Finished Object: Celtic Lattice Vest

OK, the vest is done but for the buttons, which I will be attaching as soon as it finishes drying. They are pewter buttons shaped like trout – a little more ornate than what I’d usually put on them, which was why I went with just plain black button bands instead of the pattern. I don’t want them to get lost – they’re nicer than what I generally put on my projects.

So! Here it is! Being blocked…



And here’s a close-up of the detail:



This was a sheer delight to knit. The pattern was not too challenging, but not boring either. It was knit in the round all the way up, with steek stitches (excellent article regarding these over here at See Eunny Knit, if you’re curious about how they work / why anyone would be crazy enough to use them / how come they aren’t nearly as scary as they sound).

The one change I would make if I did it again would be to widen the steek stitches – Cheryl uses three, I think I’d use five. I know it uses more yarn, but I found it difficult to run four lines of machine stitches down that narrow a band. I accidentally cut through the machine stitching in a couple places (oops), but didn’t realize I’d done it until I was picking up stitches and the loose ends pulled up and created A Problem. FEH!

Fortunately, the yarns I used are very old-style wool: They fuzz together and hold onto each other, so I don’t expect I will be punished any further for my misdeeds now that the cut edges have been covered with the facings and washed. Also, thanks to the wool being of this style, I had almost no ends to run in at all – whenever I needed to join in a new ball, I did the ‘splicing’ method (great explanation here in spit-splicing via Little Yarn Shoppe of Horrors), where you unravel each end, overlap the two unraveled ends, moisten (yes, I used spit) and rub like heck between your hands to twine them back together. If you spin, this makes perfect sense. If you don’t, you’re going “huh?!” and really ought to check out the link. The wool felts a little tiny bit with this mistreatment, and you then carry on knitting with it as though it was always one continuous strand. It works brilliantly on wool, and the ‘stickier’ the wool (e.g., more likely to felt) the better.

Another interesting technique I haven't used much: Instead of casting off and then sewing up the facings, Oberle has you tack down the live stitches to the inside. I found it was easier to keep track of what needed to be tacked down where, and that the finished product was "stretchier" - none of that 'oops, now the armhole is pulling in' afterward. Nice! I'm going to remember this little trick for my Dale of Norway sweaters, which always-always-ALWAYS seem to end up with too-tight neck openings for the Denizens (entirely because I cast off too tightly and then tack down with a vengeance).

I didn’t find any other surprises in the pattern; I did my usual thing when instructed to “pick up X stitches” along the button bands, neckline and armband: I worried more about picking up evenly than “X stitches” and adjusted on the second round – but the only adjustments I had to make was to remove one stitch on one armband, and add two on the other! That, friends, is a bulls eye.

The Dancing skein was more than generous enough to finish the project – I have quite a little bit left over. I’ve really loved this color. The finished vest has a lovely ‘wash’ to it, with a lot of depths and shallows throughout.

All in all, a fun project. And there are a few other vests I’ve got my eye on in this book; I’ve got some great alpaca that would make a gorgeous Stone Walls. Oberle now has two books out that I'm finding more than one or two things I'm interested in making. Yay! Another designer I can stalk. Er. I mean, watch for new things. (She does have a book of knitted jackets coming out soon, if memory serves...)

But first…an 18” preemie blanket, in good old purple acrylic (suitable for machine washing, drying, and washing, and drying, and washing, and drying, and washing, and…)

My room, my very own room

My mother’s day present from the husband was to do whatever I felt like doing while he took care of ‘everything else’– so first I finished the last armband on the Celtic Lattice vest, washed it and pinned it to block, and then I trekked up here and began going through all the crap covering my bedroom.

I swear, doing this kind of major organizing Event is a lot like knitting lace to me. First, there’s all this fussy-work. And it looks all messy. And you start saying to yourself, “What the @*^&@ was I thinking?! Why did I start this?! This is horrible and it will never, ever be good!”

And then the wash-n-block happens and suddenly (after many hours of sweat and cussing) (I have moved that extra desk to at least three places in this room, plus out of the room and back in again) (and then I wonder why my back is sore – that ain’t no pressboard, people, that is solid oak), there’s this incredible thing. And you can’t believe you did it, and you want to run up to random strangers and say, “Look! Look at this cool thing I did!” (Uh, hi there, Internet - Check out my bedroom!! Is it not cool?!)

We used to have a very large room that neither of us spent any real time in. Wasted space, big time. When we first bought this house, I had fond dreams of spending hours in here – it is a lovely, bright, airy room, awesome lighting for any craft you care to do. And so big! HUGE! I mean, HUGE-HUGE! Our master bedroom is almost as big as my entire first apartment, all kidding aside.

But when we moved in, we sort of shoved the dresser on one wall and the armoire on the other and got busy with the kids stuff and then were working and sort of never got back around to ‘optimizing’ our bedroom. Eh, it worked. Whatever. I’m tired. Let’s just go to bed…

Well. I’m ready to use it now. Check it out! I have a knitting nook:



All right, it is a little short on ‘sitting’ implements and table and other stuff that tends to be considered standard for a knitting nook (or anything else except what this may seem to be to the unimaginative eye, to wit, an empty corner). But it does have a knitting basket in it, so it counts.

The business desk, with ‘ready stash’ yarn storage bin, a small file box (off camera – I keep very little paper lying around thanks to the miracle of paperless billing and a decent all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier, also off-camera), telephone, shredder and recycling bin PLUS ALSO thanks to the fact that we never throw any piece of computer equipment away a sound system - two small speakers on the desk plus a sub-woofer under the desk (I could SO rock this neighborhood right now) (but I won't, because I am mature that way now and a mom and a Responsible Citizen and would never, ever want to set a bad example for the Denizens by, say, cranking up Redneck Woman and yelling "HELL YEAH!" at the top of my lungs while pounding back Miller Genuine Draft, dancing like I was hit by the Wine Truck, and eating preztels right out of the bag):



The craft desk (utterly indestructible) (seriously. I’ve tried.), with yarn overflow storage extra drawers for whatever might happen along in need of a temporary home, and the barrister shelves we can’t put anywhere else due to the fact that they have glass doors and thus must be put in the one (1) no-kids-allowed space in the Den (currently full of books that I would seriously have a heart attack and die over if someone covered them in crayon, like my full set of Child Ballads, 1808 printing, series 796 of 1000 complete set the-very-thought-of-crayoned-pony-princess-stick-figures-in-them-makes-me-vaguely-nauseous):



Yes. That weird stuff on the wall is unfinished drywall texturing. It used to open into a retreat off the master bedroom, which we walled off to make a room for Captain Adventure. I don't want to talk about how long ago that was, or why we haven't painted either space yet.

Eventually, I want to get a nice comfy chair and a good sturdy little table to go in my ‘knitting nook’; for right now, cash is tight so I’m saying that the office chair is perfectly comfortable, thank you. I’ll repurpose something from around the Den to be a footrest (hmm, Captain Adventure is about the right size…) (oh wait, using a small child for a footrest…would that be wrong?!) and call it done for now.

I’m sure that if one of the ‘trading spaces’ decorators were to walk in here, they’d drop dead of bad-designing induced heart failure.

But I don’t care. I have a place I can go when the husband is watching something I really don’t want to watch, where I can work or play or watch something I want to watch or knit or read or whatever I want to do…

Oh yeah. Life is good.

I’m going to go bring what little of my stash is actually here and not in storage up to its new home. And the vest being all done but the shouting, maybe start something new before dinner. I had promised myself that I would alternate ‘one for me, one for charity’, so I’m thinking I’ll cast on a cute little baby sweater or something.

In my room. Oooooh, I feel like a teenager again! Let me practice.

“GET OUTTA MY ROOM!”

“Do you MIND?! I am TALKING to my FRIEND!!”

“…nothing! GOSH! Can’t I have any PRIVACY around here?! GOSH!”

“I wasn’t locking YOU out of my room, I was locking my STINKY LITTLE BROTHER out! GOSH! You are just, like, such a fascist!”

“No, it's just incense...”

“I DIDN’T!! IT’S JUST THAT THE ONE BEFORE IT WAS REALLY REALLY SOFT! WHAT? WHAT?! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! THE MUSIC’S TOO LOUD!!”

…oh yeah, I feel youthful all over…!

Small but SASSY!

Our town’s farmer’s market opened today. As I have ranted before, our town sits right on the edge of prime California agricultural land – but year after year, our farmer’s market has been sagging from ‘eh’ to ‘why bother’ all the way down to ‘definitely to be avoided at all costs, run! run for your LIFE!’ over the last few years.

Last year was particularly pathetic. The ‘trinket’ vendors outnumbered the food vendors, and what few food vendors there were had very little on offer. Also, the last time I went the Mary Kay lady literally chased me in the street waving eyeshadow and enthusing about how she could give me a free facial in less than five minutes and I would LOVE! it, guaranteed!

Not to be catty (she said, promptly being catty), but if her own makeup job was any indication, she and I are on polar opposites of the makeup-wearing scene. I’m a ‘less is more’ type, and she’s more of a ‘you cannot possibly have too much color on your face!’ type.

I fled as if Satan himself were right behind me. Actually, I fled faster. Because Satan, you know, has a way of having stuff I might actually want, like a fiddle I could use to rule Nashville, or a stock calculator that never missed. Granted, the price is a little too steep for my liking, but at least the merchandise itself isn’t terrifying. But this particular Mary Kay lady was going to try to sell me fuchsia lipstick and people – that is just plain wrong.

However, I digress.

This year we have a new sheriff in town. Pacific Coast Farmers' Market Association has taken on my wee little town (probably out of pity) (or because the fact that our town calling what we had a ‘farmer’s market’ was dragging the name through toxic waste and needed to be stopped at all costs) and is managing the whole affair.

So I caught up my big canvass bag this morning and headed out the door, determined to risk the Crazy Mary Kay lady. After all, the PCFMA website says right on the homepage: PCFMA does not accept the sale of crafts, jewelry or other non-agricultural, non-food items in its markets.

I arrived right at opening and found a lot of friends and neighbors milling around eating fresh baked whatnots from local bakeries, drinking coffee, and listening to a group of kids playing jazz. The market is still tiny, taking up one city block with enough space to park a truck between each booth – but guess what?

