VegemiteGrrl's Home for the Absent-Minded

this is just a "why the fuck do i have no life skills whatsoever" week right now. the harder i try the worse the inevitable disaster feels

i think there were also some amazon and naked wines gift vouchers in that magazine :((((((((

lex, have you considered hiring some poor college sophomore or something as your personal assistant? All they'd really have to do would be to print things out for you once a week and bring them round, call you to remind you to do things at certain times, etc. You could offer to pay by the hour or the task, whatever works?

Assume they would also open your mail and sort it into to-do piles and put them in specific places like "this box in front of the tv where you have to look at it" or something. You know.

unrelated: yesterday i sat at the dining table & wrote out my grocery list. i went into the kitchen for something, and then when i came back to the table to grab the list, i couldn't find it anywhere.
Hunted high & low for 15 minutes til I found it.

...scrunched into a ball in the recyling bin.

wtf, brain.

This seems like a good time to mention my worst case of this.
It was August 2001 and I had plane tickets to fly NC-OH for a wedding in September. I couldn't miss it. My mom had mailed the paper tickets because she was kind enough to buy them for me.

I lost them. Just totally utterly lost. I had to buy new tickets because I couldn't tell her that I lost them.
Then while I was there, 9/11 came and went and I had to take the Greyhound back from NC so that ticket $ was lost twice. (Once was my fault, the other not so much).

When I got home, I found the envelope with the tickets "safely" tucked away in my undie drawer. I was so mad at myself, I wrote in huge block letters NEVER LOSE ANYTHING AGAIN on the envelope with the tickets still inside. I still have it. It's in the drawer next to the undies and it is my testament to being more mindful of what I'm doing with the things that are in my hands, making lists, etc.

maybe you needed to change your undies more often

i should make more lists but then i'd presumably just lose the lists

xp - maybe

i write the list on my hand when it's really important

also i use full sheets of paper for full-day lists and then tape them to the kitchen cabinet at eye level -- can't lose/ignore it that way

On the few occasions when I've had something I absolutely cannot lose (always a ticket of some kind, basically) I put it in an envelope, write "TICKETS" on it, and tape it to the wall above my dresser or somewhere else my gaze lands often. That way a) it's in plain sight, b) I can't accidentally sent something on top of it, c) my eye lands on it a lot between now and when I need it, so I can't forget where it is.

xp!!!!!! mind-meld

i'm definitely working hard on being a reformed space cadette.

we have a drawer dedicated to tickets, plane/concert/football etc.
it works well! that way part of the routine before you go somewhere is to ~visit the drawer~

i mean, being mindful of where you put them after that is another thing entirely.

i usually "show myself the tickets" at least once before i leave and once on the way, so i know i have them and where they are on my person

put it in an envelope, write "TICKETS" on it, and tape it to the wall above my dresser or somewhere else my gaze lands often.

I have a file on my PC desktop named "where stuff is.txt" and I write down where I've put things for longer-term storage. Like when I go on vacation and want to hide my car keys, cameras, etc in case someone breaks in. And just generally where I store stuff I only use every few years.

this morning pigeons were trying to nest in our air conditioner again (long story) so I pocketed my keys and got some biro canisters and some packing tape and some scissors (to fortify the pigeon fence I built on saturday) and couldn't find my keys anywhere. turned the place upside down. I couldn't get out to the air conditioner (or even leave the flat) without them so obv I was going off my head. this went on for like 15 minutes.

lex, have you considered hiring some poor college sophomore or something as your personal assistant? All they'd really have to do would be to print things out for you once a week and bring them round, call you to remind you to do things at certain times, etc. You could offer to pay by the hour or the task, whatever works?

oh god i consider this all the time. call it an internship and i don't even have to pay them. all that holds me bac is the sense of shame at letting anyone see how my life is currently "organised"

*back

1. Lost one earring at some point and walked around work with one giant silver hoop for god knows how long.
2. Lost my favorite winter hat.
3. Lost a barrette that was actually holding my hair up so don't even ask me how that happened.
4. Got in the elevator to go home finally and forgot to push any buttons.

haha I do the standing in the elevator without pushing a floor button all the time.
or I push it for the floor I'm on and the door closes and BING opens again

Jeff said he does that sometimes, too. I feel better about that one.

Super bummed about the earring, though. Now I have to wear my backup silver hoops until I can find a replacement.

1. Found one earring on the floor of my office.
2. Found my favorite winter hat sitting on a filing cabinet by the printers, where I guess I dropped it on the way out of work on Friday.

I must have been having a bad day on Friday.

heard a car alarm going off in the wee hours of this morning
it seemed v distant, peered out the window to see if it was our main car, which we park out front.
remember going off to sleep giggling bcz the battery on the car seemed to be dying and the alarm was making v sad funny noises

we keep our other car in the driveway. it occurred to me around lunchtime this morning that the alarm I had heard was kinda similar to that car, and not the one we park out front.

a quick email to mr veg and lo and behold, driveway car battery is indeed dead as a doornail. Boo.

