Home Disrepair

So although I was a bit wistful that my (last of 2009 vacation days) vacation / semi-staycation ended yesterday, I was happy to have a job to return to... but it was not to be.

Now don't worry: I haven't been laid off (or at least, I'll worry about that when they move our offices down the street sometime mid-year -- you know, like when you moved homes as a kid and suddenly various things "got lost in the move" that oddly enough, your mother never seemed to like in the first place).

No, late last week, I picked up a horrible sore throat somewhere, and although I feel much better today, I sound very much worse, with all of the volume and projection of a rubber ducky / doggie squeak toy. So even though it (mostly) no longer hurts to swallow, my voice is now so bad that my mom and my sweetie both have problems hearing me when I'm standing next to them in the same room, much less when I'm trying to tell them something on the phone.

So it was not surprising that when I got to the office today, my co-workers looked at me first with relief (i.e., yay, you're back to share the work) and then cringing with alarm (i.e., eeek, you're sick -- go away and don't breathe on us).

Since it was pouring rain today, with winds up in the 50-65 mph category, they were amazed I even came in. (I mean, seriously, check out some of the damage; they also closed off some streets downtown since the winds blew stuff off construction sites and even a sign off the Brooklyn Bridge!)

But I didn't want to pull the ever suspicious sick-day-after-vacation (even though that actually seems to happen -- honest -- to various people, myself included) so I went in since I wasn't feeling sick, if you see what I mean. However, after hearing me they all kindly but firmly told me to GO HOME. And really, in their shoes, I don't blame them -- I wouldn't want someone who sounded like me to breathe all over the workplace, come to think of it (duh).

Um, am I protesting too much?

Anyway, I came home, changed out of wet clothes and into fuzzy jammies and robe and noticed that my bedroom window shade looked a bit odd.

Well, that would be because I have a leak. See the hole? And the discolored wall? And the now ruined, expensive custom-made (by a previous owner) window shade? Oops.

One of the handymen came to inspect it (there's a reason I am happy to fork over the annual holiday bonus check to the building maintenance staff), looked perturbed (since there was no way to tell how many floors this affected), and went off to check if my upstairs neighbor was also having problems. Not surprisingly, they were not home in the middle of the day, so I won't know for a bit what the situation is.

Honestly though, I can't get that upset about it. It's only stuff. After the year my family and my sweetie's family have had, it's not that big a deal. It just means I get to start another savings fund at Smarty Pig for long-delayed home repairs, or perhaps get to check out just much my home insurance really covers... Perhaps if I lived in an apartment as small as these nutjobs, er, people do, then I might be more freaked out.

I did think that the binder clips my friend Laura sent me were hilariously appropriate today though. Ain't multilingualism grand?

Instead I retired to the couch, to curl up under the quilt made for me by my friend Shelley, and watched some of my TiVo backlog. (Another sign that I'm sick: watching hours of cooking shows does not leave me hungry, not even peckish. In fact, I wasn't hungry at all today, a most unusual occurrence for Ms. When's My Next Meal or Snack?)

Come to think of it, my TiVo probably represents an odd cross section of interests, all starting with C: cars (my sweetie loves watching Top Gear in particular -- I watch sometimes because the guys are funny, especially the episode with their mothers (!), but the technical aspects of the car talk are incomprehensible to this non-driver), cooking (I am currently obsessed with the cooking shows on commercial-free WLIW - Create and found out today they have Sara Moulton episodes -- woohoo!), and crime (CSI classic [in Las Vegas], although occasionally the Miami one is amusing, but never EVER the LA-masquerading-as-NY one, The Closer sometimes, and Numb3rs).

And then after endless cups of warm tea for my throat, I surfed across a 1959 Hammer Films color version of The Hound of Baskervilles, co-starring of course, Peter Cushing and a very young Christopher Lee (who looked distractingly like a young Nicolas Cage -- weird). Check out the trailer for the movie, which was actually pretty good (the movie, that is -- the trailer is just classic Hammer horror cheesefest, which is fun in its own way). Christopher Lee actually gets to play a good guy this time, in well tailored clothes and no cape.

But for pure super-cheesy fun, I recommend two things:

• a 1974 Hammer Films - Shaw Brothers co-production, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, a/k/a The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula (randomly interspersed kung fu battles + Peter Cushing + Christopher Lee + gratuitous scenes of topless village maidens which earned it an R rating in 1974). How could you resist a film which stretches its budget by flipping the film stock and showing it twice?? Example: shots of screaming villagers running left, and then... running right, over exactly the same hill. Heh. And then, the shameless tagline: "Black Belt vs. Black Magic!"
• Fashion shoots from the 1980s! Check out the 1986 Vogue Classic Knits book I am sending on to its next owner (via PaperBackSwap): the hair! the colors! Andie MacDowell when she is blessedly silent!

And now, to bed, to hopefully recover my voice in the morning.