Sun, sea, and soreness
Someday I will learn to keep a stash of ibuprofen at my desk.
Saturday I wanted to do anything but sit on the couch and stare at the DVR. Handily, there was plenty going on in the area, and we ended up catching a free blues festival at the 17th Street oceanfront. Less handily, we ended up parking at the 23rd Street oceanfront and I got my exercise for the weekend in 95-degree weather. I can’t believe I’m not sunburned. But, the music was excellent.
Add in that walking to yesterday’s five-hour cleaning spree in the apartment (2.5 rooms done, yay!) and I am an achy Borg today. Still, I’m pleased with the reasons I got that way, so I’m calling it a win.
Saturday night we ended up as guests of Starr’s parents at a mildly pricey Italian restaurant. The kitchen messed up my order once, and delayed the second attempt; the manager finally comped me the dinner and I think overdid my dessert as apology. With two large cannoli on a plate before me that evening, I’m pretty thankful for all the unplanned exercise.
Today is my mom’s birthday, At first, I was fretting over whether she’d even want to talk to me, but that’s not the right attitude. I want to talk to her, and I’m still commmitted to getting this whole situation worked out in a way that gets her as much of what she wants as is sane.
Good news for today? I just found a bottle of ibuprofen in my glove compartment; and these 90-minute OS X Leopard installs give me lots of time to tap away at the Newton.
To Do Checklist
Things to do today, in random order:
1) Have large breakfast so I don’t mope all day.
Completed at 1:00 pm.
2) Call Mom and check up on her. Continue searching for home care.
No answer at Jon Reid’s. Left message on his phone.
3) Clean gerbil cage.
Gerbils looking much happier. Cat still sad this is not a buffet.
4) Get badly needed haircut.
This is being put off for a week-and-a-half due to time and budget issues.
5) Get lamp for spare bedroom.
Lamp secure. Only been meaning to do this for months.
6) Do laundry.
Third load in dryer. That’s all I have energy for tonight.
7) Contact plumber who fixed kitchen sink at Kentland to make payment arrangements.
Number not in phone. Left voicemail with neighbor contact.
8) Try for Azeroth Olympics tabard and pet.
Got tabard. Pet looking unlikely.
9) Clean up living room. Empty dishwasher from last night.
Dishwasher is empty and reloaded. Living room in progress. Vacuum cleaner belt is broken.
10) Make dinner.
Seared then baked chicken randomly seasoned with garlic, lemon, cumin, and cilantro, with couscous on the side. An Iron Chef would be appalled, but it came out yummy.
11) Call local lifestyle group about demo they asked for on Tuesday.
Done. No problem, they just need me to revise the entire presentation, that’s all.
12) Buy new pantz to replace 1 holed pair and 2 pair falling off my hips (good thing, right?)
This is being put off for a week-and-a-half due to time and budget issues.
Brief updates
- 08:03 Wachovia appears to have decided that my zip code has changed without telling me. #
- 08:17 Obviously, Wachovia is trying to protect me from Internet purchases they feel I don’t really need to be making. #
- 11:06 Realizing that yesterday’s food intake consisted of one strip of bacon and a turkey sandwich. No wonder I felt off this morning. #
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Thinned blood
My Mom’s back in the hospital. The blood thinner she had been prescribed caused some internal bleeding; it seems to have stopped, and she’ll probably be out again by the weekend. But… oy.
We found a Jamaican cafe / grocery less than two blocks from us last night, and I tried curry chicken for the first time ever. Extremely yummy, though I’m not used to eating anything that shade of yellow; nor am I used to picking that many tiny sharp chicken bones from my teeth. Oh, and an hour later, my stomach was not pleased with these new spices at all. Still, yum.
The apartment building I live in is very nice, but it’s still an apartment building. One of the tenants on my floor has had multiple summonses taped to their door in recent months; this last weekend, they moved out in a flurry of activity (mysteriously bringing a mattress into the place in the process). Well, police showed up a couple of days later to pound on their door, and there’s an eviction notice taped there now (which doesn’t exactly change much at this point). I’m actually sad. They seemed nice enough, and it’s a shame when people’s mistakes land on them so hard.
At this moment, I am rather physically and emotionally weary. I’ll be fine, it’s hardly life-threatening. But the assertiveness I have been trying to encourage in myself in recent months is eluding me a bit just now. Of course, now is when I really need it.
Oh, and the smoke’s back in Portsmouth this morning. Koff.
Travellers
LiveJournal seems a little slow today. Wonder what their servers are dealing with.
Got a nice evening walk in last night, 1.66 miles according to the GMaps Pedometer, though I swear it felt like 2. Turned out that the exercise was a good thing; right after we got back, Dwight called, and invited us out for sushi and hibachi. Starr wore her new Questionable Content kitty shirt I got her. I told the story of the time that a bunch of us went to a hibachi place in Roanoke, and as we were served, we all eagerly grasped our chopsticks… except for the Japanese exchange student with us, who matter-of-factly picked up her fork.
You’d think that with all the exercise, I’d have slept great last night. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. While Starr said something this morning that cheered me, the weariness is still nibbling away at me. I think I may be naughty and pick up a Coke or two today.
This weekend we will be leaving Portsmouth around 7 or 8 p.m. and driving to Blacksburg. Saturday morning, we’ll be catching up with some of Starr’s family that will be in the general area, Saturday evening we’ll visit my Mom, and then Sunday we’ll be heading to my old house to survey what needs to be done to move Mom back in when she’s ready. Then we’ll drive back to Portsmouth. I may be pretty liberal with the caffeine this weekend as well.
