kayray.org

February 2005

28 — We watched two more episodes of Twin Peaks Season Two last night… Creepy! Here’s a link to the crocheted edging I’m making for my blue dress: crocheted edging. Did all the housework this morning while Henry played his bass! His arm is feeling ok and he is able to play with only a little awkwardness. This evening Henry was playing Minish Cap and I was working on my buttonholes and we were listening to my mp3s on random, and then he asked for “Blood on the Coals” so we put that on and he got all excited about the vocal harmonies, and was singing along and making up new harmony parts. Very fun :)

27 — Got up early to play WoW with Henry — we played for a couple of hours and got our Tauren characters up to lvl 10, and did the pet quests. Yay! Hunters are fun. And then Henry went out to play with Fargo and I made breakfast for Dan, and then worked on my buttonholes. I the afternoon Henry and I did the grocery shopping and Dan hauled it all up for me when we got home, and then I made dinner and finished making my buttonholes, all 21 of them. Mercy. They are sewn but not cut yet, and I still have to hide all the thread ends. And then I can sew on the buttons!

26 — Lisa and Matthew stopped by this morning on their way to LA, and Lisa gave Henry a really cool Lego RC car kit! He spent all day putting it together, with very minimal help, and now he’s driving it around the house. It is really extremely cool!

I went to the fabric store this morning and bought a whole pile of buttons for my jumper. I wanted shell, but the online place that sells them would take too long to ship them, and the fabric store only had 4 shell buttons and I needed at least 24. But I found some plastic ones with a pretty pattern around the edge and I’m happy with them. Then I came home and made a ton of practice button holes. I HATE making buttonholes! But I think I’ve fiddled with everything until it’s all just right and I should be able to make them ok. If I didn’t have to make so darn many of them I might do them by hand.

25 — Friday… We had such a nice day! Henry’s not allowed to go back to Karate until his bones have no chance of being knocked back out of alignment, so we had no activities today. We did chores and stuff in the morning, and then we played World of Warcraft together for four hours, oh my goodness. Time does fly :) We played our Tauren characters, and joined a guild with a lame name — SpeciaL ForceZ. The people in the guild are super-nice, though, so the name doesn’t matter :) We did a TON of quests with one of our guildmates, a druid, and had a great time. In the afternoon we went out to get my blood tested, then came home, did some housework, and then took a walk together down to the prairie. It’s lush and green down there after all that rain, and mudpuddles everywhere! We had fun sailing leaves down the gutters, too. And then on the way back home we met a sweet gray cat and Henry sat down on the sidewalk and petted her for about 20 minutes. It seemed like 20 minutes, anyway — my phone had a strange problem so I couldn’t check the time. It was a nice walk. And then we came home and watched the Antiques Roadshow together, and then Dan came home and I made him steak, and then we all went to bed and Dan and I watched Curb Your Enthusiasm and Twin Peaks. It was a good day :)

23 — Took Grandma out to do errands this morning, then came home for lunch and house stuff, and then Henry and I played WoW together for a couple of hours! We haven’t had a chance to play together in a while and we had a good time doing quests in Westfall. I’m sure Henry will tell all about it on his blog tonight! Oh, and I got to the boss in the Wind Ruins (Zelda: Minish Cap) but I died so I have to try again later :) Ok I need to go start dinner and then work on my blue dress! Oh, forgot to mention that I filled up my gas tank yesterday, did the calculations, and found that I got 32.92 MPG on my last tank of gas. Woohoo! Yay little Scion XA!

22 — Henry and I went to the free museums in Balboa Park today! It was very rainy all day but we managed never to get rained on. First we went to the Aerospace Museum, where we found that they had set up a new exhibit of the Apollo 9 Command Module! Very very interesting. We looked at that for ages. And then we went through the museum a little way, and found that, near the reproduction of the Wright Brothers’ plane, they had set up a flight simulator for kids — $2 for about 2 minutes of flight. They had a set-up so the kids could lie on their stomachs like the Wright Brothers, and control the flight of a plane on a large projection screen in front of them. It was staffed by nice elderly volunteers who coached the kids so they’d have a fun and successful flight. Henry did a couple of loops and then the guy cut power to his engine and he had to land the plane without power, and he did it :)

After the Aerospace Museum, we wandered through the Automotive Museum and looked at the nice old cars, and then we took the tram up to the Cafe and I bought Henry a cheese danish for a snack, and then we came home. It POURED on the way home but we felt nice and safe in my lovely Scion XA. We had a wonderful day together. More photos from our museum trip here: http://kayray.org/gallery/feb2005.

19 — Dan got an office at work, yay!!! He really needed one — his cubicle was way too crowded for everything he needed to work on, and he had to be on the phone a lot which was bothersome for the programmers near him. So now he has a nice office :) Today I helped him figure out how to arrange everything for maximum comfort and productivity.

I think I forgot to mention that Dan bought me the new Zelda game, The Minish Cap, for Valentine’s day! It’s extremely fun. I played quite a lot today, and once I got terribly stuck. I was about to ask the internet for help (gamefaqs.com is my friend) when Henry called up to say hi. I explained my situation and he gave me a suggestion which turned out to be the answer to the problem! (get tiny and go INTO the statue and hit the switch) That’s the power of being 9, I guess :)

I also forgot to mention that a few days ago I got completely FED UP with my big expensive ($40) T-Fal “non-stick” skillet. The handle fell apart while it was still nearly new, and now the teflon has worn away so that it is more “extra-stick” than “non-stick”. I treated it with gentle care, too. So I did some research and decided to try a cast-iron skillet, and found a nice large 11.5″ one at Target for $14 (total). Googled around for info on how to season it properly — it came pre-seasoned but from what I understand the manufacturer’s pre-seasoning is not so good. So I rubbed it with bacon fat and stuck it in a 300 degree oven for 2 hours or so, then let it cool, and rinsed and wiped it out. I adore it. It feels sturdy and solid (it must weigh 8 or 10 pounds!) and is remarkably non-stick. With my old T-Fal pan I had to scrape Dan’s omelettes out, even when I used tons of butter. They just slide right out of my new cast-iron pan! I’m going to look around for maybe an 8″ one and a 6″ one, and then I can get rid of my crappy old non-stick (HA!) pans and use good solid cast-iron for everything. If you switch to cast-iron remember to season them properly (most people recommend seasoning them several times, which I will do eventually), never use soap or a scouring pad, and make sure they’re thoroughly dry before storing. I just rinse it out while it’s still hot and rub gently at anything that doesn’t rinse right off, wipe off any obvious water, then return it to the burner and heat up again to make sure it’s dry.

18 — Henry had an appointment for more x-rays this afternoon at 2 (although we had to wait until 3:15 to actually see the doctor) and they say he’s doing fine. He needs to be careful of his arm still, so the bones stay aligned, but so far so good. He needs weekly x-rays for a while. They took the spacers out of his cast and gave him a fresh new wrapping around it. There were two colors of blue to chose from, but he couldn’t decide which he liked best so he went for green, which does match his shoes beautifully. I was very proud that he didn’t get tied up in knots about making the choice, as I would have at his age. I would have wept from the agony of having to choose… but Henry is more sane than I was at that age I guess :)

Dan had to stay very late at work tonight, getting everything ready for a planned power outage on the weekend. Henry went home with his dad after the doctor appointment, so I went home by myself and played WoW for hours — Kayray the Rogue is lvl 22 now. I did a bunch of Darkshore quests that were too hard for me last time I was there at lvl 19 or so. And I made a nice dinner for Dan when he got home, and we watched a bit of Twin Peaks in bed. Very nice. We do love watching old tv shows on a laptop in bed!

Yesterday we helped Mom clean out Dad’s room… He wouldn’t ever let anyone do any serious cleaning in there so it was quite something! But we helped her make a huge pile of stuff to give away, and got it all dusted and cleaned and nice. She’s been stuck in a tiny bedroom for so long, but now she can enjoy the big master bedroom with the pretty view and plenty of elbow room, so it made us all happy to help her make it nice.

The hardest thing for me, right now anyway, about Dad being gone is no more email from him. That’s how we communicated, mostly, and we’d exchange several emails every day, usually. But now there aren’t any. I miss him so much.

16 — Dad died this evening. He went into a coma in the morning. We sat with him and talked to him all day; the hospice nurses said he could still hear us, although he couldn’t respond. Mom called Ken to say goodbye to him, and Dad raised his eyebrows while Ken was talking to him. Dan came home from work to be with us. The hospice people were really nice and made sure there was someone with us all day. He was ill and miserable for such a long time, so we’re glad he’s out of pain now, but we will all miss him so much. Frank Robert Shallenberg, 1930 – 2005.

13 — Well here I am sitting with Dad and Kirsten, so I might as well write a respectably long entry for a change. Apparently Dad’s morphine gives him hallucinations so that might make things interesting. Poor Dad. I got enough sleep last night, for a change! Yay! Henry and I came over here at 10:45 so Kathy could take a break and go to church at 11. Matthew picked Henry up at 11 to take him to lunch and to see a movie and get out of the house, so that’s good, Henry won’t have to sit here with me all day.

Henry’s arm seems to be doing well. His fingers are less swollen, and he’s had no pain at all. We hope that means that his bones are remaining properly aligned. We’ll find out on Friday. I’ve been letting him play a little more World of Warcraft than usual, since it’s something he can easily do one-handed. He got Zinny to level 20, so he’s happy about that. He’s also been drawing left-handed a lot, and making some nice pictures of Pokemon guys and stuff :)

12 — Difficult day, not enough sleep, got up on the wrong side of the bed (four times) but the day ended very nicely with Dan and Vertigo :) If you are a fan of Napoleon Dynamite you will want to go to the Napoleon Dynamite Soundboard. Do the chickens have large talons?

10 — Henry is doing well today. His fingers swelled up a little a couple of times, but elevating his hand helped a lot. He discovered that he can play World of Warcraft left-handed, so that provided him with hours of entertainment, heheh. Sooo tired — I sleep now.

09 — Henry broke his arm this afternoon, poor child. I was teaching at the time, and Ken and Henry took a little walk around the block. Henry was wearing his Heelies, those shoes with the wheels in the heels — his cousins gave them to him in November, and he just recently learned how to use them. Anyway… his feet flew out from under him on the hill, and he landed on his arm and broke it. Ken made him a paper-bag splint and helped me get him into the car and to the Tri-City ER, and they x-rayed him and everything. And then they sent us down to Children’s Hospital in San Diego. Matthew met us at Tri-City, so he dropped Ken back at the Shallenberg house while Henry and I picked up Dan from home, and then we all went down there. Everyone was very nice and Henry was the bravest little boy in the world. And they finally got his arm set — his bones are mostly lined up now, good enough they say, and in a week we go back for more x-rays so they can make sure things didn’t shift around. We didn’t get home til after midnight. Dan carried Henry upstairs and we made him a little bed on the couch so he can sleep with his arm on a pile of pillows.

06 — Here’s a guy who made a Lego Dulcimer. Neat! And here’s a link to a Lego harpsichord, which looks a little better than it sounds :)

Kathy and I finished watching Wives and Daughters this afternoon. Ahh nice movie.

05 — Dan came with me to sit with Dad all day. Kathy and I watched most of another episiode of Wives and Daughters, and I knitted, and Dan played WoW and his guitar. A nice guy came with oxygen for Dad, and I think it’s helping him have enough breath to talk, which is good. It’s neat, it’s a compressor thing which sucks oxygen out of the air, so we don’t have to have big tanks everywhere. I started reading The Hills at Home again — good book.

In the evening we left to go do our grocery shopping, and Dan helped tremendously because I was getting tired. Did all the shopping, toook the stuff home, put it away, then ordered tasty pizza and went back to sit with Dad some more until Kathy came home from visiting her friend.

04 — Decided to stay home today and rest and let my cold get better. Henry and I did stuff together all morning, very nice. He played his bass and guitar and listened to music while I worked on my blue dress, and then we played a little World of Warcraft together :) We took Zinny and Ramona to Auberdine and did some of the quests there. Matthew picked up Henry nice and early (Henry is senpai for the Tiny Tigers and they’re testing today, so he was worried about being late) and then I had a quiet afternoon to myself. Very nice. Rob helped my warlock get her succubus! It was a long long walk. I wouldn’t have done the quest at all if he hadn’t offered to help me and walk me across the world to the quest guy. The succubus seems like a handy pet, although her slap/squeal move is annoying :)

02 — Sitting here in Dad’s room, keeping an eye on him while Kathy takes a break to sit outside for a while. We just watched the first part of Wives and Daughters on my laptop, yay! Last night I made a gigantic vat of tasty pasta and vegetables to bring along today and everyone has been eating and enjoying it. So that makes me happy. On the way over here I stopped at JoAnne’s to get a new tiny crochet hook and some fine crochet cotton so i can make some lace to go around the neckline of my Molly Jumper, and I’ve been working on that today. I’ve got about 2.5 feet done so I guess I’d better stop until I can measure the dress and see how much I need! It works up so fast that I might make enough to go around the hem too.

01 — Feeling slightly better again. Planned to spend the day sitting with Dad but it turned out that Henry’s friend Fargo stayed home from school, so I let them play together all morning and we went over to Mom’s house in the afternoon. While the kids played I worked on my new blue corduroy “Molly Jumper” — got the bodice sewn, lined, and turned. I think it will turn out well. Maybe tomorrow I can work on the waistband. It’s nice to feel well enough to sew again, although I still have a stuffy head and a deep juicy cough. Lovely.

January 2005

31 — Felt slightly better, didn’t do much. A little housework, one student. Here’s what I hate: having a cold and pms and cramps all at once. Here’s what I like: chocolate/peppermint Luna bars.

30 — Still sick. Felt rotten all day.

29 — Feeling slightly better. This was a nice quiet day with Dan. Um… I did the grocery shopping (finally) while he did some Dan-errands, and then in the afternoon we just hung out together. Went to bed early.

27 — I’ve been sick lately, bleah. So I haven’t done anything worth mentioning I guess. Dan and Henry went out today and brought home my favorite pizza as a surprise, to tempt my appetite.

25 — Tired. I made an mp3 cd for Mom (all Bach), for her to play in her new Scion XB, and made an extra copy for my car. The cello suites are on it, which I love, and some cello/harpsichord sonatas that Henry loves. Ahh, Bach. My new license plates arrived today. Henry and Sal played together and went horseback riding today. I worked on our new family online photo album which I am not going to link to until there are more than 5 photos there. But you can look at my new January 2005 album.

23 — Happy birthday Mom!! Kathy and I took Mom for a nice walk on the beach in the fog — here she is looking pretty cute! And then we met Kirsten and Marcos at Coldstone for ice cream. Mmmm strawberry milkshake, extra-thick.

21 — Henry has been wanting a new needlepoint project, so today we got him started on one. I found a good simple picture of Pikachu (thanks, google images), enlarged it, and traced it onto needlepoint canvas for him. We bought wool yarn in yellow, red, white, black, and brown, and a hoop. He started with the eyes and is now working on the outline. He’s doing great!

This afternoon we watched Return of the King with Kirsten, Marcos, Kathy, and Dad. That’s a long movie… I really love the bit where all the beacons get lit up, one after another. Beautiful. Also when Gandalf rides out to protect Faramir and his horsemen from the Nazgul.

Tonight Rockola was playing at Viejas, so I went down there to hang out with Chloe and hear the band. Kirsten went, too, and we had fun together! They played from 9-1 but I was dead tired and it’s a long drive from here so I only stayed til 11:30. Fun. I drove my dear little scion xa — the first long trip I’ve had in it since we brought it home from LA. What a good car. It kept me amused and alert with Loveline mp3s :)

19 — Blood tests, bank, groceries, home, put groceries away, played WoW with Henry for a while, back over to Mom’s house, sat with Dad, visited with Kathy, taught piano student, Henry to Karate, sat around with family some more, home, tired.

18 — Woke up at 5:30am, couldn’t get back to sleep. Spent the morning with Dad and family, then Henry and I drove down to SD to pick up Chloe, went to the San Diego Museum of Fine Art and had a great time there, also bought Dove bars and looked through the Botanical Building. Then dropped Chloe back at Bob’s house and went back to Shallenberg house, hung out there til 7:30 or so. Exhausted.

17 — Fargo was home from school today so he and Henry played all morning while I did housework, then I took both of them over to Sal’s and they played while K, K, K, and I sat with Dad. We looked at old family documents and stuff.

16 — Kathy arrived yesterday and Ken arrived today so we spent the day sitting with Dad, pretty much. We had a Christopher Guest marathon. Nice. I have a good family.

15 — A lovely Saturday. I woke up at 6:30am. I did stuff around the house til Dan woke up, then made him a nice breakfast (smoothie (banana, orange juice, protein powder, yogurt, and frozen strawberries) and cream of wheat). He went with Sal to help her buy her new car (Scion XB) and I stayed home and played World of Warcraft for hours! Got my warlock from level 16 up to level 18, and got my rogue from 17 up to 19.

In the evening Chloe and Bob (Tedde) came over to hang out and watch movies. It was so very nice to see them! We put in Napoleon Dynamite and watched for a while (what a wonderful movie) and then after a while Kirsten and Marcos got back from picking Kathy up at the airport and they came over too, so we started the movie over again :) After the movie we all just talked and hung out and goofed around. We started talking about our old records (Kirsten’s and mine) and it turns out the Bob had the same Sesame Street one when he was little… and he can sing all the songs just like we can :) Funny! I made another dinner at about midnight (pasta and that special sauce with everything in it) and everyone devoured it so it must have been good. And then we talked some more and watched Marcos playing Spiderman 2 on the gamecube. Didn’t get to bed until around 2. It was the Best Evening Ever.

14 — Here’s a very funny article: Nobody Checks the Signature. Thanks Cosmicray! This morning Henry and I cleaned his room (all except the vacuuming, which he despises). We did a good job and were able to get rid of two paper bags full of clothes and toys he didn’t want anymore. Yay Henry! And then we played World of Warcraft together for a long time, and then I helped him scan a painting and make a blog post of his own. Then I took him to his karate classes. He’s doing so well! I’ve got to remember to take photos again soon. Matthew picked him up from Karate, and I went to sit with my Dad for a while. We watched the History Channel with the sound turned down, I worked on my needlepoint, and we had a fine peaceful quiet time. Very nice.

13 — We were driving today, and I was fishing around on the radio for something, anything, decent to listen to. I hit the classic rock station, and they were playing “Life’s Been Good To Me So Far” by Joe Walsh or whoever. Now, ordinarily I would change the channel instantly, since I’ve heard that song 45 million times… but then I thought, well, Henry hasn’t heard it 45 million times, in fact he’s NEVER heard it. So we left it on, and pretty soon Henry was pointing out the cool bass, and enjoying the talk-box and other 70s sound effects. And I was actually enjoying it too!

I finished my Romantic Blouse this morning, and it’s lovely. Photos soon. Henry worked on some paintings while I was sewing, and we listened to Woody Guthrie and Beatles records. And later we had a great time playing WoW together — we did the Ursal the Mauler quest together, finished up all the quests on Teldrassil, and took the hippo to Auberdine.

I made that curried cauliflower and beef thing for dinner which is usually delicious but the beef I bought is so tough it almost can’t be chewed. But the cauliflower part was good :) Dan had apples and a quesadilla for dinner, heheh.

12 — Ok my CES photo album is up! Consumer Electronics Show 2005

11 — Henry’s got a bit of a cold today, but he doesn’t feel too bad. We did the grocery shopping in the morning, and then in the afternoon Sally came over and I scanned some photos for her. Henry and I played WoW for a couple of hours, too. Tonight Dan and I watched another episode of Northern Exposure, but it was pretty bad, not up to their usual entertainment value. It was the one with the Russian guy.

10 — OK I really have to talk about CES a little here before time gets away from me any more!

The drive out there on Friday was interesting — there was a lot of heavy rain and even SNOW when we crossed the mountains on the 215. I got carsick so we stopped in scenic Barstow at the Flying J truck stop, or whatever it was, for some dramamine which made me feel slightly better and very sleepy. Dan drove the whole way so I just sort of napped between Barstow and Vegas. Also got Dan some In ‘n’ Out in Barstow. That town has everything you need. We got to Las Vegas around 5, I think, and checked into our hotel, the “New Frontier” right on the strip. It turned out to be the “Very Very OLD Frontier” heheh, shabby and trashy and dismal. Our shower had a clogged drain and the TV remote didn’t work, and the handyman who came up to fix it said the hotel was built in the 40s and they’re planning to tear it down this year. And none too soon! It was really quite funny :) I have lots of pictures which I will post in my photo gallery soon. But not yet.

After we checked in and settled down, Dan called Julie and Judie (of the-gadgeteer.com and we made a plan to meet for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory in The Forum (part of Caesar’s Palace, I think). It was one mile away from our hotel, and it took 40 minutes to drive that mile and another 20 to park and find the restaurant. Traffic is CRAZY there! But we finally found them in this mall that was supposed to look like it was an ancient Roman city, columns everywhere and the ceiling painted to look like the sky etc. We had an extremely good time hanging out with them, and went back to their hotel (The Luxor) afterward for more conversation and fun. And they had actual internet access in their room so we checked our email, etc. (There was no internet access at all in our entire hotel — even the pay-by-the-minute computers in the business center were down.) Spending time with J & J was definitely one of the best parts of the whole weekend. They are _extremely_ nice and fun to be with.

Saturday was the big day! We got up, got ready to go, and then drove out to find Dan some breakfast. Ended up at a Denny’s with approximately 400,000 other people. So we just went back to the hotel and got room service :) While we were waiting for the food to show up, we started watching “Napoleon Dynamite”, a movie I won from greencine.com, which was really good! Eventually, after breakfast, we drove out to the convention center. Parking was insane so we ended up in the Hilton parking structure, then walked through the Hilton to CES. We picked up our badge holders and then started wandering around, trying to find Dan’s company. Man that place is HUGE. But we finally found them, and he hung out with the businessmen for a while, and then we just wandered for the rest of the day. We saw all kinds of neat stuff… it’s all sort of blur now though. We walked and walked and walked. By the time CES closed (at 6?) our feet were SO SORE. But we went back through the Hilton to the Star Trek Experience place there, where there was supposed to be a cool Star Trek museum, but in order to get into the museum you also had to pay to go on a couple of rides, and we didn’t feel like spending $70 to get in, so we hung out in the gift shop and bought a couple of Star Trek souveniers for Henry — two packs of Star Trek playing cards (a different photo on every card) and a Spock magnet.

Eventually we limped back to the car, got back to the hotel, ordered a large room service dinner, finished watching “Napoleon Dynamite”, and went to sleep. It was a good day, very fun.

09 — Today we drove home from Las Vegas. The weather was horrible — the 215 was closed due to snow, so we stayed on the 15 and got pounded by a fearsome rainstorm, the kind that is so heavy you can barely see through the windshield. But we made it home ok, whew! It’s so good to be home where nothing smells like cigarettes and everything is clean and nice and there are no slot machines. We had a wonderful time in Vegas but I’ll have to write more about it tomorrow.

07 — Drove to Las Vegas today for CES. It was a good drive but the weather was pretty bad a lot of the time! We have no internet access in our hotel (even the computers in the business center are busted) so I am using Judie’s computer in her hotel room. We had dinner with Julie and Judie and had a ton of fun (and good food) and now we’re visiting with them a little more. Las Vegas is a strange place! More tomorrow (maybe…if I can get online again somewhere…)

06 — I made killer-diller blueberry muffins this morning, oh my goodness. Yes. Yum. Did chores and stuff, then played with Henry, then started work on the romantic blouse, then read to Henry, then went to teach a student and hung out with Kathy. Now I am supposed to be packing for Las Vegas (going to CES there tomorrow!) but I’m writing this instead… ok more packing :)

05 — Today I got out my “Free To Be You And Me” record! It still plays just fine :) Henry and I listened to it over and over all day! I didn’t like “Girl Land” or “Housework” when I was little and I still don’t. But everything else is great! “A person should wear what he likes to, and not just what other folks say…” Quite appropriate for Henry and me :) Henry likes the wah-wah guitar in “It’s Alright to Cry”, and I heard him singing “William Wants A Doll” last night while he was playing outside. I think Grandma sent this record to Kirsten and me originally.. so thanks, Grandma, for “Free To Be You And Me”! I think we should buy the cd, actually, so we can make mp3s and listen in the car.

Kathy is visiting! We sat and did needlework together for a while, which was fun. I started one of my little needlepoint projects today, a moon in the night sky. I have a sun one to match it. I think they’ll look nice in our bedroom eventually.

04 — Ok people I’m linking to my new photo album up there… Be patient, I’ve only got photos from 2003 in there so far. But I’m working on 2004 so there will be more photoamusement up there soon! Today I put up photos from January and May of 2004. Don’t ask me what happened to the months in between — I guess I just didn’t take any photos. But now that I’ve got this awesome new photo album I am inspired to take more pictures, so maybe there won’t be entire months missing from 2005.

Dan just helped me back up my blog… He was amazed to find out that I have typed about one megabyte of raw text. The average Dick Francis novel is about 600k of uncompressed text. This blog has been in existance since early 2001, since wayyyyy before blogs were cool. So I am cooler than all of you :)

03 — I made banana muffins this morning and forgot to put the sugar in! Oops. So we ate them with honey. Um what else happened today… Oh I know, Henry and I ran errands in the rain (but in my new car I felt nice and safe). We went to the bank so the loan lady could photocopy that document from the car dealer, and then we went to the library YAY. I haven’t read anything particularly good lately but I think that may change soon. I got another novel by Elizabeth Gaskell — “Cranford” which so far is very very good so I’m sure it will eventually make it to my books page. Henry got the book he’s been longing for — “Art Fraud Detective” which is one we got ages ago. He wanted to read it again. And we went over the the other library so I could return “The Dark Is Rising” audiobook and give them proof of my address. I realized that, now that Dan’s quilt is done, I no longer have a carry-along project to work on! My scarf is half done already… So I stopped by JoAnn’s and spent a little of the gift card that Mom and Dad gave me, and got two little needlepoint projects. That should keep me busy.

Here’s a funny thing: Cute little puppy vs. cute little ducky and another one: Get My Stuff Done. Ok I gotta go get some stuff done…

02 — Dan and I went over to watch Return of the King with Dad this afternoon. Man, that’s a long movie :) Long, but good. I ripped out the slippers I started with my leftover sweater yarn and started a scarf instead — a good movie-watching project. Tonight Dan helped me un-uglify my new photo album. I’m very particular about having a nice white margin around text, and the nice simple skin I’m using had the text going right up to the edge of the screen — ugh! CSS makes me shiver so Dan fiddled around in the .css file until he found the way to add a nice margin (and take away the ugly boxes around the picture captions!)

01 — Happy new Year, everybody! This morning I made apple pancakes for the guys (just grate up an unpeeled apple and mix it into your pancake batter with a pinch of cinnamon) and then Henry and I played World of Warcraft together while we waited for Matthew to come pick him up. We did the Timberling Seeds/Timberling Sprouts quests. After Henry left, I played Warcraft myself for a while (got Kayray-the-rogue up to lvl 17!) and then tinkered with Jalbum, a freeware java-based web-photo-album-maker thingy. It’s horrible, but it was the most tempting freeware I could find. I fooled with it for many, many, many, many hours and finally got somethign semi-respectable produced. And then Dan suggested Gallery! He installed it on the server for me, and then I tinkered with it for maybe an hour and made a photo album to be proud of, instead of one to be barely-satisfied with. I did an album of all my best photos of 2003, and soon I’ll do one of all the best from 2004. And when I’m completely satisfied, I will link to it here and you people can see my photos. I think I’ll redo my crafts page with Gallery, too. I’m glad I wasted so much time with Jalbum — it made me extra grateful for Gallery!

We had a lovely day. Drove out to get pizzas (Round Table for Dan, That Pizza Place for me), ate, watched Northern Exposure, hung out together. I am very happy to see that people have donated $11,721,658.00 to the Red Cross (to help with the tsunami disaster in South Asia) through Amazon. And that’s only 145946 dontations. What if everyone in San Diego donated? That’s something like 6 million people…

Right now I’m listening to my wonderful recording of The Magic Flute, the one I’ve had since I was a teenager. Otto Klemperer conducts and Lucia Popp is Queen of the Night. Zowie!

December 2004

Dec 30 — Yesterday, Wednesday, we had our big Christmas festivity at Mom’s house! Henry spent the morning playing with Sal, and then at about 3pm Dan and I went to join them (I was baking pie and cookies all morning) and Kirsten, Marcos, Dad, and Grandma were there, and then pretty soon Chloe showed up! We had a great time opening presents, eating fabulous Eggplant Parmesan (from Spirito’s), eating pie (I made apple, Kirsten made pumpkin), singing, and goofing around. Mom and Dad gave me a wonderful portable record player, a Crosley CR49, which I love! I have a perfect place for it in my bedroom and have been listening to my old LPs and enjoying them so much. It was a wonderful day.

Dec 29 — Please go to amazon.com and hit the giant front-page link to donate to the Red Cross, to help the victims of the earthquake and tsunamis in South Asia. It’s easy and fast and might make a difference to someone, somewhere, who needs some help. When I made my small donation this morning, the total was $2,170,438.37. Now, a few hours later, it’s at $2,377,609.37. Maybe $2.5 million by tomorrow? Way to go, people!

Dec 28 — Super-rainy today! This morning, after chores, I started a new Night-Elf character (A warrior named Ramona) And Henry played his Night-Elf, Zinny, and he led me around the Night-Elf area and helped me with the newbie quests. That was fun! We also baked Dutch Spice Cookies (Spekulaas), had a wireless Pokemon battle, did the grocery shopping, and worked on needlework projects! This evening we all three watched “A Christmas Story” again — fun :) Henry is completely obsessed with his needlepoint project, and even brought it with him to the grocery store and worked on it while sitting in the cart :) It’s almost done already!

Dec 27 — Henry’s friend Fargo was home today so the kids played together ALL day. I did the housework, helped Henry thread his needle (he’s passionate about his needlepoint project!), played WoW for a couple hours, cooked nice foods, etc. Oh I’ve played my new Pokemon game for 4.5 hours already! I love it.

Dec 26 — Henry came home this afternoon, and opened up his presents from us. He seems to be especially thrilled by the Snap Circuits electronics kit, the needlepoint kit, and the stilts :) He stayed up quite late doing electronics projects. He got so involved that he forgot to ask for a bedtime story. We watched “De-Lovely” tonight. Meh. It wasn’t terrible. Stilted dialogue, nice costumes, music well-composed and poorly performed.

Dec 25 — Merry Christmas! Henry was with his dad, so Dan and I slept latish and had a quiet Christmas on our own. He gave me a lovely necklace, silver, with leaves made of peridots, and a red GBASP, and the Pokemon FireRed game I’ve been wishing for for so long! And my new car, of course :) In the afternoon we picked up Mom and she came over for a while and we scanned some old family photos for her. Very very nice day :)

Dec 24 — Poor Henry threw up in the night (3:30am). So I dragged my blankets into his room and slept on his floor in case he felt bad again, but he slept through the rest of the night and felt fine in the morning. I woke up 5000 times to check on him. Two nights of horrible sleep plus a drive to LA and several hours in a car dealership have left me feeling exhausted! But we had a nice quiet day today. Henry and I took my new car to drop things off at the library and it’s so nice! I just love driving it. It’s so small and quick and lively, and it feels really solid and safe. Fargo came over to play for a few hours and I took the boys down to the park for a while, and read my new owners’ manual. Now it’s 6:30, Henry’s off with his dad, and I’m just about ready for bed. Maybe a little WoW first, though :)

Dec 23 — Dan surprised me yesterday by telling me that he wanted to buy me the car I’ve been wanting, and he found one in just the right color and configuration at a dealership in LA! What a great Christmas present! We spent the entire day today driving to and from LA and listening to Car Salesmen yap at us, and I’m so tired right now that I can barely form a coherant sentence. Seriously, we left the house at about 9:30am and got home at 7pm or so. Luckily Henry got to spend the day with Sal so he didn’t have to endure the Car Salesmen! I really do now own the most adorable car in the world — a lovely little blue Scion XA. I can see it from the bedroom window :) More tomorrow.

Dec 22 — Henry spent the day with Sal and I did the grocery shopping, which was exhausting. In the afternoon I went back over to the house and helped them decorate the tree, and we sang carols and stuff. I brought Henry’s friend Fargo along and that made it extra fun! He’s a nice kid. I got to assemble Mom’s new Ikea loveseat, too.

Dec 20 — Feeling a bit better today, yay! Cleaned the house, got the oil changed in the Acura, and had time at the end of the day for a little Warcraft with Dan :)

Dec 19 — Yesterday Dan decided we needed another copy of World of Warcraft, since all three of us like it so much. With two copies, not only can two people play separate games at the same time, two of us can join up and do quests together! He called around looking for a store with the game in stock so I didn’t waste my time driving all over the place. He had some trouble because there are several different “Warcraft” games and most of the salesmonkeys he talked to were quite confused. He finally talked to Gregory at Best Buy who had a clue and said he’d hold a copy for us. I went, found helpful Gregory, bought it, came back, and we got it installed and registered etc. Dan and I started two fresh characters, dwarves — he’s a paladin, I’m a priest — and started questing together. Lots of fun :) We played quite a bit more today and both got to level 8!

Dec 18 — Henry and I watched “A Christmas Story” (You’ll shoot your eye out!) at Dad’s recommendation and we both enjoyed it very much!

Dec 17 — Feeling pretty bad today. I didn’t sleep well, plus scratchy throat, watery eyes, stuffy head, sniffy nose. None of it is awful, but I do wish I could have stayed in bed all day. However, when we got out of the car after Henry’s two karate classes, he said “That was a wonderful day!” so I guess it was worth getting up and doing things after all. :) The Sensei had him do something more advanced than the rest of the class, some kind of jump kick, and he said it made him feel like jumping for joy. I didn’t see — I didn’t want to give my cold to all the karate kids, so I spent the time in the car reading Dick Francis, playing FFTA, coughing, and blowing my nose. And listening to the Will Arnett episode of Loveline.

Tonight’s dinner was something that _everyone_ liked (shock). A sort of broccoli/beef/carrot/ginger stir fry thingy from the Menu Mailer. I made rice for Henry and me, the kind from Trader Joe that looks and tastes like white rice but claims to have 80% of the nutrition of brown rice — a fair compromise I think.

I had a free hour and a half today to play WoW, so I played my warlock, Carol, for a while and got her to level 12.5 or so. Joined up with a couple nice fellows and did a few quests. It’s fun to be in a group for a while. And later, when I was on my own again, some guy was asking for help with a quest I didn’t have yet. It turned out I wasn’t eligible for it but I helped him anyway. When we were done he gave me three silver, which he said was half the reward he’d get. Quite nice, and not what I was expecting — I’m happy to help just for the exp.

Dec 16 — I feel a bit better today! Slightly scratchy throat, sightly low-energy, slightly sniffly. If yesterday was the worst of it, then this is practically a pleasant illness! Today I got to see my endocrinologist (after first demanding that they let me get my blood tested and then fighting to get a consultation before FEBRUARY) and lo and behold he lowered my thyroid hormone dosage. Surprise. I complain a lot about him but he’s really very nice, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s 3 minutes from my apartment.

