July 2005
July 2005
30 — Finished “The Subtle Knife” while the boys were swimming this morning. Whew, that was an intense book! Time for “The Amber Spyglass”!
29 — Henry went to Fargo’s house to play today, and I got some housework done. We have a mysterious ant infestation in the kitchen, just a trail of them them coming in through the window in the sitting room and making for something on the kitchen floor. I can’t figure out what they’re looking for, and I mopped twice but still they keep crawling about. I don’t really care very much, though. Ants aren’t particularly bothersome to me, especially when they’re just crawling around on the floor. Oh I did some sewing this afternoon, too — took my Romantic Blouse in by 3/4″ on both sides, up the side seam and underarm seam. Now it fits JUST right. I think I just have to always sew a much smaller size than my measurements indicate, for some reason. Maybe because I’m so skinny, I don’t know, but when I go by the measurements on the pattern things ALWAYS end up too big. I listened to my “Ruth” audiobook while I was sewing. It’s good so far, but it’s no “Wives and Daughters” heheh. This afternoon I picked up H and F and we all went to karate. No one showed up for the little kid class at 4, so Sensei Mike helped Henry with his katas for about 20 minutes before the bigger kids’ class started. Fargo and I watched the class and I read more of “The Subtle Knife”, which is amazing so far. Fargo spent the night tonight. After I got the kids to bed, Dan and I watched the very excellent movie version of “Persuasion” starring Amanda Root as Anne Elliot and I sewed the waistband lining onto my bodiced petticoat. I think it will turn out well!
28 — Fargo spent the day with us again, and Bob, Chloe, and Celia came over in the afternoon to swim! I started reading “The Subtle Knife” which Alexzandra lent me (not available in any of the libraries around here, for some reason).
27 — Tired, tired, tired. Piano students, housework, Henry’s computer class, more students, karate, dinner, watered the roses, etc. Dan and I have been watching My So-Called Life at night before bed. Such a very good, enjoyable show, my goodness.
26 — Henry and I used our free passes and spent the day at Legoland! Got there about 10am, left about 7:30pm. He spent hours just building with Legos and doing the Mindstorms robotics classes (three times) so I was able to sit and rest and read Cold Comfort Farm, again. We had the most lovely day together, we really did! Henry is the Best. Boy. Evar.
25 — Piano students, housework, errands, library (Henry picked out a huge pile of non-fiction books about monkeys and tigers), more piano students, more housework, tired tired tired. Still recovering from night out at Humphrey’s.
24 — Last night I drove down to Humphrey’s to hang out with Chloe and hear Rockola. Dan was going to come along but was too tired. It was super-crowded and Chloe didn’t get there early enough to get us a table, but we dragged some spare chairs near the dance floor and sat there until a table in back was free. The band sounded great of course. I always forget how GOOD they are! And it was wonderful to see Chloe :) I didn’t get home until 1:30am so I’m pretty tired today. Oh also Dan bought me a new purse yesterday, at Mervyn’s. It’s olive green canvas, rather small, with a zipper, a velcro flap, and a shoulder strap. I love it.
So anyway today I was basically dead tired all day and just lay around. Played quite a bit of WoW and got Carol the Warlock up to lvl 40 AND got my mount, yay! Who’s awesome? Me!
22 — Bought water, helped Henry clean his room, got my Enchanted Gold Bloodrobe :) I need to go out and find some kind of HEAVY base for my umbrella… the plastic, fill-it-with-water base I bought is useless. But right now I’m too sleepy to go out again.
21 — Chloe and Bob came over this afternoon to visit and swim! Very fun. Bob and Henry played music together (Bob on guitar, Henry on bass), we watched a couple of Futuramas, and ate pizza. Super good fun time!
20 — Happy Moon Day, everyone. Dan’s parents came for a visit — good to see them again, nice people.
