Busy, busy day

I was all over the place at work today. I learned to do the cryofills for the NMR superconducting magnets, a job that requires some dexterity and hands of steel if you don’t wear gloves. The man who trained me how to do this didn’t wear gloves, and he never does, and he’s one of the safety officers in the department. Do what I do, not as I say. Cryofills aren’t a big deal, and I’ve certainly handled lots of liquid nitrogen before, but the ladder-climbing and the burning cold and the mild danger of the job make it more interesting that your everyday ordinary cryo maneuver.

After that I trained someone how to use our “starter magnet”, someone who is a former graduate student in our department but who doesn’t know the new software. She also doesn’t understand why we have so many safety rules now, and she made as many attempts as anyone could to find out if she could get around them. The answer to all of her questions was no, but after a while even I can get worn down by a fast-talking postdoc and I think I might have caved on one small thing. I made up for it by being militant about something else so it balanced out.

Then it was down to the X-ray lab for a bit to chat with the boss and take a look at the sample I had on the diffractometer, which turned out to be what it was supposed to be. Woohoo. Not quite finished collecting data so I went and ate some fruit and salad in the hope that the sudden appearance of the “summer belly” … you know, the one you get from sitting around drinking too many wine spritzers and eating chips and ice cream and not gardening enough or riding the bike enough or doing enough situps (gawd how I loathe situps, they are so stupid), that one? well, I’m hoping that its disappearance will be as sudden as its appearance, because I am just not prepared to be middle-aged with its accompanying spread, thank you.

Okay, back to the day. More training, but this time with two new graduate students. One was great, one was agh, from the U of T and wearing his attitude plastered all over himself. Darling, until you’re doing my job, don’t ask dopey questions. If you don’t exactly know how the NMR experiment works, this is not my fault. You’re the one who went to U of T, didn’t anyone teach you how NMR works there, at that fine, fine institution?

Later, one of my colleagues commented that we’d better get Mr. U of T his login info as soon as possible so that we’re not standing in the way of his pending Nobel prize. I want a share in that million, buddy.

It’s a tough go, working in two facilities. No matter where I am, I feel like I should be somewhere else. It argues against my philosophy of being in the moment, existing fully within every experience lest I lose my concentration and perhaps get hit by a blast of liquid nitrogen. Not that I’m constantly threatened by liquefied gases or X-ray beams, or crazy egotistical students (the U of T man wasn’t my only experience today) who are, by the way, legion this term, but you never know what can happen to you if your mind is wandering.

On the bright side, I got news from FFS that he received an unexpected but very welcome award yesterday from his current department. It’s great to be reminded that you’ve done something right in trying to convince someone to do research, especially when you know full well that they’re suited to it.

Wednesday, Humpday Miscellany

I'm Busier than You Are

Yesterday, talking to one of the faculty members, we were discussing when we could next meet up and without realizing it, entered into a contest of Who is Busiest.

"Well, tomorrow I have to attend all of the first year classes..."
"All of them? For the full 55 minutes?"
"No, just to introduce myself. We're all doing it so that the students know who the professors are for each section, so they know who is running the tutorials, that kind of thing. How did your kids like the first day of school?"
"They loved it. I loved that I only have one dropoff and pickup now."
"Yeah, that's tough. In January we'll have two dropoffs and pickups, and J works in Toronto and I'm here. At least in January I'm only teaching the lab course, not first year too."

I lost. I'm not as busy, even though my time is completely full. I didn't want to admit the new degree and the swimming lessons and music lessons and yoga and commuting and whatever the heck else I do. She won that one.

Packed Like Lemmings Into Shiny Metal Boxes...
participants in a suicidal race.

Commuting can be difficult, but ours is a pretty easy ride most of the time.

We commute to work and we listen to the radio in the morning, because Maureen Holloway is very funny and we can listen to the station out of Toronto that hosts her when she isn't talking to the rest of the country. Sometimes the radio is too boring though, so we listen to music. Lately it's been a mix of Foo Fighters (Echoes Silence Patience and Grace), the Police (mixed cd) and most recently, The Talking Heads. I love that band. They are long broken up, and I hope they never get back together and do anything stupid like a reunion tour. I hate reunion tours, they're so pathetic.

