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Sunday, October 2nd, 2011
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3:15 pm - Number Four
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| Thursday, September 8th, 2011
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5:03 pm - update on Secret Puppy
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The vet's news was bad; the MRI on Secret Puppy revealed that there seems to be a mass in his head blocking movement of spinal fluid and putting pressure on his brain (which may explain the tendency to walk circling toward his right that he was exhibiting even before he became weak). Treatment with massive doses of steroids or cancer-type chemotherapy might help the msss but hurt him enough in other ways not to be worth it. So all that can be done is to keep him comfortable at home where he doesn't have to be in a cage -- Lap of Love pet hospice is helping with that.
current mood:  resigned
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| Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
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5:16 pm - Unscheduled visit to Mom's
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Well, Mom called me up Monday morning to say her 13-year-old Australian Shepherd, Secret Puppy, had been in the animal hospital for a couple of days, and would I be willing to come stay with her a couple of days when he came home and help? (He may be old and sick but he still weighs more than 50 pounds; she can't lift him.)
She picked me up that evening with Secret Puppy in the back seat, and I carried him into Mom's house to his pillow bed. At first he could barely lift his head, but he did manage small amounts of water when we held him up. We couldn't get any food or medications into him though. (5 prescriptions despite no firm diagnosis.) Despite that, but the end of the evening he was struggling to his feet and taking a few steps before we could even get over to him to help him up.
Today, though, he still won't eat -- indeed, I acquired a small bite puncture on one thumb just trying to get him to open his mouth. And, unsurprisingly, he's weaker. Mom was at first firmly against taking him back to the animal hospital, because she's not much of a truster of any kind of hospital. However, it looked to Mom's boyfriend and me like an IV may be the only way to get some nutrients and strength into him. So we called the nearby vet but her location doesn't have an overnight facility, but she agreed about the IV. Now Mom's boyfriend is taking Secret Puppy back to the animal hospital, rather far away from Mom's house but closer to his own, for an IV overnight to hopefully get some liquid and calories into him and stabilize him at least until the neurologists reports back on the tests run during his first stay. Mom can barely stand to leave him but she's got her other dog, Amber, here (and I'm kinda glad she has that distraction, someone she loves at least as much as Secret Puppy). And me, but frankly we're a bit more awkward with each other than Amber is with people she loves.
So we're all emotionally wrung out and that isn't going to stop anytime soon but I'll deal with it.
current mood:  distressed
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| Thursday, December 10th, 2009
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5:48 pm - up and down in Disney rides and dentist chairs
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Last Saturday Jon and I went to EPCOT Center with his family (dad, siblings and their SOs, and Jon's little niece Katie). That was a very different experience than any previous visits to EPCOT, though I've been there a lot. Mostly with my mother, though, who is ride-aversive and regards the park as a giant shopping mall with an entrance fee. Not that the shopping can't be fun, but the last time I went on any rides at all was probably over a decade ago and most of them have been redone since then.
I'd also never been to any Disney parks with a small child (Katie is two and a half) -- she was as much entertainment as the park attractions. Particularly as you can't really predict what will fascinate her -- I think the polka band playing in the German buffet held her attention longer than anything else I saw.
Then after a few days of rest and working on holiday cards, I went to the dentist yesterday. It was just an ordinary filling this time, and I'm almost done with the stuff on the treatment plan they gave me in August. However, the one remaining big thing, the big hole in the upper right rearmost molar, has apparently gotten sufficiently worse since August that instead of "it needs a root canal and a crown -- or you could just have it pulled," the situation is now "there's a good chance it won't hold a crown; what's left of the tooth may crack and then you would have wasted your money getting the root canal and crown. You should just have it pulled." The pluses are that this can be done by the oral surgeon who comes to the regular dentist's premises every two weeks, rather than going to some orthodontist (who I had been putting off making an appointment with because there was so much to do at the regular dentist) at a different location. And it's cheaper. The minuses are that losing a tooth is kind of an extreme prospect, even if it is the farthest-back molar so there won't be a gap, and only half of its surface even contacted the lower molar when I chewed anyway. Expecially since Mom suffered some kind of damage after she had a tooth pulled some years ago and still has pain from it. (The oral surgeon I consulted with did not seem to think it was likely that anything like that would happen to me. This seems difficult to be sure of as the various medical people Mom has consulted cannot even figure out what the problem is.) I've made an appointment but not for a couple of months because my ride, Mom, and I both have holiday travel and stuff to occupy us in our time off for a while. So it's an "I'll think about it tomorrow" thing now.
