Author Archives: Cindy

replace the achey head with a fuzzy one

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Warning: Prepare yourselves for a rambling stream-of-consciousness blog post, I’m seriously medicated today.

By the time Friday rolled around and I was on day 4 of this headache, I left work early and went to the doctor. My usual (female) doctor was out, so I went to someone else in her group just so I could see someone right then. I’m not particularly comfortable with male doctors, and this guy didn’t really help my impression of them much. He was a little too touchy-feely for me. I’m sure he was just trying to be friendly and reassuring, but he actually patted the side of my face after he was done talking to me. That seemed like an awfully intimate gesture for someone that I’d only met 5 minutes ago. My mom told me I was overreacting and that he was probably just trying to be comforting like a father figure type, but the guy was less than 10 years older than me, so I’m sorry, that’s just weird.

Anyway, he told me that what I’m experiencing is not a classic migraine (which usually last a day or two at the most), it’s what they call a “cluster headache” because it can last from anywhere from 3-8 days. Whee! So he gave me some migraine medication, plus more of my favorite mild narcotic painkiller, and sent me on my way. The drugs seem to have worked, although I still have a headache in the morning before I take the pills. And I think mood swings must be a side-effect, because I’ve been uncharacteristically weepy this weekend. Yesterday at brunch, Dave and I were talking about cartoons and movies we watched when we were kids, and I started telling the story of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and I just started crying in my omelet. Then we talked about “Dumbo” and I cried some more. Dave laughed at me – I think our waitress was really confused. Then I was repeating this exchange to Kris on the phone last night, and when I was trying to explain to her why the story of “Puff the Magic Dragon” made me cry, I started crying *again*. What the hell?? (And no, this has nothing to do with hormones. Trust me.) Then today, when I saw that Christopher Reeve died yesterday, I got all misty-eyed at my desk.

Otherwise, this weekend was pretty fun. Saturday night, Dave and I met up with his friend/ex-brother-in-law (long story, don’t ask) Michael, which was… umm… interesting. Dave got drunker than I have ever seen him, which was highly amusing for me because I’ve never had to baby-sit him before, it’s usually the other way around. But drinking didn’t strike me as a good idea with my headache (and the medication I was taking for the headache), so I volunteered to be designated driver. I don’t think it was quantity of alcohol that Dave consumed, because he didn’t actually have *that* much, I think it was the combination of things he drank – spiced rum & diet coke at home, sake at the sushi restaurant where we had dinner, then beer at the bar where we met up with his friend. Bad idea. The poor guy was a tad bit under the weather after that. We’ll leave out the gruesome details. Otherwise it was a good night, though. Michael is the first friend of Dave’s that I’ve met, so I was kind of nervous beforehand, but it was fun. Strange, but fun.

So today I’m at work trying to concentrate on the two tasks that I need to complete, which is unbelievably challenging in my current foggy-headed state of mind. I’m not completely stoned, everything just seems to be moving kind of slowly. Oh, and I think one of my co-workers likes me. He’s just a little too friendly – like he remembered my cat’s name, which I told him 2 weeks ago, and he compliments me on random things – today it was my necklace, he asked me what kind of stone was it was. [Aside to Dave: it’s the gray one that you like.] I told him it was whatever stone was on clearance for $7. You fellas reading this might disagree with me on this, but in my experience, it seems like guys typically don’t comment on little details like that unless they’re interested in a girl. He invited me to lunch today, I used the “oh, I brought a sandwich with me” excuse (which is true). I’m trying to figure out a way to drop the words “my boyfriend” into a conversation without making it seem too obvious. Oh well.

achey heads, etc.

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I feel like I should write something, but there’s not much going on. Here’s the summary of my week thus far:
* Monday – I don’t remember anything specific, so obviously nothing too important happened.

* Tuesday – Got up early and went to Dave’s to sit & wait for the furniture delivery guys, because Dave had meetings to go to. I brought my laptop so I could work from his house, and I got more accomplished in 3 hours there than I usually get done in an entire day when I’m working from my apartment. Maybe it’s because my apartment has too many distractions – although Beaumont wanting to drool all over my iPod while I was trying to work didn’t really help matters. Damn cat. Anyway, the furniture arrived (and yes, it is gorgeous; pictures of the remodeled living room will be posted as soon as we finish the floors), then I went to meet Dave at a really gross, smoky dive of a pub for lunch, which happened to have excellent food. I went home, worked a little more, and developed a monstrous headache. Went to bed early.