No.
Mary.
Kay.

Also, no Avon, no Tupperware, no lady-with-the-cheap-from-China-sequined-bags, no insurance salesmen, chiropractors, mortgage brokers shoving flyers up my nose. The only thing being shoved at me were samples of peaches and cherries, which hey – I can handle.

It’s still small. It still has large holes in what is available (no carrots anywhere in the market, for example, or artichokes, asparagus, or broccoli), but I could definitely have gotten plenty of variety to keep the household happy if I hadn’t just received a big old box from Planet Organics with sugar snap peas, green garlic, broccoli, carrots, etc. etc. etc.

And having the organic vendors is new. While I’m nowhere near the ‘organic or nothing’ level, I am finding that the organics simply taste better to me. More like what I remember when I was a kid – whether that’s simply due to freshness or really is the lack of chemical intervention, I don’t know.

One thing that I found particularly exciting was a lady selling eggs. Chicken eggs, sure – but also duck and quail eggs. And when I paused to chat with her about her business (I do that, because I am nosy), she told me that her animals are all free-range. This, she tells me, means that her eggs are sometimes more flavorful (read as, people think there’s something “wrong” with them because *gasp* they taste like something!) and sometimes less, and that occasionally people are frightened senseless by the sight of two yolks or upset because the whites aren’t pure white. And let’s not get started on the worry that speckled eggs are ‘spoiled’ or whether or not brown eggs come from, you know, chickens…

Heh. I’ve heard the same thing from the local meat market – people complain that the bacon doesn’t taste like ‘bacon’. Well, it does taste like bacon, which is the salted and/or smoked meat from the back and sides of a pig.

What it does not taste like is Oscar Meyer bacon, because these are local pigs who ate whatever was put in front of them – usually a combination of commercial feed and whatever was lying around the farm, from carrot tops to corn stalks. The meat market then has its own smoking and seasoning, not to be confused with the commercial same-same of Oscar Meyer.

But since the rather nasty conditions in which laying hens are kept are one of my very few eco-Nazi-hot-button-topics, I’m delighted to have a more chicken-friendly source of fresh eggs. Also, it is very cute to have a vendor who names her chickens and can tell which eggs came from what hen. “Oh, that’s Rosie, she’s been laying big eggs lately…”

So. To make a long story short (too late!)…progress! Our farmer’s market is small, but sassy! I’d love to see some cheese makers, and a little more variety would be nice (lots of cherries and strawberries, no asparagus, artichokes or broccoli); and I’d be ecstatic if we got an organic butcher into the act.

But compared to years past: FABULOUS. Very encouraging! I’ll be diverting my grocery money to the market as much as I can, and hope enough of my friends and neighbors do the same to make it appealing to the vendors we’re still missing.

TAGGED!

Ooh, a meme! Hokay…da rules…

Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
Don't forget to leave them a comment and tell them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

Hmm. What to put up…

Thanks to some years performing on the street, I’ve learned pretend I’m not shy at parties anymore – but I guarantee you, I tried to avoid going in the first place, then worried all the way to your party about all the dumb things I was about to say or do in front of witnesses, and when I get home I lie awake cataloging all the dumb thing I said or did at the party and wonder why anybody ever invites me anywhere – unless it’s for the comedic value of all the dumb things I say and do. I'm still shy.

I read extremely fast. I can devour a novel in a single sitting. I can’t describe how I do it in a way that others can understand – it’s like, instead of reading each word, I take in the whole paragraph like a snapshot. I don’t know how I do it, but I do know that I’ve been doing it as long as I can remember.

I came to knitting in a very odd way. At Renaissance fairs, one of the street gigs I did was spinning. I’d spend two, three, four hours a day standing in the street with a drop spindle being ‘color’ for the fair. And then I had, whaddya know, all this yarn. So I signed up for a class at a local yarn store and the rest is history.

I have wanted specifically four children since I was six years old. I do not for the life of me know why. There were occasional periods of wanting fewer or more, but somehow that number ‘four’ just kept coming back. And now that I have four, that is plenty, thank you.

It took me about six months to go from “Sooooooo, this red one here is a ‘C’, you say?” to performing professionally (‘performing professionally’ being pronounced ‘being paid for it’) on the harp. Which sounds really impressive until I confess that I’d been playing the piano for twenty years by then, and also spent between three and six hours every single day including Sundays practicing. Yeah, that’ll catch you up to your peers PDQ…

I am a rotten teacher, especially at the things I do best. I don’t know how to explain how to do things that are second nature to me, then I get frustrated that you aren’t getting it and worry about what a bad teacher I obviously am (even if it really is the pupil being dense) and it all just goes downhill from there.

Someday, I want to hike the John Muir trail all the way from Yosemite to Mt. Whitney. 211 miles, plus another ten to get down from the mountain. Of course, first I’ll have to whip my domesticated behind back into shape – I haven’t hiked more than three miles in almost ten years, which makes a 211 + 10 mile backpacking trip a little…unlikely, at this exact moment.

And, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I’ve done a lot of different things already and figure I’ll probably wear at least a dozen more hats before my time is up. I admire people who can put up with ‘same old, same old’ for year upon year – seriously. Because I am utterly unable to do that. My brother shot straight through college; I grazed through it like it was the Hometown Buffet. I’ll take a little science, and a little Italian, and some music, and a minor in mathematic, and maybe just a few courses in archeology…eighteen years later, I finally knuckled down and blazed through a CIS degree – but if you simply added up units and awarded degrees, I’ve probably got a PhD in ‘Miscellaneous Stuff’.

Lessee. Tagging…
Sugar Mommy
Amy Lane at Yarning to Write
Jan at Canter In
21st Century Mom (because I know you’ve just got NOTHING BUT TIME ON YOUR HANDS for silly memes)
Needletart, and I will be stunned if I’m the first to hit her.
Terena at Medusa’s Muse (gonna get you posting more if it kills me, girl)
briarrose43 at meanderings of a bored mind (ditto the ‘posting more’ jab)
Moira at Irish Trouble (hmm, I’m sensing a ‘posting more’ theme here…)

Whew. Man. OK, now I hope nobody’s mad at me for (not) including them. Party on, y’all…

CURSE YOU, CITIBANK!!!

I am so angry with Citibank right now. They have earned my eternal hatred and also a potential well-worded letter of outrage.

Why?

Because! They sent me a $25 gift card to iTunes to thank me for being a ‘valued customer’. And I said to myself, “Eh, what do I want with this?! Huh, maybe I’ll just re-gift it…I just don’t see what all the fuss is about with this whole i-music-pod-casting-whatever thing YOU KNOW, vinyl was good enough for me, I just don’t get this whole download-thing …”

So I went to the site, you know, just for a quick peek…

It took me all of about ten minutes to burn through the whole $25. Seriously. And a lot of willpower to resist downloading about sixty-zillion ‘just one more!’ (which is also how I can go through fifty bucks at the dollar store). And now I’m finding myself wondering where we put those awesome speakers we used to have on the tower computer (didn’t that system have a subwoofer? Right ON!) and about these i-Pod things and how I might get my hands on one, because I’m pretty sure I’m the last person in the northern hemisphere without one, GOSH I am such a dinosaur…!

Also, I’m completely sure my playlist is proof that I am a terribly unbalanced person. Country, R&B, Soul, Rock, Classical, Alternative, Pop, Dang That’s So Old We Can’t Believe Anybody Wants It, Wait – did she just download Redneck Woman?!...

YEEEEEEEEHAW!

The sad truth is, the first time I got myself into serious trouble with credit cards (yes, there was more than one time – I am not one to learn a lesson the first time around, I need repetition and also to have it repeated and maybe reiterated a couple more times before I ‘get it’) it was on music. A $3,000 stereo system (at the time, I was making about $18,000 a year), buying new albums every eight seconds, going through money like water buying singles (remember those?) and blank cassette tapes to burn the vinyl onto so I could play them in my car…and then a CD player for my car (and this was when they skipped more than they played – I am still amazed at how far that technology has come!)…

I am so angry with Citibank right now. You know, this is just like walking up to a recovering alcoholic and waving a bottle of rum under her nose. “Just one little drinkie-poo! C’mon! You know you love it…”

ARGH.

I wonder if they have any 12-step programs for recovering music-holics.

Maybe I should just head over to the i-Tunes store…surely, if there is such a program, they’d have a link to it, right…? Ooooooooh! Check it out!!

…So don't delay act now supplies are running out
Allow if you're still alive
six to eight years to arrive
And if you follow there may be a tomorrow
But if the offer is shun
You might as well be walkin' on the sun

Crap. Iiiiiiiiiiiii’m a goner…they’ve got “my” music…quick, name a rewards program that carries i-Tune cards!!

(Double crap. How pathetic is that? Might as well put a sign on my blog: Will fill out surveys for i-Tunes…please, c’mon, man, hook a sistah up, I’m dying over here! They've got WILDFIRE, and I haven't heard that in, like, TWENTY YEARS!!!)

The budget report

Groceries-from-the-store this week: $44.72. (As usual [for the second time, ahem], the table of gory details will be at the bottom and as usual, skip it if you feel a sudden urge to scream wildly and run from the computer.) (Or heck, skip the whole post. I know, budget-stuff can cause narcolepsy [my favorite word of the week].)

I’m still getting a box from Planet Organics, but switched to a larger box every-other-week. Instead of $32 weekly, I’m getting a $38 box every other week – this is the ‘on’ week, so our total for groceries will come to $82.72. If the farmer’s market proves to be awesome! I will gladly give up the box in favor of buying from the farmer’s market on Saturdays…but as I ranted before, I don’t hold out a whole lot of hope on that front. I’ve been hopeful every single year, and every single year… “HI! WOULD YOU LIKE A FREE MAKEOVER?!”

No. What I’d like is zucchini. But thanks for offering.

Leftover cash: $57.28, plus $18 from last week [I held onto that last twenty pretty tight, but finally broke down and got a soda on the way home from dropping Danger Mouse off at The Brother’s house.]

