Confusion and Disappointment

Before anybody gets really excited, this post is mainly about eBay purchases, and mainly purchases of plants.

And to answer an earlier question, the seller in Michigan was not the Michigan Bulb Company. This was someone on eBay, I'm guessing that they only or mainly sell from eBay. They have high positive marks, and have been in business for a while, though I've learned this doesn't always mean what it seems, as sellers can buy their high positive marks and such from someone else.

I don't know why that was such a surprise to me. People can buy and sell eBay businesses. Just as people buy and sell regular businesses.

Anyway, I have no reason to suspect that the business has been sold, and that I didn't buy my plants from the same person who actually received the high marks, just that it is possible.

Okay, so I ordered two Stella cherry trees, a 5-in-1 pear tree, and a 5-in-1 apple tree. I have always wanted a 5-in-1 pear tree, and when I saw one on eBay that no one else was bidding on, I bought it, maybe without really thinking it through. Having bought that tree, I thought I'd take advantage of the discounted postage and also buy the cherry trees (at the time I noticed them no one else was bidding, but I ended up paying five dollars), and then I noticed the 5-in-1 apple tree (people were bidding on them, so it took three tries and about twenty dollars for that). So instead of the one tree for ten dollars plus about twelve dollar postage, I bought four trees for about thirty-five dollars and another sixteen in postage.

Now, I have bought plants online before, mostly recent purchases from eBay, and they arrive in different conditions, mostly I think depending on the type of plant more than care given by the seller. I have had great success with daylilies from three different sellers, but I've had trouble with about half of the other plants I bought this year, mostly from the same people who sold me the daylilies. So I think that it's just that daylilies and other bulbs don't mind the shipping process and other non-bulb type flowers and such aren't too happy about it.

So I think that bare-root trees are one of the things that don't mind being sent through the mail, if it is the right time of year. But May and June probably aren't the right time of year, at least it doesn't sound like a good idea to ship something from here, as we should all be done with most of our planting here and a lot of the plants left in the stores are on clearance. But the seller was from Michigan, and I know that things start growing a lot later in the season there. So the seller claimed that the trees were sent still dormant, and I thought that it might be true, and if so it was probably okay for them to keep sending plants.

I also know that dormant bare root trees pretty much look like dead sticks. This has always been a bit of a problem for me. How do you know if you've bought a healthy plant or a dead stick, if they all equally look like dead sticks? For example, asparagus really looks dead right out of the package, but if you buy it at the right time it rarely is. Usually you follow the directions and plant them at the right time, and they emerge, though this is weeks or even months later. However, this year I bought two packages, maybe a bit too late (though not late enough that they were on clearance), and one package was fine and more than half of the other package was dead. I have no idea if they were dead when I bought them or if I did something wrong when planting or what. They all looked the same.

So the description says that what I will get in the mail will be dormant, and that it will look like a stick, but not to worry because it will sprout leaves after planting and will probably have fruit in two or three years. So I have a picture in my mind that I will be getting four sticks in the mail, and that maybe they will have some greenish buds on them, or that they might really look dead, or that they might have leaves already and that would probably be bad. And I thought that two of the sticks would be five-pronged at the top, because they were supposed to be grafted with five different varieties.

Well, I got a mixed bag (or rather the products in the box were mixed), and nothing was quite what I expected. They came Thursday afternoon, a day later than the predicted "between May 25 and June 1." Not sure why those dates were predicted, since I bought the items on May 17th, but they weren't sent out till May 28th. Obviously the package cannot be delivered on the 25th if it isn't sent out before then.

I was expecting the trees to be one or two feet long, which they were. I just didn't expect them to be so thin. The apple is the thickest, and almost what I expected, but not quite. The pear is much thinner than I expected, and the cherries are just little twigs.

However, the cherry twigs did arrive mostly dormant, and now that I've put them in pots one of them is starting to show signs of life. Or maybe it is just my imagination.

The apple tree has leaves coming out of the top of the tree in three places. Not five places like I would think. I suppose other leaves could appear later, as there are bumps lower where there could be growth, but I wouldn't think so, not if all five varieties are supposed to bloom together to cross-pollinate. I'm wondering if I got a 3-in-1 tree by mistake, but I didn't see any of those advertised.

The pear tree is just the opposite. Unfortunately, it has leaves growing almost the entire length of the tree, in about thirteen places. Not at all the five-pronged stick I was expecting. I suppose each variety could have been tiny little grafts two or three places each, but my first thought is that I got a single variety by mistake. If so I've paid way too much, and I don't even know what variety it is. And of course the leaves are dying, though I don't think the whole thing is dying, maybe just the leaves.

I've got all four in small pots in the living room, thinking that it is too hot for the poor trees to go outside after their traumatic trip.

Well, I don't quite know what to do. First, I think that I've spent my money unwisely. With shipping and everything, I spent less than fifty-five dollars, but I'm thinking I could have done better with it. I might have found something around here on clearance. Or, I might have saved the money til next year and ordered trees in March or something. I am worried that the pear tree was a bad idea. Half of the varieties are good for this area, but the other half will probably get blight. I don't know if the blight will just kill half of the pears or kill the whole tree. And that's if I actually have a 5-in-1 pear tree and not just a mystery one variety tree. The cherry trees are just tiny twigs, and I might have been better off buying one larger tree. And I didn't really need an apple tree, I hadn't originally planned on it, but it just suddenly seemed like a good idea after buying the other stuff and qualifying for the discounted shipping.

So I might just be having some regular buyer's remorse, and not really have a reason to complain. I don't want to complain. I don't want to give someone bad marks if they don't actually deserve bad marks. But I was supposed to get dormant 5-in-1 trees, and they were not dormant, and it now occurs to me that it will be years before I have any idea if they are actually 5-in-1 trees.

Anyway, I haven't yet contacted the seller, and I haven't yet left feedback.

In other news about eBay, I lucked into some dvds, and I'm now looking into buying more. No one was bidding on Surface, which wasn't my favorite show, but no one bidding and the starting bid was two dollars and the shipping was a reasonable three dollars. No one bid against me, so I paid a total of five dollars. After that, I decided to look at other dvds. While looking for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I found Invasion the series (again not my favorite show, but a good deal) and the same seller had Invasion: Earth, which I did really like when I saw it the first time and I wouldn't mind seeing it again. The dvds were Buy Now under four dollars each, reasonable shipping, with discounts for multiple purchases. So I bought both for just under twelve dollars.

All three are coming media mail, which means that I might have to wait a while, but I noticed that both sellers sent the packages the next day, and there are tracking numbers. I am now worried that Surface is lost. Yesterday it said out for delivery, which could not have been possible, from Missouri. Today is says status not updated. I'm wondering if this is just what happens with media mail, or if maybe the shipping label was lost. If my address is lost and the seller's address is still readable, they should just send the package back to the seller to try again, and it should all be okay. If both addresses are missing, I don't know what happens. Should I try to contact the post office in Missouri, or should I ask the seller to do that, or is just hopeless? I have bought from this seller before, and I'm sure they would do something, but I think they'd just do the easy thing and refund some of my money, if not all. But I don't want the five dollars back (and I certainly don't want just the two dollars back), I want the dvds.

Anyway, is it stupid to think about doing anything so soon?

My other dvds are now being sorting in Greensboro and are probably fine.

Today is the day of our little election. We had some discussions about absentee voting, and we were told that we could not do that. There's an exception for the disabled, sort of, but the disabled still have to be in their homes at the time of the election. I'm told that we cannot have absentee voting because of a by-law that says you cannot vote by proxy or by email, though in some cases if the member is out of town a spouse can vote for him or her if the election officers are told in advance.

I am thinking that does not totally cancel out the possibility of absentee voting, and if arrangements are being made for the disabled a similar arrangement cold be made for other people who are going to be out of town. For the disabled person(s), a form is taken to the home and filled out, and the ballot is placed in a sealed envelope and taken by an office employee to the election officer and put in the ballot box. So it isn't a proxy, and it wasn't by US mail, and technically the disabled person wasn't absent on the day of the election, just unable to leave the home.

I would think that the same sort of thing could be done for people going out of town. Prior to the election, they could go to the office, vote, place the ballot in a sealed envelope, put the envelope in the locked ballot box, and put the ballot box in the safe. And that would not be a proxy or a ballot delivered by mail, and we could have absentee voting without changing the by-laws.

But no one listens to me now, and I doubt that my health is up to being on the board on top of dealing with my personal situation. Besides which, I never know when I might get the chance to go out of town, and would not like to take into account meetings and other board obligations when I go on trips.

