Erica Schoonmaker

It seems that every year, around this time after Christmas, I get sick. Last year I straight-up had the flu for 2 weeks. It sucked! Thankfully it isn’t that bad this year (so far anyway) especially considering I forgot to get my flu shot (again, this is what happened last year too). But still, augh.

I have a sore throat and a touch of IBS, probably due to not eating very healthily over the past few days, plus I think I have the beginnings of a UTI due to holding it in on the plane for over 2 hours on the way back to SF. I just didn’t feel like getting out of my seat on that first flight (which was about an hour and a half long) and I didn’t have enough time to go at the Denver airport on our layover because our first flight was running 40 minutes late and the 2nd flight was being held for us to be able to make the transfer. Yeah. Then, of course, I had to wait some more on the 2nd flight for us to (1) takeoff—which took way longer than it should have due to a runway change—and (2) reach cruising altitude so the fasten-seatbelt signs could go off. Needless to say I held that in more than a little too long. :/

Right now I’m just trying to guzzle a lot of water and go to the bathroom frequently so it doesn’t get worse. Fingers crossed, I don’t want to have to go on antibiotics.

As for the sore throat, not sure what’s causing that. I don’t have a fever and I’m not coughing a whole lot, just occasionally when my throat gets extra dry. Unfortunately drinking cold water seems to be irritating it. Oh well.

Hope you’re all feeling better than I am and had a good holiday.

Yes, I know it’s not Tuesday. I’m a little behind. :P

Hosted by Roots & Rings.

1. How do you eat your eggs?
I don’t eat eggs, actually. Never liked them as a kid but haven’t tried them again now that I’m older. I don’t mind them IN things though—obviously the best things have eggs in them… like waffles and cupcakes!

2. Do you volunteer?
Yes, I do! I volunteer at the San Francisco Center for the Book, which is a center that promotes book arts and letterpress! They have classes/workshops where you can learn to make your own books or use a letterpress. I volunteer at events and sometimes on Saturdays to man their front desk.

3. What’s your favorite brand of jeans?
My current favorite jeans is a pair of super dark wash skinnies by True Religion. LOVE THEM!

4. What was your child’s first word? Or what was your first word?
I think mine was “Mom” but I’m not sure. I don’t have any children.

5. Can you french braid?
I wish, I always mess up. Admittedly I don’t practice very much. :P

6. Do you prefer wide rule, college rule, or blank paper?
College rule for writing and dot grid paper for drawing.

7. Is there a specific treat do you always make during the holidays?
Not really, unless you count sweet potato casserole for Thanksgiving but that’s not really a treat. Maybe I’ll make a tradition doing a certain flavor of cupcake for Christmas. Louie’s mom wants me to bake some while we’re in St. Louis for the holidays, so I might as well.

8. Do you have a KitchenAid mixer? Do you want one?
I JUST GOT ONE OMG! It was an early Christmas gift from my mom. But I haven’t used it yet, which is a huge bummer. However, I plan to do so soon, maybe this weekend.

9. What kind of computer do you use?
I have a 27″ iMac with a 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 12 GB of RAM. It’s awesome.

10. Favorite Christmas movie?
Love Actually, which I watched today and it put me in such a good mood.

Every so often something gets on my nerves and I feel bad expressing that annoyance for fear of hurting someone’s feelings. My aunt, for example, gets upset every time I correct her grammar or spelling on Facebook. Granted, perhaps Facebook is not the best place for a lesson in the English language but it’s something I’ve always done, and most of the time without thinking. (I do this everywhere, I guess it’s kind of a bad habit, but whether in person or IM I have this compulsive need to do so.) Lately I’ve been trying to be a bit more conscious about what I say when correcting people, but I have to say the following things in internet culture annoy the shit out of me and I can’t keep my mouth shut any longer:

• Excessive use of exclamation points
• The use of an emoticon such as :) or :D after saying anything that could be taken badly

Firstly, never ever ever should every sentence in an email end with an exclamation point. Doubly so for blog posts. I don’t care if you are SO EXCITED OMG!!!! It’s just not necessary and comes off, to me, as childish. :)

See what I did there? I stuck in a smiley face after saying something is childish. After blatantly telling everyone who uses exclamation points everywhere that you know what? You’re acting like a little kid! But hey, I put a smiley face after so you shouldn’t be offended. How annoying is that?

Now you know what I mean. I constantly see this happening, most often in Tweets. It’s annoying. Please stop. :D

Kthnxbai.