It's Still Summer

I already discussed this. Hurricanes are supposed to wander up our way over the weekend, but by the time they get here they'll just be big rainstorms. I suppose that rather than cooler weather, hurricanes are a better sign that fall is upon us. Curses. I thought I still had a few weeks to be self-righteous.

Separated at Birth

And now...for your viewing enjoyment....

Me:



and Mrs. Incredible (she's a bit blurry because I expanded her):

It's not a party unless the police are called....

It's been a busy time around here. We're planning a party for Saturday, and it's a sort of big party...people are flying in from out of town, driving from far away, driving from across town...all for Hub and I. We decided back in December or January to have our marriage blessed by the church, but rather than just showing up and "having it done" we had to go through a lot of paperwork owing to my previous union and its dissolution. Getting hold of that paperwork took months, and as we waited, we thought we should maybe have a party.

A party that wasn't a wake, that is. We've had a few wakes in the last year.

In thinking that maybe we should have a party, we decided that we wouldn't just pull drunks off the street as witnesses, and maybe we should ask our friends to stand up for us. And maybe we should book a caterer. And maybe we should make several forays into the Niagara region to pick out wines. And maybe, when the priest looks at his book and says, "How about August 16?" when you're speaking to him in June, you think, "Oh, that is so much time to plan a party!"

Or it's lots of time to freak out about the party.

It wouldn't have been a big deal, but now it is. Hub's family is extensive, and they're littered throughout the city. My family, not so extensive, but littered throughout places that require flying to get here. Our friends are all over the place but many are here in town. The church is just up the street, which is handy.

Then it was what to wear, how formal to make it all, how to plan plan plan.

I am good at planning parties for other people. I can think of what they want, I can talk to them, I can organize people to do things that they don't want to do. I direct, I cajole, I maintain a calm order while all the time I'm thinking of 100 things at once. I get to do the same thing for this party, except that I'm also the centre of attention and the people I'm talking to? Are me. Or I am it.

I don't talk to myself very well. I'm not very cooperative. I don't do what I ask of myself and I would rather sit here and type or read a book about literary criticism (which I actually have been doing, and I love it) or knit or visit or just sit and stare into space than do what needs doing.

We've been busy almost every single weekend this summer, and I'm tired of it all. Next weekend we're busy again, and then it's Labour Day weekend and we'll be busy just doing stuff around here. Busy. The whole summer has been a relentless merry-go-round of busy. I want to get off. I don't want to hold this party this weekend.

Naturally we're also on a death watch; after all, no one has died in a week. Hub's cousin's wife had a stroke about a month ago, and she was doing okay in the hospital, waiting to move to rehab, when she had another stroke last week. She is now in ICU because she needs assistance with her breathing. She'll either get better or she won't. I hope she hangs on through Saturday, because otherwise nobody will want to have a happy party...it'll be another wake.

what they learn

"I had a bad day, Mumma," said Big One.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. Bad. But not like your bad days. Mine wasn't about molecules."

BFF

For the first time in my entire life, there is almost no dog hair in the house. What has brought about this incredible turn of events? What angel has descended from on high to remove all the detritus from my house?

This animal right here. Actually, ours isn't purple, but it is otherwise this particular thing.

Today we brought it home, put it together, and let it do its job. It sucked mightily. It took away the dog hair, the dust...whatever else was buried in the carpets. It is my new best friend. It is so handsome, I love it. I would marry it, except that it doesn't make martinis very well.

The Beat Goes On

Life can just keep floating past you if you don't stop to notice it. While many things have been happening, none of them have been remarkable and we've mostly just been plugging along at the business of living.

