Sunny Saturday in Congestionland

I got out of the house today, which felt like a major accomplishment after yesterday. Yesterday, I hit the trifecta:

• I have a cold, with major congestion and lethargy;
• I have my period, complete with cramps;
• I got a headache, probably from watching too much TV (since I didn't do much of anything else).

Woo-hoo! I win! Wait...

I don't have much of a headache today, but otherwise, not much has changed since yesterday. Still, I went out! I didn't do much, and I'm even more tired now, but I saw this:


And this:


And maybe tomorrow will be better. I have to tell you, I'm sick of being sick, and tired of being tired. I had to get out of the house, because I'm surrounded by things I need to do, or want to do, and I don't have the energy to do any of them. My big accomplishment recently was running the dishwasher, and then emptying it (the next day). I'm sick of this. Thinking healthy thoughts, thinking healthy thoughts! (Also: Go Bruins, go Bruins!)

Worth 18 Thousand Words (I hope)

Although my cold is better today than yesterday, which is a good thing, the funeral really took it out of me. Even a nap after I got home hasn't really cleared the decks. (Though it was a very nice nap. Pan helped.)

So would you mind looking at the pretty pictures today? And maybe I can manage more coherent words tomorrow.

As I mentioned, this is a really good year for foliage. The last couple of years, driving to NY meant a lot of green. This year? Yellow, orange, gold, red ... gorgeous! I smiled a lot.


I like the end of this marker: "...Cooperstown is well known for its historical and folk museums and its baseball hall of fame."


I mean, its baseball hall of fame? Isn't it the Baseball Hall of Fame?

Maybe I have that wrong, we all know I'm a hockey fan, but I didn't think the one in Cooperstown is one of many.

Whatever. Pretty tree.


Now, let's get serious with the festival. It is a craft festival, but that doesn't mean fiber, for the most part. But, there are two alpaca farms with booths (seeing the repeat crafters every year is one of my favorite parts of the festival). I haven't even photographed the yarn I bought, so that will have to wait, but I did want to show the fiber-lovers that they would not be lost.







Don't you just want to sink your hands in? All that's from one vendor. There was a booth with wool (alas, not soft; you know my methods, Watson), but with some cute display objects:



Is the sheep sweater or the sheep blanket cuter?

The other vendor doesn't just bring yarn and so on, they bring the alpacas themselves.


Note the fan in the background, so the little dears don't overheat. (Remember, alpaca is warm.)

This has to be my favorite way to display a hat ever.


Now, my absolute favorite thing at the fair is the Fire Department's french fries. And this year, I got photographic evidence of why they are so good.

His right hand puts a potato in the machine. His left hand pushes down on the lever. French fries come out the bottom.


They're fresh, is what I'm saying. We even had to wait a minute for the latest batch to come out. Mmm.

So there was yarn, there was food, it was beautiful.


I believe I did indicate my word skills aren't up to much today.


Just look at the pretty pictures.



Then ponder this:


And this:


And tell me we don't live in a funny world.

Now I Know How Sir Edmund Hillary Felt

Yes, yes, climbing Everest, big accomplishment. But I went to the grocery store! Even though I'm sick! Which meant putting in my contacts, showering, and driving!

Okay, so it's not as big as climbing Everest. It only felt that way. I know I'm a little light-headed. But not only did I get food, the funniest thing happened at the store.

I bought more cold medicine, and I was carded for it!

Honestly, what is the world coming to? That a vague-eyed, runny-nosed, middle-aged person at a Foodmaster wants to buy name-brand Dayquil, and has to show ID for it? He punched something into the register! Like I might be abusing the decongestant, and need to be stopped.

Actually, he mumbled an apology as he did it. I told him it was all right, I thought it was funny. Although I suppose pretty soon, the junk-food police will require me to show ID to purchase my Ben & Jerry's, or make me choose between ice cream and pudding. You know they won't listen to my excuses, either ("But I'm sick! I need lots of smooth, easy-to-swallow foods!").