This is a meme from Roots & Rings and I was inspired to do it via Allison. I’ve been getting the urge to blog more lately so I’m trying to take the first steps toward that goal. Probably blogging will be in my New Years resolutions again, like it was last year. Anyway, I digress. On to the questions!

1. What are 3 things that are on your Christmas wish list?
A KitchenAid Artisan Mixer (5 qt) was my main wish, and I have actually received it already from my mom (thanks Mom!). I am so excited to make stuff with it! Not sure about anything else I really wanted.

2. What’s your favorite Christmas song?
Um, not sure I have a favorite. In general I usually find Christmas music annoying, but that’s because it’s played everywhere and nonstop during this season. I have nothing against the music itself, just the repetitiveness of it’s airtime.

3. Do you have a favorite band or singer that sings it especially awesome?
N/A

4. Have you heard about the website Goodreads?
Yes, I have a profile there and I try to update it as I read but I haven’t been reading much lately.

5. What are 3 books you want to read?
The Hunger Games, I’ve heard such good things about this one and there’s a movie coming out soon; Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, I’ve seen the Swedish films and loved them so the books are now on my to-read list; the rest of the Kushiel’s Legacy series, which is one of my favorite fantasy series but the books are so long I haven’t read them all yet.

6. Do you hunt deer?
No.

7. Have you started Christmas shopping? Are you completely finished?
Yes, and I’m not done yet. Some people are so difficult to buy for!

8. Did you shop on Black Friday? What was the best deal you got?
I did, I went to Macy’s at midnight with two friends and it was actually quite a bit of fun! Best deal I got was on a bed set that was originally $400+ dollars. It’s part of the Martha Stewart collection and I fell in love with the metallic grey damask pattern of it. It came with everything, too! Comforter, sheets, decorative pillows, shams, even matching curtains! And the best part was I only paid $150!

9. What’s one holiday tradition your family has?
When I lived at home, we’d split Christmas Eve/Day up between my dad’s & mom’s side of the family. My dad’s side got Eve, so we’d drive upstate and see my paternal grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins. My step-grandma would make dinner, too. For Christmas Day my aunt (my mom’s sister) would throw a big party for extended family and her friends so that’s where we’d go after opening presents at home in the morning.

10. How many blogs do you read? Do you subscribe/unsubscribe often or do you purge every once in a while?
Too many, I have them sorted by categories in Google Reader. I purge every so often.

Last night I had my 2nd haircut at the Barber Lounge, which would also be my 2nd haircut since I’ve been living in San Francisco… and guess what? I have another appointment in 2 weeks! :O

Those of you that know me well will know that I have paranoia when it comes to getting my hair cut—ever since my grandma once took me to her hairdresser to get a “stylish pixie cut”—I had photos of what I wanted and everything—the summer before high school and the hairdresser gave me a bob instead with one side shorter than the other… Yeah, you get the picture. I had to wait the summer for my hair to grow out and then get it reshaped before high school started, and it was still not what I wanted. Bleh.

Since then I have avoided getting my hair cut like the plague. I don’t remember how many haircuts I got in high school but it was not many… and in college I got my hair cut all of twice in 4 years. Yeah, that’s kind of bad, I know. And I’ve grown accustomed and fond of the length of my hair!

When I moved to San Francisco I was scared of finding a new hair dresser. I didn’t want someone who was going to just cut my hair as if it were straight, which is the epitome of my hair nightmares besides the one I lived through pre-HS. I love my curls, and I wanted a hair stylist who would love them too!

Jess suggested Barber Lounge to me numerous times, actually, but I was trying to find a salon that did this “deva cut,” which is a method of cutting curly hair that I wanted to try and BL didn’t offer it explicitly. So I searched, and put off making an appointment for over a year. After realizing I’d waited so long and seeing how ratty the ends of my hair looked—all split, of course—I made an appointment. And I have to say, I am very glad I did!

My hair looks so much healthier now. My hair stylist has the coolest name ever (Lena Lightfoot) and has hot pink hair.

The next appointment is for my first chemical process. It's for a "section perm" for the top layer of my hair, which in the years since growing it back out from that pixie-cut-gone-wrong has refused to curl like the rest of my hair does. Instead, it sort of haphazardly falls mostly straight and frizzes like no tomorrow. I have solved this problem thus far by just pinning that section of my hair back with a hair clip, which looks totally fine from the front but from the back all the frizzy hair is clipped together and it looks like a hot mess. But at least I don't have to look at it. :P Anyway, the section perm is supposed to help curl that hair. Yay! I'm excited. Though I don't know how my hair will react to it, either, so kinda scared too.

