It's not a blog, it's a journal, dammit!

These are my lists. Lists!

2012-02-10T20:12:00.000-08:00

I told Diana that she needs to start listing the books she reads in her journal, so I can read them, too. She said she would do it, and I hope she does. I like to know what people are reading so I don't miss anything!

I decided to start a list of the books I'm reading, too, just so I can look back at them later and remember what I read. So starting with today, I'm reading:

Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich. I'm re-reading it because I read One for the Money again after I saw the movie, and then I just wanted to read the next one, too.

The Afterlife Club by Jude Ryan. It was a freebie for the Kindle and I'm really liking it! I especially love how British it is.

Nearly Departed in Deadwood by Ann Charles. I think it's the first in a series, and I'm enoying it. I'm reading it while I knit tonight.

Speaking of knitting, I have to make a list of my projects, because I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed. If I list them it makes me feel more in control, even though I still have the same amount of projects!

1. The peach knit dress for Maddy. I started sewing it up on Tuesday, but it's back in the bag again. I would love to finish sewing the seams tomorrow so Maddy can wear it on Sunday. Is that going to happen? I don't know.

2. The Knit-a-long socks the the February Knitpurlhunter.com knitalong. They are very pretty, but because it's two-color knitting, it takes just a tiny bit more attention than I want to give to my knitting tonight.

3. The sage-colored Wallaby I'm making for a friends' grandbaby. Almost done but I ran out of yarn! I need to go to the yarn shop tomorrow for one more skein. I'll end up with most of the skein left, but I can make a hat for Kim with the leftovers.

4. Kim asked me to knit a hat that has a pocket inside for her earphones so she can listen to music with her hat on. I've got a plan for that, and I'll get to it soon.

5. Baby sweater for my cousin Wendy's baby - what I'm making tonight! It's an easy top-down kimono I'm knitting in Hempwol. I made one for Maddy and it's so cute when it's done.

6. Another kimono for Jeanette's new baby! Haven't started it yet, but I've got the yarn!

7. Owl cardigan for Maddy. I've got the pattern and the yarn, but I'm not going to start it until her dress is finished!

Okay, I feel better. I'm going to go knit now.

And now it is February.

2012-02-05T01:58:00.000-08:00

Remember last time I said I was working on the Little Arrowhead Socks? Well, I finished one sock and started the second one, but in the middle of it I made a mistake in the lace pattern, and I couldn't fix it so I was going to have to pick it back about 3 rows and knit that section again, and suddenly I was just so tired of knitting lace while trying to read a book that I ripped out the whole sock and started over. They are going to be plain socks in my usual 3X1 rib, and they will be easy to work on while I read or watch movies, and that is really what I want from my sock knitting.

Paula had come down to my office on her lunch break and was happily knitting a mitten, and she almost had a heart attack when I ripped that sock out. The first sock was still in my purse, so I picked out the toe stitching and ripped that whole sock back, too, and she was gasping in horror. She hasn't been knitting long enough to know that if your knitting is not making you happy, you just need to cut your losses and tear it out.*

Scott called me tonight and said that Soren wanted to talk to Nan on the computer, so we got on Google+ to have a webcam chat, but there were a few snags in the process. First, they didn't have the chat program installed on the computer they were using, so they had to install it. No problem, I just talked to Scott while I waited.

While Scott was installing the program, Carl was watching him, and I heard Carl ask Scott to tell him a story about when Carl touched the computer. Carl is not allowed to touch the computer, so the story went like this, "One day Carl touched the computer and he got a spanking and had to go to his room without supper." Then Scott started laughing, and I asked what happened, and he said Carl was smiling when the story started, but when it got to the part about the spanking, his smile faded, and he was looking horrified at the end, the part where he had to go to his room. Poor Carl. Now he is traumatized.

So then the program was installed and we were trying to connect to each other, but in Google+ you connect by going to a Hangout, and you invite the person or people you want to talk with to come to the Hangout. Okay, so I tried to invite Carolyn's computer to my hangout, but I couldn't figure out how to invite a single person, and I clicked on the circle of my Google+ friends, which apparently sent an invitation to everyone in my circle of friends, including my friend Wendy, who was home relaxing after a long, rough week at work.

Wendy saw the invite to my hangout, but she was tired and watching a DVD of Mad Men so she sensibly ignored me until the *second* invite came through, because I was still unable to figure out how to invite just one person. She must have thought I was pathetically lonely all by myself in my Google hangout, so she connected to me with her iPhone, but by then I had made a precarious connection with Scott and the kids, so when Wendy came on, too, I said hello, but since I was messing around trying to get a better connection to Scott, I heartlessly blew her off!

I finally was able to chat a little with Scott and the kids, and Carolyn, who brought their cat, Nom Chomsky, to be included in the chatting, too, but then my stupid laptop decided we had had enough fun for one night and it shut me down. Geez.

So I went upstairs to get a nap before work, and I called Wendy to apologize, and now I'm writing this post just for her! So there, Wendy, get a good night's sleep and when you wake up there will be something for you to read.

*Except for that Nagano sweater I started 10 years ago. It is the beast that haunts my dreams. Every time I start to rip it out, I stop because of all the work and emotional anguish that have gone into it. It's half ripped out, resting in a box in the closet.

I'm at work now.

2012-01-30T23:10:00.000-08:00

What I am reading tonight:

A Discovery of Witches: A Novel

This is a recommendation from Diana, and it's pretty good. It's the same old thing, i.e. witches, vampires, demons, but it's well written and I'm enjoying it. I'm also reading yet another diet book, and re-reading the second Stephanie Plum book.

What I'm knitting today:

I was going to bring the sweater I'm knitting for Maddy, but oops, I forgot, so all I have is my purse knitting, which is a sock in the Little Arrowhead pattern by Nancy Bush. I don't think I have enough yarn left on this skein to get me through the whole night at work, so I might have to use something from the Emergency Knitting Stash I keep in a drawer at work.

Tonight we all went to yoga class, and by 'all' I mean Rachel, Kim, and I, aas well as Laura and Shelley. The Monday night class is always big, and the whole Y must have been busy because the parking lot was full! Ash reported that he had a hard time getting a machine to work on because so many people were working out downstairs. It will be nice when all those people who made New Years resolutions give up on exersizing!

Who wants to be haunted?

2012-01-16T22:46:00.000-08:00

So Rachel called me just now as she was walking over to the grocery store across the field from her backyard in the middle of the night. (Probably about 100 yards away.)

I told her it was dangerous, but if anything happened to her I would be comforted knowing that I was the last person who talked to her. Then I suggested that she should come back from beyond to contact me.

Rachel said if she was going to contact anyone from beyond it would be Kim, because it would be fun to freak her out. I had to agree that it would be funny if she contacted Kim, because Kim is the one who watches those stupid ghost hunting shows on TV, and she is so interested in the paranormal.

Fortunately Rachel got home safely, so it doesn't matter now.

In which I don't even try to catch up.

2012-01-10T21:36:00.000-08:00

How much I walked today:

The hospital has a walking program for all of the employees this year, and our goal is to walk 10 miles a week, or two miles a day, five times a week. Yesterday Kim and I walked our two miles, but today we went to visit with Maddy for an hour instead. Tomorrow we'll get that walk again!

What I cooked today:

Kim wanted some rice with meat and vegetables like she ate in Taiwan almost every day, so I made chicken with sauteed vegetables for her, and cooked some white rice in the rice cooker. (I like brown rice better, but I was out of it, and anyway, white rice is more Asian!) It turned out very well, and Kim said it was like what the cooks at the school made for lunch.

And I made bread!

I downloaded a free book for my Kindle with recipes for breads that you mix up and refridgerate until you are ready to bake them - at least 8 hours and up to five days! I liked the idea of making bread that I could set aside until I was ready to make it, so I mixed up a batch two days ago and baked it yesterday. These breads don't have to be kneaded, and they only need to rise once, so they are less labor-intensive. The bread from that first batch was okay, but it was white bread, and I like whole wheat better, so today I looked online to find an article I read a couple of years ago on making artisan bread in 5 minutes a day.

The article mentioned the bread cookbook written by the author of the article, and I remembered that I bought that cookbook after I read the article, but I never made any of the bread in the book. My cookbook cupboard is full, so it will requre a search to find it!

So tonight I made the basic dough recipe from the article in Mother Earth News and tomorrow I'll try baking a loaf. I'm excited about this, and if it's good, we'll have bread for a week, because the recipe makes enough dough to bake eight loaves!

What Maddy was doing tonight:

When Kim and I went to see Maddy, she was watching her favorite TV show, Phineas and Ferb, and drinking some juice. While we were there, she brought Big Bear out of her room, and Kim recognized him as Mr. Bearington, who had been her bear until she went to Taiwan. Maddy also showed us her new dog that she can pull around on a string, and she offered the dog a sip of her juice. Later she offered the dog her binky, too. I don't know why she thinks a dog would want her binky.

Day two of writing more often!

2011-11-29T23:01:00.000-08:00

I am reading a book that is so good I can hardly put it down! Diana really likes an author named Jennifer Crusie, and I have read a couple of her books and liked them, but this one is so great I wish everyone would read it so we can talk about how good it is!

The name of the book is Maybe This Time, and it's based on The Turn of the Screw, a gothic Victorian novel by Henry James. (Note to self: Get that book to re-read it!) It's got ghosts and romance and it's written in a sassy style! Read it and then tell me how much you love it!

Why I hate Daylight Savings Time.

2011-11-28T21:53:00.000-08:00

Daylight Savings Time is just a huge inconvenience for me! It puts Diana in Arizona just one hour behind us, instead of two, so instead of being able to call her when I get to work at 11, when it is only 9:00 p.m. in Phoenix, now when I get to work at 11, it is 10:00 p.m. in Phoenix, and she is already asleep or very close to it! Which means I hardly get to talk to her at all (well, not daily, anyway, which is the prescribed dosage!) for six months of the year!

Also, Kim is still in Taiwan and she was 13 hours ahead of us, which I had gotten used to, but now she is 14 hours ahead, and when I get to work, instead of just getting back to her room to chat with me on Instant Messenger, she is halfway through her break, and sometime she only has a couple of minutes to talk, because she has to go back to the classroom to get ready for the afternoon classes! Do you see how I am terribly inconvenienced?

So that is my complaint today. I am going to have to try to update more so Diana will know what is going on here, and she will just need to do the same to keep me filled in!

So, here's what I have been doing in the last couple of weeks since the damn time change...

What I am knitting:

When I got home from Scott's I quickly knitted two very cute winter hats for the boys, because while we were there it snowed and Carolyn got out their winter clothes, and the hideous hat Carl was wearing was a crime against nature. I had to make something better!

After the cute hats, I started the new Knitalong with the people at the yarn shop. We got the last clue on Wednesday and I'm almost done with my first pair of socks knitted from the toe up! I'm pretty impressed with the pattern we used, and the yarn, too! I don't know if I will ever bother to make another pair of socks from the toe up, but these look good.

Now I have yarn to make a sweater for myself, and I still have a half-finished dress that I am knitting for Maddy, plus socks! I always have socks to knit!

What I'm reading now:

While we were in Utah, I got a lot of good suggestions for books to read, and I've had a chance to read some of them. I read about a book a day because I have a lot of downtime at work, so I can't remember everything I read, but I can say that I finished Hogfather last night, a book I picked to read because I like some other books by Terry Pratchett, but this one wasn't one that I loved. I picked it because it was Christmas-y, but it was so existential that it took all the fun out of it. Yawn.

When I finished that one, I started a mystery called January Kills Me. It's not Art, but it's entertaining, and I've already downloaded the second book by that author (something about February). What I love most about my Kindle is that there are so many books by independent authors - people who would maybe not get published by the big publishers, but they can get published on Kindle and sell their books affordably, and I get to read them! Some of them are good, some are okay, some aren't very good (some are just werewolf porn), but I love that I can have access to so many books!

Okay, that's all I've got for now. I will fill you in on the Great Lipstick Adventure later. Also, Kim will be home in 3 weeks! Woot!

In which a rabbit has a jacket!

2011-11-11T07:52:00.000-08:00

I finished the two Rabbit Surprise Jackets and took them to SLC to give them to the rabbits, and wasn't I surprised when they didn't fit!

It turns out that a jacket meant for a human baby is way too big for a stuffed rabbit! Who knew?

Since it was very important that Soren's rabbit have a jacket, I did not give up! Carolyn ripped the jacket back and rolled the yarn into balls for me, and I started over from scratch, just making it up as I went along.

I have knit many, many sweaters, so I know how to construct one, and in the end, the jacket was perfect.

We didn't take apart the second rabbit jacket. Carolyn thought it was pretty, and she is saving it for a real baby, either one of her own, or to be a gift for someone else. Carl didn't care if his rabbit had a jacket or not.

Whew! I'm tired of making rabbit jackets!

In which there is yarn.

2011-10-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

So the yarn arrived from Karin today and I'm working on Peter Rabbit's jacket again. This shade of blue (Dusk in Knitpicks Essentials yarn. I think they are calling that yarn Stroll now.) is the most beautiful shade of blue I have ever seen and I wish I could make a sweater for myself in this color.

And now for the weather: it is freezing here! Even I am cold, probably because I have to wake up and come to work in the middle of the night, but tonight I am wearing a sweater over my shirt, and also socks, and I am still cold. I have a wool shawl in the drawer that I am going to put on, too.

What I'm reading today: I am almost finished with Arabella, by Georgette Heyer, and then I'll start reading book five of Septimus Heap, Syren. After that I am planning to read Blood on the Ice, a book about hockey-playing vampires. I'm so intellectual.

In which rabbits will not go naked!

2011-10-17T03:39:00.000-07:00

Rachel and Maddy and I went looking for more yarn for a Rabbit Surprise Sweater, but we couldn't find what we were looking for in either of the stores we stopped in. Rachel suggested we should check her stash, and in it was exactly the yarn I had in mind, but there wasn't enough of it!

I took the one ball that she had, because I knew who would know if that yarn was still available - Karin! It was a Knitpicks yarn, in a color that I thought was called Dusk, and Karin checked the website and said it was backordered until November (!) but that she had some in her stash that she could send me! Woot!

So I started the rabbit jacket again, and knitted on it tonight until I ran out of yarn. I'll start the jacket for Carl's rabbit with another color, because his rabbit doesn't need to meet any literary description, and I'll work on that until I get more yarn from Karin.

Speaking of Karin, we had agreed back at the beginning of the year that we would do a sock exchange, and then I immediately forgot about it. Well, Karin didn't forget, and I got a beautiful pair of socks in the mail last week from her! Maybe I should get started on a pair of socks for her now, since she is sending me emergency rabbit sweater supplies!

Still reading Septimus Heap and today I got a text from someone in the knitting group, asking me the titles so she could get them from the library. I hope she likes them as much as I do. I looked them up on the Amazon website, and it looks like there are two more out, and there might only be one more that will end the series. I finished re-reading the first four, and I'll start book five this week.

I was talking on the phone to Rachel tonight, and I could hear Maddy fussing around in the background, and Rachel said they were baking a pizza in the oven for dinner but it wasn't done yet. Poor Maddy was bored and hungry! I suggested that it was a good time to try a video call, thinking it would be a good distraction for Maddy, and oh my goodnees, Maddy loved it!

She especially liked that she could see herself on the screen too, because you get a little window that shows the view of yourself on the camera, inside the bigger picture of the person you are talking to. She thought it was so delightful to see Rich and I on the screen, but what she liked the most was showing her belly and seeing it on camera! She kept pulling up her shirt to see her belly, and then laughing at it!

Because I know how much you care about rabbits...

2011-10-15T14:10:00.000-07:00

So here's the thing, I ran out of the sock yarn I was using for the Rabbit Surprise Sweater with only a few rows to go! I could weep. It was just an odd ball of some brand I had never heard of, so it's not like I can just run to the corner store and get another ball of it, so now I am going to have to go shopping and find some other sock yarn to make the rabbit jacket!

I know what you are thinking, you are thinking that I have lots of yarn in the yarn room and why can't I just match some yarn that I already have, even if it's not a really good match? It's only a jacket for a stuffed rabbit, so how close a match does it need to be? It doesn't have to be perfect!

Well, you would be right in thinking that I have lots of yarn, and also that it doesn't have to be a perfect match. But. Aside from the fact that I want Soren's rabbit's jacket to be wonderful, there is the problem that blue is not one of my favorite colors, so there isn't just tons of blue sock yarn in my stash - there is hardly any, actually. In fact, that ball I was using was the only ball of blue sock yarn I had.

I know, blue is everyone's favorite color, and I don't know why I don't seem to have any, but I just don't. And now that I think about it, my Local Yarn Shop (LYS), doesn't have a whole ton of blue sock yarn, either. Not that I am going to go to my LYS to buy yarn for a rabbit jacket. I love Soren, but I don't want to spend that kind of money on an experimental rabbit jacket. I don't even know if it's going to fit the friggin' rabbit!

So I am going to take a little trip to the fabric store to get some ~~cheap~~ inexpensive sock yarn. I hope they have blue.

In which it is fall.

2011-10-13T20:54:00.000-07:00

It's Fall and today was a beautiful day. There was some rain in the morning, and then it was sunny, and Rachel and Ash came over to work on the door they are decorating for the movie trailer they are planning to shoot in Kim's room next week.

Have I mentioned that before? They are planning to make a series of short films, based on a book that Rachel is writing, and they have made a donation page for it that you can friend on facebook, called The Locksmith Project. They are going to shoot the trailer to put on the donation page, and since Kim is gone for a while, they have moved everything out of her room and they're making it look like a room in an abandoned house so they can shoot the film in there. Ooh! I should take a couple of pictures of the room in progress.

So while they worked on staining the door in the backyard, Maddy and I took a walk through the crunchy leaves and around the block, and eventually Rich and the dog came out to meet us and walk back to the house with us.

They finished with the door just in time for us to go to yoga, and ow, I am so sore from that workout we did tonight! We did a lot of back-bending things, but I think the one that I'm still feeling is one of the standing poses. I took some Advil and a hot shower like I always do after class, and my back is feeling better now.

I'm about halfway through knitting Soren's Rabbit Surprise Sweater, and it looks like it's the right size. I bought some buttons for it today, gold ones, because the Peter Rabbit story mentions the jacket having gold buttons. I bought enough buttons for Carl's rabbit's jacket to have gold buttons, too. It's a good thing these Surprise Sweaters are so much fun to make, since I need to make two.

While I knit, I'm reading the Septimus Heap series that starts with Magyk. I'm re-reading the first four, and I just found that there are three or four more in the series, so I'm excited to read those, too! They're like the Harry Potter books, they're a series for kids that grownups like, too. They're by Angie Heap if you want to look them up.

This is nice - I'm in bed and Rich is sleeping. The dog is sleeping at the foot of the bed, and it's so peaceful. I'm going to knit and read for a while and enjoy my night off.

Men get old and pearls turn yellow.

2011-10-13T04:20:00.000-07:00

I've gotten out of the habit of writing, but I'm going to try to get back to it. I like being able to look back later and see what I was doing months or years ago.

The title of this post is what Scott said when I told him how depressing the Three Dog Night concert was. The band members were old, the audience was old, and when the three senior citizens came out on the stage to introduce the band, one of the old dears said, "Let's show them how Freeport can rock and roll!" and I turned to Rich and told him that it was all so sad I could weep. I was staring into the face of my own mortality! I've heard from a few people that they thought it was a great concert, and someone said that she was reliving her youth, but I just thought it was sad.

In other, more cheerful news, I am knitting a blue jacket for Soren's rabbit, Peter. Carolyn said that Soren wants a jacket for Peter since they read the story of Peter Rabbit - you know, the one where Peter loses his jacket and his shoes when he is chased out of Mr. MacGregor's garden. I have been looking for a pattern for a rabbit jacket for a couple of days, and then I thought of the shape of the rabbit (which Carolyn carefully measured for me) and I decided to try making a Baby Surprise Sweater out of sock yarn. The sock yarn and smaller needles should make it just about the right size for Soren's rabbit. If it works out, I'll make one for Carl's rabbit, too, but in a different color.

Maddy is growing and can say a couple of words now. She can say quite a few words, really, but she usually doesn't bother. She said "No!" loudly and clearly to our dog the other day when he was bothering her, and she says "Out!" while banging on the inside of the front door. She wants to go out and pick up fallen leaves and carry them around in her hand like a bouquet. Now that the leaves are drying up, she likes to shuffle across my yard and listen to the leaves crunch under her feet. Rachel is planning to rake up a big pile for Maddy to play in this weekend.

Kim is doing fine and will be home in a little more than two months! I miss her!

Scratching and finishing.

2011-09-28T21:24:00.000-07:00

I am finishing a bunch of things and I feel so good about it! I just did the finishing for a grey hoodie that I knitted for Karin's sister Kelly who did me a big favor, and since I will be seeing her and Karin in the next few days, I thought it would be a good idea to get the sweater done so she can wear it! Woot!

I finished the yarn shop KAL socks and oh man, they were a big pain because they were kilt socks, so not only did they have to be long like knee socks, but they had a lacy cuff to knit to turn down on the top of them. Whew! I just finished knitting the second sock last night and did all the finishing this afternoon!

I have finished the knitting on the kimono sweater for Maddy, and I washed and blocked it, sewed in all the loose ends, and now I just need to do a little bit of knitting to make the ties and a button loop and it will be done!

So I have a feeling of accomplishment like you wouldn't believe, and now I'm thinking about what I will make next!

Maddy was at my house for a couple of hours this evening and we had such a nice time. She wanted her hair brushed when she found my brush laying on the desk, so I brushed her hair while she sat at the desk and watched some Sesame Street videos on Youtube.

Then she started playing with the back-scratcher that was also on the desk, so I used it to scratch her back, and she loved it! Her eyes practically rolled back in her head with joy at having her back scratched, so I played some funny cat videos from Youtube and scratched her back for about 20 minutes, but then I was worried about scratching all the skin off, so I distracted her from the scratching and we went to play with the button box instead.

That was my day, what did you do?

That time I fell down...

2011-09-19T21:38:00.000-07:00

At first I couldn't think of a time when I fell down, and was feeling a bit superior, what with my excellent coordination and all, but then the memories started flooding back and there were so many I couldn't decide on just one!

The time I caught the toe of my sandal on the lip of the top step of the four stairs up to my office, tried to catch myself with my arms windmilling and slammed into the glass door, which luckily, didn't break!

That time I was getting on the exersize bike in my bedroom, and threw my leg over it too enthusiastically, lost my balance, and fell backward with the bike on top of me. That was on a bare wood upstairs floor, so it echoed through the house like an elephant had fallen through the roof.

The time I parked on a hill, got out of the car carrying a large Diet Pepsi from McDonalds in my right hand, and the car wasn't all the way in gear so it started rolling forward. My right arm was still through the seatbelt, so it was pulling me with it, through the intersection until it bumped to a stop on the curb at the bottom of the hill. My seven-year-old daughter was watching in horror from the window of the school bus! (When I stood up, I was still clutching my Diet Pepsi.)

There were two times when our sheepdog, Buffy, tripped me while we were walking, because that dog was always trying to kill me!