I took Katie to the vet on Thursday. Actually, Thursdays are usually full of appointments and busy things, because that's the day I don't go to work to do Science Things, and I do People Things instead. I visited the audiologist, who took 45 minutes to get around to me because her airy-fairy business partner strolled in and wanted a meeting with all the health care providers in the building. I suppose that if the person with the purse-strings showed up unexpectedly, I'd make some time for them, but not 45 minutes of time. Very annoying. My hearing aids had last been set at Head Explosion levels, and after a week of that I was out of my mind...so the adjustment was necessary and I had to wait. It did occur to me to walk out, but the fact that hearing too much along with whistling feedback was making me rather more edgy than usual, kept me in my chair. Church pew actually, they have no chairs there. So I sat, and turned my hearing aids off.

The adjustment took about five minutes, and of course there was no apology regarding the lateness of the appointment, and I didn't broach the subject either. It was obvious that she was late, it was obvious why, and so she did what needed to be done and made me more human, and I left. I'm not going to get the things adjusted again for a while, not because the appointment was late, but just because I'm sick of going to appointments all the time on Thursdays. Cutting one out is good.

Now I have an earache. (Today is Saturday.)

Back to the vet. The vet appointment was late in the afternoon, which is a bit of a problem because The Darlings play soccer on Thursday evening, but the next appointment next Thursday was also late in the afternoon and wouldn't save any hassle. The vet that I deal with is a tall woman, not terribly attractive, with man hands and greyish-blond hair tied back in a rough ponytail. She wears lots of makeup: her eyes are blackened and shadowed and mascara'd, she wears blush and lipstick. I can take the eye makeup. The blush and lipstick are unnerving, however, and mezmerizing. They are pale purple/blue. It looks like she has giant bruises on her cheeks, and her lips are pale and dead-looking. You stare at her while she's talking to you, and she rocks you into a vortex of new treatments and blood tests and the like. Or at least, that's what happened last year, when I found out that Katie's liver function was down a tad. This year Katie has dropped three pounds, and since she doesn't have any weight to drop, that's not good, but I resisted the purple and did not go for further tests. Katie is over 13 years old (she'll be 14 in the fall). She's an old dog, who is nervous and high-strung and who suffers from great separation anxiety. When we're not home we crate her, because she's destructive, and when we're home, she curls up on her bed and sleeps very deeply. She eats a lot, and her bowl always has food in it. She chews a bone when she's nervous. She's the same way she's always been, except for the deep sleeping, but she's old. I was able to resist the pull of the purple cheeks and dead lips and I did not go for further tests or anything else, and paid my $425 for the 30 minutes of visit and three shots and the heartworm medicine and got out of there.

Yes. $425. For 30 minutes. Honestly, I should have gone to vet school like I wanted to in Grade 12...but sadly, I had a clarifying moment when I realized that I didn't want to be a vet.

This is a long weekend, but the weather is going to be yucky and cold and raining and so we won't get the garden in, although we might get it dug up. The house needs a good scrubbing so maybe I'll finally get around to that too, although it's easy to find other things to do rather than cleaning, which I hate. It is the Big One's birthday on Tuesday and her party is next weekend. I am not fond of birthday parties in the least, so I hope that the three hours of pool party and cake-eating go well and that all the little girls enjoy themselves and that I don't have to deal with them very much. Hahahaha.....

The measure of a funeral

How does one critique a funeral? In my case, the analysis of the event comes not from the feelings of the people, or the way the deceased looked (not exactly like himself, but he was dead after all) but perhaps by the behaviour of the attendees. Perhaps even one attendee in particular, who behaved rather badly and made a difficult situation even more tense. I suppose that we all deal with stress in our different ways, and for some of us these ways are more self-centred than others. Ah well.

On the other hand, if you look at the actual funeral service, then it was lovely. I will pat myself on the back and say that I received many compliments on the obituary. I also received kudos for the eulogy, but I was not nearly as impressed with it as other people seemed to be. I think that they were surprised that I could be composed, given the situation, but put me in front of a group of people and I do what’s necessary. As for content, I was not completely happy with either presentation, but I was happy with the fact that people said that they got a good sense of who Dad was from what I wrote/said. My stepmother pointed out that she thought that the obituary was written in such a way that it sounded like my dad. I suppose that’s true, he and I corresponded a lot and I knew his way of communicating an idea.