Does anyone else remember that joke that was going around by e-mail, about buying pizza in the future? Where they're cross-checking your bank balance and your cholesterol reports?

Anyway, my real question is this: if I have to buy more cold medicine in a few days (though I will NOT need to, because I will be feeling better, right? Right??), should I go to another store? Do you think they're coordinating this information-gathering with CVS? I'd hate to get hauled away for overdoing the drugs.

I'm certainly not going to see the Yarn Harlot tonight, which is a shame but not the end of the world. I'll be crapped out on the couch, trying to focus on the Bruins game. I may lie down for a while first, if there's room on the bed.

2 PM:

4PM:

Yes, they really did get off the bed in between. But not for long...

Different Kinds of Crazy Here

There's what you have after a trip: mail, newspapers, pile of random stuff you didn't deal with before you went away, wilted flowers, stuff in the fridge that should have been thrown out.

There's the stuff related to the sick cat: medications, pill shooter, canned cat food and jars of baby food, notes from the pet sitter.

There's the return detritus: bags to be unpacked, cooler to be put away, where's the camera.

There's the satellite of sickness: chicken noodle soup, medications, dishes that need to go in the dishwasher, pan from the scrambled eggs.

Then there's realizing that you might not be well enough to go see Stephanie tomorrow night, but not having the energy to get too worked up about it.

There's being determined to be well enough to go to the funeral of a friend's father, on Thursday morning. As long as I'm not coughing ... I don't want to be a disruption.

There have been a lot of naps here. I even had bed spins this afternoon. Very strange sensation: part of my body knows that I'm lying perfectly still, just breathing, but there's a part of my body that is positive I'm spinning round and round.

Looking on the bright side: I don't have to call in sick anywhere. I always hate that, I always feel like I don't sound sick. I've never in my life called in sick to work when I wasn't sick, I'm too superstitious and sure I'd get a migraine as soon as I did, but still, I feel like they don't believe I'm really sick.

There's remembering how glorious the trees looked this weekend. More on that later. Going to lie down now.

I'm Home...

...and I'm sick.

So, that's all for now. Back when I'm better.

More cat; plus, going out of town

Since Pan has lost so much weight during the recent episode (How To Drive Your Mother Crazy In One Simple Step: Stop Eating*), he's a little wisp of a cat, and I've been concerned that with the change in seasons, he's not warm enough. Example of this: he used to want to get under the covers with me at night, but would then come out in five minutes, or one minute, because he hates to have anything brushing his ears. Now, he'll go under the covers, snuggle down, and stay for an hour. Or two.

*Optional step two: resume eating, but eat very, very little. Watch Mama go crazy!

So, I decided to splurge on a heated thing for him, to see if he liked the idea.




I think he likes it.

Now if I can just get him to eat more...

I'm leaving tomorrow for my annual trek to Apple Festival. Yay! Please excuse my absence for a few days. I'll try to bring back some pretty photos, if nothing else.

Autumn is Coming. All right, it's Here.

Fall is really coming in. When you're in the sun, it can be pleasant, even warm out, but there's that chill breeze coming around the corner to remind you that yeah, winter's coming.

I like Fall, just not what it portends. But winter will come no matter how I feel about it, so I try to enjoy autumnal weather even when it comes after a summer of Not Enough Hot for Me.

I'm not the only one in snuggle mode around here. There's an awful lot of this going on.


The last of the summer flowers are in transition.


And the trees! It may be my favorite part of Fall.





I just love it. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

AP 0, Boston Globe 0

And the Associated Press screws the Globe, which doesn't even notice.

Kessel, Bergeron score in shootout for Bruins' win

October 5, 2008

WASHINGTON—Phil Kessel and Michael Bergeron scored shootout goals, carrying the Boston Bruins to a 5-4 win against the Washington Capitals on Sunday night that wrapped up each team's preseason schedule.

Who is Michael Bergeron? There are currently two Bergerons in the NHL. Marc-Andre plays for Minnesota, and Patrice is the Bruin. You know, Patrice Bergeron, my favorite player? Hello?