Actually, he probably made that up.
From the Canadian Press website:
OWEN SOUND, Ont. — A waitress from Owen Sound, Ont., says she can’t believe she was laid off after she had her head shaved for a cancer fundraising event.
Stacey Fearnall raised more than $2,700 for charity, but when she showed up for work and refused to sport a wig for her shift, her boss told her to take the summer off. Her employer, Dan Hilliard, says his restaurant has certain standards prohibiting men from wearing earrings and requiring employees to keep their hair at a reasonable length. He says Fearnall is still on the payroll and she can return to work once she sprouts some locks.
Hilliard admits the story isn’t great PR for the restaurant but as far as he’s concerned, it’s an internal staff problem. He says he’s already heard from some customers who agree with him and say they would have been “appalled” to have been served at Fearnall’s table.
Hey, you. Yes, you over there, the person who would be “appalled” to be served by a bald woman?
Your humanity license has been revoked, and we will begin devolving you shortly. Would you like “slime mold”, “dung beetle”, or “plankton”?
Allez Cuisine!
Things I like about Iron Chef America:
The Chairman’s confident good humor.
Stern-visaged samurai chef from Japan, Masaharu Morimoto.
Cooking geek Alton Brown.
Smack-talk and teasing between the chefs.
No air-headed commentary from Japanese actresses.
Things I miss about Iron Chef Japan:
The Chairman’s culinary megalomania.
Maverick avant-garde chef from New York, Masaharu Morimoto.
Professional fortune-teller Kazuko Hosoki.
Chefs focused on their dishes as if lives depended on them.
Air-headed commentary from Japanese actresses.
Brief updates
- 11:51 .67 miles again this am. Working my butt off. Also, found a pic of G.Lucas wearing a “Han Shot First” shirt. tinyurl.com/5ms88t #
- 13:30 20 min. into lunch: not a good time to find that Quiznos no longer carries my favorite sub. Prime rib cheesesteak okay, but too much onions. #
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130 Leagues Over the Asphalt
T – I – R – E – D.
Went back to Roanoke on Saturday. My mom’s doing great: she can move both her leg and arm now, and on Sunday took a few steps (with a great deal of support). I’m told this is still Gold Medal performance, and my optimism was repeatedly fed this weekend. nanoreid was there for a bit, and I got to say hi to Ginny and Ian as well. Starr bought my mother a knitting loom which can be fastened to a solid surface, and now my mom can indulge her addiction one-handed for the duration!
Roanoke felt a little odd, there are buildings and shops which weren’t there last time I passed through – a bit like hearing an old song on the radio and finding an entirely new chorus after the second stanza. I took a hotel room there Saturday night to save us the drive to and from shrewlet‘s offered crash space in Blacksburg, but while the room was huge, the bed was hard as a plank, and we slept poorly for folks who would be driving 204 miles home. Route 460 was a beautiful, tranquil drive, though. I’m sold on that road for now.
Yesterday we woke too early, and headed over to spend lunch with Starr’s mom, then the afternoon at Amy’s with the gamer group. Her mom was going to gas grill the food, but after the gas loop rusted away at a touch, we went with good old charcoal, and lunch was yummy. I now know where Starr gets her habit of cooking a regiment’s food for a few people, and felt guilty leaving before I could consume a second hamburger.
While the afternoon was sold as a combination grilling / gaming event, I’m not sure anyone was really into the gaming, and after a few hours of excellent chatting and cattching up, we left to get me some badly needed quiet time. I developed yesterday something that feels much like my old migraine headaches, something which comes in short, searing pulses then goes away for a half-hour or so. (One of the first things Starr did when hearing about that was to check me for stroke indicators – of which I seem to have none.)
In geek news, the Mars Phoenix robot probe has a Twitter account. Andy Ihnatko referred to the account as cosplay for rocket scientists, but I’m enjoying keeping up with what the probe’s doing (or at least what it was doing 15 minutes ago – speed-of-light lag, y’know). Some quick Googling finds images taken by the Mars Recon Orbiter of Phoenix on the way down (Phoenix Down?) which means that we Earthlings not only managed to hit a target scores of millions of miles away, we got a picture of it from another camera that had previously done so under our instruction. [T]hese are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years. – Carl Sagan
So, yeah. Probably another early bedtime tonight, which is a shame because I wanted to get some WoW levelling in. With luck, the rest of the week will go a little easier on me!
Another crushing Invid defeat
Last night I had my first taste of lobster in decades. I’d been putting a lot of energy into taking care of Starr lately, with her overwork issues and such; she decided it was my turn, and set up a lovely lobster and shrimp dinner for me.
Those things are hard to stare down – I’ve always been a bit wary of food that’s looking back at me. Luckily, lobsters look evil enough that I can tell myself that it would gladly eat me if our roles were reversed, and start dismembering the thing. (Cows are the same way. Don’t trust ’em, that’s all I’ll tell you.)
Very tasty; in fact, it tasted better with lemon juice than melted butter, to my surprise. I think that crab legs are still the shellfish win for me, but this is not a complaint I’m registering. I greatly appreciated the effort and expense!
Saturday was fun, but hectic and busy. A local crafter’s group pow-wow led into an unsuccesful Korean food run which preceeded a graduation party which turned into an unexpected late night hot-tubbing which became an overnight stay which included brunch the next morning with our host’s parents. I may not have gotten my explicit mileage in, but given the amount of time I spent on my feet, I’m calling it an exercise win.
Sunday mostly involved the couch, the kitten, and a lot of Discovery Network.
