Here We Go Again

I have definitely turned the corner. Wednesday, after I drove myself to the VA for my appointment (and got labs drawn — there is some question about my thyroid function), I went to this friendly neighborhood nail salon that’s in a strip mall at 19th and Quaker, right handy. My hands were still peeling, but just peeling, not peeling raw anymore. It seems most of the good nail salons in town are run by Vietnamese-Americans, including this one, but it’s nice and the people are nice and it’s named The Orchid Nail Salon. The nice lady who massaged my hands and feet got a little happy with the callus scraper on my feet, so I just blew off going to Walmart and went home. Sufficient unto the day.

Thursday, I took it easy and lay in bed all day. Carillon, in it’s inscrutable grounds maintenance, has been doing something that requires drilling through concrete, and they are doing it right outside my window in that little patio area. They drill for a while, then they have to have a discussion about it for a while . . . They start bright and early at 8:00. Since I can’t hear myself think, never mind sleep, I’ve been having breakfast, which I usually never do. I appear to be on a scrambled eggs and bacon kick. Some nice protein never goes amiss, though.

For weeks, I had been contemplating a slight rearrangement of furniture involving the scooting down of a rug, which was part of the reason the dinette set had to go. It was taking up too much space for only being used as a place to collect flotsam and jetsam. The desk works much better in the space. Friday, I reached critical mess and went after it. I have a little tank vacuum with brushes and crevasse tool, etc., but apparently the floor wands didn’t make the move. Never mind. All the furniture came off the rug, everything got scooted back, the rug got repositioned, and then I vacuumed skin flakes off the rug, off the floor, off the chairs . . . and everything went back.

I had gotten some organizer bins for this collection of little seasonal signs that I hang on my door. (That’s a thing here. We are very liturgical.) I got those sorted, and put my woolen shawls in a sweater keeper with cedar. I replaced a plug strip with a better one that makes life easier. And I vacuumed up skin flakes off the floor until the world looked level. (Insert joke here about cleaning up before the maid comes on Monday. )

Today was Walmart run day. It was busy but not heaving. I desperately needed to go as I was out or nearly out of many things. I went home by way of Whataburger, absconding with a chicken strips meal. I had been noted to have hyponatremia in the hospital, and I figured I could get away with all the salt. I have this wonderful little folding cart that goes in the trunk/boot of my car. Money well spent. I unload my trunk into it and roll it into the freight elevator (!) at the end of the hall, and it’s a straight shot to my door.

I still have two cases of Ensure High Protein in the back seat of the car that I need to go down and get. (I’ve been taking my meds with a bottle of same, morning and evening, trying to load on all the nutrition I can.)

I’ve gotten my printer moved and I have a sack set out to purge files. I need to check with various people about how much of mom’s stuff I need to keep for how long and purge everything else, as well as purge some of my own files. My poor little filing cabinet is rather stuffed at the moment.

Tonight (if I have the energy) and tomorrow I need to do at least two loads of wash, and probably three. I have new sheets that have to be washed before they can be put on the bed, plus a load of clothes, and then the sheets and towels that I replaced with clean need to be washed and put away. (I have two sets: One clean and one on.)

Monday, I start chemo again. I’ve gotten a ride with the Joe Arrington Cancer Center shuttle bus and have to be down in the lobby at 7:30 in the morning (!). I’m getting a ride this time because I’ve never had this regimen before and I don’t know how I’ll feel when I’m done. My messenger bag is packed with the stuff I’ll need — tunes, a book, antinausea medication, snacks. The main infusion takes 6 hours. Not my first rodeo. Cowgirl up.

Well, That Explains It . . .

When I had my first bone marrow biopsy in 2017, they did it on both sides, instead of just one. Now I know why. They tried the left side first and didn’t get any. Same thing happened yesterday. She tried and tried and couldn’t hit marrow. So then we had to try the right side, and did manage to get some. As a consequence, I have two big square Band-Aids across the lower part of the small of my back. The first time I had a bone marrow biopsy, they were also removing a lymph node from my left armpit and knocked me out to do it, otherwise I would have known to tell the lady not to bother with the left side. I think if I have to have another bone marrow biopsy, a radiologist had better do it under fluoroscopy.