I was reminded more than once that there are no protocols for a funeral, and that people are allowed to express their grief or not express it in whatever way they felt comfortable. I am not sure that I agree with this; I think that rudeness is always outside the allowable window. If I witness rudeness, is this the same as having someone be rude to me directly? Not really. Was anyone rude to me? Not really. Sort of. Well, yes. Is it important? Maybe not in a small sample size, but in the overall scheme of things, yes, definitely.

Enough innuendo. We left here on Saturday afternoon, and it was 24^oC and sunny, and arrived in Calgary where it was -12^oC and snowing and very windy. I never warmed up that night at all, and the temp only went up to 0^oC on Wednesday morning when I left. Sunday evening was the visitation, and that was difficult but manageable. He didn’t look like himself, but they did the best they could. It was okay, but I can’t help it…it looks like a sleeping body to me, I want it to get up and tell a joke. It didn’t. It didn’t move, it didn’t breathe, it didn’t do anything except lie in state and it wasn’t how I wanted to remember him. I don’t remember him that way, to tell the truth, but I saw him dead and stuffed up.

The service went well. The Anglican priest was Italian, and when he and Hub were talking to my stepmother, I had to mention to her later that she was talking to the two most handsome men in the room (in my opinion). He gave a lovely service, and my little talk and then that of my stepmother’s older sister, came around to give a full overall picture of my dad. There was also a slideshow, with upbeat jazz and really nice photos. In all it was a great tribute and he would have enjoyed it, and I think that’s what we were striving for.

Wednesday, got home in the evening, Thursday did a bunch of running around, and Friday BF1 got here. We’ve been drinking and commiserating, and today was the Big One’s first communion. Again, a lovely service but now I’m very, very tired. BF1 goes home tomorrow, and then life falls back into the regular grind of work and rushing home and school and rushing all over the place and meetings and other stuff. Two months left of work until I’m home for the summer making a garden and a house and a yard and a different life. I got accepted into this program and I wrote their little English test to see if I need a tutor. I can edit, I can fix grammar, I can rearrange sentences so they make sense, but I cannot condone superfluous use of language in a discourse. I had to read something and answer questions about it, and I could certainly understand what the person was saying, but I couldn’t figure out why he needed so many words to say it. I was asked to comment on my own experiences with regard to the paper the author had written. I could not use as many words as they asked me to, and I still wasn’t sure if I’d quite answered the question.

If they still want me in the program, maybe I’ll keep the tutor.

I'm so old

Last night on Space, after Battelstar Gallactica (the best not-watched show on TV people, get to it before season four is over and you’ve missed the whole thing!) Prom Night 3 and 4 were on, in succession. I’ve seen the beginning of Prom Night, so I know that the Bad Girl is MaryLou and she died a nasty death during the high school prom. So now that she’s dead she keeps coming back to kill people and terrorize her old school. (Honey, let it go already.) It’s not scary, it’s sort of stupid, and it’s not particularly well done at all … I’m talking the first one, I didn’t bother to stay up for the other ones, and I didn’t even watch more than 45 minutes of the first one….anyway, it’s not a scary film but it reminds you that kids are mean and stupid.

Having been kids, we can all attest to this.

On Friday the Big One came home from school with a birthday invitation. “No one is going to N-‘s birthday party Mumma. Not T, not G, not S or A or R are going, they all said. I think that’s horrible. N is a new student who just came to our school in the fall, and nobody wants to be his friend. He’s a nice boy. The only thing he does that I don’t like is he keeps wanting to be my boyfriend and I’m not ready for that! I want to go to his birthday party though, even if it’s just me and N and his sister.”

The Big One has a huge vocabulary when it comes to understanding and discussing complex emotional issues. Not that she uses large words, but she knows exactly what she wants to say, and she doesn’t waste time trying to explain it.

