Uuuuuuuuuuuungh ANGRY!!

The burning ball of fire is in the sky – again! Uuuuuuuuuungh does not know why it return, but Uuuuuuuuuungh want it go bye-bye. Uuuuuuuuuungh say, “Uuuuuuuuuungh!!!” at stupid noise-beeping-thing-with-flashy-lights this morning, but it do no good! {beep beep beep}, again, again, again!!! Uuuuuuuuuungh need big club, that what…

Uuuuuuuuuungh, in case you were wondering, is my new name. I respond to all stimuli with this sound now, apparently. When I don’t use @*^&@, or even ^&@^*!!!, which while in some ways more satisfying also take up more energy – so I tend to stick with Uuuuuuuuuungh.

Yes. The vacation recovery is going splendidly, why do you ask?

Well. Sort of splendidly. This is the weirdest thing ever. One of my vices is acrylic nails. I’ve been one of those women who starts whining vigorously that she simply must get to the nail salon for a fill every two weeks for going on fifteen years now. (Gads. Really? {counts on fingers} Yup. About that. Wow.)

I was a bit overdue for a fill thanks to the sojourn in hell vacation, but not totally outside the window of reasonability. I noticed one (1) crack in one (1) nail last night. I swore a little bit and resolved that at earliest opportunity (uh, about Friday-ish) I’d make a point of zipping in for the redeeming fill.

Then this morning while making breakfast, I swear I am not lying to you, six of my ten fake nails broke and/or popped off.

“Stunned” is too mild a word. I mean, the first one I was like, “Oh, bummer. That cracked one popped off!”

Then the second one went and I said, “Dude, that’s not right. Stupid things…I must have hit those two fingers on something…”

By the time the sixth one cracked in half widthwise for I swear absolutely no reason, I gave up, got the medieval implements of fingernail torture and removed the last four without further comment. (Note that I do not say ‘without further whining’ – there was whining and lots of it.)

Nine years, and I have never had something like this happen before. Sure, I’ve had one or even two break and/or pop off between fills, but this? This was Twilight Zone material. I’ve been casting back in my mind for hours now, asking myself what I may have gotten onto my hands that is different from stuff I get on my hands all the time. The only thing that was different last week was that I did wash my hands about eleventy-gazillion times, a full one gazillion times more than the average week, because of the theme parks.

I swear I’m not a true germophobe, but honestly when you see some kid wiping his nose with his hand and then putting it all over everything he comes near…ewwwwwwww! Where’s the soap? Pass the Purell! GET ME A CAN OF LYSOL, STAT!!!

So as I was applying a layer or three of nail lacquer over my raw nail beds, I found myself wondering why in the world we women DO these things to ourselves. I mean, I know why I do the acrylic nails: I use them as picks on my harp. But why do we dye our hair (and have to keep on doing it, every six to eight weeks, like good little drones)? Why do we slather our skin with oils and unguents that lie shamelessly claim they will keep us looking young or ‘refinish’ our skin or what-have-you? Why do we smear our faces with artificial color as if $DEITY hadn’t made us fine enough?!

Why do 6” heels even exist? C’mon. Why?!

I really want to know why I own any makeup at all. Lay it on me. Why? First of all, I about never actually wear it. I buy it, wear it for a few days, and then shove it in a drawer. I ought to just send money to the companies but take no product. It would have the same net effect: I still am wearing no makeup, only this time I don’t have a drawer full of crap I’m not wearing nor ever going to wear because even on special occasions, no matter how romantic, I don’t remember the freakin’ stuff.

Also, when I wear it for more than a few hours at a stretch d’you know what happens?

Chemosis. You know, where your eyeballs suddenly start glowing red, itch and burn and water and otherwise look horrid AND THEN JUST TO MAKE IT THAT MUCH BETTER the membrane ‘skin’ covering your eyeball puffs up and swells away from the eyeball itself, making you look like a grotesque travesty of a human being?

Yeah, that. If eyeshadow hits my eyeball, BANG! Vampire time. Most makeup bases, too. And we won’t even discuss mascara.

So why do I own the stuff? Why did I just buy more eyeshadow?

Idiot.

**sigh**

Oh well. I’ll give me the nails, but it really is probably time to put the kibosh on the snakeoil.

And I will do so, just as soon as I grow up.

…oh dear…

What fun!! Let’s never do it again!!

We don’t usually take vacations-as-such around here. We take a weekend here, a long weekend there. We take the whole horde places fairly rarely, and usually only for one or possibly two nights. Thanksgiving at Grandma’s in LA, for example, or the annual 4th of July BBQ at the uncle’s house (also in LA) (because my husbands ginormous family mostly lives down there) (seriously – the in-law portion of the family? ginormous. I still have trouble with which cousin belongs to what branch of the family tree and also one of my sister in laws has four boys and I have never once NOT EVEN ONCE gotten the names of the older two correct on the first try, which is mightily embarrassing but there it is).

ANYWAY.

This year, we took an actual Vacation As Such. Two seven hour trips on I-5, nine days, eight nights, and OH MY GAWD WHAT WAS I THINKING?!?!

We have a lot of family and friends down there in sunny Los Angeles, but their homes are on the >>>small<<< side. They are delightfully hospitable and when we go down for one or two nights we often spend them fidgeting on the futon and hissing “stop kicking me!” and “get off me!” at our children, but for, you know, this longer eight night visit involving multiple activities several hours apart, I thought a hotel would probably be best.

Ha! HAhahahahahaha. Best. Yes. Well. We got a one bedroom suite, which was actually about the same size as my first apartment. I spent a lot of time this last week appreciating what I have here in the Den, because six people sharing 600 square feet of hotel room with one bathroom and an ‘efficiency’ kitchenette was an…interesting social experiment.

Most uttered phrase of the week: “Will you PLEASE just SIT DOWN SOMEWHERE?!”

Housekeeping was shocking indifferent. Seriously. They had a daily checklist of five (5) items. Make beds. Change towels. Restock bathroom. Restock kitchen supplies (coffee and dishwasher soap packet). And the rather essential ‘take out the trash’ part.

They had eight tries to do all five things, and not once NOT EVEN ONE TIME did they do all five. My personal favorite was our very last night, when we staggered home at midnight to discover that they had taken all the towels out of the room and left us with about three washcloths.

Holy Moses.

However, it was better than the futon, and if our stay had been shorter we might not have noticed the Minimalist Housekeeping and thought it was just fine. Shorter stays are like that. You don’t have as much time to become irritated with things, like the dripping bathtub faucet or the fact that in order to get a replacement box of Kleenex you have to threaten the manager with bodily harm. We had two kids on one bed, one kid on the sleeper sofa, and Captain Adventure was in his portable crib (when he wasn’t sleeping on mommy) while we took up the other double bed.

Where we proceeded to hiss at each other, “Stop kicking me!” and “Get. Off. Me!” because we have a king bed at home and have become accustomed to being able to sleep alone-together.

The kids being the ages they are, there was nothing restful about the whole experience. Don’t get me wrong – it was fun and there were a lot of wonderful moments I will surely treasure forever (as soon as my feet stop throbbing and that weird twitch over my left eye goes away), but dudes.

Seriously. Exhausting.

See, at home, we each have our own spaces, and can retreat to them when we’d really like a little break from each other. The Den is set up for the children. I can go to the bathroom without worrying that I’m going to come out and find blood all over the floors and the children missing. Well. Pretty much I can. For the most part.

We have our routines, and our conveniences. If somebody throws up on their shirt, I can take care of it efficiently. If somebody else wants to color, it isn’t a four day expedition to find markers and some paper.

And if we need clean towels I know where to grab them. Or can throw some into the washer and have clean, soft, warm, non-chlorine-scented towels in a matter of about 90 minutes, start to finish. (Express wash setting, people – it’s a good thing.)

It isn’t that normal life isn’t a lot of work and that I don’t sometimes come to the end of the day and say to myself, “Dang. That was a hard day!” It’s just that…nine consecutive days of non-stop Denizen wrangling and having to dig around for everything from park tickets to crayons while paying about four times as much for everything from coffee to soda crackers really took the starch out of me.

Also, I become irrationally anxious when faced with crowded and/or loud and/or distracting situations and tend to blame my husband for disasters that are unlikely to actually happen. (Please note the word ‘irrationally’, above.)

Going to the family party at the house with the pool: Mommy is nervous wreck because she is sure that daddy is NOT paying close enough attention and at least one child will drown.

Going to Disneyland with not only our four but also two ‘extra’ children: Mommy is nervous wreck because she is sure daddy is NOT paying close enough attention and at least one child will become forever lost.

Going to friend’s house for the day with the four children plus said friend’s two children: Mommy is nervous wreck because she is sure daddy is NOT paying close enough attention and at least one child will run into the street and be killed and/or at least one child will manage to break something priceless and/or at least one child will go into the backyard and get mauled by the (completely friendly and not prone to mauling) dogs.

I do not know why I have this deep-seated fear that trusting my spouse to pay enough attention to his children to prevent disaster from striking is sure to bring catastrophe down upon us. He is overall a very attentive father and shares most of my concerns about drowning, burning, falling, being run over by vehicles of various sorts and so forth.

But I become anxious when we are in crowded and/or chaotic situations and he does not, which somehow translates in my mind as ‘not paying attention’ because it is SO OBVIOUS that we should indeed be very, very anxious. Very anxious. Not being anxious must mean you are not aware of the MORTAL PERIL we are all in at this moment.

Yes. It is very difficult, being me.

ANYWAY.

It was about a restful as preparing for final exams in five classes while working full time and having two children in diapers. And it was all go-go-go right up until the very last moment! After checking out of the Hotel of Minimalist Housekeeping (where, I have just realized, we left a full package of Oreos AND another of Pepperidge Farms cookies, WAH!), we took the children into Disney’s California Adventure. We did just about every ride in the park and snagged late afternoon reservations at Ariel’s Grotto so we could pay way too much for decent but not spectacular food dine under the sea with the Disney princesses before doing the final ‘OK, now you can pick a toy’ and heading for home.