* Wednesday – Monstrous headache, day 2. Worked from home until about 1:00, then I took one of my big-time super-duper painkillers (mild narcotic), which knocked me out for the rest of the afternoon. When I woke up, my head still hurt, plus I was shaky and sweaty, in spite of the fact that my apartment was cold and the fans were on. (It was about 60 degrees outside, and all my windows were open.) I called my mom, she told me to go to the emergency room. I decided that was silly, so just in case this had something to do with malnutrition (I hadn’t eaten much all day), I took an iron pill, drank a protein shake, and sat in front of the open sliding glass door to cool off. The shaky/sweaty phase passed, although my head still hurt. I went to bed early again.

* Thursday (today) – Day 3 of the Headache That Won’t Die. When Kris (Mickie-G) was here, she left a bottle of muscle relaxers that her doctor had given her for migraines, so I took one. Yes, I know it’s wrong to take other people’s prescriptions, but I was desparate, dammit. Anyway, it worked – the headache went away, although it made me feel kind of stoned. Not really sleepy or groggy, everything just seemed… soft. It was enough that I could finally stand the light in my bathroom long enough to put my make-up on, and I walked to the office. (I figured driving was a bad idea, and besides, I need the exercise.) I’ve been surprisingly productive this afternoon, considering my chemically-induced state of mind. But now the muscle relaxer is starting to wear off and I can feel the headache starting up again in the back of my head. This is getting old really fast, I’m starting to wonder if I have a tumor. (Every time I think of that word, I think of Arnold in Kindergarten Cop: “It’s not a tu-mah!”) Does anyone know what the hell would cause a 3-day headache? I really don’t want to make a doctor’s appointment about a headache, but it’s getting to the point where I think I might have to.

Also, this is off the subject, but what gives with my peeps not updating their blogs? Write, people!! I need stuff to read during my downtime at work. It doesn’t have to be interesting – look at the boring junk that I post here. Just write SOMETHING.

are french fries a "vegetable"?

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My performance review on Friday went very well. I haven’t been with the company long enough to qualify for an actual promotion, but they do these evaluations at the end of every fiscal year (which is now). And despite the fact that I’ve only been there 5 months, I am getting a raise of $1,000 a year. The way it was explained to me is that it’s kind of an incentive, like they think I’m doing a good job and want me to keep it up. I figure that after taxes, I might see an extra $50 a month. So that’s 1/2 of one student loan payment. Or 1/6th of a car payment. Or some insanely small fraction of rent. Regardless, it’s extra money, so I’m certainly not going to complain about it.

Now for the weekend summary. Friday was my own private chill-out night. I needed to recover from my Thursday night out with my co-workers, and Dave was having a boys’ night with one of his friends, so I cleaned my apartment and did laundry. Very exciting. Saturday, Dave and I were supposed to go to a bonfire at his neighbor’s house, but the poor guy (Dave, not his neighbor) apparently gave himself food poisoning by eating way-too-old leftovers, so that sort of scrapped those plans. I decided to go to the supermarket because I was out of a lot of stuff, and I totally forgot about the Jesus show going on less than 2 blocks away at Key Arena. I’m not sure if it was just ending or just beginning when I headed out to the store, but the Christian ladies were *everywhere*. Honestly, I have never seen so many unattractive women in one place in my life. Everywhere I looked were overweight middle-aged women in ugly JC Penney’s clothes with bad haircuts and minimal make-up. It was scary as hell. I didn’t want to walk to Blockbuster and have to navigate myself through the Throngs of Ugliness, so I decided that I was going to stay in and watch HBO. I got home, turned on the TV, and…. nothing. My cable was out. I called the cable company, and the automated voice message told me that there was a “known outage” in my area. I had a suspicion that it had something to do with the Christian women’s rally (maybe my cable signal was scared of all of the cellulite clad in unnatural fibers), but of course I couldn’t prove it. So I called Krissy to see if she wanted to go out (sort of a last-ditch desparate effort), but she had a date. Damn. So instead, I watched old episodes of “Sex & the City” on tape, then played GameBoy for a few hours. Not exactly a rockin’ Saturday night, I must say.

Yesterday, Dave and I went shopping, which translates to: he shopped, I whined. I wasn’t feeling well, and I tried to be a good sport, but it just wasn’t working too well for me. I felt better after we ate, then we rented “Super-Size Me” and watched that. Good lord. I already knew the stuff about McDonald’s, but the part about the food that’s being served in school cafeterias was absolutely horrifying. It’s amazing that we don’t all die of coronaries before we turn 25. I’ve never really considered doing the whole organic diet thing, but that movie made me think about it. Maybe that’s the point.

Ooh, and tomorrow morning, Dave’s gorgeous new furniture arrives! Hooray!!

bike accidents, hangovers and volcanoes, oh my!

