Even though I have never been a watcher of Dr. Who (other than in the most desultory of manners), I had to buy the new "Time Traveler" colorway of sockyarn from Knitpicks - it's in stripes colored like the old Tom Baker Dr. Who scarf.

I'm thinking I might knit it up into a watchcap for my brother (who IS a big Dr. Who fan, especially the "classic" series). I also got the "green veggies" one - all shades of green. Which will be socks for ME.

Yes, the stress-induced buying of yarn has begun.

I gave an exam this morning and working away on the current Clapotis while invigilating it, I realized I will need to think of some kind of exam-invigilating project for finals.

I anticipate that I will finish the "simple socks" for my mom this weekend - I have a fair amount of reading to do (I want to read through the books I'm assigning to my summer Population Biology student - I've read them already but it was a few years ago so I need to review, and I can knit on the socks while I read). I may even finish the "simple socks" for me that are on the needles. And the Retro-Rib socks, I find they require sufficient attention that knitting while invigilating would be a good way to make a mistake.

Clapotis is on the downslope to being finished. It might have enough work left on it for one two-hour exam, but then again, if I take a notion to finish it while relaxing and watching tv in the coming week...

Honeycomb takes way too much attention, and Thermal is close to a dividing point that would require more attention than I can give while invigilating.

I'm actually considering starting something totally new - either doing another one of those Lace Ribbon Scarves from Knitty. I have some pink and brown variegated fingering-weight (and I bought more of it, so I can make a long, long scarf, like the one shown) or else starting the Burma Rings pullover from the old Interweave Knits issue. (I have the yarn for that in stash).

Part of me says: no, you should not start another "big" project before finishing the other "big" projects you have going, but another part of me likes the idea of having something new to start on. (The possible downside of Burma Rings would be that I'd have to swatch it first, just to be sure....with a lace scarf, gauge isn't quite so much an issue).

I also have another SitCom Chic's worth of yarn in my stash, in a really bright strong purplish pink. I'll have to think about it this weekend and figure out what would be good to start. (If I decide to start something new)

I guess it's a function of the poor economy (and I hope not the function of my lawn having looked neglected), but twice in two days I've been approached by people wanting to know if I'd hire them to do my lawn.

The first one would have been solved with a "No Solicitors" sign (which I really should get) - he knocked on my door. The second guy stopped his truck and walked up and asked me AS I WAS WORKING IN THE LAWN.

(yes, despite the fact that I'm still rashy, I figured the guy coming to my door the night before was a clear sign that I needed to do something, so I used my electric trimmer to edge and cut down all the cheatgrass that my little rotary mower wouldn't get rid of).

I don't know about anyone else, but I'd be really leery of hiring some random dude who just walked up off the street. I've heard far too many horror stories in my town of unreliable lawn guys - who don't show for three weeks but still expect to be paid - or even a few cases of employees of services that turned out to be criminals who cased the house while they were working on it and then broke in later on. (And as a lawn service would likely be working when I'm not home...)

Besides, I like doing my own yardwork, most of the time. Maybe I'm not quite as Janey-on-the-spot about getting it done every time as some people on my block are, but I'd hope they'd cut me a little slack as they know I live alone and work full time (the people with the "perfect" yards are either retired, or one spouse works out of the home and has a flexible schedule).

I don't know. This is one of those "nanny" issues that bugs me...people thinking they have a right to insist that their neighbors keep their lawns as "perfect" as they do. (I have one neighbor - not an "immediate" neighbor, but one down the street - that I've had "discussions" with in the past. My lawn is not HORRIBLE but neither is it as perfect as hers, and I am unwilling to spray many chemicals and hire many dudes just to make it like hers).  There are city laws on what your lawn can look like and mine never violates those. But because it's not golf-course-like, I sometimes wind up taking grief. I suppose that's my choice, in a way, and I have to put up with it, but I get so weary of people who think they can run my life better than I can.

(Sometimes I think if I were doing the homebuying thing all over again, I'd buy a large plot of land just inside city limits [so I'd still have city water and a reliable trash pick-up], build a house in the middle of it, and post it "No Trespassing" so I wouldn't have to explain to people that (a) I use a reel type mower so it doesn't always cut the things like cheatgrass flowering heads and (b) my life is really very busy right now and YES I am getting to the lawn but just not today.)

Sometime, when I get a little time to bake, I want to try making these home-made versions of a Pop Tart. I particularly like the suggestion of leaving the sugar out of the dough, and filling them with pesto or ground nuts or a marinated black olive tapenade sort of thing.

But I also like the thought of making the sweet-dough ones and filling them with Nutella. Om nom nom, as the cool kids say.

The filmed version of the Royal Shakespeare "Hamlet" was really good. I found the surveillance-camera idea to be particularly striking - especially from the beginning, where the ghost of the dead King (he is never named, is he?) shows up in the "real life" shots, but the shots from the "surveillance camera" showed the soldiers interacting with thin air. (And of course, Hamlet ripping down the camera and declaring that he was now alone).

The mirrors were also a good theme to include; they sort of continue the idea of surveillance, the fact that people can see other people without directly looking at them. And the broken mirrors throughout! I was struck at the point when Claudius was preparing to have Hamlet sent to England, he was washing his hands and speaking to a broken mirror - you'd think, I thought, in a castle, the home of the leader of a country, something like that would be repaired? But then again, it looked like a very 'backstairs' sort of place, almost like a mop room.

(And a thought: is it a tradition that the same actor plays Claudius and the ghost of Hamlet's father? This production did that, and the one I saw last year on campus did that. It makes sense - partly because they're supposed to be brothers, but also - in the "real world"  - the Ghost is such a small role).

Tennant played up the madness more - acted goofier - than the actor in the stage production I saw. I will say I liked the trope of him filming the "play" to gauge his uncle's reaction, to try to (in Hamlet's disordered mind) find proof of his uncle's guilt.

Polonius was a much older man in this version than he was in the stage version I saw. The stage Polonius almost seemed more threatening - he was a tall man, and the actor was bald but wore a small mustache.

The "making of" feature at the very end was also interesting to me - I always find it fascinating how things are decided upon for stage productions or movies - they talked about how it was difficult to think about filming all the soliloquies because there are seven in the play, and it would get very repetitive to do them all as straight-on, stage-style settings. So they had the one with Hamlet crouching in his grief on the floor (which itself is mirrorlike - a very high gloss black floor), the most famous one with him filmed close-up and in half-darkness, Claudius speaking to the broken mirror, Hamlet filming himself as he prepares to return home to exact his "revenge"...

(I also have to say it's interesting to hear what I assume is the "natural" voice of the actor, when they talk about the production. Tennant's Scots accent becomes prominent when he's not in character. [And it's an endearing accent, or so I think]. I find it fascinating how actors can learn to speak with different accents - I wonder what kind of training that takes. I know a lot is made of how Hugh Laurie almost perfectly does an American accent in "House, MD" and I admit, knowing him mainly from that, it's surprising to see him in other things where he is speaking more "naturally" for himself).

(I'm actually surprised - looking at Tennant's bio - to find he's only a couple years younger than me. I had never watched him as The Doctor - never got into that show - and the photos I had seen of him made me assume he was somewhere in his mid 20s.)

I can also completely see that Patrick Stewart's real life ambition was to be a Shakespearean actor rather than a Starfleet Captain. He made a pretty remarkable Claudius and I'd like to see more productions of things he was in. (I seem to remember reading he was Malvolio in a production of Twelfth Night, which would have been truly wonderful to see).

More of this, please, PBS.

Zantac. Who knew? Apparently not me. Zantac is apparently a pretty good thing to take if you're in allergic overload as it blocks histamine. The campus nurse told me to get some (well, she did the other day, but I "heard" it as Zyrtec, which is an antihistamine). And she suggested taking the smallest possible dose of Benadryl, even though it really knocks me out. I'll do that this evening, after I'm done with practicing piano and eating dinner.

Though I may only take one at a time - maybe just try the Zantac tonight. Apparently it makes some people drowsy and I don't need the combo of a medication that might make me sleepy with one that I know will.

Oh, sweet. An online medical site says, "You may find Zantac eliminates hives fairly quickly." They say it takes longer for esophagitis to heal, but I don't have that problem. I now have tremendous hope for this treatment - if it stops me from rashing up, that will be fantastic.

She also seemed to think the rash and swollen eye were not as serious as I thought they were, I mean, in the sense of "You really need to get that seriously treated." She didn't think steroid treatment was advisable, and if I can avoid stuff like Prednisone, I prefer to.

Edited, midmorning: I have a 1:30 appointment with the campus nurse to see if anything more needs to be done. I think the next step would be trying Benadryl, which I'd rather not do, because it knocks me out so badly (maybe a children's sized dose wouldn't, I don't know). I will say having checked just now in the restroom, the eyelid is less swollen than it was, so maybe the two days' worth of Zyrtec is beginning to do some good, and maybe I just need to be patient and continue to take it. It does seem to have fewer "unpleasant" side effects than Claritin; the only side effect I've noticed is a dry mouth, and I can deal with that if it helps the allergies.

