Welcome to my twisted mind

So, I was chatting today online with my friend Gideon, who has a degree in psychology and if he were licensed, could work as a shrink. It was interesting because the topic of my illness came up, and he told me that in his opinion I'm schizophrenic. There was more to the diagnosis than that (undifferentiated type) but when I looked up the medication I'm taking I realized it's meant for schizophrenics, and probably when my old shrink told me I had brief psychotic disorder he was talking out of his ass. What does that even mean?

I'm going to ask my current shrink, whose opinion I value highly, what she thinks. I bet in her notes she's got stuff written down that she hasn't told me- I suppose a lot of people would be upset if they were given a scary diagnosis like schizophrenia (which, by the way, does not necessarily have anything to to with multiple personality disorder, which is a common misconception). Now that I've been living with it for 7 years now, it's not so scary and I can actually enjoy reading up on this illness, which interested me even before someone told me I probably had it.

We tried a wireless internet service provider instead of our cable company- setting up the equipment and so on was going to cost us around $300. However, the service we are getting is lousy, and we can get DSL (which in our area would be fast enough) for a lot cheaper, no equipment set up, and the service would be faster. And it means getting our $300 back!

So we are doing that next week.

I figured out that if we only spend $200 on groceries in the next 3 weeks, and buy only $200 worth of firewood (we don't need heating oil), our month's expenses should only come to about $3,300. $2,400 of that is my income, and then Seth has to make $900 to make up for that. He's already made $508 on his last paycheque, and should stand to make about as much on the next one, plus he's getting paid to do lights for the opera, and he is getting paid for doing the lights for the Nutcracker.

So all in all, we should be able to put aside a few hundred dollars this month, even if my laptop dies, as it has been threatening to, or finally pay off some medical bills that have been haunting me. Also, Seth and I need to start selling our things (all the things we aren't taking to Sweden or storing at my parents' place while we are gone).

I am torn about this- it means probably liquidating my book collection. Or at least getting rid of half of it. That's hard for a bibliophile to do. Also, I'm sentimental about a lot of the clothes I have, even ones that don't fit any more. I think the clothes horse thing came partly from not having a lot of nice clothes growing up (when I was little, I had a lot of hand-me-downs from my brothers) and partly because I'm just plain vain, and I like to have appropriate clothes for every occasion. It's ridiculous how much clothing I accumulated in LA, though, and I just have to probably give away a lot of what I have left, because if it's not going to Sweden with me and it's not some kind of fancy costume or dress, it's not going into storage. In two years, will I even fit the clothes I have now (after all those meatballs and loganberries)?

I'd say we have a little money this year for Christmas prezzies, but we really ought to be giving away our stuff, not collecting more of it. The only presents (aside from cards) that are going out this year are some teddies for my friend Angela's kids, and those have to get into the mail pretty soon or they won't be for Christmas.

Still working on thank-you cards... I wrote out a bunch of them, and now we have to pick a photo to print out and put in with them (just a small one, that will fit into the envelope). They will probably be more like Christmas cards, which I will probably mail out around the same time. *shrug* At least our cards will be cancelled at the North Pole, Alaska office! I wonder if anyone will notice?

Why??

Friday: Steampunk group holiday get-together, with Cthuhlu carols, games and gift exchange. Should be fun! I will bring gingerbread and whipped cream.

Saturday: Either the matinee or the evening performance of Fairbanks Opera's 'Ahmal and the Night Visitors'. This is basically the Christmas story. Seth is doing the lighting for it. FO has put on excellent performances in the past, and I anticipate this one will be no different. Plus, even if it's not great, I get to see it for free, so I am not complaining.

Sunday: Brunch at Pike's Landing! We were given a free brunch certificate by Seth's boss. After that there is a potluck Christmas party for the Community Writer's Group, which is bad timing for us since it's the only Sunday we can use this gift certificate on- so we will have two eating events in close succession! I will probably bring more gingerbread to this one, and again, whipped cream. Hopefully it will begin with a long session of readings or some such so I have time to digest my brunch! I plan to only have coffee and something small to eat.