The desk is still in a box on the floor (at left), but I got the TV table put together Thursday night. It’s not bad for what it cost, and actually looks quite nice. It was simple to assemble — four screws to hold the legs on, four screws to attach the bottom shelf, and Bob’s your uncle.

Of course, you use an Allen wrench, key, thingie, whatever you call them (included), to tighten the screws. Did I mention I HATE ALLEN THINGIES, I HATE THEM! (Inarticulate utterances of rage!)

I may go ahead and put the desk together tomorrow and maneuver it out of the way behind the dinette set. Or I may just put the box out of the way somewhere and wait until the dinette set is gone. The side board is on casters. I can flip the rug back and move the side board forward, then slide the new table in behind it and move everything over to it except the TV. I’ll need help moving the TV, not because its heavy but because it’s big (55 inch diagonal).

One of the other reasons I’m ditching the sideboard is because when they moved me into my apartment, they racked the sideboard and pulled the legs loose on the bottom. I’ve never trusted it since. The TV table is good and sturdy. I need to put those felt dots on the bottom of its legs so it will slide without marring the floor. I think I’ve still got some tucked away somewhere

This coming week, I’ve got the people coming to get the furniture on Monday and a chiropractic appointment on Tuesday. Apart from that, the deck is clear. Chemo starts bright and early Monday week. I suspect I’ll have to be going by the VA at some point and picking up medication. But in the meantime, I think I’ll go get my book and snuggle in for a good read. Yeah. That’s what I’ll do.

Fasten Your Seatbelts . . .

To slightly misquote the late, great Ms. Bette Davis, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. I’m trying to juggle lawyers, banks and doctors, clear the decks, and strip for action. I was originally going to start chemo tomorrow. Now I’m having labs and a bone marrow biopsy done and starting chemo the 11th.

I saw the sinus doctor Tuesday and he didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Afterward, I got a manicure (I’m inept with the nail scissors and weak using the nail clipper with my left hand) while waiting for it to be my turn to get my hair cut. I took home a Pizza Hut personal pizza, which, personally, was a big hit. I was on a roll yesterday, and if the Goodwill truck had been in the Market Street parking lot as it usually is, I would have accomplished everything on my to do list for the day. I met with the bank guy, closed out mom’s accounts at her bank and moved the funds to the account I opened for that purpose at my bank, and got the rent draft transferred to the new account. Then I did a paper goods run to Walmart — tissues for both ends, paper towels, two boxes of Ensure High Protein and a few groceries. I finally took the stuff of mom’s that I wanted our good friend CK to have to her house and had a nice little visit with them.

Monday, I reconfigured my computer and desk, and finally set up the new printer. I disassembled the world and had monitors in the kitchen and on the table (I had to take their pedestals off).

The monitor mount is like a wall mount for a TV except the arms are pole mounted instead of wall mounted. It has two options — a clamp mount or mounting through a hole drilled in the surface of whatever you’re mounting it on. The way my desk is constructed, drilling a hole in the desktop and using that option was the most stable option. Then I discovered it required a 3/8th inch hole in my desktop and I only had a 1/4 inch drill bit (yes, I am a Toolbelt Diva), so I had to “enlarge the hole” using the drill bit to rasp the sides of the hole larger. Got quite a little pile of particle board dust on the floor, but I achieved success. I screwed the little mounts on the backs of the monitors, mounted them to the arms, then reassembled the computer. I have a whole lot more desk space now, and everything works better. I did have to pull the desk back out and switch the monitor connecting cables so my goofy computer would call the righthand monitor “monitor 1.” (%*&$#@!)

The new printer was ridiculously easy to set up. Took me all of 10 minutes and was completely painless. It prints purty!

