The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

So much for my nice relaxing long weekend. Friday SUCKED, because Snip's blood test came back weird and she was really acting sick. On top of the election and the pandemic and L telling me she was inclined not to drive down to Noank for Thanksgiving (which meant I wasn't going either), it was too much bad stuff all at once, and I couldn't stop crying for quite a lot of the afternoon. Crying while wearing contact lenses is a terrible idea, because they get blurry and gummed up and are hard to remove. And then I got four hours of sleep because I kept waking up to make sure the sick cat at the foot of the bed was still breathing and then couldn't get back to sleep because my jaw hurt so much from clenching it.

Today Dr. P came back and ultrasounded Snip after I doped her up to the eyebrows on gabapentin, and narrowed it down to either pancreatitis or pancreatic cancer (depends on whether the lumps in the pancreas are inflammation or tumors). Three-day pain shot, antibiotic shot, sub-q fluids twice a day for five days, and appetite stimulant just until she gets the idea that eating is a good thing (hasn't happened yet). Off went another $800. But Snip actually curled up in her bed in the living room like a normal cat, which she hadn't done when her innards hurt, and the gabapentin has worn off, so she's only half doped up to the eyebrows (I don't think she knows her stomach is shaved, though, and I'm certainly not going to tell her) and might eat in the morning. And she purred at me. And I think she might have gotten some sleep in there somewhere, although I was warned the pain med might also keep her awake for three days.

I want my nice relaxing movie marathon and embroidery day tomorrow, dammit.

Made it to the dive shop on Sunday (when the weather was better). Renovations look snazzy, and I bought a couple of trim pockets and picked up the octo, pressure gauge, and drysuit hose of my reg setup. The first stage and primary are, of course, backordered. And I need a clip for the pressure gauge, but I can do that when I finally get the rest of the setup.

Stood in line outside Trader Joe's for 20 minutes, and then they didn't have the one thing I really wanted (carbonated black tea with peach juice), but I don't really NEED that, so I was merely grumpy rather than distraught.

My cousin who has already had one surgery for testicular cancer had some lymph nodes removed yesterday, and my mom's great-aunt who had broken her hip last week died yesterday. I'm starting to dread family emails titled "FYI".

I haven't been sleeping all that well lately, mostly because things outdoors keep waking me up. Friday night it was the neighbors burning papers or something in their barbecue grill at midnight, and I woke up smelling smoke and had to convince myself that it wasn't this building on fire. Then two hours later a couple of raccoons started screaming at each other. Last night it was a motorcycle and this morning it was trash collection (which wakes me up early every Tuesday). But I'm stubborn about open-window weather, so the only thing I shut the bedroom windows for in the summer, besides hurricanes, is if the wind is coming from a direction that rattles the blinds. And then there's the once-a-week hairball yarfage on a rug somewhere indoors in the middle of the night. Hopefully that will be ending soonish when the Hairy Beasts start putting on their winter plumage.

Still sick (not shocked; a cold usually lasts me a week and a half), but this is a sneezier cold than I usually get. I feel like I would be getting over this faster if I went to bed earlier, but life (and stupidity; don't start watching an hour's worth of something at 10:00, idiot) keeps interfering with that idea. This morning I dreamed about diving, until I came up from the bottom of the dive well in about three seconds and knew that was wrong, and then remembered I couldn't be diving with a cold, and woke up.

I'm up to $75 worth of externship forms if we charged $5 apiece for signatures. Which we don't, and we wouldn't, but my goodness, this third year class could paper a room with externship forms. Unfortunately they all mostly want to go to Columbia or UPenn, and I feel a little silly sending the exact same form letter to the same person for five or six different students.

This is the Year of the Earth Pig. The elements associated with the Chinese zodiac are earth, fire, water, wood, and metal, so there will never be a Year of the Air Pig. Yet another culture that can use "when pigs fly" to mean "never".

The weather is lovely again, having been shoot-me-now hot Sunday through Tuesday. It was 85 in the living room at 9:30 on Tuesday night and I couldn't get any cooler air indoors for some reason, even though it was cooler outdoors.

Last night was excellent sleeping weather, and I went and ruined it by having a frustration dream. I've been having a lot of those lately, and they all involve shouting at somebody (usually somebody who I would really like to shout at, but I can't in real life; the two I remember are Trump and, last night, Dad). I've also bitten through my night guard sometime in the last couple of weeks. I do not shout at anybody when I'm awake, but maybe I should start. Or maybe I should go somewhere way out in the back of beyond and shout at trees or something.

For lack of shouting at things, I bought myself a ticket to the Boston Pops 25th anniversary gospel concert on Saturday. One of my coworkers sings with them, and I could use a dose of raise-the-roof music (especially if I'm not singing it myself, which is work). Besides, I haven't been to Symphony Hall in something like 15 years, so I'm probably overdue.

I'm taking the last two days of June off, and am considering going and finding out what the heck is in Providence other than at least one tattoo shop and the train station. I just have to get through tomorrow, all of next week, and three days of the week after next. I hope I can actually manage that.

Oh, my creakin' cranium.

