Cropped pants and other annoyances
I will state for the record that I loathe cropped pants. This is because my legs are, on average, about 6 inches shorter than the average person's (and about 14 inches shorter than the average model's) and so what are cropped pants for normal people actually are about 1"-2" shy of full length pants on me. That being said, I nonetheless purchased today a pair of the baggy cropped gaucho pants. They are shorter than most I've seen--meaning that, instead of the usual couple of inches, they are actually about 4" too short for full length pants--but they nonetheless look somewhat silly on me, because I am short and chubby with stubby legs and these things are designed for tall and slender people with long legs. But I purchased them anyway because 1) they were some of the most comfortable pants I've ever worn when I tried them on in the dressing room, 2) they came with a very pretty beaded belt, and 3) they were only $7. I intend to wear them mostly around the house, because as I stated before, they look kind of silly on me...and anyway they are black, which means that no matter how much I clean they will somehow managed to be adorned with random sprays of pet fur within the first hour or so that they are donned. But I wish that cropped pants would go away. Or at least that they would make them in lengths more appropriate for we dachshund-legged folk.
Other things that have irked me lately (do not click unless you are prepared for verbosity):
My dental work. I broke a back molar because of an untreated cavity (moral of the story: don't wait 4 years between dentist appointments), so what the dentist said he was going to do was to drill out the decayed part and put in filling to compensate for the broken part. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Well, what ended up happening is that he ground away what feels like about the top half of my tooth (with some of the edges left though), because the decay had reached down pretty far, almost all the way to the nerve. This grinding left the nerve exposed, so he covered it with a couple of layers of dental putty and then with silver filling. The resulting reconstructed tooth works more or less okay, after about the first 48 hours of painful adjustment...but it is UNSPEAKABLY cold-sensitive. I went for milkshakes with some friends after a different appointment early this afternoon, and I thought I was going to die (and quite frankly, I would have been happy to do so, given the exquisite excruciation) after the first unguarded sip sent liquid ice cream across the tooth in question. My enforced parting of ways from the world of frozen delights may not necessarily be such a bad thing, however, because Ben and Jerry have had a large part to play in the thickening of my girth. I understand from the dentist that the tooth is also supposed to be heat-sensitive, which so far I have not encountered but I am deeply concerned. I may choose to undergo a root canal rather than to be deprived of my Ghirardelli Hazelnut Cocoa.
The state of the house. It is a total and complete pit. Since I am currently unemployed, Jeremy and I have agreed that he has 3 duties: 1) to take out the trash (just the major trash can, into which I empty the peripheral little bathroom and laundry room cans whenever they are full)...which he does, when "reminded" or "nagged", as the terms for my suggestions of trash removal vary depending on the mood the recipient is in when they are issued; 2) to clean the floors once a week, or more depending on how yucky it gets...he is pretty good about vacuuming, but he hates sweeping and mopping for some reason, though he will do it after again being "reminded" or "nagged", but right now my socks are starting to stick to the kitchen floor and it is rapidly becoming intolerable; 3) to mow the yard...which he is fairly good about and only requires occasional r/n to perform. But he has worked a lot at a job that we won't discuss over the internet so that I could complete my grad school. This means that all other cooking and pet/household maintenance falls under my jurisdiction. Rationally, I am okay with this, because I am not working, and he is working a LOT these days. Irrationally, I get annoyed about having to do housework, but I also get annoyed when it is not done, such as the current facts that there are dishes everywhere--and only one kind of cooking utensil, one kind of dish, and one kind of silverware is used up at any given time; right now it is saucepans, bowls, and forks, because the last dish that was cooked was a chunky curry (courtesy of buzzermccain, who cooks some mean Indian food)--that the back room is smelling somewhat hamstery, given that there are now two rodents whose cages must be changed; and that there is a massive amount of mail perched atop the shelf next to the door, despite my swearing that I will be good about sorting and organizing and responding. Tomorrow must be a "clean-like-crazy" day.
The dog. I love my dog dearly, and I suppose that since I do I should also love him when he is doing particularly doggy things. Currently he has not had a walk for two days, because yesterday I was on a couch popping aspirin and cradling my face where my poor tooth was throbbing, and today I was out all day. I should mention here that walking the dog IS supposed to be one of the things Jeremy and I share...our last dog, Rosie, was completely my idea to get, and she was extremely neurotic when we got her as a result of having been abused and then dumped in a kennel for five or six years. So I was the one who had to deal with the results of her neuroses. But before we got Cody, I made Jeremy promise that there would be none of the "it's Your Dog, so you deal with it" bullshit this time around. However, I have been unemployed and he has not, and I have also been wanting to lose weight and he has not seriously needed to, so I have been the one doing the bulk of the dog walking. But I've been getting a little tired of it lately, and I haven't been feeling up to it the past couple of days either. So now every time I move in the computer chair, the dog jumps up and begins to shove his nose under my elbow and prance around my feet in hopeful delight, which causes A) feelings of annoyance that I can't move without canine harassment, and B) feelings of guilt that I am not actually going to take him on a walk. So tomorrow morning I am wreaking vengeance upon both him and Jeremy, and taking them on a 4.5 mile walk along the Clear Creek "trail" (you can't call anything paved a real trail, IMHO). So we will see how much of a walk he is wanting when we get back. Hah.