I had about half an hour to play WoW today — not much but luckily it’s still fun even if you only get to play for a short time now and then! Since Dan’s playing now, and when he’s done we have a date to watch bad tv together, all I can do is read about it :) So here’s a fabulous review I just found: Gamespot review of World of Warcraft. You read that, just go read it. Doesn’t it sound like fun? It IS fun! It’s just as good as that reviewer says it is. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get another turn ;-)

Dec 15 — Sick. Not horribly sick, just sick enough to not want to do anything. But Dan and Henry are home so we had a nice day. Dan ordered Chinese food tonight for a treat — our favorite place delivers again :)

Dec 14 — I think I’m coming down with a cold or something. I’m not quite sick yet but I have that about-to-get-sick feeling. Bah. Did the grocery shopping today, finished a Christmas present for somebody, worked on Henry’s new computer some more (installed his camera software and emulators etc). Tried to play WoW for a while but the server went down and was down for hours and hours. Henry came home tonight yay! He and Matthew made a short film (a pokemon battle) and put it on a dvd! So cool :)

Yesterday in the mail there was a thin, official-looking envelope for me from The Internal Revenue Service. I tell you, that is not what anyone wants to find in the mailbox, no sir. I was pretty worried. But it was nothing but a payment coupon thing, in case I owe them money at taxtime. I guess it’s supposed to make things easier or something. Really, it took a few years off my life. These gray hairs brought to you by The Federal Government.

Dec 13 — I did a lot today. Did all the weekly housework, first, and then gave my Grandma a ride home from the dentist, and then worked on Henry’s new computer (had to ftp his special important files from the old box to the server, and then from the server to the new box) for a couple hours, and then played World of Warcraft for an hour and a half. I played my Warlock, Carol, today. She’s a gnome and so cute! Then I had to go teach and stuff, and now I’m home. And very very very tired.

Dec 12 — This afternoon I drove down to SD to pick up H and we went to the Junior Theatre preformance of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever”. It was absolutely wonderful! If you don’t know the book, we highly recommend it. The play was just as good! The kids did a wonderful job, just wonderful. The costuming was fabulous, too. Henry and I loved it and had a great time together. We even got front and center seats!

Dec 10 — Our wintery, rainy weather went away and now it’s hot. Ugh! This morning Henry had his piano lesson and then we went to buy a Christmas tree. Our favorite tree place was gone — their vacant lot isn’t vacant any more. So we went to the “other” tree place and they were gone too! So we drove down Vista way for a while and finally found a place just before Melrose. We got a nice little table-top tree and brought it home and decorated it, and it looks lovely. We put it on the kitchen island thing.

I got to play World of Warcraft for about half an hour this afternoon, and boy was it fun. I played my rogue. I finally figured out how to use my pickpocketing skill — you have to drag that skill onto the “sneak” bar while you’re in “sneak” mode, and then you can use it. I put my “backstab” skill there too and now I can sneak up on badguys and pick their pockets and stab them in the back, heheh. It came in handy for the “get the shipping schedule” quest — I snuck into the dock place and picked the guy’s pocket, got the schedule, and snuck away. The reward for that quest is awesome — a new knife that does 9-17 damage AND boosts my agility.

In the afternoon I took Henry to his bass lesson and since I didn’t have a student I got to listen in for a change. He’s doing well. And then we went off to the Dojo where he helped with the little kids’ class and then had his own class. I love it when they all line up and do kata together! Kinda like the Rockettes or something :)

Dec 09 — I insisted that my endocrinologist let me get my thyroid levels tested again today. I hate how I have to talk them into it. Whose blood is it, anyway??? I always have to argue with the receptionist and she always says “You can’t have your blood tested unless the doctor sees you first”. And then I demand that she ASK HIM, and then finally she comes back and says well, you can get your blood tested today but you have to have a follow-up appointment. Our first opening is in three weeks. Gee, thanks. And what is that supposed to accomplish, exactly? Oh I know — it’s so the doctor can get money from me! Right, I forgot what’s really important here…

Other nicer things happened today, though. I sat with Henry while he practiced bass and piano. He’s getting a lot better at knowing where the notes are on the fretboard! And I took Dan to the orthopdeist so he could get a cast put on his ankle. The guy gave him the nice removable kind of cast so he can scratch and wash, yay :) But he says not to walk on it at ALL for at least four weeks. But lucklily it’s ok with his boss for him to work from home.

I feel slightly less depressed today but extremely tired. Isn’t PMS lovely? During my free hour this afternoon I just lay on the bed and listened to my “The Dark Is Rising” audiobook.

Dec 08 — This morning Henry and I went on a super-fun homeschool field trip to the Escondido Children’s Museum! It was lovely and rainy and gloomy and cool. The museum is tiny but Henry had a ton of fun and wants to go back again soon! A nice woman, a volunteer from an animal shelter, brought some animals for the kids to pet and gave a little talk about them — a very nice talk, not “teachy” at all. They got to pet millipedes, a skink, and a guinea pig! They got to HOLD the millipedes too, eww. Millipedes are huge, HUGE I tell you! But harmless. We had a truly wonderful time.

Dec 06 — Well it turns out Dan actually BROKE his ankle. Ugh! His primary care doctor couldn’t see him today so sent him to the ER to get it x-rayed and they said it’s broken. They wrapped it up tight and gave him crutches and now he has to see an orthopedist to get a real cast.

I got all obsessed with that HP commercial and I tracked it down online. Go here: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/hpads/you/photography/index.html and click the TV ad called “Francois”. How cool is that?

Here’s a little nugget of joy for you Loveline fans: Sacred Wisdom of Chief Thunderbear.

Dec 05 — Dan’s ankle is a little better but still very painful. He’s keeping it elevated and iced. Henry played with Fargo all day, some of the time here and some of the time at Fargo’s house. The kids watched “Elf” again. I played both my WoW characters for a while :) It rained and rained and rained! We watched Malcolm in the Middle and Arrested Devlopment tonight. Both were pretty good. The best part, though, was this amazing Hewlett-Packard commercial, for some kind of photo-printer I think.

Dec 04 — Henry woke up with a little sniffle so we decided he should stay with us this weekend, so as not to give his cold to Matthew. He was sad about that but cheered up pretty fast. We took turns playing World of Warcraft (all three of us) and Henry and I cleaned his room well and got rid of two bags of unwanted clothing! And we rented “Elf” and watched it all together this afternoon. Good movie. It was a very nice day. Dan and I watched the first episode of “Wives and Daughters” again tonight.

Dec 03 — Dan twisted his ankle badly at work today, so Marcos drove me down to to SD and I drove Dan home. His ankle is all swollen and painful. Poor Dan!

Dec 02 — Dan worked from home today which was a nice change! Henry’s computer became so infected with spyware that it pretty much stopped working. (I installed Firefox for him a long time ago but never told him NOT to use Internet Explorer.) So we ran Spybot Search and Destroy on it, and it found 71 spyware problems. Yipe. It was able to get rid of all but three… but one of those 3 was the one which really messed up the computer. So it was a choice of a) reinstalling win98 for him, or b) giving him his new Christmas Computer a month early — we went with option b. Dan built him a lovely computer a few weeks ago, fast and clean and new, and put winXP on it. And while Henry was out of town with Sal we installed all his favorite software on it and got it almost all ready to give to him on Christmas. So we gave it to him today. He’s very happy! It’s so much faster and more stable than his old box, mercy. We still need to copy some files from his old one but that’ll be easy. And now he has a nice working computer machine again.

Dec 01 — Twenty-four days til Christmas! We’re all excited :) It’s going to be fun. Chloe will be here on the 28th so that will make it extra-special! Let’s see, what did we do today… Oh, last night Henry’s hot-water bottle sprang a leak and he woke me up at 4:30am when he discovered his bed was all wet, poor boy. I helped him get settled again (a big fluffy towel over the wet place solved the problem for the rest of the night) but couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got up at 5 and went out to the living room to read my book (Dave Barry’s “Tricky Business”). Finished it at 6:30 and went back to bed for a ltitle bit til Dan got up at 7. So I was a bit tired all day but I didn’t feel too bad, really.

When Henry got up he was eager to play some more “World of Warcraft” (more about that later) which was fine with me but I was afraid he might forget to do his piano and bass practice and other chores. So I told him he could play for an hour, then take care of all his stuff, and then have another turn later in the day. He was good as gold. While he took his first turn, I did chores/laundry/etc. The while he did his music practice and stuff, I had a nice long Warcraft turn (I’m a level 9 human rogue). Then in the afternoon he had another turn. What a great game! Oh I bought some velcro and webbing this evening to finish another 12″ iBook laptop bag (same luscious corduroy as Chloe’s bag) which I will sell on Ebay this weekend, probably. And if it doesn’t sell, well, then I’ve got my own nice laptop bag ;-)

November 2004

Nov 29 — Henry’s home! He and Sal got in around 2am, so I picked him up from Sal’s house this morning. It’s so good to have him home again! We looked at a children’s art book tonight for his bedtime story, and he asked me “How does art get famous?” and I had to think about that one for a while. Good question. So I told him some of the ways that art can get famous and said we could look through some of my big art history books together and see more art and talk about it. He was really enthusiastic about that, and asked if we could go to an art museum sometime soon! Yay art boy!

Nov 28 — Sunday, end of the nice 4-day weekend. It was a nice holiday, just Dan and me spending lots of time together.

Nov 26 — Dan’s got a new game — “World of Warcraft”, an online RPG. I’m watching him play and it’s super-cool!

I discovered something today, while searching Limewire for Christmas music. I LOVE Nat King Cole’s early work. Somehow I found him doing Deck the Halls and liked it, so I started looking for other songs of his… found three or four and the best was just him singing and playing piano, accompanied by fabulous guitar and bass. “Dream a Little Dream of Me”. I really super-love it. I did a little research and it seems that it’s The Nat King Cole Trio, recorded in the mid-40s sometime. Awesome. I see that Blue Note Records has a 2 volume set of “The Best of Nat King Cole Trio: The Vocal Classics” which would sure be nice to have sometime! (in case anyone needs a Christmas hint, heheh)

Nov 25 — Happy Thanksgiving! Our tiny little turkey is in the oven, Martinelli’s is chilling, potatoes are ready to boil. I’m watching the Macy’s Parade on (gasp) Live TV. I don’t know the last time I actually watched commercials. An animated dancing bear it trying to sell me toilet paper… (mute) The parade alternates between entertaining and annoying. Oo it’s back on, and there’s a marching band! (un-mute). I love love love marching bands. Now there’s a float, that’s nice. Oh horror they’ve parked in front of the grandstand and a Pop Star is lipsynching to a maudlin Pop Song. (mute) OK they stopped, now there are hundreds of cheerleaders shaking pompoms, making human pyramids, and flinging each other into the air! (un-mute) Hey there’s a Mister Monopoly balloon! But the EmCees are blathering. (mute)

Later… well. we had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner in the early afternoon, and then we went over to keep Dad company for a while and watch movies. We had a Christopher Guest double feature — Best in Show and then A MIghty Wind. Wonderful funny movies!

Nov 24 — Got started making Christmas cards today! I think they will turn out well. I don’t want to give details because several people who read this blog will be receiving one and I want them to be surprised ;-) Dan gave me a really good suggestion for one problem that I was having and it involves tinkering with flash and/or photoshop so that’ll be fun. Ooooooo also my Romantic Blouse Pattern (scroll down; I like the short-sleeve version) arrived today! This evening I traced off my size onto waxed paper, so as soon as Joanne’s has another sale I will pick out some fabric. And until then I can make a muslin.

Nov 23 — Grocery shopping today with no Henry-Monkey! Every checker asked where my little helper was today :) Finished my new Molly Apron and took some photos with the digicam on the tripod. Quite a crummy photo but you get the idea. I’m wearing it over my green plaid 1830s dress. In a few days perhaps I will post a how-to for my Molly Apron. I think I did a really good job emulating the apron from the movie! Finished my online Christmas shopping today! I feel very happy to have taken care of everything so early, while there’s still plenty of shipping time left and nothing is out-of-stock :) Go Team Kara!

Nov 22 — I did such a good job on the house! I cleaned and de-cluttered our computer area and it looks great! Dan says he loves our apartment. Nice praise :)

Nov 21 — I was going to sell my model trains on Ebay today, since I don’t have room to do a big setup and they’ve been languishing in a box for a couple of years. but when I got them out of their box they just looked so dear that it made me feel sad to sell them… So Dan suggested figuring out a way to display them on a shelf in our living room! We decided that we could fit a shelf above and behind our monitors, so we went to the True Value Hardware Store (I love that store so much I would marry it if I could) and picked out some shelf stuff and Dan built me a train shelf! It’s 5 feet long and 6 inches wide. I laid out some track and set my train on it, with a couple of the little farm buildings I built and a little guy. I plan sometime to make a backdrop and some trees or something :) It’s so nice to be able to admire my trains again. I think Henry will really like my little shelf, too. Maybe he’ll help me make some scenery!

Nov 20 — Henry went to Florida! He called me in the afternoon to let me know he got there safely. Have a wonderful time, Henry-boy! I went to the library today and got a large pile of books, and hung out in the craft store for a while. This afternoon Dan helped me completely re-arrange the bedroom and we threw away a ton of old junk! Yay!

Nov 19 — Got my Molly Apron almost done and it looks great. Photo soon. This morning Henry and I did some errands, getting him ready for his big trip to Florida! We found a paperback copy of his library book, Hank the Cowdog, at the bookstore so I bought it for him so he would have a good book to read on the plane :) And I helped him pack and everything. He and Sal went down to San Diego to spend the night at Matthew’s house so they wouldn’t have to get up so early tomorrow.

Nov 18 — Started work on a new Molly Apron, trying to get it to look even more like the ones she wears in Wives and Daughters (BBC). So far so good… This evening before bed Henry and I sat together on the couch and read our own books quietly for maybe a half an hour or more! That’s a first for him. He’s really loving Hank the Cowdog! He’s leaving for a 10-day trip to visit relatives in Florida with Sal on Saturday and is wishing to take his book with him, so, since it’s a library book, I’m going to see if there’s a paperback for sale at Barnes and Noble tomorrow. Tonight Dan and I finished our Twin Peaks dvd! Oooo I forgot how odd and creepy that show is.

Nov 17 — This morning after breakfast Henry finished his robot and it’s so cool! When you connect the battery, it rolls forward on the floor until it hits something, and then the top circle part makes it turn around and go another way. Very very cool. I helped him post pictures at his blog. I picked out the bodice darts on my new dress and turned them into pleats, which looks better. Now it’s really done ;-) We watched the last two All Creatures episodes, and played music, and did other stuff. I got him a book called “Hank the Cowdog” at the library and he really likes it. He is reading it to himself and brings it along in the car and reads bits of it to me while I’m driving. He always points out the cowboy dialect which pleases me because it means he know how “proper” English is supposed to sound.

Nov 16 — Henry helped me with the shopping this morning. We did a good job. In the afternoon, we wached the first two episodes on our new All Creatures dvd. My first piano student was at 5:30, so we stopped by the beach for a little while before that. We had a nice little walk at sunset and Henry ran about and did lots of gymnastics. It was really pretty there!

Nov 15 — I did a super-good job on the house this morning, oh my yes. It sparkles! And I also took a break to play some music with Henry, and then when the housework was done we sat in his room and listened to the new “All Creatures Great And Small” audiobook that I got at the library on Friday! I worked on Dan’s quilt and Henry started building a little robot. It’s hot today, and I’m tired. I helped Henry set up a blog today — he’s at spaceman3000.blogspot.com. He says he’ll write more tomorrow :) Ok now it’s time to read more P. D. James!

Nov 14 — Here’s a photo of Henry in his homemade “Dash Incredible” costume. He whipped this up last weekend after he saw The Incredibles twice. Since the photo was taken, he has improved his costume with the addition of real knitted black gloves and a yellow ribbon belt. Great costume, huh? :)

Nov 13 — I made Chloe’s laptop bag today! It turned out really nice. Also piped the edges of the green plaid dress sleeves, so all that’s left now is to finish the hem. We caught up on some stuff in the tivo — Dan’s Enterprise episodes and my Colonial House (great show!) and then in the evening we went out and bought a new spatula and a few sharp little knives. I hate to confess it, but we went to Walmart — they were the only store still open at 9:30. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be caught dead there. And then we went to Coldstone for milkshakes, yum. Ooo I started a new book today — “The Murder Room” by P. D. James. Very good so far!

Nov 12 — H and I took Tab to the airport this morning. We’re all so sorry to see her go and hope she comes back for another visit soon :) Then we came home and H did his music practice and I paid bills etc. We worked on our banjo and electric bass duet of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and it’s sounding pretty good! When H was at karate this evening I took myself to the library and got a nice new stack of books.

Nov 10 — Finally I am uploading a great picture of Henry in his Halloween costume! He was Megaman X, of course :) I made his costume by sewing gray and blue fleece shapes to a light-blue sweatsuit (Target, $12). The helmet I made a couple of months ago out of fleece and a discarded dark-blue sweatshirt. Henry made the Blaster Arm himself out of construction paper and a packing tube of some kind. Isn’t it a great costume???

Nov 09 — Grocery shopping with Henry this morning, and we made a couple of stops to try to find black gloves for his “Incredibles” costume. He’s been dressed as Dash Incredible for the past three days :) Finally found some at the grocery store, of all places! In the afternoon we worked on our banjo/electric bass version of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” which is sounding pretty good! This evening Dan took me to the Toyota dealer to test-drive the car I’m wishing for, again. I’ve driven it twice already but never at night or on the freeway and I wanted to do that, ’cause I’m weird. It’s such a lovely adorable little car! Mmkay now I’m going to go read some more of the book I just started — “Cassandra French’s Finishing School for Boys” which, so far, is very good and very funny.

Nov 08 — Let’s see, after I got the Monday housework done it was a movie-full day. Watched “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (again) with Henry and Tab but with the commentary on this time. Delightful! Henry liked it too. And he used the word “crestfallen”, correctly, in a sentence. Toula’s dad did indeed look crestfallen, as Henry pointed out. In the evening, while Dan tinkered with a server, we watched “The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra” which was fabulous. If you’re a fan of bad cheesy 50s sci-fi, you must rent it. It has everything — a bad scientist, a good scientist (he works in the field of science!), a rocket, a couple of space aliens, a mutant, a cheery housewife, a radioactive meteor composed of “atmospherium”, and of course a talking skeleton. It was very very funny. Thank you, greencine!

Nov 07 — Listened to lots of Loveline and worked on my dress. I got the skirt pleated and pinned and basted in place (my, it takes a long time to get pleats looking nice and even) and sewn, and then handsewed the lining into place over the waist seam, and then basted and sewed the zipper (yeah I’m using a zipper on an 1830s dress — so sue me, I’m not interested in 100% historical accuracy :) and pinned up the hem. Whew. I wish I’d remembered to even up the hem from the waistline before attaching the skirt but I didn’t. Next time. Then I tried it on and the zipper BROKE right in the middle at the waist seam. GRRRR. I actually had to pick out the stitching before I could take my dress off. SIGH. So now I need to buy another zipper and re-sew it tomorrow. But hey, before the zipper broke (when I was taking it off) I got a good look at myself and my dress is lovely! Watched “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (again) with Dan and Tab tonight :)

Nov 06 — Worked on my green plaid dress most of the day — got the sleeves sewn on and the waist seam piped, and sewed the skirt panels together. I attempted catridge pleating the skirt, but it’s not really full enough to look good that way, so I think I’ll reverse box pleat it instead. This afternoon we went to see The Incredibles and it was soooo good! Very entertaining, very funny, YAY PIXAR! Before the movie started there were some truly horrible previews, including a cliche-ridden story about a zebra who wants to be a racehorse, or some-such. It looked so mind-bogglingly bad. Dan said he could hear me rolling my eyes during that one :) The preview for the next Star Wars movie made it seem pretty good. Footage of Storm Troopers and Vader and Obi-Wan (Alec Guiness-style) always gives me the happy shivers. I expect the movie to be as bad as the last two, however. My goodness those were bad movies.

Nov 05 — My Pokemon savegame disappeared. Sigh. I was really enjoying it, too. I guess I just can’t use pirated Pokemon roms :) I’ll just have to hope that Santa brings me a real actual cartridge!

Today was a fun-filled trip to the UCSD medical place for another Echocardiogram and appt with my ph guy. Dan wanted to come with me so I met him at his work in the afternoon, which was really kind of fun :) We don’t usually see each other in the afternoon on a work day! So anyway he came with me and it didn’t take too long and they say I’m not getting any worse and to just keep taking my $1000 pills. So that was good.

Nov 04 — After watching Henry playing Pokemon LeafGreen a lot, I decided it looked like fun. I tried to put LeafGreen or FireRed on the flash cartridge, but neither rom worked. So I tried Sapphire and it works! I played quite a bit today and enjoyed it a lot. Also completed another big square of Dan’s quilt — number 10!

Nov 03 — Bush won. Ugh. Sorry, world, we tried. We’re not _all_ stupid — almost half of us voted for Kerry.

In other news, Henry’s karate class did some point-sparring today and he scored a point! It was fun to watch. Tab and I did some shopping at the Mall during his class but we got back early enough to watch the point-sparring. Seems as if there was something else I wanted to say, here, but I’m very tired and I can’t think of it.

Nov 02 — Voting day, yay! How exciting. *crosses fingers* Good luck, John Kerry.

We bought a half-dozen pumpkin bagels and a tub of pumpkin cream cheese from Einstein Brothers today, and oh my oh my are they good. I just had one as a bedtime snack :) Yum!

Nov 01 — Monday. I did all the housework, which was actually kind of fun! I’ve got a good routine going, and it’s satisfying to see how nice the house turns out in not very much time. I even put the featherbed out on the porch railing to air! Also worked on my green plaid dress — got the sleeves and sleeve piping basted on.

October 2004

Oct 31 — Yesterday I started work on a new dress using my Romantic Dress Pattern. I made a toile out of muslin, which fits quite well. I had to pinch in some extra at the sides, and enlarge the armholes a bit, but other than that it’s fine. So today I cut out the bodice and sleeves from the lovely olive-green plaid cotton I got for cheap ($1.50/yard!!) at the big sale at JoAnne’s. Sewed most of the bodice together. I’m piping the back and sleeve seams and the neckline. I’ve never done any piping before but it’s looking really good so far!

Oct 30 — Played a lot of Harvest Moon today. What a great game!!

Oct 29 — Today I gave up on “Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination”. Great title, boring as all-get-out. Henry and I played “Intimate Settlers”, a two-man variation of Settlers of Catan. Fun!

Oct 28 — Received the last disk of “The Way We Live Today” and watched the whole thing on my laptop in Henry’s room. That was a pretty good series. It was very well-made, good acting, costuming, and all. My only complaint is that the music was annoying and heavy-handed. And Trollope is… well, Trollope :) You just can’t expect as good a story as you would from, say, Jane Austen or Elizabeth Gaskell.

Oct 27 — Haven’t been feeling all that well. They put me on too much replacement thyroid hormone and I went slightly hyper again — enough to make me feel crummy all the time. Sigh. Now I’m on a lower dose and expect to feel better again someday.

Here’s a photo of my new Molly Apron (so called because I copied the green plaid apron that Molly Gibson wears in the BBC production of Wives and Daughters).

Oct 26 — Henry took photos of my new red linen dress and my brown Molly Apron so I’ll post those soon! Also we did the grocery shopping today, and I made pumpkin muffins and pumpkin soup for dinner, yummy yum yum! Dan was in San Jose all day. It’s supposed to rain tonight again, yay.

Oct 23 — We went to the Escondido mall. Horror. I hate malls, and I hate that one especially! But Dan bought me some hazelnut godiva chocolates so that made it somewhat more bearable :) Watched “Connie and Carla” tonight which was a disappointment. Don’t bother. If you want to see Nia Vardalos, just watch Big Fat Greek Wedding again.

Oct 21 — Finished my red linen dress! It’s so lovely. Here’s a photo that Henry took. There is brown grosgrain ribbon around the hemline, too. I adore this dress. Linen is great! It frays easily, so I zigzagged around every single piece before I started sewing, but other than that it was a breeze to work with.

Oct 20 — I bought “Jump Start Typing” for Henry, cheap from amazon, and, now that we’ve figured out how to make it easy enough for a beginner, he likes it a lot! I made a copy for myself to use on my computer, too :) I type very fast but have to look at my fingers. I think if I work with the Jump Start program for a while, I’ll be able to touch-type! I tried to teach myself on a typewriter (remember those?) when I was a kid but it was sooooo boring. The Jump Start software is pretty fun :) Worked on my red linen dress today, while Henry watched the new Bionicle movie. I got the lining sewn in over the waist seam, and hemmed the sleeves and trimmed them with ribbon, and measured and pinned up the hem.

Oct 19 — The first disk of the first season of “All Creatures Great and SMall” arrived yesterday, so Henry and I watched the first two episodes today, after we did all the shopping and everything. Ahhh I love that show. So soothing, so British. Tabatha is visiting and it’s so nice to have her here!

Oct 17 — Here’s a photo of my 1910 tea gown, which I made recently using the pattern from sensibility.com.

Dan took the photo last weekend at Guajome. I love this dress! The pattern is really intended to make a more fancy long gown, using layers of chiffon or similar lightweight/sheer fabric for several overskirts of varying lengths. But I wanted an every-day dress so I used 100% cotton seersucker, cut it to a sensible mid-calf length, and skipped the overskirts and sash. And I cut the bodice inset on the bias — I love bias-cut plaid. I think it turned out beautifully!

Oct 16 — Took myself to the library this morning and got several good-looking books and a few new audiobooks, including a couple of Lemony Snickets and a Jeeves and Wooster for Henry :) This afternoon Dan took me to Yardage Town and I spent some of the birthday money that Mom gave me on 3 1/4 yards of linen for a new 1910 dress. It’s a sort of rusty/tomato red. Maybe light cranberry. Also got some brownish ribbon to decorate the bodice inset, a zipper, and hem facing so I’m all set to make a new dress. I washed and dried my fabric already so I can start sewing tomorrow!

Oct 15 — H and I finished Wives and Daughters and then watched the first two Jeeves and Wooster episodes on the lates dvd from Greencine. I’m still kind of tired today, ugh, so it was nice to not do much. I’ve got another big block of Dan’s quilt done — that’s the good thing about sitting around watching movies.

Oct 14 — Henry’s still got a bit of a cough and I’m not completely well either, so we stayed home from Park Day and Karate, and watched Wives and Daughters together :) I put it on while I was working on Dan’s quilt, and Henry got really interested, so we watched the first three episodes before I had to go teach a student.

Dan and I went to bed early and watched three episodes of Venture Brothers on his laptop — the space station one, the one where Brock meets the Bionic Man and Bigfoot, and the one where Dr. Orpheus shows up and Brock gets stuck in the Joy Box. Fuuny stuff!

Oct 12 — Finally feeling more like myself! We did have a good weekend — Henry stayed with us and on Sunday we all went to Guajome park for a few hours. I modeled my new blue dress and Dan took lost of photos, and then we got the tripod out of the car and got some family photos! It was a lovely day — warm but not hot, with pleasant breezes and autumn smells.

This morning I had to see the endocrinologist and get a whole bunch of bloodwork done again. Luckily Wilson, my favorite lab guy, was working today. It barely hurts at all when he draws blood. Then we did all the grocery shopping and put the food away and now I’m catching up on my email and blogging, heh.

We’ve discovered a fine new TV show. It’s called “The Venture Brothers” and it plays on Adult Swim, the late-night block of shows on cartoon network/cartoon planet/something like that. It is _not_ a cartoon for kids! It contains some very adult content, so be warned. It is also hysterically, screamingly, rewind-and-watch-that-bit-again funny. Dr. Venture is a self-centered, mad-scientist type. His two sons, Hank and Dean, are average 1950s-style teens. Dr. Venture’s Arch Nemesis, The Monarch, is extremely insecure. The Monarch’s girlfriend, Dr. Girlfriend, has a rather husky voice. :) Dr. Venture’s secret-agent-type-bodyguard, Brock Samson, is everything you’d want in a bodyguard, and is voiced by Patrick Warburton (“Putty” from Seinfeld), who is perfect. We’ve seen three episodes so far, each funnier than the last. The most recent episode, “Tag Sale — You’re It” was so good we saved it in the TiVo so we can watch it a few more times. :)

Oct 07 — Still sick. Ugh. Yesterday we went to Julian for a homeschool field trip to an apple orchard, which was wonderful. Long drive, very exhausting. I’ll describe it in more detail when I feel better.

Oct 05 — Grocery shopping this morning, them put everything away, then cleaned all the counters very well and got rid of some more old junk. Then laundry and lunch and more housework, and now I’m going to hem the sleeves and hem of my blue dress!

Oct 04 — Last night I came down with a sore throat, ugh. It hurt a lot all night, but by morning it was just a little bit tender and I felt run-down. So I slept late, but Henry and Dan got up early and watched SpaceShipOne win the prize! After I got up, Henry helped me with the housework — we did five minutes in each room, including mopping and vacuuming, and now the house is nice. Then I mostly rested and played Harvest Moon until evening when i had a student. Also we stopped by the fabric store so I could get a zipper for my dress, and this evening I installed it. Kirsten and Marcos came over for some computer help tonight but Dan had a work emergency and had to go back down there and didn’t get home til 11!

Oct 03 — Happy birthday Kathy! Hope you have a wonderful day :)

This morning I started my 1910 dress. I ran out of tracing paper, so I taped the pattern to the sliding glass door and then taped newspaper over it, so I could trace off my size. I went for a size 14. Then I made a muslin and fit it, and, surprise, it fit almost perfectly right away! I had to use 3/8″ seam allowances and pull one half of the back a little snugger at the neckline. Then I made the bodice (cutting the center panel on the bias). Then I cut the skirt panels, seamed them, gathered them, and attached them to the bodice. By the end of the day I had an almost-complete dress! Amazing. It’s a lovely pattern and goes together so easily! After all the trouble I had with my brown dress, it was such fun to go from start to almost-finished in one day! All I need to do is hem it, hem the sleeves, add the zipper, and hand-stitch the lining into place over the waist gathers.

In the afternoon I put on my brown dress and we went outside so Dan could take pictures! Here’s a nice one :) He took several really good ones and is in the middle of photoshopping them to make the colors just right. I’m not going to add it to my crafts page until all the photos are done. As you can see, I had to add a seam up the front of the skirt because my original version had a placket in front, but it looked bad. So I got rid of it with a seam :) The neckline and hem are edged with bias tape. The sleeves and waistband are unbleached muslin. I ended up lowering the waist by about 2″, and making a size 16 ( I think, whatever I made for Chloe) with some width taken out in front and darts at the back neckline. The darts let me have room in the back without letting the neckline gape. Also had to enlarge the armholes in the lower front. It was a ton of work, but now that it’s done I’m very pleased! Oh, the lovely brown cotton was a gift last year from Dan’s mom!

Oct 02 — Got up early, finished Henry’s felt Pikachu (He needed a tail), and drove H down to SD. On the way back, we went to the Sprint store so Dan could pick up his replacement Treo 600, then after we got home I sewed and sewed and sewed. I _finished_ my brown dress! I had to make a back skirt placket, attach the skirt to the waistband (forming pleats in back), sew the waistband lining in, hem the sleeves, add the bias tape trimming to the neckline, and attach the hook-and-eye up the back. Oh I hate sewing on hook-and-eyes, ugh. But now it’s done, yay!!!!! It’s so lovely and fits perfectly. Dan will take pictures tomorrow, I hope.

Tonight we watched “The Madness of King George” which was really good!

Oct 01 — Henry really likes his new Pokemon LeafGreen game — he played for hours today while I was sewing. Nice quiet morning. We didn’t have to go anywhere until it was time for his piano lesson and karate. I have a new gameboy game too — “Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town” which is extremely fun! I played for an hour and a half during karate :)

When I got home I found that my order from Lacis had arrived! I ordered some 1/4″ steel corset stays from them last week. They shipped quickly and provided me with tracking information that let me see the progess of my order from office to warehouse to packing and shipping — very convenient! Tonight I sewed the stays into my corset (I just used bias tape to make boning channels, quick and easy but they’ll wear out soon, I suspect) and I am so happy with it! It fits well and gives the proper shaping for my old-fashioned dresses, and it is far more comfortable than a modern bra, now that the bones are in it. Isn’t that surprising?

September 2004

kayray’s buzznet moblog — crummy cellphone photos for your amusement!

Sept 30 — Survivor was on tonight. We missed the first two episodes before we remembered to tell the TiVo about it. Ugh what a horrible show, but for some reason we enjoy watching it. It’s all your fault, Chloe! :)

Sept 29 — Ripped apart my brown dress and discovered that I had enough fabric left over for a new bodice, yay! So I made a muslin, using the size 14 instead of the 10, but subtracting 5/8″ from the folded edge of the front and adding 2″ to the bottom all around. Enlarged the armholes in front, basted it all together, and I think it will fit much better. I took some darts at the back neckline to give me more room in the back but not let the neckline gape. Not enough brown fabric for new sleeves, but I think it might look nice with plain muslin sleeves. I’m so eager to get this dress DONE so I can wear it and start a new one, heheh.

Sept 27 — Happy 9th birthday sweet Henry!

I picked him up from SD in the morning, and then we had bagels for breakfast at Einstein Brothers. Then we came home and baked some cookies together :) In the afternoon we went to Sal’s house — Bob and Jean gave him wonderful books, and Sal gave him the promise of a trip to Legoland with her! He was delighted with everything. Then to karate, then home. After Dan got home we let him open his presents from us and he was so happy with everything. He especially loved the eyelighter that Dan chose for him. Very secret-agent! Kirsten and Marcos came over and hung out for a while, gave Henry his present (A book of Rush bass-tab with notation and lyrics, too) and ate cherry pie with us. The pie turned out great — I used the recipe on the label of the “Oregon Red Tart Pie Cherries”. Next time I will add another spoonful of cornstarch, as the filling was a bit runny. But the flavor was excellent! Very fruity, not artificial-cough-syrup-tasting like some cherry-based foods, not too sweet. I think Henry had a very good birthday:)

My new patterns from sensibility.com arrived today, too! I got the 1910 tea gown and the romantic era dress. I managed to find time to read through both instruction books before bed and I’m so excited! But first I must fix my brown regency dress. I’ve been corresponding with a lovely woman, Carol, whom I met on the S&S discussion board (We’re both nutty about Molly’s plaid apron from W&D) and bouncing ideas off her about my so-called “disaster dress” and she’s given me a few more ideas of how to fix it. I am hopeful!

Sept 26 — Sunday. I finished Henry’s new audiobook (I read “The Bad Beginning” into my laptop and made cds for him), wrapped his presents, and made a cherry pie today. And did laundry! But had no time at all for sewing.

Sept 25 — Had a nice drive to the Sprint store to get them to replace Dan’s Treo 600 (funky screen problem), then went to the fabric store to take advantage of the sale (bought 6 yards of muslin at $1.29/yd), and we each got a pizza — I got a small veggie pizza from That Pizza Place and Dan got a medium with extra cheese and mushrooms from Round Table. Neither of us likes the other’s favorite pizza, heh :) Then we went home and watched some of our Greencine movies — another Sherlock episode and “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, which was pretty good!

Sept 24 — Worked on Dan’s quilt a lot. I need 8 more pieced squares, and I got them ALL made today! Amazing. And I cut the plain squares, and the backing material. So tomorrow I can assemble the four 2′ x 2′ sqaures that I need and then start quilting them. Woohoo!

