Category: Stuff

Fortunate Musical Annoyances

Happy Spring! I’m on day twenty-five of randomly cycling earworms. Want to know how to get from Jackson Browne’s “Tender is the Night” to Dua Lipa’s “Illusion”? I can probably draw you a map right through Jewel’s “Standing Still” (cathartic to sing while vacuuming up tumbleweeds of dog hair!) and Post Malone/Lainey Wilson’s “Nose Dive” (great for dealing with bathroom cleanup!) with random pit stops at the dark techno equivalent of George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set On You”.

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Three Months Down The List

I will not say Happy Spring yet. I will not say Happy Spring yet. I will not say Happy Spring yet. Every time I have wished someone “Happy Spring!” this year, Winter has said “oh, yeah, let’s see about that!”, and here we are, with tulip trees and forsythia starting to bloom while there are still piles of frozen debris left over from Snowcrete Fest 2026. So, not wishing that yet.

There’s also the general counter-happiness initiative going on in the world today, doing its miserymaking mayhem thing, but I don’t think my hoping for someone’s happiness even gets on its radar let alone makes its “Must Point and Laugh and Prove Her Wrong” list. I hope, anyway.

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Holiday Post-Game

Last night, I wrote a blog post about hoodies, specifically about how I secretly wanted one for Christmas, because I almost need one (my existing ones are still holding up under the dog’s regime, but they won’t outlast it). I kept the secret to myself because I didn’t want to get one I didn’t like, or worse, one I loved but with a print that encourages my tendency to pre-game public interactions.

The post then spiraled into politics … and that, Y’all’s Honors, is why I decided not to share it, even after spending an hour and change this morning trying to tuck in everything behind a mask of extended metaphors while making fun of myself by cracking the old joke about the functional use of metaphors.1

See, I’m not sure that I’m completely over the hell-fluvidmonia-just-imagine-how-bad-this-could-have-been-if-you-weren’t-vaccinated the entire household picked up during our Christmas trip2, despite our best attempts to avoid it.

We missed a step: failing to recognize that our relatives are now inclined to understate how sick they and their friends have been in order to get us to come visit right at Christmastime instead of postponing it until after the New Year. You would think that everyone would have learned something from at least the Norovirus Family Fun Fest of 2014-2015, but I’m going to cut this digression off before I spiral again.

Thankfully, I had the opportunity to rewrite this blog post before it was yeeted into the world. Fever, fatigue, and concern all increase the chance I’ll look at something I’ve written and published and realize that a penguin had been one hundred percent at the wheel of my meatsack at the time.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope it will eventually be a better (and healthier) one, and so do the penguins. Likely. Unless they’re lying. The bastards can and do. Totally.

  1. “What’s a Metaphor?”
    “Sheep!” ↩︎
  2. My husband and I started going downhill during our visit, and fought with symptoms for a solid week. Our son seemed like he’d escaped everything until two days ago, when he crawled into bed and started refusing to come out except to lurch to and from his bathroom. I’ve been keeping up a steady supply of orange Gatorade and Goldfish Colors crackers, which is all he’s been able (and willing) to eat. Y’all, he’s turned down plain glazed doughnuts. He’s never turned those down in his entire life, even during that stretch of years when he wanted nothing else but fruit and chicken nuggets except on alternate Thursdays during a Full Moon when nothing would suit him but homemade macaroni and cheese.
    You betcha, I’m concerned. ↩︎

Contingent upon Avoidance

So it’s December now. Today’s my personal New Year’s Eve. Tomorrow’s also the twelve-month anniversary of my finally acknowledging that the 2025 family math wasn’t going to work with both my husband and me having weekdaily 120 minute commutes (on good days).1 Fortunately, he’s still right about our being okay.

For now.

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Looking Through The Back Glass

I was thinking about Mema last week more than I noticed until yesterday. Sometimes I do that with thoughts: I look them over, nod, and toss them onto the library cart for re-shelving. Better than ninety-five percent of the time, that works like it’s supposed to, despite my mental library’s being staffed by penguins.

That less than five percent, though, y’all? When the system breaks down, it can result in ideas I can’t shake for days, or worse, not until I translate the root disturbance into bad poetry to trap its troublesome ass so it no longer vexes me.

Yesterday’s system failure was not so dramatic. Or maybe I’m understating the drama, because it really doesn’t compare to the current drama going on with our septic system, but … that’s another pile of crap. Literally.

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The Continued Renegotiation of Ordinary Processes

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.

