The Bronchitis Blog; Day Eight

I have been sick for more than a week, and on antibiotics, steroids and an inhaler (oops, I keep forgetting to use it), for 4 days. I'm feeling better, but not entirely well.

Maddy and Rachel are both sick now. We're hoping Kim stays healthy. She hasn't been around Maddy and Rachel much, and I was already on the antibiotic for about 12 hours before she got here, so I think she'll be okay.

So yes, Kim has been home for a few days. She's taking her Christmas vacation now, because there was an emergency at work at Christmas and she had to stay in town and work and only came home for about a day and a half.

So far we have shopped for jeans, socks, and underwear for her, she got her hair trimmed, and had a massage. She's getting a lot of sleep, too. We did a short yoga sequence tonight, too, which is the first time I'm done any yoga in a week, and it felt really good. She says it's the best vacation ever.

Looking forward to a quiet night at work with my reading and my knitting. I'm trying to finish a couple of things, as well as work on the Cowboy Cowl I started weeks ago. I've got the Knit a Long we're doing at the yarn shop, which is a pair of socks knitted in a new yarn called CoBaSi, made of Cotton, Bamboo and Silk. Everyone seems to like it except me, so I'm not going to complain about it, and really, it's fine, I just don't love it. I will just say that it's a bit splitty.

I wish I had some popcorn.

We hates it, precioussss.

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It's New Year's Eve and I'm here at work, but I wouldn't be doing anything festive if I wasn't working, so this is just fine.

So you know that bat that Paula and I saw? It didn't leave. It must have flown upstairs and hid in Kim's room, because I've seen it in there, twice. I am the only one who has seen it, because it is is sneaky and it doesn't come out when Rich goes in there with his bat-catching net, wearing his gloves, and trying to nab it!

Like yesterday - I needed a ball of yarn that I thought was in a box in Kim's room, so I went up there, opened the door carefully and reached in to switch on the light, and the bat came swooping at the door! I slammed it shut in his face, and then when I turned around, I saw the ball of yarn I needed was in the box in the hall! So yay, I had the yarn, and didn't need to risk going into the Bat Room!

I went downstairs and told Rich the bat was flying around in there, but when he went upstairs it was nowhere to be seen. This is the second time I've seen Mr. Bat in that room and Rich hasn't been able to find it. I don't know what we'll do, except to keep trying to catch it, but until then, I can't let Maddy go in that room to jump on the beds, which is her favorite thing to do at Nan's house!

In other news, I went to the movies with Rich to see The Hobbit this evening. Good thing I had my knitting! The picture above shows how much knitting I got done. I cast on to start the sock when we sat down in the theater. The movie was really long and by the end of the second hour I was way over seeing dwarves fighting with ugly orcs. And ugly orcs riding ugly wargs. (There were ugly goblins, too, especially Scrotumchin, King of the Goblins.) It was all ugly and also? Boring. Fighting is dull. That white orc? That whole story was just added to make more fighting so the movie could be longer, and it's all just to make more money for the studio.

I'm sure Rich is wishing now that he had gone to the movie by himself, after I complained about it all the way home. He is planning to see the next two films without me.

Not all bats are as cute as Maddy!

I was talking to Diana on the phone last night, and although we are usually on a daily phone call schedule, we've been busy for a few days and have not talked as much, so I had to fill her in on everything.

Like, how the roof guys finally showed up and put a new roof on the house! Woot! It took two and a half days, and I had to sleep at Rachel's house for the first two days because roofers? They show up at the crack of dawn and begin pounding on your roof! So I went to Rachel's in the mornings after work and slept on the very hard futon in their guest room. The upside of that being that when I woke up, I got to play with Maddy!

Then there was the bat that came from I don't know where and was flying around in the house! While I was doing yoga! It's hard to focus on the sequence when there is a bat in the house! My friend Paula was here too, doing yoga with me, and she was a lot calmer than me, because she is a cardiac nurse, so she is totally grace under pressure.

Rich had been upstairs doing Tae Kwon Do in his office area, and had just come downstairs and was in the shower, completely unaware of the bat attack, and I may have been slightly panicky because, well, birds and bats are freaky, so Paula was being soothing, and I told her if she wasn't scared, she could open the front door to let it find it's way out. Which she bravely did, and we went back to doing yoga, with the front door open, and Sonny sitting by the door, wondering what the heck was going on.

When Rich got out of the shower, we told him about the bat attack and he closed the door and did a walk-through but didn't see the bat, so we think he maybe did find his way out. Ugh. I checked behind the curtains in the bedroom before I went to sleep, because bats are cunning that way, and they hide! We seem to be bat-free now, thank goodness.

Yesterday it snowed all day and Rich got his snow blower out to do the sidewalks. He said it's a wonderful sound when you start up the snow blower for the first time of the season.

Kim was supposed to come home last night, but she called yesterday to say that there was a dog-walking emergency, and she won't be able to come home until Monday. I am not happy about this at all, but at least she didn't have to drive home in the blizzard.

It's beginning to look a little like Christmas.