Sept 22 — Happy birthday pthree!

Sept 21 — Hey I just noticed a long article on greencine with the guy who made Sky Captain! Interview with Kerry Conran. Interesting!

Oooooooooooo I won I won I won! I entered a greencine trivia contest (finish-the-lyric of a weird old song which I, of course, knew, since I am the Queen of Weird Old Songs) and I won a copy of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1938, Tyrone Power, Jack Haley) on DVD!!! I don’t know how many people won (it was a random drawing of correct entries) but it’s still very exciting to win something. Thanks, greencine!

Sept 20 — Picked up H this morning, then came home and did the Monday housework. He helped with the mopping. Then I finished my chemise and it turned out fabulous! Hmm, what else… Played some rummy and crazy eights with Henry and finished reading “Joan Makes History”. Oh another dvd from greencine arrived today! It’s called “The Way We Live Now” — a miniseries dramatisation of a Trollope novel (which I’ve never read). Reviews of it are good, and I decided to rent it when I noticed it on a “Great Costume Dramas” member list on greencine. Started watching tonight and it’s pretty good so far! I object to the musical score though — extremely heavyhanded. Big ripple of dramatic strings when Felix and Maria’s eyes meet, goofy wild-man-hunting music for a hunting scene, lame-ass cowboy music when a guy who’s from the West shows up… please. I have an imagination, I do not need to be LED. But the screenplay was done by Andrew Davies, who did P&P and W&D, so of course it’s good, and that overrides the bad music. :)

Sept 19 — I found a great pattern for a chemise online! Here: draft your own chemise. elizabethstuartclarkandcompany.com is a badly-designed, difficult to navigate site, so I gave you a direct link to the page with the free patterns. The chemise one is at the bottom. I started making one tonight, using the pretty blue-flowered flannel I bought on sale a while back. Not quite the right fabric for a chemise, but it’s what I had handy. I used a 14″ wide base instead of the suggested 16″ — I’m not very wide.

Sept 18 — Happy birthday dear Susan!

Last night we watched the first two Sherlock episodes on the latest DVD — The Resident Patient and The Red-Headed League. Both very good. However, the quality of the English subtitles on this DVD is appalling. The seem to have been typed up by someone who is only vaguely familiar with English. When I first began noticing odd mistakes I tried to make a mental list, but there were so many I soon gave up. There was a serious error on almost every screenful of text. A few that I remember are: “scrawled” instead of “squalid” (scrawled lodgings??), “broom” instead of “brougham” (Watson should ride in a broom??) and “Jay Beards Wilson” instead of “Jabez Wilson” though the entire episode. Yeah Jabez is a strange name but it _is_ painted on his shop window at the end of the show. A lot of the errors caused sentences to make no sense at all. It was very frustrating for me — they could have hired someone who was at least literate! Maybe they just dragged some kid in off the street corner. Really, there was NO ONE working at MPI Home Video (I expect they are responsible for the horrid subtitles, not the BBC) who could have done a better job? They didn’t feel like maybe having someone read through the text for obvious errors? Ok I’m done ranting I guess. Bad English just really gets my goat, especially when there’s no reason for it. And by the way, if I were deaf and relying on those subtitles for the story I would have been out of luck.

Sorry for the rant. Anyway, today was great! Dan had to go out and talk to a guy in the morning, so I stayed home, listened to Loveline, and worked on my brown dress. It’s finally coming along the way I want it. Took 6 inches from the skirt back and straightened the top curve, and now it hangs right. Enlarged the armholes and sewed in the sleeves and they are perfect non-gathered little cap-sleeves. Yay me!

After Dan got home we went to the movies to see “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” which was great! I enjoyed it very much. It had the kind of plot you don’t want to think about too hard, but it was light, fun, and entertaining — a good exciting adventure movie. I had skimmed a review before we went (in case the reviewer said it was the Worst. Movie. Ever. That reviewer said the second half of the movie was better than the first, but I thought the opposite was true. I found the first half to be much more interesting. My favorite parts were when the giant robots were stamping though the city and the airplane chase when Polly was riding along. Thrilling! The first scene, of the airship docking, was also wonderful.

In the evening we did a little birthday shopping for Henrybot, and then at night we watched the rest of Sherlock (The Final Problem) and the special features disk of “Wives and Daughters” (My package from amazon arrived today!!!). Lovely day.

Sept 17 — greencine is wonderful. I shipped our last two dvds back on Monday, and they received one of them on Wednesday, as expected, but not the other. Today they still haven’t received t, so I emailed them to explain the situation — a few minutes later, I got email back from customer service saying they made a note that the dvd is lost and they are shipping the next one in our queue today. How is that for REAL customer service!

I worked on my brown dress a lot today. I’m having trouble with the skirt. I started off by pleating it, but it hung oddly, for some reason. I tried pleating it in various different ways but I never could get it looking right. Very strange. Now I’ve got it gathered instead, and basted in, and it looks better I think. I still can’t decide if I want to leave it gathered and somewhat full, or if I want to alter it completely, take out all the fullness, and have an A-line skirt. Hmm. It would look more modern. But the gathered one is kind of nice too. Hmm.

Sept 14 — Tired all day until nighttime. Bah. Grandpa died this morning. “Half a bird is in my face, meow meow meow!” He taught us how to play Double Solitaire and sent lovely art supplies for Christmas and birthdays. Bye, Grandpa, we’ll miss you.

Henry woke up feeling healthy again so we did the grocery shopping, then after we got home he put on The Fellowship and I worked on a new Regency-style dress. It’s always SO HARD for me to decide on details like front buttons or back buttons, fan front or regular, etc. But I decided on a regularly gathered button front, and I spent approx 1000 years making a sleeve that would be non-puffy. I used a sleeve pattern from my 1963 dress but of course it wasn’t good as-is, and I had to make a mock-up and tinker with it for hours. But I think I finally got it right. I made the lining today, and cut out the fabric for the bodice. I’m using the luscious super-luxurious brown cotton that Dan’s mom gave me last year. Tomorrow maybe I’ll get the entire bodice constructed, with luck.

Sept 13 — Monday, so I drove down to SD to fetch Henry. He’s got his Henry Illness again — headache and then about 12 hours of puking. The puking was last night so he slept most of the day today and will probably feel great tomorrow. He woke up once in the afternoon and said, “Let’s play cards!” so we played three hands of Crazy Eights and then he fell asleep again. :) Sweet boy.

Sept 12 — We finished watching Wives and Daughters today! That was one fine production. I decided to use my Amazon gift certificate to purchase the DVDs for us so we can watch it again and again! Thanks, Susan :) We also watched our latest Dr Who dvd — “The Stones of Blood” but it wasn’t as good as the other two, I thought. Tomorrow they’ll all go back to Greencine. They should get them Wednesday morning and ship us two more that afternoon :) Yay Greencine!

Sept 11 — Nice young man came to buy the GSR this morning, and then Dan had to go into work for a few hours so I went along so I could see his server room and stuff :) Nifty! He took me to the library on the way home and I got a new and tempting stack of books. Also updated books.php and made a spiffy new graphic, heh.

Sept 10 — Friday. Lots of errands this morning in the fearsome heat. Let’s see, we took Henry’s recycling in and he made $3.08, and then we went to the bank, and then the water store where we bought 20 gallons of water. Then to True Value Hardware (next door to the water store, thank goodness) for wire for the brim of my new hat (photo soon). I love True Value Hardware! Every shopping expedition there is a real pleasure, but if I tried to buy the same thing at the dreaded Home Depot (which is practically next door to my house) it would be a miserable experience.

Anyway it was a busy morning. When we got home I added the wire to the brim of my hat while H practiced his bass, and then we watched Mister Rogers together. In the afternoon I gave Grandma a ride to her doctor, then fixed Dad’s dinner while H had his piano lesson. He loves his piano lessons, sweet boy. Then it was off to Karate. I was totally wiped out by the end of the day, man.

Sept 09 — Woke up way too early for no good reason, so tired and headachy all day, bah. But I sewed quite a lot and Henry and I lazed about together before the busy afternoon of Park Day, a piano student for me, and a bass lesson for him. He loved his first bass lesson! I despise this weather. It is hot and muggy and humid and nasty, ugh. Dan and I sleep with ice packs.

Spet 08 — We spent hours this morning constructing a Pikachu toy! It was lots of fun. I drew a good Pikachu shape on paper and traced it onto felt, and then Henry sewed around the line with only a little help. My Pfaff is easier for him to deal with than my old machine. It will sew very very slowly and also has that nice one-stitch-per-stamp-on-pedal feature. Then we trimmed Pikachu’s edges, turned him right-side-out, and stuffed him, then applied a felt face and ears, or horns, or whatever those things are. He still needs a tail but I ran out of steam. He turned out extremely cool and Henry says I have “superior skills of a seamstress”.

Sept 07 — Did 1000 errands this morning, including mailing a little something to Chloe and a stop by the fabric store where I spent the rest of my giftcard on supplies for my stays and felt for a Pikachu toy. Then groceries etc. Our first stop was Einstein Brothers, for a bagel for Henry, where I discovered that I’d left my wallet at home, grumble. I had $.75 in my purse so H ran in for his bagel before we backtracked so he was happy. It was hot and horrible today.

Sept 06 — Happy birthday beautiful Chloe!!! I hope your day was wonderful :)

Henry spent the day playing with Fargo, Skyia, and Max, the new neighbor kids. They’re former homeschoolers, about to start at a waldorf-type school, and they’re just as nice and fun as can be. They look you in the eye when they talk to you, and they are full of thoughts and ideas and words. We like them very much!

Sept 05 — It’s hot. Oh my, yes. I accomplished a lot today! Last night I found this page: http://www.koshka-the-cat.com/1830_pattern.html and scaled up the pattern in photoshop, so today I made a muslin toile. I made the gusset slits a bit shorter (4 inches) for a more regency push-up effect, and made the gussets themselves a bit larger by using a 1/2 inch seam allowance instead of 3/4 inch. After a try-on, I found that I needed a bit more room in the upper half, so I ripped out the seams and re-sewed them using only a 1/4 inch seam, grading it back in to the 1/2 inch seam starting 5 inches from the bottom. And added a 2-inch wide panel in the center front. Also had to add 3 inches to the strap length. The final toile fits suprisingly well and is very comfortable. I’ll get some heavy cloth for a real one soon, and that’ll be a great foundation for my regency dresses and my soon-to-come 1830 and 1910 dresses :)

Sept 04 — Here’s a photo of Chloe in her beautiful regency dress. This morning I updated my crafts page so you can read all about it there. We made it this summer while she was visiting. I _highly_ recommend the pattern we used — sensibility.com regency dress pattern.

Yesterday I worked in my Flash book a lot! I’m getting better at it, and make fewer goofy mistakes now that I’ve done some of the exercises three times :)

This afternoon we went to the fabric store and i got some fabulous bargains at the Labor day sale. I got 5 yards of lovely blue plaid cotton for a dress($1.50/yard), a yard of cheery green printed plaid with little red flowers in the spaces for a hat ($2/yard), and a couple of yards of cotton flannel, white with little blue flowers, for pajama pants ($1/yard). Bargains galore! I washed it all and ironed it dry, and then made my hat using the wild ginger pattern generator . It’s very cute — all I need is some wire for the brim. Photos soon.

Sept 03 — It’s Friday, and Dan has the day off! We drove Henry down to San Diego in the morning, and then on the way back we went to Fry’s and exchanged my intuos tablet for a graphire tablet (I decided the intuos was more tablet than I needed) and a really nice 4-quart crock-pot that I’ve been wanting. Hoping to be able to have a hot dinner waiting on nights when I get home late. We also went to the fabric store on the way back from fixing Dad’s dinner, and Dan bought me a $50 gift card there so I can pick out whatever fabrics I want, whenever the desire strikes me :) A lovely present!! Tonight we finished the first Wives and Daughters dvd. Lovely, from beginning to end. I do wonder if it is confusing for people who have not read the book (or have someone next to them on the sofa who has), as it is a complicated and deep story and the movie moves along reather fast. I am in love with all of Molly’s gowns and am longing to make some lovely little plaid dresses for myself! Luckily sensibility.com has a pattern based on the gowns from this era! I like the v-neck, button front styles a lot. I think with a short, plain sleeve and a mid-calf skirt it’d be modern enough for everyday wear.

Sept 02 — Happy birthday to Ken, my wonderful brother!

Sept 01 — Wednesday. Received the first dvd of “Wives and Daughters” from Greencine (we love you, Greencine!) and watched the first 1/2 hour before bed. It was perfect. The cast is perfect. The costuming is perfect. The adaptation is perfect — yes they’re leaving a lot of things out, but it’s a tremendously long book, and they’re skipping reasonable things. I can hardly wait to watch a little more tomorrow!

August 2004

Aug 31 — Dr appt in the morning (Dr Guerin). He said it was a good thing I insisted on getting my blood tested last week, because sure enough, I was on the low side. He said it was odd that I felt so bad, because lots of people get down that low without even noticing. What can I say, I’m odd. He actually said, “You are very unusual.” Heh. Surprise surprise. Also I asked him if it wasnt’ a bit strange that I _lost_ weight when I went a little hypo (it’s typical to gain weight) and told him I got down to 100 punds again. And his answer was, well, sometimes scales vary. SIGH. I dropped it, but what I should have said was, no, see, I weigh myself obsessively, and my scale gives me the same reading as the scale in the office here — I know because I weigh myself before every appointment — so now please answer the question! Whatever.

Aug 30 — On Saturday Dan took me out to do a little birthday shopping :) He bought me some lovely little amber stud earrings and a delicate sterling silver chain necklace. It’s so tiny and fine you’d think it would snap if you touch it. Very pretty. Also we went to Fry’s because I thought it might be fun to have a tablet, the kind that is an input device that you draw on. Wacom makes them… you know. So anyway I couldn’t decide between the Graphire model and the Intuous model… Graphire is cheaper but Intuous is wayyyyyyyy fancier, with programmable buttons, a tilt sensor, etc. SO Dan suggested I get the Intuos and try it out for a while. So that’s what we did :) It was a lovely and fun day, oh, and Ken called me too!

Today was Monday… what did we do… Oh I picked up Henry from SD, and after we got home he watched two of the Sherlock episodes while I played with Flash and my tablet. Dan’s letting me use his G5 with the enormous monitor for my Flash work and it’s lovely! Nice day :)

Aug 29 — For anyone who is thinking about joining netflix, greencine, or some other online dvd rental service, here is a very thorough review of greencine (with helpful information about other services, too): CosmicRay’s Greencine Review. I must agree with his praise for greencine, and add that, here in San Diego, our turnaround time is very good — if we mail something back on Monday afternoon, for instance, they receive it Wednesday morning, ship our next dvd that afternoon, and we have it on Friday. So that’s only five days, total, and even less when you consider that we could have watched our dvd on Monday morning and can then watch the next on Friday night. Last night Dan and I watched the first two Sherlock Holmes episodes, and we’ve got two more for today :)

Aug 28 — Last night, after dinner, Henry and Dan played on their guitars together. It was so nice to hear them! This morning I took Henry over to Sal’s — she and Matthew and Henry and Lynette are all going to Big Bear for the day. While I was there, she and dad played the synchronized swimming stuff from yesterday’s olympics for me. That was quite… something, yes indeed. I know it is hard work and everything, but oh my goodness it is funny sometimes to see all those legs sticking up out of the water, waving. Just now I finished the book I was reading, “The Idea of Perfection” which was a perfectly wonderful book. Now I’d better update my books page…

Aug 27 — Happy birthday to me :) Now Dan and I are both divisible by 7. Henry and I watched our Jeeves and Wooster dvd in the morning, and then we went down to SD to visit with Susan and Charlotte and David. Susan made us a fabulous lunch of fresh bread, sliced home-grown tomatoes, avocados, blackberries, peppers, cheese, etc. The typical delicious Susan food. Traffic was HELL, as usual. Now we’re home and Henry’s out playing with his new friend Fargo who seems like a very nice little boy. He actually looks you in the eye when you talk to him and he’s not constantly wary, like most of the other kids around here.

Aug 26 — Henry went to the water park in Irvine with his karate camp group, so I had a quiet day at home all by myself :) After I dropped him off, I went to the fabric store and looked at cloth for a lonnnnnnng time. Bought some red calico (on sale for $1.79/yard!) for an apron, and some heavy plaid flannel ($3/yard) for a miniskirt. Haven’t decided yet whether to make it one of those pleated ones, or a little bias-cut one. Hmm. Well, when I got home I worked on the apron for hours and hours. Having a dressform helps so much! And later I taught a student and then picked Henry up. He had a great time with his friends :)

Aug 24 — Tuesday. Slept 11 hours again last night, so I did a little better today. Henry and I had bagels at Einstein Brothers, then did the shopping. Dan had to fly to San Jose on business and the shuttle picked him up at 6:30 in the morning, eep, and he didn’t get home again til nearly 9pm. I’ve started reading “The Idea Of Perfection” and I love it.

Aug 23 — Drove down to SD bright and early to pick up Henry before M had to go to work. Got home, did mopping etc, and moved my old desk so that Dan could use it as a nightstand instead of the ragged old box he used to use. Much nicer.

Aug 22 — We got our first Dr. Who dvd from Greencine yesterday afternoon, so we watched it tonight. It was great! It was the four-part episode called “The Pirate Planet”, written by Douglas Adams. Very fun! We also bought milkshakes from Coldstone tonight for a treat :) Yum!

Aug 21 — Nice Saturday. Finished my book and then played Tales of Symphonia ’til Dan got up, and then made breakfast etc. We went out to get the GSR washed and to take pictures of it so Dan can sell it, and I took my new GAMES magazine along and did puzzles :) Then we went home, got the TSX, and went out to San Marcos to see Spiderman 2, which was lots of fun. Great villian, lot of funny parts to break up the action and drama. Broom closet scene, elevator scene, lol. Mom came over in the evening and we helped her with her camera and cellphone and computer. Her phone is the same as my new one (which I love) so it was easy for me to show her how to add people to the phone book etc. Fun day :)

The best thing about the TSX, in my opinion, is that its navigation system tells Dan how to go places, so I don’t have to! The second best thing is that I get to control the climate on my side of the car, so I never have to have freezing cold air blowing at me :) Very nice.

Aug 20 — Henry’s off for a long weekend with Matthew and Lisa. They picked him up this afternoon, and I got to say “Hi” to Lisa! It was so nice to see her again. I’m covered in flea-bites from hanging out at Mom’s house, ugh. Hate fleas. Anyway, we had a nice evening. I rented “Tales of Symphonia” and played until Dan got home, and it’s fun so far! Wew went to bed super-early and watched “Persuasion” on my laptop. There’s nothing nicer that cuddling up in our fluffy bed and watching a movie. And it was a good one, too.

Aug 19 — Slept 11 hours last night, so I feel a bit better today. My hair is driving me crazy. It’s been falling out steadily for a year, so, although it loooks long and nice, there are a million little short bits that turn into fluff all over my head. Grr. Anyway I had enough creative energy today to make Henry the Megaman helmet he’s been craving for so long. We used a dark blue sweatshirt for the main helmet part, which I made very cleverly with a strip of cloth down the top of his head and then two curved side-pieces. Then we used some scraps of fleece in light blue, red, and black for the Megaman-type decorations. My lovely Pfaff made it so effortless to sew with the fluffy stretchy stuff. Photo soon.

Aug 16 — Our first two Greencine.com dvds got here today! This evening Henry and I watched the first Jeeves and Wooster episode, and he loved it. I read him half of a Jeeves and Wooster story for bedtime, too. How many 8 yr olds request P.G. Wodehouse for a bedtime story??? Today was Dan’s first day at Pioneer, and he had a good day, yay :)

Aug 14 — Whoops it’s been a week since I added anything here. I am bad. I’ve just been incredibly tired lately. But look, I filled in yesterday! And now we’re going to take Henry to SD and maybe I’ll write more later.

Aug 13 — Today was supposed to be the Karate Camp trip to the water park, but all the grownups got sick, so they cancelled until everyone is healthy again. So Henry and I had a nice quiet morning together. He played his guitar a lot (he’s very into “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin, and started figuring out the melody) and played with his Bionicles, and spent a long time reading the new Bionicle book that Chloe bought him yesterday.

Since Dan is now employed again, we decided to treat ourselves to a greencine.com membership! (Pronounced “Green Scene”) For $15 a month, we get to have two dvds out at a time, and their selection is marvelous. Dan was a netflix subscriber a few years ago, and was unhappy with their service, but greencine seems to be much better. We spent the morning choosing movies to put in our queue — I think we have about 35 in there already! They already shipped our first two movies, so by Monday or Tuesday we should have Persuasion (1995) and they first dvd of the Jeeves and Wooster BBC series! Other items in our queue include Cold Comfort Farm (yes they have it!), All Creatures Great and Small (for multiple dvd items, you get to specify if you want them to send them in a certain order), Wives and Daughters, the BBC Sherlock Holmes series, and lots of other hard-to-find movies and tv series. So they’ll mail us two things, and when we’re done we mail them back, and as soon as they get them they’ll mail us two more. Very exciting :)

Aug 07 — Saturday. Sorry I haven’t been better about keeping this blog updated. I filled in a few missing days just now, so you’re got something to read. I’m always too tired at night to blog, so i think I’d better get in the habit of doing it in the morning! So here I am. M picked H up last night after Karate and Dan is still sleeping, so the house is nce and quiet. I think I will finish “Wives and Daughters” and find out if Molly marries Roger, and then I’ll do some sewing, maybe.

Aug 06 — Almost done with “Wives and Daughters”. I read for a long time this morning before we had to leave for piano students and karate. I am really enjoying it, so I’m glad it’s a very long book! Speaking of books, “The Three Miss Margarets” is finally out in paperback so Henry and I stopped at the bookstore after Karate to pick up a copy for Sal. I think she’ll like it! And I want to borrow it and read it for the third time when she’s done. So tired tonight. Dan and I watched Best in Show and I was almost asleep by the end of it, a little after 10.

Aug 05 — Chloe came over and we worked on her dress while watching P&P :) Her dress is amazingly beautiful! I moved the bodice gathers a bit more to the sides, and then sewed bodice to skirt and handsewed the lining into place at the seam. Also got the hem pinned up; my dress form really helped there. It’s not her size but it’s close enough to put the dress on it and see how the hem falls etc.

Aug 02 — Housecleaning day, also I finished my little brown dress and wore it! Also I cleared my Stack of Bills and updated books.php. Good job Kara. My new favorite song is “Love You Madly” by Cake.

Aug 01 — Nice lazy Sunday. I worked a lot on my brown dress and did Kirsten’s hemming. Love my Pfaff :) In the evening we took a little walk around the neighborhood. The summer night air smells so good.

July 2004

July 31 — Ugh I fell behind for a while. Sorry. This morning (Saturday) I woke up early and took H to San Diego, and got back around 10. Then Dan and I hung around pleasantly, and I worked on my brown plaid dress — basted bodice to skirt and tried it all on. It’s going to be great! Then Kirsten and Chloe came over and helped me make a paper-tape dressform. I’m too tired to describe the process fully right now, maybe tomorrow. It was a rousing success though. Then we ate pizza and watched Bend It Like Beckham and I did some sewing for K and C. Fun day :)

July 27 — Henry helped me with the groceries this morning, and then we picked up Chloe and brought her home with us. I worked on her dress while we all watched her new dvd of The Beatles’ First US Tour. Then gymnastics, students, home, dinner, bed.

July 26 — I like Mondays :) Today I listened to loveline and cleaned the house and did laundry etc. And then I worked on my semi-regency dress bodice — found some old brown plaid cotton in a bag of scraps, and I _think_ there will be enough, since I’m doing a short A-line skirt. Oooo also the Bas Bleu catalog came today!

July 25 — Chloe came over today! When I picked her up, we went to the fabric store for her regency dress cloth. She picked out a lovely delicate white-on-ivory print. When we got home, she worked on tracing off her pattern while I made food for Dan, and then we went to work. We got a bodice toile made and fitted, and then worked on the actual bodice. Although we went by her bust measurement, the final bodice turned out to be a bit too broad across the chest, but that was easily fixed with a little seam up the front and more turned under for the buttons at the back. Got the sleeves attached and are all ready to work on the skirt next time she comes over. Note — if you use the sensibility.com Regency Dress pattern, you might want to enlarge the armscye. I needed to enlarge it for both of us, and my arms are unusually thin. Dan bought us pizza for dinner, and we wanted to rent Cold Comfort Farm, but no one has it.

July 24 — After we dropped Henry off in San Diego, Dan went to a job interview and then we went to the zoo for a while. It was hot and crowded but we headed for the less-crowded areas (not the new primate exhibit, heh) and had a nice time. There’s a Giant Anteater (near the elephants) that I’d never seen before — what an amazing animal. Also there are a few Ankole Cattle on exhibit now on the Hoof and Horn Mesa — I’ve seen them from a distance at the Wild Animal Park but never close up. Wow! It was very very tiring to walk about in the heat so we didn’t stay long.

When we got home I found that my Regency Dress Pattern from www.sensibility.com had arrived! I am super-impressed. The pattern come in a fine large envelope, the largest of any pattern I’ve ever bought — I won’t need to buy a manila envelope to store it in. The instruction booklet is well-written and has good illustrations, and is stapled along the spine. No stupid map-style instruction sheet. The pattern itself is printed on heavy paper with thick black lines — perfect for tracing off the appropriate size. I’ve already made a toile of the bodice. I made it an inch longer all around, to acccomodate my low bustline, but I think it’s still a bit high. Tomorrow I’ll experiment some more. I’m going to make a front-button bodice with no sleeves and a knee-length (or shorter) skirt — Yeah Jane Austen will roll in her grave but I want to be comfortable on these hideous hot southern California days :)

One more thing — the pattern only cost $12. Amazing. In the fabric store the other day, I noticed that a basic little dress pattern by Simplicity or someone was $16.50! Here’s this lovely woman putting her heart and soul into designing and selling beautiful old-fashioned dress patterns and charging far less then than the big companies charge for a mass-produced run-of-the-mill pattern. AND she has a fabulous website filled with step-by-step instructions, fitting instructions, alteration suggestions, photos of finished dresses, etc etc. She has more than just Regency dresses too — there’s a lovely 1910 Tea Gown which I adore, and much more. Go buy a pattern from her.

July 23 — I just finished a really good book — “The Hills at Home”, by Nancy Clark. It’s one of those lovely books about people, in which nothing really dramatic ever happens, and it’s all about how the people relate to each other and the little things that happen. Hard to explain, really, since there’s no Murder or Betrayal or Big Plot Devices. It’s just several generations of family members who come to visit elderly Aunt Lily in her big old house in New England and end up living there for about a year. Marvelous characters, very believeable. I loved the bits where everyone was talking at once. You don’t always know who is saying what and it doesn’t matter:

“They’re hoping to make Stockbridge by dark.”
“Whose car is that?”
“Oh, Louis bought them… He took one look at the VW.”
“Stockbridge? I assume they’re staying at the Red Lion? They’ll enjoy that. We always do.”
“But what’s the name of that wonderful inn in Lenox?”
“They’re not going to Lenox, they’re going to Stockbridge”
“Is that the new bigger Civic?”
“Why does it matter if they get to Stockbridge after dark?”

Etc. The back flap says the author is working on another book about the Hill family and I am looking forward to it so much!

July 21 — I sewed all morning (I love my Pfaff) while Henry played and we listened to audiobooks. I made two pairs of Henry-shorts out of Dan’s old t-shirts, and I dug up my unbleached muslin Regency dress, which was nearly floor-length of course, and hemmed it to just above knee length. Now I might actually wear it sometimes :)

After lunch, which we ate together while watching Star Trek (“The Apple”), I was so tired that I fell asleep on the couch for a little while. And then later we went to the library (yay!) and then picked up Kathy so she could come along and watch Henry’s karate class.

July 20 — Henry’s shoes were completely worn out, so we went shoe-shopping before the grocery shopping this morning. He chose black Converse hightops, so now of course he can run faster and jump higher than ever before! He looks so cute. Now I want some too! Tired and headachey. Bah.

July 19 — Did a super-good job on the house this morning, listening to Loveline mp3s all the while (Henry was still down in SD), then hung out with Chloe and Kirsten and Marcos until it was time to pick H up from karate. Got some red ribbon to finish my jeans shorts — I cut the waistband off and then sewed on the ribbon to tie at the waist, very cute, heheh.

July 18 — Dan and I went to Felicita Park in Escondido and walked around there a bit. Nice park.

July 17 — Beatlefair. Chloe and Kirsten and Henry and I went together — Kirsten drove, thank goodness. It was not a great Beatlefair, but when Rockola played at the end of the night it was all ok.

July 16 — Chloe arrived late last night so this morning we went over to Sal’s to hang out with her and Kirsten. Watched Hard Day’s Night (preparing for Beatlefair tomorrow) and part of Spiderman, lazed around. Crampy.

July 15 — Up early, did some sewing (I love my Pfaff). Doctor appointment, then to the lab for more blood to be drawn, then home for lunch (Henry and I ate together while watching Mister Rogers — very pleasant) then off to Park Day, then to Sal’s to teach, then a few errands, then home, dinner, bedtime for Henry, Jeopardy with Dan. Very tired, time for bed.

July 13 — Taught a zillion students for mom. Tired.

July 12 — Woke up early but feeling relatively good, filled with ambition to clean the house a little more thoroughly than I usually do on Mondays. I’m in the middle of floor-mopping right now, but taking a little break. Don’t want to get worn out.

I discovered this amazing woman’s website today: Historically Dressed. My god. Drool. Look at her Historical Sewing Projects page, and also her very thorough Pattern Review Page. I’m so inspired! As soon as Dan is employed and I have the funds, I’m making a paper tape dress form and doing some serious sewing. I adore the vintage reproduction Butterick and Vogue dresses on that pattern review page. Yum.

July 11 — Sunday. I don’t believe I mentioned yet that Dan was laid off on Tuesday (yeah, the day before the Rush concert). His job was outsourced. Delightful. But he’s been spending almost every waking moment seeking a new job, and things are looking promising. His resume can be found here.

He has several job interviews lined up for next week, so today we went to Mervyns and bought him some dashing new job interview clothes. And I polished his shoes :)

July 10 — I actually felt pretty good today, for a change. Spent a long time browsing through GBA game reviews, trying to pick something to play when I’ve finished “A Link to the Past”. I found a few that look like they’re worth trying, so Dan installed “Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland” on the flash cartridge for me. So far it’s fun and cute and not too hard. :)

July 08 — Last night we went to the Rush concert down in Chula Vista. Henry was so thrilled to get to see them! I’m no Rush fan but it was fun to go out with my guys and hear music. We didn’t get to bed until 1am so today I’ve been pretty tired. So I’m going to bed, goodnight. Oh we hung out with Kirsten and Marcos tonight so Dan could help them set up their new TiVo, and that was fun!

July 04 — Happy Independance Day, people.

I am still working on Dan’s quilt. I’ve completed five 2′ x 2′ sections, and am halfway done with number six. Here’s a photo of what I’ve got so far. The one on the table is the half-done one — notice the basting threads. The long section on the couch is all sewn together — eight feet long! That’ll be the length of the quilt, so I just need to make three and a half more strips like that and then I’ll be done heheh :)

Melissa, I wrote back! Ute and Julie, you’re next. Peer Völkner, where are you? Hugs, and forgive me for being such a bad correspondent.

July 03 — Henry’s off with Matthew for the weekend. I did some sewing, and we watched a few more episodes of Northern Exposure (My parents bought the first season on dvd). In my opinion, the first season isn’t that good, and I’m wondering if it will get better over time, or if the show is just not as good as I remember. I think I started watching in the 3rd or 4th season. It’s still fun to watch, though.

In the afternoon, we went to Guajome to play scrabble in the fresh air. Very nice.

Hey look at what They Might Be Giants is doing: theymightbegiants.com. They’re selling their own music over the interweb, in plain old .mp3 format (no “digital rights management”), cutting out the middle-man and trusting their fans not to illegally share their music. YAY TMBG!!! I still prefer to buy actual physical CDs though. I like liner notes.

July 02 — Friday. Henry and I took in his recycling and he made $5.48, so then we went to a few stores trying to find a squirt gun just like the one he borrowed from his friend, but had no luck. Also browsed around in Game Stop (or is it Game Spot?) and Henry played a little of the new Spiderman game, which looks pretty cool. I sewed two more pairs of t-shirt underwear. Oh I LOVE my new sewing machine!!!

July 01 — Happy anniversary parental units!

Took Henry to park day, where he and the other guys ran around with squirt guns the whole time, while I beat the “Misery Mire” dungeon in “Link to the Past” and worked on the quilt. In the evening, H and I went to see “My One and Only”, a musical out at the Moonlight Amphitheater. Kirsten gave us one of her comps (she’s in the pit band) and we sat with Marcos and a couple of their friends. It was a fun show, and we had a fine time!

June 2004

June 30 — Henry’s home! I went down to SD and picked him up this morning. So nice to have him home again! We built one of the robots in the robot kit that wastrel brought for him. Very cool.

June 29 — Henry is on his way home (I think he’ll be on an airplane most of today and get to the airport late tonight) so I finished moving stuff out of his room and back into our closet. I did a good job. The closet is still stacked with boxes but I think I got rid of more than half the stuff that was in there! There’s still a pile of stuff for Dan to sort through, but still it’s so much better than it was. And Henry’s room is nice again. We’ve been watching The Daily Show every night (thanks, TiVo) and it’s pretty fun. Also we’ve been enjoying Ken Jennings’ run on Jeopardy — I think tonight was his 19th win in a row! The new issue of WIRED came today, yay! I read it all when I went to bed.

June 27 — Sunday. Loafed. Made a poster by scanning a drawing out of “The Saturdays”, printing it out in a huge size on 9 pieces of paper, gluing them together, and then watercoloring it. It turned out great! I put my vinyl bag up on ebay so we’ll see if it sells heh. Handmade bags don’t seem to sell very well there but mine is quite unusual and different from anything else on ebay. *crosses fingers*

June 26 — There was a ham radio event thing in Carlsbad, so we went to that most of the day. I sat in the shade and finished my book, quilted, and played Zelda for hours while Dan talked to the other radio people. It was quite pleasant. Finished the bag I was making in the evening and watched some of the women’s gymnastics trials on TV.

June 25 — Felt crappy, tired, depressed, and anxious all day. Stupid thyroid. I planned to go to SD to see my friend Charlotte, who’s back in town for a short while, but felt too bad to go. Ugh.

June 24 — Spent hours today working on the closet project. I stacked up all the empty boxes and Dan told me which ones could be thrown away — most of them, as it turns out! Lovely! Somewhat less depressed today. Worked on a clear vinyl bag with a flower applique.

June 23 — Today I decided to clean out our closet. It was jam-full of boxes, boxes, boxes so I pulled everything out and stacked it in Henry’s room, and then started going through it, deciding what to put back. Most of it is cables, tons of cables, all snarled together. Every kind of cable you can imagine and some I never even saw before. So I’ve been dumping the boxes out one at a time, untangling everything, asking Dan what gets kept and what gets thrown out, and then putting the keepers in better boxes. So far I’ve been able to throw out a ton of stuff, yay.

