My C-P id, ready to turn in.

Later, I prop my iPHone on the edge of the sink as I wash my hands. My elbow bumps the phone into the sink. It falls into the sink and the display promptly winks out. Ugh.

Friday I dealt with the sadness of my last day. Except it really wasn’t all that sad. I had an amazing cake with Mickey Mouse on it, and I got a Toy Story going away card and a $100 Visa gift card. I managed to muddle through my goodbye speech without completely losing my marbles. And I left at 11am, with everyone waving and cheering as I walked out the door for the last time. Again, I thought I’d lose it when I heard the door click behind me, but…it was time. I loved my years at the C-P but the job (d)evolved into something that I’d never apply for if I saw it in the paper. I will miss my coworkers, though.

The $100 gift card went with me from the C-P to the Apple Store at the Cherry Hill Mall, where I bought the iPhone 4S in white. I stop at the post office. I come home. I faceplant into the sofa. Later that night I wake up and have a cough and a 102 degree fever.

This morning, I wake up at 7am (!!) with a cough, a heavy wheeze and a 101.5 degree fever. I make a doctor appointment for 9:10 and hey, it snowed! So WM decides to drive me there, since I’m practically speaking in tongues because of the fever. I don’t do fevers well.

Diagnosis: Bronchitis, which could have turned into walking pneumonia if I didn’t nip it in the bud early (which I really had to because OMG I START A NEW JOB ON MONDAY AND I NEED TO NOT BABBLE!) The doc gave me a nebulizer treatment while I was there. Never had one before, and I’d like not to have one again.

Now I’m on an inhaler, cough medicine, a Z-pac, and an anti-inflammation steroid. My fever is slowly breaking (down to 99.5) and I feel human again for the first time in over 24 hours.

But at least struggling to breathe kept me from worrying about sucking at the new job. Yay perspective!

I don’t need to be at 100% health on Monday — but I need to be well enough to fake it. (I would like to feel better enough to go to Target tomorrow, though. Because I’d like a new notebook and some new pens to bring to the NEW JOB AND I REALLY HOPE I DON’T SUCK AT IT AND THE PEOPLE LIKE ME!)

But it will also let you search for a specific color — I use the sliders to match up with beads:

And it’ll offer up a palette that matches your chosen color!

Your palette also has a Pin It button that’ll let you pin some pretty color in the hopes that we can drive out the usual denizens of Pinterest…pictures of impossibly fit/skinny people tagged “inspiration” and pictures of poor newborns smushed into unnatural positions or shoved into cowboy boots.

For these, I felt like experimenting with hoops and drops instead of the usual “tight” earrings I come up with.

These earrings have a 70′s color vibe to them.

Unfortunately, having a bento box sized apartment, we don’t have a lot of space for puzzles. But oh how I yearned to feel that familiar soft thuddy click of a puzzle piece sliding into place. So last weekend we bought a cheap card table and one folding chair at Target.

And a puzzle. Yes, shut up, a Disney puzzle. But what I really like about this one is that the characters are roughly placed in the geographic locations where their stories took place. So Mowgli is in India and Tiana’s in the US Southeast and the rest of the Princesses are taking part in #occupyEurope.

Naturally, the puzzle we chose is too darn long for the card table, so we’re doing it in halves. When we’re done we’re going to glue it together and forget about it in a closet put it on the wall somewhere.

And then we’ll go and get ANOTHER puzzle!

**
And hey, tomorrow around 9:15am EST, could you send me some positive “knock-em-dead, champ” vibes? Maybe hum the awesome beginning measures of “Welcome to the Jungle.” Dun-nuh-nuh-nuh! Dun-nuh-nuh-nuh! Dun-nuh-nuh-Dun-nuh-nuh-Duh-nuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhn. Thanks, all!

Gold-tone copper wire and a group of Swarovski crystals = tacky holiday ring bling! The crystals move around as my hand moves.

(Return of the ax murderer handwriting!)