****

I wonder if the allergic overload (I now have a rash on my face too: hawt.) is partly related to stress.

I have this one student. He has missed most of the labs. He wants to make them up. I told him he could do two, and to e-mail me and tell me which ones. So he e-mailed me back and told me to tell him. (I just should have done so, but in a fit of pique at the apparent willful helplessness, I told him he had to choose).

He chose the very lab that I said - three times - in class I WOULD not do as a make-up, because of the amount of prep-work it required on my part. (Of course he has not been in class).

The e-mail was sent at 10 pm last night. Now, I know some people don't get 'round to their e-mail until then, but of course there was no way for me to tell him "no" until this morning - and this afternoon is when he's supposed to do the labs.

Insert facepalm here.

(No, really. You're going to have to insert it. I was going to post the image of Homer facepalming with the caption "When 'D'oh' isn't enough" but Blogger's image-uploader is not working, at least as far as taking images I have stored on my hard drive, this morning)

****

However, I am continuing along knitting on the two pairs of socks for my mom's birthday. I shifted over and started working on the Retro Rib socks and am almost up to the heel flap on the first one. I'm not sure I like the Kertzer sock yarn, though - it's kind of splitty and doesn't show stitch definition all that well.

I'm also almost up to the heel turn on the second simple sock. So I have a good chance of getting these done before her birthday at the end of May.

I swear this year's allergies are like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates: you never know what you are going to get.

Yesterday afternoon, my left eyelid started swelling. It got worse overnight (I think partly from position; it's less swollen now). It itches, and I can tell it wants to droop and look bad. (I'm gonna cringe if I walk into class and someone goes, "Oh noes, what happened to your EYE?")

It's not pinkeye. I looked the symptoms up online. I have a considerable fear of pinkeye. This is just plain old allergies. I took a Claritin this morning and tried a cold compress but neither did much. I may have to - as much as I hate it - go and buy some Benadryl (Benadryl absolutely knocks me on my can for two days after taking even a very low dose of it).

That said, I think DISCRETION  being the better part of VALOR (ugh. I didn't catch that earlier - I had the terms reversed and it would bug me forever if I didn't change it),  (Edited again: I have it right this time, finally. Argh. Shakespeare quotation FAIL.) I don't think I'm going to try to sort the last soil sample today. I did one yesterday and I think that may have contributed to the problem.

Thank goodness for sulfa drugs*.

The cat is coming home...I was given to believe that today was the decision day, depending on the results of blood and urine tests, the cat would either be coming home, or would be Going Home (in the Rainbow Bridge sense). Yeah, my concentration today was not at its best. (I actually deal better with the certainty of something bad than with the uncertainty. The whole Schroedinger's Box feeling of the day was not pleasant.)

Well, her white cell count has gone down, her BUN and creatinine are lower (not low, but then this is a cat on kidney medication to begin with). And she's eating. And she's wanting attention. She's not totally out of the woods - she has a week plus of antibiotics, plus a potassium supplement, plus the vet wants to do a couple days of subcutaneous rehydration just to get her "back" to where she should be.

But her iv port has been removed and she's been signed out of the vet's.

I know I'm going to have to be prepared for her going at some point, but I'm glad it's not just yet.

(*Also, my mom's taken 'em many times for various infections. She's allergic to almost every antibiotic out there but can take the sulfas)

****

A while back I predicted I would come to hate practicing the Hanon pieces. Well, not actually. I find I'm just compulsive enough - and I'm also the kind of person who's soothed by repetition - that once I figure out the basic pattern, I kind of like playing them. Just running up and down the octaves doing whatever pattern has been established. So when I don't know what else to play during practice time, or when I don't feel quite up to the "interpretation" that some pieces require, I play that. I get good at them, maybe I spend more time on them than I should, but I figure they're a good workout for the hands.

And I do go back and re-practice the ones I've already completed. I so cannot do them with the metronome marking of 108 (what Hanon recommended you work up to) but I can do them considerably faster than 60 (his "starting" metronome marking).  Hanon claimed that if you worked on them for an hour a day, you could become a virtuoso by the time you had completed all 60. Well, I don't quite devote that much time (maybe 20 to 40 minutes a day) to them, but then again, I doubt I will ever become a virtuoso. (And I never will if I don't learn to conquer the stage-fright thing). And I don't really need to be one. I don't fantasize about a second, later-in-life career as a concert pianist. (Well, okay, I sometimes daydream about it, but that's not the same as thinking it would actually be possible or plausible or even, in reality, something I would want: for one thing, there would be far too much travel involved).

***

And this is scary. The murder mentioned was committed in the apartment complex right next door to the building where I teach and have my office. Yes, I realize, it was a "domestic," but still. I think I will be far more inclined to take work HOME with me rather than staying over late in the future - and trying to do any work (e.g., research) that requires me to be over there during the day from now on.

Also, the apartment complex in question has been open for only about six months, so I'm not so sure I'd give the comment, "There's never anything like this that happens here - it's a great place," a great deal of credence. 


Between this and the vandalism last week (someone creating a disturbance by breaking windows so he could try to burgle a house one street over from the building), it's getting kind of scary over there. We're a bit away from main campus, so the campus police don't always get up to patrol our place as often. (I hope they change their pattern, at least for a while). I teach a class that lets out at 7 pm on Tuesdays in the fall; I think I will make sure to be walking out at the same time as my (male) co-teacher or with a group of the students.

This is just a reminder to myself: Wednesday night PBS is airing a version of Hamlet with David Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius.


My local PBS station had no sound this morning when I turned it on. They BETTER have that rectified by Wednesday night.

I kind of ran out of steam for doing the last four rows on the "Dozen Roses" quilt top, but you can kind of get the idea of where it's going:



When it's done, it will also have two borders: a narrow inner border that will be an orangey-peach marbled fabric, and an outer border that is pink, in that Dimples pattern. (The outer border fabric I had bought with the fat quarters for the quilt; the inner border fabric was another moment of stash-serendipity because the quilt I originally planned for these fabrics didn't have an inner border and I decided I wanted one).

Here's a close up. My favorite fabric in the entire quilt is the one with the little pastel trees in it:



I also spent about an hour yesterday afternoon (still somewhat antsy) cutting out all the gorram* tree seedlings from my gardens in the backyard. And I didn't even get all of them....it'll be another hour or so's work to complete that. And pulled up an awful lot of Virginia creeper, and very carefully cut out a bit of poison ivy (and then ran in to wash my hands in cold water: supposedly if you do that within a half hour of exposure, you're a lot less likely to get it).

(*Gorram is not a type of tree. Those who remember "Firefly" will recognize it as the writers' (rather clever, I think) way of using words that are not cursing, but sound like a curse.)

I've also been doing more hand quilting. I don't know how easy it is to see it, but I decided that as I was working my way around the edge anyway, I might as well start on the inner border. I'm doing almost stitching-in-the-ditch along the diagonals and then up one straight side of each square.

For the outer border - if I decide to quilt it after all - I will need to pin on an "extender." I have an old linen tea towel somewhere that I use for that purpose.

Maybe, just maybe, the cat is going to get better. The vet took her off the penicillin derivative and started her on a sulfa drug, and continued the blood-detox (phosphorus binding). My mom reported this evening that the cat looks a lot better than she has, and she ate with more gusto than she has in quite a while (finished the whole plate of food in one go, rather than eating it slowly and coming back to it). She does have to go back to the vet (this is the "emergency" vet open weekends) for more IV tomorrow.

I know this is going to be expensive but I also know it's important to my parents to feel like they are doing everything possible for the cat. Some people might go, "eh, it's 21, it's at the end of its life" but I think they feel that since the cat still seems to be 'enjoying' life it is the ethical thing to do to treat her.

So I have some hope. Monday the cat gets blood tests which will be the definitive thing as to whether the treatment worked. The vet did say a day or so ago that she was surprised the cat was still eating considering the blood levels of things like creatinine and her elevated white-blood-cell count. So maybe the cat still has pretty strong will to live, and that counts for something.

I hope.

I did a bunch of sewing today, and I finished cutting the pieces for the Flower Garden quilt. I changed one of the fabrics at the last minute: I had had a piece of that "Dimples" fabric in a turquoise color, but I was concerned that that would blend in too much with the Moda Marble I was using as the tiny little sashing (and it is tiny little: the strips are 1 1/2 inches wide) and look funny. But then I spotted another fat quarter of a butterfly fabric, different from the butterfly fabric I already had put aside for the quilt but in the same colors as I was using. So, delighted, I took the fabric and substituted it in for the turquoise "Dimples" (which, I am sure, I'll be able to use elsewhere).

