We're going shopping

Okay, so it probably isn't what you're thinking.

So far, I've not gone crazy with the after Christmas shopping. I bought one thing of lights that I wanted, and I bought this thing of led lights that fits on your head (and I've already misplaced but I'm sure it will turn up), and three rolls of Christmas paper that because of the colors and/or patterns can be used for things other than Christmas. I intend to look for more lights, but I don't expect to buy anymore unless they are 75% off, which might be tomorrow or the next day. Or maybe I'll get lucky and it will be today, but I doubt it.

And I'm not going shopping for clothes, though I might do just a bit of that some other time. The thing that I had to take back was hassle-free (there was no one ahead of me in line) Sunday morning, and I have just a bit of store credit to spend now. But that isn't the plan for today either.

And we're not going out to look for electronic gadgets either.

No, we're finally going to do something about that diet. Or diets. He wants to do this thing where you get rid of stuff in your diet and see if you feel better. I don't want to do that. I want to lose weight and look pretty and such. So I won't be on his same diet, cause as far as I can tell his diet doesn't count calories much, but it does get rid of dairy, which I'm going to try to have three times a day.

But the point is that if he's going on some diet for six weeks, that should be six weeks that he won't be eating out much or suggesting we go get ice cream and such. So that would be a good time to change what I eat for a while.

Anyway, he's got this shopping list, and I've got a few things to get, and so that is the plan for today, after we finish cleaning out the frig. I did most of that yesterday, but there's still a few things to be thrown out this morning.

Well, I'm not officially planning to start anything til maybe the 3rd or the 4th. I've waited this long, so I might as well wait until after the New Year's Eve party. And then I usually don't feel so good the next day, so I don't want to start that day either. And then I'll want a day to practice cooking a few things, so it will be a day or two after that before I'm ready.

Anyway, this is the first time that we've done this major thing of throwing things out together, and I haven't done much of this sort of thing by myself in a long time either, not since many years ago when I had the house to myself for weeks and months at a time. So this does feel like a positive step forward, and this time next week I'll be doing stuff like making and eating homemade yogurt, and he'll be doing whatever it is that he thinks he ought to be doing.

Okay, so it's not as interesting as getting a big screen TV, but I'm looking forward to it anyway.

Christmas is nearly over

Okay, so in my immediate family, the past few years we've done our main Christmas stuff during Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day, for a couple of reasons, mainly that one of my siblings can spend Christmas with the in-laws. So today I don't know what I will be doing, if I will be doing anything at all. The guys are going to spend much of the day playing video games, and when they take a break to eat lunch I am invited over, and if they decide to watch one of the DVDs someone got for Christmas I'm invited over for that too. Other than that I will probably be here cleaning or maybe knitting. And I might go see Grandma, but one never knows if that will involve spending about five minutes actually talking to Grandma, or several hours spent with other relatives who came to talk to Grandma. Either way is okay with me, I just don't know which to plan for.

So, normally, this would be the end of it, except for the after Christmas clearance sales. Well, this year I will attempt to cut down on the clearance sale shopping, with a few exceptions, like if I see any solar powered lights I will get those. I'm thinking that I would like to have several of those, but I'm only planning to buy the one on Sunday, and there probably won't be much left after that. Solar lights would solve my problem of not having an outdoor electrical socket for Christmas decorating, and I also think that the white lights would look good somewhere year round. The office might not agree, so I'm not going to spend that much, and I'm not going to put up anything til sometime next year.

Solar lights are a bit expensive. New and in season cost $20 for a string of 50 lights, so they'll be $10 when I go and look for them Sunday morning, and I probably won't find any left when I go looking for them again at the 75% off sale later.

Ideally, you would have all different colors of solar lights up all year, maybe orange or purple for Halloween, red or green for Christmas, and white for all year long, and then you just cover up the solar panels for the lights you don't want after the holiday has past. But I don't doubt that the office would have a fit over that idea.

Well, a friend of mine got me a purple knitting loom for Christmas, and it is supposed to be the ideal size for knitting adult hats. And it just looked like they were the same as the old yellow looms, just a different color and in a new package for marketing purposes. And I didn't want to tell my friend that I already had two yellow looms somewhere, and that I didn't really think that they were the ideal size for making hats and that I rarely used them at all. But, it's always good to have spare looms, so I just said thank you and something about it being like the ones I made scarves with only bigger, and didn't mention that I already had two yellow looms. But as it turns out, after I got it home and compared it to the yellow loom it is just a bit smaller but has 48 pegs, which is several more than the yellow loom. So maybe it is the ideal size for making adult hats.

Which is not the same as saying the hats are very attractive. Making a baby hat with the red loom works fine, though I'm thinking that they quickly out-grow the hats. This year I also made a child's hat with the green loom, and that also turned out okay. But the loom hats are finished putting a strand of yarn through all the top loops, taking the yarn off of the pegs, and pulling the strand of yarn tight until all of the top loops come together. It doesn't look the least bit round, but on the smaller hats it doesn't look that bad. On an adult hat made with 48 pegs, this makes the top look a bit lumpy, and when it's on a person's head the head looks a bit odd, sort of square.

This is one of those times that I think it would be helpful to know how to crochet or hand knit with regular knitting needles (or maybe in this case circular knitting needles). Maybe someday I will learn how to do that and knit the hat part way on the loom and then finish it the top some other way. But for now the loom by itself will have to do, and I made hats for the baby and Buddy and Buddy's dad.

I didn't think that Buddy would like his hat, and that we would have a hard time getting him to put it on just so that I could see if it fit him. We put on the baby's hat first. Well, Buddy loves the baby, but he's supposed to be getting all the stuff and all the attention, so whenever something is going on with the baby, he tends to interrupt and say that he wants something. So, while mom is putting the hat on the baby, Buddy wants the hat. So when he finds out that he also has a hat, he puts it on. And he keeps it on most of the night. Buddy's dad wanted a picture taken with the three of them in their hats, and then the other two hats came off immediately after the picture. Buddy wore his nearly til bedtime.

I have a sock-loom. I don't know if I mentioned that before, but when I was out shopping Sunday I found a sock-loom I had seen online for $30, and it was $25 in the store. And I'm thinking that I'm going to come back some other day when I have a 40% off or even 50% off coupon and buy the thing. Except that they only had the one, and I'd never seen one in the store before, and they were having an additional 25% off sale, so I decided to go ahead and buy it. I haven't used it yet, and I doubt that I'll be making just tons of socks, but it is something that I have wanted for a while and now I have one.

Well, I still have a few people to exchange gifts with on New Years Eve. One gift is already done (and has been done since last year), I'll have to think of something for K, and I still might make that scarf for the pilot.

But other than that, Christmas is nearly over.

And I still didn't put up a tree.

I still have stuff to do

Saturday at the pilot's house was nice, and the following Sunday dinner with more of my friends was nice, and this past Saturday was also nice, though I did feel a bit rushed with the whole thing of having to be in Irving and then in Arlington and then yet another place in Arlington. Following that dinner some of the group went to see the Interlochen Christmas lights, but not me. Maybe my husband will offer to drive me tonight, since we didn't get to go to that other thing in Oklahoma.

Right.

Well, something interesting happened during the meeting Saturday. I was wearing a Slytherin scarf, and I got some comments the nice looking scarf. And one of my friends asked how much I would charge to make a scarf if she already had the yarn for it, and I had to tell her that the scarves are eighty dollars, and if she bought the yarn already it would still be about seventy dollars, cause it takes about seven or eight hours to make one. And she said okay, she'd think about it, which usually means no. And then I thought how this particular person is usually good with crafts and such herself, and I went back and suggested that maybe she could just pay me thirty dollars to do the three or four hours of work on the knitting machine, and then she could do the remaining work that did not require the machine, which still takes about four hours but requires no special equipment and is not brain surgery (or at least for her it would not be brain surgery). And she said that she'd think about that.

So right after that, this guy that I don't know very well was trying to ask me something. And it's a very noisy room with all of us having different conversations, and I couldn't make out what he was saying at first. He was asking if I had a Hufflepuff scarf.

Now, normally, I don't have a lot of scarves just already made waiting for someone to buy them. Normally, if you want to buy a scarf from me, you have to give me the details of what you want, and then I'll make you one and you can pay me when it's finished. And usually, after people hear that it's a minimum of eighty dollars, they lose interest anyway. But it did just so happen that last year I'd made one each of the scarves from the third or fourth Harry Potter film, and that I was going to give two away at a Christmas Party last year, which I figured that everyone would want either Gryffindor or Ravenclaw, but I also had Slytherin and Hufflepuff ready to go just in case someone wanted to trade. And as expected, no one at the party really wanted Slytherin or Hufflepuff, so I had them leftover. And it just also happened that I had both these scarves in the car (along with a few others) cause I had taken them somewhere to show someone else, and I just forgot and left them in the car. So when this guy asked about the Hufflepuff scarf, not only did I have one, but I was able to go out and get it for him, though I figured that he'd change his mind after hearing the price.

He didn't say that eighty dollars was too much, only that he didn't have that much with him. I let him look at the scarf while I talked to other people, and he said that he still wanted it, only he'd have to buy it some other time. And it was not a gift for someone else, he just wanted to wear the scarf himself, so he wanted to buy it before it got cold again. He asked if he could pay with PayPal.

