Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

Month: January 2024

  • Weekly Paint Progress: 1/11/2024

    This week the mandolin went from this: … to this. There’s some mother of pearl that will lighten up the mandolin. And I need to remind myself I’m not going for realism.

  • Ear Plugs: Best Thing Ever

    Yesterday was a long day at work. The healthy staff were summoned back to the office, so I spent the day on Zoom, watching as old friends in the office had reunion dance parties in the background. (And all the time I knew that if I had sighed about it a working committee would be…

  • Dust Mitigation Continues

    Yesterday people came and cleaned out the air ducts. Vast moonscapes of dust were cleaned out. They recommended we run the air for a while, with nothing blocking the air vents, so any remaining dust could be trapped by the HVAC filter. Gary could only take it about twenty minutes. Then, hacking, he blocked the…

  • Upcoming Alerts

    Two things are coming up fast! I don’t want anyone caught unprepared. The Emmys are on the 15th of this month. They didn’t happen last year because of the strike. Who else forget about the total eclipse? We just had one a few years back, and now there’s another. So, two things on a schedule…

  • TWIL: Evidence of a Possible Stroke

    All day yesterday my entire house smelled like chocolate cake. Delicious. Only there was no chocolate cake in my house. I, of course, thought of my Canadian friends, and their belief that those having a stroke smell toast. I tried to track down the genesis of that and got sidetracked by the wonderful video debunking…

  • The Freedom of Chaos

    My favorite time is when things tip from bad to intolerable. So bad it makes you laugh. That is the current state of my house: intolerable. It was only bad this morning. I’ve mentioned before how the house is in chaos because of the gypsum drywall dust and the mitigation attempts: HEPA shopvacs and air…

  • Used vs Utilized

    I don’t know if this is specific to TeddyJ, but people never seem to say “used” when they mean “used”; instead they choose to say “utilized”. It happened five times today. It began to cause me physical pain. And, of course, I can’t correct them, because they choose to use “utilize” because they want a…

  • Weekly Paint Progress: 1/4/2024

    This week the mandolin went from this: … to this.

  • Cat: Got some splining to do

    Gary loves it when Goldie sits on the windowsill like a Halloween decoration. Sadly, I noticed that Goldie has been slowly snipping away at the window screens, and has almost tunneled through. This means I need to purchase more durable screens. I thought Amazon would provide a selection of sizes, but it seems that all…

  • Victorian Wig

    This is the current state of the Country-western Wig of my Youth. I took thinning shears to it, and like it better piled up in my head, but it is still too much hair. And, obviously, the artful curl is too artful. You can’t look like, “Oh, dear, that curl has escaped me,” when it’s…