That's one of the reasons I like having an extensive fabric stash - when you're planning a quilt, if you're not totally in love with one of the fabrics, you can often find something you like better tucked away. Or you can sort through it and realize that a new fabric you bought coordinates nicely with some you already have, and you have what you need to piece a top. Even though I have a quilt shop in my town, it's nice to be able to go to the stash - for one thing, the quilt shop isn't open 24/7 (and often, I'm sewing on a Sunday afternoon or after 5:30 pm on a weekday, and they aren't open then). And for another, it's kind of like I said the other day about making a meal out of food you already have on the shelf: it's kind of satisfying to be able to turn to your own resources for something you need. (I'm not going to pretend it's being frugal, because I know I buy lots of quilt fabric, and I also buy lots of it without any set pattern or project in mind).

I have all the rows sewn together for the Hill Country Spring quilt but I need to press the seams (a less-favorite part) before I can set the rows together into the top. I did start sewing together the blocks for the super-simple "Dozen Roses" quilt because I was able to figure out a configuration that I liked and because it's a regular pattern, once I got the order of the colors for the first row, all successive rows were set. 

However, when I'm concerned or troubled about something, I can never sit still for too terribly long - I tend to flit from project to project. (I kind of envy one of my mother's friends: when something's troubling her, she can sit down at her quilt frame and "quilt it out" - work for several hours at a go and get up from the frame feeling better). I get antsy and need to be moving and often feel like I need more physical activity.

(I think the fall that my dad was going through a long diagnosis process of a medical condition was the fall my house was its cleanest).

So, I went out to the garden center and bought the rest of the soil I needed for the raised beds. Eight bags of topsoil, six of the "garden soil," and three bags of sand this time. (half of the soils I did get carried out to my car for me by one of the young men working there). So I spent part of the afternoon mixing sand and soil and shoveling it into the raised beds.

Oh, what do you call it when you open a bag of topsoil in your wheelbarrow, then a bag of sand, then a second bag of topsoil on top of that? A Sand-wich. Heh.

The beds are ready now. Ready for when I have a bit of time in the coming week to consider what I want to put in them. I'm thinking if I can find Arkansas Traveler tomatoes (my favorite variety of the ones I've grown, plus, they do well in this climate) I'm going to get some of those, and maybe a couple Roma plants, because their tomatoes are good for bruschetta or on sandwiches. I might see if I can find a couple butternut squash plants, or maybe try watermelon (maybe third time is the charm: the first time I grew them, borers got the plants. The second time, they got watermelons but then the watermelons never got bigger than marble size, I think because they got choked out with weeds - I got busy and couldn't get to weeding the garden). And I might stick some basil in as well. And yes, marigolds. (All the old-timers around here tell you that if you want to grow tomatoes, you have to plant marigolds as well: marigolds help prevent nematodes from attacking the tomatoes. And yes, it is really truly true, scientific studies have shown it.)

1. I'm having to deal with Human Difficultness. People frustrate me and disappoint me because of their sheer capacity to behave illogically and selfishly. I would make a poor saint - as I said before - because I regularly lose love for my fellow humans.

2. The cat may be approaching the end of her life. I'm trying to resign myself to this. Her white cell count is apparently not going down with the added antibiotic treatment, and her creatinine has gone up. (It's possible that the antibiotics, while saving her from the infection, are frying her kidneys). Damn it sucks that they don't live as long as we do.

I think I'm going to spend the day - seeing as the trash-off was once again cancelled due to rain - in my sewing room pretending the rest of the world doesn't exist.

I ran into one of our students who is now working on a Master's. He commented that he's taking a graduate-level stats class and that it's "easy" because of what he learned in Biostatistics from me. And he thanked me for the preparation I gave him.

I'm going to remember that the next time I get down on myself because a student complains that that class is "too hard." A lot of times doing stuff that's "hard" means that stuff in the future is easier, or you're able to do things in the future better because of that past preparation.

I don't know; maybe I'm a little perverse but I enjoyed many of my "hard" classes as a student because they presented a challenge, and I felt like I had really achieved something if I managed to earn an A.


****

If I can manage to finish grading these exams (I didn't, yesterday afternoon - a "heated discussion" broke out next door to me and it distressed me sufficiently that I bugged out early), I think I'm still going to allow myself a bit of a "mental health day" this afternoon. I feel much better today, though I'm not sure it's entirely due to not having to breathe wet moldy soil yesterday. (I do still need to do those two samples, but I'm thinking Monday would be a good day to work on them).

What I did with what extra time I had (I didn't leave campus until 2:45, an hour and forty five minutes later than I originally planned), was get the first batch of soil for the raised beds.

Yeah. They're gonna take a lot of soil. Four, forty pound bags of "topsoil", mixed with two fifty-pound bags of "play sand" and amended with four, "1.5 cubic foot" bags of organic mulchy stuff didn't even fill the first bed. I'm thinking it'll take three rounds of that to fully fill the garden. (It's wet today so I don't think I'll do the second round today. Maybe Saturday, after the trash-off).

I'm mentally putting this expense in the budget column for "therapy" rather than for "having cheaper food." Just so you know. (And yes, done right, gardening can be a form of therapy.)

Besides, it makes me feel good that I can lift and carry fifty pound bags of sand.

****

I made an off-the-shelf dinner last night. I like being able to do this occasionally: realizing I don't have anything really left over or planned-ahead, being able to go to my pantry and make dinner without having to go (dahn dahn DAHN) to the grocery store (or worse, the wal-mart) at the end of the day when everyone else is there.

I did stewed tomatoes. Opened up a can of "petite diced" tomatoes, seasoned them with some Penzeys' "Sandwich Sprinkle" (which, despite the name, is a good all-purpose seasoning, with a kind of vaguely-Italian herbs flavor). I didn't have any white bread, and usually I make stewed tomatoes with white bread, but the thought of even running out to the Braum's for a loaf of their (admittedly spongy) white bread was more than I felt like doing. But I had wheat bread.

First of all: I tend to have very distinct and rigid preferences for "what bread goes with what." I am actually kind of like the average five-year-old in that aspect. (Well, maybe not. I wouldn't throw a screaming tantrum if served the 'wrong' kind, but I'd be distinctly discomfited). Grilled cheese is made on white bread. Egg salad sandwiches have to be on white bread. Peanut butter is acceptable on either, but best on some kind of wholegrain bread. Turkey has to be on white, ham on whole wheat, roast beef is best on marble but failing that, the bread should be white. Pizza must have white-flour crust. And don't serve me those gritty, "good for you" whole-wheat pasta noodles. (I know, they've improved them. But I remember having some when they first came out and being really put off by them, and every time I saw an ad claiming that "your family won't tell the difference" I thought, "Oh, don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining.")

So, I had always only made the scalloped/stewed tomatoes (I guess strictly speaking the addition of bread makes them scalloped; stewed is just plain tomatoes) with white bread. But going out to get some: meeeeeeeeeeh.

So I used the whole wheat - I toasted it first, and buttered it a little, and tore it up into bits.

And at the end, I put some mozzarella on top to melt.

And you know? I think I like the whole wheat bread better in this. It holds up a little better (sometimes the white bread kind of dissolved and got gross), and it does have more flavor.

The cat is home now. She's doing better - apparently the daylong treatment was a combo pack of a more powerful antibiotic, rehydration, and treatment for out-of-whack phosphorus levels.

The vet fed her tuna. And babyfood ham. Neither of which she EVER gets, so that probably made the stay a little less onerous. My mom said the cat looked better - that apparently she was dehydrated and that was what was causing a lot of the problems. She did get sent home wearing a funnel collar (because the iv port is still in her paw), but my mom said she took it off and instead put a small piece of soft cloth over the port, because she figured it was unlikely the cat would mess with it, and besides, she figured the cat could not eat or drink with the collar on, and she really does need to continue taking in water. At the very least.

She does have to go back tomorrow and I guess based on the results of a blood test, she either gets to go home with more pills, or she gets another day of the antibiotic drip. I'm hoping the conclusion is that she's better enough just to go back home, but at least it sounds like she's doing better for now.

Here are Some really fascinating photos from the Icelandic glacier's eruption.

I think I've been working too hard and pushing myself too much. I didn't sleep well last night - had lots of strange unpleasant dreams culminating with my dreaming that was driving along sort of at dusk (this is a common theme, for some reason) but then I had to swerve to avoid a buffalo that was crossing the road, and wound up rolling my car down an embankment. (I was wearing my seat belt in the dream. The air bags did not deploy in my dream). When the car came to rest, I thought, "Oh, crap, my new car is going to be all banged up" and then I woke up. I've also been dreaming about teaching, which is never pleasant - you feel like you haven't slept, like you haven't "gotten away" from work when you wake up.

So I've decided to give myself as much of a "mental health day" as I feel I can reasonably take in my job. I give an exam today, and I have a few hours of office hours. In the before-exam office hours, I'm going to clean my office a little (get rid of all the un-handed-out handouts: I really should be more draconian about disposing of them and telling people who miss class that it's on the online site and they need to get it there). After the exam, for my 2 office hours, I'm going to grade.

And then I'm going to go home. I'm not going to try to sort the remaining two soil samples - it's possible part of my tiredness is due to allergic overload from trying to get them all done this week. I'm not going to hang around waiting for someone to come in with a problem - I've already put out fires I should not have had to put out this week.

I don't know what I will do with the extra free time at home but I am sure I will find something.