(Current mood comes from fighting Facebook to play the stupid games I'm addicted to, not so much these other events.)
current mood:  frustrated
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| Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
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2:39 pm - Crowning achievement
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Well, I went to the dentist again today to get my temporary crowns replaced with permanent ones (with three-year warranty -- sounds a hint less than permanent when my life expectancy from now is at least forty). But these fit better than the temporary ones, in that they do not stick out farther than the neighboring natural incisor and slightly interfere with biting down, as the temps did. And this took a lot less time than either the root canal appointment or the making-impressions-for-permanent crowns did, even though there was again a bit of difficulty removing the temporary crowns. I feel tired, as I was tense and slept badly last night, but my mouth feels fine.
Mom had to bring her dogs in the car to pick me up, as the air conditioning at her house is not working. In her eyes, leaving two thick-furred Australian shepherds in an un-air-conditioned Florida house would not be much better than leaving them in a closed car, and given how ovenlike I used to consider Mom's house, I can't really complain. Secret Puppy was all anxious and whining on the way to the dentist -- in his experience, when he, Mom, and Amber come and pick me up, it usually means we're starting the long trip to Granddaddy's, which he hates. Mom's tension about getting the AC repair person to show up this afternoon and mine about the dentist may have reinforced his anxiety. Amber might have picked up on my tension too but she acted completely differently, licking my arm and nosing under my hand to get me to pet her. She didn't do that on the way back when I was in a great mood just to have the crowns over and done (though I've got ordinary fillings to get through in November). And getting to hang out with Mom's boyfriend and Mom while I was actually at the dentist must have persuaded Secret Puppy that it wasn't going to be the long trip today; he wasn't whining on the way back either.
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| Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
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9:11 pm - As seen on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) eschewv
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* Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive.
* No captions. It must be like we're speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words.
* They must ALREADY be on your hard drive - no googling or flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you've saved there because it resonated with you for some reason.
* You do NOT have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don't want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.
( Read more... )
current mood:  accomplished
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, July 5th, 2009
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11:24 pm - Has it been two years already?
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Two years and two months, actually, since the last time I had all my hair cut off to donate to Locks of Love. Mostly just because I'm lazy and cheap and this gives me an excuse to do nothing with my hair except get a free haircut at Great Clips when the hair has grown long enough to donate. I expect I'll keep doing it until I have too much gray hair for them to want it.
In the past, the salon has kept the ponytail and mailed it in themselves, I suppose to keep the person getting a free haircut from doing something else with the hair. They now seem to be avoiding doing the work/spending the postage of sending it in, so I get to do so. I might stage silly Rapunzel-type pictures with stuffed animals first . . .
On the other, more annoying side, my mom prodded me to make a dentist appointment with the dentist she's been seeing for a while, because I haven't been to one in years, and Mom likes this one (a great rarity; she's had a lot of trouble with dentists over the years). She said she would take me to his office, as transportation (along with money) has been one of the major obstacles to me doing to the dentist in the past few years. But the damage to one of my front teeth is getting quite visible, so I was prepared to run up some credit card bills for the sake of still having that tooth as I aged. Now Mom e-mails from my grandfather's in North Carolina that she won't be back in time to take me to the appointment, due to a forecast of weather she doesn't want to drive in and her reluctance to leave Granddaddy alone. Jon is already scheduled to work Thursday (and we're a bit short-staffed at work due to a co-worker giving birth, so he probably wouldn't be able to arrange time off). So now that I've been steeling myself for seeing the dentist and hearing how horrible my mouth is, that appointment will have to be postponed. Curses . . .
current mood:  light-headed
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| Thursday, June 25th, 2009
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8:11 pm - Stupid digital television. Stupid cable companies.
