I might be out of contact for a bit

My main computer seems to be dead. I'm not sure what happened or if it can be fixed or if I'll be getting a new one. I suppose now it is actually time for a new one, just the money situation isn't that great. Anyway, I won't be on the computer that much for a while, whatever happens, won't be checking my email as often, won't be posting much, won't be chatting, etc.... Just thought I should say something about it. I'm not dead. Yet.

Note to self

Today I went to Bonham, just to get out of the house for the day. I probably should have stayed at home. There's a lot of work to do at home, but I got a lot done Saturday and even a bit on Sunday. Monday I took a break and went to see Source Code.

Today I am bored, and I hate my life.

Maybe tomorrow will be nice.

The weather sucks

It is nearly the end of March, and we've had point zero something of rain. That's for the whole month. Some of that was yesterday, making this the second driest March on record, instead of the driest, which it looked like it was going to be. It's just sort of cold and damp all week, and not much actual rain. Looking online, I thought that it was going to rain from eleven in the morning til hours after dark, but that isn't what happened at all. It just rained a tiny bit, a sprinkle here and there, and then after not much it would stop and then maybe sprinkle again later. So you would go inside and then come outside and see that things had gotten just a bit wet, but not enough to water the plants or anything like that. I suppose that there's a chance of a tiny bit more rain today, it isn't as likely as it was yesterday, so we probably won't get much, if we get any at all. The good news is that without rain to interrupt me, I got a new asparagus bed dug. The bad news is that I think it was too late for those particular plants, that the roots might have been to dry, or the weather too hot, or whatever. So I might have wasted ten bucks on the plants, in which case I'll have a bed already dug for trying again next year. I'm about to give up on waiting for rain and just give all the plants a really good soak with the hose. I haven't even taken the foam thing off of the faucet. I don't expect a frost in April, but you never can tell. And I'm thinking that's one of Murphy's laws or something, that after you get everything in the ground there will be a late freeze. Anyway, whenever I take the foam thing off we get some near record late freeze, so I tend to leave it on for a very long time. So it's going to be cold and yucky for another day or two. I've had enough of it. Cold and yucky when it comes with beneficial rain is one thing, but this is just a waste. But I suppose in a couple of days it will be dry enough to dig again. Might as well get started on where the fruit trees will go next year.

The end of the world as we know it

I thought that with all the accidental traffic to my blog, I should write something important (like the 300th post message to home-wrecking sluts wasn't important enough). So, I've decided to say a bit about a book I recently read about surviving disasters.

Sadly, though I just read the book a month ago, I've already forgotten the name of it.

But, that doesn't matter much, and maybe I'll remember it and add it in later. It was a very general overlook, and if you are worried about a particular kind of disaster, you should get another book (or many books) specifically for that. Cause if you have a plan for surviving a world of mostly blind people that has been overtaken by man-eating triffids, that probably won't be as helpful in surviving nuclear bombs or anything else involving radiation. More than half of this book was about storing emergency food in case something happens, probably something that involves the electricity being cut off.

There was a lot of stuff, even for a very general book. The author made a couple of points that I thought I'd mention. One of them was about having a portable kit with stuff to survive for three days. Most of the book talked about nutrition and calories and make sure you have enough of this and enough of that, etc.... But, for the three day emergency pack, most of that goes out the window (except for obvious things like pack plenty of bottled water). Unless you have an allergy or diabetes or some other medical condition that requires you to eat special food every single day, don't worry about too much sugar and not enough veggies and such. Pack something that you like that you will eat for three days, stuff that needs no refrigeration, stuff that needs no preparation, and maybe stuff that requires little preparation but no electricity (and make sure that you pack whatever is needed for food preparation and maybe some paper plates and plastic sporks.)

In other words, pack peanut M&Ms.

Okay, maybe not just that. Pack energy bars and granola and raisins. Pack cans of tuna and a can opener. Pack a jar of peanut butter. Pack crackers to put the peanut butter on, and maybe some store bought cookies. (Crackers and store bought cookies will go stale, so every couple of months you'll have to eat those and buy new ones to pack.) Pack banana chips and other hydrogenated snacks that you've been told are bad for you. Pack nuts, even if they have salt on them. Maybe pack some canned pineapple (just remember that it isn't as important as important as the canned tuna, so if you haven't got room for both, stick with the tuna). And if you think you can get hot water (remember that you probably won't have electricity), maybe pack a bowl and spoon and some of that instant oatmeal with too much sugar and ramen noodles with too much fat and salt.

With the stuff that's been in the news lately, I wonder if packing for a whole week might be better. Except that I'd never be able to carry a week's supply of water on my back, so I don't guess that I'd be doing that.

The other really good point made by the author was that you probably don't want to buy someone else's prepackaged emergency food. You would probably pay too much for it and/or not like the food. It might be low quality stuff that couldn't be sold for profit at places that you would normally buy food, but after it's been repackaged for "emergency supplies" not only do people buy it, but now they pay extra for it. And the calorie count is probably lower than what you would need in an emergency, so you'd probably have spent all this money and then still not have enough food. So then there's all these tables and charts (most of which I did not read, cause I'm not going to go out tomorrow and buy all of this stuff) suggesting that you might need this much of something and that much of something else, and how to store it, and canned is probably better than dehydrated if you have the space, though you probably want to try a bit of both.

There was a whole chapter about frozen food. I'm not sure why. In most disasters we'd be preparing for, there would be no electricity, the freezer would stop working, and then you'd probably be stuck with a lot of food that would thaw out and then go bad. Have you even seen this type of disaster movie with the electricity and everything still working?

Night of the Comet. Maybe? Flip a few switches at the mall, and the lights came on, music played, and the escalators worked. Maybe a week later, the traffic lights still worked. This never made any sense to me. I'm assuming that when whatever it is comes that without the guys going to work at the power plant the electricity will soon go off, and there will be no traffic lights, no music at the mall, and no working freezers.

Okay, there might be a few working freezers. There might be some rich "green" people who have totally switched to solar and wind power, and they will have working freezers. And there will be a few people who bought gas powered generators for Y2K who will have working freezers and other things until they run out of gas. But for most of us, our freezers probably aren't going to work. Little is said about this in the book, just if you have a bunch of frozen stuff and the power goes off, you'd better have a plan to store the food some other way, like drying and canning. I'm not sure how to can a frozen steak, so I'm probably better off just buying Spam and canned tuna to begin with.

Anyway, you're supposed to store enough food for about two years, and then not everything you want to store will last for two years, so you'll have to store a lot of different things. And then before the two years are up and you're out of food, you'll have to do stuff like learn to plant corn. And so you'll also have to store three years worth of garden seed, cause you're first attempt at gardening might not be what you hoped for, and the second year there might be a drought and/or a late frost, and so forth. You'll always need to store several years worth of extra seed, just in case of one year's crop failure.

I read this book and thought it was all a good idea, though even with all of that it would only work for certain disasters. A few months ago, I read One Second After, about trying to survive following an EM pulse, and I think that it would really help for that (and maybe the world taken over by triffids), but I don't think it would help much in a nuclear attack (unless I knew ahead of time where the attack would be and moved all of my supplies someplace safe). I think that I'm too far inland to worry about tsunamis, but if I were hit by one I guess that my supplies would get all wet and ruined, or at least scattered and/or buried under debris. Also, if terrorists poison the air, I'm not sure what I'd be able to do about that, unless again I knew ahead of time and were able to leave the area being attacked, or maybe do some short-term thing involving gas masks and/or oxygen tanks. And if there's an outbreak of smallpox, I'm unlikely to be in the minority who survive.

Two years supply of food and three years supply of garden seed won't help me survive either poison or plague. In the unlikely event that I survive either of these things while the majority of other people die, I won't need to worry about my own emergency supplies, cause I'll just take stuff that used to belong to the dead people. So again I'm back to thinking that this plan is mainly good for surviving after an EM pulse (or maybe survive hiding in the basement from people infected with Rage, except that I don't have a basement to hide in anyway).

So after reading this book, I'm thinking that I need that three day emergency supply pack for short-term emergencies, and that if I want to prepare for a long-term emergency, I'd better decide which emergency to prepare for, probably the EM pulse.