After that I'm thinking about what I want to do with my hair next. I kind of want to try something fun, bright, and unexpected, like hot pink and purple hair dye! I've never dyed my hair, and honestly I probably never will dye my entire mane until I start growing grey because I love my natural hair color to death. However, I'm totally open to dying the ENDS of my hair. (That way it won't affect my roots and if I don't like it I can just cut it off.)

I saw this photo of Lauren Conrad with her ends died in pink, blue, and green. I just want to do pink & purple because I think blue & green won’t look good in my hair. Whatcha think? It’s ombre-style so it’d be a gradient starting at the ends.

“You’re like rags to riches!”
“She was never in rags!”
“She was never in riches, either.”

This was the conversation that happened between my grandma & mom after I showed them my new Louis Vuitton bag (that Louie convinced me it’d be cool to buy, I swear) over webcam last night. As amusing as their reaction to it was, I guess they have some kind of point. I don’t really consider myself rich but Louie and I, with our combined income, are well off and I feel really, really lucky for both of us to be in careers that we love and make a good living so that we can afford the things we want along with the expensive San Francisco rent we pay. (Wow that was quite a run-on sentence, there.) :P

I wrote this last night, when I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking too much. I haven’t written poetry in a few years so it’s not that great, but it felt good to get my feelings out onto paper. I think I want to start writing poetry more often.

The hooks of memory
are freshly pierced into my mind.
A rush of fear and sadness
mingled with the smell of burning.

Never forget.

Smoke so thick it blot out the sun,
how can I forget such a darkness?
People so desperate to get out that they jump,
how can I not remember watching as they fell?

It’s impossible to.

Buildings once bright, tall and firm
reduced now to ghosts in the skyline,
a hole in the heart of my city.
How can I not recall that void,
felt in my own chest?

Life moves on.

10 years have gone by but still, the image—
seared onto the backs of my eyelids,
a brand of remembrance so vivid and real
that the nightmare once lived
is absorbed through each blink.

I remember.

I figured I should announce this here, since Louie did on Twitter on Monday. He’s leaving Apple as the Visual Designer on the iTunes Team to join Square, an up-and-coming company that process credit card payments. They have really cool iPhone & iPad apps and I think they’re also available on Android. I had planned to use their service to sell Paper Owl Press stuff when I get it up and running (which is taking much longer than I thought, I keep putting it off).

Anyway, he’s really excited to work on something new and to get rid of his 2+ hour commute to Cupertino (1+ hour(s) each way!). Square’s office is about 4-5 blocks from our apartment, so pretty convenient. :) He starts in 2 weeks.

Other changes include doctors! Since he’s switching jobs it means we’re also switching health insurance. My current endocrinologist doesn’t accept the new health plan, so I’m going to have to find a new one, again. I’m not really looking forward to that process, but I have an appointment today with my current one to get prescriptions and such that will hopefully last me till I find a new doctor. Wish me luck? (Anyone know of a good endo in SF who accepts Kaiser?)

I’m back from my just-over-a-week-long visit to New York and have realized that San Francisco is indeed growing on me, I actually missed quite a few things about it! But I will still always miss certain things about NYC, too. As a given, missing family & friends is assumed in this list post. :P

What I Missed from San Francisco

The Weather: Part of the reason I agreed to move to California in the first place was because of this—No snow? Yes, please! But, in this case, NY was extremely hot and humid, almost 90 degrees every day and daunting humidity forced Louie and I to wear shorts, tanktops/tshirts every day. I got a sunburn at the baseball game, for example, and the sweat from my legs was so bad I was almost sliding off the seat. (Gross, right?) In SF, the weather is between 60-70 during the summer and 50-60 in the winter. The absolute coldest it gets is around 40 and hottest is around 80. And the humidity is low!

My Morning Mocha: There’s a coffee place 4 blocks from home (2 blocks from work) where I go every morning before heading into the office to get a mocha latte. They use a lot of chocolate and top it all off with delicious chocolate whipped cream, so my coffee ends up tasting more like chocolate mouse. Delicious! I couldn’t find a comparable mocha in NY, however, though honestly I didn’t try very hard.