I have received flyers from all nominees except D, one strange letter of general complaints about board members and nominees and pizza and too many kids at our one meeting which kids are invited to, and one additional flyer begging people to go out and vote (though the author neglected to mention if he or/she was for any particular nominees). Off the top of my head, I'm saying yes to A, will probably vote for R, and my third vote will probably go to that other guy's son, cause he did later come around and campaign for himself. My brother suggested the third vote go to the other R, who did later send out a small flyer (and with very small print to keep costs down, but at least it was sent out), because he was the least liked person mentioned in the complaint letter, and we don't agree with much said in the complaint letter.

We had a similar complaint letter last year, but we are not sure it was the same author (both were anonymous), because most of the complaints were about different people (unless maybe the author has switched sides?).

So voting for A, probably R, probably the other guy's son, or maybe J. Not D because he didn't send a flyer and I don't know him. Definitely not S, cause she needs to mind her own business. And definitely not T. Even if I liked T, it would probably be a wasted vote. She is odd, and I doubt she will get enough votes to be a serious threat to anyone else.

Really, I wish I could just somehow vote against S three times without having to think too hard about who to vote for.

Next year we get to vote again M.

Plant problems

My husband went out of town yesterday. I didn't go with him. It would have been nice, but I'm probably stuck here until further notice, because of the plants.

This week (and probably some of next week too) in particular I am stuck here because I'm waiting on another package of live plants. I worry even about going to the grocery store, that I'm going to be gone too long and I'll miss the package, and that extra time being in a box without enough water will damage or kill the plants. Being gone for two or three days is obviously out of the question.

And it's not like I really needed to go out of town, but originally it was just for the one day, and it would have been nice, just to get away for a bit.

And then some really annoying things happened.

He'd thought that he was going to a suburb of Oklahoma City. Suburbs of Oklahoma City were hit by tornadoes, so we wondered if the job would be cancelled. Turns out that the job wasn't where he thought it was, and he had to leave the day before. So we went to lunch, and he left right after that.

Turns out that we'd been to this place before, but I don't remember it. After a while, you forget a lot of places. But I guess when we were there before, we'd noticed a few things that we wanted to do if we were ever in the area again and had more time. Like, now would have been a good time, if I weren't stuck at home, mostly because of waiting on this package.

Well, he probably won't want to do any of that stuff without me, so he'll be coming home tomorrow.

And now about the battles with tree limbs.

Well, it would have been nice to finish up with the garden and such for the year. It just gets too hot, and I don't like to work on it much after April, and so I had planned to stop all of the major work the first week of May. And then the weather changed, so that it seemed very cool again, even though it wasn't raining as much as I had expected. So, I thought, as long as the weather permits, I should do more work.

After having tried a couple of times to cut down two trees growing too close to the back fence, the trees grew back at odd angles, and some branches grew through the fence and did some minor damage. That is one of the reasons I bought a reciprocating saw last year, so that I could cut the limbs that start growing too close to the fence. So I had some work to do just for that, and a few weeks ago I decided to get started on it.

I had tried the saw last year, but I didn't really use it much. It's not bad. I just have trouble with physical work in general, and after using tools I need a rest. My hands ache. I have to shake it off, literally. So after sawing off the small limbs that would have caused us trouble later, I gave the saw and myself a rest.

After going back into the house and putting the saw away, I noticed that my right hand was swelling up. I did not quite look like young Captain Kirk having an allergic reaction to a vaccination, but one hand was noticeably larger than the other for a bit. Odd. I don't remember having that reaction using the saw last year, but I didn't use it much last year.

Anyway, the problem went away, and I decided to try it again the next day. Again my hands and arms hurt, but more what I had expected, and I didn't notice that much swelling.

After getting done with what absolutely had to be done I cut down some dead branches. And after that went well, I decided to keep going and just cut down the whole tree. I was planning on doing that at some point anyway, so I might as well get started now. And then at a certain point, it does seem like a lot of work, but it's better to keep going that to stop and have half a tree.

So I've cut all the branches off of the first tree, leaving the main trunk, which is really going to be a lot of work with my little saw. But, it will have to be my little saw, or combination of the saw and a small axe, because I'm afraid of chain saws. Or else, I will just have to leave it the way it is, checking once in a while to remove new growth.

I tied up some of the smaller pieces for trash removal, and then I went on to cut down the second tree. This mostly went well, until the last of the main branches, which was too big to get in one cut, and also slightly leaning in the wrong direction, and would possibly get caught in power lines or phone lines or whatever they are.

It took a while, but I got a lot of the second tree cut down, until there was just the main branch left. And it was leaning slightly in the direction of a power line, or a phone line, or cable or something. Anyway, instead of making a straight cut, I made this sort of V cut pointing away from the direction I would rather the branch fell, thinking that if that works with trunks that are straight, maybe a really big V cut would still work on this branch that wasn't quite straight.

But after a lot of work making cuts on the branch, I figure out that my plan isn't going to work. So I'm thinking if I make an even bigger V and get some rope or something and pull in the direction I want the thing to fall, maybe that would work. I've cut almost halfway through, but it doesn't want to budge, so I go back in the house to look for the some rope and get my husband to help. He says he's about to take a shower and will help right after that.

I hear a noise.

I go back outside, and that branch that would budge earlier is now starting to lean over, and not in a good direction.

I yell for my husband to skip the shower.

My husband comes out and looks at the branch which is breaking and now leaning on the line of whatever it is. Other branches I cut did the same thing, but they were much smaller and came loose without too much trouble. This branch is heavy, even though I cut it far away from the rest of the tree, about level with my head. My husband climbs a bit of the tree to get a better look, and tells me to cut where the branch splits off into smaller branches.

Like, if I could have reached that high, I would have done that to start with.

So he's telling me to hand him the saw and he'll do it.

He's never used this saw at all, and just doesn't get how that's a bad idea. The thing shakes a lot, even with both your feet planted firmly on the ground. You can't use the thing at an odd angle while you're trying to balance on a tree.

If I had to do this over again, I would get the step ladder and stand on top of that while I had someone holding onto my legs and I would cut the smaller branches first. But at the time that looked like a silly thing to do and it would have taken a long time.

So I tell him to get off of the tree, and I'll just keep cutting the branch the way it is. Maybe he can stand under it and push it away as it falls?

So that's what we do, and it sort of works the way I pictured it in my head. Only when the branch comes loose it just seems to fall really fast, and I'm thinking, that was dumb, I just told my husband to stand under a falling tree. But he says he isn't hurt, and the branch is free and we get it off of the line pretty quick.

So I didn't quite get that last one right, and into the lines it went, but nothing broke, and I can't tell that anything is wrong because of it. I don't know what the line is for, but the power is still on, the phone still works, and the Internet still works. After getting the branches off of the lines, that one line hangs very low. It might cause me problems later.

Working on another outdoor project now. Since I don't have money for a storage shed, but I do have this cement slab where one used to be, I built this thing to hold up an 8x4 piece of plastic lattice. To one side of that is a fence that used to have plants that blocked view, behind it is the original wall of the house, and to the other side a bit farther away is a wall to the added on room of the house. So the junk on the slab used to mostly be blocked from view, because of the vines on the fence, which aren't thick enough now for that. So I'm building another thing to which I will add lattice next week when I get more money. So that's what I was building today. Forgot about the low line, didn't see it, and while hammering some boards together got caught on it. Again, didn't seem to do any damage to anything, and the power is still on, phone still works, etc....

Anyway, when I get that done, the junk will be mostly blocked from view except on one side, and you can only see that from a certain angle if you are in my yard or my next door neighbor's yard, or in the alley just behind them. In other words, after I put the lattice up and put all the junk back on the cement slab, most people won't see the majority of the junk unless they are out looking for it.

And I suppose that I could spend another thirty or forty dollars and build a third wall. But that is not planned for now.

Anyway, the backyard is full of branches, as I have now cut down most of two trees. My hands hurt from using the saw, so I am mostly resting now. But I will have to cut the branches into smaller pieces, and then I will put them out a little at a time for the trash collection. I would rather do something else, as it seems a waste, but I haven't had any better ideas. I would think that some people who do ren faires would maybe like walking sticks or wizard staffs, but I don't have any way of getting the branches to them, and I can't have an open invitation for them to come here either. So I think that it will be a month or so of slowly getting rid of these branches by putting a few at a time out for regular trash collection.

Glad most of the hard part is over.

Still can't do anything interesting. I'm still waiting on that package of live plants.

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.

Now I feel guilty

Okay, so I had a week with mostly valid reasons for being lazy, followed by another week of mostly being lazy with no real excuse for it. Saturday I cut the grass and did the laundry and washed dishes. I even started painting the kitchen.