Now, my husband has a PayPal account, and I certainly buy enough things with it, but I'd never before had anyone want to pay me with it, other than on eBay, so I didn't have all that information in my head. It certainly would have been possible, in the room with all those nerds and their smart phones, but I didn't have a clue how to go about it, and I couldn't get my husband to answer the phone (he was at someone else's house playing video games, but I'd forgotten and didn't try calling there). And this guy did not really live nearby, and he would probably lose interest if he had to wait another month to get his scarf. But we did manage to exchange emails and figure out a place to meet Sunday afternoon, and he has his scarf, and I have eighty dollars.

Or I did have eighty dollars. I've already spent some of it.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy about the whole thing. This is only the third time that someone has ordered a scarf and actually paid for it.

Okay, so I've bought some more supplies and will try again to make some ornaments, which will probably be a Christmas gift for K, though we will not be exchanging gifts until New Year's Eve, and it will be too late for him to use them this year. But he'll have them for next year. If that doesn't work I don't know what I'm going to give him, probably some homemade dessert, but he's said that he'd rather not have candy as he's already eaten way too much of the stuff and is starting to feel ill, and G already gave him (and the rest of us) cookies, so that's probably not a good idea either.

I'm still thinking that I might make a scarf for the pilot, but again that is something that won't be needed until New Year's Eve. There's still stuff that needs to be done by Friday. I need to get something for my brother in law (probably a gift card for a restaurant), I'm thinking of knitting three hats, and I need two $5 gifts for the Chinese gift exchange. Also I'm wondering if I should put a gift I recently got in a similar exchange in with my brother's gifts, or if I should just keep it. Cause as cute as it is, I don't really need a Star Wars computer mouse, but probably my brother doesn't either.

Okay, in order of things that need doing: buy gift card, buy two $5 gifts, make candy and maybe cookies, knit three hats, wrap gifts, make ornaments, knit scarf, and wrap more gifts.

I still haven't put up a tree.

Getting close now

Okay, as someone pointed out earlier in the comments to my last post, it now really is two weeks til Christmas. Not even two weeks now.

I'm screwed.

Okay, not really that bad, just it doesn't seem right either. There's still a bit of stuff to do, and I don't quite seem to get it through my head that the deadline for a lot of it is here. Like the day after tomorrow here. And like, there won't be time to do anything for it the day of the thing on Saturday, cause it needs to be done before lunch, and so I don't want to be rushing around trying to do anything then. And tomorrow I have plans for going to a movie and such, so except for shopping that I have put off until Friday knowing that I would be in the same general area, I shouldn't plan on having much time to do anything tomorrow.

Which means that a lot of it needs to get done today.

Okay, what I have done so far is buy and wrap some DVDs for the charity thing, and knit a scarf for the charity thing. I have started a knit hat for the charity thing, but a hat isn't something that I committed to, so if it doesn't get done I won't really worry too much about that. Also, I meant to do some ornaments for the charity thing, but again, that wasn't something that I committed to, so if it doesn't get done it is not really a big deal.

For the official gift exchange, I've almost decided on a Darth Vader ornament and a ten dollar gift certificate to Half-Price Books. The thing is that I'm always going to Half-Price Books and forgetting to get the gift card, or else putting it off on purpose til I'm sure of the amount. So now I've put it off and put it off again, and I need the thing before lunch Saturday, so I'd better remember to get it tomorrow. I could still go by and pick up the thing Saturday morning, but if I do that I'll have to wrap the gift in my car, which is possible (especially if I just put the thing in a gift bag) but I'd rather not. Besides, someone might see me.

That leaves the question of whether or not I'm getting a gift for K, or if I'm just getting him a card, or both.

Last weekend we went to dinner. The pilot had us over. Some of us thought it was just for dinner, some of us thought we were supposed to exchange gifts, and some of us thought that we were supposed to exchange cards but save the gifts for later. I had some of the stuff ready, and some not. So I was going to bring some, and print out IOUs for the rest on this nice holiday paper that seems made for just that purpose. I had a gift for G, a gift for D, and Miss Allergies gift was made last year and she already knows what it is. So I wrapped those and put them in the car. And then I was making cards, but I only got two of them done, so I decided to only give to J and R (who said card exchange only), and to the pilot (cause we were at his house and he made the dinner, plus I'm still not sure if his gift is going to work out). I started another one for K, but I'm having a bit of trouble with it, and it still isn't done. So K didn't get a card, and I found out that the gift I originally planned for him won't really work for this year. So I either need to figure out how to finish this card, or else maybe he can have fudge as a present, or maybe I'll knit him a hat.

Then besides the usual bunch there were two other people at the dinner, and I didn't get them a card or anything. I didn't know that they were coming until just a couple of days before, and I wasn't going to try to make them one of these cards (especially at the last minute like that), and I don't do cards usually anyway.

So it ended like this: the two other people gave me a card, and I didn't give them one, and some of the other people did not give them one either cause they either did not know they were coming or did not know that it was meant for us to exchange cards that day. Miss Allergies did not want to unwrap her gift, cause she hadn't brought mine and she wants us to exchange gifts at the same time, so it remained in the car. I gave D her gift, because while we usually exchange gifts we usually are not together the day we exchange gifts, so the gifts are exchanged through messenger service (the pilot). And I wanted to see her open her gift for a change, so I did. And then G was getting the same gift (a Gryffindor scarf), which I thought that she might want to wear to the charity thing, so I went ahead and gave it to her then. I gave one card to J and R, and one card to the pilot. The pilot seemed to really like the card, and he probably thinks that is all he's getting, so he went and gave me the gifts he'd bought for me, though he's saving everyone else for later. And that left K, and I did not even give him an IOU, cause then I thought that the two extra people would wonder why they didn't get anything, not even an IOU, when everyone else got something. So poor K probably thinks that he isn't getting anything.

I really need to finish that card.

Anyway, everything is weekend is screwed up. The charity thing is supposed to be on the Sunday after the Saturday of the meeting. That way, the people not going to the charity thing themselves can still give things to the charity, and we gather all the stuff together on Saturday. There were two problems with that this year. The charity family is going out of town, and they want to start driving on Sunday morning, so they don't want to wait around for us to stop by Sunday afternoon.

The other problem is the damned Cowboys are ruining my life. We were told that going to the charity family's home would not be a good idea, as they live in a trailer, and there are other problems with that we'd really rather not deal with. So it was decided to meet at the apartment of a relative, and the apartment is on Fielder. The stadium is on Collins. Fielder is a major street that parallels Collins, but there are other streets in between them, like Cooper, so I would have thought that Fielder might have some traffic problems before and after the game, but not during. But apparently people will park their cars as far away as that and walk to the stadium rather than pay for parking, so we were told that Sunday would be a bad day to be in the area because of a noon game, even at 2 or 3 as far away as Fielder.

I am not in anyway someone who helps plan this charity thing. In fact, I'm just not that into the charity thing at all, I just sort of feel bad if I don't participate at all while other people are going out and buying really nice things for them. But I don't see how it gets to be this difficult and this complicated. Find us someone who wants free stuff, but not too much, who wants people in their home for a few minutes on the Sunday after the third Saturday of December. (And now add don't have them live anywhere near the stadium if the Cowboys have a home game that day). Is it really that difficult. Find someone who doesn't have much, likes people in costumes, and wants a little bit of free stuff.

Anyway, that is all the stuff that I need to get done for this weekend. And then there is Christmas Eve. And then there's a bit more for New Year's Eve.

I don't even have a tree up.

Christmas is two weeks away

Okay, so if you've seen a calender recently, you know that Christmas isn't really two weeks away. It just suddenly seems that way to me.

My family has decided to cut back a bit on Christmas, so that we mainly buy one nice thing for one person, after we draw names out of a hat. And then we also buy a smaller gift, but we don't know who will get the smaller gift. So the spending limit with tax and everything ends up being just a bit under forty dollars per person, and should only require the one shopping trip. And all that is just fine, and I have most of a month to get that done.

It's the rest of it that I'm unsure about, and a lot of it I need to get done in the next two weeks.

Okay, so there's a group of friends who usually try to do things together two or three times a month. Due to not having a job and the price of gas and some other things, I rarely make it more than once a month now. Once in a great while, the pilot has us over for dinner. And, usually on the third Saturday of December, we exchange gifts. And this is in addition to the official gift exchange at the club, which is also on the that same Saturday.

It probably started when I opened my big mouth and asked the pilot if he was having one of his dinners in November, after I was looking at something and noticed that he'd had a dinner at that time last year. Now, I was not meaning to invite myself over for dinner, just that I was trying to schedule a few things, and I wanted to know if there was a dinner in November that I needed to to keep a certain date open for and not go out of town that week and such. So what he said was that he had meant to have a dinner in November, but this year it just wasn't going to work out, and he wondered if we wouldn't keeping open a Saturday in December for that instead. So now dinner with my friends is scheduled for the second Saturday in December at the pilot's house. So I asked if we should exchange gifts then instead of on the third Saturday like we usually did. At the time I did not have a preference, I just wanted to know.