And then there was the time when I was doing the two mile walk with Kim, who was babbling about Pokemon and driving me crazy, so I looked up at the sky and rolled my eyes, which caused me to not see the broken sidewalk, and when I stepped on it, fell and broke my foot, thereby proving that exersize (or Pokemon) isn't good for you.

That was just hitting the highlights. I'm leaving out the times I have fallen on ice, because anyone can do that, and the time I slipped in a miniature mudslide while walking Buffy, who laughed all the way home as I cursed out loud because I was covered in mud! (She didn't plan that one, but it made her happy anyway. That dog hated me.)

So that is probably enough of my humiliating incidents for now. See you next time, when I will maybe tell you about that time in 1978 when I tripped and fell outside a club when I was wearing my Candies 4-inch platform heels and tore a hole in the knee of my Calvins and looked like I was drunk when I had not even had one drink!

In which I have nothing to hide.

2011-09-12T21:52:00.000-07:00

I'm getting tired of the 30 days of shamelessness, and I've been making up some better and more interesting topics that we can use when this series is finished.

In the meantime, hmmm, something dirty that I usually hide? OMG, when do I hide anything? I haven't had a cleaning lady for at least two years now, since the one I had (for about 10 years) decided she had more important things to do than clean houses, so that's how long it's been since my house was actually clean!

Or do you mean something dirty like Bondage Fairy comics? I bought some years ago on a trip to a comic book store in Phoenix with Diana and Sarah, and they were very entertaining and very dirty, but I haven't seen them in years. I think I threw them out so my cleaning lady wouldn't see them.

The next thing is Sweat, which isn't really something I want to talk about because ewwww, I hate sweat! I hate looking at sweaty people, and I get crabby when I am sweating in the summer. I was very surprised to find that we sweat in yoga class! I thought yoga was all serene stretching and, you know, thinking about nothing!

No, the truth is that we go to class, spread out mats, and then the teacher works us like a rented circus monkey! Today we had to tuck one foot up against the opposite inner thigh and bend over the extended leg, only not really over it, just off to that same side, and stretch the top arm up and outward, over our ear, and look up at the ceiling, and then the teacher got up and went to talk to a student for a couple of minutes and left us all sitting there bent over to the right and stretching our left arm up and over and we were just holding it forever with our rib muscles gasping in shock!

And that is why, when I get home from yoga, I am not only sweaty, but in need of a handful of ibuprofen!

In which I keep doing something that I don't think I'm very good at.

2011-09-06T21:22:00.000-07:00

Some people know that I want to write a novel, in fact I am working on three books right now, two fiction and one non-fiction. I thought that I was a good enough writer, but now that I am actually writing, I suddenly see that I am not as good as I thought I was. What?? Oh noes!

The thing is, my whole life I have been told that I am so good at writing, that I have such talent, blah blah blah, and even though I blew it off, I secretly kind of thought it was true.

Here's the thing, though. It's not that I can't write, because that's not the hard part, it's actually sitting in my chair and doing the writing. Not just a scene that I imagined one day, but the whole story! I have the vaguest idea of what I want my story to be about, but I don't actually have a story in my head!

It's hard, and I am hoping that if I just keep writing, the story will come from somewhere. I had a sudden epiphany the other day in which I realized that I have to keep writing to find out what happens!

I have two quotes that I keep in mind to encourage myself:

Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work. -Chuck Close

and this one:

I hate writing, I love having written. -Dorothy Parker

In which I am not very girly

2011-09-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

I can't think of anything especially girly that I do, and I hate that gender-specific stuff anyway, so it took me two days of pondering to come up with...hmm...nothing!

I went grocery shopping on Friday, and when I got home, I carried six plastic grocery bags in two hands up to the front door and kicked it so Rich would let me in. As I staggered to the kitchen I ~~ordered~~ told him to get the case of Diet Pepsi and the giant bottle of laundry detergent out of the car, and when he brought them in and deposited them on the floor of the kitchen, I told him I was going to put that in my journal as the girly thing I hardly ever do, i.e. asking him to carry heavy stuff into the house for me, and he said actually I always make him do it!

I think he's wrong about that, because I know I carry those in myself all the time but sure, whatever you say, honey.

I considered getting a pedicure, so I could write about that, but none of my pedi friends are around, and it's no fun to go by myself. If I go to the one place, I don't like to talk to the idiots that work there, but if I go to the Asian place, they don't speak enough English to talk to me.

As I write this, I am suddenly realizing that there are a few things that I always call on Rich to do, like killing gross bugs and disposing of (their) bodies, and also burying small dead pets. So there. Times when I am girly. You happy now? I have to go smoke a cigar and scratch myself.

In which you learn the name of the film.

2011-09-01T00:10:00.000-07:00

When I was talking about which uncool movie I like, I didn't tell the name of it, because I was kind of thinking that one of my kids would name it in the comments. I forgot that none of them actually read my journal, either because they don't have time or they just don't care (sniff!).

Karin suggested that it might be America's Sweethearts, but no, that is an excellent movie that I am proud to love, unlike another John Cus@ck movie, Serendipity, that is so terrible it sucks the cool right out of you through your eyes. I can pretty much watch Mr. Cus@ck in anything, but that one makes my ass ache.

The actual movie that everyone in my family thinks is so terrible is Nashville, which was a huge hit back in the day and it is a classic! A classic!! What is wrong with you people??

In other news, I spent an hour with Maddy this evening, walking around the neighborhood, mostly in my neighbor's backyard. Her yard is all pretty with landscaping and nice outdoor furniture, and she had a couple of jars of bubble stuff on a table for her grandchildren, but they are getting a little old for bubbles, and she was happy to see me blowing bubbles for Maddy to catch.

We stayed outside as long as I could stand it but the humidity was so high that I was miserable, and mosquitoes were eating us both, so I coaxed Maddy back into the house, where she played the piano, plucked at the harp, and typed on the computer in the den.

That's all I've got. Tomorrow I'll get back to the 30 Days of Shamelessness.

In which I like many movies, and they are all cool.

2011-08-30T21:29:00.000-07:00

As with TV shows, I feel that if I watch it, it must be cool, but I know my kids don't agree with that at all. They have spent some happy hours mocking my favorite movies, with special attention to anything by Robert Altman.

My friend Axel, from work, is the movie guru. He can give you the year of release and the director and leading actors in almost any movie you ask him about. He owns a large library of movies, and has loaned me quite a few.

When I watched movies, the kids got so they could recognize Axel's influence, and they thought he had terrible taste. I told them they wre getting an education in film that they would appreciate later, and assured them that I was doing them a favor, really.

When Rachel was younger, we had a fun activity we called a "Crapfest", in which we would go to the movie rental store on a weekend night and rent anything that looked the slightest bit like it might be ok, even if we suspected it would be terrible. We would rent a movie based on who was in it, like Steve Zahn (who we both love and it's too bad he can't pick a decent script), or based on a review on an obscure film website, or just the blurb on the back of the box.

We had rules, like if the movie had a member of the Friends cast in it, we knew it was going to be crap, but sometimes we rented them anyway. Unless it had David Schwimmer in it, then we knew there was no hope at all. (The only exception to the Friends rule ever was The Good Girl.)

Another rule was that if it said on the box that the movie was "hilarious", we wouldn't touch it. Hilarious almost always means that it is stupid and/or slapstick, and I hate both of those things.

One memorable weekend, we accidently struck gold - three of the four movies we rented that weekend were wonderful! That never happened again, but we have seen lots of movies that we enjoyed, but we would never have rented them if we hadn't been having a crapfest.

There is one movie that I am famous among my family for loving and making each of them watch with me, insisting it is part of their film education. I won't even tell you the title of it, but when I ask them what movie I like that is uncool, each of them will tell me the same thing. (I just called Rachel and asked her, and she said it right off!)

How I waste time.

2011-08-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

Diana thinks she is getting ahead of me by posting the Day 4 topic, Wasting Time, but I am going to camp onto her post about wasting time with Dr. Mario! See? Everything's a competition!

I probably knew at some point that Diana played Dr. Mario, but I have forgotten about it if I did know. We must have been wasting our lives playing Dr. Mario at about the same time.

I also played Tetris, so much that I felt slightly embarrassed about it, because I was good at it, and I would spend hours playing it while the kids were in bed, with tears running down my face because the game was moving so fast at the higher levels that I couldn't blink! I would just play and play with burning, tearing eyes!

One day I saw in the paper that there had been a Tetris competition in Detroit the previous weekend and some kid had won a largish amount of money. When I told Rich about it, he said I should play all I wanted to, since there was money in it!

It was after that (and I kind of think I hadn't been playing Tetris as much because eventually I did get tired of it), that my kids brought home Dr. Mario for me to play. It is very similar to Tetris, and I was pretty good at it, but although I did waste plenty of time on it, I think I had lost the fire for stacking things and I got over Dr. Mario relatively quickly.

I wouldn't mind playing a little Dr. Mario right now, just for fun.

I'm lagging behind already!

2011-08-29T21:21:00.000-07:00

Diana just took the 30 Days of Shamelessness challenge and ran with it, and I'm limping along behind her, trying to catch up!

This, therefore, will be my catching up post!

Day 2 - Look Like a Fool

This is not a problem for me, as I have many opportunities to look like a fool, and I just have to pick one. Let me tell you about my yoga class...

It was Laura's idea to take the yoga class a few weeks ago, and I have always wanted to try yoga, so I happily signed up to do it with her, and then I mentioned it to Shelley, who said she wanted to do it, too, so we all did a six week yoga class this summer. It was so much fun, and we went once a week, but we really wanted to go more often - like every day!

Rachel had to work most of the days of class, but she went with us a couple of times and she liked it too, and when Carolyn was visiting, she went, too. Everybody liked yoga!

Fast forward to this session, and Laura and I were not going to be able to go to yoga class because we had microbiology on that night, but then I dropped that class, because people, I am so not going to be a nurse. I like it in theory, but when it comes down to taking care of actual sick people? No, thank you.

Once I had dropped micro, that freed up my life a lot, and I signed up to take yoga two nights a week for six weeks!

So tonight was the first night of yoga. Rachel and I went in and parked our mats, and the woman next to me introduced herself and made some little conversation, and then it was time to start, but Shelley wasn't there yet. She came in a few minutes late, and it was fine, we were still breathing and centering our chakras, so no problem.

There are different kinds of yoga, and this kind is Vinyasa, or Flow yoga, which is a series of movements that flow into each other and it moves rather quickly once you have gone through the sequence, so you can work up a sweat and you get to use many muscles and they will all report back to you later in pain.

We were doing a series of sun salutations, which is how it usually goes, with some slight variation, depending on what the teacher feels like doing that night, and oh my goodness, it was hard work!

At some point we stopped to change what we were doing, and I whispered to the lady next to me that she was doing an amazing job, and she said she teaches yoga at another studio in town, so that explained why she was so good at it. Then she told me it's not a competition, but I assured her that everything is a competition, and she just laughed. Did I mention that she was in her sixties? Oh yes.

So then halfway through the series of sun salutations, when I was trying to inhale and exhale the way we were being directed to do, I got hyperventilated, and rather than pass out, I decided to sit down for a series, which worried Nurse Rachel a bit! I was fine, and I got up for the third series and finished the rest of the class.

That is my story of how I looked like a fool, when I was getting shown up at yoga by a woman 10 yrs older than me, and I had to sit down in the middle of it. How embarrassing.

Day 3: Eat Whatever You Feel Like Eating

Remember a week (or more) ago when I mentioned that all I wanted to eat was tomato and bacon sandwiches? It has been a couple of weeks of constant tomato and bacon sandwiches, and finally yesterday I finished the last tomato in the house, and I think I will not buy any tomatoes for a few days, so that I can eat something else.

I'm not tired of tomato and bacon sandwishes, not at all. I just think that in the interest of balanced nutrition, I might want to eat something else. Just for a few days. The Farmers Market isn't until Saturday, and I will probably go buy a few then. It's tomato season, though, and if anyone were to offer me some tomatoes from their garden, I would certainly make a few sandwiches!

In which I am shameless.

2011-08-24T21:39:00.001-07:00

Sarah suggested that we take part in a blogging activity called 30 Days of Shamelessness. I think by "shameless" it means things that we are a bit ashamed of, but that we don't need to be; in other words to let your weird flag fly.

Day one is 'A show you watch that isn't cool,' and I had a hard time thinking of one, because hey, if I watch it, it must be cool, but then when I was watching the coverage of Hurricane Irene on the Weather Channel, I realized that was the one. I love the Weather Channel when there is any kind of extreme weather going on! If there is a blizzard, or a hurricane - well anytime, really, that Jim Cantore is standing outside wearing protective weather gear? I'm there!

I love to sit in my chair with my knitting on my lap, drinking a diet Pepsi, and watching the wind blow! It's harsh! The reporters get buffeted, and sometimes pieces of roofing or lawn furniture blow by!

Once when a big snow was blowing into Chicago, I turned on the Weather Channel (over the protests of Kim, who was probably watching Spongebob), and there was Jim Cantore, wearing a parka, standing at an empty intersection in the middle of the snowstorm with a microphone in his hand, and I ran to the kitchen yelling to Rich, "Come on, Jim Cantore is in Chicago! We have to go right now!"

Rich just rolled his eyes and laughed at me, but when I went back to the living room, Kim was putting on her shoes. It was latish, and I asked where she was going, and she said, "You said we were going to Chicago!" in an annoyed way, like why was I even asking when it was my idea, and I had to explain that I was just being funny because it was Jim Cantore! In Chicago!

So yeah, that is probably the show I watch that is the least cool. Although I have also been known to turn on the TV Guide channel and just let it roll by, over and over, while I knit and watch it hopefully, waiting for something, anything, to look good. That might be considered a bit lame.

In which I talk about my knitting.

2011-08-17T01:34:00.000-07:00

When I mentioned the mystery shawl knitalong in my last post, I completely forgot that my friend Wendy might be interested in making one, too, so this is just a PSA for her - we're making a pattern that's on Ravelry - the 2011 Mystery Shawl: Earth & Sky. Go take a look at it, it's really fun, and it goes fast, so even if you start right now, you can get caught up by the weekend, and you will get the last clue when everybody else does.

If I can remember, I will take a picture of my shawl and post it here tomorrow. I have a couple of things to do when I get up tomorrow, and then I have my Microbiology class, so I might forget. Send me a reminder if you want to see a picture!

When this knitalong is over, Sharon from the yarn shop is going to start a sock knitalong for us, and I'm looking forward to that! She's going to start it after Labor Day, which will give everyone time to get their mystery shawl finished.

What I'm knitting today:

I promised someone that I would make some mittens for her to sell at Civil War re-enactments, so I'm making a few pairs for her. Last night I knitted a complete mitten, then decided it didn't look right, and ripped it all out, back to the wrist ribbing. Today I looked at the pattern again, asked another knitter for her thoughts on the mittens, and now I am reknitting what I tore out yesterday. I'm an idiot.

It's almost Fall!

2011-08-15T21:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, our visitors have come and gone, and the only popsicles that got made were one batch of Jello pops. They were great, and they don't melt and run down your face and arms as readily as the Koolaid pops. I never made any other popsicles, because I was busy chasing after kids all day, except when they were napping, and then I was too busy collapsing and enjoying some quiet knitting time to bother with popsicles. So at this point, having made that one successful batch of popsicles, they come out to about $7.50 apiece.

It was fun to have Soren and Carl and their parents here, and Soren read the map of Asia to us, and Carl is very sweet and has a rabbit named Bunnicula. Maddy went to GenCon with the adults and had a time, and came back with a cold that she shared with her parents.

It is a lot quieter at our house now.

What I am knitting today:

I finished a lot of half-done projects in the last few weeks, and now I have started a shawl. It's really going to be more of large scarf, because I am getting tired of the long rows, so I'm going with the smaller, scarf option. It is a mystery project, in which we get one clue a week for four weeks and we knit up the new clue and then eagerly wait for the next clue. Several people from our knitting group are making it, and it's fun to see how everyone's project is going - we're all using different yarns in different colors, so every shawl is special and different! (Could I say different any more?)

What I am eating today:

All I want to eat, since I saw an article on the internet about tomato sandwiches that referenced Harriet the Spy, which is only the best book ever, and I am not even exaggerating when I say I have read it a hundred times, are tomato and bacon sandwiches! I am not usually a fan of plain raw tomatoes, and Kim will tell you that I don't even love red sauce on my pizza (to her disgust), but tomato and bacon sandwiches on whole-grain toast with mayo? Are the best thing in the world.

Rich's mom and dad were here last weekend to visit while all of the grandchildren were here, and they stopped at a farm stand to buy corn (fresh! it was so good!) and they got tomatoes, too, just in time for Tomato Sandwich Madness! When those tomatoes were gone, I got RA out of bed early on Saturday to go to the farmer's market and buy more tomatoes!

You know you want one, so go make a tomato and bacon sandwich! I use instant bacon, the kind that is already cooked and you heat it up in the microwave - it doesn't get grease all over the stove and make your whole house smell of bacon.

Why my hands smell like rubber gloves:

I am taking microbiology this semester and the first class was tonight. It is all very interesting, but I am a bit germ phobic, and I have been picking at my cuticles so I wore a rubber glove to protect myself from the live bacteria we were handling in the lab! Eek!

Laura is even more squicked out about the germs than I am, so she was using her herbal calming spray in class, and practically hyperventilating in the lab! I thought we'd have to carry her out on a stretcher, but she did okay. We're going to get used to it and be fine. (Pass the Purell.)

In which I make popsicles!

2011-07-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

Rachel brought Maddy over tonight to play in the sprinkler. It's pretty funny to watch Maddy with the sprinkler, because she doesn't so much play in it as she skirts around it to avoid the water. The first time she played in it, she was more excited, and she happily ran over and put her head right up to the water, but she is more wary now.

I called a plumber to come and replace the missing faucet from the side of the house that has been gone since forever (actually since about the first year we moved in, but it's a long story involving freezing temperatures and elderly neighbors that I don't feel like getting into), and now we have a faucet! Then I bought a hose, and Rich found the old sprinkler in the garage, and now we are ready to entertain children! Except the ones who don't like to get wet.

Scott and Carolyn are coming to visit, and bringing Soren and Carl! The boys are going to stay with us for a couple of days while their parents go to get their nerd on at GenCon in Indianapolis, and that is why I'm making plans for children, the entertainment of. We're pretty excited!

Another brilliant idea that I had was to buy a popsicle maker. I read about it on one of the knitblogs, and it sounded very cool - it makes popsicles in just a few minutes, using Koolaid, or yogurt, or whatever. I immediately ordered one, and then the day before it arrived, I was in W@lmart and saw that they had a similar product, only theirs was much less expensive.

So anyway, my popsicle maker arrived, and I put it in the freezer overnight to get cold, like the directions said, and the next afternoon I made some Koolaid popsicles for Maddy! That was when Rich found out how much a popsicle maker costs and how steep the learning curve is for making them, and began to mock me for the whole briliant idea. He keeps asking me how many boxes of popsicles I could have bought for the price of my amazing popsicle maker. He needs to shut up.

So I am going to show him how fabulous my popsicle-making skills are! Diana told me that Jello makes better popsicles than Koolaid, so today I used Jello (and I also have instant pudding, for future pudding pops), and while Rich and Rachel got the sprinkler set up and dressed an angry, kicking baby in her Hello Kitty swimsuit, I was making popsicles! I made a bunch of them, and put them into freezer bags and stored them in the freezer, so next time Maddy comes over, we have popsicles!

She didn't actually get a popsicle today, though, because after she spent 5 minutes outside ~~avoiding~~ playing in the sprinkler, we brought her back inside and she was sitting on my lap eating a peach and watching a Youtube video of Elmo, when I saw the clock and realized I only had 10 minutes to get to my yoga class!

Rachel has been wanting to go to yoga, too, so we dropped Maddy off at the Y's daycare center (which Maddy is familiar with and she loves it!), and we went to yoga. Laura is out of town, but Shelley was there, and we put our mats down by her. It was a good class, and Rachel loved it! Yay! I'm so glad, because I love it, too, and I want to go more often! So we're going to see if they have two classes a week for the next session. We would like to go every day, but the Y doesn't offer that many classes, darn it!

What I'm knitting today:

I'm trying to finish two little tunic sweaters with hoods for Soren and Carl. Laura told me that this style - which is commonly seen on college students, more so a couple of years ago, but you still see them occasionally - is called a Drug Rug. So we refer to these sweaters as the Drug Rugs. Anyway they are cute and simple, and I'm making one with some blue/gray/brownish Noro that I bought from the sale table at the yarn shop, and the other one is made of a wool blend called Coffee Beenz, in olive green. The pattern can be seen here.

It was a day. A long day.

2011-07-08T21:33:00.000-07:00

It's been a long day, but overall a pretty good one, minus those 45 minutes of my life I spent trapped in the car with Maddy screaming furiously in the back seat and there was nothing I could do that made her happy!

On Fridays I get up in the morning, having slept in my own bed the night before because I have Thursdays off, so that is nice. I almost always go out to breakfast with RA on Friday morning, but when I accidently woke up at 6:30, I thought it was too early to go out to eat.

I went back to bed for a while, and woke up again at 8:30 when I got a text from a knitting friend asking if I would be at knitting group in the afternoon. I texted back that I would be there, and then I went back to sleep.

When I woke up for real, it was 10 a.m. RA was ready to go out for breakfast, so I took a fast shower and was ready to go! We usually go to one of two restaurants, and each of them has their good points and also their bad ones, so we go to one for a while until the bad starts to outweigh the good, then we switch to the other.

Today we were tired of both of them, so we drove through McDonalds and got a breakfast sandwich. I hadn't had one in a long time, but today it was delicious. That and a large Diet Coke was a perfect breakfast.

We drove around in the country (it looked like a postcard, Diana!) so as to find the location of an outdoor wedding reception RA is invited to. We didn't find it this time, but we still have a couple of weeks.

We stopped at the health food store to get some Wheatgrass powder for Rich, as recommended by a friend for the cough and congestion he still has after the bronchitis in May. In the parking lot of the heatlh food store there is a farm stand in the summer, and they have the best peaches, so we bought peaches and sweet corn. I looked at the cantalopes, but they were so huge that I couldn't get excited about the idea of cutting them up, so I didn't buy one - this time. Maybe next week.

Later Laura picked me up for knitting, which was pleasant. Rachel met us there, and it was fun to see everyone. We had planned to leave together to go to Rockford for shoe shopping, so we picked up Maddy from Rachel's place, and took her to Shoe C@rnival, the happiest place on earth.

Maddy and I just walked around the shoe store while Rachel tried on shoes. Maddy was wearing her monkey backpack, with a tail for a leash. She looked at herself in the mirrors, and she found out that pushing the shoeboxes in is fun. They are all stacked up and she just shoved random boxes inward as she walked by.

We went to @ld Navy next door and bought cute shoes for Maddy, and a very beautiful new sweater for Fall. She found a tub full of soccer balls, and she really wanted to take one home, but she had to leave without it, and that is where things took a turn for the worse.

