Saturday

I finished that book today.  It was good.  I really couldn't put it down.  I sat up till about 1 am last night reading it, then woke up at 5:30 am and picked it up again.  Of course, this meant I did not get a ton of work done, but the book was just so intriguing.

It's kind of a conspiracy theory/alternate history/thriller.

Something is wrong with my EBAY account.  I will have to call them in the morning.  I looked at that link for the "MY Friend" doll patterns and someone was selling 2 for about $10 on BIN.  When I clicked to BIN, it did not recognize my password, and the "secret question" was replaced by gibberish. 

Something weird is going on.

Sigh. 

With a little effort, I can probably alter patterns I already have to fit these dolls.  The are so much slimmer bodied that the standard doll of that height.

Ah, well...I have too much crap now and no time to sew anyhow at this time.

Mom and her brother Jerry went to the funeral of their cousin Dee's husband.  I did not really know him.  I had met him years ago, and he seemed like a very nice guy.  He was a teacher, apparently beloved by all his students.  That makes me kind of sad that I never really got to know him.  We might have become good buds.

He died a slow painfilled death with cancer.

Fucking cancer.

The plumber came today to fix the drain.  He was supposed to come between 8 and 8:30 am.  He showed up at about 11:45.  I had been sitting upstairs in my mom's recliner reading my book after making myself a grilled cheese sandwich.  I used Swiss cheese, which is one of my absolute favorites, especially in a grilled cheese sandwich.

I don't really know how long he was here--probably till about 2 pm, then he left. 

Mom got home from the funeral and we sat and talked a while.  Then he came back, and he worked on replacing some faucets upstairs.  Mom went to Cora's birthday party at about 4:30, and I figured he wouldn't be here TOO long, but at 6:45, I decided to just go or the whole party would be over.  Of course, I forgot my stupid camera, so I cannot post any pictures of my niece with her gifts.  She got two dogs that bark and move a little and three cats that move, blink, meow, and twitch their tails.  They are really cute. 

I gave her a calico one.

She loves her stuffed animals.

I was hoping Kari would have her famous scotcheroos for Cora's birthday, but she had made brownies from a mix instead.  They were okay--but nothing as fabulous as her scotcheroos.  :)

My hand, especially the wrist, aches today from giving Lily that long massage yesterday.  I wish I had a cold ice pack to wrap it in.

Ah, well.  It will probably be better in the morning.  I haven't given any real long or powerful massages in a long time, so it was bound to get sore.

I have been feeling kind of head-achey and feverish today.  I feel like I have been outside in the hot sun too long, with it baking my head.  No idea what that's about.

It could just be that I did not have enough sleep.

Mom has taken quite a fancy to Peaches.  Peaches has always  been the most stand-offish, so Mom feels quite thrilled that Peaches lets her pet her and play with her.

I hope she bonds as much with the other two.  They are all really sweet cats.

Tomorrow Mom, Kari, Caleb and Cora are going up to Tammy's house north of the cities in order to help her organize her craft room.  I have decided to stay here and continue to work on my own mess.  It will also be very nice to just have some alone time.  I may go shopping or go to a movie or even call DeAnn and see if she'd like to go to lunch with me.  I'm feeling the isolation and I don't like it much.  They will be back some time on Tuesday--probably in the afternoon.

I have more laundry to wash, dry, and put away tomorrow.  I also want to finish sorting through all the paper crap that was on my desk.  I am almost done.  Then i think I will make it a practice to type a few recipes into my computer every day.  I have a bunch of them that I have collected from many sources in a wire basket.  If I could get them all typed up and put into my recipe book (a three ring binder with all my recipes kept in plastic "sleeves" and sorted according to what they are.

I also have a great big Walmart bag full of patterns or pieces of patterns that need to be filed appropriately.  I will have to pull my file cabinets out from under the desk to sort them properly--I may need to haul them into the family room so I can have room to spread out while Mom is gone for a couple of days.  I have the strong suspicion that I really will need one more file cabinet as well.


I cannot think of anything else of significance to expound on, so I guess I am finished.  :D

Writer's Block: True love waits

[Error: unknown template qotd]
Nah.  I am quite certain that my commitment issues would last longer than any significant other that I happened to dig up's  commitment issues.

Besides, I learned long ago that I do not NEED a man in my life--and that in many cases being alone is vastly superior than being with some asshole.

Sunday--CRAZY Sunday...

Well, what a crazy day.

While I was getting dressed this morning, my sister Kim texted me that she had just touched her first dead body.  I thought she had found a dead mouse or something, so I texted her back, asking if she had finally killed her (no good) husband Kevin.

She responded that he had not driven her to it...yet.  Then went on to explain that her next door neighbor who shares a driveway with them burst into her house early this morning yelling, "Kim!  Kim!"