I knew this week was going to suck pond water through a flavor straw. Monday was OK, and then I went to chorus rehearsal and got home at 10:30, but couldn't decompress enough to sleep until midnight. Dragged myself out of bed on Tuesday morning and spent the whole day with oatmeal where my brain was.

Tuesday night I managed to stay up late enough to go to bed at a reasonable hour, and slept like a rock. Woke up on Wednesday morning feeling human, went to work and got stuff done (oh, look, there are two different versions of Standard 2-7 in this document; that's not good), and then I went to chorus rehearsal and got home at 10:30, and had to concentrate too hard on decompressing by 11:30.

This morning I had a weird dream about trying to fly from Barbados to Guam and having my luggage come off the plane in Barbados as individual articles of clothing on the conveyor belt, but no suitcase. Then they found my suitcase and wanted to know why there were embroidery scissors in the lining. I explained that by pulling embroidery out of the lining too, although I don't know why I was keeping it there (and I never take scissors on a plane; I use nail clippers). It was a pattern I've never seen before, but it was very pretty and there was about half of it done. I wish I could remember exactly what it was, so I could write it down and stitch it. It was geometry and flowers.

Today I have systemic oatmeal; it's in my muscles and my brain, but I'm a little better mentally than I was on Tuesday. I still am not breaking any records for brain power and I'm not even trying to revise any complicated documents, but I can at least go to meetings and pretend I know what the hell is going on. Just don't ask me whether I want to be in the meetings in the first place.

Welcome to New England! Black ice on Wednesday morning, 50 degrees on Wednesday afternoon, 10 inches of snow on Thursday and 10 degrees on Friday morning.

I managed not to wipe out on the black ice, but I did cross the street on my hands and knees. It just wasn't going to work unless I lowered my center of gravity. It was nice to step onto the bus and not have to worry about the floor being slippery.

Yesterday I was going to shovel at 2:00, and then it got dark and proceeded to snow HARD. So I waited until dinnertime, and cleared off the sidewalk and the plow berm (which, surprisingly, wasn't that bad yet). And when I wasn't shoveling, I did some embroidery and rotted my brain on various electronic devices and provided lap space for various cats.

What I should have done, of course, is get a jump on the weekend chores and do the laundry and clean the bathroom and wash the floors. But of course I didn't do any of that. Maybe that's why I had another frustration dream. New one, this time: I was trying to get across to somebody that I don't disappear when I'm talking to them and a specific third person joins the conversation. Somewhere in there was a bottle of hot sauce with a label on the bottom that said "Scientology supports this hot sauce." I don't know why Scientology, or why hot sauce (or why I was on a charter bus with the hot sauce). Maybe as long as my brain was bringing up things I don't like, it threw those in.

I'm not trying hard enough to get back into my size 8 pants. Every time I think I'm doing well, my willpower explodes and I end up buying and inhaling cheese ends or pork rinds or something. As much as I'd like to blame it on reading bad news every time I read the news, I can't; it's plain old lack of willpower on my part. Helped along by the fact that there's usually leftover meeting food lately. There are too many damn meetings going on around here.

I think I want to go to Seattle on vacation, whenever vacation ends up being. Sometime in April, maybe. It depends on CODA. But I don't need a passport to go to Seattle and I haven't been there since 1984. I know that because my sister got a souvenir shirt that said "I spent my 1984 summer vacation in Washington". I wonder if they still make those shirts?

The problem with coming back from winter break and picking up where you left off is that none of the problems have solved themselves over the break, so you're right back in the same rut you left in, if not worse. I don't care who's doing all this scheduling next year, but it is not going to be me. (That's what I said last year, too. Obviously the universe wasn't listening.)

My coffee maker's water level indicator isn't working. It doesn't even have any moving parts, so I guess I can't say it isn't working, but it isn't working as intended. It's got air bubbles in it and I can't tell how much water I actually put in the reservoir, without doing all sorts of math (OK, the top is up to 9, but there's a bubble between 3.5 and 5 and another one in the middle of 6 and 7, so maybe that will be 6? But the coffee maker always subtracts one, so maybe it's 5?). With the result that today I made rocket fuel by accident and had to put sugar in it to make it drinkable. Today is the sort of day that calls for rocket fuel, though.

I have a new recurring dream, but I'm not sure why. It involves going to see a very large model aircraft carrier and having to climb up a ladder to stand on it, and getting stuck at the top because people want to argue with me instead of letting me get off the ladder. And then my aunt shows up and yells at me for something involving somebody else's marijuana. I've had this dream three times now and I haven't a clue what it means.

I keep thinking there's got to be a better way to crush up Lily's pills than doing it on the back of a saucer (which has a rim so the fragments don't go everywhere) with the back of a spoon, but so far I haven't found it. I'm not interested in investing in a pill crusher, because I'm not sure the bits I start with are big enough to crush that way anyway. The problem is mostly getting the teeny amount of powder off the back of the saucer, and remembering to use the "cat food spoon" instead of the "thyroid spoon" on Snip's wet food. Maybe I need to invest in a couple of cheap pill-crushing spoons that don't get used for anything else.