June 22 — Sewed some more t-shirt underwear from my perfect new pattern. In case you’re wondering why I keep sewing underwear, I threw away all my hateful old ill-fitting storebought undies recently so all I have now are homemade ones that fit properly. My new machine handles stretch fabric so nicely! I went to the library this evening after teaching, and then when I got home I sewed and we listened to a couple of our Loveline recordings. Yay for streaming audio and helpful software! Star Trek this evening — “This Side of Paradise” — very good episode. Exchanged non-fitting Danshorts for another pair of the nice corduroy ones, of which I am very fond.

June 21 — I cut apart my favorite raggedy old pair of underwear today and made a new pattern, and then made a test pair and they are great! Also went to Mervyn’s and bought Dan two pairs of shorts and a shirt, and two out of three items fit properly! Yay me.

June 20 — Wastrel had to go home today, so we went to the zoo before taking him to the airport. It was a great day at the zoo. The orangutans were very active; one was somersaulting around, and another young one was playing with one of the siamangs! The mother siamang had a tiny tiny baby clinging to her. We also saw the gorillas, bonobos, lots and lots of birds, the polar bears (not swimming, but finding and devouring hidden yams in his enclosure), and the pandas. We walked around the Hoof and Horn Mesa and saw the antelopy things and zebras and giraffes etc. Very nice afternoon. And then I dropped wastrel at the airport. We hope he’ll come back again someday!

In the evening I started knitting the Fuzzy Feet slippers from knitty.com with my leftover sweater yarn. The idea of felting something on purpose still makes me nervous but I guess it’s worth a try! WE watched “The Bishop’s Wife” which was very good. Cary Grant was non-annoying, Loretta Young was lovely as usual, and David Niven was elegant.

June 19 — We all went to the fair! My sweater did not win a prize, oh well. We spent a lot of time in the Photography exhibit and saw tons of great photos, also looked at the crafts and collections, the animals (of course!) and saw the very end of the Bull-Riding. And we saw the hypnotist (Mark Yuziak) — he does a very entertaining show, boy oh boy.

June 18 — Our dear friend wastrel is visiting us for the weekend! We picked him up at the airport tonight. Yay for wastrel!

This morning I picked up my sewing machine and sewed for hours. I finished about 6 of the pieced quilt blocks, and made a couple of pairs of t-shirt underwear. The only problem I had was that the top thread occasionally unthreads itself from the takeup lever, which causes the thread to break. Also a couple of times the bobbin thread came out of its tension guide and that caused a bit of a probelm. I don’t know if its a machine problem or a Kara problem (it can take some time to get used to a new machine and get everything threaded properly.) so I’ll test it a while longer and then take it back in for adjustments or whatever if I still have problems. Boy it’s a nice machine! The integrated walking foot thing is amazing. It makes it so easy to sew with stretch fabrics! Amazing. Love love love the Pfaff!

June 17 — Dan vacuumed, I mopped, and we got the whole place looking nice! Yay! I had to get more blood drawn today (liver panel) and for the first time it hurt like crazy. You’d think having a giant needle in your arm would just always hurt but it doesn’t. One of the lab guys is so good, I can barely feel it. This afternoon we went to Baker’s Sewing Center in Escondido to look at sewing machines. We were there for a couple of hours! Very nice store. I brought a large pile of all different kinds of fabric scraps and tested the two machines I was interested in — both Pfaffs, one mechanical, the other computerized. I thought I wanted the mechanical one but after testing the computerized model (Pfaff Lifestyle 2022) I decided I liked it better. Boy it’s nice! It’s a bit out of our price range but they happened to have a slightly-used one that a lady traded in for a fancier model — only a year old, and a couple hundred dollars cheaper, and they’re extending the warranty so it’s just as good as the warranty on a brand new machine. So it looks like Lucky Kara gets a Pfaff! They needed to clean it up and give it a once-over, so I get to pick it up tomorrow.

June 16 — Um, Wednesday… Worked on Dan’s quilt, taught students, played Zelda, acquired wrist-pain from too much Gameboy, fixed Dan’s favorite fish dish for dinner.

June 15 — Henry flew to England with his dad today! They’ll have a great time :)

I noticed that my front tires were extremely worn, and the right one was just about bald around the edge, ugh! So after work I went to the Discount Tire Company at El Camino and Vista Way. Very good place. They put two new tires on for me, and noticed that one of my back tires was a little low so the guy looked at it and discovered a nail in the sidewall! But that tire was still under warranty so he put a new one on for $5. Whew! Tonight we played Scrabble again — lots of fun. Now I think it’s time for a big cone of Haagen-Daas strawberry ice cream, yes indeedy.

I installed the latest Firefox browser (0.9) today, and now, half an hour later, I am frantically re-installing the previous version. Problem #1: the default theme is butt-ugly. The only tolerable replacement theme does not show the draggable thing on the scrollbars! Ok so I went back the the default theme, not a huge deal. Problem #2: The location bar does not necessarily reflect the location of the webpage you are currently viewing. I was at a forum, hit a link to view a thread, enjoyed the thread, copied the location bar so I could url a friend, and he ended up somewhere else. Hmm, I said, and looked at the location bar. Sure enough it was still showing the url for the “recent posts” page. Tried again, reaching the thread a different way. Still the location bar showed the url for the recent posts page, even though I’d been to three different pages since then. So I went back to 0.8 as fast as I could. Nice jaerb, there, firefox.

June 14 — Grocery shopping this morning, then a trip to the ham radio store in SD around noon, then a student in the afternoon. But I got home nice and early after that and sat around in my new chair, playing “A Link to the Past” which is so much fun, even the second time through! What an excellent game. I’m wimpy and use a walkthrough, heheh, but hey I like to make sure I get every single treasure in every dungeon. In the evening we caught up on some tv — Arrested Development and an episode of Jeopardy. Nice :)

June 12 — This afternoon Dan and I went out to do some shopping! He bought me presents — a deluxe Scrabble set and the They Might Be Giants’ “Then: The Earlier Years” double CD. It’s got their first two albums plus lots of EP stuff, B-sides, alternate takes, etc. I’ve been wanting Lincoln, which is their second album, and now I have that plus a ton of other stuff! Very cool. And yes, I could have dl’d it all but TMBG is a great band and they deserve some money. The only reason I became aware that they were a great and talented band, however, was by downloading some (ok, a LOT) of their music for free. If I hadn’t, I would never have gone to any of their concerts (total tickets purchased: 7, at an average price of $40/ticket) or bought any cds or merchandise (total spent probably $90), or recommended them to friends who have now bought some of their cds! So I feel that we have a win-win situation here. The RIAA can go play in traffic.

Well anyway, we bought my stuff at Barnes and Noble, and then walked over to the Radio Shack for a timer for the water cooler (the power bill is outrageous and Dan thinks we can save quite a bit by not cooling our water all night every night), and browsed about in a shoe store and a video game store. I wouldn’t mind some new sandals, but all the cute sandals this season are slip-ons and I like a heel strap. Sigh. And then we went to an early dinner at Chili’s — not usually my favorite restaurant but they’ve changed their menu quite a bit since last time we went there, and I had some very delicious vegetable quesadillas, yumyumyum! Four-thirty is a great time for eating out — no waiting for a table :)

When we got home we played Scrabble! It was a ton of fun. I hadn’t played in years. And then we finished “Bells are Ringing” which is now one of my favorite musicals! Judy Holliday is just marvelous.

June 11 — This was a good day. I had a few bad days in a row where I felt tired and crappy most of the time, but today was better. Henry and I did some errands, getting him ready for his big trip to England (he and his dad will be there for two weeks!). Bought batteries for his digicam, flossy picks for his teeth, and gathered a bag of things he needs to take down to his dad’s house to pack. I made him a few mp3 cds of audiobooks and his favorite music to take along too.

In the afternoon, Dan drove us to the dojo for Henry’s karate, and he and I sat outside while Henry helped with the little kids’ class, and then watched his actual class. He’s doing so well! When we got home, Henry and I watched two episodes of Star Trek — “I, Mudd” and “Journey to Babel”. The former was better than I remembered and the latter was a little worse, heheh. Still very enjoyable.

Henry’s all tucked into bed now, and I’ve just cooked some pork chops for Dan and some zuchinni for me, and now I’m going to put on “Bells Are Ringing” :) “I’m in love… with a voice… Plaza oh double four double three…” Ahhhh Judy Holliday. I’ll probably be ff’ing the Dean Martin bits whenever possible.

June 10 — This morning Henry and I made some Harry Potter Spell Books to share with the kids at parkday. We found a website with a list of HP spells, then copied and pasted them into Adobe Indesign so there were four little pages on one piece of paper. Printed them out, cut and folded them, and then bound them together with the sewing machine. And Henry drew nice cover art of two broomsticks and a Golden Snitch :) They were a big hit with the kids, and they all ran around casting spells on each other all afternoon.

After park day, we went to gymnastics. I was so tired I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone so I waited in the car and read “Altered Carbon”. When I went in to pick him up, they told me he needs to move to a more advanced class. Yay, Henry! So he’s moving up from the “Handstands” level to the “Giants” level and will have Mr. Justin as his new instructor. His new classes are longer — an hour and fifteen minutes. He’s very proud and likes to say he’s “leveled up”. Can you tell we play a lot of RPGs around here? Heheheh.

June 09 — This morning I shoved some furniture around in the bedroom to make more floor-space, and then vacuumed and dusted yay! Also vacuumed Henry’s room (nice and clean now) and part of the hallway and then I got tired and decided to leave the rest of the floors for another day. And then I went to work and taught piano students etc. While I was gone, Dan vacuumed the rest of the house — even UNDER the sofa cushions! And he tidied up the living room, too, and took the junk out of the hallway. It looked so nice when I got home! What a great Dan he is.

June 08 — I found a perfectly good rocking chair by the dumpsters today and dragged it home. Dan hauled it up the stairs for me. It’s the kind that sort of swings on its base, rather than rocking on rockers. It has no cushions but that can easily be fixed! There’s absolutely no room for it in our crowded apartment, but I managed to stuff it in near the glass door to the balcony. Very comfy for laptopping.

June 07 — This morning Henry and I did a bunch of errands — bank, library, toystore, fabric store. He had some money burning a hole in his pocket and wanted a new Harry Potter lego kit (Quality Quidditch Supplies), so we loooked at Toys’r’us first but they didn’t have it. Target did, though! Also bought some black twill to make his knickers for his Morris Dancing costume. Then when we got home I had to do laundry which kind of tired me out so I lay down for a while before we left for piano students and karate. Busy day.

June 06 — I owe my robust physique to your tubes of triple-bleached goo!

Today I lazed about a bit and watched some tv. Thank you TiVo! Last night we took out some old season passes for shows we never ever watched, and today I told the TiVo to quit recording its “suggestions” for us. Man, we watched one season of Survivor and now it’s suggesting Spanish-language reality shows for us. But anyway, today the TiVo provided me with the some quality entertainment while I worked on Dan’s quilt, especially Star Trek (Mirror, Mirror) and the Antiques Roadshow.

Dan is laughing at me because I like to dilute my sparkling water with plain water :) Waiter! I’ll have some diluted water, please!

June 05 — This was a very good Saturday. In the morning I took Henry to his outdoor demo class, and I took Dan’s Nikon D70 along and got a few good photos. Not great, but better than nothing. I’m still getting used to the new camera and all its fancy settings, heheh. Henry went home with Matthew after class, and I came home and made breakfast for Dan, and then in the afternoon we went to Guajome to walk around and take pictures again. It was lovely there, as usual, and we had such a good time walking around together! Here’s a photo I took of some flowers… don’t know what they are but they grow on a big bush and smell nice. I like doing macro-ish shots.

After we were done at Guajome, we went out to Barnes and Noble to look at books, and hung out there for quite a long time (how could we not?). Dan bought himself a photo book and bought me a slice of key lime cheesecake from the cafe there, mmm :) And then eventually we got home and I made dinner and we watched a couple episodes of Simpsons from back in the day when every episode was funny and creative. And now it’s bedtime! Bedtime, wonderful bedtime. I love our bed. It’s enormous (California King) and we have a thick fluffy featherbed that I sink into, and cotton flannel sheets, and real silk (homemade) pillowcases on my real feather pillows. It’s so soft and cuddly and soothing, with all the flannel and silk and feathers.

June 04 — I keep forgetting to update. Sorry, regular readers, I know it’s annoying. I promise to try to do better.

This morning Henry and I went to the movie theater to pick up tickets to an afternoon showing of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”. We decided to try out the new theater in Vista — the Krikorian Googolplex. We drove out there on Vista Way, which is always a wierd trip down memory lane for me. I remember driving on it back in the early 80s, back when 78 was much narrower and less important than it is now. Some of the stores and buildings along Vista Way are the same as they were back then — the Rayne Water Softener place with the funny marquee is still there, with a new message on the board every time I drive by. The nursery near Emerald has been transformed into a rent-a-car place, though, and the saddest change happened long ago when the wonderful “Two Floors Of Books” used book store moved out and the building was taken over by a Bail Bonds place. Sigh. That still makes me sad when I see it.

We live right on the border of Vista, almost literally, but we almost never go there so I’m still not used to the renovation that has gone on there in recent years. The movie theater was a construction site last year when Henry and I went geocaching in a new park in downtown Vista. Crazy. Now, near the park, there’s a movie theater and a little out-door shopping area that’s slightly charming. At least it’s not a Mall. They’ve got the same thing as every other shopping area, though — a Coldstone, a Subway, an eyeglasses place, fast Japanese food, etc. Grumble.

But anyway, the theater is brand-new and squeaky clean, with comfortable stadium seats. And the movie was pretty good! Better, I think, than the first two Harry Potter movies. The film was messed up for the first fifteen minutes or so — covered with dark blotches and streaks. Somebody spilled coffee on it maybe? Somehow I feel that paying $18.75 for three people to see a movie entitles us to a pretty good print, especially on the day the movie was released! I recall that one of the LotR movies had sound problems, and Kill Bill had odd orange dots on it (and that movie was bad enough without odd orange dots on the print). And they wonder why people download movies. But ANYWAY the movie was good! And we had a great time all together :) I thought Professor Lupin was wonderful and the Hippogriff was amazingly believable.

June 01 — Henry and I did the shopping this morning. First we had breakfast together at Einstein Brothers Bagels, which was a nice treat. It took about three hours to do the groceries, and then when we got home Henry and Dan carried everything upstairs and I put it away. Sorry this isn’t a better blog entry… I’m tired and I’m trying to just write anything so I can get my June page started here.

Michelle gave Henry a ride to the dojo when she dropped Daneesha off for her piano lesson, so Henry was able to be Senpai for the Little Dragon class and go to the juniors class too, and then I took Daneesha to the dojo when I picked Henry up between students. And we treated ourselves to an ice cream cone at Vinakas — really good ice cream they have there. “Niederfrank’s” or something. And then we went back to Sal’s and I taught another student and then eventually we came home.

May 2004

May 30 — The Kenyon family and their neighbors has a big beach party thing today. Henry and I went and were there for hours! It was nice. henry ran around with kids and played in the water and boogie-boarded, and I took a chair along and sat and read my Flash book. A nice woman let me sit under her umbrella, so with that shade plus the all-over sunscreen, plus long pants/sleeves, plus large shady hat, I think I may have escapsed with only a slight sunburn.

May 29 — We went over to watch Return of the King with Dad. There are a lot of battles in that movie, my oh my. I’d forgotten. But it’s a good one.

May 26 — Happy birthday Dad!!!

This morning Henry accompanied me to the lab to get my blood drawn (am on a higher dose of blood thinner and they want to see if my blood is thin enough yet) and then we drove down to Del Mar, to deliver my sweater to the fairgrounds. We had a lot of fun chatting and listening to music while we drove, and the line to drop off Home and Hobby entries moved along quickly. They let us drive right onto the fairgrounds and park near the grandstand (where the Home and Hobby display will be) and we saw some of the food and ride trailers waiting to be set up. I can hardly wait to go to the fair! Everyone should try to see my red wool cable-stitch hooded zip-up cardigan :)

Austin headed home to Texas today, so we are minus one houseguest, heheh. Wastrel will be here for a weekend in June, and then Chloe for a month in July, and we’re hoping Tabatha might be able to visit sometime in Summer too!

May 24 — I got to come out of my isolation today yay! Dan gave me a million hugs and kisses, and when I pick Henry up tomorrow I’ll bet he will too :) I learned about a new quilting technique called “paper foundation piecing” which makes it far easier to piece complicated patterns. I tried it with Dan’s Monkey Wrench quilt and it works very well! I pieced two more blocks with greater accuracy than I managed without the paper foundation. Here’s a page that explains the paper foundation piecing technique. Boy, you learn something every day! I made a full-size line-drawing of my pattern in Flash, and then printed it out so the most complex bit was in the center of the paper (it’s a 12.5″ patch so it would have been annoyingly difficult to work the entire patch on a paper foundation). Then after I was done with the piecing, I just ripped the paper away from the back of the patch, voila!

May 23 — Last night I watched about 2/3 of the second P&P dvd, so this morning I finished it, while quilting, and then I watched “Some Like It Hot” and “Dr. Strangelove”. Movie day!

May 22 — Another pleasant day of solitude. Stayed up WAY too late last night, finishing “Getting Over It” by Anna Maxted. Yeah I read the entire book in one day and it’s a thick one. And good! So I’m deservedly tired today. But I spent a pleasant morning listening to NPR (Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Wha’ D’Ya Know, and Away with Words) and qulting, then a pleasant afternoon playing Tropico. And now I’m going to bed. Maybe I’ll watch a dvd on my laptop before I go to sleep, just so I dont start another book and stay up too late again.

Funny link! Requires Flash, family-friendly: Amy’s Diary. I can’t decide which is my favorite — March 5? April 17? November 18? The only problem is that there are only ten entries!

May 21 — Yesterday I had my radioactive iodine treatment thing, to kill my evil hyperactive thyroid. Take that, thyroid. All I had to do was swallow an enormous pill that a linebacker-shaped male nurse-type-guy gave me out of a titanium cylinder, and then Dan drove me home. I have to stay away from people for three days, so I don’t leak radioactive iodine particles on them and wreck their perfectly innocnet thyroids. I get to have the bedroom and back bathroom all to myself, Dan’s sleeping in Henry’s room, and Henry’s at Matthew’s house for the next few days. So I have my laptop, a large stack of library books (don’t worry, the radioactivity will be completely decayed by the time they go back), my sewing machine, my quilting, and a few audiobooks. My door is open so I can hear Dan out there in the living room and I’m not lonely at all. He checks on me frequently and delivers food and good cheer :) Today I listened to an audiobook (“In Tuscany” by Frances Mayes — read by the author, alas. It’s a rare author who’s any good at reading his own stuff aloud) and quilted for a long time, then read my book for hours (“Getting Over It” by Anna Maxted), then played my new game, Tropico, for hours and hours. And ate. Very relaxing and pleasant! Sort of an odd little mini-vacation.

May 19 — Now that Dan’s birthday has passed, I can finally post a picture of the quilt I’m making for him! I decided to make it a couple of months ago, but quilting is far more time-consuming than I anticipated — so on his birthday I only had two sections finished and joined together. I’m doing it lap-quilt style — joining four 12″ blocks together and then quilting them, then joining the finished two-foot-square blocks together. This is a picture of how much I have done so far! It will be queen-size (about 6′ by 7′) when it’s finished. The pattern is called “monkey wrench”. I’m hand-quilting it, by the way! If I were machine-quilting it, it’d be done, heheh. I’m machine-piecing it though — I’m not insane.

May 16 — Happy birthday Dan!

When I rented “Amelie”, I also rented “Big Fish”. Both movies got a 3 1/2 star rating from Leonard Maltin so I figured at least one of them would be good. I was right — “Amelie” was marvelous! But last night we tried to watch “Big Fish” and gave up after half an hour or so. Blech. So we put “Amelie” back in and watched part of it with the director’s commentary — he’s so funny! It got late so we didn’t finish, but we’ll watch the rest before it has to go back on Wednesday.

May 15 — Last night We watched “Amelie” — wonderful movie! We both loved it. It’s startling, almost, to see a movie that has uniformly good acting, directing, writing, etc.

This morning I got up at 8 to drive Austin to a job thing down in Cardiff, then came home and worked on stuff, then went back to pick him up at 12. Traffic was Hell. We got home about 2:30, and for a couple hours I lay on the couch and watched “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (I’m not a Doris Day fan but Jimmy Stewart makes everything better). Then Dan and I went to the beach — we walked just a little bit, not much because I’m pretty shaky, and mostly I sat in the sand while Dan took photos. We were there until the sun went down! Very nice.

May 13 — Thursday. Felt rotten all day. Bah. Got nowhere near enough sleep last night and also I’ve been feeling more and more hyperhyroid for the last couple of weeks. Finally my blood tests came back looking hyper so now they’re going to destroy my thyroid, what fun. Took Henry to homeschooler park day and he had a great time running around playing swords with a bunch of nice kids, and I lay there and worked on a project (a project which will soon be revealed) and read a bit. And beamed some some software to a nice teenage girl who had a Visor Prism. Rupert won the million dollars, yay. Now we have to wait until September for the next round of survivor. However shall we survive?

May 11 — It’s almost 11pm. I’m sure there was something I wanted to say about today, but now I’ve forgotten. Yesterday Henry rented a new game for the gamecube, Pokemon Colusseum, and he just loves it! There’s lots of reading involved (it’s an RPG-type thing) and he seems to be able to read everything just fine. Six months ago, he would have needed help reading everything and he also would have needed help figuring out how to play the game. Oh, another thing about Henry — he loves this new kata they’re working on in his karate class. It’s called Sai-fa or something (I never know how to spell them, just how they sound). Anyway he works on it every day.

Oh I remembered what I wanted to say! Dan urled me on a page with screenshots and even a trailer for the up-coming Zelda game! It’s not suppsed to be released until 2005, grr, but the screenshots and trailer look marvelous. I don’t feel like pasting in an url right now — just go to nintendo.com and hit the Zelda link. Prepare for happy shivers when watching the trailer!

May 10 — We got our Anonymous 4 “American Angels” CD on Saturday! It’s a female quartet singing early American “shape note” hymns. So beautiful. I’ve listened to it over and over, doing housework, going to sleep, playing games, and driving to pick up Henry yesterday. My favorite is “Shall we Gather at the River”. I can barely understand any of the words but the sound of it is just lovely.

Dan took this photo of Henry at his Karate class last week. He was sparring with Sensei Paul, I think. He looks so fierce, doesn’t he?

May 08 — Saturday. Got up about 9:30, worked on a project for a long time, watched “Shadow of a Doubt” which wasn’t that great. I expected more from a 4-star Hitchcock movie. Played Crystal Chronicles with Dan and we beat another dungeon. Later Austin and I watched “The Thomas Crown Affair” which was ok… it was frantically artistic, 1968-style, but rather dull after the initial robbery. They should have worked more on making believable, likeable characters. Dan and I went out at night for water and CANDY, and then we went to bed and I played Railroad Tycoon for hours on my laptop. Fun :)

May 07 — Pleasant day. I read the last chapter of “Tale of the Toa” to Henry this morning so he’s got the whole book on CD now and I don’t have to read any Bionicle books any more! That was the deal — I already read all three of them to him, but he said if I would re-read one and make a recording of it, I wouldn’t have to read them again. *whew* :)

Henry wants to enter something in the fair this year and today was the deadline for entry forms, so he decided to enter an “original model” made of Bionicle parts. He can invent something really neat before the delivery day. I mailed my entry form last week, for my sweater. The fair starts in about a month. I’m so excited!

This afternoon Dan and I played some more Crystal Chronicles and beat another dungeon. My guy was rewarded with a Mage Staff (magic +3) so I’m eager to play again and see if I can notice a difference in her spell-casting ability.

Later, we took Henry to his Karate class. While he helped out with the little kids’ class, Dan and I walked around a bit taking photos with his new camera. And then we sat and watched Henry’s class. Dan took some photos — we’ll see if any are good enough to show off.

May 06 — Dan’s got a new online photo album thing here: Dan’s photo thing. It was hot again, today, hot hot hot. Ugh. I had a free hour or so in the afternoon and started another game of railroad tycoon. This time I’m doing a little better. To win the scenario, I have to have $5,000,000 by the end of 1899 — it’s 1887 or so and I already have around $3,000,000. So I think I just might win!

I got email from my English friend, Julie, this morning! What a lovely treat. Her letter went into my spam folder (CRM-114 is ruthless) but luckily I noticed it in there. Hi Julie, if you’re reading this! Write again soon!

May 05 — Wednesday. Long, long day. Did laundry, fixed several breakfasts, cleaned kitchen, paid all the bills and dealt with various money issues. It’s surprising how much time it takes to pay bills. Then it was time to fix more food and clean the kitchen again. I felt vaguely crummy all day, so I lay down for about an hour before I went out to teach my piano students. M came up to take H to his first advanced (green belt and higher) karate class! Henry said it was lots of fun. They did point-sparring, I think. Finally got though all the teaching etc and got home, thank goodness. Now it’s time to veg with Dan and go to sleep. Possibly we will play a little more Crystal Chronicles.

May 04 — Henry helped me with the grocery shopping this morning, wonderful boy. We treated ourselves to a couple of bagels at Einstein Brothers, too. After shopping came housework, reading to Henry (we’ve done half of the Dawn Treader already!), and piano students. Tiring day and I feel grouchy. We played some Crystal Chronicles tonight, for the first time in a while. We beat a boss but it was soooo close. Dan’s guy was already dead, and mine had half a heart left when I dealt the final blow.

May 02 — Last night we watched “The Triplets of Belleville”. Great movie! Strange, but great. Great soundtrack too! It was hot today, 92 degrees. Nasty.

May 01 — Henry and I went to Holiday Park this morning, and he had a fine time rollerblading and swinging and playing while I worked on a project. We were there for a couple of hours, and then we came home and had some lunch and then I took him swimming for a little while. Just sitting near the extremely chlorinated apartment pool makes my eyes burn, so I tried wearing a pair of goggles which may have helped a bit. My eyes were only slightly burny later. But the goggles fogged up so I couldn’t read, heh. Luckily the pool is unheated and Henry gets cold really fast, so we were only there for 20 minutes or so. Hate chlorine.

Later in the afternoon, Dan and Henry and I all went to Guajome park. It was lovely there. We walked around and took photos and had a nice time all together. Here’s a photo of Henry coming down the slide at me!

A while ago Dan found a game for me called “Railroad Tycoon II” (mac version) so this afternoon I finally installed it and tried it out. It is very very fun! It gives you a map (I used England) with cities and stuff on it, and you have to lay track to connect the cities. And you have to haul resources from one place to another and make a profit. And you have to maintain your trains and make sure perishables don’t spoil, etc. First I tried a campaign and failed miserably. Then I tinkered around in “sandbox” mode (where there’s no goal and you don’t have to worry about money) for a while, and then tried a “scenario”. I had to start it over three or four times, but I finally got the hang of it and I seem to be making a profit!

April 30 — Tired. Took Henry to the dojo to help out with the little kids’ class before his own class. He loves helping the little guys, so we usually go early on Fridays.

April 29 — Thursday. This morning I took Henry to Sal’s house to play and then I picked up a few things for Dan at the grocery store and browsed through Cost Plus for a while (I never go there otherwise because it’s so boring for everyone but me, heheh) and then I went to the library and got a mighty stack of books! Some for me, and some about knights for Henry, and some photography ones for Dan. I found a new Clyde Edgerton novel on the new books shelf, yay! I read his “Killer Diller” years ago and just loved it. His others are good too, but “Killer Diller” was always my favorite. I also made a little jfile database for books I’ve read or want to read, so I can keep track of them better. Survivor tonight (how embarassing)!

April 28 — Actually remembered to take my Scotch Guard to Sal’s house so I could treat Kirsten’s purse before she goes home to SB. Taught students etc. And when I got home there was a lovely veggie burrito from Eriberto’s waiting for me!

April 27 — I finished Kirsten’s purse and delivered it to her this afternoon. She seems to like it :) I did a better job on hers than on mine (which I made up as I went along) or Mom’s (which I made using a slightly different and not quite as successful method). Also Kirsten’s has buckram in it for stiffening, which really seems to hold its shape better than even the heaviest dressmakers’ interfacing. At her request I put the cellphone pocket on the front, where it won’t interfere with the sides of the purse. I think it’s better there anyway.

April 26 — Dan got paged for work early in the morning, but (amazingly) I was able to get back to sleep and everyone let me sleep nice and late. I had to go get all kinds of blood tests done again this morning, but that was ok. I’m used to it by now anyway. I’m reading “Carrie Pilby” by Caren Lissner and I absolutely can not put it down.

April 25 — We all went for a nice walk on the beach this evening! It was foggy and mysterious. Lovely. Henry rolled in the sand and had to have a bath when we got home, funny boy.

April 24 — Henry’s belt test was this morning. He did very well and passed, so now he’s a green belt! He had to demonstrate a lot of punches, kicks, and blocks and also two katas, and the kids who were testing did free-sparring too, paired with non-testing kids so the sensei could observe them. We’re all so proud of him! We went up to Vinaka’s afterward for an ice cream cone, and bumped into the Kenyons there so that was fun. Then when we got home we found that his new Exo-Toa Armor bionicle kit that he bought on ebay had finally arrived, so he spent the rest of the day putting it together while I worked on Kirsten’s purse. We listened to my Pride and Prejudice audiobook the whole time, too. It was a pleasant day. Except that my sewing machine decided to skip a million stitches right as I was finishing up Kirsten’s purse, so I’m not sure what’s up with that. I think I may need to put a heavier needle in it. I’ll try that tomorrow.

April 23 — Guerin appointment in the morning, and then Dan helped me do all the laundry, and I took Henry to karate in the afternoon. Tired.

April 22 — This morning I finally got the floors mopped, yay! Now it’s less of a pigsty around here. Henry’s off playing with Sally, so after I catch up on my blog I’ll eat something and then work on Kirsten’s purse. I was going to make Helf’s screen protectors but I can’t find my thin vinyl anywhere, grrrr. Poor Helf, he’ll have to wait some more.

Last night we watched the most recent Sopranos episode. It stank. It stank like dead fish wrapped in garbage. We wasted an entire hour hoping it might get better, that SOMETHING might happen, but it never did. Man. This season started out well, too. The previous episode was bad, but last night’s took the cake for stinkitude.

April 21 — My throat felt a bit better today, so I taught all my students. Kathryn brought me a smoothie, that sweetie. Henry stayed home with Dan, since Matthew was sick, and they rode bikes and played with Henry’s RC car and had a barbeque. They even cooked me some potatoes in the coals, so I had nice hot dinner waiting for me when I got home!

April 20 — Today I had to go to UCSD again for another horrid test. They did a trans-esophageal-echocardiogram (maybe that’s spelled wrong) which means they stuck a thing down my throat and looked at my heart from the back. Or something. They gave me a sedative and I don’t remember any of it. Anyway they got a good look at the hole in my heart so I guess they will be able to figure out the best way to fix it. The thing made my throat really really sore and I could barely talk for the rest of the day. Dan came with me and took care of me of course, and Henry stayed with the lovely Kenyon family and played all afternoon. I was really woozy and nauseated all the way home so Dan drove nice and slow. And he stopped and bought me clam chowder from that place near the beach — I guess I asked for it while I was still groggy, I don’t really remember, heh. It was delicious and nice and smooth. Well anyway everyone at the hospital was very nice, so that was good. I guess I don’t have to go in for any more awful tests for a while, yay!

April 18 — Last night (April 17, 2004) we saw They Might Be Giants!! It was a wonderful show. Dan and Henry and I went all together and had a great time. It only took about two hours to get up to LA, and we found the UCLA campus and Royce Hall with no problems. The theater was lovely and our seats were good. The opening band was an fellow named Corn Mo. He was… different. But kind of cool. He played accordian, sang, and hit a cymbal with a stick attached to his shoe. Our favorite song of his was “Busey Boy” (download it here!) TMBG came on a bit after 9 and played until 11 or so! They opened with Robot Parade, and also played XTC vs. Adam Ant, New York City, Dr. Worm, In The Middle, Violin, She’s An Angel, Why Does The Sun Shine, Older, Particle Man, Istanbul, Ana Ng, Drink, Birdhouse in your Soul, Clap Your Hands, Man It’s So Loud In Here, I Palindrome I, Fingertips, and other favorites! Also they played a few songs from the upcoming album which will be called “Spine” — the most memorable of those were Stalk of Wheat and Au Contraire. It was really fun taking Henry to his very first rock concert. When Flansburg invited everyone to stand and come closer to the stage, we stayed where we were (so I could sit if I got tired) and let Henry stand on the arms of the seat in front of me, so he could see very well right over the crowd. He was thrilled and happy :) TMBG is a great rock band to take a kid to. They’re not bleeding-ears loud, and their music is so good! There’s always a bit of language, but it’s not bad. We saw quite a few other kids at the show. Nice!

Today I finished my purse tutorial, whew. You can see it here: gingham purse tutorial. If you make a purse following my instructions, please let me know and send me a photo!

April 16 — 4 hours of sleep, felt like crap all day. Ugh. Dan took Henry to Karate and brought me home a smoothie and some special treats from Trader Joe Himself. I lay on the couch and watched movies and played ffta most of the day. I tried really hard to enjoy “Kiss Me Kate” but it was very bad, so eventually I gave up and switched to “Ziegfeld Girl” which was extremely melodramatic but fun anyway.

April 15 — Here’s a photo of my recently-finished bpt sweater. Delicious, eh? You can read about it in greater detail on my crafts page.

We got up at 6:30 this morning and drove down to the hospital at UCSD for more nasty tests and things for me, so they could properly diagnose my pulmonary hypertension. I won’t go into details here, ugh. Maybe some other time. Right now my leg hurts a lot where they shoved a catheter into me so they could look around in my heart. What fun!

Dan just read me a (probably fake) english paper about Walt Whitman. We were both laughing so hard! It’s got a bit of salty language in it, so kiddies beware. Here’s a quote: “Walt Whitman is 90 stories tall and his adventures are legendary. With his blue ox, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman traveled across young America and helped the nation grow into the angry powerhouse it is today.” Here’s an url: Biography: Walt Whitman

April 14 — Someday, when we have a backyard, I want “the fantastic award winning eglu – the worlds most desirable chicken house”. Wow :) Go there and keep clicking “next”. Doesn’t it make you want to keep chickens? The website is so delightfully British, too!

April 13 — Felt kinda crappy all day, feminine-style. I’m going to make Kirsten a purse for her birthday so we went to the fabric store to pick out cloth and stuff — she chose a lovely dark olive-ish green solid, and some cool buttons for the closure. I’m excited about making it for her! Taught a couple of students, and then Henry went back to the girls’ house to play, and I went home for a bit and worked on my purse tutorial. Then when I went to pick up Henry I hung out there for a bit and made origami cranes for everyone. Such a nice family!

April 12 — Appointment with Dr. Tsai in the morning — he treated me for anxiety and depression and I did feel quite a bit better afterwards. So I did some grocery shopping and then came home and cleaned the bathrooms and mopped the floors, yay. I listened to the audiobook of “The Westing Game” that I got for Henry… I’d forgotten what a good book it is! I first read it when I was about his age, I guess, and several times since then but not recently. I made tamales for dinner and they turned out delicious! We watched the The Sopranos before bed, and it was ok but not great. The writers have got to stop making people act completely out-of-character.

