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My birthday was last Saturday and, thanks to my dear family and friends, I had a very pleasant day. Let’s see if I can remember how my day went… Everyone sent birthday email. Elli made recordings of two German picture books (which were part of the HUGE pile of special books and toys that she mailed to me last month). Dan gave me a beautiful sterling silver and diamond bracelet which I love, and a book about brain science that I was wishing for — “Incognito”, by David Eagleman. It’s fascinating!

Oh, another gift from Dan was that he bought three copies of “Worms: Reloaded” — one for each of us so that we can all play Worms together, even when Henry isn’t at home! I’ve been playing “Worms: Armageddon” on my iPad a lot recently but it’s WAY better on a real computer with proper network multiplayer. SUPER-FUN!

Dan and I lazed around all day and played a LOT of Worms, and then Chloe and Bob came over in the evening (with donuts!) and we watched Catch-22, which I think I saw years ago but I didn’t really remember. Excellent movie.

Henry wasn’t home on my actual birthday but he took me out for a birthday treat on Tuesday. He drove me to Adams Avenue Books, a wonderful two-story used book store. I browsed for ages and finally chose a pile of books and Henry bought them for me :) It was a lovely and special outing!

Here’s a not-very-good photo of my bracelet. It’s actually much more delicate than it appears:

Am I forgetting anything? I dunno! Anyway, thanks everyone!

Although in general I’ve been feeling better lately, I still haven’t really felt up to doing much recording. I was scrolling through iTunes one day and realized I have a large number of old recordings, from when Henry was little, that I might as well share with you. I’ve just uploaded my recording of “By The Great Horn Spoon!” by Sid Fleischman.

You can download it from my archive.org page:
http://www.archive.org/details/KayrayReadsToYou,
or from my “Kayray Reads to You” page here at my blog:
http://kayray.org/kayray-reads/

Blurb from Amazon:

Brimming with riveting adventure, the story is set during the Gold Rush. The fast-moving plot follows the high spirited young Jack and his aunt’s faithful butler, Praiseworthy, as they set out to strike it rich in order to support the financially strapped and beloved Aunt Arabella.

It’s a lot better than that description makes it sound, I promise :) If you like it, please buy a real paper copy!

Yesterday I felt tired all day, and today I feel tired and headachy. Yuck. I remembered http://www.framerater.co.uk/home and have been having a nice time checking movies off the lists, and adding ones I haven’t seen to my Netflix queue. And I watched a few movies yesterday, too. Finished “Crimes and Misdemeanors”, which didn’t do anything for me. Also watched “The Lady Vanishes”. Not that great. But “Witness for the Prosecution” was fun! Charles Laughton FTW.

Today is my 15th day on Tyvaso, the inhaled medication I’m taking to treat my pulmonary hypertension (see previous post).

The first thing I’ll say is: if you’re starting Tyvaso and it seems daunting and miserable and horrible and impossible, be brave and stick with it. It gets better! I’ll try to write down as much detail as possible in case it might help someone who’s going through the same thing. Let me know if you have any questions.

On Friday July 8th a big box arrived from my specialty pharmacy containing the actual medication plus two nebulizers (one to use and one spare) and all their parts and accessories, and three or four instruction books that all say the same thing, and a little carrying case, and some other random stuff… Don’t worry, you will be able to pack most of it away in the closet in case of emergency. The stuff you need every day will only take up a little room in a kitchen cupboard or somewhere like that.

You get three power sources for the nebulizer — regular wall-wart, rechargeable battery pack, and a car adapter, plus every kind of international plug adaptor. I leave the wall-wart plugged in in the kitchen (which is where I use the nebulizer) and keep the car adaptor in the carrying case.

Stephanie, a nurse from the specialty pharmacy, showed up that afternoon to teach me how to use the thing. Actually, TWO nurses showed up… the second was there because Stephanie travels all over the west coast, and they wanted someone local to be familiar with my case. Anyway nurse #2 wasn’t important.

