Even-ing

Mood: OK
Hair: Not my crowning glory today, I'm afraid
Eyes: Really, officer, it's just allergies!
Listening to: The Chicagoland Speedway NASCAR race; would someone PLEASE take Kyle Busch OUT OF THE RACE?!?!?!

So I got our bathroom thoroughly cleaned today, as well as all the ceiling fan-blades in the house. Sparky & I went and ran some errands; he drove most of the way. I've spent several hours cleaning up Bloglines feeds and going through old posts on this blog. I probably deleted about 10 that had completely dead links and/or stupid stuff, and I rewrote several. Hey, it's my blog: I make the rules. ;-) I rediscovered a thing I used to do called "Snappy Comebacks" that I may resurrect once in awhile.

I'm really tired, but determined not to go to bed until later than usual so perhaps I'll sleep all night long finally. I stopped drinking caffeinated pop at about 5. Normally I can drink Dr. Pepper until I crawl into bed. My plan was to watch as much of SNL as I could stomach tonight, until the comedy just totally disappeared. However, then I discovered that Mariah Carey is on, so I will watch until she appears, and then go to bed and read or something.

Oh. And I loathe Kyle Busch. In case you didn't get that up above.

Also, Brett shouldn't come out of retirement. He's thinking with something other than his brain. Stop that, dude!

---

Word Spy:

microboredom: n. Boredom caused by having nothing to do over a short period of time.

I think right now I'm experiencing a bit of microboredom in anticipation of work tomorrow.

We're home

Mood: Probably the best I've felt in months
Hair: In desperate need of professional help...or even shampoo!
Eyes: Good
Listening to: Beast snoring through the NASCAR race

I'd have written before now, but we were totally exhausted by the time we got home to stay last night and I worked all day today.

We are psyched, sunburned, and stunned from a wonderful week working with various urban ministry sites. There are some amazingly wonderful people doing some good work in Milwaukee to make life better for people who just need a leg up. Props to Raymond Rivera and Sister Clara Atwater to name just two.

Personal memory moments:

• blowing up at the site leader for arranging the smallest group to clean up the biggest post-dinner mess on the night with the least amount of clean-up time
• blowing up at two girls who were were standing precariously on a second-floor window-sill hanging up wet towels over Beast's C-pap (feet on my pillow and Bible, and pressing on the aged window glass for support...it was totally justified, but handled poorly)
• watching Sparky's eyes swell nearly shut after throwing mold around all day while cleaning out a flooded room (THANK YOU GOD for the nudge to pack a Large Bottle of Benadryl!!!)
• one of our girls' commitment to mentoring two younger girls on their faith walk
• realizing that I shouldn't EVER pay retail for a vase or coffee mug but should hit the resale shops because they have hundreds (they actually throw away coffee mugs they get so many!)
• being prayed over by a real saint
• gaining a son (by adoption)
• goofing with a fun(ny) guy who spends his day reclaiming gang-bangers of every stripe
• lying on a large flat rock baking on the beach after an hour of mid-morning walking on the edge of the water
• locking the keys in the car and crying over the situation
• being called a "day brightener" by one of the other adult leaders; apparently, our appearance at the worksite halfway through each day caused her to realize that she was going to survive. Not sure what that was about, but I do know that keeping her half of the group on-task was like herding spiders
• having sore feet EVERY DAY--hobbling for the first 10 minutes every morning, including today
• NOT having sore neck/shoulders
• watching all of our kids outshine so many others on the trip as they grew stronger in their faith and melded as a group
• growing my own faith, and learning some wonderful new songs
• so many others....

Now, I'm going to wake Beast up and tell him that if he's sleeping he should be in bed. :-)

---

Urban Word:

fake the funk: (v.) To act with a false ethos surrounding oneself in an attempt to win respect from a certain influential party.

I'm not cynical, just realistic: I wonder how many kids were faking the funk this week. Time will tell, I guess.

Shopping

Yes, I went shopping today. Surprisingly, this was not my idea. I hope you all read that with an appropriatly dry tone of voice. The people with whom I went shopping got quite upset with one another at one point. This was not a comfortable event. They smoothed it over, and we carried on, but it put a damper on things.

I spent about $100, including lunch and some Christmas prezzies.

My feet are tired tonight from walking around cobblestones in one of those "quaint" recovered 19th-century town-center kind of shopping areas. The whole place smelled of apple-cider donuts. I didn't eat OR buy any. That should shock the hell out of everyone! heh (I don't care for lines, and there was a line to buy them.)