April 11 — Spent most of the day making another gingham purse and taking photos of every step. The good people of crafster.org are clamoring for a tutorial, and I aim to please. But boy it’s tedious doing so. And now I have to select and crop and upload photos, and write out the directions. And it’s a complicated little purse. Whew.

April 09 — Worked on my purse for hours, and finally finished it! Here’s a photo (click to see a larger and different view). It’s got an exterior cellphone pocket, two interior pockets, and a key-strap. The bottom is stiffened with plastic needlepoint canvas, and the top edges are held straight by lengths of dowels in a casing, so it holds its shape nicely.

I updated my books page recently, so check it out if you are in need of book recommendations. Oh, this morning something very exciting happened! I got email from Laura Shaine Cunningham, the author of two of the books on my page! She bumped into my page and just emailed to say hello and thanks for the nice comments. Wow :) It made me glad that I usually mention only books that I like, and not the unreadable stinkers that I sometimes encounter. If you can’t say something nice…

April 08 — Started making a new purse, using some gingham that Grandma gave me. Photos soon.

This afternoon Dan went out with me to do some errands — first to fix dinner for Dad, then to the library. I got a nice new stack of books, yay! And then for a special treat we went to dinner at the Greek Corner Cafe, yumyum.

April 07 — Happy birthday, Kirsten!

My sweater finally dried and it is 100% awesome. I’ll get a photo up soon. This morning Henry helped me with the Trader Joe shopping, so all the grocery shopping is finally done for the week. Now I have to catch up on the housework before we all die of filth-poisoning. A bunch of students cancelled this afternoon, so I had time to work on a certain project. :) Henry’s off to San Francisco for the weekend — have fun sweetie!

April 06 — Spent most of yesterday at the hospital, getting various tests done. More tests next week. I don’t want to talk about it.

April 04 — Got up about 9, did some sewing and stuff (added some interior pockets to a big messenger bag, to make it more useful). After Dan got up, we sat on the balcony for a while, I playing ffta and he playing his acoustic guitar. I think it was possibly the first time we’ve sat together out there, and it was nice! There were kids swimming in the pool and making happy niose, although if you ask me it is far to cold to swim. But nobody asked me :)

April 03 — I didn’t get enough sleep last night so I was kind of tired today. But we went for a short walk at Guajome, and then at night we watched “Master and Commander” in bed, on my iBook! It was quite a good movie. Very exciting, good characters, good acting, and pleasantly unpredictable. Good ending, too :)

April 02 — This morning Danny-the-awesome-mechanic called me and said he was in the neighborhood, so he came to our place with a new battery and installed it for me! He tested my car, before he put in the new battery, by trying to start it with the lights and wipers on, and it wouldn’t start at all. So he says the problem was definitely the battery, yay! Now it starts up fine all the time.

I have to brag about my child here, for a minute. At karate class today, the Sensei held a little contest to see who could hold a certain tricky stance the longest. I can’t spell it, but you have your feet rather wide apart, your knees out over your feet, and your thighs almost parallel to the floor. And your back very straight. I can’t do it for even a few seconds. The Sensei went around eliminating people who wobbled, rose up at all, leaned forward or back, or just collapsed. In a class of 25 or 30 kids (ranging from white to brown belts), Henry and his friend Cierra held out the longest! They got a big round of applause :)

April 01 — Thursday. Happy birthday Jo!

Let’s see… I went out to do some errands this morning, and it was a little hard to start my car. That’s been happening now and then, lately. So I called Danny right away and described the problem, and he thinks I need a new battery. He recommended going to Sears and just having them install one, rather than drive out to his shop in San Marcos. So I went to Sears. Parked, went in, there were a few people ahead of me in line… One solid hour later, I got to the front of the line. There was only one poor guy working the desk and everything took forever. A woman who’d been waiting an hour and 45 minutes for her oil change, who also worked at Sears in another department, says they’re not hiring anyone full-time and it’s like that all over the store. Bad plan, Sears — it’s hard on the customers and hard on the existing employees.

So then there I was, at the front of the line. The guy takes my name, zipcode, shoe-size, etc and then we go to read the mileage on my car. Then he says we’re all set, and I say, how long will it take… and he looks doubtful and says, well there are three people ahead of you… Now, I’d heard them estimating an hour and a half or two hours for the guy three spaces in line ahead of me. And I’d already lost an hour of my day, and didn’t really feel like sitting at Sears for another 2 or 3 hours. So I left. Bah, stupid Sears. Called Danny, asked if there was somewhere else he’d recommend, and he said he’d do it for me tomorrow morning. Yay!

Mar 31 — Henry got home with his little 3/4-size electric bass tonight! He loves it so. Lisa bought him a little bass amp, too, with a headphone jack so he can practice while others are sleeping. He played for ages before bed. He has a little notebook of tab that we’ve printed out, lots of Rush and lots of They Might Be Giants. He likes “She was a Hotel Detective” a lot — nice bassline.

Mar 30 — Drove Henry down to SD so he can spend a couple days with Matthew. They have plans to go to Morris practice and I think sweet Lisa wants to buy Henry a little electric bass! He’s been wanting one for a while, and the desire increased a lot after he got to play her bass at her party a couple weeks ago. He and Dan played guitars before bedtime last night, and Henry was so happy to learn some new Rush riffs. He also expressed a desire to learn all the words to “Natural Science” so I printed out the lyrics for him, and after he went to bed he listened to the song and sang along for ages.

Mar 28 — A nice Sunday. I slept until 10:00, which is late enough to be called “sleeping in” and early enough to leave me hours and hours of daytime to spend doing fun things. So I knitted my last sweater sleeve (I think I have about 10 more rows before it’s finished, so I can probably finish after dinner) and I sat on the balcony to play some more Final Fantasy, and I fiddled around on my computers, and I cooked a nice breakfast for Dan, and in the afternoon we took another walk around the lake! It was quite warm today — in the mid-80s I think. Here’s the cutest photo ever: cattray.jpg

Mar 27 — This afternoon Dan asked me if there was anywhere I wanted to go (we’d all been hanging around the house all day) and then he suggested a walk at Guajome park! So we got ready and drove over there, it’s only 10 minutes away, and had a lovely walk while the sun was going down. It’s been raining a bit lately, so the park is green and the lake is wet and there was that good wet-plant smell everywhere. It was so peaceful and pleasant. We walked on a nice flat trail near the lake, so I wouldn’t get worn out, and climbed a little hill at the end. There was a bench at the top with a pretty view. Here’s a photo of us :) It was a perfectly lovely little outing and I was so happy that Dan had the idea. It meant a lot to me that he thought of something that I’d enjoy so much, and that he went out of his way to make it pleasant and fun for me.

I received my purse-swap purse today! I love it. Thank you so much, Photogirl! She made me a nice large messenger-style “jordy bag” (if that doesn’t mean anything to you, you’re not a regular craftster.org reader) of a jaunty red-and-black plaid with a padded lining. I think I’ll use it as my new knitting bag — it’s a lot nicer than the plastic shopping bag I’m using now!

This evening, after dinner, we snuggled up on the couch and watched the last two episodes of The Sopranos on my iBook. I think this season is better than last season (so far). They’ve introduced some new characters to liven things up a bit (well, an awful lot of the old characters have ended up dead over the years, heh). Thank goodness for those big Italian families… it’s not hard to believe in a few extra cousins and uncles showing up. I’m worried about Adrianne. Will the FBI let her just run away and protect her if the family starts suspecting that something’s fishy?

Mar 26 — I re-did the i-cord edging on the bottom of my sweater, using a needle 3 sizes smaller, to see if that would control the curling at all. And it was a success! It barely curls at all now, and I think with proper blocking it will be just fine.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance update: I have an Illusionist now, Travis. She was my original White Mage, who also has extensive Black Mage abilities. An Illusionist is very useful — she learns by using the same “rod” weapons as a Black Mage, but her spells attempt to damage to ALL the enemies on the battleground! So far they do 20-25 damage, with a few misses here and there. They cost a lot of mana (32, I believe) so you’ll want to make sure your Mage has a high MP count before she learns the job, and that she can perform some other lower-mana abilities too. My Blue Mage has learned Life Drain and Bomb, and is also improving his White Magic. As soon as my other white/black mage, Dominick, learns a few more useful skills I’ll switch him back to Beastmaster and that should help the Blue Mage a bit.

Mar 25 — Here’s a very fun geek quiz! How did you score? I got “37.47535% — Major Geek”

Mar 24 — Paid the bills, worked on the bikestore website. Dan suggested I install Bluefish, an opensource HTML (etc) editor. It’s nice! Works on my Debian box and my iBook, has nice syntax highlighting, and seems very customizable. Um, then I taught a bunch of students and came home. I read some more of a Junie B. Jones book to Henry for bedtime — I really enjoy reading those. We made a recording of “Boss of Lunch” yesterday and now we’re half-way through “First Grader at Last”. My iBook is perfect for making audiobooks. I just take it in his room every night at story time, then use Sound Studio to record my reading, and then when we finish a book (or have a cd-worth of reading saved up) I use Toast to burn the .aiffs to cd. Then I use lame to convert them to mp3 for storage. Henry’s got quite a collection of home-made audiobooks :) Oh! He’s getting very confident about his own reading lately. It’s nice to walk past his room and see his nose buried in a book. He was asking me questions about how to make websites, and I told him I have a good book about making websites (the O’Reilly book) and he asked if we could take it with us to read at Sally’s house while I was teaching! I think he might actually have tried to read it for a few minutes, too :) I was just glad to know that he gets the concept of taking a book with you for enjoyment, and also learning something you want to know from a book.

Mar 23 — Hmm Tuesday… Knitted my sweater during karate and got most of the way down the first sleeve, whew! Maybe be able to finish that sleeve tomorrow. Oh! I read the best book today. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Mark Haddon. I started it last night and finished it today. It was an amazing book, and I suggest everyone go find a copy and read it. The narrator is a fifteen-year-old boy who has something like autism, and the author does a wonderful job of showing how he sees and experiences the world around him. It was the most compelling thing I’ve read in a long long time, maybe ever. Here’s a good interview with the author which doesn’t give away anything significant about the plot (I don’t think).

Mar 21 — We slept late, and then Dan went with me down to SD to pick up Henry, but we went early enough to go to Balboa Park for a while. We went to the Aerospace Museum, which was great. I haven’t been there in a couple of years, and Dan had never been at all! We had fun walking around and loooking at planes and things together. It felt like a mini-vacation! And then we picked up Henry and came home. Now I’m going to sit around on the couch and play FF:TA for a while. I need to train a new White Monk and see if my Thief can become a Ninja yet, and give new equipment to some other people. And then slay some monsters :)

Mar 20 — Saturday. Got Henry ready for his weekend with Matthew, and then, once they were off, I worked on my purse-swap purse for hours and hours. It’s so cool — I kind of want to keep it :) My swap buddy listed red and black as her favorite colors, so maybe I’ll make another for her with some red plaid fabric I have hanging around, and keep the green one for myself. Lucky our names both start with “K”.

I made my favorite dinner, a sort of chunky vegetable sauce with rotelli, mmmmm. Here’s how you make it: Chop up about a third of a red onion and a couple of garlic cloves, more or less depending on your taste. Start them cooking in some oil in a large, deep skillet or a stockpot. Peel and dice an eggplant, chop a green (or red or yellow) bell pepper, and a couple of zuchinni. When the oinion is partly cooked, dump the other veggies in the pan, drizzle some more oil over them, add some salt and pepper, and cover. Cook over medium heat, and stir frequently. You don’t want anything to burn. Wash and chop half a bundle of fresh spinach. When the veggies in the pan are tender (not mushy!) add half a 28-oz can of roma tomatoes, choppped or crushed (I buy the whole ones and just rip them apart into the pan) and also half the juice from the can. Stir it all around, and then put the spinach on top and cover. In a minute or two, the spinach will wilt and you can stir it in. It’s all done once it gets hot, although if it’s too wet you can cook it uncovered for a while longer to reduce the juice a bit. Serve over rotelli, hot or cold. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Mar 18 — Kinda tired and PMSsy today but I still managed to be nice to everyone, I think. Henry wanted to play FF:TA on his emulator, so I got him started, he played through the half-hour intro, and then when he finally got to the world map and tried to save, the emulator screen went black. So then we started over, thinking he could use emu save states instead of game save slots, got through the unavoidable half-hour intro again, then when we went to the “party” screen the emu went black again. Ultra-frustrating. So we found a different emulator (visual boy, I think), and I sat there hitting the “A” button and reading, to get him through the intro. Then we got to the first fight with the two bangaa, and he took over, and then accidentally hit “load” instead of “save” and had to start over again. Why oh why did they not make the intro optional??? Well, he’s finally gotten into the real game and is doing well and having fun. It is a great game, depsite my complaints here.

I’m part of a handbag swap on craftster.org and I got info about my swap partner today! Can hardly wait to start sewing.

Tonight I knitted and watched “The Odd Couple”. Funny, funny movie.

Mar 17 — Worked on sweater sleeves, taught many piano students, did laundry etc. Practiced my banjo in the evening! I still have three tunes memorized. I really need to memorize some more. I haven’t felt well enough to have practicing energy in so long, I lost my callousses (sp?).

Mar 16 — Last night Kirsten came over to watch African Queen (1951, Hepburn & Bogart). Ahhhhhh real actors. I finished knitting the hood of my sweater and grafted the top together while we watched, and today I sewed in the zipper. Now all I have to do is finish the sleeves, woohoo! The i-cord edge isn’t holding the stockinette as flat as I hoped… It’s what the pattern called for though, so we’ll see if blocking helps.

FF:TA — My fencer has learned Piercethrough and is working on Stinger. My fighter has learned Air Render and is learning Backdraft (first time I used it, she did 72 damage woooo!) I turned the Beastmaster into a Black Mage, and am planning to turn my tough-as-nails Black Mage into a Time Mage soon. Considering taking one of the three White Monks and turning him into a Templar or Warrior.

Mar 15 — Monday. First, went to Dr. Tsai for more accupuncture and new packets of herbs for my medicinal tea. He says I’m doing well. And I certainly am feeling a lot better lately — whether from methimazole or accupuncture or herbs, I don’t know — probably all three. Oh I dropped Austin at the library for a while while I was at my appointment. Then I was home for a while and did laundry and cooking and stuff, and then it was off to teach Jonathan (we had a nice discussion of FF:TA before his lesson) then to the dojo for Henry’s karate class, then back to Sal’s to teach Kathryn.

When I stand outside the dojo, waiting for class to start and playing on the gameboy, I usually attract a crowd of small boys — they seem astonished and pleased to see a grownup playing a gameboy game. And we always discuss the game :) Everyone who knows FF:TA always says something like “Oh man that’s the BEST GAME!” And I agree with them. Hmm, I don’t think I ever linked to any info about it… Here you go: Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance. It’s sooooooo much fun. It’s difficult at first but there are lots of guides online. I was lucky to have Dan to advise me and and get me started. When he first started playing, I’d watch over his shoulder for a bit but it looked pretty dull. But then, after a while, I saw that it might be fun after all. And I’m so glad I tried it.

Mar 13 — A pleasant Saturday. Slept in a bit, played a ton of FF:TA, worked on the bike store website, worked on my Flash book, did laundry, etc. In the evening Dan invited me to take a little walk on the beach! It was so lovely. We walked down the boardwalk in Carlsbad, and it didn’t even tire me out very much. And then I made a delicious pasta and vegetables thing for dinner, yum, and then played some more FF:TA. It’s a great game, boy oh boy.

Mar 12 — This afternoon Henry went to the Kenyons’ house to play, and then he got to be Senpei (senior student helper) while Michelle taught the little kids! He was so proud and happy. I had to teach a piano student in the afternoon but I got to the dojo in time to watch most of the class. He said afterwards that being Senpei was one of the most fun things he’s ever done! His own karate class was next, and he was chosen to demonstrate a stretch — he’s one of the most flexible children in class. I’m so proud of that little boy. Then, since there was a plan for him and Sally and Matthew to drive up to a mountain on Saturday to play in the snow, Henry and I drove around looking for snow boots for him. It was fun. No one had any snow boots — it was all summer sandals! But then, after four or five fruitless stops, we thought of trying a sporting- goods store, and we found ONE pair of Henry-size snow boots, nice rubber ones with a drawstring at the top and a removable wool liner. And they were on sale for only $15! Score! So then he was all set to play in the snow and I dropped him at Sal’s to spend the night and get an early start.

Mar 10 — Got up early in case Danny could come do some work on the Acura, but the part wasn’t in yet. H and I went down to the train station to pick up Austin, but one of his trains had been late and he’d missed a connecting train, so Dan got him later in the afternoon. So we stopped by the fabric store on the way home to exchange a too-short zipper for one of the right length for the front of my sweater.. I’m having peculiar wrist pain and can’t knit at all grrrrrrrrrrr. Also I’m laying off the videogames in case that’ll help. Taught lots of piano students all afternoon, and when I came home there were three nice fellows and an Eriberto’s veggie burrito waiting for me! Henry showed me a new videogame and then I put him to bed. Then we watched the new Sopranos episode. Time for bed, the end.

Mar 09 — Woke up early feeling good and did a lot of stuff! Cleaned bathrooms, mopped floors, cleaned kitchen counters well, vacuumed entire apartment (even the ceiling fan, with Dan’s help), cut the guys’ hair, took Henry to the pool, played a few more missions in FF: Tactics Advance, taught a student, etc. When I got home in the early evening we all went outside. Henry and I walked around the perimeter of the complex, I blowing bubbles and he attacking them with his new sword, and Dan rode his bike around. And then we all went down to the Fed-Ex depot to pick up a package that didn’t get delivered, and then we came home and I cooked various dinners for everyone. And then after H went to bed, Dan and I watched last Sunday’s Malcolm, which was pretty good. Nice day, and boy oh boy was it nice to actually feel good for a change. Whoa here’s a neat link: fontifier.com.

Mar 08 — Even hotter today, mid 80s. My day was thus: Wake up, shower, doctor, lab, groceries, home, put food away, cook food, eat food, cook more food, email/irc for a while, take H to karate, home, more food, clean up, bedtime for H, tv with Dan, prepare for bed, write blog. A very nice day. I felt well and had lots of energy all day! Took the GBASP to Karate and played FF:Tactics some more, beat two missions and lost a third. We watched the new Arrested Development tonight — very funny! Wonderful show. Everyone should watch it.

Mar 07 — Hot today, high 70s. M picked up H for the day in the morning, and I knitted and knitted all day. Watched a great old movie, “A Thousand Clowns”, which Wastrel recommended and I remember my parents talking about too. It was very very good — fine acting and writing all through it.

In the evening I went to pick up H from Temecula and it was quite a traffic ordeal. I took 76 over to 15, but when I got there it turned out that 15 northbound was _completely_ closed at the Pala on-ramp because of a serious accident. Looking south, to the right of the overpass, I could see a sea of headlights just sitting there. To the north, I could see the flashing emergency lights all the way across the freeway quite close to the overpass, and then north of that, _nothing_, no tail-lights at all. Eerie as hell. I called Dan to ask him to check what was up — I couldn’t tell if it was just an accident, or if there was some serious scary reason why no one would be allowed into Temecula or something. He checked a traffic website and said it was an accident and that the freeway should be open again to the north. I got trapped on eastbound Pala Road, which is narrow and twisty, and drove for more than 20 minutes before I could find a place to turn around and go back west into Fallbrook, hoping to go through Fallbrook and hop on the 15 north of the accident. Well, everyone else was doing the same thing… so by the time the long slow line of us got back to the 15 on-ramp, the accident had been cleared and northbound was slow but moving. Whew. Glad I didn’t take 78 and get on the freeway way south of the accident!

I finally got to Temecula, collected the child, and we headed back to O’side. We stopped for food on the way, yumyum. In’n’Out for Dan and Eriberto’s for Henry and me! I had possibly the best veggie burrito ever. At night Dan taught me how to play Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance on the gameboy. I’ve watched him play quite a bit, and at first it looked boring but then I saw that it might be fun! It’s just different from the type of game I usually enjoy. I played through the intro (yawn, I hate long game intros) and then did a couple of the first missions and it was quite fun! Looking forward to playing some more later on.

Mar 06 — Henry’s with us today, so I took him to the morning Karate class, and then when we got home we cleaned up the balcony. We swept away the cobwebs and leaves and things, and then planted nasturtium seeds in some of the empty pots. Henry really enjoyed mixing the mud and planting the seeds. He found an old bottle of bubble mix out there, from two birthdays ago, maybe, and spent hours blowing bubbles, after we were finished, and I sat out there and read my Flash book.

After Dan got up, we loaded their bikes in the car and went to Guajome, where I sat and read and knitted while the guys rode around the lake. It was a perfectly lovely day — not hot, not cold. There were lots of big happy family picnics in the park, too. Quite jolly. Oh I read a lot more Hobbit to H today, enough to make another cd. I think that’s the 6th. We started chapter 14 tonight, the one where Smaug attacks Esgaroth!

Mar 05 — I’ve been working in my Flash book a lot. I’ve done the first three chapters — not only doing their examples and exercises, but tinkering with the new information on my own. Tonight I learned about symbols and did some fun things with them. This afternoon I took Henry to Karate and worked on my sweater some more — I’ve finished the waist decreases and have started the increases. Tonight Dan and I played FF:CC some more — lots of fun! My character is getting quite strong. I had someone craft me a mythril helmet tonight, and that improved my defense a lot.

Mar 04 — Henry’s feeling completely fine today. He’s got his Boy Powers back, yay! Here’s a very funny short film: Nutri-Grain Commercial. I feel GREAT! Go ahead, hit me! Lol. I knitted my red sweater the entire time during Henry’s gymnastics class and made a lot of progress.

Mar 03 — Lots to catch up on, here. First of all, there’s a new post on the android’s library which you should read. Also, my beautiful cousin Chloe has her picture up on rockola’s website! Scroll down to the “Valentine’s Day 2004” picture — she’s on the left in front.

I voted on Tuesday. Did you? We had the new touch-screen computer voting thingies. I do not approve. I want the old punch-cards back. It was so much fun punching that stylus through the card, and, as Dan pointed out, with that method we received the stub off our own personal voting ticket as proof that we had voted. The computer thingy gives you no proof whatsoever. Computers aren’t always better, people. You can’t hack a punch card.

Today I had my first appointment with Dr. Tsai, an accupuncture and Chinese herb doctor. He’s a calm, quiet, soft-spoken man and I felt completely comfortable in his office, which is a nice change from the panic I feel when I see the MDs. I really enjoyed the accupuncture treatment! I felt only a small “thwack” when the needles were inserted, and then a sort of warm feeling. I had 25 needles in me, in various places from feet and shins to scalp, and I think I was only aware of about 7 of them while I rested for 20 minutes. The ones in my ears were most noticable, and felt like those old clamp-on earrings. Afterward I felt very relaxed and calm and rested. Quite nice. He sent me home with bags of herbs to brew into a foul-tasting tea which I must drink three times a day. They’re not what I think of when I think of herbs, but are more like a mixture of dried flowers, sticks, roots, seed-pods, and maybe even some bark! Interesting.

I took a trip to the library on Tuesday, also. I owed $8, ouch, from when I was sick and just plain forgot about returning my books. I got an enormously thick biography of FDR, and a book on Flash MX, which so far is excellent. I’ve worked through the first two chapters. It’s well-written, well- organized, and slightly humorous — always a good thing in a computer book. I know and understand far more about Flash already than I ever have, even though I’ve previously worked through several tutorials. I just can’t remember things unless I understand WHY, and this book tells WHY.

Mar 02 — So tired. I didn’t go to bed particularly late last night, but this morning when I got up I was just so sleepy, Henry and I fell asleep on the couch for a couple hours. He’s a lot better today.

Mar 01 — Poor Henry is sick again. I lay around with him all day on the couch, and we entertained him with FF:CC and tv and reading. I was up in the night with him a lot, so I’m really tired today.

Feb 28 — Slept delightfully late, made a giant breakfast/lunch, went out with Dan to do various errands: Gasoline, oil, exchange at Toys’R’Us, purchase of our own FF:CC game, stop by bike store to discuss website, etc. On the way home he bought me a Jamba Juice smoothie — Peach Pleasure, my favorite! MMM best smoothies in the world. Tonight we finished the second year of our game. The second time through the River Belle Path area there were some enormous Griffons that were mighty tough. But we beat them all eventually. Ok bedtime.

Feb 27 — Chloe came over this afternoon and we played in Henry’s room for a while. He told us about Bionicles (he’s an expert) and played the piano for us, and I read some more Hobbit to them both. And then we all watched “The Song Remains The Same”. She’s going home tomorrow and I will miss her so much. More FF:CC with Dan this evening — we beat another level!

Feb 26 — We rented Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles for the gamecube yesterday, and, after assembling the proper cables and gameboys (_each_ _player_ needs a gameboy and for the multiplayer version), Dan and I tried it out and have been having so much fun! We’ve beat three bosses, collected three drops of myrrh, and finished the first year of the quest. The game has a few annoying aspects but on the whole we’re really enjoying it.

Feb 25 — Apparently our president, George W. Bush, wants to amend the constitution to ban marriage between homosexuals. WHAT??? This burns me up. Isn’t the constitution supposed the PROTECT our human rights and freedoms? I just don’t understand. Who does it hurt if two women or two men love each other enough to get married? It’s none of anyone’s business! It affects no one. Several gay couples were married in SF recently. Did anyone suffer because of this? NO! How about if the president takes action on some issue that actually matters — say, child abuse, poverty, domestic violence, or illiteracy? In my opinion, singling out gay people in this way is exactly the same as singling out people of any particular race or religion. It is evil. Not to mention devisive, non-productive, and bigoted.

Feb 24 — On the way home from Karate, Henry was full of songs. He sang a lovely one of his own, which went something like this:

If a Bionicle and a Megaman meet
They might have a fight
But no one will win
Because, in my opinion,
They are equal
Yeah, they are equal!

It was a very nice song :)

Feb 23 — Did the grocery shopping (finally). Henry was a tremendous help, and Dan carried everything upstairs. Lay on the couch most of the rest of the day, then took H to karate. We finished watching “The Band Wagon” which for some reason was awarded 4 stars by TCM, but if you ask me it’s one of the dullest Fred Astaire movies. No amazing dance numbers, few interesting tunes, lame plot, implausible romantic pairing. Give me “Royal Wedding”, “Easter Parade”, or “Shall We Dance” any day.

Feb 22 — Watched two movies — Notorious and The Maltese Falcon — and then two episodes of Nova on PBS. One was about these men who study glaciers in France and the other was about scientists figuring out why a plane crashed. And I knitted and knitted and knitted.

Feb 21 — Rain again. Still sick. Chloe spent the night here last night which was wonderful! We stayed up too late talking and watching tv and knitting. This afternoon Dan drove us all to the yarn store in Encinitas and he bought me enough beautiful yarn to make a sweater! I’m going to make the bpt sweater on knitty.com. I bought Lamb’s Pride worsted (85% wool, 15% mohair) in a lovely red. I made a sample and it’s working up at a bigger gauge than is called for in the pattern (4 st/inch instead of 5 st/inch) even with needles two sizes smaller, so I’ll have to alter the pattern. But I can do it. Mom came over tonight, and Dan helped her with her computer while I helped her with her knitting, and then we all watched Best in Show.

Feb 19 — Feeling slightly better. Sort of. We picked Chloe up around noon and brought her home, and then we lay around and knitted and watched Henry play “Super Smash Brothers” on the gamecube. Neat game. Chloe has finished the yoke of her sweater and is working on the body! It’s so pretty, such a lovely shade of brown. Then we took Henry to gymnastics and he bounced, and then we went over to Sal’s for my student and to fix Bob’s dinner etc. Chloe came back home with us to spend the night! We got smoothies on the way home, yum. After Henry was in bed, we watched Jeopardy (super geek boy won the first part of the Teen Tournament) and then Survivor which Chloe is all into — we scoffed at first but it was really quite entertaining! I guess we’ll have to stop picking on our friends who watch it :) We’re looking forward to next week’s episode now, heheh. Next week there will be “A Big Twist” ooooooooooo!

Feb 18 — Still sick, cancelled all the piano students today but I did manage to take Henry to Karate. Sat in the car, coughed, and read while he was in class. It rained and rained, and we lay around playing videogames and watching Star Trek.

Feb 17 — Dan gave me a Valentine’s Day present today! It’s a lovely sterling silver 18″ 2mm square wheat-chain necklace. It’s elegant and so pretty! I love it.

I’m still sick. Pardon me while I go cough up a lung. Ok I’m back. Blood test said I don’t have agranulocytosis which is good. I do have a bit more of an appetite today.

Feb 16 — Still sick. Cough cough cough. Henry and I played videogames and watched Star Trek today. I went to the lab to get my blood tested again.

Feb 14 — Been sick the last couple of days, ugh. Feeling slightly better now but extremely tired. Bah. Happy Valentine’s Day, dearest Dan, and thanks for taking such good care of me all the time.

Feb 11 — Took Chloe down to Encinitas to a lovely yarn store called Common Threads. Terribly ugly website, really great yarn store. Chloe bought nice brown yarn to make a sweater, and I bought one skein of very fine blue wool/nylon yarn to make gloves for Henry. He chose the color. I carefully folded up the label, tucked it into my purse, and promptly lost it, grr, so I don’t even know the name of the yarn or the exact fiber content.

Feb 10 — Didn’t get enough sleep last night, felt moldy all day. Henry felt crummy too and ended up with his usual pukey-headache thing. It’s half-past 8 and we’re going to bed to try to catch up on some sleep.

Feb 09 — Henry helped me with the groceries again this morning, and then I did a ton of laundry and cooked lunch and by the time that was all over it was 2:30 and we went over to Sal’s and hung out with Chloe. I taught her how to turn a heel and we watched Henry swing on his rope swing. And then Jack came home from his boat outing and he drove us over to Karate and we three watched Henry’s class. It was SO hot whie we were shopping, earlier, so I under-dressed and then I was freezing at night. Brrr. And now I’m very very tired and it’s time for bed.

Feb 08 — Picked up Henry a bit earlier than usual so we could hang out with the Robinsons! We all went to the beach in the afternoon. I taught Chloe how to knit cables and she’s got a sock started. Henry ran around bouncing with joy — there’s nothing happier than a little boy frisking around on the beach! It got really really cold after a while and we went back to Sal’s house.. Kirsten and Marcos were there too and we all piled onto the big sofa-bed and watched “A Mighty Wind” again. Lots of fun!

Feb 07 — Slept until 1, got up, went to bagel store, came home, ate bagels. Then I worked on my bag until Dan got up, and then we hung around. Went out to get him a pizza and then Sal and Chloe came over! Dan helped Sal with her computer and then we all watched “A Mighty Wind” which was even better the second time. After they left, we watched “Lost in Translaton” which was excellent! Very good movie, wow.

Feb 06 — Did I mention our Fred Astaire Marathon this week? Good old Turner Classic Movies played three Fred movies on Monday so we TiVo’d them. Henry and I watched “Shall We Dance” and “Royal Wedding” on Monday, and most of “Top Hat” today. We’ll finish that one soon. Oh, Fred Astaire is so wonderful. Henry likes “Royal Wedding” the best. For days he’s been humming the number that Fred dances in the gym with the hat-stand! Dum, da-DUM-dum, da-DUM-dum, DA-DUM! Dum-dee-dum-dee-dumdy…

I woke up far too early today. Blah. Henry and I ran a few errands — bank, library, toy store — and then came home, and I lay around until Chloe called in the afternoon and we went over to House of Sal. Jack drove us to the beach where I lay around. Henry ran about and played in the sand and jumped off the rocks and had a fine time! It was really nice to hang out with Chloe and Jack at the lovely beach.

After we got back to Sal’s house, I fixed her email problem and added names to her address book and bookmarks to her browser. And then Henry played at the bionicle website until Matthew came to pick him up. And now I’m home with Dan! We watched Jeopardy, which we enjoy so very much. I love the wordplay categories, and anything to do with art or music or general cultural stuff. I hate categories that involve vice-presidents, chemistry, and war-stuff.

Feb 05 — Had an early appointment with my endocrine guy to take more bloooood and see if I am hyperthyroid again. I’m pretty sure I am, and he thinks so too. So I’m back on 20mg of methimazole instead of 10. I worked on my new bag all morning, after I got home, and Henry went biking with Sal fora bit. And then he and I watched Star Trek; it was “Amok Time” which is an excellent episode. Henry loved it. He ran to his room and put on his Spock costume while we were watching :) And then I took him to gymnastics, and then we went over to Sal’s house and I taught a student and set up her new iBook and we hung out with the wonderful Robinsons for a long time.

Feb 04 — Long day, wasn’t feeling all that great. Chloe, Jack, and Susan arrived from NY and it was wonderful to see them again! I had a cancellation so was able to hang out with them for a while in the afternoon. When I got home I was feeling anxious and depressed, and Dan was feeling kind of down, too, but we sat together and cheered each other up :)

Feb 03 — Sewed some great boots for Henry, following MissRoo’s instructions for fleece slippers on craftster.org. I measured his his feet and made the pattern taller and narrower and they turned out _great_! And I made his green felt Link hat last night, so he’s got a really excellent Link costume now :) Oh here is a photo.

Feb 02 — It’s pouring rain right now (10:30pm). We were watching tv a while ago and we heard this funny noise… and it took a while to figure out what it was, heh. That’s how often it rains here. Anyway I had an ok day. I think I’m going hyper-thyroid again, just haven’t been feeling “right” for the last few days. Bah. Blood test again on Thursday morning. Did the vacuuming this morning, finally, and the laundry. This afternoon, before karate, Henry and I went to the drugstore and then to the fabric store — he wanted a pointy green hat for his “Link” costume so we bought some green felt, and also some black fleece so I can try to make boots for him, and I got some really pretty plaid stuff on sale for the lining of the bag I plan to make. And I dropped off my good Gingher shears to be sharpened. And then we went to the park for a while, and then to karate. I started Dan’s second green glove, and during the Antiques Roadshow tonight I got all the way up to the second finger. Just two more and a thumb and then I’ll post pics.

Feb 01 — Yesterday Dan and Sal went bike riding, and I stayed home and knitted and worked on my skirt. In the evening Sal came over and I started a scarf for her to knit, and she played with my iBook and decided that she wants one, and we watched part of “A Fish Called Wanda”. What would Plato do?

Had a good long sleep last night, yay. We went to the Apple store in La Jolla to pick up a new iBook for Sal, then picked up H. Everyone was watching the Superbowl so there was no traffic anywhere. Lovely.

Jan 30 — Grocery shopping in the morning, with a stop at Einstein Brothers for a nice breakfast of bagels and cream cheese. Henry’s such a good helper! Then I lay around the rest of the day, built a couple of K’Nex modles with Henry, cooked for the guys, worked on pinning and basting my skirt. Henry and Dan are playing with Dan’s new midi-keyboard thingy… Recording and sampling Henry’s voice, testing out all the various sounds etc.

Dan and I watched “O Brother Where Art Thou” tonight and really enjoyed it! It seemed a lot better the second time. It took me a couple of years to get used to the music but now I love it. I wish the soundtrack included the version of “I’ll Fly Away” that was in the movie. The slide guitar in the “main” version of “Man of Constant Sorrow” is so cool! Clooney is kind of annoying but I could watch John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson all day long.

