VegemiteGrrl's Home for the Absent-Minded

I get terrible anxiety when I have to meet someone in a public place, for the same reasons as a passing spacecadet. Like if I have to meet people in a restaurant and they are seated before I get there, I'm just terrified I'm going to get way too close to a table of strangers before I realize they are not my friends.

Recently I've been playing softball with my friends at a park where you have to walk across a big field before you get to the three baseball diamonds. Sometimes more than one of the diamonds is occupied, and I'm walking across the field hauling a bucket of balls and two bats (which somehow makes me feel even more ridiculous in this situation), and at some point you really have to commit to which of the three diamonds you are walking towards, but at that point I am almost never certain which group of people are my friends. Sometimes I'll get really close and start feeling really confident and then the first person who comes into focus will be some complete stranger that one of my friends invited that week, and the interval between seeing him and realizing that I know everyone else there is full of this horrible sinking sensation...

Just walking towards people who can see you from a long distance away is enough to induce self-consciousness, and you end up doing those little bursts of jogging that don't actually make you go any faster but at least make it look as though you're putting in some effort: having to do it with a big weight dragging behind you would be much worse.

forgot password, ffs. again. i forget a lot.

requested pwd change, changed it. i'll remember it now!

prompted to login. can't. pwd is wrong. waht?

try again, nope. variations don't work. caps lock isn't on, wasn't on before.

requested another pwd change. ffs.

2nd time this wk. 2 difft sites.

imo nobody should ever be admonished for flubbing or forgetting a password

one day the lord supreme king of devils woke up and said 'FUCK YOU ALL I'M INVENTING PASSWORDS'

Normally park our car in garage overnight. Lately garage has been full so have to park in the driveway. Am horrible at remembering to lock the damn car. The other morning, go to car to discover someone has Been Through It.

Only spare change was taken (as far as we know) but WOW am I a ridiculous flake and in SO MUCH TROUBLE with my husband.

AM: Wake up late b/c I set the alarm to 7:00 pm, so I have to take a cab to work.

PM: On the bus ride home I get an email from a Groupon-like company that screwed up and was offering me a voucher for $10 of take-out food, good tonight only. I say hooray, free dinner! and order an $11 pizza from the place by my house. Right as I hit Submit, I remember that I hadn't entered the discount code. Instead of *free* dinner, I spent $11 unnecessarily.

I wonder if anyone on the bus heard me exclaim what I dumb bitch I am.

I have developed a terrible habit of forgetting to take the filter out of the cofeemaker when I brew coffee. Mr Veg had to have a ~serious talk~ with me about it a few months back. and I've been SO much better! And then...I made a pot of coffee on Sunday morning. And the filter sat in the machine til Monday afternoon when Mr Veg went to make coffee.

;_;

back to square one

stupid brain

In other news, I made myself some popcorn in the microwave today. And for some reason, absent a decent sized bowl it seemed to me that a ziplock back would be a good receptacle. The unpopped kernels melting through the plastic was my first indication that this was a terrible idea.

Jesus christ what is wrong with me. It scares me sometimes, if I'm like this now what am I going to be like when I'm ACTUALLY senile (assuming that I'm not already, lol)

bag not back

bag never come back, bag melt ;)

lol

paper bag popcorn is pretty good though. supposedly you can even staple it shut because the staple is somehow smaller than the wavelength of the microwave or some nonsense but can you trust alton brown who is probably laughing at all the exploded microwaves?

I make paper bag popcorn all the ding dang time! I don staple the bag be aside I'm scared to and also one of those little folder-over self-staple moves keeps it closed fine.

WOW Lookit them thumb-typos.

