The Marci Rating System

With full sun and mid-70Fs predicted today, combined with rain in the forecast for five of the next six days, I expect today will be a LOT of people talking about how nice the weather is, and a VERY LITTLE actual work. (I mean, that's always the goal, right?)

I have many non-work goals for the day, most of which currently seem overwhelmingly impossible, which probably means I need to eat more food.

What I've actually achieved so far is, um, adding some more crochet hooks to my shopping cart? hahahahaha no big deal. It's just in case! I might want them later, right?

This is a little bit one of those 'could a depressed person make THIS?' things, but I have ACHIEVED EMAIL TIDYING!

This morning I (finally) went through a bunch of emails that were piling up in my inbox -- mostly AO3 notifications I wanted to read, or things that were easy to delete, although our escrow payment is going up and I'm not entirely sure they're going to send a paper notice, so I guess good that I clicked through on that one.

(Okay, I did not click through. Clicking through is a not-super-safe habit that I'm trying to get out of. I used a separate tab to go to the mortgage site and view the document. But I *wanted* to click through, because that definitely seemed easier.)

Now my email is less stressful, and I can really bask in my bird feeder order confirmation emails, which is an unanticipated side benefit!

I was browsing through my early entries for this year, trying to figure out if I ever posted any 2023 goals. (I don't think so? Apparently I just imagined that.)

On February 6, I mentioned a tumblr post which referenced Sesame Street (I recently saw this mentioned again elsewhere on the internet, so this one has really made the rounds), highlighting a Very Fun Number Thing for the end of this year: (depending on how you write your day/month/year dates), the last day of the year will be 12/31/23, or 123123.

And I love very fun number things, so this was a great reminder!

Also, I may go back and just re-read all my fic rec Friday fics. They look good, and I've genuinely forgotten most of them by now. It's literally a rec list curated just for me!

Last night I stayed up SEVERAL hours longer than usual, and didn't find myself in bed until it was technically today already. It made perfect sense at the time -- I was comfortable, and that feeling has been in short supply with the heat and humidity this week, so why not extend it as long as possible?

Also, I thought to myself, with the brilliant clarity of late-night bad decision-making, if I'm tired all day Thursday, that will distract me from being hot!

So now it's Thursday, and I'm hot, cranky, AND overtired. In retrospect, this decision was neither my best nor my brightest. So it goes!

Yesterday I took some boxes to the garage. Wait, backstory:

We have a garage! Yes, it feels wildly luxurious. It's a freestanding structure separate from the house, and connected to several other garages. Most importantly, it shares a wall and a teeny-tiny vestibule with our neighbor's garage.

Also for VARIOUS REASONS the easiest way to get the big door open is to crack open the little door, reach in, and push the button.

SO! Yesterday. I'm at the garage, in the teeny-tiny vestibule, and I opened the little door and IMMEDIATELY I heard the sound of the big door going up. But I hadn't pushed the button! My mind boggled. Was the electricity working TOO WELL? Did the door just up and down on its own whenever? Was the garage reading my mind? Time travel? I pushed the button and then forgot? AMNESIA?!?!

I reversed course out of the teeny tiny vestibule to put eyes on the big door. Which was, of course, still closed. Because the absolute MOST LOGICAL explanation for the situation (aka our neighbor had just arrived and opened their garage door from their vehicle) had not occurred to me at all. (I laughed a lot, then tried to explain it to the neighbor, who possibly did not understand exactly why this was so humorous.)

In conclusion: gold star for my brain for coming up with a half a dozen hilariously improbably explanations for something so simple.

How are we on round 3 already?!?!?!?!?! I went to check the boss tracker this morning, and found board 3 instead, woohoo!

Part of me: AHHHHHHH I'M NOT READY I NEED A NAP AND A COOKIE

Other part of me: LET'S GOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

Things to do while A03 is down:

*make listicle posts about what to do while A03 is down

*the aforementioned weeping, gnashing of teeth, etc

*moment of thanks for the fact that it's not *usually* down

*be extra careful not to close any fics you might happen to have already open in tabs that you were saving for later -- their time has come!

*I guess grocery shopping? and then work?

I have a double dentist appointment this morning (first a cleaning, then a filling), which I have been trying to stay positive about. I'll get a free toothbrush! I'll be right near a grocery store afterwards and can get the weekly shopping done! I'm taking the day off from work so I can take a nap in the afternoon!

But I'm still pretty anxious about it, and then this morning I noticed the cat is limping. I mean, it sure did take my mind off the dentist, but that is NOT what I meant when I said I wanted to think about something else!

(PS: Right now I'm in 'wait and see' mode. She doesn't go outside, so the likelihood that she got bitten or scratched by something is pretty small. If she'll let me take a close look at her paw, I'll try to see if she might have something stuck in there, or it could be a muscle strain from all her leaping about.)

31 day months are so wild -- like, today is the 27th already, but it will still be March on Friday!

(To be fair, numbers -- and dates in particular -- have never really made any sense* to me. I managed to fake it through school long enough to stop needing to take math classes, and luckily it turns out that we actually DO have calculators in our pockets all the time as adults, so take that, middle school math teachers!)

(*It's like this: I can look at the calendar, and count the days of the week starting with today and ending with the 31st, and clearly see that there are 5 days left in the month. But 31 - 27 = 4, which is too few. And 32 - 26 = 6, which is too many, so you can't just go around the numbers. Which means you must have to get an extra day from either the end of the sequence or the beginning, somehow, but how do you decide which one? Why only one? Why is such an easy thing so conceptually hard for me to grasp?)

Usually I go to the grocery store on Wednesdays, but due to Some Weather, it made more sense at the time to go on Monday this week. Which was neat! And I woke up on Tuesday thinking it was Thursday, and today thinking it was Friday. So that's less neat.

Just to really shake up the week, we also put off Takeout Tuesday due to That Same Weather, and we may do it on Thursday instead.

(And thanks to the time change, the light outside hasn't mentally matched with the time on the clock all week. My brain keeps suggesting that I fix one of those things, but I'm relatively confident that this is one of those things that will eventually work itself out.)