I’ve got just under half a tank of gas left, but will definitely have to fill up before Saturday because we’re taking a little trip this weekend – while we might make it there and back again on ‘not quite half a tank’, well. It would severely suck to find myself in the High Gas Prices neighborhood when Homer the Odyssey is running on fumes. I’d much rather top him off at the cheap gas here in town than pay $4.11 a gallon (OUCH!) over the hill. Probably about $40 to top him off Friday.

You may note there is not a whole lot of ‘…and then I went to WalMart and bought $418.27 in, uh, stuff, followed by a quick trip to Taco Bell and then I got the most adorable set of whatnots at the Dollar Tree while waiting for Boo Bug to finish her ballet lesson…’ in here. It isn’t that I never, ever under any circumstances do those things – it’s just that I’ve got a goal and I’m darned serious about it.

Once I’ve paid off the first loan on my ‘kill list’, I’ll lighten up a bit. That loan has a payment of $350 a month, which I’m going to split 50/50 – half for me to spend on ‘stuff’, the other half to go into the snowball to pay off the rest. That brings my monthly ‘spend on stuff’ budget up to $775, which allows for ballet lessons and Taco Bell and even the occasional safari into WalMart.

If I keep the faith, I should have that sucker paid off in either July or August – it all depends on whether or not a largish check I’m anticipating actually shows up (oh-please-oh-please-oh-please), and my own ability to resist things like…new furniture for ‘my’ bedroom (may Disciplina forgive me, but I am lusting after California Closet ‘solutions’, and also big comfy chairs) and yarn.

Especially yarn.

Item	Price
Dishwasher detergent	$5.75
Allspice	$5.39
100 tea bags (generic)	$4.19
4 gallons milk	$9.98
Apples	$2.31
One crummy bell pepper	$0.69
Watermelon!	$3.99
Bag o’ Spuds	$2.69
Big old bag potting mix	$3.99
Block o’ Parmesan	$4.99
Rendering unto Caesar (sales tax)	$0.75
Total	$44.72

It’s a long, long way from Organized to Here…

I have worked now for almost two hours in my room and do I see much headway?

No. No I do not.

I have this:



And this:



OH YEAH AND…



(Note the knitting magazine, still unread, but on top of the pile – I have my priorities, people)

There is more OH YES THERE IS, but thankfully the batteries died in the camera and I was thus spared any further documentation of the chaos.

The worst part, of course, is that I’m doing this to myself.

See, it’s like this. My husband and I were sharing the office downstairs. It was a little tight in there, and also the office is probably the worst room in the house for Peace And Quiet Or Something Like It. If anyone is watching TV, the noise comes right through the wall. If anyone is playing upstairs, it sounds like a herd of elephants is tap dancing overhead. And then there is the tiny matter that whenever my husband gets on the phone with a coworker (about seventy times a day), he is loud and I am ‘not supposed to be there’.

Yeah. Gets old, being run out of the office all the time. Or trying to work with Slash ‘Em Dead XIII: In the mall, everybody hears you scream, even people trying to read annual statements in the other room blaring through the wall.

So the decision was made (by me) that I would move my base of operations upstairs. I would move everything upstairs: my ‘quiet’ knitting space, my computer, my filing system, my writing, everything, to our bedroom. The way I have envisioned it, whether I’m writing or knitting or cussing out vendors on the phone, I can simply glance out the bedroom door to check up on the Denizens at any time.

It will rock.

Eventually.

IN THE MEANTIME, I have an awful lot to get through. There is all kinds of stuff that has been ‘temporarily’ stored in, on, under, or around the dresser and armoire I pulled out of this room to make room for my new space. Due to the impending remodeling project (which, by the way, is already making me a crazy person and we haven’t even gotten final plans yet, let alone anything resembling a bid), I’m being forced to kick it into high gear.

I am also being forced by my nature to get it done.

I’m not a neatnik, I swear I’m not – I have a healthy slob-ability inside me. But at the same time, clutter does distress me. It disorders my brain, it makes it hard for me to think about anything else. It makes me tired and unhappy, and I will fly into irrational rages when, for example, I can’t find my keys.

I have actually run through this house throwing everything on the floor like a PMSing teenager because I couldn’t find my keys. “If we didn’t have all this @*^&@ all over the place,” I’m usually screeching. “I wouldn’t be having this problem!”

(Which is a lie, because I have the worst habit of setting my keys down in a different place every single time I come through the door. If this Den was spotless and organized all the time, I’d still manage to misplace them. Seriously. I am a lost cause when it comes to lost keys.)

I know that eventually I’m going to get through this. One basket, one box, one insane pile at a time.

But it’s a long, long way from Organized to Here…

Meh.

I’m still ‘repurposing’ furniture all over the house. This, there. That, here. Wait, if I put that with this over yonder…

In real terms, of course, this means that my house looks as if somebody picked it up off the foundation, shook it like a snow globe, and then plonked it back down to admire the way all the debris floats around and ends up all higgledy-piggledy. My bedroom is bearing the brunt of it all, because I am moving my base of operations up here – the dresser and armoire have gone out to be replaced by my computer / craft table and a little corner where I can sit and knit while the Denizen frolic merrily in their bedrooms under my kindly gaze and my husband works downstairs, by himself, without interrupting me every eight seconds with expletives regarding this or that server, or commands to “look at this, this is totally cool, see, what this does is {insanely detailed explanation, during which I attempt to look both intelligent and interested, when really I’m just waiting for him to run out of adjectives so I can get back to counting stitches or whatever I was thinking about without starting WWIII right here in the Den}.”

Saturday, before the SAM-e kicked my butt, I completely pulled apart our bedroom, from the huge walk-in closet to the dresser drawers to the armoire. ALL the clothes, out on the bed, naked and shamed in the light of day – which revealed that I owned an awful lot of ancient clothing I hadn’t worn in several sizes.

I still had a pair of size 14 pants (I’m back down to a 6 now). And silk shirts that went o-u-t in the early 90s. Plus also slacks that had shrunk (no, really, they had!) to the point where they resembled floods. Modern archeological techniques unearthed three (3) pairs of pants that have been waiting for hems for at least three years now.

Oy.

The dinner dishes have not been washed. The dishwasher is already full of clean dishes. My bed is buried beneath about forty pounds of paperwork, computer equipment, clean laundry I meant to put away (oops), and so forth.

There is a huge box of hangers in the middle of the floor posing a threat to life and limb. Honestly, I do not know how I came by so many ‘extra’ hangers. You would think I had everything from my suits to my socks dry cleaned or something, I have so many cheap hangers in this Den…

And also a basket full of stuff that I said, “OK, and, I’ll go through this when I get a second…”

You know, there are times when I look at everything I no, really, I mean it need to do before I go to bed, and all I can think is… “Meh.”

I do not guarantee that I won’t just get up from this desk (conveniently located near my bed), walk over to said edifice, shove everything currently on it onto the floor (on my husband’s side, of course), climb in and pretend I have never heard of this strange custom called ‘cleaning the kitchen’.

I am sorry, your Earth ways are strange to me…

I will, of course, be furious with myself in the morning, when I’m trying to make coffee and have neither clean coffee-making implements nor a space large enough to set them available to me. I will also be in a state of high holy wrath if it takes me three weeks to find some bill or other I should have paid tomorrow, or if my husband breaks another toe on all the rubbish.

However…I really, really don’t feel like dealing with any of it right now. It has been a very, very long day – one of the ‘started at 4:30’ days. And I need it to be over, right immediately now.

Except that I suppose I’ll need to move that old desk out of the way, in order to get into the bathroom.

And probably I really had better pick up those rods that are jutting out from beneath the bed, because one of us really is going to break some body part or other on them otherwise.

Wait!

…I just heard something…

Oh.
My.
GAWD.

The husband…he’s…no, wait…I must go to the door and listen…this can’t be true…

Holy carp.

Let it be known that on this day in history, May 8, 2007, my husband spontaneously and without nagging afore-action, decided to do the dishes.

**sniff**

I am so happy, I may just have to clear a path on his side of the bed…

Produce, or lack thereof

I’ve become hooked on the Planet Organics produce. I confess to being completely agog at the difference; I mean, I knew that I served up a lot fewer vegetables than my mother did (and felt kind of guilty about it), but I couldn’t blame my children for professing undying hatred of the things. They were just plain yucky.

I didn’t want them either. Green stuff that could be zucchini, or might also be cooked cucumber, or perhaps it was…some other…squash-like substance…after a while, I too started to dislike them and slowly, just stopped buying them altogether except on those rare occasions when I’d happen to be someplace with a decent farmer’s market.

Our town’s farmer’s market is opening this weekend, so I’m hoping to be able to get decent local produce soon.

Hoping, but not expecting.

Our farmer’s market has always been double-l-lame. Last year, we had anything you wanted as long as all you wanted was bok choy or strawberries. Or apricots that looked as if they’d been picked at the height of fermentation. Oh! And there was this one guy who had baskets of blackberries. And really messed up hands (scratches, band-aids, scrapes clear up to his earlobes), which inexplicably cracked me up. Perhaps it was PTSD from all the times I took a header into the brambles myself while trying to fill pails with the @*^&@ing things.

The ‘best’ blackberries were always out on the water. The ‘dry land accessible’ bushes tended to be picked clean, but if you got out in a boat and went ‘shore crawling’, you could get some of the biggest, juiciest, most delicious blackberries ever.

That was because nobody else would get out there after the things, because invariably some braying jackass would come flying along at 35 knots (in a ‘no wake zone’, naturally) and send you flying into the @*^&@ing brambles. My personal favorite was the time I was in the stupid crawdad boat with a big pail of blackberries and a rather precarious perch, leaning waaaaaaaay out because the levee rocks were kind of ‘shelved’, and some twit in a ski boat came flying through the marina (MARINA, HELLO) and the crawdad went baaaaawooooop! and tossed me literally and bodily into the brambles. Which then clung to me with a million tiny sharp fingers while the @*^&@ing wasps expressed their displeasure with my party-crashing.

Oh yeah. Good times. Goooooooooood times…yup, those were the days when I developed my preference for the ‘breathable fabric’ style band-aid…but I digress. Where was I, anyway? Oh yeah. Produce, lack thereof… Zucchini! Zucchini was a no-show! Come ON, how in the world do you go through an entire season at a farmer’s market without anybody hawking zucchini? Zucchini is, like, a farm weed! Every farm seems to have it! Worse than crabgrass! Everywhere and producing like skinny green legless rabbits with seeds!

