Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

Cut in case mild medical stuff gives ya the ick. But want to document things since I'm getting old and forgetful

( Mounjaro update )

Tomorrow we're going to the hockey game and Emily would rather drive to Newark rather than take the train. Okey dokey. Hopefully our preferred parking is available.

Since I need to use up vacation days, I'm taking Monday off. In the morning, I'm going to film at least one, maybe more videos to put up on the YT channel. I like to get ahead so I'm not letting too much time go in between them so we don't lose traction. A little after noon, I'm going to finally drive over to the YMCA and trudge around the exercise pool with the other old farts.

Later that afternoon, my work buddy Noor is going to come over so the three of us can go get a snack (it's Ramadan for her but she's on her cycle so she's allowed to break fast). She invited Emily and I to her shower and wedding in May. I haven't been to a wedding in ages and this will be a Muslim wedding which will be a first for me! Evidently a tradition at a Muslim wedding is to hire a coffee cart and Noor is a coffee maniac so of COURSE she's going to keep with tradition there. lol

I was ticked off earlier this week when the bar in my closet fell AGAIN. The problem is that even with a brace, it wouldn't stay up because there wasn't a stud in the back of the closet to fasten it to so an anchor wasn't doing squat. I'd already put one of the drawers in the closet rather than futilely trying to put the bar up again. I'm trying to figure out how I can use about a foot worth of space next to it. As you see, I can't easily reach into it but I'm thinking maybe I can put some hooks on that piece of wood (there's no similar piece wood on the other side, hence why the bar falls) Here's the before with my dresses and tunics dumped over the cat tree.



For the dresses, I ordered a heavy duty garment rack. The rack arrived today and literally snapped together, no tools needed. It's very sturdy. And yes, I know I have toooooo much clothing. It's an eye opener to STOP spending. But at least it looks more organized now

Guess we're going to a HOCKEY game of all things. But wait, WOMEN'S hockey.

Emily found out that when the New York Sirens score, fans are supposed to go WEE-WOO! Oh we are into THAT. So we wondered where they play (since most NY teams play in NJ but we didn't know if hockey would be in actual north NY state or something). Turns out they play in NEWARK where we've gone for concerts and that we can take a train to.

Even better that they have a game on Sunday March 8 at noon so that I'm not out past my old lady bedtime, so we're going and Emily's getting tickets in the section where we typically book to go see concerts.

WEE WOO WEE WOO

Oh Canadian buddies, they'll be playing the uh...Ottawa Charge so you'll have to let us know if we're bitter rivals or something now.

I hope Columbus Ohio gets a team so that I can be rivals with my sister. lol

Earlier this last week, there was a forecast of 3-5 inches of snow for tomorrow. Then mid-week it went down to an inch and since then, the forecast kept creeping up, possible 5-8, then 6-12 and now the forecast starting tomorrow morning into Monday is a Blizzard Warning with from 16-20 inches of snow.

We were JUST able to finally see some grass under the snowbergs mid week and now it's going to KERFLUMP snow and have high winds. Booooooo

At least this time around, the temperatures aren't forecast to plummet after the snow so I'm hoping things are decent by Thursday so I can get to my GP appointment.

This winter has been wild.

EDIT: It's just rain with a smidge of snow mixed in so far but NOW the forecast is saying 18-25 inches with winds up to 45mph. Ughhhh

Work has been pissing me off but I don't feel like going into great and glorious detail. Suffice it to say, no movement on ever getting me upgraded. Well, we'll see how that goes when I have my 25 years in come October 2027. Maybe they'll find me suddenly gone after that (gotta wait until then to get the good health plan for retirement). If I retired, I'd still find some job, just not at the University. We'll see. Anyhoo, I bring up work since tomorrow I'm involved in some Zoom bullshit as a speaker on my area to new faculty. It annoys me that they've called in the former Boss Bitch to kick things off since she's still managed to retain her Vice Provost for Research at RU. It's also tedious since we're supposed to only talk for 5-15 minutes and I crafted 3 slides with plenty I can vamp in between to hit maybe 10 minutes but Elaine is being a kiss ass again and put in TWENTY slides. Oh good god.

I don't want former Boss Bitch to think she can get to me so I'm going to change into a suit jacket and do my hair and put on jewelry. I'll plant an expression of calm professionalism on my face and give my slides in a soothing ASMR tone. After that, I'll sit with a slight bland smile and not react to ANYTHING said or done. You'll think that I've put up a photo of myself.