But the rest of the house was a mess. I debated about going on this trip. It wasn't anything really special, just that my husband was saying how if I went with him we would go to this restaurant or go do this and that, but without me he didn't much bother with such things. So I could have stayed home another week. We have bigger plans for next week's trip, but this week was no big deal.

But I really wanted to get out of the house, and sometimes there are last minute changes to the schedule. Sometimes he doesn't go where was planned, sometimes a job is cancelled and he works near home instead, or sometimes he just doesn't have any work. And if that had happened, I'd have been kicking myself that I gave up my last chance to get out of town for the summer.

But that isn't what happened.

The only thing that I cleaned Saturday was the kitchen, and then that got messy again with the painting. The rest of the house was still a mess, and then it was an even bigger mess once I actually started packing, as it had been a while and I tossed things around while looking for missing items I wanted to take with me.

But I was thinking that I would clean that up later, not the next week, but the week after, when I got home from the second trip.

Well now the second trip has been extended to two weeks. And of course, I have no idea what is planned after that. For all I know there will be a third week, or another trip to someplace even more interesting.

It is my fault entirely for being lazy last week. Not that I would have had a spotless house, but I could have cleaned the bathroom before I left, or gotten an earlier start on the painting and cleaned up afterward, or straightened the backroom a bit more, or a number of other things. But no, I didn't start the painting earlier, cause I didn't want to make yet a third trip to the store to return the paint, unless it was on a day that I was going to be right near there anyway, which didn't happen until Friday, so I didn't paint anything until Saturday.

Not that any of this guilt makes me reconsider next week's trip. I haven't been to that place in like four years. I'm really looking forward to it. Just not so looking forward to being away from home so much all at once.

I guess this will be yet another year when I don't fully decorate for Halloween because I'm too busy to get out the rest of the decorations.

Tomorrow I will pay for being lazy

I didn't start out intending to be lazy. I had planned to work. I had imagined getting a lot of work done. The week before I had done a lot of work and put things aside to give away to people, and I had imagined two more weeks that would be about the same, though I was coming to the point where I'm running out of things that I really want to get rid of and still having too much stuff.

Okay, so I had imagined having two weeks to myself (later the trip was extended to three weeks), and I usually get more work done when I have the place to myself, and I pictured a lot of the stuff either being more organized or just somehow magically going away.

And then the maintenance guys were supposed to come and fix the wall that first Monday, and I did a lot of work trying to move stuff around so that they would have room to work. And while the stove and the cabinet were moved, I thought that I should scrub the floor, cause floors under appliances and cabinets get really dirty, and unless you feel like doing the work of moving these things on a regular basis to clean you have to take the opportunities when they occur. So I did some work that Sunday evening and a lot of work that Monday morning, and then the guys didn't even show up until Tuesday.

And I did no work that Monday. Having moved everything, including the microwave, I couldn't even cook, so I ended up going out to eat twice. When they did not show by five on Monday I moved things around a bit so that I could get the microwave, which I put on top of the washing machine. I still couldn't cook anything proper, but at least I could reheat things that were already cooked.

Later I would move the microwave and put a fan on the washing machine for the repair guys. The repairs that should have taken about four hours were stretched to four days. I kept moving the fan and the microwave back and forth from the washing machine. On Thursday it was all done, and I have done no work to speak of, other than washing a few dishes and moving the fan and the microwave. I know that I could have found some work to do, but I couldn't cook and I couldn't do laundry, and with the way things were moved around I couldn't do anything about the dining area. I finally just decided to relax and be lazy. I found something to watch on TV and started to enjoy it a bit.

By Thursday I was starting to not feel so good. Friday I was just a little bit sick, so I decided to keep being lazy for a bit. Saturday I had social things to do and decided there was not much point in doing any work Saturday morning that didn't have to be done just right then (like cooking something for the social thing). Being lazy continued.

Sunday, I was recovering from the social thing, cause I stayed out late and didn't get enough sleep. More time being lazy.

Monday, I had no excuse. I just enjoyed being in bed doing nothing.

Tuesday morning I had to watch just a few more DVDs before I got up to run some errands. The errands were near the dollar theater, so I watched a movie.

Wednesday, I bought the wrong thing, and had to go back to the store. While I'm in the area, I might as well watch another movie.

Yesterday I found something else that I needed to take back to the store, but three days in a row of this just seemed a really dumb thing to do. I stayed home. I didn't get a lot of work done, but some. Mainly I just didn't want to drive back to the same place, especially since today I want to watch two more movies that I've been waiting to come to the dollar theater. I can take stuff back to the store then.

So now it is Friday, and I've done very little with the two weeks. My husband has decided to come home for a day, so that he can do laundry and cut the grass, and then I can go back with him on Sunday.

And I haven't done any of my laundry, or packed, or even washed dishes in a bit. And I'm not planning to skip anything that I'd planned to do today (watch movies, go to the store, go to my brother's place, etc...), so that leaves a lot of work for me to do tomorrow.

But it was so nice to stay in bed and watch TV.

I feel like I've been hit by a truck

Okay, not really that bad. But I'm probably not going to get anything done today. I'd rather skip the cleaning and the gardening, get covered in muscle rub or some such thing, and just go back to bed.

It is very frustrating to be in such pain over things that other people take for granted. And while I know that if I dig a big hole in the ground I'm going to hurt later and probably the next day, and that should be expected if I'm going to do that much work, but going for long walks and other things should not make me feel bad. Other things make other people feel better.

This makes me think that I should give up on life entirely and spend most of my days in bed either watching TV or reading large print books. No more trying to get even tiny amounts of exercise, no more trying to have relationships with other people, no more garden, no more watching what I eat, no more trying to make anything better, etc....

Someone I know has lost twenty-nine pounds in about ten weeks. I do not have the money to do what he is doing, but I think that I could do something similar if I put some thought into what I eat and plan out what I'm going to do a day or so ahead of time. But instead I am sitting here drinking a Coke and eating animal crackers.

And the bedroom still isn't clean. Forget cleaning the rest of the house, just getting this one room in order seems totally beyond my abilities, unless maybe I just throw everything into one of the other rooms and make the mess there worse.

Of the cleaning that I did get done, I've found all of these bottles of vitamins and over the counter medications. I buy something, it falls off of the shelf or something, I can't find it when I need it the next time and I buy another one. So yesterday I threw away a lot of stuff like expired aspirin. There's still a lot left that isn't expired, but I don't know where to put it. It doesn't all fit where it is supposed to go. Medicines don't all fit in the medicine cabinet, even if that is all that you keep there, which usually isn't the case. I guess it's just that medicine cabinets aren't very big, because people used to have fewer medicines and cosmetics and such.

I have fifteen bags or boxes of things like cough drops. Most of them are just things from the dollar store that I lost and then bought more of and then lost again. About six of them are stronger stuff that I stocked up on for the flu season, but then I lost them too. So now I have fifteen, about half of them are opened.

So I need to figure out what to do with all of this stuff, but it isn't going to get done today, cause I feel so awful. And I didn't dig any holes or cut any branches or move any furniture. Just did a little bit of exercise that other people take for granted, that is supposed to make you feel better, and all I feel like doing is going back to bed.

Substitutions

Tuesday, I just didn't feel well. Not quite actually sick, but just not feeling right. At times I would think that it wasn't going to be so bad, and I might as well get up and do something. And then I would get a twinge and think, no, that's not a good idea. I'm going to get worse. I'm really going to be sick and I might as well get used to the idea and do something so that it won't be so bad.

I thought about what would make me feel better. Eating a whole lot of cookies makes me feel better, but that isn't really good for me. But I was thinking that I could make a whole lot of cookies out of this cake mix I got on clearance (not this year, and not even last year, and I still have lots of it left) and all I would have to do was add a half stick of margarine and two eggs. That would cost about fifty-five cents. Then I could eat cookies. I could probably eat cookies instead of eggs for breakfast. Maybe I could even eat cookies for dinner. I could eat cookies and still do this dollar a day thing.

But the dollar a day thing isn't important. I was going to drink less soda this week, have less sugar, and here I was thinking that eating cookies for breakfast might be the thing to do.

Probably not a good idea.

I gave up and went to the dollar store for some over the counter meds, and while I was there I bought mac and cheese and a pint of chocolate milk. So I have so far spent an extra two dollars that I had not planned to spend. And I think that I will just have to say that I've gone over six dollars and leave it at that.