I don't know WHY it didn't occur to me to check the other bedroom window, I could have disabled the alarm easily if I had realized it was that car. Stupid fuzzy half asleep brain.

xp carl agatha, my sister just now said she'd finally remembered to pick up her earrings at the jeweler's. Got 'em tightened so they don't fall off. I (ignorant male) had no idea that could be done.

Searching my pockets for my mobile phone while talking to someone on said phone has to be a new low for me.

― Go Narine, Go! (ShariVari), Saturday, December 15, 2012

Oh, I think I've plumbed those depths, a few weeks ago:

Me: "Has anybody seen my cell phone?"

Daughter: "Have you looked next to your ear?"

Me: "Um, oh"

(Yes, there it was, in my right hand; I was on hold, whilst apparently "multi-tasking"...).

xp carl agatha, my sister just now said she'd finally remembered to pick up her earrings at the jeweler's. Got 'em tightened so they don't fall off. I (ignorant male) had no idea that could be done.

― dow, Wednesday, January 23, 2013 12:37 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I didn't know this either. Are they clip ons?

humbling, sad moment for me this evening

after yet again catching the cord of my earbuds on the corner of a kitchen drawer and watching my iphone go clattering to the floor, and exclaiming loudly in woe, i complained to mr veg about this always happening to me. He commiserated and said I should try putting the cord under your sweater. So I took the phone and started trying to feed it through the neck of my sweater. And he looked at me sort of funny and I was like, what? "I can only feed it down down, or I have to feed the buds up through my sweater and that would be more annoy--" and he asked for the phone and I handed it to him and he unplugged the earbuds from the phone, and dropped it down the neck of my sweater and I swear, I exclaimed as though he had just made a quarter appear out of my ear. OMG I HADN'T EVEN THOUGHT OF THAT.

I've sunk to a new low. I think I need a new thread. VegemiteGrrl's home for the very stupid. LOL

i'm having trouble with the mechanics of that. he unplugged the earbuds, *then* dropped the phone down there? so what happened to the earbuds?

it is 2 am and we are in like week 39284729847239842 of the stupidest heatwave ever so i may be even dumber than usual

no dropped earbuds were in my ears, he unplugged the earbuds jack from my phone so that the cord was free of the phone, dropped the cord down, while ALSO holding onto the phone. which he then plugged in once the cord had been fed down.

slot a into slot b then c through f

ah, got it

Today: Finish lunch at work desk, take bottle of Sriracha to meeting instead of notebook.

hahahaha omg that is awesome!

winner!

That's literally the coolest thing anyone has ever done.

Lolol amazing!

- Decided last week to transfer rent money from Chase account to ING account.
- Been spending and spending from Chase, yet not getting a balance alert text message. I'm rich!
- Mistakenly transferred money *from* ING *to* Chase.
- Been spending rent money on cat toys and falafels.

And this is still amazing

Today: Finish lunch at work desk, take bottle of Sriracha to meeting instead of notebook.

― Chuck_Tatum, Friday, March 8, 2013 11:42 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

LOLOLOLOL

I just pasted this into a calendar invitation for work:

Today: Finish lunch at work desk, take bottle of Sriracha to meeting instead of notebook.

As an aside, the whole story of Sriracha is kinda fascinating. "Huy Fong" was the name of the crowded Taiwanese freighter David Tran fled Vietnam in.

My job involves maintaining/monitoring some scripts which process files people upload and email them error reports, and when I test them after changes/upgrades I am really bad at remembering to tick the box which says "don't actually check the upload area and don't email anyone" for test runs

so once again today I ran the script and emailed some real live users with about 6 billion error messages and then had to send out "please ignore this email" messages and wonder if everyone else screws up this often or if it's just me

(geeky postscript: someone is probably going to say "you should really have separate live and testing environments" and I'll say "we do but I keep overwriting the config from the live version which is in subversion" and yes I should really make it so that I can't do that any more)

Dumped the remains of bag of what I thought were ice cubes in my iced tea; slurped with gusto. Not ice cubes; onions.

hahahaha oh no!

irl lols oh no

Onion tea soup, eh? That's strongoesque.

Worst part is that I like eating ice, and the onions looked like perfect chewing ice.

once in elementary school i was supposed to go out to recess but i couldn't find my snowboots (wisconsin in winter) and was looking frantically for them, eventually enlisting the teacher's help to scour my locker, the areas near my locker, the lost and found etc. recess was over by the time i realized that i was wearing my snowboots.

the most disastrous example of an onion/iced-tea mixup i've ever had is when i accidentally used trumpet valve oil as contact lens rewetting drops.

Terrible!

As a former trumpet player and vision-challenged person: lol.

oh my je55e you are killing me, lolololol

thank god I made this thread