But no zucchini at our farmer’s market.

However, if you would like to purchase anything from Mary Kay, Avon, Pampered Chef, or perhaps you were more in the mood for extremely large and cheap-looking handbags with sequins glued on them or t-shirts with slogans sure to offend somebody, we’ve gotcha covered.

**sigh**

ANYWAY. There’s a new outfit running the show this year, so I’m hopeful. If they can actually manage to provide, you know, edible produce, I’ll consider dropping my Planet Organics box.

IF.

And ONLY if…

Just a little progress…

First things first: We found the camera!! Go ahead, guess where it was…give up? (Yeah, me too.)

Boo Bug came running into the office yelling, “I founded it! I founded it! I founded the camera!!”

(‘We herewith found this noble institution of Cam-err-wah in the year of grace 2007…’)

“Where?” I demanded eagerly.

“On the backup cleaner!”

*blink-blink* “Where?”

“It’s hanging! On the backup cleaner! No, wait, the backroom cleaner! Yeah, that’s it, hee hee, the backroom cleaner!”

(‘Guido, we’se got a sensitive-type job for youse…go on in the back room and clean up what youse find there…’)

“The what cleaner? Wait, just show me…”

It was hanging by the strap from the vacuum cleaner. I would have found it the next day (no, really!), but it had managed to hang there for three days unseen.

So! Hey, look! A funky looking piece of knitting that I swear is going to be a vest…



Oh, you don’t believe me? Check it out: A vest! With button bands (but no buttons) and the wee beginning of the neckband:



Still don’t buy it? OK, here’s a vest with a Boo Bug (Finder of Lost Cameras) in it!!



I made a slight modification to the vest, which was to leave off the cable pattern in the button bands. I did this for two reasons: although I like it in the picture and on the sample vest Cheryl had in her booth, when it was staring at me from my needles I thought it looked excessively ‘busy’ – and since my buttons aren’t “plain” buttons but kind of ornate little things, I decided to go with ‘plain old black’ and let the buttons “pop” a little more.

With luck and a tailwind, I’ll finish it this week. I haven’t had a whole lot of ‘sitting down knitting’ time, thanks entirely to housework (boo, hiss!) (overrated! OV-ER-RAY-TED!) and Denizen uprisings (they seem to think they should be fed, like, two-three-five times every single day! the nerve!) and so forth and so on.

Also, somehow every time I say “…and then I’m going to sit down and knit until…”, somebody immediately calls and says, “Hey, how about I come over at {precisely the time when I planned to be sitting down knitting} so we can {do something that precludes knitting}? It’s the only time I have available until Octember, so I hope it works for you!”

**sigh**

The world, she is against me…

Fine print

Every bottle of pills has that section. You know, the one that says, “Side effects may include…” and then rattles off everything from increased toe lint to death?

Friday, I finally decided I’d give SAM-e a try. This is a supplement of many purposes, with the primary generally listed as ‘anti-depressant’, and with ‘osteoarthritis’ way down the list. What the heck, I thought. With enough people bugging me about trying it, well, hard to tell them to piss off before you’ve tried it, right?

And yes, I read the part in the disclosure which read, Adverse effects include gastrointestinal discomfort, nausea, vomiting, and headaches.

But that was after the part that said, Clinical improvements with depression and osteoarthritis are often seen within 1 week and effects seem to continue, as treatment progresses.

So, you know, ‘within 1 week’ and then a bunch of ‘blah blah blah’ the usual. I’ve actually been kinda low lately, to the point where I start saying to myself, “Now, do I feel blue because I hurt, or, do I hurt because I feel blue?” – which is an express ride to the nuthouse. Just asking the questions causes all my joints to start aching, as if they were given permission or something. And then I sit there saying, “Shut up, right elbow, there’s nothing wrong with you! And if I hear one more thing outta you, Mr. Jaw, you’ll be in time out for a month!”

And then you realize that you’re scolding your body parts like they were small children and worse, doing it aloud in the supermarket, and then…well, it’s ugly.

So I thought I’d try the SAM-e and hope for the best.

Friday night, I felt a little queasy; but I’d also downed about a quarter of a pizza at The Brother’s house, which is a damned foolish thing for one lacking a gallbladder to do. “Hey, I know what sounds good! Let’s inject an entire day’s worth of fat into my system, in less than twenty minutes!”

Yeah. Real bright. So I wasn’t surprised that I felt nauseous and flushed.

The next day, I took my vitamins and my SAM-e and by golly, I felt great! I moved furniture! Re-did our closet, to include getting eight Hefty bags stuffed with clothes out of our lives, my ‘office’ moved into our bedroom into the space formerly occupied by the dresser, the armoire moved down the hall to Eldest’s room (she is very, very excited to have actual drawers now), blah blah blah.

A lot of movin’ and shakin’ going on at Chez Den this Saturday.

Finally, exhausted and looking forward to getting back up and at it Sunday, I went to bed.

And then I woke up.

And I thought…why is it so @*^&@ing hot in here?...

And then I thought…@*^&@. Gonna puke. @*^&@. Gonna puke. @*^&@.

I have not been so enthusiastically sick since shortly before I learned way more than I ever wanted to know about gallbladder function, or lack thereof. And that perhaps a cheese-sauce meal and cheesecake chaser at Olive Garden was probably not the best judgment call for one with ‘lack of’ before the words ‘gallbladder function’.

Today, I had exactly the same symptoms I used to have after a gallbladder attack: Not queasy any more, but decidedly not interested in doing anything. Sore throat. Sore body. The general feeling that if I got up off the sofa, I would immediately die of sheer angst.

Oooooooh, the agony.

What annoys me is this. Just about every label on every bottle of pills in this house says, “Adverse effect may include {blah blah blah} nausea and vomiting.”

Very, very seldom do they actually make me puke. BUT NOT THIS TIME!

I need a better profile. I need Star Trek technology, here. I need to walk up to a Pill Replicator and say, “Hey, I need something to tone down my osteoarthritis and perhaps assist my mood, which has been pretty black lately and I’m not sure if it’s, you know, real or just the fact that I’m being drained by the sore joints”, and then the Replicator says, “Hmm, OK, here you go…” and out pops a pair of pills that are genetically matched to cure what ails me with an acceptable level of side effect (which should be pronounced, none).”

I don’t think I’m asking all that much, am I?

Of course I’m not.

So, um, if somebody could please get on that? It’d be much appreciated around here…

I love this catalog

Emergency Essentials has a catalog they send me. The link will take you to their ‘Ultimate Year Supply of Freeze Dried & Dehydrated Foods (25 cases)’.

Yes, that’s right! Twenty-five cases of freeze dried and/or dehydrated food! A year’s supply, for only $2,400. Only problem is: I see no coffee on this list. None. No coffee.

In what reality can you have a ‘year’s supply of food’ without the primary food group, coffee?! (Demands the woman on her third double mocha of the day…)

They do not carry coffee. In any form, freeze dried or otherwise. WHICH IS JUST WRONG. How, I ask you, HOW can a company pretend to be all about emergency preparedness, without having this most basic of human needs – THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID BASIC HUMAN NEEDS! – in their catalog?

But I digress.

What I really love about this catalog is that, every time it arrives, I engage in a brief but lovely fantasy in which I live all by myself in a little cabin in the middle of nowhere. Just me, a few thousand pattern books and floor-to-ceiling yarn (plus, of course, the assorted notions required for a life of knitting) and a single annual purchase of the Ultimate Year Supply of Freeze Dried & Dehydrated Foods (25 cases) and, well, every single ball of yarn KnitPicks has at the time. Possibly Webs as well, though that would require that I had first won a bazillion dollars in the lottery. Which, unless I start remembering to buy a ticket, is just not going to happen.

Yeah, pretty much, the whole never-buying-a-ticket thing is going to preclude any lottery winnings. Dang.

There would be a vegetable garden, too. Which the Den does not, for reasons that piss me off way too much to discuss. Let’s just say that when I ask, “Do I have to do everything around here?”, it is a rhetorical question. And also, that asking my husband to help me with something simple like putting together a small vegetable garden in the backyard always-always-always turns into a $15,000 project with multiple new power tools ‘needed’ and then somehow we have a new patio right where the vegetable garden (the what? the which? ooooooh, yeahhhhhhhh…) was supposed to go.

Oh wait. I think I just discussed it. Never mind. I’m not discussing it. I’m also not discussing how much trying to work in the backyard with the Denizens underfoot is like trying to keep four cats in a bathtub at once ({wail!} “Mooooommmmmeeeeeeee, Captain Adventure fell off the ladder, or actually, Danger Mouse pushed him!” “Did not!” “Did too!” “Uh-UH!” “Uh-HUH!” {screech!} {scream!} {wailllllllllllll…run up and rub bloody nose on mommy’s jeans…}), or the way that if anything should chance to grow in the garden and the Denizens are outside while Somebody, LET’S SAY THEIR FATHER – LET’S JUST SAY is ‘in charge’ of them, the little monsters will pull up every shred of greenery in the backyard while Somebody is watching UFC Unleashed inside.

You know why my roses survive and even (dare I say it?) thrive? Because they have thorns, people, and they are not shy about using them. Each and every one of the girls has come running up to me sobbing with a bunch of bright red gashes on their little hands and arms. “I was only trying to PICK ONE!” they cry.

Did I ask them not to go after my rose bushes? Yes, yes I did.
Did I warn them about the thorns? You betcha.
Has even one of my girls escaped temptation? No, no, and no.

If carrots had thorns, we might have had carrots. Unfortunately, they do not. Nor does spinach. Or onions. Or zucchini. Ask me how I know.

Better yet, don’t.

I don’t want to discuss it.

Also, this alternate reality in which I dwell for a few minutes every few months when this catalog arrives would be quiet. Which the Den is most assuredly not. It is so noisy in this house right now that I am expecting the police to stop by any minute now. “Hello, yes, we had complaints about a herd of princess cat elephants being put through a wood chipper with glassware and perhaps a drum set at this address?”