I keep thinking of something I saw, maybe with John Hirsch, maybe in Taxi (though I really can't remember and I never did watch much of Taxi). Anyway, there is this man at a restaurant that he probably can't afford. And he keeps trying to make it work out that he can eat there. He keeps asking the waiter what comes with what and can he make substitutions. And then he ends up saying something really silly, like can he substitute another meatloaf for the sprig of parsley.

So I keep thinking that maybe I can substitute something and still only use six dollars for the six days. But I should give up on that. The chocolate milk and the mac and cheese did make me feel a bit better, and without most of the added sugar of eating a whole bunch of cookies. Spending less than a certain amount of money isn't really the important thing this week. Not being sick is important. Getting some work done is important. Maybe not ingesting a lot of sugar is important.

It may not always be that way. I think that if I don't want to do eat what I have planned to eat, I don't have to. There are other things in the house to eat, and if I really wanted to, I could spend ten dollars or so and go buy Chinese food, or a pizza, or ice cream, or something at a bakery. I could do something like that to make myself feel better.

If I really only had four hundred dollars to spend on food for the year, and I spent a dollar a day, and then I didn't feel well and went out and spent ten dollars, I could do that, once. I could do that a second time and a third time. The fourth time I wouldn't quite have ten dollars left, and I would maybe look around on the ground for someone's dropped change. The fifth time I would just be out of luck, unless I happened to find a ten dollar bill that someone dropped.

Anyway, I felt good again yesterday, but this morning, not so much. We will have to see.

And now I'm going to be sick

Of course I'm going to be sick. Whenever I feel like I'm almost going to get something done, something happens. So I'm not feeling good.

Okay, so on the one hand I have gardening to do, and cleaning to do, and I usually get more of that done when I have the place to myself, which is what I have this week, so I should be getting stuff done. And then I thought I'd do this dollar a day thing, and maybe I'd save some money, and maybe I'd lose a couple of pounds.

I think I got a lot done yesterday. I think that I might have done more, but the main thing that I wanted to do was empty and move a planter, which I did, so that's good. After doing that much work, I don't feel well. Doan's pills really do a lot for me, so my back doesn't feel like it did, but the rest of me still hurts.

Anyway, I woke up last night after only being asleep for about an hour, and I saw a few bugs. And I recently bought this "green" bug spray, which doesn't quite smell as bad as regular bug spray. So I chased away a few bugs. I'm not sure if "green" bug spray kills as much as regular bug spray, but it got rid of those.

And then I tried to go back to sleep. Only now there's this smell of "green" bug spray, which isn't as bad as regular bug spray, but still it bothered me a bit, and I couldn't sleep. So with the smell of bug spray and not getting as much sleep as I hoped for, I feel a bit nauseous.

So now I'm just mostly staying in bed watching Star Trek DVDs. Now I wonder if I drop the whole dollar a day thing and eat something that would make me feel better, would I feel good enough to go back to work and get everything done? Or, should I go ahead an ate what I had planned? It might be that I'm just not going to feel better either way, and I should just stick to what I was doing, go back to bed, and watch more Star Trek.

Another thing I could do that would make me feel better but would really not be good for me is to eat a lot of cookies. And, oddly enough, I could get some really cheap cookies and still spend less than a dollar. But that is tons of sugar. Here I had bought diet cola, and I'm thinking of making cookies.

Okay, I'll decide later. Back to Star Trek.

The cabbage soup diet

I am writing this just after lunch on Tuesday. Before that, I had not eaten any meat since lunch on Saturday.

I guess that everyone has seen the magazine headlines for odd diets that promise to shed so many pounds or so many inches. Some of them sound good, some of them sound awful, and I guess that I just don't believe what most of them say anyway. The cabbage soup diet is supposed to help you lose up to ten pounds if you do it for a week.

The diets all say "up to" some amount. Losing zero pounds would be included in the "up to" ten pounds, right? So that would probably be what I would get for my efforts. Zero weight loss. Or maybe like two pounds of weight loss that I would put back on the next week.

And cabbage soup just sounded awful anyway.

A while back, my husband made some cabbage soup. Not a diet cabbage soup, just a soup that happened to have cabbage in it. It was pretty good. I thought maybe I had misjudged cabbage.

I was thinking that I should start eating better. Well, I am always thinking that, and never doing it. My husband was going out of town for a few days. It is easier to eat better when he isn't here. And, if I were ever going to try one of these stupid sounding diets, that would probably be easier to do when he isn't here.

So, I had pretty much decided to do this silly cabbage diet for a week, just to see what would happen. Ten pounds of weight loss sounded unreasonable. Maybe would it be five pounds. Five pounds would be worth the effort, right?

And then my husband's trip out of town got cancelled, but I decided to do some of it anyway. Maybe starting Sunday. Saturday we had lunch at Whataburger, and I had a fish sandwich. Fish isn't bad for you, but the ton of mostly mayonnaise sauce probably isn't too good for you.

Saturday night I went out with friends, and somehow we ended up at a Greek place instead of the restaurant we had agreed on earlier. It was more expensive than places I normally go to. I spent thirteen dollars on a vegetarian plate. It wasn't quite the cheapest thing on the menu, but it was the cheapest thing that I didn't have to pay extra for a side of hummus, and I like hummus. I had some fun talking to my friends, and I took half of the food home with me. It was good, just maybe not thirteen dollars plus tax and tip good.

Okay, now it is Sunday, and I'm supposed to start this diet, and I make some soup. Only then I remember that I have these leftovers from the Greek restaurant, and I have to eat them for lunch or the food will go to waste. And I'm not going to waste food that cost me thirteen dollars plus tax and tip. Besides, I like hummus. So the diet could not officially start on Sunday, so I also ate a couple of cookies and some nuts, but mostly I ate leftovers and a bowl of soup.

Okay, so then it was Monday, and I'm officially going to try this diet, sort of. I made this soup. I'm surprised that there's all this other stuff in the soup and only half a head of cabbage. I am missing a few things that were supposed to be in the soup, like a bell pepper and mushrooms and I didn't quite have enough tomatoes. And I didn't have Lipton's onion soup mix, so I substituted a ramen noodle seasoning packet. Close enough, right? The idea is to eat a soup that has no meat or added fat and just has a lot of veggies. I did that.

Well, even with only half a head of cabbage and all of this other stuff in the soup, the soup mainly tastes like cabbage. And it is nothing like the soup my husband made. For one thing, my husband's soup had potatoes and lots of this fancy bacon stuff. This soup doesn't have either of those. And when my husband made the soup, he didn't add the cabbage until right before serving. So I should have made the rest of the soup and then just added the cabbage right before reheating, but I forgot, so the first bowl of soup had nice fresh crisp cabbage, and all of the rest had regular mushy cabbage that I don't care for.

On the cabbage soup diet, you make this soup, and you eat as much soup as you want, and then you eat this other stuff, depending on what day it is. So on the first day, you eat soup and you drink water, and you eat all the fruit you want except you can't have any bananas. Okay, so on Monday I ate some of the soup and some pineapple and an apple. By Monday night I really hate the soup, even though I've only had about three bowls of it.

I am thinking that the point of the cabbage soup diet isn't really about however much you might lose that week, but how much you would appreciate other foods after you get done eating this awful soup. You would be just so happy to eat skinless chicken breasts and broccoli and fat-free salads and anything else you're supposed to eat as long as it isn't this cabbage soup.

I think that I am there already. I don't need to torture myself for the rest of the week. Boring skinless chicken breasts and broccoli sound really good.

Still, I spent money on this stupid idea, and I'm not going to waste the food. I'm going to eat the rest of this soup. I didn't make that much of it, and what I did make I have eaten half of it. I will eat the rest and try to make something better tasting with the rest of the veggies. I will try to eat the rest of the cabbage too, maybe if I remember not to overcook it.

The second day of the diet you are supposed to drink plenty of water, eat as much soup as you want, and eat as much veggies as you want but not have any fruit. And as far as veggies go you are supposed to stay away from beans and peas and corn. Avocados aren't mentioned, but I'm assuming that you stay away from them during the whole diet.

I remember that a friend mentioned getting a free sandwich from Jack-In-The-Box on Thursday. Maybe I can do this diet thing until Thursday.

I look on the computer and find out that the free sandwich thing is today, Tuesday, not Thursday. Happy to have an excuse, I go to lunch with my husband and get a free sandwich after buying a giant soda. I wonder how many calories were in the sandwich? I think that I drank about two hundred calories of soda, and then I put the rest in a bottle and into the fridge for later. Drinking the whole soda was probably close to eight hundred calories. I don't need it. Not today.