Today:

Validated my observations about the wrong concentration of reagent, and now my experiments work perfectly every time like they are supposed to. Now I have found that I don't have enough size standard- I thought I had access to another container, but that's the wrong fluorophore, and the one container that is the right fluorophore is, as far as I can tell, empty. So unless Julia's ordered my size standard (the purchase requests were approved over a week ago, as far as I know) and it's on the way, I'm going to be kicking my heels again. I have enough to do half a plate- I had wanted to do 2 whole plates this week!

Hurrry up and wait is the motto for this laboratory, for certain. Shipping to Alaska is such a pain, and that gets compounded when I have to go through this bureaucratic nightmare to get anything ordered. It's worse for one of the grad students, whose account vanished on him, or something like that, meaning he has no money any more to order stuff. Glad it's Not My Problem...

While I wait I can... hmm. I suppose I can dig out my code for the R programs I was working on and try to remember what exactly I was doing with them when I last touched them, oh, 3-4 months ago. On my laptop that keeps crashing because it has too many programs on it and not enough memory. Bleargh.

So, my experiments worked, then didn't, then worked again, then didn't... I couldn't figure out why until this morning.

I was adding everything in the correct volumes. Turns out I was using, half the time, the wrong concentration of dNTPs (a reagent). A stupid mistake, but one that is easy to fix, thank goodness. It could have been really bad, like something wrong with my enzyme or with the PCR machine.

Now we try again, using the CORRECT concentration. Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, what a stupid mistake.

I'm tired and hungry and want to go home. Waaaaah!

For the molecular biology types out there.



Pretty much anybody should be able to get this one. It's about the peer-review process in academia...

Here's something fun to do: Phone the Nestle Crunch hotline at 1-800-295-0051. Wait about 10 seconds after the prompts for English or Spanish (don't press any buttons), then press 4. The entire menu is fun, but my favourite option is number 7. If you get a busy signal, keep trying, it's worth the effort. Have fun!

I have to admit, this made me laugh.

Did anyone else get an annoying and intrusive Best Buy ad on their Friends Page here on LJ?

I should be going to the gym but Seth and I are both too tired, and I have a headache and scratchy throat. In the next week I want to get our thank you cards out in the mail... we bought envelopes for them, and now we have to buy the ink for Seth's printer. We also need to get or print out one of the wedding photos to include with the thank you cards, and link Seth's cousin Steve's photos to the page on Seth's website where he is posting them.

In the next six months, I would like to:

1. Finish my project here and publish a full-length article on it.
2. Write up and publish the nematode disease note Katerina and I have been discussing.
3. Sell off or give away a substantial amount of my stuff. Ebay, Craigslist and moving sales will be our friends.
4. Renew my passport, which expires in October.
5. Finish editing the first batch of my mother's short stories. I am on #5 out of 12 total- this is mostly because I am tired when I get home and my brain isn't up to thinking about writing. I haven't been working on my own writing, either. :(
6. Finish my "Nightwalker Meets Dr. Evil" story that I've got half done (you can see the first half on my Facebook profile, I posted it as a note- one thing though, the formatting is off because I cut and pasted it from Word).
7. Help Seth insulate the house (underneath), and help fix up the interior of the house so we can rent it out for a lot more than the mortgage
8. See if we can get a lower rate on our mortgage- even slightly less would help.
9. Get winter holiday cards out in time for people to actually receive them in December! And mail the teddy bears I made to Angela so they will arrive before Christmas.

There is more that I'm not remembering at the moment- I'm very tired right now, and I do need to get to the gym more often. But this list is enough, if I manage to do all those things I'll be very happy.

No matter how much I eat these days, I'm still hungry. I ate my lunch already and it's only 2:30pm. Still hungry. I don't have any cash on me to buy more food, either. Guess during my next break I'm eating the emergency oatmeal packets I keep in my desk. This morning after I ate my breakfast, I was still hungry. I've been hungry all day, and it's not like I didn't eat plenty yesterday.

I'd love a big plate of pasta right now! Must not eat giant bowls or plates of anything. I must be missing some kind of nutrient, but what?

OK, back to work.

