Stopping in to say “Hey”

Yesterday we toured the bathhouses at Hot Springs, Arkansas; and dug for diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park.

Today? Elephants.

Can life get any better than this? I think not!

Breakfasting at Camp David

Okay. It’s not the Camp David. I’m talkin’ the restaurant/lounge in the hotel where we are stationed for the next few days. Still, though, the hotel lobby boasts the presidential seal, and there’s a china hutch filled with all kinds of presidential curios. Our room is quite cozy. The bed is über soft. The only hitch in this set-up is a curious advisory pasted to the bathroom door at eye-level, if you know what I mean:



Any thoughts?

So far so good on the trip. Haven’t gotten tons of knitting done, but managed to squeak in a bit on the straighter roads.

A Pre-trip Surprise

It’s been a long exhausting week, and Saturday was one of those crazy days where we were zipping around town in a frenzy of non-ending errands that would enable us to leave on our business trip without leaving our clients in a lurch or risking the house be condemned for its state of uncleanliness.

So it was an extremely pleasant surprise to walk into our office library where we discovered this:



We didn’t even know that plant bloomed!

The next week will also be crazed, and I predict very little blogging will happen this trip.

Sleepless Friday

By now all of you have probably heard about the terrible weather that swept through the midwest overnight, killing seven people in Arkansas. Well that storm line was pretty much born on top of us.

The cats were freaked out. Freaked out. I recall waking to lightning and thunder, and seeing the outline of Nacho’s head pivot from window to window watching the flashes. The weather alert radio went off a few times. I tried to sleep through it, but was aware enough to know that most of the alerts were for storm warnings and not tornado warnings. Then sometime around 11, I think, I heard a terrible cat fight. The boys were at it again, taking measure of each other's penises. I try to let them resolve their disagreements themselves, but the stairs change that rule. And what I heard was Caper pushing Nacho back-asswards down a flight of stairs. Not good. I separated them, bringing Nacho into the bedroom and closing the door. Trouble was, that meant I could no longer hear the voice alert on the weather radio.

I reopened the bedroom door and crossed my fingers that they would have forgotten their disagreement. I was disappointed. Another fight, and on the stairs once again. I stumbled my way through the house and scruffed Nacho who was hissing and puffing away, and shut him in the downstairs level while Caper had the run of the 2nd floor. Thank goodness, too, because that's how we heard the tornado warning.

Even though we heard that the twisters had been spotted on the other side of the county and were moving away from us, we got up and watched radar. And then we returned to bed and stared at the ceiling for a few hours.

I am really hoping for a nice long sleep tonight because we are about to leave on business, and I'm barely speaking in coherent sentences.

Finished Object: The Shirt off our Backs Rug

Whew! The rug is finally finished and in my mother’s possession.

This isn’t the greatest photo because the sun was on the wrong side of the house, but frankly I had been up since 4 a.m. hand sewing the binding to the edge, it was now 9:30 a.m., and I had to rush vacuum this, roll it up, and run out the door. Work to do!

But here it is:




And how did it go over? A-Maze-ing!!!

I met my eldest sister at my mother’s house after sis got off work. She hadn’t seen this yet, though she had donated loads of fabric to the effort. Neither she nor my mother could take their eyes off the rug. There were lots of finger pointing, trying to remember which fabric squares belonged to which person. The nice thing is that my sister had donated a pair of gray t-shirt material shorts that had belonged to her now-deceased husband, so even he was a part of the rug. My brother did not get off work until 8, so he hasn’t seen it yet.

When my niece stopped by after work to pick up her two children my parents care for, my mother showed her the rug and told her that she was sorry that she didn’t contribute. My niece said she had forgotten about it, and claimed to not have been aware of the deadline for donating fabrics. Uh... I walked to her office in an ice storm to tell her about this and gave her the deadline of the family garage sale. In fact, the day before I had called her mother (also one of my sister’s) and left a message on their answering machine telling her the same.

A little bit later after my mother talked to her granddaughter about the rug, my other sister came screaming up the driveway to complain to our mother about the way she had talked to her daughter.

I love families.

The daffodils are now spent, but I’ve been too busy to share:

Eight to Go

I am definitely in the home stretch of the Shirt off our Backs Rug. Only eight more measly squares to go, plus binding off. Yay me! Unfortunately, I have begun the binding off process I invented, and I find that this is going to take a heck of a lot of time. I had been hoping I would finish by the end of the day Sunday, but based on my current progress, I must have been high (on life) when I arrived at that date.

Yeah. It’s not happening.

