I'm far past busy.
And outta brain.
And too tired to explain.

I just need to get the Bloggapost Monkey off my back.

And that's where I'm at.
A-ratta-tat-tat.

1. What a Difference a Year Can Make. Or, Where'd My Baby Go?
Here's Cakers at soccer camp last summer. ::Clearly, she has her mother's athletic poise and focus.:: Click it, for full impact.



Here she is at last week's game:




At this level, the game is just supposed to be fun, so they don't keep score. Funny how every kid on the opposing team knew that they were ahead 7 to zip.

2. What a Difference 18 Years Doesn't Make
18 years is how long I've been knitting. Looking at this meatloaf-esque Ariann sleeve, it's like I've turned enemy. Part of the problem is that I can't find my long-enough size 7 needle for the magic loop method, so I'm bastardizing the two-circ method on too shorta cables, and it's not going well.



3. Not Your Mother's Cabana Boy.



There'll be more to follow, regarding the machinations of my marriage to the feeble hearted. At least he's still cute.

4. Eye Cakers Friday.
This was taken last summer, at soccer camp.



See that golden glow around her head? That's the image I hold of her always, when we're apart.

Labels: From My Loins, Knit In Progress, Manpie

Or How to Have a Perfect Friday Afternoon
1) Come home from work, change into exercise garb so as to catch a walk before dinner.

2) Go out for ice cream before dinner, instead.

3) Come home from ice cream store, and announce to family that you're going for a walk, and you really mean it this time.

4) Grab camera and join family in the front yard, instead.











::Psst. Pretend you don't see the Camo Cat in the picture. She'd be mortified if she knew you could really see her.::

::Psst. Don't forget to click, for phull photo impact.::


Why Did You Take This Picture?
1) Because the distortion of the glass took about 6 years off my gut.

2) Those are shorts from last summer, and they still fit me. This is the first out of three springs, that I haven't had to go up a pant size.



P.S. I've been crazy busy and tired and am way behind in my online world. I hope to get to some correspondence this weekend. After soccer and cleaning and cooking and working on a report. And a walk. Yeah. Right after the walk. Heh.

Labels: eye candy Friday, Fur, Pho-Ho'

Today I observed a student in a 9th grade English class. They were reading and discussing the Dylan Thomas poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.

Even though the poem is about an old man dying, when the student read the final two lines, "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, Rage against the dying of the light," I thought about the tales of courage and heroism,now pouring out of Virginia.

As a mother of a college student, I can't help but feel a connection to Monday's events. As a mental health professional who works in a high school, this week I'm feeling physically and emotionally vulnerable, and oddly defensive.

I was talking to a student in my office yesterday, when a fight broke out in the hallway. While wrestling for the best take-down position, the students banged themselves several times into the lockers. It sounded like gun shots.

But it wasn't.
But it could of been.
And it took several minutes for my heart to return to it's rightful place under my ribcage, while I played my best porker face for the client.

The truth is, none of us is too special for tragedy.
Not a one of us is entitled to the promise of security. Or sanity.

And no, college students shouldn't die like that.
Neither should children in L.A. Or Pennsylvania. Or Kabul.

Neither should wives, in their kitchens.
Or husbands, in their beds.
Or soldiers, anywhere.

The English class is held in a science classroom. As I listened to the discussion of death and youth and the meaning of "dark is right," I noticed the day's agenda for next hour's Biology class, posted just beyond the English teacher's head.

Today:
1) Finish worksheets.
2) Start Evolution.

I really like the sound of number 2.
Who's going first?

It's Ear Candy Friday
Finding this C.D. for $5.99, was the only good thing that's happened to me this week. Well, besides tonight's takeout of orange chicken and sauteed green beans and rangoon. Oh, and some wine. I think. No. That was last night. The wine.


I am having quite a stretch of shit-for-jobs. And outside of a day's lull here and there, I foresee no end in sight until June 7.

Anyway.

Last night I found myself at the neighborhood pharmacy. Our neighborhood pharmacy is of the national-chain ilk, except it's small and neighborly, with dangerously crooked floors and a faint smell of musty, from roof leaks gone by. Despite the element of national-chaininess, I loves me some neighborhood pharmacy. ::I got lots of stories of old neighborhood pharmacy living, from standpoint of child customer, and later, adult employee.::

In a moment of stress-based distractibility, I took to wandering the aisles my stinky, bumpy, neighborhood pharmacy. I fondled back scrubbers, re-contemplated the meaning of Midnight Blue Mascara, re-considered starting an Easter basket collection and re-read a brochure about lady holes that smell like rotted carrot tops, such as found in the bottom of the vegetable bin. At least that's what I think it was talking about.