Speaking of exercise, I am very annoyed with myself that I haven't managed to lose the weight I've put on since I graduated. I've always struggled with weight issues. In high school, I was really chunky. During my undergraduate years, rather than putting on the Freshman Fifteen, I dropped about twenty pounds, largely due to various influences from my then-roommate, Dorthe: one of the sweetest and most fun people I've ever had the pleasure to meet, who was also a beautiful blonde Danish aerobics instructor. Anyway, I put back on about 10 pounds before I finished my undergrad work, and then we moved to a town and a job that I absolutely hated everything about with the very notable exception of some of our best friends whom we met there. My unhappiness in that town and at that job combined with the fact that there was a junk food vending machine right down the hall from my office (and man, am I a sucker for Zingers) and conspired to enable me to put on thirty pounds. Over the course of my 7 semesters in grad school (not counting summers), I lost 5 pounds, put 5 pounds back on, went on the South Beach Diet and lost 20 pounds, gained 25 pounds after the diet screwed up various physical systems and I stopped both it and my exercising at the same time (and started stress-eating with school), dropped 5 pounds when I went to Oklahoma for 3 weeks for fieldwork and got in the habit of walking and running every morning and eating properly while I was staying with my friends there, and put back on 15 pounds during the last semester of my schooling, when I was finishing my thesis and working on the Website of Doom. Food has always been a comfort and a crutch to me in times of stress, and it's also a procrastinating tool (because, you see, I can't possibly do work while I'm eating this sandwich/cookie/bag of chips/whatever, since it would be too messy). So I swore that after I'd finished school and during the semester I had off while I was looking for jobs, if I couldn't lose all of the net forty-five pounds I'd accumulated since my undergraduate years, I would at least make a serious dent in them. So far, that hasn't materialized. I was really good at the beginning of the semester, and was working out twice a day and really restricting my eating. But I couldn't make myself keep it up, and so the lose-5-pounds-gain-five-pounds yoyo continued. I've been trying to be really good this last month. I've been keeping a food/drink/exercise journal, so that I can keep track of how much I'm eating, and what kinds of foods I'm eating (so far, fresh fruits and veggies are coming in last, which is stupid because I'm vegetarian), and I've been trying to do at least something physical every day. I've been really good about keeping the journal honestly, but not so good about always eating properly and exercising. But last year we cane to Tulsa for a wedding, and ran into one of our old friends there who had been extremely heavyset most of his life. We hadn't seen him for three years, and in that time he'd lost something along the lines of seventy pounds. He told us he'd done it just losing two or three pounds a month, being careful with what he ate but not denying himself something if he really wanted it, and trying to exercise at least a small amount daily, and he looked great. So I'm trying to go off of his role model, and I think I'll do better at it than by constantly trying to force myself to a level of diet and exercise I can't sustain long-term. I'm pretty disappointed in myself, though. I went shopping with my mother when I went to see her earlier this year, when I was in the middle of the intense workout and diet phase, and she spent a lot of money on professional clothes for me. I was embarrassed about being around my size 8 mother and purchasing the size of clothing I actually needed though, and so a lot of the clothes I picked out were a size smaller, as I was thinking that surely I'd be able to fit into them by the time summer rolled around. And those clothes are currently sitting in storage with the tags still on them, and today I had to go fork over even more money to buy a new suit that actually fits in the event that I get an interview.
Last but not least, this job thing is wearing me down. I've whined about it enough here before, so I won't mention it too much again. But it is down to the wire. The landlord is not being a jerk, but wants a committment one way or the other here in a few weeks. I'm still holding on to hope about the Missouri job and the Tulsa job, but I just got a rejection letter today from a museum I applied for a while back that is very similar to the Tulsa one, for a lower-level position there that paid a lot less than Tulsa is offering. It's very scary and depressing. I don't know what I'm more afraid of: that I won't get any job at all? That I will get offered the Missouri one but still won't have heard back from Oklahoma? That I will get offered one or the other of those jobs, but not before we have to renew our lease here in Indiana, resulting in either having to find a replacement tenant or having Jeremy and I pay two rents and possibly spend six months apart? Is anyone here in B-ton potentially on the market for a two-bedroom rental house but willing to wait a while to find out whether or not you can move in? :)
I will close my whinging with a decidedly non-whinge plug. Go see Slither. It is not by any means a "good" movie, in the critical sense of the term, but it is by any means definable a FUN movie; it alternates between amusing dialogue and good old-fashioned B-movie phantasmagoric splatterfest, and it also features the immensely enjoyable Nathan Fillion (Malcom Reynolds of Firefly and Serenity), playing what is essentially Mal in a police uniform but with lots more appropriately inserted swearing. Much, MUCH fun.
