Sunday again: ramblings and updates

Early Saturday morning I woke from a dream in which it was late Sunday. You know how reality is ephemeral when you begin to wake up? I didn't know what day it was.


I saw the doctor about my floater. It's nothing to worry about (probably) but he wants to see me in three months to check on it. He had his bright shine-in-my-eye light and what looked a bit like a jeweler's loupe that he used to see inside my eyeball. He saw the cat hair/spider in there and exclaimed "That's a big one!" (pause for snickering) He said it'll probably become less noticeable as time goes by. I'm glad I had it checked out. Also, he dilated my eyes. I have specifically put in a standing order for cloudy days when I must have my eyes dilated, but alas, that day was bright and sunny. I survived. The vision in my right eye (not the one with the big floater) has deteriorated again. Seems it's about as bad as the left eye now. Meh. I need new glasses.

Since Twitch moved out (to Charleston, where he now has a job!) my old office which was his bedroom is once again vacant. Light had that room before she left for college all those years ago. Six years it's been now! She painted half the room a dark and stormy blue, and it's been bothering me since I started using the room. So yesterday Superman and I painted over the dark with Kilz 2 primer.  Man that lightens up the space! Makes it seem bigger, more open. I haven't decided what color to use on that wall, but I'm looking into something very light. I want to use the room for sewing and crafts also, and the walls need to be light and close to neutral to prevent the wall color from influencing how I perceive the fabric colors. Gray, white, or beige don't do it for me, you know? So I think perhaps a pretty cream or maybe a very light blue. We'll see.

Interesting quotes seen on my Kindle:
"The unanswered in science is solution-ized with research." - from a book description. I didn't buy that book.
"If wishes were horses, that accounts for all this horse manure." - Barbara Morganroth, If Wishes Were Horses
"When whiskey talks it rarely counsels prudence." - Anthony McDonald, Matches in the Dark: 13 Tales of Gay Men

I woke up very early this morning, before 5 I think. Couldn't get back to sleep. Poor Superman had trouble getting to sleep in the first place, so he got up and read something boring to put him to sleep. Didn't work. When he came back to bed I sort of woke up. I don't know if got back to sleep then, or if I've been awake since then. Anyway, I'm very sleepy now. Think i'll take a morning nap.

Road Trip Log: the rest of the days

Total miles traveled: 3000, give or take a couple dozen. Really, it was quite close to 3000 miles. On the last day I messed up my trip odometer. I zeroed out the wrong one. The final day we drove 555 miles, and adding up what I did know to what I found out, I got 3003. If that doesn't make any sense, welcome to my life. With me most things are estimates. Let's just smile, nod, and say 3000 miles. Yes, it's time for another oil change.

Now where were we? I recently reported on days 7 and 8, so this will be days 9 and 10 of the trip, and the day or so of recovery. About the recovery, there was a lot of sleeping. I'm old and fat and out of shape. I can push myself for a while, but eventually I need to catch up on sleep. I slept a lot Saturday. We got home Thursday at 5:00 in the afternoon, right as Superman was coming home from work. Ah, it was so good to see him! He smells so husband-like, and feels warm and soft and fuzzy to hug. He's grown a beard and mustache since I started this road trip foolishness. He quit shaving when Sproing and I went to Florida, and has only shaved his neck and cheeks since then. He looks good with a beard and mustache, but his face fuzz is very coarse and it pokes me in the tender parts of my nose when we kiss. It's a challenge I'm willing to face.

Anyway, I mentioned Thursday and Saturday, but what about Friday? Wouldn't it make sense for me to rest on Friday? Yes, it would, but instead I did more driving. Light went to her college to participate in the graduate school graduation (as an usher-type person, not actually graduating). C had a chance to see his sweetheart in the Charlotte area. So I drove them to their respective rendezvous. Sproing went with, as he has been mommy-less for a long time. He and I had a fun lunch at Waffle House while C and Sweetie spent some time together. I was so tired, though! When we picked Light up later, she drove the rest of the way home and I napped in the backseat. Then Saturday I slept in late, got up for breakfast, caught up with my email (not been to most of the blogs yet, but I'm working on it), then took a very long nap. It wasn't all that late when I went to bed, either, and I slept until 9:30 this morning. I am beginning to feel better.

