Always look on the bright side of life

Oh, man, it's late. But I am so full of words! I'm saying.

I don't know, today was...nice? Right up until my mom told me about the rattlesnake I ran over with the mower on Monday. Whoops! Or was it Sunday? When did I mow? Unknown.

It's also possible that the rattlesnake was alive and slithered away from where she saw it. Because when we went out to look at the piece of rattlesnake, it was gone. Though lately it's been made very clear to me that dead things vanish very quickly around here.

Like the bunny that the mail truck ran over right at the end of the driveway. It was all gory and freshly dead when I left for work, then when my mom went out two hours later, it was down to just bones and a few scraps of fur.

Turkey vultures: they are fast eaters and very thorough. They also leave great big pools of, well, evidence, to show where they were standing while they were eating. Ewwww. That and the big smear of blood make me wish for more of those giant thunderstorms.

Or maybe I'll learn how to use the power washer?

My dog just got in BIG TROUBLE for jumping at the buzzing moths bonking into the screen. He's lying down next to me being extremely good and immobile. He's learned this recently, not sure how. When in trouble, lie down next to your human and don't move. Good boy!

It's a good default option.

He's all drenched in flea and tick drops and smells like medicinal gum. There are ticks again. Ewwwww. I sure do hate the ticks. Especially when you're enjoying a lovely morning cuddle with the dog who spent the whole night under the blankets with you and you find a great big fat engorged one in the curve of his ear. Gaaaaaaaaaah!!!

I figure if he cuddles up tonight, I will also get flea and tick immunity. Woohoo!

This is unrelated: I'm going to try to wear either a gingham or madras shirt tomorrow. I don't know why I'm pushing myself like this. I only this past year graduated to t-shirts that SAY THINGS and HAVE IMAGES. And I only got a non-drab/forest/sky-colored garment when I bought red shirts for the WGA thing. So you know. Eeek!

The new clothes are quite alarming. QUITE alarming. Because there are so many of them! And they were so necessary! Eeek! And now I have to wear them! I prefer to let new things sort of seep into my usual wardrobe incrementally. But I can't wait on this due to the unholy heat.

Madras or gingham. Gingham or madras. It's a tough one.

One of these days I'll get brave enough to pack away and/or give away all those oxford shirts I don't wear and haven't worn since about, ooh, 2006? Around then. I don't wear them because they don't fit right anymore. Unbelievable! When I only got them in about 1997! How can this be?

The unholy breathing issues have returned, starting yesterday. I'm having those giant coughing fits where I can't get my breath and I turn scarlet and tears run down my face. It's AWESOME. It's nearly as awesome as finding out you either did or didn't run over a rattlesnake with the mower!

The odd thing is, I definitely remember hearing some rattling over there and wondering if it was related to the mower somehow. Jeebus. Running over a rattlesnake and not realizing it = horrible because a) oh man, so gross and awful, and b) I didn't know it was there and I was that close to it, ack ack ack! Not running over a rattlesnake = it's still out there, roaming around, waiting to bite me or my dog. Gaaaaaack!

Not good. Stuck between a snake and a snake place?

I suspect (but obviously can't prove) that it was alive and slithered away. There was a big swervy dent in the grass where my mom showed me. Like a big snake sunned itself there. Oh man.

Snakes. Possible snakes. Possible partial snakes that then disappear. Anyone else having flashbacks?

At least I didn't see a raptor flying over with a whole snake dangling from its claws, like back when I lived in the land of myth and legend, where you could get poutine at the pizza place.

Ha ha ha, that dog flea and tick stuff: I washed my hands thoroughly, realizing even while I was doing it that someone was going to rub it all along my legs. And lo! He has done so already. And my hands and lips are already swelling up! That's just awesome.

All together now! You live your life like a canary in a coal mine. You get so dizzy even walking in a straight line.

Today really was an oddly good day, though, in between the impromptu bunny bones golf (whacking them across the road so my dog wouldn't get into them) and forensic snake remains investigations. And other various assorted stressors. And Alison's mom died yesterday, which is awful. The local paper had the biggest, most comprehensive, best written obituary in the entire time my mom has been reading it, which is over 20 years now. Oxford commas and all! So clearly not written by that paper, because they are legendary for outrageous misspellings and grammatical solecisms.

The dog ate most of an apple and a lot of snow peas. Oh and I gave him a dewormer. In the evening, on a Wednesday. So I am an idiot and fully expect to have to go out at least once tonight. Serves me right, man. I only hope there isn't a carpet steamer involved.

In positive news, that amazing soup I invented (onions, lots of olive oil, cumin, garlic, black pepper, cayenne, salt, dry mustard, black beans, squash: puree) was still ridiculously outrageously amazing. It has the most wonderful texture. I used canned black beans and a brick of frozen squash, so I don't know if it would work as well with regular home-cooked ingredients, but I'm certainly willing to try. They do something extra velvety with the squash you buy in frozen bricks. But it just says squash on it. I dunno.

Right, off to bed! To cough, perchance to sleep. And in that sleep what dreams may come must give us pause.