We bought a Christmas Tree on Saturday, which is really early for us. We usually wait until the last possible minute to put up a tree, because eek! A Fire Hazard full of (probably) spiders is something I want in my house for as short a time as possible.

This year we have Maddy coming around, who is very interested in Christmas trees, so we wanted to get a tree in the house for her to look at and maybe help decorate. We got the tree, and Maddy did admire it, but then she wanted to go upstairs and jump on the bed in Kim's room, so the tree wasn't the huge hit I thought it would be.

In other news, Scott finished his book and published it on Amazon for the Kindle yesterday. It's called The Black Eye by Scott Duede, and he's selling it for a dollar, so go get it! He says if he makes enough money to buy a pizza, he'll consider it a success.

Also, have I mentioned how much I love yoga? Because I do. Tonight I was sitting in the living room feeling crabby, and wishing we did not have to always watch the damn History Channel, and I told Rich I needed to do some yoga because I hadn't done any practice since Thursday, and just a few minutes later I got a text from Luanne asking if we were going to do yoga tonight!

It's the Winter Break for all of the fitness classes at the Y, so we didn't have our regular Monday night class, so I thought it was a great idea! I texted the rest of my yoga friends and then went over to the church to set things up.

It was great to have Laura there - she has been swamped with studying but the semester is over so she could come to practice with us, and the three of us did the Rodney Yee Power Yoga DVD. When we were done I felt so much better, and I'm sure Rich was relieved when I came home in a better mood.

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The winds of grace are always blowing, apparently.

Let me tell you about yoga! I love yoga! It's all I want to do, and I keep reading the blogs of other yogis to see what they are doing and how they are practicing, because it's so interesting! I started doing yoga about 18 months ago, when I was taking a chemistry class and I made friends with another woman in the class who said she was going to get back to doing yoga to help herself relax and be less stressed. She asked if I wanted to do it with her, and because she was fun and I wanted to do something with her, I said I would go, too.
I told my friend Shelley about it and she wanted to sign up, too, so we all started taking yoga class at the Y on Monday and Thursdays, and it was great! I thought it was all going to be stretching and listening to sitar music, but it turns out that yoga is a lot of hard, sweaty work! Who knew?
So Laura,Shelley and I kept going and gradually got to know other people in the classes and invited a couple more of our friends to go with us, and here we are, a year and a half later, still going, and we love it.
The Thursday class started out being the easy class, with a teacher whose style focused more on breathing and just easier postures, and then when that teacher moved on, there was another teacher, and still, Thursday was the easy class, but then on the next session, we got a new teacher who was very different!
Chris was teaching the class to fulfill the requirements to finish her 200 hour teaching certification, and she brought a whole new outlook and a different style to our yoga classes! Rachel called it Boot Camp Yoga, because it was hard work!
The Thursday class had always been the less attended class, with a smaller enrollment and like any class, as the session went on, people would drop out, but with Chris, it really started to weed out the class, and I mean really fast! We'd get 12 or 15 people the first week of the session, but they would drop like flies and after a couple of weeks, it was just down to the six or seven dedicated followers again. It was hard but we loved it!
Then, toward the end of the last session, Chris was suddenly gone. The last two classes of the session were cancelled, and we were told there would be no Thursday class for the new session! We were all shocked, and we don't know what happened there, except maybe a couple of health issues that she had mentioned, her own, and her mom's.
So, there we were, wishing that we could get three classes a week, and suddenly we are down to one! I tried a class at another gym, but that place was kind of ghetto and the teacher was, well, she was no Chris!
The Monday teacher had tried using a borrowed space downtown to start a class that met Tuesday and Thursday, which was great - for one week. Then the space was rented to a martial arts group, so that was no good.
I suggested to Shelley that we could meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the church and use a DVD to follow for classes, and she thought it was a good plan, so we invited our core group from the Thursday class, and that's what we've been doing for a month.
It's been really good for me because I ended up doing yoga daily as I previewed DVDs for us to see if they were appropriate for our interests and skill levels. There are a lot of different styles of yoga, and we aren't interested in some of them.
So that's what's been going on, but last night I found out that our Monday teacher will probably be teaching the Thursday class too, starting with the next session, and that's fine. We'll stop doing the Tuesday and Thursday class at the church, and just go to the Y for the two weekly classes and practice at home on our own if we want more.
I learned from this that it's doable to have a home practice, and I made space in the den for a 'yoga room' by giving away our old couch, so I have a space to practice in.
The best thing is that I found a website called Yogaglo.com that has classes in all different kinds of yoga styles,where you can pay a small monthly fee and then you can take as many classes as you want. I love it!

Let me tell you about a girl and her purse.

This is a picture of Maddy's purse. It was a gift from her other Grandma, and she has loved it from the day she got it. She carries it with her everywhere, of course, because she knows from observation that a woman always carries a purse with her Important Things in it!