Okay, diet experiment over. Bad idea. I will force myself to eat the last of the soup later today, and tomorrow I might think about eating only veggies tomorrow. But then after that I'm going to eat a nice sensible low fat chicken. And I've already bought the chicken, so there's no way that I'm not going to eat it.

The video contest

I sort of want to label this a Monday Moron post, except that I'm not really sure who is the moron in the story, unless maybe it is me, and I was the moron last time.

Anyway, several months ago (I think it was September, though it might even have been August), I found out about a certain contest. The idea was to video a bit about what you could do with a certain amount of money, and then you post your video on YouTube and this other site, and then people would leave comments about the videos and vote on the videos, though the contest was supposed to be decided not by the public votes but by a panel of judges.

I had never made a video before, but I had a few ideas, and I noticed that there were not very many entries. There wasn't a big money prize either, but I thought that I might as well give it a try. First place was five hundred dollars, second place was three hundred dollars, and third place was a hundred dollars. With less than a dozen entries, the odds were good.

Now if I could just find a video recorder.

First, I thought that I would borrow my brother's. Now, he didn't have a problem loaning me the camera, he just said that it was old now and didn't have an easy way to convert to digital, which is what I would need to get the video on YouTube, so I decided to look elsewhere.

Dmarks pointed out that I probably already had a video recorder on my husband's digital camera. I didn't think so, but it turns out that Dmarks was right. Making videos with the camera was not recommended and did not produce videos of high quality, but it would probably be good enough for making short videos for YouTube.

My husband and I made the first one together and uploaded it on his account, cause I forgot the password for my account, and then I thought of a few more videos that I could make on my own. We put up two more videos on my account, though these were not as good as the first. Then we waited to see if we won anything.

The deadline for the contest ending was pushed back several weeks, cause there just weren't many videos. This upset me a little bit, because at the time the public vote had our first video in third place, and if the panel of judges agreed with the public we would have won a hundred dollars. At the time, I really wanted that hundred dollars. I planned to buy Christmas presents with it. If the entry deadline was postponed, there might be a new video that was better than mine.

But, there was nothing that I could do about that. I re-edited the two videos that I made myself and added a third one. The entry limit was five, but I couldn't think of another one. And I emailed the people having the contest, explaining that my husband and I had worked on the first one together, so that I really had four entries, though probably we could have gotten away with making five videos each and entering ten videos. I asked for some clarification on that and some of the other rules, but I received no reply. We both got a few automated responses for stuff like the entry deadline being pushed back.

There were more videos posted, but there still weren't a lot. Our first video stayed in third place. The second deadline passed, and we waited to hear if we won anything. This was in October.

And for about a week, nothing happened. And then my husband got an email saying that we had won third place. I sent an email thanking them and sent our address and phone number and such, and waited for our prize money to show up in the mail.

Another week went by, and nothing happened.

I then received an email thanking me for the three videos that did not win. Actually, I got three emails, one for each video, though all the emails were the same. I was told that I would receive a small prize for participating. I wondered if I would receive one prize or one for each video. I emailed back, again with our address and phone number, again explained how my husband and I had worked on the first video together and I had done the three others by myself, and I didn't want anyone to think that we had in some way cheated, cause the limit was five videos, and this only gave me a total of four videos. And I asked if I would still get the consolation prize since I had already won third place, or would my husband get third place and I would get one consolation prize, or would my husband get third place and I would get one consolation prize for each of the other three videos?

And I waited, and I didn't hear anything for another week. Finally, my husband received an email saying that he would receive the third place prize after he filled out some forms, and there was a fax number where to send the forms. And I received an email that said I would receive a consolation prize for each of the three videos that did not win, again after I filled out some forms and faxed them. One of the forms needed my our social security numbers, which I really didn't want to send if it wasn't necessary (which they said that it was needed for tax purposes), and if it was necessary did it have to be sent by fax? Both forms had the wrong amount, and I asked that they be changed, and then I saw that I could change the amount myself and did so, and I emailed about the change and that I would rather not send a fax, and I filled out the forms and waited for an email confirming that I could send the forms by regular mail.

I waited about a week, and nothing happened.

Okay, fax it is. I think that there is a fax on this printer, but I couldn't figure out how to work it. But, we had a new printer (sort of a spare, which we had put back in the box after printing one or two things with it), and that seemed easier to use, and I sent the fax.

And I waited about a week, and nothing happened. It is now November.

I was about to send yet another email to complain, when it occurred to me that the mistake might have been mine. So I again took the new printer out of the box and tried to send the fax. This time I see that it doesn't work, that the line is busy. I figure that they are just busy, that it is a Monday morning, and they probably just get a lot of faxes on Monday morning. I try again later in the day, but I get the same message. And I try again several times later in the week, but the same thing happens regardless of the day of the week or the time of day. Line busy, line busy, line busy.

I decide that the problem is on my end and give up trying to fax with that machine. I will have to pay someone to fax this thing, which I don't want to do. We aren't talking about a lot of prize money, and I can't even think of who does that sort of thing, other than hotels and maybe Kinko's and the places that rent mailboxes and such. Those places were not near my house, they were near school, and while I used to make that drive everyday when I was in school, I didn't want to waste an hour doing that when I had no other reason to drive there.

My husband had a few out of town trips, so I thought maybe I would use the motel fax. Except that most of the trips were to the middle of nowhere and he stayed at cheap mom and pop motels where mom usually doesn't speak much English, and I don't think that they had fax machines for us to use. But there was one trip in a city at a nicer motel, and I just assumed that I would send the fax from there, but I was told that they did not have a business center.

It is now December. I figure that I will find something while I am out Christmas shopping. I get busy with other things. I forget about the whole fax thing.

After New Year's I was in the grocery store getting some lottery tickets, and I notice a sign that says the fax machine is being repaired. I didn't know that they still had a fax machine. They used to offer fax service, and bill paying services, and copying services, but the copier has been gone for a long time, and they had stopped doing a lot of the bill paying services, so I had thought that that whole service thing had been done away with because most of us could do the same thing ourselves on our home computers. Not so. The copy machine was gone because it was just too big and they needed the space for something else. The bill paying stuff was mostly canceled, not by the store, but by the companies they were forwarding payments to. The fax machine was still there, just it wasn't used much.

I went back the next week after the machine had been repaired and paid to have the fax sent. And I got the little printout that says the fax was successfully sent, instead of "line busy" like I kept getting when I tried to send it myself.

I went home and sent an email explaining about the delay but that I had sent the fax.

While I was looking for the email address, I found an unopened email confirming that I could send the forms by regular mail and confirming the mailing address and such. I wanted to send the forms regular mail from the beginning, I just didn't want to do that without them confirming a mailing address, and here it was. The email just didn't show up on the day that it was sent. By the time I got it, I had a bunch of other emails that I hadn't deleted, so I couldn't see the email a few days later, cause the way the email is listed it appears in the order that it was sent instead of in the order that it was received.

Doh!

Okay, but that doesn't matter, cause I've already spent money to have someone send the forms by fax.

And I wait a week, and nothing happens. And because I have to think that this is mostly my fault and that they are not trying to cheat me, I wait another week. I still don't have my money. But I now have a confirmed mailing address, so I will send the forms yet again, this time by snail mail, which is what I wanted to do in the first place.

Monday Morons: Me

Well, I've gone and done something not to bright. I do this once in a while, cause I feel bad and this temporarily makes me feel a little bit better. Only afterwards I don't feel so good about it, and I feel stupid for ever doing it in the first place. Still, the damage is done, and it does temporarily make me feel better, and it is beginning to look like it just isn't going to matter that much in the long run anyway. My situation is going to change anytime soon, except maybe to get worse.

I'm not feeling really bad yet, just acknowledging that I might have done something stupid.

But that isn't what I want to write about today. What I want to write about today is the car recall.

In the seventies, we had a Pinto. So sometimes car recalls are very scary. And I should have dealt with it right away, but I didn't.

After we stopped working for a certain company in 2001, we bought bought cars. Not new cars, just "new to us" cars, and much newer cars than what we had been driving. They seemed very nice and in good condition, but still, they were both about five years old and had a lot of miles when we got them. About the time all the really bad stuff happened, my husband had to have his vehicle replaced so that he could drive all over the place for his new job. He hadn't even had it for a year when he was in an accident and had to get yet another vehicle. This one was much newer, though it was still purchased used.

And while all this was going on I was having some car trouble, and it kept getting towed to the shop, where they would "fix" it, and then I would get stuck at the mall or something and have it towed again. So I was spending money on repairs, but I just think that they either didn't know what was wrong with the car, or else they were going to repair all the minor stuff, because if it turned out to be something major I just wouldn't be able to keep the car. It just wasn't worth the money to try to fix a now ten year old car.