So much cumin. I wonder if a giant cumin aura repels rattlesnakes? Brrr, I would not like to be bitten by one of those. I love snakes but going to the ER and getting LifeFlighted to Danville to get antivenin is not my idea of a good time. Though it sure sounds like a great thing to put into a story, huh? Plus then I would have special snake superpowers! And speak Parseltongue! And could live happily ever after with the alternate history version of Severus Snape! I know!

That's me, looking on the bright side of everything, yep, uh-huh, oh yeah.

An oboe. Or possibly someone talking in the next room. Strangely compelling!

Well hi! You're looking great today! Did you get a haircut? Looks terrific!

I'm having a weird day! Yes! Oh, thank you, yes I did actually get out the blow dryer and dry my hair, then put it back in a top-only scrunchie because I'm twelve and also from 1987! And the scrunchie matched my t-shirt! I have to get some of those curly laces for my sneakers.

No no no, it's a weird day because my temperature has been doing trapeze tricks or something. Way down to a whisker away from hypothermia! How about that, huh? I thought hypothermia was 93 but it starts at 95. Mine was 95.4. And I was SO BOILING HOT I could barely stand it. This is after mowing the grass for an hour.

Hmmmmm.

So I googled things that cause low body temperature and it told me: hypothermia (wait...is it an effect or a cause?) as well as oddities like problems with the hypothalamus. I think I remember that they go in through your eye sockets to do surgery on that. SO LET'S NOT HAVE THAT.

Anyway. Now I'm curious what on earth it could be. First of all it was 48 degrees outside and I was mowing in shorts and t-shirt, which honestly is pretty normal for me. Remember all the snow shoveling in regular clothes plus gloves when it was ridiculously cold in Maine? Exercise heats me way up.

Then I remembered Jim Henson and got all scared I was having sepsis or something, I don't know! Wouldn't I know? I think I'd know. Wouldn't it be readily apparent in some way? Besides hypothermia?

At any rate, today I bought some clothes to help me adapt to working in a hot hot place when I'm already super boiling hot. I don't seem to have proper clothes for any environment, do I? Well, sweaters. I'm good with the sweaters. And hand-knit wool socks. And hats, gloves, snow boots, cardigans, scarves, and so on.

So now we have some capri kind of pants in an array of khakis and darkish colors (and one pair in lime sherbet! awesome!) and some sleeveless tops and short-sleeve crinkly kind of cotton and all that kind of thing, in gingham and mild-mannered madras-y plaids.

They also had all these long-sleeved t-shirts like I wear all winter for $1.99, so I got a bunch more of them, feeling like a murderer because they were probably made in Bangladesh. (No, Nicaragua, but you know the same issues apply.)

I really wanted a stripy Mo shirt.

Wait, back up.

Last week while going about my business I ran into the supremely awesome Alison Bechdel. You MUST know who she is, right? I could not believe the number of people who didn't. I was agog. I've been reading her comic since the 80s, people. Literary heroine! Every kind of heroine!

I was a complete daft loon about it, of course. Remember when I found Emily at the screenwriting thing and I was like, "Hi, I'm Maggie, from the internet!" One of my finest hours.

Well my brains could not wrap around running into someone that outrageously awesome here in nowheresville *despite* knowing perfectly well she's from the next town over. So I said brilliant things like, "Are you Alison? You're super famous!" And I'm hitting myself over the head with my keyboard right now, believe me. Anyway she was very kind and friendly and I had all these huge unwieldy feelings the whole rest of the day (and a fever from the bronchitis) about how we went to the same school and are from similar nowheresvilles and so I CAN BE AWESOME TOO. Because I got that inspired. I know!

So when I went to the library this weekend, coughing furiously the whole time, I checked out a gigantic volume of her comics. I think it's called The Selected Dykes to Watch Out For? I think so. And then I read it all. Hundreds of pages. Ate it all up.

I remembered bunches of it from back when the lesbian moms I was a nanny for got the paper and I grabbed it and read that before they even got home from work. In fact the one mom kept all these back issues (I wish I could remember the paper's name--it was in D.C. and I feel like it was hyphenated, but I'm probably remembering Whitman Walker) and I went through ALL of them, reading the comic. It's excellent. It is all about liberal co-op going march attending bumper sticker having people who are basically all of my friends and I loved it. The characters are so fantastic. And the art is brilliant. And there are all these tiny visual jokes sprinkled all throughout that just cracked me up.

And ever since reading that whole book, I keep imagining Mo flipping out about things as I go about my shopping. Legitimately flip-out-able things, like buying a lot of t-shirts for cheap that were made by underpaid exploited people and so on. Well, first I imagined her asking why I needed more clothes. (Which is a fair point.) And then the cartoon rants.

So that's why I was hoping to find a stripy Mo shirt but alas! I did not! Probably a good thing, given the problematic nature of imagining a cartoon character's rants every time I would have worn it.

One shirt is stripy. It's a navy blue hooded t-shirt thing with thin white horizontal stripes. It has one of those sewn in pretend white t-shirt things that make it not obscenely low-cut. I'm against those on general principles. Things that are made to pretend to be other things! Dislike! Degeneracy in artistic creation!