I'm thinking about going back to get something I spotted, if I don't come up with a better idea for a gift for that person. Amy, wanna come with? There's a tea shop(pe) I'd like to check out.

Meanwhile, at home, Beast finished the other closet floor (and the laundry), and Sparky shut his finger in the car door (aside from some minor surface damage on the tip of his finger, he's fine). My clothes are all back in the bedroom hanging where they belong.

Next up: painting the bedroom walls. And finding throw rugs. I really want something like these, but I can't find them anywhere except in England.
Boo.
No. Really: booooooo!

Anyone have access to kilim rugs with Greek dolphins on them? Seriously. I'm just looking for smallish area rugs. Let me know if you have any ideas for where to check. I'll go with something else if I have to, but not with good grace!

So that's my day. I'm going to bed now, in hopes of a major enough freeze tonight to kill anything pollen-y so I can be outside again.

I have to work tomorrow afternoon. Ick. But I can't complain, seeing as how I haven't worked for two days. Plus, after next weekend, I don't work Fridays or Saturdays for the rest of the month.

Good night.

Itch itch itch

Yesterday's youth group activity was picking up garbage along the road near our church. We are fun, aren't we? Hey, we had prizes at the end. And we fed them well before we left.

And now I have a fall sunburn on my face (gotta love tetracycline!) and matching mosquito bites on my biceps. I kid you not: one on each arm, in exactly the same place. And they itch. A lot. Almost as much as my eyes.

Today I'm trying not to stare at the computer, and I'm trying to take lots of breaks and accomplish things (like laundry, and grocery shopping), and listening to music on XM. The latter has proven frustrating because of the whole radio rotation thing. I've heard the Klaxons' "It's Not Over Yet" three times, and several other songs twice. I do not like repeats. Once a day (once a week!) is sufficient for most songs!

My project today is updating my "Favorite Authors" list. Haven't done that since 2004-ish, and there are a few new names I have to go back and plug in.

My life = thrilling, eh?

The fun things that have developed are that Sparky is trying to figure out if he's going to the Homecoming dance in a couple of weeks, and my brother & sister-in-law will be in the area at the end of October. Plus, Thursday is The Big Concert for Sparky and Beast. I have to work (shucky-darn).

...all week...

I worked all day, my full hours, one day this week. Every other day I was supposed to work, I came home. My eyes, especially my right eye, look like this: And they hurt. And today my vision clouded over every time I tried the old "cool compress" method of reducing the annoyance.

Fuck it. I can't sit at the reference desk with my eyes closed, which is about the only thing that brings relief. So I'm hoping the Rx my doctor calls into the pharmacy helps over the weekend. This is getting tiresome, no pun intended.

Poor, poor, pitiful me.

Profitable day?

It's almost 10 p.m. I've been up since about 5:30 a.m. For most of that 16-hour period, my eyes have been killing me. They are red, blood-shot, incredibly sore. I am either having a bad case of allergy-eye, or pink-eye. Since I've never had pink-eye in my life, I'm betting on choice #1. They have been sore, getting sorer for most of the weekend.

So, what did I do today with my sore eyes? Sparky and I watched approx. 12 episodes of CSI: Miami (Season 2). This is a bit like eating 8 slices of cheesecake in one day (I'd imagine--having never actually done the cheesecake thing!). Damn, I'm tired of dead bodies and David Caruso.

We also went to Borders and the grocery store, the former for game-coding books (long story, the short version of which is we only wrote down ISBNs), the latter for enough food to get us through the week. We were gone for about an hour. I'm a little afraid to be seen in public: I look like I'm a stoner.

And from about 11 till about 4, I was trying to upload our vacation photos from the laptop to Snapfish. WTF?! I did manage to get copies of our Minnesota trip photos ordered from them before I started having trouble. I also purchased a few Official Wedding Photos ($70, ahem, all 4 x 6" siz...racket, much?). So, yeah, still haven't ordered our wedding photos or vacation photos, from Snapfish. We took over 350 pictures. I love digital cameras, but damn! That's a smackdown. I'll see if I can get my act together and order them...uh...sometime soon.

And since you asked--right?!?--here are a few favorites from the vacation part of our trip last month:

Some major awesomeness of mountains pictures (well, I am a mountain girl, after all!).
This was taken in Kentucky... ...this was western Virginia......and here are the Smokies.
Our (rental) car had an outside temperature gauge. These two photos were taken almost exactly two days, and about 100 miles, apart. We all would have preferred an average of the two, I think!

The good news on the hot day is that we weren't having to wear "authentic historical" costumes from the Civil War Era. That would be...wool.

