Wednesday morning stuff

- Driving home for lunch yesterday, I was headed towards the new-ish apartment complex next to my office building (which removed a lot of the lovely view of trees we once had). Woman pulled out of the drive and immediately swerved into my lane. I panicked a bit, pulled over as far to the right as I could, almost up onto the curb and lawn of my building, and then she swerved back, about 2 feet from hitting my driver's side fender.

I watched as she went by. She was TEXTING. Eternal facepalm. I didn't even have the reaction left in me to hit the horn - I was that concerned about my own survival.

Please, please, please: don't text and drive. There is NOTHING you have to tell another person that cannot wait for you to pull over.

This is not the first time I've nearly been taken out by someone doing something on a cell phone, and I expect it won't be the last. I just hope that I don't buy the farm this way, because of all the stupid annoying ways to die.....and I really hope St. Peter or whoever's in charge of it would let me go back and haunt the person, if that happened.

- I'm not a fan of increasing numbers of laws that tell us what we can and cannot do with the minutia of our lives (laws against killing people: good. Laws governing what species of trees you can plant in your yard: not so good). But if people fail to exercise common sense, and do so in a way which endangers others? I will say I really wished a cop were sitting right there to pull her over and ticket her for reckless driving.

It stinks how there seem to be so many people who can't use basic common sense.

- Had an ocular migraine after my late class yesterday. And class let out early! I think it was probably because I was grading biostats stuff, and had to look from the screen of my computer (where I had the problems I was grading worked out in Excel) and the student papers, and that kind of rapid-fire change in the type and amount of light my eyes were getting triggered it. I've also gotten them from malfunctioning fluorescent tubes (flickering) and from driving in tree-lined areas on sunny days, where there's a lot of light-flicker on the pavement from the sun coming through the trees. Sunglasses helps a LITTLE with that but not always.

It's funny, at first I thought, I can't see very well. And I thought, oh, maybe I looked at that bright light or its reflections on the floor tile too long and it's an after image and it'll go away. But then it got worse, and I had that brief moment of, "oh no, something is really wrong with my vision" followed by the "Wait, there are those stupid little zig zag lines. Oh, it's an ocular migraine." I excused myself and ran to my office and took an ibuprofen, and after class let out I sat in my office for 10 to 15 minutes and finally it went away. One of the grad students DID offer to drive me home, but I told her the things were usually short-lived and anyway, how would I get my car back other than by walking in the next day?

I also felt very shaky and unsteady after I got home after the migraine. My bp has been lower than it was, though it wasn't unusually low last night. I'll have to monitor this and if it happens more times, bring it to my doctor's attention. Supposedly beta blockers prevent ocular migraines but I still seem to get them, even on them.

With the flickering light thing, and the fact that migraines of different sorts are abnormal electrical activity in the brain, I wonder sometimes if this is going to progress to actual epilepsy. (Ugh. Another medication to take....) I don't know if migraines/ocular migraines are a risk factor or an early symptom, and I don't have a family history of it...but the fact that flickering lights bother me makes me wonder.

- I'm seriously considering an antiquing trip this weekend. Not sure whether I will go to Sherman/Denison or to McKinney. Right now I'm leaning towards Sherman/Denison, because that would allow me to check at the JoAnn's or Books a Million for any new editions of the Brit knitting magazines I've become so attached to of late.

The main thing I want to try to find is some kind of vintage glass vinegar cruet. Back in the years before ketchup became so ubiquitous, it was very common for households to have a cruet of vinegar - for seasoning vegetables, especially - on the table. And I've found I use vinegar a lot, now, and I think it would be nice to have a cruet of it on the table to replace the salt shaker I've taken away. I know that Anchor Hocking and places still make them (mostly as part of an oil-and-vinegar set for making your own salad dressing at the table), but they're a little "blander" than what some of the older versions are.

McKinney has more antique shops, and more "upscaley" ones that might have it, but also it's an hour's drive just to get there. (And there's the issue of a meal - if I go to Sherman I could do it Friday afternoon after lunch, or Saturday after lunch (and after Ponies) - but in McKinney, to have enough time for it to be worth going, I'd have to leave here around 9 to get there when the shops opened, and I'd have to eat down there. And one thing I've noticed is that I apparently have VERY sodium sensitive high blood pressure - when I was traveling and had to eat the saltier train meals, it went higher, and then after a day or two of eating low sodium it dropped back. Though maybe that means I shouldn't worry about the rare saltier meal, because it DOES drop back after I'm careful again.)

McKinney also has the quilt shops, but right now I'm so far ahead on quilt fabric and haven't done any piecing in a while, so I don't know that I really should go quilt fabric shopping.

- Stupid little thing that popped into my head after listening to the Christmas music channel on my digital music channels last night: "You know who ELSE I saw kissing Santa Claus? MY MOM!" (they should TOTALLY have Muscleman do that joke, if they ever do a holiday special.)

- Also, I'm just gonna leave this here. Inspired by a discussion on ITFF:

- I am noticing that my quick wit (for some values of wit) is coming back stronger than it was. I'm wondering if the past 8 or ten months, my blood pressure crept up high enough to affect other things - mood, cognition, etc. - without my realizing that that was affecting it. I had noticed that I seemed less creative or quick to come up with solutions than I had been in the past. And that I was not as good at just laughing at the stupid stuff that happens in life as I had been in the past. And I attributed it to being too tired/to the campus administration intervening too much in our work/some kind of mid-life crisis but maybe it was just that my blood pressure was screwed up and it was affecting my brain.

I did come up with an idea - a very simple idea, essentially plugging a stitch pattern into an existing 64-stitch sock - but an idea nonetheless, and it's an idea that pleases me, and as soon as I get something else done I will start it. (It's a Pony themed sock, but it's going to be very subtle - though I can also imagine a way to make it LESS subtle, if you wanted it to be.) And I can also see how maybe a pair of fingerless mitts could be modified for it, and I want to try that, modifying an existing pattern to put in the stitch pattern and make the fingerless mitts. So maybe my creativity is slowly returning.