Embarrassing Half Hour

I left the office for lunch at 11:30, a few minutes later than I usually would, but not too bad. My coworker who usually goes with me was on the phone, so I was on my own, walking down to the other end of campus to meet my friend Jamie for lunch. No problem. It's overcast and kind of gray out, but it's semi-warm (40 degrees), so it's a nice day for a walk. Except for one problem - I have to go to the bathroom. Not number one - number two. Okay, I can hold it back until I get back from lunch, it's okay.

I walk down through campus, seeing that there are a LOT of students out today. For some reason, 11:30 on Wednesdays is a busy student time at lunch, and they were all out and streaming towards the dining locations.

Oh yeah, I do have to go to the bathroom. Commence butt clenching. I'll still be fine.

I get to the lunch place where I meet Jamie, and I join him at the table, taking out my sandwich and my yogurt container. Oh, the abdominal cramps are bad, now. I'm eating and clenching, kind of sort of in pain. But then the urgency passes, and all is well.

We finish our lunch, and walk out. He turns left to stand outside of the building where he works, smoking his cigaratte until he goes back in, and I go to the right to walk up the stairs and back to my end of campus. There are still a lot of students streaming across campus, and since only one set of stairs is open right now (they close two sets for winter, and haven't opened them back up yet), I have to find my way through the crowd to go up. I'm on the left side of the staircase, so I go past one guy and rush over to the right side to avoid most of the students coming down.

As I'm walking up and sideways, my right shoe slips off, I trip, and I fall on the stairs. You know how you fall going up stairs - my left leg was laying across two lower stairs, and my right hand was on one a little higher up. A nice girl asked me if I was all right, and I said I was, thanks, mumbling something about my shoe falling off. I didn't look at her - I was all about getting away from the scene of the accident.

And then an obnoxious student behind me begins guffawing loudly to his friends. I use the word guffawing to get across to you just how loud he was laughing. I walked a little faster, embarrassed as hell and hoping he would just shut up. He didn't. I walked halfway across campus with him laughing behind me before I got away from him (all the while thinking about how my orange and blue jacket makes me stick out, turning me into even more of a target).

On the way back, I was going to stop at the convenience store and spend the lunch money work gives us, but I couldn't do it with him laughing behind me, so I kept walking back towards my office building. I finally lost him, and I walked on, shame faced and hoping to just make it back to my office so that I could hide.

Remember the first problem I had, when I went to lunch? About having to go to the bathroom so bad? Yeah, well, it chose this time to come back in full force. I had to run into the bathroom as soon as I got to the building, and I barely made it in time.

My Wednesday afternoon is going fine so far, how about yours? Sigh.

Gracie Update Part 2

Sigh. I called the vet this morning, but she was out of the office, so I left a message. She just called me back.

The good news: the radiologist agreed with her that Gracie's elbow is healing well. Woo!

The bad news: she is being more conservative than my vet, and wants to make sure the bones are healed fully before the cast comes off, since it was in kind of an awkward place. She wants the cast to stay on for 3-4 more weeks. Sigh.

We're still close to having it off and Gracie being free to run around the house, though. I guess. I was just really hoping it would come off next week.

Gracie update

I took Gracie to the vet this morning for another check of her broken leg. I was OVERJOYED to find out that her leg is healing very well, and she could be out of the cast as early as next week! Woo! Go Gracie! The vet was going to have the radiologist look at the x-ray this afternoon, and I have to call tomorrow to find out what she said, and when I need to bring her back in to have her leg freed from the cast.

I'll update tomorrow to let you all know.

Easter Surprise

Happy Easter!

I've had a pretty good Easter so far. The Easter Bunny (J) got me a basket full of goodies, including a solid chocolate Dove bunny. Yum. J had to work this morning,(by which I mean from 12:30 at night until about Noon), so he's sleeping right now. I'm playing the Sims and watching some Friday Night Lights, season one, on Netflix (you can watch online as part of the membership fee). It's fun. And we have boiled dinner (ham, cabbage, potatoes and carrots) in the crock pot, and the house is filling up with that great scent. Boiled dinner is my favorite. Even though it seems weird to J to use ham instead of corned beef. :)

So, I just let Rosebud and Bernie outside a few minutes ago. They were wandering around, so I went out to see what they were doing, and saw that they had found a surprise in our front yard.


For those who might not be familiar, this is an opossum. They're generally nocturnal, so why it's in the yard in the middle of the day, I have no idea (and now that I think about it, that's weird behavior, so I'm glad the dogs left it alone as soon as I called their names).