Part of this may also be due to the fact that my parents' one remaining (21 year old) cat is not doing great - she is going to the kitty hospital today for some kind of "flushing" treatment - she is on antibiotics for an infection and the doctor is concerned it could be affecting her kidneys, so they're going to put her on an iv drip for the day and think that might help. I am probably excessively concerned about this. And anyway, intellectually, I know: the cat is 21. That is remarkably old for a cat. But still.

The cat is still eating so I suppose that's a good sign.

****

And, something cheerfuller. Or at least, that I find cheerfuller. The other day, Lynn linked to a site showing the anatomy of a tribble, and a commenter brought up the, "but they don't show the baby tribble growing in there, I thought they were born pregnant!" And that triggered the memory of another site for me:

"Whoa, [tribbles] be always preggers!" (quotation from "Bones" McCoy). Yup, Star Trek in LOLspeak. (I know I linked the site before. And I know some hard-core trekkers really hate it. But, for me, it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen on the Internet. They even work in the DS9 tribute to the episode at the end.)

****

Also, my mail has not been fun lately. Lots of junk mail, lots of weird catalogs for stuff I'm not even interested in.

But then yesterday, I opened the mail box. And there was one, lone piece of mail. A small envelope, with my name and address handwritten on it. About the size and shape of an invitation. "Now who," I asked myself, "who of the people I know could be getting married or having a baby?" (I assumed it was a shower invitation or a wedding save-the-date card. I couldn't think of anyone who would be sending me a formal invitation.

Well, yes. It was a formal invitation.

An invitation from the Women's Health Center. For my annual mammogram.

This was my reaction:

My dentist sends postcards with cartoons of dancing teeth on them, so you know immediately what they are. I think that's more my speed. (I know, I know, the "invitation" is meant to be a nice gesture and all, but it seemed excessive to me.)

I don't have the most manicured yard on my street, and I admit at times I look at my neighbors' (some of whom hire lawn services to come in and remove/spray anything that they deem as "not belonging") and get nervous that I'm not "doing enough" to keep up the "beauty" of the neighborhood. Then again, I see other benefits to my wilder lawn and garden.

Yesterday, heading back to campus after lunch (I was in a hurry but still wish now I had got my camera and photographed it), there was a small brown snake curled up on top of one of the abelia bushes. I presume it climbed up the trunk and branches, and probably set up there at the top to get the warmth from the sun. (And maybe to find insects, I don't know). I'm pretty sure it was a rough earth snake. I've seen them in my yard before, and this one looked a lot like those. (It was bigger than the other ones I've seen, though about the same size as the larger ones shown on that site). One of the diagnostics is the belly color but I didn't want to scare the snake by trying to pick it up to look at its belly. I'd just as soon it stayed in my yard and brought its conspecific friends, because the website says they eat slugs, and anything that eats slugs is more than welcome in my yard.

Also, like a lot of other tiny things, tiny snake is cute. Yeah, it's possible for a snake to be cute, I think.

The other neat thing I saw was a purple oxalis blooming in my yard. The yellow ones (Oxalis stricta) are really super common down here, but the purple ones (Oxalis violacea) are rarer.

So, one of the reasons I like having a less manicured lawn is that sometimes things surprise me. (I also seem to get a lot more birds than the people with the "golf course lawns" seem to get)

And a question:

Has anyone used a brand of flour called Blue Bird Flour? Apparently it's milled in Colorado.

I'm asking, because the Green Spray (the small, locally-owned grocery here in town - they don't carry every item and every brand I use but I like to shop there because they are saner than the wal-mart) has it. It comes in cloth sacks! Now, these are not cloth like the old feedsack cloth that quilters love (it's not printed), but it is cloth and it has a bluebird on the front. And it comes in small-ish amounts (I think they had five-pound sacks). And I admit, I like the idea of both buying flour from a smaller mill (I usually buy Gold Medal) and I like the idea of having the empty sacks to do something with - maybe even make new kitchen curtains someday (I like the idea of repurposed flour sacks as curtains). But: I need to know: is it hard wheat? Soft wheat? Is it good?

One online site claims it's the "only" flour that Navajo will use, but I don't know about that. ("Only" might also mean, "most reasonable and readily available, especially in large quantities, for people who don't get to the grocery often")

I don't use a LOT of flour - I don't bake bread as often as I once did, and these days, I'm actually more likely to make tortillas - so I don't need to replenish my flour stocks just yet. But it would be nice to get either a "Oh yes, buy it, it's fantastic!" or a "you might be disappointed" to let me know whether to consider going with Bluebird the next time I'm ready to buy flour.

Random stuff for a Tuesday:

1. I'm going to leave the comments on moderate. As much as it bugs me, I AM getting spam that has what are apparently embedded links to sites. I don't know what the sites are (don't click on them) but from the address that comes up, I'm suspicious that they are prOn.

Not sure what I'll do when I'm going to be away from the computer for a while, but then again, I don't get THAT many comments.

2. I can has raised beds!



I decided that if I was going to actually do any gardening this spring, I should either decide once and for all to go to a raised-bed system for the veggies (the herbs are too entrenched; I don't want to have to excavate and transplant a 3 foot high rosemary bush). I also realized that if I was going to do raised beds, I probably had better see if any were still available (I live in an area that retailers tend to think is smaller than it actually is; stuff sells out, especially seasonal stuff). Orshelin's had none, but Lowe's had these set-ups. The tallest part is 18" deep, which should be perfect for tomatoes. (I think my problems with them not producing in the past was in part competition from tree roots, and in part that the soil here is pretty shallow and stony and hard to grow through). I'm debating whether to just do a tomato blow-out this summer and plant all available space in these with them, or figure out something else...winter squash, maybe? Or, as much as it pains me to leave unplanted area, leave some area to try a fall crop of beets. I don't know.

I haven't filled them yet. I think what I'm going to do, rather than buying "GOOD FILL DIRT" as some advertise, I'm going to go the expensive route and get bags of topsoil, bags of sand, bags of organic matter stuff, and mix them. Partly because a lot of the soil around here tends to be kind of heavy (lots of clay) and also because sometimes GOOD FILL DIRT around here comes with a side of fire ants. And I've managed to mostly avoid fire ants in my yard up to now; I'd like to continue that.

I'm half tempted to buy another set-up like this for another part of my garden. I'm hoping that having the raised beds will AT LEAST cut down on the St. Augustine grass creeping its tillers into the garden, which I then have to cut out on a regular basis. They had smaller set ups (smaller and cheaper) that were only 5 1/2" high but where still 4' by 4'.

3. This is the first finished sock for my mom:



I'm about half done with the cuff on the second one. And last night I started the second pair; they're going to be the Retro-Rib sock (from Interweave Knits) in kind of a denim blue heather.

I just hope I can get these finished by the end of May when her birthday is.

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City.

It amazes me that it's been that long.

In 1995, when it happened, I was still in my 20s. I was still in graduate school. I had just started working on the doctoral degree that would eventually be (in part) my ticket to a career here in Oklahoma. At the time, I had no idea I'd be moving to Oklahoma - no plans, really, beyond the vague "get my Ph.D. and then teach somewhere."

I remember we heard the news in the biostats class I was taking at the time. I tend not to think of things as being as bad as they actually are - I remember back in 1986, when one of my friends stopped me in the hall at my high school and told me that the Challenger had blown up, the first thing I said was "But they got the astronauts out safely, didn't they?". I think at the time I imagined the Murrah building bombing as being similar to the abortive 1993 World Trade Center bombing - a small number of people killed, a lot injured, but the building wasn't destroyed.

It wasn't until I got home for the day and saw the news coverage that I realized how bad it was. I particularly remember the harrowing newswire photo of a firefighter carrying a bloodied and badly-injured toddler out from the building.

And that's really the face of the victims of terrorism, isn't it? That the people who get hurt are ones who have nothing at all to do with whatever crazy cause the terrorists are trying to advance.

I can understand disagreeing with what the government does - believe me, over the years of my adult life, I've had my share of disagreements - but I can't understand wanting to kill people in order to make those disagreements known. I can't imagine believing that doing that would solve anything.

There's something about April. Famously, Eliot commented that it was the "cruellest month," though I'm inclined to think he meant more personal observations about that - seeing the spring progress and, especially as you get older, thinking about those who are no longer around to see the spring. The mixture of new life and mortality.

But it seems that a lot of horrible things in recent years happened in April. The Oklahoma City bombing. The shootings at Columbine. The shootings at Virginia Tech. And there may be others I'm forgetting. I'm not sure if it's random, if there's something about this time of year that brings serious problems in people that have them to a head, or if the two later killing sprees were in some way brought on by the memory of the first.

I suppose my problem is I'm trying to impose my own sane thought-patterns on the minds of people who don't have them - who very possibly didn't have a well-developed conscience (because, with a well-developed conscience, how could you justify killing children in a day-care? And McVeigh went to his death unrepentant. I can never look at the poem "Invictus" the same way again, after he quoted it before he was executed.)