Wednesday, Day 9, was a really good day for me. C didn't enjoy it so much, but I don't care. We left Danvers and drove west on MA 114 for a while. We got on some interstate thing and tootled into New Hampshire. It was my first time in that state. We crossed into Vermont, my first time in that state, too. We drove local highways to Middlebury, then up US Hwy 7 to VT Hwy 17, and east to VT Hwy 116, where I turned around and went as far west on VT Hwy 17 as I could before leaving Vermont. I was particularly interested in that area because Superman is interested in that area. He is writing a story, a furry fan fic about a vixen named Wendy who lives in (an imaginary) large B&B just a couple of turns off of VT Hwy 17. So I checked out the area, took some pictures, and missed Superman like crazy. I wish he had been there! He knows the area geography very well, but has never been there himself. It's beautiful terrain, very rural, lots of hills and gorgeous vistas. C, who is a fool about some things, didn't appreciate it. He doesn't much care about the natural beauty of country roads or quaint seaside towns, and as such he's not a good photographer of these wondrous places. Greg thinks that C will wake up and get a clue about this in another 10 years. I hope so. For now, though, I don't have many good pictures of that sort of thing.

We ate at a quaint little restaurant/diner on the edge of western Vermont on Hwy 17. It is a few hundred feet from where the bridge across Lake Champlain used to be. There is no longer a bridge, but there is bridge building activity. Evidently the structural supports for the bridge were unsound, so they had to demolish the structure. There is now a ferry that transports travelers across the short span. The waterway is called Lake Champlain, but right there it looks more like a river to me. What do I know? I got to ride the ferry, and that was a lot of fun for me. C is a stick-in-the-mud. I got a picture of my fairy on the ferry. He was not amused. I was. Good for me!

I keep talking about all these pictures, but you haven't seen any yet. My plan is to post separate entries with the pictures. It's difficult to arrange pictures with text on the browser I use, ironically. I use Google Chrome to write my Google Blogger blog, but the photos don't want to go where I want them. So far I've downloaded most of the pictures, but the ones from the final two days are still in the camera. Soon, peeps, soon.

After crossing into New York on Wednesday afternoon, we hit the interstate and drove like mad women as far as we could. I had made reservations at a hotel in Chambersburg, PA. It looked like a good point from which to drive back to South Carolina in a day. We got to the hotel at 11:00 p.m., and left at 6:30 Thursday morning. Of all the places we stayed on our road trip, this was possibly the nicest. The Holid@y !nn in Taunton, MA was also very nice, but the hotel in Chambersburg was at least as nice, and much less expensive. It's also the place we spent the least amount of time. Whatevs. I would like to have stayed there all day Thursday and rested, but alas, I had told Light we'd try to get home before Friday so she could do the thing at school.

We drove hard Thursday. I was very tired. C took the wheel a couple of times. Driving conditions were good, he can drive pretty well, and I was dangerously tired. He drove, I snoozed. Then I drove and he snoozed. We traded places a couple more times, snoozing or driving, but not both at the same time. Every time we stopped for gas/food/bathroom breaks it was hotter and muggier than the stop before. We got off I-77 at the southernmost exit in Virginia. Wow. We were in The South (TM) again, by God! The heat and the hicks were thick as Grandma's peach cobbler. I wanted to turn around and run back north, but alas, t'was time to go home. There isn't much to report about Thursday. All I remember is being very, very tired and driving many, many miles. And I've already told you about arriving home to Superman, the best part of the day by far.

I can't think of anything else to report about this road trip. I'll start working on the picture posts now. Stay tuned.

Lessons for the kitchen

I used to like to bake. I might still enjoy it, but for some reason (probably stress) it's hard for me to get motivated to do anything in the kitchen these days. Perhaps once there aren't so many needy people in my house I'll be able to enjoy it again.