They all yelled and sang and carried on for about the first six Advils two hours of the drive home. With frequent reprises.

It is truly astonishing how much noise four young children can make in an enclosed space…say, a minivan…and for how long they can keep it up, and also how often they can drum up yet another round of it.

We were so tired we practically wept when we pulled into our own driveway late last night (or, arguably, very early this morning), threw the children in the general direction of their beds and fell into our own like vampires hitting their coffins at dawn. I have vague memories of running around turning the water heater and air conditioner back on, and I may have kissed my sheets because they did not smell like chlorine, and that I may possibly have declared my undying love for my own bedroom and that I had forgotten how clean the Den is, and well-stocked with clean towels. And how large. And how altogether cozy and comfortable and lovely it is.

The vacation was great fun.

Let’s not ever do it again.

Life, interrupted

Vacation. Children. Hotel room coffee.

Can’t deal.

Write later.

Send caffeine.

Oh my {censored}!

No. WAY!!!! And here I’ve always striven to maintain a ‘G’ kind of rating because, ya know, my mom visits here sometimes. Gee, I wonder quietly to myself, what kind of WILD AND ALSO CRAZY things have I been writing lately, which would make this site potentially dangerous to the delicate psyche and morality of the 17-and-under set…

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

poop (4x) knife (3x) shoot (2x) hurt (1x)

Ah. I see. Yes. Poop is, indeed, extremely damaging to the psyche.

Trust me to know all about that.

Two hats for Thursday

In my continuing efforts to shirk housework add to the national preemie hat supply, I made two hats today.

The first one was an old standard: the petal hat. I’ve had this pattern in my binder of printed-off-the-Internet-patterns for about…oh geez…eight years or so? It’s a simple deal, scaled down slightly for the preemies, worked back and forth and then seamed (feh – I am really over the seaming-hats thing). The ‘scalloped’ edge is a natural by-product of the lace pattern, and the finished thing has always made me think of a tulip:

So I finished that one, did the dishes (again), rotated the laundry (again), set the Scooba washing the kitchen floor (again) and found myself contemplating what if (again) (it was apparently déjà vu day in the Den today).

What would this hat look like (I asked myself, firmly ignoring the small voice inside my head that said if I didn’t get clean sheets back on all the beds before bedtime I would be very much upset with myself later) if I made it more…flower-ish? And did it in the round instead of back-n-forth? On smaller needles?

Say, switched to green at the crown and maybe did an i-cord at the top like a stem?

So, to get out of cleaning the bathrooms satisfy my artistic curiosity, I tried it out. It looks like this:

Or on a ‘baby’ head, like this:

I intentionally made the stem on the short side to make it harder for Baby to accidentally get hold of it and pull off the hat, or choke on it.

It amuses me far more than it has any right to do. But then, I’m still lusting to make the tulip toes booties from Knitty’s Summer 2006 issue. So perhaps it is possible I have some kind of ‘flower’ thing going.

Doldrums, caffeine, lost teeth and best-laid plans

People, I can darn near set my watch by the 2:00 doldrums. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing. I could be running away from a rabid alligator, scrambling for my life through the Everglades, and yet, come 2:00…zzzzzzzzz…so…tired…want…nap…

It does not help that last night, I went to bed at a darned decent hour, and then woke up two hours later with hot flashes and feeling like I was going to hurl. Which I did not. Which somehow pissed me off.

I don’t claim this is a particularly rational response to not throwing up in the middle of the night, but there it was. Look here, body! If you’re going to get me out of bed in the middle of the night for puking, AT LEAST PUKE! Don’t do this ‘no, just kidding, we’re just nauseous’ thing to me!!

Fortunately, I have learned to get everything I really want done done before 2:00. Anything else I might get done between 2:00 and bedtime is just icing.

So to perk myself up a little this afternoon (it doesn’t work, but I live in a state of eternal hopefulness) I made myself a quick triple lowfat mocha…what? Yes. I know that it is approximately a million degrees outside. BELIEVE ME, I know – all the Denizens are trapped inside with their dear mama today due to the searing heat outside. But, well…I believe this will explain better than a thousand words:

I am 85% Addicted to Coffee

See, some people would consider this to be ‘significantly addicted’. Personally, I think it means, ‘still have 15% worth of wriggle room’.

I could quit any time I want. I just don’t wanna. Nyah.

ANYWAY.

So I’m making my mocha and am approaching the all-important ‘milk frothing’ stage when Boo Bug suddenly calls from upstairs, “Mommy, where are you?”

“Down here.” Oy. Please tell me you’re not about to tattle on somebody…

“Where?”

“Down. Here.” Mommy hasn’t had her afternoon coffee yet, darling, do not irritate mommy or she may sell you to the gypsies. Who do NOT have cable!!

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Makin’ coffee.” Writing an aria. Chatting with the pope. Solving world hunger. Geez!

“Oh. Can you…stop?”

Oh great. Now, this probably means that Captain Adventure is doing something horrid, like stuffing all the toilet paper into the bathtub or drinking toilet water or something like that.

“Why?” I ask, cautiously.

“Because I think it might be time to pull my tooth out now,” she replied calmly, and walked in pointing at her loose tooth, which is now dangling by the merest thread.

This, people, is her first loose tooth. For her to be so calm is truly miraculous – this is the same child who once screamed and carried on so violently about a tiny splinter in a park that she literally drove another mother and her offspring away, the scene being too laden with sorrow for her to bear (rookie!).

“Wow,” I said. “Let me see…”

One slight anxious whimper and ping! The tiny little tooth was in my hand. Boo Bug ran off to examine her new empty space and I rinsed the tooth carefully, marveling at how tiny and perfect it was. Her babyhood, in my palm…my little Boo, heading off to kindergarten in a little over a month, my sweet little baby losing her teeth…hmm…I don’t suppose she could lose the darkened one I almost knocked out of her head next…? Because I hate it when people notice that darker tooth and say, “Oh, honey, did you hit your mouth or something?” and she turns up her beautiful little cherub face and cheerfully says, in her sweet little voice, “No, mommy hit me in the face with her knee!!”

…and then…

They look at me.

Please, dear $DEITY, let that @*^&@ing dark brown front tooth be the next to go, thank you hallelujah amen.

So we had all due excitement and tried to call daddy at work and got his voice mail (drat) and agreed that the tooth fairy would be most pleased by the cleanliness of the tooth and the obvious good care taken of it whilst in her mouth and then as the excitement died down I realized I’d neglected my coffee.

I mixed it up anyway. Because a person with an 85% caffeine addiction does not let espresso go to waste, even if it has to go into microwaved milk.

When I returned to my desk, the architect had sent us an email regarding our permanently-stalled plans saying, “I can finish the floor and the floor beams, but I can’t do the calculations on the roof. You need a structural engineer for that part.”

Here, let me translate that: “This is going to cost you yet more money before you ever even pick up a hammer.”

This is why I was so adamant about not allowing the husband to take a sledgehammer to any part of the Den. This old hen has pecked around in this particular poop before. I know how these things go with us: We jump in with both feet before we know what, exactly, we’re jumping into, and then we climb out of the poop saying, “Oh. Uh. Heh-heh. That, uh, that was poop, huh?” “Yes, dear, I do believe it was.”

We’ve already got a little bit of poop in the form of the storage shed, a $160 monthly expense incurred months ago when we were planning to sell the Den. You know, before we realized that selling right now would be next to impossible and that we’d have to wait about sixteen years before getting an offer due to market saturation? And high foreclosure counts? Meaning that you could get this same house for pennies on the dollar at the county courthouse?

You see the problem.

ANYWAY.

I just want to bring all our stuff home from the storage shed, put it back where it damned well belongs, and relax about it for a while. I have a gut feeling that this project is on permanent hold at this point, and really I’d rather not make myself any crazier than need be about it.

In somewhat related news, anybody who ever utters these words: “Hey! Don’t put that box in there! You might scratch the bed!” ought to have the keys to their Ram 350000000 taken from his hand, be whumped upside the head with them, forced into a Gremlin and told to keep his pasty-white behind O-U-T of a seriously red-blooded, hard-working, manly-man vehicle like a pickup truck. Seriously. It defiles the good name of the pickup truck, having little girly-men prancing around worrying that there might be a {gasp!} scratch in the bed.

{deadpan} Oh. The unmitigated horror. A pickup truck with a scratch in the bed. Somebody call 911. {/deadpan}

Sorry. I digress. I mean! (Sorry, here we go again…) Sometimes a person might be somewhat irrational about shiny things that become, well, unshiny, even if by design they are going to be un-shined. I’ve done it myself, most notably when I got all upset over a throwing knife getting scratched during target practice.

Yes, really.

It was not one of my more sensible moments.

“Hey, I just threw this knife with as much force as I could muster into that block of wood, and it got scratched!” Duh. Ya THINK?! But still, it was shiny and new and when I yanked it out and there was a big old scratch down it, I went, “Awwwww….it’s SCRATCHED!” like it was some kind of shocking outcome. It’s just a thing with us. But we get over it, ya know? We do. I mean, I did, anyway. I rather quickly realized that I was being stupid, and the boys all had a good (but cautious – I’m a good shot with a throwing knife, actually) laugh at me and we all moved on.

But a guy who buys a big old honkin’ pickup truck, one of those ultra-king-cab-you-could-put-an-entire-apartment-back-there monsters, is Making A Certain Statement, right? A “Lookit me, I’m a cowboy!” kinda statement, right?

What kind of cowboy, WHAT KIND OF COWBOY I DEMAND TO KNOW, would saunter out of the bar, push back the Stetson and drawl out, “Hey there, Slick, don’t be puttin’ that hoe in the bed there – it might scratch it!” Not once, but repeatedly?

Really.

It offends me on so many levels.

Like nonfat ice cream and low-carb pizza, it’s just plain wrong.

