Salt Kelp Manager

During the last basho, clam brought over some new snacks, and I saved the wrapper because I love this guy:

When I told mrguy that this had contained shiso candy he said something to the effect of "When I see this guy that's definitely what I think is in the package", so I looked him up. When I asked Google AI for more information about Shio-Konbucho, this is what it told me:

"Shio-Konbucho (塩こん部長), which translates to "Salt Kelp Manager," is the highly successful, dramatic mascot for the Kurakon Foods Corporation. First introduced onto packaging by the marketing department in 2007, the character single-handedly reversed stagnant product sales and sparked consecutive years of double-digit growth.

Key Facts About the Character

The Dramatic Persona: He is illustrated in a classic, intense, thick-lined gekiga manga style. He wears a standard salaryman suit and tie, usually with his jacket slung over his shoulder or making an intensely passionate face while discovering a new food combination.

The Name Pun: His name is a deliberate Japanese wordplay (pun) combining Shio Kombu (salted kelp) and Bucho (department manager).His Corporate "Role": According to Kurakon, he is a highly talented General Manager whose entire job is coming up with creative recipe suggestions to show how versatile savory seaweed can be in everyday cooking.

Interactive Marketing: The character has an active social media presence in Japan where he "replies" to customer comments using a commanding corporate-boss tone while sharing recipes. He also regularly stars in live-action television commercials portrayed by actors.Collaborations: Beyond traditional kelp bags, his massive popularity has allowed him to branch out into collaborative snack items like the Daimaru Honpo Plum Candy shown in your image, as well as limited-edition corn snacks."

I will now attach him to my final work notebook.

Saturday Doin's

I was beyond excited for today. Boy kitten let me sleep in. I took out the garbage, green waste, recycling and stomped on some beer boxes to get them in the recycling, and scooped the cat boxes. Redid my dry-erase calendar in very tidy handwriting. September and October are now accounted for. I've written down the holidays for November and December.

It feels great. Then I cleaned up the aku room, tidied some plants that were trying to overtake the house, while listening to my current book, This Changes Everything, by Tyler Merritt. He has stopped yelling. I stopped listening to Andre Agassi because the guy's unredeemably angry, only to find that Tyler Merritt gets pretty wound up, too. 

I paused for a little plant shopping at Home Depot, some groceries for the best soup ever made, and now I'm here. I made the mistake of reading all the sad messages from departing employees on the Discord channel, and then I had to write out my sorrow. 

But I'm back, so to speak. I made a tuna sandwich, and now mrguy is eating tuna for the first time in a few months. His appetite has returned. His CEA, which had gone up to 3, stubbornly, has gone down to 2, where it lived since he first started responding to chemo. Yay! His CA 19-9, the important tumor marker which was way up there, is continuing its downward trend and although it is not in the normal, it's coming down by hundreds of points every week. We may be heading for better news. PET scan in two weeks.

Some photos of the wild succulents. They make babies that then fall off of the leaves and root on the ground. I made a large pot of cuttings, and am rooting some leaves, and they're kinda everywhere in the aku room now. I used to not like these plants, but then succumbed to my mantra "like plants that like you".

Let's do that.

PS Can NOOOOOTTTT wait to retire. For real. 

A Final Layoff Post?

This past few weeks has been really sad.

Yesterday was my 26th anniversary at the forklift factory, and it was also the last day that laid off employees had their keycards. People were doing things for the last or first time, like using their newhire free lunch coupon that they had never used, or buying things at the company store, or asking the commissary to make their favorite cookie or dropping things off on the free table or selling a million things that were in their office. On Thursday while I was eating lunch with some friends, there was a young woman openly weeping at the table next to us and being consoled by her tablemates. On Tuesday and Thursday we did oral histories with 5 people. Despite the advance notice that layoffs were coming, so many people were caught unawares. My teammates especially. We are still in a state of shock.

