duck-shaped pain

Someone at the college whose servers I use decided to turn the server off while they went away for a few days, leaving me and at least several others in the lurch. Sort of irritating, really.

Worked some more on renovating my "office," or at least, my other room that serves as place to put everything that is not a bed or my clothes. Set up the big table I bought last weekend and moved my other desk in there. Getting the desk out of the basement and onto the top floor was fun -- it was just a bit too big for the stairwell, so taking it out the garage and then through the front yard and then up the top staircase (a bit wider than the bottom staircase, I think) was required. However, the desk got sort of banged up in the process, and there's now sort of a scratch in the finish on its top. Since it's an original Mission desk, I try to be careful with it, but it was clearly built for squatter and opener houses than this one.

I have many lamps, but finding the right one for the right spot here has been sort of a challenge. I have five, none of which seem to be exactly right:

• turquoise-and-white lamp base with a big blue rooster painted on it. The only shade I have is a weird red metal shade that, while it fits the lamp and matches it in scale, does not even live on the same planet as it in era or style. They're together for now, but the combination is painful to look at. [1]

• Boring black metal base with boring tan shade. Bought because it was $5 when I got my first apartment. Always surprised, I am, that the thing still works.

• The Lamps. So big. So out there. So the center of any room that they're in. However, I don't really have any table, other than the desk, that is close to the same scale they are, so placing one of them on what's available looks like an elephant balancing on a chopstick, so maybe not.

(Above: The Lamps sitting in my garage, waiting to be moved to Oregon and then eventually moved back. The brownish one I acquired first, and then its turquoise cousin was found at a yard sale ten years later. People either usually love or hate these lamps, with the firm majority going for the latter)

I roasted a chicken and made roasted garlic, lemon and sage risotto for dinner. Roasting a chicken is one of those activities that always reminds me that hey, I'm an adult. [2] Not sure why, but it just does. Roast chicken seems like one of those quintessential adult foods -- it's not particularly exciting, it's far from zesty, it's pretty dependable, it (depending on its size and the number of diners) can provide a lot of leftovers, and its taste is pretty understated. No one grows up and looks forward to roasting a chicken, but it just happens. And then it continues to happen, until you die.

It was juicy and tasty, though. The timing was off -- it took about 15 to 20 minutes longer for the chicken to be done, which meant that I had a load of finished risotto to deal with before I was ready. I scooped it into a dish and put it into the oven to keep warm. It was acceptable when it came out of the oven -- hell, I ate it anyway -- but it lacked the silkiness that just-cooked risotto has. Just a warning, in case you ever run into the same problem.

Worked 11 hours yesterday. Have to work tomorrow. Not fun. Not enjoyable. I've even run out of lists to make. At least I don't have to work Monday, but just two days of work in a row off would be eminently acceptable.

I got to work yesterday and opened the fridge. In the space normally filled by everyone's soft drinks and half-empty tubs of yogurt was beef. Lots of beef. Everything else had been sort of pushed off to the side to make way for countless chops and roasts. A whole fridge of beef is sort of a disturbing thing to see. You don't expect that much red.

Turns out one of my coworkers had purchased an entire side of beef the previous day and had run out of fridge and freezer space at home. Not wanting the excess to go to waste, he drove over to work in the middle of the night to fill the work fridge with many pounds of meat. Right now, he has no real plans to move it, but we've been assured by The Employer that the beef situation should come to an end soon. Too bad there's no cooking implements at work, because there's hundreds of tasty lunches right at hand there. One could probably ingest about five or six pounds of beef all on one's own before its owner even noticed.

[1] I know what base I want to use for this shade, but the problem is that I don't own it yet. "Yet" will probably turn into "never" sooner or later, because I've wanted this lamp base for years but I've never bought it or even picked it up and carried it around the store while thinking about buying it. You'd think if I wanted it that much, I would have done something about it by now. It's not that expensive, either, only $28. But I keep waiting for it to go on clearance, but after years of it not even coming close, I guess I should just give up.

[2] Other things that give me this feeling: waking up at 6 a.m. even though I don't want to, paying my car insurance, feeling extra super bad when I eat ramen noodles for lunch.

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