Stephanie showed me how to assemble, use, and clean the nebulizer. It’s quite small. Looks like this when it’s ready to use:

The base contains a little bit of distilled water. A little conical cup sits on top of the water, and the medication goes in the cup. The machine vibrates the water a few million times a second, which vaporizes the medication. The circular parts contain filters and you breathe through the nozzle thing.

In the morning, you put water in the base, put in the Tyvaso, put fresh filters in, and put the whole thing together. After each treatment (four per day), you take off most of the bits and put some plugs in the holes:

This keeps the water and Tyvaso contained, and you can even knock the thing over and it’s ok. At the end of the day you take it all apart, dump out the base, wash all the plastic bits (just a swish with soapy water, nothing fancy), and let it air-dry till morning.

The machine has a timer and tracker so you know how many breaths you’ve taken. It seems really confusing and time-consuming and intricate at first, but dealing with the little machine becomes habit really fast and it’s nothing to worry about. I can do each treatment in under 2 minutes, probably.

The HORRIBLE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE part is actually breathing the stuff. I don’t know if it makes everyone cough they way it did me, but wow. After my very first breath I was coughing so badly I could hardly breathe and I had to pause a long time between breaths. After the three-breath treatment (they start you at three breaths, four times a day and work you up to a higher dose slowly), I coughed violently non-stop for the full four hours until the next treatment. My mouth and throat were miserably dry, and my throat was raw from coughing. It was AWFUL. There are several things that can help the coughing and dry mouth for some people — lozenges, hot tea with honey, yogurt, etc., but none of them helped me even the slightest bit. This was extremely depressing. I couldn’t do any recording at all and it felt as if I never would be able to again, and all the coughing left me so exhausted I couldn’t do anything.

It was almost unbearable for about, oh, three days. I just lay on the couch, coughing, and waiting for four hours to pass so I could start it all over again. Ugh. After that, it got slightly better each day. Still bad, but slightly better. Then, after seven days, I had to increase to four breaths at a time and the misery started all over again, almost as bad as the very first day.

However — on the 9th day I noticed that, despite the coughing, I actually felt a little better for a few hours. I felt like I didn’t need my oxygen, I had a little bit of energy, and I felt, you know, like maybe the Tyvaso was actually helping a bit!

Ever since then, the coughing has been decreasing day by day and I would say that, on the whole, I definitely feel better. I’ve been running errands without taking my oxygen along, and not missing it. I don’t always feel like I need to spend several hours lying down in the afternoon. Some afternoons I do, but not every day. One evening I even had enough ambition to go to the store for ingredients and baked a pie! A very simple recipe, but still something that would have seemed pretty near impossible, or at least a very bad idea, just a few weeks ago. My poor family has been living on frozen pizza, bagels, and take-out for far too long because cooking proper meals has been just too exhausting for me. I have the energy to cook more often now. In fact, today I’m planning to make a big thing of scalloped potatoes, with grilled chicken and asparagus.

Yesterday I moved up to five breaths per session and I tolerated it really well. Just a little bit of extra coughing, maybe. I think I probably won’t have to wait a full week before increasing to six, and then I’ll be two-thirds of the way to the full dose of nine breaths, four times a day.

One day last week I had to take Henry to the dentist and knew I’d be away from home at treatment time, so I took my little machine along (with its plugs in place you can just toss it in the carrying case and it’s fine), plugged it into the car, and it was all easy and quick. It made me feel less tied down to know that I could easily be gone all day if I just remember to bring my machine.

To sum up: if you’re just starting Tyvaso and feeling really miserable, don’t despair. It will probably get better for you just like it did for me, and maybe you’ll notice some benefits too!

I don’t usually talk about my health here, other than complaining about normal stuff like sore throats and colds, but Dan thought it might be helpful to me (and possibly others with the same condition) if I blog about my pulmonary hypertension, with which I was diagnosed in 2004 or so.

From wikipedia:

Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) is an increase in blood pressure in the pulmonary artery, pulmonary vein, or pulmonary capillaries, leading to shortness of breath, dizziness, fainting, and other symptoms, all of which are exacerbated by exertion.