It's sobering to think of how one person - or a small group of people - can change so many lives so horribly forever.

We needed rain. It was getting pretty dry here (my grad student and I had a hard time digging the soil she needs for setting up her main experiment). And also, the pollen: in the street gutters, where the rain water has collected, there is this yellow-green scum of pollen.

The fact that it lead to the city trash-off being postponed to a week where my head is less explodey is just a benefit. (I had offered it for extra credit, so if it was going, I absolutely positively had to be there).

I GUESS I'm going to go in in a few minutes (have to run by the bank and cash a check as soon as the bank opens: yes, I could have an ATM card but I don't think I should have one; I am disorganized enough that I'd forget to write down withdrawals and wind up screwing up my ability to balance my checkbook easily. Writing a check forces me to remember to keep records). If I do two soil samples today then I can easily finish the remaining ones next week.

It's tempting not to go in, though.

I know that "Something for the Weekend" with a music performance is sort of Lynn's thing, but in the course of the sort of stream-of-consciousness clicking I tend to do when on YouTube, I ran across one of the earlier performances of the Benny Goodman orchestra doing "Sing, Sing, Sing."

I had forgotten - it's been a while since I listened to it - how much I well and truly love this song. So I'm sharing it.



Makes me wish I knew how to swing-dance, and had a good partner.

I got a few more quilt pieces cut last night, and I am closing in on finishing the first "simple" sock of the pair I'm giving my mom for her birthday.

I find it really hard to wrest much free-time-to-do-stuff-like-that this time of year. Even though during the school day yesterday, in addition to teaching, I

graded a full set of ecology labs
updated all the BlackBoard pages for all my classes (I have a love-hate relationship with BlackBoard.)
wrote a letter recommending my grad student for a summer workshop program
wrote next week's ecology exam
filled out the paperwork for someone who needed to drop my class with my special permission
prepared all necessary handouts for classes for the end of this week
sorted a soil sample (I was going to do 2, but by the time I got done with that one, it was nearly 3:00, I hadn't gotten up to do a workout yesterday, and I kind of wanted to go home and do one).

I find it's easier to work out in the afternoon (what asthma problems I have seem to show up overnight and lessen as the day progresses), but I'm not sure I can reconfigure my schedule to be able to do the full hour every afternoon. (And I'm not sure I could bring myself to get up at 5 to do the hour's piano practicing then).

****

One sort-of-random thing. The Local-On-The-8s here for the Weather Channel plays some different music. (Or at least they do now. It used to be the kind of wandery, "new age" type stuff that didn't have much of a set melody).

For a while, the instrumental part of the "Theme from Shaft" was in the line up.

Lately, though, they've been using a song that I suspect not too many people know: Sleep Walk, by Santo and Johnny (I don't think it's the original version, though. It might be the Brian Setzer Orchestra version, or just some random studio-musicians version. I have a recording of the "original" and it sounds a little different).

I guess this was used in a couple of movies and more recently in an episode of "Heroes," but I suspect not a lot of people of my generation know the song. (I used to be really into some of the obscure early-rock stuff and this was on a compilation album I had).

I'm not sure what style you'd call it. I used to think that the slidy steel guitar made it sound kind of proto-surf. But the guys who originated it are from New York City.

It's funny, in this video, they look different than I envisioned they would. I guess I didn't expect the suits:

Two things.

First of all: I love Weird Al:


Someone posted that on Completely Pointless and Arbitrary group and it made me crack up. Especially his expression at the end.

(And oh, how tempted I am to do that. Or, actually, rather, loudly count the items in the baskets in the people ahead of me to make it abundantly clear that I know they have more than the 20 items that the lane is supposed to be devoted to. Or maybe I need to borrow a child who has just learned to count to "big numbers")

2. I was in the mood to cut fabric yesterday - which doesn't happen often. So I spent some time (not a lot, as I had Board Meeting last night, sigh) cutting fabric. I got most of the cutting done on a quilt called "Dozen Roses." It's from the Bundles of Fun fat-quarter book: 12 fat quarters, cut to yield 12, 5" square pieces each. Then you arrange them so the fabrics run diagonally across the quilt:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2

and so on.

I had had a stack of fat quarters that I think I ironed three separate times planning to cut the top, and just kept not getting around to. They are mostly very bright fabrics, some of the patterns look almost 1970s-inspired, and I have several from the Woodland Wonderland line (that is example is the deer; I also have the rabbits and the mushroom print, both of which are apparently out of print). And I have some very cute pastel tree print, and one with cute bugs on it...all pinks and that bright green and some orange.

So I got the blocks for that quilt cut (it's just simple cutting). I also ironed off and started cutting the 4 1/2" by 7 1/2" rectangles of the turquoise and brown fabrics for the Flower Show quilt I posted about the other day.

I don't generally have cut fabric "ahead" - though maybe it's something I could do, when I feel like doing a bunch of cutting, cut the pieces and have them on hand for when I have time to do the layouts (which does take time) and then have the laid-out, pinned-together stacks for when I'm ready to sew.

This seems to be the time of year that people get loud.

(An aside: I wonder if the rise of cell phones, with their attendant need-to-shout-into-them-at-times, has lead to people speaking more loudly).

I have been party to a lot of loud and somewhat aggrieved conversations, as my next-door-neighbor teaches the "hurdle" class for the majors (as in: if you don't pass with at least a C, you don't get to go on to take higher level classes until you do). There is also a particular individual around who seems prone to loud and rather self-serving "Aren't I a wonderful person" conversations.

And it's getting on my nerves. I need to be able to concentrate. And other people's words break my concentration. Well, I tweeted in some despair about the situation, and Lydia responded with a link to this website:

Simply Noise

It pretty much does the trick. I can still hear that people are talking, but I cannot hear distinct words, so I don't focus on the conversation. It's actually better when I really need to concentrate than music, because music has quiet spots (and some of it is vocal, which for me defeats the purpose of drowning out others' words).

I could also see using this if I ever had to have a really secret, really-high-privacy conversation with a student - the campus doctor and campus counselor both have white noise machines they put outside their offices and turn on if they are with a patient/client, so that no one else can hear what's being discussed.

More think geek:

I really, really love this t-shirt. "Hello Schroddy" hahahahaha.

I really don't need another geeky t-shirt (especially another one where I order it, get it, and look at it and go, "I should have ordered the next size larger." Babydoll t-shirts fit, but they're a lot more fitted than what I'm used to, and they make me a little self-conscious.)

I think Lynn, at least, will appreciate this:

Think Geek has teamed up with Adagio Teas to offer their own blends.

One of them is labeled, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot" in the Star Trek font.

(There's also Zombie Blood Orange, Pirate Chai, and 1-Up Jasmine Green).

So they've got Star Trek, Zombies, Pirates, and Nintendo. Nice.

It's shaping up to be a busy week. But I did do one thing successfully this morning: I ordered tickets for a short visit with family (over my mom's birthday late in May). And I managed to use the $75 voucher they gave me after the miserable trip coming back from Christmas. I was kind of concerned about that; the last time I tried calling (before spring break), the hold-times to work with someone were running into 40 minutes...which, 40 minutes of my time is probably worth more than $75, at least, it would be if I were doing ecological consulting or lab analyses for someone.

This time I got right through. Talked to a nice man. And interestingly, the ticket prices were some $40 less than what the website was telling me (before the $75 voucher). So I got the tickets for over $100 less than I would have without the voucher.

I'm not sure it's enough to make me order my tickets by phone every time - at busy times, dealing with the Amtrak phone bureaucracy can be challenging (to put it politely), but I'm relieved I was able to use that voucher, and I'm happy I have my tickets on their way to me.

I did finish the Hill Country Spring blocks last night. I had fewer done than I thought I had, but I finished them all. I also laid out the quilt - but didn't get a start on sewing it together as last night was also CWF.

These are the 8 rows - there are 8 rows of 5 blocks, which makes a longish narrow quilt (not quite twin sized, but good for putting across the foot of the bed if you want more warmth across your feet)



The stacks go vertically:

1 3 5 7
2 4 6 8

You can't see on there the little trick I use to keep track of which stack represents which row. I pin the blocks together and order the pins like Roman numerals. (So row one has one vertical pin, row five has two angled to look like a V, etc.). It makes me laugh to do it because I remember one of my classmates in third grade or whenever wailing about "Why do we need to know Roman numbers? We'll never use them!" Ah, but often you can FIND a use for things. (I'm also good at knowing when an old movie was made by quickly reading the Roman numbers on the "title card" that usually comes up at the start).


I also got out the packet of fabrics that I'm going to use for that quilt I talked about:



Planning quilts is my favorite step - putting the fabrics together, figuring out what pattern would work best with them. Sewing up the pieces - especially if it's fairly simple sewing - is a close second favorite.

I think I like sewing fabric patches together to make a quilt because it's partly a making-order-out-of-chaos thing, and it's also, in its own way, like playing with blocks. I liked playing with blocks as a kid, both the Lego bricks that my brother and I had so many of, and then the old-timey alphabet blocks that one of my grandmothers had a big set of that she would bring out for the grandkids to play with.