At that point someone mentioned something about exchanging cards instead of gifts, cause some of us are short on cash, and most of us really don't want to spend that much time in the mall anyway. We had discussed doing this last year too, but we didn't really discuss it early enough for me, and I was already knitting things for two of them. And I didn't want to just exchange cards after I was already either buying or knitting things for some of them. And then I wasn't sure if I should just give the gifts I already had planned and give the others just cards. That didn't seem fair at all. So we ended up having the regular gift exchange and decided to talk about just exchanging cards the next year.

And really, I don't exchange cards. This comes from a time when I really had no money, and I watched other people spend more on the cards than I had in my whole Christmas budget. So with me you either get a gift, or you don't get anything. Even when I didn't have money I gave candy or small fruit baskets or candles or some homemade thing rather than exchanging cards. This means that I have a small list of people, and that there are a lot of people giving me cards when I don't give them anything, but I just can't spend time or effort or money on cards.

Okay, so G brought up the whole gift or card discussion, and everyone else jumped in, and for the most part people said cards were better. The exception being Miss Allergies, cause she picked out what she wanted from me last year, and so I put a certain scarf aside for her. R and J want to exchange cards, K also voted for cards, and the pilot said something about making cards, and G is in favor of either cards or baked goods.

I like baked goods.

Okay, so having heard that we would be mostly exchanging either cards or baked goods with most of these people on the third Saturday (except for Miss Allergies' gift which is already done), I mostly put the idea out of my mind. While I probably won't do cards, I had plenty of time to do small gifts or figure out baked goods or whatever else I might do.

The pilot is now saying that he has cards, but he also found a few gifts....

Okay, so I've been wanting to make him a certain scarf, and I will try again this year, though it might not work out. Also I've heard that K is now leaning towards gift exchange. That's fine, though at the moment I'm not sure what I would get him, as I gave him the handmade scarf last year and a different scarf another year, and even if I had the time he doesn't need yet another scarf. So far as I know, R and J still want to exchange cards, so I will get them something small or baked goods, and I will get something for G that would either be baked goods or something like that.

And then after looking at the schedule, there is something going on with R and J on the third Saturday, which makes me think that we'll end up exchanging gifts or cards or whatever on the second Saturday.

And this means that for the most part, I have only two weeks to do the Christmas stuff, whatever that will be.

For the official gift exchange, I still have until the third Saturday, or I can even decide not to participate. And for my family I still have until Christmas Eve.

Except that last year there was also this extended family Christmas party, and while I haven't heard that it is planned again this year, I was thinking that I should make a couple more scarves, just in case. And also I would like to make another scarf for this charity thing, which would also be due on the third Saturday.

While it slowly dawns on me that I have a lot to do in the next two or three weeks, my husband mentions going out of town. I hadn't really planned on it. In fact, I hadn't really thought about it at all. He's going to the middle of nowhere a bit north of here for two or three days, then has a day off on which he will have to move to another place also a bit north of here for another three or four days. If I had planned on it, I would have had knitting and such ready to go, but I hadn't planned on it. Middle of nowhere and all of that, and I didn't think that there was anything for us to do there. Only he found some Christmas light display between the two places, and he was thinking that we could go see it.

Now that I've looked it up, I don't think that they allow visitors on that day. It was nice of him to think of it, but probably I should not go. The house is a mess and all of that, plus that would leave all this leftover turkey to rot in the frig.

I don't want the turkey to rot. I want to make stuff with it and eat it.

There are plenty of Christmas light displays here, but for whatever reason, he never seems that interested in going to see them.

Okay, so I have a very messy house to clean, and a lot of knitting to do, and then probably more shopping and practice baking to do. Going out of town is probably not the best idea.

I wish that I had planned better.

Happy Thanksgiving

Okay, so it's six something in the morning, and I'm wondering if it is too early to get in line at the cafeteria.

Probably.

Anyway, despite there being like four turkeys between us, we've decided that we will eat out, probably at Furr's, though I probably haven't been to Furr's in years and don't know what to expect, other than some really long lines. There will only be four of us, as the rest of our group have made other plans with in-laws and such. Mom isn't much into the cooking and such anymore, and this year in particular she just doesn't feel up to it. Either my brother or I could do the turkey itself (I see no problem just doing a very basic turkey and had already made one for myself, and my brother had other ideas and practiced two of them early this month), nobody is quite up to making mom's stuffing (or grandma's stuffing, depending on how you look at it), and while I like a plain basic turkey to make other things with, it isn't much of a Thanksgiving turkey without mom's stuffing. Also missing is grandma's (other grandma) potato salad and a number of other things. So it would have been my brother making a turkey and me attempting stuffing and potato salad, and then not much else interesting, and mom didn't seem that interested in the turkey anyway.

Still, I think my brother did an excellent job on the two practice turkeys, though one of them did turn out too salty. But, then, that is the point of doing practice turkeys, so you can figure out that kind of thing.

I was just this close to buying a roaster this year, cause I'd heard that it could also be used as a slow cooker. But then I heard that a.) this isn't really a good idea, and b.) the roaster that was on sale was not digital, which means that it wouldn't automatically switch to warm after it finishes cooking. So I did not get one, though I might look again. But I did find a rack that folds up when you're done, and it fits in the cheap aluminum pans, which I like cause I can be lazy and toss when I'm done with them. And I really don't have room for a roaster anyway, which I suppose is the reason I did not buy one some previous year.

Later I will be looking over the ads, but as far as I can tell I really only want one thing and from one store. Or, rather, I only want the one type of thing, and the big sale is at one store. The last few years I've gone to Walmart to get jeans for myself, and try to get a few other things, and while I'm there I look through the sale DVDs. Anyway, this year I did not lose any weight, I gained the weight back somewhat, which means that I probably don't need any jeans because I'm wearing those that I bought a year and two ago, and if I lose a bit of weight I'll be wearing the jeans that I bought last time. So now I have to decide if I want to maybe buy just one pair just in case I should lose more than that.

I really don't want to buy any larger clothes just in case I gain. My husband is planning some sort of diet the first six weeks of the new year. Not that he's really planning to lose weight, just that he's thinking he should get a few things out of his diet. This would be a good time to go on a diet too, though not the same diet. I want a lose weight diet. I want to look pretty and maybe have lower blood pressure. But, if I go on a diet while he's doing his thing, at least for the first six weeks I won't have him constantly suggesting that we go out for ice cream and such.

Anyway, without needing to buy jeans, I don't have much excuse for going out early Friday morning, except for buying DVDs. I'm wondering if I'm going to buy that many, or if maybe I should just try to get them online. Other than that, I'm thinking of going to Half Price Books, and I've heard that Racetrac has free coffee. I don't have any plans to camp out in hopes of getting a TV or any of that.

Lately I've been trying to find a certain diet cookbook. I don't know why. I don't need another diet cookbook, I probably just need to take one I already have on the shelf and cook stuff. But, I saw this one, and I keep bidding on it on ebay. But I don't want to bid much more than five dollars (cause with say ten dollars and shipping, I might as well just buy the book new in the store), so I don't have the thing. And then I had the idea of borrowing one at the library, cause I might not even like it that much, but for some reason I can't get the computer and the library computer to talk to each other. I already know that the two libraries I use most don't have it, but if I really want something I go to Fort Worth, which is a bit of a drive, and I'd rather not go all the way there if I'm only going to look for a book that the computer won't even tell me if they have.

That's enough for now. I'll probably post again later.

...and they eat us and they take our women...

I saw a movie this weekend. From the above title you should be able to figure out which one. I was looking forward to it. It was okay.

Also, I have recently seen Monsters. After being told it was being released on a certain date, and then a later certain date, and then a third later certain date, my brother found it on pay for view, so we ended up watching it at his house. You would think that watching it at someone's house would be really cheap, but it was eight dollars. This is not cheap to me, since I usually watch new movies at a nearby theater for less than four dollars matinee, and more often than that just wait til things are at the dollar theater. Anyway, after all that waiting and wanting to see the thing, I was a bit disappointed. I liked the feel and look of it, and I don't have a problem with the low budget and such, it's just that after sitting through the whole movie I know just about as much as I did from watching the previews. Which is, mostly nothing, except that six years ago we sent a probe to get samples of some lifeform, then the probe crashed, leaving the lifeform to grow on Earth, mostly in the northern half of Mexico. There were hardly any action scenes in the movie, but for all of that time talking, no one said anything. No one said anything interesting about the creatures, and no one said anything interesting about themselves. We have your average jerk guy who apparently doesn't know where babies come from til he ends up with a now six year old son, except that he still hasn't figured out what not to do cause he's still sleeping with random people. And we have daughter of the jerk's boss, trying to get home after doing we don't know what in we don't know where and we don't know why. And they wait til the last possible day, have their boat tickets stolen, and have to get home by land through this area where the creatures live. And that's pretty much it.

Also on the movie front we have Harry Potter coming up. But I can't talk about that really, cause it hasn't happened yet. I should have made a new hat last year, but I didn't, and now I'm just getting started on it, and I need it done by Thursday.

Right.

Okay, so I was all in pain with the mysterious back/hip problem. That pretty much lasted a whole month. I never went to a doctor, just kind of waited for it to go away, which it finally seems to have done. Now I just feel rather blah bad, not like really bad, which I guess is mostly normal for me now.