Starting with being mad about us not buying that ball for her, which looking back, I so wish we had done, she was mad about the cashiers, mad about getting back in the carseat, furious when we offered her some crackers, and she just screamed and flailed all the way home. Even her favorite Ben Folds and Cake songs didn't make her happy. By the time we got home I was ready to cry myself.

Rachel dropped me off and took that angry baby home, and I went into the house, where Rich had been enjoying a quiet afternoon of dogwalking and watching a Star Trek movie. He had also bravely drank a glass of wheatgrass powder mixed with, I think, water. He reported that it was disgusting. I didn't mean for him to just drink it like that, I was planning to make him a smoothie or something! I'll try that tomorrow and see if I can make it taste better.

I was so tired from the screaming car ride home, and I certainly didn't want to watch Star Trek, so I went up to my room and got into bed, planning to take my evening nap before work. I had a message from an old friend on my phone, so I called her and ended up talking for an hour! So that was a better end to my day, and now I'm at work.

Rachel says that poor baby was cranky all evening. Maybe she is getting more teeth?

In which Maddy has a lot of teeth and she knows how to use them.

2011-07-05T21:21:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to go to Knit Night because for the last two weeks it has been so crowded, and when there are too many people it isn't as much fun. It's just too big a crowd and then someone brings three little girls with her, and one of them eats a lot of sugar cubes from the coffee table, and gets a little too energetic, but it wouldn't be a problem (because she's not my kid) except the group is just too big.

So tonight I was thinking of not going, except that it really is nice to go sit and knit with everyone. Rich wanted to go to the movies to see Green Lantern, and I thought about going, but then Laura came over and we both almost swayed over to the idea of going to the movie and at the last minute, decided to go to the yarn shop instead.

It turned out to be a good night! There was about half the amount of people that were there last Tuesday, although the Annoying One was there, but when she was really shooting her mouth off, I ignored her (Personal Growth moment!) and texted a message to Laura's sister, instead of thinking about how very annoying the Annoying One is. And I was glad I went.

What I'm knitting today:

I finished a very cute little short-sleeved shrug for Maddy to wear with her black tutu. It was small and easy to make, and it took less than one skein of a random fuschia-colored wool I bought off of the sale table at the yarn shop. That pattern was fun and went fast (because of its small size, and also because it was knitted from the top down, my favorite way), so I bought another pattern from that website, Knitting Pure and Simple, and I started a hooded sweater for Carl. I think I will probably make one for Soren, too.

What I bought at a garage sale today:

I don't usually go to garage sales, ever! because I have plenty of stuff of my own, thanks, but today Rachel and I were out in the car and drove by a garage sale that had a little dog on wheels for a toddler to ride on, and we stopped to try it out for Maddy. It was just the right size for her, and then the guy who was running the sale brought out another little scooter for her to try, so we bought both of them.

We took the scooters back to my house and taught her how to sit on them and walk her feet to move them and also how to say "Wheee!" when she rides! She thought it was good entertainment, and Rachel took one of them home and we kept one at my house.

Why Maddy's breath smells like dog food:

I'm sure you can guess why Maddy has Alpo breath, but here's the other thing that she tried to eat - stitch markers! She snatched one and shoved it in her mouth, and then grabbed the other one in her pudgy fist! They are small rings of rubber, and it wouldn't hurt her to swallow one, but dammit, I wanted my stitch markers back!

It was easy enough to pry the one out of her hand, but Maddy has a mouthful of teeth like a shark, so you have to be pretty brave to go in there after something. I tried holding her upside down and shaking gently to make her laugh, hoping the stitch marker would fall out, but she was determined to keep it in her mouth.

Finally I cowboyed up and put my finger in her mouth and she bit down on it, but I didn't yank my hand away - I felt around and got that marker out of her mouth! I had a deep dent on the top and bottom of my finger where she sunk her little chompers in! Tonight there is still a faint pink mark, but I got my markers back, so I win!

In which it's life as usual.

2011-06-29T03:19:00.001-07:00

What I'm knitting today:

I have been working on the Baby Blanket of Doom, but I am finished with my part of it and ready to pass it on. I didn't have the (very simple) pattern right in my mind, and I ripped it back twice before I got it right. It's a lovely soft blanket for one of the knitters in the Tuesday night group who is pregnant, and everyone is taking a turn to knit a few rows on it.

Why I have sore muscles today:

I went to yoga again on Monday, and we worked so hard! I was aching when we left the Y, so I took some ibuprofen when I got home, and went to bed to get my evening nap, but when I woke up I was so sore and stiff that I took a hot shower before work. I felt good after that, but ooooh! Today I have some sore muscles! It's a fun class, though.

How fast a baby can climb stairs:

Apparently a baby can climb stairs at the speed of light! Maddy was at our house this afternoon for an hour while Rachel and Ash went to the Y to swim laps, and she wandered off to the kitchen, presumably to take cans out of the pantry and put them into one of the other cupboards like she always does.

I was sending an email so I didn't follow her, and Rich was sitting on the floor with her toys, expecting her to come right back, and after a minute he got up to check on her, and then I heard him say, "Where did Maddy go?"

I said, "The kitchen," but he said she wasn't there, so he went to look in the dining room and I started up the stairs to see if she was in our bedroom. I was calling her as I went but she didn't giggle or answer me like she does when I call her, and she wasn't in any of the rooms on the second floor, so I went up the stairs to Rich's office, and there she was, playing with a tube of lotion! She had gone all the way to third floor just that fast!

How much fun is Kim having today:

I am assuming she's having a great time on her island vacation. I hope she doesn't have a mental breakdown without internet access for a couple of days! We should get to see some good photos when she gets back to Taiwan and updates her blog!

In which I have nothing else to report.

2011-06-24T21:36:00.000-07:00

Kim actually wrote a blog post about her first day in Taiwan, and she has pictures that she says she will post later, so if you want to follow her adventures you can go here.

What I am knitting today:

I didn't get Kim's top done in time for her to take it with her, but it is almost done. I'll work on it and get it finished and she can have it when she gets back.

I took a bunch of baby sweaters that needed finishing to knitting group this afternoon, and got several of them finished! I'm pretty happy about that. There is only one Baby Surprise Sweater that still needs the shoulders seamed up, and the other sweater that I didn't finish is a Wallaby that I thought was all done, but it turned out that I need to finish knitting the hood! I'll do that when the weather is cooler and Maddy needs a sweater.

I just brought a sock to work on while I read tonight. It's knitted with a soothing blue and green varigated yarn that has aloe in the yarn so it's supposed to be good for your hands while you knit, and good for your feet when you wear them.

What I'm reading today:

I'm reading a paperback mystery that I bought at Walmart yesterday for research and inspiration. I am hoping to write a mystery novel to sell for the Kindle, but I need to get started! I stupidly bought a paperback, though, when I know I don't want to hold it open while I read! I like to read on my Kindle so that I can just prop it on my lap while I knit! What was I thinking? I don't know. I blame it on Maddy - she was distracting me in the store and I was just throwing things into the cart!

What other things I did today:

1. Went for a walk with Laura, her sister Rachel, and their little bulldog Annie. Are all bulldogs named Annie? In my experience, they are.

2. Attended Friday afternoon knitting group where I got urped on by a baby, and also brought home the group baby blanket to work on. We're all knitting a few rows on a baby blanket that will be a gift for a pregnant member of the Tuesday night knitting group.

3. Mailed a piece of paper that Kim needs that she forgot to take with her, and while I was at the P.O. I asked what it would cost to mail a five-pound package to Taiwan. The answer was 45 dollars, so I think that if Kim needs anything else, she can buy it there!

4. Talked to Kim on the webcam. She says the humidity is unbelievable! It takes forever for her hair to dry after a shower, and if she naps, she wakes up covered in sweat. Apparently Taiwan is hotter than Hell or Arizona. She held her Coke bottle up to the camera so that I could see that the label is in Chinese!

In which the dog thinks I am intruding.

2011-06-23T20:49:00.000-07:00

I talked to Kim on MSN Messenger this afternoon. It was 4:30 a.m. in Taiwan. She was eating a bowl of ramen soup, and was wide awake. She said she had been traveling for 30 hours altogether, and had been on two planes, a bus and a train. It was quite the adventure for her.

When she got to Taipei, Taiwan, she had to get her bags from the baggage claim, then go to a machine to exchange some money so she could go to another machine to buy a phone card. She used the phone card to call her contact person to meet her at the train station.

Then she found the bus to take her to the train station. The contact person, who is a friend of the principle of the pre-school, helped her get her ticket to Hualien, and asked a couple of girls who were also boarding the train, to help Kim get off the train at the right stop.

When she arrived in Hualien, the principle met her at the train and took her to the apartment. What a journey!

So Kim is fine and arrived safely. When I talked to her again tonight, she said she had slept for about 3 hours, so that's good.

I had taken the night off on Tuesday so I could be up in the morning to go with Rich to take Kim to the airport. Rich was already asleep when I went upstairs to bed, and Sonny was asleep on the bed, too. Not in his usual place at the foot of the bed, though. Apparently when I am not home, Sonny sleeps on my side of the bed!

I was surprised to see Sonny laying in my place and I gave him a little push and told him to move, and he ignored me, so I gave him a push and told him to move again, and he growled at me! I had to use both hands to shove the dog to the end of the bed!

I read for a little while, and then I got up to brush my teeth. When I came back to bed, guess what dog was laying up in my place again? That's right, and he was very annoyed to be pushed out of it!

So tonight I came upstairs to read in bed and found the dog asleep on my side of the bed again. This time when I told him to move, he growled in a disgusted way, but he got up and went to the end of the bed. He has since rolled over and is laying right up against Rich's leg, as far from me as he can get

.

In which Kim goes on an adventure.

2011-06-22T21:34:00.000-07:00

So we got Kim safely off to Taiwan today. We got up early to drove to the airport, and actually parked and walked in with her instead of just pushing her out on the sidewalk in front of the terminal and driving away. It's a good thing we did, too, because it turns out that her big bag was too heavy by about 7 lbs! She would have been charged 200 dollars for the overweight bag!

We helped her cram a few things into the smaller bag, and we took a couple of books and her notebook full of CDS home with us. She was taking the CDs because she hasn't moved all her MP3s to her new netbook, and she wanted her music. Once her bags were repacked, we sent her off to the security line. She reported later that she just went through the big xray thingy and did not get ~~molested~~ patted down by the TSA.

Rich and I had a leisurely drive back home, listening to an audiobook while he drove and I knitted. It was extremely leisurely, because the last few miles of the expressway before Rockford were under construction and the traffic was moving slo-o-owly.

When we got home I picked up everything Kim left strewn around the living room and carried it all up to her room and closed the door. I'm planning to clean that room this summer!

I didn't finish the top I'm knitting for Kim, but it is almost done, and I'm going to get it done this week, just so I can say it is finished! Then I will fold it neatly and save it in her room until she gets home.

When this top is done, I am going to do the finishing work on a few things that have been resting in the knitting basket(s) for a long time. I just want things to be done, so I can start a new project with a clear conscience. I think there are four baby sweaters that need a tiny bit of seaming, and some Civil War mittens for Suzy that need thumbs. That won't take long, and maybe I will take them all to knitting night and finish them there, with people to talk to (and listen to) while I work.

In which the air is too thick to breathe.

2011-06-19T21:09:00.000-07:00

Oh my goodness, it is so humid tonight! When I left the house to go to work, you could see the air! It's so humid, the air is hazy! It may be 104 in Phoenix, but the air is so thick you can eat it with a spoon in Northern Illinois tonight, so hah! I...win?

Tonight was the first night of the summer concerts in the park, and we all went because we actually know someone who is playing in the city band this year. Rachel and Ash took Maddy to her first concert in the park, and guess what? She's really too little enjoy it. Rich and Rachel took her to play on some of the park equipment and to ride the carousel, instead.

Laura, Rachel and their mom were there, and various other friends, so it was fun and a nice little outing. When our kids were little, we went every Sunday night and sat on the grass on the hill behind the seats, with all of our friends and their kids, but since our kids have grown up they are no longer interested in rolling down the big hill or picking blackberries while fighting off giant mosquitoes.

Now that we have a reason to attend the concerts, it is fun again, and I hope we'll keep going. It will be something more to add to the list of Things We Can Do for Fun While Kim is Gone.

Kim and Sando are having their last gaming night at our house tonight. I think they are going to ride bikes together on Tuesday, so this is not the last thing they will do together before she leaves, but it's the last gaming night! (Until she gets back in December.)

The top I'm knitting for Kim is moving along and there is an actual possibility that I could finish it before she goes. I'm going to keep working on it!

(Insert cursing here)

2011-06-16T00:06:00.000-07:00

I am so sick of spending my life at the cell phone store. I hate them very much right now. I got my replacement phone today, and took it to the store to get my service switched over from the loaner to the new phone. I waited forever in that freak show of a store, texting descriptive messages about the clientelle to Laura to amuse myself, and finally a clerk was free to help me, but something is still not right!

I can make and receive phone calls, but my email, facebook, and Twitter are still not right! I get a message that I don't have a data plan to allow me to access those things! Really? Because I pay a largish amount of money to your company every month to have that data plan, so I think someone has made a mistake somewhere!

I will have to drag back over there tomorrow to get this new problem straightened out, and you know what? I am very tired of this, and I am running out of nice.

I would write more, but I have to get back to my knitting!

2011-06-14T21:16:00.000-07:00

Kim is going to Taiwan in a week, and we are ready! She has her passport, a visa, an armful of shots, and today I ordered an electric outlet adapter for her to take. I cannot imagine what else she might need, but whatever it is, she can buy it when she gets there.

I started knitting a very cute top for Kim because I wanted to knit something with the yarn made from recycled blue jeans, and tonight at Knit Night I thought it would be an exciting challenge to make the top in time for Kim to take it with her to Taiwan, which means that I need to finish it by next Wednesday morning! I blame Laura for this madness!

Therefore I will be knitting this top every waking moment for the next week. Good thing Kim has a new video game to play that will amuse me while I knit. She bought the new Harvest Moon game for the Wii yesterday and it is so frantically fun that she played it far into the night last night and all day today. I will be sitting in the living room watching her play and play and play!

In other news, I seem to be DEATH on cell phones and have killed another Blackberry. I will be getting a replacement phone in the mail tomorrow, and in the meantime they gave me a loaner phone to use. I could not be happier, and it was totally worth the two hours I spent waiting in the cell phone store while they dinked around with my phone and waited on many, many other people, to get this loaner. Not like last time when I went to the smaller cell phone store on the other side of town because it is never crowded and I didn't want to wait. They didn't give me a loaner! I was without a phone for three days! I will always choose the crowded busy store - I have learned my lesson.

In which I am so sick, but I still have to do things.

2011-05-27T12:43:00.000-07:00

I finally have the bad cold that everyone else has had, and I'm not happy about this. I went to work last night and felt terrible for the first couple of hours because I just couldn't breathe, but then Rachel had the bright idea for me to call Kim to bring me a decongestant pill from home, so I called Kim and she came to my rescue. It was 1:30 a.m. when I called her, but hey, she was up!

With the decongestant and much ibuprophen, I got through the night and was so happy to come home this morning and get into my bed! I didn't sleep well, but I slept, and now I'm up, sitting in my chair in the living room, thinking of going back to bed.

How the trip planning is going:

Kim got her passport in just 10 days (yay!), and now she needs to go to the Taiwanese consulate in Chicago to get her visa. She called this morning to make an appointment, and we are scheduled to go on Friday. That might change to Wednesday, we'll have to see how next week goes.

We have an appointment at the health department on Tuesday for a consultation with a Travel Expert, and to get the shots she'll need. It sounds like she will only need Hepetitis A, and possibly Typhoid. Ugh.

So things are moving along.

Why I am sick of Pokeballs:

Yesterday I went to the Post Office with RA to mail packages to our grandchildren. I had a couple of books for Soren and Carl, and a very cute plush Pokeball that Kim bought for Soren at an Anime conference she went to in St. Louis a few months ago. After I mailed the package, actually, even as I was putting the Pokeball into the envelope, I started thinking that there is only one Pokeball and two boys, and that is not a good equation.

When I got home I called Scott to consult with him, and he agreed that Carl is certainly going to want a Pokeball if Soren has one, because Carl is not a baby now, he is big! Big like Soren! Doing whatever Soren does!

So I did a quick search on the internet and found an identical plush Pokeball on Etsy, and ordered it to be sent to their house, and then I called Scott back and told him that whichever package arrives first, he will have to hold it until the other one gets there, so that there will be two Pokeballs! Scott assured me that he can do this, but I think I had better tell Carolyn too, because you know husbands forget to tell you things you need to know.

Why Henhouse is a funny word:

On Wednesday night I worked the 3-11 shift at work because my schedule is very different and mixed up for two weeks, and I am tired of telling the story of why, so just accept that it is and move on.

When I got home shortly after 11, Kyle and Kim were sitting in the living room, surrounded by Arbys bags, playing a video game that takes place in a futuristic Old West. They were talkiing in terrible Western accents, and I asked them to please stop because they were so terrible as to be painful and I was getting this cold, so I was not a well woman, and their accents were killing me!

I called Rachel, who was still up because we are all Night People, and midnight is not too late to go to the store. I needed to get some Echinaecia because I was getting a cold and Kathy at work had recommended it. (Note: I am still sick, so it was not a miracle cure!)

While I waited for Rachel to pick me up, I called Diana to whine about my cold, and also about the terrible accents I was hearing. She said she would be so happy if anyone at her house was playing a video game to entertain her, and if she was here, she would be begging them to talk Western for her!

When I got back home with my Echinaecia, I told Kim and Kyle that Diana said if she were here she would beg them to talk Western for her, and Kyle said, "She wouldn't have to beg!" and then they both went on babbling in their twangy accents about gunfights and henhouses.

So that is what's going on here. I am going back to bed to rest, and hope this cold goes away.

In which a baby gets so mad!

2011-05-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

So here's the thing - everyone around me has been sick - Rich has had, and is almost over, bronchitis, Ash has been sick and now his went into an ear infection, Rachel has been bravely resisting a cold because she has had to keep working, so she has sternly kept hers under control, but still, she has had one, and now Maddy is getting sick. Kim is the only member of my immediate family who has not been sick for the last three weeks, and that is only because she hasn't been here until just a week ago.

Through all of this, I have stayed healthy! I have not been around all these sick people very much, I have avoided contact with them and washed my hands diligently, but now, tonight, I am feeling the first little hint that I might, possibly, maybe, be getting a cold! Oh noes!!

I am not going to get sick! I am going to drink a dose of EmergenC every hour tonight and I'm going to take ibuprophen, and I'm going to ignore any incoming symptoms and I will be just fine!

Rich, Kim and I went to dinner at the Chinese buffet tonight so Kim could practice her Chinese language skills in conversation with the waitresses. Rachel met us there, with Maddy, who was a bit flushed and had a little temperature and a hint of a runny nose.

Dinner went well, with Maddy getting a little cranky toward the end, but she really held up pretty well, and would have been better if she had had a little baby Tylenol to take. I need to start carrying that in my purse!

Kim talked to the waitresses, and showed them a letter that a friend had written to her in Chinese characters, and the waitresses were pretty impressed that an American wrote that letter! Kim has been translating the letter into English, and now she is going to write back, so she can practice her Chinese writing. So that was fun. We told Kim we would keep going back to the restaurant often so she can practice talking until she leaves for Taiwan.

After dinner we all went back to our house so that Maddy could get some Tylenol and play outside. We took her for a walk - she rode in the stroller and Kim walked Sonny on his leash. We walked our usual two-mile walk, and then we turned to walk into the cemetary so that Maddy could get out of the stroller and run around among the tombstones.

Which was a good idea, because there is open space to run around in, and the cemetary is enclosed by fencing to keep the baby contained, but there was a yappy little dog on the lawn across the street, barking it's foolish little head off and Maddy would not stop trying to go over and get a closer look at the friggin' dog!

We could not distract her at all, no matter how shiny or interesting a tombstone we showed her, as soon as Yappy Von Fleabag started barking again, Maddy wanted to go over and cross the street to get to his miserable yapping self. Finally we put a furious baby back in the stroller and wheeled her tantrumy butt back to our house, where she walked around the yard and picked up sticks to give us until her fingers were so cold (and we were tired of our yard), that we had to take her back inside.

In which Kim is planning a trip.

2011-05-13T14:05:00.000-07:00

So Kim called me at work at 1:30 on Thursday morning, and said she had gotten an email from the owner of the preschool in Taiwan where she had applied to work next January. They had a teacher cancel suddenly, and they wondered if Kim could come in July, instead?

Kim was very excited and wrote back immediately to let them know she could do it! Now we have to get all of her paperwork and shots and whatnot done, so she can leave at the end of June to be there ready to start teaching July 4.

She exchanged several emails with the owner of the preschool over the next couple of hours - it was daytime in Taiwan - and I started googling for information on the fastest way to get a passport. She'll need a visa, too. And some shots. We've got a few things to do!

When we got up Thursday afternoon, we ran right out and got the passport application taken care of. So that's done.

Kim is excited about going to Taiwan and improving her Chinese. We just got her home from school, so we're a little sad to have her leave again so soon, but also, I am hoping she'll get everything she brought home from college put away before she goes! She's taken some of it up to her room, but there are still boxes in the living room and in the kitchen.

In other news, I am finally finished with Chemistry. Woot!

In which my phone is a problem.

2011-05-10T00:08:00.001-07:00

Rich went down to E-ville on Thursday - just a quick run down and back to get a load of Kim's belongings to bring home. She wanted to stay until Saturday to say goodbye to all of her friends, so she ended up being the last one out of the apartment, and brought home her own stuff, plus whatever the other girls left behind that was worth taking.

So Kim is home, and her stuff is slowly being carried out of the main floor of the house, and stashed in her room, or in the basement. She is washing her clothes, and getting a lot of sleep, and by next week she'll be ready to start looking for a job.

My phone has been acting up again, and the last time the 'fix' was to update the operating system, but the problems are back now, except they are worse. I took it back to the store again and this time I am getting a replacement phone. It should be delivered tomorrow!

I can hardly wait to get the new phone, since one of the problems (but not the worst one) is that the bottom line of keys, including the space bar, will not work. It's not impossible to type messages that can be read without a space bar, but when you don't have spaces AND you can't type an N, M, or C, it is almost impossible.

Knit Night

2011-04-26T21:43:00.000-07:00

What I am thankful for today:

I'm thankful that Laura came over with her knitting and her (finished) chemistry homework, and held my hand while I worked on my chemistry homework, but not literally, because then she wouldn't have been able to knit! She kept me going until all of the homework was finished, even the optional parts!

What I am learning from knitting night at the new shop:

I am learning to knit quietly and let other people talk, something I am usually not very good at. I am learning, but not fast enough, that if someone else's project is ugly or dumb, it is not necessary for me to point it out. I am learning to be tolerant even when people are going on about stupid things like sports - just because I am not interested, doesn't mean that other people shouldn't be. Even if I think they shouldn't be.

What I am cooking today:

Nothing, because it was Knit Night! Yesterday I made Tater Tot Casserole, however, and it was so good! I had some leftover casserole today.