It would not surprise me. I would just take another sip of my coffee and say calmly and with my best attempt at sounding completely insane, “Well, no, but there are four children under the age of ten running wildly through the house wired up on afternoon snack and post-homework euphoria and I’m not doing a thing about it – could you arrest me for noise control violations, please, and take me away from here?”

At which point the police officer would undoubtedly say, “Sorry, ma’am, but you’re obviously completely sane and competent. What adorable children! Heh heh, sorry for bothering you, have a nice day!”

Because they are remarkably unhelpful at such times.

The catalog shows a healthy, ruby-cheeked young lady dwarfed by the 25 cases of freeze dried / dehydrated food, looking peaceful and competent. She does not look as though she has ever had a garden yanked up by the roots, or preempted by a new $15,000 patio. Or plans for one. Or the UFC, which has more ‘unleashed’, ‘ultimate battles’, ‘can’t miss events’ and $50 PPV episodes than can be believed. I thought the CSI:Anywhere thing had a lot of airplay? Ha! UFC (literally) kicks butt on that (and a few other) front(s).

Yes. That woman? Just peace, quiet, vegetables, yarn, and 25 cases worth of freeze dried insta-food.

Probably in a cute little cabin in the woods surrounded by wool…

Oh crud

So, when not quelling Denizen uprisings against my Omnipotent But (Mostly, as Long As You Are Not Interrupting Good Knitting or Precious Reading Time) Benevolent Dictatorship, I’ve been working on the Celtic Lattice vest. I finally finished the ‘vest’ part last night.

This morning, because I know that everybody is just dying to see (ahem), I took pictures of the pre-steek-sewed-and-cut vest and set the camera down on the edge of the dining room table. Then I sat down at the other end of the table and sewed and cut the steeks. I was driving off both Boo Bug and Captain Adventure repeatedly as I worked. Both of them were very, very interested by the Big White Machine That Goes Whir.

And then I reached for the camera to take pictures of the now decidedly vest-looking article waiting for button, arm and neckbands.

Um…where’s the camera?!

It is believed that Captain Adventure made off with it. Where he put it is anybody’s guess. I have gone through the whole house searching and not found it. ARGH. It will undoubtedly turn up someplace obvious. Eventually.

I suspect to get it to surface again, we will have to take a Once In A Lifetime trip to Disneyworld. It will surface within hours of getting home.

In the meantime, however, I have no way to take pictures of anything other than my Treo, which takes crappy pictures.

So, uh, you’ll have to imagine a crisp picture of a weird looking armless thing…that then looks like an unfinished but definitely vest-like thing sort of like this only less blurry:



I really wish I knew a) how he got the camera in the first place, and b) what he did with it.

Seriously.

I mean, I will grant you that I was rather involved in the task at hand. I am about as far from comfortable with my sewing machine as a 21st century human can be with so basic a tool. It kept locking up on me. I ended up taking the whole bobbin assembly apart, glaring at it balefully, and putting it back in exactly the way it came out, at which point it worked fine.

What.EVER. This right here is why I am in no danger of taking up quilting. Seriously, people, I cannot work a sewing machine. This new one is driving me crazy - I prefer my old Singer. And by ‘old’ I mean ‘vintage 1950-something’. It has two speeds: Go, and Not Go. It can go forward, or back. It has, like, four settings for stitch length and that’s it. No zig-zag. No waves. No buttonhole functionality.

Go, Not Go, long, medium-long, medium, or short stitches. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got on the old Singer. I understand this. I can handle this. It is the appropriate level of complexity (i.e., NONE) for my level of sewing skill.

The new one has about eleventy-bazillion stitches and each stitch has lengths and there’s two different dials and {sob sob} I don’t know what any of them DOOOOOOOOOOOO! {…collects self…}

Anyway, at some point during this period of sweating, cussing and wishing it weren’t so early in the day because I have a strict policy about drinking before everybody is home for the night, Captain Adventure swiped that camera with all the stealth and cunning of a ninja assassin.

And he has apparently transported it into some kind of alternate dimension, because I’m serious: I have looked everywhere. I have looked under beds, in drawers, dug through the toy boxes, checked under all the furniture and in all the boxes (of which there are many!) and behind the piano. Under piles of clothes. In the toilets. In the cupboards. Got down and crawled around the house, questing for the camera.

Hmm. I didn’t check the soundbox on the harp yet, but I think I would have heard the reverberating ‘clunk’ – the harp was right next to me.

ARGH.

Oh well. It really can’t have gone far. It’ll turn up, probably as soon as I stop looking for it. And then I can show y’all the weird armless phase of existence. And hopefully, the ‘finished’ vest, which hopefully will not look weird or armless or otherwise odd.

One hopes, anyway.

Sssssssssssinge!

Oh, man, y’all. You are not going to believe what I managed to do.

So, we’re all enjoying nice, fresh bagels. There was quite a bagel-toasting festival going on in the Den for after-school snack yesterday afternoon, as there usually is when I come home clutching twelve of the things fresh from Costco.

Being greedy hungry, I decided to go in for a second bagel. Was I punished for my gluttony? Oh yes I was…

Just as I was reaching into the toaster oven to retrieve my bagel (yes, with my dominant hand, what else?), Eldest ran up and blurted out something. I have no idea what as my memory becomes somewhat hazy right around this point, but I turned and looked at her as I replied. Immediately, I was overwhelmed by a feeling. A disturbance in the Force, if you will.

Hmm, I thought to myself. Something is Not Right…

And I turned my head back around and observed a wisp of smoke rising as I pulled my middle finger off the glowing-red element.

It was so bad a burn it did not hurt. At first. For a rather long moment, it didn’t hurt. Instinct had me standing over the sink running cold water over it, but honestly I was wondering: Was it just my fingernail that got burned? Maybe the smoke was from the bagel? Because the finger didn’t hu-

And then…it started to Hurt. Oooooooh, baby. It hurt. In that way that only burns can hurt. The cold water suddenly began to feel warm, warmer, hot. Ow, ow, OW!

For heaven’s sake, it takes a World Class Klutz to pull this off. I mean, seriously. The burn is right across the pad of my middle finger, it isn’t like I just grazed the tip of my finger on the element. This is a full-on, second degree burn right across the fleshiest part of the finger.

Anyway, I kind of…lost track of the rest of the afternoon. I meant to respond to comments from yesterday (Toilet paper: 36 rolls. Cheese: the 3 pound block was $7.80, the 5 pound bag preshredded ~$9.19 for a miniscule savings of $0.80 a pound. Gasoline: yeah, has to come out of the cash BUT! I don’t drive as much as I used to and a full tank can last me almost three weeks.) but I sort of…forgot all about it.

I also meant to bake bread. But didn’t. Forgot all about it. Bread? What’s that? Never heard of it.

Then, this morning, when it was time to make Denizen lunches…oops. One tiny sliver of heel.

Two bagel sandwiches and a two mile roundtrip walk to drop the older two off at school, I came home and got busy. Bread rising! Dinner (pork roast with radishes and chard) into the crockpot! Butter softening for cookies (we were also out of cookies CAN YOU IMAGINE?!?!)! Breakfast dishes put away!

Shape the dough into loaves, whump up cookie dough and start making cookies. All is going very, very well at this point. The last batch of cookies comes out and the bread goes in. Smooth as butter.

Did you know (you probably did) that if you get a potholder wet, it will cease to protect you from the heat of the oven and instead intensify it until it burns with the intensity of a thousand suns?

Yes, I knew that too.

But my memory retrieval system chose not to trot forth this rather valuable bit of information until after I had thrust my wet-potholder-clad hand into the oven, seized hold of the bread pan and begun pulling it out of the oven.

@*^&@(O^!!!!!!!

In case you were wondering: If you drop a pan of hot bread fresh out of the oven so that you can shove your hand between your legs and jump up and down yelling “OUCH! @*^&@*^!! FOR THE LOVE OF @*^&@^!!!!”, it makes quite an interesting ‘thump’ on Pergo but as long as the bread stays in the pan, no real lasting harm done.

To the bread, anyway…

p.s.: I discovered something even better than an ice pack for a burn. Take the ice, put it into a glass, add vodka, triple sec, cranberry and lime juices, wrap burned hand around it and take your time…

Down to only $20, and it isn’t even noon…

One word: Costco. Oh yeah. The Big Box warehouse. The place famous for bringing you the Lifetime Supply of Disposable Razors.

Today, I handed over $159.65 to the warehouse in exchange for a bunch of staples (I listed them out at the bottom – feel free to skip if it bores you to tears).

I’m having a lot of trouble adjusting to the new budget. If my budget is a bus to get us where we’re going, well, my brain got onboard, but my guts were still in the gift shop and missed the boarding call.

I keep having ‘gut feelings’ about things. Like, I have a gut feeling that I can totally afford getting pizza tonight, or I have a gut feeling that a new keyboard for my Treo is not only OK, but downright necessary, considering how often I’m using it to write things while waiting for one Denizen or another on the road.

I can afford a small amount of that kind of thing. Very small amounts. Each thing is usually under twenty bucks (negligible, right?), but kind of like the way a single drop of water is nothing to worry about but a bucketful can drown you, the twenty bucks come flowing together until at the end of the month I’m scratching my head going, “Wait, how in the world did pizza delivery end up costing us $2,521.72?”

I’ve decided to give myself the budgetary equivalent of electric shock treatment. Instead of using my credit cards, I’m getting my weekly allowance when I get groceries. At the first of the month, I get $180; each week thereafter, I get $140.

So when the register came up to $159.65, I swiped my card and got twenty bucks cash back. Twenty measly bucks. I looked at that lone twenty dollar bill and groused to myself. Well. Not entirely to myself. I may have muttered aloud a bit. Twenty @*^&@ing bucks. Ridiculous!

But it is exactly what I need to do. As I went through Costco, I was keeping a mental tab as I went. $20. $25. $35. $57. $80. I had to! I knew I only had $180 for the week, and this being the first week I have precisely zip in carryover from previous weeks!

As the mental tab was getting to be more than I had, I was putting things back. Prepackaged snacks for lunches. String cheese. Potato chips (shouldn’t be eating those anyway).