Only just before I started writing this, I made an attempt to find the name of the book I just read last month, and I came across a website that reminded me of the other emergency I should be planning for.

The Tribulation is coming.

Not that I'd really forgotten about it, just that I wasn't specifically thinking too much about it when I was reading through this book decided what might be useful. So that might be similar to the plan for surviving the EM pulse, except that I'd need seven years of supplies in someplace so remote that I'd never see any other people. So I guess if I win the lottery I'll be buying a bunch of "green" stuff and moving to an underground bunker in someplace like Montana.

I think I'll buy a Spam cookbook.

What is an All-Con?

Following recent posts, a reader has asked, "What is an All-Con?" Reader must have sci-fi conventions explained to her, as she has recently moved to the land of the Big Chicken, just down the street from Atlanta. Atlanta, of course, will be home to Dragon Con in September, and she'll need to know stuff in order to decide whether to attend it or get the frak away from it. (And in case you didn't know, frak means f**k, in some other language, long ago in a galaxy far away where machines have taken over and decided to wipe out the human race.)

Okay, first off there are professional cons and fan run cons. "Professional" doesn't mean better, it means that it is someone's job and they expect to make money from it and keep doing it on a regular basis. Some fan run cons are very good. If there were not some very good fan run cons out there, it would never have occurred to anyone to start companies to have professional cons. See?

Okay, the professional cons I am most familiar with are Creation Con and Vulkon. On the one had, most of the cons I have been to were Creation Con. On the other hand, most Creation Con events I have been to were a bit on the boring side. I know that sometimes in other parts of the country, Creation Con has really big events and that they sometimes work with fans to do something different, but for the most part they don't do that here. At a Creation Con you have a star (or maybe stars plural), an actor from Star Trek or Stargate or whatever you are a fan of, and you go to hear that actor talk and maybe pay extra to get his or her autograph. You hear the actor speak in the main auditorium, and while you wait for that there are other things going on in the main auditorium, but if you aren't interested in that your only other option is to visit the dealer's room and maybe buy some t-shirts. There is nothing else going on, just programming in the main auditorium and shopping in the dealer's room. Sometimes the dealer's room is just the back of the main auditorium, so it's all just the one room. And, if all you want to do is hear the actor speak and maybe buy autographs and t-shirts, then you're fine with that, and Creation Con is just what you want.

Vulkon was a lot like that, except that they had two other rooms for fans to do stuff. So if you weren't interested in whatever was going on in the main room, you could go to another room and play a game, hear Klingon poetry readings, or watch a makeup demonstration. And of course, there was the dealer's room.

More recently I have been to another professionally run con. I don't remember the name of it, and I guess I've been ignoring it for years thinking that they only did Star Wars and comics. It was somewhat in between Creation Con and Vulkon. There's the main auditorium and an autograph room and a photo op room and a dealer's room. There was no fan run room when I went, but there were at least fan tables set up to promote local clubs. Creation Con and Vulkon usually have a costume contest (though it is usually short), but I don't remember this other group having one, though last time there were plenty of people running around in costume.

Fan run cons are usually different. There's always something going on in five or six different rooms, and you have to get out the schedule and figure out what is most interesting to you. You might even go to the con for some reason other than to see the actors. There are movie screenings, writing workshops, makeup demonstrations, model-making demonstrations, costume workshops, singing, and sometimes even children's programming. And there's usually a big costume contest, followed by a dance, and lots of parties. At the end there might be something called the Dead Dog, which I have never been to, as it sounds like a lot of people getting really falling down frakking drunk (but I can't say for sure, cause I have been, see?).

Some of the conventions are mainly for fans of a particular thing, like Star Trek or Star Wars or Babylon 5 or some animated shows from Japan. Or, some cons try to have a little bit for everyone. Some of the cons have gotten very big, and have just everything for everybody, like Comic Con in San Diego.

Dragon Con is sort of like Comic Con's little brother. Only it's getting bigger. Really Big. It's taken over four hotels and the underground. And there's a parade. A big parade, with costumes from just about anything you can think of.

Dragon Con is too big for me. My friends say that it's great and I have to go, but I don't think that I ever will. I don't really like crowds. And I can watch the parade on YouTube.

Okay, so what is an All-Con. All-Con is a fan run convention. It is not a big convention. It is more my speed. I liked All-Con the one time that I went, though not everything there is for me. Like, I did not watch the performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (I'm still thinking that there might be a prize for the oldest virgin). But, there are five or six rooms, movie screenings, workshops, parties, a costume contest, a dance, etc....

After a while, all the cool con names are taken. You have to call it something. Since this was one of those cons that tries to have a little bit of something for everything...All-Con.

This year's main guests at All-Con are Richard Hatch (of Battlestar Galactica, not the naked guy from Survivor) and Anne Lockhart (of the real Battlestar Galactica, not the recent re-imagining). But if that doesn't interest you there will also be Stormtroopers, Browncoats, people fighting ripe produce with swords, etc...

Okay, I hope that explains. If you like, I'll try to find some YouTube links for you.

I'm not going tomorrow. I don't know if my friend is going either, she might still be too upset about the whole ticket situation. I already have Anne's autograph. I would like Richard's, but the ticket price, plus another thirty or so for the autograph, plus standing in line, plus I can't tell from the schedule even when I would be standing in line. Now there's a $15 Sunday only ticket, but on Sunday there's no costume contest, no Battlestar blooper reel, and I'm not sure when or if Richard and Anne are going to speak. At this point I'm going with my original decision. No $20 or less Saturday ticket, so I don't need to go.

Update on the All-Con Situation

Okay, after months of asking about one-day tickets and being ignored, and then being told that there will be no one-day tickets, and then even some people were told that they were being a problem for only coming to All-Con on the one day and having the bizarre thought that they should only pay for the one day that they attend the convention, All-Con will now be selling Sunday only tickets for $15.

You still can't buy a one-day ticket for Friday or Saturday, when the stuff that most of us want to see is going on.

What the frak???

So I don't know if at the last minute they've figured out that they screwed up and just can't do anything about it because they didn't have any one-day tickets made up and so the only thing that they can do is sell left over badges on Sunday, or if they don't think that they screwed up but they might as well try to make a few extra bucks on Sunday.

The person who told me about the Sunday tickets is really, frakking mad.

Still not going. If somehow there had been a Saturday only ticket, I'd have gone. If somehow there had been a Friday only ticket, maybe. Okay, Friday is tomorrow, and I have stuff to do, and this is short notice, so probably not. But at least there's stuff that I want to do on Friday, so I would have had to seriously think about it, even if I ended up decided against it.

Anyway, if you're out there and you're not totally mad like my friend, and Sunday is the day that you really wanted to go anyway, now you can go for $15. Just thought I'd pass that on.

Don't go to All-Con this weekend

Unless, you have already bought the $40+ ticket, or you were planning to buy the three-day ticket, or you don't mind paying the $40+ for just one or two days. Apparently, this year you can't buy a one-day ticket.

Attempts to find out about one-day ticket prices were at first ignored. Some people persisted, and were finally told that there would be no one-day tickets, and that if you just wanted to come for the one day you would still have to pay $40+ for the whole weekend.

The last people to inquire about one-day tickets reminded All-Con that some of the people wanting one-day tickets could only get one day off from work or other responsibilities, and if one-day tickets were not offered people would stay home rather than purchase $40+ tickets, an amount unfair and charging for events that they mostly would not be attending.

These people were told that "the higher demand put upon us by the people who support us the least (one day)that was the basis for the decision to do away with the discounted tickets."

I'm not sure how to interpret that.

For one thing, I've never thought of the one-day ticket as a discount. You go for one day, you pay for one day, and that's fair enough. That isn't a discount. You go for three days, and if you pay for a weekend pass ahead of time, the three-day pass is usually less than the prices of the individual three days added together. So buying the three-day pass is the discount. Like, maybe a Friday ticket is $10, a Saturday ticket is $20, and a Sunday ticket is $20, but a weekend pass is $40, making either Friday free after paying for Saturday and Sunday, or Sunday half-price after paying for Friday and Saturday.