Chimney was cleaned yesterday. Seth didn't fall out of the lift bucket, there were no mishaps (though there was a tense moment when the rig started rolling toward our house) and I got video footage of much of it, including Seth trying to get into his safety harness and, initially, failing. We didn't make too much of a mess, and now we can have fires in the wood stove again!

Chimney cleaning took pretty much all day, and that night I finished making a green teddy bear for my friend Angela's kid Jordan, sewed up the backs of the three bears I'm sending to her (there's a pink bear for Breanna and a blue one for Nathaniel), and finished one little blue scarf for Jordan's bear. Nathaniel's bear is getting a red scarf, which is currently being knitted. Once I'm done with those three I get to pack them up and mail them to Alberta. Hopefully the kids will like them.

I have so much fabric! I will need to sell off my stash. It will be heartrending since I had grand plans for a lot of it. I'm going to be making a bear for my Mom (either white or brown), and using up some of the white muslin to make a tunic dress for this SCA thing (should be pretty simple). I had plans to make skirts and blouses for our steampunk gatherings with some of the rest of it, but I don't think I'll have the time now, and it would be stupid to ship fabric down to the lower 48 from up here. I'll just have to have a fabric sale one of these days. If anyone wants a care package of fabric from me, just write! I have mostly remnants, since I had planned on making lots of bears, but I do have some larger pieces of fabric also.

It's chilly out- dropped down to about 0F again, and it isn't going to get much warmer or colder for the next few days or so.

We had to rent a lift bucket to get up onto the top of our chimney to clean the spark arrestor (and while we are at it, sweep the chimney). It actually only cost us about $10 more than the chimney sweep was going to cost (the sweep refused to touch our chimney because of the steep roof) so this isn't such an unreasonable expense, but it's just one more thing when we don't have any extra money to pay for things. We switched internet and cell phone providers to try and cut costs, but we still aren't making enough, because the money we saved from that has been eaten up by buying life insurance. The good news about an impending long distance move is that we can now look at some of the things we've bought and think about selling them. I might cull my book collection and sell some of those (unfortunately, my clothing won't be worth all that much up here, though I will have fewer storage space issues if I got rid of some of it), and Seth has a table saw still in the packaging that we can take back to Sears. In 6 months we will have a moving sale and get rid of our furniture and TV, and maybe also Seth's car and our trailer. So only Christmas cards again this year, though I'm making a few bears and sending those out. Hopefully I'll get them out soon because I can't afford to ship them priority (they may be New Year's Bears otherwise). I am optimistic that Seth's plan to teach computer classes on the side will work out- there is no overhead involved because we get the classroom for free, and the computer shop already has customers asking for them. All Seth has to do is spare his time, which is in great demand lately, unfortunately. In this way we should be able to pull in enough money to cover our bills and hopefully have extra that can go toward home improvements. He's also getting paid to do the lighting design for the Fairbanks Opera, $250, which is better than nothing.

I am going to videotape Seth going up in the lift bucket. Hopefully we can post that to YouTube (along with our wedding video- which I still haven't seen!). And hopefully he will not fall out of it!

All righty, back to work with me.

Turkey day was low key. We had one friend over for dinner, another kind of showed up for a brief period to get away from his family, and we just sort of hung out and ate all day. Leftovers galore.

Today there is a bit of a shadow over things because we realized that it will cost us about $200 to get our chimney cleaned so that it works properly, and with the other expenses we are facing (more money for insurance, our other usual bills, setup for a different ISP) we just don't have that money. So guess what, I did what I promised myself I wouldn't do again and asked my parents for help. I hate, hate, hate doing that, but I seem to be doing it all the time. It's embarrassing. I wish Seth had a better-paying job, or I did, so we could afford to live here without constantly having to get help with our basic expenses. I thought this might happen when we bought the house- that maintaining it would cost more than we could afford- and I hate being right. I had visions of "The Money Pit" when we bought it and Seth reassured me that it wouldn't cost that much to fix up. Well, we have the house, it was my decision and it was an emotional, not a sensible, one. We will just have to hope that the investment pays off so I can gift my parents with a nice trip somewhere (or at least the knowledge that we are not going to ask for any more money). Nothing I can do about it now.