But that's a tangent to what I came to talk to you about.

When I bake, cook, wash dishes, or do pretty much anything in the kitchen, I usually get messy. The front of my clothing is often covered in flour, and gets wet when I wash dishes. When I wash dishes after I've been baking, I end up with paste on my waist.

This morning I discovered a way to avoid getting my shirt messy. Cook in the nude! My stomach is much quicker and easier to clean than is my shirt. However I wouldn't recommend it for cooking bacon.

(I have no idea where this picture originated. It looks like it's from a magazine. I got it from another blog, I think, quite a while ago.)

I only have one class today, and that's not until 3:30. My other two classes were canceled for today. Everyone else is at work or school, and my clothes are in the dryer, hence the baking in the nude. There are many things I would like to accomplish today, studying being first and foremost. I also need to sew a costume shirt for Light. The day started off on the late foot when I slept until 10:30 this morning. But I had an awesome dream about flirting and falling in love/lust!

I have already accomplished a few things. I bathed. That's always a good way to start the day, and something that, on bad days, I skip. So it's a good sign. I iterated laundry, and baked a blueberry buckle coffee cake thingie. I just now took it out of the oven. It has to cool a bit before I taste it. And here's a blog post, something that I've been meaning to get around to for a few days. The kitchen is clean, all the dishes washed and counters and table wiped down. I finally put away the hand mixer that Diva left out last week after she baked a cake. It's been sitting on one of the chairs at the table for days. So all in all, I'm feeling mostly good about my morning's accomplishments. And I needed the sleep, so I'm not going to beat myself up about sleeping late.

But alas, I have yet to do anything that is actually on my list of things to accomplish, so I'm off to do that which needs to be done. TTFN

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

Yesterday was an extremely long day. Extremely. Like 21 hours from sleep to sleep, with LOTS of driving in between. But I am home now, and that is a good thing. (so far)

Allegedly they are happy to have me home, all evidence to the contrary. We won't even discuss the terrible disarray in every room of the house I have been in so far. When I got home I tried to come in through the garage into the kitchen. The side door to the garage was left standing wide open. It is supposed to be closed and locked before the last person goes to bed. Of course I have a key to that door. The door from the garage into the kitchen was locked, however. The doorknob is designed for interior use and locks with a twist of the center piece. The other side, the knob toward the garage, only has a little hole in the middle of it. This is not a keyed entry knob, so there is no key. Thus I was locked out of the house. Locked out of the kitchen door, anyway.

So I wandered around to the back door. It was standing wide open. This, too, should have been closed and locked. Don't tell the neighbors, but it would be incredibly easy to steal stuff from this house.

There are quite a few wonderful experiences I wish to relate about my visits on this trip. I'm too tired to do that now, but I will tell you one story of the first day of my trip. I left home before 11:00 in the morning so I had plenty of time to get to the campground in southwest Virginia where I had a camping reservation. Or so I thought. The drive turned out to be a bit longer than I anticipated, and not just because the roads were long.

I had a memorable time in Boone, NC. Not wonderful, but memorable. I was in a fender-bender with another couple from out-of-town. While daylight was burnin' we sat in the parking lot of a gas station for over 30 minutes waiting for Boone's man in blue to fill out his paperwork on the incident. It was my fault entirely. He was ahead of me, stopped at a traffic light. We were both turning right. He moved forward, preparing to turn, but stopped to check oncoming traffic. I also was checking oncoming traffic but not the car in front of me. I rolled into his back bumper. I was in my wonderful old Ford pick-up truck. He was in a beautiful shiny black BMW. My front bumper has a new "bump" in it. His rear bumper has a tiny scratch. He will have his fixed. I will enjoy the added character on my truck.

Alas

Where has the day gone? What have I done with myself all day? Is it enough?

I don't know why I do this. I have a perfectly good excuse to go to sleep. It is 2:30 in the morning. I have been awake for 19 hours now. The beloved husband is asleep beside me. My eyes are tired. My brain? Not so much. I am trying to solve the world's problems.