I'm not sure about this "higher demand" part either. If it's just that they sell more one-day tickets, maybe they should be nicer to people buying one-day tickets instead of acting like they are some sort of burden. If a bunch of people were buying $20 tickets, and you do away with the $20 tickets, that's a lot of twenty dollar bills that will be spent somewhere else. And I can't quite picture what extra work the one-day customer is causing for the convention, unless maybe the customer actually had a good time and decided to come back the next day and pay for another ticket, and the cashier had to do the same job twice for that customer instead of just once for the customer buying a three-day pass.

If read another way, it just sounds like the one-day customer is just somehow more trouble to have at the convention. Like, people who just come for one day to get an autograph and buy a couple of things somehow make trouble for the convention and require more security than the people who stay out partying and such for three days.

Anyway, not much of it makes any sense. Several of us have just decided not to go. A few people are going cause they already bought tickets, but probably wouldn't have bought tickets if they had realized their friends were going to be treated like this. And then of course they will not get good word of mouth advertising, cause people this year either won't go or will go and get really mad cause either they were overcharged or they didn't get to meet with friends who had planned to buy one-day tickets. Bad experience this year means less people next year.

It's sad. I only went the one year, for the one day. I thought it was a good convention, and I missed some things that I would have liked on Friday, and I wished that I'd bought the three day ticket instead. I was planning to go the next year, but life happened, and I didn't go the next year, and so forth. I could have gone this year, probably just Saturday, but I currently have a limit of about $20 for such things, and so I am not going, and my $20 will be spent at another convention later that doesn't sound as interesting.

If All-Con hadn't made this stupid decision, they might have sold some one-day tickets to people who liked the convention enough to make plans to come back. But people who make stupid decisions are usually quite attached to them and usually keep them. So I don't expect that our complaints will do any good.

Next year, when the club is voting to move things around to accommodate All-Con, I'll vote that we not move anything, and that we might not want to bother with it at all.

Stressed out

A while back I went to Planned Parenthood to do the usual embarrassing stuff I have to do once a year. I don't like it, but this year I tried to get it over with as soon as possible. Usually, I pay about a hundred dollars, and I get a pelvic exam, some lab work done to look for cancer and such, a prescription for birth control pills, and a packet of pills, and then maybe make another appointment for a mammogram. Then I go home with my pills and hope that the phone call telling me I have cancer doesn't come.

I have to go back every month or so to pick up more pills. I shouldn't have to go every month, but that is the way it has been for a while, as I do not seem to have enough money in my pocket to pay for more than one packet at a time. It's not so bad. While I'm in the general area I watch a movie and do some shopping or go to the library.

Anyway, this year I got the exam, but I was told that no lab work would be done, cause there was nothing wrong with me last year so there was probably nothing wrong with me this year either. That doesn't seem very scientific. There could be something going on this year that didn't happen last year, or the year before, or didn't get caught the year before, or whatever. Safe last year does not mean safe this year or next year.

I didn't argue. I came to get pills. Trying to talk sense to medical people leads to arguments, and an argument would lead to high blood pressure, and high blood pressure would mean having to wait for my pills, or maybe getting no pills at all.

I'm not sure what the pelvic exam was for, if not to collect samples to send to the lab. It seems like a pointless exercise, sometimes an embarrassing and painful exercise. It would be like going to get a blood sample taken, and going through having a needle stuck in your arm only not having a tube to collect the blood. But medical people seem very fond of giving pelvic exams, any time anything might be wrong with a woman. I don't know what they are looking for. My appendix is not in there. My tonsils are not in there. If I have food poisoning, it is not in there.

So far the dentist has not suggested a pelvic exam. I'm pretty sure we all know that my teeth are not in there.

So, I had the pointless exam, no samples taken for the lab, and did not ask for any blood to be drawn or a pregnancy test or anything else that might be done there. I did get a warning that my blood pressure needed to be good or I wouldn't get anymore pills. My blood pressure was a little high that day. People who work at this place don't seem to grasp that it has something to do with being there for an exam, and that blood pressure goes up if the patient is upset, and telling her that she might not get her pills might upset her. And this has come up before, and I have told them that this is the wrong thing to do, and that if they leave me alone it will go back down. I have something called "white coat syndrome" and I've had it for at least five years and I've told everyone about it. Still, they hover around and make it worse.

For some reason, the bill for the exam was almost a hundred dollars. I can't see why. It is usually just about that, with the lab work and a packet of pills. This was the same amount of money for no lab work and no pills. I didn't have another thirty dollars, so I left without my pills.

A bit later my husband and I went to run some errands before going out of town. We went to the library and some other places, and then my husband turned the car to go home, forgetting the most important thing. I still needed my pills. I didn't have thirty dollars, so he would have to go to the bank. He didn't want to do that, and he talked me into waiting til after the trip. We were only going to be gone a week, so that shouldn't be a problem, just that it worried me a bit.

Anyway, we stayed longer than that one week, and I worried that we wouldn't get back in time to get my pills. That, and the long drives, and the caffeine and some other things probably weren't good for my health. So when I went to get my pills I felt a bit nervous. I didn't feel bad physically, I just worried that the blood pressure would be a little high and that I would be stuck there a bit while I waited for it to go done. And then when I got there the woman who went to get my pills was gone a long time, and I worried about the delay.

By the time someone took my blood pressure it was 170 over something. They would not give me my pills. That upset me. So they took it again. I was so upset that it jumped to 190 over something. They still wouldn't give me my pills. Now they want me to go to the emergency room.

I have not spent a lot of time in emergency rooms, but I know that they don't do anything good for my blood pressure.

I can't believe that the nurse didn't just come out and apologize and give me my pills. If someone really thought that I was in danger, surely they would have done something to calm me down instead of suggesting I drive someplace.

That really made me feel bad. I told them I wasn't going to the hospital, that I was going to the movies instead. I had to do something to feel better, and I usually go to the movies anyway. Playing with a dog would have been better, or maybe a cat, but neither was available. I didn't feel much better after the first movie, but some was better than nothing, so I stayed for a second movie. I can't say that I felt good even then, just not as bad. So I thought that I would go somewhere else to see what my blood pressure was without the hovering people refusing to give me my pills.

Only the first place didn't have the machine, and the second place didn't have the machine, and the third place had the machine but when I tried it something seemed to be wrong with it. I tried it three more times and finally got it to work. By that time I felt even worse than before, and it was 185 over something. It was then too late to get pills anyway, so I gave up and went home. I'd probably feel better after some rest.

Looking online I found out that I'm not supposed to be using benedryl with the high blood pressure. So, I got some sleep, just not as much as I'd like. Still I felt so much better.

Until Planned Parenthood called, and apparently not to apologize and tell me my pills were ready. They just aren't going to part with those pills, even though that is why I'm getting the really bad high blood pressure. So I guess they just called to make themselves feel better, making me sick in the process.

After I calmed down some my blood pressure was measured at 163 over something. On a normal day, when there are not hovering people and idiots telling me that I can't have my pills, my blood pressure is 120 over 80. When I was on blood pressure medication a few years ago, it was 150 over something. I quit taking the stuff I gradually felt better, and a year later it was back to 120 over 80. So this is not something that I imagined. It is my body and I know what I'm talking about.

Funny that when you go to Planned Parenthood they totally buy that whole "it's my body" thing if you want to kill a baby, but if I want pills when I have high blood pressure it somehow isn't my choice to make.

Anyway, since my choice was taken away from me this month, I'm probably going to stay upset for a very long time, possibly get sick, etc.... And of course I don't have any birth control pills, so that's going to cause me a lot of other problems. People don't seem to understand that birth control pills are a medication that I need just like other people might need antibiotics or pain meds or anything else. People just think that you stop taking birth control pills and start using some other birth control method and that it's no big deal. It is a big deal. It's mood swings and physical pain and other problems, and for me it is also sometimes staying in the house and being afraid and depressed.

I'm going to have to get a new doctor. I'm going to have to go through this whole messy business with someone else, and I'm going to have to start from the beginning and say a lot of stuff that I don't like talking about, which probably will not help with the blood pressure. And I will have to pay for all this, after having already paid for Planned Parenthood to do this stuff, only I guess they think I just paid them a hundred dollars cause I wanted someone to look at my a**.

And then of course, there's no way of knowing if I will get a new doctor with half a brain, so I still might not get the pills, which means I will have to go through it all again.