PH makes it harder for the heart to pump blood through the lungs, much as it is harder to make water flow through a narrow pipe as opposed to a wide one. Over time, the affected blood vessels become both stiffer and thicker, in a process known as fibrosis. This further increases the blood pressure within the lungs and impairs their blood flow. In addition, the increased workload of the heart causes hypertrophy of the right ventricle (a condition known as cor pulmonale), making the heart less able to pump blood through the lungs, ultimately causing right heart failure. As the blood flowing through the lungs decreases, the left side of the heart receives less blood. This blood may also carry less oxygen than normal. Therefore it becomes harder and harder for the left side of the heart to pump to supply sufficient oxygen to the rest of the body, especially during physical activity.

I’ve also got a chronic dry cough, a rare symptom caused by my swollen heart tickling some nerves in my chest (they think).

My PH was caused by a birth defect in my heart.

I’ve been really lucky. PH is a rare disease and there is no cure and not many treatments, but mine has been kept under control all these years with simple pills — lots and lots of them (2 Tracleer and 12 Revatio per day), and they’re costing my insurance company untold thousands, but relatively easy for me to deal with.

I’ve had to take it a bit easy and cut back on activities, but up until a couple months ago I had enough energy for all my daily tasks, slow walks, the zoo, etc. Just no hiking, dancing, or running about :) We hire a cleaning crew to take care of the mopping and vacuuming.

But I started feeling much worse recently, which was frightening and frustrating. I don’t like to think about my PH, obviously, but I had to when I was suddenly getting out of breath on the shortest, slowest walks and around-the-house activities. My doctor saw me and ran a bunch of tests and it looks as if my heart is working much too hard, so it’s time for more aggressive therapy. Ugh.

The easiest and least invasive of the three possibilities is Tyvaso, a medication which I will breathe out of a small machine four times a day, so my doctor says he’ll start me on that and see how it goes. http://www.tyvaso.com/.

It’s the kind of thing, like my other fancy medications, that will be shipped to me by a specialty pharmacy every month. I’m pretty freaked out about this. I feel like I should be extremely grateful that such a medication exists at all, and that I have access to it. And I am. Of course. But it still seems scary and difficult. And I’m angry that I have this condition at ALL, and that it’s getting worse.

I also have an oxygen concentrator, a wonderful magical machine which sucks oxygen out of the air and sends it down a tube for me to breathe all night (without it I sometimes wake up in the night feeling breathless). It was hard for me to accept the fact that I need it; I don’t feel like an invalid, but breathing out of a tube seems so invalid-esque. However, I got used to it, and now I love it. Sometimes I use it in the daytime if I’m feeling worn out. It’s very soothing.

Now my doctor says I should use oxygen whenever I do anything active, so yesterday an oxygen company delivered some small oxygen cylinders. They’re about the size of a wine bottle, and I have a shoulder bag to carry one in when I go out. This is another hard thing to accept. How will I feel at the store, or the zoo, with an oxygen tube under my nose? But maybe I’ll be able to do the shopping without getting so worn out if I have enough oxygen.

Anyway. That’s what’s going on with me. I should get my Tyvaso next week, maybe. A nurse will show up and teach me how to use it. I asked if it would help me feel better, or keep me from deteriorating so rapidly, or what, and they said it might actually help me feel better, so that would be nice!

I designed a sweet little headband using Barbara Walker’s “mosaic” technique, and I wrote up the pattern, made a PDF, and posted it to the Ravelry store. You can download the pattern PDF here: Mosaic Headband

The Ravelry pattern page is here:
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/mosaic-headband (no login required)

And now, photos!

I made the first one with green and white Risata:

After I posted it on Rav, I got a lot of compliments and even a few requests that I’d write up a pattern, so I did. And then I knit a blue and white one with Palette while following my own pattern so I could check for mistakes and confusion:

I’ve always been intimidated by mosaic knitting. The descriptions are always so wordy and I couldn’t quite believe that it would work. But when I decided to be brave and try it out on this little project, I discovered how fun and easy it is! To sum up: you follow a chart of dark and light squares. You knit across and back with only one color of yarn, then drop that color and knit back and forth with the other color. While knitting with color A, you slip any stitches which are color B on the chart. Both directions. That’s it, that’s all there is to it. Just try it!

