Oh, how I want a potato chip. A salty, crunchy, comforting potato chip. I tried retail therapy–Bed, Bath & Beyond has a simply startling selection of shower caddies!–and then I tried some celery and low-fat dip, but my body isn’t fooled.
I told myself when I arrived here I would get back to healthy eating. We chewed our way across America, we made plenty of excuses–we can’t cook! we’re on the road!–but it’s time. My 49-year-old body just isn’t amused by living on junk food any more. But this is a tough week to go back to nuts and berries.
A year ago I was sweating through the final stages of MPOW’s migration to a new content management system. Today I am sweating through the final stages of switching MPOW over to a new search engine. This implementation was going really, really well, right up to last Friday afternoon. That was supposed to be the magic moment–yes, the same Friday that the movers were here. I spent the morning shouting, “Bedroom! Kitchen! Living room!” in between endless phone calls with developers, some of whom I have never met (so in my mind they now all look like the nerd in Weird Al’s video, even though the companies I work with actually have rather comely stables of geeks).
Then mid-afternoon, things crumbled. Don’t ask. It’s just as well, because you also shouldn’t ask me why I was involved in a launch on a Friday, anyway–a way to guarantee miserable weekends all around. It’s not as if anyone foisted that date on me. I happily stuck my finger in that light socket, completely of my own volition. “Terrific, the 15th it is!” What in tarnation was I thinking?
Meanwhile, I’ve been on house arrest, more or less, due to the time difference (I put in a full day, then work with developers for several more hours), the additional work related to the migration, and the many twiddly chores related to this move. I almost conquered the kitchen last night, but then called Sandy–who is at a conference in New York–and asked if she thought it would be ok if we used the spice cabinet (formerly an ironing-board holder) as a display for our collection of glasses from winery tastings, as we did at our last home. I wasn’t asking her permission; I was just uneasy. She pointed out that we are still acting as if we need to get approval to do things to our home.
So today I got up my nerve and on my lunch break took off the door and removed the shelf standards so I can paint the inside of our wine cabinet the same red as our kitchen walls (leaving just a bit of white trim around the edge). I feel so grown-up. Then I figured out almost entirely on my own how to produce a special XML feed from our content management system–it will supply our synonyms to our search engine so I can delegate synonym maintenance to the editorial level–and that just floored me, so I rewarded myself with a handful of huge, wonderful Muscadine grapes, the size of tiny plums and with a sultry tart-sweet tang that is pure essence of vineyard, but they were still grapes.
It’s not our first home; we owned our condo in California, and we bought it with the proceeds from Sandy’s family home, which we lived in together. But we are still in awe of a house where all the appliances match and where we unequivocally live in a nice neighborhood, and still a bit overwhelmed to be in Florida, and daunted by all the work that remains, such as painting the wineglass cabinet, plus there is that television to buy (until then, no Jon Stewart, because we don’t have a setbox, because we can’t get one until they can hook it up to HDTV because that’s the kind of setbox I ordered, thinking I would just drive to the store and buy a TV), and I am grinding my teeth over the launch, and a bit tired of very long days, and I would really, really like a potato chip, though I would settle for a government-issue TV.
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