Seems to me that I know a few bloggers who are in Mexico now. Maybe they could just buy some birth control pills for me.

Note to self

Today was Pie Day. Get it? 3.14. Today was also the first day of asparagus. And I found some purple asparagus at Walmart, so I'm going to try to plant that, even though it is probably too late in the season to start doing that. My first attempt at grafting was a fail, but I think that I will try again next year, with something smaller.

Home now

Well, we almost went to El Paso for a few days. The trip that was only supposed to be for one week was extended for a few days because another photographer was called for jury duty. We thought that was going to be on Tuesday, and that someone would tell us Tuesday either that we could go home or that we would be heading to El Paso. Only the photographer wasn't called on Tuesday, she was called on Wednesday. What she was saying was that she needed someone to cover for her on Tuesday because she couldn't work in north New Mexico (almost Colorado) Tuesday afternoon and evening if she had to be in a courthouse in Albuquerque on Wednesday morning. And then she might still get on a jury, but isn't less likely that you'll get picked for a jury on Wednesday than on Monday or Tuesday. So, pretty early on Wednesday she was told that they didn't need her. Not early enough that we could be told at eight in the morning when we called, so we headed to Albuquerque and called again when we stopped for lunch. We absolutely had to know then, as from Albuquerque we would either head south to El Paso or west to go home.

I suppose if it still wasn't decided, we could have maybe headed south to Socorro, called from there a couple hours later, and then either kept going to El Paso, or traveled home with a detour through Roswell. And Roswell can be fun when you are in the mood, but really we weren't, and by the time we got there we wouldn't have had time to do anything anyway. Really we just wanted to go home, though if they had told us early enough El Paso would have been okay for a few days.

Anyway, before noon we were told the jury duty was over, and we could go home. We were about ten miles away from Albuquerque, and according to Mapquest the drive home from Albuquerque is ten hours. But we know that Mapquest rarely tells us how long the trip really is. The drive is usually a bit longer than that, and then you have to stop to eat and to get gas and sometimes just stop to get out of the damned car for a bit. The trip from home to Albuquerque was well planned and we got an early start, but the trip took twelve and a half hours. The same twelve and a half hours, from when and where we started Wednesday, would have ended near Wichita Falls at about 10 pm. But my husband was already tired, so we only got as far as Amarillo. As originally scheduled, we would have had to drive at least to Wichita Falls, as my husband had been scheduled to work in Dallas Thursday. But the boss agreed to change it a bit so that he didn't have to work til Friday. He'd just done too much driving.

We'd stayed at the Fifth Season, or something like that. That's one of those older hotels that isn't the new cool place to be and isn't anywhere old enough to have historic interest. Someone is trying to fix up the lobby and the pool and the rooms near the front of the place. The rooms in the back are not too good, do not have microfridge or ironing boards or any of that stuff. My husband stayed there before, at my suggestion, cause I found a coupon and it had nice pictures and came with sausage and eggs for breakfast. He didn't like it, the air conditioner didn't work very well, and he couldn't get an Internet connection. It did have a hot tub, and it did have a nice pool, but he really isn't into pools that much and doesn't use the hot tub that much either when I'm not there. So he didn't like being stuck there for a week.

But on the way home I found the coupon again, and he didn't think that staying there just the one night would be a bad idea, especially since it wasn't warm enough to need the air conditioner and for just the one night we could live without the Internet and the microfridge and ironing board, etc....

I thought that it was okay. I really liked the pool area. The breakfast was nice, but I'd get tired of having the same thing all week. It isn't the usual stuff with sausage and eggs included, it is pretty much just the sausage and eggs, and toast, and oatmeal. No other cereal, no waffles, no bagels, no donuts, no muffins, no fruit. So I'm glad I got to stay there, but I probably won't stay there again (unless again it is just the one night when we don't need the air conditioner), unless maybe the amount we are allowed to spend on motels increases a bit and we can stay in one of the front rooms.

The next day we packed everything up, or I thought we did. I guess that I left my pillow. On the first day we lost one of my swimsuits, and sometime after that we lost one of his. And now my pillow is missing. Probably other things will turn up missing, but so far nothing really important.

I thought we would stop in Wichita Falls for lunch, but we didn't get that far. We stopped in Vernon, and I guess he was really hungry, cause he stopped at the first thing he saw, a McDonald's. Really, Vernon is a small town, but it isn't that small. It does have restaurants. Half an hour later, after we had eaten, we pasted what he really wanted, a catfish restaurant. Oh, well.

We saw a lot of stuff this trip, and I will have to blog about it all later. Just for now I thought I'd mention that we were home.

Summer season begins next week

It doesn't seem to matter what we are doing or when we are there, but we just always seem to be there at not quite the right time. One place we visited last week had half of the place closed off for the winter season, which ended on March 6th. Yesterday we visited a Navajo Museum that had a small free zoo, except that the zoo was closed March 7-14 to get ready for the summer season. A lot of restaurants seemed to be closed on Sunday, while other things seemed to be closed on Monday. Sunday and Monday are usually his days off, so that's annoying.

And then there were a few things that we might have done yesterday, except that it rained a lot, and even after driving only three hours or so we were tired.

But we did visit Window Rock. If you're a Trekkie, imagine the Guardian of Forever's bigger less talkative brother. I've wanted to see it twice before, but just didn't have the time to make a detour of an hour or so, much less time to get out and take pictures and such. But we spent the night in Gallup, and we had all day to get to the next place about two hundred miles away, so we had some time.

While looking at Window Rock, a cow wandered past, and I wondered if we shouldn't tell someone about it. Only it turns out that cows just have the run of the place, that the fence only discourages them from being in the parking lot and doesn't actually keep them in any particular place. We later saw several more cows in odd places, and then four horses. They didn't attract any more attention than the stray dogs.

I've seen a lot during this trip. Strange that I almost didn't go.

It's been a nice trip, but...

I should be going home tomorrow. I'm not. My husband has to at least work in New Mexico again on Tuesday. And then, we will either have a long trip home Wednesday (and probably some of Thursday), or, he will be working a few more days in a part of Texas that we rarely go to. We won't know which until Tuesday night, and I'm not really sure which I would prefer.

I am getting tired of the long drives. If we go home on Wednesday, that would be the longest drive yet, and the least interesting.

The drive home next weekend would be slightly shorter, we would probably have two days to do it, and a detour would allow us to do something silly we've never done before. Also, we could think about going to another place we've never been before.

But, driving next weekend would mean that I'd be getting home a couple of days later than I should. This could cause me some problems later. And four days already in motel rooms without knitting have been a bit boring, so I can imagine how I'm going to feel after four more.

We've totally thrown out the diets. I'm sure that the little bit of weight loss that I've had will have disappeared by the time I get back home. I think that we've had Mexican food five or six times already, usually with Cokes, chips and salsa, and sopapillas.

Saturdays are usually the worst for me, with little to do other than watching whatever odd thing is on SyFy, usually movies they made with plots that make little sense. My husband gets home earlier on Saturdays, but usually he doesn't feel up to doing much if anything.

Tomorrow we will spend most of the day being tourists. Since we've already taken the direct route to where we are going Monday (and will be taking it again on Wednesday) we will take a detour and do whatever looks interesting between here and probably Gallup, and then drive the rest of the way the day after. So that will be probably be a rather dull day, with little or nothing to do after lunch, but it is probably a good idea to take it easy since either way will mean a lot of driving on Wednesday.

And there will probably be more Mexican food.

...and technically Utah

Saturday, I was supposed to move things around in the living room and scrub the floor and get everything ready so that the thing could be moved out of the back room and the living room floor could be painted. As it turned out, I wasn't going to get everything done that I wanted, so I decided to not do much of anything. It would have been nice to have it all done and have the final bit of paint drying while we were both out of the house, but I was nowhere near that. If I had known sooner that I was going out of town, maybe I would have done some of the other stuff faster, but I didn't. It can wait.

So, other than wash dishes and try to get things packed, I went to run an errand, and then I didn't do much of anything. I thought about what knitting project I could take with me, and then I decided that I wouldn't take any knitting. I was going to spend one day in a motel in Colorado, and then three more in New Mexico, but then we were told that one of the days in New Mexico was probably going to be cancelled. So that was only going to be three days in motel rooms, and it didn't seem worth the effort of going to get yarn and such.