And then I finally went to the dentist. I had my annual checkup (which I have missed for like the last four or five years) back in August, at which time I was told what needed to be done and the estimated cost for all of that. I would need at least three more appointments, and several hundred dollars for the first two, assuming that all went well and the insurance paid half and all of that. So, in August, I did not have several hundred dollars twice over, much less four times over if the insurance did not pay, which was not very likely but something I might have to be prepared for just in case. So I did not make those appointments in August, cause I said that I would have to talk to my husband and find out when we would have the money, and when we would be in town, and so forth. My husband was also supposed to have had his "annual" checkup that day in August, but his schedule was changed and he went out of town, and so he was not there for a while to have this discussion about the money. So I told the lady at the dentist office that I would call her back, but then I did not call her back for a very long time. First, we went out of town a lot, for most of September. And then my first week home I had a lot to do and went to visit Buddy and the baby. And then the week after that, my back hurt, and I was in such pain that I could only rest in certain positions, and the dentist office chair was not one of those positions. So I did not think that I could stand being in the dentist chair long enough for him to get any work done, so I continued to put it off until after Halloween. When a week went by without serious back pain, I finally called the dentist office to make an appointment, and they said that they could see me the following Monday. I should have scheduled the crown first and gotten it over with, but I didn't. I've had two of those before, and I was in pain the whole time between getting the temporary crown and getting the permanent crown. So I just needed a bit more time to get mentally used to the idea, and also I had to schedule it so that if I were in serious pain for the whole two weeks before getting the permanent crown that I wouldn't be missing anything important. They were wondering if I could come in that Thursday.

Two weeks from that Thursday would be Thanksgiving.

I'm thinking that they would not be open on Thanksgiving, even if I wanted to do that. I didn't want to have to wait more than the two weeks, and even if they could squeeze me in that Friday, I rather think that I'll be out shopping and such on Black Friday. Not that I told them that. I'm not going to tell my dentist that saving some money on clothes and getting cheap DVDs is more important that fixing my teeth. But they did seem to understand wanting to get it all over with before Thanksgiving. So they asked if I would mind coming in that Wednesday.

I wouldn't mind that at all, I'm just surprised that they could get me in so soon. If they had suggested coming back in the next day, that might have been a problem, since I didn't get to eat much solid food on Monday after breakfast, and doing the same thing again and not eating on Tuesday would not have been fun. But having the day between to recover was okay, as long as they were going to be open two weeks later to do the permanent crown. They said that they would be, so I made the appointment.

While they were working on my teeth they found another cavity, and I said that they should go ahead and deal with that since they've already given me pain medication, so that cost another hundred bucks. But we are still a bit under a thousand dollars, and the checks did not bounce, and so far the insurance hasn't refused to pay for anything.

Oh, I forgot about Halloween. I spent most of the Thursday or Friday before making finger shaped cookies for the party, which was that Saturday. And then at the party I spent a couple of hours handing out cookies and trying to get people to guess that I was Weena. I was surprised how many of them could not guess, and I stayed in character and did not tell them. And then I was going to get really strange about half an or an hour before the costume contest, only I didn't correctly remember when that was, so then I'm rushing around trying to get one of my props ready, and I didn't get to do all that I meant to. So no one saw me eating the Morlock foot till the contest. Get it? In an alternate timeline, the Eloi eat the Morlocks.

I guess just too many people there were not familiar with The Time Machine, so I guess they just didn't get the joke. Maybe they thought that the Eloi were supposed to eat the Morlocks. You would think that people would get it. I mean, there are mundanes that know about The Time Machine and that the Morlocks eat the Eloi. But I just wasn't getting the laughs. So, I ended up winning an honorable mention for the cookies, but I didn't win any awards for the costume contest, other than the sort of joke awards that they hand out later.

So I had fun, but it was also a bit of a disappointment that nobody got it really. And I didn't get to eat much, cause a.) I was busy handing out cookies, and b.) I was trying not to get anything on my very light yellow dress.

So that was Halloween, or at least the night before, and there was nothing to do on Halloween itself or any time near Halloween, as my back was still hurting a bit and I was afraid of going to a haunting house or anything that might make my condition worse. Too late I thought of going to the wax museum, as they are usually very tame, and I'm sure that someone would have let me out early if I was having a problem. So I didn't get to do anything at all this year, other than the party.

And I'm trying to restrain myself with the clearance sale shopping. I've hardly bought anything at all, and half of what I did buy was either for Buddy or the baby.

Other than that, things are mostly just annoying. Like, I can't find my Harry Potter clothes. Or, I can find some things, but I can't find other things, and most of the things that I do find don't fit. But, I'm not quite ready to give up on the idea. I still have my scarves if nothing else works.

Another thing is annoying, which I won't talk about now, except to say that it has been a whole damned freaking month. And I have had enough of it.

Anyway, back to looking through the costumes and working on my hat.

Monday Morons: Those pants are supposed to cover your butt

I am not dead, I just haven't posted in a while. I will have to do a catch-up post soon.

Anyway, I had to go to the bank. Actually, I had to go to two different banks. The first one has limited parking, but a Taco Bell has just opened next door, and at three in the afternoon it has a lot of empty parking spaces. So I figured that I would park at the Taco Bell, run into the bank, and then go to the Taco Bell and have a snack.

So I got some money from the bank and went to the Taco Bell. I hadn't realized til then that I was even hungry. I ordered a drink and a taco and while I'm waiting for them to make the taco I get a couple of napkins and some hot sauce and a straw and all of that sort of thing. And there is this guy doing pretty much the same thing, and I don't much look at him or pay any attention to him.

This is a bad habit, but I'm sure that most women understand. You don't look at people, and you for sure do not make eye contact with people. You especially do not make eye contact with guys. And you really, really do not make eye contact with random guys while you are alone. If you make eye contact with people, then they might start talking to you, and I don't want to talk to anyone. And I really, really do not want to talk to random guys while I'm alone. I just want to have a soda and eat my taco in peace and then leave and get on with my errands.

So, I know that this is a bad habit. I don't look at people, and I especially don't look at random guys while I'm alone. So, if two minutes later, the police come in looking for someone, even if they have a picture of the random guy that was just there, I wouldn't be able to say that I had seen him. While I was up getting my food and such, I took no notice of him at all, other than to register that someone else was there and move around him.

Now, once I had sat down with my food, and the other people in the restaurant had also sat down at other tables with their food, then maybe it is a little bit safer to look around. Cause, unless someone recognizes me from someplace else, they probably won't get up from their table and leave their food just to come talk to me. So I'm looking around a bit, though still not making eye contact with anyone.

The random guy that I didn't look at earlier is sitting at a table with his back to me. This is one of those newer tables that is really tall with bar stools around it. And he is in the middle of the room, so regardless of where you are sitting, if you aren't facing the other direction, you can see him.

And it is starting to get a bit cool around here, but this guy apparently didn't get the memo, so while he's put on a jacket he's still wearing summer clothing, so the rest of his outfit was sandals and thin knee-length shorts. And I guess the elastic in the shorts is not so elastic anymore, cause he's doing the plumber imitation without even bending over. The quarter-slot is exposed to the rest of the restaurant.

And then I notice that the quarter-slot is for a really big quarter. Pretty much most of his butt is hanging out.

I'm glad that I didn't notice that last bit until I was mostly finished eating. I decide that I need to leave soon. I think that he's kind of creepy looking, and that he doesn't care that he's showing everyone his hairy butt. In fact, I think that he must be doing it on purpose. Some of his skin is actually touching the chair, so there's no way that he doesn't know what he's doing.

I suppose that you're supposed to call the police or something, but the police probably have better things to do. I have better things to do. I still had to go to another bank and run to Walmart and a few other places. I left.

Let the people working at the Taco Bell call the police. Besides, the creepy guy was probably just wanting attention, and he wasn't going to get more of that from me.

The Dallas Cowboys are ruining my life

Okay, the Cowboys are not literally ruining my life. Like, I have not been kicked out of my home to make way for a bigger stadium and/or parking lot. That happened to a lot of other people, but it did not happen to me personally. They are just making life annoying at times.

The Rangers were annoying enough. Then the Rangers got a bigger ballpark and got more annoying. The Cowboys were in Irving, in a part of Irving right next to Dallas, and I hate Dallas, so I was rarely there. The Cowboys were still annoying, just not in the same way as the Rangers, as long as they were staying near Dallas were I would probably not have to deal with them or their fans or the traffic problems involved with games.

But then they moved to Arlington. They moved to Arlington right next to stores that I shop at and restaurants I eat at and so forth. So they are now a problem for me. And as I care nothing for sports, I don't remember which days they plan to be a bother, until it is too late to do anything about it.

So today was one of those days. But it was early in the day, and we safely escaped from it all (though it would have been nice to eat an early dinner in the area, but we decided against it). But they are still annoying, as right now I am not watching The Event and such on TV, cause my husband is watching the game. Yet another lie that he told me, so on top of all the other things I have to put up with from him, he now watches football games, even when there is something else to do or something better to watch.