And when I saw this new-to-me CD on the display, I recognized it right away as the perfect little sumpin-sumpin my cheese-shredded brain was seeking.

I was not disappointed. This man's voice has always been able to move me to tears, but singing these classics, umm mmm, it's like a blankie for my soul.

You can sample the CD here. Unchained Melody is my fave right now, but there aren't any cuts I would kick out of bed for eating carrot tops.

What She Said
Yesterday Cakers asked me, in all earnestness, if we could please get Bella's Kitten Maker fixed, so she can have kittens. I don't know why, but it kind of made me want to cry. ::I know. Big deal. These days I cry at sight of dryer lint and Valerie Bertinelli.::

Work, Work, Work, Work, Work, Work, Work.
I'm taking tonight off to dance and sing and drink, a bit. But the rest of my weekend belongs to the bitch in the briefcase.

Labels: eye candy Friday, I Work Too, My Daughter Scares Me, Now You're Whining, Too Tired for Pudding

Thank you for all the support and encouraging thoughts on my husband's recent heart scare. He seems to be doing well, although every time I asked him over the weekend, he'd make the Porker Face and tell me "fine". Yesterday, he sheepishly admitted to feeling totally symptom-free for the first time since before going into the hospital. He also corrected an earlier misperception of mine, that test results from the hospital revealed no abnormalities.

Weird thing is, I was in the room when the cardiologist revealed that E's heart pumper thangy was heart-pumper thanging a little slower than it should be. I know I was there when he said it, because I remember him demonstrating the slow pumper action using the universal heart-pumper thangy hand signal, which bore a disturbing resemblance to the universal feel-a-boob-thangy hand signal. But I still don't remember the words.

Maybe I was distracted by the doctor's disturbing/intriguing hand gestures, or his baby-poo-green turtleneck, or the Charles Nelson Reilly-esque glasses.

Or maybe I was preoccupied with the deeper implications of this sign*, hanging on the bathroom door:



Umm, yeah. I'm pretty sure that in the event of any of these things happening, I would run right down to the nurse's station and ask for a gown and a mask, so I could get myself right back in there.

And in consideration the protection of others, I made sure to take care of any potentially splatterable bodily fluid functions, in the public bathroom down the hall.

There's Not Much Clever to Be Made From the Name Ariann, But Ain't She Pretty?




I did get lots done on her the second day in the hospital, while we sat around waiting for discharge papers to be delivered.

I'd like to stay and chat but I have to get myself to work. Speaking of, between home and work demands I'm suffering from a low-grade life ache. For the next couple weeks, posting will be sparse.

Gotta go. And no time to edit.

*This is not the actual sign. I copied the words of the sign, verbatim, then created my own sign, using this warning sign generator.

Labels: Boobs and Pee and Poo, Knit In Progress

Sigh Candy.



It might not look like much to you, but believe you me, this picture taken just this morning, is a Sigh for these Sore Eyes.

I'm kind of at a loss as to what or how much to share of my past two days. Because everything seems to be okay now, the emotional havoc I've recently endured, seems a bit melodramatic in the retelling. But I still feel the need retell, so I'm just going to open the lid and see what tumbles out onto the keyboard. So bear with.

We returned home from the cottage Tuesday night, the house still a mess from when we left it, with the addition of extra fur blobs scattered about, likely from Bella renting herself in grief, in response to our absence.

Anyway.

On weekends and vacations, my husband ::aka Cabana Boy, but today he's E.:: and I take turns sleeping in, and Wednesday morning was mine to sleep into. About 9:50, E comes into the room and announces that he had just passed out in the bathroom and needs to go to the hospital. He looked poorly. Greenish. I thought maybe he was getting the flu.

So I got up and dressed and we headed to the ER, where I dropped E off at the door, and went off to park the car.

For the sake of brevity I'm going to try to bullet the high and low points of the adventure. ::And no offense or anything, but I'm mostly writing this for me and not you, but I need to be brief with myself too, because I gots shit to do.::.

After finding E. with the intake nurse in her little intake cubby, I experienced what I call the first in a series of Little Terrors.

Little Terror #1: The intake nurse appearing obviously concerned with my husband's medical presentation as indicated through her muttering "With a pulse of 43, we don't have time for a temp...he needs to be seen....Now."