Jan 29 — Woke up before it was light, ugh. Lay around a while, got up, and created a set of knitting needles for Henry and some hair-sticks for me out of a 3/16″ dowel. I cut the needles 8″ long, sharpened the ends, sanded them with very fine sandpaper, rubbed them well with waxed paper, then buffed them on a cloth. Then I made some polymer clay knobs for the ends, baked them, and glued them on. Presto, a nice set of boy-size knitting needles for Henry’s knitting project. They should be much easier for him to handle than my long flexible needles. I made three, btw, so in case one gets stepped on or mislaid he’ll still be able to knit :)

Then I watched three episodes of Star Trek and picked out the seams of a pair of jeans that will soon be a skirt. I know you youngsters call it “Star Trek: TOS” but to me it is and always will be Star Trek. The real thing. First episode was “Court Martial”, a sort of average episode. Then “The Naked Time” which I think is somewhat better than average. Love that “itchy” music when the virus spreads. Also there’s a Kirk/Spock fistfight which is entertaining, and Uhura gets to take the helm for a while. Then “The Galileo Seven” which is ok… but not a great one. Quit picking on Spock, everyone, he’s your COMMANDING OFFICER for the mission! Do what he says and shut up about it. Oh, wait, then there wouldn’t be an episode.

We went to homeschooler park day this afternoon, which was lovely. Henry ran around with the kids for two hours playing an elaborate army game, the one they play every week, and I knitted a glove for Dan. Then we went to gymnastics, then to Sal’s so I could teach a student and help my dad. Long, but nice, day!

Jan 28 — I got my sample glove done enough so Dan could try it on, and I see what I need to change to make the real ones fit perfectly. So I bought some nice green yarn on my break tonight so I can start the real ones soon.

Jan 27 — I did a ton of housework this morning and kind of got worn out but the kitchen is very clean and so are the bathrooms and I even straightened out the bedroom and living room somewhat. Made a new pair of stretchy pants for Henry (white, so he can be Link from the Zelda games) and started fingerless gloves for Dan because his hands are always so cold in the morning while he’s working. We watched Monday’s new Antiques Roadshow tonight! Oh how I love that show.

Jan 26 — Made a new apron out of some old blue calico that was lying around. It’s nothing special so I’m not adding it to my crafts page, but I had fun making it! I started a new book, “Devil May Care” by Sheri McInnis, and so far so good.

Jan 25 — We re-arranged the furniture. Man what a job. We moved the 8′ Henry-and-Kara computer table and my sewing table over near the sliding door, where Dan’s desk used to be, and we moved the Dan desk into what’s supposed to be the dining area where the Henry-and-Kara table used to be, and we brought the other 8′ table out of the bedroom (YAY!) and into the dining area so Dan has a nice corner work area now! And I have natural light for sewing. And all the garbage got cleaned out of some areas where garbage was piled, yay :) And some things even got thrown out!

Jan 24 — This evening Dan declared that he wanted to take me clothes shopping! So we drove through the rain (!) to the Mall, and I got an adorable little pajama set at Victoria’s Secret — mint green tiny drawstring shorts with little cherries printed on them, and a matching mint green tank top. And then from the sale rack at The Gap I got a pair of black capris and some really neat orange pants… hard to describe. But anyway they were only $10 each! Super-bargain! I was a little bit startled by the sizing, though. The capris are 1s and the orange pants are loose-fitting 2s. Umm… I thought I wore at least a 4 and probably a 6. Is this that resizing-because-americans-are-fat thing I heard about? I pulled a pair of mushroom-colored velveteen jeans off the rack, size 8, thinking, hey maybe they’ll be just a little loose… well you could have fit 2.5 of me in them. Crazy. If you know anything about dressmaking, you’ll know that if you’re an 8 in today’s patterns, you’re probably a 12 or 16 in vintage patterns. Which means that I wear off-the-rack size one, and vintage pattern size 16. I think that’s funny.

On our way back to the car we passed through the pots and pans in Robinsons, and we got a lovely huge T-Fal pan to replace our ancient, peeling, grocery-store frying pan. In the store we weren’t sure if it was bigger than our old pan, but we knew it was nicer. When we got home we compared them and it’s much bigger. So I can cook more pancakes at once, heheh :) We had fun shopping!

Tonight I finished my knitted hot-water bottle cover (which I will post over in crafts asap) and we watched a pretty-good old movie called “Smile” about a 1975-or-so beauty pageant. Very nice day!

Jan 23 — Happy Birthday Beautiful Mother! We hope you have fun on the mountain!

I taught Henry to knit today, and he picked it up pretty fast. I was surprised. He’s working on a little garter-stitch scarf :) I told him not to worry about the little mistakes, to just keep knitting and enjoy himself. He told me yesterday that he wished he had spiky hair, and I said he could if we just bought some gel, and he got ALL excited and could not rest until he had some gel of his very own. I think one of his super-heroes, megaman maybe, has spiky hair. So spiky hair is very important. Tonight at Karate he got his blue-belt-with-a-black-stripe that signifies that he’s in the Black Belt Club! He’s very proud and is all prepared to set a good example in class. They did the second kata (I can’t spell it, sorry) and he did quite well. He and Dan went biking again in the afternoon and had a lot of fun together!

I’m still working on the hot water bottle cover, and will be done tomorrow I think. I have SO many projects boiling around in my head! I want to sew a great messenger-style bag with lots of pockets, and I have an idea for a crazy sort of bag with thrift-store LPs for its sides (last night in bed I think I figured out the logistics of lining it), and I bought some extremely pretty blue flowered rayon for some capris, so I need to make a pattern for those, and I have cloth for a new pair of Stretchy Pants for Henry, and and and… :)

Jan 22 — Took Henry to the local Homeschooler Park Day this afternoon and we both had a great time. He found some nice kids to play with and I sat with the moms and knitted. The weather was perfectly lovely, too. And then we went to his gymnastics class, and then over to House of Parents to make Dad’s dinner and teach a piano student who, I guess, forgot to come. Oh well, these things happen. Got photos from my friend Ute in Germany and her kids are so beautiful! Thanks Ute — I’ll write soon, I really will :) Spent _far_ too much time at craftster.org today. A good forum is a wonderful and addictive thing.

Jan 21 –Grocery shopping in the morning (Henry helped and Dan carried everything up) and then piano students all afternoon. Everyone did so well today! I really like my job, yay. How many people can honestly say that? Of course I teach very, very part time… It’s hard work and I’m sure I’d get burned out if I taught full-time. I’ve been hanging out at craftster.org lately. What a great site! I started in the knitting section, and then made my way though some of the clothing and bags and purses. I still have TONS of posts to read and I’ve found so many inspiring ideas! I really want to sew a messenger bag soon. I started knitting a cover for our red rubber hot water bottle last night, using gray and blue worsted in fair isle patterns! It’s going to be nice and cozy.

Jan 20 — Hobbit sock post is up on my crafts page! Thanks, Henry, for letting me borrow your camera and for taking the nice overhead shot :) Mom and Dad gave me a silent ionizer/air purifier thing and I set it up and it’s cleaning the air in our bedroom! Soooo cool!

Jan 19 — Finished those Hobbit socks before bedtime! Photo soon. Dan and Henry took an 8-mile bike ride this afternoon and had a great time together, while I stayed home in the quiet! I love my family so much but it is nice to have the apartment to myself for a few hours now and then :) Every night Dan lets me play Stuntcar Extreme (a.k.a. race-car-game) on his new Zodiac. I beat the first level and won all the cars, and now I’m working on the second level. To win one guy’s car I had to do a lap on the “Ring Of Fire” track in less than 24 seconds… and last night I did it! I won a good car, too. I hate the Rollercoaster track, but I’m good at all the others. It’s a really great game.

Henry loves a little Bach minuet in g minor, so I taught him the right-hand part of the first 8 measures. It’s too tricky for him to simply memorize right away so he has to look at the music, which is good for him. He can do it pretty well and he has such excellent rhythm. He feels those eighth notes and we don’t even need to count them. He sets his keyboard to “pipe organ” and I play the left-hand part along with him and it sounds great!

Jan 18 — We went down to Balboa Park to see the SD Junior Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet, which was wonderful. Those kids are amazing! Then we picked up Henry, got dinner, and came home. I did almost all the driving so I’m pretty tired now. It was a very good day :)

Jan 17 — Sewed, finished knitting a Hobbit Sock, went down to Value Craft for elastic and picked up a ball of gray yarn — planning to knit a hot-water-bottle cover with it and some leftover blue yarn.

Jan 16 — Dan updated his book blog today with a nice long post about Dragonflight. Henry had a bike ride with Sal in the morning and another ride with Dan in the afternoon, then an hour-long karate class — so I imagine he’ll sleep well tonight. I modified my t-shirt underwear pattern again and made another pair this morning and they fit perfectly! Modifications are complete! I knitted the toes of Henry’s hobbit socks, but after some trying-on sessions we both decided that they’ll really be too uncomfortable to wear. So he helped me rip back the individual toes and I’ll make a regular sock-toe instead. Oh Dan showed me the hilarious slashdot posting regarding putting a man back on the moon. I laughed until the tears ran down my face. Be warned, the language is, um, salty: Kennedy vs. NASA. Keep scrolling down the page. Some of the later comments are pretty good too :)

Jan 15 — Scheduled an appointment with the Sensei to discuss Henry joining the Black Belt Club at his dojo. Henry’s very very eager so I hope it works out. He’s been taking karate for over two years now; he loves it and we’re very happy with the school, the Goju Karate Center in Carlsbad. I’m downloading “drivers” for my new scanner for my windows box… except HP doesn’t offer just the drivers for download — you have to get an entire enormous software package. It’s taking 40 minutes to download on our broadband so I feel sorry for anyone with dialup. Gripe, gripe, gripe :) I’m still feeling a little better every day. Yesterday I had enough ambition to take a little walk around the apartment complex. I walked moderately briskly for about 12 minutes and it felt nice. I was a little tired afterwards but not very much. I’ve also noticed that my enthusiasm for all my many hobbies and interests is returning! I have a big pile of discarded t-shirts to transform into underwear, and I’ve just knit a new pair of socks for Henry and have started some nifty Hobbit Feet socks for him too! I got the eyelash yarn under control. He tried them on today and is delighted! Photos soon.

Jan 14 — You may have noticed the two perma-links at the top of my main page — one for Lileks’s Daily Bleat which everyone should read, and another for The Android’s Library. The Android’s Library is Dan’s new book-blog, and I think it’s great! I like the layout and the plan and his reviews. He doesn’t have a lot of reviews up yet but give him some time :)

Jan 13 — Nice weather so I hung the blankets on the balcony railing to air, washed the sheets and pillowcases, and fluffed up the featherbed. Other than that I had a nice lazy morning, then taught a couple of students in the afternoon. For dinner tonight I made myself this lovely delicious pile of onion, garlic, green pepper, eggplant, and tomato, all sauteed up in some olive oil. Mmmmmmmmmm. Started working on the foot-part of Henry’s hobbit socks, and ran into a little trouble with the eyelash yarn. When I work in stockinette stitch, the hairy part ends up on the wrong side of the fabric — the inside of the sock! Why why why. I guess I’ll post a question on one of the crafty forums.

Jan 12 — Decided to do some grocery shopping this morning, instead of waiting for Dan to drive me after he was done with work. Henry and I started with a lovely breakfast at Einstein Brothers (courtesy of the gift-card that Mom gave us) and then did the Stater Brothers shopping, the the Trader Joe’s shopping. Henry’s so helpful — I can send him anywhere in the store to find anything and he’ll come back with it, almost every time. It was nice to be out in the morning. The weather has been perfect lately, sunny but not hot, with that pleasant wintery (for SoCal) feel and smell in the air. Matthew picked Henry up after we were done shopping, and I came home. Dan unloaded the car for me, and then I spent several hours just resting on the couch and puttering around. When he was done with work we went out again, this time for the Atkins bars that he likes from yet another store, then to Michael’s so I could pick out some yarn for my Hobbit Foot Sock project, then to the library! Ahhhhhh the library. Got a good stack of books. Home again, made dinner, watched Jeopardy and the Antiques Roadshow. Oh I do love the Antiques Roadshow. Then bed, and started “Good Faith” by Jane Smiley. I read her “Moo” years ago and enjoyed it, and “Good Faith” so far is great.

Jan 11 — Played “Hobbit” on the gamecube with Henry, and took him down to the playground to practice riding his new bike. He found a little girl to play with and had a fine time while I read “Drinking the Rain” which was excellent. I am really enjoying my Zire 71 even more now that I have an SD card large enough to hold a variety of mp3s. Using PocketTunes, if I turn the DB Boost up to 3x (loud enough to hear over the noise of my rattley old car) we can plug my car speakers into the headphone jack and have music even when I forget my cd player. And I have a “bedtime” playlist with some of my favorite TMBG and a few other soothing tunes. I turn the volume down quite low so I have to concentrate to hear the music, and I think it helps me sleep. PocketTunes lets you set it to turn off after a certain number of minutes, so I don’t have to worry about turning it off or killing my battery before the alarm goes off in the morning!

Jan 10 — Henry and I went on our special outing that we had planned for a Christmas present! We caught the 9:40am Coaster from Carlsbad Village Station, had a nice ride, and got downtown in about an hour. The Santa Fe station is so beautifully old. We looked at a map of downtown and decided we could catch the #7 bus to Balboa Park, so we walked a couple blocks down Broadway and there was a bus stop. A pleasant old man told us the #7 would be fine and that our Coaster tickets would be good for the bus, too. So it came along pretty soon and we hopped on. Took only a few minutes to get to Balboa Park, and we got off at the stop across from the Pepper Grove Playground.

Henry had a burning ambition to swing on the swings so he did that, and played for an hour or so, and then we walked across the parking lot to the Rueben H. Fleet Science Center. Bought admission tickets to the Gallery (the fun stuff) and had a little snack in the cafe. Then went in, and had a great time looking at and playing with the exhibits. They had a little build-it-yourself arch bridge that Henry loved, and a neat “weightless” mirror, and a tornado generator, and all sorts of great stuff. We took a lot of photos with Henry’s camera but haven’t unloaded them yet. Maybe tomorrow. And I bought Henry a little model space shuttle at the gift shop, which thrilled him to no end as we usually don’t buy anything when we go to the museums.

After a while we walked over to the carousel and bought tickets (6/$9) and had three rides together :) Wonderful fun! The same nice gentleman who ran the carousel when I was a kid is still running it. We rode the Cats, the Roosters, and the Zebras. Then we walked over near the zoo and rode the mini-train once, and then went into the zoo. It was only an hour before they close the gates so we strolled right in — ah the joy of membership! I was very hungry so Henry led me right to a nice cafe where I had a tasty, freshly-made sandwich. The counter-guy was super-nice. (that cafe is to the right, through a gift-shop when you first enter the zoo). Then we went over and said “hi” to the Orangutans and Guenons, and Henry climbed on some poles, little monkey.

At about 3:50 we caught a cab from the line-up near the zoo entrance and went back to the train station to catch the 4:22 back to Carlsbad. Got there in plenty of time (we’d bought our return tickets in the morning — I highly advise doing this, as the ticket machines don’t always work properly and there’s quite a jam of people just before train-time) The train was a bit crowded on the way home, and we shared seats with a nice family of five — mom, dad, two little girls and a sleepy toddler boy. Henry and Madelyn got on famously and played I Spy until the family got off the train at Encinitas. I knitted Henry’s second sock and finished it except for weaving the toe. And then soon our stop came up and we picked up our car and came home! It was a truly wonderful day.

In completely unrelated news, my favorite song lately is “Certain People I Could Name” by They Might Be Giants. I will give you an url to the lyrics, and I’m sure you can find the song on limewire or somewhere. If you like it, buy the album: Long Tall Weekend. It has many wonderful songs such as “Older”, “Operators are Standing By”, and “Rat Patrol”. Support good artists!

Jan 09 — Henry and I went over to Sal’s to spend some time with Kathy before she flies home to KY tomorrow. We’ve really enjoyed seeing her, and Henry adores her. Henry was a little tired so we lay around in Dad’s room and watched Finding Nemo all together. Not a bad movie. Then Henry perked up a bit and we went to the park for a while — Kathy and I pushed him on the swings and admired him when he jumped off. Also he performed some gymnastics on the grass. Fun afternoon :) Then I took him to Karate, and then we came home. I started a new pair of socks for him the other day, using cheap-o 80% acrylic/20% wool yarn, and got one finished today during the movie and the leg and heel of the next done during Karate.

Jan 08 — Cleaned under the kitchen sink, as instructed by the flylady. It took less than 5 minutes, I think! Yay me. Took Henry to gymnastics and then continued on to teach a student. We’ve had the TiVo record Jeopardy for us lately, and that’s fun to watch together after I get H to bed in the evenings. Oh forgot to mention that the season premiere of Antiques Roadshow was on the other night! What a huge treat! They replaced Dan Elias (Android Dan) with a chirpy blonde woman… she’s ok but a little too “cute” for my taste. Maybe she’ll calm down a little in later episodes.

Jan 07 — Got another 11 hours of sleep, yay. Felt well enough, for the first time since October, to drive myself to work instead of making Dan drive me. Went ok, was just averagely tired at the end of the day. Although I’m feeling better, it’s a bit depressing to know that _probably_ the drugs aren’t actually fixing my ailment, but suppressing it. There’s a small chance the Graves Disease will go into remission so I’m hoping for that. But oh well — as Dan says, I won’t ever have to go back to feeling as awful as I did for the last few months of 2003, no matter what, and that’s good. And I can enjoy feeling better.

I sewed another pair of stretchy pants for Henry this morning and he’s so delighted! We bought this red cotton knit a while ago for $.99/yard and got three pairs of pants out of it, good deal. I don’t know where his clothes go. They seem to simply disappear off the face of the earth. He needs socks desperately. Started knitting a new pair and will buy a pack of cotton ones asap, poor kid.

I tried to read the 5th Harry Potter book, I really did. Couldn’t do it. Sorry, J.K, I just don’t find that world believable anymore. Sigh. Why, oh why, would a community of wizard-types be so fearfully upset by “underage wizards” practicing a little magic? It’s unfair. Magic is in their blood; it seems unreasonable that they can’t do magic when they’re not in school. How are they supposed to practice? I know the author devised this to create conflict, but there had to be a better, more believable, way.

Jan 06 — Sorry I didn’t complete yesterday’s entry; I felt rotten all day, but I went to bed early, got 11.5 hours of sleep, and felt better today. Kathy’s in town so she accompanied us to Henry’s Karate lesson, which was fun! Went to the doctor and they sucked more blood out of me for testing. Bah. Helped Henry start a bionicle website today, and read him some more of The Hobbit (He’s got the gamecube game and it’s making him want to know the story better. I think it’s funny that he knows LotR backwards and forwards but not The Hobbit.) Made a delicious dinner of fetuccini with sauted fresh garlic and chopped canned roma tomatoes, mmmmmmm. Oh, I found enough blue yarn in a the closet to make another pair of socks for Henry. I haven’t felt well enough to knit in months, so we’ll see if I can get started with some socks.

Jan 05 — I just finished my photos from Monterey page. Enjoy :) More later…

Jan 04 — Kept Henry company in his room while he built a complex Bionicle model — some kind of crab-like creature, pretty cool. Also made him a new pair of stretchy pants and documented the process with his digicam so I can make a how-to page one of these days (it’ll show up on crafts when I get around to it). I did not sleep well so I felt pretty tired all day, but still managed some housework and playing with Henry. Dan’s working on a new blog-type thing and using Moveable Type, so I’m getting a little bit interested in modernizing my blog… yeah I know I’ve said it before but you never know, it might happen someday. I will soon be the last person on the planet who codes her blog by hand. I should have called all my piano students today to remind them about lessons next week and set up all the make-up lessons, UGH. Let’s put it off one more day. Finished “Millie-Molly-Mandy” (wonderful!) and started the most recent Harry Potter book, whatever it’s called. I prefer reading it in print, rather than ebook, because it’s easier to skim the annoyingness and find the PLOT.

Later… Ok we just watched one solid hour of entertaining, non-rerun television. Amazing. First was a rather good new episode of Malcolm in the Middle, better than average, and then this week’s episode of Arrested Development which is a wonderfully funny atypical non-sitcom show that everyone should watch. Just try it next week, Sunday night at 9:30 on Fox, and give it two or three episodes and see if you don’t like it as much as I do. It has a continuing storyline and numerous characters so you’ll feel as if you’re coming in on the middle of something, but you’ll catch up. Fox executives, _please_ let this show continue unchanged! Keep the writers! Don’t add a laugh-track! Just leave it alone; it’s perfect. While I’m on the subject of TV, a little suggestion to all the people in charge — take the ads for other shows off of the bottom of the screen please! Do you have any idea how annoying that is?

Jan 03 — I’m tired. Did two loads of laundry (Dan hauled it back up from the laundry room for me), mopped one bathroom, played with Henry. This evening Dan took us grocery shopping so we have food again, yay. Yeah I guess I’ll go to bed.

Jan 02 — Drove from Buttonwillow to home! It rained and it rained, which was not really a problem until we got to Hell On Earth, I mean Los Angeles. Driving through LA traffic in the rain is not fun. But anyway we made it home just fine, and were glad to see our little birdy again! Henry came home in the evening and told us all about everything he’d been doing. Wonderful boy, I missed him so much. He brought his new Hobbit gamecube game to share and coached me while I played for a bit. Pretty fun. It’s good to be home. We missed Henry, the bird, and the Tivo. After I got Henry to bed we sat around and enjoyed the luxury of pausing a show, skipping commercials, and watching what we want when we want. Oh TiVo we love you. Oh I updated my books page, in case you want to see what I read on vacation. Also working on a page of trip photos but it’s not done yet so you can’t have the url :)

Jan 01 — Woke up pretty late, checked out of Hilton, returned videos (highly recommend “Bend It Like Beckham”), drove through the rain down 101. Such a pretty drive! It’s not Grand Canyon Spectacular or anything, but I enjoy the farms and little towns, each with a McDonalds, a Mobil Gas, and a Denny’s, the happy-looking little groups of cows grazing near the road, and the nothingness between towns. You have to drive for hours from my house to get to any nothing. I like the farm houses in the middle of great fields, with trees planted around them. Lots of nice things to look at along that drive, and the rain made it even prettier. Yeah I’m a little odd :) Drove all the way to Buttonwillow and stopped for the night at the Motel 6, had dinner, and read far too late — finished “Beautiful Bodies” which was wonderful and I could not put it down `til I was done.

Dec 31 — Happy new Year’s Eve, people. We had a good day — slept late (but not late enough due to noisy hotel neighbors) then drove out to get Martinelli’s, videos, and food. Then settled back in the hotel for the rest of the day, very relaxing and pleasant. We watched “Bend It Like Beckham” which was a wonderful movie, and then X-Men 2, which we’d seen before, in the theater, and liked so we knew it would be fun to see it again and it was. And we drank our sparkling juice, and ate — I bought some very good sourdough bread, “European Style” butter, and tomatoes, yummy yum yum! Paused the movie for a while around midnight to watch the Ball drop in Times Square.

Dec 30 — We’ve had a great day today! Slept late, then went to the charming little Monterey Chocolate Factory. A dear sweet woman gave us a little behind-the-scenes tour and we saw some machines mixing chocolate and some machines for squirting goo onto piles of nuts, and some racks of unfinished candies. And then we filled a box of assorted goodies from the piles of candy, mmm. Then we drove back toward downtown Monterey, ended up on Lighthouse St. and parked there to walk around a bit. Went into two used bookstores, one tiny and one larger, and browsed for ages. Bought just one Bill Bryson paperback, about travelling in Iowa I think. I’ll lend it to Mom when I’m done. Looks like a good book and the first paragraph had me laughing in the store. Also went into two junk/antiques stores and drooled over a very old phone… Dan says he could fix it to work in a modern jack so maybe we’ll go back tomorrow, after I’ve had time to think about whether I really NEED an antique phone. And we looked in the windows of some other places, and picked up some take-out menus. There’s a noodle place that looks really tasty. After we’d walked around for a couple of hours we came back to the hotel and placed another www.doorbelldining.com order, this time for Greek food. It’ll be here in about an hour, mmmmmm. Dolmades and tatziki!

Later… oh boy that was a good dinner. My dolmades came with three sort of side-dish things — a rice, cinnamon, and raisins dish, something made of green beans and tomato, and something lemony with white beans. Also came with a tasty fresh little salad and such good tangy tatziki. Mmmmmmmmm. Ate about half and saved the rest for later (I’m sure to be hungry again before bed) and finished off with a rich melty coffee truffle.

Dec 29 — I wanted Mexican food for dinner, but we didn’t want to go out in the pouring rain and deal with a restaurant. So Dan, my wonderful Dan, called the front desk to see if they knew anyone who delivered. Well they gave us a couple of numbers, but none of those restaurants actually delivered — however, in the course of investigations, one of them gave Dan the number for a multi-restaurant delivery service. He called them and asked if they had a website with menus — “Certainly sir, www.doorbelldining.com.” So we went there and, lo and behold, El Indio! So we browsed the menus for a while, and then noticed that the deadline for ordering for dinner tonight had passed. I was ready to give up, grr, but Dan called and checked with the guy, and the guy let him order! So now we’re waiting for hot nice non-fast food to show up at our door :)

Today it rained and stormed, very nice. We went to the Monterey Aquarium which was amazing! There were a billion people, man oh man. The place is huge — I had no idea. My favorite part was the darkened upstairs hallway with several tanks of beautiful jellyfish, glowing in the darkness. There was also a huge kelp forest tank that was fascinating, and a giant octopus, and a tank of large things such as tuna, a ray, and an enormous sea turtle. Fish are kind of creepy, but much of the non-fish sea life is eerily beautiful — jellies, crabs, coral, anemones, etc. We had a great time! Then we walked around in the rain for a while, and then came back to the hotel and hung around reading and so forth.

Dec 28 — Brr it got cold in here last night. Today we went to Long’s for hotel-snacks and atenolol, then drove down to the coast and parked by a lake, walked around and decided not to rent a paddle-boat, kept walking and looked at the boats parked in the marina. Very peaceful and pleasant. Kept going, got to one of the Fisherman’s Wharfs, watched the organ grinder’s monkey and went in the little Customs House museum — lots of neat old stuff and a pile of cowhides that smelled like my parents’ 1970s leather shop. Walked out on the Wharf, looked in windows, had a sample of chowder but wasn’t hungry enough for a whole bowl, darn it. Maybe another day. I do love a good clam chowder. Bought a couple of postcards, some blue cotton candy for Dan (gross) and a delicious thick espresso milkshake for me at a hole-in-the-wall ice cream place, mmmmmmm. There’s always room for ice cream! We could hear the sea lions barking and could see them out on the rocks when we got to the end of the wharf. Now we’re back in the hotel, lounging around :) We’ll spend the rest of the day snacking, reading, computing, and probbaly surfing the bad tv. Oh, Malcolm and Arrested Development shoudl be on tonight so that’ll be fun. Maybe we’ll go in the hot tub again later too. We can’t say “hot tub” with doing the Will Farrell/Rachel Dratch thing. :) Later… hey here’s a fun link! virtual paper snowlfake. Fun :)

Dec 27 — Woke up at 8:30 feeling nicely rested! Got showered and packed, then went down to the Buttonwillow Denny’s for breakfast — incredibly busy and we had to wait a long time but the food was tasty. Then we gassed up the Acura and headed for Monterey! Took the 46 across to the 101, really beautiful drive and I took lots of pictures, and then the 101 up to Monterey. Dan hates it when people say “the” 101 or “the” 5. Sorry Dan :) Our Yahoo directions were funky and we had to depart from them, but we found Monterey and our hotel with no problem, thanks to the GPS receiver. Very nice hotel :) We got unpacked and rested for a bit, and then ran through the corridors and explored. There are several drink machines but only one snack machine. Also there’s a jacuzzi! We went down and sat in it after dinner and it was soooo relaxing. My eyes are burning a little from the chlorine so I won’t stay in so long next time. We got totally pruney :) Now we’re lying around watching the funniest show on VH1 — something like “Outrageous Moments from Game Shows”. I’m laughing very very much. It’s a little embarrassing, though, because I am so familiar with the 70s shows.

Dec 26 — Hey if you emailed me and it bounced, please try again — everything’s fixed :)

Left for vacation today, around 11:30. Traffic through the entire Orange County/ Los Angeles area was just hellish. It’s the most stressful place to drive. Narrow lanes, people merging on from all directions, insane divers weaving all over the road. Traffic is very bad in SD but at least the freeways are wider and things make a little more sense. We hate it that we have to drive through LA in order to get anywhere. Anyway, once we got north of LA things cleared up a bit. That pass over the mountains is really beautiful, and the tops of the mountains were dusted with snow like powdered sugar, very pretty. When you get to Gorman, you know you’re almost to the top. Then down in valley the freeway is flat and straight and you can make good time and admire the cows and oil derricks. By the time we got to Buttonwillow we were glad to stop driving. We’re at the Motel 6 here for the night, and then finishing the drive to Monterey tomorrow. We have, in the past, driven from SD to Berkeley and even Santa Rosa all in one day… but it’s exhausting and stressful, and we figuured it’d be a whole lot more relaxing to do the drive in two hops. We had dinner at the Buttonwillow Denny’s, very tasty, and now we’re lounging around watching bad tv (no TiVo, aieeeee!) and IRCing. Dan dialed up off his phone and made us a little, slow, wireless network :)

Dec 25 –Merry Christmas everyone :) I lazed around all day, cut up one of Dan’s old shirts and made two pairs of underwear, made him a nice breakfast when he got up. We packed and did laundry and got ready for our vacation to Monterey. In the evening we cuddled on the couch and watched South Park.

Dec 24 — Today was our Christmas! Henry and I woke up at about 7:30 and entertained ourselves with cartoons and Zelda. Dan got up and 10, and then we opened our presents! Henry likes his Bionicles, his CDs, and his keyboard. Dan likes his new slippers, says they’re the best ones he ever had, and his tool set and the set of various resistors that Henry gave him. I like my books — Henry gave me “Then There Were Five” and Dan gave me “Spiderweb For Two” so now I own all the Melendy Family books by Elizabeth Enright! And I like my “Gigantic” DVD (documentary about They Might Be Giants, one of my favorite bands), and I like the pretty glass salt-and-pepper shakers that Henry gave me, and the new scanner that Dan gave me — he set it up for me already and I scanned a couple of photos! I’m sooooo glad to have it; it’ll really come in handy. We set up Henry’s nice keyboard (a gift from the wonderful Kenyon family) and he put on his new Rush mix CD (specially made for him by Dan) and was figuring out how to play along on his keyboard :) Sal came to pick him up for more play and bike-riding in the afternoon, and Kirsten and Marcos came over to watch Gigantic with us. Matthew picked Henry up from Sal’s house, he was late due to car trouble but did eventually get there, so Henry’s off with him for the next week or so. We watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off tonight — fun movie. Merry Christmas everyone!

Dec 23 — Yesterday Mom and Dad gave Henry his Christmas present — a lovely new bike! It’s a 6-speed green KHS “Raptor” mountain bike and he adores it. He said goodnight to it before he went to bed :) This morning Sal came over to take him riding — they didn’t have much time yesterday — so they’re out now having fun. What a lovely present! Here’s a fun game! weihnachtsmann! Click the mouse once to start the elves running, click again and hold to pull back the catapult, release to let Santa flyyyyyyyyyy. My top score is 337.2 :) Oh, turok just gave me an url to the strangest flash animation thing I’ve ever seen… Here you go: presidents.swf. Boy. I don’t even know what to say about that one except some people have a big imagination :) “Dwight Eisenhower invented ska.”

After Sal and Henry rode bikes for a while, they went shopping with Kirsten and Marcos. Dan and I went over to the house in the afternoon, and hung around. That was fun. We had dinner, and then opened presents — Dan and I got the wool socks we love, he got jeans, I got 8 more of the wonderful Costco cotton-spandex camisoles that I love. I live in those things, so comfy. Kirsten gave me a pincushion that’s just like the one Sal used when we were little — made of silk, dome-shaped, with a ring of little soft-sculpture silk Chinamen around it. I love it and I already filled it with my pins and threw away my hateful worn-out old pincushion. Everyone liked the handmade ornaments and cookies and framed Henry-photos that we gave them :) We sang carols for a while before we came home and that was so much fun. Mom can play SATB stuff, wish I could. Maybe I’ll practice.

Dec 22 — Baked two batches of cookies to give to people, wrapped things etc. Played a ton of Picturelogic — it sure looks good in high-res. Nice quiet day.

Dec 21 — Lazy day, not sure if I did anything at all… Oh yeah finished recording “A Bear Called Paddington” onto CD for Henry’s present, installed the latest version of picturelogic on my palm. Good game, been playing for years. Watched “Malcolm in the Middle”, re-run from around Valentine’s day, and it was an extra-good one. Very funny and entertaining. Also watched “Arrested Development” which is a new and good show, whoa I can’t believe I said those words. Everyone should read Lileks’s daily bleat every day.

Dec 20 — One of the previews before RotK was interesting. It was more like a commercial than a preview, and it was for the “NS-5”, some sort of “fully-automated domestic assistant”… I was a bit mystefied, but at the end the text came up: “3 Laws Safe” and I knew it had to be a movie based on something of Asimov’s! Did some searching online with friends and Rob came up with this page: www.irobotnow.com. Woooooo!

Dec 19 — My cold has progressed to the coughing stage. Feeling crummy. But Henry and I made a gingerbread house from a kit this morning — that was fun! In the afternoon we three went to see Return of the King! The theater was almost empty so that was nice, although an enormous tall man sat down right in front of Henry so we swapped places, and the woman behind me never stopped talking through the entire movie. I really don’t understand people… About the movie, I don’t want to give away any spoilers, so I’ll just say that if you ignore the wierd changes it’s an excellent movie and a fine ending to the trilogy. Thank you Peter Jackson and everyone! And especially Andy Serkis — you get to see him, the actor himself, in the movie for a short time so maybe they can finally give him an Oscar. He deserves one.

Dec 18 — Feeling better, just a slight cough now. I walked up two flights of stairs tonight and didn’t feel winded! Dan drove us to Henry’s gymnastics class, then over to the theater to buy tickets for RotK tomorrow afternoon, then over to Sal’s so I could teach. Oh yeah, last night Dan gave Henry his present early! It’s a great little digicam, not too expensive but still good enough to work well and give satisfying results. Henry was thrilled out of his mind when he saw what it was :) Dan gave it to him early so he’d have plenty of time to have fun with it before he leaves with Matthew for Christmas. It’s a Kodak EasyShare CX6200, and it’s a great little camera! The software it came with is easy enough for Henry to use on his own, so he can take photos to his heart’s delight and then look at them on his computer. He has been enjoying taking photos of his bionicles expecially much :) He sleeps with his camera on his bed, in its nice little case that Dan picked out. He loves it so! Oh and Dan gave me an early present too, a new 256MB sd card for my Zire71, which I loaded up with mp3s and I still have 71 megs free!, yay! And I gave my old 64MB card to Henry for his camera, so he’s got room for 100 photos on there now :)

Dec 16 — Whoever called us this morning while it was still DARK out (probably 4 or 5am) — and I know it wasn’t a server emergency, that I can forgive — I’d just like you to know I never got back to sleep and I feel extraordinarily wretched. DON’T CALL BEFORE DAWN for god’s sake. Oh yeah the doctor’s office called and I don’t have agranulocytosis, yay! Cancelled students and lay around all day feeling crappy. Talked to Chloe on AIM and that was fun. Henry helped me cut up veggies for soup and now he’s outside playing with one of the nice neighbor kids.

