Book #22 of my new years challenge is Bloody Bones by Laurell K. Hamilton. I keep on thinking that surely I’ve read more than just that since my last book update, but I’ve got a lot of half-read books lying around. Actually, for the last week I’ve been reading the first few volumes of Yun Kouga’s Loveless manga series, just because I didn’t want to get too deeply carried away while adjusting my sleeping schedule for my new job. A manga doesn’t take nearly as long to read as most novels. And if I can’t stop in the middle of the manga, I typically can at least manage to put down a volume once I’ve finished it, and be able to resist picking up the next volume until the following night.

Ah yes, my new job. I’m working at the Hawthorn Inn & Suites, which is a Hyatt hotel. I also sometimes work at the Hampton Inn & Suites, which is the Hilton hotel next door. Both hotels are on the same lot, owned by the same people, and share a lot of staff and facilities. For example, the laundry for both hotels is done at the Hawthorn, and the spare cleaning chemicals for both hotels are stored at the Hampton.

I have been hired to be a “room attendant”, which is a fancy word for the person who cleans hotel rooms all day. So far it’s not nearly as scarring a job as I had feared. Granted, it’s not glamorous, but it’s not horrifically difficult either. Remembering all the steps to cleaning the rooms is relatively easy, it’s the speeding up that is the most difficult part. Some of the other housekeepers are like the wind. Today I worked with one of the faster housekeepers. We were assigned fifteen rooms and we were done before noon. Similarly, on Sunday I was assigned with another woman who is really fast, and we cleaned 24 rooms in roughly six hours. I am often reassured that I am getting the hang of the job, but a lot of the other housekeepers can do three or four rooms to my one, and it’s pretty intimidating.

So, I’m no longer employed by Borders. My new job is challenging but hey, it’s full time, the pay is decent, and if they keep me on I’ll be eligible for insurance. Also, I’ve come to find that I am enjoying not having to answer customer questions all day long. This is not likely a forever job, but if I can keep it, which I’m cautiously optimistic about, I will likely try to keep it for a good while. I can actually afford to take care of myself and set in order all of the things I’ve been putting off due to being dirt poor. It’s a good feeling.

Yesterday whilst I was out and about I bought a breeder net for my tank. It’s a little box with plastic sides and a large net that covers it. You submerge it in your tank and hook it onto the side, so the baby fish have the same water and are kept in the same tank as the adults, but are safe from being eaten.

As soon as I had the breeder net installed I put in my two heavily pregnant female platys. They both had the big dark spot that livebearing fish get just before they drop fry. This morning I looked in my tank and vwallah! Baby fish! My larger female had dropped her fry during the night. After feeding I removed the no-longer-pregnant fish from the net. Now it holds over a dozen baby fish and one pregnant momma fish. I’ve never tried to raise fry before, so this ought to be exciting.

As most people who read my insane cat ramblings know, Big Hairy is an indoor-only cat, and has been for the past few years. What most of you don’t know is that since we’ve moved I, and sometimes my sister Casey, have begun to occasionally put a cat harness on Big Hairy and let him ramble around the front yard. I would like to say that I take the cat for a walk, but it’s more like I’m just attached to him so I know where he goes, and he drags me around and I prevent him from walking into the street and climbing trees.

Casey and I finally remembered to take pictures of one of these escapades in non-cat walking.

Since my pay went down, my cooking time went up. In the past few months I’ve gotten into the bad habit of eating out all the time. Once my work hours went down I couldn’t afford to continue eating out, so instead I got off my ass and started cooking my own food.

Not that I am any sort of a great cook, but it doesn’t take a genius to make a sandwich or basic spaghetti. The two previously mentioned foods are what currently make up the majority of my meals.

I started out just boiling whole wheat spaghetti noodles and adding pre-made spaghetti sauce on top. Then, one day, I bought mushrooms on a whim, so I started sautèing mushrooms in olive oil and adding them to my spaghetti. Then I thought “hey, there’s this other stuff that would also taste good in this meal,” and thus began adding sautèd onions and turkey bratwurst as well.