Bad things happen. Horrible people with evil in their hearts do wicked and despicable things to helpless innocents. These atrocities go unchecked, leaving in the wake a tide of broken, tortured souls. Is there a grander purpose? Does ultimate justice exist? Whether it does or not, what do we do in the meantime?

Water cannot be un-spilled. Fire cannot be un-started. Some things must run their natural course. Can we act? Are there solutions? Water can be removed, wiped up, dried. Fire can be extinguished. But that won't undo the original event. It won't prevent the damage, and often does not restore the affected elements to their previous condition.

Some things can be redone. But in life the opportunities for do-overs are limited. No, we must attend to the matters at hand with the hand we were dealt. Do what damage control is possible.

Where is the Phoenix who rises from the ashes? Where is healing? Where is justice? Where is peace?

Briefly

Tuesdays are typically busy days for me, and yesterday was no exception. To complicate matters I feel like I'm getting sick again. My chest it tight and my throat is getting sore. Superman is sick with this upper respiratory mess, too. He was home yesterday, and is taking a strong antibiotic which will hopefully knock out the bug that's been lingering in his system for a while.

I have an appointment to see the doc this morning, and another this afternoon to see my opthalmologist. My eyes have been feeling strange in the past few days. It might just be sinus pressure, or it might be the eyes themselves. Anyway, I'm seeing 2 different doctors today to ask about that.

I was very tired yesterday. When I got home from work Superman was lying down to rest, and he fell asleep shortly after I got home. I lay on the bed next to him and watched him fall asleep. It seemed like such a good idea. I got the kids situated (told them to eat some leftovers we have in the 'fridge and to put themselves to bed on time) then went to bed. It was about 5:00. I slept until 4:15 this morning. I haven't slept for 11 hours in a long time! It felt good. And upon waking I didn't feel any worse than I did yesterday. No better, but no worse.

I'm still working on book three of the saga. I hope to get it posted later today, unless I fall asleep again. We shall see. And yes, Patrick, there are 2 more additions to the family in book three.

Update:
I saw two doctors today. This morning I saw the family doc, who said I've got a sinus infection. I was in there a month ago for a sinus infection, and I suspect this is the same infection that didn't die out completely. And yes, I took ALL of my antibiotic. I think I was on Augmentin(sp?) But it's back again and I feel icky. After 11 hours of sleep last night I've been tired all day. I feel like I'm going through the day in a fog. My mind isn't *sharp* like it usually is. I'm making careless mistakes and missing obvious details. I get nervous about driving the bus when I'm like this. Anyway, the doctor prescribed a new, stronger antibiotic. (Levaquin 750mg if you're curious.) He says this ought to knock out the bug. I hope so! He also said the pressure I'm feeling in and around my eyes is probably from the sinuses and not the eyeballs themselves.

This afternoon I saw the eye doctor. They tested my vision, did their glaucoma test and stuff. He didn't dilate my eyes this time. He said we'd do that next year. OK by me! They did, however, update my prescription (slight change) and get me back into contacts. I wore contacts for a while maybe a year or two ago, then kinda' stopped. I don't remember why. But I wanted to start using them again. So I am typing this while looking through my contacts, not my glasses! OK, technically I'm looking through the reading glasses I need to use for close up vision, since the contacts only correct my distance vision. Let me tell ya', I look adorable in my little cheaters :-) I'll have to get a pic of this for you. The opthalmologist checked a few things concerning pain/pressure I've been having in my eyes for the last week, and didn't notice anything that might be a problem. He thinks it's probably the sinus infection. Although if it doesn't improve in a week or two I'm to go back.

I have a work excuse to stay home tomorrow, written by my wonderful friendly family doc. So I'm planning to sleep, sleep, drink lots of fluids, sleep, blog, sleep, blog, blog, sleep tomorrow.

2007

Introspection is highly overrated. We'll have none of that foolishment here. There's a Saturday, a Sunday, predictably followed by Monday. After Monday comes Tuesday, just like every other week. Wednesday we will mourn the end of our little break from work and school, and on Thursday we will get up at 4:fuckin15 in the morning and drive a big orange/yellow school bus to the end of the county and back.