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First, a bit of local news for those of you who haven’t already heard this: Mount St. Helens is in the process of erupting again. So far, all that’s coming out is steam, so it shouldn’t be quite the disaster that it was when it blew in the 80’s. Still, though, it’s pretty scary, because no one really knows what it’s going to do next. I remember when it erupted when I was a kid, and I didn’t know where Washington or Oregon were, so it didn’t have quite the same impact. When I moved here and saw Mount St. Helens – or rather, the concave back-side of it – I had nightmares for weeks about Mount Rainier erupting (which is much closer to Seattle and is also a dormant volcano). So it’s all a little creepy.

And speaking of creepy, this is going to be going on for the next 2 nights at an arena that’s about a block and a half from my apartment. As many as 18,000 Jesus-loving, God-fearing women all in one place. I’m terrified. I don’t think I’m going to be leaving my apartment until all of their charter buses are safely on their way back out of town.

One thing I forgot to mention about the last day of Orientation Week: I got there yesterday and everyone was saying “hey, have you heard about Ben?”, “Yeah, that’s really awful, I hope he’s ok,” etc. Ben is one of the Aussie guys in our class, so I asked another Aussie what happened. Here’s the story: Ben borrowed a bicycle from the hotel so he could ride around downtown. I guess it was kind of a crappy bike, because the brakes locked when he was coming down a hill and he fell off the bike. Only that’s not the end of the story. Oh, no. When he fell, he happened to land right in the entrance to a parking garage. A car came out, didn’t see him on the ground, and RAN OVER HIM!! Literally, one of the 4 tires of the SUV went completely across his torso. Now, here’s the amazing part: the guy is totally fine. They rushed him to the ER and kept him overnight, but he had nothing broken, no internal injuries, na-da. A few bruises and scrapes, but that’s it. He was released yesterday afternoon, then went back to the hotel to sleep off the drugs they gave him. We joked that it was a pretty extreme method to get out of the videotaped team exercise, but apparently he’s ok to fly back to Australia this evening. Thus proving the theory that all Australians, even the little scrawny computer geek types, are total badasses. The hotel, meanwhile, sort of panicked over the fact that this happened on one of their bikes and he could potentially sue the poo out of them (which probably doesn’t even cross the mind of most non-Americans), so they upgraded his room, sent many free platters of food to his room, etc. Nice.

Anyway, last night I went out with a bunch of the guys from class because it was their last night in town. Many drinks were consumed at the hotel bar, then we walked to Axis for dinner and more drinks. On the way there, we passed the spot where Ben had his bike accident, and we stopped for a respectful moment of silence as we stood around the spot of blood that was still on the sidewalk. Many of our fellow drunken cohorts took photos. I’m sure Ben will appreciate that when they email them to him. Anyway, I ended up getting very tipsy and talking about politics and religion with a bunch of foreigners (and one or two Americans). Strange evening, but fun.

And this afternoon, I have my very first performance review – it’s end of the fiscal year, so this is when they do all that stuff. Everyone wish me luck!

hell on video

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Today is the last day of Orientation Week. I cannot begin to tell you how happy I am that it’s almost over. Yesterday we were given a scenario like this: You’re in a plane crash in the sub-arctic region above the Newfoundland-Quebec border. The pilot and plane sank into the river/lake/some icy body of water, and you’re left with 15 items (sample: hand axe, compass, rope, sleeping bag, bottle of Bacardi 151 rum, etc.). You have to prioritize them in order of importance. Then you’re divided into teams, and your team has to collectively rank everything in order of importance. Then you have the official expert opinion on the most important items, figure out your score, then the team’s score and realize that (here’s the point of the exercise) you did better as a team than as an individual. Nevermind the fact that we’re all dead because we tried to walk 50 miles to the nearest town and we should’ve stayed put and kept our fire going to signal passing planes. But my team survived longer than the other 2 teams, so there you go.

This morning, however, we reached a new high (low?) in Consulting Suckiness. We have to come up with an actual scenario from our lives – preferably a consultant/customer scenario, but you could use anything from your life where you were dissatisfied with the outcome due to your own personal lack of communication (i.e., you wish you had said something, but you didn’t). Then we get to act this scenario out with our partner ON VIDEO!! Aacckkk!!! I couldn’t think of anything work-related, except one project where I was the only girl and I felt like the team secretary, and I really didn’t want to talk about that because I don’t like playing the gender card. So I talked to the group facilitator to try to get another idea, and he told me to use something non-work related, like maybe a bad experience with a customer service person or something. Here’s what I came up with: A few years ago, I was at the vet’s office, I saw a guy abusing his dog, I didn’t say anything to him and I wish that I had. So this poor other guy from Singapore has to act out the role of the dog-abuser, and I have to (calmly, mind you) ask him to treat his dog more kindly without killing him (which was honestly my first instinct when this happened in real life). We just finished acting it out, and it was so awful that there are no words.