This is exactly what the cash diet is good for – it forces you to acknowledge how much you no, really have, and to act accordingly. I won’t be going into the supermarket and blowing $40 on stuff I didn’t go in there to get, purely because it’s ‘only’ $40.

I have $20. That’s it. There it is. One twenty dollar bill. And if I cheat, well. It’s like cheating a solitaire, you know? I’m cheating myself, and the family who rely on me to make it all work.

Fortunately, we have a half-full freezer, an almost full tank of gas, and good sneakers – there will be a lot more walking to and from school now, both to save gas and hopefully so that mommy can lose some of the jiggle that seems to have made itself at home around her waist.

Hopefully, next week’s grocery trip will be more of the $40 variety…

Costco Carnage

Item	Price
50# Sack of flour	$9.49
Milk (4 gal)	$9.58
Mac N Chez (15 pak)	$8.99
Ritz crackers	$6.29
Canned mushrooms	$5.49
Applesauce!	$6.39
Diet Pepsi (oh, vice!)	$8.79
Sin Tax (CA redemption)	$1.44
Ramen noodles	$4.29
12-pack bagels	$3.99
Toilet paper	$18.89
Shredded mozzarella 5#	$9.89
Shredded cheddar	$9.19
5 dozen eggs	$6.49
Dishwashing gloves (9 pair)	$5.99
Bananas	$1.30
5# Rotgut non-gourmet WOE IS ME coffee	$9.69
Babybel cheese, 28	$8.89
Yogurt	$5.99
Half-n-Half, 1/2 gal	$2.29
Butter	$6.99
Pasta sauce	$6.59
Tax	$2.72
Total	$159.65

Notes:
50# of flour is a month's worth of six to eight loaves of bread a week (I already had a 5# sack of yeast in the garage), a weekly batch of cookies for lunches and snacks, waffles, muffins, and however many pies and banana bread and whatever other fool thing I take it into my head to bake. I go through not nearly as much sugar as you might think, though – one ten pound bag will last me a couple months.

The milk, though, will be toast by next Monday. Four gallons is conservative; I actually already had a gallon and a half in the fridge. We go through a lot of milk. A lot of it.
The canned mushrooms will last me several months. So will the Ramen noodles – we don’t really eat them all that often. They’re more of a junk-food-snack for us.

I’m sure I will survive the gourmet coffee deprivation. And it will make me that much more grateful when I do manage to acquire a bag or two of Da Good Stuff.

I go through dishwashing gloves at a shocking clip. I swear, I go through a pair a week. What am I doing wrong?! Even ‘heavy duty’ gloves always seem to acquire a hole in the tip of a finger within a week or two. ARGH.

Give me a year, just one short year…

So, I’ve actually been reading again. That I have not read a single book in about a year is a sad, sad commentary on my life in general. But lately, I’ve been chewing my way (between outbreaks of Denizen warfare and things needing to be cleaned [again]) through this:



As the title no doubt gives away, the author decides to give up shopping for a year. She buys only ‘necessities’, but foregoes things like movies, eating out, and new clothes (mostly).

It’s interesting to me as much for what it’s not as what it is.

Most people who turn to this kind of extreme consumer deprivation do so because they are going through traumatic financial times. For example, they may have gotten themselves so deep in debt that the minimum payments alone could bankrupt certain small nations. (Raises hand.)

From the review on Barnes and Noble: Not Buying It is no primer on the simple life and how to live it. It's the confessions of a woman any reader can identify with: someone who can't live without French roast coffee or SmartWool socks but who has had it up to here with overconsumption and its effects on the earth and everyone who dwells there

Long ago, I went through a similar cycle of not buying it - because I had to, because I literally did not have the money. Because I had to focus on those debts and get rid of them – they were sucking our life out of us, one interest payment at a time.

Back then, the list of debts was ‘too long to list here’.

Today, I have five: Mortgage, minivan payment, car payment, loan-for-furnace, loan-for-surgery-last-year.

That’s it. And none of those loans is at over 5% interest. A far, far cry from the days when my lowest interest rate was 18%.

Everything else is paid off as it comes in. Car and home insurance bills are paid annually at renewal. The credit card I use for daily purchases is likewise paid off each month.

We are in the blessed, blessed position of having enough plus a little extra. I can go to the supermarket without checking my account balances first, but if I’m heading to Best Buy a quick reality check is definitely in order. And, we’re funding our retirement quite nicely.

The new discretionary budget (money I can spend on any fool thing I want) is a lot tighter than I’d like, though, so I find myself thinking about ways I can pay off some of those five things sooner, to put the monthly payments back into said discretionary budget.

As I’ve been pondering the ways and means, and reading Levine’s book, I find myself thinking…what could I accomplish with the resources and (more importantly) the knowledge I have now?

I know how to work the banking system. I know that I will not, in fact, curl up and die if I don’t have…a vacation, or a new pair of shoes, or gourmet coffee. (There. I said it. I will not die if I have to drink Costco coffee.) I know how to leverage what I’ve got to maximize benefit.

One year. If I spent one crummy year trying to do my personal best with what we’ve got – what could I do? Where would we be, what could we have?

Right now, my discretionary budget is $600 a month. That’s for groceries, gasoline, vacations, ballet lessons – anything that doesn’t involve a monthly bill. Not a whole lot, for a family of six. It feels like a slightly-too-tight turtleneck, frankly, and I’ve been having trouble settling into it. I’ve gotten into a habit of overbuying (and under-thinking, if I’m brutally honest with myself).

If I took one year, just 1.25% of my guesstimated lifespan, and spent it working at both economizing and tightening the overall ship…what kinds of things would become possible for us?

Just what could I do, in a single measly year?

I have a feeling it could be rather impressive.

And even…fun.

In a bizarre, household-economics-nerd kind of way…

School mess

Very Herodotus asked, Ok, I'm confused. What do you mean when you say if you are late with the forms then you have to live with whatever you got from the district? Wouldn't your kids by default go to the nearest local school? It sounds like you're saying the school district will decide what school to send your kid to, and maybe your next door neighbor's kids are at a different school?

Exactly. It isn’t random, though. What happens is simple. We have 60 openings for kindergarten per year at our school. Some years, only 45 kids are coming in and anybody who wants to go to our school – even those who technically belong at other schools, are welcomed in.

Other years, we have 75 kids who technically belong at this school – but still only 60 openings. 60 will get in, the other 15 will end up elsewhere. They start at the next school out in the ring, but if they happen to be full as well, they keep moving outward.

“Usually” you will end up at ‘your’ school. But then there is that ‘occasionally’ that happens and you end up somewhere else. If you missed the sibling deadline but hit the regular registration one, you still get in line ahead of all the folks trying to an interdistrict transfer this year – but if you missed the regular registration as well, you’re at the back of the line.

Clear as mud? Good. Glad I could help out there.

Now. Let’s go over the various schedules for fourth, second and kindergarten grades, all over which overlap but none of which are exactly-precisely in sync…

Welcome to Bureaucratville

Boo Bug starts kindergarten next year. The sibling registration packets (for those with children already enrolled in the school) were available for pickup last week.

They had to be turned in yesterday, today, or tomorrow. Three days. That’s it. Get it in on one of those three days, or pay the penalty.

Not in by tomorrow? Too bad. Get in the regular line, putz, and thank you for stopping by. (The staff at the school is actually very, very nice – but they have to be very, very firm. If they make even one tiny concession on anything, boom. That’s it. All exceptions, all the time.)

I dutifully picked up my package last week, filled out the forms, dropped off one form at the pediatrician’s office and another at the dentist (can you believe it? now we have to have a dental report on file!), vaccinations up to date, birth certificate, blah blah blah.

Today, I picked up the last thing, went over the list twice, made sure my i’s were dotted and my t’s crossed and, trembling, dared to enter {dramatic music} the school office.

Every single time, every.single.time, I have to do something for the school system, I do it wrong at least once. Usually two or three times. Eldest almost didn’t get to go to kindergarten because she was ‘short’ a vaccination. I had to get two (2) doctor’s notes explaining that she couldn’t have the fourth vaccination until such-and-so a date due to the third having been on such-and-such, and fourth could not be given blah blah blah, and I almost missed the Absolute Last And We Really Mean It! cutoff date for registration.

So it did not surprise me in the least when the nice lady stopped dead at my mortgage statement and said, “Um, OK. No. We can’t use this to verify your address. We need a PG&E bill or city water bill to prove residency.”

Because, y’all understand, my driver’s license showing this address on it AND a mortgage statement showing that I pay $X every single month for the privilege of sharing ownership of the Den with the bank is not enough to hint that PERHAPS I LIVE HERE.

**sigh**

Fortunately, she had internet access. I am a ‘paperless’ kind of person and the only reason I brought the mortgage statement in was because it was the only official-like paper statement I had, of any sort, which showed our names and address together. But as she had internet access, I was able to log in to the PG&E website and printed out the last statement and we were good.

Let the record show that, on this day in history, Mother Chaos actually got a child registered for kindergarten without having to quit the battlefield and return another day!

And also, I got it all turned in one day prior to the last day! Which is early! Which is a Personal Best and I am so proud I may have to eat a celebratory box piece of chocolate!!

Now, I told you that so I could tell you this: I felt so sorry for most of the other parents in that office.

“Why can’t I turn this in now?”
“You don’t already have a child at this school.”
“But, I want both of them to go here.”
“But neither of them are registered yet.”
{pause}
“But they’re siblings!”

Have you ever thought you were in danger of popping like a soap bubble because you were holding in your laughter so hard? Because seriously...busting out laughing right about then would probably have gotten me decked by that (now really annoyed) mom.

“How come you need a birth certificate?”
“We need proof of age.”
“Well, it says right there on the vaccination record! XX/XX/2001!”
“That isn’t proof of age – the doctor’s office doesn’t specifically…”
“BUT IT SAYS RIGHT THERE ON THE RECORD FROM THE DOCTOR! WHAT THE @*^&@* DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”
{Everyone in the office, thinking, Um, a copy of the birth certificate?}
“Sir, we are required to have a copy of her birth certificate on file.”
“@*^&@ this. @*^&@ it!!”