The Basic Preemie Hat Pattern

The pattern I use is, in fact, exceptionally basic. I clocked it this morning and it took me precisely 1.5 hours start to finish with brief (but incessant) interruptions for coffee, shoving husband out the door to work, making cereal for two Denizens, another cup of coffee, loading the dishwasher and cleaning up a spilled bowl of cereal. While Captain Adventure giggled madly, pointed, and yelled, “UH-OH! OH NO! UH-OH! OH NO!!” and tried to splash in the milk puddle.

Adorable children. Really they are.

You can use DPNs or, if you’re like me and extremely lazy prone to losing DPNs and only finding them by sitting on them into current technology, two circulars. A good primer on knitting with two circulars is here.

I use baby weight yarn (like Simply Soft or Red Heart Baby – as I mentioned before, if you’re knitting these for charity they like the acrylic rather than wool due to potential allergy issues) and #4 (3.5mm) needles. The gauge works out to 6 stitches and 8 rows to an inch. Not to bring down the wrath of the gauge gods upon myself, but – whatever size it ends up being will be useful. You can make a whole hat and call it a gauge swatch, it will fit one of these little people.

It takes under an ounce of yarn altogether for the preemie – I weighed one last night and it came out to 1/2 an ounce finished weight.

Cast on 48 (little preemie), 60 (large preemie), or 72 (newborn) stitches and divide it up evenly on your needles of choice. Join, and off you go:

Work 8 rounds of rib – I default to K2/P2, planning to flip the rib up as a kind of brim. (If you hate rib with the passion of a thousand burning suns you can always skip it and go straight to stockinette – it creates a ‘roll brim’ hat which is equally cute) (or do seed stitch, or reverse stockinette, or whatever else makes you happy).

After the rib, switch to stockinette and carry on until you get to a total hat length of 4.5” for preemie, 5” for large preemie, or 5.5” for newborn. This is the part where you can easily play with color, add in stripes or whatever else suits your fancy. Or, just keep on keepin’ on until you’ve got the length you want.

When you’ve gotten to the right length for your hat, begin decreasing:

Round 1: K4, K2tog, repeat around
Round 2: Knit
Round 3: K3, K2tog, repeat around
Round 4: Knit
Round 5: K2, K2tog, repeat around
Round 6: Knit
Round 7: K1, K2tog, repeat around
Round 8: Knit
Round 9: K2tog around
Round 10: K2tog around

At this point, you should be down to six or less stitches. Cut your yarn, draw it through the live stitches, and pull it tight. If this is for hospitals they’d prefer no pom-poms or other things that might conceivably choke the baby (gee, go figure) – generally, I make the draw good and tight so there is no more than a wee tiny hole, and then I draw the yarn end down through it to plug it up even further.

An AWESOME! site for preemie patterns (and lots of other good stuff, actually) is at Bev’s Country Cottage .

If you’re looking for someone to send them, check out the Knitting 4 Children group on Yahoo – they have a long list of charities, just about anything you produce can find a home. They even have a place for your scarves and ‘big kid’ hats!

When I’m not doing a shower for Knitting 4 Children, I usually send my things to Stitches from the Heart. They’re a great outfit, and send to hospitals all around the country. They gladly accept things for preemies up to toddlers, and a good home will be found for all of them.

Here’s today’s hat (and also one from last week)! Modeled by the lovely sisters Helene (right, last week’s hat) and Lulu (left, today’s) (not that anybody is REALLY keeping that tight a track of these things…). Helene and Lulu have been with me for thirty-mumble years now, so you will please forgive them any…I don’t know, love being blind and all that…lazy eyes or raggedy hair or thirty-mumble year old fashion sensibilities (they are lucky to be wearing anything at all, as the Denizen seem to believe the only thing to be done with a doll’s clothing is to strip it off them):



Today’s was the standard 48 stitches, 8 rounds K2/P2 rib (flipped up to form brim), followed by 8 rounds each of white, pink, white, and then the crown in pink again. Tres cute for the little ballerina, non?

Last week’s is the same pattern, in yellow 8 rounds K2/P2 (brimmed), 8 rounds yellow, 4 rounds green, 8 rounds “checkerboard” with the green and yellow, 4 rounds green, and finished off in yellow. Ready for skiing! In, uh, her salsa dress…

Ahem. Well. I’m sure I can find the rest of their clothes. They’ve got to be around here somewhere…

Lost and Found

My husband lost his wallet.

At first, we weren’t too worried. Because, you know, things go AWOL all the time in the Den. Really nothing to write about there. Stepped barefoot on a toy, had boogers wiped on my shirt, cleaned juice off the floor and lost something. That’s pretty much the every day deal around here.

But as the initial search turned up nothing, we began to become slightly alarmed. Where had he seen it last? Was it in the washing machine right now? Retrace your steps, honey…

As the more intensive search (which included in and behind toy boxes, on top of shelves, the garden shed, and other unlikely spots which nevertheless have been known to turn up missing items) likewise turned up no wallet, we began to become downright uneasy. Think! EXACTLY where were you the last time you had it? Where did you go? Did you check in the car? Under the car? Around the car? Glovebox? Did you take it out of your pocket and set it on top of the spa?!

My poor husband finally took a bracing sip of beer and headed out for what is possibly the grossest thing we could think of: that Captain Adventure had found it and tossed it in the trash, and that we had then thrown said trash into the tote without noticing the wallet IN it. This is a new thing for him, picking stuff up and tossing it in the trash. I’m constantly pulling kitchen towels, cups, silverware and other oddments out of the kitchen trash can, toys and clothing and other things he was finished with out of the laundry room trash.

So out Himself went, to search for his wallet among the decaying whatnots and also the ‘used’ diapers and OH GOD I CAN’T TALK ABOUT THIS RIGHT NOW.

Bravely he went forth. Dejected he returned: no wallet. Maggots, yes. Wallet, no. (EWWW!)

After dinner, I headed upstairs to look just one (1) more time. Because you know how it is: You lose something, you search like a maniac, find nothing, and then the next morning find it precisely where you thought it was in the first place.

It was not in the closet, on the floor or a shelf. It was not on my desk. It was not on the nightstand. Dejected, I sat down on the bed and rubbed at my eyes. The last places left to consider were bad, very very bad – the parking lot at Target, Starbucks, or in the parking lot at Orchard Hardware. None of these retailers admitted having the wallet in their lost and found, soooooooo…visions of our credit card being used all across America, having to replace this and that, no driver’s license (hmm, just what IS the penalty if you get busted driving without one?) not to mention that he hadn’t remembered to take his social security card out of his wallet after landing his last job…ARGH! Having to put a fraud alert up on the reporting bureaus, MEH!!

Now people, I had checked some very odd places. I had checked trash cans. I had checked kitchen drawers. I had checked under desks, and behind the washing machine. I had looked all kinds of places. Not really expecting anything but dust bunnies (or maybe Jimmy Hoffa), I got down on my hands and knees, lifted up the bedskirt and peered under the bed.

Lo. And. Behold. Kicked under the bed $DEITY only knows when…the wallet lay in impudent splendor amid the dust and lost socks.

I swear it stuck its tongue out at me.

I SWEAR IT DID!

I snatched it up and ran downstairs like I’d won the lottery, yelling, “HOW MUCH DO YOU LOVE ME?!” at the top of my lungs.

Dignity and decorum at all times, that’s me.

And he, uh, he loves me a lot.

…and not just for wallet finding, allegedly…

(…although he DOES rather wish I had thought of under the bed BEFORE he went digging through the trash…)

A Hat A Day

The Knitting 4 Children group is doing a ‘shower’ this month for a NICU in Texas – this is preemie knitting, for the wee-little-tiny-ones. The average weight is between 3 and 5 pounds, which makes for a baby about the size of a large doll.

Make a fist.

That’s how big their little heads usually are.

Yeah. Whoa. One of the big challenges these little guys face is keeping tiny bodies warm in a one-size-fits-most-unless-you-are-the-size-of-a-kid’s-doll world – enter the hand knitters of America, who recoil in horror at the thought of anyone ESPECIALLY BABIES being {gasp!} cold (oh, the horror!), fire up their needles and get busy!!

I’ve decided that for the month of July, I’m going to start my knitting day with a hat, every day. Preemie hats are quick and easy to make, and ironically the hospital requirement of soft baby acrylic makes them relatively cheap to boot – ordinarily I like to go for the superwash wool for babies, but for these little guys the hospitals request hypoallergenic, can-be-thrown-in-the-wash-with-jeans acrylic. Their wish is my command, so Baby Soft it is!

Here are the first two, one for yesterday and one for today:



By the end of July, I should have 31 hats ready to send off for the ‘shower’. These are knit in the round on two circulars, which makes them ultra-fast – no seaming, and minimal end-running-in. The pattern is also ultra simple, and lends well to playing with color (stripes, boxes, smiley faces, whatever) if you feel like it while turning out a perfectly serviceable hat if you don’t.

Which sometimes, I don’t. (Yellow hat.) But often, I do. (Blue checkers.)

While I’m on the subject of hats, here’s a picture of the three hats I finished and mailed off before I took pictures. The owner of said hats happened to come over to the house and brought them back so I could take pictures. See?



The top two are Noro Kureyon. I have real mixed feelings about the Noro. On the one hand, the colors are absolutely to die for. Gorgeous! Sexy! Faboo!! But it isn’t the softest, most gentle wool around, I think it was trying to felt right on my needles ($DEITY help us if those hats somehow end up in the washing machine!) and I swear it actually rubbed my knitting callus a little raw – like old-style acrylic used to do. (Actually, that’s where my knitting callus originated – while making a big old afghan out of Ye Olde Red Hearte about twenty years ago.)

I wouldn’t make something that goes right against the skin in Noro Kureyon, is what I’m trying to get at – the colors are enough to make me forgive it being rough around the edges, but it would be really awful if you, say, tried to make a bra out of it. Just sayin’.

The bottom one is Trendsetter Tonalita, a 52% wool, 48% acrylic blend – ultra soft and very, very nice! The colors are rather manly, think you not? And this is the kind of yarn I think is ideal for hats – soft but reasonably sturdy.