Other things that have irked me lately (do not click unless you are prepared for verbosity):
My dental work. I broke a back molar because of an untreated cavity (moral of the story: don't wait 4 years between dentist appointments), so what the dentist said he was going to do was to drill out the decayed part and put in filling to compensate for the broken part. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Well, what ended up happening is that he ground away what feels like about the top half of my tooth (with some of the edges left though), because the decay had reached down pretty far, almost all the way to the nerve. This grinding left the nerve exposed, so he covered it with a couple of layers of dental putty and then with silver filling. The resulting reconstructed tooth works more or less okay, after about the first 48 hours of painful adjustment...but it is UNSPEAKABLY cold-sensitive. I went for milkshakes with some friends after a different appointment early this afternoon, and I thought I was going to die (and quite frankly, I would have been happy to do so, given the exquisite excruciation) after the first unguarded sip sent liquid ice cream across the tooth in question. My enforced parting of ways from the world of frozen delights may not necessarily be such a bad thing, however, because Ben and Jerry have had a large part to play in the thickening of my girth. I understand from the dentist that the tooth is also supposed to be heat-sensitive, which so far I have not encountered but I am deeply concerned. I may choose to undergo a root canal rather than to be deprived of my Ghirardelli Hazelnut Cocoa.
The state of the house. It is a total and complete pit. Since I am currently unemployed, Jeremy and I have agreed that he has 3 duties: 1) to take out the trash (just the major trash can, into which I empty the peripheral little bathroom and laundry room cans whenever they are full)...which he does, when "reminded" or "nagged", as the terms for my suggestions of trash removal vary depending on the mood the recipient is in when they are issued; 2) to clean the floors once a week, or more depending on how yucky it gets...he is pretty good about vacuuming, but he hates sweeping and mopping for some reason, though he will do it after again being "reminded" or "nagged", but right now my socks are starting to stick to the kitchen floor and it is rapidly becoming intolerable; 3) to mow the yard...which he is fairly good about and only requires occasional r/n to perform. But he has worked a lot at a job that we won't discuss over the internet so that I could complete my grad school. This means that all other cooking and pet/household maintenance falls under my jurisdiction. Rationally, I am okay with this, because I am not working, and he is working a LOT these days. Irrationally, I get annoyed about having to do housework, but I also get annoyed when it is not done, such as the current facts that there are dishes everywhere--and only one kind of cooking utensil, one kind of dish, and one kind of silverware is used up at any given time; right now it is saucepans, bowls, and forks, because the last dish that was cooked was a chunky curry (courtesy of buzzermccain, who cooks some mean Indian food)--that the back room is smelling somewhat hamstery, given that there are now two rodents whose cages must be changed; and that there is a massive amount of mail perched atop the shelf next to the door, despite my swearing that I will be good about sorting and organizing and responding. Tomorrow must be a "clean-like-crazy" day.
The dog. I love my dog dearly, and I suppose that since I do I should also love him when he is doing particularly doggy things. Currently he has not had a walk for two days, because yesterday I was on a couch popping aspirin and cradling my face where my poor tooth was throbbing, and today I was out all day. I should mention here that walking the dog IS supposed to be one of the things Jeremy and I share...our last dog, Rosie, was completely my idea to get, and she was extremely neurotic when we got her as a result of having been abused and then dumped in a kennel for five or six years. So I was the one who had to deal with the results of her neuroses. But before we got Cody, I made Jeremy promise that there would be none of the "it's Your Dog, so you deal with it" bullshit this time around. However, I have been unemployed and he has not, and I have also been wanting to lose weight and he has not seriously needed to, so I have been the one doing the bulk of the dog walking. But I've been getting a little tired of it lately, and I haven't been feeling up to it the past couple of days either. So now every time I move in the computer chair, the dog jumps up and begins to shove his nose under my elbow and prance around my feet in hopeful delight, which causes A) feelings of annoyance that I can't move without canine harassment, and B) feelings of guilt that I am not actually going to take him on a walk. So tomorrow morning I am wreaking vengeance upon both him and Jeremy, and taking them on a 4.5 mile walk along the Clear Creek "trail" (you can't call anything paved a real trail, IMHO). So we will see how much of a walk he is wanting when we get back. Hah.
