Shitstorm Indeed...

And I'm the umbrella.

I got to work yesterday, clocked in and went to find coffee.
(coffeecoffeecoffee)
Before I even sat down at my desk my boss appeared in my doorway. The first words out of his mouth were, "Please don't quit."
This is not how one introduces good things.
I took a drink of my coffee, sat down and gestured for him to sit.
"No," he said, "I'll stand."
I blinked at him and said, "Ohhhhhhhh-kay."

Then he proceeded to tell me what happened with one of my clients (and one of my co-worker's clients) the night before. Which kicked off a series of excruciating and teeth-gritting meetings.

I call them "The Fuck" meetings. As in "The fuck?" Which was my first response to the story.

There was the "what the fuck actually happened" meeting.
There was the "ok neither of your stories match, so both of you will sit there and tell me what the fuck happened" meeting.
There was the "what the fuck do we do about this" meeting.
There were phone calls to parents and guardians. Who pretty much said, "The fuck??"
There was a second "what the fuck do we do about this" meeting.
Then there was a "OK. Here's what we're going to do about this so listen (the fuck) up" meeting.

Right about the time we were coming to a close the other client let slip a secret about my client. The other case manager took her client away and left me to deal with this new surprise.

Which led to a whole new series of "The Fuck??" meetings.

At the end of the day yesterday I said, "I'd better not even hear your name tomorrow. Got it?"
After a whole day of "the fuck" meetings with me I think he felt the same.

Knitting, The Color Orange and Wolf Love

No posts lately because there has been nothing fit to blog about.
Which, really? Is a good thing.
I love having a boring life again.

Of course, writing that means the shitstorm is brewing, I just don't know it yet.

Oh well.

I've been knitting... A Jayne hat for Darren that has been knitted and re-knitted... and it's still not done. The first time the colors were wrong (says Bean) and the second time I was talking and not paying any attention to measuring and it's WAY too small. So I will cast on again sometime tomorrow. It also involves pom pom making which I haven't done before. I bought a pom pom maker from Twist, so I'm all set... I don't "get" pom poms, in the same way that I don't "get" bobbles, but maybe this will change my mind and everything I knit from now on will have a pom pom or two stuck to it.

Bean's dad is apparently jealous that I'm making the Jayne hat for Darren - not so much because I'm making it, but that Darren will have one and he won't. I'll have had lots of practice by the time I get the first one done correctly, so maybe he'll get one after all. It's not a difficult hat, and it knits up relatively quickly...

I am currently knitting fingerless gloves inspired by the New Moon movie, using a yarn called Jasper. (Hee hee). It's variegated shades of blue. So very calming and a necessary diversion before I start Jayne again. The Jayne hat involves lots of knitting with orange and yellow, and some of you know about my aversion to all things orange. I mean, I'll eat oranges and Cheetos and orange gummy bears and drink orange juice and Orange Crush and stuff... but anything else orange can suck it. It's just so "in your face" and perky. I prefer the calm of blues and greens and purples. And yellow? Is just orange's idiot cousin. Red is fine, and pink...

I'm starting to sound like a crazy person. All of this emotion over colors.

So, New Moon... We DO have our tickets already, but we are not going to the midnight show. This whole "job" thing is really cramping my social style. Jeez.
I am excited about it...
And I have learned over the years to appreciate movies as separate entities from their corresponding books, so I was NOT disappointed in the last movie (unlike EVERYONE else I know) and I don't care that Jacob's fur should be a different color. So there.

And I still love Jacob.
What I want is a nice, sweet, stable, adoring wolf who won't break my heart. None of this hot and cold, overwhelming, all-consuming Vampire love bullshit. Love isn't supposed to feel like that, and in my experience when it does it's not at all good for you.

I'm just saying.

Tired

I'm so tired.
Tuesday I raced home to pick Bean up and then we got a quick dinner and went to see Wicked. It was great.
After the show was over I recorded a speedy quick voice over job. Well... it would have been speedy quick if I weren't so rusty. It took me half an hour to record a 90-second spot.
(Amateur).
It had been so long since I recorded anything, and even given how long it took me to get it right it feels good to be good at something.

Wednesday I got up early to take care of Grandma and left for work by 7. I didn't get home Wednesday night until almost 7:30 last night. That's a long freaking day.

Today was not as long, but as I'm settling into this job the problems are getting more and more complicated. I have gotten to know the clients and the agency well enough that I am starting to feel confident about my role. It was weird at first to have people who have worked there for 15 years deferring to me when we all knew I had no clue... but the things that fall into Case Manager Land can only be decided and acted on by case managers. So their asking me was really just a formality.

Now I'm starting to actually have something to say.

But it's exhausting, y'all. I've got a zillion balls in the air all day long.
It is such a relief to climb into my car at the end of the day, hit the "play" button on my current novel and breathe all the way home.

I'm listening to the newest Diana Gabaldon novel. I want so much to be embarrassed by how much I like these crazy romance/historical/time-fucking-travel books, but I just can't. I started reading this series when I was pregnant with Bean... and let me just say that as much as I don't want to get married again, I am totally and completely in love with James Fraser and want to marry him and have a dozen little red-headed Scottish babies with him. Seriously.

But then, between 8am and noon most days I would marry anyone who showed up with coffee or found a way for me to sleep as much as I did during the Summer of Darkness and still have a job and get a paycheck.

I have actually been knitting a bit... here are the teeny baby monkey socks I started tonight for my cousin's teeny baby. He was premature, and now at 2 months old is almost as big as Bean was at birth.

Damn It.

I was so very pleased with myself Sunday night.
So last night after Bean was done with her hour and a half of SIMS playing I logged on and after about half an hour or so, as I was clearing the 2000-word mark, the computer warned me that the battery was only at 5%.
Even though it was plugged in.

Of course.

Damn it.

Yes. Yes I know I could just NaNoWri-by-hand-Mo.
Yes. Yes I know that people - actual published author people - have been doing that since paper was invented.

Whatever.

I emailed the draft to myself for safety, but now my work-bots are refusing to allow me access to gmail from my desk computer. eBay? No problem. Ravelry? Go right on in. Blogger? Abso-frickin-lutely. Gmail? FAIL.

This charger thing has happened twice before - both times it took about two days before the computer got over it's little snit and allowed a charge. If I could actually find my warranty information I wouldn't hesitate at all to march into Best Buy and use the fucking thing as a soapbox... but since I can't find it I'm going to be very quiet and polite and sweetly ask them if they might be able to maybe look it up on their lovely and quite fucking functional computers.

Damn it.

NaNoWriMo Day One

I made my NaNoWriMo goal for the day. With a few interruptions it took about two and a half hours to write 1685 words.

Which is amazing to me. I expected it to take four times that long.

It has been years and years and years since I made any attempt at fiction. I know this is not going to be anything great, but it is the best writing I've done in recent memory - if only because it's the ONLY writing I've done in recent memory. Of course there are still scraps of poetry around, but I generally pretend not to notice those.

It feels great. Not just the writing - I had forgotten how much I enjoy the writing - but the accomplishment. The having a goal and then meeting the goal. Something else I haven't felt in a long time. I don't think I realized how much grad school had taken away from me. I'm glad I didn't follow through with the MFA... I might have never written again. All of the writing I did for the MSW was formal and not at all creative. But crafted, still. I know how to write around a quote and how to stack it all together. My long-format editing at the radio station helped with that too.

Maybe it's all just timing. I'm finally in a time in my life when I have something so say and the tools at hand to say it all the way through. Clumsy it might be.

Of course, it's just the first day. I should be careful about feeling too victorious just yet.