Thursday, August 30, 2007

August Is A Cruel Month

Seriously.


They read our bill wrong last month - so this actually represents a month and a half worth of electricity. It also represents in my mind a small fortune. Or a lot of yarn. Depending on how you look at it.




The painting inspector, while quite impressed by our paint job on 2 sides of the house, told me that NO, actually, that wasn't good enough. So the painting and scraping continued on for another 3 weeks past his initial visit, and was (hopefully in his eyes) finished this past weekend in a marathon burst of extreme Hard Work and Extreme Heat. Not to mention a hydraulic lift that dangled me 30 feet in the air for hours on end.



Hello! I am Bactrim. I am an antibiotic. Quite useful if you have - for example - an extremely painful bladder infection caused by (probably) too much
stress & overexertion in extreme heat (see above comment).......




I am Vigamox. I am antibiotic eyedrops. Used for those of you who have searingly painful corneal ulcers in their right eyeball. Remember now, don't wear your contacts! Wear those lovely coke-bottle-thick glasses of yours that give you a pressure headache on either side of your temple after only 20 or so minutes of wearing, and which so cut off your vision that you cannot drive with them and so have to put your contacts back in against the eye doctor's orders!



And then yesterday it got Even Worse.


I am a dented car. This is what happens when an 18 year old with a sassy attitude and a total lack of respect for a stop sign and a blinking red light decides to exceed safe speed limits and crash right into the side of you. And then change her story and tell the police officer that she came to a full and complete stop at said stop sign and that in fact you (yes, you!) were the one who ran the red light. Luckily all evidence is quite clearly on the side of my version of things. But still. No fun.




Seriously, this has most definitely **not** been my month.


I think that this Slate Magazine guy has got the right idea and we should just skip August in entirety from now on out..........

Thursday, August 02, 2007

- Signed, Sealed, Delivered -


Today so far is a Very Good Day.

I woke up and almost immediately my ears were filled with the sound of massive giggles coming from my son as he and Peggers tickled each other on the bed and were generally Quite Silly. That's a stunningly good thing to wake up to.




Then I had a slice of the farmhouse oatmeal bread that I made on Tuesday smothered in creamy peanut-butter and a mug of ginger-peach black tea with a splash of milk for breakfast while I read the ending of Greenwitch. It wasn't bad. Not as good as The Dark Is Rising, but still not bad. The series is shaping up to be a decent way to work your way down from the crushing disappointment after finishing HP#7, if I do say so myself......


Then I came into work and packed my Sockpalooza package:


She hates yellow, and I've been teasing her for ages now that I was knitting her a pair of Tweedy-Bird yellow socks, so I couldn't resist covering up everything with this yellow tissue paper...





Absolutely anything and everything looks better packed in a nice basket, don't you think?


We have starting at the top and going counter-clockwise: finished sockpal socks (!), Tarantulas Gummies, a mini skein of sockpal pink yarn for darns or whathaveyou, a lavender sachet, some Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans, and a greeting card with a little note from me plus a printout of my blog page from the day I posted about signing up for Sockpalooza 4 in the first place. Dead center (hidden somewhat by the insanely-pink ribbon) is a lavender aromatherapy candle. Also scattered in the basket are some salt-water taffies from a local candy shop.


And last but not least, the all-important Care & Washing tag to let my Pal
know how to care for her pink lovelies.


Everything was carefully packaged up, sealed, addressed, and then stamped via Priority mail - and finally entrusted to Carl, my lovely local postmaster. As she's only over in PA I'm wondering how quickly this will in fact make it's way to her. I'd like to think Saturday, but I'm guessing in fact next Monday. Now all I can do is hope that the box doesn't get lost in transit and when the socks arrive and she pulls them out her face doesn't immediately fall with disappointment!!!!!

I showed the basket and contents to my two new co-workers and they both ooh'd and aah'd over the goodies and the socks - and the two of them were BOTH wearing pink shirts today - so there was no need to ask if they liked the colours! - so I took that as a good sign.

There is no new painting news to report, as I took a break this morning to not only eat breakfast but to also do the dishes and tidy up the house a bit - something that hasn't been done in nearly two weeks (the tidying, that is - dishes have been dutifully washed while painting was going on!) I also worked a bit more on my EZ Baby Surprise Jacket.


Pattern: BSJ from EZ's Opinionated Knitter
Yarn: Gedifra 'Dandy' in this insane yellow/green/purple colourway
Needles: Addi Naturas - size 7 - 4.5mm
Finished Size: 3Tish or thereabouts
Mods so Far: like many others, I've done a provisional cast-on so that I can add length to the sleeves as necessary once everything else is finished...

I started this Tuesday night and managed to get a good amount done yesterday evening while eating cheese fries out of a plastic baseball helmet, watching our local minor league baseball team play - and lose - over 7 innings. Good times. Tonight is the bi-monthly Boys Night In - where Peggers and his mates all congregate in our dining room until late in the evening - and while I shut the french doors between the dining room and living room and happily curl up on the couch and knit and watch DVDs or listen to books on CD. No idea what I'll be watching or listening to tonight, as we've no new Netflix DVDs to watch and I've seen all of the ones we already own, and I've listened and re-listened to every book on CD that we likewise own. Hmph. A visit to the public library might be necessary before I go home tonight. Oh shoot. They close at 5 PM tonight. Damn budgetary cutbacks! Looks like I'll be hitting the Redbox $1 DVD setup in the grocery store instead this time! (hmmmmmm........maybe I can get that monster bag of peanut M&M's that I've been craving ever since I read Franklin's comment about how peanut M&M's are his favorite movie food......)

Speaking of Franklin I was thrilled to see that there is a Dolores Devotees group in Ravelry - you can betcher' bottom skein that I ran right on over & joined that particular group as soon as I found out! Isn't the banner for it just fantastic???




.....and my day just keeps getting better & better! See what I found waiting this afternoon when I got back to my desk? It took the journals folks almost 10 weeks to have these sent off to the bindery, bound, and returned to me - but for less than $20 I now have four full years of Interweave Knits in sturdy, bound form safely at the ready for my reaching hand whenever I need them. Hooray to no longer hunting down that one last elusive issue, or finding that an issue was wrinkled and squashed underneath a pile of comic books, a pile of cooking magazines, or a large Tonka dumptruck!



Happy Weekend everyone - I'm home with the Munchkin starting tomorrow until Friday the 10th, so don't expect more than one post from me - if any - in that interim time. I'll be too busy painting the house, taking the little guy to the beach, and hitting the zoo to once again check out the Stinky Buffaloes!