Dec 15 — The cable (both internet and tv) was out from morning until the guy came at 2pm! Someone had vandalized the apartment cable box, ugh. I had to go in to get my blood tested to see if I have agranulocytosis, a nasty possible side-effect of the methimazole. But it didn’t take long. I guess we’ll call a bit later and see if they got the results. My little illness is a mere sniffle now. I’m calling all my piano students and asking them to please stay home if they’re even a little bit sick. Trying not to catch anything ELSE.

Dec 14 — The other side of my throat was sore in the night, but not badly, and again I feel better in the daytime. Henry felt a little bit poorly this afternoon so he consented to watch “It Happened One Night” with me. (1934, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert) Wonderful movie and thanks to BobC for pointing out that it was on!

Dec 13 — Sore throat all night, but my morning it was a bit better. Now at noon it’s just tender-feeling, so I’m not going to the ER, just keeping an eye on myself.

Dec 12 — I felt really good most of the day — tried out “Intimate Settlers” (a two-player variation of the wonderful three-player game, “Settlers of Catan”) with Henry and had tremendous fun. Cooked a nice salad-and-steak lunch for Dan and he was very happy :) And then in the evening I realized that my throat felt funny… guess I picked up Mom’s recent sore throat. I’ve been dreading the prospect of catching a cold or virus, because my anti-thyroid medication has the rare but possible side effect of seriously messing up my immune system, so they told me to stop taking it and get my blood tested if I get sick. So I’m fairly depressed right now, because tomorrow is Saturday and I suppose the only place I can get my blood tested will be the ER, for which my insurance pays only a tiny fraction.

Dec 11 — Washed and dried all the sheets and pillowcases, with Henry’s help, and then Dan helped me fluff up the featherbed and make the bed all nice. So when we go to bed tonight it will be so luxuriously soft and clean and nice! I love our bed. It’s the size of a small European country, and we have a lovely puffy featherbed, then a flannel sheet, then me, then my lovely fluffy, flannel-covered feather comforter on top, and I have a down pillow with a real silk pillowcase that I made. It’s quite the lap of luxury.

Dec 10 — Finished “Dreams of Rescue” — it was good so I’m saving her other novel for our vacation. Also started “Brilliant” and it’s good so far so I’ll save it, too. Now I’m starting a book that doesn’t look so good, so that I can thin out my library pile, heheh.

Dec 09 — Henry and I worked on this nice craft project, making something I can’t talk about here because I don’t want to spoil anyone’s Christmas surprise :) But without going into details, our project turned out great! I’m still feeling considerably better. They took my blooooooood at the doctor’s yesterday, and will phone me with results eventually. The methimazole is helping my thyroid condition, without a doubt. Also I don’t have to even think about the pulmonary hypertension until January, probably, since they can’t even diagnose it properly until the Graves Disease get better. I even drove a little bit yesterday, out to teach and then get our Christmas Tree. I probably shouldn’t have, as I felt very very tired at night, but still it was nice to know I can. We got a darling little Noble Fir and set it up on the gray project table. It looks just lovely. I finished “The Here and Now” by Gregg Easterbrook which was a super-good book, and have started “Dreams of Rescue” which is promising! Oh the luxury of a stack of new library books is hard to beat.

Dec 07 — Here’s what I like: a big bowl of brown & wild rice, mixed with some black beans, chopped tomatoes, a big glob of sour cream, and a dash of soy sauce. It’s known as “glop” and I eat it for lunch and dinner, lately. Yum, so good.

Dec 06 — We slept nice and late and then Dan took me out to do errands. First we went to the library where I suffered severe book-greed and got almost more than we could carry, including a few that I’m going to read into my laptop to make audiobooks for Henry for Christmas. Then we went to OPT for B&W film, then to Stater Brothers for a few groceries, where we bumped into Sal and gave her a ride home. Traffic was hellish of course. Then we went to Barnes & Noble, and I browsed around and finally chose a lovely illustrated hardback “Child’s Garden of Verses” for Henrybot. I think he’ll like it, and I’ll enjoy reading the lovely poems to him. From there we walked over to Michael’s where I got some craft supplies to make presents with, also a kit for a Gingerbread House. From there we went to Target where I bought some Bionicles and a new cd case (to put Henry’s audiobooks in) and wrapping paper. Whew! And then we were all worn out. It took hours. So now we’re home, full of dinner, being entertained by the Glowing Box. I will list all the books I got for myself — I chose them on the merits of title/cover/blurb/quick-sample-at-random, so I’m sure a fair portion will be unreadable.
The Book of Spies: an anthology of literary espionage
Best Friends (Thomas Berger)
A Shortcut in Time (Charles Dickenson)
Shroud (John Banville)
Beautiful Bodies (Laura Shaine Cunningham)
Dreams of Rescue (Laura Shaine Cunningham)
A Newberry Christmas (collection of stories)
The Here and Now (Gregg Easterbrook)
Lucy (Ellen Feldman)
The Hotel Riviera (Elizabeth Adler)
Making Things Better (Anita Brookner)
Caramelo (Sandra Cisneros)
Getting it Right (William F. Buckley jr.)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling, yeah I’m the only person on earth who hasn’t read it yet)
The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque (Jeffrey Ford)
The Sinister Pig (Tony Hillerman)
Brilliant (Marne Davis Kellogg)
Antiques Roadshow Collectables (Carol Prisant)
The Greatest Minds and Ideas of all time (Will Durant)
Well! Now I have something to read. My only problem is: which books do I read now, and which do I save for our vacation to Monterey after Christmas? I need to make sure I have a big pile of good ones then, so maybe I’ll start a few and save some that seem particularly good.

Dec 05 — Went to pulmonary specialist at UCSD medical center… nice, intelligent man, really great office and nice people there. Don’t really want to talk about it though. Ugh. Very depressing. Here is an excellent _Not Suitable For Children_ flash animation on kernel_panic’s site: endofworld.swf. Yeah it take a long time to load but it’s worth it, heh. Oh, hey, John updated his blog (finally). “Parking for the Complete Idiot”.

Dec 04 — Helf (a.k.a ressedue) and I were talking about the wierd things a thyroid does when it gets out-of-whack, and he said:

ressedue (8:56:46 PM): yep
ressedue (8:57:11 PM): its like aligning the crystals in a lightsaber. if just a tad off in wrong degree it’ll blow up when you turn it on!

Ahhhhh the geekiness :) Doesn’t it warm your heart?

Dec 03 — Here’s what a VQ Scan is like: You breathe a radioactive gas for a few minutes, and then you lie in a huge camera-machine and it takes several pictures of your lungs. This takes 20 minutes or so. Then they inject you with some more radioactive goop and you get the pictures taken all over again. All the radioactive stuff has a half-life of about 6 hours, so my “healthy glow” faded pretty quickly ;-) They were testing for the risk of blood clots in my lungs, which can be a cause of Pulmonary Hypertension, but the test showed my risk is low. So that’s good, very good. Also I had another chest X-Ray. The whole thing took 2.5 hours — but almost an hour of that time was spent waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for a chance to initial a form. Henry and Dan went with me of course, and both of them stayed with me as much as possible. Today I felt well enough to clean one of the bathrooms. Oh, and we finished “The Four-Story Mistake” and started “The Phoenix and the Carpet” which is just wonderful!

Dec 02 — Ugh I’m sleepy. I just didn’t feel sleepy last night (although I felt bad all day from waking up at 5) so I read for too long and now I’m sorry. Sally took Henry out to play so at least he’s having some fun today. I have to go in for a VQ scan later and I’m dreading it.

Dec 01 — Henry told me today that he was concerned that maybe he was watching too much TV, and said that it is very hard for him to stop once he gets started. When he was very small I gave him three little cardboard “Tv Circles” which he could trade for some TV time. When the circles were gone, that was enough TV for the week. I stopped doing that when he got older, but he asked if we could do that again, as he thought it would help him keep his TV-watching under control. So last night after he went to bed he created 5 new TV Circles — we agreed that 5 would be a good number. He’s very pleased and proud. In other news, I’m still feeling sightly better. The depression comes and goes. It was a beautiful sunny clear winter day, so I even took Henry outside! Dan carried my nice chair out for me, and I sat and read while Henry bounced his ball and played in the sand. It was very good to get some fresh air and I didn’t even get horribly out-of-breath on the way back up the stairs.

Nov 30 — Lay around, made french toast for breakfast for a change and discovered that I don’t actually LIKE french toast. Ooooo got a new game for my iBook — Age of Mythology. Lots of fun so far, very very fun. Henry’s home!

Nov 29 — We’ve got this old wool blanket, not sure how old it is but it’s been in the family as long as I can remember. It’s sort of reddish-brownish and very scratchy — but it’s VERY warm. Dan calls it the Elven Blanket. My feet were as cold as ice a little while ago, so I filled up the hot water bottle, rested my feet on it, and draped the Elven Blanket over them. Dan’s got the rest of it on his legs, with his feet pressed up against me. Very cozy :) Henry phoned me tonight and told me all about the movies he saw this weekend and how he cleaned his room, and he told me to be sure to floss my teeth and keep my feet warm :)

Nov 28 — Still feeling a tiny bit better! Felt well enough to make a nice breakfast, and then we lay on the couch all day long. Let’s see, we watched “That Thing You Do” and “Galaxy Quest” yesterday, and finished up the movie marathon today with “Waiting for Guffman”. “That Thing You Do” was dull and uninteresting, but the other three movies were fun! “Guffman” is my least-favorite of Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries. It seems a shade more cruel than the others, but still it’s entertaining and has plenty of funny moments. Eugene Levy is wonderful, and Fred Willard makes you want to beat his character with a bat, as usual. “Galaxy Quest” is wonderful, very funny, especially if you’re a Star Trek fan.

. Nov 27 — Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I love my family so much — the best family in the world. Everyone is smart and funny and different! I love you Dan, Henry, Sally, Bob, Jean, Kirsten, Marcos, Ken, Eiko, Kathy, Scott, John, Daniel, Chris, Jesse, Susan, Chloe, Jack, Jon, Rosie, Scott, Jennifer, Daniel, Mark, Luke, Ashley, Caleb, Mike, and Carol! Yesterday I woke up feeling a little better and we had fun making cranberry sauce (1 cup water, 1 cup sugar, 1 bag cranberries, cook til done) reading The Four-Story Mistake, and playing Wind-Waker. Taught my Wednesday students and it wasn’t as exhausting as the last few weeks. Henry went off with Matthew for the holiday — he’ll have a nice noisy time, I think. :) We rented 4 movies on the way home — “The Good Girl”, “Waiting for Guffman”, “Galaxy Quest”, and “That Thing You Do”. Watched “The Good Girl” last night and it was pretty good. Today I’m still feeling just a little better! They say I have pulmonary hypertension, too, so next week I have to go in for MORE tests and specialists and stuff… Ugh. But I’m not too worried because apparently it can be caused by graves disease, and if so can just go away again when the graves gets better. So lets hope that’s the case for me. Today we slept til noon and have been sitting around eating and watching bad tv :) Nice relaxing day!

Nov 25 — Henry’s off with Sal all day again, having fun. She says he did very well in karate tonight and that the Sensei complimented his focus! This was a long and difficult day. I went to bed at 9 last night, stopped reading well before 10, even, but I woke up ridiculously early and felt 100% miserable. Spent a couple hours just crying on the couch and then Henry woke up (nice and late, lucky boy) and cheered me up. Felt horribly depressed, sad, hopeless — comes with the Graves Disease territory, they say. Ugh. Just pretty much lay around until we went to the hospital at 2 for my echocardiogram. Don’t know results, they’ll tell me when they get around to it. Afterwards Dan bought me bagels at the new bagel place down the street, for a reward :) Right now I feel better than this morning, not so depressed and weepy. Early to bed again and this time with a big fat benadryl to knock me out.

Nov 24 — Every light is too bright, every noise is too loud. None of my friends ever update their blogs. I feel ill from looking at my computer screen all day but I don’t feel well enough to do anything else. Just now I spent a while just lying on the couch doing nothing, and then I made a simple-but-delicious sandwich. Henry spent the day with Sal — he’s not even home yet. They went biking and skating and I don’t know what all. It’s so wonderful that they like to play together, and so helpful for me right now. I feel bad because I can’t do anything fun with him, lately. Even reading to him wears me out. Anyway he had a good day I’m sure :)

Nov 22 — Slept 12.5 hours last night, yay. I wish I could sleep that much every night but usually Henry is here and I like to get up at a reasonable time to make his breakfast and spend the morning with him. I spent the _entire_ day on the couch. There was some entertainingly bad tv on for a while — saw the E! True Hollywood Story 2-hour special about Michael jackson, and then an hour of some show called, um, “True Spin” where they revealed facts about pop songs. I learned many life-enhancing facts. Did you know that “Jenny” (867-5309) was a real girl? Wooo!! Next I watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” on bravo. Really enjoyed that, great movie. Then several episodes of Seinfeld. I also spent a LOT of time at lileks.com. I think I’ve finally read everything there. Add some more, Mr. Lileks, please :)

Nov 21 — Yay it’s Friday and that means I don’t have to go anywhere or do anything. Last night I read the first chapter of The Four-Story Mistake to Henry. Great book. We read two more chapters today.

Nov 19 — The mom of one of my dear piano students brought me a Jamba Juice smoothie tonight :) She’s a nurse and says my doctor is very good, which is nice to hear. All my students did well today. We watched the rest of the first disk of TTT this afternoon, and then Dan drove me to work, cleaned the apartment, took care of Henry, and then picked me up from work again. Henry helped him clean up, brought me juice in the morning, and was an angel-child all day. Everyone is SO GOOD to me. There is no family better than mine. Oh since I’ve been pretty much lying around all the time I’ve had time to talk to Chloe a lot on the instant messenger. Wonderful Chloe :)

Nov 18 — On the way home from students and karate, Dan suggested renting The Two Towers Extended Edition (or whatever it’s called) which was released today. I had a $.99 coupon in my wallet, so we went to Blockbuster first. They had only two copies, and both were already taken. It wasn’t surprising — I can remember only one time when they actually had what we wanted. Then we went to Hollywood Video, who almost always has what we want. But they didn’t have it for rental, only for sale. So Dan bought it, heheh. We watched about an hour of it before Henry’s bedtime and it was great! So much extra stuff that really improves the movie.

Nov 17 — Another doctor visit today. Did I mention that what I have is called Graves’ Disease? Well I get to choose between drugs that MIGHT work and radioactive iodine that will most likely destroy my entire thyroid. So it’s drug time, let’s hope they work. I feel extremely horrible.

Nov 15 — Tab made blueberry muffins for me :) I lay on the couch all day. Sounds familiar, huh. I entertained myself with the backfence, (turn off cookies before you go there or they’ll make you register after reading one column) lileks.com, literary maps , and other internetty places. Also a few episodes of Seinfeld and most of Streetcar Named Desire.

Nov 13 — Got up at 7:30 again for the last part of that test. Was that really today? Man it seems like so long ago. I lay on the couch most of the day and read “Animal Dreams” from start to finish. NOW what will I read… Oh, more Pern will do. Dan drove us to Henry’s Gymnastics class and then to Sal’s so I could teach. I’m sooo tired. Tomorrow I don’t have to go anywhere, thank goodness. It’s exhausting to leave the house — we’re on the second floor. Too many stairs.

Nov 12 — Hello all you regular readers — sorry I haven’t been updating daily. But here I am, so don’t give up on me. I’m watching another Ken Burns documentary — the one about building the transcontinental railroad, part of the series about the West. I’ve seen every episode. It’s so good! I like how it doesn’t have any goofy re-enactments, just photos with interesting narration, and lots of contemporary letters and documents etc. Good stuff. In other news, I still feel rotten, yes indeed. I had a Thyroid Uptake Scan today. Dan drove me there early in the morning and again in the afternoon and we have to go again tomorrow morning. It has confirmed that, yep, I have hyperactive thyroid, like, five times more active than it should be. Ugh. Ah well. They say I’ll feel better someday. Henry and I have been playing Wario World and we really like it! It’s not insanely hard — Henry can do pretty well on his own with just a little help occasionally, and it’s fun for me too. Hmm, what else… I finished Sense and Sensibility, and now I’m reading the first Pern book, which I think is called Dragonflight but I’m not sure ’cause I’m reading it in my palm so I never see the title :) I have read the Dragonsong trilogy many times. Dragonflight is a lot… stiffer, shall we say, but still enjoyable.

Nov 09 — Today I slept until noon and woke up with the desire to make soup! So maybe I’m a little better, hard to say. Spent the rest of the day on the couch, alternately playing with my iBook and reading “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” which I’m enjoying. Tabatha not only cleaned the kitchen but also made fabulous banana-oat muffins! Oh also I tested my dvd drive with one of the new Zeppelin DVDs — cool :)

Nov 07 — Tabatha came to visit — she’ll be here for about a week! Sal took Henry out to run errands with her this morning, so I spent the first part of the day playing with Flash MX (got a neat tutorial). Then Dan dropped H and me off at Sal’s house so I could teach a student while he went to his guitar lesson, and then he came back and we hung around a while and then drove to the airport to get Tab. Traffic was HIDEOUS, but at least we’re home now. I still feel relatively rotten, bleah. Almost done with S&S, darn it. What will I read next… I don’t feel well enough to go to the library so I’ll have to make do with what I’ve got (and what #bookz has ;)

Nov 05 — Well finally I’m getting around to writing. I’ve been feeling pretty bad, but yesterday Mom took me to the doctor again and this morning I’m feeling a little better, maybe. Definitely mentally better. Hmm, what’s been going on… Dan surprised me with a new 12″ iBook G4 laptop last weekend, so I’ve been figuring out the Apple way of doing things. It’s a nice machine! It’s taking me a LONG time to get used to the touchpad, though. I’ve been reading “Sense and Sensibility” which I’ve read only once before, a long time ago, and I’m really enjoying it. Well, what else can you do with a Jane Austen novel? :)

Oct 31 — I slept extremely badly last night, don’t know why. Ugh. Felt tired and weepy all day. Henry (I mean Frodo) is down at Matthew’s house for Halloween.

Oct 29 — Fires still burning. Cuyamaca, near where we camp, is entirely gone. I was more hungry today and actually ate three meals. Henry went to the Karate Halloween Party and won a dojo t-shirt for “Most Original Costume” (Frodo Baggins)

Oct 28 — Mom drove me up to Irvine to see her homeopathic doctor, Dr. George, and he seemed really good. He said if I do his homepathic program, I’ll feel better in a month! Which would be SO good. And I don’t have to let the MDs destroy my thyroid. There was a new Antiques Roadshow on the TiVo tonight. My goodness, I sure do love that show. Tonight it was in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Every single person was pleasant. I especially like the woman with the Connecticut Ladder-Back Chair, the one with the little groove in the arm where she kept running her finger. She was so sweet and cheerful! I remember one Roadshow in which many of the people seemed grumpy and argumentative, but I don’t remember which city it was! (ought to avoid going there) I remember that the NYC episode was also filled with especially friendly, cheerful people.

Oct 27 — The fires are still burning, but the wind has died down a bit and they’re not spreading so fast. Yipes.

Wow I just found out that Leigh and Leslie Keno (the wonderful twin furniture guys from the Antiques Roadshow) have their OWN SHOW. It’s called “Find!” Yay Keno brothers!

Oct 26 — Huge out-of-control brush fires in SD county today — not near us thank goodness but still prett scary. Freeways closed, hundreds of houses burned up. Ugh. Watched the news a lot, read my book. Reading “The Saturdays” to Henry and he likes it :)

Oct 25 — Well. Dan drove me to the doctor yesterday, and after doing an EKG he said he thought it was either a funny heart problem, I forget which, or a thyroid problem, but he wasn’t sure and said I should go to the hospital ER to get blood tests and stuff done that very day. Ugh. So Dan took me over to Tri-City and I did the emergency room thing, what fun. They stuck an IV in me (ouch) and took blood and hooked me up to all kinds of monitor-things. Dan stayed right with me the whole time which is good because otherwise I would absolutely have fallen apart. And eventually the very nice doctor decided it was Hyperthyroidism. Which explains my racing heart (up to 145), shaky knees, absolute exhaustion, weight loss (I’m down to 102 — eek), and loss of appetite. If you have these symptoms, go get tested. So now I have beta-blockers to take to slow my heart down (it’s around 100 now) until I can see a thyroid specialist next week. Wonderful Sally cancelled her piano students and took care of Henry for us, so Dan could stay with me in the hospital (we were there for hours and hours). And then after we got OUT we went to the bookstore and Dan bought me a book I’ve been longing for (The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book Of Love) and the new Junie B. Jones book for Henry, and also Jamba Juice Smoothies, and then when we got home Henry and I finished his Batmobile and I read him his new book, and Dan went out AGAIN to get my prescription and rent a movie for us, which we watched after I put Henry to bed — “About Schmidt”, which was pretty good!

Today is Saturday. I still feel peculiar but at least I know what’s wrong with me and I don’t have to worry about that. I took Henry to Sal’s house this morning and they went to Legoland (Wonderful Sal!) and I came home and spent the whole day lying on the couch, reading my new book, which I finished already, darn it, tinkering with my z71(trying out zlauncher, took a long time to get it configured to my satisfaction and find a theme that wasn’t revolting; ended up with Jack Swinden’s “Blue Theme”), and talking to friends on IRC. I sent off two more rolls of flim last week and got them back today — photos from more than a year ago, including Henry’s 7th birthday party :) Got some really cute ones!

Oct 22 — Henry and I have been working on his little pine-car Batmobile a little every day. Yesterday we glued on the fancy fenders, and today we gave it another coat of paint! It looks so cool. I think next we give it another coat of paint, and then the gloss finish, and then the decals, and then more gloss, and then glue the axles on! It was quite a day.

Oct 21 — Still feeling extremely peculiar. Doctor on Friday, ugh. Dan was an angel and drove me everywhere today — piano student, Henry’s Karate class, two grocery stores, and the water store. He and Henry helped with the shopping and carried everything up all the stairs into the house too.

Oct 19 — I finished my latest audiobook — “The Sweet Potato Queens’ Big-Ass Cookbook” by Jill Conner Browne. I don’t know when I’ve laughed so much! Gotta get to the library for some more of her books soon, although I don’t know if I’ll enjoy them as much in print as I did on cd; part of what made the book so much fun was the author’s lovely thick Mississippi accent.

Oct 18 — We ate Chinese food and then saw Kill Bill, the new Quentin Tarantino movie. My opinion of it is mixed, though I definitely enjoyed seeing it. On the plus side, Uma Thurman is wonderful. The dialogue is well-written. It was a visually interesting movie, lots of beautiful sets and colors and neat camera angles. The plot is good and unpredictable. It’s got that chronologically-mixed-up Tarantino thing, which is fun. However… I’m not that fond of watching lengthy fight scenes. I”m not fond of outrageous goriness. And I don’t care about swords :) I didn’t care for the anime section, and he could have left out maybe 30 minutes of fighting. The first fight was fun, but it was relatively short. During the long ones, which most of the time I’m watching through squinty eyes ANYWAY because of the icky gore, my mind wanders and I wish we could get back to the plot. Tarantino is good at cool plots and clever dialogue, but I wish he’d quit chopping body parts off. Oh also — as some kind of anti-piracy measure, there are ORANGE DOTS which flash on the screen from time to time. Apparantly this is to screw up illegal copies — I doubt if they intended them to be visible to the paying customers. Well guess what, folks, they ARE visible! Cut it out, please.

Oct 16 — Henry and I took every single thing out of his room so we could give it a good cleaning. We even took the brick-and-board shelves out of his closet, took the closet doors off, and leaned them up against the back of the closet. Now that his shelves are back in, he can see his toys and clothes and those big dumb sliding doors don’t get in the way all the time! We piled all his stuff in the kitchen, and then after his room was all clean and vacuumed we sorted though his stuff. He threw away about four paper bags full of junk and came up with two bags full of nice stuff to give away! I was very proud :) It took hours and hours. His room was a real disaster area when we started but now it is clean and lovely and he has room to play :)

Oct 15 — The Innopocket aluminum hard case for my Zire 71 arrived yesterday! It’s really spiffy :) Now my little Zire has a lovely protective case and doesn’t have to live in my ancient bedraggled neoprene Palmvelope case. I stuck velcro on the back of my iiic so I could use a nice leather zip-up wallet case, but I couldn’t bear to stick nasty velco on my Zire. I woke up with a headache but it faded away after a while and I actually feel good today for a change! Beat a couple more levels in LotR, finished reading TTT to Henry and started RotK, did laundry, paid bills, helped Henry with his pine car (we got it shaped and sanded!) taught students, made my wonderful soup for dinner, etc. Good productive day. Oh, I forgot to mention that we watched the most recent SNL last night (thanks, TiVo). The guest was Justin Timberlake, who appears to be some kind of pop star. He had actual acting ability and good comic timing, and the episode was much more enjoyable than the last one, the one with Jack Black. That one was just awful, and we ended up FF’ing most of it. We only skipped two of the sketches last night — everything else was either funny or bearable. The Omeletville sketch had me rolling on the floor :)

Oct 13 — We rented the Lord of the Rings (The Two Towers) game for my gamecube and it’s lots of fun! Henry has beaten the Watcher in the Water, and I’ve gotten a bit further, even — beat the Watcher, and the Cave Troll, and about a thousand orcs and a boss Uruk-Hai guy in the Amon-Something level! I’m ready for the Fangorn Forest section.

Oct 12 — Felt like crap again, watched movies all day. Uh, “Now, Voyager” — soapy melodramatic thing starring wonderful Bette Davis, and “Baby Doll” — tedious thing about miserable southerners. I only watched it because they pre-empted a Fred Astaire movie for it, and I figured it BETTER be good. It wasn’t, really.

Oct 11 — I finally updated palmstuff. Yay me :) Today we went out to Fry’s to look at stuff, eat, and buy blank CDs. Very pleasant. Dan bought me a pack of replacement styli for my z71, and we got 2 packs of cds and some special cd-labeling markers. And lots and lots of candy :) On the way home we rented A Mighty Wind and will watch it soon! I can hardly wait. Oh I got a package of photos back from Clark Color Labs, where I mail my film. I didn’t even know what was on the roll of film that I sent in, and I wasn’t sure they’d even develop it, since it was B&W. (Real B&W, not that fake kind that Kodak makes) But they did, and the pictures turned out great! I just sorted them, and 20 of them turned out well enough to put in a photo album, if I had one, or to make copies for people. Twenty out of twenty-four is pretty good, I’d say. I got some great photos of Henry and Daniel swimming together when the Thiles were visiting!

Oct 10 — Henry and I watched the Ken Burns documentary “Horatio’s Drive” about the first man to drive coast-to-coast across the US, in 1903. It was an absolutely fascinating story and an extremely well-made documantary. Highly recommended!

Oct 09 — I finished Luigi’s Mansion today! It was quite fun, but I’m glad we rented it (for free) instead of buying. It took me about 3 months to beat Wind Waker and 5 days to beat Luigi’s Mansion, heheh. Henry’s so extremely helpful — it was he who noticed that I had to shoot the spikey balls at the Bowser Robot Dinosaur thing when it was stooping down! Yesterday I finished the work I was doing for Julie, and she paid me this morning. Dan made me promise to buy myself a treat, so I ordered the Innopocket Aluminum Hardcase for my Zire 71! Ooooooo I can hardly wait ’til it gets here :)

Oct 08 — Well, despite our best efforts, the recall went through and Schwarzenegger is Governor. Ugh.

Oct 07 — Henry passed his Blue Belt test last week, and today he was awarded his Blue Belt! We’re all so proud of him :)

Oct 05 — Ahh, a much needed lazy weekend… Played Luigi’s Mansion for hours and hours today… Henry loves watching and it turned out to be a pretty fun game! I think I’ll be able to beat it before we have to return it. Read two Dick Francis novels this weekend… “Reflex” yesterday and most of “Twice Shy” today. I happen to own the paperbacks and have read them a few times over the years. Those are a couple of my favorites, plus “In The Frame”. I haven’t read any Francis in ages. I seriously need a trip to the library. Henry made me a burrito for lunch today! Sweet dear little boy.

Oct 04 — Rented “Luigi’s Mansion” for Henry… he thought he’d played it at McDonalds but it turned out he really hadn’t, heh. Poor boy. It’s too hard for him and not very fun. But I played for a while and he enjoyed watching. Also we finished watching “My Favorite Wife” together which was fun. Not a great movie, but enjoyable. Irene Dunne is cool, Cary Grant is obnoxious. I’m so tired.

Oct 03 — Happy birthday wonderful Kathy!

Oct 02 — Feeling a bit better. Henry helped me with the grocery shopping and then I lay around and rested and read “The Long Winter” out loud for hours! Wonderful book. Henry’s doing so well in gymnastics!

Sept 30 — So tired and awful-feeling. Bleah. Stayed on the couch all day pretty much. Mom came over and painted with Henry and played with him, which was wonderful. Tonight Henry found the Music Man dvd that we borrowed from my parents so we watched that together. Very nice. I hope I feel better tomorrow. I don’t want to have to cancel all the Wednesday students.

Sept 28 — Feeling slightly better; sleeping ’til noon probably helped. Henry came home around 2, and we went out to return the movie and buy 11 gallons of water. Dan spent hours and hours on the phone with Tech Support because our cable internet access is so flakey. He’s my hero!

Sept 27 — Happy 8th birthday wonderful Henry!!! I made him his favorite breakfast of pancakes and we spent the morning putting together his new Takanuva Bionicle kit, then I drove him to SD, hung out for a bit, then drove home. I was still feeling quite sick and it felt so good to get home after all the driving. Spent the rest of the day quietly on the sofa with my laptop, doing some work for Julie. Dan took good care of me :) Tonight we rented Die Another Day, the latest James Bond movie. It was… action-packed. The dialogue was extremely painful in places, possibly churned out by a team of monkeys with typewriters, and made us wince, but on the whole we had a wonderful time suspending our disbelief and watching together :) Judi Dench is awesome.

Sept 26 — ugh I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been either horribly tired, sick, or both for several days and just taking care of normal stuff has left me exhausted. Tomorrow is Henry’s birthday! His Great-Grandma Jean gave him his present yesterday — a wonderful lego set from their new “Designer” line. It makes many different robots and he loves it. He made several small robots yesterday, then took them apart and spent most of today building a LARGE robot out of most of the legos in the set. I highly recommend the Lego Designer sets — they’re a refreshing change from the sets that make limited, movie-themed stuff. Sally came over and took him out to play for a few hours and he loved that too :) Tomorrow I’m driving him to his dad’s house in the morning so Dan and I gave him his presents this evening and he was so happy and excited. What a wonderful little boy we have.

Sept 22 — I drove CosmicRay & Terah to the airport and traffic was pleasant, for a change. It only took about 45 minutes to get there! Amazing. Listened to the Goldberg Variations on the way there and the last disk of “The First Eagle” on the way home. Henry’s got a cough and sniffles, poor little boy. But I read to him a lot today and rented the Spiderman game for the gamecube for him :) Controlling Spiderman as he swings through the city is probably a dream-come-true for him. I practiced my banjo for AGES tonight — worked a lot on June Apple and Bill Cheatham (the newest, hardest ones) as well as my older songs. Also worked out the chords for Wish You Were Here, which sounds mighty funny when played with a banjo picking pattern. I think I want to make this sweater but I want to use Cleckheaton country 8-ply yarn because it is so soft and lovely and never pills or felts… and it is very expensive and I will need to spend about $70 so I’ll have to wait a while, heheh :) Ah well I’m good at that. Today’s new Strong Bad email wasn’t that great but last week’s still cracks us all up so you should go watch it!

Sept 20 — We did a lot of fun stuff today! Drove down to Balboa Park through hideous traffic and went to the MOPA (ugly website, for an art museum) and the arboretum. They’ve got automatic misters in there now and it’s really lovely and jungley. Then we drove back through hideous traffic and stopped for a walk on the beach — the water was warm! Then home for a while and then out to dinner (Dan drove since I was 100% sick of driving) and we’re all so tired now I think we’re going to bed early, heh.

Sept 19 — Drove Henry to SD — we listened to “Rat Patrol” most of the way. Now it’s permanently embedded in my brain. Come on, Rat Patrol! Dun dun DUNDUN dun dun da DUN DUN. Tonight we played Settlers of Catan with CosmicRay and Terah — it was the most fun I’ve had playing that game in a long time, and it’s always fun! They had played before so we didn’t have to teach them. The last few games we’ve played have been with newbies, and teaching them takes a long time. So anyway we had a great time playing!

Sept 18 — CosmicRay (a.k.a. John — he’s an old IRC friend of ours) and his wife Terah came to visit for the weekend! It’s a geek-fest around here tonight :) We’re all on the couch in a row, everyone has a laptop, Terah and I have been playing Tip-Top, and we’ve been comparing gadgets :) I am SO TIRED. I hope I can sleep past 6am tomorrow. I finished reading “Eat Cake” by Jeanne Ray — another good one! Henry and I started reading “By The Shores of Silver Lake” last night and I read another three chapters to him tonight! Great book.

Sept 16 — Today I was telling some young IRC friends about the Adventure Through Inner Space ride at Disneyland, my favorite ride. None of them had ever heard of it, and I know it closed a while ago but wasn’t sure exactly when. So I googled for it, and found that it closed in 1985. Ugh. I also found this AMAZING tribute site, with visuals, floorplans, the script, and vast quantities of information about the ride. Man oh man! The guy is working on some kind of CGI virtual ride :) I sure hope he succeeds — I’d like to show Henry sometime. Oh yeah here’s the url: www.atommobiles.com/. I got so excited when I found the site. Riding ATIS is one of my clearest memories of my first trip to Disneyland when I was about 4. I remember how pleasantly cool and dark it was, I remember being rather frightened by the tiny people travelling into the microscope thing, I remember that my brother sat in the blue chair with me and touched one of the huge fake snowflakes. I remember *exactly* how it smelled, and the spooky way the narrator talked when the snowflake started melting or whatever. I think I thought of it as the Blue Chair ride until I went again when I was older :) Other vivid memories of that first trip to Disneyland are: my brother telling me the Haunted Mansion was too scary for me (I’m sure he was right); singing “The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife” in our volkswagon bus on the way there, and my older sister’s boyfriend making a joke about how the part that goes “rightful rightful tippee-fi-day” sounded like “tippee-fried-egg”; my dad bringing us delicious cups of orange juice while we rested somewhere, and riding the Pirate ride — again, I remember the dark, the cool, the SMELL, the music, the little waterfalls, that big pile of glittering treasure, and being almost too frightened to have fun… but wanting to ride again when it was over :)

Sept 15 — Well my mechanic called this morning and told me my repairs would only be $455… So I decided to get them done and think about getting a younger car the NEXT time I need large awful repairs. This time it was a new front axle and some kind of wheel-bearing business and front brakes. My car is all done now and that funny clicking noise that I’d been hearing for so long (so long that I thought it was normal) is completely gone. I’m so tired… woke up really early ’cause I was worried about my car and was waiting for Danny-the-splendid-mechanic to call, then did a ton of housework, then a ton of errands, then took a break and played Super Mario Sunshine, which we rented with a free coupon, (it’s really fun so far!), then we went out and picked up my car, then I went and helped my dad, then home, took a little rest, then out for our monday night string class which was lots of fun! Now finally home and computing on the couch with my Dan, who takes such good care of me and is the best Dan in all the world :)

Sept 14 — I did some birthday shopping for Henry today — bought him the “Batcar” kit he’s been yearning for for months, and a ton of art supplies — new scissors, glue, construction paper, markers, and a big spiral-bound tablet of drawing paper. I’ll get a big plastic box for them all and he’ll always be able to find everything :) Then in the afternoon I went to Temecula to pick him up, and then we dropped my car at the mechanic’s and Dan picked us up. Sigh… now, after I get an estimate, I have to decide whether I should repair my Subaru or possibly buy a different car…

Sept 13 — This morning was so nice and peaceful. I listened to NPR, played games on my Zire 71, played on my computer, and practiced my banjo! I spent a long time at amazon, trying to decide how to spend my birthday gift certificate… I’ve got it narrowed down to a couple of things. I’ll decide for sure sometime soon :) I also had a great time looking at amazon’s recommendations, deleting the off-the-wall ones, and adding some of them to my amazon wish list (yes, I finally made one). I found a Bouree from a Bach cello suite arranged for banjo at www.acutab.com/BullardSample2.html which I worked on until my fingers hurt too much to play anymore. This evening Dan and I went to fry’s and looked around for hours and hours and hours… didn’t buy anything but we had fun looking! Oh I found a nice gadget-oriented website run by a geeky girl! www.jenneth.info. Nice site, Jenneth! Her review of the aluminum Zire 71 case has me drooling…

Sept 12 — Nice day. Read to Henry, played some Zelda (going back through Wind Waker again… I love the cheerful cartoony colors), did house stuff, taught a student, took H to karate, etc etc. Ripped back my brown knitted skirt and started over with a better plan in mind (double increases instead of single).