Anyway, the main reason for the football fans being a problem that had to be dealt with earlier in the day is that on top of whatever ridiculous price the fans paid for their tickets, they are expected to pay yet another $67 to $82 for parking their cars (this amount will go up another twenty dollars for next year's dreaded Super Bowl Game). And, while they have somehow been persuaded to give up whatever amount they paid for the tickets, they don't really want to pay $67-$82 just to park their cars. And it is a really big parking lot, so even after paying the $67-$82 for parking the car, that doesn't guarantee that your car will end up being parked near where you want to be, and you might still be in for a long walk even after paying that much. So many of the local stores and restaurants were charging $35-$40 dollars to park in their parking lots, and from their you might have an even longer walk, but since you're going to have a long walk anyway you might as well get a parking space for half-price.

The best deal seemed to be that of Half-Price Books. If you spend $40 dollars or more that day, you got to park in front of the bookstore for free if you taped the dated receipt onto your windshield. And, to make things even easier, instead of looking all through the store for something that you want to spend $40 on, you can just buy a $40 gift card and spend the money later. So that almost makes the parking free, if you are someone who buys a lot of books, and if you are willing to walk the extra couple of blocks to get there.

Not that I picture many of these people being readers, but perhaps these people have friends who are readers, and they can give these bookstore gift cards to their reading friends for Christmas.

Then there were also people walking from really far away places on the other side of the freeway. I have no idea where they were coming from or how much they paid to park their cars, but I can't imagine that they got a better deal than what the bookstore was offering. And even if you really just do not like the bookstore and don't have any friends who read and therefore have absolutely no reason to go to Half-Price Books, most of the other stores and some restaurants had a similar deal, and you might find something that you would want to spend $40 on.

Anyway, now I'm going to find something to watch on Hulu or Youtube, because I can't watch The Event like I'm supposed to, because the Cowboys are still on.

TAZ still hate pain

I can't believe I feel this bad. It has been almost four weeks now since my back started hurting. I don't know what caused it, since it didn't start hurting when I was doing anything interesting. Pain pills do not seem to do anything. I just seem to be in pain, except when I can get into certain positions, which isn't very often because I can do little or nothing in those positions, except that I can sometimes sleep in two of them.

Not knowing that I would feel this bad, I went out of town. I felt okay the day we came, but the next day I felt bad and now I feel bad. I don't understand why I felt okay on Wednesday and pretty good in the car on Thursday, and then feel so bad on Friday and Saturday. My husband thinks it is because I'm not sleeping in my own bed. But I was not sleeping in my own bed two weeks ago in Amarillo, and I did not feel so bad then. I just don't get it.

Today I did not even feel good when I first woke up. That is very unusual. First thing in the morning, I usually am too foggy to notice pain or illness much.

I should be working on my costume, but so far I haven't felt up to it. I have only the week left now to do it, plus making decorations, plus baking cookies, plus all of the things that I would normally have to do like laundry. And of course the house is in the usual mess, except that I have a lot of the mess neatly stacked, cause I had to move it out and away from the closets to make a clear path for the bug guy who came on Wednesday.

I didn't need to be here. I could have stayed home and slept in my own bed. But I thought a couple of days watching cable and using a hot tub would be nice. This is so damned annoying.

Halloween movies

Okay, so probably nobody else would like to celebrate the season the way I would. As much as I enjoy the Halloween Party, it might be better for me if it were some other time of year, like maybe in March. They are not so much into the ghosts and such. I guess my idea of a good Halloween get-together would be if we all dressed up mostly in black, lit candles, ate weird food on my spiderweb design plates while maybe the theme to The Exorcist played in the background, and then we all watched movies like The Initiation of Sarah and the Vincent Prince version of The Last Man on Earth.



During my last trip out of town I turned on the Syfy channel, only to be disappointed in what they called The 31 Days of Halloween, which turned out that week to be some not very good movies, most of which didn't seem to be much in the theme anyway. I guess they were only choosing from movies they had made themselves (the before mentioned monster movies mainly about mutants and sea creatures passed over by Peter Benchley). Not impressed.



But it was early in the month, and I can only hope that some decent vampire movies are coming later.



So I'm going to try to locate movies that I would want to watch in October. I will come back and add links as I find them.



The Initiation of Sarah (1978 TV movie)(ending missing)



The Initiation of Sarah (remake 2006 TV movie)



The Last Man on Earth

A catch up post

I am home, while my husband is off in middle of nowhere Oklahoma. I was briefly very excited about nowhere Oklahoma and wanted to go too, as I wanted to go back to the Castle of Muskogee for their Halloween stuff. But as I looked more closely at the schedule, I saw that a trip to the Castle could not work, because the Castle is not open on Sunday night, and that would have been the best opportunity to go, as he is scheduled an hour and a half away on Friday and Saturday, the only nights that they are open.

So I quit trying to figure out how I might get to the place and just stayed home to work.

Of course I am not working, as my back still hurts. Maybe not as much as it did. Sometimes I think that whatever it is maybe getting better. Other times I just think that I am having a few good days, and then I'll have a few bad ones. It is best to sit just a certain way in this chair (so there has been a lot of Hulu and Youtube and such), or to stand up straight (which does not happen very often cause how boring is it to just stand still somewhere), or to maybe walk around a bit at a mall or something, or to stay in bed in a certain positions. Those positions in bed are not good for watching TV or reading, so I'm trying to stay out of bed, but eventually I am there watching TV or using the heating pad anyway. And of course I am trying to sleep some, which does not seem to want to happen at the right times.

The first thing that happened after I decided to stay here is that I seem to have lost my marbles and forgot to pay rent. I could have sworn that was done before I left, but there was no money taken out of the account for it. And I thought that I had given it to the "temporary manager", but as I got out of there fast and did not ask for a receipt, that might have been an earlier month. Anyway, paying that late means a lot of late fees, and I ended up paying eighty dollars for my mistake. She at first said a hundred, and I know that she could have even said a hundred and twenty, but "temporary manager" wasn't around, so she didn't charge me for the first day and she didn't charge me for the day that I wrote the check. (I later heard that "temporary manager" had quit, but as that was after I went to the office I did not get that confirmed.) I just can't imagine having forgotten to pay that check, as I went so far as to make sure that my brother had an emergency check before I went out of town. So how did I remember the emergency check but not the regular rent check?

The next odd thing was I learned that mail delivery for our street had stopped. There was an incident with a dog and some man at the beginning of the street (technically his address is on the cross street), and so everyone else would have to go get their mail from the Post Office until further notice. That started Friday afternoon while I was away. The mail service just stopped, and you only heard about it through the rumour mill, not buy a note on the door or phone call or anything official from either the Post Office or the office here. I didn't hear about it until Tuesday. Wednesday, the man who lives in the apartment in question came around to apologize in person to everyone on the street, saying that it was not him and not his dog, but his daughter's boyfriend and his dog. The boyfriend and dog have left, and the man has apologized and made arrangements to have a box at the post office, and the mail service was restored on Thursday.

Tuesday I got my TDaP shot. I don't know the difference between the TDaP and the DTaP (maybe one is for adults and one for children?), but I ended up getting it from the Kroger's pharmacy for $50. That is considerably less that the prices I'd been told at other places ($80 and $129), so I wonder if they made a mistake. I got the shot before they could change their minds. So now I won't infect the baby with whooping cough, and I'll remember that my tetanus shots are due on years ending in 0. So that's all good, and I'm glad to get that over with.

The bug guy is coming next next Wednesday. I suspected that, and that is the main reason I asked to come home instead of going straight on to Oklahoma with my husband, but now I have that confirmed. So I should be doing a lot of cleaning, which I am not, because of my back. But I should at least try to clear him a path through the junk.

Tomorrow I should have my picture taken, but I really don't want to. I don't know what to wear. I don't feel like getting dressed up anyway. Maybe I'll wear Harry Potter stuff.

The baby is in the hospital

First let me say that the baby formally known as the baby will now be known as Buddy. He is perhaps a little bit big to be called the baby, and as he now has a baby sister, calling him the baby would be confusing.

Anyway, just as Buddy was getting used to his baby sister, she got a temperature of 101, and apparently babies with temperatures above 100.4 get a trip to the hospital, even if there does not appear to be anything else wrong. And there does not appear to be anything else wrong, but they are not done looking.

The baby's temperature has gone back down, and if there is nothing else wrong she'll get to go back home tomorrow or the next day.

I will not say who the babies are or who their parents are. There are just too many weirdos out on the Internet, and I don't intend to help them find their next targets.

It just so happens that these are the only babies I've had in my life since I've been married. Not that most of my friends and family haven't had babies, just somehow they haven't had any when I was around. There are a few couples I am friends with who don't want children, but most have either had them when I wasn't around, or else they had babies and then somehow ended up not being friends anymore. It just seems to happen that way. Like people in the club who start families tend to stop being in the club. Family stuff is more important, and they just don't have time for some of the social stuff they did before.

So somehow there are these two babies who have come along at a time when I was not away on a long trip, and their parents didn't up and move, and while they don't have as much free time as they used to they haven't completely disappeared.

