Things are looking up.

So far, this morning, I have:

1. Obtained crickets for Wednesday's lab (that was a worry; sometimes the local pet shop's "cricket truck" doesn't come in on time)

2. Obtained lettuce, plastic cups, and other impedimentia for the experiment we are doing (testing various plant compounds for antiherbivore properties)

3. Mailed Jennifer her book (It turns out the post office - not that I had had a chance to get there - was closed yesterday. Apparently yesterday was some kind of federal holiday that EVERYONE ELSE BUT US had off.)

4. Found my garage-door opener (it had slid way back in the car. I suppose that happened when I had to stop fast yesterday when one of our many inattentive drivers pulled out in front of me without looking).

5. Found out that the fieldwork I was slated to help on this afternoon has been postponed until Thursday morning because there is a 90% chance of thunderstorms today.

6. Got a call from my mom to reassure me that their cat was eating again. (One of the cats had gone off her feed. It is kind of a worry when an eighteen year old cat quits eating. She took the cat to the vet - the vet did a bunch of tests [well, it was time for blood tests anyway; this is the hyperthyroid cat] and said it was most likely a hairball. The vet recommended my mom get papayin (or however you spell it - that enzyme from papaya) tablets at a healthfood store, break them in quarters, and give a small piece to the cat each day. Apparently the papayin will break up the hair in a hairball and also settle the cat's stomach. Well, it seems to have worked. The hairball has...um....passed [I really did NOT need the litterbox description] and the cat is eating again without having to be coaxed. So yay papayin. [And Diann - the vet said the next option would be to start feeding the cat pumpkin, for fiber. So that's not such a far-out treatment, apparently])

7. Ordered more "five," "one," and "two" from Woodland Woolworks so I can do the e and phi hats (dragon knitter, the e link is sometimes kind of wonky and it doesn't load well on a dial-up. Another place to try is here, but you will have to scroll down through all kinds of documentation to get to the numbers).

I also ordered more of the black and some red, blue, and green for the "quark colors" scarf I've been thinking about. Sort of a "fluster" for myself, since yesterday was a hard day.

Maybe I should put together just a simple little self-published booklet of the geeky-knitter patterns I come up with - the various number hats, and the quark scarf when I get to it, and the socks...and offer it as a freebee for a SASE or whatever type of postage is required. I like the idea of sharing these and having the patterns go out into the larger world. But I'm too much of a dilettante to come up with a whole book of, say, math-related knitting patterns or quantum-physics related knitting patterns. So I'd have to call it something like The Book of Knitting Patterns for the Geeky Dilettante. Or the Dilettante Geek. Maybe that sounds better. Something to think about for the future. Maybe I can figure out some kind of statistics-related thing... Probability Theory mittens or something like that.

(And another numbering pattern for scrap-yarn hats? Get yourself a table of random digits [from any old statistics books; it looks like the ones online they want to charge for] and just use those. Oh - here's one, but it makes my astigmatic eyes hurt.)

Still on deck for TODAY though: write a quiz for Thursday and prep for today's class. And this afternoon, type up the GIS stuff I did yesterday that I figured I'd not have time to do, what with the fieldwork.