The big change, the one that prompted this whole post, occurred last night. I had, up until this point, been using pre-made traditional Ragu spaghetti sauce whenever I cooked spaghetti. It’s not that I’m a big fan of Ragu, it’s just that a large bottle of it was already conveniently taking up residence in the refrigerator. Well, I noticed yesterday that I was starting to run low, so after work I went to the grocery store with the intention of picking up more sauce. However, I could not pick a really heavy bottle, as I’ve been riding the scooter. I also had no intention of spending $5 on a bottle of spaghetti sauce that would only last four meals.

It is also worth mention that since I began my great label reading escapades there are a couple of common ingredients I’ve begun avoiding. The first and most worth mention is high fructose corn syrup, because it’s evil. If you don’t believe me go and watch the documentary King Corn. I also avoid soybean oil, just because seeing it in so many labels has begun to make me nervous. I avoid cane sugar and salt when possible for health reasons: they’re bad for my already-bad teeth, and also because I’m perfectly aware that the average American diet contains a lot more sugar and salt than most people need, so I’m trying to cut down where I can.

Imagine my lack of surprise, that it was impossible to find a pre-made spaghetti sauce that was cheap and also had quality ingredients. Huh. I of course could have just sucked it up and either bought the really expensive kind, or picked the cheap sauce that I thought was the least of the evils.

Instead I said fuckit and picked up two cans of generic tomato puree, no salt added. I figured, hey, it can’t be that difficult to make a basic spaghetti sauce.

So, today when I cooked, I sautèd my mushrooms, onions, and turkey bratwurst and set them to the side. Then I added roughly 1/2 of a cup of the tomato puree and thinned it with 1/4 a cup of water, so it was more like a sauce and less like a paste. I warmed this on the stove, used garlic powder and pepper for spice, and added in my previously sautèd foods. Once my noodles were finished I poured my improvised sauce on top and took a taste.

And it tasted fucking fabulous, even better than most pre-made pasta sauces I’ve tried, so take that unhealthy pre-made pasta sauces! Woo-hoo!

If I ever get around to taking pictures when I cook I’ll try to make a more formal cooking post. Until then I’m just going to bask.

This morning I woke up to the cat yakking. Not fun. I had a panicked moment where I thought maybe his medicine wasn’t working after all. He used to throw up roughly once a week, but since I started giving him pills for his hyperthyroidism a few weeks ago he hasn’t thrown up at all. Luckily, it was a false alarm. He only threw up a little, and when I cleaned it up the only thing I saw in the mess was a leaf. So I’m guessing that he ate a leaf off of one of the house plants and it didn’t agree with him. In this case, I’m probably lucky that he threw it up, since so many house plants are poisonous to cats. He usually leaves the house plants alone completely, but I suppose this must be an exception. When I looked in his food bowl I saw this it was nearly empty. I refilled it right away, so hopefully he won’t mess with the plants again.

I recently finished reading Sourcery by Terry Pratchett and The Lunatic Cafe by Laurell K. Hamilton. Both were good, but I can’t think of much to say about them other than that. Each book is from a series, and each series is one whose books I have reviewed previously. I get tired of reviewing sometimes. On the upside, I’m on book number 22 of this year. It brings me that much closer to my goal of 50.

One day last week my scooter ran out of gas. Only, I didn’t realize that it had run out of gas. By my calculation, I should have had at least 20 miles left before I needed to take it to be filled up. It stopped running twice on the way to work. As I pulled it off to the side of the road and tried to start it again, I had horrible flashbacks to my first car, and all the times it stopped running while I was on a busy road, or at an intersection. Not a good experience.

When I got to work I called my mom and asked her to bring oil for me to refill my scooter. It’s oil-injected, and even though, when I checked, it looked like there was enough oil left for a while, I couldn’t think of anything else that might be wrong at the time. Anyhow, my mom brought the oil, we refilled it, and the bike kickstarted just like it was supposed to, so we figured we had the problem fixed. Alas! It was still sputtering and acting funky when I left work. I finally figured “hey, maybe I’m wrong and it really just needs gas). So I hobbled the scooter to the nearest gas station, only to find that there was no way I could use the gas there because it was a Sams Club gas station, and the pump is unusable to anyone without a Sams Club card. Bastards!