How many times Maddy and I went up and down the stairs at my house today:

I couldn't even tell you, but it was a lot. She went into all of the bedrooms to look around, and when the cat sees Maddy coming, that cat shoots out of there. A cat who is peacefully sleeping on your bed can go from zero to sixty in no time at all when a baby comes toddling in, saying, "Cat!"

What I am reading today:

Charmed Life by Diana Wynn Jones. I think that is my favorite book ever. I have given so many copies to people, because I want everyone to enjoy it. When Jenna came to live with us, she told me about a book she read when she was younger and it was her favorite book, but she loaned it to someone and never go it back. I asked her what it was about, because I thought I could help her find it in the library or a bookstore, but she couldn't remember enough about it. Then one day she came to me, and she was so excited because she had been reading a book she found on a shelf in our house, and it was the book! It was the amazing book that she had loved! And it was Charmed Life. You should read it.

What I am knitting today:

1. A shawl. It's the Brandywine shawl. I saw a photo of a finished shawl on someone's Ravelry page (Pynnski), and it was so beautiful, I had to have one! I had a big hank of handpainted yarn from the Fiber Festival, and I started it, with hope and doubt. Hope that I could knit it, and doubt that I could follow lace instructions without messing them all up, because I am terrible at knitting lace! It's moving right along, though, and I'm very excited about it!

2. A Jayne Hat. I made one for Scott three years ago, and now a friend of Kim wants one. It's kind of a joke, and if you walk down the street wearing that hat, everybody knows you aren't afraid of anything.

3. Socks for Paula. The socks are pretty but a pain to work with. She brought me some yarn made of microfiber, and it's pleasantly cotton-y, but the thing about cotton is that it has no give, so my hands get tired of working on it.

4. A Chicknits classic cardigan for Kim. I'm making it with mauve Galway yarn, and it's coming along slowly.

5. Still working on the classic cardi for Kelly, too.

That's all the news for now.

In which there was knitting. Also, cookies!

2011-04-20T00:27:00.000-07:00

So there is much rejoicing tonight as a new yarn store opens! In my town! I've been keeping an eye on the place since I noticed it a few weeks ago - there was a sign that said it was opening soon, and then on Friday I was downtown and saw a woman sitting in a chair inside the store, knitting!

I waved at her and she beckoned me inside! There wasn't a lot in the store, but she said she was waiting for a delivery, and she let me look around. She said they would be opening on Monday, and there would eventually be classes offered, and it all sounded very exciting!

Then yesterday I was gone all day, so the store opened without me, but this afternoon Rachel and I took Maddy to her first yarn store! Maddy thought it was just great! There was lots of open floor space for toddling around, and there were yarn balls to pull off of shelves while Rachel and I ran along behind her, putting the yarn back on the shelves!

I texted Laura to come see the store, and she was there in just a few minutes, and by then we were having to distract Maddy by letting her pull everything out of my purse, and she was sitting on the floor wearing a necklace I had put in my purse just for her to play with, and on the floor around her were my wallet, some random receipts and lists, and she had pulled one of the needles out of my current sock project.

Rachel had to go home to get ready for work, anyway, so she took Maddy, and left me there with Laura, who then picked out yarn for a hat and started making a swatch to find the right size needles. I sat with her, and fixed the knitting that Maddy pulled out.

Tuesday is going to be Knitting Night at the shop, so I called another friend (Paula, a friend from work), and told her to come and check it out, and bring her knitting! The official start time for the group knitting was 7, so we had time to go to my house to start some dinner for Rich first.

When we got to my house, Rich was already gone, but I threw together some Curried Chicken and left it for him to eat when he got home, and we went back to the yarn shop to knit!

It was so nice to sit with other knitters and just knit! There was just a small group tonight (Paula, Laura and me! Who needs any more than that?), but I think it's going to grow, and I'm very excited about it. It's so great to have a yarn shop in town again!

In which someone got fingerprinted.

2011-04-18T21:18:00.000-07:00

What is the world coming to when Diana is shaming me by writing in her journal more often than I am?? I just don't have anything going on, just the same old thing, blah blah laundry blah blah walked the dog blah blah made/didn't make dinner blah blah knitting. Now you know that's not very interesting!

Today I actually left town and did something, so I have something to write about! Wooo!

What I did today:

Laura Chem (all of my friends from Chemistry are listed in my phone contacts by their first name, with Chem as their last name. Diane Chem, Joann Chem, Nick Chem, Kim Chem... Kim Chem. Heh.) So where was I? Oh right, so Laura is applying for her Illinois license for massage therapy so she can get a job in Illinois instead of commuting to Wisconsin all the time, but part of that process is to be digitally fingerprinted, and apparently the closest place to do that is in Rockford.

Rockford is a longish drive, so she asked if I wanted to ride along to keep her company, and you know me, I will ride from Hell to Israel if I have my knitting and a pop to drink, so I said I would go along.

We left at two in the afternoon, but first we had to stop and get a pop and a hamburger for me because I had just gotten out of bed, and then Laura needed to put a couple of things in the mail, so we stopped by the post office, but after that we were on our way.

The drive to Rockford was uneventful, and I did several rows on my knitting (the yellow sock for RA). To my delighted surprise, our destination turned out to be not a police station, but a detective agency! We were greeted by a tall thin woman with big blonde hair, wearing a leopard-print scarf to accessorize her sweater and pencil skirt. She was wearing heels, too, and the overall impression was that she looked quite a bit like a Barbie doll.

Detective Barbie allowed us to use the bathroom, and I noted the collection of hair products in the glass-fronted cabinet in there, but then she got a bit pissy with me when I asked about the pink camera on her desk. She told me I could wait in the lobby while she did Laura's fingerprints, so I wandered out and read a book on my Kindle, and knitted on the yellow sock while I waited.

There was a table display in the lobby of gift cards you could purchase - in case your friend has been wondering if her husband is cheating on her? I think those would make pretty hilarious Christmas gifts!

When we left there, we kind of felt like we had come all that way, and that we should do something in town while we were there. We headed over to the main drag of strip malls, and went to see what we could find at Borders. We each bought a couple of books and I looked at a stuffed rabbit for Maddy ("Cat!"), but I didn't buy it.

We stopped to get a turkey sandwich on the way home, and it was a really great sandwich. Too bad the restaurant is called Beefaroo, I'm embarrassed to tell anyone where we ate.

We stopped at Laura's house when we got back to town, and there was cake, and her 'girls", including my new girlfriend, Mazey, were so happy to see us! All the girls jumped in the car for the ride to my house!

By the time I got home, it was really time for my evening nap, and I was ready for it. I slept for a couple of hours and when I woke up, Rich and Sonny were ready for bed! I got out of the bed and they got in it!

So there you go, that was my day. If anything else happens, I'll let you know.

And the heroine always has red hair.

2011-04-11T01:56:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy weekend, and I'm trying to remember what we did. For one thing, Kim was here this weekend, and she went back to school this afternoon. She got here Thursday night, and before she came home, we had made plans for cooking her favorite things, and letting her rest and relax, but things didn't work out quite like that.

What we planned to cook this weekend:

Kim told me she wanted salmon for dinner one night, and another thing she wanted was roast beef hash. Neither of those things happened. Salmon was so expensive I couldn't bring myself to buy any, and we ended up with pizza that night, and then I was gone most of the next day, so I didn't cook anything for dinner at all and she and Rich got some takeout.

What we made instead of dinner:

It was Kim's birthday last weekend, and we wanted to make a birthday cake for her while she was home, so I bought a cake mix, and was going to make a Jello cake, but I am not actually sure how to make one! I asked RA about it, because she makes them all the time, and she said if I gave her the cake mix and the Jello, she would make it for me, and that's what happened with the cake. It was delicious!

The other thing that we made, and this I actually did make, well okay, now that I think about it, Rachel made it and I just chased Maddy around the house and kept her out of the way, but anyway, the thing was that Kim said she wanted salt-water taffy. I didn't think we would be able to just buy some, because isn't that something you can only get when you go on vacation, like when you go to Mackinaw Island?

Then I kind of remembered a long time ago, my friend and I wanted to cook something, and her mother helped us make taffy in a pan on the stove, so I thought maybe we could do that and it would be really fun! Didn't pioneers used to make taffy and it was an evening's entertainment? I got a recipe on the internet, and I borrowed a candy theromometer from RA, and Rachel came over with Maddy, and we worked on making candy.

Can I just tell you, that making taffy isn't as easy as you'd think, and what we ended up with was a pile of hard, sticky candy, a lot of dirty dishes and a big blister on Rachel's thumb. I think that pioneers were easily amused.

What I did at the Fiber Festival:

Rachel and I were up early (for us) on Saturday morning, and we were pretty excited to take Maddy and go to the Fiber Festival! They have yarn! We looked at everything, and we saw people that we knew, and we maybe bought a little yarn...

Rachel took Maddy home for a nap, and I went home to fondle my new yarn (and to wake up Kim). RA kind of wanted to go the Fiber Fest, and I was supposed to go back to meet Laura too, which is why I was back there again in the afternoon, but I only bought one circular needle, that's all, and that other bag of yarn I carried home was not purchased by me! RA doesn't knit, but she buys yarn for me, and I knit it into socks for her - do you see how everybody wins?

What I am reading today:

I just finished the new book, City of Fallen Angels, and I am thinking that maybe I need to take a break from Urban Fantasy for a while. I'm feeling a bit sickened by all the melodrama, and the professions of undying love! Can anyone just get a grip on themselves and maybe do something relaxed and ordinary like take a class or eat a hamburger? No, it's got to be all magic and the love that burns like fire and fighting with your last breath and your amazing magical skillz to save the person you brought back to life (magically) because without them you can't even freaking breathe or walk your dog. I might have spent too much time with this book, but I couldn't put it down, even while I was mocking it in my head.

What Kim forgot when she left:

When kids come home from college for the weekend, they always leave something behind - like their glasses, or their retainer, or oh, I don't know, a dryer full of their jeans!?! So Kim was about an hour away from home when she remembered that she never got her jeans out of the dryer. I told her to use her (my) Old Navy card that I gave her for emergencies (and yes, there are emergencies in which a person needs a pair of jeans and this is the perfect example of one), but then later I thought that I will have to mail a package to her this week when the birthday present I ordered arrives, and I can put in a pair or two of her jeans, and anyway it's not like she has nothing to wear, because I know she has clothes down there at school. So I called her back and said I could send her some jeans and also the t-shirts she left drying in the dining room, and she said did that mean she couldn't go shopping?

So that was our weekend, and I'm back at work tonight, knitting socks for RA with some beautiful merino sock yarn that is hand-dyed in pale yellow, and I'm going to look for something else to read on my Kindle, maybe something with no frantically attractive supernatural creatures?

In which I take a test and am kissed by a dachsund.

2011-04-06T23:51:00.000-07:00

We had the second big test for our chemistry class tonight. Diane told me a couple of days ago that she dreamed that when she took the test, she marked all of the answers "C" and got a B on the test, so we joked that she would mark all of her answers that she didn't know as Cs and I would mark mine Bs.

Well, before we took the test in class, we talked about it again, and that is pretty much what I ended up doing. I actually knew the answer to one of the questions, and a few more of them I made (sort of) educated guesses on, and the rest? I marked them B. So we'll see how that works out for me. Diane said later that she did the same thing, marking the ones she didn't know with C. I think Nick mixed them up a little more than that, but it was mostly guessing on his part also.

After class people were ~~complaining~~ talking in the parking lot, and when almost everyone was gone, Laura invited me to come walk the dogs with her, and I said I would, but then told her that I was going to leave my phone in the car to charge up while I was gone, because it was almost dead. One of the guys from class was still standing there near her, and when he heard me say that, he offered to give me the battery from his phone and take my dead one! I gladly accepted his charged battery, and felt guilty for mocking him behind his back to my friends earlier!

So Laura and I went to her house and took her "girls" for a walk in her neighborhood. It was fun, and then when she drove me back to get my car at the college, all the girls jumped in the car to ride along. They each have their spot in the car - the poodle sits on the driver's lap, the doxie sits on the front passenger's lap, and the (English Bulldog?) other dog sits in the back seat. That doxie gave me a couple of kisses while we were riding, and slipped me the tongue! I think we might be going steady.

Maddy came over for an hour tonight before class, and it was the first time I've seen her this week, I think! I was going to walk her around the block in the stroller, but when we went outside she started toddling away across the lawn toward my neighbor Judy's house, so I followed along, guiding her away from the street. I coaxed her into Judy's backyard, where there is a wooden bench swing, and we sat on that, which Maddy found delightful, until the dog in the next yard started barking!

There is a high wooden fence all around the dog's yard, so I couldn't show the dog to Maddy, she could only hear the loud barking! It's a friendly dog, but Maddy has no way of knowing that, and I'm not sure she even knows that dogs bark like that, because the only dog she knows is my dog Sonny, who rarely barks at all, and never when Maddy has been around.

Judy came out of the house to say hello, and when Maddy saw her, she started to cry and reached out for Judy, who must look like a comforting grandma-type, because hello? I was holding her! Then Maddy came back to me, and we took her around toward the front of the house and sat on the porch with her, but when I gave her a toy to hold, I saw that her little hands were trembling, and she still looked like she might burst into tears at any moment.

The dog stopped barking when he couldn't hear us talk any more, and we got Maddy to sit in a little chair on Judy's porch and eventually she laughed and forgot about that dog. I hope so! I hope it won't become the dark beast that haunts her baby dreams!

In which Sarah is showing me new ways to waste time.

2011-04-04T03:58:00.000-07:00

It's all my sister Sarah's fault that I have spent hours on facebook, looking for entertainment and farming. Now she has discovered Twitter, and I am getting sucked into that along with her.

Actually I've been on Twitter for quite a while, I just don't really twizzle much, because I feel that when I do tweet something, it should be of such astounding wit that people reading it will writhe in envy, but I rarely have anything like that to share.

Also, Rich is all about the Twitter, and has about a million followers, so many, in fact, that the last time I bothered to tweet something he didn't even see it because it was lost in the shuffle of his many twiddles, the avalanche of tweets that he has rolling across the bottom of his screen constantly. Are that many people really interested in his rate of Twinkie consumption or how many ladybugs are crawling on his keyboard? My point is that he is always babbling about Twitter like it is a Big Deal, and I lost interest in it because for me, he was gimpifying* it.

So now Sarah is all Twitterpated and is Tweeting right, left and center, and following people and whatnot, so I updated my profile, and followed some people (no one you've ever heard of), and I may possibly even tweet in the near future! Wait for it, it's going to be legend...

If you want to follow me on Twitter (and who wouldn't?), I'm @oozaroo. Don't expect too much.

*Gimpify (v.) To make a previously cool thing lame.

In which I had a great title, but I forgot it.

2011-03-29T21:40:00.001-07:00

As I was falling asleep tonight, before my evening nap, I thought of a great title for this journal entry, and I thought I would remember it when I woke up, but no, I forgot it. Darn.

So I woke up at 2 this afternoon, like I had planned, because RA and I were going to pick up some Papa Murphys pizza to take to someone who was supposed to have a minor outpatient surgery today, but as soon as I woke up, I had a call from RA to say that the surgery was cancelled. We didn't need to take the pizza to our friend, but we went to get pizza anyway, because I wanted the chicken, bacon and artichoke pizza for myself for dinner!

Diana and Laura were coming over to do the Chapter 16 homework and quiz, and Laura brought some great brownies, so with the pizza (and the desert pizza!) and her brownies, we had plenty of food to keep us going while we slaved over chemistry! We actually managed to get it all done in three hours, and had a wonderful feeling of accomplishment at the end.

I didn't do anything else today, just got up and went to get a big pop and the pizzas, then home to do chemistry. I came to work a few minutes early tonight and took some leftovers up to Rachel's floor for her to snack on tonight.

In which I slept all day.

2011-03-28T21:32:00.000-07:00

I worked last night and when I went home this morning I went to bed just a little after 8, and then I slept all day! I usually get up about 2 so I can go out with RA to get a big pop and do some shopping or errands, but today I didn't go out at all.

What I cooked today:

Because I didn't go out, I had a little lunch at home and then did some laundry and made supper for Rich and I. It was fast and easy with almost no preparation - I put frozen tilapia fillets in a baking pan that I sprayed with cooking spray and baked them for a half hour, and cooked two sweet potatoes in the microwave for 10 minutes. I thought about steaming some broccoli but that didn't happen.

What I am knitting today:

Still working on the Wallaby for Maddy in size 4. The baby Wallaby is done, it just needs some ends woven in. That always takes longer than the actual knitting because of my dread of finishing. What usually happens is that a finished object will wait until I have two or three other things to finish and then I'll do tham all at once, usually at the last minute when someone needs one of them. Or when there is something boring and long on TV and I need something to do with my hands while I ~~ignore it~~ watch (like if Rich is watching golf or 2001, A Space Odyssey).

What I am reading today:

I'm almost done with Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, and then I'll have to look through my Kindle archive and see what else I've got. I bought a book written by someone I know, and RA insists that it's good, so I will probably force myself to read that next, and then I can read the murder mystery I got as a free book today.

What Maddy did at Nan's house today:

Maddy came over for an hour tonight, and here is what she did. First, she had to go upstairs because she loves to go up the stairs! Sonny was so excited to see her, and he has to stay near her in case she drops something edible, even if she isn't carrying any food at all, because you just never know!

So Maddy and Sonny went upstairs. She went into Kim's room, which is a treasure trove, but we have put everything she can't touch up too high for her to reach, so she just walks around and looks at everything and checks the bed to see if the cat is sleeping there.

Maddy left Kim's room and went into the bathroom, where she looked in the cupboard, looked in the toilet (then I closed the lid), and headed for the dog's upstairs water bowl. I hastily moved that because last time she was in the bathroom, she spilled the dog's water all over the floor and my socks got wet! Ick!

Then she went into my room, where I threw her onto the bed, thinking she would like that, but she found it too scary, so we just slapped the surface of the bed and yelled Boom! Well, I yelled Boom, and she laughed, over and over, until I got tired of it. Then she looked at everything on the headboard while I made the bed with both Maddy and Sonny on it. That's right, I changed the sheets on my bed with a baby and a dog ON the bed! I am amazing like that.

After the bedmaking, Maddy was ready to go back downstairs, and Rich had some toys out to entertain her with. She watched her ZhuZhu hamster run around, and then she carried a toy cell phone off to the kitchen (probably to make a private call). I followed her to the kitchen to move the dog's food and water bowls up out of her reach before she could make dog soup with them, because dogs? They don't like dog soup.

I filled a coffee cup with Sugar Pops and we went back to the living room, where Maddy sat on my lap and ate cereal, one piece at a time, and watched some Sesame Street music videos for a while. This is why I can never get the Wubba Wubba song out of my head!

Rich enticed her back to the toys then, and they played with a fun toy that has a plunger in the top and when you push it down the insides turn around and around. It was a present for Maddy from Rich's parents when she was about 6 months old, and she has always liked it, but she couldn't push down the plunger by herself until recently, so we had to sit with her to plunge it for her entertainment. She can almost do it herself now, so I made a little video of her and Rich playing with it. I was planning to send it to his parents, and I will when I figure out how to send it from my phone! The best part is that you can hear Rich in the background, singing a little song about the dog's dirty butt.

And then Ash came back to get Maddy, and I went upstairs and took a nap on my clean bed.

In which I watch a lot of tv.

2011-03-25T20:29:00.000-07:00

I spent most of today sitting in my big chair, knitting another Wallaby while I watched TV on my laptop. One of the blogs I read mentioned a show called Becoming Human that can be seen here. It's about kids who are a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost. You know how I love teenage angst, and their accents only made it more entertaining!

Then I watched an episode of the BBC show called Being Human, which is a show about adults who are a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost. Again, their accents were lovely, and they are all very attractive, and filled with angst! What's not to like?

In the evening Diane needed to work on chemistry, and Laura came to help, because she had gotten more of it done and was able to help us finish the chapter and the quiz. We aren't done, but we got a little further.

I made a pan of chocolate chip bar cookies, because Rachel thinks we work better with food, and the cookies came out great. I added a little more flour than the recipe calls for, like Diana told me to do, and it does give the cookies a cakier texture that I really like. I boxed up most of what we didn't eat for Diane to take to work with her for Rachel, who is also at work tonight, and some for Diane to share with Sue in the lab. Whew! Got all those cookies out of the house so they won't be calling my name all night! (I saved a couple for Rich, too!)

After Diane left, Laura stayed for a while and watched all of Ash's videos that we could find to watch online. I love his short films, and I never get tired of watching them.

In which there were a few flakes of snow.

2011-03-23T22:15:00.000-07:00

It's been raining all week, but today it got a little colder and there were a few flakes of snow, and of course I had to hear everyone complaining about it, because even though the seasons change slowly and it happens this way every year, many people are unfailingly surprised! What? It's snowing! Oh this rotten winter, when will it end?

It ends when it ends people, and just be grateful that you don't have to scrape ice off of your car window at 7 a.m. when you stagger out of your workplace and stumble into your car, eager to go home to bed, but first you have to wait for the car to warm up and melt the ice off of the windshield because you have a terrible cracked scraper and your husband has the new good one in his car that he never even uses...okay, breathe, relax, it's almost here, Spring is here, and it's only going to keep getting better, even with the occasional hiccup of cold and a little snow. The window is not iced over in the mornings now! It's all downhill from here!

What I'm knitting today:

Working on the body of the Wallaby for Maddy. I'm making it with some Vanna's Choice acrylic, so it will be washable, and the color is wonderful! It's a variegated bluey-lavendery color. I'm going to start the pouch tonight.

Finished the green Wallaby yesterday and I just need to weave in the ends and mail it to the parents.

What I'm cooking today:

I started something, but then I went to Rachel's to work on chemistry, which ended up being a brain-frying experience with Maddy in a crabby mood and annoying repetitive video game music playing, and the new online homework system that I'm not quite used to, so yeah, very frustrating. I'm so tired of chemistry class...

Uh, where was I?

Oh right, I started cooking and I will finish making it tomorrow, but for tonight we had pizza from Papa Murphys, and what I learned was that I don't like their red sauce and there is too much of it. I don't like red sauce at all, really, and if there is going to be some, what I like is for them to just pass the sauce ladle over my pizza and not actually get any on it! Rachel wanted another Smores desert pizza like the one Rich bought last time, and that was really good. Maddy likes it, too!

What I'm reading today:

I finished a book about a vampire private investigator, but it wasn't as good as I had hoped, so I won't bother to tell you the name of it. It was a free Kindle book and I'm glad I didn't pay for it. It wasn't the worst thing I've ever read, how about I just say that?

When I finished that, I looked in my Kindle archives for something that I have read before that I could relax and enjoy reading again. I'm going to reread Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married by Marion Keyes. I love her books because the dialogue is natural, the characters are real, and they are upbeat stories with happy endings, even when sad things happen. I especially love the stories about any of the Walsh sisters.

How I exersized today:

Hahahahaha! Yeah, that didn't happen. Hey, it was snowing!

In which I did not make chili.