In other knitting news, look! It’s a crap-tastic picture of Siv!



Yeah, I know, I know. My camera bites. I tried really hard to get a decent shot of the cable, because it is ultra-cool. But no. My cheap camera is struggling enough just to grok that this is purple, not black or blue or orange. It doesn’t help that cables always vanish a bit in dark yarns – it won’t ever be a “!POP!” kind of cable, and then you take a cheesy camera and try to take a picture of already shy cables and well.

You get a big blob of something that looks like a black stain on your white carpet.

My carpet isn’t white, it’s beige. Just for the record. I mean, I think it was white once, but that was when the Den was owned by a pair of DINKs who took their shoes off before trouncing through the joint and who also by the way kept the bathrooms extremely clean. They also had the carpet re-stretched every year, which I priced out shortly after moving in and, when I got up off the floor and caught my breath, decided really we could go ahead and not do and instead maybe get it shampooed annually.

ANYWAY. Now that I’ve gotten the @*^&@-up bugs out of my system, it’s starting to move along pretty quickly. I’m about halfway to the armhole decreases already. Once you get yourself together (which is apparently harder for some of us than others, ahem), it’s a simple pattern that is easy to memorize and keep on doing. The Silky Wool is a joy to knit with, too. It feels like chenille, but without the ‘worm’ factor.

And that is the knitting news in brief. Stay tuned for the drunken rant about how I thought I finally had Siv straightened out but was OH SO VERY WRONG…

Do we rock? YES WE DO!!!

Mrs. H over at I Like Yarn tagged me with a Rockin’ Girl Blogger award!

Eeeeeee! It’s PINK!! And thank you so much for thinking of me, Mrs. H. It feels down-to-the-toes wonderful to know you’re enjoying my tales of chaos!

It’s funny, when I started flipping through my (rather too long, actually) blog list, I realized: MOST of the ones I read regularly are rockin’ girls. And also, most of them have already been tagged. @*^&@. See, this is what happens when you come late to the party…

But I did find a few who haven’t already been tagged (I hope!!):

Clare from Three Beautiful Things. This is an awesome ‘feel good’ blog, short and sweet – every day, she posts up three things that gave her that warm-fuzzy that day. I love this blog to distraction, because the world is so full of the negative, the scary, the pissed-off-and-ranty – and Three Beautiful Things is a place of refreshingly simple beauty.

Coach Susan from Varsity Butt Dent Squad. Funny, tart-n-sweet, and very, very real.

Amy Lane of Yarning to Write. She’s got three books out with a fourth on the way and oh yeah, by the way, somehow manages to keep up with a full time job teaching, knitting and motherhood.

I've been flipping through a lot of the blogs sporting this little button, and dang! This is some AWESOME company to be in!! We are a smart, sassy, witty crowd out here in Internetville, people - it is a marvelous thing, to have all our voices out here being heard.

I came to blogging rather reluctantly, to be honest; I resisted, I argued, I said “no, really, the boards are fine...”

Ultimately, it was the freedom to put out my own voice in all its weird, “...oh yeah and also...” disconnected craziness that put me here. There is no ‘OT’ on my blog. In fact, it could be argued that the whole thing is nothing but a long ‘OT’ ramble, about nothing and everything, in no particular order. It is here to amuse my family (hi, mom!!), my friends, and you. To make you smile, to maybe give you something to think about, maybe save you a little money here or there, or at least let you know you aren’t alone with the crazy. There’s at least one other person who loses her keys every.single.day at least once, another person who goes out to get the newspaper, calls said newspaper in a rare fury because it isn’t there AGAIN for the THIRD DAY IN A ROW, only to be reminded by the customer service rep that she, uh, kinda cancelled the paper two weeks ago...

Heh heh. Yeah. I knew that. I was, uh, testing you guys, that’s what. OK. So. Good job! And I’ll…just…ring off now, shall I…?

Thanks for reading, and for writing your own stories. I look forward to them, every time I log on.

The Dreaded Yarn Monster

Siv is going better now. The cable is still mis-crossed, but I’m going to stitch it over Harlot Voodoo Style later. After a few drinks and a suitable period to forgive the project for being such a pest. Thanks, Moorecat! I remembered that post the instant you showed it to me again!

The word ‘pest’ brings me to the Subject of the Day: Yarn Monsters. I made a terrible, terrible mistake a couple days ago. I am writing about it in the desperate hope that, somewhere out there, another knitter who like me was ignorant of the guile shown by Yarn Monsters; that the devil hath indeed the power to assume a pleasing shape and all that.

For the as-of-yet uninfected, there is hope.

For me…eh, not so much. I suspect I am done for.

You see, there are things you do not, under any circumstances, want around your precious yarn. Moths spring to mind instantly, of course; and the lesser discussed but nasty carpet beetle. Being put into sealed bags with moisture present, likewise not good. Even dust! Dust can be damaging! Especially in the quantities which settle over the Den on a regular basis – I sometimes forget just how rural we really are. But then I open my upstairs bathroom window and gaze out on the horses running around and around and around their arena kicking up massive amounts of Delta dust (which is like talc powder in consistency, but sticky like clay because that’s what it was before it became dust and snuck into my house through openings no bigger than half a micron) and I say to myself, “Oh. Yeah. That whole ‘farmland’ thing…**sigh**…” and I get the duster and continue to attempt to turn the tide of battle.

Which is a lot like trying to keep the ocean tide from coming in using a beach towel and your cooler lid. Only without the ‘fun’ factor.

But I digress.

Another thing you do not want around your yarn is a Yarn Monster.

Yarn Monsters can be somewhat tricky to spot. Their identification can be made all the trickier by the fact that they are often extraordinarily cute. How cute?



Uh-huh. That’s right. THAT, people, is a Yarn Monster. Do not be fooled by the Ritz cracker, which might give you the impression that it is a crumbly snack monster. Or the PJs, which might make one think it is a ‘cuddly, slumbery’ kind of monster.

This…is a Yarn Monster. It is extremely active and also persistent, and its appetite for yarn is insatiable. Once it has acquired a taste for the stuff, it will begin the acquisition and hoarding processes, and will not be deterred. Except possibly, temporarily, by a snack of milk and cookies.

I allowed this one to get into my stash Monday, and now I will spend the rest of my life in a state of Constant! Vigilance!, lest my entire stash be ferreted away into dark corners of the toy box.

OK, so, I mentioned how he was getting into my stash Monday and bringing me all the red wool he could find? Well, it went on for quite a long time, and he brought me quite a few ball of yarn before I finally put an end to the game. It occurred to me somewhere between the 10th and 30th ball that landed on my desk (because I am quick-witted) that perhaps this ‘playing with mommy’s yarn’ game was not the best precedent I ever set.

Today, he was once again! clinging to me like a leech. Whither I go, there likewise goeth Himself. I mean, it’s getting better, he doesn’t hang on the bathroom door while I am attending to the Royal Business and scream as though someone is driving an ice pick into his skull anymore, and he did take himself upstairs to play with sisters earlier, so hey. Progress and all that.

But, overall, he wants to be where I am and no matter how boring I’m being he just brings his books or toys along and sits somewhere inconvenient (like, for example, pressed between my legs and the sofa) (yes, really, on the floor, BETWEEN my legs and the sofa) (adorable child, NO REALLY! And coming as he does with free overnight shipping and a month’s supply of Huggies, please – bid early, bid often!)

So I was sitting here earlier this afternoon reading some emails and catching up on my blog reading (we are a chatty group out here in Internetville, aren’t we?!) while he sits on my bed playing with trucks and perhaps I got just a little bit channeled into what I was reading, and then slowly two things entered my awareness at the same time: Captain Adventure is being awfully quiet, and, my wire yarn shelves are looking…kinda…bald-ish.

I almost got whiplash, I whirled around from the desk so fast.

My son, the Yarn Monster, was sitting on my bed, surrounded by carefully (re)sorted bundles of yarn. Similar colors were together, and a few things had been obviously hand-culled for “specialness” – like his mommy, the Yarn Monster appears to have a special affection for alpaca, and also earth tones.

He also had peeled the labels off several (dozen) balls, and laboriously unraveled two balls of mohair. (WAH! Of all the confounded balls to choose – WHY THE MOHAIR, MY SON?! Why couldn’t he have chosen…the kitchen cotton? It’s soft and pretty!! Or even the Atacama alpaca, which at least has skein-ties so I’d have a prayer of being able to get it back into some form of “put-up”?!)

When he saw his death in my eyes me looking at him he grinned at me, spread his arms wide in an expression clearly indicating that he had found his One True Love AND BEHOLD IT IS WOOL!!!!, and then fell over into his shameless contraband and proceeded to roll around in the tangled-up mohair, the now-unlabeled wool, the handspun alpaca, the sock yarn, the cotton.

Giggling madly the whole time.

He wailed and fussed when I was putting it all back on the shelves, and wanted to argue with me about where each one went, and when he realized that the shelf was now a “No Captain Adventure Zone” he sank to his knees, threw back his head, and wailed.

When I tried to give him a partial ball of Simply Soft to soothe his loss he looked at me with the exact expression I suspect a starving child would give a person who said, “Oh, here you go, sweetie!” and then handed him a bowl full of Kibbles ‘n Bits. He held it for a split second, then let it drop to the floor disdainfully before flinging himself full-length onto the floor, covering his face with his hands and sobbing as if Go, Diego, Go! had been permanently cancelled.

The despondency touched a nerve in my soul. And also, I was curious: was he just pissed off in general because I told him “no” (the NERVE of me! what do I think I am, his mother?!...oh…wait…), or was it really what it looked like: yarn snobbery in a two year old?!

So I placed a tiny skein of Lorna’s Laces Angel, a 70% angora / 30% lambswool confection in ‘Rainbow’ on the floor in front of him.

He lifted his tearful face from the floor and regarded my offering skeptically. Then he reached out and picked it up, squeezing it a few times and taking in the bright, variegated colors.