Now I have to be more careful about things. I've had a flu shot. Not that I shouldn't have a flu shot anyway, but in years past the decision to get one was made mostly on factors like whether or not I had the cash in my pocket when someone was given vaccinations at school or maybe Walmart. Anyway, I made a point of getting it this year, and now I'm thinking about the dtap. There's like an outbreak of whooping cough in California or something, and they are afraid it might come here. Besides, I should have gotten a tetanus shot a couple of years ago anyway.

The dtap is eighty dollars in Dallas (I hate Dallas) or a hundred and twenty-nine if I can get it at a certain Walgreens. I don't have either amount, so I haven't gotten it yet. I wish I had thought about it earlier. There's a place about a mile away from where I'm staying that probably has them here (though I don't know for how much), and I wish I'd have heard about it earlier. Maybe I could have gotten the shot instead of going to that restaurant.

Anyway, I will be heading home tomorrow, and Sunday I'll have to decide if I should see the baby, since I haven't had this shot.

I will be glad to go home. I had fun yesterday, but it will be good to sleep in my own bed again.

Out of town again

I look forward to going out of town. Then I stress about going out of town, about the schedule, about how I didn't get something done before I left, or about how I need to get back before a certain time.

And then I get here and wonder what made me do this?

As much as I dislike being stuck at home all day, being stuck in a motel room all day usually isn't any better. I brought projects with me, my Halloween costume and stuff that goes with it, but once I started working on it I realized that I didn't have everything that I need with me, so that might not get done this week like I planned. Without my little projects to keep me distracted, I usually have a very boring day of watching TV.

Not that the whole trip is boring. Monday I went to a certain restaurant. I'd never been there before, and I'll probably go there again, but now whenever the subject comes up, I can say that I've been there. Probably Wednesday I will go to a state park, and probably Thursday I will go to someplace we once went to when I was a child. Then I can say how everything looks smaller. I'll spend some time in the hot tub, and once in a while I'll even have my husband with me.

Saturday will be a bit of a hassle, but I didn't want to go to on next week's trip, so we have get home in time for him to get going again. Anyway, the plan is for me to spend most of Saturday at a mall so that we don't have to spend money on this room, and then we'll end up spending the night somewhere between here and home.

Taz hate pain

I am sitting here trying to be somewhat quiet. I unexpectedly have someone sharing my bed this morning, as my husband came home a day early. He is still sleeping, and as usual for this time of day I am not.

When I wrote my last post I was beginning my second week of being home after being away most of three weeks. My first week here my husband was here, and there was other stuff keeping me away from the house most of the time, so I did not get much done around here. The second week I was to have the place to myself, and as I had a lot of work to do and usually get more of it done when he is not here, that was to my liking.

I did a lot of work that Monday. I attempted to move the washing machine so that I could clean behind it and paint. I was able to move it some, but not all the way, as that would have require cutting off the water and such, and I was afraid that without help I would somehow do something wrong, like get the hot and cold water backwards, so I did what cleaning I could and painted the spots I could reach, and then I put the washing machine back in it's proper place. I did not quite finish painting the kitchen, as that would have required the ladder, and I don't do that when I am alone in the house, just in case there is an accident. So there are small areas up near the ceiling and around the windows and such, and those will take patience, but other than that (and the bit behind the washing machine that I couldn't reach) the kitchen walls are all painted, and I don't plan on painting the ceiling.

Having completed all of that task that needed to be done before putting the cabinet back in it's usual spot, I moved the cabinet. The kitchen is now back to being mostly the way it was, and now I can think about what needs to be done to the new wall, if I want to add hooks or magnets or whatever.

After all of that, the tiling under the sink still isn't done. I did buy another cutting tool, but I haven't used it yet. So still a lot of kitchen stuff is still tossed into the dinning area, which I can't use because it has too much junk in it.

After moving all the stuff in the kitchen, I decided to get the other major chore out of the way and mowed the front yard. Then it was time to eat dinner and pat myself on the back for a job well done. All that work done and it was only Monday. Off to a great start.

And then I felt like I was going to fall. I didn't fall really, I caught myself, but my back really hurt. Well, these things happen. But I was done for the day anyway. I was just going to eat and then watch TV for the rest of the evening.

Except that the next day my back still hurt. I tried some Doan's pills. I don't know what it is about Doan's pills, but they really do magic things and get rid of back pain. At least, they usually do, but not this time. I had an errand to run, but after that I spent most of the day in bed watching the last season of Saving Grace.

Wednesday morning I did not feel that much better still, but I had many errands to run, and I decided to go ahead and try to do them. While I was out, I got the coolest sandals on clearance for ten dollars. At about five or so I decided that I'd had enough. My back still hurt, but not so much as it had in the morning. I decided just one more thing could be done that day, so I went to Walgreen's and got a flu shot.

I ended up not getting home till after six, and after getting something to eat I invited myself to my brother's place to watch Stargate. We were going to watch some other stuff, but we ended up talking about this and that, and then we decided we should save the other stuff for another time. I borrowed some DVDs and went home.

I thought that I would try doing as little as possible Thursday to see if that would help my back, so I spent most of the day in bed watching those DVDs. It did not help. If anything I felt worse.

By Friday night I hadn't gotten anything done around the house except for what I'd done Monday. Since the day I felt the best was Wednesday, the day I'd spent the least time in bed complaining about my bad back, I decided to mostly stay out of bed and at least wash the dishes and do the laundry on Saturday. And then my husband came home a day early.

So if I'm going to get anything done besides laundry it will have to be today. We will see what happens. We are planning another trip.

Something interesting happened on the way to the store

Well, I've been away for most of three weeks, and then this last week I was home, except that I didn't spend much of my time actually at home, and I was busy, and I didn't much of anything useful done around here. And after you have been away for most of three weeks, and then spend little of the fourth week at home and end up eating out, then you have to throw most of the stuff in the refrigerator away and buy groceries.

So I was on my way to do that, except that I wanted to have a look at my luffa plant, and while I was in the backyard I stopped to talk to my neighbor for a bit. And then I waved bye and was headed to my car, and I noticed one of the other neighbors with her baby. She was knocking at my neighbor's front door, and of course no one heard the knocking, because they were all in the backyard. So I said to the lady that they were in back. I don't know this neighbor as well as the one I'd just spoken to, in fact I mainly just wave at her and rarely talk to her other than at the annual meetings, and I don't even remember her name. But I've seen that this neighbor seems friendly enough with the other one, so I thought that she would just go on to the backyard. But either she didn't hear what I'd said, or going around to the backyard was too much for her to do, and she says that she has to run after her escaping dog, and could I hold the baby.

Sure.

And the lady got in her car and drove down the street, and I took the baby to my other neighbor's backyard.

Well, I don't have a dog, but if I did have a dog and she got out, this would upset me and I would immediately run after her. I don't have a baby either, but I guess if I did I would care a lot about her.

Now, if I had both a dog and a baby, and if for some reason I could only look after one of them, I'm assuming that I would favor the baby over the dog.

Not that I wasn't happy to help out and watch the baby, or at least watch the baby for a while til my other neighbor could watch the baby, as the other neighbor was the first choice for watching the baby instead of me. But I just don't think that I would have given my baby to someone who just waves at me from across the street, someone I rarely speak to, someone whose name I can't remember.

For all she knows I could eat babies for breakfast or be dating someone that Law and Order: SVU modeled one of their bad guys after.

All is well. She very quickly recovered the runaway dog and came back to the other neighbor's backyard, and then we all tried to get the baby to throw a ball to us. (She's very happy picking up the ball, but she hasn't quite got the throwing part figured out.) The lady took her baby home, the other neighbors went back to whatever they had been doing, and I went to the grocery store.

My routine is screwed up

Okay, so I am home now, after having been away for most of three weeks. And I don't quite know what to do. I don't quite remember what it is that I'm supposed to be doing. I have to think about things that I used to just get up and do. But I haven't done them in three weeks, and I don't remember what needed to be done or where things are and such.

I've forgotten to water the plants. I was away all that time, and the rain mostly took care of them, and a neighbor watered a few things, so that when I got home some of the plants were rather sad looking, but very few were dead, and those dead ones were mostly either things that I expected to die or things that I just didn't care about anymore. The second thing that I did when I got home was water the plants. I gave them lots and lots of water. But then on Monday I totally forgot to get up and water the plants, and Tuesday I didn't remember until I was doing something else and could not stop to check on the plants. So now I'm sitting here remembering that I need to water the plants, and this is the time of day that I used to water the plants, only I can't water them right now because it is dark outside.

Why is it dark outside?

Okay, so I guess that it's just that time of year that it stays dark longer, and I just didn't notice that from the motel. But here, today, it is dark, and it is a surprise. So I'm just sitting here worrying about my plants and not able to do anything about it.

So I thought that I would sit here and try to be quiet, and do things like check my email and check a few other things. And I'm sitting here, and I forgot my email address. Well, one of them anyway. I don't use it much anymore, but I have to check it once in a while, and I have to know what it is to use some other things. And I'm sitting here, and I just couldn't remember. Not that I forgot my password, but I just couldn't remember the email itself. I couldn't remember where to go to check the email. I didn't remember if it was gmail or yahoo or hotmail or fastmail. It was hotmail, but I sat here for the longest time and just could not remember that.