Speaking of ASMR, the video I put up of the roleplay has made us get close to double our followers (still ages to go) and it's past 500 views. Wow. I have these ideas for upcoming roleplays and will get props:

• Asking your friend that doesn't wear makeup to do yours (I'll have plenty of funny and awkward expressions lol)


• Activities Director at the Shady Pines Nursing Home. Going to get a wig and props for this which I'm hoping it'll be a series. One will have coloring books, for another, I ordered a cheap bingo set with the cage that spins.


• Your irritating gossipy coworker from the cube next to you (I'll channel Elaine but I can't be TOO Elaine since her kids follow my channel lollll)


• Cheesy Victorian-era seance

It was a good thing that Emily got the maintenance plan back on December 23 but BOY we didn't expect that it would have already paid for itself (though the pipe bursting a few weeks ago was still expensive since it could only cover SO much)

Heat is slowly coming back up. The guy admitted that his fix yesterday to make it sound less like Thor was attacking our pipes with Mjolnir was not a good fix which is why everything crapped out sometime between midnight and 4am.

It still seems like the system is McGyvered together with spit and duct tape but hopefully things hold enough for a few more years and if one or the both of us decide to retire (and work outside of the University), then we can move to one of those houses in an old people community.

Ok, I have a work zoom in 15 minutes. I wouldn't normally drink coffee at this time of day but I'm making some to get both of our insides warm and because my headache has tacked on ringing in my ears.

Thankfully my sister has stopped trying to get me to join her pyramid scheme of beauty products but she's still pushing them HARD on social media. She did a before and after hair thing which my jaw dropped looking at her. Mind, this is a screenshot of the video showing the after. Also, I picked as good of a shot as possible, I seriously didn't try to get one that made her look bad:


Oh, she pushes the face products of the brand too.

For comparison, here's a non-edited, non-filter selfie of me on one of the days we were freezing inside


It's not so much the hair I'm looking at (though I'll have to say I'm not all that wowed by her hair products or her extensions) but what is up with her eyes?

Out of curiosity, how old do you think each one of us are?

Little irritations are getting to me which the number of them make me think that it's probably MY attitude more than theirs. Or not, who knows.

Elaine at work drives me up the wall with her constant self-congratulatory crap. Today it was how she buys gifts for the people helping at her kid's theater crap. Yesterday really irritated me, though. She was going on about how she "doesn't tell people how to grieve" which is a complete lie. Evidently the grandfather of her stepkids died, though not the father of her husband, the father of the kinda crackpot ex wife. The kids (adults) hadn't seen him in at minimum 10 years and so obviously didn't have a relationship with them. But oh, Elaine had to bring it upon herself to buy a tree and is guilt-tripping the stepgirls that are in the state about going out to Long Island for whatever observance they're having for the guy (he was cremated). Because evidently according to her, that's the "right" thing to do. Then, yeah, you ARE telling them how to grieve and you're an asshole for guilt-tripping them into it. Add in her self-righteous blabbering on about all the wonderful things SHE does when people die, yadda yadda, it really annoyed me and I had to fight to keep my sassy mouth shut. If you feel the need to perform a soliloquy about how good of a person you are, you're not a good person. Good people don't brag about being good people and they don't guilt trip their step children on how to properly grieve. UGH.

Other small irritations are things like jackasses that make coffee in the coffeemaker that I donated to the floor - mainly because it has an automatic shutoff - but then don't clean it up. I don't care if that thing gets all kinds of mold. I'm done with it. I have a keurig in my office. The neighboring lazy coworker that reports to Elaine and hasn't learned her job in over EIGHT months that leaves her space heater going in her office and forgets about it and the door is locked. She's done it twice in a week and today tried to lie that she didn't leave it on last night. Yeah, I could hear it. It happens once more and I'm placing an anonymous call to the University fire code enforcement.

Even smaller dumb things are always being the one to run and put away stuff from the dishwasher, the one that will make dinner 9/10 of the time, the one to try to clean the never ending house clutter, the one that will have to get a shoe stand for my bedroom because evidently having one shelf of the two shoe racks in the living room doesn't help.

Eh, probably mostly not sleeping great doesn't help.

Oh and Emily's having to work from home yesterday and an indeterminate time this week because at her work, the pipes burst above her office and a couple office next to it and it's a health hazard at the moment. We are having NO luck with this stuff.

