In which my site’s beginning to generate email.

Today I got two emails from random people who had found my site (I’m getting about 13k hits a month this year) and had something to say about what they’d read.

The first was from a guy who also rocks himself to sleep, and wanted to know if I’d ever discussed my rocking with a doctor.

The second was from a guy telling me he was glad to hear I no longer hate Heinlein, and who suggested a couple titles to me.

So cool!

I love the Internet. Love it.

In other news, we got our deployment schedule and we haven’t left yet. Soon, but not yet. So I spent most of the last 48 hours lying around doing nothing, blessed nothing.

In which the Universe is really funny. Ha, ha.

We’ve accepted this gig in Indiana, right? Leaving the day after tomorrow, yeah?

So naturally in the past three hours, Bread’s gotten two job offers. One for production building in Colorado for a good friend, another for a comprehensive remodel of a high-end house here in town!

Good one Universe, good one. You crazy bitch.

In which there is sex, band practice, pizza, napping, cheese dreams, swimming, tanning, and a very flat goddamned tire.

The day after our impromptu BBQ/wedding anniversary, I slept in. (All that vodka, yo.) Got up, put on a bikini. It was hot, windy, blustery. Pushing ninety degrees.

I wandered up to the pond. Put my glasses and barrette into my Birks, set my Birks in the center of the floating dock, dove off into the blessedly cool water of the triangle pond.

The rope holding the barrels under the dock broke. It’s been in the water for going on three years now, so I don’t blame it.

When I finished my swim and seal-wiggled myself back up onto the dock, one of the barrels started to escape. I saw it, but thought it would hold. I relaxed there on the hot dock in the sun, listening to my breathing, feeling the water run down my skin, enjoying the heat of the sun and the breeze and being alone on the dock. The water lapped at the dock, the shore… I could hear acres of grass rustling. Continue reading The Rest of the Story →

In which a tragedy is averted by the judicious application of a skirt.

This baby just now got caught between the panes of one of the windows in my home office and fluttered for awhile. I lowered the window as much as I could, hoping it would be able to get out, but it couldn’t.

So I stuck an article of clothing in there next to it, and eventually it figured out that the cloth, unlike the glass, would give it some purchase and it climbed out.

It sat on top of the skirt for a minute, then flew around the room bonking into the windows for awhile… and then it accidentally hit the open window low enough and escaped!

(I was able to blog this so quickly by snapping a picture with my cell phone and emailing it directly to Flicker and then pressing the “Blog This” button in Flickr. God, I love the Internet.)

In which driving along can be fun. And informative!

We drove past this sign yesterday and loved it so much we had to go back and get a picture of it.

“Give Satan an inch and he will become a ruler.”

A ruler! Think on it!

Good thing for those roadside signs or I’d surely not know a damned thing.

After that edifying moment, we went to the Red Rock for dinner and then we went home. I crashed immediately because, yay me, my period started a week early. (I think my uterus is on strike.)

My left tonsil still hates me, but it’s getting better. It only hurts in the morning when I first wake up. Staying hydrated helps it feel better. I think I’ll be totally well any moment now.

I want to go somewhere. Chi-town. New York. Hell, I’d even go to California, even though I hate California. I want to go on vacation. Too bad I have no money and my husband doesn’t have a job. *sigh*

In other news, the rhubarb’s in and it might be time to make some rhubarb cream pie. Yum.

I’m going to get a latté. Can I get you anything while I’m up?

In which I tell you about my weekend.

Friday night I called Bread when I left the office and he was at his mom’s. I went there, and all three of us went over to the Dew Drop. I ended up sitting and chatting with my MIL for a couple of hours; it was a lot of fun but sitting in a bar wasn’t doing my health much good so I eventually had to leave.

Around nine Ray and I had a text message storm. I didn’t actually want to go out because I’d been sick all week, but I wanted to know what was going on. She was hanging with Gorgeous and maybe they were going for a drink or something. I played around on the Internet and eventually went to bed. (Yawn.)

Saturday I slept in. Bread and I went out for Mexican food, then bought some groceries for our empty larder. There’s a new dairy apparently; we got milk and chocolate milk in glass bottles.

When we got home we put the groceries away. I did a little housework, he did some landscaping. Then I went to town and worked on the seva laptop at C’s. Picked up Amazon Blonde on my way to LISCO to borrow a 2.5″ hard drive converter, went back to C’s. Never could get the old drive to spin up. Drove C and AB to the auction dinner, bought tickets, went in.

The food was awesome. AB and I ate with Puffer, and our crazy conversation had the other couple at the table alternately sniffing and laughing out loud. Mother’s little sister was serving desserts and everyone at the table had something different; I had a slice of C’s decadent chocolate layer cake and it. Was. GOOD.