And I just kept thinking that if I had bought a new car to begin with, that I wouldn't be dealing with this stuff, or at least not for another five years or so.

And so we finally gave up trying to fix my car and I bought a new one. Really, a new one, though it didn't cost quite as much as my husband's slightly used vehicle. This is the only actual new car that either of us has ever bought.

So we have both had our current vehicles for a couple of years now. And we got a letter in the mail from GM telling us of a recall. It didn't quite make sense. Something about a leak and something about the cruise control and the car maybe blowing up. It said that until I could get the car looked at that I should park the car as far as possible from houses and other cars and such.

I left the car right where it was. It wasn't leaking anything, so I think that it was unlikely just blow up while parked on the street. And there really wasn't anyplace else to park it anyway.

I looked up stuff on the Internet about my car, and there was a recall of some sort for the year that I bought the car, though it did not say anything about the cruise control. And it wasn't supposed to blow up just from being parked, only if there was a collision.

Anyway, my car doesn't have cruise control, which was why I was confused with the original letter.

The letter came before Christmas. We were about to go out of town, and I decided that it could wait a while. And then we got back, and I was very busy knitting and doing other Christmas stuff, and I decided that it could wait a bit more. The letter said that there would probably be a long wait anyway, since everyone else who had bought the car would also have to have their cars looked at. I wasn't driving the car much, so I decided it could wait a bit more.

And then I just sort of forgot about it for a while. It could wait til after Christmas and New Year's. Probably everyone else will have gone in for the repairs by then, and I wouldn't have a long wait if I took it in sometime in January.

As you can see, it is now past the middle of January, and I still hadn't done anything about the car. I misplaced the letter about the recall, but I didn't think that they really needed the letter. I finally took the car in Friday and told them I had this letter from GM, but I wasn't even sure that it was my car being recalled. They said that they would look at it anyway.

After getting some numbers from my car and looking on their computer, they did not find any recalls about my car, even though I had seen something about it on the Internet. Since I wasn't actually having and problems with the car, they thanked me for checking and sent me home.

So I'm thinking that I got this letter by mistake, that it was only for cars with cruise control, cause it said something about cruise control in the letter, and my car doesn't have cruise control.

So I've been trying to do a bit of cleaning, and I finally found the letter about the car recall.

It wasn't about my current car. It wasn't about my husband's current vehicle. It was for one of those other vehicles that we don't have now.

A few things in no particular order

A friend sent me a link about a job, and I can't get it to work. I will try again later, but maybe it isn't worth the effort, as I missed four or five questions on what seemed to be an easy practice test. I'm getting old. I'm slipping.

We have finally figured out the whole unemployment thing. The thing about the unemployment is that you have to file all the time, even when you worked and don't need it, even when you didn't apply for a job and won't get it, even if you turned down work and won't get it, even when all this is going to do is waste time and make people at the unemployment office do more work that is totally unnecessary, and that way you are still in the system on the week that you don't work and need the money, and they send you your money in a reasonable amount of time and such.

So that is what we are doing. Unfortunately, now that we have figured all of that out, we are told that we only have ten thousand dollars left, and the way things are going that isn't going to last us very long.

My husband seems to be making an effort to be especially nice to me, if you can call it that after more than three years of him still not having done one thing that he was supposed to do for us to be roommates, much less actually be back together like nothing had happened. On my part I was having one of those moments when I think that I might as well try to enjoy myself with the way things are, as they will probably not change in the near future. He worked two days last week and two days the week before, and then he is not likely to work at all for the next two weeks, and then we don't know what is going to happen after that. So of course what we tend to do when he has all this time off is go to restaurants and go to movies and go shopping. Well, we are short on money, though not as short as we would be now that we have figured out the whole unemployment thing. We have not been going out to nice restaurants, just now and then going to Arby's and such, cause we have coupons. And we haven't done that much shopping, but we have bought a few things. While I feel some guilt over that, I can't really say that I feel bad about seeing a few movies, as we have a couple of inexpensive theaters. But there are still days when we stay home and do absolutely nothing, and it tends to get on my nerves spending all that time together doing nothing, sort of getting in each others way.

Not that the day I had to myself went any better. I had planned to spend it knitting, and something went wrong, and I don't know if I can fix it. And he was really trying to be nice to me after that, but there is just nothing to be done about it. I will just have to put the thing away for a while, and maybe after some time has past I will see a solution and not get so upset when I look at it. I instead spent the day watching videos, but I did not feel much better. The next day when he was trying to be nice to me, I did make an attempt to just forget about everything that is stressing me out and just enjoy the day, which I did, for a while. And then the next day I noticed something, and that made me think that something is going to go wrong, and that he knew about it and intended for something to wrong, or at least that he was okay with it. But even if nothing goes wrong, that is what I think of him now, that he is very selfish and this attempt at being nice is just to hide the fact that something else is going to go wrong and that he is responsible.

Christmas Eve dinner was finally rescheduled for yesterday. I ate a half dozen oysters and have no need to see anymore oysters for a while. They were really big oysters too. I'm not really complaining, the food was good, and it was good to see everyone and it was good for mom to have a break, as grandma did not get better like we thought from her most recent hospital stay.

Saturday was fun, though not what I had imagined. We did trivia as planned, but just regular trivia, not sci fi stuff like usual. So I did not win, even after having put together a really great team. And we were playing Family Feud, and the answers are based on what people think is the answer, even if that in fact is not the answer. So we were trying to "steal" points from the other team, and we just don't have any good ideas. The question involved things that turn from green to yellow, and all the good answers have been taken, and all I can think of is pears. My friend thinks maybe the answer is yellow squash, except that I and another friend have gardens, and we know that yellow squash starts out yellow, or maybe even white, and is never green to begin with. So we go with pear, cause no one else can think of anything, and the answer was squash. And then there was a question involving things associated with Texas, and the answers to this question obviously did not come from Texas, and no one was getting those right. And then there was a question about haunted houses, and I was thinking theatrical production, and I guess that the people taking the survey were thinking real house that no one lives in anymore. So we got all of that wrong too. But it was still fun, and I didn't need a silly plague anyway.

I have really had it with all the junk. This helps somewhat when we are shopping, as I have several times put things back, cause I'm thinking that I don't need it right away and I don't want it enough to find someplace to put it, and if something happened and I had to move away, would I want to pack this? Probably not. So I have stopped myself from buying a few things, but I still don't manage to get rid of much.

I know all the experts say that if you don't use something for a year (especially things that you have had in box that hasn't even been opened for a year), you should get rid of it. And I know that makes sense on some levels, but on other levels it just doesn't work for me. Like I have many craft things that I don't use for a year, but that doesn't mean that I should throw away tools or supplies that are still good (or even still new in the package). And seasonal things stay in boxes most of the year, should I throw them away cause I was too busy to put everything out this year? Throw out the stuff that I didn't put out cause it looks too old or I just don't like it anymore, sure, but just because I didn't use a particular decoration this year doesn't mean that I won't want them next year. And I haven't done any baking in forever, but I just have a feeling that in the future I will want to, maybe because of the financial situation, and then I either wouldn't be able to do anything or else I would have to go and buy all new stuff, which would be hard to do because of the financial situation.

And then like all people who have either been on a diet and gained it all back (or people who keep thinking that they will diet but don't), there are all these clothes to think about. And even if I haven't worn them in a year, it still doesn't seem to be a good idea to throw them out. If my weight changes by ten pounds either way, if I didn't keep the clothes, I would have to go out and buy clothes (clothes that might not even fit for very long), or else I would have to stay in the house all the time naked.

So I guess I would rather live with all the junk than live in fear that I'm going to be stuck in the house naked without bakeware and holiday decorations.

The other thing that I have a lot of that I don't really do much with anymore is books. For the last three or four years I have done little reading. My eyesight isn't what it was, and most of the time I just don't have the attention span necessary to enjoy reading a book. But reading has been such a big part of my life, and I keep thinking that someday I will feel better and want to read again. And it also seems silly to get rid of the one thing that is somewhat organized and I actually have a place for. I have many bookshelves, and the books that I've had for a long time have places on the bookshelves and I know where they are and I can find them when I want them. And then there are some additional books that I'm not quite sure where to put, cause they don't quite go with the books that are already on the shelves. And then there are really new books that I didn't put anywhere, cause I was reading them (or at least I meant to), and they are just here and there. So there is the dilemma about the books that on the one hand I shouldn't get rid of them because if I really put some effort into it that is the one thing that I could get organized and every book would have its place, and on the other hand books are the one thing that I could easily get rid of and there is a place to take them where I wouldn't feel that they had just been tossed out. I could even get some money for them, though not enough for that to be the deciding point. Still, I think today I will make another attempt to cull some of the cookbooks. There are two boxes of them that I meant to look through, and it may have even been a year since I last looked at them.