19 — Fargo came over this morning and then around noon the Hendrix family showed up, and we all went to the beach. I took my new beach umbrella and it worked pretty well — I only got slightly sunburned (despite said umbrella AND sunscreen). Henry tried out his new boogie board, which works well, and he and Fargo and Hannah played in the waves while Johannes built a sandcastle with his dad. Very nice, though somewhat stressful for Ute and me to keep an eye on the kids in the rough surf. They all kept washing south down the beach. Then we all came back here and the kids swam in the pool until it was time for everone to go.
17 — At 10:30 last night, while I was taking my shower, I got a tremendous craving for grapefruit juice. So Dan ran down to the store to get some for me :) :) :) Also, I just can’t get enough of the Musical Tribute to Star Wars so there’s the link for you again.
Today I’m feeling a bit better so I cleaned all the bathrooms, using a mild solution of Pine-Sol to get rid of the shower-door soap scum. That works way better than anything else I’ve ever used. I usually do all the basic weekly housework on Mondays, but I have a bunch of students tomorrow and anyway this house is too big to take care of all on one day.
This afternoon I watched “Bride and Prejudice” , courtesy of Greencine. I had high hopes, as I’d heard it was good and I loved “Bend it Like Beckham” — I was not disappointed! It was wonderful. Even the corny musical numbers were fun — so colorful and dazzling — and the whole cast was great, although the guy who played Darcy was awfully bland. Not at all attractive, if you ask me. But then, who can compare to Colin Firth? :) Anyway, it was fun to watch Austen’s story unfolding in a modern Indian setting, and to think, “Oh! That’s Charlotte Lucas! That guy is Mister Bingley! Oh no, here comes Mister Collins.” etc. Beautifully done, yay!
16 — Woke up, went to the library. They’ve got Shakespeare’s plays performed on CD, done by the BBC! I got Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing. Drove to SD to pick up Henry (listened to MND all the way there and back), got home, cleaned up etc. Watched Henry swim, fed people. I’m pretty tired tonight. Oh yeah, the doctor’s office called me back yesterday with my lab results (did it really take 4.5 days to get the results?). He wants me to go back to alternating 50 and 75 mcg every other day. Uh huh. That’s the dose I was on last time I went HYPERTHYROID. Of course by the time the office called me, the doctor had already gone home for the weekend. Since I’ve been feeling slightly better the last three days, I told them I’m not going to change anything over the weekend and that I want to talk to himn on Monday. Sigh. Terah suggests I try the name-brand thyroid hormone, so I think I’ll ask the doctor to write a prescription for that for me.
15 — Felt slightly better today. Henry and Sal and I went to Target this morning to return the Worst Toaster Oven Ever (don’t buy the $30 Black and Decker toaster oven) and then over to Bed Bath and Beyond for doormats and a better toaster oven. (Also $30, the Euro Pro model, a very good toaster oven! It actually works.) In the afternoon Ute and Martin, and their sweet children, Hannah and Johannes, came over for a swim and a visit! The’re in town from Germany for three weeks. Lovely people, easy-going and fun. The kids played in the pool for ages and we talked. Very nice! Hope to get to see them again before they go home. At night we watched “The Producers”, which was wildly funny in places. The scene near the beginning when Leo gets hysterical was my favorite part.
14 — Tired. Endlessly tired. When will the results of my last round of bloodwork be in and what will they indicate this time? Stay tuned.
Yesterday, while I drove Henry to his computer-game-making class in Vista, we listened to the mp3 cd I made recently. We started with the Fleetwood Mac, and sang “The Chain” together several times; when the cd moved on to “You Make Lovin’ Fun” I pointed out that it had a sort of disco feel, more so than any other song on that album, and then we started discussing disco, and then I realized that I have a true, undeniably disco song on that cd — “Le Freak” — so we put that on and Henry was enchanted. He repeated that song until we got to our destination and then played it on the way home, too.
13 — Tired. But here’s a link to a very entertaining flash movie: Star Wars: A musical Tribute.