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There are two PBS (Public Broadcasting System) television stations in the Tampa Bay area, WEDU and WUSF. The latter is associated with the University of South Florida and broadcasts (among other programs) some TV courses for USF, as well as a lot of locally made shows that aren't on WEDU, which shows more of the nationwide PBS stuff. The general manager of WUSF said in the Tampa Tribune that "a recent study showed WUSF and WEDU had less than a 13 percent overlap with duplicate TV programs."
OK, obviously Jon and I don't watch a huge amount of WUSF (but we do watch it sometimes) because we just discovered this today: Bright House, our cable company, on Friday the 12th changed the channel that formerly showed the station to a blue screen with text saying the station is "no longer available" unless viewers upgrade their package to a (more expensive) digital tier or rent an extra converter box for $1 per month. The company says in the USF Oracle that "The change follows a national agreement made in November between the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS)," and the Bright House web site says "Customers will continue to receive one PBS network in analog format, WEDU." -- as if all PBS stations show exactly the same stuff.
It's not that $1 per month is a huge amount to pay for the converter box, but we were told throughout all the build-up to US TV broadcasts going digital that paying for cable already meant that we didn't need any additional equipment. Also, Jon tells me there would have to be adapters involved in hooking the box up with our TiVo and it would likely interfere with recording stuff -- he said just looking at the technical instructions made his eyes glaze over. Imagine the situation someone less tech-savvy (say, my mother, whose microwave clock I have to reset every time I visit) would be in trying to deal with installing this cheap converter.
I don't understand, frankly, why the public TV stations agreed to let cable companies do this "pick one station" thing (I thought the whole point of public TV was to widen the range of stuff on TV from what the commercial channels showed), but I guess it wasn't a problem that concerned the ones in areas where there aren't two PBS stations available, and those were probably enough to swing the vote. The Sarasota Herald-Tribute notes that the Tampa stations aren't alone:
"A similar situation has occurred within the past two weeks in the Washington, D.C., area, with Maryland Public Television. Two Delaware counties served by Comcast also have been affected. In Sussex County, Del., Comcast analog customers -- those who subscribe to limited basic or expanded basic cable -- have lost a PBS affiliate, and Comcast subscribers in New Castle County, Del., have lost the ability to view a Philadelphia PBS station."
The USF Oracle says WUSF is not even visible to some in the USF dorms and I'd have to agree with their position that the University's television channel should be available in the University's dorms, at most a couple of blocks from WUSF's studios. But at least Tampa subscribers to cable TV provider Bright House Networks are better off than the people who live south of Tampa Bay, who are apparently charged $52.50 per month if they want to upgrade to a new level of service that gets WUSF, as opposed to $16.95 for the level that used to have both PBS stations but now only has WEDU. (Note that this article from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune is two months old and seems to believe that Tampa's cable company was keeping WUSF on the basic cable roster. But that backs up the WUSF general manager's statement in the Oracle that "Bright House informed WUSF of the change shortly prior to the digital transition, which made it difficult to inform the station’s viewers."
And the Tampa Tribune says the two stations were feuding on their own, even before the cable companies started picking and choosing. Le sigh.
current mood: frustrated
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| Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
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4:04 pm - Nothing much going on today . . .
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I've been at my dad & stepmom's house nearly a week; the visit was in June instead of my usual August because my brother graduated from high school last Saturday and I wanted to attend the ceremony. That was actually the first graduation I've been to that wasn't one of my own (high school, bachelor's, and master's), but it was pretty much the same except for not having a robe over my dress clothes. Given that this is June in South Carolina and the ceremony started at noon, that was rather a blessing. My own high school graduation, while in June in Florida, was at least in the evening, and my other two were in early May and the weather was less oppressive.
I don't spend all that much time fighting the Computer of Little Power that the family has, and when I do sit down and verify that I still can't even get my Yahoo! mail account to load (but luckily my Gmail one works) and all the other things that either won't work at all or that I don't have the patience to wait for, it's usually right before bed. The rest of the time I'm working on a crewel embroidery purse from a kit I found in my late Grandmother Lonon's craft supplies; there's no date on the kit but somewhere around my age would not surprise me. I think some of the yarn colors may have faded. There are about twenty different stitches in the pattern and I've never done crewelwork before, so it's going slowly compared to knitting or cross-stitching or even needlepointing, but doing something different is always interesting.
