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Joe, Carl, Everett and I got together for dinner this evening. I cooked and the food cost was covered by everyone else, an arrangement I enjoy. We had pork tenderloin, a reduced spinach side, and some golden cake and caught up on what we each had done since the diaspora. Carl continued on at my previous firm and spoke of his work load. Joe mentioned how easy his job was. Everett and I told tales of unemployment. At one point we were bullshitting about dogs and Everett said “Yeah this is kind of like being in the lab again, except we were paid there”.

He’s right, we were paid there, somehow. We were paid to advance the frontier of knowledge in our particular domain and enjoy each other’s company. I hope I can’t believe I’m getting paid at my next job.

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I helped Randy and Kelly move today and I was glad to do so.  I did 38 trips up and down the steps of their old apartment and my Fitbit counted every one of them.  Today I was firing on all cylinders even to the point where I did a really good job of backing up father’s truck with a trailer attached.  I picked up box after box of life lived and moved it either from an apartment to a truck or trailer and then from said truck or trailer into a house.  The recipe for moving is simply doing that until you’re done.  I was a satisfied kind of exhausted at the end of the day and Randy had bought me a keto cheesesteak which is simply a pile of meat and cheese in a bowl.

There was a slight nag to the notion that I was helping someone move on with their life.  Randy and Kelly were going from apartment to house and had called in their collective families to do it.  My amazing back-up was enabled by Randy’s sister’s husband and that is a network of relationships alien to me.  I try not to inconvenience others and would feel like I were calling in favors when I next move.  I feel I’ll do most of the work with either a flatbed or a book of matches.

 

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I saw The Dark Knight Rises today with someone that I had seen a bunch of movies with. We had never sat through a movie we both enjoyed together and this was no exception. She doesn’t bring out the worst in me so much as is good at bringing out the critical in me. That’s wonderful when there’s a shared object of resentment. I think it’s the last movie we’ll see in each other’s company at least for a good long while. Another chapter closed.

Kelly asked to borrow my carpet shampooer to work out some…stains in the carpet of her new place. I was glad to have her over and I showed her how it worked. I then unloaded a few pounds of superfluous carbohydrates on her including blueberries, prunes, and raisins. She’s a good friend.

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With so many people having been removed from my previous work place there was a strange freedom to everything I did.  If I needed a stapler I could just grab it from the cube of someone who had been dismissed.  If I had a question or a concern, most of the people I could ask were too busy to reasonably answer it so I simply went with my gut and checked back when I had an answer even if I had wasted a chemical or material.

I haven’t had that kind of freedom since I was an intern.  I missed it.  That was back when science as a career was still in the cards.  After eight hours or so cowboy science I had to fill out a lab report to describe what I had done.  Immediately I remembered why science as a career was no longer in the cards.

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My dad and I in the kitchen:
Dad: You’re on a diet?
Me: I’m eating low carb.
Dad: What’s a carb?
Me: Short for carbohydrate, all sugars and starches are carbohydrates.
Dad: I tend to eat what you eat. What’s it mean?
Me: See the pepperoni in the fridge?
Dad: Yeah.
Me: Go nuts on it. I’ve got tons of it. See the cheese in the fridge?
Dad: Yeah.
Me: Go nuts on it. Also, I’m going to be preparing a lot of broccoli.
Dad: I can deal with this.

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Low carb dieting has lead towards food choices that alternate between “oooh, that looks healthy” and “why are you doing that to yourself?” My lunches have been a salad topped with chicken and hardboiled egg topped with bleu cheese dressing. That last part is responsible for 40% of the calories in the salad so I figure I’d swap it out for balsamic vinegar and give myself a margin to down extra pepperoni later in the day. I ate my lunch gingerly, knowing that I had reduced my consumption that day by 15%. This energy faded when I logged my lunch in my calorie tracker and found that the two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar had contributed 6.8g of net carbohydrates against my daily allotment of 20g. How could ascetic acid with a few flavoring agents possibly be so high in carbohydrates? Because balsamic vinegar isn’t a traditional vinegar. It’s a grape reduction that turns out to be quite sweet that is then soured to give it the vinegar-y taste.

I had gotten quite good at rotating jars to check their carb content but now found a new Brutus waiting to slay me.

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Although I had been gone for two weeks, everyone at work had stories to tell me as if we’d not seen each other for a decade. One fellow told me of his adventures spearfishing and how messy it was. I asked if you could just aim for the brain and be done with it quickly and was told “Terry, the brain of a fish is the size of a pea. If you miss a little, you’ll hit it in the eye which is a hard place to pull a steel dart from. In spearfishing, there are no head shots”.

I worked late and went straight from work to Ockanickon without a chance to change. I was wearing a purple shirt that I thought made me look like a blueberry but everyone seemed to think it was a bold fashion move. One staff member looked at me and said “pooh, my name’s Terry and I’m from Dubai.” Good to know I have a shirt should I need to blend in with a gaggle of Emeratis.

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While traveling, I received a request to return temporarily to the firm that had fired me to take care of some testing needs that had popped up. Rather than my standard rate, I would be returning at my contractor rate which is 50% higher so I was glad to be back. Even thought I was gone for two weeks a few things were different:

  • 85 people had been laid off since I was last there, the hallways were a little less crowded. This trickled into other things like shorter cafeteria lines and a closer parking spot.
  • The new blank space in the refrigerator allowed me to bring in a 2-liter iced tea container. Something I should have tried to do at least five years ago.
  • The candy dishes were brimming and someone had even brought in a cake. Now that I was a contractor, part of me wanted to bake a cake to bring in and then bill for “off site work”.

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5am is normally a time where I can sleep quite well, but for some reason, rest wasn’t coming. Today I was driving home but, if I left now and drove swiftly, I’d be able to make a family get together just in time to politely decline the potato salad. I said goodbyes to the rest of my confused parties and launched Eastward making very good time for the first 500 miles. Then I-80 clogged up, then US-220 clogged up, then I-476 clogged up and I lost a total of four hours to traffic. Reunion missed, I parked in my driveway at 8pm on a day where I had driven back from Chicago, six hours before I’d normally return.

I broke the news to my housemates that I was going to be eating low carb:

Dave: So, what’s that mean for us?
Me: I have some popcorn to get rid of.
Dave: Smartfood, I love that stuff!

Me too, Dave. Me too.

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This trip to Chicago was the first for which I took no pictures. I even have pictures from what amounted to long lunch visits there yet this time my visit was for a full day and a half with no pictures. There are two things I missed:

  • Suzie had a low carb ice cream mostly consisting of heavy cream which Peter’s young cat found very compelling. The cat became less and less hesitant to investigate until it decided to poke its head in while Suzie was eating resulting in a cat vs. person stare-down.
  • The sun setting over South Chicago while Audrey, Peter, Suzie, and I had our first homemade dinner at Peter’s residence.