Sorry I Went AWOL

... last night but I came home in the afternoon feeling like crap.  By the time it was time to go to Friday Knitting I had the chills and I was wearing a path to the toidy.  Not a great feeling.  I dosed myself with the pink stuff, bundled up, and was in bed asleep by 9:30--and woke up about every 45 minutes through the night, so often that my fitbit decided that I got up at 3:30 AM.  Not restful.  I am happy to report that, aside from being tired today, by this afternoon I knew I was really on the mend.  Whew.



It was terribly windy yesterday and I found a way to show you how windy it was.  See this picture of my bootprints in the roughly 6" snow?  I went out at 8:30 to clear the snow that had blown over the seed in the platform feeder and this is how it looked just over an hour later.  The wind had blown snow in and nearly filled them up.  Windy.



The red family of birds visited the platform feeder yesterday.  All of the House Finches, the ones with the reddish pink heads and chests, have started to put on their mating finery and this Cardinal came to join them.


 

And at the same time this male Downy Woodpecker was working so hard to get nuts out of this wreath that I could hear it through the double-pane glass.  I know there's a biological reason why woodpeckers don't get headaches but it amazes me to watch them pound away at the frozen seeds and suet.





My knitting friend, LB, and I went down to the Lutheran church where the Bay Lakes Knitting Guild meets and we went through the library cart.  I printed out a (frustratingly incomplete) inventory and we went through the cart, culling these torn or unpopular books, and adding in new donations that hadn't been entered.  I guess when I get home from my jaunt to the sunny south I'll be the one making a new inventory list.  

I haven't told you about my escape from winter.  My beloved Aunt B, she of the comments, bought me a ticket to go visit her in Florida for a week.  I'm so looking forward to it.  I haven't seen my cousins in ages and ages and can't wait to spend time with them someplace where I don't have to put on all of my clothes to go outside.  Tomorrow I pack.



I added a few more rounds to the February Seaman's Cowl this afternoon once I started feeling human again and stopped dropping off to sleep every half hour.  Being sick is tiring.

9 February--Tropical Obsession. 

"Where do they buy their paint?" Edward shaded his eyes with his hand as he stood gazing at the Amstel Bar in Rincon. "Creative name too," he said to Louise as she walked up beside him after parking the car down the street. "I suppose it's safe to leave it there while we're inside," she said, squinting up and down the street as if expecting to see roving bands of car thieves. She turned to him. "What did you say, dear?" Edward patted the tin Amstel Beer sign nailed firmly to the wall beside the open door. "Someone thought long and hard to name this joint." Louise elbowed him. "Don't be superior. You're not known for your creativity, remember you've got a Dalmatian named Spot." "Well," he said with an injured sniff, "you wouldn't let me name him Sparky."

I do not remember who Edward and Louise are in that story.  They aren't the people that found the body or maybe they were in the first version but they're not now but I really like them.  I'm keeping them.  It's surprisingly difficult to think about what I'll pack because my mindset now is piling on clothes to keep warm but it's in the 80s in Florida.  This is going to take some consideration.  Oh, poor me, having to think about warm weather clothes.  
--Barbara

Snow & Wind

 

Yippee.  We had rain, freezing rain, and snow today.  I cancelled my session with the trainer because I didn't want to be out on the icy roads.  I waited until about 6:00 to go out and clear the driveway.  I am so grateful for the snowblower because the snow and ice was heavy and hard to move.

It started snowing and blowing again almost as soon as I came in from shoveling so by the time I was ready to close up shop for the night there was snow on the less salty parts of the driveway and enough snow is blowing around that it turns on the motion sensor lights.




 

Instead of going to the Y today I closed up the TV armoire, stowed my knitting out of sight, and got to work on my manuscript again.  I found a glaring hole in the story that will take at least a chapter's worth of writing to fix.  I'm about 50 pages from finishing the read-through and then I'll tackle the edits, corrections, and that hole in the story.  It needs to get done because I'm taking it to the Writer's Institute in Madison in April to pitch to a couple of agents.  (eek!)  Then I can start working on whipping the next manuscript into shape.



After supper of more Asian Turkey Meatballs with sauteed baby bok choy with scallions on the side (yum!) I finished February Preemie Hat #2 while watching mindless TV.  I watched Wisconsin Foodie on the local PBS station because it was about Door County but I gotta say, the host is ultra-annoying.  I'd hoped that my tolerance for his voice or manner or whatever it is that bugs the daylights out of me had grown but nope, it hasn't.  I still can't stand the guy.