I feel your pain, buddy. But if Captain Adventure suddenly says @*^&@ to me, I’m gonna kick your @**. And I mean that @*^&@ing sincerely.

Why doesn’t this count? How come I can’t use this? Well, I live with my mom so the bill is in her name…but I swear I live there, too…but he turns five on December 3! C’mon, it’s one stinkin’ day!!

Not to mention all the parents who were picking up the packets today (they were available last Wednesday, but for some reason an awful lot of parents thought it was this Wednesday) and realizing they had twenty-four hours to get all the forms filled out, find birth certificates and so forth and get the pediatric and dental forms filled out and signed by their doctors and dentists, or they’d miss the window and have to live with whatever they got from the district.

None of the forms are optional. None can be turned in later. It is all or nothing. And if you goof it up? You have to wait until May and try again. The later you turn it in, the more likely you won’t get into this school, and you’ll have to bus your children all over town.

Welcome to Bureaucratville. Please remember to use blue ink on all your forms, make copies of everything and do not leave the office without a signature on the little slip of paper that says we took possession of the whole thing – otherwise, when it mysteriously goes missing, your child will be sent to the School of the Forgotten, with all the other kids whose parents forgot to do some obscure thing by the 14th of Octember.

Thank you for stopping by, and have a nice day.

Charmed again…

OK, these booties have just charmed the socks off me. Click on the picture to get to the pattern at Knitty.com. Which has more pictures! YAY!



The Knitting 4 Children group strikes again!! I got the link to this (and a few other delectable babies things) in the digest. And now, of course, I’m going to be suffering yet another bout of promiscuous behavior…NO! Must. Finish. Vest. First.

Good news for YOU, maybe!

So I just got off the phone with the pediatrician a little bit ago. We now have the official diagnosis: Contact dermatitis, absolutely hands-down-no-question.

No new bumps, no fever, no itching, what spots there were getting smaller and paler without any eruptions or lesions. T’aint chickenpox, ‘tis probably something in the tub.

Which means that I am guilty-guilty-guilty and it is all my fault. Hmm. Where did I put that hair shirt of mine…

So after I hung up the phone, I turned to my beloved offspring and announced, “Good news, guys! You can go back to school tomorrow! You are neither contagious nor sick!”

Eldest looked me dead in the eye and deadpanned, “Good news for YOU, maybe!”

You know, it really sucks when they're wittier than you...

How I Know He Ain’t Deaf

Sometimes, I find myself wondering if Captain Adventure actually does have a hearing problem. You know, like, maybe he’s deaf or something. Because you say things to him, and he just…looks at you.

And doesn’t respond appropriately.

“Come here.” {Backs up until he runs into a corner}

“Don’t you throw that!” {Better duck}

“Pick that up! Pick. It. Up. Captain Adventure! Stop! You come here and pick that…argh!” {Yeah, you know exactly what happened there.}

The way he babbles. The way he says “daddy” and it doesn’t mean, you know, daddy. That he won’t say ‘juice’ or ‘up’ or ‘help’, no matter how much he wants or needs any of those things. Sometimes, I start saying to myself, “Well, maybe he does have a hearing problem! Maybe he doesn’t hear clearly! Maybe he needs hearing aids!”

Because seriously – sometimes even when he really is thirsty, he won’t respond to the word ‘juice’ in any way. He’ll just stand there and look at you, giving you absolutely no clue about what he thinks of the idea of juice…

So just now, I was asking if he wanted a snack. “Do you want snack? Captain Adventure want snack, now? Snack? Do. You. Want. SNACK?”

And he’s looking at me with the blankest expression. Almost imbecilic. (Yeah. The kid who yesterday built a town out of blocks that I swear my five year old could not have duplicated.)

We stared at each other. Then I turned my back to him and said, very quietly and with no particular emphasis, “Would Captain Adventure like a cookie?”

“YEAH!” And off he charged for the kitchen, where he stood before the cookie jar quivering with glee. He pointed at the cookie jar and grinned at me and clapped his hands.

Ay-yup.

I’m gonna call that a negative on the hearing loss thing…

I learn something every day

I just set a very annoying password on my Treo. It is going to annoy me every time I want to make a call, download email, or hand over the phone to a Denizen to play PDA Playground while we wait in a doctor’s office.

Because I just learned something about what kind of bills you can end up with if your phone is stolen.

Ten Steps to Cell Phone Security: This [complaints to the BBB] is mostly due to incorrect billing, confusing fees, unexpected charges, and deceptive contracts. These can certainly add up, but I was shocked to learn that the most significant -- even devastating -- monetary damage can occur when your cell phone is lost or stolen…San Francisco resident Wendy Nguyen was even more shocked to receive a bill for $26,000 after her cell phone was unknowingly stolen before she left for an overseas vacation. Cingular held her responsible for charges incurred after the phone was taken, up until the time Wendy discovered the theft and called the carrier.

Interestingly, it seems the providers pursue the folks who lost their phones until they manage to get television coverage about it. The industry says it tries hard to keep customers happy. But Cingular pursued Wendy Nguyen for months for $26,000. Only after she told her story to CBS station KPIX-TV in San Francisco did Cingular drop the charges.

Uh-huh. What a pain in the butt. Now, password protecting your device isn’t a ‘get out of jail free’ card. If what the thief is after is free phone use, s/he can take out your SIM and put it into another device and be off and running. But that will take a little more time, which gives you a chance to get the service cut off before any charges are incurred.

And shame on the industry for doing this. It isn’t bad enough that they sign you up for two year contracts every time you contact them in any way, they also have to make sure you’re fully punished for criminal activity you wanted no part of? What’s that about? In what way is that good business? Inviting Federal oversight to complicate your business? Encouraging consumers to demand same from their duly appointed representatives? In exchange for profits you probably won’t get from consumers who are going to get wide publicity in regards to your evilness for their plight?

Idiots.

The first day of the rest of my life

Boo Bug suddenly walked up to me yesterday afternoon, pulled up her shirt and said, “Hey mommy, I’ve got a dot on my tummy!”

Why, so she did. It looked like a little pimple. Hmm. Odd, but not crazy-odd.

Just as I was about to get up and start making dinner, Danger Mouse came into the office and said, “I’ve got dots on my tummy. And they itch.”

Whaaaaaaaat?

Sure enough, she has half a dozen largish ‘pimples’ on her tummy. And then she informed me that she also had some Down There.

By golly – she has quite a few Down There.

I ran out to the playroom, collared Boo Bug and said, “I want to check your dots.”

One dot on tummy. Three under her underwear.

Oh, crap.

Inspection revealed that Captain Adventure likewise has a few ‘pimples’ on his tummy but Eldest is free and clear.

We went immediately to their pediatrician, who said, “Ummmm…well, it could be contact dermatitis, or, it could be chickenpox.”

ARGH.

Apparently, the chickenpox they can still get after vaccination does not behave like the chickenpox of my youth. There may or may not be fever. There may or may not be massive quantities of dots spreading like wildfire over all their skin. There may or may not be sore throat, headache, or really any other symptom at all.

Adding to our uncertainty is the fact that these particular three Denizens take baths together, while Eldest bathes alone, thank you. It is entirely possible that these three all encountered something in the tub, maybe I didn’t rinse the cleanser thoroughly enough (great, yet another thing to feel guilty about) or perhaps they used a new soap or who knows really.

**sigh**

You know…when you start a new job, you get…a little ‘welcome aboard’ party. A new nameplate for your cubicle wall. A walk around being introduced to people. Hey! Sometimes you get taken out for lunch!

Me, I get itchy tummy-dots of mysterious origin, possibly contagious, possibly not.

But it isn’t really bothering me. Because! I don’t have to email anybody about it.

Hello, yes, I’m going to be encumbered with four children who may or may not have chickenpox. Yes, I’m aware this is about the eighteenth time this year. And that the average number of days per month is four. This is about weekly. Yes. I’m aware of that. I do math for a living, I understand how averages work. Thank you for pointing out the bloody frickin’ obvious. It makes it so much easier for me to deal with the fact that my kids may or may not have chickenpox and are in any case itchy and miserable to know that you’re ‘concerned’ about how often my kids are sick.

Go ahead and be sick, little ones. Get it out of your systems. I officially have nothing better to do than be with you.

Let’s make waffles for breakfast. Sure. We’ve got time.

Plenty of it.

Hallelujah, amen.

My Hero!

OK, so, there’s this preschool show called Higgleytown Heroes {warning: music will play}. Obviously, for the last year it hasn’t been a part of my life – no Denizens have been home when it’s on and for some inexplicable reason, I haven’t put it on for my own entertainment. (Can’t imagine why not.)

Today, Boo Bug (who got up ridiculously early) and I watched an episode.

So they had this ‘biggest tallest longest’ festival. And they wanted to have the longest scarf. So Grandma whipped out her knitting needles (ok, see, they had my attention right there) (and by the way, Grandma knits faster than a machine) and started making the scarf.

Then she ran out of yarn.

“Someone special, who could it be…this job’s too big for you and me…we need help but never fear-o! This is a jooooooooob…for a HIGGLYTOWN HERO!”

And who should burst through the door but a shearer, with a sheep clutched under her arm. With an Aussie accent, no less!

I ABOUT FELL OUT OF MY CHAIR, I LAUGHED SO HARD.

I watched a guy shearing last year and was so impressed it made me wish I had sheep. Or perhaps made me willing to entertain the (passing) fancy of keeping sheep. Because this guy was not only extremely good with the animals, but took that fleece off them with beautifully precise passes. I watched him do four animals (one of them extremely nervous) without a single nick AND YET without massacring the fleece to the point where it is useless to a spinner, hand or mill.

MY HERO!!!!!

{!SWOON!}

You know we of the Woolly Faith have ‘arrived’ when our heroes make preschool programming. BOOYAH!

Why I love living here and now

My Scooba battery died.

I had to wash the kitchen and playroom floors {gasp!} myself.

