rain, blessed rain.

I bet it won't last long, but yesterday was 105 and today was scheduled to be 103/104, so I will gladly take a rain shower.

Here it's so cool that I'm wearing a long-sleeved dress with tights and boots. Crazy!

It's a beautiful fall day here in Chicago.

Wait, let me check that calendar again.

I put. My pants. On backwards.

Hah!

The favorite part of my commute is the part that goes through the farmland on the edge of town. I was coming up the road this morning and saw a car stopped in the lane ahead. I slowed down, wondering what was going on.

Ah. Escaped cow cavorting in the road. A youngish cow, given that it was up to cavorting, not just standing and staring thoughtfully. So two lanes of traffic paused while the youngish cow decided that cavorting over into the front yard of a nearby house was more fun than cavorting on asphalt. Hopeful the careless farmer finds his cow before cow becomes carcass.

I'm so sorry, Burrell.

And Ginger, like you I am quite hopeful about some of the new targeted treatments but so far her cancer remains "undifferentiated," meaning no specific tumor markers are present. They still don't even know what kind it is.

I know that limbo is particularly hard. I have a friend who had undifferentiated carcinoma throughout her lymph system. They did a DNA test and found it was, quite unusually, gall bladder cancer. (Her gall bladder was removed for misbehaving in usual gall bladder ways several years ago.) She just finished chemo and her PET scan now shows no sign of cancer.

Still going with the polka dots, msbelle. I love love the dress, and I think you'll look better in photographs wearing that than the others (though I like the second one a fair bit for it not being in my palette).

Matt, face massages in general, if you can get over the initial weirdness, are great. Like, eyelid massages (your eyes are closed, for people following along at home) are surprisingly relaxing for the tiny surface area.

I told my boss I'd start work early so I could finish at three. "I don't care what time you start or finish, as long as the work is done." All my gratitude at that moment would have been HR-inappropriate. The work will be done! This morning is knee deep in project plans and waist deep in software development lifecycles. Oh, right--and vendor selection methodologies and criteria.

Whoever selected a ten digit PIN for my voicemail was crazy.

Oh.

We have officially been told to encrypt any media we store work information in or on. Pfft. Time to take that work folder out of Evernote, and the directory out of Dropbox. And it will need its own flash drive, because I'm not encrypting my personal stuff (despite reasons why! If I lost it at work....). I see their point, but ::sigh::. I don't ever handle sensitive information about clients or employees. I never get the good stuff.

I'm on my "no eating 8 hours before" gap now. It's best to have the procedure first thing, so your last meal is totally normally dinner, or as late in the day as possible, so I can actually eat breakfast. But, shit, no water? Cruel. And I hope they don't try (again!) to get a peripheral line. THERE'S A REASON THERE'S A PORT, PEOPLE.

The New York Times has an article this weekend updating the infamous Lisa Belkin "Opt Out Revolution" article about stay at home mothers, which was 10 years ago. [Aside: as probably surprises nobody, it is really hard to get back into a high-paying executive type job after 10 years out of work, it turns out.] And I was like, "I remember reading that article! Wow, that was 10 years ago? I remember that I had just come back from maternity leave with Casper when I read it... which means... Casper is about to be 10 years old... which means... oh my god how did my baby get to be 10."

Also she has been waiting since age 4 to get her ears pierced at age 10 (which we told her was our family rule) but the fall soccer season starts at the same time as her birthday and she can't wear jewelry and play, so I think she is going to have to wait.

Found a Buffista mansion. [link]

In My Day, you could just tape over your earrings, if they were the piercing studs.