It bothers me a great deal that seven-year olds can decide that they don’t want to go to someone’s party and that they’ll be so vocal about it. Not just vocal, perhaps they won’t go and they will toss their invitations into the garbage and they’ll just ignore N, not because he’s a misfit, but just because they can. I think back to my seven-year old days, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to dare to make the kind of decisions these kids seem to be making. I suspect that they’re not quite so independent as they seem, however, and that more of them will end up going to the birthday party than it first appears. I really hope so.

In another dinner-time conversation, tonight’s in fact, Big One was asking about being an Alter Server at mass. Since she can’t do this until Grade Four it’s not a big deal right now, but she did ask Hub and I if we were ever Alter Servers. I explained that we didn’t live close to church, and if I had been a Server, then my mum would have had to take me, and my brother and two sisters (ranging in age from seven to one, if I had been nine) to mass early, and then sit through mass with the kiddies while I served. My dad wasn’t so into going to mass at the time. Hub just said no, I wasn’t a server.

Then I realized that when I was younger, it was Alter Boys, and that Alter Girls were not so much available, in fact, you might say they were a rare commodity. As such, it wouldn’t have been part of my repertoire, being an Alter Server, because girls didn’t do that.

My children could not understand a world where the women did not do whatever the men wanted did. Isn’t that fantastic? They actually couldn’t comprehend a world where women had babies, stayed home with babies, looked after the house, and didn’t go out of the house to work. I think that’s amazing.

We Only Talk about the Weather Anymore

I don’t like that title sentence, not because all we do is talk about the weather, because that’s quite true, but because of the use of “anymore” at the end of it. I have heard people speak this way, and it always annoys me and wants me to rewind the Tape of Life and get them to say the sentence correctly.

Sadly, there is no rewind button, otherwise I might have corrected a few other things.

Last weekend we got wacked by snow, and even though it’s been four days since it all fell, it wasn’t the first or the last storm of the season, and today it was supposed to snow and rain and that just makes your skin crawl, you know? There might be more snow. Or if it rains, then the eight foot (2.4384m) snowbanks at the end of the driveways might slither off down the storm drains….if the storm drains aren’t covered by eight foot snowbanks. If they are then we’ll just have a nice flood and comment that maybe we should grab the children on their way by. Good thing they’re strong swimmers.

It only took Hub about an hour to find the Corolla on Sunday:

It’s March Break and today I’m home with the Darlings. Hub has been home with them the rest of the week, but today he’s got a course in project management to take, so I’m home instead. Just as well because work is beginning to make my head explode. I realize that I said that I would do a lot of the things that people normally don’t want to do, but I couldn’t have predicted the mind-numbing boredom that awaited me. Let’s just say that by about 3:00 every afternoon I start to pray that the clocks stop their evil tricks and start to move a little more quickly, lest I end up face-planted on the keyboard, snoring. Naturally I would wake up with the alphabet in qwerty all imprinted on my pretty face and then I’d have to stop all the raging nerds I work (and live) with from plugging my head into their computers because really, wouldn’t it be so totally cool to have a human keyboard? Really? While this might make for more exciting times in my temporary job, I’d be happier with maybe getting to puzzle out some data once in a while, or hey, maybe it would be good if I just got to actually collect some data. Or maybe if I was allowed to finish a calibration, and figure out why it went the way it did without having some NMR jockster hang over me and say, “Oh, use the Magic Shim file that D- wrote, because it always works for him,” even though he knows full well it doesn’t. And if I show up in the X-ray lab one more time and get told, “The structure is finished, you just have to clean up the disorder and the solvent and the……..” in other words, the crap part. I don’t get to tell the student/prof what the structure is because they already know that. I get to make it pretty and number the atoms and deconvolute the messy bits. While this is important, it isn’t the part of the story that gets the pat on the back.

Here, look at Katie in the snow. It's a nice diversion.

On the other hand, yesterday I did have an interesting conversation about a Pd(0)-catalyzed reaction that resulted in a Zwitterionic ligand. That was cool.

