Slice and Twist

It’s what I feel the time change has done to me, but that’s not all.

True, I do feel like someone has sliced away an hour of my time and twisted my internal clock into an inoperable tangle of wheels and cogs, but on the bright side I’m enjoying a piece of pepperoni pizza after a dress rehearsal for The SpongeBob Musical: Youth Edition and later I’ll be enjoying a soft pretzel for Pretzel Sunday.

Hence, slice and twist.

Earlier last week the ring finger on my left hand betrayed me. For some reason, whenever I cut my nails, that finger has a 50/50 chance of getting infected, and this time I lost. But three says of applying Neosporin and employing Epsom salt soaks cleared it up. As I put it on Tuesday:

Today the painful throbbing has finally stopped. Either it’s getting better or my nerves are dead, but since it doesn’t seem to have grown any larger, I’m guessing it’s the former.

The other week I told you about how our oven went out when I tried to make hot hamburger plate. Well, I was able to use the new oven this week to make French fries in observance of Poutine Day. It was also the same day that I got a copy of Scooby Doo Meets the Boo Brothers in the mail.

My biggest thing this week was going to statewide conference for community college professionals working in Students Services. It was my first time traveling alone for business, and the first time I’d be presenting at a conference. To say I felt a huge case of imposter syndrome would be to put it mildly.

Wednesday’s weather was nasty, and looking at the future radar online I made the decision to leave an hour earlier than planned.

It turned out I made the right decision. It rained the whole way there and even though I left early I still arrived at my expected time. I passed several accidents and even had the vehicle in front of me go off the road and into the median but there was nothing I could do – I can’t make calls through my car and I wasn’t about to try to use my cell phone to call 911 while visibility was almost zero, and even trying to pull off the road would have been dangerous without someone to help me change lanes. It was all I could do to keep a safe speed and white-knuckle it through the worst of it repeating “I’m in this lane and everyone will just have to deal with it” over and over and over again.

It’s a good thing I was traveling with extra spoons:

Thankfully the hotel didn’t give me any trouble at check in and there was a Bojangles just across the way. Not what I wanted to eat but with the rain and the travel I just wanted to heave something to eat and get off the road, so that’s exactly what I did.

TL;DR: I drove four and a half hours to spend a rainy night with two queens.

That was a quality joke that didn’t get nearly enough attention when I posted it on my social media.

Later on that night, I enjoyed some “space blast” Oreos, it being Oreo Cookie Day and all. I did not have any milk, and that made me sad.

I went to bed and woke up the next morning, got ready and drove to the college where the conference was being held.

This hotel coffee wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t very good, either. Nevertheless, I thought I’d left my hotel in order to be fifteen minutes early to conference check in only to discover I misread the agenda and had instead arrived an hour and fifteen minutes early.

Such is life.

My presentation would not be until after lunch, and even though the conference covered several rooms, all the sessions i would be attending were in the same room on Thursday, so I found a seat (when the conference opened) and made myself comfortable.

The conference coffee was much, much better.

About an hour or so before my scheduled presentation (about using Customer Relationship Management software on a community college campus) I started getting texts to check my email. I did and discovered that our CRM software company is going out of business and will cease entirely in December 2024. So, everything I was going to talk about I was now telling to myself once more. In fact, it made a great icebreaker to say “This is the software we use, but this isn’t going to be an advertisement for them. In fact, it can’t be because they’re going out of business.”

Fifty people audibly gasping in sympathy for the speaker really helps put one at ease.

I should say this doesn’t mean I am out of a job, it’s just drastically changed the focus of my job for at least the next ten months at least.

I made many good contacts as a result of the presentation and then went out to celebrate at a nearby restaurant I’d found online. I had the grilled meatloaf with mashed potatoes and green beans and they even brought me extra gravy. I hadn’t planned it, but it also happened to be $2 off classic cocktails that night, and I chose to celebrate with a Pomegranate ‘76 and a “Spirited” Old Fashioned.

I should back up a bit and say that during lunch I found some of my counterparts from another college that remembered me from last year; one of them even has a Pusheen plush in her office because of our talking about cats 🙂 They all gave me their dessert cookies “for the ride home” out of sympathy I was by myself.

It was great to be remembered that way.

I rested up that evening and checked out of the hotel the next morning before going to the conference for the second day. It was a good day and I made more good contacts and was able to get back on the road by 1:30. Unfortunately there was an accident on the main highway several hours into the drive, and so I followed the suggested detour on my maps app. And then, just before I’d merge to get back on track, there was another accident I could not get around and had to wait for them to clear.

Needless to say those cookies came in handy.

I got a chicken sandwich for supper and a bit of rest before D&D Friday night. I haven’t yet typed up the notes, but if you’ve been filling along via the links I”ve shared, the shorter version is that more of the gods are being affected by whatever entities are trying to bring about the end of the world, and after visiting a quite uncanny library we at least know the names of those entities. For those that may have listed to The Magnus Archives, our game is heavily inspired by that podcast.

The other big D&D news is that we’re back to alternate weeks, and so this coming Friday will be my first sessions with my Kenku, Rustle, and I’ll finally get to use and share the set of dice my friend Jax gave me back in February.

I went grocery shopping yesterday and then tried to rest after being out of town and I mostly succeeded. My body protested the rain and the travel and I found myself enjoying a Coke and a few ibuprofen along with the heating pad and my feet up watching Scooby Doo Meets the Boo Brothers once more.

I tried making Guinness-marinated mock tenderloin steaks and while they were edible they weren’t great. I think they needed to marinate longer and perhaps I should have attempted to braise them instead of grilling.