Pickles & Dimes

2010 is still going well, but Work 2010 is like a terminal patient whom you’ve already said goodbye to a dozen times, and yet it won’t let go and STEP INTO THE LIGHT. I was told January was the slowest time of year at work, and I happily compiled a list of minor tasks to do during this time and now that the time is at hand, I realize it was all a lie. I have three proposals due next week, which at first seems overly busy but doable, until I realized Monday is a mandatory unpaid day off, so OK, three proposals due within four days. But wait, the leadership team (who signs off on all proposals) will be on a retreat starting on Thursday, so that means three proposals due within two days, and now we’re officially entering Insanity Town. THEN I realize most of the guys will be busy in a meeting Wednesday afternoon, so that leaves a day and a half. To do three proposals. One of which I have not even received yet. ARGH. This is why people drink.

The Vikings play on Sunday, and Jason and I have been talking about it with an equal mix of excitement and dread. Yes, they’re playing well and yes, we should be able to win, but we both know in our hearts that this is the Vikings, man. We are purposely not getting our hopes up because the heartache of 1998 is still with us, to the point that if one of us said, out of the blue, “He hadn’t missed a kick ALL YEAR!” the other would immediately understand and be driven into a bout of grumpy despair.

I’m going to try to listen to all of my CDs this year (all 90 of them) to decide if I should import them to iTunes or sell them. I pulled one from the beginning of my collection and one from the end (they’re alphabetized, naturally) and as I listened to Fever to Tell by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I kept stabbing the off button on my car stereo because man: too screamy. The screaminess noticeably lessened with each track, so that by track 9 I could listen to the entire song, and by track 11 I actually hit the repeat button. But tracks 1-8: I would’ve driven my car off the road to avoid listening to them.

Are there certain songs that you refuse to listen to because they make you want to punch something? I have many (like nearly every song of Kenny Chesney’s [nothing personal, Kenny] and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Date With the Night), but now that I’m typing this, I’m drawing a blank. On the flip side, do you have any songs that you could listen to a million times without tiring of them? I like: Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley, Unchained Melody by The Righteous Brothers, Dragula by Rob Zombie (don’t ask), and Right Now by Van Halen.

My car got a Minnesota car wash this morning, after I refilled the washer fluid with the jug I keep in the backseat for days such as these, days where my entire commute is spent windshield-wiping my way to work, seeing the road through a slice of clean-only-for-a-second glass as other vehicles send a fine spray of gray, spattered sludge into my field of vision.

It was warm enough for a car wash, and as I debated the pros and cons (pros: clean car. cons: doors will freeze shut later, car will be clean for less than 5 minutes, I’ll have wasted six bucks), I decided the heck with it and grabbed a large chunk of snow, cheese-grating it against my headlights (which were so filthy that when I drove at night, I could barely see the road) until they were clean.

Then I kicked off the giant ice hunks from my wheel wells, which were frozen so hard last week that no amount of kicking could release them. (I had spent way too many minutes on my commute listening to them rubbing against my tires and wondering which would give first, the ice or my tires’ ability to move forward.)

And afterwards, when I was done, I looked at the shiny, clean headlights, the mostly clean windshield and the kicked-off hunks of ice and thought, “Yep. Should’ve gotten a car wash.”

How often do you wash your car?

Our condensate pump froze this weekend. Or rather, the tubing outside did, backing up and overflowing the pump, which I had just checked a few hours earlier before Jason heard the pump running and running, and opened the furnace closet door to discover water just starting to spill onto the floor.

Outside, where the pump tube drains, is an ice dam of massive proportions. It looks like an ice volcano. A slippery, frozen, non-yielding volcano of ice that formed within the last two weeks, when the temps were below zero. The ice volcano finally reached high enough to smother the end of the tube inside its frozen core (despite my nightly checks), and the water had nowhere to go. It froze inside the tube and backed everything up. Jason took an ice hoe to the dam, but the water in the tube remains frozen. So for now, we have the tube running from the furnace to a bucket instead of the pump.

In our other basement closet, our water heater drain valve is leaking, and despite the very simplistic diagrams and assurances from me that we could probably fix it ourselves by replacing the plastic valve with a brass one, we have yet to do anything about it. Mainly because we have never ever drained a water heater before and there is gas involved and we are afraid of an explosion, so now we have an old tupperware container catching the drips instead.

Someday, we’ll get around to fixing everything (the frozen tube issue should resolve itself this week with temps in the 30s), but until then, we have plenty of Tupperware containers.

How about you guys? Any household repairs you’ve been putting off?

I am loving 2010 so far. I am in a great mood and attacking tasks with the same sort of self-righteous enthusiasm that normally makes me want to throat-punch people when I see it elsewhere.

Look at me! I dealt with the mortgage company again!

I organized my file folders!

Man, shut up, self. I am totally annoying myself with my productivity. Good thing I have 60-extra-minutes-for-no-reason commutes, and procrastinating but-I-need-it-now coworkers to distract me.

I didn’t make any formal resolutions, but I have started a multi-colored, Sharpie-written, bullet-pointed list of things I want/need to do in 2010. Some of it is boring grown-up crap, like the aforementioned 401(k) rollover and hunting down my pension contact person from 1999 (who never returns phone calls ever), but there is some fun stuff, like knitting some quick and easy washcloths (and ignoring the Frankenstein Sweater guilt-free) and sampling some fancy cheeses.

Here’s where I need some suggestions. What types of fancy cheeses would you guys recommend we start with? And if you don’t like “fancy” cheese, what’s your favorite type? Jason and I are both huge fans of cheese, but we don’t really care for stinky cheeses (bleu, etc.), and would like to be more adventurous and get a nice hunk to sample once in awhile without spending a ton of money on something we’ll hate after one bite. And, if anyone lives in the Twin Cities and knows of a good cheese shop where they let you sample their wares, let me know.

(Also, is it not cool to refer to fancy cheese samples as “hunks”? I need to know this stuff.)