Sept 10 — Um… it was Wednesday… Lots of piano students today, and I made Shepherd’s Pie for dinner, yum yum yum. Actually made it in the afternoon and called Dan to turn the oven on before I got home from work, so it was ready when I got home. Luxury! My piano students were darling and wonderful — everyone did extra well today for some reason. I like my job :) The Enterprise season premier was on tonight… thank goodness they finally redesigned T’Pol’s costume and made it more flattering. The old one was just too awful.

Sept 09 — The weather was actually pleasant today! I wore long pants and was comfortable, wooo! Finished the neck edging on my brown sweater and blocked it. I can hardly wait for it to dry so I can wear it. Henry got to demonstrate a good strong double-punch in Karate today! Oh, and I started a new book, “Home Comfort: A History of Domestic Arrangements” which so far is very interesting.

Sept 08 — It was cooler today, thank goodness. Henry and I started our music class tonight — we’re in a little class run by a nice homeschooling family, for beginning guitar/banjo/mandolin/uke players. It was really fun! Our teacher, Tim, taught the little ones three chords, and I worked on picking out the melodies of the little tunes we were playing, and working out nice fiddly banjo picking patterns over the chords. Oh also the Mehndi kit I bought on ebay a while ago showed up so I had fun with that! I did a little design on each foot and they turned out GREAT, better than I expected.

Sept 07 — I’ve just spent the last several hours installing and trying new palm software. TipTop by Astraware is good, and MegaClock is pretty cool too. I’ll probably stick with BigClock though. MegaClock is too fancy and doesn’t “lock” alarms after you set them… I always worry about accidentally messing up my alarms.

Sept 06 — Happy birthday wonderful Chloe! Hope you’re having fun in Philadelphia :) Today I read to Henry for hours and hours… First 4 or 5 chapters of Ramona the Brave, and then two books about the Apollo 13 mission. This afternoon we went to Fry’s with Dan, and then when we got home we watched the Apollo 13 movie! It was fun for me to see it again, and Henry enjoyed it extra-much, I think, because we had read all about it first and the movie was so faithful to the facts. It was Dan’s idea to read about it FIRST and then watch the movie, which was a very good plan. I think the movie would not have had the same impact if Henry’d seen it before we’d read about it.

Sept 05 — Man it was hot today. So hot, so dry. It’s 9pm and 88 degrees in the livingroom, with our industrial-strength fan blowing air in from outdoors. Henry and I went to the library today and chose a big stack of books about space — mostly about the Shuttle, Apollo 11, and Apollo 13, and then when we got home I read some to him and he read the beginning-reader one to me! Very interesting stuff. I’m learning a lot about space :)

Sept 04 — Soooo tired. I’ve got to stop staying up so late, talking and reading. Early to bed tonight. Henry is suddenly very interested in the Apollo Program, so tomorrow we’re going to go to the library and find him lots of books on Space etc. I think his interest was sparked when Dan played the Rush song “Countdown” for him in the car one day… it’s about the space shuttle, I think, and they had a long conversation about the shuttle and the Apollo missions and stuff. Henry built a little rocket out of legos and put three lego men in it, and said they were the guys from Rush, heheh.

Sept 03 — Finished “The Poisonwood Bible”. Good book, but still my favorite was “Prodigal Summer”. I’ve been practicing my banjo a lot the last couple of days, and my fingers are killing me!

Sept 02 — Happy birthday to Ken, the best of all possible brothers! Hope your day was great :)

Henry’s monitor has been acting funny lately — doing a sort of swelling-and-receeding routine a lot. Today it finally blew. We heard a loud POP as if someone had stepped on a balloon, and we all looked around, wondering what made that sound.. and then I noticed a puff of smoke coming out of the monitor. Poor Henry, it was the end of a long tiring difficult day and he fell all apart. Dan called CCC to see if they had any decent refurb’d monitors, and he took Henry down there instantly and bought him a nice 17-incher, which happens to be a dark charcoal gray. Very much a Batman-type monitor. :)

Sept 01 — Hmmm, what did I do today? Swept & mopped & vacuumed & did laundry, etc. Normal Monday stuff. Read three or four chapters of Ramona’s World to Henry, and played his new Pokemon card game with him once, and rode our scooters around before dinner. We tried out my home-made cdplayer case in my car and it worked well! All the buttons are accessible through the clear vinyl front, and the velcro on the back keeps it attached to my dashboard, and the remote attaches to the side just right. Yay me :)

Aug 31 — Ugh, crampy. I finished my cd player case! I made it of red flannel, nice and soft and bright. Dan suggested adding a couple of pockets in back for extra cds, which works well! Also I *finally* got around to installing the windows palmdesktop gunk so I can download photos off my palm (sample: henry!) and try loading some mp3s onto it! I started reading “The Poisonwood bible” today and it’s excellent.

Aug 30 — Yesterday my cd burner died… right when I wanted to copy a bunch of stuff for Jo AND make myself a new mp3 cd. So today Dan did some research, and found a good one at Circuit City, $70 with a $30 rebate. We went there to get it and found that it had a $30 rebate AND a $25 rebate… so it’ll actually cost me only $15. Amazing. Jo bought it for me, for a treat :) We all went to the Wild Animal Park and had a great time — the threat of Exotic Newcastle Disease has ended, so they brought the free-flight part of the Birdshow back and re-opened the aviaries! We had a great time and it wasn’t even THAT hot (we were there late-afternoonish). Started working on a case for my new mp3/cd player — I’m planning to make a clear window in front with vinyl, and then have velcro on back so I can stick it to the velcro on my car dashboard.

Aug 28 — I have gotten my lovely new Zire 71 all set up with my essential apps. Since it uses OS 5, and my IIIc was running 3.5 (I think) I was worried that some of my antique software wouldn’t work properly. Almost everything does, though. I need to hunt up some fancy OS 5 enhanced stuff to take advantage of my high-res screen and ultra-fast-processor! Any suggestions? This little Z71 is the prettiest palm ever, and it’s soooo fast, and the screen is bright and sharp and clear and elegant, and it LOOKS good, and it feels nice in my hands. The camera is fun, too :) Dan made hotsyncing work in Linux for me right away, so I haven’t even installed the stuff on the cds, like the RealPLayer and Audible player — but when I do I’ll have music in my zire too. Amazing. My new mp3/cd player is excellent. It feels nice and solid, and it works well in the car, and the fm tuner gives me better reception for KPBS than the boombox on the desk! It’s so nice having music in my car again. I need to make a new cd. Tonight Jo and I watched the first 4 episodes of P&P :)

Aug 27 — Happy birthday to me! I had a great day. Thanks, everyone, for the birthday emails! When we got up in the morning, Dan and Henry gave me my presents — Henry gave me a beautiful hardback copy of “The Saturdays”, they gave me both of the homestarrunner t-shirts I was wishing for, and Dan gave me the iRock mp3/cd player I wanted AND a zire 71 with a 64MB memory card! All my presents are so wonderful, and my family is wonderful :) Susan gave me an amazon gift certificate, and my parents gave me the 4-volume, newly reprinted “Treasury of Knitting Patterns” books by Barbara Walker. Oh and Jo surprised me later in the day with chocolate mints and flowers! Everyone is so good to me :)

Aug 26 — We (Dan, Henry, Jo, and I) rented & watched The Two Towers tonight (along with everyone else on the planet, probably), which was great of course, and now Jo and I are watching “The Bachelor and the Bobby-soxer” (1947, Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Shirley Temple), which is relatively dull, heh :) Movie night, yay :)

Aug 25 — We just picked up Dan’s mom (Jo) from the airport! She’s really sweet — brought me some absolutely lovely brown Egyptian cotton to sew something with! It’s so silky and lovely, and it’ll be waiting there for me the instant I get a notion to make something all of a sudden. :) I started “Pigs in Heaven” today — it’s a bit darker than any of Kingsolver’s other novels that I’ve read so far. I was in a quandary today, wanting to read and to practice my banjo, and discovered that I can do both at the same time, heh.

Aug 24 — Mmm lazy day. I finished “The Bean Trees” and can hardly wait to start another Kingsolver book. Tonight :) This afternoon we dropped my car at Danny’s so he can fix the smog problem and do my oil change and whatever else needs to be done, so I took Dan’s car to SD to pick up Henry which means I had a good CD player to use! So I took along my Pete Seeger complete Carnegie Hall concert from 1963 cds. LIstened to the first one on the way down and the second on the way back. Henry told me the slow ones in minor keys sounded Elvish… especially “Genbaku O Yurusumagi” (Never again the Atom Bomb) which makes me weep every time I hear it. We listened to “From Way Up Here” over and over, trying to learn the words and tune, which is tricky. (from way up here, the world seems very small, it’s just a little ball, of rock and sea and sand… no bigger than my hand) Henry can actually HARMONIZE, so on This Land Is Your Land we were both harmonizing in different ways with Pete. :) It was great!

Aug 23 — Last night I finished Prodigal Summer! I loved every page. I think I liked the “Moth Love” thread of the story best. I’m glad the author didn’t wrap everything up in a tidy little package at the end. You can kind of see how the characters’ lives will just keep flowing on and intertwining… I hope Lusa and Deanna get acquainted when Deanna comes down off the mountain in September… I’m sure they will :) Today we went to the Mall (hateful place, far too many people) so Dan could get a new watch, and we strolled around looking at things. He bought me a new card game I’ve had my eye on, “FLUXX”, made by Looney Labs . We played it 6 or 8 times already tonight — it’s WONDERFUL! I highly recommend it. I started “The Bean Trees”, another Barbara Kingsolver novel, tonight. Very good so far :)

Aug 22 — Watched “Easter Parade” (1948, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland) with Henry today. That’s a pretty good one :) We both love “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” and “A Couple Of Swells”. The costuming isn’t very impressive in that one though… Judy has one really nice brown suit but all her other dresses are just ugly, especially that pink-and- brown one near the end. Ah well :)

Aug 21 — We just finished watching the extended Fellowship of the Ring dvd. We watched it in little bits over the course of several nights. Wow :) All that “extra” stuff (I mean the stuff they should have kept in the theater version) was great. I like Elijah Wood less and less and less though. I never thought he was a good choice for Frodo and I’m sick to death of him by now. I’m totally happy with all the other actors, but I’ve had enough of Elijah Wood’s pale pasty pretty face and sorrowful bugged-out eyes. And inadequate acting skill. Heh. On the other hand, I am more impressed than ever by whomever played Boromir… Sean Bean? Yeah that sounds right. The extra material gave Boromir’s character more dimension and I thought Sean Bean did an excellent job. In other news, I started “Prodigal Summer” by Barbara Kingsolver today and I really like it! (Thanks Chloe and John!)

Aug 20 — It rained tonight. Wild! When I got home from work I found that Dan had hooked up a new set of computer speakers for me! My old ones were so crummy. My new ones even have a sub-woofer! I tested them out with some TMBG, Cake, and Prodigy — sounded GREAT. Such a nice surprise :) :) :)

Aug 19 — We went to the library this morning and I got a stack of books by Barbara Kingsolver, on Chloe’s recommendation. I’ll start one as soon as I’m done re-reading “The Three Miss Margarets”, which is even good the second time in one week! Hmm then we went to the bank and the water store (bought 10 gallons; we’ve all been drinking a lot of water in all this heat) and by the time we got home it was time to make food for everybody, and then I had a little rest and then it was time for my Tuesday afternoon piano student, then Karate, then back to Sal’s house to cook for Dad. While Sal had a break between students she and Henry had a swim in her pool while I did the grocery shopping — it was a good time of day for shopping (6:30 – 8) — cooler, not crowded at all. I think I’ll switch to nighttime shopping for the rest of the summer. They released “Chicago” on DVD today so I rented it on the way home and Dan and I watched together after I got Henry to bed. Good movie!

Aug 18 — O.K. here’s my long-awaited birthday wishlist! I may add some more stuff if I think of anything… I’m all tired out — I did a lot today. Cleaned the floors, dusted, vacuumed the screens, did the bathrooms, etc. Read LotR to Henry, played Mille Bournes with him, returned the too-big shorts, cooked for everyone. Hmm, I think it may be time for a little Zelda!

Aug 17 — Hot. How long ’til winter gets here? I worked on my new brown sweater a lot today — did the back from shoulder to underarm, and now I’ve got the front almost there too — then I’ll join the front and back together and begin to work in the round. Hmm, I should have started that cable pattern in front too… well, I can drop those stitches back and work them up correctly.

Aug 16 — We went out for dinner and a movie tonight! Had dinner at Chili’s which was perfectly pleasant, then hung out in the new bookstore there for a while, then went to see Freaky Friday, which was great! It was really surprisingly good, very entertaining, touching, funny! Much better than I was expecting.

Aug 15 — Henry’s all better today, yay! Worf (aka James), an IRC friend we’ve known for years, was in SD on business, and this morning Dan drove down to pick him up so he could hang out with us a bit before he flew home. Nice guy! I’m reading a new book called “The Three Miss Margarets”, one of those stories that takes place in the South, where everyone knows everyone else’s family history for generations back. So far it’s very very good! I drove Henry down to his dad’s house today and traffic was awful, as usual. It occurred to me that, maybe, if we planned it right, we could somehow make the trip down there on the Coaster, our nice commuter train. Their schedules are a little strange, but it might work. Then we could spend a couple hours on a nice air-conditioned train, reading or playing games, instead of sweating and dodging idiots on the freeway, I mean clog-way. Hmmm…

Aug 14 — Ugh it’s hot. The entire East Coast is without power today, it seems. So hey, East Coast friends and relatives, if you’re reading this I guess you got your power back! :) Henry’s sick today, poor boy. He’s got a fever and has spent the day lying on the couch, resting. I read him most of another chapter of The Two Towers, and we watched some Fred Astaire together, and talked about vaudeville and other things.

Aug 13 — Dan’s helping me install vmware; when it’s finished I’ll be able to run windows programs in a window on my linux desktop, which means I won’t have to reboot into the winders to update quicken, etc. Cool :)

Aug 12 — We used one of our “Rent One Free” coupons to rent the gamecube “megaman” game for Henry. It’s kind of frustrating how the game gives you random battle chips — sometimes good ones, sometimes crummy ones — but on the whole we’re having fun with it :) Neither Henry nor I have been able to beat the first boss yet though.

Aug 10 — Hot. Tired. Bought some nice brown worsted cotton (real cotton) for another tanktop sweater.

Aug 09 — Hung around the house all day, sewed a bit, played with my computer, listened to NPR (streaming live from kpbs.org). Also did my ironing. Did I ever mention the “new” iron I bought on ebay? I got fed up with my iron (which wouldn’t iron wet cotton cloth FLAT) and sought a good old heavy iron on ebay. Found one that’s probably from the 60s or 70s (has a cloth cord). It reminds me VERY much of the iron my mom used when I was little. I only paid $3 for it and I LOVE it. It gets very hot, produces plenty of steam, and is nice and heavy. I always thought I was bad at ironing and I just hated doing it, but it’s actually fun with my new iron. Things get flat.

Aug 08 — Today was the last day of Henry’s Karate Camp. They went to the Wild Rivers water park and had a great time. Henry says the best two days of the camp were the laser tag day and the water park day :) I watched “Roberta” which was not great until Fred and Ginger started singing and dancing, and then all of a sudden it got good! The “I’m Hard To Handle” number was wonderful. Dan and I had to drive to Kearny Mesa this afternoon… it took 2.5 hours to get there and then back to Carlsbad to pick up Henry. Traffic was appalling. So then we picked up Henry, did some stuff at Mom&Dad’s house, and then Dan bought us Jamba Juice smoothies for a treat! They just opened up a Jamba Juice in O’side… yum yum yum! Best Smoothies Ever. Then after we got home, Henry and I took turns playing my new Zelda game (Ocarina of Time, ported for Gamecube). Lots of fun!

Aug 07 — Went along with Henry’s summer camp crowd today — bowling, laser-tag, and a hike at Hosp Grove. Henry was a little bit apprehensive about the laser-tag bit, but it turned out to be the best part of the day for him :) I knitted most of the time, and finished my sweater! I blocked it when I got home and it’s still drying. Photos soon! My wonderful Dan brought home Chinese food for us tonight, and now I’m watching one of the Fred Astaire movies the TiVo got for me on Tuesday — “You Were Never Lovlier”. I chose this one because I’d never seen it before, but it isn’t very good. Rita Hayworth gives me a pain, and the music isn’t very interesting. I think I’ll just fast-forward to the Fred parts :)

Aug 06 — Tonight, when I was reading The Two Towers to Henry, we finally passed the part I am familiar with and got to something new! I had read up to almost-the-end of “The Palantir” last time through the book, before he wanted me to start over, and now we’ve just finished that chapter and I don’t actually know what’s coming next. Sometimes Tolkien is so much fun to read, when he’s not being all epic and grand. Those bits bore me sometimes. Anyway that last chapter was nice and juicy.

Aug 05 — It was Fred Astaire day on TCM. Wonderful, wonderful Fred!

Aug 04 — Today was Henry’s first day of Karate Camp! I took him to the dojo at 9, and they had a seminar on newaza, which is sort of wrestling around on the floor. I stayed to watch and it was really neat. Then they all went to the beach for the rest of the day! When I picked him up afterwards he was worn out and very happy. :)

Aug 03 — Finished my shorts, yay! Also won an auction for the gamecube port of the Zelda game “Ocarina of Time” — can hardly wait to play :)

Aug 02 — Worked on my new green shorts a lot today. I did a great job on the pockets! But then after I got the side seams sewn, I tried them on and they seemed like they needed more width. So I carefully added a panel of fabric to each side and did lovely topstitching and everything, then did the waist. Then tried them on and they were too big, grr, so I had to carefully pick out those side panels (16 rows of stitching). Remember to measure, Kara, remember to measure! Tomorrow I should be able to finish them. Finished Ender’s Game today :)

Aug 01 — Dan and I went to the store tonight, late, about 8:30, so I could buy some groceries for my parents — great time to shop! No crowds, no traffic, so white-hot sunshine. We were having such a nice time that, after we dropped off the groceries, we went down to Mervyns (open til 10!) and did some much-needed Dan-clothes-shopping. It was so nice to be out at night together :) Today I made a new shorts pattern, this one with a curved front pocket, and cut out the pieces from my new green batiked cotton. Hoping I can do the sewing tomorrow, and have new shorts. I read a fun book today, too, called “Shopaholic Takes Manhattan” by Sophie Kinsella. I enjoyed it quite a bit (well I read the whole thing in one day, so I guess it’s obvious that I liked it :). At first I was kind of annoyed by the protagonist, Becky, but I soon grew fond of her. It was also, um, how shall I put it… unmistakably “inspired” by Bridget Jones. So it took me a while to get over that, too… But it was fun to read and had a great ending :) Also started Ender’s Game today, on Dan’s recommendation — super-good so far! Ok, going to bed to read some more :)

July 31 — First thing I did today was finish Henry’s new Renaissance Fair costume! He’s going to be dancing at a fair on the weekend and his dad was picking him up today, so I absolutely had to finish by this afternoon. I made such a nice shirt, with a band collar and the sleeves pleated at the top insteaad of gathered, and I made a nice deep hem that we can let out when he grows. And then I made a hat out of the same gray velveteen that I made his breeches out of! I took a couple of photos (some digicam, some B&W). Too cute! And it’ll be a good Frodo costume, too :)

July 30 — Very stressful day, ugh. But something really nice happened in the evening after my last piano student was finished, and we went outside to wait for her mom — there was a huge, perfect rainbow in the sky. I ran in and got Henry and Grandma, and Kirsten and her student came out to look, too. It was actually a double rainbow. There was a faint extra arch just outiside the bright one! It was so beautiful, and such an amazingly rare sight around here. I doubt if Henry had ever seen a real rainbow before. I sure can’t remember the last time I saw one. I made Kara-style comfort food for dinner, my favorite soup. Here’s how you make it: In a big pot, cook a handful of barley and a couple of minced garlic cloves in a couple inches of water for a while. Then add a diced russet potato and a handful of sliced baby carrots, a lump of butter, and some salt and pepper. Cook until things start to get done, and then add a big can of tomatoes (I use the roma tomatoes with basil) and sort of chop them up if they aren’t already chopped. Also add a can of black beans, and a handful of whatever kind of pasta is handy. The pasta will soak up liquid, so add more water if it’s too dry or skip the pasta. Cook a little more until everything is just right. Eat with a large glob of sour cream. Oh yeah :)

July 29 — I finished Wind Waker today! Go me! What a wonderful game it was. I also sewed a new pair of breeches for Henry’s ren fair costume, using a gray velveteen tunic that Sally didn’t want anymore, and bought cloth for his shirt.

July 28 — Henry needs shorts very very badly — he’s got maybe one pair that actually fits him. So we dug out some nice red flannel from my cloth box, and together we made shorts. I made the pattern (by enlarging one that I made last year) and he cut the cloth out and sewed the main seams himself! He also threaded the elastic through the waist casing — he liked that part a lot. And I showed him all the various presser feet that my machine has, and he thought that was fascinating! Lots of fun :) He’s wearing his new shorts now while he watched Looney Toons. I sure love sewing. It’s so wonderful to start with a piece of cloth and then end up with something new to wear.

July 27 — I’m reading this book, “A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver”, that I grabbed off a shelf in the children’s section, and it’s so good! I shall go update my books page… When Henry got home tonight, he found the brand-new hardback copy of “Junie B. Jones, First Grader: Cheater Pants” and the audio cd I made of me reading it out loud — he was so delighted! He listened to it while he ate his dinner, while he brushed his teeth, and while he went to sleep :) He says it’s the funniest Junie B. Jones book yet!

July 26 — Peaceful, lovely day. I slept until 11 (well I was up til 2 reading the night before), then got up and finished the book I’d started last night — “My Kitchen Wars”. Good book, impossible to put down. Then, hmm… I made two pairs of underwear for myself out of a huge t-shirt that no one wanted, and recorded the first two chapters of “A Bear Called Paddington” so I can make Henry a new audiobook. In the evening we rented “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and had such a nice time watching it together! And I started another book — “A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver” which is excellent so far.

July 25 — We rented “The Big Lebowski” tonight — good movie! It’s nice to see a movie that doesn’t follow a predictable formula. John Turturro as Jesus Quintana cracked me up — I almost didn’t recognize him.

July 24 — All three balls of green yarn that I bought for my sweater were from different dye-lots. They were the last three balls they had, and they looked the same in the store… but after knitting a while I found that two balls matched nicely but the third was way off. So, I bought some black yarn to finish my sweater. Better a real contrast than not-quite-matching. Today I knitted the neck edging, but I cast off too loosely so I’ll have to re-do that but it won’t take long. Did one armhole edge too, which turned out great! I went to the new (large, lovely, tempting) Barnes & Noble bookstore and bought “Cheater Pants” as a surprise for Henry, and tonight I read it out loud and recorded it in .wav so he can have it on CD! I’ll leave the book and cd on his bed as an anytime present for him to find when he gets home on Sunday :) :) :)

July 23 — Pilot518 (aka Mike :) is in town for a business seminar, and he came over for a few hours tonight. Super-nice guy! It was great getting to talk with him again — last time we saw him was when we went to Philadelphia in spring of 2001. Before Henry’s karate class today, Sensei Paul went over the Kata with him, the one he needs to work on a little before he can try again to test for his blue belt, and then the class went over it again later. He’s very very anxious to test again, so it’s good they practiced that Kata. I’m so proud of him! He’s very enthusiastic about the library’s summer reading club, and his reading is getting better and better. He read a level-two Real Kids Reader to me today — I thought he’d need a lot of help but he got all but about one word. Yay Henry!

July 22 — We got a couple of the nice “Real Kids Readers” from the library for Henry… he likes those a lot. They are illustrated with photos of real kids, and they have short, fun easy stories. He read two of them to me in the car! We also looked for “Junie B.Jones: Cheater Pants” but the librarian says they won’t get in for at least a month. Bah! Might buy that one as a surprise for him :)

July 21 — Hmm, it was Monday today… what happened… Oh, we went to the library and got a lovely stack of books! Mmmmmm new books :)

July 20 — Henry and I went to Beatlefair today! We had a nice time together. Mostly we hung out in the big main auditorium, watching whatever was happening on the stage. Henry was very excited about the raffle; we didn’t win anything but it was fun anyway. Tony Sheridan was there again this year, and he played more music than last year! He’s a cool old guy and really rocked. The Pete Best band was there but they were kind of odd.. hard to describe. There were two drummers — is Pete Best not good enough? Maybe not. All the young members of the band looked like gangsters, too. Wouldn’t want to meet them in a dark alley. Yeah that part was kind of lame. Oh, there was a band called Lighter that I really liked. They were all really young, maybe early twenties, looked kind of garage-bandy. They weren’t technically perfect, but they played with GREAT energy and were a ton of fun to listen to! I really hope they are there again next year. The bands who try to sound exactly like the Beatles are sometimes kind of dull. Arthur was there again but always playing in a room where we weren’t, so we never heard them. Next year. Rockola was there, and they were wonderful of course, but only played a short set (maybe 45 minutes) because the whole thing was running an hour and a half late. (Would have been juuuuust fine w/ no Pete Best) Henry knows a lot of Beatles music (of course) but he’s unfamiliar with Rubber Soul and Revolver so I need to play those more! I have them on LP, but my records are at Mom’s house and my turntable is still at Matthew’s house because I don’t have a stereo to hook it up to, heh. So I guess I should get those on CD at some point.

July 19 — This morning I drove Henry down to SD, and dropped Ken at the airport. Traffic was hell. It took almost 1.5 hours to get from Sal’s house to Matthew’s — usually takes maybe 45 minutes. And it was hot in my car; it’s like a greenhouse-on-wheels :) This afternoon Dan and I went to the new Fry’s just for fun. It’s nice, a lot nicer than the one down in SD. Lots of giant fishtanks and good lighting.

July 18 — Daniel was feeling yucky today so Henry and I sat with him and watched cartoon network all day. I knitted a lot of my sweater! So far, so good. Sleepy, bedtime.

July 17 — Still coughing up crud, but feeling a bit perkier. Bought water, took Henry to gymnastics, started my green sweater (guided by the excellent, indispensible book “Knitting From The Top” by Barbara Walker, available from Schoolhouse Press) My brother flew in from NY for a quick visit while Kathy & family are here! We ate pizza and watched a little of The Fellowship; more visiting tomorrow. I love my family! They’re the best in all the world. Forgot to mention that Dan baked chocolate-chip cookies from scratch yesterday, under my minimal guidance. Yay Dan!

July 16 — Sick, but better. Hung out with family again, Henry played and swam with Daniel, nice time. Felt well enough to take Henry to karate, and on the way home bought some kiwi-green cotton to knit a little sleeveless summery sweater.

July 15 — Sick. Bah. Hung out with family some more, then came home to rest while Kathy and Scott looked after Henry so he and Daniel could play some more.

July 14 — Sick. 3/5 of the Thile family came out to CA to visit, so Henry and I hung out at Sal’s house with them for a long time. Henry had great fun with his cousin Daniel!

July 13 — Feeling a lot better today, but very weak and exhausted. Sore throat is gone, yay! Lazed around, managed a little housework, played a little roller coaster tycoon. It’s hot. Henry came home in the evening and we watched Star Trek together (“Spock’s Brain”). What a great show!

July 12 — Sick. Ugh. Felt a bit better by night time though. Spent the day watching bad tv (there really is nothing on, ever) and listening to my “To Kill A Mockingbird” audio book.

July 11 — Sore throat. :( It started in the afternoon, and now I feel awful. We had a good day though. H and I did watercolor painting together in the morning and I played some Zelda. Tonight everyone was sweet to me and Henry took care of me while Dan was out and we watched Justice League and Star Trek and he sang to me and read me little stories. Ok I feel terrible, time to try to sleep.

July 10 — Oooooooo I found a good website! www.word-detective.com! I was googling for the origin of the phrase “23 skiddoo” and I bumped into the Word Detective. That’s going to be one of my daily stops, now. It’s hot, I made pizza for dinner, played some Zelda today, Henry’s got a cold, time to go to bed and read some more Hillerman!

July 09 — Had a new piano student today — nice little girl! She caught on really fast to everything I taught her today, so I think she’ll do well. Henry was at Matthew’s house this morning so I had to do the grocery shopping without my helper! But I survived :) I picked him up in the early afternoon and luckily had time to drop him off at home before I went to teach all my students. He has a little cold so I didn’t want him to have to entertain himself at Sal’s house the whole time… he hung out with Dan at home instead :)

July 08 — I installed Roller Coaster Tycoon on Henry’s computer yesterday, and that reminded me how much fun it is, so today I installed it on my desktop… but it doesn’t like win2k. It runs ok but then if you try to load a savegame it crashes! Ick. Luckily there’s a patch you can get that fixes it. Now I’ve got it running just fine! What a great game. Dan bought me some special broad-spectrum, unscented sunscreen, which we hope will protect me better. Oh jeeze it got late while I was playing… darn it. Bedtime!

July 07 — The Fair is over and today was exhibit pick-up day, so Henry and I drove down and got our stuff. We each got a red ribbon! Traffic was awful on the way home because a semitruck jack-knifed off the road. Bleah. Poor Henry’s bee-sting started to itch really badly tonight and that part of his foot got swollen, red, and hard. It was kind of worrisome but I looked it up and the internet told me that it’s normal, and that we should put a cold compress on it, so we did and it helped a lot. It seems that after the first time you get stung your body makes antibodies, and so the next time you get stung the reaction seems more severe. Or something :) Anyway he’s fine. We bought him some surfer-shoes at the sporting goods store today that he can wear to the pool, in the pool, and home again and never worry about stepping on a bee while he’s swimming. He walked all over the fairgrounds on that bee-stung foot and barely complained. Poor little guy. He’s super-paranoid about bees now… there were FOUR in his room tonight but I got them for him and closed the window. I think I’ll ask the apartment people to replace his screen or something.

July 06 — Started a new-to-me Hillerman mystery last night, and finished it this morning. “Fallen Man”. Very very good, and now I just put another one in my IIIc for tonight (until I can get to the library). Poor Henry stepped on a bee at the swimming pool and was almost hysterical, it hurt so bad. I carried him home and Dan and I comforted him as best we could. Poor little guy. Then we watched two episodes of Star Trek (“Arena” and “The Lights of Zetar”) and that cheered him up a lot! Time for quesadilla and bed.

July 05 — Well, moving the servers out of the bedroom was quite helpful. It was only 81 in there when I woke up! Finished my shirt this morning, and then when Dan got up we went down to San Diego Technical Books so he could get a couple of, uh, technical books :) And then we went to hideous Home Depot for another fan so we can have one in the livingroom pushing out hot air and one in the bedroom pulling in cool air. But the Home Depot fan is awful so we’re taking it back tomorrow. Grrrrr. Never go to Home Depot if you can help it. Go to Ace or True Value instead. And then we went to see the new Charlie’s Angels movie (Full Throttle) which was so much fun! It’s very goofy and silly and ridiculous and we laughed and laughed and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. When we got home I ate split pea soup and watched “On The Town” (1949, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller, Betty Garrett). I’d never seen it before and liked it a lot! Boy the some of the women’s costumes were nice, especially the green dress with plaid lining that Ann Miller wore in the “Primitive Man” number. Mmmmmmmm. (Great song, btw :)

July 04 — Happy Independence Day, citizens of the USA! Be thankful for the freedoms you have and work to preserve them! We had a great day. I worked more on my shirt (done except for armhole finishing), read to Henry, baked oatmeal-raisin cookies for Dan, gave both my men a haircut (flowbee!), took Henry swimming and played marbles with him, and helped Dan move our servers out of the bedroom and into the living room, to try to cut down on computer-generated heat at night. It was 89 in our room when Dan got up today. Henry and I had fun tonight watching Mister Rogers and The Justice League with our feet on an icepack :) I finished my book last night (World of Pies) and now I’m starting a Hillerman that I’ve never read. So, time to go to bed, eat a popsicle, and read!

July 03 – Blogging a little earlier tonight, before I’m too tired to think of anything to say. Two years ago today Dan flew out here to CA to live with me. It’s been a great two years! Henry has been yearning for a pretend scythe (he wants to be the Grim Reaper for some reason) so today we made one. We used a nice long dowel for the handle, and made a blade out of cardboard covered with duct tape, which looks really cool :) He’s delighted! I worked on my shirt for hours and hours and got it almost done. It’s a little big, though, so I need to take in the side seams a couple of inches which means I need to unpick the hem facing, etc. No problem, it’s just going to take a little while so I think I’ll do it tomorrow. The collar was HARD. It has this collar band that had to be set into the neckline in a slash. I did it by hand, ’cause I knew it was too intricate to be done well by machine. Turned out ok. I can hardly wait til it’s done!

July 02 — Well I felt great this morning and did the shopping and everything, and then I took Henry to the pool and he swam for two hours and had a great time with his friend Kaysha. They made up a game called “tidepool” which provides seemingly endless fun. I hid in the shade, in my long sleeves and hat and all, and discovered when I came in that I had gotten a sunburn anyway. And the chlorine fumes gave me a headache which I still have, so I’m not feeling too perky right now. Dan and I just watched half of the Antiques Roadshow and now we’re going to bed nice and early.

July 01 — Really sleepy, it’s late… Hmm what happened today. Kirsten came over and we played Settlers of Cataan which was great. She won! I worked on my complicated shirt; got all pieces cut out and marked. Can’t think of anything else right now…