08 — Have been tired, cold, depressed, and cranky for days. I suppose I’m hypothyroid again. Sigh. My doctor is out of town and then booked up through August, but luckily they had a cancellation on Monday so I get to go in then and convince him that I don’t feel well. And the bird is sick so i had to take her into the vet today. Poor birdy. They’re not entirely sure what’s wrong with her, but she’s definitely got an intestinal fungus. She has to drink a vinegar/water solution for the fungus, and also has some powder for her food in case she’s also got liver trouble.
07 — Mass-transit bombings in England. Horrific.
06 — Today was a nice Henry-and-Kara day. We had breakfast and then drove over to Vista to pick up my new LP, stopped at the mailbox place, and then came home to play WoW together for hours :) Lots of fun! We took Zinny and Ramona to the wetlands and did a bunch of the quests at Whelgar’s Excavation, all except for the one where you have to find four relics — we each found three but couldn’t find the fourth, argh. I started reading “Gone-Away Lake” to him, too. Lovely book. Still horribly tired.
04 — Tired all day. We went down to the beach at 8pm, hoping to be able to see the fireworks on the pier at 9. We brought beach chairs and sat on the beach and it was just lovely, lots of happy people waiting around and little kids running and splashing. As it got dark, lots of people on the beach set off their own fireworks while we waited for the offical fireworks! It was extremely entertaining :) And then of course the waves were phosphorescent still, so that added to the show. We sat there ’til after 10, I think, and then walked up to Coldstone for ice cream — banana split for Dan and milkshakes for John and me.
03 — Played a bit more WoW this morning and got my warlock up to lvl 35. Also joined a pleasant, chatty guild — The Guardians of Azeroth. Our copy of Bagthorpes vs. the World was due back on Friday but we haven’t quite finished it yet, so I read the last couple of chapters into my laptop so Henry can hear them when he gets home, and now I’m off to the library to return it and other things.
Forgot to mention — a couple of days ago I decided that, since I like “Never Going Back Again” so very much, I ought to investigate Fleetwood Mac a bit more thoroughly. I have heard that Rumours is one of the best-selling pop albums of all time, and the sonagram analysis page had a lot of interesting things to say about the album. So I tracked down all the songs from Rumours, gave them a test listen, and discovered that I REALLY like a lot of them! I deleted the really goopy ones and kept eight — The Chain, Gold Dust Woman, Secondhand News, Never Going Back Again, I don’t Want To Know, You Make Lovin’ Fun, Go Your Own Way, and Don’t Stop. I’ve just bought the LP, too. (Which I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t been able to download the songs for free ahead of time, to make sure I really liked them) The varied textures in some of the songs really blow me away — deep thumpy bass drum, interesting twiddly guitar stuff, vocal harmonies so clear and high, and lots of empty space. Yay for “new” music!! “Never Going Back Again” is one of those rare Perfect Songs.
02 — Saturday. Slept until nearly 11am, amazingly! Got up and played WoW for hours and hours, until Dan woke up in the afternoon. Played Carol the Warlock — she’s lvl 34 now! Dan and John and I went to Anita’s for dinner, and then when it got dark John and I went for a walk on the beach (i needed some fresh air after so much computer gaming today) and saw the amazing phosphorescent waves, caused by the Red Tide. There were lots of people on the beach admiring the waves. We discovered that the phosphorescence stays in the damp sand after the waves wash back out — you can stamp on the sand or drag a foot along and activate the glow. Amazing! We stopped for milkshakes at Coldstone, then came home and Dan and I played Monopoly. I won :)
01 — Henry and I finally had a chance to play WoW together for a good long time! We played Zinny and Ramona and had lots of fun adventures together until Matthew came to pick Henry up for the weekend. And then I cleaned up, did laundry, sewed, etc. It was COLD today. Crazy. Oh, the floor in the main teaching room is done! Mom and John and I re-arranged the furniture and it looks so nice now!