Reading lots of science fiction/fantasy, between my dad's broad F&SF collection and my stepmother's vampire paperbacks, writing a few letters, doing puzzles in a book of puzzles that sylvar gave me around two years ago, playing with the dog and the cats and the baby kitten; I won't go quite so far as to say I'm bored, but nothing massively attention-drawing is going on. With any luck my step-cousin did not pass on strep throat to any of us when she, her twin, and their mother came for the graduation (it was the day after they all got home that we got the call to say "oh, she's sick now") and no other things that are interesting-in-a-bad-way will happen.
current mood:  indifferent
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| Sunday, May 17th, 2009
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1:23 pm - thingies
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I'm motivated to post because some non-noder felt the need to e-mail me most rudely about my E2 writeup [Chacun a son gout] to castigate me for using plural pronoun "their" with singular "each." I don't expect that the sort of person who tells strangers that they obviously "don't know any language, including English," would actually listen to me pointing out that "their" has been used as a singular for centuries in cases where English speakers need to refer to a person of non-specified gender, so I'm bitching here instead.
In other updatery, housesitting for Mom while her kitchen was redone was boring but ultimately satisfying in that Mom said multiple times that I was a "lifesaver." And she gave me money too. The kitchen work, unsurprisingly, ran over the scheduled number of days, but it looks very nice, particularly in comparison to the old kitchen, which featured counters and cabinets older than I am, and stained with 23 years of Mom's coffee spillages and such accumulated since she bought the house.
Jodi/turtlebat23 has been staying with us for an end-of-the-semester break, and last night Sean Michael came over. So Sean-Michael and I actually used the apartment complex's hot tub and pool (a first for me despite having lived in this complex for a year and a half), watched Jon's 30 Rock DVD's, had Mexican food, and both lost to Jon at Trivial Pursuit rather badly. And then Jodi came home from an outing with another Tampa friend and joined us for another (somewhat buzzed) game of Trivial Pursuit which was a much closer competition (but I ultimately won). An evening of things I don't get to do nearly often enough, though I suppose anything would pall with repetition.
And apropos of nothing, this article on proposed revisions to the DSM is scary. 'First, Blanchard is proposing a significant expansion of the DSM's definition of "paraphilia" to include: "any intense and persistent sexual interest other than sexual interest in genital stimulation or preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, consenting adult human partners."' So sexual interest in any person with any physical difference, or in any activity not involving genitals or working quickly toward them is now a disorder? Monty Python's words come to mind:
Headmaster: So just listen... now did I or did I not do vaginal juices?
Pupils: Yes, sir.
Headmaster: Name two ways of getting them flowing, Watson.
Watson: Rubbing the clitoris, sir.
Headmaster: What's wrong with a kiss, boy? Hm? Why not start her off with a nice kiss? You don't have to go leaping straight for the clitoris like a bull at a gate. Give her a kiss, boy.
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| Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
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11:03 pm - We Got Annie!
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I found my Raggedy Ann doll stuffed into the end of the underbed box full of rolled-up posters. I had actually put that box under the bed to get it out of the way while I unpacked all the other stuff and found the hammer, picture hooks, plasti-tack, etc. so I could hang up the posters. Now she is sitting on her usual chair on top of the bookcase.
My mom wants me to house-sit for a few days next week while workmen come in to replace her oven and other kitchen things. This is necessary so she can take her dogs elsewhere so they will not go absolutely nuts and bark for hours on end because strangers have entered their territory. She's actually offering to pay me, and I really want to say "If you had just put some effort into training Secret Puppy not to attack all human beings except for about four, you wouldn't have to go to all this trouble." (Amber will bark when Secret Puppy is barking, but faced with a stranger alone she will just try and hide, or pee on the floor if they get close and she can't get away.) But I will do her house-sitting barring some great difficulty, mostly because it's my mom, though payment and free rein in her fridge and pantry also have their attractions.
current mood:  calm
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| Sunday, April 26th, 2009
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8:32 pm - random updatery and requiem for a rag doll
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Well, the move to a new apartment that I last mentioned two months (four entries) ago is done with, though the unpacking seems endless. Jon and I now have a second-floor, two-bedroom apartment in the same complex where we shared a three-bedroom with the ex-roomies, who are doing fine in Vermont according to what Jon said was in their occasional e-mails.