For a moment, it was scary. My email address was totally gone from my head, and it wasn't going to come back. And here I had thought I'd left that particular address where anyone with half a brain could find it (never thinking that I would be the person looking), but it wasn't there. I don't remember moving it, it just seems to have been removed for me during some stupid update or something.

Okay, I have the email now. But that was really annoying.

I am painting my kitchen. It seems that I've been painting my kitchen for a couple of months now. Maybe not really that long, but I started a while back, and then I was gone for weeks, and now I'm back, and I'm still not finished painting the damned kitchen.

I could paint half of the house in a day, if the house were empty. But the house isn't empty. I've never before tried to paint with all of the stuff still here. Well, maybe that isn't true, but that was a very long time ago. And I've certainly never before tried to paint such a small kitchen with all of the appliances still in place.

I shouldn't be so obsessed with painting the kitchen, especially now. But I had been thinking that I should paint. Not a different color or anything, just it is time to paint over all those little marks that do not clean off, and in order to do that I need to paint everything so that I know everything is the same color white, and I need to know exactly what color white that is. And I was thinking that I should get started on it, since I'd already go to the trouble of moving a few things for the guys to repair the wall. And then once I got started I thought that I should not halfway do things, that if I'm going to do this I should really do this, and so I am moving everything and painting behind stuff and cleaning under stuff and cleaning over stuff.

Before I left, I had done some of the work. In the day and a half I was home between trips I did enough work so that I could put the stove back where it was supposed to be. Yesterday, I moved the refrigerator and cleaned under that and painted behind it and moved it back where it was. That is what is taking so long, that I have to move one thing at a time, clean, put tape on the floor and around cabinets and electrical stuff, paint, wait about four hours, paint again, wait a couple more hours, remove tape, and then move the thing back where it was.

And also I am afraid of being on a ladder when I'm the only one in the house, cause I really don't want to fall and be stuck like that the rest of the day. So any cleaning or painting that involves being on a ladder can only be done before my husband leaves for work or on his day off. So that is annoying and takes even more time.

So I have now painted most of two walls, and that took about five sections. Now I need to paint the wall with the sink and the washing machine. I'm not sure about moving a washing machine. It might be complicated, or I might have to unhook something. And I really shouldn't bother with it, except that a.) I will know I didn't do a proper job even if no one else notices, and b.) I really need to clean behind it. There's a smell in the kitchen, and that is the only place left that I haven't looked. So the area needs to be cleaned even if it doesn't really need to be painted, and I want it painted anyway.

So am I near completing this task? No. Today is the day of the thing that my mother insisted I be here for, even though now it seems that there won't be much for me to do, except that I need to feed mother's dog while she is out doing something. Except that she forgot to have a key made for me, so this might take a while. So I'm not sure that moving the washing machine is a good idea today, as it is right near the door, and it might get moved in such a way that it would prevent me from leaving the house for several hours, and I don't really know yet when I might be needed.

Well, it is less dark outside, so I guess that I will go out and look at the plants.

I wanna go home now

Okay, so after our week in Oklahoma City, he was scheduled to work one day here, followed by four days in a not so interesting place two hours away. But I got excited and planned that we should leave day earlier and have a whole day off here before he had to work. I cancelled that extra day after I learned that he was also scheduled to work the next week here, and I figured that we would have a day or two off (and possibly more) here without having to pay for it, so why add an extra day that we did have to pay for.

It turns out that we only had that Sunday off (and we had to spend two hours of that day off driving here before we could do anything fun) and that he had to work Monday, which is usually a day off for him. And then we had a flat tire, which cost us another two hours off our fun time.

So when I heard that the schedule had been changed and he might work in another place about two hours from here, and that we might have another day or two off here, at first I was happy about it. But that would have meant that I was going to miss the thing that my mother wanted me home for, after I had already told her the schedule and that we would be home in time for that.

And really, it has been two weeks since I've been home, plus I was only home for a day and a half after spending a week in Oklahoma, and so I've been away from home for almost three weeks. So that's almost three weeks of not doing any work (other than making two and a half scarves), and three weeks of not eating spaghetti and yogurt and other such things that I am used to eating, and I missed doing the stuff I usually do with my friends this weekend, etc....

Two more days off here would have been great, but I guess that it's time to go home anyway.

So, I was not too disappointed when the schedule changes were made that did not include any time out of town next week.

It will be good to be home. It will be good to sleep in my own bed with my own pillows, and take baths in my own bathtub, and eat spaghetti and yogurt and such.

I am not sure what (if anything) we will do after work today, but we will head home tomorrow.

See you in the world.

Wednesday through Saturday was spent in the middle of nowhere. Not as middle of nowhere as some places I have been, but not anyplace particularly wonderful, and not a tourist destination. There were two things there that I would want to do, and one of them was only open to visitors after lunch on certain days, so we were not able to do that at all due to scheduling problems. The other thing we did Thursday morning. The rest of our time off was either spent eating (mostly Mexican food) or doing nothing.

The motel mostly sucked (though I have been in much worse), but we knew what we would probably be getting, just that in our budget there weren't any other options (or the other options looked worse). But at least I had Syfy on cable, and other things on cable. (Now that I am in the nice motel, there is no Syfy, and most of the rest of the cable sucks).

At some point I tried to get some help from my cell phone company. I wanted the most basic of information, and they wouldn't give it to me. I wanted to know which chargers work with which phones. I had my phone, but I'd left my charger at home. I could use a different charger from the same company, but I just wanted to make sure they were compatible, cause I had been warned earlier that using the wrong charger would damage the phone (and also I had prior experience damaging a tape recorder by leaving it charging for more than a week).

So there should be lists somewhere of all the chargers that go with which phones, and which phones that can use what chargers, and there should be a master list of all the phones and all the chargers and which ones work together. But they refused to send me the list, because I could not give them some number off of my phone, which I could not read because my phone had no power.

My phone had no power. That was the whole reason for asking about the chargers.

There were suggestions of which buttons to push on the phone to get the number, or that I should call and talk to a real person, etc.... It took many exchanges before they seemed to understand the words NO POWER. Eventually, they called my home, but I'm pretty sure that in my first message I told them that I was out of town, and that was why I couldn't use my own charger.

Eventually a friend talked me through the process of Googling enough things that I found the information without their help. The charger I had worked with eight phones, and after Googling some images of phones I found that mine was one of the eight. At least, I hoped that was right, as Googling images is not always the best way of finding the name of something.

Three hours after I charged my phone, I got yet another email from them, that they were still trying to help me. Except that they still didn't send me the list, so they weren't trying very hard. I wrote back that someone else had already done their job for them, and that I would file a complaint when I got home.

They still didn't get it. They finally answered my first question, that not all chargers work with all phones, and that I might be able to get some of the numbers that they need to help me by removing the phone's battery....

I guess they missed the whole part that I didn't need their help anymore because someone else did their job for them. I haven't emailed them back. And they still didn't send me a list. This is just the most basic thing to know when you have a cell phone, and the company is telling me that they can't send me a list of all the phones that work with all the chargers because I didn't give them the number of my phone. They don't need my number to send me a master list, they're just lazy or something.

It's hard to believe that anyone is this stupid.

I'm really mad. I'm thinking about making a lot of trouble for them. I'm even wondering if I should find a really annoying lawyer.

It's sad, because right before this happened, I was thinking that I should start using this phone more. I originally got it as an emergency phone, but there really aren't a lot of emergencies, and over time I collected over a thousand minutes that I wasn't using. And my phone at home doesn't get much use either, mainly bill collectors leave messages. By the time anyone that I know wants to leave me a message, the machine is full. If not for the possibility that I might need to call 911, I probably could just get rid of it.

So now I don't know what to do. I was going to spend about a hundred and fifty dollars on new minutes for next year, but since they were less than helpful, maybe this isn't even the best for an emergency phone.

And we did have an emergency of a sort, though I ended up not needing the phone. We had a flat tire Sunday morning, but my husband managed to change it himself, even though we were on the freeway at the time and had to pull over onto the grass and work with other cars speeding past us.

If we had been stuck there with the flat tire and no phone, I'd definitely be getting a lawyer.

So we lost about two hours of our only full day off while we waited at the tire place. But now we are all worn out from our one day off and our attempts at squeezing in tourist stuff before lunch. Unfortunately, we will not have Sunday or Monday here like I thought. We have to drive back Sunday, and while my husband usually has Monday off, this time he has to work in Oklahoma again. So there will be this rush to get me home before he has to head out again.

Anyway, this morning was nice. A bit rushed, but nice.

Is it September 11th already?

From the TV you would think that it was the 10th anniversary, but I counted on my fingers and it's the 9th.

I have already blogged about my 9-11 experience, so I don't think that I'll do that again.

In case you were wondering where I was last week, we went to Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City is not that far away, and over the years we have been there many times. But I was watching the series Saving Grace, and I realized that I'd never been to the memorial, where the Murrah Federal Building had been. My husband had been outside it, but never to the museum inside, and I had never been there at all.

My husband was scheduled to work in Oklahoma City for a couple of weeks, and then another week, and then another. But during this time I had to be home because of the termites or because of the kitchen wall being fixed, or maybe just that I didn't want to leave the plants that long without water. I said that if he went back again I wanted to go, and I wanted to go to the museum.