We stopped at a rest area at about 10 a.m. one day, and this was the view in the vehicle next to us. "This little piggie went to market..."
And frankly, this little piggy is now going to do what those little piggies in the picture are doing...sleep.

Good night.

Bullets

• More bad news about our neighborhood: our rather questionable neighbors--diagonially across the street from us--had both their cars towed Thursday afternoon. We haven't seen much of them this weekend, so we're not sure what that's all about.



• My allergies...suck. The semi-amusing part is that I look high (as in pothead-high) almost all the time now. Yay. (or not)



• Just received some not-that-great news from a friend that means I'll be picking up some bloggy slack. It shouldn't affect this site at all, but the news is disturbing.



• It was a depressing, wintry-looking day outside today. Yuck. Good thing the people we saw were worth the trip! I don't even think we hit 70 degrees outside.



• Beast is going out of town this week. Again. But only for a couple of days.



• Speaking of Beast, there's a funny post about The Beast (not mine, the Big One) here. It was funny enough to get my Beast to write a comment--for like the third time ever!



• The run up to the school year commences for Sparky this week: Thursday physical, Friday pep-band rehearsal (also the following Monday and Tuesday), orientation...uh, sometime (too lazy to go look at the calendar). Where did the summer go? Into assorted video screens, that's where.



• What do YOU call those dots at the front of each of these points??

What's up?

I am very tired tonight, and I forgot to take my allergy meds this morning. I look like a pothead around my eyes.

That's all.

How addicted am I?

Very. VERY addicted to the laptop.

I noticed at the end of the previous post that I was nearly out of battery power. Odd, I thought I was plugged in. Actually, I was plugged in! WTF. Let the plug-wiggling commence, to no avail. I called Beast and apprised him of the situation, and of the fact that his son is a giant, neon-lit doofus-head (not related directly to the laptop issue, just a little chunk of trivia for fun).

Six weeks ago I had to run to Circuit City and purchase a replacement power cord for this machine. The original one had been closed in the recliner, or twisted, or stretched, one time too many and was no longer functional.

Tonight we took the replacement cord back--after Beast checked it with his magical electrical-current-checking tools and found that it was not sending current past the large battery-ish box. They let us exchange it for a (less-expensive) new one. The battery is now full again.

Unfortunately, this cord ALSO requires a great deal of wiggling to get it to work. In fact, the only position it actually completes the circuit and charges the computer battery is with something holding the cord in place on a flat surface. Ergo, I'm back to typing on battery power. Something is apparently wrong inside the plug itself.

Could it be that I've used the computer up??

In any case, it's going to mean a call to Geek Squad, or someplace similar, and a lot shorter bursts of 'creativity' (or work) from me.

This was quite annoying today, because using the desktop to access the stuff I had planned to do today for work just isn't feasible. It's too old and slow for the sites I intended to use. I simply click around too fast (I was told that by a tech about three years ago at work when my PC there kept freezing up).

As I told Beast: it's bad enough when the best-laid plans gang aft a-gley at work, but I expect my schedule to be more-or-less my own on my days away from work. It's been quite a frustrating week.

Tomorrow, I'm back at work. Beast has torn his car apart tonight in preparation for replacing all the brakes (not 'breaks'--though something has apparently broken, which accounts for the muttering 45 minutes ago...). That means he wants to take me to work tomorrow so he has a vehicle to drive in case he needs to make a run to the parts store.

Oh, and allergies? They've been better all week, till today. Today I spent the day in a room FILLED with dust: our office. I need to get out the environmental jumpsuit, face mask and ventilator and go in and CLEAN in there!!

Ahem...testing...

...is this thing on?

Yes, I'm still around, as those of you who check in the memespot know, but I haven't posted anything here because it's all been whiny weird stuff about Harry Potter and cataloging and being buried in cataloging, and being cranky in general.

Tonight we had a big thunderstorm. Not big enough to cause major power issues, but we did lose power once completely and had several "dips" in power throughout the evening. Fun storm. Very loud. Good rain for the corn (oh, I forgot to mention allergies up above) and other growing things.

So, what's on my mind? My brain feels like week-old corned-beef hash. I can't make anything out of it, there are parts that seem suspiciously like mold, but they are adhered firmly to things that I know I still can use, no--NEED to use!--but really the whole bucket should be slung out, scraped clean, and started fresh.

I hate to leave you with that rather dire image, so I'll just point to the left at a new toy I added to the page. After some...bizarre...testing, it seems to work, but I'm not sure how secure it is. In other words, what you type may be visible to others. Or not. I know that if I'm online, I'll see you right away; and if I'm offline, I'll get an archived post.