We took our affected teammates to a very fancy lunch on Wednesday, which felt good, when it didn't also feel shitty. We met at the rose garden, and then lunched, and then I went for a walk with my old boss and caught her up on everything. She knew some stuff that I didn't. Anyway, it was while walking with her that I realized that I've outlasted all of my bosses and all of my enemies. Except one.

As I said, yesterday was my 26th anniversary and also the saddest day I have felt at the factory. I've been through the deaths, all but one of the layoffs, metoo, Covid. People have left their goodbye messages on Slack. And because Slack is ASS and doesn't have an archiving function, and since all of our goodbye messages in the past were sent by email, I am cutting and pasting every single goodbye Slack into an individual email message which I send to myself, with the subject line "Employee Name Slack Goodbye" with date sent. Then I move it to my Terminations folder so we can archive all of the contact information, past and present, in the same place. This means that I read every single one of those goodbyes.

One person said that she'd be sitting on the lawn near the front gate playing the theme song from Top Gun until she was disconnected from the company wifi. I will miss her.

After work, clam and I went to a bar to sew. Her husband was part of the layoff and stayed home with the rest of the champagne bottle they were working on when I arrived to pick her up. We quickly had a distracting moment on our way to the bar when we saw a guy in cream colored shorts and a lemon yellow golf shirt, facing the busy street. He was holding his phone pizza box style and talking to someone while simultaneously battering a tree with the force of his tremendous stream of urine. We started pointing at him and yelling, while I flipped him off. I don't need to see that. My people just got laid off!! Clam and I later agreed that he must have been drinking 40 ouncers because of the volume and light color of his flow.

That really was an interesting way to change the subject from sadness to outrage and observation. Then we sewed and drank beer and caught up on several weeks of news.

Today is another day.

Friend Stuff

I reconnected with an old friend last week. Neither of us is quite sure why we haven't been in touch.

I do better with scheduled togetherness. Otherwise I'm sure I'm bothering someone or it would be an intrusion. Setting our zoom schedule today.

In other news, on Sunday I went out to lunch with one of our bandmates. I had Chuchitos, in honor of our friend's Uncle Chooch, who I have never met but whose name I adore. Friend had fried chicken.

Then I went to a friend's house and took a walk with her 88 year old dad, who is recovering from a fall. Afterward he told her I was a "force of nature". I was on my best behavior! She said that he meant more like I'm a good egg. Whew. 

Then, back to the house where the man's son-in-law was having a beer with mrguy. I cooked pasta shells with beef marinara while the guys talked, and we ate together. It felt like a weekend.

This week's viewing:

• Renovation Aloha, Home Town, Sweet Magnolias (these are things we can watch while chewing). Then How To Get To Heaven From Belfast. Man, that's a great show.

Post SBD

The whole layoff thing has been super depressing, and I'm trying to make sense of it -- to find a narrative that works for me. I don't understand the layoff methodology. I don't understand getting rid of all of the managers in some departments, including the managers of the forklift operators, when forklift operating is what a forklift company does. It's in the company's name, for crying out loud. 

We're doing handoffs with people who were affected, including an archivist who is of the "making things globally better in the company" persuasion. Her projects are heady, important and involve people across departments. I am not motivated to continue her work, because the desire for making things better by means of large projects that I might also leave mid-stream just doesn't seem like the right thing to do. That said, I will need to continue to participate in handoff discussions in order to honor the departing.

I gave up on my own larger projects a long time ago. And in the months before the layoff I realized that even if I stayed at the forklift company for another two decades I would not get the opportunity to take care of some stuff that I think needs to be done. 

Case in point: there is a database that I've been looking at since 1999, when I was a contractor. It was a combination of data from several different databases pulled under one hood. I would love to do data cleanup, because there are project titles that nobody will know about without the brain of a longterm employee. I bring assets back by knowing what the records mean, but when I'm gone some of that access will be gone with me.