My own head is full of those same rants, see. Oh boy!

Mo's shirt is equal width red and white stripes, though. Isn't that what the U.S. Women's team is wearing now? Wasn't I just searching the world for one so I could write WAMBACH on the back? 

The library didn't have that Lynda Barry book, can you imagine?

Anyway I'm still all inspired to awesomeness. And I have a lot of inexpensive but very necessary guilt-ridden Mo-ranty light-weight clothes so I don't utterly die of the heat at Day Job. Which is probably my own personal thermostat going wonky but does that even matter?

I'm mystified by the hypothermia thing, seriously. I would put it into WebMD as a search but absolutely everything I search for, unless it's that neuroma on my foot, comes up multiple sclerosis. Like, always.

Which is annoying because either it is or it isn't, it can't be both, stop Heisenberging me with your mixed messages, nervous system and also WebMD!

Speaking of which, it's been 8 days since I fell last! Woohoo!

I did rearrange the furniture while in bronchitis exile. And vacuumed. Those are two things you're not supposed to do with a massive respiratory infection. Oops.

Boy have I been coughing a lot. So much coughing! Unreal how much coughing, actually. What's that thing where you hurt your ribs coughing? Costochondritis? Yes. Where it feels like your ribs will actually break off your sternum, sproing, sproing, sproing. It causes much dramatic hand to the bosom action in the manner of pearl-clutching.

So this all started when I mowed the grass last week. And then today I did it again. Oops. Now my mom feels terribly guilty because she kind of nudged me to do it by telling me that the Amish neighbors called to see if we were getting the lawn taken care of or if we needed help. Which is to say: cut your grass, it's a big eyesore.

You can't see it from their house, not clearly, so someone must have come over to check on it. They are very good at taking care of my mom so nobody minds but I felt like maybe I ought to get the giant tall grass cut. It went bananas in the past week. All this rain, it shot up ridiculously high.

So now I can't breathe and I'm wheezing and coughing and basically having a relapse. My favorite thing is the oboe sound. And I did at one point stop to wonder who was talking in the next room, then realized it was a rattly/wheezy inhale sound. Oh dear.

I have bronchitis all the time in the sense that I have chronic bronchitis, so that plus the asthma means that exercise plus pollen and dust and junk (and gasoline engine exhaust, for what! a patch of grass! --Mo) pretty much puts me on the bench after mowing.

Though I don't really recall it being this bad in Maine. Was it? Maybe it was.

Plus I can't take all those antihistamines because of the cold/respiratory infection/chronic bronchitis. You're not supposed to take them AT ALL with chronic bronchitis. Or benadryl. Yep. How about it?

Today I realized I've never seen the Zapruder film, so I was going to watch it, but apparently the President gets shot in it or something (okay, I knew that) and so it says WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT which means I certainly won't watch it.

My hands are all creepily wrinkled up like I'm a hundred and ten.

I guess I do feel pretty weird. But don't worry, I'll be fine! I have all these new clothes, man! Royal blue capri pants. Me oh my. Also the brightest most colorful pair of outrageous sneakers in the whole world. I really wish I could wear them all day every day. I should find a picture. But instead I'll find a picture of Mo.

Toddy, hot

See, I just don't think you'd have to talk to the replicator that way. Surely it could figure out syntax, if it could make things out of nothing and all that? Why would modifiers need to follow the noun? If you said "hot tea" would it freak out and unleash hell upon the ship? Nope nope nope.

This hot toddy is terrible! I squeezed a lemon and an orange and put in honey and rum and hot water. Oh, I think it's the rum. Too much rum, maybe. Dilute, dilute!

Did you use Dr. Bronner's soap ever? Me too!

I'm about to pour some cran-cherry juice into this hot toddy, which isn't hot anymore anyway. It'll make it colder and redder and possibly might make it taste even yet more dire still. We shall see!

Oh, I have a nasty cold/sinus/breathing thing. It's boring. It makes me cough a lot and not get any sleep. Also I clear my throat all the time, ahem AHEM ahem.

Here is my ongoing quandary. It's very hot (to me at least) where I work. I can't even really ever get comfortable there. What can I do about that? Skirts and knit tops are pretty much the coolest attire I can figure out. But then I remembered my linen obsession phase. Linen is the ultimate coolest fabric. Wrinkly, yeah, but so? Actually, where are my various linen garments? Where is that tan linen skirt?

I think many of them are in Maine, alas.

Mostly I have dark dark dark clothing, which looks odd against my utterly white legs (except for all the rosebush scratches and various gouges and bruises.)

Also these great pants I have are a) too hot and b) too short, unless worn with boots. Can you even imagine wearing heavy twill pants and boots to a place that is already boiling hot to the point where I'm dripping sweat down my face? Me neither!

And how, HOW I ask you, did I manage to acquire a bunch of tops in a collection of colors none of which go with essentially anything else I own? How?

Hum de dum.

Obvious solution #1: make some linen skirts. Doy! Okay. Obvious solution #2: go buy some skirts since my motivation is approximately nil these days.

Obvious problems with both: my motivation is approximately nil these days. Don't wanna go anywhere or do anything. Oof.