That’s right! Your faithful correspondent was sent back to the Stone Age and had to get out the Hoover Floormate, and find the Lysol solution, and then push the Floormate back and forth, hither and yon, across the whole floor…herself…and it did not then bring me a fruity drink with a little umbrella in it and murmur, Madam, I have finished the kitchen…if it pleases you, I will now take myself upstairs and scrub the children’s bathroom floor… so that I could wave my hand languidly and say, “Make it so, Scooba dear, make it so…”

I was grumbling to myself. Did I have any idea (I asked myself, rhetorically) how much I didn’t want to do this? I mean, really! My mouth is still killing me, and when I bend over (say, to unload the dishwasher) it just throbs and throbs and I’m pretty darned sure that mopping the kitchen floor with the Floormate isn’t going to help any too much and wah wah whine whine complain complain.

But as I was pouring the solution into the tank and plugging the monster in, I had already moved on to thinking how darned glad I am that I live here, and now, with these household machines to help me deal with the mundanities of life.

It took fifteen minutes for me to thoroughly scrub about four hundred square feet of Pergo. Scrubbed, and dried, and ready to walk on again.

Fifteen minutes, and the movie-theater like coating was removed. The black spots from shoes and the fly-trap like areas where sippy cups had leaked were gone. The dirt was lifted. The floor was clean enough for a baby to crawl on.

I like here and now. I really do. The dishwasher is working on the dirty dishes, the Floormate took care of the filthy floors, tomorrow the washing machine will tumble the clothes clean and the dryer will fluff them nicely.

Hmm. I wonder if anybody is working on a folding-and-putting-away robot…

Meanwhile, in the Land of the Lost

Let’s talk about something other than my dental angst, shall we? Oh yes, do let’s.

I finished the baby sweater last weekend! Well, except for the buttons, because once again – I don’t like any of the fourteen million I already own and must make a special trip for them. (sigh):



I love the color pattern. I love the look of the seed stitch.

And I never, ever want to do that much seed stitch again. (Seed stitch is knit one, purl one – like ribbing, only on the other side you do the opposite of what you would have done to get a rib so instead you get something that looks like little ‘seeds’, hence the name. Got that? Good. You speak ‘Tama on Dental-Angst-Mitigating-Vicodin’ quite well. Quiz later. Carry on.)

Construction-wise, this was a fairly easy knit. Classic neck-down construction, with the sleeves picked up and knit straight from the body in the round. I like that on baby sweaters – it’s a small thing, but I like not having a seam down the arms. Seams can rub, even when you’re using soft yarns. No seam, no chafed baby arms. Good deal.

But I don’t know I if I’m actually going to make the other two on the list to this same pattern. The seed stitch got very tedious after a while, and frankly…well, I like the ‘clean lines’ look of this, but suddenly I have a wild hankering for more color. We’ll see if it passes…if not, I’ll come up with a Plan (Pattern?) B for the twins.

That done, I finally got back to the Celtic Lattice vest and by golly have cranked out a bit of yardage today. Seeing as how every time I stand up and move around my entire head threatens to explode, just sitting in my chair watching the television, trying to avoid being smacked by a rampaging toddler (he isn’t “hitting me”, by the way – he’s just enthusiastically showing me things) and quietly knitting seems like an entirely sensible thing to be spending the whole entire day on. (Whoops. Sorry. Angst showing again.) (Here look! A picture! Not of a tooth! Or imploding head! YAY!)



Now, this little darling is pure pleasure to knit. The pattern is just interesting enough to keep me awake (even though I slept like @*^& last night and feel rather droopy today), but not so interesting that I can’t find my place when Captain Adventure pulls my post-it note placeholders off the pattern.

This one involves steeks. That funny non-cable down the front is the front steek – I’ll be cutting that right up the middle to make it a ‘vest’ rather than a ‘sleeveless sweater’. There are also steeks for each arm, and in about four hours (or so) I’ll be putting in neck steeks as well.

The neck steeks make me happy. They mean that, instead of going to ‘flat’ knitting (knit across, purl back), I can continue in the round. While I wouldn’t say that purling is my sworn enemy or anything the way some knitters do…it’s not my favorite, either. I find that my hands tire more quickly with purling, and when I’m doing color work it becomes a pain in the tookus. I have trouble seeing what color ought to go where and then when I’m knitting back, I’m constantly having to drop-n-fix stitches (this is where you intentionally drop a stitch which is the wrong color, and pick the stitch back up with the correct color from the strand – another great reason to make sure you strand loosely across the back of your work!).

You know what else would make me happy? Pizza. Pizza sounds really, really good right now. Hmm. I wonder if I have any cash to pay for a delivery...because see, not only does pizza sound good, it also sounds like ‘not cooking’, which sounds like ‘not getting out of my chair more than absolutely necessary’ which sounds not just good, but great.

Ah, sloth! What a marvelous state to be in…

By ‘great’, I mean ‘awful’

I was dragged kicking, screaming and crying by a determined husband duly reported to the endodontist’s office yesterday morning, ready to have my abscess fixed.

It went great.

And by ‘great’, I mean ‘awful’.

Apparently, I am immune to triazolam. One hour before my appointment, I dutifully downed the ‘maximum’ dose of this stuff. This was supposed to make me ‘drowsy’ and ‘relaxed’ and otherwise not squirming around in the chair like a squirrel on a triple venti macchiato with eighteen sugar packets in it.

One hour after I took the pills, I said to myself, OK, now, granted, I am often somewhat resistant to sleep aids and also EXTREMELY anxious right now but, uh…shouldn’t I be feeling…I dunno…A LITTLE MORE WASTED RIGHT NOW?!

Because people, the ‘wasted factor’ was negative. I was about as far from wasted as I have ever been in my entire life. I was downright hyper. And nervous. And the more I realized how anti-wasted I was, the more nervous I got.

The (devilishly handsome) endodontist came in and cheerfully asked how I was feeling. I cheerfully said “Oh, I feel fine. Ha! Ha! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! ha…”

Now, you must understand: this was nervous laughter. The kind that makes dentists freeze in panic. It is the laughter of a patient who may at any moment break down into outright hysterics, start screaming or kicking or biting or $DEITY ONLY KNOWS WHAT ELSE.

So he looked at me anxiously.

“Did you take the triazolam?” he asked.

“Yes, ha! ha!”

“When did you take it?”

“One hour ago! Ha! Both ha of ha them ha! HA! HAHAHA! Yeah! Ha! I don’t heh heh think they’re uh HA! working too well…HA! HAHAHAHAHAHA!”

“Ooooooooooookay,” he said slowly, looking very closely into my face. I think he was doing a kind of DUI test on me. “You’re probably a little resistant to the drug itself. This happens all the time, and what’ll happen is this: Once we get you all numb and get working, once you realize that you’re not feeling anything, then you’ll go ahead and relax and it’ll kick in and you’ll be fine.”

He said this with great confidence. I wanted to believe him, because I did not want to spend the next hour or so working at not freaking out. I wanted to spend it daydreaming. I wanted the triazolam to do all that work for me.

“Oh, OK! HA! Haha, yes, ha, I’m sure you’re right…yes, I’m sure you’re right. I had a cousin who was right once, you know, I mean, he used to race turtles. Which is nothing like dentistry of course, but the turtles used to get nervous sometimes so he’d blah blah blah…”

No, I didn’t really go on about turtle-racing cousins. But believe me, it was that absurd. I became aware of some idiot’s voice, babbling away inanely, and suddenly realized it was my own voice doing that.

Unfortunately, I can’t blame the triazolam. I do that when I’m anxious, with or without drugs in my system. I babble when I am extremely comfortable, or extremely agitated. Everybody who knows me in person wishes I would be just slightly uncomfortable or a lot less high strung, I’m sure.

ANYWAY.

I have to say, all the various kinds of numbing agents didn’t bother me much. Boy, have they come a long way in that department! They used a numbing gel first and after that? I only had one wee little squirmy moment as he injected eight! vials of various deals in there so he could take my mouth apart without getting kicked clear across the room.

Then he went away forever. Or fifteen minutes. Which, in Dental Time, is about six lifetimes.

I knit on my sock, trying not to dissolve into hysterics at my utter lack of sedation. I was so hyped, I got halfway through the heel flap, even though one of the Cocktail of Numbness had contained adrenaline, which he informed me might make me feel as though I were having a heart or panic attack.

Uh, yeah. Yeah, it did. And I’m hoping that wasn’t a lie to get me through an actual panic attack because…the triazolam still wasn’t kicking it.

It didn’t kick in as he started the cutting. Which didn’t hurt. I began meditating. “…completely relaxed…” Start at the toes, release and relax, release and relax…

It didn’t kick in as all the sanding and other ‘rrrrrrrrrowr! rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrOOOOOOOwr! Rr-rr-rr-rrr-rrrooooooooWWWWooWWWWowwww!’ noises commenced. Which also didn’t hurt. Except in my psyche, which promptly went into overdrive. I had to close my eyes and work at mediating – which of course is completely not how you mediate. RELEASE AND RELAX! RELEASE AND RELAX! @*^&@*^@ IT ALL TO @*^&@, RELEASE AND RELAX!!!!!

It didn’t kick in as he said, “OK, no, the root looks good…”

Or while there was a little more scraping and rrowwring and pushing and pulling.

Or when he added, “Hmm, well, can I get some air on this?”

Or when he went, “{mutter} microscope {something} {sigh}…”

Or when he grunted, “Well, OK. Let’s just get that irrigated and then we’ll patch it together.”

It was at this point that he began to explain that the one thing we really didn’t want to see was what he had found: the afflicted root of Tooth #3 has a fine crack running right down the middle of it.

There is nothing more to be done for Tooth #3. Its wild ways have caught up with it. It will be nothing but a bacteria-farm until such time as it is removed.

@*^&@.

So he sewed everything back up and said, “OK, so, we’ll call you in a few days to see how you’re doing! And we’ll go from there! I’ll give you some options about what you can do next!”

I woke up this morning with a face that felt like it had been kicked by a peeved horse. And a very bad attitude. Because having a face that feels like it has been kicked by a peeved horse will do that to you, you know.

Especially if your two year old proceeds to whack you right on the stitches with a metal train.

Which reminds me, there will be a two year old boy for sale on eBay shortly. Very cute, low mileage, comes with his own train set, sippy cups and three month supply of diapers – reasonable starting price, free shipping!! BID EARLY BID OFTEN!