And while I am trying not to spend money and buy things that I will just have to put away somewhere, I am thinking of buying yet another black dress. I was invited to a party, and it is less than a month away, and since I just now learned of it I haven't been planning what to wear. Ideally, it would be something goth, and while I have plenty of black I don't think that just being black makes it look goth, and of course a lot of my things just don't fit at the moment. So I am looking through my things trying to find something that looks goth, or something that I can add to something to make it look goth. I don't think that my best black dress looks goth, but if I add enough stuff to it then maybe it does, except that I wore all of that to a party this time last year that was for the same people, and I'd rather not wear the same thing two years in a row. Though they do not have the same reason for the party as last year, they are thinking of just having a theme party as an annual event. So this may require a whole series of black dresses and gloves and hair ornaments and such.

I thought that there was more, but now I can't remember what.

I have no plans

Usually at this time of year people make resolutions and decide what they want to be different in the future. They want to go on a diet, they want to go back to school, they want to give up smoking, they want to give up some other bad habit, they want to redecorate the house, they want to be more organized, etc.... I would guess that the majority of us are in some major group like going on a diet or quit smoking, so we would have a lot of company. And we will also have a lot of company when we fail.

Having had the same plans for several years now, I'm afraid I don't even much see the point of making the plans to begin with.

I have looked back over my blog and seen all the times that I've almost gotten this or that room cleaned, or this or that organized, and it this rate I should have it all done in a month or less. Except that it never actually gets done, not all at once, and whatever part did get done is soon back to it's usual state.

And the dieting never works out, except for the one time that I had the house all to myself for several months, and another time that I was just too upset to eat much of anything. So I had dramatic weight loss twice, though only one of those times actually counts as dieting or good eating habits. The other just happened, and I would rather not have it happen again.

As for the smoking, I have never had a cigarette, so I have never had to stop smoking. That must be a hard one, like giving up caffeine, which I try once in a while but never stick to.

As for the usual stuff that has been bothering me for the past several years, no, I am not over it, and I do not really feel better about it. I just have for a time given up on the idea that I can do anything about it. There may be a smile on my face, but the inside of my head is constantly screaming. And no one seems to notice. And it is better that way, that no one seems to notice, because when I am pretending to be alright I at least feel well enough to get out of bed most days and knit or something. I couldn't do that if my outside appearance reflected my inner thoughts.

But I had better soon work on my outside appearance as well. I'm getting zits on my face again, so it is time to go an buy some ProActive. And I do not care for the rest of my appearance either, although my a** still seems to be shrinking. I wear size ten jeans, and I even have a pair of size eight that I can get into sometimes, but I have not lost weight and I do not look any better. I am sure that there is some trick to it, like the people who make the jeans are marking the wrong size so that we will think we have lost weight and buy more clothes. But the scale does not indicate any actual weight loss, and I do not look or feel any better. I just have to buy smaller jeans once in a while.

The appearance of the house is really bad. The living room and dining room look like something from the hoarders show. This is partially the usual stuff, and partially the Christmas shopping and wrapping stuff. There are boxes tossed here and there while I look for something the right size to wrap this thing in, and then I've lost a roll of tape and toss things around while I look for that, and then when I find some tape I can't find ribbon, and so on...

I guess that I can start with that. The Christmas clearance shopping (if I do more of that) will be mostly done today or tomorrow, and I should start putting all of this stuff away. And I can throw away all of these boxes (or at least most of them) that I have been holding on to just in case I needed them to wrap presents.

And in spite of my feelings that the dieting won't work any better this year than it did last year, I really should try to do something about it. Only it is already a few days into the new year, and I haven't even made any plans. Not that I have plans that I haven't followed through on, just that I haven't even made any plans. So that is unusual. I usually have some plan but feel like I have to wait for something to happen before I get started. This year, I haven't even decided how to start.

And I probably will not come up with any plans today either. My only plans for today are knitting (as I have had to start over with the scarf that I meant to give to the pilot for Christmas), and possibly going to Target to see how much Christmas stuff is left.

For the rest of the week

I shouldn't do any knitting. Or, at least, I shouldn't do any knitting when I have enough time to do something else. If I get some knitting done while I am waiting for something else to happen or right before I go to bed, that's fine. But, for the most part, I should be doing other things, as Halloween is on Saturday, and I am not yet ready for the party.

Plus, starting Tuesday, I'll spend four afternoons at the Irving Library, and that will take up a big chunk of my time.

Other things I need to be doing--I need to find a copy of my resume. I need to get out the cotton candy machine and see if it works. I need to make jewelry and props for Saturday. I need to pick up pills and maybe get that flu shot. I need to see if Tuesday is a good day to visit grandma. I need to see if I have stuff to fix my hair properly before Friday.

And, in addition to the normal cleaning and such I should--try to make a witch hat (just in case the other plans for the Halloween costume don't work out), and see about getting an oil change (which I might not have money left for since I'll have to buy extra gas for all that driving back and forth from Irving), and decide what (if anything) I should try to buy 50% off on Sunday. I don't think there's anything that I really want of Halloween decorations, but that is a good day to go and buy kitchen stuff that gets marked down because it is orange and black.

Still, it will be hard to remember to leave the knitting alone. While I was sorting through some stuff in the back room, I found that I had seven boxes of yarn and unfinished scarves. So I had been thinking that I should go and finish those scarves and do something with them. Some of them might be Christmas presents, or I might want to wear some of them, and I suppose there is always the slim chance that I would sell some of them. Selling them is unlikely, since to get paid a reasonable amount for my time and the money I spent on the supplies, I have to charge eighty dollars and up for the scarves mostly made on the machine, and the totally handmade scarves would start at around a hundred and fifty dollars.

As you might guess, I don't sell a lot of scarves.

I wear a few of them myself, and then I give a lot of them as Christmas gifts, and I've given two away for club fundraiser auctions. But I think that I've only actually sold two scarves, and both of those were the eighty dollar ones.

Anyway, I started making a lot of scarves, but I didn't finish a lot of them, unless someone was waiting for it I just put it away somewhere. For some reason I can't really explain, I really dislike making the fringe at the end of the project. Partially, I think this is because I sometimes get my left and my right confused and do something backwards, which then has to be undone and then done over again. But that doesn't happen near as much now as when I first started, but still, I tend to put off this part of the project until someone is waiting on the scarf, or maybe the scarf just goes into a box and I never get around to doing it. And, with those scarves that are mostly made on the machine, I dislike joining the ends of the panels together, and maybe I dislike this part even more than I dislike making the fringe.

I have really no explanation for either. Making fringe usually takes about two hours, and joining panels together takes two or three hours (or longer, depending on how long the scarf is), and I think to myself that there is no hurry, and that I've already done the part that takes real time and effort, and finishing the rest of the scarf would only take two to five hours, which I could do in an afternoon whenever I decided that a scarf really needed to be finished.

But without someone waiting on a scarf, without Christmas or some other deadline approaching, the scarves never get finished, which is why there are now several unfinished scarves in with the seven boxes of yarn.

For some of them I will have to go out and buy more yarn to make the fringe. I hope that I can still match all of the colors.

So for the past month or so I have been trying to finish up a scarf every week, so that I don't have all of these unfinished scarves just taking up space, and now I have about four finished scarves and I am working on two more. And, while I should not put them away, as that would mean I might not get back to them until after Christmas, or, that they would again go unfinished indefinitely, I should try to refrain from working on them much this week, at least until I've crossed off these other things from my list that should be done by Friday so that I can relax and go to the party on Saturday.

And that is just the scarves. I'm sure if I really looked that I would find I have all sorts of unfinished business.

My husband will be mostly gone for the week, so if I don't get anything done I will have no one to blame but myself.

Maybe I will edit this video again

Okay, I have a version of the video, but I'm not entirely happy with it, so I might redo it. That is, I might redo some of the editing part, not the filming part. The filming part is done except for this one little thing that I forgot to do at the end, but it will be no big deal to add that, and it is something done inside and it will only take about five minutes to set up.

