Twists of Fate

Monday has never, and probably will never be my favorite day of the week. I have been fighting a cold for like, oh, two weeks and am just so tired and achy today. Everyone at work keeps passing this plague back and forth to each other, and today’s casuality is the Director of the group. Meh.

My annoying officemate (from here on out referred to as VBI, for she is Very Busy and Important) talked for two damn hours straight about her adventures in house buying this weekend. I so totally don’t care. Meh.

VBI also wants to hook me up with someone who is a) looking for a wife, b) the mother of his future children and c) a great cook and d) a nice girl. I’m …pretty much 0/4 there with his qualifications, and my comments about womb renting and the Zero Population Growth Movement hopefully put paid to any matchmaking plans. I’m not and hopefully will not actually spawn my own children, and am perfectly content to dote on nieces and nephews. “Oh, but when you meet the right man, you’ll totally feel differently!” Bitch, please. *snorts* VBI annoys me. Meh.

Yesterday or today is Brother-Out-Law’s birthday, so we’re doing pulled pork BBQ somewhere in greater Seattle for dinner. My sister is vegan, and the only meat allowed in the house is the occasional special event piece of salmon. This should be interesting, but really, I just want to go home, curl up and go to bed. Clutching a skein of my new Sundara Silky Merino, naturally.

So you can see why today is very much a Monday Meh sort of day.

Hrmph.

I just turned the light back on after participating in Earth Hour. The New Moon in Aries Thursday and the new and vigorous growth that I can see exploding in the natural world outside prompted me to listen to President Obama’s weekly radio addresses from his Inauguration onward.

I still have a few to go, and I’m finding it a surprisingly painful process.

I find that it still hurts an awful lot to just plain hope.

I’ve been offline for a while. I did find a job, for 1/3 the pay of the previous one. It took a while for me to believe it, but apparently I also have somewhat less than 1/3 of the responsibilities. This is…good in many ways, but really really bad in others. My morale, which is already having a hard time recovering from over half a year of unemployment, feels like it’s been sprayed with liquid nitrogen. I’m frozen in some sort of scary ass quantum leap backwards in terms of my career. And to top it off, I want to possibly strangle my new office mate, who seems intent on treating me like I’m an amusingly bright dog whose sole purpose in life is to be at her beck and call.

I haven’t been knitting much. My physical health is…well, in kind of a sad state. My bum knee is worse than ever, I’ve managed to do something to the other side of my back, which means I’m lurching about the hallways at work like an exceptionally fat Quasimodo. I hurt all over, and it’s hard to get out of bed every day.

On the plus side. The rising tide of springtime life makes me feel a bit better. I have a job, which is definitely something. I would like very much to move, but am not sure that’s going to be possible in the coming months as eight days after I got my new job I was informed I’d be taking a 10% pay cut. That pretty much put the kabosh on my plans to move, as my paychecks will see a measurable decrease every two weeks. Maybe you don’t miss what you never had, but I miss the dreams I had regarding that money.

Not everything is doom and gloom. I learn something new every day. There’s one particular teeny tweet (small bird) who has a very long, complicated and involved song that is sung right around sunset every day, not far outside my windows. It only lasts one or two calls, but it’s beautiful enough to bring tears to my eyes. I have a roof over my head. I mostly have enough food to eat. I have the ability to entertain myself and learn something along the way, and produce some lovely things that are functional as well as beautiful.

Things could be worse. Things will, I hope, get better.

That’s all we can really reasonably ask for at the moment, no?

OK, I cannot remember who in the list of blogs I read linked to the International Stashbusting Giveaway Day for those who are interested in knitting and sewing, but dammit. Now I want to organize something similar for those of us who use Ze Yarn in our crafting. Seriously. Imagingermonkey is so incredibly fabulous for doing such a mindblowingly simple, yet totally fantastic thing.

I’ve been pondering whether or not it would be possible to do something similar for us yarn (and spinning fiber?) folk. Something along the lines of “All Things Being Equal” on the day of the Equinox that’s coming up here in a few weeks? Wouldn’t that be completely full of awesome? I know I’ve got a few skeins of some pretty groovy stuff in my stash that I’d put up for something like this. I’d even organize and do the links for folks who might be interested. What do you think? Would you be interested in something like this?

OK. For those who don’t actually know me all that well, I am a Star Trek fan. I adore Trek.

I wanted to have Picard’s highly intellectual and terribly sexy babies for a while there when The Next Generation was in the full throes of it’s run, or at the very least find out if Data really was fully functional.

I got lost, for a while, and had to abandon Deep Space 9, but I came back to it later when I could rent the entire series from Netflix and was utterly enraptured for weeks. Best plotty series of the bunch by far, with the subplots and story arcs and uberthemes…seriously smashing tv.

I won a trip, once upon a time, to visit the set of Voyager, and got to sit in Janeway’s chair and ponder why such an amazing universe couldn’t write a female captain to save their lives. I have a tattoo that’s Trek related, and I did my part to support the Paramount juggernaut that was the Trek “enterprise”.

By the time Enterprise rolled around, even this die hard fan was “meh” about it all. And believe you me, my pre-teeny crush on Dr. Sam Beckett burned with a white hot intensity that I thought I’d never get over when they canceled Quantum Leap. If that couldn’t break through the ennui about Trek at that point, could anything?

Enter JJ Abrams. I adored Alias. For the first two seasons. After that, I think Lost started up and the show began drifting and there was this sense of…no one minding the helm? It was a show without direction, done in by it’s own cleverness (did no one learn from The X-Files?), and honestly, every ep I saw of Lost managed to cement that impression.

So you can, perhaps, understand why I am concerned that they turned the cash cow over to JJ to milk for a while. I have no doubt that the effects will be amazing. The action scorching and breathtaking. But JJ tends to, well, over-complicate his story lines. All his shows have had a trademark of seriously twisty plot turns and “never saw that coming” moments. He can’t do that in a two hour movie, so what can he really do?

Don’t talk to me about Mission Impossible 3, please.

So. Kirk. Spock. Going back to where it all began and doing it over again? I know we get a lot of those “reset” button eps throughout the various series, but…it’s Kirk. And Spock. And JJ Abrams.

*skeptical Vulcan eyebrow* I find this highly illogical.

What about you? Will your bum be warming a chair in the theater come May?