We finished lugging our possessions up the stairs about 10:00 p.m. on Easter Sunday, and now most of the boxes have gone to the recycling center, but that doesn't mean the stuff that was in them is really arranged in its new home. The walls are still mostly blank because the pictures and posters to hang on them are still waiting for us to decide what goes where. The piles of things on the floor are smaller than they were, but not gone. I can't find the magnet we used to indicate whether the dishes in the dishwasher were clean or dirty, or my Raggedy Ann doll that I've had for thirty-one years. The wooden chair my late Grandfather Saunders got me for her sits empty on top of one of the bookcases, and this depresses me. I think Annie was probably the possession I've owned longest; I know I slept with her every night until the age of fifteen or sixteen. I really want to find her and I can't think of where else to look; the old apartment was certainly completely empty when we left it for the last time. Things certainly do disappear for good during moves; I lost another stuffed toy, a black velour seal my mom gave me in college when she got tired of it (after she bought it for herself when I was in elementary school and named it Sealy Posturpedic) in a move around 1996 and I still rather miss that one as well. Annie, with the memories of sewing her clothes, stringing beads for her, and trying to give her a bath (which led more to the colored stripes on her legs running and blotching than any of the desired removal of dirt from her face), leaves a bigger hole.
On the other hand, Jon says the vaulted ceiling makes him feel more grown up (though perhaps my setting out all the Simpsons figures may ruin that) and we are away from the very loud dog who had moved into an apartment near the old one recently. Our new toaster oven has a built-in timer that is very convenient. My craft supplies are all laid out in the little office above the stairs to our new place instead of being buried in the back of the bedroom closet. Ben and Jodi are coming to visit in May.
I am fascinated by seeing my high school physics lab partner, William Packer, in the TBT (St. Petersburg Times free offshoot), because he is a producer on that movie "Obsessed" that just came out. I'd seen stuff in the paper about his earlier movie producing work before but he really seems to have hit the big time in the past couple of years. Very sweet guy who deserves all the success he achieves, though.
And Sarah/pookledo/e2's [shimmer] says her "friend list seems to be a bit sparse at the moment" and asks for help finding more -- so here's that suggestion if you're looking for people who post more often than I do. 8)
current mood:  thoughtful
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| Monday, March 9th, 2009
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10:30 am - "Pie doesn't have tentacles!"
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| Thursday, March 5th, 2009
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2:20 pm
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Well, the weather postponed Mom's and my departure by a day, but on Tuesday we left Tampa and drove as far as Savannah, GA, and after a night in the usual pet-friendly La Quinta Inn, continued to Granddaddy's in Morganton. We made fairly good time both days, despite Mom slowing down for fear of ice on the road after we started seeing snow by the roadsides in northern South Carolina. (There was actually more of it an hour's drive to the south than there was here in Morganton.) The difficult bit was, as usual, dealing with whining, restless Secret Puppy in the car. We let him sit in the front passenger seat to prevent the canine equivalent of "Mom! She's on my side" with Amber (that would just be whining, not the two pups snapping at each other -- but nearly continuous whining for six hours a day wears away at one's nerves). He still couldn't get comfortable -- kept getting up and turning around and poking his head into the backseat to see if there was more room back there (not with Amber and me already there). He even managed to knock the gearshift from drive to neutral during his search for comfort -- I didn't think you were supposed to be able to move that without pressing the button on the driver's side at the same time. Mom saw the move and put it back in drive without any difficulty, though.
The weather also postponed the finally-ex-roommates' departure for a day, but apparently they finally left for Up North on Wednesday, leaving bags and piles of furniture, clothing, VHS tapes, etc., throughout our apartment. Seriously, the night before they were supposed to leave if their flight hadn't been canceled, they and Amanda's mother were still going through all their junk when I went to bed (and their flight left two hours earlier than the time Mom was picking me up in the morning). Amanda called the Salvation Army to come pick stuff up Thursday, but Jon says there was ACTUALLY TOO MUCH STUFF FOR THE TRUCK. I wish we could charge rent on their stuff -- anything there when I get home from Granddaddy's has a great risk of being posted on eBay or Craigslist for Jon's and my benefit. But I'm away from that situation right now -- Jon's the one who needs the support for dealing with it in the next week and a half.