Anyway, I came back inside and was sitting here holding Gracie, and decided I wanted to take a picture and post it to my long-neglected blog, so here it is. :)

Speaking of this blog being neglected, I think I'm going to sign up to blog every day in April, so there will be a post every day that month (if I don't change my mind). Exciting!

Also, speaking of Gracie, she has a vet appointment tomorrow to get her leg checked, so cross your fingers for me that she's healed, or at least almost. I would REALLY like to get her out of that crate for good soon.

Okay, I'm going to go get Gracie back out (since I put her back in to get the opossum picture). I hope you all are having great Easter Sundays.

Cats and Nightmares (but not nightmares about cats)

Gracie and I are both so ready for her to get out of the crate! She is yowling a lot because she wants out, and whenever I go in there to scoop her litter or check her dishes, she tries to escape on me. This morning when I was scooping her litter, she got out and went wandering around the mudroom. She somehow jumped to the top of the shoe dresser/organizer that J made for me. Then she jumped down and went running out to the dining room and hid under the table. I don't know if her elbow is healed or not - her next vet appointment is on the 24th - but she is sure acting like she's ready to be free.

She's not the only one who's ready.

Anyway, we'll see what the vet says when I take her in, but I'm definitely hoping that the x-ray shows a healed elbow bone. Too many more weeks of this and we're both going to lose our minds.

So. I had a nightmare about my brother this morning. I won't bore you with details, I'll only say that I hate that I have a brother who has scarred me enough emotionally that I have nightmares about him from time to time. Although I did hear something about him that may explain a lot - last night J and I had dinner at my sister's house. My sister is 10 years older than me, so she knows a lot of stuff about our family that I don't know. Anyway, she said that when our parents were building the house that we lived in when we were all kids, our brother, who was probably less than a year old, was in a walker. Someone left the door to the basement open, and there weren't any stairs going down to it yet. He walked his walker over to the open doorway, and fell down onto the concrete basement floor on his HEAD. That explains so much for me. :D Just kidding.

Anyway. I'm tired this morning, and I want it to be 4:30 so that I can go home. But it's only 10:12 in the morning. Sigh. I really need to start playing the lottery, so that I can win and J and I can both retire early. Like, right after I win. :)

And that's all I have for now. Later!

Weekend Talk

Why do the weekends go so fast? We need to work on finding a way to slow down time from Friday afternoon until Monday morning, to make them last longer.

So, I had a good weekend. J had to go into work on Friday night because of a storm that was forecasted to come through. He spent the night there, and then he had to work his shift on Saturday, which ended up going long, so he left Friday at about 10:30 at night, and didn't get home until about Midnight on Saturday night. I missed him a lot. It's amazing how used I've gotten to having him there, it really is. A hole is left in the house when he's gone. Stupid work.

Anyway, while he was gone, I did some laundry and I played some Sims and I watched some General Hospital and some back episodes of Medium. I also found out the hard way that you can't wash a shower curtain in the washing machine - at least not in one that you can't remove the agitator from, and not on the regular cycle. It came out looking much cleaner on the inside, but it was also shredded. Oops! So I had to take an unscheduled trip into town to buy a new shower curtain at Family Dollar. Hee. Lesson learned - next time I'll just throw the thing away and buy new without trying to clean it first.

I also started working on the new baby blanket. I like it. The colors aren't typical baby colors, but they go well together, and it's very soft and best of all, it's going to work up much quicker than the last one I made! (That's the difference between a pattern that calls for mostly double crochet, instead of all single crochet like the last one.) I hope you like it when it's done, Michelle. :) I found a mauve colored yarn at Walmart that was what you had originally asked for, so I bought that, and a soft pink and a light tan and a darker tan. It sounds weird, but they're all colors that were in what you picked out online, or that you had asked for, and they really do work well together.

Anyway. Yesterday J was actually home, yay! So we hung out and watched TV and went to Jrecks Subs for lunch and ate too many peanuts (that last one was just me) and watched the NASCAR race (that was mostly him) and played the Sims (that was all me). And bemoaned the fact that our weekend was one hour shorter, because of the time change. It makes Sunday feel so short! Sigh. And getting up this morning was horribly hard. One hour makes a huge difference, it really does. Oh well. At least now we have sunshine until after 7:00 - when the sun deigns to come out, that is.

And now I'm done rambling. So, bye!