Last night Henry and I saw OK Go in concert at UCSD! It was a fantastic show!

The concert was in a ballroom, so it was standing room only. We were the 2nd people in line so we got to stand in the center front, right at the railing which divides the band from the audience. There was no one between us and the band. It was just amazing to be that close! At one point, Damian stood on the railing right next to me and leaned out over the crowd with a microphone. The girl next to me held his hand to help him balance. He had striped socks on.

These photos are not zoomed. That’s how Damian looked from where I was standing:

And Tim:

Sorry about the awful photos; they’re just iPhone photos and I was too busy listening to bother with getting better ones. My god, they put on an great show! In addition to rocking out on all my favorite songs, they played “Return” on the handbells, which was hauntingly lovely. Oh, and they handed out 3d glasses and played a 3d film of the video for White Knuckles in the middle of the show! That was fun! The audience cheered when the dogs appeared to jump right out of the screen. And they had confetti cannons that shot out so much confetti that it was like being in a heavy snowstorm, especially in the very front row! A very simple but nifty effect.

Thank you, OK Go, for the wonderful show!

I’ve wanted to record myself reading a few picture books for a long time now, and since today is Elli’s birthday, and she loves my recordings, I asked Dan for help last night. He set up a tripod and pointed my lovely Olympus PEN E-P2 camera over my shoulder, and made sure everything looked and sounded good. And afterward he even converted the video to a reasonably-sized format that would look good on Elli’s iPad. I’ve just put it up on youtube in case anyone else wants to hear the story too. Happy birthday, Elli! :)

The Little Engine that Could, by Watty Piper:

I read this book 4,728,759,276 times to Henry when he was little, and of course my mom read it to me. I love the illustrations, especially the cheerful food. I don’t know if you can see the illustrations clearly enough, but all the food has happy faces, and the milk bottles are marching along while the spinach dances. I also love it that a jack-knife is included in the list of toys.

Chug chug chug. Puff puff puff!

Dan and I went to dinner last night at Cafe Athena in Pacific Beach and had the best time.

It was a short drive from home, parking was easy, and the atmosphere there is just right — comfortable and casual, but not sloppy. We sat at a little table in the window. The staff was great, especially our server. We started off with an appetizer of Yalandji, which was stuffed grape leaves with a filling of rice, fresh tomato, red pepper, onion, mint and pomegranate molasses. The flavor was amazing — tangy and fresh and zingy and just fabulous. Next time I might make a dinner of Yalandji alone!

Then we had soup — tomato basil for Dan, and avgolemono for me. Yummy. Then Dan had the beef kabob and I had Papoutsakia, which was Italian eggplant filled with seasoned ground leg of lamb, onion and pine nuts. Topped with tomato sauce, fresh basil and Feta cheese and wrapped in a slab of pita bread. It tasted very good, though I would have preferred a higher veggie-to-meat ratio ;-) And by that time I was pretty full of appetizers and soup so I brought most of it home for lunch today. Looking forward to it. YUM.

The restaurant wasn’t too crowded so we felt like we could relax and take our time, and we had a lovely long slow dinner with lots of fun conversation. It was a great evening!

I’m working on two main knitting projects for the fair this year. The delivery deadline is May 25th, so it’s time to get cracking!

Thing One is another striped Chroma vest like the one I designed and made for Mom, but with a few refinements to the pattern and some adjustments to fit me. I reached the underarms today, which means it’s time to plan out the steeks and the whole thing gets much narrower and moves along even faster, so I’m well over halfway finished with the main knitting. After that it’s just steeks and ribbing. Woohoo!

Ravelry page here (no login required): http://ravel.me/kayray/cv2

(Actual green is more mossy, less minty. Actual red is less orange, more a dull tomato red)

Thing Two is a “Nerderdel” lace tired skirt. Just started it today as a reward for making such great progress on the vest. The yarn is knitpicks “cotlin” (cotton/linen blend).