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| Sunday, March 1st, 2009
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5:26 pm - Stoopid weather
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Mom and I were supposed to drive up to my grandfather's in North Carolina tomorrow. The roomies are supposed to fly to their new home in Vermont on Tuesday.
And then it started snowing across the South, closing Atlanta-Hartsfield Airport (and forcing my friends Ben and Jodi to drive their rental car from Tampa back to Atlanta so Ben could be at work Monday). My trip has been postponed at least a day. We really hope Atlanta is flying again by Tuesday so that the nearly-ex-roomies (whose flight has a stopover there, because it's nigh impossible to fly anywhere in the southeastern U.S. without stopping off in Atlanta) can leave.
current mood: frustrated
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| Monday, January 26th, 2009
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8:53 pm - Six squared
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Happy Australia Day! Happy Chinese New Year!
So it's my birthday today, and a happy birthday wish to me is the E2 chatterbox topic (which made me feel like I was blushing when I saw it even though no one else was in the room with me), plus piles of personal messages on several different sites I frequent. Half the observance of the occasion was done this past weekend and the other half will be this coming weekend, because of lives, including my own. (Going back to work on Mondays is always a bit tiring; Jon went to bed at 8:30 p.m. this evening.)
So Saturday Jon and I had a very nice dinner with friends Deb and Phil and their two kids, Ben and Freddie, which gave us all a chance to catch up on each other's lives and such, since we don't see one another terribly often anymore. In addition to the card they came with, I got another birthday card drawn by Freddie at the table (the family came prepared with drawing supplies, which would have been a good idea for restaurant visits when my siblings were younger). And yesterday I got together with Mom for some shopping and all. A very pleasant weekend, and next Saturday is another birthday dinner.
Life is, of course, not any different than it has been for the last year and a half in this apartment, the last ten years in this small-company job, the last ten-plus years with this dearest beloved. But birthdays make one reflect -- not just my own, either. My brother, born just before I turned eighteen, himself hit eighteen last week. Not so long ago he was spitting up on my, it seems, and now he'll be going off to college. And I'm thirty-six. Not old, certainly -- my grandmother Lonon was this age when, married just under a year, she gave birth to the first of her three children. On the other hand, when my mother turned thirty-six, I was ten years old. Such numbers just make me think about how different life could be -- how different my life is from many of my high school friends I've re-met on Facebook. (Not all of them, though; some are unmarried and childfree also.)
Just short of sixteen years ago, when my sister was born, I was in my first long-term relationship, both of us assuming we would get married and have children I'd even agreed to have raised Catholic at his request. We also assumed I'd be writing for a living and he'd be working in academia. Now that ex-boyfriend, who I haven't talked to in nearly ten years because his then-fiancee would not allow him any contact with his exes, was in the Navy last I knew, has been a Mormon for just over ten years and, if the guy Jon came across on Facebook is the same one, seems to have two kids with his then-fiancee/now-wife.
I can't think of anything from that time's hypothetical future that I'd prefer to my current life. But being unambitious, not having any particular goals like raising kids or advancing in some career field, does make me feel sometimes like I haven't lived up to potential. Too many years of being at the top of academic stuff, perhaps, where magnet schools and stuff made me feel perhaps too special, obligated to stand out. So living a life where I don't take work home, have a lot of time off work, am responsible only for myself, while making me very content, can feel like something's missing. Stupid internalized expectations.
But I'm doing well. The roommates are not noisy right now. Dinner was good. The Internet is full of amusing stuff. The Christmas and birthday DVDs await. Someone else ran the dishwasher. All those kind of good things.
current mood:  pensive
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| Thursday, January 8th, 2009
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2:33 pm - grmbl grmbl
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I think I've screwed up the keyboard on my family's computer (stupid hairtrigger gag reflex made me spew the humongous pill I was trying to swallow and the accompanying water all over myself and the keyboard). Some of the keys have stopped working. I'm literally cutting and pasting the letters I can't get off the keyboard, or the post would look like this:
"I'mlitrallycttinnadplastingthlrsIcan'goffhkyboard,orlshxwoldlooklikhis."