Well. I don't know the solution to any of that. Online shopping? Maybe! If I could be sure things would fit and be flattering and not be shoddy or see-through or anything unfortunate like that. Except paying all that money for skirts really grates my cheese, since they're just two not very large squares of cloth sewn together and very easy to make. Quandary!

I need motivation. This R2 unit has a bad motivator! Uncle Owen!

Any suggestions? I can't even get around to reading my library books, you guys. Or cooking reasonable food. Or stopping in the grocery store that I drive right past every day to buy reasonable food to cook. It's serious!

Maybe the evil bug of doom that has infested my breathing apparatus is part of the cause? Maybe it's being boiling hot a lot of the time? Or not getting any sleep due to coughing and gasping for air? Lassitude, I tell you what. LASSITUDE.

Get gone, lassitude. You are not wanted here.

Romulans? Roald Dahl's mom?

Ugh, why are the Romulan villains so boring in the Star Trek movies? I can't stand them. This Christian Bale one might be the worst, though. Also, figure out how two ships go through a black hole (um, problem) and emerge 25 years apart. And then the Romulans basically sit around sulking for 25 years. How did they know that other ship was even coming? How did they know when it would?

I've watched this movie a couple (a lot) of times now and the logic holes just get more and more glaring.

However. That's okay! Because it's really just about cute boys bonding. So many cute boys! Bonding!

Cute Zachary Quinto Spock is not the gorgeous creature original Spock was, but he is eerily similar at least in body shape. It's kind of alarming. I have to keep looking at his chest because it's the same. How? How would you even do that? Normal Zachary Quinto is not shaped like that.

Also I can't figure out what it is but Chris Pine has very strange features somehow. Like they're all overly large? I'm mystified by what bothers me about him because he's utterly charming and a Cute Boy but something seems off. What is it?

My favorite Star Trek cute boy will always be John Cho, obviously, because a) he's clearly the winner of the cute boy competition and b) he looks sort of slightly sad all the time. Actually that's even when he's not being Sulu. Why so sad, John Cho? Don't be sad! You are awesome!

Okay, tied for favorite Star Trek cute boy is Scotty, because of course Simon Pegg! I mean! Yes! I would totally watch a show that was just those two left aboard in Utopia Planetia or whatever, while everyone else was off on shore leave getting into gratuitous fistfights (obligatory fisticuffs! drink!) and running around in their underwear. Scotty and Sulu would manage to get the ship nearly destroyed by trying to do a fancy unauthorized upgrade and there would be lots of worried faces and racing around in Engineering. And by the time everyone else got back, you wouldn't know any of it had happened except Sulu would be exhausted and Scotty would be asleep at the transporter.

Also I really think Uhura should have been captain while Kirk and Spock were off being heroes. Seriously. I wanted to see her in the captain's chair! In fact I hereby insist that she WAS and we just didn't get to see it.

I wish we'd seen more of Kirk's dad, though. Fall through that black hole, Kirk's dad!

Anyway. I'm watching Star Trek (this movie) a lot lately to try to cure a) insomnia and b) nightmares. So many nightmares! So horrible! The nightmares really contribute to the insomnia, alas. Ideally I'd watch lots of DS9 episodes or something. Maybe I should get it on iTunes.

Nightmares like: a couple of other people and I decided to go to a hospital and murder some people for the thrill of it. On Halloween. So we did, covering each other and whatnot. Skinning them with a fish knife, hiding the remains in these public area trash bins with the enameled covers, you know the ones? Except then we realized that there was video surveillance and our perfect crime had been recorded, so we skedaddled, arguing about whether anyone watched that kind of surveillance video anyway, and whether we could run. With our bags full of flayed skin.

Horrifying nightmares to have. There are lots of other mundane ones about trying to do absurd paperwork in incredibly messy and gross places while people go by indoors with leafblowers and such, making it impossible to tidy up, because as soon as I did, foosh, there it all went.

And the ones about holiday candy and those kind of public holiday events that are all garish and noisy and crowded and plastic and horrible--the kind of thing lots of people enjoy but which are actual nightmares for me to be in, never mind the literal nightmares. I mean it's horrible in real life, plus I have horrible nightmares about it while asleep. Things with loud music blasting from speakers. They make me want to be a hermit. And I'm already basically a hermit!

Tonight I ate some anxiety cheese and knitted socks and watched that Star Trek movie and cuddled the furry animals. Today I mowed the rest of the grass (except the back) and worked on this dopey puzzle I've been doing, of three black Lab puppies looking guilty over a pair of work boots. One has a bootlace in its mouth. Oh and I baked that fabulous oatmeal cake for my birthday cake finally.

SO EXCITING, my days.

It's because I'm super anxious. I tried taking those anti-anxiety as-needed pills but they just made me super depressed. It's true! I kept listening to that "A Team" song, which is not about the A Team but about a dying crack whore in the winter in Ireland or something? It has excellent music and goes around and around, but the lyrics are truly depressing. Oh and I've been reading Roald Dahl's autobiographical material, which I just adore. Star Trek and Roald Dahl = comfort food for the brain.