2011-03-20T22:00:00.001-07:00

I meant to get that chili into the crockpot this morning, but that didn't happen. I went from work to church and then home to bed, so there was no cooking at all. I'll make the chili tomorrow. Really!

When I finally woke up at 5 in the afternoon (evening?), I heated up the rest of the curried chicken and ate that while I watched episodes of Psych on Netflix. When I was done with the chicken, I pulled out the hunter green Wallaby, and worked on that.

That's all I did until it was time to go to work - I talked on the phone to Scott, and watched Psych, and knitted the whole time. The Wallaby is all on one needle now, and I'm starting the raglan decreases! Woot!

I finished that trianglular shawl this morning, and bound it off, but I need to weave in a couple of ends before I give it away. It's done though!

It rained all day, but I was sleeping, so it didn't bother me. When I woke up Rich told me that he walked the dog in the afternoon, and when they were about a half-mile from home, the rain, that had been coming down lightly, suddenly got worse and began to hail! Instead of hurrying home, the dog kind of hunched over and walked slowly and miserably, and finally Rich picked up Sonny and carried him home!

Okay, I'm going to start knitting see if I can finish this Wallaby tonight! I

In which it looks like Spring.

2011-03-19T21:42:00.000-07:00

It was so beautiful and sunny out today that RA and I went to McDs to get a big soda, and then just drove around in the sunshine, drinking our pop and looking out the windows! Tonight was the night of the biggest full moon in 20 years, and I was looking for it as I drove to work, but it was covered with clouds, so it may have been huge, or hey, it might not!

I've been walking indoors with Leslie Sansome DVDs all Winter, and today I used the five-mile one for the first time. It turned out to be quite a walk, and I was dripping sweat by the time it ended. Rachel and Ash dropped by with Maddy when I was about halfway through it - they wanted to get the stroller and take Maddy for a walk to get something Rachel left at work at the hospital last night, and then they were going to the park. I told them I would meet them at the park when I was done.

That five-mile walk is all 12-minute miles, so it takes an hour, and it is work! I was so sweaty when I got done, that I had to change clothes before I could go to the park. Rich was ready to go out to walk the dog, so we all walked to the park together.

It was sunny out, but the breeze was cool. I wore a light sweater but I didn't wear a t-shirt under it because I was still very warm from the walking workout, and I was comfortable until we started to walk back home. I was feeling a little cold, so Rachel gave me her sweatshirt to wear. She was warm enough and had just been carrying the sweatshirt.

Maddy enjoyed the park, and Sonny thought it was all very interesting. He sniffed around, but we couldn't let him off the leash at all because he is an idiot and chases squirrels, and we're afraid he would chase one right into the road.

What I'm reading today:

The Edith Wharton Murders by Lev Raphael. I had to order it from Amazon, because it isn't available for the Kindle and my library didn't have it either, so I bought it used.

What I'm cooking today:

Made curried chicken for the first time in weeks, and I love it. I could eat that every day! I don't know why I haven't made it recently. Tomorrow I'm going to make chili in the crockpot in the morning so we can eat it when I wake up in the afternoon.

What I'm knitting today:

I'm almost done with the triangular scarf I'm knitting as a thankyou gift for the person who gave me that big box of yarn last week. Just a couple more rows and it will be done.

I brought the hunter green Wallaby to work tonight, and I'd like to get that done this week.

Almost done with sock number one of a pair of plain beige socks. They were going to be My Vampire Boyfriend socks for Kim, but that pattern was just too labor intensive!

Still working on the gray hoodie for Kelly, Karin's sister. She has been giving me her textbooks for the classes I'm taking, and I wanted to make her a sweater to thank her. When I'm done with this sweater, I'm going to make another one for Carolyn because it's cute and easy.

In which I acquired more yarn. Like I need that.

2011-03-13T21:51:00.000-07:00

I got a call from someone I know last week, who said she had a box of yarn at her house that was from the house of an elderly lady who had died. I assumed it would be some crap acrylic, but I was assured that it was good stuff, so I went to take a look.

Ahem. It was, indeed, good stuff, but there was only one or two skeins of each yarn, and most of it was novelty yarn. Expensive novelty yarn, yes, but still, not my favorite thing to knit with.

The person who offered it to me had sorted all the skeins and bagged them up together, and she had obviously enjoyed doing it. I thought that was cute. She's not a knitter, but she had fun with fiber! I asked her which yarn was her favorite and promised to knit something for her with the one she chose, as a thankyou.

She chose a very pretty boucle yarn with a subtle multicolor running through it. Ugh! Boucle! I hate that stuff! But, I told her she could choose what she liked (that is always a mistake, why do I never learn?), so I wound the first skein into a ball, and cast on 3 stitches to start the corner of a triangular scarf.

There is not enough yarn here to make a shoulder shawl, but she will get a nice drapey triangular scarf to toss around her neck in an arty way, and I think she'll like that. I knitted about 2/3 of the first ball, but it wasn't quite right. It was too thick. It was pretty, but it wasn't draping the way I wanted it to.

I ripped that back and tried again. And again, and finally today, I have found the right needle to knit this thing the way I want it! As an added benefit, the needle that I'm using now is a Susan Bates needle with that gray coating, and a slightly more rounded tip than the Addis that I started with, and the needle slips nicely past the horrid little snaggy boucle loops! Woot!

I spent most of the weekend sitting in the big chair in the living room, knitting and watching episodes of Psych on Netflix. It was very pleasant.

Kim left early on Friday to drive to St. Louis to meet up with her friends at the Kawa Con. She took her Japanese schoolgirl uniform, and she told me tonight that three people asked to take a picture with her because she turned out to be dressed like Kagome and they were dressed as Inayusha. They are two characters in an anime series - I think it's called Inayusha. I would include a picture, but I'm at work and can't do it from here. If I remember, I'll put a picture of Kim-Kagome in tomorrow.

In which we see that college is a good investment.

2011-03-07T21:28:00.000-08:00

Kim is going to Kawacon in St. Louis next weekend, so she will be cutting short her visit at home to go back to school early. She told me about this last week while she was still at school, and I asked her what she was going to wear this year.

Last year she wore her Japanese schoolgirl outfit, but this year she was planning to wear the Scarlett costume that Diana helped make. (She also has a kimono, so she is prepared for any anime convention occasion that might arise.)

She said she was thinking about wearing the Scarlett outfit, but I really think the schoolgirl skirt and sailor top are cute, so I was encouraging her to wear that one, and she reminded me that we didn't have the right socks for it last year, and when we realized it, it was already too late to buy any, because we had to order them online.

This year we were planning (slightly) ahead, so I told her if we ordered them immediately she would get them in ~~plenty of~~ time! I immediately started searching the internet for superlong knee socks, because the thing is, to be a stylin' Japanese schoolgirl, you need to have long, long, knee socks that you can scrunch down around your calves in a fetching way.

There were superlong kneesocks available, yes, but the first ones we found had to be ordered from the UK or Japan, both of which places take some time to arrive - it took two months to get my Pogues CD from the UK!. Then I remembered what used to be one of my favorite websites - Sock Dreams , and yay! They had the socks, although not in our first choice of color, and shipping was free!

So Kim ordered the socks (and they arrived today, thanks), but in my searchings I had also looked on Ravelry for a pattern to maybe make the socks myself, and I had found not socks, but superlong legwarmers, worn with the uniforms the same way as socks, all scrunched down around the calf.

I looked at the patterns, but either there was no pattern, or it was in Japanese, and anyway, I didn't need to make legwarmers because Kim had already ordered the socks! But what if they didn't arrive in time? Also, the thing about looking at knitting patterns is that sometimes a project catches your eye and even though you have several other projects already on the needles, filling baskets and knitting bags around your house, and listed on your whiteboard, waiting to be crossed off as you finish them, sometimes that one new thing gets in your head and you keep thinking about it and you just have to make it!

So there was the pattern for the legwarmers and I had a ball of cream-colored WoolEase up in the yarn room, and I really needed to start those legwarmers! I could wing it, I could just cast on what looked like the right amount of stitches and just start making ribbing, because that's all the pattern was, just ribbing, going on for miles, but I really like to have a pattern, all figured out and written down that I can follow! And there was such a pattern, right there on the website, but it was in Japanese! A language that I do not speak!

But wait! I have a son, a son who is a linguist, and he always laughs off his degree in linguistics, and his graduate classes, also in linguistics, as though they are of no worth to anyone, although that is how he got his job, and it's a cool job!

So I called Scott and he said sure, send him a link, and if he couldn't do anything with it, he works with other translaters who could! I sent the link to Scott, and went to bed, thinking about those legwarmers, wondering what kind of yarn they were made of, and what size needles I would need...

The next day I was sitting at Rachel's, and I don't know why, because I wasn't there to do chemistry (for once), but while I was there, Scott called, and he had been looking at the pattern and figuring it out for me!

Scott's Japanese knitting vocabulary is ~~minimal~~ non-existant, but he had asked me what were the essential pieces of information that I needed to make the legwarmers, and from what I told him, he had been able to make a decent translation of the pattern!

Scott says that the pattern refers to Front and Back instead of knit and purl, and instead of saying stitches, it says holes, or eyes. So it tells you to cast on a number of holes to start, and there was a little chart he gave me for the ribbing. He could tell me how many to cast on, and how long to make the legwarmer in centimeters, and you know with my amazing chemistry-related math skills, I can translate from centimeters to inches - I'm kidding, of course, because every knitter knows that 10 centimeters = 4 inches!

I cast on immediately after that phone call, and later I went to the store to pick up more of that cream WoolEase, which turned out to be the perfect yarn to get the gauge for the pattern. The only thing better than knitting your new project is buying yarn for it!

I finished the first legwarmer this morning just before my shift ended, and in case you are wondering, it takes three days to knit a 24-inch tube of ribbing. I just started the second one tonight.

Into the wild country.

2011-02-26T09:35:00.000-08:00

I'm up early today to go to the salon for a haircut. It would normally be a cut and color, but after the big allergic reaction/fiasco last year, I'm not getting my hair colored like I used to. I'm trying to learn to love my natural (grey) color!

I love my salon so much! I've been going there for about 10 years now, and they are like family - well, like good friends, anyway. I hadn't been there in a while, since I don't have to go so often now that I'm not coloring, and I really needed a haircut. Yesterday someone posted on the salon's facebook page that they had a couple of openings for Saturday morning, and I called and got an appointment!

I told Dawn, my stylist (and she owns the salon), that I called because I saw that on facebook, and she told me that Kimber, one of the other stylists, had said she was going to announce on fb that they had openings, and it was funny that someone else and I had called and taken the spots.

It's funny how much I learn from fb that I would be the last to know otherwise! I get a surprising amount of family news on fb, and I always know what's going on in RA's family too, so I tell her about what her daughters are saying, because she never checks her fb page. I always say I'm going to stop looking at fb, but then there I am, whenever I'm bored, checking my page to see if anyone is saying anything interesting.

This is my weekend off and I should be studying for a chemistry test next week, but I really don't feel like it.

Last night I went for a drive out in the country with Rachel and Maddy. Rachel was taking a casserole to someone who just had surgery, and I was just riding along. We had the GPS to help us find the place, but even with that, we still had to turn around a couple of times.

Ugh, the country is no place to be at night. There are wild animals running across the road, and there are no street lights! Also, no gas stations if you are low on gas or need a Diet Pepsi. We never did find the house, because they live in a gated community, with no one at the gate to let us in! Yeah, we just turned around and came home.

Maddy had a good nap in the car, so something good came of our trek out into the wilds. She fell asleep with her head on her monkey neck pillow, and we could hear her little snores. When we didn't hear snoring, I reached back to feel if she was breathing, because I am always checking kids to see if they are breathing, and I didn't feel her breath when I held my hand in front of her face, so I held one side of her nose closed and then when I let go, she snuffled so I knew she was okay. Whew!

In which I am still talking about chemistry.

2011-02-23T22:00:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm talking about chemistry class, that is, not so much about chemistry. I'm pretty sure you are not interested in...loga...logo...hmm, okay, I was going to use a chemistry word, but I couldn't spell it.

So it was chem class night, and Diane and I spent a couple of hours at Rachel's, working on our homework. That's pretty much what I do every day now - get up, go to Rachel's, work on chemistry homework, and then go home to take a nap before work. We were running so late by the time we finished the last problem tonight that we didn't have time to stop and get a hamburger on the way to class like we usually do! Good thing Diane had a box of Hot Tamales in her purse to keep us going!

Class tonight was partly going over...uh, something, and then review of homework problems and talk about the upcoming Big Test. The second half of the class was all reviewing of homework problems, and Diane wanted to leave when other people started leaving, but I thought we should stay so we would look like we cared! I didn't want Dr. Chemnerd to be reminding himself later, when he looks at our terrible scores on the Big Test, "Uh huh, and those two skipped the review!"

So we stayed and didn't really get much out of it. Except that Dr. Chemnerd looked around at one point and mentioned that the people still in the classroom were his stalwarts, because so many people had left. See! He noticed!

Tonight he was talking about radiation (I just remembered!), and I asked if exposure to gamma rays is what turned Bruce Banner into the Hulk, and our professor? Didn't know the answer! Apparently he's not a real nerd, he's just a poser! I didn't bother asking about Tony Stark's chest appliance, since I didn't want to embarrass him further, I texted Rich about it, instead.

Just what is slow-jacking, anyway?

2011-02-16T21:46:00.001-08:00

So it was chemistry class night. I went to Rachel's this afternoon to do the last few homework problems before class. I got them done in time to go to class, but Diane was feeling rebellious, so we stopped at McDonalds to get a soda on the way and went in late.

It was the same old thing, we tried to pay attention to Dr. Chemnerd reading his Powerpoint presentation, and look attentive. I spend a lot of time looking attentive in class, and sometimes I am thinking about adjusting my expression and miss what he's saying. Not that I am ever really able to focus on the lecture for very long.

There is a guy who sits directly behind me and bugs me by murmuring to himself during class, and by the tone I can tell that he is making smart-ass remarks, but I can't hear what they are. Tonight I talked to him during the break, and he seemed friendly, but yeah, he's a smartass, which is fine and can be amusing, but he also has a very high opinion of himself, and that? Makes him less appealing. After we talked to him during the break, he made his comments a little louder during the rest of the class for our benefit. Ugh.

One of the Frontrow Girls was taking the entrance exam when we did on Monday, and Diane told me afterward that she saw that girl getting answers from the girl sitting next to her during the test. So in class tonight, I told Diane I would give her a dollar if she struck up a conversation with Cheatergirl during the break and asked her what her test score was.

So while I was talking to the wiseguy, Diane was schmoozing the people in the front row. There was a guy who sits in the front row every week who was also at the test on Monday, and Diane says she knows him from Anatomy and Physiology last semester, and that he is weird. I told her there was another dollar in it for her if she could get him to tell her his test score, but although I saw her talking to him, she said she wasn't brave enough to ask. She did, however, ask him if she could borrow his test book so she can study it before she retakes that test!

Turns out that Cheaterchick didn't score high enough on the test, even with the cheating, and it was her second time taking it! Diane wouldn't take my dollar, so I'll have to buy her a soda next time we go out.

PS - Slowjacking is what Wiseguy said he was doing in reference to taking classes and applying to the nursing program. By which he meant that he is taking the pre-reqs slowly instead of cramming them all into a couple of semesters, which is what Diane, Laura and I are doing also, but we don't have a cool name for it. We call it taking our time so we don't get stressed. Also, he said he was planning to BS his way through the entrance test when he takes it, and good luck on that, pal. Since he is taking A&P for the second time, I think his BSing skills maybe aren't as stellar as he would wish.

It's been a day, I tell you what!

2011-02-14T21:39:00.001-08:00

I took another night off so this was a four-day weekend for me, but I didn't do it to have fun. I needed to sleep on Sunday night so I could get up early to take a test.

There is a test you have to pass to get into nursing school, and it's really a test of basic skills, which is kind of insulting, because if you can manage to pass chemistry classes, and also Anatomy and Physiology, you have pretty much demonstrated that you have some basic skills in reading and math, but it's just another hoop to jump through. Scott says that college is an endurance test, and I think he's right.

So Diane and I registered for this test, knowing that you can take it three times if you need to, in order to get a grade good enough for acceptance. We didn't do a lot to prepare, but I did try a practice test, and scored okay on the math and science sections, so I thought I'd be able to pass this thing.

We got up early and met for breakfast, and then went to the college to take the test. There were 8 people there, including us, and one more was registered who didn't show up. More than half of them were taking it for the second time.

We sat at computers to take the timed test, and we had three hours to finish it. I flew through the reading section, got bogged down in math but finished right at the limit for time on that one, and guessed my way through the life science part, because I took Anatomy and Physiology about 12 years ago, and I didn't remember much!

Diane is the slowest, carefullest test-taker in the world, as some of you may remember from the final exam in Intro to Chem, where it took her 4 hours to finish the exam, and I mocked her pretty hard about it!

So I finished, and the system gives you your results immediately, only you know I have a problem with reading instructions - I only read my favorite words! So I skimmed the page, looking for my score and I was crushed to see that I had barely done above the average!

There were some other numbers further down the page, blah blah blah, and I could see my scores on the individual areas, like my amazing score on reading comprehension and on grammar and English, and then my laughably lower scores on math and science, but wow, I was pretty sad and embarrassed about my miserable average score!

So I went and sat outside the testing room to wait for Diane. One of the young girls came out and was so excited over her high score on the test and told me that she had bought a test prep book, and it had really helped her! So I was sadly thinking to myself that I would need that book before I took the test again.

While I was waiting for Diane, Laura showed up for chemistry tutoring, because people, chapter 7 is hard! Laura sat and waited with me and commiserated on my low score, and then she went off to tutoring and I kept waiting for Diane.

Since it was a timed test, Diane did not get to take four hours, so she did eventually come out, and showed me the paper she was carrying, that she had printed after the test, a paper that showed all of her scoring, and that paper made me realize that I had misread my results, and the number I thought I had gotten? Was wrong!

Diane had to head over to her math class, and I stopped in to see if I could get anything out of the tutoring group that Laura was in, but the whole time I was sitting there, all I could think of was that I wanted to go home and check the testing website to see what my score really was!

I slipped out of there and went home, printed my scores and oh my goodness! I had actually scored quite a bit better than I thought I had! Woot! I did not get a score as high as the girl who used the test prep book, but you know what? I'm happy with what I got, and it's good enough. Yay!

I went to Rachel's after that to get help finishing chapter 7, and while I was there, Laura texted to say that she wasn't done and still needed help, and then Diane texted to say she was having a meltdown after math, so they both came to Rachel's House of Baked Goods to eat muffins and cupcakes and do chemistry.

After all of that, I was sooo tired and Rich had gotten my favorite pizza for dinner because apparently it is some sort of holiday? Whatever. I ate pizza and went to bed to get a nap before work.

Endothermic, Exothermic, Entropy...

2011-02-06T00:31:00.000-08:00

I am so tired of doing chemistry, I can't tell you. I've been working on the homework problems for chapter six for almost a week, and I am just done. I didn't get answers to a couple of the problems and I am not even going to try any more. I'm moving on!

Chapter 7 doesn't look too pretty, either. I looked over our teacher's Powerpoint slides that he always posts before class so we can print them and read along, and ugh. I made flashcards of the new terms, and then I made flashcards of the polyatomic ions we need to memorize (hah!), and now I'm taking a break.

*****

I wrote the above bit last night and then I stopped and saved it, because I just had nothing more to say. I'm going to look at the chapter 7 homework tonight and take a stab at it.

So I left work this morning and it was snowing lightly, but nothing like last week. It snowed all morning, and on and off all day. Just another layer of frosting on the existing snow. Everyone was talking about it in church, and relating their snow storm stories and the deep thoughts that went with them. Yawn. It's winter, people, it snows. Suck it up.

That being said, I will tell you that I got stuck in my own driveway when I left the house to drive to work tonight. Rich went outside with me so he could move his car into the driveway when I left, because we don't like leaving our helpless cars parked on the street when the plows are out.

Rich walked down the driveway as I got in and started my car, and I was looking over my shoulder as I backed out, so as not to run him down but because I was looking backward for him, I wasn't keeping my car straight, and oops, I drove off the edge of the driveway and got hung up on a big snow pile.

I tried rocking back and forth, but it didn't help. Rich saw what was happening and came back to push me off of the snow pile, and all was well. I drove to work feeling the weight of his scorn, but hey! By looking behind as I backed up, I saved his life and you'd think he'd be grateful!

In which there is some snow.

2011-02-01T21:27:00.000-08:00

I went to Rachel's this afternoon to work on my chemistry homework, and it was just snowing lightly, but by the time I left, it was getting deep, and there weren't very many cars on the road.

We've been hearing warnings for two days about the big snow that was coming, and we had our doubts, because this happens every year, there are dire predictions of blizzards and then we get nothing, or hardly anything. People were getting more and more frantic about this, though, so it was beginning to seem like we were really going to get some snow this time.

So yeah, I got home from Rachel's and it was pretty thick in my driveway, but Rich had made a fire in the fireplace, and I curled up on the couch and we watched the Weather Channel with the dog, and it looked pretty frightful. Jim Cantore (yum!) was in Chicago, standing on a windy street corner, telling people to stay off the streets!

I went to bed to get my nap before work, because I only live a few blocks from the hospital, and I can get to work even if other people can't because they live out in the country where the wind blows across the fields and makes deep drifts on the roads, or so they tell me.

I left for work a few minutes early, and wow, the wind was really blowing! Rich and Sonny walked outside with me, so that Sonny could pee and Rich could help me get the car out of the driveway, and oh my goodness! I got stuck at the end of the driveway!

So with much irritation at my womanly snow-driving ways, Rich dug around the tires, and then backed the car out of the driveway himself, and I started down the road to work. There were no other car tracks on the road ahead of me, and the snow was at least six inches deep down the middle, which is mostly where I was driving!

When I got to work, I just gunned my engine and drove up over a mound of snow and into the Princess Parking lot, the one closest to the back entrance, where I always park. Mine is the only car in that lot, and there were no other tire tracks! It looks like no one has been out plowing for a few hours!

I've had a couple of calls since I got here from employees who can't get out of the parking lot. They want Maintenance to come and plow them out, but the Maintenance guys say they can't do it, and they are suggesting the employees should sleep here overnight.

This is all very exciting, and we'll just see how it unfolds. Rachel is working tonight, too, and we are wondering if we'll have to walk through the snow to get to our house in the morning! Walking in deep snow is not the worst part, the wind is what will make it unpleasant!

While the cats are away...

2011-01-29T09:32:00.000-08:00

So Rich and I offered to watch Maddy for a couple of days so Rachel and Ash could go to Winter Wars in Springfield. They met in person for the first time at Winter Wars, so it's like an anniversary.

They left around one yesterday, and I was at the apartment with Maddy all afternoon while Rich was working at home. RA came over and brought lunch for us, and was very entertained by the ThinkGeek catalog she found on the table. She had never seen one before, and found it very amazing!

We fed Maddy some french fries and after we ate, when I picked her up from the high chair, her diaper felt a bit squishy, so I bravely started to change her diaper. I put her down on the floor and pulled off the old one, and as soon as the air hit her bottom, she surprised me by pooping on the floor! Eeek!