Anyway, the almost cancelled day in New Mexico got uncancelled, and the schedule might change even more after that, leaving me alone in motel rooms for even more days without much to do, so I'm really wishing that I had packed some yarn, or at least a loom or something so that I might go buy some yarn later.

Anyway, tomorrow I was planning to spend the whole day in Durango. Now it looks like we're maybe planning to have lunch in Durango before we have to be somewhere else.

Sunday was a very long drive to Albuquerque, but we left at 6 in the morning as planned and it really didn't seem all that bad.

The next morning we took some pictures and went to ride the Sandia Peak tram. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but that meant that we had a late start on everything else. Scenic drives and lunch and a slight detour to look at some ruins and then another slight detour to go to the Four Corners Monument.

Only we got there at 5:30, about an hour too late to do anything, and about half an hour too late to even get in. So we drove past some more really interesting views and checked into our motel, which did not have an indoor hot tub as advertised. But dinner was great. Didn't really want yet another Mexican restaurant (third already this trip), but we really didn't want to go looking for something more interesting, and this place was practically in the motel parking lot.

This morning we woke up early, and we went back to Four Corners. I didn't know that Four Corners was a flea market, or I would have brought more money. But we had enough money for fry bread, and we bought a few things, mostly a couple of necklaces from a woman who agreed to take a check.

I have eaten too much. Might be just as well that I don't have a hot tub. It probably isn't a good idea to get in the tub after eating too much.

So I've now added Colorado and technically Utah to the list of states I've been in. So that makes 42 of the lower 48.

It's been a busy few days.

Should I go on a little trip?

Well, I should know by now to always have a bag packed and be ready to go, just in case. But usually, I'm not. Usually when the opportunity comes I either have a lot of work to do, or a lot of thinking to do, or both. Then there is a lot of rushing around to get packed and ready to go.

Okay, so I've never been to Colorado. My husband is going to work in middle of nowhere Colorado, for one day. It will take two days of driving to get there, there doesn't appear to be anything in town that is particularly interesting, and then that will be followed by another day of driving to get to the next place that he works, which is in New Mexico. I have been to that place before, but I don't think that we've been there very often, and we haven't gotten to see much while we were there.

Not that we'd get to see much this time either. My husband would have to work for three days, and then so far as I know we'd be driving back, either a day and a half trip or else a very long day, so that he could work in Dallas the next Tuesday.

On the one hand, this isn't a good time to go. And it isn't just that I don't have a bag packed. I'm busy. Really, I am busy. I am painting the floor. I couldn't take that last little bit of carpet anymore, and I've ripped it off of the floor. That took a lot of work. Then I removed all of the old tiles that were under the carpet. And then there was all of this dirt. I cleared away almost a third of the floor moving a few things into the kitchen and the back room and the hallway, and then pushed everything else to the other side of the room. The empty space on the floor has been scrubbed three times, then two coats of bonding stuff added, and then the little holes left in the floor where the carpet was nailed down had to be filled in. I took a few days to rest before I did all of that, and then I painted the first coat of paint, followed the directions and waited a whole day before painting the second coat, and now I'm waiting three days before moving the furniture back to where it should be on the one wall, and then I will have to move a lot of other stuff in front of that furniture so that I can scrub more of the floor as step one of preparing to paint.

So what I had planned for Saturday was to move the furniture, and then create a path through the living room and the kitchen so that my husband could remove something very heavy from the backroom to the front of the house, where it will sit for a while while I maybe try to get someone to take it away by mentioning it on Craigslist.

Getting all of that done is more important that going on a trip. However, I'm not sure that it will get done by my staying. I can't do much of anything until Saturday, Friday night at the earliest. The paint is supposed to dry a whole three days before I move the furniture and such. The item in the back room cannot be moved until everything else is moved. I cannot move the item myself, even after everything else is moved. So the item must be moved on Saturday night or Sunday morning, and it must be moved before I do anything else to the floor.

If the item does not get moved by Sunday morning, I can not continue with painting the floor next week, and the whole plan will probably have to wait until it is possible for everything to be moved out of the way and for my husband to have the time to actually move the thing.

It is very inconvenient to have all of these things in odd places and shoved against a wall where they cannot be used. Also, it is difficult to do things like laundry, as the pathway to the dryer isn't what it was.

The rest of the house is quite the mess, as I gave up trying to deal with it. There is just dirt on the floor everywhere, especially the kitchen, as we track it in from the area of the living room that has not been prepared yet. And while I'm not doing anything right now (as I have to wait three days for the paint to dry), I'm afraid when I was doing a lot of work on the floor I got a bit behind on the dishes and the other stuff. I could probably get caught up in a few days, but I still don't know about leaving the rest of the stuff. Everything takes longer than you expect it to, but I thought that most of it was going to get done next week when I had the place to myself and my husband was going to be in Lubbock.

Anyway, I've never been to Colorado and I want to go. On the other hand, I'd really like to get this painting stuff over with. If I don't go, I'll probably regret not going. If I do go, I'll be behind schedule on everything else, and I probably won't get to do that much anyway. I'm trying to decide if it is worth the effort to go one day to middle of nowhere Colorado.

We would have to drive two days to get there, so even if there's anything to do in middle of nowhere Colorado, I don't see when we could do it. There's just too much driving the first two days, and he actually has to work from about 11am to after 10pm on Tuesday. He doesn't have to work Wednesday, but then there's that five hour drive to New Mexico. So Colorado is going to be a few hours in the evening Monday, breakfast and hopefully cable in the motel room Tuesday, and a few hours before driving away on Wednesday.

I think that the only thing we'll be doing in Colorado is looking at stuff in the middle of nowhere as we drive by.

As for New Mexico, there's probably more to do, but again there's not much time to do it. Maybe a few hours Wednesday night, breakfast Thursday morning, whatever we might do before 1pm on Friday, and maybe a couple of hours Saturday night. And then it's drive back to Dallas.

Our we might leave right after work on Saturday night and have more time to maybe do something on Monday, but traveling on a Saturday night is not the best idea. You have to plan ahead, know exactly when you're going to need to stop and get a reservation before you leave, and that usually costs more money (and that money would come out of our pocket, since the company isn't paying for us to leave early).

And, if I go, I'll miss C's party. It was scheduled for a few weeks ago, but they changed the date because of the ice and snow. So now it's going to be next Friday, and if I go I'll miss it.

I suppose that isn't a great tragedy. I really don't even have anything special to wear.

I guess the work on the floor can wait. I was just looking forward to having it all done. The end was in sight. At least for the living room floor.

Work. Work. Work.

And then it was back again

So that possibility of a little snow Wednesday turned into a lot of rain followed by sleet. I'm not sure we got much if any snow. But we did get the sleet, so the streets are covered with ice. Not like the really thick ice of last week, but ice is ice, and you can't drive on it. And then the temperature dipped again, to the possibly record lows, and so the ice won't all melt away for a bit. It might get a just a tiny bit above freezing today, but I don't really expect the roads to all be clear until Friday.

So this sucks, again, but maybe not quite as much as before. At least it will be over sooner. And with the ice not being quite so thick, there shouldn't be much of it left to refreeze Friday and Saturday. So I'm still hopeful that I will still be able to go on as planned Saturday night. Now I just have to decide what to bring and what to wear, as I hadn't bought anything new or planned anything really special.

My husband is home. They did at least have sense enough to cancel things before the ice came this time. So there's good news and bad news. With my husband home, I don't get much work done, so the floor is just as I left it Saturday morning. I've made no progress at all since then. The only work I've done is wash dishes. Like all of the dishes that I didn't wash last week (cause it was cold and I just thought I might as well not make myself more uncomfortable by having my hands in the water), and then all of the containers that my husband brought home from last week. And then there was all this stuff I had planned to cook, which I didn't, and has now gone bad, so I'll have to deal with that too and clean out the frig on Friday. So anyway, I haven't been working on the floor, which is just a bit more than halfway done and you'd think I would have finished it all by now.

