It’s chilly and dreary out. It’s been raining off and on all day.

The four rugs I put on the laundry line last weekend have never dried and at this rate they never will. Sigh.

Brett’s back is still fucked up. It was better Thursday, but he made the mistake of going to work Friday – to do flooring – and now he’s pretty much back where he started. This morning we took him into town to see the chiropractor, but the office was closed. Of course.

I called around for muscle relaxants and couldn’t find any; Reni told me to call Kathy which I did. Kathy said she was busy today, but told me what to do: “Put him on 800 mg of ibuprofin every six hours. That’s four pills every six hours. It’ll bring the swelling down. Muscle relaxants won’t actually do anything while the muscle is inflamed like that. So keep his ass down. Don’t let him get up and move around, even when he feels much better after the second dose. You’ll have to wait on him, pamper him. [I groaned at that, of course.] Don’t let him move around at all. Call me in twenty four hours and we’ll go to the next step if we need to!” She is so awesome!

Brett bitched about “just taking ibuprofin,” just as she’d said he would, but he’s doing it anyway. He’s lying in bed right now reading the magazines I picked up for him at the store.

Anyway, back to this morning in review: Went to the chiropractor and it was closed. Went to 2nd Street Coffee Shop, bought lattes, sat in the car and talked to Reni and Kathy on the old cell phone. Stopped at Drug Town for Motrin IB. Stopped at Hy-Vee for lasagne ingredients (and a bottle of wine for the cook). Stopped at Casey’s West for gas. Drove home.

Helped Brett out of the car. Carried in all the shit we’d acquired. Put groceries away. Came upstairs and posted a few pics I took this morning (before it started raining) to my knitting blog. Visited the SFBC’s site to refuse next month’s selections.

Now it’s nearly one and I think I’ll go run the oven for awhile to take the chill off my bones. (I suppose I’ll bake a lasagne and some garlic bread while it’s on!)

Ciao, babies. Smootch!
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We’ve all had blemishes… pimples, zits, whatever. We all pick at them now and then, and sometimes little scabs form. It’s a normal part of the healing process, right?

Well, this is a story about a blemish and the little embarassments life can dish up.

I was sitting in my car taking a break. (I’m working today because Tim’s out of the office and they asked me to come in.) I had a book propped against the steering wheel and was reading, right there in my car next to the Mi-T-Mart on a fine sunny day.

It was pleasant. Traffic vroomed by on Burlington, breezes flowed through the Jeep’s open windows, and I sipped a Starbucks Doubleshot. All was well. I figured I’d finish the page and wander back in to the old jobby-wobby.

Now if you wear glasses, you’ll happen to know that sometimes you have to push them up and rub the bridge of your nose. For some people, it’s because their glasses pinch or are too heavy. In my case, it’s to wipe away some of my skin’s excess oil – my glasses start to slide down when I’m hot and sweaty, which is pretty much always in Iowa’s August weather. (Having oily skin may keep my skin soft to the touch, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be in terms of functionality and keeping my glasses on my damn face.) Everyone you know who wears glasses will occasionally be seen absently swiping the bridge of their nose. It’s a fact of glasses-wearing life.

I’ve redone the site. I’m going to move many of the old pages into MT as entries so I never, ever have to mess with them again and they’ll be updated automatically whenever I update the MT templates.

Some stuff I’m just going to delete. I have so much crap on my server I can’t even move around any more… temp folders, stuff in the wrong places, orphaned pages with graphics from Christmas two years ago. It’s a mess. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of images in my images dir and tons of them are sliced graphics for tables no one’s seen in years.

I’m serious. This time I’m cleaning up the site! For real! It should take about six months. (Snort!)

Last Friday, Mr. Brett hurt his back. Badly. A group of small muscles in his lower back were so swollen they were pulling his spine out. The man could barely move.

He spent the weekend in pain, stuck on the couch. Joe found him a muscle relaxant that put him out like a light for several hours on Saturday, but other than that he’s been in pretty constant pain.

Monday he called his mom, and she not only recommended a great chiropractor, but she had some muscle relaxants in her medicine cabinet at home! (We should have called her first. When will we learn that moms have special powers?)

Brett saw this guy with the most reasonable charges I’ve ever heard of ($37 for the first visit, $28 afterwards an no appointments and no waiting, ever) and got adjusted Monday. Afterwards we met Barb for lunch and she reminded us again we should have called her right away because her chiropractor is actually open on Saturday mornings. I had half a tuna melt and some slices of hard boiled egg off of Barb’s plate, and Brett and Barb chatted about silly family stories involving drunk young Mooks and grandparents. It was a hoot.

The doc told Brett he’d be in pain for the rest of the week and gave him some stretches to do. He also said to “ice the piss out of it” and to come back in a couple of days if he needed to.

The poor man hasn’t worked all week. He can barely get out of a chair by himself, so it’s not like he could reasonably expect to be laying flooring – kneeling and standing and kneeling and standing all day would kill him.

He asked me this morning if I thought he should try to work today, and I told him, “under no circumstances. You’re not smart enough to go home if it starts to hurt too much!”

So he’s home yet again today, watching satellite TV and bored out of his mind. Hopefully he’ll be better soon!
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I was catching up on reading blogs this afternoon.

I went to a friend’s blog and then followed a link to one of her friends’ blogs… and holy shit, The Sloth is a funny, funny blog.

Especially the post for August 17th! Normally I would’t mention a blog twice-removed, but the chick writes with such a tone! Allow me to quote a section of the captioned entry of August the seventeenth:

“19. I would also like to say that the phrase “ribbed for her pleasure is the most meaningless grouping of words in the English language. I once had a vibrator that was ribbed for my pleasure and I found to be the most unpleasurable toy, sex or otherwise, that I have ever owned. Which moron decided that ribbed was supposed to feel good? Are penises ribbed? Is my finger ribbed? What is with the ribbed? They should just say “chafing and painful” or “designed by men for her pleasure.””

ROFL!

No wonder her posts all have thirty or sixty comments, rather than my piddly two or three. Snort!
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The week before last, I got bit by something – a mosquito, or a spider perhaps – on the left eyebrow.

Naturally I had to pick at it. The fact that I did it unconsciously because it itched doesn’t reduce the outcome one bit. First I scratched it, then I scratched off the scab and the one after that. The skin’s all healed up now (despite my best efforts), but there’s a problem.

I have a little bald spot in the middle of my left eyebrow!

It looked stupid. I decided it had been awhile since I’d last plucked my eyebrows, and I thought a little shaping would reduce the obviousness of the hole. Yes, yes – cleaning up the whole shebang will fix this little problem admirably!

Monday I took my great grandmother’s silver hand mirror and my best pair of tweezers, and sat at the picnic table in broad daylight to pluck my eyebrows.

Fabulous! Perfect. Shaped and thinned and just plain lovely. All a pair of eyebrows should be!

Yesterday I looked at my reflection in LISCO’s not-so-brightly-lit bathroom, and it’s as if half my left eyebrow is gone! Argh! The fine hairs I can see up close are too thin to be seen from a distance! I’ve been walking around in public all day with half an eyebrow missing!

This morning I used a bit of eyebrow pencil, just enough to fill it in. It looks normal enough. But still! I can hardly wait until these baby hairs grow in properly.

That’ll teach me to leave well enough alone, won’t it! Our mothers were right: don’t pick at it!
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