Someone once told me that I shouldn't care more than the company does. I never agreed with that, because I can't do my job if I'm not aiming higher and thinking about all of the ways that the things I collect will be used. On one hand maybe I was wrong all of those years, but on the other I helped make something remarkable. I'm going to concentrate on the latter, and try to tidy up before I leave.

Oh one more thing. This whole situation makes retirement so much more desirable. 

The Man Report

Things are good. The road has been rough.

Earlier in the week, after weeks of chemo and radiation, mrguy looked unbelievably frail. He was awake for a few hours of the day. He could only rally for his Monday dj session. He was living on yogurt, and I felt like I needed to intervene. He'd get up to drink three 530 calorie Boosts a day. I would make food and eat it myself. Both of us were super depressed. I had my work life, which was incredibly intense, and then I'd step out of a meeting about crazy work stuff to get advice on what I should do for mrguy, or what to expect.

When I talk to our oncology nurse navigator, who is provided by our insurance plan, I realize why it's so hard to retire. We can't continue to work with her unless I stay at the forklift factory, because Cigna doesn't work with individuals. And she is the most calming influence I have. For two and a half years, she has guided us through cancer, and we wish she was our mom. Anyhoo, she suggested that mrguy take his nausea meds a different way. Then I suggested to him that he go back to his old plan that worked so well. He kinda gave me a "Hell no" on that, saying that the original plan required him to get up at 3am to take one of the meds. He said he'd just stop Compazine entirely.

Unlike most stories in which a person goes cold turkey and then has something awful happen, he woke up the next day and was a completely different person. The spark of life had returned, Lazarus-like. He stopped sleeping 6 hours in the middle of the day, and occasionally cruising like a toddler who steadies himself on the furniture while walking. He's super thin, but last night all he could think about (insomnia hasn't changed) was driving to the town where he went to college, visiting a particular bagel shop, burrito shop and donut store. His description of the chile relleno burrito has my stomach rumbling. And we are SO going to do this.

I can't tell you what a relief this is. He's been suffering for weeks and weeks and now we see a bit of a light in the distance. Maybe, just maybe, we've made it through this tough stretch.

I'll take it.

FedEx v Locust Tree

From over on the fb:


Late-breaking neighborhood excitement: FedEx guy backed into one of my trees (twice), while doing a terrible 3-point turn. I went outside, took photos, smacked his truck with one of my lady hands as he drove away, and made him stop. He was literally dragging a small tree branch on his bumper. Despite his adorable face melting my heart I pointed at him and yelled “I want you to APOLOGIZE for hurting my tree”. He did, and was very nice and I was appeased.


I did not use any bad words.

PS Sorry about the formatting. I do not consistently hit preview before I post to see if it looks like dooky.

Ingrediments for Sumo

Miss clam had a double bunionectomy. The viewing of last day of the basho was over at her house. I made mackerel mousse and risotto. It was delightful.

By the way, I am so in love with this lady. An admin in one of the sumo fb groups threatened to expel me for asking who she was. Reddit is a little / lot more promiscuous on the matter. Someone says that she's the head of one of the fan groups. For which rikishi or for which beya I do not know. She reminds me of my mom -- judging me through the screen.

Bonus sumotori armpit for y'all!

My Sweet Boy

That face just kills me.

Spinning Blades of Death

From Last Wednesday:

The term "Spinning Blades of Death" was coined by a guy named Ed Ho, who worked at a startup with mrguy. "SBD" would be the subject line of an email containing a list of laid-off employees.

Today was the day. I wasn't laid off, but not for lack of trying. I have asked the head of the company to reconsider. In a huge shocker they laid off our manager, and our infrastructure archivist. This is one third of our department. Those two make the department run. And we were told that we are now going to be managed by a senior publicist (very nice person) who knows nothing about archives and already has a job.

My initial thought was to whiteboard and fix and do the things that you do if you stick around. But as the decisions above us have sunk in, the pure thoughtlessness of it, the apparent assumption that we'll band together and make things work? It seems pointless.