Sat up.

Sniffed loudly.

Looked up at me.

Looked back at the skein.

Smiled.

Clutched the skein to his bosom and made off with it.

It is official.

There is a Yarn Monster in the Den. It has no shame, plenty of guile, and a darned cute smile.

…I’m done for…

Mind like a Siv

You may be wondering why there are no pictures of my current project on this blog. After all, I’ve been working on Siv from Elsbeth Lavold’s Viking Patterns for five whole days. SURELY, there should be enough progress to take a picture, right?

Well, ordinarily there would be. But people, I am having the worst time with this sweater. Seriously. You’d think the pattern was written in Icelandic. It is not. It is written in very clear English.

And yet, I’ve had to tear out nearly everything I’ve done on Siv – twice!

The first time I’d mistakenly done ten rows even (all three cable panels the same) when it was supposed to be “offset” – on the center panel, you do rows 1 and 2 ten times (hold onto that thought, attention to certain small details become important later), but on the side panels you just charge straight on in and start cabling like mad.

So I ripped it out and started over, dutifully starting the cable pattern on the sides right away, and when I got to row 10 I started the cable panel on the center.

Let me say that again: Instructed to do rows 1 and 2 ten times, I proceeded to do ten rows and then start the pattern.

Two rows, ten times. Ten, times two. Does this equal ten, Tama? Does it?

Idiot.

So I tore it all out again.

In public.

Yes, that’s right! I didn’t discover this glorious example of math-impairedness in the privacy of my own Den. Oh no! I had to realize it while sitting there in front of God and everybody at gymnastics.

For a long, long, long moment, I thought about pretending it wasn’t so. Calling it a ‘design feature’ that the cable patterns were badly cattywhumpus.

But I knew I couldn’t do it. It looked wrong, and no amount of squinting could make it look right. @*^&@.

Briefly, I considered just putting it down and not knitting. You know. Just, sitting there until the gymnastics experience was over.

In two hours.

Yeah. Right.

So I sat there, right there in public, and tore out a good three hour’s worth of work, muttering unsavory words under my breath as I did so.

AND THEN, I had to be all mature about it when one of the kids asked what I was doing. Well, you know, when you make a mistake…you just pick yourself up and do it again, right? Ha ha, yeah, that whole ‘practice makes perfect’ thing applies to knitting, too.

@*^&@^ing practice.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!!!!!

As I’m going on with the whole experience here, I’m now really scrutinizing my work. Because I will lose my mind if I have to tear this thing out yet again. So as I’m approaching row twenty at long last, I flip over to the picture to make sure it looks about right. Does it look about right? Because the second pattern will start here, so the first center panel…the curve on the…the curve…wait…where’s the…what the…

I’m doing the wrong chart.

I’M DOING THE WRONG {BEEPITY BEEPIN’ HONK} CHART!!!!

I had a moment of vertigo.

I believe I may have had a miniature anxiety attack.

For a few wild seconds, I wondered if Silky Wool would burn well. Perhaps I could set the whole obviously Satanic project ablaze with the cigarette lighter in the van…

But then, as I regarded the cables clearly shown in the picture and compared them to the cables I was actually producing…I realized…

I like MY pattern better.

Well, shoot.

I’m not @*^&@ing it up.

I’m customizing it.

So I carried on.

Cheerfully.

Enthusiastically!

Got quite a bit of ground regained and felt darned good about it!!

Eventually, gymnastics was over and we came home and I took it upstairs and was getting ready to take a picture of it.

And then…

!!!!!GOD HELP ME!!!!!

…I noticed I blew the first cable on the sides. Instead of over/under/over, it goes over/over/over. It is so obvious a mistake that I am absolutely beside myself with wonder that I didn’t notice I was doing it at the time I did it. About an hour and a half of knitting time ago.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Or whether I’m going to actually find out how well Silky Wool burns. I don’t guarantee I won’t actually burn it. Ceremoniously. With sage, cedar and sweet grass.

Then again, perhaps I will just say, “Only Allah is perfect” and leave it the @*^&@ alone.

Sleeping on it is probably best at this point. Because with ‘attention to detail’ issues this intense, it is entirely possible that I could burn the whole house down while attempting a simple smudge with a stick that ordinarily won’t stay lit no matter how carefully you tend it.

FEH!

{stomps off to sulk and obsess}

Attached at the hip

Hi! I’m back! Didja miss me?! I took a three day weekend, went to Arizona, had a great old time driving around and bouncing off the locked doors of yarn stores (what the @*^&@? I mean! They were supposed to be open, yet they were not? Not one (1) of the four (4) I tried to visit?! ARGH!!).

It was marvelous. I got to really relax and kind of…well. Drop everything, and then decide what pieces of psychic junk I was going to leave on the ground and what I was going to pick back up again. The noise inside my own skull resembled descriptions I’ve heard of tornados – like a freight train was running, running, running inside my head all the time.

Recharged, I came back and was instantly plunged back into laundry, filth-removal, email and oh yeah, dealing with the Denizens.

One Denizen in particular was not happy about me taking a solo trip. I had no prior authorization. It was not an OK thing for me to do. We have policies! We have procedures! We have terms and conditions! And they go like this: The Mommy is not allowed to leave her precious son for any reason whatsoever. The precious son must be taken with her everywhere she goes, preferably slung on her hip like an overgrown tumor, forever and ever, hallelujah, amen.

The girls hardly seemed to notice I’d gone. But Captain Adventure has literally not willingly let me out of his sight since I got him out of his crib yesterday morning. He is sitting in my room right now, making sure I don’t go anywhere. I just got back from the bathroom, which I dodged into like a jailbird going over the wall.

I locked the door. Because, you know.

I work alone.

Whenever possible, anyway.

Before I could unbutton my jeans, the handle was being yanked from the outside and a little voice was wailing, “Mommmmmmmmmeeeeeee! Mommmmmeeeeeee! Mommy, no-no! Mommy! In! UGH-UGH-UGH! MOMMMMEEEEE! AAAAAAAAAH! WAH! WAH! AAUGH IN IN IN MOMMEEE I WAN’ SOME IN *sob sob sob*!!!!!”

**sigh**

Attachment issues, much?!

It would be flattering if it were not so profoundly annoying. Every time I sit down today, he climbs up in my lap. Every time I get up, he grabs hold of my hand or my belt loop or the end of my shirt and holds on to make absolutely sure I don’t actually go anywhere. He wants to be right in the middle of whatever I’m doing. He wants to have my attention at all times. I’d swear he’s even trying to be more interesting to me – he started bringing me balls of red yarn. All the red yarn he could find in the “open stack” stash, he was bringing over to me. “’Ere you go!” {toddle, toddle, dig, dig, toddle, toddle} “’Ere! ‘Ere you go! Mommy! ‘Ere!”

What is it they say about deepening bonds in a relationship? “Take an interest in each other’s hobbies”? Look, mommy, I’ve brought you yarn! Which is your hobby! I am interested in red! Come, let us discuss our mutual interest in red yarn…at exhaustive length…

Honestly, none of the other Denizens were this level of momma’s child. This is actually a touch disturbing to me; I mean, I’m gratified that my adoration is apparently returned, but at the same time…uh, dude? Little space, please?

It’s hard to remember that someday, someday pretty darned soon, he’s going to be turning to me with a pained expression and saying, “Mom, puh-LEEZE! Could you, like, drop me off around the corner? I don’t want to be seen in public with you!” That someday, I’m going to look back on these baby years and sniffle for the closeness we once shared.

I’m sure I will. Someday.

But for this precise moment: GET OFF ME, DAWG! DOWN! BACK! SIT! STAY!

Oh yeah. That worked. He is at this moment climbing up my leg. Argh. OK. That’s it.

I didn’t want to do this. But! Desperate times, people, call for desperate measures…and there is laundry that needs to be put away.

I’m putting on Go, Diego, Go!.

Don’t look at me like that.

It could have been one of the ‘older’ Baby Einsteins. See? Are you not now feeling the love for baby jaguar? C’mon! Sing it with me!! Awwwwwwwwwwwwww, RESCUE PACK! Comin’ to the rescue!

The 401k: It’s not just for corporate employees anymore!

OK, so, y’all know how I am. I may not be working-working, but I am physically incapable of just doing the Sally Homemaker routine.

It is definitely a character flaw.

So I’m bashing around a bunch of ideas for a home-based something-or-other. I’ve got three main ideas that are equally appealing, and I’m just letting them stew right now while I get through summer. Three of my four kids will be in school-school come mid-August, and I’m contemplating putting Captain Adventure into a morning preschool as well. Maybe. We’ll see. It all depends on how his speech delay is coming along, and whether or not I can get the boy to acknowledge the existence of the Strange and Magickal Device known as ‘The Potty’.

ANYWAY. Sometime next Fall, I’ll probably be firing up the engines and looking at getting some income of my own flowing again. The kinds of ideas I’m bashing around are not earth-shattering, “and then I became a bazillionaire and bought this fleet of yachts” kinds of ideas. They’re small. They’re easy to turn on and off. They make money when I have time and inclination, but I can completely disentangle myself in a matter of weeks. I’m projecting, eh, maybe $20,000 a year net from it.

Check this out (full article is here):

Individual 401k Contribution Calculation - for a sole proprietorship, partnership or a LLC taxed as a sole proprietorship

Salary Deferral Contribution

Although the term salary deferral is used, these businesses do not provide a W-2 salary to the business owner. For businesses of this type, the salary deferral contribution is based on net adjusted business profit. Net adjusted business profit is calculated by taking gross self employment income and then subtracting business expenses and then subtracting 1/2 of the self employment tax. In 2007, 100% of net adjusted business profits income up to the maximum of $15,500 or $20,500 if age 50 or older can be contributed in salary deferrals into an Individual 401k.

Allow me to translate: I can earn $20,000 net next year, put it $15,500 into an individual 401k, and pay taxes on how much? How much is taxable this year? Would that be…$4,500?!

