Twist of Lemon

Well it has been nearly two months and I am still coming to terms with the loss of Grim. So I thought I would take the time and write down some of my fondest memories of him.

Malgrim was one of four kittens of a friend’s friend’s boyfriend’s cat. One kitten looked Himalayan, two were tabby and one I think was black. I don’t remember what made me choose him, except for the fact I was looking for a tom cat. As a kitten Grim had the largest ears, his first nickname, of many over the years, was beanie head. The rest of him was so cute and tiny. I got it into my head, after hearing that most cats actually like water, to test this with the new kitten. So what better way to test the theory than to bring my new kitten into the shower with me? Did I mention that it was one of those showers with the sliding door? Grim wasn’t very pleased when I turned on the shower, there was a bit of blood before I managed to get the door open, and him out of the tub. I have never seen such an evil look on a cat before or since. At the time I wondered if he would ever trust me again, but he was forgiving. It was so nice having him curl up on my bed at night to cuddle with me. In the mornings we had a ritual. I didn’t wake very easily, so he would take a running leap at the bed to land on my bladder. I would bolt awake, run to the bathroom and when finished fill his food bowl before going back to bed. It wasn’t the most pleasant system, but it worked for us.

A few weeks before he was to be fixed Grim managed to rip open a screen to the window of our ground level apartment. I was panicked, spent hours searching for him, and eventually left a bowl of food by the open window. Later that night I awoke to strange sounds coming from the kitchen. I found Grim coming back in the window, pulled him into the room and shut it. He took one look at me, could see how ticked off I was, and decided to sprint to the bedroom. I beat him down the hall and shut the bedroom door in his face. I was damned if he was going to go carousing all day and then come home to cuddle with me! The next day I opened my bedroom door to find every cat toy in the house piled there as a plea for forgiveness.

Eventually we had to more to a new apartment. During the move I worried that Grim would be bored, as I would have to leave him at home alone during the day. So I decided to leave him a sock filled with catnip as a toy to while away the time alone. I came home that afternoon to find Grim splayed out on his belly, drool covered sock in his mouth and my entire kitchen floor “mopped.”

I could go on, there are numerous stories of cute, funny and crazy things Grim did in his life. But the most important thing was that Grim gave me unconditional love during the years I needed it the most. During my time with Grim, and before I met my partner Brain, I lived in about ten different apartments, had about ten different low paying jobs, had about twenty different relationships, and as many breakups. People often think of cats as being standoffish, but whenever my heart was broken Grim was there trying to comfort me.

I still miss him.

I believe the subject line says it all.  Frances Davenport if you read this please find some way to get in contact with Brain or me.  We are concerned!

I know it has been quite awhile since I have posted.  The only excuse I have is when I am not wokring, or working at home I have been reading a lot.  I come up with great ideas for posts while I am stuck in traffic, but I hardly have the energy to type them up once I am home.  I have also been trying hard to exercise on a consistant basis.  The good news is I have been fairly sucessful.  The only problems I have is with all the thin people that use the gym at the complex here.  There is only one exercise bike, and I like to spend my cardio time pedaling and reading.  So imagine my ire when I went tonight to find som thin fit guy using the bike, and then when he was done gallantly offering it over to the thin blonde chick even though I had been patiently waiting.  Well I lifted some weights and waited themout.  I hate fit people!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I want to be thinner, more fit, whatever you want to call it.  It really isn’t for my health, no matter how much I would like it to be.  Really it is to feel more accepted and loved.  I find myself wondering how my life would be different if I felt attractive again.  I believe I would have more self confidence.  How would finally being fit affect my life for the better?  I also worry that even if I do make it to my goal, that I won’t be content.  I’ll just wish I could recapture my youth, or get trapped in the pit of nostalgia.

I guess I better get to the point where I have met my fitness goal before I worry about anything past that point.

Being deeply unhappy with my current state of health I have decided it is time to make some changes.  Typically lacking in willpower I am going to try something in order to hold myself more accountable in reaching my goal.  I will be posting updates here.  Currently I am suffering from major lower back pain, and I believe it is indicative of my current level of fitness.  So here is the plan.  I currently weigh 280 lbs and want to be down to 200 lbs by the end of December 2009.  I also want to be exercising on a regular basis by April 2009.

Stay tuned for updates…

Work has become very busy over the last few months, and consequently I have spent most of my down time escaping reality through books and the computer.  If you care, and I do hope you do, here is the breakdown:

WORK: We had a SQF pre-certification audit a couple weeks ago.  This was meant to give us an idea on how far we are from being able to become certified to the standard when we have the full audit in January.  Well the week before the audit was stressful, trying to get as much done as possible, and the audit itself was two full days.  During the plant portion of the audit I took 80 pictures of problems.  Going to be fun to get everything corrected.  More recently I have attended two training classes, one a day long training for managers and supervisors, focusing on the importance of proper hiring practices, new employee onboarding and communication.  The other was a class on personal productivity improvement.  I found the material interesting and have already put it to use.  I might have been even more productive if we hadn’t had three power outages at work this week.

PLAY: About a month ago I convinced Brian to let me buy a copy of Spore, the newest game from Maxis.  If you haven’t heard of the game [and just where have you been?!?!] the premise is that you control the development of a species during its [directed] evolution from a bacterium to a space faring sentient race.  I also made the mistake of getting Brian to try playing.  Well we both have spent A LOT of time on the game since.

READ: I have also been reading a lot.  I have put holds on nearly 45 books at the public library and have already read twenty of them.

So what have you been up to of late?