The thing I realized this time through was: he got his writing chops from writing all those hundreds of letters to his mother. He doesn't even seem to realize it himself, though he includes photos of various letters to illustrate his stories. It's actually a method I've taught in writing classes, directing your writing to one person who thinks you are absolutely wonderful, even if you have to make up that person.

It would be totally fun and interesting to write to your alternate reality pen pal self, where everything went very differently but you're the same person. Hmmm! I might do that.

Things I am NOT doing include: writing, editing, emailing people I need to email, writing thank you notes (I got birthday presents from family members!), cleaning, unfrakking my habitat, ironing, sewing, quilting, fixing that heat shield thing on the car, doing situps, doing crunches, jumping on the trampoline, brushing the housepets, reserving a truck to get my stuff out of Maine, looking at housing/work listings all dreamily, making skirts, or making the bed.

Things I AM doing include: mowing the grass, laundering my clothing and bedding obsessively, forgetting to wear my glasses, staying up way too late, failing to drink enough water, sleeping too long, and today, forgetting to take any of my dang pills, except the thyroid ones of course. I never (almost) forget those.

It's all this feeling that Something Is About To Change. For which, yay! But also, ack! That's my dual reaction to any change, really. I mean I get utterly bored into stupefaction and then freak out when it's time to change things. Oh I am so hard to please.

I will tell you things that please me, though, because of Positivity and whatnot.

1. sleeping all snuggled up with my dog
2. reading a whole lot
3. strong hot black tea
4. this possibly vile but delicious butterscotch schnapps stuff that isn't really schnapps at all but liqueur
5. oatmeal cake oh man
6. mowing the grass
7. sitting out in the blue chair with the dog on my lap
8. snuggling the dog and cat simultaneously
9. water goblets
10. running out of hangers because all my clothes are clean except what's on me RIGHT NOW
11. those TARDIS towels
12. pictures of my little niece playing soccer, her first game!
13. knowing I'm in charge
14. the unspeakable dorkiness of socks and shoes with skirts (seriously, it's so over the top!)
15. bunnies, especially the surveillance bunny that came and watched me through the sliding glass door on my birthday even though my dog was going ballistic and my cat was there. That's dedication!
16. those little bright yellow chirpy birds that make me feel like a cartoon character
17. messing around in the creeks, like clearing out clumps of dead leaves that are blocking water flow
18. did I mention cheese? cheese. Also strawberry jam.
19. making wild non-fascist quilts. seriously I am so done with these fascist straight line Teutonic quilts.
20. squeezing orange juice and drinking it right then. Get away from those nasty jugs of fake juice! Squeeze it yourself! It's actually eight hundred million times better by actual count!
21. my blue backpack with the soccer ball embroidered on it

There, that's a twenty-one thing salute.

Maybe I can sell going to bed early/on time as dog snuggling time, right? If only I had a no-nightmares guarantee. Dreams really stick with me. I get flashbacks to dreams all day, every day, even dreams I had years ago. Dreams are persistent so bad ones are really something to dread and avoid if possible.

While I'm busy doing/not doing all those things, you should also read Boy and Going Solo (Roald Dahl) if you haven't. Even if you have. Especially Going Solo. The utter insanity of what was asked of the RAF pilots in the Mediterranean just astounds me. The mind reels. And the part about the Air Commander who told him to burn up this package of secret papers if he happened to crash, did he have a match? And it was his friend who had to say: I think he'll burn up with it if he crashes, sir.

Anyway I'm more muddled and less like writing letters to Roald Dahl's mom but it's good to articulate things, don't you think? So I'll try to be around more often. Mwah.

Mow mow mow your boat

I mowed today, first time of the year, woohoo! You know how I love the mowing of the grass. Except it was hard to do it today because of a carpet of gorgeous dandelions. The thing is, though, tomorrow there will be more dandelions. But still.

I saw a baby snake (of course) and a baby toad (SO CUTE) and all kinds of assorted stinging bee/wasp varieties, all of which considered killing me dead and then didn't. Yay! Thanks, stingy things!

So then I had to look up the Vulgate Genesis again, as I seem to need to do every so often, to see if there was a word for crawling things (well, reptilia, which is kind of disappointing) to go along with flying things. And stinging things. But nope. Stinging things don't get their own category. They're mostly flying things, though, anyway. Volucri.

There is some funky Latin in the Vulgate Bible, seriously. I know I'm a medievalist and all but I'm biased toward classical Latin's neatness and complexity. It makes medieval Latin look inept and clunky, like someone's homework that is going to get a C.

Today I read Roald Dahl's book Boy again. So very awesome. I have Going Solo up next. Oh man oh man I really want to learn to fly. But maybe not.

I'm really enjoying this anxiety-free weekend. I'm not sure what brought it about except a) I got all finished with the latest iteration of Online Job and so I'm actually OFF for once, b) birthday margaritas interrupted the cycle of anxiety, c) my birthday got over and that's a relief, d) I got lots of actual sun and fresh air, e) I've been eating barley on the advice of that Mother Jones column and for whatever prebiotic/probiotic/biotic/unknown reason, all that heinous constant inflammation has dialed waaaaayyyyyy down. 