Moreover! I can roll my existing retirement funds INTO this deal, and then take a tax-free loan from those funds for business startup expenses without having to worry about traditional loan qualification processes AND!!!! the interest I pay on those loans goes where? Where does it go?

Back into the 401k.

You see why this is exciting to me? Granted, the kinds of things I’m thinking about doing don’t really have high startup costs that would necessitate a loan…but at the same time, it does open a few more doors than I had previously considered.

And $15,500 kicks butt over the paltry $4,000 allowed in an IRA. Gee whiz, what braniac put THAT limitation in place?! Would it kill them to allow $15,500, like in a 401k account?!?! Are you telling me that doing so would be just so shockingly detrimental to the tax base of this great country?

First we kvetch that people aren’t saving enough. THEN we tell them that, unless they are fortunate enough to have a 401k, they aren’t ALLOWED to save enough – not on a tax-deferred basis, anyway.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And you can’t tell me they’d even lose all that much in tax benefits, because most people either are really not fiscally able to make that kind of contribution or emotionally unprepared to make the daily sacrifices necessary to do it.

Me personally, I’d live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to do it. It’s freedom, people. When I look at this individual 401k deal and I calculate out what it could do for us, IF I were able to put the full $15,500 into it every year…well. We’re retired at 50 instead of 55. That’s only ten years away.

It gives me something to shoot for with this whole ‘yeah, uh, I think I’d like to do something that brings in a little cash around here’ thing.

And now, my tax deductions are asking for snacks. Hokay. Carry on, people! And if you’re self-employed and haven’t heard of this, look into it. It might be a really good thing for your future fiscal health.

So much **yawn** excitement…

Actually, it has been kind of exciting around here. But it isn’t “…and then I wrestled an alligator!” kind of excitement.

I finally got my refund check from MegaMedicalGroup.com, who have been steadfastly pretending for the last eight months they don’t remember me, let alone the fact that they owed me (ahem!) almost ten thousand dollars.

Oh yes. They did. “Um, I’m not seeing any record of a Chaos, Mother in our system…”

Dudes. You sucked over $40,000 out of me and Blue Cross last year before you were soundly slapped upside the head by said MegaInsuranceCo when they caught you up to your armpits in the cookie jar. Don’t even give me the ‘what? who? I see no record of that…’ routine. I have faxed all the assorted bills and receipts to them about eleventy-zillion times and still: “Gee, I don’t know, I’m not finding you in the system…” or even, get this, “Um, actually, I see a balance DUE of ${nine to nine thousand, depending on the day}…”

If you heard a lot of banging noises coming from the Central Valley over the last eight months, that was me slamming my head on my desk. I literally couldn’t talk about it, because it just put me into A State – you know, where you don’t know whether to laugh, cry, scream or get a lawyer?

Finally, someone accidentally transferred me to the one (1) person in the entire corporation who had the right combination of competence, intelligence, and Give-A-Gosh-Darned to actually look into it, say “ACK!” and get me a check.

Well. It wasn’t really an accident. I got my Yuppie on with the last clerk I talked to (“Now you listen here, Mr. Man, do I need to get my mother on the phone? Do I? Because I will! Do you even know who you’d be messing with?! That’s it, you just wait, I’m dialing her on conference…!”), and they transferred me to the escalation specialist – the person who gets all the crayons on account of because they’re so good at talking us down off ledges. I know her job well, because I used to do it for MegaBank.com. People screaming about how they made a $200 deposit fifteen years ago and the teller didn’t write it into their passbook (remember those?!) – so therefore they always had $200 more than what we said they had.

I’ll give you a minute to work out that particular logic. Heh heh. Yeah. Good times. Goooooood times…{bangs head on keyboard to get rid of flashback}

ANYWAY. My Angelfish navigated around all the bass turds in the billing department pond (seriously – the incompetence I encountered dealing with this group positively boggled the mind. It was like a bunch of orangutans with ADD were operating the billing systems or something.), and I got the ten grand back a couple weeks ago. I promptly paid off the loan-for-surgery with it and signed the girls up for gymnastics.

They are the cutest gymnasts ever. Seriously. I do not just say this because I’m their mom. Cutest. Ever.

Meanwhile, in other news, the remodeling project has stalled. We don’t have final plans yet thanks to being bumped off the radar by higher paying clients more urgent projects, and frankly I don’t think we’re going to be getting them any time soon. Once we get the final plans, they then have to go through the permitting process, which I’ve heard is about as simple and fun as brain surgery. Only after we have final plans AND permits will a contractor deign to pencil us into the schedule.

At this point, I’m figuring that we will have plans and permits sometime…right in the middle of the rainy season. Seriously. My husband is enthusiastically saying, “Oh no, September at the latest!” but…eh. I don’t think so. I really don’t. The contractors I’ve talked to have given me anything from four to six months before they have openings on their calendar, some of them even longer. Each month we wait pushes that out as well.

I’m thinking we won’t be doing this until next summer, at the earliest. (Even though my husband says, rather pitifully IMHO, “Well, but…well…it doesn’t rain all that much in January!” Yeah, well, if the roof of your house is sitting on the lawn while framing and such is going on inside and it rains even a little bit? It is a problem. We are not doing this when the chance of rain is $ANY_%. Thus is it spoken. Thus shall it be. HAIL PHAROAH!!)

Which makes me feel a lot less slimy about shamelessly stealing from the remodeling fund to pay off the furnace loan AND the car. What can I say? I like to live dangerously. I’m just a gamblin’ kind of girl. That’s right. I’m betting that I’m right, and using about a third of the remodeling fund as my marker.

Of course, I also like to hedge my bets – which is why I didn’t also pay off the minivan, even though it actually has the most onerous payment. It leaves enough in the account to cover the permits and the initial phases of the remodeling project – basically, all the stuff we have to pay the contractor to do. The stuff we were planning to do ourselves, the drywall and finishing and painting and such, we’ll have to do out of the regular monthly budget.

Which is now three times what it was before.

Now that is what I call exciting. I may just have to do something Wild! And also CRAZY! to celebrate. Like, buy a full-priced gallon of ice cream!

Nah.

Too crazy.

But I might go ahead and pick up whatever’s on sale…

No sense of gravity around here today

Danger Mouse: MOMMY! MOMMY! Captain Adventure fell down!!

Me: What?!

Danger Mouse: Captain Adventure fell down and now he’s crying!!

Me: How did he fall down?

Danger Mouse, sardonically: Well…I guess somebody put gravity right where he was standing or somethin’.

Spider Has Moves

I’m sitting here, reading blogs, just minding my own business. Well. And that of a dozen or so fellow bloggers. Suddenly, something lands on my nose. I stare down at it, cross-eyed and perplexed. At first, I think it is a rather large dust mote.

But it is not a dust mote. Same color, but…livelier.

It is a spider. A tiny little white spider, probably mere hours old.

The spider is doing a little dance. I am going to call it the “Hey, where am I, this doesn’t look like the desktop to me!” boogie.

Just as I am about to reach up and flick the minute (but impudent!) beggar off my nose, it apparently somehow attaches a line to my person (the nerve!) and rappels down to the floor, disappearing into the carpet forever before I have time to react.

And now, I am left to sit here wondering: Did that just really happen? Or have I had one too many Monster Energy drinks tonight? There are a lot of buggy visitors in the Den right now, but still – how often does a spider drop from the ceiling onto one’s nose, do a little boogie, and then fling itself to the floor?

Probably squeaking, Thank you, and GOODNIGHT! all the way…

Things that go ‘Mommy!’ in the night

{pitter-patter-pitter-patter} {creeeeeeeak of the door opening up}

Intense whisper: Mommy!

Mommy: {snork?!}

Intense whisper: Mommy…I can’t get to sleep!

Mommy: Ungh? {a glance at the alarm clock reveals the time to be 1:03 a.m.}

Intense whisper: I keep trying to sleep but I can’t and then I just lie there, awake, and I can’t sleep!

Mommy: Ohferloveofchristophercolumbus GET OUT OF HERE!!!!

{pitter-patter-pitter-patter} {creeeeeeeak of the door closing again}

{time passes}

{pitter-patter-pitter-patter} {creeeeeeeak of the door opening up}

Intense whisper: Mommy!

Mommy: {SNORK?!} {1:23 a.m.}

Intense whisper: Mommy, I still can’t…

Mommy: Oh no. No. You are not waking me up to tell me you can’t sleep. No. This is not happening. I mean, what kind of logic is that? Gee, I can’t get to sleep – I KNOW! Let’s go wake up EVERYBODY ELSE in the house, and tell them I can’t sleep! That’s just brilliant, that’s just feckin’ brilliant. Whaddya want me to DO about it, anyway? What? What do you think I’m going to be able to do about YOU not being able to sleep? I can’t MAKE you sleep! I can’t give you a sleep-pill OH LORD IF ONLY!, no! No I can’t! There is NOTHING I can do about you and your sleep-not-able-ness right now. Waking me up for “I can’t sleep” this is just {mommy begins to slowly sputter into silence}

{there is silence for an instant, into which Daddy speaks}

Daddy: Go back to bed and stay there.

Intense whisper: OK.

{silence falls over the Den for the remainder of the night}

Moral of the Story: At 1:23 in the morning, blathering on and on about logic, cause and effect, etc., to the insomniac preschooler is really not helpful. They aren’t listening under the best of conditions and in the lack of clear direction will continue pestering you. Just tell the kid to go back to bed, and stay there. This they can understand.

Finally Seeing the Light

So the ceiling fan and bathroom vanity bulbs have been burning out left, right and center around the Den recently. I put the last one I had on hand into a fan yesterday, and bang – another one out this morning.