As our travel season nears, we have realized that we are sorely behind on movie rentals. We rectified that in one fell swoop on Tuesday when we rented: the new Stargate movie, Legend, Jesse James, and Hooked Up. We didn’t watch them all on Tuesday. In fact, we didn’t watch any. But Dillons has a wonderful new release special where if you rent any new release on Tuesday (even movies that were released in preceding weeks), and return it on or before Friday, you can get a punch on your frequent renter card. That’s one punch for renting the movie, and one punch for returning it. Wednesday we watched Stargate and Legend.

I found Stargate to be predictably disappointing. Oh, I have always and will always love the actors of Stargate. It’s the creative team behind it that is plumbing the depths of idiocy and desperation.

Legend was haunting and spurred several discussions the next day about responsibility and wisdom where his dog was concerned.

We returned both on Thursday evening right after we had dinner with the in-laws where I gifted the Jayhawk Dishcloths to the MIL. The dishcloths went over like gangbusters, though the MIL said she had no intention of actually using the cloths, but instead wanted to hang them in her front window like little banners. And after dinner ended several hours later and quickly following my MIL’s sneering remarks about my candidate of choice, we went home and watched Jesse James. Gorgeous cinematography.

When as we were leaving the restaurant we ran into our vet. I met her husband of under 1 year, and I cautioned her that I would probably be making an appointment in the next few days for Eclair who was suffering from her usual seasonal allergy barfing.

As I stepped away from the table, I realized that Thursday was essentially over, and that if I didn’t make the appointment for Friday, that it would be Monday at the earliest, and that Eclair usually needed more time than that to recover. Besides, if she continued barfing at her current rate, she would be a dehydrated husk of a cat by the time Monday rolled around.

You see, Eclair is an allergy cat. She has had near death experiences from food, and every year about a month after trees begin to bloom and pollinate, the little booger begins to barf profusely and without end.

I called the vet the next morning, taking the first appointment of the day. Eclair’s medical file is a weighty tome, but the good news is that the vet knows her inside and out. She knows what shots gave her allergic reactions. She knows what shots have worked before. And she knows what shots we haven’t tried. This year we went with a new medication that is supposed to work on not one but two barf impulses in the brain.

I put her in the parlor where her condo, litter pan and food station was already set up, and picked up her food bowl so she would give her tummy a break. The meds worked wonders. She hasn’t barfed since her shot. The first 24 hours she slept pretty much non-stop. The second, her eyes were sometimes open, but she seemed to have trouble focusing.

With Friday being a full night of sci-fi already, we returned Jesse James and postponed viewing the non-new release of Knocked Up for Saturday night after knit group. Not a bad flick. But I’m not sure if that’s the movie, the 8.5% alcohol by volume bottle of Delirium Tremors that we shared during important business research, or the fact that I had been up since 1:30 a.m. working on the Shirt off our Backs Rug. The first half of Knocked Up didn’t live up to its hype, but I was relieved to find the second half was much better.

In other news: Around 12:40 a.m. Monday, we woke to a terrible cat fight. The cats were whiny the rest of the night, and one insisted on playing on our bed like there was no tomorrow. The next morning I checked the internet and found that a strong aftershock had hit southern Indiana around 12:38 a.m. earlier that morning. Cats are weird!

*The rug is almost done! I finished the last square and crocheted the edge under. All I have left to do is machine sew the binding tape to the edge, trim, and fill in some of the gappy bits on the rug interior where canvas and/or locker twine is visible. The rug gifting appointment is at 4:45 p.m. Tuesday.

A High PFO Quotient

Every home we’ve toured, the Realtors have asked what we are looking for. Two-car garage... a certain number of bathrooms... no toilet in the master bedroom... the usuals. But I have one criteria—a secret criteria—that I have never voiced. I am looking for a home with a high PFO Quotient.

Don’t bother to look that up in your handy Realtor reference dictionary because it’s not there. PFO stands for “Piss Family Off.” In other words, I want to find a home that will really piss my family off. How sick is that?

Not the whole family. Just one or two select individuals. One, really. One person who has handled money carelessly all her life, is less than two decades from retirement, and (not surprisingly) has no assets to speak of. And it really ticks her off when other people, who do handle money carefully, are able to afford a few nice things. Apparently, just the fact that homes in our price range tend to have basements, puts us in the Richie Rich category. Which we are not, by the way.

Today was our second day on the Open House circuit, and boy did we find a few with high PFO’s.

I won’t let the PFO Quotient dictate the home we buy, because the joke will be on me if we buy a house for its PFO Quotient but don’t care for it otherwise. Like a house we toured today that was at the top of the PFO Quotient scale, but the only shower for the master bedroom was basically a jacuzzi sun room in full view of the neighboring homes.

But we did see two others that could work very well...

very well indeed!