Ravelry page here (no login required): http://ravel.me/kayray/nlts

I might also enter a striped scarf that I’m making, which is pretty and would be fun to show off, but it’s not very special. Also it’s SO BORING and SLOW to knit and it’s only half-done…

Ravelry page here (no login required): http://ravel.me/kayray/cs

I designed and made this vest for Mom’s 66th birthday, which was in January, but she’s used to getting late handmade presents. Yesterday it was officially finished, and I gave it to her and took photos:

So cute! Both vest and Mom :) (more photos on flickr)

It’s made of Knitpicks’ “Chroma” and “Wool of the Andes” yarn. I worked it bottom-up and steeked the armholes so the stripes would be consistent. Crocheted steeks are MUCH more fun than sewn ones!

You can read all about its construction and see more photos on its Ravelry page (no login required):
http://www.ravelry.com/projects/kayray/chroma-vest

I took it along to the North Coast Knitters Guild Knit-at-Night on Wednesday and it was much admired! I love love love the Knit-at-Night. Everyone is so friendly and encouraging and warm. I really look forward to going every month.

First: let’s keep helping Japan to recover and rebuild. Here’s a great way to double your donation: http://www.crowdrise.com/handsforjapan/

The Ogawa Family, together with the Red Cross, is challenging donors to donate for Japan disaster relief. Every tax deductible dollar you donate, the Ogawa family will match equally in contributions to the Red Cross up to $500,000. Together we can donate One Million Dollars to the Red Cross.

They were only at 14% of the goal when we donated on Monday, and now they’re almost halfway there with 17 more days remaining. Please give what you can!

And now back to your regularly scheduled blog post.

Henry just spent a week on Santa Catalina Island doing a marine biology camping program with some of his schoolmates. Last Sunday afternoon (the 20th) Henry and I drove to Long Beach (it’s about 2.5 hours away, depending on traffic) in a terrible rainstorm and spent the night in a very nice hotel that Dan chose for us so that we could get Henry to the dock by 8:30 the next morning without the stress of leaving home at 5:30am and still being nearly late like we were last year. We got some dinner at Ruby’s and then had a relaxing time in our hotel and watched season 7 of Peep Show together while I knit a warm hat for him. (To quote Super Hans, I was knitting like an electric Nan.)

Here’s a view of the storm from our 4th floor hotel room. A HUGE eucalyptus branch blew down into that intersection a little while later!

Got Henry to the dock on time the next morning and he got on the ferry boat and sailed away.

And then I drove up to Long Beach yesterday (Friday) to fetch him. I left at 11am, though I didn’t need to be there until 2:45, because last year I left at noon and was an hour late because of traffic. But traffic was easy yesterday and I got there at 1pm, so I found a free parking lot and knitted while I waited. It was so wonderful to see him again! We never go a whole day without talking or emailing or texting, so five days felt like an eternity to me :) While we drove, he told me about all the fun stuff he did all week — nighttime snorkeling, a 15-mile hike, a visit to an old mine, kayaking, etc. I’m so glad he had such a great time! What a wonderful opportunity!

Here’s the Birthday Vest for Mom that I’ve been working on:

Still need to add pockets but then it’s done! You can read about it on the Ravelry page (no log-in required): http://ravel.me/kayray/cv

(note: I struggled to write this post because all I can think about is Japan. But this concert allowed me to think about something else for a few hours, so I can at least share that pleasure with you.)

Last night Mom, Chloe, Henry, and I went to UCSD to hear a concert. It was Bach’s Sonata in G Minor for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord (played on modern viola), and Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” and it was just marvelous from beginning to end.

Embarrassing as it is to say, I haven’t been to a proper classical music concert in years, I guess… I’d forgotten how amazing it is to hear real live musicians. The viola and harpsichord piece was just as lovely as you might imagine. The viola was rich and velvety, and the harpsichord had none of that nasally sound they can sometimes get. And it was Bach. What more do I need to say? The audience loved it and wouldn’t stop clapping so the musicians had to come back for three curtain calls! Also, no one clapped during the movements, thank goodness. I’m always nervous about that. But the audience was mostly old people and university music students so I guess they knew how to behave.

The harpsichord:

Then there was intermission, and the crew whisked away the harpsichord and brought in the chairs and stands for the Stravinsky piece.