I managed to get the scooter to start and make it partway up the road, but it stalled out at the stop light of doom, and absolutely refused to start again. I ended up walking it to the next gas station, which really wasn’t that far off, but still. It was embarrassing to be seen pushing my scooter down the road. Luckily, no one tried to be an asshole and run me over, or yell insults (in some ways, people in Colorado on the whole have shown themselves to really be better behaved than people in New Mexico). In the end I managed to push the scooter to a gas station that - hip hip hooray! - took my card and let me fill up my tank. It took less than $1.50 before the pump shut off. I have a secret suspicion that the sensors at the gas pump aren’t letting me fill up the tank on the scooter all the way, which would explain why it ran out of gas more quickly than I thought it would. I haven’t had any problems with the scooter since, but the whole experience has made me jumpy, and every time the scooter puts out so much as a sputter I tense, thinking something’s gone wrong with it. It is overdue for it’s 200 mile checkup anyway. Once it’s been in to see the motorcycle guru’s, I think I’ll be able to feel secure riding it again.

I’m hoping I’ll not have to go through this experience again. The entire episode left me uncomfortably sore for several days. My back and arms were sore from pushing the scooter and from lifting it onto its stand so many times in one day. I also was sore on the back of my neck; it felt like I had knotted a muscle, likely from looking at the ground (while pushing the scooter) with my helmet still on. Also, one of my legs was sore, from kick starting so much, but the other leg was normal. Sore all over except for one leg: very strange.

So, it’s gotten to where I have no choice but search for a new job.

Borders has been downsizing over the last few months. Overall it hasn’t affected me much since I’m a low-level employee, a part time cashier/bookseller. I knew last month that I needed to start looking for a new job, because my regular hours weren’t cutting it anyhow. It’s gotten bad enough that I just couldn’t afford car insurance this month. I’m scootering everywhere and hoping I can dig myself out of my financial hole before the weather gets cold. Overall it’s really not a bother to drive the scooter; the weather is nice and it saves me gas. Granted, it puts a limit on how much I can carry (I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to bring home cat litter this month) but since I’m poor it’s not like I can afford to do much shopping anyhow. In fact, sometimes I can’t even afford to go grocery shopping, ahaha. But I digress.

Last week it was revealed that Borders finally made a change that affects me, deeply. They cut the hours each store is allowed overall for its workers. Normally the store is given a little over 700 hours a week to split between the workers. Now the store has to be manned on less than 600 hours a week. This has resulted in slashed working hours for everyone at my store. I’ve gone from working three, occasionally four days a week to only being given two days of work a week.

It sucks.

Anyhow, it’s jump started my job search. I’m hoping for a clerical job of some sort. A nice, reliable 9-5 type of thing. With benefits. But pickings are slim. I might not be able to get what I want. I suspect I might end up taking something else out of sheer desperation. The search I did last night, which mostly utilized the website for the local newspaper, did give me a lead for two possible front desk-type jobs and one other paperwork type job. The only other things I found that weren’t in food or retail was a job as a copy repairer and a job at the dry cleaners…

I’m going to target the front desk jobs first.

Today I saw, via Neil Gaiman’s blog, a list of the supposed 100 new classics of American literature published between 1983 and now. It’s an interesting list, at any rate. I’ve only read a small percentage of the books that made the cut:

1. Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
2. Maus by Art Spiegelman
3. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
4. Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding
5. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
6. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
7. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

The fact that I’ve read even a small portion of the books on the list makes me feel good about myself.

I’ve also read work by Haruki Murakami, but not the book that actually made it to the list, the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. However, I do own a copy of that book, it is sitting on my shelf, staring at me. There are several other books on the list that are also sitting on my “not-yet-read” shelf, On Writing by Stephen King, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. If it’s on my shelf, I’ll likely get to reading it, eventually.

I’m curious as to if any of you have read books on the list: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20207076_20207387_20207349,00.html