I give credit to Fluto Shinzawa, one of the Globe's hockey writers, who of course got it right in the Bruins blog. But I hope either the AP or the Globe corrects the other one. Sheesh.

Sunday, Lovely Sunday

Wow, where to start? Things are looking up so much today, it's almost daunting to describe. But I shall remain undaunted!

Pan has continued to eat throughout the day. This afternoon, I offered him a Pill Pocket, his former friend that he scorned of late, and he ate it right up. Ahhh. The little sweetheart. He's also been sleeping deeply today, making me realize that while he's been resting a lot lately, it was not so much sleeping. He slept on my lap a couple of times today, for probably 2-3 hours altogether. I smiled at him fatuously.

Face against his soft thing, aka what I thought was going to be my fleecey jacket.

And watched Animal Planet. I like watching Animal Cops and Animal Precinct, with a cat around to remind me of happy endings, but the last few weeks, I couldn't handle. Today, we're back in business.

Last night, I had dinner with a few friends, to celebrate my birthday, and it was a lovely evening even before I came home to a cat who would eat again. We had a yummy lasagna, with salad and bread (note to my mother: it tasted like Purity bread!), and then a special dessert:


Chocolate mousse cake, with hazelnut shortbread crust, and chocolate ganache.

And they sent the leftovers home with me. Oh, yes, they did. And I didn't even try to politely decline. Nope.

Two of my friends gave me flowers, which went together beautifully, though flower arranging is not my best thing.



Speaking of flowers, I did finish the ones I was knitting for Grandma. Eight altogether:


I'm pleased with the way they turned out, and they were fun to make, too. And hopefully she'll like them!

In other, really exciting knitting news, my mother, my darling, delightful, thoughtful mother, sent this for my birthday:


My very own swift and ball winder. I called her as soon as I finished winding, to let her hear the first rush of my enthusiasm, because heavens, it was so easy! It worked like a charm! I love this thing!

On the left, the sock yarn that I wound by hand, at stitch and bitch the other week, getting terribly tangled just at the end, and taking much deep breathing to remain calm during the untangling and unknotting. On the right, the fantastically neat and tidy yarn cupcake that was perfectly done in under five minutes.


Amazing. What will they think of next?

Oh, and by the way? The Bruins won their game today. It wasn't on TV (of course), but the radio stepped up for me. Go, WBZ! Go, Bruins in the shootout! Woo-hoo!

Now this is unrelated to anything, just to say what is the world coming to, and how the Globe has fallen, and other doom-and-gloom that is quite out of place in the tone of this entry. But I have to say it anyway. Do you see the error in this?


How about now?


What's that, Globe? Plumbling? I guess you could have laid off all the proofreaders, but doesn't anyone even run spell-check anymore?

And a final shot of Pan, just because.


He's eating again. And that is the best present I could ever get.

Although the swift and ball winder is a very close second.

Finally, a little good news

I wasn't going to post tonight, since I just got in and it's late and all, but I had to tell you, Pan ate something tonight. Do you know how huge that is? He hasn't eaten anything in, what, weeks? Yes, it's weeks. He seems perkier, too. Maybe, maybe...

Flowers in Bloom

I promised knitting, and knitting you shall see, my pets, but first Harold would like to tell you something.

Curly ribbon off someone else's presents makes a great toy.


Thank you.

Now, let me show you sock knitting progress. This photo was taken Saturday, so I've made slightly more progress since then, but essentially, here's where we are:


They're getting there, if slowly. I'm ready to move on, frankly, but after the last episode, I want a pair of finished socks already, so I soldier on. (Those socks are still in time out, but at stitch and bitch we discussed having a finish-it session where we bring in projects that are sooo close to being done and work on them, so perhaps I am almost ready to let them out again.) (Maybe.)

(By the way, see the DVD case in the lower left of the picture? Season 2 of The Muppet Show? The cover, Miss Piggy's face, is fuzzy. Fantastic.)