Little Terror #2: After getting Cakers situated in the waiting room, I walked into Trauma 2, where it felt and looked like a scene from the T.V. show, E.R. Orders were being barked while professional bodies moved about the room and around the equipment and one another, in a frenzied yet oddly synchronized dance.

Little Terror #3: A nurse stopped the frenzy to ask if she could call someone to come in to be with me.

Little Terror #4: The fear in E's eyes.

Little Terror #5: They put pads on his chest in case they needed to use the paddles.

Long Portion of Story Shorter, it took about two hours for his pulse and blood pressure to creep into their respectfully normal ranges, although they were still low.

Once the color started returning to his face, we relaxed a little and started enjoying Little Happies, In Light of the Situation.

Little Happy In Light of the Situation #1: Whenever the monitor showed a considerable dip in blood pressure or pulse or a red alert came on the monitor, my facial expression indicated alarm. ::E couldn't see the monitors. I'm sure that's on purpose.:: He finally asked me to either stop looking at the monitor or develop a better poker face, because I was scaring the shit out of him. But I initially thought he said "porker face," so every time I looked at the monitor, I held my nose up like a pig. It was still hard to hold a porker face in response to scary dips in the numbers, so I would still look scared, porker face notwithstanding, which made E laugh...okay I guess you had to be there.

Little Happy In Light of the Situation #2: The nurses station was right outside his room. One of the nurses walking by the door, dropped a pen and stopped to pick it up. E. then called me over to whisper "I have some ER gossip. That nurse is wearing a red thong." I laughed and with my best porker face, looked at his blood pressure reading and saw that it immediately went up a couple points. We then decided to tell the doctor that his blood pressure Got Up at the Crack of Thong, and maybe he can get a prescription for some of that.

Blood work showed E was low in potassium, so that was added to his IV, which seemed to help, after a while. The doctor ordered him to spend the night so they can monitor his heart and undergo further evaluation. Once he was stablized and a plan was in place, I went home to pack a bag for Cakers to stay at my in-laws, to let the dog out and tidy up a bit for when the in-laws came by. Through the course of tidying up, I somehow picked up a blob of peanut butter on my palm, which I somehow got on the steering wheel and console of the car, and a little on my jeans and purse, and nothing handy with which to wipe it off.

Back at the hospital, I had a very hard time getting a straight park with E's behemoth car ::It's a hatefully huge SUV.:: and was in and out of the car three times to check how crooked each attempt was or wasn't. I never did get it quite right, but barely good enough was good enough for me.

And it was a bitterly cold, snowy and windy day. When I was just outside the entrance of the hospital, I noticed a flurry of money flying past me. The folded bills looked strangely familiar as they tumbled away. As I watched a couple bills go down the storm drain I thought, Damn, that's my money! I chased after what remained, almost hitting my head on a parked car.

Little Happy In Light of the Situation #3: Between accidently transferring peanut butter from the kitchen cleanup to E's steering wheel and my purse, and the parking problems, and money blowing out of my purse and into a storm drain, I light heartedly determined that the first thing I will tell my husband when I see him, is that he cannot die because in the past hour I have seen what I am without him and it is not a pretty picture. Not only would he get a kick out of the image of my utter and complete dependency on him, but would surely prompt him to an even quicker recovery.

So I make it up to his room in one piece, to find that he isn't there. I stopped to inquire at the nurse's station, where several scrub-clad women were circled and jabbering like a nest of magpies. While I waited and waited. Finally a woman looked up from her nearby desk and asked what I needed. I told her I was looking for my husband. Clearly, this woman was new to the job and could not help me without first consulting with the magpies, who did not stop their chatter for yet another minute, as she stood by, waiting to ask the question.

Little Terror #6: The newbie told me that the magpies told her that my husband was still in the ER. Still? It's been hours, I said. She shrugged and told me that it can take a long time to get transferred to a room from the ER.

So, I head back to the E.R., which in this hospital, is kind of like changing terminals at a major airport.

Not so Little Terror #7: I get to the ER and head to Trauma 2, where I last left my E. But the door to Trauma 2, which was previously open the whole time we were there earlier, was now closed. When someone came out of the room, I could see and hear that there was some very serious shit going on in Trauma 2. With my husband. He's dying in there, I thought to myself. He's going to die before I can tell him that he can't. Die. Because if he dies, I will spend the rest of my life leaving a trail of peanut butter, and pulling in and out of angled parking spots,and letting money blow out of my purse and down the storm drains. Eventually we'll be poor and homeless and forced to live in an SUV, down by the river. Except we won't even be able to do that, because I can't park the fuckingly huge and hateful car.