I have found out that a.) long shots are boring, and b.) trying to edit the sound is harder than editing the video. If you shorten a piece visually, the voiceover stays the same, unless you remove it entirely. So I had this part where nothing was really happening, and I had nothing else to say about it, so I tried to cut some of it out. So that just the voiceover not match up with other things later. You can't remove sections of the voice over, unless you did the voice over in little sections. So I tried doing the voiceover in little sections, to go exactly with the little video clips, but the little clips were just too small to work with. I can cut off pieces of the end of the audio, but only if I remove the video it goes with. So I may end up cutting it back to about the first third of the video where there is a big gap and redoing the rest of it. And then I might have room to add what I left out at the end. But I've still got the first version in reserve if I decide it is taking too long.

I know that I always complain about the way the house looks and I should get around to cleaning it someday, but now it is really bad. Even the kitchen and areas that I try to keep up with are bad. First, there was stuff that I put off because of the "new business", and then I put stuff off in the house while trying to do stuff in the garden that I meant to do while the "new business" stuff took over, and then I had a knee injury, and now I've but things off again to work on this video.

The knee injury is odd, and I know nothing about knee injuries. I didn't do sports as a kid, so I don't even know the terms. It is not a problem that I had diagnosed as a kid, so that I just say, I've got this again. This isn't something I've had before. And there is no bruising and no swelling or anything else that I can see. And I don't really remember doing anything to it, I just didn't feel great one day, and then I really felt bad. I just figured that I had banged my knee on something in the garden but didn't remember.

Now I think that it is some sort of repetitive motion thing. I think that I have been doing a certain thing with my knee off and on since I've moved into this house, and that I've been doing it more now than I used to, and maybe I'm too old to do that anymore, and maybe I wasn't supposed to be doing it in the first place.

Anyway, I haven't gone to the doctor about it. For one thing, I haven't got any money, and I figure that he would just tell me to avoid doing that particular motion. And I am trying to avoid that particular motion, which usually means that I'm just doing it on the other knee. But after I get things cleaned up I will try to be more careful with both knees.

Nothing exciting happened here for the weekend. We didn't even go over to my brother's for hotdogs. I'm sure that my sister had all kinds of fun with her in-laws, and it isn't much worth the trouble for only three or four of us. And the rest of us are all a bit short on money anyway.

I had been looking forward to Tuesday

At first I thought that I would go with him. It was just one day out of town to no place special. But I haven't been away for a very long time, and I thought that maybe just the one day would be nice. And one day away wouldn't hurt the plants or anything. A week away would be bad for the plants, cause I really cannot trust anyone to come and water them. Unless it is raining already, and then I have to worry about the house flooding. Not that the house might not flood if I stay, but at least I would be there to make sure that the pump is working properly (once it wasn't even plugging in). So I don't even think that three days in Waco is a good idea for me, but one day in the middle of nowhere might have been okay.

On closer inspection, we decided that it would be best if I didn't go. In fact, it would probably be best if he didn't get a room at all and just came back home that night. The place where he would have gotten the room was about two hours away, but the place he would actually do the work was just a little bit closer, and while I would rather not make that drive at night after working all day, he has done worse. And we are very short on cash now, even for motel rooms that they eventually pay him back for. We have to actually have the cash first before we can spend it on stuff that they pay back.

So I had been looking forward to getting out of the house for a day, but gave up on the idea. Then I got over it and starting looking forward to having the house to myself for twelve hours or so. I could sort through some clothes or do other work that I don't usually do when he is here. There's some stuff that I don't do when he is here, cause we will just end up getting in each other's way.

So we have a little bit to eat (which in fact was even food that he cooked), and then he leaves, and I take some time to do a few things on the computer before I get started doing any work.

And then my mother calls.

Now, I should know better by now. I just cannot talk to my mother one on one. But she calls and asks if maybe I would like to go and get something to eat.

Now, my mother has it in her head that the reason I don't talk to her very much is that I only spend time with her when there is something else in it for me, a bribe of some sort, like she is buying me something, usually lunch. And that isn't true. But lunch at a restaurant is usually the safest time and place to spend time with my mother, but I don't have any money, and I have to eat something anyway, so if she is offering to buy me lunch I usually go. But the truth is that now I usually don't want to go, even though she is buying me stuff, but I end up going anyway because I just feel like I should see her once in a while even when I don't want to.

She is still my mother, even if I don't like being around her and we really don't have that much to talk about anyway.

But I think to myself, this isn't so bad. She has called to invite me to lunch, and I've already had lunch. If I just go with her and have a soda, she won't have to buy me anything, I'll spend an hour or two with her in a public place, it probably won't get ugly cause it is in a public place, and then I can leave and I'll still have about ten hours to myself before my husband comes home.

And maybe since she isn't buying me lunch she'll get it out of her head that the reason we don't talk very often is that she has to buy me stuff before I will talk to her.

So we pick a place and agree to meet there in ten minutes. And I get there before she does, and I even manage to pay for my own soda. Now she doesn't have to buy me anything.

Now, most of the first hour or so goes well enough, and if I had just managed to stick to the original plan and leave, it would have been fine.

I am halfway through reading a book about why the bees are disappearing. This is very serious stuff. If the bees all die, we won't have any food. Well, maybe not literally no food, but a lot of the cultivated food that we take for granted just doesn't grow without bees.

So I try talking to her about the bees. She doesn't care about the bees. She is not one little bit interested that most of our fruits (and this includes a lot of stuff that we don't think of as fruits like tomatoes and almonds and squash and cucumbers), just won't be around anymore. I might as well have tried to start a conversation about Star Trek or Harry Potter. She just doesn't get it.

Anyway, she won't stick with the unimportant small talk. She has to talk about stuff that is important to her, and bees don't measure up, even for talk over lunch. So eventually it gets to some subject that I don't want to talk about. So the talk gets ugly, even though we are in a public place.

At some point she says something like if you say you will do something you can always change your mind and not do it.

Sometimes I wonder where I get my morals from. And I said so. If you say that you are going to do something, you are committed to doing it, except in the most extreme circumstances when something more important comes up.

Now I have seriously hurt her feelings, and I have to stay longer and smooth that over, even though she is the one who said what she said.

By the time things are better, I figure that I have wasted most of the day anyway, so I might as well go to her house for a bit.

Big mistake.

We played with the dog for a bit and mostly didn't say anything ugly. And then at some point she noticed that it is past when she usually eats dinner, so she invites me to dinner.

So much for getting through the day without her buying me anything. But I really did not plan to stay this long, and I do have to eat something and I don't have any money. If I had just had the sense to leave before that, it would have been okay.

After dinner, it gets ugly.

I really just cannot talk to my mother anymore. I felt fine Monday, or at least, what passes for that now. I just never feel really good anymore, and I suppose that I am never going to feel really good ever again. But Monday wasn't so bad. I didn't get anything done Monday, but I had plans to do something Tuesday and felt okay about it. I wasn't spending days at a time in bed feeling sorry for myself. I had the idea that things would eventually get better, even if they would never really be good again. But Monday I was okay, and then Tuesday I spoke to my mother, and usually after speaking to my mother I come to the conclusion that I can't do anything. I can't get a job that is worth having. I can't even get a job that I don't like that might eventually be useful. I am a drain on my family and I don't even deserve to have the car that I drive because I don't drive it to a job. Nothing that I will ever attempt to do is worth doing.

After talking to her I think that I might as well do nothing. I can't do anything. It isn't even worth getting out of bed to wash the dishes and such that I can do.

So I not only wasted Tuesday, but now I feel bad right before I have three days to myself, and I really should be getting something done then. Now I don't have any energy. Now I just don't see the point.

I eventually leave my mother's house and walk to the car. I cannot take anymore. She follows me. There is just no getting away from her. I try to be nice.

She finally allows me to leave. I think that I might have finally gotten through to her that I don't want to talk about things, but no. Her parting words were something like, we'll have to talk more about this later.

I go home. I don't even have an hour to myself before my husband comes in. It was a totally wasted day and I feel awful. He even mentions that the laundry isn't done. I don't even bother telling him that I've been gone all day.

Wednesday we went to see a movie called Moon. I only just heard about it a few days ago, and it isn't on a lot of screens, and it wasn't at our usual place. To get a reasonably priced ticket we had to go to a theater we had never been to before. It was okay. Moon is mainly about this one man who has agreed to work alone on a station for three years. If Silent Running or Solaris is your thing, then you would probably like this movie. But most people won't be really crazy about it. Then we went to lunch and did some shopping.

I should have stayed home instead of going out and spending money, but I felt so bad after Tuesday. I just needed to do something to feel better.

All of us are probably going to lunch Sunday, so I will see mother again, and I don't want to. Probably nothing bad will happen with everyone else there, but after Tuesday I am not looking forward to it.