I reached behind me for the box of wipes, but it was empty! I yelled for RA to grab some wipes from the bedroom, and she hobbled in there to get some (her back is acting up), but there weren't any on the changing table! Oh noes!

I was still on the floor with Maddy, holding her legs to keep her bottom up out of the poop, but when RA couldn't find the wipes in the bedroom, I shifted into desperation mode! I picked up Maddy, and, holding her away from me, I ran to the kitchen sink. That's right, I hosed her butt off with the sprayer!

By then RA was on her way back to the living room, carrying a towel she had dampened in the bathroom, so I used the dry end of the towel to dry off the baby. We got her into a clean diaper, and used paper towels to clean the carpet. Whew!

After all that, RA decided we needed some ice cream from the Culvers around the corner, so she went out to get some for us. I finished cleaning the floor and changed Maddy's clothes. By the time RA got back, Maddy was in the high chair, all ready for a treat. I was exhausted.

Week three of chemistry

2011-01-25T22:17:00.000-08:00

Last week I didn't realize how much homework there was going to be, so I left it to the last minute and didn't finish it all before class. Thanks to Laura, I did manage to finish and submit both quizzes on time, though!

This week I planned ahead and divided the homework into equal parts, planning that if I did six problems a day, I would finish all of them by today. Hmm, well you know that didn't happen, but I came close, and I only have six problems left to finish tonight. I can do those at work tonight, and if I get stuck on anything, I still have time to study at Rachel's before class tomorrow.

One of the things that slowed up my homework, was the weekend knitting challenge that I got into with Karin! We both had some stalled projects that just needed a little effort to finish, and we just needed a little nagging to do it!

I worked on that a little bit every day, and I still didn't finish, but now I'm really close! Really! I would like to finish Carolyn's sweater before the end of the week, and the other thing to finish is the fingerless mitts I made for the Pay It Forward exchange on facebook.

Tonight I sat down to watch a little TV before work, and I wove in the ends on all the mitts except one - because when I picked it up to weave in the ends, I found that I hadn't finished the thumb! So that one I'll finish tomorrow.

My real incentive to finish these projects is that I want to start some new projects! One is a sock of the month club that Karin planned for herself, as a gift to her sister, but it looks fun so I'm going to make them too. The other is a white sweater that Rachel needs because it's cold on her unit when she's at work. She picked out a couple of patterns, and I'm eager to get started on one of them!

So that's what is going on here. Chemistry and knitting. And the dog peed on the floor this morning, but that's hardly news, is it?

I need a backpack, like the cool kids have.

2011-01-18T15:23:00.000-08:00

I was going to try to get through this semester without carrying the big heavy book to class every week, and I still think I can do it, but I'm just not going to be able to leave it at work like I planned to. Damn.

Diane texted me while I was shopping with RA, and she said she was working on the Chapter 2 homework, but it was hard, and what did I get for number 59? Oh yeah, like I have that done! It's not due until tomorrow, so I was planning to do it at work tonight!

I told Diane I would talk to her about it tomorrow after I have a chance to look at it, but then Laura texted me, also about the chapter 2 homework, so I started to get a little concerned! What was in chapter 2? Maybe I'd better look at it!

Then I remembered that I cleverly left my book at work. Oh well, I can stick to my plan about doing the homework at work tonight, but then Laura mentioned the chapter 2 quiz! Oh man, I forgot all about that, and it's due tonight at 9! Crap.

So I logged on to the website and started looking at the quiz. Question 1, no problem. Question 2, had to think about it, but okay, did it. Question 3 - oh man, this is hard, but I'll come back to it. Question 4, hmm, I think I need to review some of this. I'll call Rachel! Oh. Rachel is taking a nap before work.

Well, I called Laura to see how she was doing on the quiz, and she was all done with it, had submitted it electronically, and had cleverly cut and pasted the questions, so she could refer to them later. Like when a friend needs some ~~answers~~ help.

After I finished and submitted the damn quiz, I decided to be more organized, like Laura and Diane. I need a bag to carry my book and some paper (so I don't have to mooch paper from Diane, like I did all of last semester), and my flashcards, because I need flashcards!

I didn't want to go shopping again, so I thriftily went shopping in Kim's room for school supplies! She has saved lots of stuff from high school and college (I found her day planner from junior high!), and she has pretty much everything I ever need! That's where I got my calculator when school started last year!

She didn't have a spare backpack in her closet, but I did find her bluetooth thingy that she has been looking for. It was in the pocket of the purse she was using before the one she is currently using. She must have transferred her stuff to the new purse and missed the bluetooth thingy - it was in a zipper pocket.

So I got a couple of her old spiral notebooks, and some mechanical pencils, but no backpack. No problem, I have a Project (Red) totebag that used to be Rachel's. I cleaned out the assorted half-done knitting projects and put in my chemistry stuff and blammo! I'm organized! Except for my chem book that I left at work, but I'll get that tonight. (I put a couple of those little knitting projects back in the bag, too, just in case.)

I'm all prepared now (well, except for that homework I have to do at work tonight), so I can relax and eat some chili. Ahhhh. It's a good feeling.

Back to school - let the complaining begin!

2011-01-12T21:19:00.000-08:00

So this semester I'm taking the second chemistry class, Chem 120. I swore I would not take another morning class because that would require me to go straight from work to school and sit through class half-asleep, so this one is an evening class. Once a week. For three hours. Ugh.

What's good about the class is that three people that I know from Intro are in the class and we all sat together. I met Diane in the parking lot and we went in to find the classroom together. It's in a lecture hall with long curved tables, and that's a good thing, too! In the Intro class we sat at those little school desks, and there was just that tiny desk top, so I was always juggling all my stuff, my big chem book, notepaper, calculator, my knitting and a Diet Pepsi, and something was always falling off!

Tonight I was lucky enough to sit by the cutest kid in the class! He had pretty curly hair, just like Darren Cri$$, and he smelled fantastic, too! Sadly though, by the time the class ended, the fumes from his bodywash had given me a huge headache. I'm sure my knitting and the fact that I am probably 10 years older than his mother made me fascinating, and now all the girls his age are jealous of me.

The instructor is cute in a chubby nerdy way (you know you want him), so that is another good thing about this class. There is nothing sexier than a PhD in Chemistry, I tell you what! (Diane is already making plans for Laura to flirt with him, hoping it will get us all As!)

On the downside, the class is three hours of lecture. On the upside, I got a lot of knitting done. Also, well, it is chemistry, so it's hard to leave there without my ears ringing with boredom, and have I mentioned (today) that chemistry is all math? You know how I feel about numbers!

It's going to be another long semester, not only for me, but also for Rachel, my chemistry tutor.

In which we give a dog a bath.

2011-01-08T00:28:00.000-08:00

The dog has been smelling, well, doggy, and Kim discovered why - his hairy dog butt is caked with poop! We gave him a bath today and he is much more pleasant!

Kim and I took him upstairs and put him in the tub, hosed him down with the shower nozzle and soaped him up with dog shampoo. We wore rubber gloves, because I am not interested in touching a dog's junk with my bare hands! Kim worked on his nasty bum, soaking it with water, then soaping it, and finally trimming it with scissors. Sonny stood patiently for all of that, because he is a good boy!

Then we toweled him off and would have dried him with a blow dryer, except that our ancient blower was dead! Oh well. He shook himself all over us, thanks, and then went downstairs to find his daddy. It has been horribly cold here for the last couple of days, but Rich took the damp dog out for a walk! I hope he won't get sick from going out with his hair wet!

Kim is going back to school tomorrow afternoon, and I'm really going to miss her. She took me to a late lunch at the new sushi place today, and that was a nice ending to her winter break. The food was really good, by the way, but we were sitting by a big window, and we were both freezing by the time we finished eating!

We went home and got into bed to warm up and Kim fell asleep right away, as she slept over at Ana's last night, and they must have stayed up really late. I read my book and knitted for a while, and then I took a nap too, so I would be ready for work tonight.

So that's all the news for now. I'll let you know if anything exciting happens.

Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

2011-01-03T21:14:00.000-08:00

I woke up this afternoon and went grocery shopping with RA, and when I got home, Kim was in the living room watching Pretty Little Liars, a kind of soap opera with teenagers who have Secrets, and also, dress like hookers. I sat down at my laptop to check my email, and I was sucked into the show, too!

I kept watching it because it was a mystery, and because everyone was so pretty! We watched it all afternoon - it was a marathon, just one episode after another - and we watched and watched, and then Rich came downstairs to walk the dog and have some dinner (leftovers), and he started watching it with us.

The marathon was leading up to the first episode of the new season, so when that ended at 8, I was free to go to bed for a nap before work, in which I dreamed weird things. When I got up again, Kim and Kyle were watching cartoons while they used their laptops. There was leftover pizza, so I had a piece before I came to work.

Kim said she ordered the first four books in the Pretty Little Liars series, so we can read them and figure out what's going on!

In which I was a bit tired.

2011-01-01T14:01:00.001-08:00

I'm tired today, but it's not from partying last night. We did have a family party, in which we watched Rear Window and had root beer floats (well, everyone but me - I hate root beer). Kim and I were the last ones to go to bed around 1 in the morning.

No, I'm tired because Maddy spent the night at our house, and although she went to bed beautifully at 8:30, she woke up at 2-ish in the morning and didn't want to go back to sleep. Rich got up with her first, because he had gone to bed about 10, so he was more rested than I was.

She still hadn't gone back to sleep by 3:30-ish, so I got up and took over so Rich, who was getting sick with the cold that I just had, could go to bed. Carolyn got up to try to help, and I was so grateful, because I couldn't find Maddy's binky, and Carolyn found it!

There was a Dr. Who marathon on the BBC channel, so when Maddy fell asleep in my arms, I didn't try to put her back in the porta-crib, I just sat in the chair and watched television and let her sleep.

When Rachel got off of work she stopped at my house, where Maddy was just waking up a little bit, and I went with them back to the apartment, where Maddy went right back to sleep in her swing and I slept on the couch until she woke up, three hours later!

Happy New Year!

Detente.

2010-12-31T10:53:00.000-08:00

I have a cold in my head, and you know I'm not happy about that, but other than that we're having a lovely holiday. Scott and Carolyn and the boys are staying with us, Rich's parents were here for a couple of days, and Rachel brought Maddy over, so we've had everybody together!

The weather is oddly warm, so all the ice is melted off of the front steps! I don't know how long it will last - I heard that it might get really cold tonight, and in that case the steps will ice over again. That's how they are all winter, because there is a little slanted roof over the steps, and the sun melts the snow from the roof during the day, causing water to drip down onto the steps, then the water freezes at night, and we have icy dangersteps!

Soren was very afraid of the dog when they first came to stay, but he is so used to having the dog around now, that he is actually sitting next to Sonny on the rug right now, playing with Legos. They aren't playing together, they are ignoring each other, but it's peaceful.

In which I am tired of listening to the radio in my head.

2010-12-21T00:20:00.000-08:00

We had some big snow today! I went out to lunch with RA, and when we started out there were a few light flakes in the air, but when we came out of the restaurant, there was some real snowfall going on, and as we went to do a couple of errands, it was snowing more and more.

It was coming down heavily when we got back to my house, so I asked Rich if he would drive Kim and I to get a Christmas tree, because he is the one you want driving if you have to go out in bad weather!

We went to the grocery store to buy a tree, because we are cool like that, instead of going out to a tree farm and riding in a wagon and cutting something ourselves, like Some People do (Sarah), and the trees in front of the store were all snowy and pretty! It was very festive!

Since it was all snowing and whatnot, we went inside and bought some staples - bread, milk and Diet Pepsi - just in case we got snowed in! The probability of getting snowed in was looking pretty high by the time we left the store, and I was glad we didn't have far to drive.

It kept on snowing all afternoon and evening, and it is deep out there, I tell you what! While I took my evening nap, Rich had been outside shoveling around my car and cleaning it off so I could drive to work, but I had to scrape the windows again before I could drive it.

Kim goes to college in the Southern part of the state, and she was laughing about how surprised her friends down there would be if they saw all this snow! She's going to take pictures tomorrow to send down to them.

What I'm reading today: Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett. Still have The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell for bedtime reading.

What I'm knitting today: I re-knit the thumb in a mitten for Rich, and I was very gratified that he asked me to do it. He doesn't appreciate handknits as much as I wish, but he really likes this pair of mittens for wearing to walk the dog. They are double-stranded mittens knitted in the Spruce pattern from one of Robin Hansen's books, but I didn't have the pattern handy, and I wasn't sure I could match the yarn, either, so I just ripped back a few rows, picked up the stitches and knitted the top of the thumb in solid green. The original thumb was green and white.

Tonight at work I'm making the first of a pair of fingerless mitts for myself. I like wearing fingerless mitts, and I started this winter with three pair and now I only have one pair. One pair was loaned to someone, and then I lost one of the other pair. It's okay, they are a fast thing to make.

What I'm humming today (and wish I wasn't!): I'm so tired of Baby It's Cold Outside! It's been playing on the radio in my head for two weeks and I'm so very sick of it! The first time I heard it this year was in a delightful video clip from Glee (I hate that show, but I have a crush on Darren Criss), and I've been humming it ever since! Make it stop! I wasn't actually humming it today until I read my sister Sarah's journal and she was complaining about that particular song, and that started it all again. Thanks, Sarah.

In which there is cake and my phone gets all sticky.

2010-12-15T21:55:00.000-08:00

Oh man, I ate so much cake! Rachel made a beautiful layer cake, chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and served a huge piece to me on a plate that had been drizzled with raspberry syrup, and I ate the whole big piece! It was really good, but I think I will never be able to eat cake again.

She made the cake because Rich told me tonight as we were leaving the house how much he wanted to eat some cake, and I ran back and grabbed a can of Hershey's cocoa to take to Rachel's with me. I checked the back of the can, and yes, there it was, the recipe for chocolate cake, and for chocolate frosting!

Rich dropped me off at Rachel's, carrying my can of cocoa and also bearing a bowl of quinoa salad. Rachel and Ash are making an effort to have dinner every night, sitting down at the table, and this was day one of that new plan. They grilled chicken, made rice, and salad, and I brought the quinoa salad I made - it was a wonderful dinner.

Then I played with the baby while Rachel made cake. I had a lovely time, and the baby was so much fun! She did get my phone all ooky, and I just had to clean it up because the keys were too goobery. Yuck.

So that was my night, and Rachel sent home a huge slab of cake for Rich. He was very grateful and enjoyed it muchly.

What I'm thankful for today: I'm so glad that I finished my class last week so that I am unencumbered by finals this week and can be free to talk everyone else off the ledge while they finish their finals!

What I'm reading today: I just got Making Money by Terry Pratchett from the library today and brought it to work to read. Also, I'm in the middle of What the Dickens, by Gregory MacGuire, and my bedtime reading is The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell.

What I'm knitting today: Still working on the first sock of a pair of man's grey socks. Men's feet are so big! It takes forever to finish the foot!

When I'm going to put up my Christmas tree: When Kim gets home from college, and not a minute before, and I consider the week before Christmas to be still a bit too early! When I was a kid, my parents put the tree up on Christmas eve after we were in bed, and that is, in my opinion, the perfect time! When we got married and Rich wanted to put up the tree two weeks before Christmas, I was shocked! I have compromised through the years, but a week before Christmas is as early as I can go with it, and it comes down on New Year's Day! (I will probably buy the tree tomorrow, though.)

In which we find that dogs don't like to potty in the snow.

2010-12-13T11:01:00.000-08:00

It's winter, I'm bored, I'm done with Intro to Chem, and so now it's time for me to do what I do every winter - go to the movies! I do this every year - always start to feel like I never get out of the house, and I tell Rich we have to go to a movie every Saturday, and then we go, maybe two or three Saturdays, before I forget or we can't find anything that we want to see and that's the end of it.

This weekend we finally went to see The Deathly Hallows. Yes, I know, we are the last ones to see it, but I can't go on opening weekend because there are too many people, and then I was busy studying, blah blah woof woof, and now I've seen it. I liked it very much. The kids get more attractive every year (especially those Weasley twins, yum!), and why did no one mention all the lovely knitted garments they wear in this movie? There were a couple of things I would really like to make!

When we came out of the theater, it was raining and cold, but as the evening went on, the rain turned to big wet flakes of snow, and then it just went on snowing all night! When I went to work, all the maintenance guys were out plowing the parking lots, and they kept at it all night.

It was so snowy that church was cancelled, and I was happy about that, because I was so tired, and I just wanted to go to bed! When I woke up, Rich made a fire in the fireplace, and I made a pot of chicken noodle soup for supper. I love a snow day!

In which I did not fall apart, but someone else did.

2010-12-08T16:09:00.000-08:00

Whew, the chemistry final is over! Afterward I was supposed to meet Diane to go sell back our books and then take Rachel to lunch as a thankyou for tutoring us through it, but after I had been waiting for an hour, Diane came out of the classroom where we had been taking the test, and said she was going to stay to double-check her answers! She had already been taking the test for three hours!

I went home to meet Rachel, who usually drives when we go out, because she has the carseat for Maddy in her car. We went to the restaurant and had just gotten seated when Diane called. She sounded so crazy, and was ranting about the test, so I went into Calming Mode, and talked her off the ledge, because hey, that's what I do.

Once she settled down, she came to join us at the restaurant, and after lunch I did some shopping with Rachel and Maddy and then entertained Maddy while Rachel got a haircut.

Now that Intro to Chemistry is over, I have to start working my way through the Intermediate Algebra book during Winter Break, because Rachel says the reason I have so much trouble with chemistry is because I don't know algebra. For crap sake, who knew I'd ever need it for anything?

In which I have lost the will to study.

2010-12-07T18:50:00.001-08:00

Yes, it's true. I did suggest to a couple of people that we do Holidailies again, but it was already December 4 when I thought of it, which is a bit late to get started. I was studying for the Everlasting Chemistry class at the time, so I emailed three people that I thought might be interested in posting every day, and scratched some notes on a scrap of paper to remind myself of what I had done for the first three days of the month, but then I went back to doing equations and forgot all about it. Until today, when Sarah said she was doing Holidailies at my suggestion, and guilted me into making an effort to post something.

So I found the scrap of paper that I made the notes on - I was surprised at how unhelpful the notes are! Here is what they said:

Dec. 1 - Test in Chem. Compared grades.
Dec. 2 - Day off - did what?
Dec. 3 - Beans, handbells, snow.
Dec. 4 - Practice problems. Dog in snow! Top Gear. Shoveling out a spot.

And now it is three days later, and I'm wondering what I can possibly make out of those cryptic notes!

I have spent the last few days reviewing stuff for my Chemistry final, and going to Rachel's to work on things that you'd think I'd know by now. She has been so helpful and kind, but I'm beginning to see cracks in her veneer and I'm wondering if she is breaking up under the strain of pulling me through Chemistry like a dead seal.

I'm feeling pretty much at the end of my rope also, and I have that flatlined, brain dead feeling you get when there is just nothing else you can learn, and if you keep trying to push stuff in one end of your brain, then things will fall out the other end, things that you don't want to lose, like important memories of your life or what pie tastes like.

So I've done all the studying I can do and tomorrow is the final and I don't even care about it anymore. I'm going to get in bed and read and knit and warm up my cold toes, because hey, it is only 11 degrees outside!

Tomorrow I will be done with my final and I can write about something else. Something maybe more interesting...

In which Rachel was working like a rented circus monkey.

2010-11-30T21:21:00.000-08:00

It's getting near the end of the semester, and there are many chapters in our Intro to Chemistry book that we have not touched on at all. Our teacher said she was going to give us a take-home test over the last unit, and then we would spend the rest of the remaining classes reviewing for the final next week.

She gave us the take-home test last week, but I didn't even look at it until after we finished testing on the previous unit, and then there was Thanksgiving, so I really didn't start working on the take-home test until Friday night at work. Which is when I found out that it was all over my head.

I told Rachel I was going to need her help, so Saturday afternoon I went to her house and she looked over the test and started coaching me through a couple of the problems on it. I did those, with her help, and then she suggested that I do some of the practice problems from the book, so I did that for about another hour, which is pretty much as long as I am able to focus on Chemistry before my brain melts and starts running out of my ears.

Sunday there was no time to get together with Rachel, but I did more practice problems at work. Rachel was at work, too, so she was trying to talk me ~~off the ledge~~ through it over the phone in between taking care of her patients.

My friend Diane, who is taking the Chem class, too, was at work on Sunday night and then we both went to class in the morning to sit through review and she was complaining about how tired she was, but I had no sympathy, because I have worked the night before and gone to class in the morning this whole semester! I blame my poor test scores on having taken every test while I was half-asleep!

I went back to Rachel's yesterday in the afternoon for more practice problems, and then last night at work, Diane and I had to really put our heads down and work on that test! We did all of the fill-in-the-blanks questions and but then today we still had the equations section to work on!

I went to Rachel's at 4 in the afternoon and started working on blah blah woof woof - you know you don't care what it was, but it was hard, let me tell you! Diane got there at about 6:30, and by then I was unable to focus anymore, so I took Maddy off to the other room and played with her while Diane and Rachel went over some of the things I was done with.

Ash took over amusing Maddy when I was ready to go back to doing horrendous equations, and he played with her and gave her a bath while we made the final push to finish my test! Yay! It was done and I was as wrung out as a used dishrag, so I went home at 8 to get a nap before work.

I'm at work now, and I just talked to Rachel, who said that Diane stayed until almost 9, and then she had to leave for work, but she got through it all. Rachel is exhausted, and Ash pointed out that she had been tutoring us for five hours!

What I'm thankful for today:

I'm thankful that Rachel was willing to spend the whole evening teaching us to do ridiculous crap that we will be unlikely to ever need to know in real life.

Now I just have to review all the stuff we covered early in the semester that I immediately forgot after we were tested on it.

I'm sore all over!

2010-11-29T21:41:00.000-08:00

Ouch! I'm sore all over after Rachel and I did an exersize video this afternoon. It was fun to do, especially with Maddy crawling all over us, but now I am feeling it!

The semester is almost over - only two more weeks of this chemistry class, and I'll be glad to be done with it. My friend Diane is taking the class too, and this week she is working all night and then going to class in the morning, like I always do, so she is finally seeing how hard it is for me! We were both being bitter about it this morning, but as I said, it's almost over.

It's been gray and rainy all day, and a couple of people I've talked to are having some hard times in one way or another, so I'm trying to stay upbeat and positive to help them. Instead of whining about my sore muscles and my stinking class, I am going to think of something to be thankful for...

Today I'm thankful that my cat vomited on my new leather couch because the shiny surface was easier to clean than if it had been on the old cloth-covered couch. How's that for gratitude?

Thanksgiving

2010-11-26T08:50:00.000-08:00

We went to Rachel's and had a wonderful dinner there. She made homemade rolls! With butter! She made Mexican Wedding cakes!! She made some delicious stuffing in the crockpot, with pork sausage and cranberries! She made some Brie in a crust with carmelized onions! She did some amazing cooking!