Griping first, music stuff second

Gah! People are such idiots. I just went to the convenience store on campus, and I really should just know better than to go there for anything. First, they're ridiculously overpriced - $1 for a regular sized candy bar, $1.35 for a pack of Orbit gum - is it just me, or is that way overpriced? I mean, I know anything sold on campus is going to be marked up, but still. There's marking up, and there's gouging. And then they have students working the registers, and either they don't train them properly or they're just brain dead and don't care, because they always screw things up. I have $2.25 left on my employee meal allowance for the day. Instead of running the $2.25 through on that and asking for $.75 cash, WHICH I HAD TO GIVE HER, she ran the whole $3 through on my faculty/staff charge. Which is like a credit card account we have through work, and which I do NOT want to charge anything to. It's not a huge deal - I can straighten it out in the office when the stream of students going through the office ends. Still. It's just annoying. And I needed to vent, so thanks for listening. :)

And now, so that this whole entry won't be just me complaining about stupid crap, here is an entry copy and pasted from my Sims 2 livejournal. I got tagged there for a music meme, and thought you guys who don't care about the Sims 2 stuff might like to see what I was listening to yesterday when I wrote this. Enjoy!

Here is the explanation: "List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're any good, they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your Live Journal (and blogger!) along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to."

I got tagged for this last week, but hadn't done it yet, because while I love music, and listen to it in the car and at work all day, I didn't really have any songs that I was listening to on repeat. Well, today I started a new station on Pandora, and the artist I put in to start the station with was Bonnie Raitt. The station is giving me some really great, bluesy sounding stuff, mostly by women, and I'm really loving the sound of it. So I'm going to keep this window open as I listen, and mark down the ones that I particularly love.

First, two that have already played:
"Whatever Gets You Through the Night," by Etta James.
"My Favorite Mistake (live)," by Sheryl Crow.

One that was on while I was typing that:
"There Must be a Better World Somewhere," by B.B. King.

And look at that, the very next song is another good one:
"Dr. Feelgood (Love is a Serious Business)," by Aretha Franklin.

A couple of songs later, the second song I've gotten on this station by this artist. I like her a lot, so far:
"Wait for Me," by Susan Tedeschi. I hope they play more of her stuff - I'm kind of thinking I want to buy it.

Another couple songs later:
"And it Stoned Me," by Van Morrison.

And okay, I was going to wait for a song that really knocked me over to finish this list, but my Pandora just broke, because my work computer is old and slow, so I'll end it with this:
"Fast Car," by Tracy Chapman.

All good songs that got me through a chunk of my boring work afternoon. I have four stations created on Pandora right now, and I think this one is my favorite by far.

Oh, also - I'm not tagging anyone, but if you haven't done it already, I'd love to see what songs you pick if you decide to do it. :)

Good sleep equals energy - who knew?

I got a good 8 1/2 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night, and I feel GREAT this morning. It's amazing what a decent amount of sleep will do for you, you know?

I think I had written about the headaches I had been having - you'll be happy to know that they've gone away, finally. Woo! I think I was fighting off some sort of illness - most likely a sinus infection or the flu that was being passed around my office - and now I've fought it off and feel great. Here's to a good immune system!

I'm also still loving my yogurt. Yum. I have one every day now, and would seriously almost consider eating it in place of chocolate. Almost. :)

I found out what colors Michelle wants for her baby's blanket (she's growing my great-niece, you know), so I picked out a pattern yesterday. Now all I have to do is buy the yarn, and I can get it started! I'm kind of eager to get it going. I'm running out of time.

I'm sorry I haven't updated in here much lately. Once I gave up on the blog 365 thing, I kind of fell apart, didn't I? Sigh. I'll sign up to write every day for a month soon - maybe in April, and if not, then in May. Part of the reason I haven't updated here is because I've been completely obsessed with my Sims again. I try not to write about that here (I save it for my livejournal), hence the silence. Oops. :)

So. I spent my whole life sleeping alone on a nightly basis, until J moved in with me last year. And now, in a space of just six or seven months of having him there, I've completely lost the ability to sleep when he's not home. It's sad, isn't it? The other night he was working a little late. I went to bed at 9:30, because I was so tired, and then I lay there. And lay there. Awake the whole while. At first I was too cold to be comfortable (I love the kerosene heater, because it keeps the living room area nice and warm, but it doesn't do anything for the bedroom, so it gets kind of cold in there), and then when I got warm, I still couldn't sleep. Until J got home just after 11:00. Once he climbed into bed, I was out like a light. What the heck? Sigh. I don't mind - I'm glad that he's become so important to me that I can't sleep if he's not home. It just amazes me. :) Also it kind of frightens me, because he has a work trip coming up. If I can't sleep without him, those four days alone are going to be ROUGH.

Okay, well. I've rambled enough, I guess. I'll try not to go a whole week between updates next time, okay? ;-)