Sidebar links!

I figured out how to get links in the sidebar but not in the body of my posts. Ya learn something every day...just not enough and my learning curve is a tad...ummm...flat.

I have decided

I see the brain doc on Thursday to set a day for my surgery. Then I am going back to work. The end. I am sick of being home. I am sick of being dizzy. I am sick of weeding. I am sick of being stuck more than anything.

I haven't driven since NOVEMBER....talk about regressing! I have to ask for rides everywhere; so of course, I have to really THINK about where I want to go and what I want to do and cram all I can into my outings.

I got my first disability check...I made about the same 35 years ago when I first started to teach. They were off by two entire months....it takes about 90 days for this stuff to get started and all I can say is that if my husband didn't work, we would be on the street by now. Sure, on paper, I look great---in in real life, all my money is ties up and disbursed by people who have a regular paycheck and can't see what a little delay can hurt. And their little delay of a week turns into a month turns into 90 days.

I have to see my regular doctor so he can resign the papers...my FMLA hasn;t gone thru yet because he didn;t complete the paperwork. Same thing with the disability papers. He signed the day he was SIGNING the papers as the first day I was out.

Now really, do you think that these are the first and only papers he has ever signed?

Me neither.

But on the knitting front, I have finished the BABY sweater. Maybe I mentioned it? It still needs to be seamed, ends woven in and washed...probably more than once, I am one of those grimy knitters. Mom's Christmas/Mother's Day afgan is almost finished...again, so grimy you can;t really tell what color it is.

I have projects to start after this, so I really do need to get moving. The house is clean, I can say that. The laundry is caught up. I need new towels for the master bath and I need to clean the poolhouse (winter is always hard on it) and since it is not REALLY part of the house, I never put it on the list.

I have tomatoes to put out and the eternal weeding to do....but I AM going back to work maybe as soon as Friday...which is perfect...spend the entire day at return to work and then fool around until lunch because no one was expecting me. Maybe do some filing or answer the phone....and then there are the rounds of Friday meetings! I could always go to those.

It's 100 at home

Where am I? Central Coast where it is cold, damp and foggy...the whole reason we spend time at the coast is that it is cool when it is hot at home and sunny when it is foggy at home. But this weekend was just the teeniest indulgent. Sometime today, I do need to water my garden....I weeded, rooted out and racked like a crazy person two weeks ago (Neighborhood Clean Up Day).

Yesterday, Darling and I went shopping for a bookcase...no surprise that we couldn;t find anything that suited me. So of course, Darling will have to custom make it. I want it to wrap around the window and have space for the TV but not look modern. He'll veneer it with knotty pine paneling from the 50's (from a tear down, natch). The cabinets will have the fronts cut out and have a latticework of rope, but the drawers will have some kind of real hardware.

Julie's baby sweater was finished on the flying trip to Arizona. It just needs to be seamed, washed and then have all the ends woven in. Hope the head is big enough. I always worry about the head not fitting, no matter how much measuring I do.

Now, I'm working on a HUGE afgan for my mother. It was supposed to be finished by Christmas. Now, it's a mother's day gift. And I really need to get in gear to meet that deadline.

After this, I have some fingerless mitts to make for my FIL, who spends every day chilled to the bone. The colorway is called "sunset flame" and I think it will work up nicely. Then I have a sweater for Girlie and a cardi for Darling. THEN I will only knit for myself. I have a grand stash that I need to get rid of via ebay....too much yellow! What was I thinking? That yellow afgan of Darling's just about did me in. I think I am NOT an afgan knitter....too much of a time committment.

This coming week, I am getting all of my "excess" books out of this house and up into the library at the hotel. I need to measure my card catalogs and see where they are going to go into my wee little office. I just want to be able to sew or rubber stamp or just sit and look at my yarn. I already have a good chair and file cabinets (they need to be sprayed, since none of them match).

When I was in Arizona, I visited my sister in law, who has painted every wall of her house with great colors...turquoise, serape red, dawn pink, cobalt blue. Loved it. Loved the pinky-lavendar of her bedroom....and I don't even like lavendar. She is moving out to more bold colors, which is giving me the much needed SHOVE....I will be missing my Tampa Bay turquoise/teal/aqua but you can't be dragging the same wall color into every house for the rest of your life!