I made the mashed potatoes, and it was a really good batch. I made polenta and squash casserole, too, which is just mashed winter squash cooked into corn meal mush along with a big handful of parmesan cheese! I love that, and so did Maddy.

Then Ash went outside and deep-fried the turkey and it was fantastic! I've never had the turkey cooked that way before and it was so good! It only took an hour to cook once the oil got hot enough, but Ash had to sit outside and keep an eye on the fryer the whole time, and it was really cold! He was wearing gloves, a scarf, and a hat, his winter coat, and had a thermos of hot cocoa! (No one went outside to keep him company - it was freezing!)

Maddy nibbled along with us all day, and she never got her afternoon nap, but she was having a nice time playing and crawling around. She finally got so tired that Rachel put her in bed for a late nap, and she woke up again in about an hour. Rachel said Maddy was furious when she saw that all the company had gone home and the fun was over! She didn't go back to sleep until after midnight, just to punish her parents.

After dinner, we all felt so sleepy, you know how it is after turkey dinner. Ash took a nap in the bedroom and the rest of us sat on the couch and watched Kim play a video game, and talked about how sleepy we were. It was lovely and peaceful. I love to watch my kids play video games while I knit, especially Mario games, and the one Kim was playing is one of my favorites. (I don't know which one it is, either Mario 64 or Mario World. I think it was Mario 64.)

It's only 24 degrees outside today!

Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday.

2010-11-24T21:44:00.000-08:00

This has been a long day, what with the cold, rainy weather, and the chemistry test this morning, and then I couldn't sleep this evening like I usually do before work. I used what would have been my sleeping time to catch up with Diana over the phone, so that was good. I played solitaire on my computer while I talked to her, and she played Vampire Wars on Facebook. (Just a reminder - if you see updates on Facebook that give you the status of my Vampire Wars achievements, that is not because I am playing VW, it's Diana. She plays my character as well as her own.)

So it was very cold and wet all day, and I had to go out to the college this morning to take a chem test. I felt really prepared last night when I was reviewing the Gas Laws and doing some practice problems. When I started the test I was fine - I had the Gas Laws memorized, and I had no problem with the multiple choice questions, but then I got to the problems, and hey! There was no indication of which Gas Law went with which problem! I was supposed to figure it out myself! Eeek! So I am expecting to have done very badly on the test, and I don't think I'll be getting a B in the class now.

When the weather is gray and rainy like this, it is good weather for sleeping during the day. Kim brought her laptop and got into bed with me this morning, and I slept until 3:30 in the afternoon.

After dinner Kim and I went to Rachel's to see Maddy. Rachel is all excited because she and Ash are making the Thanksgiving dinner this year, except for a couple of side dishes she asked me to make. She has been making lists and shopping for several days, and tonight we all went for a ride in the car to give Maddy her daily outing, and to pick up the propane tank from my garage. (Ash is planning to deep fat fry the turkey.)

Maddy started out wearing a jacket, a hat and little socks, but she pulls those off as fast as she can, so you have to keep distracting her from that activity. She was busy looking at things in the store where we stopped to get bread for making stuffing, so the hat stayed on while we were there. I never saw her do it, but somewhere between leaving the store and getting back into the car, she stripped off the hat and socks again! When I looked down at her, she was dozing comfortably, but was barefoot and bareheaded.

I'm back at work tonight, and expecting a quiet night. I'll sleep in the morning when I get home, and when I wake up we'll make the mashed potatoes to take to Rachel's. Yay! I love Thanksgiving dinner!

Here's an old post, it was too boring to publish. Until now.

2010-11-15T01:37:00.000-08:00

Kim was home this weekend and she left this afternoon to go back to school. She drove the van back and left her car here, because Rich saw a crack in her tire. We'll get her tire taken care of and she'll bring the van back next week when she comes home for Thanksgiving break.

It was nice to have Kim home, but we didn't do anything special. I worked all weekend, and she spent some of her time writing her Nano story. Sando brought a new video game one night and they stayed up late playing that. So it was just the usual, but I was glad to have her for company.

In which we drove a long way and got a bad case of roadbutt.

2010-11-11T14:53:00.000-08:00

Someone reminded me today that I haven't written anything here in a while, and said that she still checks every day to see if I've updated, so I'm going to write something just for Sue's Birthday! Happy Birthday, Sue!

Where I've been:

Rich and I took a driving trip to Salt Lake City to visit Scott and Carolyn and to spend time with Soren and Carl. It was a good trip - we had some good audiobooks to listen to, including Bulletproof Mascara, which we both enjoyed, and if Scott had time to read I would suggest it to him because the main character is a linguist who couldn't get a job in her field, but she falls into another job by accident and her skills as a linguist are unexpectedly helpful!

We visited two museums in SLC, one was the Museum of Natural History at the U of U, and the other was a children's hands-on museum. I am the worst sight-seer in the world, and also I pretty much hate nature, so once I have glanced at the exhibits I am done, so the natural history museum was not so great. It's very small, too, and on the day we went it was full of fifth-graders. Ugh.

The hands-on museum was slightly better, not because I am interested in child-oriented science or shopping in a grocery store full of plastic pork chops, but because there were a lot of cute kids and their parents, and I like to watch people and how they interact. I spent some time sitting on a bench with my knitting, talking to Scott, while Rich played in a very cool playhouse with Soren.

One night Scott had to go out to a meeting, and Carolyn dressed the kids in their Halloween costumes so we could walk over to visit a deaf friend of theirs who lives a couple of blocks away. (Side note: It's embarrassing to see how much my signing skills have declined.) Soren was the Cat in the Hat, and Carl was Yertle the Turtle. They were great costumes! Carolyn made them!

What I knitted in Utah:

I promised Carolyn's friend Monique a sweater for her baby when she first got pregnant, and I finally made one while we were visiting. On Tuesday morning we went to a lovely yarn shop called Black Sheep Wool near Temple Square, and I bought yarn for a Wallaby for Ethan. I spent the next three or four days knitting on that sweater, and finished it Friday night!

Scott took a couple of days off while we were there, and one afternoon he and I walked for blocks to visit another yarn shop called Blazing Needles! It was about a mile and a half away! That's right, I walked three miles round trip to go to a yarn shop!

It was a very nice shop with a lot of beautiful samples hanging up, but the most amazing thing was the Bison yarn! There were small skeins of it, probably an ounce or a little more, that were selling for 60-80 dollars! I felt a little shy about fondling it because it was so expensive! I didn't want to get it all rubbed up!

Carolyn wasn't with us at the hands-on museum because she was sick with a cold that spread through their family the whole week we were there. By the end of the week, Carolyn was almost completely well, Soren and Carl were still sick but Carl was on his way to wellness, and Scott was starting to come down with it. I'm sure you can guess who's got a cold now!

While I was gone I missed two sessions of my chemistry class, in which we started a new unit on moles and stoichiometry. I didn't take my book with me, and because there is limited access to the internet at Scott's house, I didn't see any of the notes or practice pages on the website, so when I got back to class on Monday, they were ready to take a quiz on things I was clueless about.

I looked blankly at my quiz paper, and then I scribbled a mole joke on the bottom of the page, hoping to get points for being funny. I stood up to turn in my paper and leave, and suddenly our teacher announced that everyone who showed up for the practice quiz would get full points and then she did some more review problems! Yay!

That afternoon Rachel tutored Diane and I for a couple of hours, so we were able to do the mole-converting, and I went back to practice more on Tuesday, too. We took the real test on Wednesday, and I am hoping to get very lucky and maybe get a C! If not, well, I will have to do better on the next unit to make up for this one. I never did get through the stoichiometry chapter.

While we were in SLC, we had a chance to meet up with some friends who moved to California last year, and see their new baby! So that was fun and unexpected. I did some cooking while Carolyn was sick, making chicken soup and chocolate chip cookies, which were so good I amazed myself!

I made some bacon quiche the last night we were there, and Carolyn had shopped for the groceries for it, but since she is not me, she had shopped for the kind of groceries that she buys - cheese in a block and bacon that has to be cooked in a pan, instead of a bag of shredded cheese and that instant bacon that you make in the microwave! I felt like a pioneer! I was just grateful that we didn't have to milk a cow, too!

We had a good drive home, including a stop at a place in Iowa where I like to get hamburgers, but I found it depressing this time, and I don't think I want to stop there again. The burgers are good, but the ambiance not so much. We listened to the second half of Bulletproof Mascara and started another book that was also good, but we only got through about half of it before we got home.

Rachel and Ash brought Maddy over to see us when we got home Sunday afternoon, and as they brought her up the steps, I opened the door and she started yelling in a happy way and kicking her feet and waving her arms with a big smile, and I said, "I know! I know!" because I was happy to see her, too.

Dumb it down.

2010-10-29T21:44:00.000-07:00

I got a new phone today. I know that right now you are saying to yourself, "But didn't she just get a new phone two weeks ago?" and you are right about that. I did get a new phone two weeks ago. I bought it on the run on the day Diana left town, and had no training at all in how to use it, so for the first few hours I didn't know how to answer a call! I had to let the call ring until the caller hung up and then call it back from the call log until I got back from dropping Diana off, and then Rachel showed me how to answer the phone. (I figured out hanging up on my own, thank you.)

Two days later I went back to the store to ask how to find my contacts list! There was a Contacts list on my Droid, but it was a list of my Facebook contacts, which wasn't helpful at all. I don't call any of those people! Heck, I hide half of them because their status updates are so dumb (not you, of course, yours are brilliant)! My phone contacts list that had been transferred from my old Blackberry was in an imbedded menu about three menus deep! I would never have found that on my own!

There were some other irritations, too, and two frustrated weeks later, I was tired of it, so today I went to the phone store and traded the Android for a new Blackberry, and tonight I am happier. I know, I know, you want an Android, all the cool kids have one, even the white-haired old dear with her Android in a zebra-striped gel skin who was standing in line ahead of me today is hipper than me, but I can live with that.

When will it end?

2010-10-27T01:40:00.000-07:00

I've been taking this chemistry class and one thing I've learned is that I don't care about chemistry. I can't believe anyone does! So I'm studying for a test tomorrow and all I can think about is when it will be over and I will never have to think about chemistry again.

In other news, my phone is still smarter than I am, and also smarter than my dog. It has a lot of functions that I will never use, and a lot that I probably could use but only once, and then I will forget how I made it work the first time and will never be able to use again. I'm thinking that when Kim's contract is up in February, I will give her this ridiculously complicated phone, and I will get a new, simpler, phone. I'm looking forward to it.

We had a fun trip to Michigan over the weekend. We went for my niece Kate's wedding, so there was a lot of family time, including time with my brother Ed and his wife. I got to meet Jenna's son Chase, who is darling, and get manis and pedis with Jenna and Sarah. We got to know Inger's stepdaughter Heather better, and she is a lot of fun and really appreciated the armwarmers I knitted for her. (I love people who love my knitting!) Rich got to play golf with his dad and Jenna's husband on a really fun golf course, and we saw some old friends at the wedding reception.

Okay, that's the update. I have to go study chemistry.

In which I am dumber than my phone.

2010-10-16T22:01:00.000-07:00

Diana left today, after spending a hard-working vacation painting, sewing, and playing with Maddy. Before we left to drive her to where she would catch the bus to the airport, we stopped at the phone store to get a new phone for me.

I was planning to keep my Blackberry until Kim's phone contract is up in February and then get both of us a new phone on the buy one get one free plan for Android phones at the phone store, but then this week my phone started failing! It might have been heat or water damage, I don't know, and the guy at the phone store switched the battery for me, but it didn't help much. I was able to baby my phone along all week until the contract ended today!

So we stopped at the phone store and I got my new phone and all is well, except for the steep learning curve with this new *smart* phone. Sadly, my phone appears to be smarter than me.

In which Diana is Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

2010-10-07T23:58:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here at work, trying to breathe through a stuffy nose, and I'm hoping that it's stuffy because I was out walking tonight, and inhaling dead leaf mold, and not stuffy because I'm getting a cold! Rich has a very bad cold this week, so bad that he didn't go to Tae Kwon Do classes or his Wednesday night meetings, so you know that is bad! I don't want to get sick! I have too much to do!

For one thing, I have company! Diana got here last night, and I drove to the bus stop in Rockford to pick her up all by myself! RA is out of town, and she doesn't like to drive late at night anyway, because her night vision isn't good, Rachel had to work, and Rich was too sick, so I had to pull up my big girl pants and go by myself! It went okay in spite of the construction on the highway and also, my Garmin is apparently a big fat liar who told me to take a turn that sent me the wrong way when I was almost at my destination.

In spite of everything, I got Diana back to our house, and she had to go in and clean the boxes of yarn off of the guest bed herself while I went to work! Because all of the days she is going to be here? I have to work them. Kathy, the other night operator, is on vacation for the exact same 10 days that Diana is here!

Diana is really here to visit with Maddy, and she got a great start this morning when Ash had to go help a friend with something, and Rachel worked last night so she needed to sleep in the morning, so Diana went over early in the morning to play with Maddy! They had a lovely time together!

When I woke up today, I had a call from work, telling me that we were having a disaster drill, and if I came to work as a responder, I could get my flu shot as well as education credit for showing up. I brought Diana to work with me and gave her a tour of my department, which was thrilling for her. Rachel came to get a shot, too, and then she and Ash took the baby to do some shopping.

I had someone coming over to have a little knitting lesson, so Diana and I just had time to grab some lunch and then go back home. While I was helping Summer knit, Diana decided that the piles of DVDs on top of the entertainment center looked messy, so she organized that area (and dusted - hey, maybe that's why my nose is stuffy! All that dust that was floating around!)

Sometime this afternoon, my phone died, so after supper we had to go to the cell phone store to get help! That was an experience! The people watching was entertaining, the young man who helped us was charming and had beautiful eyes, and my phone wasn't dead, it just needed a new battery. When he took the phone apart to look at the battery, the cell phone guy said it looked like it had gotten wet, and smelled like Dawn dishwashing soap. We laughed and assured him that me and my phone do not go near dishwashing soap! That is not my job! He replaced the battery and it's all working just fine now.

Tonight we went for a walk with the dog, Rachel and Maddy, and I spent the entire walk trailing behind eveyone, talking on the phone, because while my phone was dead I had gotten several calls that I needed to take care of. Diana and Rachel took advantage of my phone-calling to make me walk through the cemetary with them, in the dark! I was too busy talking to have more than a moment of misgiving. I didn't get possessed, so it's okay.

After the walk we went back home so I could get a nap and Diana could watch some cable TV. She's enjoying it because she doesn't have cable at her house right now, and so for 10 days she can watch all the Food Network and E! she wants to. When I was leaving for work, she was reluctantly getting up to go to bed, and she was sorry to have to turn the TV off. I told her to get some pillows and sleep on the couch - she can leave the TV on all night, and I think she might be doing that.

In which Fruit Loops are not dog food.

2010-10-03T21:48:00.000-07:00

So it has been a busy weekend, and I'm back at work tonight with studying to do and another pumpkin hat to make. This is the fifth pumpkin hat I have made in a week, and after this one I have only one left to make and then I am done -DONE- with pumpkin hats. For another season, anyway.

The fun project that I would like to do more of is mitten knitting! Someone asked me to make some mittens, using her Civil War-era pattern, and her lovely wool that is grown on sheep raised by 19th century sheep-raising methods, and I said I would be happy to, because it is so pleasant to work with that wool of hers! (Also, she is paying me to make them.)

So I told this person that I had several other projects going on right now, and that I wouldn't get to the mittens right away, but then the mitten pattern looked interesting and the yarn was lovely, and I thought it wouldn't hurt anything if I just swatched a little swatch, just to see how it knitted up...and now it is two mittens later, and I have just discovered that what I thought was a mistake in her pattern-writing is a mistake in my pattern-reading! (Is anyone surprised at this? I'm sure my children aren't because they always say that I only read my favorite words!)

I will be doing some ripping back on the mittens tomorrow, but for tonight I have this pumpkin hat to work on. And chemistry practice problems to do.

In other news, we have had a couple of incidents with the dog, where he has been all crazy hyper, running like a wild thing in one direction and then back in the other direction, and you can't even calm him down, it's crazy! The first time it happened was after Maddy had visitied and shared some Fruit Loops with the dog, and then later, when Rich was juggling Maddy in one arm and a half-eaten Twinkie in the other hand, he dropped the Twinkie and Sonny barcuumed it right up! Tonight the dog was able to score a few dropped Fruit Loops again, and now I wonder if those few pieces of cereal are triggering the crazy behavior? He didn't have that many! Maybe 10 Loops! What do you think? Does the dog need a Ritalin milkshake, or will keeping him away from the Fruit Loops fix the problem?

In which we visited a farm, and Kim got duck poop on her shirt.

2010-09-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

Kim came home to meet the dog this weekend. She got here last night, and Sonny was happy to see her! He was sleeping on the floor in her bedroom this morning when I woke up. It was very cute.

I didn't realize how late she stayed up last night, and I didn't care anyway. I woke her up at 9 to start getting ready for the Alpaca Festival! Rachel and I have been planning to go to this event all week!

It wasn't all that early anyway. I went out at 9 to get an Egg Mcmuffin with RA, and I woke Kim up before I left. I told her I would bring back some breakfast for her if she got up and dressed while I was gone.

When I got home, she was up, and it didn't matter that she wasn't dressed, because Maddy was taking a nap, so we couldn't go yet. Finally Rachel said she was going to wake the baby up to go!

On the way there, Rachel and Ash took Maddy in their car, and Kim and I drove our van. Kim was complaining a little about a song that was playing in the car, because she said she had to listen to it the last time she was home, and then it got stuck in her head but it drove her crazy because she only knows one line! I am tired of all of my CDs, and can't get excited about listening to any of them, so I invented a new game - CD roulette. You reach into the CD notebook, and pull something out without looking at it, and whatever it is, you have to listen to it.

It was a great day to be outside! The temperature had dropped overnight to something like 57, and the leaves are starting to turn colors. We drove out to the country to find the farm where they were holding the festival, and we only had to turn around once to find the right road.

The Alpaca farm was beautiful, and so clean! We looked into the barn, and it was spotless! There were supposed to be displays from eight Alpaca farms, and there might have been for all I know. There were big Alpacas and small ones - the baby Alpacas were the cutest things!

We really enjoyed looking around at everything. Maddy was riding in her sling on Rachel's hip, Ash was carrying his new camera, and I was hoping to find some yarn for sale!

The first thing we saw was a pen containing some goats, baby ducks in a smaller pen, and some big white ducks with cool fluffy topknots! What kind of ducks are these? I never did find out, but here is a picture of Kim holding one:

Kim spent most of the time in that pen, corraling ducks. It was pretty funny to see her slowly sneaking up behind them, and herding them into the corner so she could hold one of them.

We showed the ducks to Maddy, and she was entertained by them. She looked at everything and seemed interested in all of it. We showed her the alpacas, who were so cute! They didn't seem to be as interested in us, though, and they were shy of being petted. We were trying to coax one of them to let us pet his topknot, and then we saw Kim, luring them to her with a handful of grass! That's when we started calling her the Alpaca Whisperer!

I did manage to score some Alpaca yarn, which is possibly the softest thing in the universe! Also, someone pointed out that there was a woman spinning yarn on a spinning wheel by the barn so I went right over to take a look, and it was someone I know from the Fiber Festival! She had some of her homemade soap with her, so I bought a couple of bars of that as well as some lovely Alpaca yarn!

On the way home Kim reminded me that we had talked about going to the apple orchard, too, and I was so tired, but she really wanted to go. I did talk her into stopping at home first so we could eat some lunch and use the bathroom! When we were ready to go out to the orchard, Rich and the dog decided to go with us.

We drove out about 30 minutes North to get to the orchard, where Kim got her cider, some donuts, and an apple-caramel pie! We bought a bag of apples, too, and at the last minute I thought of getting a caramel apple for Rachel. She loves those, and she was very grateful to get it.

It's been a long day, and I'm so tired!

In which Sonny takes a little trip.

2010-09-21T21:28:00.000-07:00

So Sonny is doing very well at housebreaking, and he is charmingly friendly and cheerful, but his hobby of humping legs? Very annoying. Sonny will be making a little visit to the vet tomorrow to get some shots and have some surgery. I'm sure he will come home a humbler dog, one who is less apt to molest us. He can find a new hobby, like maybe crochet.

In which we do not name our dog Sir Buttered Wafflebutt.

2010-09-18T22:09:00.000-07:00

Okay, here he is:

I called him Pinky Johnson all morning, and laughed every time I said it, because I think I am so darn funny, but Rich didn't think much of that name, if you can believe that, and he was calling him Waffles. We both called him Waffles for a while in the afternoon, but I think we are agreed that we will just let him keep the name he came with, so his name is still Sonny.

First day with the new dog.

2010-09-18T02:05:00.000-07:00

Some of the names for the new dog that we have tried and rejected:

Sparky
Snoopy
Lord Wafflebutt
Stinky Boogers (thanks, Beck!)
Snickers
Hobbes
Dumbass (well, we haven't completely rejected it, it's his default name)
Foogerhead

None of these names were quite right, so we are still calling the dog Sonny, in theory, but mostly we call him The Dog.

I told Axel about the new dog when I saw him at work tonight, and he told me about a childhood friend who named his dog Patches, but the poor kid's father insisted on calling the dog Pinky Johnson. When I stopped laughing, I told Axel that is my pick for my dog's new name, and I'm going to start calling The Dog Pinky Johnson immediately!

I gave The Dog, I mean Pinky, a bath this morning with some dog shampoo I bought years ago, and for some reason never threw away. I tried bathing our sheepdog Babs once, and there is nothing on earth like the experience of hoisting a 100 lb dog into the bathtub and keeping her there against her will while she makes every effort to jump back out of the tub! I never washed my own dog again, but I still have the shampoo.

This dog is so good-natured and cheerful that he was perfectly okay with getting a bath, and he is easy to lift in and out of the bathtub, too! He smells much better now!

I got a crate and some dog bowls at the store this morning, and RA bought him a beautiful purple braided rope for playing tug-of-war. The Dog (Pinky J.) didn't seem to be familiar with tug-of-war, but he's catching on.

In which I lost my mind and woke up with a new (used) dog.

2010-09-17T05:23:00.000-07:00

So last night I was on a walk with Rachel, Maddy and Ash, when I got a phone call from Rachel's friend Kat. She was driving back from Chicago, where she had gone to her aunt's house to pick up a dog.

Kat loves animals and she has three dogs, and now this aunt, who seems to be a little nutty, is moving to Montana to live with her daughter, and she wanted Kat to take her dog - supposedly this is temporary. So Kat and her mother went to pick up the dog in Chicago, and ended up coming home with the dog, a cat, and an extra dog! She said her aunt was keeping this other dog in a crate and that it has been staying in the crate for hours at a time, and also seemed to be afraid of the aunt!

So Kat said she had to take the dog, because the aunt was just going to take it to the pound, but Kat couldn't bear to let her do that, so she brought the dog home with her, but since she already has 3 dogs of her own, plus now her aunt's dog and a cat, she wanted to know if I could take the dog. That's when I temporarily lost my mind and said yes, and now I have a dog at my house.