Dang. But not surprising, as we use the ceiling fans for about 85% of all the lighting in this house and are generally still rambling around at midnight every night. So I said to myself, said I, “Self! Why don’t we look into those fluora-whatz-a-name-o-dems for replacements…”

If somebody wants to do a great service to the eco-Nazi “If Everybody Would Replace Just One (1) Lightbulb With Fluorescent We Could Save The World” movement, they could put together a fact sheet that says, “Click here for ceiling fan replacement suggestions…click here for regular old light bulbs…click here for vanities…If the package you’re trying to replace says “Medium Base / A15”, click here…”

It should not have taken me over an hour to buy a set of @*^&@ing ceiling fan and vanity light bulbs, people. I am used to going to WalMart and grabbing a case of the danged things off the shelf. It is fast, and easy, and cheap. These fluorescent deals are going to make me crazy. Their shapes aren’t readily identifiable as being “my” bulbs. Their prices are shocking. And given the shocking price, I really don’t want to take a risk on buying bulbs that might not be the right fit for my Medium Base, A15 ceiling fan bulbs…

About two seconds before I was going to give up with a loud and vulgar tirade, I finally found them. And bought them. And then let out a loud and vulgar tirade about their cost compared to the standard bulbs at WalMart.

Of course, the cheap standard bulbs have also been burning out every eighteen seconds. Well. That’s an exaggeration. They have been burning out “constantly” because they are “constantly” being left on. I could make a full-time career out of turning off all the lights that get left on around here. Right now, glancing down the hall, I note that one ceiling fan (three 25 watt bulbs), the Denizen bathroom vanity (six 25 watt bulbs) AND the light in Captain Adventure’s room (60 watt bulb) are cheerfully adding their yellow glow to that provided by the @*^&@ing SUN, WHICH IS UP IN THE SKY PROVIDING US WITH LIGHT AND HEAT AND THEREFORE I SEE NO NEED FOR ALL THESE @*^&@*^ING LIGHTS TO BE ON DOING THE SAME…

…excuse me for a moment…{…stomp, stomp, stomp…} {click!, click!, click!}

OK, I’m back. Geez. I yell. I stamp my feet. I carry on. I make them go back upstairs and turn them off. But, along with putting empty Capri Sun wrappers in the trash can and bringing their plates to the counter to be washed, the ‘turn off the lights when you leave the room’ war will likely continue raging right up until the minute they leave the Den for their new lives as professional light-burning slobs.

Anyway. According to theory, these bulbs last up to seven times longer, produce the same amount of light using a fraction of the electricity and without generating a quarter the heat – important in the summer, thank you very much.

We shall see. And also, we are fascinated by odor eliminating light bulbs. Seriously. I just can’t say it with a straight face. Can you imagine the conversations you’d have at parties?!

“My goodness, what interesting bulbs you’ve chosen for this bathroom vanity!”

“Yes. They’re odor eliminating light bulbs!”

“I, uh, oh, uh, really? How…interesting…” {backs away from insane person who thinks her light bulbs will eliminate odors…}

I almost have to get some just for the conversational possibilities…

The Finisher Strikes Again!

I like to celebrate when I finish things, because it is a rare occurrence. I’m more of a ‘starter and then forget all about it’-er. A ‘find it years later and put the finishing touches on it’-er. So when I actually start and finish things within a reasonable time period – I boast! LOUDLY!!

I finished the Wool Peddler’s Shawl…



It turned out nicely; the wool isn’t quite as soft as I’d like, but I suspect another bath or two will straighten it out.

I also finished a hat in the same wool and lace pattern. (Dead batteries + Pointless discussion with mate about whether or not we have more batteries and whether or not there WAS a box of them in the downstairs closet and where the heck they could have gotten to and whose fault this is, precisely = No pictures until I motivate myself to the store to buy more batteries, so that the box I just KNOW we do actually have will resurface with its tongue waggling impudently at me) (Sorry.) (Here’s the lace pattern, though…)



I also finished my bedroom, which was a tremendous feat of organizing skill and I am very, very proud of myself. For a few days there, walking through this bedroom required both a keen memory (to remember where the mines were placed) and the balance of a Cirque de Soleil performer.

There were actual needles, on the floor. Not knitting needles – needle-needles. You know, like, for sewing fabric? The kind normal people keep on high shelves inside boxes with locking lids? Yeah. Those. I had them on the floor of my bedroom in a pincushion.

**sigh**

Darwinism at work, people. That’s all I can say about that.

ANYWAY. I got it all cleaned up and the shelf moved in so I could pick the books up off the floor and put them, you know, on a bookshelf, picked the needles up off the floor and put them away in a latching box, and then I vacuumed!

It was a very exciting moment.

Then I started doing laundry and was so unmotivated about the whole thing that rather than hang up the clothesline outside for the wet delicate things, I plopped a drying rack in the middle of my bedroom floor and hung Unmentionables and lacy little girl dresses that can’t go in the dryer all over it.

Not to digress, but why, Oh Designers of Children’s Clothing?! Why would you EVER, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, design clothing that must be line dried?! The letters 5T and the words ‘line dry only’ (or ‘hand wash only’, for that matter) should never, ever appear on clothing labels! Seriously! (says the woman who hand-knit sweaters out of hand wash, lay flat to dry Merino for all four of her children last year) (never mind! Do as I say, not as I do!).

Anyway, that kinda ruins the ‘perfect, well-organized room’ effect, you know?

But under all the drying laundry, it’s a very clean, well-organized room.

And no. You don’t get to check back in two weeks. Let’s just take it as read that it will be in a state of utter Chaos and I will be unable to find so much as a pair of socks, let alone a set of #8 circular needles, OK?

OK. Glad we had this chat.

Carry on with your lives, people. I’m going try to dig up enough motivation to make dinner for the Denizens. They haven’t turned their noses up at my cooking in at least four hours now, and I’m worried about their lack of exercise.

Translation needed, please

It is 10:00 a.m. in the Den of Chaos. Nobody has eaten anything yet, because everybody was up too late last night and really, apart from Captain Adventure, we’ve just barely gotten out of bed to survey the damage left from a night of watching a Deadliest Catch marathon and complaining about the Space Formerly Known as Tooth #3. I’m sure my family appreciates that I keep them up to date on each individual sensation in graphic detail every time there’s a commercial break.

Ahem.

Anyway, it suddenly occurs to me, because I am of a maternal bent, that hey – the Denizens haven’t eaten anything since pizza last night (uh, yeah, I was feeling a little too delicate to make dinner last night). So I turned to my offspring and begin the following conversation:

Me: Hey, are you guys hungry?

Eldest: No, not me.

Danger Mouse: Me either. Well. Not very hungry. Maybe a little. Just a little. I mean, not like, I want a thousand bowls of cereal or anything…

Eldest: No, not like that.

Danger Mouse: But maybe A bowl of cereal. Or maybe toast. But I’m not really hungry. Maybe just a little bit.

Eldest: Yeah.

Danger Mouse: Not really. But maybe. I don’t know.

Eldest: Yeah. Not really. So, rock people can’t collect anything but rocks, because they don’t want to collect anything but rocks…

Danger Mouse: But sometimes they want purple seaweed…because sometimes other people don’t think they’re very nice…

Captain Adventure, popping from out of nowhere and jumping up and down in a state of High Excitement: Uhna mayma badda bidda mana! Huuuuuuh? GO GO GO!! Daddy? Out? GO!

OK, so…

Hmm.

See, I know what Captain Adventure wants. It’s the same thing he always wants: to GO. He wants to put on his shoes and hit the open road. He wants some adventure, dammit. You people are boring and I want to GO-GO-GO!!

He giggles all the way out, and starts crying the minute he realizes we’re heading home.

Not much of a home-body, that one.

But the girls? What the heck does this mean? If I make them some breakfast, will they refuse to eat it? Or are they actually starving but too involved in their rock-person game to listen to their yowling stomachs? I know that I am capable of going until 2:00 in the afternoon before it suddenly occurs to me that I ought to eat something, but is this something the ten-and-under set do as well?

Or are they going to wait until we’re on our way to the party this afternoon (a two hour drive) to suddenly let forth shrieks of starvation OH MY GAWD WE’RE DYYYYYYYYYING OF HUNNNNNNGERRRRRRRR!!!!!

Are they going to demand Happy Meals, so they can eat a quarter of the bun from the hamburger and three French fries, slam their drink and then need to go potty while we’re on That stretch of highway, where not only are there no potties, there isn’t even a shoulder to pull over on? Is that their devious plot?

**sigh**

Oh well. I’m just going to quietly put some bowls of cereal on the table and bang on the triangle. And we’ll see what happens.

That’s the true benefit of cereal: If they don’t eat it, I can put it back in the box. You can’t do that with scrambled eggs.

Trust me on that one.

My life, now in VIDEO GAME FORM

There is a new video game out there called Nanny Mania.

“Nanny Mania puts you in the heart of a household with 4 children, 2 parents and a whole heap of trouble. Juggle domestic duties as you try to keep the house in order. Fold, cook and clean your way to becoming the perfect nanny!”

Oh look. It’s my life – in video game format.

I played it. And you know what? It really is my life.

In all its drab, monotonous, oh-goodness-are-we-doing-laundry-again glory.

And by ‘glory’, I mean ‘wretchedness’.

Is there anything as depressing as realizing that your life makes for a very dull video game? Seriously.

However, I did figure out my Ultimate Sweater Machine yesterday. Now, if that had been part of the game, there might have been more excitement! Laundry, cup of coffee, make the beds, figure out Ultimate Sweater Machine, answer emails, drink coffee…

I’ve owned this thing for eight years now, and never done anything more than move it from one closet to another. But yesterday, I finally sat down and sweat it out and made a baby blanket.

Once I figured out how the machine works (which I’ve decided is completely not the same as knowing how to work the machine), it took me about 40 minutes to “knit” a 20x20” preemie blanket. Add two hours to crochet a border around it and bang!

Done.

Except that my crochet has not improved even a little bit and I’m going to be putting this particular blankie into the “playthings” category and the girls can use it to put stuffed animals ‘nite-nite’. I can’t even give this away, that’s how bad my crochet-work is. **sigh** Oh well. We all have our talents. Some of us more than others.

But don’t worry. I’m not about to become a machine knitter. While it is exciting to whump out that much fabric that fast, I’m more of a “process” knitter – I love the feel of individual stitches as they across my needles, I like the feeling of individual personal skill and frankly the fact that it slows me down a bit.

