Whooshy snowbuckets

Whoosh go the days. Whoosh! Just zooming on past, so busy and stuff! And oh man, the snow, dealing with the snow. You know how in Maine there was snow the first year I was there and then less and less and the last year there was almost none? Here there has been just tons of relentless snow. It's snowing right now! Whoosh!

Because of The Patchwork Girl of Oz (I think) I always want to make popcorn when it snows. Mmm.

Well I am busy busy busy, yet totally not stressed out about it due to discovering yet again, Captain Obvious, that anti-anxiety meds--get this--make you LESS ANXIOUS. I know! What I did NOT know was that you can take them for a few days to kind of break the cycle/habit and get out of a loop of anxiety. Hey!

It's fascinating. Brain chemistry is fascinating to me. Being all addled and such. Oh my niece's giddy aunt!

What else have I learned this week? Let's see.

1. I never regret shoveling, but I do regret not shoveling. So always shovel.

2. Getting a knitting project started immediately relieves any stress I was having about it. Yay!

3. I sure do like peanut M&Ms. And they're even legit on my dietary limitations because they're nuts and chocolate. Hey! Eating like 40 ounces of them is probably not a good idea, however.

4. Baking that rainbow cake is totally fun and seems all miraculous and also strains the brains, trying to make it be rainbow shaped with the colors in the right order AND flat on the bottom. Basically I think you can't. If you do it in the right order, it curves up, not down. Interesting mental gymnastics trying to figure this out. Also trying to figure out if you can make two rounds and have the rainbows match up. (NO.)

5. Speaking of match, I went on one of those dopey dating websites and had the following fascinating revelations/sequence of thoughts that require their own outline sub-headings:

a. But I don't know any of these people. (Why this is always a surprise, I do not know.)
b. Ugh, a guy in a suit and tie.
c. Ugh, a guy in a t-shirt.
d. Ugh, a guy in a baseball cap.
e. Ugh, a guy in sunglasses.
f. Ugh, a guy with a car/boat/motorcycle/fish/pool cue/other male symbol of supposed awesomeness.
g. Ugh, a guy who actually says without irony that he likes candlelit dinners and walks on the beach.
h. None of these people are awesome.
i. However I am totally awesome.
j. Also they won't like me because I'm fat.
k. Which makes them even less awesome. In fact, they suck baloney. The kind with pimentos in it. Or is it olives?
l. Now I want to write stuff like that in my profile, about how I'm awesome and if you can't see that due to my weight, you are a boring stupid loserface with a speedboat and I hope you have white bread with margarine for supper. And no cheese.
m. Anyway I look great even with upholstery, so shut up, you speedboat-having loserfaces. Someone awesome told me I HAVE STYLE just this very week. And I totally do. Whereas your Nascar-looking sunglasses and haircut from 1980 are so very unstyling. You are Normal Boy. I will have no truck with Normal Boy. We've met before and it did not go well.
n. Oh and Normal Boy is always deeply intimidated by all the places I've been and people I've met and all the cool stuff I can do and how I'm really independent and have read all the books. Seriously, they pretty much crawl under the table and I'm not even trying. It's sad.
o. What on earth would I want with Normal Boy anyway? They are so very boring and I do not want one and they would be terrified of me even if they got past superficial upholstery-based judginess.
p. I would rather have an alpaca. Or two. Three alpacas! Or a Winnebago. Or a trip to Iceland. Or the Orkneys. I would rather have a cup of tea.

6. Which is why I get on these sites and then get sad and then get mad and then get absolutely reaffirmed in my belief in my own awesomeness and then, you know, get OFF the sites, ha!

7. I moved some giant rocks. So what's new?

8. I eyeballed the chainsaw. And I read up on how they're dangerous and what not to do. I haven't progressed as far as finding the manual yet. But I might go to the chainsaw store (they also sell lawnmowers and snowblowers--it is a compound noun yardwork store!) and see whether they can put a guard on this one. A guard goes over the end of the blade so that it can't catch and flip and saw your leg off in 1/10th of a second, which apparently happens A LOT, especially if you're new to chainsawing. Yikes!

9. Snow, man. I shoveled the whole driveway again today. And now it's snowing but not sticking on the driveway except where I left a piece so I could see what would have happened if I hadn't shoveled. What, you don't leave a control patch when you shovel the driveway?

10. My phone totally fell out of my butterfly-covered hoodie pocket when I knelt down on the bridge to move some rocks in the creek. But it did not fall into the creek! Well, it did, but it landed on a nice flat rock and not in the water. It got one teeny tiny scratch, my first scratch ever. On the front at least. But it didn't get a ducking and for that I am seriously grateful. Phew!

11. In a fit of reduced inhibitions (those meds, man) I got a bottle of ginger brandy as well as my intended butterscotch schnapps. I'd been looking at the ginger brandy for a while. I know, don't I get the most vile beverages when on anti-anxiety meds? Remember the Wishniak? What's going on there? But anyway it turns out that if you Google drinks that you can make with ginger brandy, you find some truly glorious names. Like Typhoon Betty, for example. Yay! Anyway if you pour ginger brandy into white cranberry/peach juice it is just ridiculously delicious. It's sort of multi-dimensional.

12. White cran/peach juice is ridiculously delicious anyway. But looks disturbingly like a tall glass of pee. Eep! Hey, that's a palindrome. Pee, eep!

13. I'm knitting something amazing. Well, it's the Honey Cowl, you can see it on Ravelry, but with this particular fancy handpaint yarn I've had for umpteen years, it's coming out far more gorgeous than I had imagined. And I imagined pretty gorgeous. I'm so pleased!

14. I know I haven't taken pictures of knits and things and I am so abashed. Must get on the stick!

15. That story about the family that lived alone 40 years in the taiga really bothered me, because a) if you were starving, you shouldn't have peeled your potatoes, and b) why on earth would you throw the potato peels on the floor? Gross. And c) when two of them died of kidney failure within days of each other after returning to civilization, it was not because of their poor diet all those years, like the article said, but no doubt because they suddenly ate all kinds of things. Come on, now.

16. I really really really want to go buy a painting at a thrift store and paint monsters/dragons/aliens into it in the traditional manner (see Henry Reed et al.) and give it to my brother for his law office.

17. My new month's resolutions are: try to live up to last month's resolutions about not eating wheat and therefore immediately feel a hundred times better. Doy. But damn, sometimes a Triscuit just looks so good.