Okay, you see that? That was the coolest part of the last two weeks. Now I know that Hub reads this thing and that he’s sitting there thinking of things for me to do where I don’t have to interact with/be told what to do by the other boys in the lab. I don’t mind the other boys, and they don’t mind me. We get along fine, as long as they get to do their little things, and I get to do…..well, whatever it is that girls do. Maybe instead of doing anything that has to do with spectrometers tomorrow I can write a manual instead, and hang out in the X-ray lab because that boss is off to get some synchrotron beamtime and I can pretend I run the place, which mostly means that I get to tell everyone who comes in there that no, J- isn’t here and he won’t be here.

I know that I’m blaming work for the ennui. If I figure out the real problem I’ll let you know. Or maybe these guys know what's bugging me:

In an interesting twist of fate, the following is the Dictionary.com word of the day:

rodomontade \rod-uh-muhn-TADE; roh-duh-; -TAHD\, noun: Vain boasting; empty bluster; pretentious, bragging speech; rant.

Stop the world, I need to get off and get a drink

So you know, if I write a bunch of garbage about completing structural analyses and tuning probes and whatever else it was I wrote about in that last post (except the kids, because they were cute) then you know that life is going faster than I'd like it to go, and I don't exactly have the words to explain what the devil is going on. Plus it's February, the cruellest month, even if it had a most excellent lunar eclipse. That is not enough to pull one out of the giant blue funkorama that February is. I am positive that I am not the only person to talk about this, so I'm going to leave it be, although I had a rather down day and I'm sort of half-drunk now so if this turns into a blathering self-indulgent fest feel free to leave your computer for the mindlessness of HNIC. If it's still Saturday night and you're in Canada. If not, then the CBC is not in your reach and the internet will have to do you and I'm sorry because you won't be able to listen to the song, and the song is the thing that rings in Saturday night. If you're young, then it's sort of time to get ready once you hear the song, and if you're older then it's either time to put the kids to bed or else it's time to get some beer or it's time for tea or it's time for bed.....or it's time for that Saturday night thang, because by the way, you're older.

Okay, so this week bit those brass monkey balls. This week my dad almost died, but not quite, because he's my dad who's been cheating death for years now, and he's done it again. By Sunday, he'd not peed for three days.

That's sunk in, right? Three days? If it had been even 24 hours, would you not be begging everyone around you to take you to the hospital absolutely right now because something somewhere is not working and all the liquid in your body is pooling...in your body? Of course you would. But if you're my dad then you deny that this is happening. "I'm fine, this will clear itself up." Never mind that you only have one kidney. 72 hours and one kidney and no pee? Panic, and maybe a tiny bit of frustration. Perhaps you're feeling bloated? Oh no, not my dad, who says that he's seeing his own GP on Monday anyway, let's just wait and see what she says. Can I just remind you that my dad is a trained EMT? this helps everyone else, except him, because he will ignore every symptom in the book and then lie about the rest of them. Anyway, when he did see his doc on Monday, she sent him off to Emerg, and he went there, barely with the world.

He has apparently cheated Death again as I said, in that they've figured out that heart failure, not kidney failure, is his problem, but that the fluid that would have normally gone to his lungs and drowned him has instead just sat in his body, because he takes drugs to clear his lungs. Drugs that are apparently no good for the kidneys. Or kidney, as in his case. So now he's in the hospital still, and things are clearing up a bit, but he's confused and saying unusual things, which is new, and his body is mad because it's all screwed up, and my sister the ICU nurse is mad because his nurses are useless in her estimation, and my stepmother is doing what she does, which is coping.

We'll go and visit when he's home, March break I think, and with luck he'll last another six months or so before this entire mortal coil gives up its fight and we have to go for a funeral. I just want the kids to see him when he's up and available for a conversation.....they've lost two family members already in the last six months, they're getting used to the fact that people die. Still, they should see him.