I got to do a few other things. We went to a couple of restaurants that we like, and it was nice to have access to a pool for a while, and we had other things that we would have liked to do if we had stayed a day later (which we didn't do when we found out about this trip), but the main thing I had planned was going to the memorial.

There's a room with pictures of all the victims. And there's a space for the family to put an item that might tell you something about the person in the picture. A golf ball, a baseball, another picture, a poem, a figurine, a Christmas ornament, a service pin, etc.... Two of the victims were Trekkies, cause they had little Starfleet ships next to their pictures. A few pictures had really odd things, like one girl had a credit card, and another girl had hairspray. And a few pictures didn't have anything with them, but most of those were adults, and I thought maybe they just didn't have family, or that they were not close with their family anymore, and so there was either no one to pick what should go with the picture, or no one knew what should go there.

But one lone picture was of a baby. Surely the baby had a family. Surely someone cared about the baby. How else did the baby get to the daycare (or elsewhere in the building) if he didn't have someone? But no one left a teddy bear, or a figurine, or a poem, just the picture.

There's a calender with the birthdays of all the victims. There were 168 victims, so that takes up about half of the dates.

There were many newspaper articles, some about people suspected of being responsible. I knew when it happened that it wasn't them, that it was one of us. I didn't get the whole Waco connection, I just thought it was someone who didn't like paying taxes. I was really surprised when 9-11 turned out to be foreigners, but as my husband pointed out, our nut jobs mainly like to kill other people, but their nut jobs will also commit to killing themselves.

The outside is pretty, sort of like the reflecting pool in Washington DC. And there are things that look like chairs, one for each victim, each with a name. And then there's a big tree that survived the bomb.

You could spend all day in there reading stuff and watching videos, but my husband had to work, and we only paid for two hours of parking.

Enough of that. I'm going back to knitting and watching cable TV.

The trip of things not working

I have just started my second scarf. I've asked for help from my friends to find out if people I plan to give the scarves to actually want the scarves, but so far they haven't responded. Most of them were having too much fun in Atlanta to bother with checking their email and such. I guess I'll send another email out before I start the third scarf, and having an extra scarf won't kill me.

So at the motel before this one we changed rooms because we were supposed to get a whirlpool tub, but the jets didn't work. They gave us an upgrade, and we ended up in a room made for handicapped guests, so we had the extra large whirlpool tub for two. So that was nice. But the water wasn't very hot, and the cable sucked, and the frig didn't really work. It never got really cold, and it had old frig smell. Not really sure how to do describe it, sort of chemical, sort of just bad, and it just comes from refrigerators that are either old or haven't been used in a while. And everything in it picked up this smell, so I had to throw out anything that we put in there. But we were lucky that we hadn't done any major grocery shopping, and that we only had to throw out a few things that we brought from home and a couple of half empty sodas.

So, in spite of having a really helpful front desk girl and an owner who did try to make up for the inconvenience, we will probably not go back to that motel when we head back to that area Sunday.

The place we are staying at now isn't that great, and we knew that going in, but this was the only place here that we found in our budget on Priceline.com. And I thought that would be better than just roaming around town asking for a room under fifty dollars. At least this place has better cable, and there is plenty of hot water.

Sometimes the Internet here is weird. Sometimes it is just slow or something doesn't load images or whatever. It is annoying. And this is the new computer, so I know that it is them and not me.

The remote control didn't work the first day.

Okay, as it turns out, I was using the wrong remote. But I don't know why there are two remotes here, as the one doesn't seem to do anything other than turn the TV on and off. Using the other remote now, so that is better.

Again, I am having trouble with the frig, though it doesn't have the nasty smell of the other one. First, they just forgot that we were supposed to have a frig and microwave, so they had to move one in. And then the frig just never seems to get very cold. Found out that the plug was loose, and I switched outlets with the microwave, so that is better, except that no I have to hold the microwave plug to the wall when I use the microwave or it will slip out and not work. So the frig has power all the time now, but it still doesn't seem to be as cold as it should be. Again, since I was suspicious we did not fill the frig full of groceries. And we will be leaving here Sunday, and I hope that at our last stop we'll get a good room with a properly working frig and such.

Sometimes I think that I am tired and ready to go home already, even though we really haven't done anything yet. I guess it just seems like a long trip already, because I was gone the week before and only home for a day and a half before we left again.

But I am ready to leave here, because there were only two things that I really wanted to do here, and we've already done the one, and we can't do the other because of the schedule. My husband has to be at work at the only time the other place allows visitors, so that just isn't going to happen.

Time to go and be a tourist, at least for a day.

My mother isn't happy with me

Big surprise. But it's just the reason for her being unhappy.

Okay, she's been telling me that something is going to happen in October. She told me months ago that something is going to happen in October. She repeats this several times. Okay, got it, something is happening in October. The something isn't happening to me, and it isn't happening to her, it's happening to someone else in the family. It doesn't really have anything to do with me, it is going to happen regardless of what is going on with me at the time, I don't need to be there, etc....

Okay, so now apparently, the thing is not going to happen in October, it is going to happen later this month, and I'm going on a trip, and then another trip, and for all I know after that week I'll go on another trip. I have no way of knowing that stuff very far in advance. My husband's schedule gets posted on Wednesdays, so that you know what you are doing that week and the next week, but you don't know what you are doing the week after next until the schedule is posted on Wednesday, and even then there are changes which sometimes happens at the last minute. So I might know where I am headed for the next day, I know where I plan to spend that week. Right now I know where we plan to spend the rest of this week and the next week and we would have to think about coming home probably a week from Sunday. And now it is Thursday, so I've seen the schedule, but at the time I talked to my mother I hadn't seen it yet, and there was a possibility that schedule posted on Wednesday would have meant another week in the same area or a week that is someplace closer to where we are now, and then there would have been no point in going home.

Anyway, I'm planning to be gone for about two weeks. That is the plan. Plans change. I have no way of knowing.

Before I left and I talked to my mother (and she was already not very happy with me), the plan was that I would only be gone this time for one week. See? Plans change. The plan at the time was to leave on Sunday and come back a week from either Sunday or Monday. But now he's working on that Monday, and we'll be doing tourist stuff on that Sunday, cause there just isn't any reason to come home for half a day and then turn around and head back the same way.

So I'm telling her the plans (at least, the plans as I know them at the time), and she's asking aren't I going to be home for the thing? And I'm like, I don't know, and anyway, the thing is in October. No, it is in September. Well, I don't know, maybe. Why? Cause we might need you to help out. Other people aren't going to be here.

Okay.

Well, I can't help that other people aren't going to be here. Last time anything like this was going on, I offered to help, though I couldn't really think of anything I could do. And there wasn't anything for me to do, and everyone was like thanks anyway. So I hadn't really thought about offering to help this time, cause I know from last time there really isn't anything for me to do except hang around and say, I'm here if you need me. But it was obvious that I was just in the way, and when I wasn't given something to do, I left.

So now my mother is upset with me cause I'm not promising to come home to hang around and say that I'm here if someone needs me. Someone does not really need me, just my mother wants someone to be here just in case, and other people have travel plans and aren't going to be here.

The other people who have travel plans are people with money who can travel any time that they want to. They picked now. I don't know why they picked now, but they did. I don't get to pick my travel time. Travel is offered, and it is rarely any place that I want to go, and I either go when it is offered or I don't. I can't turn it down and then expect it to be offered again at a more convenient time.

Not that later would be a convenient time for me. October is too late for some of the stuff that I want to do, and besides that I am usually a very busy person in October.

Oh, speaking of being busy in October, everyone seems to think that I'm co-hosting a children's Halloween party. I'm not, but that was announced. I just said that I was donating some stuff to the party, which I did, and I thought that was the end of it. I can't even say for sure that I'd be in town during the week of the children's party. At this point I'm not even that sure about helping out with the adult party, and I can't even say that I'm that excited about going to the adult party, which is something I look forward to all year. I'm just not having any good ideas this year, and it's all starting to seem boring on the one hand (if I don't do much) or a lot of work (if I end up doing a lot in spite of not having any good ideas or maybe having a good idea at the last minute). In fact, if there was really something interesting offered to me, I might go out of town instead of the party, which is something I would never do. But my husband was briefly talking about Orlando, but that wouldn't have been work travel and we would have had to pay for that all ourselves. But work travel is different (it doesn't cost near as much), and if something really interesting were offered right now I think that I'd do that instead.

Back to my mother's problem. I am supposed to give up my travel plans to hang around just in case someone needs me, even though I know from the last time that no one will need me and if someone did need something it would probably be something that I can't do and so they would still not need me, and the main reason for my giving up my travel plans is that someone else has made other travel plans and won't be here.

I don't think so.

So I'm sure that everyone thinks I'm a heartless bitch or something. But I don't see that I should give up something that I want to do just to be here for moral support. It is unlikely that I would actually be doing anything useful. And the person that might be needing the help didn't ask for help, just my mother is upset that I'm not going to be around to offer help. And the other person with travel plans apparently is not a heartless bitch for making travel plans and spending a lot of money to go out of town even when she knew that she had made the plans during this time that was not convenient, but apparently no one expects her to change her plans, maybe because she spent all this money.

I don't get it.