Lack of Commute: While staying at home while visiting NYC is cost-effective, it adds 1+ hours commuting into Midtown Manhattan, what we New Yorkers refer to as “the city.” (As in, “Are you going to the city?” means “Are you going into Manhattan?”) While I don’t mind the commute on it’s own (nap time!) I do mind greatly when it corresponds to subway construction and/or maintenance which leads to trains not running their full route and therefore adding annoyance and time to my ride. Of particular nuisance was the 5 train this past week, which was not running at all past E180th Street in the Bronx! So we had to get off there, transfer to the 2, and then at Grand Concourse get back off the 2 and transfer to the 4 so we could go down the east side of Manhattan… only to then find out the 4 was running local! It took us 2 hours to get to Union Square from my neighborhood in the Bronx, which is absolutely ridiculous when it takes that long to get from where I lived to JFK on a normal day. /sigh

My Apartment: This is probably pretty obvious, I missed sleeping in a real bed (we were on a pullout couch in NY) and I missed our cat. But, most of all, I missed the feeling of being “at home” in my own place. Thus I realized I actually think of San Francisco as home, along with New York being home. I guess I’m officially bicoastal.

What I Miss About New York

Bagels: I totally forgot to buy a bunch of bagels from H&H to bring back to SF, and now I’m kicking myself for it. Having a hard time finding a good bagel out here, any recommendations? (I haven’t tried Noah’s New York Bagels yet because there isn’t one around where I live, sadly.)

Cabs Being Yellow: The crazy cab colors in SF still bother me a bit, especially the “Royal Cab” colors… red and poop brown. Bleh!

No Tax on Clothing Items Under $100: Since it’s considered a “necessity,” NYC doesn’t tax any single clothing item that’s under $100. I would save so much money this way, but alas. On the bright side, Portland is close enough to fly/take-a-train/bus to and they don’t have sales tax on anything! (Also my friend Allison is moving there next yearish so I’ll have someplace to stay when I visit.)

Dunkin’ Donuts: The only chainy doughnut place I know of in SF is Happy Donuts, and they’re always attached to something weird… like a Louisiana Fried Chicken or Chinese food place, which seems really sketchy to me so I won’t eat there. >

Standing “on line” instead of “in line”: It’s how we say it in NYC, and I refuse to change for the rest of the world. DEAL WITH IT. /cc Louie.

Museums: The best in the world, nothing in SF really compares. I was extremely sad I wasn’t able to get to the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met before it closed, but there’s a video walkthrough online (and I mean the internet, not the line at the grocery store).

My Grandma’s Cooking: …and who wouldn’t miss such a thing? It’s delicious.

You may or may not have heard via Twitter, but my endocrinologist has put me on a CGM for a week (well, 5 days) since my last A1C result was much higher than it should be. We’re trying to figure out why, hence the temporary CGM. I went into the Diabetes Services office last Monday to get it put on, and it was more of an ordeal than I expected it to be.

Firstly, I was nervous. I didn’t know how big the needle would be or where the diabetes educator would recommend putting it. I’ve never worn a CGM before, but I do wear an insulin pump. However, I only put my infusion sets in my legs mostly because I get the heeby-jeebies about putting them anywhere else.

When I got to the office, the diabetes educator, Sylvia, was very nice and had everything set up and waiting for me. She recommended putting it in my stomach or hip, so I opted for my hip and took a deep breath… However, the launcher wasn’t working! Which, of course, made me more nervous. I’ve had issues with my pump’s infusion set launcher before and it’s not a fun thing to deal with. (Basically, it either causes the set to go in too slow, so it hurts more, or not all the way in so you accidentally pull it back out and have to start all over again.) After a few attempts with the launcher not working, she decided to try a new launcher… which then worked. Damn things.

It hurt a bit, I’m not going to lie. That coupled with my mounting nerves due to the launcher issue caused me to feel quite light-headed, so I had to lie down after the CGM was in and she was calibrating my meter with it. I thought I was going to pass out, so she brought me a cold towel, a glass of cold water, and pointed a small table fan at me. If there’s a good place to feel like your going to faint, it’s a doctor’s office. I felt much better after about 10-15 minutes and was on my way home shortly after that.

I’ve worn the CGM for ~4 days now, and I go in tomorrow to take it off. So far, it’s been really uncomfortable. I have no idea if it’d be better or worse if I had chosen my stomach for the site instead, but in it’s current placement on my right hip it’s very itchy and I’m constantly afraid of pulling it out. Additionally, I once accidentally rolled over on it in my sleep and woke up abruptly because it felt like someone had stabbed me. :/ So I’ve been taking great pains not to hit it with things like my purse or backpack or the back of my chair at work. I think this has caused the extra pain/pressure on my lower back, which has been killing me all week. I’m probably standing funny or walking/sitting weirdly. My mom thinks they might have put too much tape on it, which causes more pulling at the set as I move. Augh!

In any case, I’m glad that I was able to do this and I hope the results will be helpful in adjusting my doses and achieving a more normal A1C. *crosses fingers*