Speaking of my dad and his one kidney, I have a new audiologist who is totally awesome and who is fitting me with hearing aids that are going to break the bank (real cost, $3100 each...but with extended health and OHIP, we cut that total number by $2K, i.e. $4200 for the pair.) but with luck I will be able to hear way more clearly. It turns out that the embryonic tissue that makes the heart and kidneys and the like also make the auditory bits. It turns out that it is very possibly an hereditary problem. Yea. Or yuck, since there's nothing I can do about it. I did surprise the audiologist, however, because during my tympanic test my results were not normal. I can take noise with masking into an ear, but the same noise blasted into the opposite ear is very bad and I get angry and rip the earphone out of my head. Same thing on both sides, which is apparently not normal and she'd never seen it before. I make no claim on normalcy and in fact, perhaps this indicates that my problem is not my hearing but my brain. This is no consolation by the way, because knowing that your brain is wacky just isn't a source of comfort, you know? Another weird thing is, and I have asked several people about this, and it turns out that being able to unfocus your hearing is not in the normal realm. What I mean is that I can be half-listening to something and let my brain shift it a bit, so that it sounds sort of like a foreign language even if it's English. I thought everyone could do this, like unfocussing their eyes. Apparently no, people do not "unfocus" their ears. Well, people don't. I do.

On top of the (full cost) $6200 ear things, I also will pick up my new glasses on Monday. These have "progressive" lenses.....those unlined bifocals. I don't really really need glasses, but I've been having a slight problem with seeing lately. Very slight. I can see in the distance, but I have an astigmatism and so I sort of don't focus well on anything in the distance, and then of course I have those "old eyes" that would prefer to have reading glasses, thank you very much. Progressive lenses are the two in one kind that take care of the distance and the reading in one. Oh happy day. Cost prior to extended health benefit: $500.

Welcome to my $6700 head, not counting dental benefits, which if I'd had braces as a kid would of course up the ante, but we will just not go there. As an adult, I should not need to spend so much money just to function day to day like a regular person.

Okay? We're up to speed now? My dad didn't die and I need all this expensive headgear. Other things too, spiritual and religious things did and didn't happen, but these are things I need to keep to myself for now. Regular life is a bag of dirt.

Oh, and I went to work too and people are saying remarkably good things about me. I mean, amazing things, where experts in their fields are coming to me in the hallways and introducing themselves and saying how pleased they are that I've joined the staff, that they're happy we'll finally get some real work done now. Yeesh. Guess I'd better figure out what it is that I do.

Portent

These have been days of event. I could have written on Friday, when we were being buried under mounds of snow and none of us made it to work....schools and universities were closed....I sat here on the couch and made a hat for the Big One (StaceyJoy's Katie Hat. I will take a picture.) The snow came down all day, and Hub went out shovelling on and off all day, the kids played, I knit. Knitting is good. I could have done some work, I've got work to do at home, but it was a snow day. I also could have cleaned the house because god knows the house needs a cleaning, but no...I knit. Knitting was successful, I made a useful garment and it's fuchsia and it has really cool twisty shaping and it was lovely to knit. I do love a successful project.

Unfortunately, Saturday was not successful, although I did get to spend it on the couch. For some crazy reason my blood pressure tanked in the middle of the night, and I was left lightheaded and dizzy (or dizzy and lightheaded...believe it or not, the two are hard to distinguish) and not able to do much except lie here and not move. I don't think I was dizzy because the room was not spinning. I called Telehealth Ontario, the most fantastic bunch of R.N.'s anywhere, who chat you up and then help you decide if you need to see a doctor within four hours or within the next three days. This time, I'm on the next three days regimen, and that's okay with me. Since my doc is not available until Monday anyway, I'm good with waiting. Things got better as the day progressed, and I did sit at the table to have supper with the troops, although I hit the couch again soon after. I watched a lot of sports yesterday: the Habs beat the Islanders, there was some women's downhill from Saint Moritz (hey! Brenda Irving! would it kill you to use the French pronunciation??) and then a bit of news, and then Toronto skated all over Ottawa, which was good for Montreal. Do I normally watch hockey? Not really, but like anyone in this country, many of my Saturday nights have been punctuated with the HNIC song as I was heading out the door for an evening of revelry.