I was never into building towers and knocking them down (Well, maybe when I was very small, to young to remember), but I did like building "things" - either I'd make patterns with the blocks, like crenellated walls, or I'd build "habitats" (either zoos or "houses") for the little plastic zoo and farm animals that I always had as a kid (they were one of my favorite toys - the small animals, maybe about an inch to two inches in size, that you used to be able to buy in bagged sets at places like the Kresge's. I had tons of those - the predictable zoo and farm sets, but also some "oddball" animals (I think I referred to having  a toy pangolin and how I always sort of liked it because it was so unusual) and a set of dog breeds of the world.)

In a way, "making things" out of pieces of fabric is kind of like playing with blocks was. Or at least I think it is.

I also found another pack of fat quarters that I put together and never used, perhaps I'll do a second one of those "Flower Show" quilts out of. I think I will use a strong dark pink for the narrow sashing (I already have some on hand), and probably white again for the wide sashing.



I do need to "discard" one fabric from the pile. I think it will either be the very pale floral stripe, or maybe one of the bird-print fabrics (the pink or the yellow one in the lower right corner, because they are so similar).

No wonder I like that "Flower Show" quilt. It's a Bill Kerr/Weeks Ringle design. (They are the authors of "Modern Quilt Workshop," one of my favorite of the "modern quilts" books).

Like Lynn, I like making simple quilts. I've made my peace with it - I make a concerted effort to not feel bad that I'm not doing highly complicated things. Because:

1. I LIKE the simple geometric-patterned quilts. They make me happy. I enjoy looking at them. They tend to be more like the quilts that people in my family had - or that friends of mine had inherited from older family members.

2. It's a lot of fun to play with color and design with a simpler top. The color becomes the focus more than the blocks, and really, for me, it's about the color and the prints in the quilt.

3. I make quilt tops to relax. I would not find doing Mariner's Compass with its 82,352 little bitty triangle pieces relaxing to sew. Yes, I know, you can do them paper pieced but I have to admit I don't ENJOY paper piecing. I do enjoy taking a bunch of squares or rectangles and mixing them up and sewing them together.

4. It really is about the fabric for me. Not as much about my piecing-fu. Which sometimes isn't the best, I admit. But I'd stress myself out worrying about matching triangle points so six of them (or whatever) came together precisely. And I don't need to be more stressed. I need to be more happy, like I am when I take a bunch of bright colored fabrics and cut them into squares or strips and sew them together and see the quilt taking shape under my hands.

5. If simple geometric designs are good enough to make Kerr and Ringle famous, and if they're good enough for Jane Brocket to write a book about, then they are certainly good enough for little old me.

The quilt that most caught my fancy in the new quilting magazine is here. I have a stack of fabrics in mostly-turquoise, with some bright yellowish-green and some yellow, that I had assembled from fat quarters I just "liked" - I think I picked them up at Quilt Asylum a while back.

I even have a piece of semi-solid turquoise - left from the most recent County Lines quilt (it was the backing) that is large enough do to the "color sashing" (the red in the pictured quilt).

I would need to get some kind of large piece of solid color to use for the main background. I'm thinking white would probably be best. Or possibly a pale, pale yellow. What I might do is stitch up the rows of patterned fabric and then take them down to the local quilt shop and try them out against various solids (and marbles; they have most of the Moda Marbles there, I think)

I also really like the Lincoln's Platform pattern and think I will eventually pull out some of the reproduction Civil War-era fabrics I have and make one of those.

Of course, first I need to finish the Hill Country Spring quilt top. But I'm thinking if I can maybe break away early enough today, I might feel like working on that.

For the first time in a long time, I felt energetic enough to actually consider doing something more than the bare minimum today.

I don't know why...I don't know whether it's that my allergies have finally abated a bit and the pain I was having in my sinuses/ upper teeth went away Saturday night, allowing me to sleep. I think when you have some kind of low-grade pain like that, you really don't notice how much it affects your life. You tell yourself: This is not a migraine. I should be able to function. And you try to, but it's not the same, and you don't have the energy or the desire to do stuff.

I think especially pain in and around the face is bad. I don't know if it's because there are SO many nerves (There are something like 11 cranial nerves. I used to know most of them, there's a mnemnonic that goes "On Old Olympus' Torrid Top, a Finn and German Viewed Some Hops" but I think some of the names of the nerves have been changed since). Or maybe it's because it's close to your brain, close to "you" in the sense of it being your thought-centers and all. I don't know...I do know whenever I have tooth problems (like the bad temporary crown a couple years ago), I'm really miserable to a degree I don't fully recognize until the pain is gone.

I also wonder if maybe it took this long for me to actually get rid of the aftereffects of the virus I had over a month ago. It's possible I developed a low-grade sinus infection after the cold and didn't realize it, and my body finally fought it off (I've actually read recently that some doctors don't give antibiotics for every sinus infection any more, because apparently in some cases they're fungal in nature, or the body is able to eventually fight them off). It's also possible that it just took this long - my mom had something similar over a year ago and she claimed it took her a month to finally shake off the fatigue. (I kind of pooh-poohed that at the time as my mother maybe being a wee bit dramatic, but maybe it was true). Viruses are funny things.

It may also be that I heard and did some things today that I needed to hear and do. First of all, the sermon in church. It was the standard post-Easter lectionary about Doubting Thomas, but the minister took a different tack. I've usually heard it as a "blame Thomas" sermon, or a "aren't we really all like Thomas" sermon. But this time, he talked more about Christ's scars...and how He's showing people that everyone has scars, and yet, everyone has value...and the minister extended that to point out that sometimes the things that scar a person also shape them (he referred to a well-known theologian - I didn't know her or remember her name but she was a professor at Emory- who used crutches all her life, and how she said that she felt like in Heaven, she'd still be on crutches, because that was part of how she "knew" herself, and she felt she was given the disability for a reason). And he spoke of his own dyslexia. And it made me think about how much time I spent talking about some of the traits I have, how I think they make me weird or abnormal or something and how maybe I need to change them. And maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way, maybe it's those traits that really make me who I am, and while I can see the bad about them, there's also a lot of good in them too. And the scars: well, I don't really have any, other than perhaps some emotional scars of a relatively minor sort. But for example, having been "unpopular"* and getting teased a lot as a grade school kid: on the bad side, it's made me overly wary about opening up to people and sort of shy and suspicious of people I don't know. But on the good side, I think I am a FAR more compassionate and understanding-of-human-frailties sort of person than I would have been otherwise. And I don't think I'd give that up in return for greater self-confidence, or more of a tendency to come right  out and make friends easily.

(*though again, I wonder: it seems a lot of people I know and consider friends thought of themselves as "unpopular" kids, so maybe popularity is largely a myth and everyone felt like they were hopeless and weird in grade school)

ETA: Maybe I'm not saying it very clearly. By "scars" or "flaws," I mean ways in which either the world has damaged us, or in ways in which the world says there's something wrong with us. Sort of, to use a silly example, Barbra Streisand being told her nose was too long - but if she had had surgery on it, it would have affected her voice. 

So the main message, which really hit me and actually made me almost tear up a little (and I think one of my friends saw it and understood, she reached out and squeezed my hand right at the end) is that we're all flawed, but that those flaws are what make us who we are, what make us unique. What give us something different to contribute.  And I spend way too much time focusing on how I am "flawed" and how I "need to change" and perhaps not enough in focusing how I have a different perspective or something of value to contribute.

I don't know, there's something tremendously freeing to me to think of just accepting the ways in which I am flawed (I don't mean moral flaws here, I don't mean bad behavior: I mean the ways in which who I am is different from what is "normal") and figuring I have the unusual personality traits or whatever for a reason, and maybe I can even figure out a way to use them to help others.

Also, after church, I went out to lunch. There's a group of the women - I think the next-youngest is some 15 or maybe 20 years older than I am - they are all widowed or divorced so they get together most Sundays and go somewhere to eat. They ask me, but I don't always go (some weeks I have something I took out of the freezer, or some weeks I just want to get back home, to be honest). But I did go this week and I realized that I probably don't get enough interaction with people where really nothing is "expected" of me - where I'm not in charge of some meeting or class, where I don't have to make a decision, where I'm not somehow an authority. I think I've just been carrying too heavy a load this semester (I say this every semester) and it was nice to just go and eat lunch and talk about stuff, just ordinary everyday stuff, and not have to come to any big decisions or fix any problems.

And then I went home. And mowed the yard and trimmed back the abelia and the hollies. Because, as I said, this was the first day in a long time where I felt kind of energetic again.

Yesterday I also went out - I still wasn't feeling 100% but after I got done with grading and sorting 2 soil samples (Two is all I can do in a day before my eyes go; it's looking down a microscope at a bright light). I hadn't done any shopping other than in-town grocery shopping since - well, since my birthday. And there were a few things I needed that I can't get in town. So I went to Sherman.

It was good just to get out. I think I need, occasionally, to tell myself it's OK to burn some gas even if there is no necessary goal at the end of the drive. I never got into the "just driving around for the sake of driving" thing but I do think sometimes when I need to clear my head, going for a drive somewhere helps.