The people are coming for the dinette set and sideboard Monday. In the meantime, I ordered a TV table , the pieces of which are now unpacked and lying on the floor (some assembly required, of course). I currently have my TV on the sideboard, which is 38 inches high; my chair is too close to the TV and at that angle, watching TV is a pain in the neck. The TV table is 30 inches high. One of the reasons for ditching the dinette set is so I can get more distance between the TV and my chair. I can flip the rug back, pull the sideboard out (it’s on casters), slide the TV table in behind it and transfer the VCR and black box, etc., to it, but it’s going to take two people to move the TV, not because it’s all that heavy, but because it’s a 55-inch diagonal.

#3 Orchid is MAGENTA! It has two blooms open now. Mr. Balls is next up to bloom. I already know his flowers are white as this will be the second time he’s bloomed since I got him. Don’t know what color #4 Orchid is, though. (Oh, the suspense!)

I’ve just started on book #2 of the 19-book Sebastian St. Cyr series re-read– murder mysteries set in Regency England. C. S. Harris is a pseudonym for Candace Proctor and her husband Steven Harris. Harris is a former intelligence officer. Proctor has a Ph.D. in European history and specializes in this time period. Her settings are not the romanticized, sanitized, “movie” version. She shows you Regency England, warts and all. I find it fascinating the way she fits her plots into the context of what was going on in the world at the time, not just in Europe, but in America as well, and that some of her “characters” were real historical figures (e.g., Benjamin Franklin’s oldest son) doing things they actually did. If you like Regency romances and murder mysteries, these books are the best of both worlds. Each book is stand-alone, but I’d start with the first book and read them in sequence as they occur in chronological order.

Now, if I can just catch the Goodwill truck and unload the stuff in the trunk and back seat of my car, I will be a happy camper.

The Motivational Power of Deadlines

Mom’s 99th birthday party is Saturday (23rd). Rellies are inbound from NM (her oldest sister’s boy and spouse), from Pearland (just south of Houston) (her second oldest sister’s older daughter) and from somewhere in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex (I’m sure somebody told me where exactly, but I’ve slept since then) (second oldest sister’s other daughter). Got to get the apartment fit to be seen in public.

Mom’s mother hand-pieced a quilt top for each of her grandchildren. This one is mine. Mom’s second oldest sister was a quilter. After her kids left home, she converted her daughters’ bedroom into the quilting room and had her husband make her a quilt frame that hung from the ceiling on pulleys and could be hoisted up out of the way when not in use. Mom got her to finish out grandma’s quilt top for me. It’s her two girls who are coming Saturday. EJ, the older girl has a grandbaby by her son, a little girl. I’m giving it to EJ to keep for her. She’ll have a quilt that was pieced by her great-great-grandmother and quilted by her great grandmother for her first cousin twice removed, so it’s a real heirloom. (I have no idea what that quilt block is called.)

Like I say, deadlines. Having this one has lit a fire under me to get some things done I’ve had on the To Do list for a while. Monday I rotated my mattress (I have one of those mattresses that has a right side and a wrong side). I’ve been sleeping on one side of it for about two years now, and it needed to be rotated 180 degrees so I could sleep on the other side for a while. Monday evening, I repotted all three orchids and put half a fertilizer stick in them. Tuesday, I went to the punch doctor (chiropractor), shopped groceries and did a Goodwill run (the Market Street I used to go to lets them park their truck in the far corner of their parking lot, so after I donated, I parked closer to the front entrance and shopped groceries.) After I put my groceries away, I took half a dozen roses over to mom, and came back with ANOTHER orchid. That’s four now.

We’re “semi-arid” here and we’ve nowhere near enough humidity for orchids, which are tropical jungle plants. However, I’ve been having great success putting the vases full of water next to the plants where their roots can get at all the water they want. It’ll be interesting to see if they bloom next spring.