Hi everyone [if anyone is still checking this blog- and if you are leave a shout out on a comment please- I would just like to know] how are things?  I have had a busy past few weeks.  Here is how they played out…
The week of August 18th I spent in a Food Safety and Sanitation course at Ecolab in St Paul.  Sounds dull doesn’t it?  Actually it was very informative and gave me a lot of ideas for improving programs around my plant.  I also got to meet a few other people in the industry as there were 38 students in the class.  It was sort of strange being one of about three students that were local to the area.  I really would have enjoyed myself even more if I was from out of town.  On the first day we were taken for a tour of St Paul at lunchtime, and then spent about a hour and a half after class at a free bar, free eats ice breaker session.  I found out the next day they had even more free bar time at the hotel the out of towners were staying at, I wish I had been from out of town.  Hard to drink my fill and then drive home, so I didn’t.  While overall the class was very good, there were times when I found myself having a hard time paying attention.  And I may have figured out why it took me such a long time to gain my college degree.  When I am in class and cannot concentrate my eye tends to wander to the hotties in the class.  And there were at least four within my line of sight during this class.  It is a wonder I gained any information at all.  Considering my hormone levels during my college career, it is a wonder I ever got my degree.  So a week of sanitation and daydreaming, and then I got to eat at a new restaurant on Friday afternoon , POP, before going back to the plant for a three hour meeting on SQF.
Last week was audit week at the plant.  We are in process of getting our site ready to implement a new quality standard called SQF and will be having a pre certification audit in October.  Since we are one of only four sites that our parent company owns that will try for certification this year, our parent company sent out their SQF expert to get an idea of where we are in the process as well as give us guidance.  So the SQF expert shows up on Monday, and while I am working with her I get a call to let me know the FDA has shown up at the plant!
It turns out they wanted to test their biosecurity plan, what with the whole RNC being in town soon, and picked us as a nearby milk producer.  So I spent the day with two FDA officers going over our processes, pulling four product samples and tracing them back to the specific invoices for the raw materials used to make them.  On the up side, they told me the FDA was looking to fill six positions in Minneapolis and if I was interested I should apply.  They seemed to think I was competent, which is a good thing when dealing with the feds.  So that was Monday, on Tuesday our third party auditor came by to conduct our yearly surprise audit.  I won’t bore you with details, but we ended up with a 95.9% score which is the highest the plant has ever gotten!  Wednesday was back to SQF boot camp, and Thursday I got to host the six other QA managers from my company for an SQF planning discussion.  It went about as well as you could expect with a group of radically different backgrounds and agendas.  I hate decision by committee.  Friday I spent in recovery, trying to get my normal work done.  Tomorrow I’ll post about the fun stuff Brian and I have been up to, but right now I need to get to bed!

If you can figure out where the title is quoted from you are my kind of reader.

I received a call the other day from a friend wondering if I was still alive since I haven’t posted here for weeks [months?].  And to that I say “Hi Gabby!”  I haven’t posted because I just haven’t thought of much to write.  My work is going well, but takes a lot of energy and when I get home I spend most of my free time with Brain and playing strategy games on the laptop.  On weekends Brian and I have been spending time with my folks.  My Mom is still doing fairly well with the chemotherpy, but it is hard on her.  She is halfway done, and I will be happy when it is all done and she has some energy again.  Dad is doing a lot to take care of Mom and keeping the dog was tiring him out some.  So now the puppy is here at the apartment with Brian and I.  It is nice to have our little “family” all back together, I think the cats even like having the puppy back to boss around.

What else is news?  Well the house is still for sale, now with a new Realtor.  Both Brain and I just wish it would sell so we can get out of this apartment and into a new home.  We went down to Rochester a week or so ago to see how the house was looking.  We found five freebe papers on the porch, the thermostadt still set to heat the hous eand the smoke detectors beeping for batteries.  I don’t think the last agent was doing a very good job.

Other than that we have spent time hanging with friends.  I have been terrible at keeping up with correspondence, so I owe another “Hi!” to Sue, who I have now hooked on the show Corner Gas I hear.

It has come to my attention that I haven’t posted anything in more than two weeks.  Well here are some items that have come to my attention:

Squirrels
New Venture Brothers
Wait wait don’t tell me

You run across anything interesting?  Let me know in the comments.

For my birthday this year my friend Frances purchased me an EcoSphere. If you have never seen one just picture a ball of glass with seawater, algae and shrimp sealed inside. The idea is that it is a closed ecosystem that survives as long as the temperature remains within norms and it gets indirect lighting.  From the start everything went well.  The sphere arrived with four shrimp in it.  After a day or so I started to wonder if I was doing something wrong, since I only saw three shrimp.  Then I looked a little closer, and there was the fourth shrimp, hiding under the ball of algae.  Another day would pass, and I would only see three shrimp, and upon closer inspection would find the fourth sitting motionless upside down under this sort of branch thingie in the sphere.  I decided to call this shrimp “Number Four,” and while I realize it may have been a different shrimp each time, I wouldn’t bet on it.

It has been a few weeks since I really looked at the sphere, and I came to realize the other day that I can only find three shrimp in it, and perhaps a slim carcass that is all that remains of #4.  The materials that come with the shrimp mention that if some die the others will scavenge the remains, so I guess that is what happened.

NOTE:  It took me a few days to finish the draft of this post, and in that time I lost another shrimp as well.  I think I will call the last remaining shrimp Hermes and Aphrodite.  I don’t think they are expected to breed, so I hope they can keep up eating the algae that is growing in the sphere.