“L’Histoire du Soldat” is an interesting and unusual piece (written in 1918, I think) and is played by a septet of woodwinds, strings, brass, and percussion, with a story which is read by a Narrator, a Soldier, and the Devil. The conductor was excellent. I love to watch a good conductor. The part of the Narrator was read by a dapper Englishman in evening dress, the Soldier was read by Seth Lerer (more about him further down), and the Devil was read by a dark-haired woman who reminded me of Lily Tomlin’s “Edith Ann” character. All three were perfect. Marvelous piece!!! My favorite bit is the second little piece, the “Airs by a Stream”, but it’s all fantastic.

The bass player broke a string about five minutes in, so he ran away to find a new string, and then they started the whole thing over. I’ve never seen that happen before.

Oh, yeah, Seth Lerer! I’ve been listening to his lecture series on “The History of the English Language” for years, and I recently got his “Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer” which is as good as it sounds. I also have his book “Inventing English” and I’m looking for a hardback copy of his “Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter”.

His voice is like the voice of an old friend, so seeing and hearing him perform live was amazing! It turns out he’s the Dean of Arts and Humanities at UCSD. I had no idea! After the concert we found the door to the backstage area and I bravely marched in and found him, and asked if he’d sign my copy of “Inventing English”! He was very sweet and friendly, and signed my book “To Kara – Warmest wishes – Seth”. Squeal!

I guess I’m a linguistics fangirl. Hilarious.

I scanned the whole “Santa’s Christmas Village” book yesterday. The book is a lot larger than the scanner bed in both dimensions, so it took quite a while to make sure I’d scanned all the parts of all the buildings. Most of the buildings will need to be printed in several parts on 8.5×11 paper, so I need to do a lot of work on the images to make sure there is enough overlap for gluing the pieces together, and that it’s clear which roof goes with which house, etc. I printed out a test lady on Dan’s nice photo paper and she looks great!

Does anyone know how much margin I should leave on each page so that the average printer will be able to print the whole image without reducing it?

Update December 7, 2011: Want to make your own Christmas Village? You can download my scans here: http://www.archive.org/details/SantasChristmasVillage !

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When I was six (1975) I had this wonderful book, “Santa’s Christmas Village”, which contained a punch-out-and-assemble Christmas village. It made a huge impression on me and I’ve never forgotten it — the bright, shiny colors; the feel of the heavy, glossy paper; the embossed details; the faces of the little cone-shaped women; the fun of slotting the little buildings together… But what I did forget was the actual title and publisher.

When The Internet arrived, I remembered my little Christmas Village one day and started searching to see if it still existed, perhaps in a retro-reprint or something. I wasn’t unhealthily obsessed or anything — I mean, I would maybe remember and have a little search once a year or so. Since I didn’t know the title, I searched on strings like “cut-and-make christmas town” or “papercraft christmas village” and never had any luck at all. Last week it occurred to me that it might have been a PUNCH-OUT-and-make town, not cut-and-make. That gave me some new results, and somehow I found what sounded like my book mentioned on an antique site somewhere. “Santa’s Christmas Village” (Published by Whitman in 1975.) So I started searching on THAT string, and found an original edition for sale on etsy for $4 including shipping. (I’m sure that link will break pretty soon.) The seller had posted enough photos that I was 99% sure that it was my book. UN-freaking-believable. So I bought it, and chewed my nails waiting for it to arrive.

It showed up in the mail a couple days ago. It’s my book. It really is. The book I’ve remembered since 1975. My little Christmas Village that I haven’t seen in 36 years! Here’s the cover:

I’m going to scan it and print on heavy paper so I can make my little Christmas Village next December without spoiling the original book. I asked my little sister if she remembered it (we each had a copy so we wouldn’t fight), and she does, even though she must have been only four at the time! So I’ll print a copy for her, too. She says my internet-fu is strong!

Oh, internet. Thank you. And thank you, Etsy seller AdaJane!

I wanted to knit Mom something very special for her birthday (it was in January, heheh) so together we planned a vest. It’ll be long, v-neck, button up, and striped.

