Zombie food

This poor beastie (an appropriate symbol considering my alma mater's mascot) really captures the way I feel these days, so much so that I am contemplating adding a new label/tag category to the blog: STRESS (a/k/a, the opposite of my RTBT). I was so frazzled that tonight I left the office, walked across the passageway to our neighboring building (soon to be sealed off by its new owners, presumably), walked down the hall (in other words, I walked 2 city blocks) and was waiting for the elevator before I realized that I had left my MetroCard on my desk... along with my card key. This meant that not only could I not get on the subway to go home, but I couldn't get back in the office to retrieve the cards either!

So I went back and started dialing for dollars: calling various people in the analysts' group next door, hoping they were still there, so that they could let me in.

Yep, really doing well these days. (I even forgot to take a photo of the dinner I made for my sweetie & myself last night: sausage and sweet currants with whole wheat pasta, an event I thought would never happen, says Ms. Food Photophile [is that even a word?])

I feel like a pseudo-victim of a zombie attack, since it feel like someone has eaten my brains. "BRAINS!" (gobble, slobber, burp -- for more vivid descriptions of gore, check out the zombie world trilogy by David Wellington; I've only read the middle one, Monster Island, courtesy of the public library, and I'm working up the nerve to read the others... maybe on his website, where he's posted them in serialized format... hmmm... )

Now where was I? Oh yes, besides my mom's health scare, and my unnerving confrontation with her mortality -- (sure she's healthy [er, sorta, for 80] but 80 is not a number to be blase about like, say, 60 ) -- one of my coworkers was wiped out by a bug for a week (tiny microbes: 5, Big Mike: 0) leading to a wee bit of stress on our cut to the bone team, especially with all of the new planning projects landing on our desks (i.e., they're doing planning, so we're doing vast amounts of research for each campaign), right next to our regular workload.

Don't get me wrong, since I am SO GLAD to have a job still, but more pressure + less staff + personal stress (hi Mom!) + other family obligations + lack of sleep (I've apparently forgotten all about my "take care of myself" rules from treatment time... and blathering/blogging here at all hours is cathartic/self-destructive, can't decide which) = BEYOND FRAZZLED.

Clinging to the edge of that mental cliff until Turkey Day holidaze. I even skipped my Tuesday night ceramics class because I was feeling so queasy.

Ahem. End of whining. For now. Mostly.

Today was my coworker Julia's 25th anniversary with the company. Yes: Two. Five. I was still in high school when she started -- what a funky concept. She was the one who saved that tiger cover art above -- "Tigers Catch Cold" from a 1998 Asian reinsurance mag -- because a then-colleague had photocopied it with a caption that read, "Not another research request!"

So we all had one of our little potlucks in the morning (she was taking off this afternoon) and I originally made almond apricot muffins last night (even toasting the almonds), since her twin sister said almond was one her favorite flavors. However, they felt worryingly hard and dry this morning (although my colleagues later claimed they were fine and tasty) so after my sweetie left at his usual unearthly hour of the morning, I made chocolate red velvet cupcakes (nee cake, but cupcakes are easier in an office setting) with NO FOOD COLORING thank you. Of course, that is also why they are not day-glo red.

Oh well. Two recipes to work on refining, but damn, a whole cup of butter does make that red velvet cupcake taste fine! (5 pts for one! eek!) But I was highly gratified to note that out of the 21 chocolate and 8 almond munchables that I brought in, only 6 and 1 (respectively) were left by quitting time. Heh. AND I managed to only eat ONE choco-vel!

And on that thought, I will leave you with my "junk food" reading, By The Sword (a Repairman Jack / horror series which I am so fried that I borrowed 2 copies from different branches of the library without realizing it!) which is an intermission from both The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble (set in historic and modern Korea), and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan for one of my book clubs (set in pre-modern China... morbidly fascinating footbinding details, in case you ever wanted to know, with a cringe-inducing photo montage on YouTube which I refuse to link to -- search for it using the book title and "trailer" if you really want to see the ickiness).

And now I need to sleep! Desperately! (I am such a dork sometimes.) Ciaooooo...