While I'm glad that we paid the kid for a first pass yesterday, digging out the remaining white crud is no mean feat. We were able to shovel out the thinner layer of snow/sleet mix that fell after he was done without much trouble and salted the sidewalks so things are decently walkable. However between the end of the driveway being plowed in by the town plows, the part in between the cars not having been touched on the first round and a good amount of drifting, it's rough trying to unearth the cars to be able to go to work this week sometime.

I had shoved off the bulk of the heavy piles atop the cars first thing this morning before we did the "legally obligated sidewalk clearing." I just got back inside from trying to dig out my tires and take a crack at the giant drift between the cars and I am wiped out. It was up to my thighs and had a heavy crust of icy snow on top. I was able to get about half of it dug free and tossed into the yard before I called it quits. Emily's going to try to dig out the rest in a little while. Since the kid shoveled the end of the driveway yesterday, Emily was able to clear a good bit of the precip that fell after that and then ram her Subaru (hey, it's marketed to be an "offroad" one!) through the mass at the end of the driveway and run it over a few times before parking the car again behind the drift that's between the cars.

On the basement fun, the patches are holding so while we don't have it up to the regular temperature, it's functional and comfortable enough. I might even run the dishwasher after dinner. We do have to pay for the labor costs for the fixes downstairs and they're scheduled to come between 12-4 tomorrow so even if we wanted to go to work, it's best to stay and WFH to keep an eye on the work so we can anticipate having to do or get anything if stuff takes longer or somehow doesn't go well otherwise.

We both slept pretty hard last night. Not shocked there.

Yesterday around noon, we were going to move the cars so that I could take mine for a drive to get the engine heated up and running since we're obviously not going to be going anywhere today or tomorrow. Emily had started the laundry a couple hours before that but I didn't think a wash cycle was going and I kept hearing an odd noise downstairs.

We were just about to leave when I pointed out the noise and Emily was going downstairs all ha ha to ease my mind aaaand yeah. Hot water pipe burst, steam going EVERYWHERE. Fan-freaking-tastic. Old houses are awesome, eh? We tried putting a towel around it as carefully as possible and called the heating folks (the ones that came out on December 23 to finally fix the heat on my side that wasn't working and it involved having to get a new heat pump).

They said they could come out between 2-6 and we had to shut off the heat to minimize any damage while we waited. I had been intermittently turning on my space heater since my bedroom was chillier than the rest of the house since it's clearly not well insulated and when the temps get into the single digits, well, it's cold. But I hadn't had it on much - until we had to shut off the heat altogether.

The dude arrived about 3 something and assessed things but they didn't have the stuff to replace whole sections of pipe so he went off to Home Depot to get stuff to try to patch things. I belatedly realized that even though Emily turned off the heat, the gas stove still worked fine so I started putting on simmer pots as well as started the process to make cookies. The guy got back and put on a patch but it needed an hour to cure before testing it so he went out to hang in his truck while we finally got to drive my car around some. We stopped to get snacks and booze (mainly for Emily, I don't really drink). Even after hours of waiting and testing, unfortunately the patch and the clamp weren't going to hold.

We're holding out hope that the plumbing supply place is open this morning since he's going to try to get things there and hopefully he can make it to our place in the storm and get this fixed, otherwise it's going to be yet another uncomfortable day. We can turn the heat only in 20-40 minute stretches. Emily brought down her little space heater and her human-sized dog bed to sleep in the dining room. I woke her at 3 to put the heat on for a stretch because out in the living room, it was down to 46F. It didn't get quite to 50 after 40 minutes but at least it was slightly warmer there.

I got up at 6:30 and started the simmer pots up again and when those got burbling, I put hot water in the steel coffee carafe and started making coffee. I had to shut off the space heater in my room to do that but it's fine since it only needed to be off for 10 minutes. In the meantime, Emily put the heat on for another stretch.

With the simmer pots and the heat on for about 35 minutes, the living area got from 45 to 50 and her dining room area got to 53 so not comfortable but at least keeping the pipes from freezing.

I do love the irony that by leaving my bedroom door shut and my bigger space heater running, it's slightly above 60 in here.

I told Emily I was hoping to film some ASMR videos in the dining room but clearly that wasn't going to happen. I did joke that I could do the ASMR or Emily snoring. heh heh.

So if you could toss some hopeful vibes this way that we get heat restored and no more burst pipes, that would be super duper awesome.