To afford to fix it up (hardwood floors, etc.) for sale, Seth has to find some other form of work, or be allowed to work more hours than he is. I'm not legally allowed to do anything but work for UAF in my current capacity, or I'd see about a weekend job in a tea shop or something. Seth has plans for teaching computer classes at a local computer store, so hopefully that will work out.

He says I'm not allowed to worry about money, but how can I not worry?

I have a job offer from Sweden!

I've accepted. It's 23,000 kroner per month (about $3,300) with no taxes coming off it, for two years. I might get to teach classes in addition to my usual work, and Seth can get a work visa too. The cost of living in Uppsala, Sweden is about 10,000 kroner per month for two people, so I would be able to cover that plus my credit card settlement bill (I had to go to a consolidation service, so I can't not pay it). This means for travel and fun money we would need Seth to have a job. We will try to rent out the house after we move until we can sell it, so we would have to put money aside for property management and maintenance upfront (I am not sure how much extra this will be), and we will have to save for moving as well. We will get some money via Seth's financial aid this January and we have to put all of that into savings for these purposes- which will be hard, since we often are short money each month. We will have to sell or put most of our things into storage here (on the property, secured somehow) and take only some clothes and our computers and some papers to Sweden, probably our suitcases full plus a few shipped boxes. This scares me (what if something happens to our belongings?) but at the same time it is a bit exhilarating- no having to deal with a lot of stuff! We will have to get insurance on the things we put into storage. If it were feasible I'd ask my parents if I could store our things in their garage, just so I know no one (or no critters) would be getting into them, but I think that would be too expensive. Maybe we can get a Conex container, fill it, ship it to Guelph, and then it can sit on my parents' property so that if we sell our house we don't have to find a new home for all our things.

Seth thinks we can afford to pay for home improvement expenses- like flooring and drywall and paint and wood- and it will only come to a few hundred dollars. I myself doubt this, but he's the guy doing the work so I have to wait and see. We now have a deadline for fixing up the house so it looks nice enough to sell. There is a possibility of getting some money back for energy efficiency improvements made to the house, but that means a lot of work fixing air leaks and chinking it. Again, this is in Seth's realm. He thinks he can get it all done over the winter, and I think that's possible for as long as we don't have internet at home... heh. Seriously though, he's been working part time and going to school full time, and that doesn't leave a lot of time for home repair. I wonder when he will be able to do this work.

In other news, went to the gym last night and I feel great today. I think exercise is really beneficial for my energy levels and mood.

Today and tomorrow are my lazy days (and Thursday of course). Friday to Sunday I will be working full time. I feel this entitles me to goofing off for a couple of days.

Tonight: gym time! If not tonight, then tomorrow morning for sure. I really feel the lack of exercise.

For some reason, I am craving pineapple. I wonder how long this will last?

Seth bought a mega-bag of potatoes, and now I want to make the scalloped potato recipe I found online. I can't cut and paste it for some reason, and I am too lazy to type it out. But it looks creamy and delicious.

Mmmmm. Potatoes.

Going home in 10 minutes, yay!

... now I don't want to work, either. I've been noodling about on the internet for a good hour or two. Haven't done much of anything on my review, mostly because I know the deadline will be extended. My collaborator has been flaking on me.

I was exhausted a few hours ago, ate some protein and drank some tea, and now I feel a lot better. But I don't want to focus on anything, either, so my brain is still asleep. I will get back to work after writing this post because I have no one left to IM, but basically I'm ready to go home and take my meds and fall asleep. *yawn*

This has been a most unproductive evening. At least I managed to get a few things done during the day. I'd go home now but I'm carpooling with Seth. Carpooling sucks when you're ready to go home and your ride isn't.

*yawn*

I never thought I would consider 0F to be warm, but compared to -30F it is. Today was a pleasant day, and I even got to walk around a bit outside while the sun was up. It's long down now, and I'm still here at work- I'm exhausted! I think because it's so dark out. I'm going to take the happy light my folks gave us and plug it in tonight and see if that makes a difference.
( Long post is long )