The good news is that with my husband home a.) I'm not constantly trying to find out the road conditions in Abilene so I can figure out when it's safe for him to drive home, and b.) he's downloaded all sorts of things for us to watch while we're stuck indoors. So we watched a bit of Being Human (which gets a bit weird if you watch that and the American version at the same time) and Primeval and something new called Outcast.

Anyway, I think that things will mostly be back to normal later today, and totally be back to normal sometime Friday, and my husband doesn't work again until Saturday. So it's not so bad, not like the nearly all week thing that it was before.

Week five

Okay, I'm getting sick of this diet stuff.

First week, I lost weight. Fine. Great.

Second week, I lost weight, just not as much as the first week. Or maybe I just read the scale wrong the first week. But there was definitely weight loss. Fine.

Third week, I can't really tell if I've lost weight, but if I have it wasn't that much.

Fourth week, again, I can't really see any difference in the scale. So then, what is the point? But I had made something to eat that had broccoli in it, and I had overcooked the broccoli, and I really hate overcooked broccoli. But, I made it, so I should eat it. And there was ice on the roads and all of that. It just wasn't a good time to waste food.

Saturday, when my husband came home, we went out and had Mexican food to celebrate surviving the week. I even had a regular Coke. This was the first caffeine I'd had in about a week, and the first regular soda I'd had in more than a month.

Sunday was the Superbowl, and I'm not into football, so I wasn't going to do much anyway. My husband made salsa and guacamole, so I had some of that and some chips. He went to my brother's place and they ordered a pizza.

Monday I had leftover pizza, and then we also had some hot wings cause there was all this leftover Super Bowl food marked down at the grocery store.

My husband is about at the end of his six weeks because a.) he started the week before I did, and b.) his plan wasn't really about losing weight, so he can say that's enough whenever he wants. So I guess that his six weeks were over Saturday, though technically I think that was closer to five weeks.

So I expect we're back to "let's go out" and "let's get ice cream" and such as that, though other than this last weekend I don't expect a big rush to do that, just that eventually things will go back to the way they were. I had hoped/expected that during the six weeks he was on his diet that I would lose about twelve pounds on mine, and that would make me feel better and I would want to keep going with it. But I haven't lost twelve pounds. I might have lost eight pounds, or, I might have read the scale wrong and just lost six pounds. Either way, most of that was the first week, and a bit more was the second week, and I can't tell that I've lost much if anything after that.

I wonder if it is some mental thing, and you lose five pounds or so just because you say that you're going on a diet, and then that's the end of it. Or, was I really doing something different that first week? Or did it have something to do more with what I did the previous week?

I must admit that almost every week I've had something come up so that I did not eat at home just one time. But I didn't do anything really crazy. When I went to Burger King with mom, I only ate half, and when we went to Outback Steakhouse I ordered the smallest steak and veggies and this tiny thing of seafood and salsa that just didn't look that bad. And on the day of the convention I had something called a Dutch Baby for breakfast, but again I only ate half so it would not be just tons of calories all on the same day.

You would think that I would lose a pound a week or so just from giving up regular sodas, even if I didn't do any other diet stuff. But that doesn't seem to be happening.

I think that it is unusual for an American woman to get to be my age without trying a bunch of diet pills and such. I really have not done that, except for buying some Slimfast bars and shakes, but that really wasn't about trying to lose weight, that was about having some emergency food that did not need refrigeration when were were traveling.

Okay, so I've gone to the drugstore and bought some snake oil. Not really, but I did buy some "detox" stuff (which is not really about losing weight it just sounds like a good idea anyway), and some other stuff that I think is mostly overpriced vitamins and caffeine. I haven't tried the caffeine stuff yet, and I might never try it, but it was on sale and I figured that I would go ahead and get it just in case. I was disappointed that there weren't more instructions inside the box, just how many pills were recommended. I thought it would say something like best results with certain types of diets. It doesn't even say much about eating sensible meals, just when to take the pills.

Okay, so I'm not trying the pills yet, but I'm just wondering if the first week's weight loss had something to do with all the Cokes I had the week before. Maybe a caffeine pill would do some good, when I'm totally giving up Cokes. So maybe I'll try them in a few weeks, when I'm not even having diet sodas. But not right now.

Anyway, I just feel like I've wasted the last three weeks (other than trying to clean the house and going to the convention). Between all the stuff in the frig and the party on Saturday, I'll mostly be taking a week off from the dieting. Though I do think that I'm going to try this detox thing and maybe eat some more yogurt.

And then it was gone

Yesterday around noon it finally got above freezing and stayed above freezing enough to melt the ice and snow, or most of it.

It has just been awful here since sometime early Tuesday morning. There was a bit of snow and there was thick ice all over the roads. Usually, it will snow only very briefly here, and usually not enough to stick, and if it does stick it doesn't stay cold enough to stay around for very long. But it got very very cold, and it did not melt (except maybe in places where you put salt and such), and even what you got to melt would then freeze over again and make even more of a mess. And then Friday we were supposed to get a little more snow, and we ended up getting a lot more snow, about five or six inches of snow, and that covered the ice on the roads, which made them even more dangerous.

While all this was going on, my husband was out of town. He was supposed to work Tuesday through Saturday at a place on the other side of Abilene. So he had left to do that Monday, not knowing if all the talk of snow was really anything to be concerned about, and even if it was it probably wouldn't be the same conditions in Abilene. Having talked to several people in the company on Monday at noon, and not being told he should do otherwise, he drove out just after that. So at about nine-thirty or ten, one of his bosses called looking for him to tell him that the first two days of the job were cancelled.

Great. What are we supposed to do about that now? If you don't want him to be at a job Tuesday, you have to tell him Monday, or better yet Sunday, as he would probably leave early on Monday. Even if he had decided to drive out early Tuesday, nine-thirty is way past the time he would have had to leave, even on a normal day. If the ice had only been here, and not in Abilene, he wouldn't have been able to go, and they would have yelled at him for not leaving earlier.

Sometimes his bosses do not seem to grasp that their traveling employees actually have to travel, and that means that they are not here and should not be expected to be here and such.

So I told the boss where my husband was and the number he could be reached at and so forth. A bit later I called my husband to make sure he had gotten the message. He said that Abilene was also covered with ice, so he guessed that he wouldn't be going to work that day, but it was good to hear someone confirm that. But only the first two days of the job were cancelled, cause ice on the road usually clears up by then.

Except that it was really really cold, and the ice did not melt.

Apparently the bosses do not talk to each other, so another boss called here looking for my husband on Thursday to say that he did not have a contact number, so could I call my husband and tell him that the rest of the week was cancelled and that he should just come home.

Come home, in this?

He can't drive a few blocks to the job site, and the customers can't drive from the other side of town to see him, but it's okay to drive from one town covered in ice to another town covered in ice that is several hours away, even though all the road between are covered in ice. Sure. We'll get right on that.

I did not notice the message for several hours. My husband expected at least a message to confirm that he didn't have to work that day, but he wasn't going even if he didn't get that message. So he got the message from me, quite a bit late. Coming home was out of the question, even if he had gotten the message when he should have. But he somehow had the idea that it would be safe to drive home Friday, while I knew that it wouldn't be safe til ten am on Saturday.

My husband spent a lot of time in a cafe drinking tea and talking to other people about where they were going, and where they had come from, and when it might be safe to leave. And there was a couple who thought that it might be safe to leave Friday, and that was what they planned to do. Only they didn't get very far when they saw the remains of a wreck and decided to turn back and checked in to the same motel again.

So Saturday morning he stayed in the cafe talking to truck drivers, and he found one who said he'd just come from Fort Worth and that it was mostly safe to drive that way. So my husband called me just before ten (when I suggested it might be safe to leave) and I told him not to be in any hurry, but it did at least look very sunny even if it was still just below freezing here that it should warm up soon.

So I thought I would start to look for him about two, though I didn't really expect him quite then, as I thought that most of the way he would have to drive slower than usual. But he got home even sooner than that.

His six week diet is nearly up, so he suggested going out for Mexican food.

But first, I had a bath and washed my hair.