Today, I girdled my loins, bit the bullet, got out my Act of Congress and reconfigured the pictures on the wall behind my computer to make room for the two new ones. (The green matted hedgehogs and the aqua matted unicorn)

And then I finally separated the Siamese computers (it was about a 5-hour operation). Now that I have the new Acer 27-inch monitors, I set the Windows 11 machine up with them, and I’ve set up the Windows 7 machine on the dining table with one of the old Acer 21-inch monitors (to be absolutely positively sure I’ve gotten everything important off it before I wipe the drive and take it to Best Buy for disposal). As I was setting them up, I discovered the W11 machine does not have the same kind of big VGA plug as my VGA splitter cable needs. Luckily, it has both a regular VGA plug and an HDMI plug. The new monitors will take either, so I frankensteined one new monitor to the VGA plug using one of my old monitor’s VGA cables and used one of the new HDMI cables that came with to hook the other new monitor up to the HDMI plug. (I have an HDMI splitter on order which should be here Friday or Saturday.) I’ve got both HDMI cords plugged in to their respective monitors, so all I’ll have to do is hook up the splitter, hook both HDMI monitor cables to it, and remove the VGA cable.

I took the whole shebang apart down to bare table as I had to clean surfaces and reconfigure everything and lower the legs on the little monitor tables. The keyboard I had been using was years old, full of crumbs and had a recalcitrant backspace key. I replaced it last year, but I was having to use the new keyboard for the new computer and the old keyboard for the old computer. . . The only fly in the ointment is that the power switch for the new monitors is on the back instead of on the bottom edge, which makes it problematic to turn the left-hand monitor off and on. The W11 machine has a rinky little hard drive (300 Gb), but I have a 7 Tb external drive and a 5 Tb backup drive plugged into it.

Tomorrow I have a care plan meeting for mom and I need to do another Goodwill run. When I get back from that, I need to re-assort the books in the two bookshelves beside the desk to take up about 2-feet of slack. I also need to tell the backup drive what files to back up where. I’ve got a bunch of work to do setting up Word the way I want it on this new machine and making sure all my fonts are loaded but that can wait until next week. So can the five hats I’ve got to finish knitting. But the heavy lifting is mostly done.

I’ve had my supper and I’m going to have the other half of the piece of cherry cheesecake I ate half of Tuesday night and then hit the hay.

Oct-over and Hallo-went

One more day left in October. I’ve got running around to do tomorrow. Gotta do a Walmart run (TP, paper towels) and vote early.

My poor old Logitech M600 Touch Mouse has become decidedly arthritic and unwilling to scroll. I’ve had it for like six years and the poor thing’s just plain wore out. I love it because it doesn’t have a scroll wheel (that’s the part that invariably wears out first on my mice). You just stroked with your finger in whichever direction you wanted to scroll and I really liked it. But I can’t get them any more (because I love them, naturally they quit making them. . . are you listening, Logitech!). So I decided to live dangerously and get a vertical mouse. I’ve only had it a day and I’m still getting the hang of it, but I think I like it.

The typical mouse has the hand lie flat on it, which twists the bones in the forearm, with the added potential of resting the flat of the wrist on the edge of a desk — not good!. The vertical orientation of the hand with this mouse is kinder on the carpal tunnel by having the hand in a vertical orientation, with the weight of the hand on the outside edge.

The one thing I don’t like about it is that you can’t pick the mouse up easily. I’ve got this huge monitor (22-inch diagonal) and if I have to get the mouse pointer from one portion of the screen way over to another, I can’t hop the mouse as easily — move it over a couple of inches, pick it up, move it back, put it down and keep moving it in the same direction. This “hopping” maneuver minimizes how much you have to move your whole arm to get the mouse pointer from hither to yon, especially useful if your mouse pad isn’t very big. With the vertical mouse, I have to take my fingers off the control surfaces to pick up the mouse. Oh, well. I’ll cope.

I follow this YouTube channel called “The Last Homely House” run by a lady named Kate who lives in the north of England. She got the name of her channel from J. R. R. Tolkien’s books. She’s an older woman whose parents are both gone, her children are grown and married, and she has a grandchild. She likes quilting (English paper piecing in particular), sewing, knitting, cooking, gardening, and cats. She promotes local crafts, and craftspeople in what she offers on her channel and in her shop. Watching her videos is like visiting a friend for a cuppa and a natter — over 78 thousand other people feel the same way I do and have subscribed to her channel. Quite a long lime green sofa.