I will be surfing the 'Net, looking for a botanical that both goes with the main colrscheme of the hotel AND has a lot of potential for lots of pattern in the bedroom/bathroom/sitting room/office and closet. I'll be doing all of the soft goods (I keep saying that to prime the pump, as it were, since there will be MILES of straight sewing to do. Miles and miles and miles. All straight but a lot of it. Did I mention miles? Like to Africa and back. On horseback.)

Weeding is good for a person

I think I have weeded for about 60 hours this week---and I have only made a dent in it! I've been pumping out the koi pond (always my Easter weekend project); I use the water and bottom glop for the garden beds. I have so much green trash that i have filled up FOUR trash cans, when I decided to just stop bothering the neighbors and just have the trash trailer come by. (And this after I have filled my composter up all the way.

The garden boxes are weeded and turned (and filled with pond goop)-next week I make my little zig-zagged short rows. I plant carrots in each row, a week apart. I have three boxes of carrots--baby ones, sweet ones and then just a mixture of seeds. We eat a lot of carrots. Then I have cherry tomatoes on a wire hoop (photos when there is something to see) and another box with two wooden teepees so I can get them tied up and facing the sun. This year, I am also planting zuchinni and pumpkins in the front, by the roses, in the hopes that I will see AND pick the zukes before they weight 900 pounds. I'm planting a big variety of fancy pumpkins with the hopes that i will have enough to decorate in the fall.

I've ordered a bunch of seeds from ebay--only the ones I can't get locally. I try the local gardening shop first with my little list then I go to OSH and then Home Depot. THEN I'll go to ebay. I have had such luck with gardening seeds, not so much with the plants. I think that plants almost have to be grown in the county you are planting them in for it to work.

We had a giant freeze and I lost all of my wild hyicinths...so I guess I will have to go to the river and see if I can find any. They are REALLY expensive on ebay and I had, oh, about 100 pounds of them. I'm going to look for waterlilies on the river, too. I know that they are there. I just have to hunt them down. And next time we have a freeze, I'm covering my water plants. The fish are fine...the pond is almost 10 feet deep at the deep end, so they are safe from the weather extremes.

I'm on the lookout for polliwogs on the river, as well. I have to get several gallon jars filled with the critters, since there they have a gigantic mortality rate. I have one frog from the millions I brought home several years ago...and I'd like to get a couple so maybe I would have to go searching for the eggs anymore. Although with my luck, I would probably end up with all males or all females!

The fight is over. The world won.

I give up.
I have been dizzy since November. I have taken every test humanly available. Obviously, I didn;t study too well because I haven't passed a single one.

It looks like I am going to be sent to some fancy pantsy teaching hospital for more tests...although why, I don't know. I didn't go to medical school so there is no doubt in my mind that I will fail all of their tests as well.

Boo Hoo. I am sitting here with a monster migraine and I simply cannot get the energy up to ask to be taken to the ER for a shot. Maybe this is the headache that will kill me. There is a wee angry little man, with a pickax trying escape thru my eye socket. There is another equally wee, equally angry little man who is determined to hammer thru my cheekbones while climbing up my molars.

I have been weeding today until my hands started to bleed, so I knocked that off. I have, oh, maybe another 60 or 70 hours of weeding to do. I have to say, it really takes out the pleasure of having a nice yard.

THEN...and this is such a wee little complaint that it hardly counts. My spouse wanted to know exactly when I was going to get the office cleaned up. He is sick of looking at the mess when he opens the door. (There is nothing in that room that belongs to him; that he uses; that he owns. He has never, in ten years, set foot in the office.)

I was only weeding because it was something I can do without falling on my head. When you spent the entire day crawling on the ground on your hands and knees, it makes little matter if you fall over. BUT, by all that is holy, that office will be clean tomorrow. I will open all the windows and if all of the stooping and bending makes me dizzy....I don't even care.

The merry-go-round that is constantly spinning outside of my head is way more than I can deal with. This is no kind of life. It is just miserable.