I hadn't had a real bath since Tuesday, and I'm not sure how much before that since I'd washed my hair. Monday, everything had been fine. Tuesday, there was snow and the roads were covered with ice and it was cold, but you were fine if you stayed inside. But it stayed really cold, and Wednesday morning there were those rolling blackouts. And it was cold inside, and the space heater was nearly useless. I mostly stayed in bed Wednesday, and I just couldn't deal with the idea of getting totally undressed, much less get undressed and get into water. I decided the bath could wait. Thursday, it still seemed cold to me in the house, though either it was not quite as cold as Wednesday, or else I had just gotten used to it, but I still spent most of the day in bed. Friday was better still (inside, cause it was a mess outside), but I kept imagining that the blackouts would come back just as soon as I would decide to have a bath, so maybe it could still wait a bit more. Friday I got out of bed and got some work done, and work means that my hair needs to be washed, even if it didn't already need to be washed. Saturday morning I decided to get just a bit more work done, and the bath might as well wait til it was officially above freezing.

That was probably the best bath I have ever had in this house.

But I was really hungry, or I probably would have just stayed in the bath for a while.

All the ice on the streets were melting. There were puddles of water everywhere, and mounds of slush in the parking lots, but there didn't appear to be anything unsafe anywhere. After eating our late lunch and going to a couple of stores, we came home a couple hours later to see that most of the snow in our front yard had melted away. In the backyard and across the street there was still some snow, maybe in places that had mostly been in the shade, but it was all going to melt away, and on my side of the street you just wouldn't have known that there had been more than six inches of snow Friday.

It was just a miserable few days that almost became a week. And there are people who decide to live this way for months at a time. And I don't get it. I know that they've gotten used to it, but I don't get why after the invention of the air-conditioner that there wasn't vast migrations south and the northern states still have all those people in them, much less that there's a whole country of people who live north of them.

After finally getting through all of that, today at about noon it will start raining and/or snowing again, and that will last on and off til about four in the morning. But it won't stick, and it won't get much below freezing for long, so unless people are actually on the roads when it is happening (which they will be, because today is that damned game), they should be okay. So I will be sure to get all of my business done before noon.

And then we will get more on Wednesday. But again the temperatures are not going to stay below freezing around the clock, so I imagine that it will all be gone long before Saturday, and I have nothing to worry about this weekend.

Yet.

Anyway, I have my fingers crossed.

More bad weather

It had seemed to me that the conditions were slowly going to get better, or maybe I had just gotten used to how bad they were. But we have more snow now, and there is still the ice on the roads under the snow, so it is in fact a bit worse, because drivers cannot see now where the ice is, and while they drive over the snow that will sort of compact and make more ice.

My husband had heard that it might be safe to drive home today. I don't know what he was thinking. I know what the weather is here, and I've just looked at the forecast where he is now, and it won't get below freezing until 10 am tomorrow. So, if you happen to be reading this, don't check out until tomorrow morning, and don't actually start driving until sometime after 10 am, and if you are not home by 6 pm you had better see about getting another room and waiting til Sunday to make the rest of the drive, cause unless the roads are actually dry the melting snow will just start to freeze again.

We had heard that there was more snow coming, we just didn't expect this much. We have like 5 inches, and there might still be more coming.

Two days ago, someone in my family had ventured out, and had called to ask if I needed anything. I said no. I wish now I had asked for a pizza. I have food, and I'm supposed to be trying to lose weight, but I am so tired of it. And I haven't had caffeine for over a week now. No Cokes, not even diet ones. It's hard to sleep sometimes, so I figured that it was better off without caffeine if I could manage. But I really want a Coke, and a pizza, and chocolate, and maybe a hamburger. And some Chinese food. And some nachos. And some hot wings.

C's party has been rescheduled for next month. Now I'm a starting to worry about next week's party, as the weather is probably better next week, but it looks like it will snow again on Wednesday, and I don't know if it will all be cleared away by Saturday. I have already been told that there are absolutely no refunds for the room, so the party would either have to go on as scheduled, or they would have to somehow raise more money to rent the place a second time. The money lost on C's rescheduled party is just coming out of C's pocket. I'm wondering if we shouldn't pass the hat or something, but right now I don't even know how much money was lost.

I have spent most of my time in bed. The bedroom is not the warmest room in the house, but as I just recently decided to get on with taking up the carpet and such, the warmest room is unusable, and the rooms and hallway next to it are full of extra stuff. I got work done on Monday and Tuesday, as the house still seemed pretty warm for most of Tuesday, but not so much on Wednesday. So I just stayed in the bedroom under blankets. Yesterday seemed warmer, but I was in no hurry to get back to work, as I expected it was going to be even warmer today I thought today soon enough. But now I expect it to be cold until after lunch. Maybe then. Still no hurry I suppose. The trash will not be hauled away until Saturday, if then.

Okay, back to bed.

School closed for the Superbowl

Okay, not really. Schools around here are closed because of ice and snow. And it hasn't been this cold here in ten years.

It is unusual for it to snow here, and more unusual for it to snow here and there to be ice on the roads and be this cold all at the same time. We expected to get into the single digits last night, and I think that I missed getting that cold by about two or three degrees, but it is expected to get that cold again (if not colder) tonight or tomorrow morning, and today we're only going to have a high of maybe twenty-one. It won't get above freezing until sometime Saturday.

I'm told that there was plenty of de-icing stuff out and ready to go, not so much for us, but because they were trying to plan for anything that might interfere with the Superbowl. Still, that stuff apparently stops working at about fifteen degrees, and we are still a bit below that now, so regardless of how many trucks go out with it, we'll still have ice everywhere.

So much for going to C's party Friday night. Even if some of the ice melts by then, it will just freeze again, probably during the party, and then I'd get stuck there. I'm still watching the forecast, but probably not, though I'm still surprised how many other people have said that they will go.

We are having what is called "planned rolling blackouts". So the power went off just before seven, and while it was only supposed to be for about fifteen minutes, it was actually a bit more than half an hour, and then at nearly eight-thirty it happened again, for maybe twenty-five minutes, and I suppose I can expect the same for the rest of the day. I have a gas stove, but the house has been modified so that I cannot hook up my gas heater. I am thinking that after this is over I might go and see if I can somehow hook up the heater from the same place as the stove, just in case this happens again, though having a heater in or near my small kitchen will be annoying.

Other people are not having "planned rolling blackouts." They are just having blackouts.

I had misplaced my lighter, but I have found it now. If I get a longer blackout I'll at least have candles and be able to cook.

It is all a bit annoying. When I don't have power, I try to think of things to do other than watch TV, only to figure out that most everything else I think of also involves electricity. I can't use the computer without power. I'm not writing anything at the moment, but if I were, I suppose that I could write without a computer, only that is too distracting now to write anything on paper, and I no longer even have the convenience of a regular typewriter. Or I might want to read something, only without power I don't have a lamp, and much of the time it isn't light enough to read without one. And this morning I couldn't even find my lighter, so I couldn't even have a candle for that. And I might knit something, but again without sufficient light I can't do it at all, and doing it for long without the TV or radio or audio book is rather sad.

So without anything else to do here, I would go run some errands, or go to the theater, or even just go shopping or to a restaurant. But all of that is out as well, with the weather and the roads the way they are.

I decided to drag out a space heater. I haven't used it in three years, and really the last time I had it out was to dry something after a flood. I can't remember the last time I used this heater for it's intended purpose.

Just to show how life is not fair, while I'm thinking that I will have to miss C's party, all will be well by Sunday, in time for that game at that evil to go on as scheduled. And, as I write this, the evil place is being spared from the "planned rolling blackouts" because of security or something, while all the houses nearby still have to do without power now and then. Why couldn't it have been the other way around, with nice weather on Friday and a blizzard cancelling the game on Sunday? I'd be stuck at home on Sunday anyway, avoiding the traffic and such. If the ice doesn't melt much on Saturday, I'll be stuck here til Monday.

I suppose it isn't as bad missing C's party as it would be missing the other party next Saturday, as I have already bought a ticket, and I've been trying to collect charity stuff.

I'm going to go back to bed.

Yesterday's convention

I suppose everything went as well as could be expected. At least it was for me. I think other people might have had different feelings on the subject.