But, as I said, I had to pick up a few things. I went to Target, and to the bookstore, and to the Hobby Lobby and the JoAnn's. (Those last two were fun stops, not necessity stops).

At the Target, they still had some of the Liberty of London stuff. I thought they'd be all sold out. I did wind up buying some...one of the big organizer bins to hold the books beside my bed (Yes, I have a bookcase but the books I am "reading right now" have overgrown the space of the "books I want to read next" that are on that bookcase). And a big pillow and a small pillow...they don't 100% match the living room but they were cute and springy and they were nice and squishy because they're stuffed with feathers (luckily, feathers are one of the few things I am not allergic to)

And I bought a hat. I don't need another hat but I liked it. (And secretly, I think I look good in hats. This is not the bestest picture ever, but here it is)



I flipped the brim up in front to try to give it a bit more of a cloche effect than a bucket-hat effect.

I also bought a couple of quilting magazines, including one that has several VERY CUTE simple patterns in it, including one that I've already designated a packet of fat quarters I had "waiting" for the right pattern for.

So maybe part of it was getting out, getting back to a more normal schedule where I'm taking "care" of myself part of the time, instead of just feeling like I'm taking care of other people. One thing I'm learning I have to really guard against is letting my own time and own focus be excessively co-opted by other people. I got to the point this spring where I felt like I was losing myself - that I was becoming solely someone who put out fires and did stuff for people, instead of someone with an independent life. And part of that independent life is taking a Saturday afternoon to go to the bookstore, or going out to lunch with friends, or just doing stuff around the house.

I also feel like I have to apologize for being so THIS this week:



(Little Emo, having an emo freakout). It's just that time of semester. But I do begin to worry when I'm not finishing stuff or posting extensive discursions on knitting or quilting or something like that that I'm shedding readers. And I need every reader I get.

Someone else on that ROFLrazzi site captioned the Homer Facepalm in a similar way to what I did, but they did it so much better (and less wordy):

Yeah, I'm slowly learning the lesson that I think all hyperresponsible people have to learn at some point: Saying "I don't have time to do it" or "I don't have time to do it right now" will not cause the world to fall off its axis or something. And that if I DON'T say that occasionally, I take on way too much, make myself ineffective and crabby, because I'm not sleeping/not taking time to cook and eat nutritious food/not taking time for myself.

At least today is Friday. I'm going to see how things go, and either come back and sort soil samples after lunch, or decide to take the afternoon off. (I have to meet briefly with a colleague about something; if he can meet during my break between classes, I'm taking the afternoon off; otherwise, if I have to come back after lunch I might as well sort soil.)

And at least on Friday the really flaky people depart campus early, so I'm less likely to have the kind of "OMGWTFBBQ I FORGOT TO TAKE THE LAST TWO EXAMS AND NOW I NEED YOU TO LET ME MAKE THEM UP" kind of freakout happening.

Also, the "Children's Play" (which my AAUW group helps out with: mainly the taking-of-money, which means 18 ziploc baggies filled with a mixture of dollar bills and loose change from every school group that comes. (And we have to count it all. Twice. And figure out how many students were paid for. I'm sure there are some who get in without paying, but whatever.) It's an important service (it raises money for the Theater department and it funds the scholarships we give every year), but it always comes at the busiest part of the year.

First off: forgive any glaring typos. I'm not wearing my glasses as I type this so it's largely touch-typed "blind."

(I'm taking a break in the middle of sorting a soil sample).

But: The Compassion Fatigue, I has it. As I said on Twitter, I make a monumental effort to keep my own "stuff" together - to keep my emotions from flying off in random directions, to get my bills paid on time, to fulfill my responsibilities, all that. And I am finding it increasingly hard when people who can't get or keep their "stuff" together come to me and either ask me to help them do it, or, they ask for accommodations that mean that either I can't complete work in a timely fashion, or I have to write a make-up exam just for them, or something.

I really think - and maybe I need to make a greater point of this - that students don't realize that if they are coming to me needing an extension, or a make-up, or some other over-and-above thing (I had a person the other day ask me to write a letter of recommendation that was due the next day. He asked me at 3 pm, and it was due in by noon the next day), that there are likely five or six other people asking for similar accommodations. And there comes a point where I just can't juggle that stuff any more.

I really genuinely think some folks don't think about that - they don't think that other people may be experiencing difficulties, and that, even beyond that, their poor old prof is sweating about how she's going to find a couple-hours block when she's at home and not sleeping to get the laundry done, or how she's going to get that abstract written for those meetings, and what about that independent-research student who hasn't updated me on her project for a couple weeks?

I wonder if some folks treat time like they treat money. For me, money, while not a constant worry, is sometimes a concern: I have a generous savings account because of "what if something goes wrong" (like the transmission dying in my car back in '06). I feel the same way about time: I need to build in a cushion of time - in case I get waylaid by someone (it happens a lot), or in case I can't find something I need, like my watch, or in case there's one of the other hundred minor emergencies that happen around here.

But I think some folks figure that if they run out of time - like if they run out of money - they can either get "credit" and somehow pay interest on it, or they can find someone willing to bail them out.

And I hate to say it, but too often that person being looked to is me. As I said before: at what point does requesting help and mercy and extensions from someone slip over into exploiting them - valuing their time less than your own?

I don't know. All I know is that I've hardly knit at all - or read at all- or worked on my quilt at all this week, and it's making me cranky.

I'm also worrying about getting my tax documents all "redded up" (I have to do some recalculations; I forgot $500 I earned last year reviewing textbooks, so I have to put that in) and sent off. It's all of the little stuff. The being-pecked-to-death-by-ducks stuff that drags me down. I can deal with the big scary stuff; it's the small daily things that make me want to tear my hair out.

I probably just need to sit down and do the dang taxes; I brought them in with me today because I can make copies of the forms here for my records.

***
Edited, later: I finally got them all straightened out. Though, in some places, I think they must have tapped Snape or whoever the Spells teacher was at Hogwarts: there are places where you add two numbers together, than compare them to the line above, and if the number on line 8 is greater than line 7, you write that number in line 9, and if it isn't, you write in a 0 and then skip the next two lines. And blahdeblahdeblah. Honestly, at one point, I almost stood up, pointed my finger at the Schedule D Calculations Sheet, and exclaimed "Expelliarmus!" but I don't think that would have helped. (Or worked, seeing as I think you need a wand for that to work).


I will say I'm getting a refund from the Feds (which, yes, I know, means I made them a free loan, but whatever, with investments having unpredictable returns trying to zero out my withholding would probably mean some year I get stuck with doing quarterly payments).

And for once, I get a refund from the state. And I'm quite pleased at the amount. It's $42.

AND I have a load of laundry in the dryer, and another load in the wash. So I guess I will survive this week after all.

I think tomorrow after putting my tax forms in the mail (with the special, "open this one extra slow and let it sit on someone's desk a while, because she's getting a refund" address on the label), I'm going to take myself out for lunch.

Hah.

I had two investments the past couple years that involved calculating "depletion" (which means a Schedule E and all of that). I did the calculations over break, had my forms done but not sent in.

My dad had the same thing for one thing. He called me up last week and went over the calculations; I had done them right.

Then he called last night. No, no, he had redone the calculations, the depletion was MUCH lower than what I had calculated and how had I got that number and I was going to have to go back and totally redo everything.

Not something I wanted to hear then. I was tired, my allergies were bad, I was still thinking about the program reviewer's comments (the summary: we are an excellent department but we have to hold off on all the things that could make us even more excellent because they cost money, and we have to be "sensitive" to the fact that it's a bad economy. Oh, and we're probably being worked to death.)

We went back and forth about it but reached no resolution, and after the phone call I was unhappy and contemplating having to re-re-calculate my taxes before finally sending them in. (I would still get a refund, it would just be smaller. It was, however, the thought of having to crunch the numbers yet again that seemed daunting).

Well, I open my e-mail this morning and find a note from him. I was right and he was wrong.

Look, don't doubt your statistician daughter, OK? Doing tedious number-crunching is something we are good at.

Hack, hack, sniffle. This post is brought to you by too much Claritin and too much Mucinex.

Yesterday, our pollen count was at 11.

That's one more than 10. You see, most pollen counts, you know, they will top out at 10. It's on 10 there, all the way up, all the way up, you're up to ten from the tree pollen. Where can you go from there?

I don't know.
Nowhere. Exactly. What plants here do is, if they need that extra push to drive allergy sufferers over the cliff, you know what they do?
Put the pollen up to eleven.
Eleven. Exactly. One more.

Why don't they just make ten more miserable and make ten be the top number and make that a little worse?

...the pollen count here goes to eleven.