Meanwhile, there has been other knitting happening here, and unlike a certain Christmas-knitting-secret-secret project (motto: it's small, but it's secret!), I'm going to blog about it before presenting it. This is because I am quite certain that my 94-year-old grandmother, though she loves me dearly, couldn't find my blog if she had written instructions, and I'm sure if my aunt reads this, she can keep a secret for a week (right?).

It started when my grandmother broke her knee last month. From the hospital she had to go into a nursing home to recuperate and learn to move with the cast on, but as of today she's happily home again. When her release date was announced last week, I thought about sending her flowers, but then I had a better idea. Could one, perhaps, knit flowers? Hello, Ravelry?

The answer is yes.


They even look rather like tulips, the flowers I most often bring to Grandma.

I loved how clearly the pattern is written, and with step-by-step photos (and bilingual!). Knitters are awesome.

The picture above has one design modification from the pattern: I hadn't put pipe cleaners in the stems. At first, I wasn't planning to bother, since I'm putting the flowers in a little vase, but they flopped a bit, and I decided to try the pipe cleaners.

Or, as the label calls them, chenille stems. WTF?


(And why did the damned photo un-rotate? Is that Blogger or Picasa to blame? Either way, it pisses me off big-time.)

After pipe cleaners, the flowers stood up better, and it wasn't as fiddly to put them in as I had feared it would be. (I did choose the 3mm size, not 6mm, which I thought might be harder to thread through the I-cord.)

I found it surprisingly hard to make the camera understand where to focus, but you get the idea:


I think they're rather cute.


I finished another today, and I think one more will fill the space well.


I was originally going to mail them, but as I'll be there in person myself next week, I believe I will hand-deliver.

Perhaps I can finish it tonight, watching the debate. I don't know, do you think I can knit while playing Sarah Palin Bingo? Because that's really the only thing making me look forward to the debate, so knitting might have to take a rare back seat.

I Feel Like I Have Been Punched in the Eye

Which I kind of have. With a laser.

Not, however, a laser wielded by some interesting character in a sci-fi novel. By an eye doctor.

When I was at the eye doctor last week, he found a little tear in my retina. In the interest of keeping it from becoming a big tear in my retina, which could lead to a detached retina (and that just sounds bad), he proposed to "tack" down around it with the laser. Fun, right?

I would rate it as not quite as bad as the annual visit to the gynecologist, which is just about as miserable an experience as I ever hope to encounter*, but pretty close at the end. It got hard to sit still and take it, at the end. My eye feels sore and warm and what-happened, and it's still dilated two hours later, which I am ready to be done with. Though it isn't as bad as having both eyes dilated ... like last week.

*And you have to make yourself go, every year, and then they charge you for it! Talk about adding insult to injury. Being a responsible adult truly sucks sometimes.

Gosh, great day! For example, I just heard that NESN will, in fact, be showing another preseason Bruins game. Yay, right? Well, except that the game starts this Saturday at 4, otherwise known as the exact time I will be leaving my house for evening plans. Now, I recognize it isn't NESN's fault that I have plans that conflict with the game ... but could they show tonight's game, in freakin' Montreal? Apparently not. (Because the Sainted Red Sox are playing. Not that I'm bitter.)

Here's the thing. With all the crap going on in my life right now, my fuse is a lot shorter than usual (and usual is pretty darn short, I admit). Stupid little nothings drive me insane right now. I lose my temper much too easily right now.

So here's what I need. I need October to be better than September* was. Are you listening, October? I want you to promise.

*And by September, I'm really referring to the period from August 18th through yesterday.

Because October loves me.

October will be better! I am Visualizing it! It will happen! It's my birthday, and I'll be delusionally optimistic if I want to!

I will get a new job in October.

Pan will start eating again, for the love of god cat stop messing with me.

I will visit my grandmother for Apple Festival and find that she's recovering from her broken knee tremendously well.

All the other things I'm worried about will improve, or at least not get worse.

In October. Yes. It will all be better in October.

I have spoken.

P.S. Knitting tomorrow. Wait til you see the flowers!