Paper bag popcorn is exactly what I was doing - <3 it so much

Except I think I put the bag in the wrong side up because half the kernels didn't pop? I think they got trapped in the bottom fold of the bag somehow. Popcorn fail x 2 :(

i was told recently that it's the edges of mental objects that catch alight in a microwave (or something like that) so putting staples in a microwave would probably be a bad idea

I had a travel mug that was plastic with a metallic inlay...I had a VG moment and put it in the microwave to heat up my coffee and wooo did I get a pretty show

:O

xp to self

metal NOT mental

Begbies

I have developed a terrible habit of forgetting to take the filter out of the cofeemaker when I brew coffee. Mr Veg had to have a ~serious talk~ with me about it a few months back. and I've been SO much better! And then...I made a pot of coffee on Sunday morning. And the filter sat in the machine til Monday afternoon when Mr Veg went to make coffee.

;_;

back to square one

stupid brain

I always do this :P I am bad people

Never mind that Begbies lol

haha

I belong here. :)

Wondertwins, activate

on various hols i've forgotten/lost my wallet x2, didn't have my licence or the right type of licence x2, lost keys to campervan, missed flights, forgotten knives packed in carryon luggage, slept in the rain outside the gates of an airport that closed at night, and left my passport and wallet on the table in the cafe in stansted for six hours while i slept on the floor seventy yards away. This is all in the past three or four years, i'm amazed anyone still travels with me tbrr

we welcome u, dmac

tks but i can't stay i think i left my niece in the recycling bin

lol

how the fuck do you become a responsible, organised adult? how? just learned that i've apparently not paid any national insurance contributions for three years. i don't know how that happened. i don't know HOW i was meant to be paying them, or how i paid them before. literally no idea. i don't really know wtf they even are. i feel like at some point in their early twenties everyone went to some sort of life skills class that i wasn't told about

you're not alone, i'm 38 and i only just found out i've been paying $thousands per year in tax because i have a savings account

xp Same class that runs straight after antenatal classes which teaches blokes how to regrout a bath and make terrible puns.

Go upstairs for a wee. Wife asks me to bring back slippers. Two tasks, both very simple. Come back without slippers, every time.

what is most important, wee or slippers?

That depends whether you're me, or my wife. Slippers are generally in the bathroom, though...

I was burgled a couple of weeks ago. They stole my best bike (left the other two) and my flatmates' laptop. That was all, I thought, until I was looking for my camera on Saturday. My camera which sits on my desk in my room with two other cameras, immediately visible when you walk in the room, and yet I didn't notice all three had been taken.

:-( sorry to hear that ledge.

thx man. could've been worse, was insured and they didn't trash the place - didn't even touch anything else. just feel like an overpriviliged idiot for not even realising the cameras had gone.

sucks

how the fuck do you become a responsible, organised adult? how? just learned that i've apparently not paid any national insurance contributions for three years. i don't know how that happened

Lex if its anything like it is in Aus (ie superannuation or a health fund thing), isnt the company you work for meant to help organise paying into a fund? Like how they take out income tax? I'd have no clue how much money was going into mine, I trust my payroll ppl to be doing it!

Lex, aren't you a freelancer? Did you perchance start freelancing three years ago? I imagine it's like any other taxes - if you're self-employed, you are responsible for paying all the taxes/mandatory contributions yourself since you do not have an employer that would withhold those things from your check.

Have you paid any tax the last three years, lex? That might be a bigger matter.

Last night I putt a cigarette behind my ear so i could go outside and smoke it. In getting ready I looked down to grab my tea and it falls into it. Plus side: leave it to dry, tea-flavored cigeracchi.

i've been paying $thousands per year in tax because i have a savings account

wait... what?

Lex, shouldn't an accountant be handling the tax BS for you? I've heard it's that a freelancer's taxes are an unpleasant matter. It was terrible enough doing my taxes when I was a waiter that I gladly hired someone (who saved me a thousand or two a year).

My contribution to the the thread's topic: tonight was the second time I tried to unlock the door of the apartment 1 floor below mine. The elevator stopped at the wrong floor and I auto-piloted to the door while reading mail. I hollered "Sorry sorry sorry!" and ran to the stairwell. Poor Unit 505 - I would pee my pants if someone came rattling at my door unexpectedly.

I signed up to staff an Election Day voter hotline again this year, which requires a training, which is fine bc it's been four years and I don't remember how it works.