He can't be dying in there, because I can't live without him. I just can't.

I don't know how long I stood staring at the door of Trauma 2, but I'm sure it was just moments. Finally a clerk behind the desk asked me if I needed something. I somehow choked out my husband's name and asked if he was in there, and pointed to the door.

No, he's been taken to his room, the clerk said. A nurse overhearing the conversation, piped in to confirm that she had delivered him herself and a floor nurse signed for receiving him. He was probably getting his echo cardio somethings or his doppler doppling whatchamacallits.

"They told me he was still down here. They told me..." and then I couldn't talk anymore, but only pointed again, to the door behind me. The door to Trauma 2.

And then I started to cry.

After some genuine consoling, I was given directions back to my husband's floor. While I was certainly relieved at the good news that my husband was not behind door #2, I had a hard time shaking the fear and made several wrong turns on the way to his room. I apparently had the look of neediness, because several hospital staff stopped to help me along the way. They were rewarded for their efforts by my bursting into spontaneous bawl and incoherently grateful blubbering. One woman, who appeared to be leaving for the day, recognized me from earlier, and walked me all the way to E's room.

Once I was up in his room, one of the magpies approached me and apologized for the breakdown in communication. It was genuine and she was forgiven. She later apologized to E as well.

There is definitely more blogging to be done, from this saga. I'm still feeling emotionally skittish, even though my man seems fine, for now. All his tests came back normal, and his heart is strong. Because of his congenital heart issues, he is scheduled for further evaluation, with the focus on trying to figure out what caused the problem. He'll also be fitted for a temporary monitor, which will record his heart activity over an extended period of time.

For now, I'm just happy that we're all back together.
College Boy is heading home at this writing, for the holiday weekend and tonight we're celebrating with one of E's favorite dishes, Black Bean Enchiladas.

I apologize for the choppy, messy writing here, but I really needed to get this out of me. Because I lost 2 days of spring break, wherein I had planned on doing some Easter preparation, I am sorely behind in that and all other household endeavors. And with Cabana Boy currently on medical waivers, I gotta get the getting going.

Have A Good Friday, everyone.

Labels: Deep Shit, eye candy Friday, Manpie

Since you made it past Sunday without the weekly Margina Monologue, I'll bet you thought you were free and clear...Especially since it's now Tuesday.

:: I meant to finish this post last night, but College Boy needed some Momma Love in the IM, til 12:30 a.m. I keep saying that I'm over him, but he's having a hard time taking a hint.::

I promise to make it short and, well, short.

Sunday Sky



Monday Sky



Monday Marcia Modelling MiMi Long Gone aka Spring, FO reals.



Ariann in Progress



Flash Version



I had hoped to be further along on the pattern by now, but I ran into some problems. I started reading a book. I may have mentioned this here before, but when I read a book, I don't just read a book. I am the book. The book is me.

When I'm reading a book, I don't talk or cook or eat or sleep or knit or shower. Until it's over. Yeah, it gets ugly. The people I live with tend to like their meals on time and their mommas not too smelly.

On Sunday I was standing on the beach, with the book in one hand and my camera in the other, trying to catch a picture of the loons running on water. You may notice, in this post, the absence of pictures of loons running on water.

The literary culprit in question was The Other Boleyn Girl. That I let a book engulf me, does not necessarily indicate that I liked the book so much. I am an indiscriminant addict. But it just so happens that I loved the book. I started reading books of this ilk ::but more fictional, less historical.:: back in middle school and it seems that I still have a soft spot in my brain for them.

Anyway. Short. This was going to be short.

The Ariann pattern is Kick. Ass. I was kind of worried about getting the pattern established, as I'd heard there have been a few false starts, around blogland. I'm happy to say, and very much aware of the risk of jinxing myself, that so far, so good. In all my focus on the body pattern, I kind of missed an important detail that will make my front edges not look the same, but I don't want to talk about that right now.

The yarn is pretty and felt soft and silky in the skein, but I was disappointed to find it a bit crunchy in the knitting. And it separates like the thighs of a Boleyn, at the sight of the king.

I'm not sure what's up with the ribbing all pucky in the wrong direction, either (see view 1), but I hope it grows out of it.

We're heading home today. It seemed like a short trip this time, but there was some great knitting and reading and weather, in spite of the currently near freezing temps and drizzle.

Oh No You Didn't.


Do Swans let tooters?
::click for big.::

Labels: Cottage, Knit In Progress, Pho-Ho', The Casting On Couch