Then a little bit later, I had to play the customer for this Australian guy, but all I had to do was act closed off and unresponsive, so that was pretty easy. Then – here’s the best bit – we’re about to get to watch all of ourselves on tape IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE GROUP and evaluate how we could improve our communication skills. I think I’m probably going to crawl under the table and die.

I cannot WAIT to get back to actual work.

lunch break

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I only have a few minutes to write this, so I’ll be brief: whoever invented the concept of “team-building exercises” should have bamboo shoved under their fingernails for all of eternity. Here’s a sample of this morning’s activities: each table (which in my case consists of me, an Australian guy, and a girl and guy who are both from Singapore) gets a white board and a marker. In the center, we draw a big circle. On one side of the circle, we write things we all have in common (example: we all have siblings, dark hair, that type of thing), and on the other side of the circle, we write down common challenges that we all face as consultants (kill me now). Then, outside of the circle, we write one unique trait about each of us, and the rest of the room has to guess who each trait applies to. For mine, I wrote “has 2 tattoos”. When our orientation leader read that out loud, all 35 people in the room simultaneously called out my name. Um, hello? I thought the whole thing about my having tattoos is that I don’t look like the type of person who would have them. But maybe compared to the other three, I was the only logical choice. Or maybe it’s because I’m the only American. Or maybe, just maybe, I give off way more of a badass vibe than I ever thought I did.

Aside: Jerry, an African-American guy from NYC, pulled me aside at lunch to ask me where my tattoos are. I told him on my back & on my ankle. I think he was disappointed that they’re nowhere obscene. Oh well.

Two other side notes:
1) Kris, or Mickie-G as Dave calls her, got a new job. Hooray for her!! It should be a great opportunity, and getting over a $5K pay raise is never a bad thing.
2) Today is my mom’s birthday. I would write a shout-out for her like I did for my sister, but she never reads this (that one time was apparently a fluke), so I guess it doesn’t matter. Just in case, though: I love you, Mom, and happy birthday. (And I’m not saying how old you are on the Internet, so be happy.)

geek girls of the world unite

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I’m sitting in a huge room full of nerds. Not that that’s really any different than my average workday, but today the nerds are all strangers. And most of them don’t speak English as their native language. Translation: this is Orientation Week. Which is funny, since I’ve worked for this company for almost 6 months and they’re just now getting around to sending me to orientation. So this morning was hell – go around the room, introduce yourself, talk about your previous work experience, why you joined this company, and your favorite hobby. Oh lordy. Have I mentioned how much I HATE talking about myself in front of large groups of people? If I had some assigned topic to talk about, I’d be fine, but not about my career and “fun facts” about my personal life. Ugh.

Interesting side note: there are actually more females in here than I was expecting; however, only 2 of us are non-Asians. And I don’t mean Asian-American, either – these girls work for my company’s branch offices in Singapore, Malaysia and Bangkok. However, I am the only female systems engineer in here, the Asian girls are all developers. And the sole other caucasian girl is one of our company’s internal lawyers. Once again, I’m the weirdo for being the girl with a guy’s job. I used to like having that distinction because it made me feel like some kind of pioneer feminist, but it’s starting to get kind of old. I wonder if I’d be a good developer. I met a guy this morning who switched fields and said it wasn’t that hard a transition. Hmmm. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about lately.

Anyway, this past weekend was pretty good, although poor Dave had to put up with an irrationally grouchy me for 2 days. I don’t know why I was in such a foul mood, but I couldn’t seem to snap myself out of it. I think it had something to do with my sinuses being all weird – I tend to get irritable when I have a sore throat & runny nose. But anyway, we got a lot done in the house. The living room is totally cleared out (the big-screen TV was the most daunting thing to move), and the plywood has all been laid down. There are some really funky angles in that room that allowed Dave to play with his new circular saw, which he thoroughly enjoyed. (Aside: the saw has a laser sight guide on it, and every time he mentioned something about it, I would have to repeat the world “laser” in my best Dr. Evil voice, complete with finger quotes.) We got the floor itself put down in most of the dining room, and we were going to do the rest on Sunday, but we were both tired and felt like taking a day off. Plus the fact that I was (and still am) sore as hell from spending most of Saturday on my hands and knees with a nail gun. I can’t imagine that it’ll take more than a day to get the rest done, so we’ll do it next Saturday. No worries. We should have enough time before the gorgeous new furniture shows up.

So yeah… Did I mention that I can’t wait for Orienation Week to be over?