And now I've got this song stuck in my mind, so I need to go find something to replace it. Did ya'll know there's actually a place called Slumgullion Pass?

Sweet dreams everyone.

What I did with my holiday day

I wrote a letter of recommendation. I used l-o-n-g words. I said wonderful things, which were actually TRUE and therefore easy to come up with.

I went to the Memorial Day Parade. Sparky marched in it, it was a lovely (PERFECT) day for it, and it's more meaningful--and shorter--than the parade that is part of the Celebration of a Character in a Comic. That parade is next month, in lieu of a 4th of July parade. Don't get me started.

Because if you get me started, this may happen:

{knock-knock} Hello? {knock-knock} Roll your window down? Thanks. Hey, I'm super-glad you came to the Memorial Day parade today. I'm glad you fitted out your kids with plastic grocery bags so they could beg for candy from the people in the parade; that meant I had virtually no candy thrown at me, and that's nothing but good. But you know what? You parked in the library's employee parking lot. You aren't an employee; I am, but hey, I'm cool with that since the library is closed. It's good that you parked your SUV and walked that block over to J street to sit on someone else's lawn and drop cigarette butts and candy wrappers there. It's a nice day for that sort of thing, if you like that sort of thing.

But here's the thing, yo: the parade that finished passing you over there just now? Yeah, that one. It comes back down Library Street about 20 minutes later to finish up. And, here's the thing: there's only one exit from the lot where you parked. The exit is onto Library Street. Which has Girl Scouts and pony carts and kids playing trombones and flutes in it. You know: in the parade. For another 20 minutes. So, guess what: you can't get out of the parking lot, like, till the parade is, uhm, OVER?! Where exactly do you need to be in Teh Big Hurry? It's a holiday. The race was yesterday.

And, yo, gas? It's $3.65/gallon? So, like, your exhaust--which is blowing the face of that old lady you pulled up next to--is like, GREEN. Money-green. But it still stinks. The weather, yo? It's about 65 and breezy, with low humidity and No Sun, thus negating the necessity of using your AC.

Hello? Are you listening? No, I didn't think so. Is this clearer? TURN OFF YOUR GODDAMN ENGINE!! GET OUT OF YOUR CAR!! MAKE NICE WITH PEOPLE, WAVE AT THE NICE VETERANS (take off your hat, you moron, when the flag passes), AND FUCKING RELAX!!!

Oh, so now I'm the crank? Yeah. OK.

Actually, it was a lovely day, this was just a minuscule part of it, but I don't feel good (see the previous post) and thre were two girls next to us, both probably 10 years old, who were openly panhandling (only with bags) for candy, totally working the street. Meanwhile a little preschool-aged Hispanic girl on the other side of us was being completely passed over because she was polite and shy.

We stopped for lunch, and when we got home I slept for an hour, took a shower and then wrote the aforementioned letter. And memed. And now I'm going to Sim.

Maybe my head will actually explode and put me out of my family's misery today.

Why my head hurts today

But they are so tiny!

It sucks that something so cute can make me feel so lousy.

All I ever do....

I had the weirdest dreams last night. I don't remember any of them, really, but the overlying theme seemed to be showering.

What?

Yes, showering. I'm not sure why. I don't feel particularly dirty. I don't smell particularly bad (and I slept on the couch last night, so it's not Beast, either--my allergies are playing havoc with my ability to lie flat AND breathe, plus I had too much DP too close to bedtime last night).

So. I guess I'll take a shower this morning, but I'm anticipating that weird dream-déjà-vu feeling to completely weird me out.

Time keeps on passin'

(name that tune)

Yeah. Been at work nearly two hours.

Today was the day to shift stuff around on the counters as we reorg our "ILL Department" (insert snort here). They haven't been cleaned in about 7 years. Dust much? My eyes are now completely out of control: itching, burning, clogging up....

I'm just starting on the cataloging part of my job. And I have refused to put on one of these damn purple bracelets, at least for today. It's a good theory, but at the rate things have gone today I'll develop carpal tunnel switching the damn thing every 30 seconds!

Headphones: going on. Mood: improving, I hope.

Woe, Temperature and Internet

We've been fighting both battles this weekend. It was -20 at the end of the Super Bowl last night; this morning, according to the local news we stood at -9 with a wind chill of -31!

To make life more fun, all weekend it has taken me 10 tries ("refresh" "refresh" "refresh"...) to get ANYthing to come up on Explorer. Yes, I know, but I think it was our ISP having issues with the cold, not Microsoft having issues with reality. Everything seems fine now. {shrug} Who knows.