Oh, the ring will come eventually, when I decide what the heck I want. But we’ve been wanting an iPad since the first one came out and even though we seriously, absolutely do NOT need one, I got tired of drooling for an object that people buy for toddlers.

The iPad is sweet. Oh so sweet. This is our Christmas gift to us.

**
Anyway, I’m off from the sloggy job today. Here’s the plan…

1) Vaccccuuumm*
2) Make cookie dough for Kristen’s cookie swap tomorrow.
3) Head to Best Buy and maybe Wegmans for lunch and eggnog if it’s not too crowded.
4) Bake six dozen cookies
5) Complete 2 loads of laundry.
6) Find a cute and jaunty way to print out the cookie recipe for the swap.

My “extra-credit” items –

Extra credit 1) Bake the sugar cut-out cookie dough that I have frozen.
Extra credit 2) Find a Christmas gift that’ll get to my Dad by, you know, Christmas.
Extra credit 3) Pick up the family cards at Hallmark. It’s in the same center as Best Buy and Wegmans.If I do this, I’ll reward myself with something at Starbucks.

*If you don’t know how to spell it and are too lazy to look it up, may as well make your mistake with wild abandon, right?

It’s the plain e-ink original version — not the fancy color tablets — and it goes with me everywhere.

I was a voracious reader as a kid but school killed my passion with its dusty old reading list of dry classics. Although I read many magazines through the years I couldn’t get back into books until the nook came along last December.

And I can’t tell you exactly why, but it’s easier to carry my nook than to carry a flimsy paperback or a heavy hardcover. The nook remembers what page I’m on. And, of course, I can carry more than one book at a time.

I have no desire to upgrade to a color reader. We’re getting an iPad in the near future and I don’t need all of the bells and whistles that accompany the new models.

They’d only distract me from reading.

In any case, it looks lovely…

These are ornaments, but they make a nice tableau on their own.

Our stockings.

I never thought I'd have a 'theme tree.' But it just happened that way.

I’m a fan of biographies to begin with, so I knew I’d really enjoy this book. And enjoy I did. This crazy roller-coaster tale of the life of Steve Jobs grabbed me from the first chapter and the only thing that prevented me from finishing this faster was the sheer size of the book. It was too large for me to lug around when I left the house.

(I’d have purchased the Nook version, but I was appalled that the actual hardcover only cost me $5 more than buying the pixels.)

Steve Jobs’s accomplishments are well-known. He was the creative mind (genius? maybe…) behind all of Apple’s successful products and a few of the not-so-great ones. He was one of the men who gave us Pixar’s beautiful and touching movies.

I knew he was impossible to please and a viscous taskmaster of a boss. What I didn’t know was how much of an ass he was.

Stubborn, spoiled and sometimes stinky, Jobs screamed, sulked and cried until he got what he wanted. He screwed over his friends, berated his employees, and blatantly favored his son over his daughters. He even purposely parked in the handicap spot at Apple rather than have his own CEO spot. As he whirled like a manic-depressive Tasmanian devil through Silicon Valley, Hollywood and beyond, Jobs was surrounded by the most indulgent and enabling supporting cast ever assembled. But he possessed some kind of Svengali-type power that kept these people on his side and fully participating in his distorted reality.

The author, Walter Isaacson, kept me reading and more surprisingly, CARING about this gigantic diva, even when he did things like use his wealth and connections to get a new liver sooner in Tennessee rather than wait longer on the California transplant list. Isaacson did a great job explaining what made Apple products so innovative without bogging the text down with tech talk. He also gave a nice peek into the world of the super-wealthy, a world where sitting President Bill Clinton stays in one of Jobs’s houses while he visits Chelsea at Stanford.

The appearances by another Bill, Bill Gates, were my favorite parts of the book. I enjoyed seeing their relationship grow and mellow through the years.

You already know Steve’s rise began in his parent’s garage, and you know it ended prematurely in October of 2011. This book will fill you in on all of the juicy stuff in the middle.

PS: I’m a PC.

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