Here is how much less anxious I am: I sat there working on a puzzle for hours. Hours!

I did some yicky tasks such as sorting through the ancient crap in the barn to see what I might want to keep. In fact I put a lot of stuff aside (in my trailer) just in case I decide later I want it. I probably don't. But some guys are coming to clear out all the metal and take these giant culverts that have been there for umpteen years, so I had to rescue whatever we wanted to save.

I now have a toboggan, in case you're in need of one. And our childhood sled with the metal runners. And I saved my mom's childhood sled with the metal runners, too. I saved a lot of weird stuff, like our old camping lantern (no doubt rusted out or otherwise corroded) and this rusty dutch oven and some white enameled box with a matching lid that looked all 1930s surgical or something. There are about forty horseshoes in there, too. I did not save those. Though actually...you can totally PLAY horseshoes, can't you. Hey!

Here's the other reason for lowered anxiety: I realized that I'M IN CHARGE. Of my life, I mean. I tend to get into these situations where I get battered around and beat up (metaphorically of course) and feel like I have no control and then I get miserable and hate it and all. But I'm in charge. If I put up with a crappy situation, it's because I decided to do that.

I don't know why this was such a blinding revelation to me, but it was. And it's awesome.

Here's another fabulous thing: the box that came from my brother included a drawing that my little niece made of me and her in a canoe. I'm a big blue oval with arms and legs and head sticking out and she's a short purple oval with arms and legs and head sticking out. And our hair is drawn perfectly. And we each have a briefcase. And it says LOVE MAGGIE! and then there's a stick figure with a heart for a head and it is saying love in a speech balloon thing. And we both have great big smiles.

It's the most awesome drawing ever and I'm keeping it for all of time.

We did all this weird errandy stuff today like haul the garbage down to the road (the firemen moved it so they could turn around in the driveway one million times) and get the snowblower out of the garage finally and move the cart here and the wheelbarrow there.

The snowblower turned into a saga. First my mom couldn't get it started and then I came outside after a decent interval and tweaked the choke a bit and it started right up. Which must be a little aggravating, but I think she was just glad to get that sucker running.

I am the small engine whisperer, I'm telling you.

Then she wanted to leave it running in the shed until all the gas was gone, which is fine except a) the firemen have already been here enough today, b) there were three grass fires and two house fires in the area today, c) I like that shed and don't want it to burn down, and d) smoke isn't good for me to breathe.

So I stayed outside and watched over the snowblower. Also I took the great big gas can out of the shed, away from the hot running engine. Holy mackerel. Boom, huh? And then it was getting dark so I turned off the outside lights and my pup and I sat in the blue plastic Adirondack chair and watched the satellites and planes go by and looked at all the constellations. Or asterisms. Whatever. And drank another margarita. Mmm.

When the snowblower got very low on gas and started doing that high/low/high/low revving thing, Gawain jumped down off my lap and trotted over to the shed to bark at it. I just love that. He also always barks when you pull the starter cord on a small engine, like the lawn mower or the pump. I love that he's engine literate. That's my boy!

Anyway, that was a great day. And we are all pooped out. Gawain's actually asleep on the dog bed under the desk, with his paws up under his chin in classic dog manner.

I have to fix the heat shield under the car, between the exhaust and the drive train, or whatever that aluminum baffle thing is. I was looking for the horrendous rattle and hoping I didn't need a catalytic converter or mufflers. I think it's just this aluminum thing, though. A tab tore off and it got all bent up somehow. I have to figure a way to punch a new hole in it and get it re-bolted on there. Then the loud embarrassing noise can stop. Phew!

Also I have to bake myself a birthday cake, though it was behind mowing the grass and Online Job on my priority list.

Here is my cute dog story then I'll scamper on out of here. My mom took him outside with her when she was gardening and gave him one of these frozen yogurt dog treats my sister made. He ate part of it then took it off and hid it in the bushes somewhere for later. After a while she told him it was time to go in, so he ran off and got it out of the bushes and brought it over to take inside.

That dog knows a lot and understands a lot. Scary, huh? And fabulous! Good boy!

I've been unplugged from the internet due to excessive relaxation levels since Friday night, so I know I owe everyone and their dog an email and all kinds of things. I am getting there, I swear! I'm just enjoying the rest and relaxation oh so very much. Lovely!

Tapestry needle

Because I'm feeling oddly at loose ends, get it? Knitting joke! You use a tapestry needle to pull in all the loose ends! Oh ho ho! Humor.

Projects for today include but are not limited to:

1. Taking medications one at a time at widely spaced intervals and examining my lumpy face for reactions afterward. (Complications: already got hives and haven't taken anything yet. Hmmm.)

2. Laundry. Woooooo!

3. Digging out that fancy white monitor/tv that AppleTV will talk to so I can watch the Star Trek movie somewhere other than on my laptop. (Complications: I forgot my old Apple password two years ago, the one that AppleTV knows, so I might have to call up the help line and see if they can, you know, help.)

4. Setting up AppleTV with its own router and all those cables and whatnot, oh man. Though maybe it'll work through the house's wireless router? This is giving me a preemptive headache.