  1. It was in the shop for almost two weeks due to deferred warranty/recall repairs. ↩︎
  2. 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. ↩︎
  3. 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. ↩︎

Spring Cleaning, Ontologicaldociousnessly

I didn’t hear from the potential employer this week, either. It’s fine. Everything’s crazed right now, so I honestly wasn’t expecting to. I spent most of the week spring cleaning. Correction, I spent part of the week planning how I was going to tackle spring cleaning, and the rest of the week accumulating schedule-cruft that’ll need to be factored into executing the spring cleaning plan.

Yes, I may put the ‘er … hi’ into overthinking.

Speaking of cleaning, I … augh. I should explain. I was one of those annoying teenagers who wrote poetry, but worse: I started when I was in my tweens.

I didn’t willingly call it poetry; grownups did, and I just quickly agreed with them so they felt right enough to change the subject before they could notice my discomfort, or worse, want to talk about what I was actually doing. I was lining up words and gleefully sharing them with the universe because I wanted to boot them and their gluey mood-baggage out of my skull. Out, git, scram, leave me alone, go find someone else to bother.

Since I wasn’t a poet and would never be one, I didn’t feel I had to follow any poetry rules, such as paying attention to syllables.1

In some ways, I have never grown up. Now and again, I accumulate stacks of words that need to be chucked onto the curb for bagged waste pickup.

Here’s the latest one:

To hide
I undress
To dissemble
I disassemble
To repent
I rebuild
To reveal
I redress

I’m sorry, and I would promise never to do it again, but I’m pretty sure I can’t. I did make a new page to stick all this stuff on, so at least it’ll be out of the way from here on out.

  1. Ms. Samford, if you ever stumble across this blog, please accept my apology for resisting learning haiku and cinquain. I did eventually make a begrudging peace with sonnets. ↩︎

Penguins III: Snow Day

Happy post-Super Bowl week, if you’re on the Philly side of Pennsylvania. We are not, and are celebrating about as much as we intend to celebrate Valentine’s Day, which is … not really. I think I have chili mac planned for dinner that night1. We have zero incentive to go out, even if we are no longer snowed in that day, unless that’s the only decent window for getting to a grocery store before we are snowed in again.

The most romantic gift I can think of right now2 would be a new snowblower to replace the one that died during the last snowstorm or a new vacuum cleaner to replace the one I killed last week.

Speaking of a total lack of ambition, not that I was, but I decided to update the old page about the penguins and put it back up on this blog. I have gotten questions about them lately from folks who aren’t already in on that inside joke, so yeah, it was time? Maybe? Anyway, it’s here if you don’t want to click the link at the top of the blog.

And speaking of ongoing inside jokes about my being the last to join new social media platforms, I’m finally on Bluesky. You can find me there at shainorton.bsky.social.

  1. I suspect either my husband or I (or both of us) will want to bake something, though, even if I just wind up making more bread instead of waiting for the weekend. My last loaf of basic sandwich bread, unlike all of the others I baked in 2024 and January 2025, was not cursed! It came out great! It will probably be gone before Friday! ↩︎
  2. Within reason, with minimum planning required. Unreasonable things that require planning are way too much of a stretch for February. Ask me how I know … or better yet, don’t. We also have our wedding anniversary this month, which we’ll probably hold off on celebrating until summer, or maybe early fall. ↩︎

Move Slow, Carry a Broom

Happy not-Monday, February, or pre-Super Bowl week, whichever you celebrate. If you’re celebrating, that is. If you’re not, that’s completely understandable, because…

Dang, I’m in this weird mental space1 of feeling like I dodged a bullet by leaving my last role and guilty that I didn’t stick it out to face the mess alongside the people I was working with, never mind how unreasonable doing that would have been. All the reasons I needed to walk are still just as valid as they were in December and as unrelated to the current Great Collapsing Hrung Dis … I mean kerfluffle.

Other than that, I don’t have a lot of things to say, interesting or otherwise2. I did succeed in killing another vacuum, a picture of which is on Instagram3. That’s been the third vacuum since we’ve gotten the dog. We should probably stick to using a broom on the carpet.

  1. Yeah, it’s equipped with inner Musak. I’ve had “Fortnight,” the chorus of “I Had Some Help” (most noticeably when I’m cleaning), and “Nosedive” stuck in an earworm loop for a few days now. I’m sure this will clear up once we’re out of endless February and I’ve clawed my way up past the rubble. ↩︎
  2. Writing’s happening. Professional Education … isn’t yet. My home office plants have perked up enough to stare at the back of my head and plot vengeance. I think. I’m a little afraid to turn around to look at them. ↩︎
  3. Oh, yes, I also succeeded in joining Instagram! It only took, uhm, a while. My username there (nine.penguins) is a throwback to my old LiveJournal, which I swear I took down a long time ago, but it’s still apparently online. At least the earlier posts of Modus Dementi have had the decency to stay in their box, seriously, y’all … I just can’t even. ↩︎