and my living is a freaking mess. As in: where is the floor? Are there any horizontal surfaces left? I hate it. (Apparently I hate lots of things this morning.) Must go attack living room now. Argh.

Must remember to breathe deeply...

...and not panic about my upcoming schedule: 2 more days in the office --> Vegas for a week, for a long-planned jaunt with my friends Sam & Sarah (and their dad!) --> back home for ONE day --> leave for Hong Kong for 4 weeks. EEK!

The office loaner laptop I received for the trip is ancient and has (wait for it...) 256MB of RAM. Hold me back!

It also lacks any Chinese language recognition software so I will haul it back tomorrow (today) for our IT gal (NOT a guy! Ha!) to install it. She has also granted me permission to install my beloved third party apps (Palm desktop, image editing software, etc.) as long as they all magically evaporate before I return said laptop to her in May.

Ironically, Vegas and HK have very similar air temps...with diametrically opposed humidity levels. Vegas: 18%. Hong Kong: 81%. Oh boy. Well, at least it's not August, as with my last business trip there.

The following story was sent to me by my possible future boss, who's currently quarantined in Beijing:

Cub Scout splittists

(you can't MAKE this stuff up)

Just in case we need a reminder that China is a country with ALL media controlled by the government, the net connections for him & his wife have "mysteriously" gone down a lot this week...hmmm, so if I send him an e-mail with the word "Tibet" in it, will his computer blow up entirely? (assuming he even gets said e-mail).

Speaking of which, I desperately need to finish seaming and knitting the buttonband for this baby sweater for their baby girl before I see them in HK...a fine use of various oddballs I had (Cascade Sierra Quattro), some oddball contributions from a friend or two, and okay, maybe ONE purchase (the pink skein).

Come to think of it, I should go party with my ballwinder again for the pink skein. (Ever since my friend Margaret pointed out that "ballwinder" sounds vaguely lewd, I feel faintly embarrassed using the term.)

I'm all out (gah!)

...of shorts. Started going through my closet today, preparing some clothing for (could it be? do I even remember?) warm weather, since I'll be in Vegas on vacation next week, and then in sub-tropical Hong Kong for a month. And I've discovered that EVERY. Single. Pair. Is. TOO. LARGE. Agh!

Skorts, shorts, skirts -- there's an ever growing pile of discarded, destined for Housing Works, clothing accumulating next to my bedroom door. I stopped counting after 8. And my favorite pair of turquoise cotton shorts....wah!

I know, I know -- it's a luxury problem. But I am out of shorts. I wonder if Century 21 is selling resort wear yet...if so, I sense a lunchtime sprint.

Today at lunch, I ran off to C21 for a leather passport cover. Now normally I pooh-pooh such frippery, but the new microchipped passports come with an entire set of care instructions: not, too hot, not wet, don't bend, etc. etc. And the covers are now stiff, like hardback books, and no longer flexible like those old bank books. They've also moved the photo in a page, instead of on the inside/p. 2/ so a cover is actually feasible now. I'm trying to find a nice leather cover that's also long enough to hold the boarding pass.

Yes, I discovered that my previous (old) passport would have expired on April 5th, while I would be in Hong Kong (oops) so my employer (a) paid the now $100 fee (!!!) for a renewal, and (b) paid the dunno-how-much fee to expedite the application.

Right now, I'm going to hide from all of my cranky-making problems by watching my Tivoed premiere episode of Dancing With The Stars.

I love my ballwinder

...but can I say that this stil took me a freakin' long time to do?

I'm going to bed now.

Yes, it's true -- I'm still alive

Life has been very eventful since last I posted -- I'm now single (end of my 2 year relationship in October -- coincidentally, shortly after our 2 year anniversary...), joined Weight Watchers and lost 30 lbs...(resulting in vast donations to Bottomless Closet, an excellent charity where my now swimmingly large suits went to find good homes), and my friend Margaret has gotten married and moved to Seattle (SOB!), and many other changes...but those would be the most notable.

After Art and I broke up, I joined WW, rejoined NYSC (M, W, Sat), and started taking ceramics classes again on Tuesday nights. This left me with not a lot of time or inclination to knit. Oops.

So when I finally finished a garter stitch tank top made of Tahki Willow in a lovely shade of rose, and discovered that it was GIGANTIC (and this was before I lost 30 lbs.) I just didn't have the heart to rip out the whole thing:

Well, the time has come. I've been getting the urge lately to pick up my knitting needles again, and one of the things that's crossed my mind is, "Gee, that Willow is really a beautiful yarn..."

And so, last night, while watching (well, while having it play in the background) my Tivo'd copy of Omen III: The Final Conflict (which is relaly laughably bad, BTW -- but then, very few things from 1981 have aged well, except Sam Neill...yum), I ripped out the entire sweater. Sigh.

It now awaits a date with my ballwinder, once it has finished drying.


In the meantime, I am working on a new baby sweater for my co-worker Shirley in HK, who had a baby boy in January.

Why so diligent for a distant colleague, you ask? Well, I will be working in the HK office for almost all of April, so perhaps a baby gift would be good.

Also, as a back up gift, I have ordered some t-shirts from my favorite rude baby gift shop, T Shirt Hell, a site so raunchy, the server at work blocks it and gives me a nastygram if I try to access it from the office. HA!

I also offered to wind my co-worker Sally's stash of New Zealand wool since I bought a ballwinder (for $20 on sale!) last year and just love the damn thing. I'm not sure why she asked her friend to buy her wool while in NZ, since Sally says she is allergic to wool (this would include while knitting, no?) but hey, I am certainly NOT the one to be pointing fingers about stash building...

Many more projects (and events) to catch up on from the past year, but I need to actually go do some knitting now, before I have dinner with my friend Laura...or at least go wind some yarn so I can feel vaguely productive -- shopping on ebay for my HK trip & clothes that actually fit me does NOT count as being productive in my mind.

(I'm remembering why I took a hiatus from this thing, as it is a VAST TIME SUCK.)