She has roped her daughter-in-law Anna into helping her with the photography, and with her shop and the various activities. (Anna’s husband John is a woodworker who has made several items for her shop.)

It’s getting to be “need a new calendar time,” and she put one together (Anna’s photos) so I ordered one. She’s also into jigsaws and had put out a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle. They sold out before I could get one but I caught it on the second go-round. They came Saturday. There are a lot of jigsaw enthusiasts here, and I thought I’d contribute this one to the cause (after I worked it myself!).

This is a good place to plug the website “Jigsaw Planet” which is a free website that allows you to set up a free account, upload whatever photographs or graphics (.pdf, .jpg) you want and make them into jigsaw puzzles. You can also work other people’s puzzles. I’ve made a ton of puzzles — I like artwork (Anne Bachelier‘s paintings, for example) and photographs. I make 200 piece puzzles because I have a nice big monitor to work them on. I love working jigsaws, especially while listening to some nice music. The nice thing about working puzzles on Jigsaw Planet is you get puzzles for free and you can’t lose any of the pieces!

In the knitting news, I’m going to try knitting something that has to be felted — a Scots Bonnet! (or tam or beret, or whatever . . . ) I’ve already got the yarn — 100% wool. Enough for two bonnets.

I’ll have to swatch so I’ll know how much this yarn shrinks and take that into account. (Ah, yes. Adventures in math . . .) You knit the thing too big, “felt” it by washing it in hot soapy water, and it shrinks down until it fits. Or that’s the plan at any rate. You’re supposed to block it by putting a plate in it. Stay tuned.

Here is the natural habitat of the indigenous knitter. I got that little hexagonal table when they had the estate sale of the lady up the hall who I regret not being able to have gotten to know better. Notice the bowls. I have one of those LED pole lamps that remind me of the saucer ray guns from the 1953 version of the film “War of the Worlds” with Gene Barry, but it puts out great adjustable-level light for knitting. Out of frame at left is a reader’s table with a bowl of knitting notions and a Kindle Fire with internet radio apps for music purposes.

Venice Classical Radio is a big favorite, as is Soma FM.

Here’s a little trick. When you’re knitting a scarf or some other long flat piece that’s getting long enough to be a pain, roll it up and “pin” it with a large stitch holder. Makes it much easier to turn your work without that great flapping length hanging off your needle getting all twisted up in your lap.

It’s gotten cold enough in my bedroom that the heater has come on. (Thermostat is set at low of 68 F/20 C) Hot tea drinking weather has returned. I’m having a “two-bagger” in my stainless steel commute mug — a bag of Twining’s Irish Breakfast and a bag of Stash Tea’s Moroccan Mint. Scrummie.

What We Have Here Is A Failure to Communicate . . .

This is a first: The first time I’ve posted from the little reconditioned HP laptop I got. Frustrating. I’m used to a large gamer keyboard and this jicky little keyboard is a PITA. If I situate it in my lap, where I can reach the keyboard, I can barely read the screen. I already knew from using my BFF’s laptop that I hate touch pads, so I got an “el cheapo” wireless mouse and a mousepad, but there’s hardly any room for it on the little lap desk. Yeah. I know. First world problems.

Anyway, the failure to communicate mentioned above reared its ugly head yesterday after I’d gotten my labs drawn and my port accessed and was in my oncologist’s office. Turns out this is my fourth session of Rituxan (he counted) and not my fifth (I miscounted; chemo brain strikes again), which means I still have two chemo sessions to go, which means I’ll be having my last chemo session in September right around the time of mom’s 98th birthday (the 23rd). The degree of bummer-tude of this development will depend upon how far into September that last session falls, as my white blood cell count needs at least a week to recover from the preceding chemo session before I’ll even risk removing my mask, never mind be among a group of people of unknown COVID status. My sessions are three weeks apart. My penultimate session is 29 August and three weeks from that is 19 September. I can ask my oncologist if I can have an extra week between the last two sessions so I will be four weeks out from my last chemo instead of four days. He’s done it before. I bet I can sweet talk him into doing it again.