After eating, AB and I checked out the silent auction stuff, then bought clothes. She got a sari and choli; I got two punjabi sets — one in red and one in green.

Ray called and we went to the Hideaway to meet her. After a drink, AB and I left. I dropped AB off at home and went back to C’s, where I reconstructed the seva database out of parts because this year’s iteration was lost when she dropped her laptop and the hard drive failed. GW sat at the piano and played 70’s pop songs and I sang along while working. (All of the work of hosting Amma‘s visit to Iowa each year is done by volunteers. This work is called “seva,” which means sacred sacrifice. We assign this huge amount of work using this piece-of-crap database I built a few years ago. It’s a kludge. I hate it, but it’s the only game in town. Other tour stops do it all by hand; our database lets us print reports, at least.) I had fun singing, and eventually we had a database that should work. C lost her previous data entry, but says she’ll survive.

I left about a quarter past twelve, stopped for gas, stopped put air in my tire (the jeep needs new tires like a year ago), and then stopped to buy Bread sour cream and onion soup mix even though I knew he’d be asleep by the time I got home.

He was. Passed out on the couch in front of the telly.

I put the groceries away, admired my new punjabis, and went to bed.

Today Bread woke me with a mocha latté made from the new milk. Yum! BoSe came out with his four dogs; he and Bread went to MILs to move some furniture for her. I did laundry, worked on Bread’s eBay listings, puttered around.

I blew off tonight’s band practice. BvB couldn’t be there anyway, and since our drummer got married and moved away it’s not like we’re practicing for gigs or anything — we’re not even technically a band right now. (We’re looking for a drummer, if you happen to know any.)

We haven’t set a date for the barn party, but it’ll probably be in early June.

Excuse me while I go throw some stuff in the dryer and go settle on the porch to read sci-fi.

In which it’s freaking gorgeous outside!

These flowers smell like grape Kool-aid.

I don’t know how they do it, but they do. They might be my favorite flowers in the entire world.

They grow at the foot of a tree near our house, and every May we walk by them and smell them and every May we’re amazed that they smell just like grape Kool-aid.

Awfully pretty, huh?

I took this picture yesterday, with my piece-of-shit old cheapo digital camera with the broken flash.

Although Bread’s point that it’s silly to “ruin a perfectly good week off by working on Friday” is valid, I made it to town today anyway. I’m at work, but I’m not actually working. Mostly I had to upload a bunch of images for the eBay auctions I’ll be posting this weekend.

Bread’s selling a ’50 Chevy truck and a ’64 Dodge Dart GT, and there was no way in hell I was going to try to upload several megs of images over dial-up. No effin’ way.

(If you check the Flickr badge over there on the left, you’ll see it’s fulla Easter pics of our niece Parker. She’s a hoot.)

Last night I went to band practice. It was exhausting. BvB told me I sounded great. “For a sick person, you mean,” I said.

“No, for any person!” she replied.

My voice? Unbreakable. Yes!

Bread’s got the property lookin’ mighty spiffy and the barn’s almost cleaned out. Oh yes, my people: there’s a barn party comin’ next month, oh yes there is!

In which nothing really happens.

I may have given up on the brown theme. I love it, but I really need three columns and I couldn’t make those cute fucking tabs work in Internet Exploder.

This plaintxtBlog theme, however? Love it! It supports Widgets, which I hadn’t played with before but am now deeply in love with. (Widgets let me drag and drop sidebar content, rather than coding it all by hand like I used to. Widgets are very, very hot.)

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day and I have not finished knitting her slippers. She’s been my mom long enough, though, that she probably doesn’t expect anything until June anyway.

In which I work too damned close to Mi-T-Mart.

I just went next door to the convenience store — it’s entirely too close, not even thirty paces from the front door of my building — and I bought a Mocha Frappuccino and a package of Hostess Ding Dongs.

Then I consumed them at my desk in a diabetic-inducing frenzy, getting little waxy chocolate crumbs all over my gel wrist-rest and keyboard.

It wasn’t pretty.

And now my tummy hurts.

In which I’m boring.

Got off work last night, picked up some drive-thru, and went home. Bread and I ate at the picnic table outside and he showed me the tear in his jeans and the small scratch on his thigh where he’d not cut off his leg with a chainsaw.

Jesus.

He’d trimmed the lower branches off of several of the big trees near the house, cut down a badly-placed and dying pine, and done other property maintenance. The place is looking really good. We’re contemplating a barn party with music and BBQ next month.

Later he ravaged me and then I watched a TiVo’d episode of South Park while he took himself out for a cocktail in Lib’ville.

I slept for twelve hours last night. Yum.