Today things are a bit better, as in I only sort of fell over on the way to the bathroom this morning, and I forced myself to sit up and to shower and to get dressed to go to mass. After that I asked for a trip to Shopper's Drug Mart so I could actually check my blood pressure, which was a (normal for me) 108/64. So maybe it's not the blood pressure, although I'm sure it's not dizziness but lightheadedness that I'm feeling. I made the Sunday pancakes and ate sitting up like a human, and then hit the couch again to pound this out and prove that I am still functioning.
There is still snow outside, and you might be thinking, "20cm of snow fell on you the other day. Of course there's still snow!" except that the weather is mental, and on Tuesday the temp is supposed to go to 9C, and that's warm enough to melt it all to a slithering mess again. Oooh! maybe the fainty feeling will pass and I'll get another weather-induced headache from hell! How exciting!

Or, you know, maybe I will just stop thinking about myself and my tiny ills.

Behind

1) The house is a disaster. I say this all the time, and sometimes this statement is truer than at other times, but really, it is a disaster. I don't clean. We have mice, although they are more or less confined to one kitchen cupboard where they snack on the poison mousetreat I have in there. They are truly the laziest rodents on the planet, because the kitchen is a veritable cornucopia and they choose to eat the poison. Stupid mice. Katie is a shedding machine and the dog hair is an impossible battle. The kids' bedrooms look like bombs went off in them. Everything is dusty. In our room the handwashing is beginning to block the windows. Toys, toys, toys all over the place, and the words, "Put this away," have no meaning. I live with chaos generators and I am just as bad as they are, but I complain about it because I'm the one who cleans the mess up (most often).

2) Ravelry is a lot of work! It's work I'd like to sit down and do mind you, but man! I've hardly started in on it and feel a bit overwhelmed by it all, but maybe that's because the idea of following someone else's idea of organization is daunting. I'm organized but my system is based on seemingly random relationships. Hmmm. See "chaos generators" above.

3) I have photos to upload, but attaching the camera to the laptop is a Herculean task. There is no good reason for not uploading the photos, except that I'm easily distracted and end up doing something else instead.

4) Backing up the laptop is another task that's not really that huge, but really needs to be done. I have DVD's, they have lots of storage space, I could back up all my files and run the CrapCleaner to get rid of the crazy temp files and run Spybot to get rid of the spyware and once I've backed up a lot of my files I can take them off the hard drive, because really, I don't need files from five years ago any more and I'm just keeping them for sentimental reason. Much like my chemistry course files, the tests and exams, the....oh, now I'll get all nostalgic and want to keep everything. Yeesh. Computer packrat.

5) I owe people letters. It sounds terribly old-fashioned but there is one family with whom we keep in touch via the written word on paper, and they wrote in the summer and I've not gotten back to them. The summer was heavy and difficult and I have excuses, but really, it would take an hour to write a letter and explain everything and I haven't done it and now it's nearly Christmas and then it'll be another letter.....damn.

On the bright side, I have one or two small Christmas gifts left to buy or make, so I'm nearly done with that. My list includes my kids' teachers and the family members I need to buy for and the friends too, and I am actually nearly finished. This is probably because I like to shop more than I like to do most anything else, and I like to shop for other people, and I will shop rather than clean the house (yeah. See #1 again). I have to wrap and send some gifts, but that's okay too, because I can get that done within the next week. I have to finish that crazy sweater for my brother, but that's doable now, just the sleeves to go and it does knit up quickly, it was just hard to pick it up after so long away. I finished the front of it last night and realized that I shouldn't put this off any more, so the weekend will hold at least one sleeve. There are four other things floating around in my head to make, but I'll try to just concentrate on this one thing for now.

There's painting to do, it's time to break out the twinkly lights, there are papers to sort and an office that I can't even get into now because of the stuff that has been piled up. I will need to work in that office soon, because I really think that I shouldn't use the dining room table any more as my office. Why? After all, a dining room is such a useless space...and I agree, except that we have nowhere else to eat in this house. It's the dining room, or stand around the island in the kitchen, and that won't work for the children because they are challenged by their lack of height.

So I'd better get at it then, which is something else I always say just before.....OH look! Something shiny!..........