The best development out of this very mixed bag is that I have a chin again. The lymphomas in my neck had gotten so large you could barely tell where the bottom of my jaw was. But they have all shrunk drastically and those lymph nodes are back to normal size, which means I’m showing a good response to the chemo regimen. It will take a CT scan to check the response of the rest of the lymphomas in my chest and abdomen which he will probably order when I’ve completed all six of my treatments in September.

My chemo infusion went OK and I got the Udenyca shot this afternoon to boost white blood cell production and get my white count back up to normal. I gained seven pounds between Sunday night and Monday night, all of it from the chemo regimen. I get the decadron and anti-nausea medication in 0.25 liter of IV fluid, followed by the Rituxan diluted in a full liter of IV fluid, followed by 0.25 liter of IV fluid to flush the line, followed by the cyclophosphamide diluted in a full liter of fluid, followed by 0.25 liter of line flushing, which is 2.75 liters of fluid over the course of about four hours, plus the 32-ounce stainless steel bottle full of Crystal Light I sucked down between yesterday and today. A liter bottle of soda weighs 2.2 pounds, so imagine having three of them strapped to you. I lost 2 pounds between last night and tonight, but my poor little kidneys are having a hard time keeping up. I don’t have to go anywhere tomorrow so tomorrow morning, I’m going to take a Lasix (“water pill”) and see if I can’t get my legs emptied out. (I should have spent yesterday evening and the rest of this afternoon and evening in bed with my feet elevated instead of sitting at my desk puttering on the computer.

I saw my cardiologist this morning and he said my oncologist was concerned about me, so the cardiologist wants to do a stress test — not the treadmill thing, but what they call a chemical stress test. His office is used to dealing with the VA, and they will set it all up and let me know when. I’ll have to get a ride because I can’t drive myself home after it, but Carillon provides rides to and from doctor’s appointments at no charge. I just have to give them 24 hours notice.

Saturday, I spent the afternoon downloading the requisite drivers (software) for my little Epson printer from Epson’s website onto the new computer so it could talk to my printer and I could scan financial and bank statements to the computer that has working email and email them to Mom to keep her up to speed. (Gmail won’t run right on my old computer since Google stopped supporting Windows 7 — Google is the “G” in “Gmail — which is why I got the new computer in the first place. The setting up of the software was a fairly straightforward process, but getting the computer and printer to talk to each other was tricky and expletives (and more than a few pejoratives) were not deleted!.

Among the groceries I got Monday was one of Market Street’s fruit bowls — the one I got had chunks of cantaloupe and honey dew melons, chunks of pineapple, a handful of raspberries, a couple blackberries, a handful of blueberries and a couple grapes. It’s a big enough bowl that you can get two servings out of it. I supplemented that with some cherry tomatoes cut in half and some whole black olives. I had the second serving tonight likewise supplemented, and as a side to a brisket sandwich on a big ciabatta roll which I’d already inhaled half of before I could get the camera app on my iPhone limbered up. Copious nums.

I had been using a gamer chair with a foot rest, a birthday present in 2020, as my computer chair. The desk I was using at the time was on casters, so it didn’t matter that the gamer chair wasn’t. I could just sit down and pull the desk up as close as it needed to be.

After I moved to Carillon, I had to get a longer desk so I would have a place to put my printer. I was putting it on my filing cabinet, but when I moved to the smaller apartment, there was no way I could get the filing cabinet close enough to a plug to continue doing that. This new longer desk doesn’t have castors and it was very difficult to get in or out of the gamer chair if it was too close to the desk. Unfortunately, “too close” was not close enough. So I got a desk chair with casters. It is also higher than the gamer chair, which puts my shoulders and forearms at a more comfortable angle when I’m keyboarding and mousing.

I’d gotten in the habit of just swiveling the chair around to the side to get in or out of it. I’m having to learn to roll the new one back back from the desk before trying to get out of it. I’m going to list the old chair on Craig’s List and see if I can’t sell it to offset the cost of the new chair (which wasn’t all that much, really).