Speaking of exercise, I am very annoyed with myself that I haven't managed to lose the weight I've put on since I graduated. I've always struggled with weight issues. In high school, I was really chunky. During my undergraduate years, rather than putting on the Freshman Fifteen, I dropped about twenty pounds, largely due to various influences from my then-roommate, Dorthe: one of the sweetest and most fun people I've ever had the pleasure to meet, who was also a beautiful blonde Danish aerobics instructor. Anyway, I put back on about 10 pounds before I finished my undergrad work, and then we moved to a town and a job that I absolutely hated everything about with the very notable exception of some of our best friends whom we met there. My unhappiness in that town and at that job combined with the fact that there was a junk food vending machine right down the hall from my office (and man, am I a sucker for Zingers) and conspired to enable me to put on thirty pounds. Over the course of my 7 semesters in grad school (not counting summers), I lost 5 pounds, put 5 pounds back on, went on the South Beach Diet and lost 20 pounds, gained 25 pounds after the diet screwed up various physical systems and I stopped both it and my exercising at the same time (and started stress-eating with school), dropped 5 pounds when I went to Oklahoma for 3 weeks for fieldwork and got in the habit of walking and running every morning and eating properly while I was staying with my friends there, and put back on 15 pounds during the last semester of my schooling, when I was finishing my thesis and working on the Website of Doom. Food has always been a comfort and a crutch to me in times of stress, and it's also a procrastinating tool (because, you see, I can't possibly do work while I'm eating this sandwich/cookie/bag of chips/whatever, since it would be too messy). So I swore that after I'd finished school and during the semester I had off while I was looking for jobs, if I couldn't lose all of the net forty-five pounds I'd accumulated since my undergraduate years, I would at least make a serious dent in them. So far, that hasn't materialized. I was really good at the beginning of the semester, and was working out twice a day and really restricting my eating. But I couldn't make myself keep it up, and so the lose-5-pounds-gain-five-pounds yoyo continued. I've been trying to be really good this last month. I've been keeping a food/drink/exercise journal, so that I can keep track of how much I'm eating, and what kinds of foods I'm eating (so far, fresh fruits and veggies are coming in last, which is stupid because I'm vegetarian), and I've been trying to do at least something physical every day. I've been really good about keeping the journal honestly, but not so good about always eating properly and exercising. But last year we cane to Tulsa for a wedding, and ran into one of our old friends there who had been extremely heavyset most of his life. We hadn't seen him for three years, and in that time he'd lost something along the lines of seventy pounds. He told us he'd done it just losing two or three pounds a month, being careful with what he ate but not denying himself something if he really wanted it, and trying to exercise at least a small amount daily, and he looked great. So I'm trying to go off of his role model, and I think I'll do better at it than by constantly trying to force myself to a level of diet and exercise I can't sustain long-term. I'm pretty disappointed in myself, though. I went shopping with my mother when I went to see her earlier this year, when I was in the middle of the intense workout and diet phase, and she spent a lot of money on professional clothes for me. I was embarrassed about being around my size 8 mother and purchasing the size of clothing I actually needed though, and so a lot of the clothes I picked out were a size smaller, as I was thinking that surely I'd be able to fit into them by the time summer rolled around. And those clothes are currently sitting in storage with the tags still on them, and today I had to go fork over even more money to buy a new suit that actually fits in the event that I get an interview.
Last but not least, this job thing is wearing me down. I've whined about it enough here before, so I won't mention it too much again. But it is down to the wire. The landlord is not being a jerk, but wants a committment one way or the other here in a few weeks. I'm still holding on to hope about the Missouri job and the Tulsa job, but I just got a rejection letter today from a museum I applied for a while back that is very similar to the Tulsa one, for a lower-level position there that paid a lot less than Tulsa is offering. It's very scary and depressing. I don't know what I'm more afraid of: that I won't get any job at all? That I will get offered the Missouri one but still won't have heard back from Oklahoma? That I will get offered one or the other of those jobs, but not before we have to renew our lease here in Indiana, resulting in either having to find a replacement tenant or having Jeremy and I pay two rents and possibly spend six months apart? Is anyone here in B-ton potentially on the market for a two-bedroom rental house but willing to wait a while to find out whether or not you can move in? :)
I will close my whinging with a decidedly non-whinge plug. Go see Slither. It is not by any means a "good" movie, in the critical sense of the term, but it is by any means definable a FUN movie; it alternates between amusing dialogue and good old-fashioned B-movie phantasmagoric splatterfest, and it also features the immensely enjoyable Nathan Fillion (Malcom Reynolds of Firefly and Serenity), playing what is essentially Mal in a police uniform but with lots more appropriately inserted swearing. Much, MUCH fun.