5. Writing things! Yay! I totally wanna write things.

6. Tying a horseshoe to a rope and flinging it over and around that half-fallen tree so I can climb up the rock pile and pull it off the shagbark hickory it's trying to knock over. Though I did have this awesomely labor-intensive idea of cutting six foot lengths off the bottom end one by one. Then it falls down six feet, see? Lots of sawing involved. Saw saw saw. (Complications: the tree could actually fall ON me if I do that. Which would be bad.)

7. Reading another book if I'm over my Tender Morsels PTSD. We'll see.

8. Switching out my dad's old monitor which I've connected to the laptop for the white tv/monitor, if it won't go crazy connected to two things, which it might. Hmm. I can switch them out, though.

9. Researching non-broken laptops. I was thinking ooooh, a fancy one, but then I thought: how about a lightweight kinda basic one, right? I just want to write things. I want a light but sturdy one I can carry around with me. I don't want to have to worry about it all the time. Seems like a better idea. Still requires research.

10. Make some soup full of things. Not watery soup, is what I mean. Things! More things than soup!

11. Take out those horrible sliding glass shower doors that are such a pain to clean and put up a shower curtain. (Complications: involves leaving the house and engaging in base commerce at some sort of Thing Emporium. I would like to avoid that if at all possible.)

12. Call up the various pharmacies to see who has the thyroid meds that I'm NOT allergic to, since I totally blame Walmart for all of this, including the ER visit, for not having the name brand and giving me the generic that I told them I'm allergic to instead. Grrrrr. That's probably the whole source of all of it. Stupid Thing Emporium! Do you know how many benadryls have died to fix this? A LOT.)

It's perfectly likely that instead of doing any of that, I'll lounge about all sybaritic-like and play Sudoku on my phone and drink lots of cups of tea instead.

I feel like Herman is an unusual name for Melville's time. Don't you? And more Germanic than it ought to be. Where did his parents get the idea to name him Herman? Inquiring minds would like to know.

I've been chasing ancestors myself lately. When looking for my birth certificate to show the notary to sign some papers that were made out by some dopey lawyers to my nickname instead of my legal name, I came across the death certificate for my paternal grandfather, whom I never met.

There are several interesting points about this.

1. He looks like Craig Ferguson to me. The pictures are from the 1930s so more like Craig Ferguson in the 1980s, I guess.

2. I don't look like anyone on my mother's side at all or on my paternal grandmother's side at all, which leaves his family for relatives who look like me. (Aside from my dad and uncle, his sons. And my little nephew.)

3. I learned that his parents were Scottish (father) and German (mother.) And that his mother's maiden name was Schieswohl, which is kind of awesome. No, it does not mean poo. That is scheissen. It means shoots well. Which I do. Hey!

4. Also apparently I have a whole batch of second cousins or something in a little town in Maryland? Maybe? There's no way to know if they're actually related except that a) it's a very tiny town and b) they have my last name. Also c) I guess I could, you know, ASK.

5. And a whole batch of some other kind of cousins that are his sister's kids and grandkids.

6. I think they were only two of a whole lot of siblings so who knows how many more there are?

The whole thing is completely alarming, frankly. Except I'm not sure why. Except in our family, you weren't allowed to talk about my grandfather AT ALL and got in huge trouble for even asking questions, even as a tiny kid. It's a fraught topic is all I'm saying. And no one really knows why.

I'd like to find out what the story is. I mean, I have a genuine family mystery here! Imagine finding a whole lot of relatives, huh? Imagine if I found some who actually looked like me!

Picture one, center back. Picture two, that's obvious. Picture three, on the left.

Hmmmmmmm!

Barleyman Butterbur

I was reading an article in Mother Jones about probiotics on my iPhone because I am a total caricature of myself and my demographic. But that's beside the point! The article made a good case for eating brown rice, barley, and oats, because certain good bacteria in your innards thrive on the fiber they contain. Different bacteria like each of the different grains. Whereas if you eat "junk food" (which was never codified, which makes me grumpy) you have a bloom of the bad bacteria that make you get all kinds of inflammation and feel terrible and get fat. And that's why we all feel terrible and are fat, apparently? Except for all the people who eat junk food and don't? I guess? QED.

So because anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I ate a bunch of oatmeal for breakfast (lunch) (late lunch, actually) (I was sleeping, okay?) and then for dinner made barley and brown rice together in the rice cooker, plus a bunch of veg.

All I can say is I feel fantastic. My knee doesn't hurt at all. The one that was swollen up like a great big honeydew melon yesterday. That knee. Nothing hurts. It's so weird. Could be a total coincidence, of course. Somebody get me some junk food so I can test it!

What the hell is junk food? What are they talking about? Because I don't eat fast food, which I think is what they mean. I do eat popcorn. Define your terms, people.

Oooh, speaking of coincidence, I also didn't eat any of my evil nemesis, the peanut M&M, today. I was just reading that peanuts are hugely full of Omega 6 fatty acids (oh my gosh I'm dozing off myself right now) which are great big inflammation causers.