I’m using Knitpicks’ gorgeous new Chroma Worsted in the “Midwinter” colorway, with stripes of black Wool of the Andes. The Chroma is SOFT. Soft, soft, soft. And beautiful! But it seems very delicate; although it does have 20% nylon mixed in for strength, it has almost no twist at all, so it’s almost like knitting with a strand of unspun fleece. I wouldn’t recommend it for socks, but for anything else worn next to the skin it would be perfect.

The color here is fairly accurate:

I’m inventing the pattern of course, and working bottom-up for a change because I wanted to establish the stripes before I had to deal with armholes and neck shaping. I’m working from all three balls of Chroma at once (two rows from each, then six rows of black), having first evened them out so that they were all at the same point in the color transitions.

Last night I knit through the waist section and started bust increases and neck decreases! (color here is wildly inaccurate):

You can get more details on the Ravelry page, no log-in required: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/kayray/chroma-vest

I’m planning to steek the armholes, if I can get up the courage and if I’m POSITIVE the fit is correct.

Henry is already feeling a lot better, hooray! His fever is gone and he has a lot more energy. Still coughing but not so much. It’s so wonderful to see him smile again. I felt really tired today so I hope I’m not getting it! We’ll see. I’ve stayed as far away from him as I can and have been washing my hands like crazy.

Oh, my laptop went to Apple for repairs for the 7248th time (it has an intermittent screen flicker), and it came back this morning. So far, so good – not a single flicker all day. Time will tell… This is its second new motherboard! It has also had a new display, a new optical drive (for a problem unrelated to the flickering issue), and I think a couple of other new things. I kinda lost track. Oh, a new battery also, because its original battery swelled up.

Note: when Apple sends you that postage-paid Fed-Ex box so you can ship your computer to them for repairs, make sure you remove the original shipping label to reveal the label underneath, the one addressed to Apple. I forgot that part the first time, and my laptop went from the Fed-Ex drop-off right back to me. D’OH! ;-)

I felt quite good today and it was sunny and warmer so I worked in my little garden in the morning. I weeded the peas-and-lettuce bed and thinned out the lettuce seedlings, and then I planted tomato seeds in a pot. It’s still pretty cold at night, and most days, so I sliced the bottom off of translucent plastic jug and popped it over the seeds as a little greenhouse. Oh, I also planted thyme and oregano in a pot.

Peas in their fluffy, weed-free bed:

Poor Henry is very sick, sicker than usual with a fever and a very bad cough, so I took him to the doctor and she said it’s probably bronchitis. She ordered a chest x-ray to be sure it wasn’t anything serious, and it came back clear, so that’s good. So he’s on antibiotics now. She also prescribed some cough syrup but he hates it because he still has the urge to cough but he can’t. I read Lord of the Rings to him for ages tonight to help him get to sleep. Poor boy! I hope you feel better soon, sweetie!

Invented a simple tuna casserole last night. Dan gave it a big YUM and had two helpings!

1. Fix a box of Trader Joe’s mac-n-cheese, but also chop up a couple stalks of celery and drop into the boiling water after the mac has cooked a minute or two.
2. Mix prepared mac-n-cheese-n-celery with two cans of tuna fish (drained) and a glug of cream.
3. Stick into a buttered casserole dish and top with a sprinkle of garlic powder and some grated cheese (I used sliced colby-jack, which I chopped into ribbons).
4. Bake 20 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit or until the cheese is melted and the whole thing is nice and hot.

It would be great with a salad and buttered french bread, if you have some. I didn’t, so we just ate casserole.

A couple of weeks ago, Elli found a cute little picture-book biography of J.S. Bach on Project Gutenberg. She showed it to me, and then we noticed that the same author, Thomas Tapper, had written a number of these little biographies, and that Gutenberg has ten of them. So I made them into a collection and recorded them all. Elli did the administrative stuff and the proof-listening. And here they are!

http://librivox.org/stories-of-great-composers-for-children-by-thomas-tapper/

There are links on that catalog page to each little book online, so you can look at the pictures while you listen :)

If you find an online source for any of the other little composer biographies, let me know. I think there around ten more that Gutenberg doesn’t have yet, and I’d be delighted to do a second volume.