Oh man. This dog is not housebroken at all! And he's three years old! He is very friendly, and is having a great time playing with a squeaky rubber duck that used to be Maddy's but it is the dog's toy now. It was a set of three ducks, a Momma and two babies, and Maddy only played with the babies because they are small. The Momma was too big for her to hold, but it's just right for a smallish dog to squeak the heck out of!

I shut the dog in the bathroom last night so he wouldn't pee all over the house while we were sleeping, and he was fine. He is used to being in a crate, so I imagine the bathroom was like a castle to him! I'm going to look for a crate for him at Walmart today, just to sleep in or to stay in when we aren't home, until he is housebroken. When he's housebroken, we'll just use the crate for traveling or for when we are going to be gone from home for a few hours.

The cats hate him, of course. They are avoiding him like crazy, and I put a baby gate across the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen, and closed the french doors between the living room and the dining room, so the cats have the dining room and the downstairs bathroom to themselves - a dog-free zone!

My new dog's name is Sonny. Rich says he is too old to change his name, so I guess it will stay Sonny. Kat's Aunt said he was a Lhasa Apso, but he isn't. Rich took a look at him and says he is a Cockapoo, which is better, since they have a good temperament and are smart, like poodles. Also, they don't shed much, so that's good! He's laying by my feet now, chewing his squeaky duck.

In other news, Maddy crawled last night! She was trying to get a little cracker that was just a bit farther than she can reach, and she crawled two steps to get it! Rachel immediately laid a little trail of crackers for her, and she crawled again, twice, to get the crackers! So apparently when properly motivated, Maddy can do new things! Just like Kung Fu Panda!

Pedicure socks are open-toed!

2010-09-07T21:13:00.000-07:00

Kim got up early, packed her car and went back to school this morning. She didn't even forget anything! Well, she did forget something, but she came back for it. When I woke up this afternoon, I called to see if she got back okay, and she said she had already unloaded her car and was on her way to class.

So with Kim gone, when Maddy came over to play tonight, I had her all to myself - Rich was at Tae Kwon Do. She looked through the toy basket and I had to make the one toy work for her over and over, because she is too little to make it spin around, but she really likes the spinning!

Then she got distracted by my phone because Kim was texting me, so I let her play with it for a minute. She is not so interested in the toy cell phones. Then I remembered that Rich's old cell phone was upstairs so I ran up and grabbed it, and she had that one to play with (chew on) so I could rescue mine and wipe the drool off of it.

Maddy has had a terrible diaper rash this weekend, so I decided to give her a dry diaper to help keep her skin in good shape. I took off her diaper, and her bum looks much better, by the way, and then I remembered that Rachel read on the internets that you should let their bottoms air-dry and leave them uncovered to help heal them, so I didn't put a diaper on her right away. Like a sucker, I left her bare for a few minutes, and of course she peed on the floor, and also on the little one piece thing she was wearing.

I mopped her up and put a dry diaper on her and dressed her in a dry nightgown I had from when she was smaller, so it was a close fit, and she was a little annoyed with it. I distracted her with a bottle and a Youtube video of Voltaire, and then Ash came to pick her up and take her home. Whew!

Tomorrow I have a chemistry test that I have been reviewing for all weekend, and I just had a text conversation with Kim about it.

Kim:
Good luck on ur test. Don't panic!

Me:
I will use my Rescue Remedy drops and not sit staring in terror like a deer in headlights.

Kim:
U will be ok. Do u need a Xanax?

Me:
No, I will be too tired in the morning. If I take a Xanax I will pass out with my face on the desk and drool on my paper.

Kim:
Haha, so pass on that idea.

Okay, I'm going to study now. When I'm done reviewing, I will just relax and knit on the pedicure socks I'm making for Kim.

Labor day weekend.

2010-09-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of the month of August, in which I was on antibiotics for cellulitis almost the entire month, and I'm tired of taking antibiotics, which gave me an allergic rash, and I'm tired of taking steroids to chase away the rash, and the antihistimines to stop the itching.

But now it is September, and the weather is beautifully cooler, and I finished the last of the antibiotics on Saturday, and I'm almost done with the steroids, and hardly need the antihistimine at all, and all that, along with the much cooler weather, is really making my whole life look better.

Kim is home for the weekend, and has been in her old place on the couch, with her laptop on her lap and cats sitting next to her. Sando hasn't been around as much as we would have expected, because he's working every day this weekend, but he came over after work on Saturday and signed my copy of his book, and then stayed until late.

Kim and I have cooked a little, and taken a walk every day, and today I showed her how to repair a hem on one of her favorite t-shirts, and gave her a little sewing kit to take back to school with her for future repairs.

It's not very exciting stuff, but it's been nice.

Everywhere I go, damn, there I am.

2010-09-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

So it's my day off and I had a dentist appointment - just a cleaning. I went to that, and look ma, no cavities, so that's good. Then I had to stop at the store for cat litter and milk, and one of those roasted chickens that you take home hot so you don't have to cook it yourself, so I got that, and for some reason, the whole store and everyone in it was annoying!

I was trying to be zen as I got my few things and then as I checked out, the bagger was being all cheerful and friendly, and for some reason that I haven't figured out, she thinks we are good friends (maybe because I've been shopping there a long time? I don't know.) so she was being all chatty about the stuff I was buying and it was just getting on my nerves.

She was babbling about the cat food I was buying, and I don't know why I responded at all, except that it is expected of one, to be civil, and I made a remark about cats peeing in the house and that they don't even deserve to be fed, and omg, she told me about the psychology of cats and how they have to mark their territory and if I have moved to a house where other cats have been living, that is why the cats are peeing, because they can smell that other cats have been there...

I could not be bothered to tell her that we have lived in this house for 16 years and the cats have nothing to be marking territory for, unless they are just trying to show us who is boss, so I just shrugged and walked away and did not roll my eyes right to her face, which I think shows great personal growth.

Scratch, scratch, scratch

2010-08-31T23:58:00.000-07:00

I have a rash from antibiotics, and even after my doctor changed my medication, I still have an itchy, itchy rash! This is making me unhappy! Rich told me this morning that I should just stop taking the antibiotic, and I did actually skip the morning dose, but when I woke up I started taking it again, because people, you should not stop taking your antibiotic before you are finished taking all of it. That just helps the remaining bacteria develop immunities, and we don't need to grow stronger bacteria!

So I am taking Benedryl to help fight the itching, and it helps a little, and I'm using a clear Anti-itch lotion that Rachel had at her house. I'm still itching, though. Don't be jealous of my beautiful life.

I am still slaving away over my intro to chem class, and ugh, it's no fun at all. I could not be doing this at all without Rachel's help, and I am grateful for it. My friend Diane is taking this class, too, and she asks me for help, which is so humorous if you think about it. It's truly the blind leading the blind. She is impressed by my mad chem skillz, y'all!

Every night I go to Rachel's house and work on chemistry while the precious fat baby rolls around on the floor by our feet, playing with her toys, and I pick her up to love her, but then Rachel makes me put her down and figure out metric conversions. It's so unfair! I just want to blow raspberrys on the baby, but no, I have to slave away on chemistry instead.

So that is the story of my life this week - I scratch, do homework and play with the fat baby. The baby is the only part that is fun.

In which I remember our family motto: Cs get degrees.

2010-08-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

I know it's been a few days, but I've been busy, and not with anything very interesting to write about. I'll try to write more of the boringness, though, because people are starting to complain that I never write.

Since my last post, I have continued going to the chem class, but it hasn't been anything worth journaling about. The kid with the completely tattoed arm hasn't been back to class, so he must have dropped. The annoying whiskey-voiced woman came in one morning and sat down beside me, but then she left the room to go smoke or whatever, and I got up and moved away from that seat. I wasn't trying to be mean, I just wanted to sit by Diane, and there wasn't room at the table for all three of us!

We had our first exam in the class on Wednesday and I got a B, thanks to Rachel's tutoring. I am not learning anything in class, because I go to class after work and I'm too tired to take it all in. Since I go over the notes and homework with Rachel, sometimes class is like a review of things I've covered, so it's not a complete waste of time.

We got Kim back to school last week. It was my working weekend, so Rich took her back by himself. He went with the van so he could take the harp, and she drove her car. Even though they took two cars full of her stuff, she still forgot things, so I'm filling a box with the things she asks me for, and she'll be home next weekend and can take the box back with her.

What I'm knitting today:

I'm working on a little shrug for Maddy to wear to church over her dresses. The air conditioning is always too cool at church, and Maddy has one little sweater that she wears every week, so Rachel and I are both knitting sweaters for her! I had mine about half done when I noticed the stitch count was off and I had to rip back 3 or four inches. It's a pattern from a Debbie Bliss baby pattern book. I'm looking at another sweater for her that has a fair-isle design around the yoke, and some beading that is sewn on after the knitting. (Yes, Sarah, it's the same one you made for Eugenie's little girl. Where did you get the beads?)

I'm also excited about the Bella hat that Diana knitted for Chanelle, so I'm going to make one for Kim. I still have a sweater on the needles for Carolyn and I need to get that one done soon so she can wear it this Fall! Rachel got very excited about making the fancy buttons for it when we were talking about it yesterday, so I will probably finish it soon with Rachel's encouragement!

What I'm reading today:

I'm re-reading a mystery that takes place in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan, and I bought the next book in the series and downloaded it to my Kindle, so I've got that to read this weekend.

What I'm watching today:

Rich and I are planning to stay in tonight (not that we ever go out) and watch Kung Fu Panda. I just got it from Netflix on Scott's recommendation.

What I'm cooking today:

I'm planning to make chicken noodle soup because Rich says he is sore all over from TaeKwonDo last night. I haven't been cooking much for about 3 weeks, maybe a month, because it's been so stinking hot, but now I feel like cooking again. I made spaghetti last night, with turkey sausage instead of ground beef and it was really good.

So that's what is going on here, at the House of Boring. Aren't you happy I wrote something?

In which I have no class, but I had to go to one.

2010-08-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

Today was my first day of Intro to Chemistry. This is the second time I've taken the class, and this time I'm taking it as a lecture class instead of self-paced. Last time I took the self-paced class and it was horrible, because I am not very motivated, and also, I don't like to do things involving numbers - they make me feel woozy and I have to lay down.

I had to go straight from work, so I stopped and bought a bottle of Diet Pepsi to keep me going, and I met my friend Diane outside the building and we walked in together.

I think the best part about the class will be making fun of some of the other students. It certainly won't be my amazing new knowledge of chemistry.

One woman followed us down the hall to class, talking in a cigarettes-and-whiskey voice about the stressful summer she had, and after class, she followed us outside and joined us in talking to someone Diane was introducing me to. Whiskey Voice lit a cigarette and started babbling about herself, and her kids, and her love of chemistry class - ugh. I was so tired from being up all night that I just stared at her and nodded, wishing she would go away, and finally Diane excused us. As we walked toward the parking lot, Diane said, "We need to avoid her in the future!" and I couldn't agree more.

In which I am not a doctor, but I can dose a baby. Sort of.

2010-08-06T21:41:00.000-07:00

Friday is always such a long day! I went to bed early last night and woke up at 8, and went to do some errands with RA. I was back home finally at 2, but Kim needed some Mountain Dew and Ramen soup, so I went back to the store one last time.

Rachel brought Maddy over around 4 or 5 so that Rich could keep her overnight while the rest of us go to work. Maddy was having a bad day and Rachel had given her some infant Tylenol, but forgot to bring the bottle with her, so I had to go back to the drugstore later to get some. I accidently bought the wrong kind - I bought Children's ibruprophen instead of Infant ibuprophen, and there was no eye dropper in the bottle for measuring out the dosage and giving it to the baby.

I was looking around in the kitchen for something that we could give Maddy the medicine with, since she is too little to sip it from the tiny cup that comes with the bottle, and Rich suggested that we use the dropper from the cat's antibiotic. Kim had given the cat the last dose today, and she said she threw the bottle in the trash, so I went through the trash bag and found it!

I rinsed the eyedropper out carefully and then I had to figure out how much of the ibuprohen to give Maddy, based on the recommended doseage for a two-year old, and then I had to figure out how many of the tiny cat-size doses in the eyedropper would add up to the right amount for a baby. When I told Rachel about it on the phone at work just now, she figured it out on paper and told me I hadn't given her enough, but hey, that's better than giving her too much!

How to change a printer ribbon.

2010-08-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

When I got home from work this morning, I was feeling very bitter about my life and my job, mostly because ever since we had an 'upgrade' (it turned out to be more like a downgrade) to the switchboard at work a couple of years ago, there are things that don't work the way they should and you have to do them in a roundabout way, but since I work in the middle of the night, I hardly ever have to do those things.

Mostly I just transfer calls to the ER or one of the nursing floors, but this morning some guy wanted to make a collect call or two from his room, and this is one of the things that is all bass-akwards now and had to be done a special way instead of quick and straight-forward like it was before the 'upgrade', and Barb wasn't at work yet to remind me of how she does it during the busy day shift.

So the process wasn't working like it should, and I was trying to do it, but the guy misdialed and had to make the call again, and then he had to call someone else collect, so it was going on and on and was very frustrating for both of us! I have no idea why he wasn't just using his cell phone to make the call, like any other person on the face of the earth would have because even small children and my mother-in-law have cell phones now. Although my mother-in-law would probably have been calling me to help her make a collect call, too, because she has a cell phone, but she doesn't really know how to make a call on it. My father-in-law has written the instructions for her and taped them to the back of her phone, but he's hoping she never has to use it - and so is she.

Also, earlier in the night I had to change the ink cartridge on the big printer, a job that I hate because it goes wrong every damn time I have to do it! It's not just like slipping a toner cartridge into a tabletop printer. I have to put a giant ribbon cartridge into a large printer that stands alone and is about chest-high to me (or waist-high to a person of normal height).

Here's the thing - I have to put in the ribbon cartridge and jiggle it into position so it drops down onto two spindles and OMG, the stinking cartridge just will not drop down onto those two spindles! There is a knob on top of the cartridge that can be turned counter-clockwise until it all drops neatly into place, and I turn it and turn it, and jiggle it and jiggle it and jiggle it, and it just will not go and then finally it does!

And then I start the printer again, because I still have more reports to print and the printer runs a little and then it beeps and shows me a red light and I look at the little window and it says "Ribbon Fault", which means something is wrong with the ribbon! So I clear it by pushing the Clear button, and start it again and it prints a line or two and then BEEP, Ribbon Fault. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I can clear it and start it as many times as I want to, but I might as well not bother, because in the end, I just have to take out the ribbon, throw it away, and start over again with another ribbon cartridge. Last night I had to use two cartridges, and the third one worked the way it should, so that was good, and at least I didn't fall into a pit of rage like last time and slam the faulty ribbon against a cabinet, causing the plastic casing to break and release pleated ribbon all over the place. I cleaned it up (covering my hands with paper towels) and put it all into a plastic bag, and gave it to the midnight housekeeping guy to throw away so no one would see it sitting in the wastebasket. It is important to hide the ~~bodies~~ evidence.

So that was my night and by the time Barb came in this morning I was pretty cranky and tired and I was so glad to come home and just go to bed!

Baby's first butter!

2010-07-27T22:00:00.000-07:00

Rich mentioned tonight that there were a lot more dishes to wash since we got home! Yes, since he was just eating Triple Baconator sandwiches from Wendy's instead of cooking, he didn't have much to wash at all while we were gone!

Rachel brought over a cookbook for babies today, and she wanted to look through it for ideas on what to cook for Maddy. I had been shopping with RA, and bought a bunch of leeks, so when Rachel saw a recipe for Potato and Leeks with Peas, we thought it would be fun to make that!

When the kids were younger, potato and leek soup was one of my favorite things to make, and Rachel recently confessed that she didn't like it at all when she was a kid, but she remembers it fondly now, so she was excited to make a batch for Maddy. We made a bigger pot of it for ourselves, too.

We didn't use peas, because the recipe I use calls for carrots, and we like it that way. Maddy loves pureed carrots (from a jar - when Rachel made some steamed carrots and pureed them herself, Maddy thought they were disgusting!), so Rachel used carrots in her little batch of soup.

So making this soup requires two pans, one little pan for Maddy's version, which is pretty much the same as ours, but with no salt and no added milk. Just potatoes, leeks, carrots and butter. Baby's first butter!

So where was I, before I got distracted by butter? Oh right, the pans, one little saucepan for Maddy, one big soup pot for us. We need the blender, a big bowl for the pureed adult soup, a little bowl for the pureed baby soup, and then some soup bowls for the adults to eat from. Various utensils - knives for chopping and spoons for stirring and eating, so yes, the dishes added up.

The soup was very good though - well, we thought it was, but Maddy wasn't so excited about it. Rachel put her little portion in a bowl with a lid and took it home to try it on her later, and maybe mix in a little rice cereal. Sometimes babies don't like something on the first try, and sometimes they don't like something until they are adults.

How I spent my summer vacation.

2010-07-25T21:24:00.000-07:00

A lot has happened since I last updated. That last post was written Friday July 16 at about noon, and a couple of hours later, Rachel showed up with Maddy and some boxes of books and announced that she was going to have a book sale on our front lawn!

We spread a quilt on the lawn and set up a couple of long tables that she got from the church, and while I played with Maddy on the quilt, Rachel spread out the books. She brought out a box or two from our garage, but there were some boxes in the garage that she couldn't get to easily, so she didn't bring them all out.

Judy, our next door neighbor, came over and sat with us for a while. She brought her camera and took pictures of Maddy on the blanket, and I'll post one or two of them tomorrow. Dan from across the street came over to talk for a while, too. That was the most neighbor-interaction we've had in a while.

Kim's friend Phil showed up to hang out with Kim, so they took over the living room to play video games and watch Ghost Hunter shows far into the night. Phil slept in the yarn room, and since their friend Catsy slept up there a couple of weeks ago, I had to change the sheets. Catsy didn't mind sleeping on the bed knowing Phil had used it last, but I told him he didn't have to sleep in Catsy's cooties. I am such a good hostess.

Rachel came back Saturday morning and set up her tables again, and Maddy and I spent another day on the quilt. It was a beautiful day, and Maddy loves to roll around outside, looking at the leaves and feeling the grass with her toes.

Rachel's friend Kat came over in the afternoon and sat on the quilt with us, so that was fun. Kim and Phil stayed in the house to continue the video game they started on Friday.

Rich brought more boxes of books from the garage, so there was more to sell, but altogether Rachel only sold about 50 books. We had fun looking through the books ourselves and decided to keep quite a few of them.

We closed down the sale by dinnertime, and Ash grilled hamburgers for us, Kat went home, and Phil finally left. Kim was pretty tired of his company by then! She was ready to start packing to leave on our drive to Utah, and she told him it was time for him to go so she could get to work.

While Rich was putting the borrowed tables in the back of the van to take them back to the church, he noticed a big crack in the rear axle! I told him I kept hearing a big noise back there, but he doesn't drive that car much, and he wasn't worried about it.

That changed our plans for our vacation! We were going to have to stay home and get the car fixed! I called Scott to tell him, and he was so disappointed, that he offered to buy our tickets to fly to Utah to visit them!

I couldn't let him buy the tickets, but I booked a flight for myself, and when I called him back to tell him about it, Carolyn said they still wanted to help pay for the trip, so I let her buy a ticket for Kim to come with me. Rich had to stay home to take care of the car.

So Kim and I left on Monday and flew to Utah. We stayed in the basement apartment at Scott and Carolyn's house and had a nice time playing with the kids and visiting Temple Square. We didn't do a whole lot of sightseeing because I really just wanted to see the kids, so that's what I did. We spent a lot of time sitting in the backyard drawing things on the patio with sidewalk chalk, and reading out loud to Soren and Carl. It was a nice trip.

We left at 5:30 in the morning on Friday, and traveled all day, arriving home in Freeport almost exactly 12 hours later. Apparently there was a lot of heavy rain while we were out of town, and parts of town are so flooded that no one can drive on the roads in those areas! Some people have flooded basements, but for once it isn't us, and I'm grateful for that, although my basement smells like cat pee, thanks to Patsy, who is mad about getting a dose of medicine every day!

No matter how nice your vacation is, it's good to get home. Ahh, my own bed! Ahh, my own kitchen! Ahhh.

I've had a day already!

2010-07-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

Patsy had to go to the vet before 8 this morning, so I got up at 7:30 (didn't work last night) and dropped him off for a Lion cut!

There he is, in all his pissed-off glory! He had a small cyst on his shoulder drained, also, and now he has to have a dose of oral antibiotic every day, but since we are leaving on our vacation Sunday, I guess Nurse Rachel will be in charge of that!

Once I was up and about this morning, I also stopped to get the oil changed, and went to Walm@rt to get some groceries. As I was leaving the grocery area, I got a call from the vet's office to say that Patsy was ready to be picked up, so I called home and woke up Kim so she could go with me.

I dropped off the groceries and picked up Kim - I just needed company, it wasn't to wrestle the cat! So now we are home and I feel like I've had a full day already!

This afternoon Kim is going to use some carpet shampoo on the basement stairs, because Someone's Friend dropped a large cup of Mountain Dew as they came into the house last night, and if it was diet pop, it would just evaporate, but since it was full of sugar, well, someone has to clean that up.

As a bribe/reward, for cleaning the stairs, I bought Kim a bottle of Vampire cologne when I was shopping (and a pair of poison green flipflops!). She says it is better to smell like a vampire than a werewolf, because werewolves smell like a wet dog!

Okay, I'm going to go do some laundry and then just sit in a chair and read for a while. I've already had a full day and it's not even noon.

In which I stayed home like Cinderella.

2010-07-13T21:43:00.000-07:00

Kim left for Chicago today to visit a friend for a couple of days, and while she is gone I'm cleaning her room! It's piled up with books, papers, boxes of dishes and computer cords and her printer and who knows what else, and also, enough clothing to clothe a third-world country. Hmm, maybe I should send some of her clothes to Haiti...

Last week I sat on her bed to keep her company one day while she cleaned out her closet, and we filled a bag that I took to the Goodwill, but the rest of the room is still so terrible that I can't walk through it to get to the bed. Maddy slept at our house last night, and she was asleep in my room so I went to Kim's room to take a nap before work on her bed, and ugh! I had to pick my way between piles of stuff to get to the bed!!

So today RA sat on the bed, folding clothes and putting them in piles, and I sorted out some of the boxes, deciding which ones can go to the basement, and filled another box with crap for the Goodwill. The clothes are piled on the bed, because her dresser drawers are so full that she can't put anything else in them, so my plan for tomorrow is to empty the drawers and give away more of her clothes!

I took a couple of boxes to the basement and Ash carried a heavier one down when he came over later, and it already looks much better in there. I've got it to a manageable state now and Kim could probably finish cleaning it up herself, except that she's out of town and I want to get it done now!

Kim texted me tonight and said she is having a great time in Chicago! They waded in Lake Michigan, went to the zoo (briefly), shopped a little (oh no! she bought a new shirt and a pair of shorts! More clothes!) and ate at a sushi place. I wish I was there, but I was home cleaning her room and eating leftovers. What's wrong with this picture?