Like me, she doesn't wear a bra unless she must, so she hollered, "Just a minute!"  Got herself presentable, and went out to see what the problem was.

He said, "There's a man laying in my back yard and I think he's dead!"

Many years ago, Kim was an LPN, and she knows how  to do CPR.  She was steeling herself to give some random guy CPR as she walked out to the neighbor's yard with him.  She put her hand on the guy's back and shook him, asking, "Sir, are you all right?"  But she could tell immediately that he was gone and had been gone for some  time.

Her neighbor had called the police, and they came pretty soon after that. 

The man was lying face down in  the back yard.  He had taken his glasses off, and they were folded on the ground next to his head.  He also had a ladder lying next to him.

When the police turned him over, his body was so stiff that his arm remained bent and his hand stayed up to his face.  Kim said his face was swollen and purple and already covered in flies.  Ewww.

The police got his wallet out of his pocket and he turned out to be a 60 year old neighborhood man who lived just a little ways from Kim's house.  The police found marks on the ground near the garage that appeared that he had put the ladder up against the garage possibly  to climb onto the roof. 

Kevin said that this guy had been a burglar in his younger days...and the neighborhood has had a lot of issues with a peeping tom lately.  As an extra icky detail, the neighbor's preteen daughter was having a slumber party last night and there were a lot of preteen girls up hooting and giggling all night....so it is possibly this was a peeking pedophile...I hope not.

The guy had to have died in the middle of the night--and there is really no good reason he would be in the neighbor's back yard with a ladder, so who knows what he was up to.

My poor sister's driveway was full of squad cars and an ambulance and all kinds of emergency vehicles. 

Another icky detail is that they could not move the body until the coroner was on the scene--and he never showed up till around 1 pm.  So that dead guy lay in poor Paul (the neighbor)'s backyard in the hot sun all day long.....ewwwwwwww.  They did have him wrapped up in something, but still....

Now my poor sister who has problems enough has this grim evident burnt into her brain.


My day was much less eventful.  I was supportive to Kim over the phone as much as I could be.   Mom and I had two ears each of sweet corn for lunch and then milk and oreos for dessert.  Very healthy.  Ha.

Mom and I rolled up the wet carpet remnants in the furnace room and got them into a big black garbage bag.  It was so heavy neither of us could carry it out to the garbage can, so after my mom and my sister-in-law and the kids left for Tammy's, I called Jack to see if he would come and take it to the garbage.  He did.  We chatted a little while he was here.

After mom left, I hauled my blue Walmart bag full of patterns out to the family room and started sorting them out.  I made real good progress getting them separated out...also, there were a bunch of pattern pieces that I had xeroxed which had not yet been cut out, so I sat and cut out several pages of those while watching Pawn Stars and Auction Hunters.  I could have watched Hoarders, but for some reason it just seemed too depressing for me today.

I did not get any laundry done as I had planned,  but I will have all day tomorrow to mess with that.  I want to take a bath first thing in the morning, then get dressed and buzz into Owatonna to do a little shopping.  I want to get a new pillow for my cats as theirs was wrecked by the flood in the furnace room.  I also want to get some hair spray to kill the damned little gnats that are every where in the bathroom.  I don't know where they came from, but they are thick in the garbage can and on the mirror and even on the towels.

I like hair spray to kill them because it isn't toxic for me or the cats.  It paralyzes them and kills them.  The bathroom really needs a good cleaning right now, but I kinda want to wait until I get all the rest of my stuff put away, so I can thoroughly clean everything. 

I also want to sort through my towels while mom is gone.  I want to get rid of about half of them to free up drawer space for other things.  Once I have done that, I will drop them off in the green box that is at the gas station.  That is great for getting rid of stuff.  For some reason Mom is uber possessive about my stupid towels.  She wants me to keep them all.  I don't need them all.  I don't want them all, and I don't have ROOM for them all.

I also need to restock my chocolate stash.  I am down to the bitter end of it.  I will want to pick up a couple bags of Bliss Milk Chocolate pieces and some kitkats and possibly some red licorice or gum drops.  The candy lasts me for a long long time because I only eat a couple of pieces a day--usually at this time of night while I am messing around on the internet. 

I will also need to fill my pill caddies tomorrow.  I should do it tonight, but I really just do not have the motivation to do anything more productive than type right now.  Sigh.

Tomorrow is the first day of school at ROC.  I feel really sad and a bit bitter about not being there.  I feel like I got royally fucked over, and fucked over by people I thought sincerely cared for me.

Well, not one person from ROC called and checked in with me over the summer.  Not even Susan.  We did speak a few times this summer, but never about that.  And I almost always called her, not her calling me.

Dust in the wind....out of sight out of mind, I guess.

Sad.

I thought I meant something to those people.  Obviously I was foolish in my assumptions.