Spent the day with Katherine today. At lunchtime, I got a call on my cell phone from the school: Sparky was at the nurse's office. So a mad scramble to call someone here to pick him up while I dealt with what I needed to do with Katherine. Sparky came home and slept for two hours, and I just got home about 45 minutes ago. He seems fine; I think he's suffering from Too Much Chili and Not Enough Sleep Syndrome and will be perfectly fine tomorrow. I hope.

Beast is on his way to Orlando for a conference/trade show. My heart bleeds for him! Actually, I do feel sort of bad since his original flight was cancelled, and he spent about 5 hours sitting in the airport getting the plan reorganized and being bored. He's concerned that his suitcase may be on its way to Spain or Albuquerque or someplace.

Other stuff happened this weekend, too, but I'm tired (4 hours of sleep last night) and not feeling all that great (cats...feh!). I've got 90 feeds to catch up in Bloglines....

Yay COLTS!!

Bullets

• The sorting of baby stuff is done. Now Katherine and Alan need to work out exactly what should be returned.



• His mother called me last night and I didn't lose my temper. Thank God for voice-only phones! And a mute button, though I didn't need to use it last night.



• It took me 15 minutes to fully wake up in the living room this morning. Gaaahhhh, I don't want to do anything but go back to bed. I think I'll be ok, but I'm T-I-R-E-D.



• How do cats know I'm allergic to them?!?



• I had a very weird dream about work, during which MAS was leading a meeting of Our-Part-of-the-Consortium's catalogers, minus those who don't need to come anymore and those who are too afraid of Brownie to return. During the meeting we were told that only water was allowed at meetings and absolutely no food. She came and picked up Amy's banana peel as an example. At the end of the meeting, I discovered she had brought her dog, and I sort of went ballistic about the fact that I'm allergic to them (the words "I could die!" were part of the conversation--hyperbole much?) and it didn't seem fair to ban soda and coffee but have a dog in the room. I also remember saying under my breath, "This is bullshit." The dream ended with her leaving, and me tearing up the folders we'd been given during the meeting, and my notes.
  
  I wish I could say that this is far-fetched. Symbolic, yes; far-fetched, no. Sigh.



• Beast is driving all over the frozen north for the rest of the week doing sales calls. Pray for no snow, though his rental this week is an SUV.



• Talked to a good friend last night for the first time in months. Her marriage is a nightmare, has been for several years. However, new depths have been reached, and she has decisions to make that just suck. There aren't really any good choices available. Mostly, her husband needs to be taken to the woodshed and soundly spanked.



• Marie and Jan (sister and bro-in-law) are back home safe and sound.



• I gave blood yesterday, and for the first time ever, I beat Beast, finishing in less time than him! Small victories....



• Session meeting tonight. I need to rewrite the minutes. Yuck.



• We had an ambulance across the street one night last week. They left with the wife. We are worried that he beat her up. I don't know if she's ever come back. I hate winter; no one's outside to "run into" and ask what's going on.



• I need to stop the self-destructive behaviors I've picked back up: eating nothing but sugar, and biting my fingernails down to the quick. The sugar messes up my GI tract badly, and my fingers hurt. They also look fugly.

But mostly right now what I need to do is get ready to leave for work. Oh yippee.

Infected

All week, I've been waking up with severe cold symptoms which abate by mid-morning. Last night, I woke up at 12:15 in the early stages of an asthma attack, with my head fully plugged up. I was fine when I went to sleep a couple of hours earlier.

I had been wondering all week, but last night cinched it: something allergenic has been in/on/around my bed. I'm not sure if it's cat dander from Katherine and Alan's, where we were after the funeral Saturday, or if it's "just" dust blowing up from the furnace (the duct is just behind my head when I'm lying down), or even dust under the bed. SOMEthing. [It's been a bad bed week: I've also somehow managed to shred one of the pillowcase hems, tearing it loose and creating a wonderful place to get my arm stuck so that I wake up flailing about like a maniac, with a pillow attached to my arm.)

Fortunately, the penny finally dropped. I got up, took a Benedryl and came downstairs to spend the night in the recliner. And that's where I still am, blanketed, robed, and warm. I don't want to get up.

My clock radio alarm is playing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" upstairs, doing it's best to wake me up. What did wake me up is my cell phone vibrating off the end-table next to me this morning. I always forget to unmute it when I set the alarm....

I have to get moving. There's a Reference staff meeting this morning.