It hasn’t been exciting here, which is frankly, awesome. I’ve had a few chats with recruiters; I’m still not actively looking, but I do take calls, and if I have a good conversation about one I can’t do, I pass it along to the folks I know who are looking. I still haven’t been able to make myself work on the refresher training I need for my professional certifications, but … I’ll get to it. I will. Really.
The writing’s going great, though! The rest of everything else is also getting there, one step, one wondering why something was put where I found it, one trip over the dog, one lily bulb in the dirt at a time.
I took Metro in to meet the NFCW for lunch last Friday. We didn’t know where we would eat or wander around, I didn’t think I could use my husband’s car1, and if I’m driving my truck, I don’t go anywhere near the Beltway without a pre-established plan to park. While my truck is not obscenely large, I’m not the most confident about how it should occupy space, even though I do have most of the fancy bells and whistles (not auto-parking because I don’t trust it). I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 23 for … many reasons, but let’s go with being verifiably inept at parallel parking. My beloved Mazda CX-9 also taught me some embarrassing lessons about needing a lot more space between cars than what’s afforded by just being at rest fully inside painted parking lines.
(Hey, automakers? Vehicles aimed at parents who don’t like to drive mini-vans need doors that will not slam into neighboring parked cars even if they are opened carefully by children who have earned the right to open their doors themselves. Or, y’know, by those parents trying to model civilized parking lot behavior.2)
It had been a while since I’ve eaten out in a restaurant; quite literally, the last week of December, when I met the NFCW for lunch after turning my work gear in.
Fortunately, I did not forget how, and the usual disaster associated with the cuisine we picked didn’t happen during the meal3. I thought this might have been a fluke, so, I tested it yesterday: I persuaded the husband to go out with me to grab lunch at a local Thai place before going to the grocery store (also together, which is something else we haven’t done for a lot longer than just the last week of December).
One stumble at a time, y’all. One stumble at a time.
- It was in the shop for almost two weeks due to deferred warranty/recall repairs. ↩︎
- Shout out to the mother who was yelling at someone on your cell phone while screaming at your kids and flooring your Lincoln Navigator in reverse until you smashed into the cart corral of the Target in Manalapan, NJ, WHERE. I. WAS. PUTTING. UP. MY. CART. WHILE. CARRYING. MY. TODDLER. ON. MY. HIP. YOU. OBLIVIOUS. PIECE. OF. SHIT.
It’s been almost eighteen years since that incident, and I am happy to report that my son didn’t develop a trauma response to returning shopping carts when he’s done with them!
Please continue to enjoy your stay in the pits of Hell. ↩︎ - We had Chinese food. It’s been my experience that sauces in Asian restaurants have traditionally had a slightly different relationship with gravity than they do at home, or they’re more attracted to the clothes I wear outside the house. ↩︎
Modus Dementi 
Your comment about the sauces… I have similar issues and have taken to wearing sacrificial hoodie jackets zipped up when eating at places with sauces.
Also glad to hear the writing is going well.
Thank you!
I have some semi-sacrificial hoodies that I wear when I’m out adventuring with the dog. They’re only semi because they haven’t been destroyed yet, unlike Jarrod’s hoodies. I’ve also learned that it’s a bad idea to wear jeans I like when I have to go hunt him down in the woods behind our property. He’s not the brightest dog (other than figuring out how to get out of the fence): I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had to wade into bramble thickets to get his fur untangled from them.