7 February--Tropical Obsession. 

Trying to walk in the sandy places in the shallows he moved out of the cleft in the ironshore rocks and shone his flashlight at the white fiberglass boat purring on the horizon. Ready with a story in case the dawn light was playing tricks and instead of Santiago in the Santa Marta the boat carried the Coast Guard or worse yet the fish police, Manning thought about how he had gotten into this mess. His whole life he had attracted a, let's say, more interesting class of people. His mother, his social-climbing, money-loving mother hated his friends, forced him to live his life in the shadows to avoid her disapproval. A sly smile lifted the corners of his mouth when he saw the flash of Santiago's smile when the Santa Marta reached the edge of the drop-off. Manning waded out, swimming the last few yards. He slipped over the gunwale like an eel, pulled the zippered plastic pouch out from under his shirt and counted out the pile of guilders. "I said dollars," Santiago said, his smile draining away from his eyes and lips. "You want me to explain to the bank manager why guilders aren't good enough? 'Dollars are what smugglers want, sir.' Yeah, that'd be great." The hard light in Manning's icy blue eyes stopped Santiago's complaint.

Man, it's windy out there.  I'm glad I'm in here where it's warm and the electric blanket is warming up my beddy-bye.  Tomorrow afternoon a friend and I are going to tackle organizing and sorting the knitting guild library so I've got to print out the inventory before going to bed.  Hasta la vista, babies.
--Barbara

More Good Eats

And this time I didn't have to cook it.  Tonight was the community dinner at DS's church and on the menu was Shepherd's Pie and Chicken Pot Pie.  It was too hard to decide which to choose so I had a small scoop of each with apple and orange wedges and a couple celery sticks (in Durwood's honor--he loved celery and I pretended not to like it so he'd make sure to leave a big piece of it in what he was cooking and put it on my plate just to hear me holler--funny what amuses people).  A couple of boys played dinner music on the piano, neither of them were concert ready but it was fun to hear them play and I was impressed that they'd do it at all.  DIL1 is in charge of the kitchen so I make sure to get to the suppers because she's so good at food plus DS, LC, and OJ come too so I get to have supper with my favorite people.

On my way to supper I glanced at my odometer and noticed that it said 98000 miles.  A landmark!  I hope my little red HHR keeps chugging along for many more miles.

This afternoon I met ACJ at The Attic for our bi-weekly writing date.  She brought her "word box" which she made out of an old wooden cigar box and decorated it up so we each chose three slips of paper from it and wrote for 10 minutes.  My words were "swimmer," "hailstones," and "yoke."  That last one was hard to worm into a story but I managed.  It wasn't great literature but most of the words went together pretty well and I got all three words in there without straining belief.  ACJ got her words in too and I liked what she wrote.  It's fun to stretch your writing muscles that way.  It pushes you out of your comfortable rut.  We spent the rest of the time working on our individual projects.  I'm halfway through what I hope is the last pre-agent, pre-publisher rewrite of my novel manuscript.  Fingers crossed.

On my way home I stopped at Camera Corner to get the last 37 compact VHS tapes and their DVDs.  On the weekend I'll write the names on the DVDs and probably watch some.




I had to return one of the workout shirts I bought at Meijer yesterday so I did that on my way home too, only I went back to the sale racks and found another pair of workout pants and a couple more workout shirts--but they were all on sale.  Really.  I realized yesterday that I'll be more comfortable going home in sweaty clothes that aren't cotton.  I need to wear miracle fibers that wick perspiration away so that I don't freeze on the drive home.  Plus I wanted them.  On sale!  Remember that part.  Don't judge.

Tonight I knitted a few rounds on the February Seaman's Cowl and cast on February Preemie Hat #2.  Both are patterns that don't require much thought or attention so they're good for mindless TV knitting.  One of these days I'll run out of these yarns and face the dilemma of either buying more or digging out other suitable yarns.  Yeah, I'll probably do that.  I do not need to buy more yarn, not this century anyway.  I have achieved what they call SABLE--Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy--so I don't really need to buy more yarn ever.  I probably will, I definitely will, but if the zombie apocalypse comes anytime soon, I'm ready.