G picked me up at my place, on time, and drove me to a restaurant where he liked to have breakfast. I had never been there before. I liked the place, though what I ordered was not the best for a person trying to lose weight. Even after having breakfast, we were still a bit early, as I had been told that the general admission people would not be allowed in til 11:00, and they wouldn't even be sold tickets til 10:15. So we had time for G to run an errand, and we still arrived around 10:30. Not in any hurry, we spoke to a few people in the parking lot, and then a friend came to tell us that they were letting people in a bit early. So I told G that I would see him later, and I went off with my friend. By the time we found where to buy a ticket, there was no line at all.

At least, there was no line for buying a ticket. There was a long line for getting autographs. I wasn't sure that I wanted any because a.) getting an autograph costs a lot more than it used to, and b.) I wasn't sure if I wanted to stand in this line. So I went off in search of something else to do, thinking that the line would go down some and I might do it later.

My club had a table, somewhere. I looked around, but I didn't see it. I went in the dealer's room, not so much looking at the dealers, but looking around for my friends in case they had been moved to this room. I didn't see them. I ran into a few more friends and talked for a bit, then walked around looking again for the club table. I had walked back and forth the entire length of the place twice without seeing it. I found another friend, who pointed out the table for me. I hadn't seen it before because of all the people in the autograph line in front of it. Okay, mystery solved.

So after figuring out where most everything was, I went back to the dealer's room. I didn't see much that I wanted, which was good, cause I didn't want to spend much money. The main thing that I wanted was Nichelle Nichols' autograph. Getting Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) to autograph a picture would cost $30, and I wasn't even sure that included the picture.

There were other people there besides Nichelle Nichols. I had met Anne Lockhart (original Battlestar Galactica) before. Erin Gray from Buck Rogers was there. The girl who had played Batgirl in the 60s was there. The medtech from the now cancelled Stargate Universe was there. But I think most of us wanted to see Nichelle Nichols, Morena Baccarin (Firefly and the new V), and Trisha Helfer and Katee Sackhoff of the Battlestar Galactica remake.

Now, at about $30 each, getting all the autographs would have cost me over two hundred dollars. I already have autographed pictures of Anne and Erin, so that would bring it down to $180. Not much of a Batman fan, so I didn't really need that autograph either. And as much as everyone else loved the new Battlestar Galactica, by the end of it I was mainly still watching cause everyone else loved it so much I just wanted to keep up so I'd know what everyone else was talking about. So the remaining three autographs would have cost me $90. And even if I'd had $90, that's just too much. And really, while I'm still a fan of Stargate Universe, I don't really feel that I need that autograph either. If I spent all the money I had I could get two autographs, and it would have been really nice to have Morena Baccarin sign something, but no.

It did not used to be this way. When I first started going to conventions, the actors who did autographs did them for free (or at least, we did not pay them directly, it was included in the price of the ticket). So either the actors would autograph stuff for everybody, or they would autograph stuff for a limited amount of time they had been paid to do that, or they didn't autograph anything for anybody (I was shocked the first time I paid to see Leonard Nimoy and he didn't do autographs, and DeForest Kelley didn't do autographs at public appearances because he had arthritis), depending on how much the convention had paid them and how long they were scheduled, etc.... So if the actor was doing autographs, the only additional money you had to spend to get an autograph was maybe five dollars for a photo for them to sign, but if you didn't have that they might still sign your convention program.

Then came the VIP tickets and the Gold tickets and the preferred seating tickets, etc.... You had to pay to get autographs, and they probably weren't going to do autographs for everyone, so if you really wanted an autograph you should buy a special ticket that put you at the front of the line and such. I have never done that, but some of my friends always do that. The price of getting an autograph went from free to five dollars to ten dollars to twenty dollars.

I pretty much stopped getting autographs then, though I did still purchase a few, and I got five free for volunteering at a Stargate convention. But it's been about ten years since I've done much of this sort of thing. I miss it sometimes. (But I don't miss it enough to spend a lot of money and/or drive to the other side of Dallas.)

Someone from my club stood in that long line and spent $120 getting three autographs. He wanted two more autographs, but Trisha and Katee were late and he'd have to get them later. He ate lunch and then got back in line.

I talked to a few more people and then had another look at the autograph line. It was about half the size it had been, but it was still a line. And that was just the line to get into the room. You had to stand in line again for each autograph.

And the people with VIP tickets got to go to the front of the line, whenever they happened to arrive. So you could stand in line for a long time, nearly get to the front of the line, and then have dozens of people just walk in front of you. And the preferred seating group was also supposed to go before the general admission people, but there seemed to be some confusion about that. Anyway, I thought that maybe most of the VIP group had already gone through the line and there wouldn't be that many of them walking up to the front. But I still had to seriously think about standing in this line and spending $30.

While I was standing there thinking about it, one of the volunteers was trying to explain how the line was now being split into two separate lines, because Trisha and Katee still were not there. If you were waiting for either of them you stayed where you were, but if you just wanted one of the other autographs, you got to move forward quite a bit. You still had to stand in line again once you got into the autograph room, but still, if I got in line right then that cut the wait time by more than half. So I got in line.

Once I got inside the room and found out which line I was supposed to be in, it was okay. There were people waiting for Trisha and Katee. Nichelle and Morena both had long lines, but not near as long as the line outside. There was a very small line of people waiting to get Batgirl's autograph, and a few people talking to Anne and Erin. There was no one waiting for the Stargate Universe medtech. I felt sorry for her. If I wasn't so short on money I think I might have gotten out of line and gone to her table for a bit. It didn't stay that way forever, but she never quite had the line the the actors around her had.

When I was halfway through the line to get Nichelle's autograph, I saw Katee come in. Stuff happens. Planes are delayed, and there are accidents on the freeway, and people are late. It is annoying for them, and it is annoying for us.

I got Nichelle's autograph. I couldn't think of anything interesting to say. I had seen all of the other original cast members in person; she was the last.

Now that I had my signed photo, I went back to the dealer's room to buy a photo protector. I probably had several at home, but I forgot to bring any. It's been a long time since I've gone to a convention. I'm just not organized.

A bit later I see the guy from our group still in line in the hallway, waiting to get autographs from Trisha and Katee. That surprised me, as I had seen one of them come in and I thought the other one was just behind her. But just before he could get into the room, one of them was called away to do a photo op, and not only are photo ops scheduled for a very short time, they cost more than autographs, so the photo ops were not delayed anymore than necessary. He was still waiting in line when I went off to get a seat to hear Morena speak.

The schedule had been changed. There should have been someone else speaking in the main room when I arrived, but the room was nearly empty. There had been an announcement, but I had missed hearing it in the autograph room. But it was not important.

I went to look for G, and did not find him. This worried me a bit, that I would not find him before the other stuff started, and maybe he would want to leave as soon as Nichelle finished speaking but couldn't find me. I spent about twenty minutes looking for him, gave up, and went back to the main stage room. There were a few more people there now, so I did not have the perfect seat that I gave up, but I still had a good one. K came to join me, and I saved G a seat just in case.

Now there was confusion as to where the preferred seating people were supposed to sit. The VIP sections were clearly roped off, but I didn't see anything that said preferred seating. Someone sitting behind me had paid the extra ten dollars for the preferred seating, and she thought that she the general admission people would be asked to wait outside until all the VIP and preferred seating ticket holders were seated, and that this would be repeated again between speakers. I expected that since no one had asked me to wait that other than roped off areas it was first come first served, and I had a good seat and I would be there for the next three hours or so.

Morena spoke for almost an hour, and then Nichelle spoke. At that point I found G, who was not concerned one way or another when we left. We stayed to hear the last panel, which was Trisha and Katee. The other actresses did not speak that day, and most of them were not scheduled to speak on Sunday.

G and I left. I do not know when or if the other guy from our group (who paid a bit extra for the preferred seating ticket) got his autographs from Trisha and or Katee. Except for lunch the only time I saw the poor guy he was standing in line for something.

I was tired by then, and mostly glad that G was ready to leave. Others were going hang around for a bit and then head to a restaurant. It would have been nice, but I didn't need it, and I'm eating quite enough non-diet type food as it is.

I got home and thought how this wasn't my life anymore. I kind of miss it, but on the other hand I kind of don't. I wish I had something else entirely, but I haven't a clue what or how to get it.

But I am very glad that after all this time I have finally seen all of the original Star Trek actors.