But now I'm mad because I still have a ton of hives on my face (SO ATTRACTIVE, all big red bumps) so I just don't even know. Dunno.

Barley and brown rice. Mmmmm. I love that stuff.

So we'll see how that goes. Eating the food I'm supposed to eat instead of idiotic things. Who knew?

Of course I had a giant bag of barley just sitting there because again, I'm a caricature of myself.

Yesterday was all dramatic because the water ran out, so I had to trek up the mountain to the spring and determine that yes, it was full of water, then trek back down and get the adorable little gas-powered water pump, then learn how to use it (my mom got the manual from her manual hoard) then trek back up to the reservoir and get the pump to start, which required NOT doing what the manual said but instead using my bizarre small engine whisperer skills and messing with the choke and idle until it purred away.

I had it hooked up to the line going from the reservoir to the spring, pulling water out of the reservoir and pushing it up the pipe to blow out whatever was blocking it. And it worked! Foom! It was awesome.

Then I rescued a gargantuan spider from the reservoir, but I couldn't get the frog out. I went back today with a sieve duct taped to a ski pole, and discovered a) the reservoir was now full up to the tippy top, and b) the frog had gotten itself out somehow. Yay, frog!

I'm strangely reluctant to drink the water after seeing that frog in there. Odd, no? (NO.)

I seem to have a tremendous quantity of faintly lemon-lime seltzer around the house.

Yesterday my busted up knee was absolutely killing me, all swollen and shaped all weird, hurt to move or not move, stand or sit or lie. In fact it woke me every time I tried to turn over. Guh! Kneeling on the cement slab over the reservoir tank did not do it any real good. Nor did all that hiking around. Yeah. Ow. So I'm delighted and mystified by its sudden recovery.

You are inexplicable, knee.

Anyway it was totally fun to play with the little baby pump and it was awesome to be all, "Yep, I fixed it," airily, waving hand as though: no big deal. Also I switched the system to gravity feed so the pump wouldn't burn itself out and instructed the mother as to how to switch it back this morning: "Move the lever on the left to where it isn't." It only has two positions, see.

My shed/RV/treehouse/hobbit hole/train car fantasy has moved to school buses, because they're for sale cheap everywhere and easily convert into a big open space once you take all those pesky seats out. I am much exercised in my mind about how to insulate such a thing. And which windows to take away. And whether you'd want an engine in it, or no. On the whole I'd say yes. Though they're diesel and mysterious to me. Also, man, that suspension! That drive train! What a dinosaur of a system!

I really should learn the diesel engine one of these days. Oh oh oh, I love engines so much. It's a little bit alarming to me how much I love engines. I LOVE THEM. Oh, you got that. Right. Sorry.

Ack! And then I stayed up half the night finishing this book and got utterly blindsided by the wrong wrong wrong ending and of course told Twitter, because I'm like that, only to wake up to a message from the author saying Sorry but also saying the happy ending was way wronger.

That was pretty awesome, actually.

I can't even really talk about how the ending was so wrong without giving away absolutely everything about the book. But I will say: the way it is, this character gets punished for bad things that happened to her, in a way that's common in literature, and it says terrible things about whether women can come back from these terrible things happening to them. By which I mean, it says: no. Whereas the answer has to be a resounding YES.

It's the most terrible kind of rejection and it froze me in place when it happened in the book. I felt sick. I couldn't believe it. I got mad at the author for doing it, that's how un-organic to the story it was. Everything was leading to a+b=c and redemption and then suddenly we got the square root of negative one.

I was completely absorbed by this story, too. It was the rudest of jolts out of it. There was another wrong thing too but it's kind of all part of the same wrongness. Wrong wrong wrong.

Why? Why? Ack! No!

I won't even pick up another book right now in case it turns around and bites me like that one. Sheesh!

Well. Anyway. It was the best book in just about ever up until that point.

So. Change of subject. I'm making serious inroads into paying off all that Maine-is-hell mostly medical debt. You know I've been working two jobs most of this year, three for a while there, and putting about 95% of it toward paying that down. And prescriptions. Every two weeks I pay off another one of them, which is just the best feeling. I wrote a stack of checks yesterday and put them out for the mail today.

This is awesome given that it was not too long ago that I wouldn't even open my mail. Then I got to the point where I put it all into Quicken. Then I started paying them down. And now they are diminishing regularly and will even go away entirely at some point. What a relief that'll be! I'd love to get rid of them before I move. Oh yes yes yes.

Working very hard to get back in the black. It's awesome to see it coming nearer. Wait, is the black the tunnel that I'm going to see the light at the end of?

I'm also tremendously excited at the thought of getting that great big Penske truck and filling it up with my stuff and driving away with dog and cat in the front seat with me, like a Muppet movie scenario. Moving right along!

I never consciously thought, "Hey, I'll go there and work and pay down all that medical debt and then I'll be freeeeeee," but that's what happened. It's exactly what I should have planned to do, but it kind of happened by accident. Like I earned money and then thought, "Hey, no rent. Pay those bills!" And the rest is future history to be.

If the uttermost ideal circumstances come true, then you will hear me scream with joy all the way from over there. We'll see! I sure hope so!