In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy being at home with Superman, enjoy Light being at home with all of us, and make the best with what we've got with the other souls in the house. And I'll try to rest. Rest, as in SLEEP! There's a difference between "resting" in bed blogging until after midnight and actually sleeping in bed for 8-10 hours.

Update on the germ party in my system: Nose-congested, but not too bad. Ears: fine. Maybe still a bit stopped up but not in any pain now. Thankfully! Throat: Mostly fine. It is rough and my voice is scratchy, but the throat doesn't hurt like it did 2 days ago. Chest: clusterfuck. Tight, congested, wheezy, limited breathing ability, damned uncomfortable.

Superman had a "procedure" done today. I can't remember what it's called, but it has to do with studying the nerve feedback in his arms and legs. He's been experiencing some strange pains in his arms and torso. He's got a ruptured disk in the middle of his back, and that might be part of the problem, but he also has recurring shingles attacks that usually bring a good bit of pain for a few days. The last bout was different, and the docs aren't sure it was shingles or some other neurological condition. So yesterday he had an MRI, and today he had this nerve thing study. The one today was kinda painful, so they gave him some Valium to take right before the procedure. Superman is a cheap date, y'all. It doesn't take much to knock him flat on his ass. The techs couldn't do the test for over an hour because he was sound asleep. They needed him to be a bit more aware than that. They also said he was having strong leg jerks in his sleep, which they were concerned about. Superman has never been bothered by it, but I know he jerks his legs in his sleep sometimes. I do, too. The techs doing the test said that the doctor should know about the restless leg thing, because he takes that sort of thing very seriously. We shall see. I told him to tell the doc my legs do that, too.

When he got home from the testing lab, he was so funny! Sort of like drunk, but different. He was dizzy and loopy. Couldn't carry on a conversation that lasted more than 2 sentences. Non sequiturs all over the place. He ate some supper and went to sleep. But it was early and I was still talking to the kids. He'd hear something I said to one of them, sit up in the bed and say something completely irrelevant. I can hardly wait until he wakes up tomorrow so I can share with him how funny he is.

And alas, it has gotten very very late again. I've had a marvelous evening catching up with my blog buddies. Some are still off on vacation or whatever, but many of them are back and posting all manner of interesting stuff. I love this whole blogosphere and all my new friends. :-)

Thursday ramblings. Not pretty.

There are things that need doing. Superman has a goal for the day: to clean out the garage. It is nasty. But he keeps getting pulled away from the task. I've tried to get all the others in the house to pitch in and do useful-work-for-the-good-of-the-cause. As usually happens, things got started but not completed. The problem is endemic. And originates with me. As wonderful as I seem here (HA!) I'm really messed up.

I've been resting and drinking vast quantities of fruit juice. But no likker. I have a strong desire for eggnog and Captain Morgan. But I digress.

Where were we? Ah, yes, rest. I've rested, but not slept. I am tired now, my brain isn't thinking clearly, and I need to SLEEP!!!

Laundry is the task I gave Light today. I told her she could bring all of our clean stuff in here, pile it on the bed, and I'd fold it. And she did. Here it is. On my feet. I want to stretch out and go to sleep, but I have to fold clothes first. I'm just about to do that, really. I've been just about to do that for the last 3 hours. That's my messed-up-edness. No self discipline. And lots of whining. Shit. I hate hearing it from others, but not as bad as I hate hearing it from me. Shit.

The head feels a little bit better today. I'm not as congested, my ears and throat don't hurt much at all. The crud is moving down into my chest. For some reason when I am tired my chest gets tight and icky. I'm sick, and I'm tired, and my chest feels icky already.

I'm blogging from within a fog. I have no idea where this is going, and I doubt it makes much sense. But I'm spellchecking! Am I spelled correctly? OK, I'm off to fold this mound of clothes on my feet. More later, maybe tomorrow. Maybe I'll sleep the rest of the day after my clothes are folded.
must. fold. clothes.