I built this department up from the contents of a double office and have seen it grow into a well oiled machine. Our team has had a great run. It seems weird to want to walk out the door without knowing that someone will run the thing, but I'm just so depressed that I can't imagine sticking around. I went to the car wash, and was so disappointed there, as well. I paid for three color foam and there was no pink. It looked like the sink in my hotel in Singapore when the neti pot broke through my sinus infection.

From Today:

It's been over a week now, and I feel better-ish. The day after the layoff the team (I call us the square, cause there are only 4 of us) whiteboarded the departing employees' roles and tried to come to a decision about what we won't do. I came clean with the team that I'm retiring. This was a huge relief. The week has been about coming to terms with this seismic shift in our department. Meeting with the GM. Hearing that they really do want us to do less, and won't fire us if we do. Figuring that they had to lay off the people they did, because if they got rid of me it wouldn't be enough.

I am not going to dwell on this too much, but we were doing outreach to forklift designers who didn't have time for what we were offering. We were hearing and responding to the things that the company was telling us. Then brainstorming and executing things that we could do to align with that vision. I am reminded of mrpeterpotamous, my old diner boss, who said "I don't pay you to think. I pay you to serve". So what if? 

In some ways nothing is wrong. Other than being heartbroken that our teammates are leaving. And feeling guilty that I feel bad for my own situation.

One of the square suggested that I hand off my presentation for the fan fest to another member of the square who is attending. I finished the presentation and did just that. Mrguy has been so sick, and this week I realized it's just too much. Thankfully my sweet colleague is going to step up.

I am going to try to get into this new world in the short term. Mrguy isn't ready for me to retire yet, it turns out. And now that I've delivered a first draft of my presentation, my goal is to power through as much of my processing backlog as I can before I go. It's feeling a little better.

Little Drummer Boy

I read a statistic last week that 30% of adults under 30 still live with their parents. One of them lives two doors down in the house with the perpetually mulch-filled driveway. He plays the drums. The adult kid on the corner also plays drums. Just our luck.

Yesterday was hot, and the man child in the mulch house was playing drums in the garage with the garage door up. I am MASSIVELY cranky this week and I am hearing him play IN MY HOUSE. Mrguy is unwell. This will not stand. I went down to ask him to close the garage door.

I find his dad watering some plants, wearing a pair of cargo shorts and no shirt. He's got his airpods in, and his belly is sweaty and tan. It's so loud. I flap my arms in greeting and mime that I'd like to have him close the garage door. He's all "What?" and takes out his airpods. I yell to him that I can hear the drums in my house, and ask him if he can close the garage door. The right response would be "Sure, sure. Sorry about that"

Man: Where do you live?

Me: Two doors up. I can hear this in my house

Man: There's another guy on the corner who plays the drums

Me: I don't like that either

Man to Man-Child: Close the garage door

Living on Grandma Time

Went out to see music last night and during the performance a person came up from behind, put one hand on my left shoulder and kinda put their right hand in my right (front) pants pocket and said “I’m so into you”. 

Twice. 

I checked my valuables and I was not pickpocketed. Later figured out it was a woman with fake sideburns. Just thought I’d share. I felt a little less compromised when the bartender identified her as a woman.

Other than that, it was a great show. A friend was interviewing a famous old guy, and then doing a folky opening set for him at a local dive bar, and then going to a different club and doing a punk set with her other band. She's retired, and she never stops.

The crowd was pretty darned ancient.

Doors at 5

Show at 6!

World Cup

Mrguy has disappeared. I think he went back to bed.

So it's just me and my little memento of the Norway / England game, where the guy who sat next to me at the club repeatedly broke champagne glasses and then claimed to not know why they broke. Then he reached over me and put this on the...

Oh my god is that Miss Piggy singing in the World Cup halftime? Gross!

And we have to see the president?

OK, anyway this is my little friend that the drunk Norwegian put on the window ledge next to me. Then later he tried to put the rest of the glass on my plate while I was eating. It was another trippy day at the club.