6 February--Tropical Obsession. 

You have to dive Red Slave at dawn if you don't have a boat. And even if you do have a boat, dawn is still the best time because that's when currents run slowest. Red Slave is a collection of huts at the extreme southern end of the island and currents run strong, so strong that what anywhere else is a gray vase-shaped sponge grows in a flat fan-shape offshore of the Red Slave huts. There's a lot of detritus around, mute evidence of just how challenging it is to dive there. Broken fins lay where desperate divers flung them onshore anxious to lighten their burden as they staggered and struggled through the building waves to the safety of shore. If I wanted to dispose of something, this is where I'd do it.

I whacked my hand this morning, I think when I was snowblowing and shoveling or maybe when I was refilling the bucket of ice melt salt, but ACJ noticed that I have this huge nasty bruise on the back of my hand.  It hurts too.  It's crazy that I can't remember doing it.  And I have old lady hands.  I thought I never would.

It's supposed to start snowing overnight and keep snowing tomorrow.  There's a rumor that school might be cancelled again.  If it's too bad I'll probably cancel my trainer session but I don't want to.  I want to wear my new workout clothes--and workout with Megan.  Really.  I'm sore the day after a session but it makes me feel good.
--Barbara

Would You Look At That?

The sun shown a few times today even though it started getting colder.  I was glad that it

was colder because that meant the clouds went away even if it was only partly sunny.  I feel as if the sun is inside me when it shines  This evening it started to snow.  I didn't know it was supposed to but my electrician friend, TD, stopped by to replace the dimmer switch in the dinette because it had been flickering every once in a while and yesterday it turned off.  That's not a good sign.  I called him this afternoon and he stopped on his way home from work to put in a new switch.  Seems that the old switches only like incandescent lights (the old light bulbs) not the CFLs or LEDs.  Who knew?  He said we were supposed to get 7-9 inches of snow but I just checked the local weather and we're only supposed to get 1-3".  Much easier to deal with.

The colder temps and the salt I scattered on the driveway worked together to make yesterday's icy coating go away so I could safely leave today.  Except that when I tried to back out of the garage the snow that collects behind the tires in the wheel wells and then falls out when it warms up had fallen on the garage floor and then refroze so my right front tire was sort of frozen to the garage floor and then it didn't want to drive over the heap of yukky black snow behind it.  I finally prevailed and got myself to the Y for a round of weight machines with a little treadmill chaser.

I went to Meijer on my way home for a couple items I needed to make tonight's Asian Turkey Meatballs.  I cut it out of the Sunday Parade magazine in the newspaper and ran it through the WW recipe create function.  Such an easy recipe and so delicious.  You mix lots of ginger, garlic, cilantro, and sesame oil into ground turkey with an egg and some bread crumbs, scoop it out into meatballs and bake them for 20 minutes.  The recipe recommends drizzling sweet Thai chili sauce over them and sprinkling on toasted sesame seeds.  Yuuuuum.  Three meatballs is 1 point, a Tablespoon of chili sauce is 1 point, and the sprinkle of sesame seeds is 0 points.  I meant to make rice but needed to eat because TD was on his way so I just made some fake potatoes.  That was a good supper.  I'll get some bok choy to saute to have on the side next time.

I cast on the February Seaman's Cowl tonight.  I realized that I was just sitting there with my hands in my lap when I could have been knitting and purling around and around.


5 February--Tropical Obsession. 

Red orange walls flashed past as the truck sped through the sleepy village. "Stop," Edward said, "stop. That was a bar. I need a drink." But Louise didn't stop. She gave no sign that she even heard Edward's plea. "Louie," he whined, "I'm parched beyond reason. You kidnap me at the crack of dawn and drive me around this God-forsaken island covered with cactus that looks like it has been radiated, stark white rocks like moon rocks, and wild donkeys that..." His rant was cut short by Louise stamping on the brakes of the rental pickup to avoid running into one of the wild donkeys that had ambled out of a thicket onto the narrow road in front of them. Edward caught himself just before his head slammed into the windshield. "Maybe I should drive."

I don't remember who Edward and Louise are but I like them.  Tomorrow I meet ACJ to write for a couple afternoon hours.  I have hopes of getting the rest of the way through The Seaview so that I can make the few changes, additions, and adjustments before the April Writer's Institute in Madison.  Part of me wishes that I hadn't signed up (and paid for) that weekend.  It's much easier to stay at home and not risk having someone in publishing look at my work.  That's why one of my MyIntent.org bracelets says "bravery."  I need to remind myself to be brave.  I used to say that I needed to be brave so that my children would grow up brave but now I need to be brave for myself.
--Barbara