Unfortunately, cutting and pasting will not work for the login blanks on either of my email accounts.
current mood:  annoyed
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| Sunday, December 14th, 2008
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9:18 pm - "Your luck has been completely changed today."
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That was the message in the fortune cookie that came with the beef and broccoli Jon was kind enough to fetch me. And it's true! Not, however, in the way the little smiley faces around the words would imply.
Mom and I and Secret Puppy and Amber stayed overnight in Savannah, Georgia, halfway through the drive home from Granddaddy's place. This morning, before getting the dogs into the car for the remaining six hours of the trip, we naturally took them out on their leashes to relieve themselves. Amber, actually the smaller of the two dogs, decided to take off after something, and I, holding her leash, was pulled off the curb to land splayed on the pavement, taking some skin off both palms and my right knee, and . . . I'm not exactly sure what the left foot went through, but it hurt like hell.
Since we didn't know where anything was in Savannah and couldn't really go anywhere longer than the very brief time one can leave two (non-stranger-friendly) dogs in the car, Mom helped me limp to the car and we got on the road. The foot swelled some and continued to ache, but not more than Advil could cope with. (Until I had to go use the restroom at a gas station and realized how difficult it was to get anywhere on one foot.)
Finally we got to my apartment, phoned Jon from the parking lot to please come and bring in the luggage (and me). But when he saw the swelling, he felt someone medical should look at it. So, as Mom drove off to take the dogs home (and make Secret Puppy shut the hell up; he whines till he sounds like an old door hinge on long trip), Jon took me to the nearest walk-in clinic. (Which is, in fact, the same place where I went the last time I sprained an appendage.) Some X-rays and $200 later, it was confirmed that it's only a sprain and not a break, and I got a prescription for some stronger painkillers, which the doctor said might make me "loopy." (No such effect noticeable after the first one.)
So now, I'm moving around my apartment mostly on my rear end, with propulsion by my good foot and my balled-up fists (to avoid scraping more skin off my palms and knees). Good thing the chairs at work have wheels, but I'm not looking forward to the journey to and from the car in getting to those chairs.
current mood:  achy
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| Thursday, December 11th, 2008
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12:51 pm - Probably good that I don't want kids
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because if I did want kids this would probably look a lot more tempting. As it is, it's kind of a pink overdose -- most of my favorite HK merchandise has other color schemes.(found via pookledo):
Japanese Hello Kitty Maternity Hospital
It's raining and depressing up here in Morganton and Mom's dog Amber is spending her time under the bed, as she often does when thunder threatens. On the other hand, Secret Puppy wants to go outside, despite the wet; I guess he finds Granddaddy's preferred temperature too warm. Me, I just find his necessary TV volume to be too loud, but he can't help that he's losing his hearing.
Anyway, I expect my mood will lift when the clouds do.
current mood: blah
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| Friday, November 28th, 2008
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9:24 pm - Life, the Universe, and Everything.
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While I'm not all that thankful that the Thanksgiving holiday makes November incredibly busy at my job, since we have to get everything for December newsletters done early before the four-day-stretch of no UPS shipping (two days of holiday and two of weekend) starts, I'm now thankful that I get a chance to rest. I've been fighting some level cold for nearly three weeks now, or I've got a new one now (since it was sore throat first, then coughing, and now my throat is sore again), so that didn't make extra hours at work more pleasant either.
But I still found time to put up a bunch of Christmas ornaments for sale on eBay, taking advantage of two half-price listing days and freeing up a bit of storage space in the closet. Several already sold via "Buy It Now", too.
And, yet AGAIN, Mom and I are planning to go visit my grandfather, leaving on Monday. Let's see if something interferes for the third month in a row.
And, for my fellow Doctor Who fans, a picture I found on one of the Who LJ communities that I pop into when I'm bored.
( Read more... )
current mood: accomplished
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amused