Retirement Plan

Three years ago I knew I would retire and some day my mom would die. I wanted help preparing for those two big life events, so I hired a therapist. Several months after starting therapy with a nice but very young therapist he told me that he would no longer be accepting my insurance. It was a godsend because I had felt like he was over his head with me. So I found a new person, lickety split. And she's great.

Just in time! Right as my new therapist and I started working together, mrguy got sick and I really needed someone to help me navigate this. And I no longer had the bandwidth to deal with my increasingly cantankerous mom. Mrguy's illness gave me clarity. Readers of mrsguy know the story well.

My retirement plan started in earnest in January. Mrguy's recurrence helped focus my thoughts, as did a realization that I'll never get a chance to do the things I wanted to do in order to prepare for leaving. I have always feared leaving a mess. But that's what work allows me to do -- make messes and move on. I am coming to terms with this, and realizing it has made it easier to let go. 

Finally, I will miss everything about the work people and the work place, but how much of it all do you need? I have tried during my time at the factory to be observant, to enjoy, to smell the flowers -- to appreciate every wonderful thing about it.

I've had a plan for some time. If I get into the Academy of Forklifts I stay for a while. Then if there are layoffs the choice will be made for me. There's a forklift convention where I'm giving some talks, and that would be a good time to say PEACE! and drop the mic. And maybe there will be a forklift bonus at the end of the year. I have a retiring friend who is staying for that. Again, after mrguy had his recurrence I didn't care a whit about any of that. He kinda wanted me to stick around, but I told him that if he died and all I had was a pile of cash to hug I wasn't going to be happy about it. The time is now, you know? But he has a great attitude and thinks he's going to live for a good spell with cancer.

The layoffs are in a few days. My fingers are crossed because that would be the easiest thing. I have an external hard drive coming today, and I'll use it to grab personal stuff off my computer -- all those random folders that say "send home" and the personal mail between mrguy and I. Maybe some resume stuff, like some of my keynotes (or just the text of them). Not so I could give the presentations elsewhere, but to enjoy things I've created. I have made things.

And Hammerslag, you can have those two keynotes I wrote for the big forklift convention next month.

Pretty Things -- Tiny Paintings Edition

I bought two small paintings for $60 and put them over the sofa. 

O'Hara, whoever you are, I would like more, please. These are from 1970.

I love them.

Visible Mending. VERY Visible Mending

I went on ebay looking for cashmere sweaters with holes, specifically so I could do some visible mending.

I bought a lovely orange sweater with a few holes. More holes than they said, but I don't care:

I received the sweater and began covering the holes. First, I used a piece of vintage fabric to cover the one on the back. Then I picked out a few colors and used them to embroider some designs over holes. I was very pleased with myself.

I put the sweater down on the table, and turned around mere minutes later to find this:

Such a pisser. Boy kitten chewed a ginormous hole right next to the mending I'd done. I decided to see if I could salvage it. I used a piece of a tshirt from the free table (the same one I used to repair my "skirt") to make a patch. Then I used a little bit of it on the sleeve to make a teeny patch. It looks kinda nutty, but I'm really liking how it turned out, and I got unprompted admiration from my coworkers yesterday. They pretty much agree that boy kitten's work led to improvements.

Here's the patch on the back. Yes, I will iron it at some point.

I just bought another cashmere sweater on ebay yesterday. I'm having fun.

Never Again Will I Ever...Or Will I?

This was the prompt:
"Think back to a fiasco—a moment when you were helplessly, hopelessly human. A mistake, a misstep, a plan gone spectacularly sideways. Write about what happened, what you were afraid it said about you—and what it revealed instead."

We were on a work assignment in Hamburg. Our project manager had quit and hadn't been replaced yet. We didn't think we could get our crates (artwork, AV equipment) past customs for no good reason other than fear, and the registrar at the museum was cackling with laughter because this was her last act / responsibility before retirement. Also she made disturbing jewelry with glow-in-the-dark rubber zombie fingers. You'd think I would like that but I did not.