When she goes up to bed, she puts her purse carefully on the table next to her bed, next to her Cars lamp. If she gets upstairs with all of her other Necessary Stuff (her stuffed dog Meena, her blanky, her binky and her Big Blue Blanket), and then notices that her purse was left behind, she yells for the purse until it is found and brought to her, then it is placed on the table. Where it belongs.


She gets mad if she finds anyone pawing through her purse, and yells, "No! Gettout! Mine!", as any woman would, so I have a picture of the purse, but not of the contents. She has been a little more lenient with me because I am her Nan, so I have been able to look through the contents a little bit, and also I have paid attention when she is looking in it for something, or adding something new, so I have a pretty good idea of what's in it.

• There is a spare binky, just in case she loses the one in her mouth.
• A comb, although heaven forbid anyone should take it out and use it on her hair, which generally looks like monkeys have been doing science experiments on her head.
• A cellphone, or sometimes two, because she knows that a cellphone is an Important Thing to carry with her, and we give her our old ones, so she has plenty to choose from. Her favorite cellphone is the pink one that used to be Kim's. Maddy calls it Phineas and Ferb, because on that show, their older sister Candace has a pink phone just like it.
• She has a chapstick, because you know, Makeup.
• The rest of the contents vary from day to day, depending on what she has been playing with. Today I saw a baby-sized My Little Pony, a Hot Wheels car, and a Scrabble tile that she stole from my house. A couple of days ago I saw her pull out a mirror mounted on cardboard and she smiled at herself in it, murmuring fondly, "I see you...".
• Oh, I almost forgot, she usually has at least one bead necklace and a green rubber bracelet, too. Women like jewelry!

Her purse is often topped off with a small, open bag of chips ("Reetos!"), or a couple of loose cookies, or even a banana that she is transporting from one place to another. She knows it's a good idea to have a snack with her in case of emergency. (I taught her that.)


Last week Rachel and I took Ash and Maddy with us to Rockford so that Maddy could play at Monkey Joe's, a kid's play place full of bouncy castles and bouncy slides (and you know Maddy likes to bounce!), and I needed to go to the Ulta store to see the eyebrow specialist. (Shut. Up.)


Maddy brought her purse and her blanky, and sat in her car seat with both of them balanced on her lap, but just as we got into Rockford, her purse slipped off her lap and landed upside down on the floor of the car! Oh, the screaming!


It had fallen on the far side of the car, and Ash was sitting next to her on the other side, where he couldn't reach it to pick up her Stuff, so he told her she would have to wait until we got to Monkey Joe's for him to get her purse.


Maddy was furiously upset and none of us could reason with her, so finally Ash took off his seat belt, told Rachel not to have an accident and kill him, and he slid back to the rear seat and cleaned up all of her Stuff. He got every bit of it, too, because she was watching him carefully, and when he first gave it back, she could see that there was still Stuff on the floor, and she yelled for it!


Ash gave that purse the evil eye when he finally had all of the Stuff back in it, but he just doesn't understand that a girl needs her purse!

It's a mystery! Also, an evening with Maddy, in which she jumps on Kim's bed.

So today there was a dead bird laying on the floor in the dining room when I woke up! A. Dead. Bird. OMG! I called Rich to come downstairs and dispose of it, but neither of us could figure out where it came from!

I went out to get a pop and a couple of groceries with RA, and when I got back I went upstairs to strip the bed and change the sheets (because it was about time), and in the bathroom I saw that my hairbrush was on the floor, which was weird, because no one uses that bathroom but me during the day, and if I had knocked my hairbrush on the floor I would have picked it up! Then I saw (duh duh duh) a feather in the sink!

Rich was passing by just then, so I showed him the evidence that a bird had been flying around the house, and then I flushed it’s germy, mite-filled feather down the toilet, but still…where did the bird come from? I think it probably came in when Rich had the door open to take Sonny out on one of his many walks today, but it’s a mystery.

So Ash brought Maddy over tonight while Rachel was at work, and the first thing she did was go to the kitchen to get a bag of chips, because I always buy packages of small bags of chips for her (and Rich). She ate a couple of Cheetos (She calls them Ritos, because to her all chips are Doritos) and then she saw the bananas, and wanted one of them, too. I gave her the banana, half peeled, and she took that and the Cheetos and ran upstairs to Kim’s room.

I had to stop and shut down my laptop so I didn’t get up there right away, but when I did, she was jumping on the bed, eating the banana and she had carefully set the Cheeto bag upright on Kim's dresser, where she saw me put the chip bag last time to keep it away from Sonny.

No wait, she wasn’t on the bed yet, because first we had to pick up all the necklaces that were in a pile on the bed, and she sang the clean up, clean up song while we did it! She is so funny. Then she jumped and jumped and jumped. She can deliberately land on her butt now, since her feet slipped and she did it once, and I applauded her butt jump and told her to do it again. She demonstrated it for Ash when he got back from the store, and then they went home.

Oh, also, the minute she came in the house, she stripped off her own clothes and gave them to me to hold. She can undress herself now! That clever girl. She likes to run around in the house dressed in just a diaper, and they have to fight her to put her clothes on if they want to take her anywhere.