So I'm at the training right now and they are talking about field volunteers a lot and hotline volunteers not at all, which seemed weird until I doubled checked the calendar apt and realized I signed up for the wrong thing. This is after I very carefully disregarded two other training sessions bc they were for field volunteers.

this is a typical VG tl:dr story but w/e it's my thread, lol

Our office has these end of the month parties, usually with a theme of some kind. The Halloween end of month party usually coincides with the office Halloween costume festivities. So I have my thing planned out, not so much for the competition but just bc I'm a dorky nerd who likes to dress up now and then, and I like futzing around with stage makeup and whatnot.

So I've had it in my head that tomorrow is the costume contest, because the end of month party is tomorrow. They gave us all a free lunchtime creative thing to do this week, where we all take a sheet and make a 'ghost' costume. I wasn't in the office yesterday so they let me do mine this afternoon. So I made my ghost and all the while I'm thinking, well that's kind of weird that they'd make everyone put sheets over their heads when half the people will be dressed up in costumes. So I cut a hole for my head bcs I'd be in makeup, and I tried to theme my ghost-sheet a little bit around my planned costume.

I came back to my desk and mentioned to my coworker my same thought, about why they would have everyone covered in sheets when ppl will be in Halloween costume.
He looked at me funny and said 'Dude, the halloween costume thing is next Wednesday. Tomorrow's just the end of month party.' And I was all, 'But they always have the two combined!' And I quickly looked on our intranet page and lo and behold...the costume contest is on Wednesday.

If I had not had that conversation I would have gone to work tomorrow in costume. Like, I already had mentally figured out what time to set my alarm to put everything together. And I quickly ran back upstairs to re-doctor my ghost sheet and remove any traces of 'thematic' elements tied to my halloween costume, lol.

Holy fuck, talk about a close call. That could have been SO bad.

^lol VG

My life is littered with events like this; the latest just this afternoon.

Today I left my car parked near downtown Boston with one of the rear doors wide -and I mean wide- open, for two hours. I found this out when I left my office to go home, and from a full block away I saw that rear door sticking way out like an elephant ear into the cityscape. I broke into a run because, in addition to the usual glove compartment goodies, my car was stuffed full of stuff including: CDs up the wazoo, change of clothes, about a dozen library books, flyfishing gear (3 rods, 3 reels, etc), and a pop of the trunk would have revealed a bunch of rockclimbing crap, such as a bouldering mat, shoes & chalk. Worst of all, I had left, in the backseat, the back cover of a magazine from my childhood, featuring a watercolor I had submitted to them as an 8 yr old, and which I had long ago given up for lost until my mother dug it out of an old chest and had it framed. So basically I left all this stuff out there for display, just airing out in the gentle Indian Summer breeze.

Lo and behold, when I got to the car I found everything was exactly as I had left it. Nobody had even rustled it, it appeared.

I felt huge relief and gratitude and momentary love of humankind, of course, but also, weirdly, a slight twinge of, I dunno, quasi-adolescent forlornness? I mean, nobody wanted any of my crap? I can understand, ok, who the hell needs a pair of smelly climbing shoes, a kid's watercolor (faded), or a bunch of brick-heavy philosophy books, but you'd think maybe someone would have snatched the Zizek at least, no?

I sewed a button onto a pair of combats yesterday - it was the just-above-the-fly one, which has previously popped off (yeah, I know). Anyway, sewed the button, job done, put on the combats, walk around for a bit going "mmm, trousers".

Then I returned to the desk and went to put away the needle and thread, and realised that the needle's gone missing - it's from a set of six, and the others are all there. I get a little worried because, well, because needle, and also because of specific fear that it'll wait until I'm down on the floor looking for one of the other things that I tend to knock over, and as soon as I think it's a good idea to actually get down to eye-level - boom! needle in the eye.

So I look around for a bit and I can't find it, and I can't find it, and then I think to do the "Sir, where is the last place you remember seeing the object in question", and I realise that I can't remember cutting the thread. And sure enough, there was the needle still at the end of the thread, "safely" nestling next to my junk.

whoa