With great relief, in our penultimate evening in Hamburg the bulk of our work was complete and we'd passed inspection. We went out to dinner and we / I got hammered.

A guy tossed a colorful postcard on the table, advertising a nightclub. Cool! Before the guys could stop me I walked out of the restaurant and hailed a cab. They managed to jump in with me, and off we went. And thus, at the tender age of 50, I found myself dancing in a cage at a raging gay nightclub in St. Pauli. I had so much fun until I realized that someone had stolen my purse which contained my passport and a week's per diem. My more sober companion, an air force veteran, noticed it in the hands of a woman in the parking lot. He snatched it from her and returned it to me.

The next night at dinner I apologized to my workmates. My hero responded "THAT was AWESOME", which took away a tiny piece of my mortification, which I feel even now, for obvious reasons.

What did I learn? Nothing, to be honest.

Hot Dog Diplomacy

It's week 2+ of 5 in mrguy's radiation and chemo journey. He feels like shit. Wants to throw up, or he has diarrhea or he's constipated. He's sleep deprived and angry with everything.

On the other side of the fence our neighbor [name redacted]'s beautiful wife died suddenly. He feels like shit and is being loud. Mrguy can't sleep with him acting out, because the bedroom window points toward [name redacted]'s house / his loudness. I went to the wake on Friday. It was beautiful. But it's been days, now, of lack of peace. Kinda like when [name redacted]'s sister and mom passed away in weeks of each other. He acted out, I asked him to keep it down (not knowing the context) and that made things escalate.

Six months later mrguy saw him manning the grill at our block party, and told me "I'm taking one for the team." He does not usually eat pork or beef, but he sidled up to [name redacted], started a conversation and ate a hot dog. 

Hot dog diplomacy worked. We have been cool ever since.

Right now I'm at the place where I want to protect my man, but I don't want to ruffle any feathers. And mrguy just yelled at me, which made me cry. Mrguy tries not to bother people, and [name redacted] takes up so much space, as do all of the people in the neighborhood whose sounds and actions bother him. And the things that I do that he usually overlooks have also provoked him. Poor guy. I have taken refuge in the pasha lounge with some sewing and an audiobook.

Genealogy Updates

This has been soooo interesting. I am lucky that I got my mom to do a dna test. She's that much closer to the answer of who her ancestors are than I, right?

What has been answered definitively is that she is not related to her father's side of the family. And that she and her brother have the same father. And that a fellow who shows up as her nephew is an unknown son of her brother. My siblings and I have an unknown biological grandfather who was responsible for both of my grandparents' children. We are all related to my grandmother's side of the family. And all of us look like that side of the family including, very strongly, my newfound biological cousin.

What my mom's dna tells us is that in addition to the German roots in Saxony that I already know about and have researched, there are German roots in Bavaria. Recent german roots in Bavaria. I thought I knew everything about my Germans, and I did not.

The genealogists at Ancestry looked at my mom's dna and my own and her bio nephew. In addition to the recent Bavarian connections, they found other German genealogy matches in the "unassigned" areas of my mom's matches. With great effort they found ancestors that were in this additional German line. What they are seeing is that there was only one likely man who linked those two families together, and unlike all of his family, who lived for generations in Illinois, he lived 7 miles away from my grandmother during the time that my mom and her brother were born. I determined that he was in the automobile business during this time, which makes it even more likely that he would have come into contact with my grandmother and grandfather.

I am loving this.

Project Pause

I stopped where I needed to but am happy with the progress. Most of the pots match-ish, and I have new herbs growing at the top. As things grow in I can move them to different levels. Not sure what I'm going to do with the bottom three spots.

A lovely thing happened on the way home from the movie theater the other day. There were goats grazing on the field in the abandoned middle school. I pulled over and took photos. It smelled so goat-y, and they were chewing so loudly that I could hear them over the distant freeway, passing cars and light rail. I liked it so much that I took mrguy the next day to experience it.

Such goat variety!