I've sold a piece of embroidery for the first time in my life. It's the blue band sampler from 2012 (the name of the pattern escapes me, but there's a blue one and a red one and I did both. I'll have to look through the archives when I get home). So tonight I have to iron it, but before I do that I have to go to an art supply store and get a cardboard tube to wind it around and a poster tube to transport the whole thing in. Fortunately it's only on a quarter yard of linen, so I should be able to find what I want.

Eleven hours of sleep is what I apparently needed yesterday. I went to bed at 8:00, woke up at 11:00 and turned off the light, and slept until 7:00. Today I feel considerably better. Funny how that works. I don't know whether I was trying not to catch something, or whether my brain just Had Enough, but turning everything off for eleven hours seems to have fixed things.

Last night probably wasn't the best time to decide to try a new restaurant, but I did, because I was in no shape to cook anything. I went to Stoked and had a meatball and ricotta pizza, finished with basil oil. Tasty, but as usual I like my family's meatballs better. (Mine don't come out quite right, because I would have to make bread to get the right bread crumbs to use.) But I got to watch my pizza cooking in a wood-fired oven, and that was reasonably nifty. Skip the brussels sprouts, though; they were pretty tough.

Anyway, here it is, Friday, and I feel human again, and that means almost everything else is good. Except my foot hurts, because yesterday I was so tired I forgot to change my shoes before I left work, so I went home in my decent flats. That's fine because I want to wear them to sing in tomorrow. But that meant I had to wear other shoes to work today, and they don't fit like they used to, and my foot hurts. First world problem, I suspect.

Last night I went to Deuxave, ate entirely too much and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I had a somewhat complicated salad that came in a soup-can-size cylinder of very thin fried potato, and consisted of greens, truffle vinaigrette, a mushy (but thankfully not runny) egg, roasted mushrooms, bacon, and endive. After the salad came a freebie: three cheese agnolotti and hen of the woods mushrooms on top of some squash puree and under some gremolata crumbles. After the agnolotti came the entree: spice-crusted venison loin and venison sausage on top of sunchoke "risotto" with mustard greens and quince. Everything but the quince was quite tasty. I bailed on dessert for lack of room for it and had coffee instead, but they brought me a chocolate truffle the size of a small marble, a 3/4" square of citrus-flavored layer cake and a toffee that had orange and ginger in it and stuck to the roof of my mouth fairly firmly. (Good, though.)

I didn't bother with wine, although Deuxave is supposed to be good at it. Partly because I'm cheap and I was already spending a lot of money on food. And also partly because I clomped in wearing my snow boots, and first impressions being what they are, I didn't want to be the hick in the snow boots who ordered the absolutely wrong wine. I had brought other shoes with me in case of dress codes, but it was too cold to walk in them, so I walked in my snow boots. I know I'm overthinking this, but I do that sort of thing. (And I read too much British interwar fiction, in which ordering the wrong wine is Not Done.)

Anyway, I had a very nice dinner, and now I can know what I'm missing when I go past on the M2 every Wednesday night until the end of April.

And then I came home and went to bed and had a frustration dream, again. The oral surgery course will do that. This one involved taking a mail bag across a very narrow jetty to get to the post office before it closed, but I was stuck behind somebody walking very slowly on purpose, and snarking at me about how they could walk faster than I was.

First HRC rehearsal last night was the usual madhouse, but we're singing Purcell (Ode to St. Cecilia) and Purcell (Come Ye Sons of Art) and I can live with that. Especially since I've sung Come Ye Sons of Art before; I just can't remember whether it was high school or college. In any case, I know how it goes. And the altos get the melody at least once, because they pick up where the countertenor soloist leaves off. That almost makes up for the last three or four pages of alto line being "find an A and stay there, except when you go to G# once in a while, for two repeats". Easy to memorize, anyway.

Tonight I get MRIed. I almost don't care if the second thing they say is "And we can't do anything about it" as long as the first thing they say is "THAT is why your shoulder hurts." Because it does, and it keeps on doing so. I rather suspect it's an -itis, but I don't know which one. Bursitis? Tendonitis? Arthritis? Some of each? One from column A and one from column B? I doubt it's arthritis, but either or both of the other two wouldn't surprise me.

It occurs to me that putting in stud earrings on Tuesday night might not have been the wisest idea ever, because I have to remember to take them out again tonight when I take all of my other jewelry (watch and necklace) off. But I did want to make sure the front hole in my left ear was still open. I couldn't get an earring into it on Monday morning, but it turns out it works much better if you aren't in so much of a hurry that you don't aim the hook at the hole properly. Given better light and less of a rush, it worked.

Let's see, good stuff...the weather last night was warmer than I thought it was going to be, based on the heat having come on in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago. It was marvelous sleeping weather once I kicked the quilt off the bed again.

Also good stuff...I bought some new work-appropriate pants, which are very comfortable and make a decent attempt at fitting pretty well. Or at least they fit now. Last time I bought pants like this, they stretched so much when I washed them that I couldn't wear them at all afterward. This time I think I'll wash one pair to start with, and won't put them in the dryer. I have to admit that the idea of experimental pants amuses me, so yes, I am twelve occasionally.