****

I had to wash Ladybug again...she was turning orange from all the pollen on her. I've decided, after ruining a few t-shirts from the horrible grubby hoses at the quarter-fed "wash it yourself" places (they always have this soot-like stuff on them, it seems, that doesn't come out of clothes), that it's worth it to me to drop the two bucks or so extra for a "touchless" automatic wash now and again. (I know, I know: I can do it essentially for free at home. But the problem is, then I never do. Because, I have to get out the hose, and hook up the hose, and find the spray attachment, and get a bucket, and find some kind of acceptable soap, and then find some rags and MEH. If it takes me 20 minutes to assemble the stuff to do a task like that, I'm a lot less likely to do it. (And given the propensity of things like hoses to "walk away," I can't just leave the hose out in the yard).

****

I worked some more on the Clapotis last night. I do think now I will have enough yarn to complete it and have it be "big enough," I should be able to complete nine repeats before I start decreasing. (Maybe even ten, I'll have to wait and see)

One thing I like about the soil-sorting - this is the process where I mix aliquots of the soil with water, and hunt through them to pick out any invertebrates that missed being collected in the extraction step - is that it gives me time to think about things. In a way, it's like weeding a garden or hand-quilting or even driving on a low-traffic country road, in that while you are paying attention, you are not paying TOTAL attention, and part of your brain can work on other stuff. (It's also oddly restful: I cannot be doing anything else while I sort.)

And I think I came up with the best way of putting the lock-picking incident to rest. I decided not to e-mail the guy's chair, at least not right away. I'm generally a pretty good judge of people and the sense I get off this guy is not "criminal in the making" but "slightly goofy and immature, but a decent guy at heart." And I don't want to get him in trouble if the stunt he was pulling was simply a "stunt" - that it was, as I suspect, him and his lab partner sitting there bored, he pulls out his Leatherman tool, and either he says, "Hey, look what I can do" or his lab partner says, "Bet you can't get the door open with that" and it went from there.

I asked a colleague - someone with a few more years on me - who's had some weird stuff happen to him in the time he's been here (that's actually how I opened the conversation: "Hey, Tim, you've had some weird stuff happen to you while you've been here") and asked him. His advice was to take the guy aside and try to determine if it was (a) really a stupid stunt or (b) there was something more to it.

But I'm bad at opening conversations that feel confrontational to me. I thought of a way, though, while working on the soil this afternoon.

"Hey, what would you have done if you had actually gotten the door open?"

If he laughs, or says that he figured he couldn't, or gets a little embarrassed or something, I'll figure it was, as I suspect, two guys just out of teenagerhood being bored and doing something not-well-thought-through. If he kind of stutters or gets irritated, I'll figure it's something more.

I'm also going to just calmly and casually remark, "You know, if it had been someone other than me that ran across you doing that [e.g., the campus security force, who wear sidearms and take stuff pretty seriously], you could have been in a boatload of trouble."

I think that will be a subtle way of letting him know that (a) what he did wasn't cool and (b) I'm going to be keeping an eye on him. (And if he seems hinky when I'm talking to him, then I can e-mail his chair).

So, rather than being the deeply tedious task that some people think it looks like, I find sorting the soil rather restful - and I can work out things I need to work out while I'm doing it.

****

I've decided - at least for now - to leave comments on 'moderate' but take off the captcha word requirement: so you can comment without having to type in some weird mix of letters that sounds sometimes like what a dolphin might come up with if it were trying to put together an English word based on what it had heard.

I'll see if this leads to a  marked uptick in bot-spam or not. If not, I'll leave it off. If it does, though, the captcha will go back on.

This is what happens when too many years of education (and too many random facts rattling around in the head) meet up with a (probably overused) meme:

(This picture was the closest I could find to a true facepalm. I was really hoping there was either a painting or a statue of him with that "tortured artistic soul" hand-to-brow gesture that could be interpreted as a facepalm, but no dice, at least in my searches. And yes, he really did write that quotation, it's from "Maid of Orleans," which I've never read, but which the Internet tells me is about Joan of Arc.)

Wow, I can't believe my allergies this week. This has been almost like a cold. It finally let up a little this morning (great, just in time for me to start sorting the moldy old soil again). I had absolutely no energy last night - I knit a bit on the two pairs of "simple socks" but really had a hard time concentrating.

(And in case anyone's wondering: I told my chair about the student attempting to pick the lock and I am going to e-mail his departmental chair (he is from a different department) today. I don't want to get the guy in big big trouble over what was probably one of those "hey, look what I can do" Stupid Human Tricks, but I do think he might benefit from being talked to by someone scarier than I am)

So I'm going to talk a little about the other book I completed over Spring Break but never wrote about here. This was a book sent as a gift from a reader. It's really fascinating: "Women's work: the first 20,000 years" by Elizabeth Weyland Barber.

The book does talk some about ancient Greece and Egypt, but there's also lots of what you might call Proto-Indo-European stuff - that sort of dawn-of-civilization, we-still-don't-know-much-about-it-and-could-be-totally-wrong-after-all-look-at-what-Macauley-did-with-Motel-of-the-Mysteries stuff.

I find the really early stuff deeply interesting - it's partly the roots of who we are, but it's also so different. And yet, sometimes, it's possible to trace (or to try to trace, and recognize that the links are really tenuous) how some of those old beliefs and rituals came down to present day. One example is the idea of the "string skirt." Some of the early Venus statues were naked, except for a "skirt" of knotted string. And Bronze Age remains of a woman were found - again, she was (apparently) naked when laid to rest, save for a skirt of knotted string. Barber interprets these as fertility symbols: that a woman donned them when she had reached menarche but had not yet been "married off" (whatever form "marriage" took in those societies). Essentially, it was advertising: Hey, boys, I'm ready.

The thing is: some "recent" European folk costumes (particularly from places like Wallachia and Macedonia) feature heavily fringed aprons for the women. And Barber interprets that as a modern day survival of the old string skirt - maybe people would say that it meant something different now, or maybe the wearers of the dress wouldn't even be aware of the old meaning. But somehow, the thing survived, and was passed down, and maybe changed a bit in meaning over the years.

(This seems to be not-uncommon. From what I've read of some of the Morris dances in England, they are holdovers from old festivals in the spring - for the fertility of the earth - but now all the old ideas have been largely forgotten. And in Lark Rise to Candleford, they talk about the May Day festivities, which include carrying around a huge bouquet of flowers, with a china doll attached, called The Lady - and Flora Thompson speculates that The Lady was once (in earlier times) "Our Lady" (meaning Mary), and that she was a replacement of an earlier pagan goddess).

Barber also talks about the "hooked lonzenge" geometric figure that shows up again and again: it's another fertility symbol, or to put it politely, a "female" symbol (in that it resembles, very roughly, female genitalia).

(Fertility being much more important, I guess, to ancient societies than it is to ours. Or maybe we still have that stuff going around - all the subliminal sex in advertising - but we're just blind to it).

The book is mainly about spinning and weaving (knitting comes later,  and crochet comes MUCH later). One thing I found interesting were the different loom set-ups: in Egypt, they often used a flat loom that was low to the ground, where women would sit on the ground to weave. This worked because they could set it up in a courtyard and pretty well trust that it would not be rained upon. In wetter northern Europe, vertical looms were used (they were also apparently used in Greece), where the warp ran vertically and was held straight with clay weights (in some cases, it's only the weights that remain to attest that people wove in a particular habitation). She also notes that Penelope's fabled loom was probably more like a tapestry loom - weaving a tapestry, or pictured-cloth, is probably the only way she could have justified all the time it was taking (when she was ripping back at night, to avoid having to choose one of the "suitors," knowing her Odysseus would return).

One thing Barber notes is that doing an archaeology of things like spinning and weaving can be difficult. For one thing, fiber does not generally preserve well. For another, at least in earlier archeological days, some of the findings were discarded (loom weights can look like rather indistinct lumps of clay). One thing she used - which I found interesting, as I've taken some linguistics classes, back in my undergrad days - is using comparative linguistics to see how "old" words are for different spinning or weaving processes: are they similar across all Indo-European languages, suggesting a common origin (what biologists would call "homology"), or do they differ and represent a later development ("analogy"). Another thing she did - and this is the opener for the book - is that in some cases she (or other researchers she writes about) actually TRIED OUT the methods they were contemplating: trying to spin flax, for example, or, as in Barber's case, trying to weave a small piece of plaid cloth to match one fount in the Halstatt salt mines. And she talks of what she learned from that process.

And that seems to make a lot of sense to me: learning how people did something by trying to do it yourself. Seeing what mistakes you make (Barber mis-warped the loom; she used the weft pattern for the warp). Seeing if there is an "easier" way of getting to the desired end. And then, of course, the idea that you are kind of "feeling" what someone felt hundreds (or, in Barber's case, thousands) of years ago.

Actually, that's one reason why I knit and crochet and quilt: I've said it before. I like that idea of a connection with the past. (And also, I suppose, playing the piano could count too: how many people, over the past couple hundred years, have picked out Beethoven's "Ecossaise in G" as part of their instruction? How many young ladies in households played that to entertain themselves - or someone else?)

Anyway: it's a really interesting book. It's written in such a way that it moves fast, it kept me engaged in it. And it's full of interesting small facts about spinning, weaving, and ancient cultures. I really enjoyed it.