However, the “leftover” balls of yarn have been breeding like rabbits around here. I was forced to realize just how many of them I had when I was moving my stash around recently, and that my plans to “someday” make a bunch of squares to join together into an afghan (or two) (or ten) had better move toward the top of my To Do list.

Of course, making a bunch of squares to then sew together to make a blanket-thing is, to me, about as exciting as scrubbing the bathroom grout.

Enter the Ultimate Sweater Machine. Now that I know how it works, I think I can take all eleventy-billion tiny balls of miscellaneous yarns and produce however many squares to whip together into afghans before I have time to realize how mind-numbingly dull a task it really is. Go ahead. Ask me what I’m doing this weekend…why, I’m going to be removing about eleventy-billion balls of leftover baby acrylic and/or wool from my stash! And adding about eleventy-billion squares I intend to sew together into blankets!

And I will do it.

Someday.

Although I think I’m going to knuckle down and do a knitted-on border on them. Because my crochet?

Lumpy moose piss.

Through a straw.

Sucks that bad.

**sigh**

As Seen From Space

Well, I finished the hats. Yes, hats. There were three of them. Two in Noro and one in, uh, hmm. I sort of…forget.

See, here’s the thing. I did them rather quickly because they were Asked About. Whumped out all three of them over the weekend, and then I threw them into a priority mail box and tossed that at a passing postman, without pausing to say, “Perhaps I should take a picture of these!”

I was in a hurry, you see. Also, I was on Vicodin and thus perhaps not thinking clearly.

So you’ll just have to envision two hats in Noro here, and one in a very soft, very warm wool that is gently variegated blue and gray.

And then I moved on (or, more precisely, went back to) this, which is the Wool Peddler’s shawl from Cheryl Oberle’s Folk Shawls book:



This deceitful little number is one of the ones which starts with an innocent “Cast on 7 stitches” and then proceeds to grow and grow and grow as you go along. The row that took less than a minute at the start is now taking ten minutes and still it is growing.

This red wool has been sitting in my stash for about four years now, waiting for me to come up with something to do with it. It is a wool for grownup people who understand how to treat wool – hardy, yet fragile.

With proper treatment, this shawl could last for many generations. My great-great grandchildren will be arguing about who gets saddled with to keep great-great-gran’s mangy old shawl.

But if it is tossed into a washer even once, it will become a very nice felted tea cozy.

So I’ve decided that this one will be for me. This winter, I will prove just how dorky I am by wrapping it around myself when I dash out to pick up the Denizens from school. They will be mortified when they see me coming – which they will, because this red can be seen from about eleventy-million miles away.

This red right here is what they’re talking about in Proverbs when they say, When it snows, she has no fear for her household; for all of them are clothed in scarlet.

Yeah. There is no way anybody wearing this red is going to be able to get lost. No matter how hard they try. It could be spotted by satellite. Which I think would make an excellent selling slogan: “AS SEEN FROM SPACE!”

“This is rather rare, but…”

I think the only phrase I hate in medicine more than ‘as we age’ has got to be ‘this is rather rare, but…’

It is rare to get a dry socket in the first place, even rarer on an upper tooth extraction. However, it is slightly less rare when the extracted tooth is an “old” root canal tooth, and the rare-factor continues going down as things like the poor condition of the bone and greater-than-average violence of the extraction process are put into play.

So there you are. It is, indeed, a dry socket. And it does indeed hurt like a @*^&@. And there is little he can really do about it, other than continue to apply a new dental band-aid over the top of it every Tuesday and Thursday until it settles down.

The good doctor came into the exam room where I sat fidgeting and saying things like now, don’t get all melodramatic, just calmly tell the man how it feels… to myself, and he said cheerfully, “So, feeling better?”

I looked at him as if he had suddenly sprouted another head and blurted out, “NO! It hurts like @*^&@, actually!”

He looked very surprised and concerned. About four seconds and a glance into my mouth later he was wincing and muttering and asking his nurse to bring x cc’s of this and a tray of that and some of that jelly-pak™ stuff and also a vial of this other stuff and could she please call the pharmacy and order a refill of both the amoxicillin and the vicodin (I could have kissed him for that last one).

Now, when I had talked to the nurse last week, it wasn’t his nurse. His nurse had already gone home for the weekend. I talked to the advice nurse, which is about as helpful as walking up to a random person in WalMart and asking what they think you should do.

Himself was a touch annoyed with your faithful correspondent because, all jokes about crank calls aside, I did not actually call the nice man at home to whine about my face feeling as though I had been kicked by an irate mule; I also didn’t bother calling yesterday to beg for an emergency appointment, because I knew he was in his other office – the other office being about two hours roundtrip from here, and me without any babysitter available for the Denizens, I felt that overall it was less painful to just ride it out at home and wait for my Denizen-less appointment this morning.

So he shot me up with Novocain and removed the stitches (ouch) and poked around at the gaping hole in my jaw (OUCH!) and shot some more Novocain in there and tried to take a better look in there (AY YI YI WHAT ARE YOU A SADIST JESUS HOLY I MEAN GEEZ ARE YOU CRAZY?!?!) and then put a little more Novocain in there and also dripped a bunch into the hole and still I was basically >>this<< close to bursting into hysterics because, seriously, OW!, and finally we both just kind of took a deep breath and he ::!!QUICK!!:: packed it up with some antibiotics and Novocain-soaked cotton and then he slapped a collagen band-aid over the whole thing and we both sat back and regarded each other from beneath sweat-beaded foreheads and honestly – I think we each wished we had never laid eyes on the other.

Which is not really true. I’m very glad I’ve got this guy for this deal. He’s very skilled and I don’t think I could have had a better man for the job. Tooth #3 has apparently been infected off and on for eleven straight years, the bone is a hideous spongy mess in there and I can’t pretend I’m surprised that we have complications. Annoyed, yes. Surprised, no. I also got dry socket not once but twice before, which apparently is yet another twitch upward on the ‘how likely is it that you’ll get a dry socket after extraction’ scale.

I’m sorry he’s having to deal with this, because he’s not a person who likes pain.

I like that in a periodontist.

So now I’ve got to resist both diet Pepsi and poking at the bandage with my tongue, both of which are much harder than they sound. Mostly because they are absent-minded things for me to do.

See, if I had to think in order to do these things, I wouldn’t. But the fact that they are precisely the sorts of things you do when distracted by other things makes them almost impossible to quit doing.

In fact, I have had to scold my tongue for poking at it three times in just the last half hour.

**sigh**

This is going to be a looooooong couple weeks, people.

You can have my stuff

Seriously, I’m dying. Y’all can have my stuff. I don’t care who gets what. Except that I want to be buried with my iPod shuffle and also that bracelet my girlfriend gave me this year. And I want to be buried in Homer the Odyssey, because I love that minivan with the red hot passion of a thousand suns.

Other than that, I don’t care. Take it. Mudwrestle for it. That’s right. Even my extensive collection of broken harp strings. They’re yours. Because where I’m going, I won’t need to be reminded about all the broken harp strings I need to replace before the new ones also break and leave me high and dry without a 0.028” blue string for that high ‘F’ that breaks so darned often.

It won’t matter.

Because I’m dying, and will never need to replace that freakin’ string again. It will pass to one of my daughters, I suppose. Or something. Whatever. I don’t care. Because I’m dying and have more important things to think about.

Well, actually I’m not dying. Or at least, I’m not dying any faster than I was last week.

I’m just not sure this is such a good thing, right at this exact moment.

I believe what I have here is something called dry socket. This condition occurs when instead of having a nice blood-clot “plug” to protect your ravaged bones, said bones are exposed to the air and whatever other fool thing you put into your mouth (like soda, rice, popcorn – the list goes on) and become rather annoyed about it because, being that they are BONES, they’d prefer to be safely ensconced within mile upon mile of nice, soft, bacteria-thwarting tissue.

The packing material the good dentist sewed over the hole in my jaw fell out less than 48 hours afterward, and it was about twelve hours after that that I became aware that, far from becoming “better”, my jaw was throbbing as if the world were ending and I could no longer eat anything that required even a little bit of light chewing.

Tomato soup, people. That’s what is on the menu right now. Tomato soup and ibuprofen. That’s it. Even the good drugs I insisted on getting can’t touch this (although they do make me more cheerful about being in pain). Fortunately (hmm, ok, I’m not entirely sure ‘fortunately’ is the word I really want here), my symptoms are not indicative of something requiring emergency morphine drip attention. It’s “just” the dry socket thing. Which will work itself out in time, but will feel a lot better after I see him on Tuesday and he can replace the packing material. Because he isn’t in the office until Tuesday. So this is the earliest I can see him.

**sigh**

Funny how something like 36 hours can seems so different depending on circumstances. If I had 36 hours to spend, say, in Hawaii, it wouldn’t be nearly enough. It would go by faster than a Thunderbird on maneuvers. So would 36 hours spent on a cruise ship, or at a spa resort, or in the Webs store.

But 36 hours to wait before I can see a dentist qualified to irrigate and repack my extracted molar?

Eternity.

Which is another word for ‘forever’.

And also possibly where I am going. You know. Eternal rest.

Seriously. I’m going to be the first person ever to have died of dry socket. MARK MY WORDS!

“Unfortunate but fairly common”, they said. “Oh, you poor thing – don’t worry, it won’t last forever”, they assured me. “Look honey, I hate to tell you this, but there’s really not a whole lot to be done about it – take your ibuprofen, we'll see you Tuesday, but really nothing but time will take care of the problem,” they sighed (with a touch of exasperation and probably wishing they hadn’t given me their home phone number).

Oh well. I’m going to bed, where I plan to lie awake all night comparing this to every other pain I’ve ever had in my life and perhaps crank calling my dentist.

“It’s 2:15 a.m., doc – do you know where your laughing gas is?!”

Yeah. I think he’s going to really, really regret giving me his home phone number…