In the knitting news, my dive into my button stash proved bootless, so I swung by a local fabric store on the way home from JACC and picked up what I needed. I’ve finished the little baby top. I just need to weave in ends and sew on buttons and it’s done. I’m at the heel increases on the second matching bootie and the crown decreases on the little sun hat. I’d like to get this stuff in the mail by the end of the week and get it out of my hair. I’ve got until Thanksgiving to finish the little red dress(es). I’m thinking I’ll have enough yarn for a little matching red headband with two crocheted holly leaves in the green yarn, and some red shanked buttons for berries to decorate the headband. or else I could just do the holly leaves and button berries as a kind of removable corsage that could be safety pinned to the front of the dress for Christmas, and removed later.

However, in the several matters mentioned above, the plan is that bridges will be crossed when come to.

The first season of Neil Gaiman’s dramatization of his “Sandman” graphic novels dropped on 5 August on Netflix (early reviews are that it sticks very close to the novels, has a brilliant cast and is visually fabulous) and I still haven’t watched season 2 of The Witcher (Henry Cavill!). I may be crossing The Bridge over the River BingeWatch after a certain package gets posted. Not to mention the Bridge of TV Knitting . . .

All Right, Then

Thank goodness I shopped for glass by phone this morning. About half the stores I called only did auto glass. Michael’s framer guy called in sick today. Home Depot’s glass guy didn’t come to work either. Lowe’s didn’t have a piece of glass longer than 36 inches (I needed one 38-1/2 inches), but the Lowe’s guy referred me to Abercrombie Hardware, who had a piece of glass long enough, would cut it while I waited, and only charged me $12. Great, except it’s WAY the heck out on the northeast corner of town at 3rd Street and Buddy Holly Avenue. (I had to go under Marsha Sharp* AND a railroad track to get to it.) (Yeah, Holly was born here. The parents of a dear family friend used to live across the street from them, and I’ve met Peggy Sue.)

As I was girdling my loins preparatory to setting out on my pointy rounds, the accountant doing mom’s taxes called to tell me that I had gotten our social security statements mixed up and sent him mine instead of mom’s. While we talked, he cautioned me to be prepared for how much tax she owed because she had sold some stock. Capital gains tax hit her a hard wallop. (That loud howl you heard this morning was her bank account taking a direct hit . . .) So, in addition to the other errands I had planned, I had to take mom’s social security statement out to the accountant WAY out on the southwest edge of town at 122nd Street and Slide Road. (On a historical note, Slide Road is so named because it’s the road to Slide. I’ve been to Slide. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there’s not a lot of there, there.) And because of the figure the accountant gave me, I added going to the bank to the agenda as I needed to transfer funds from the back pocket to the front pocket so the accountant could file her taxes electronically and I could pay Uncle Sam and the accountant with a debit card once her taxes are done.

Already on the agenda was another sack of things to donate to Goodwill, (further culls from the last two boxes), and getting printer ink cartridges. I left the house at about 1:30 pm and actually got all the things done that I needed to do, including picking up a soft drink at Whataburger on my way back up Quaker going to the bank from the accountant, and picking up a chicken strip box at Whataburger on my way back up Quaker again from completing the last item on the agenda, getting a set of printer ink cartridges. After zigging and zagging all over town, I got home at a little after 4:30. Not too shabby.

The piece of glass I had cut was 38-1/2 by 9-1/2 inches and thin enough to bow slightly when I was cleaning it. It was an awkward shape and once I got it safely back home, I got my rubber gloves and a Phillips screw driver, and put it in place immediately.

(I always put on my rubber washing-dishes gloves to handle pieces of glass like that and the glass in picture frames. Not only does it protect my hands from being cut, but the rubber helps me hold onto the glass more securely.)

I’ve had my supper and gotten things all put away in the china cabinet. I’m as moved in as I can get until the maintenance guy comes to fix the blind and put that one bin up on the top shelf of the closet.

I’ve always loved blue and white together and I’ve wanted a set of “Blue Willow” dishes since a child.

This set was made by Churchill China of England. I bought these in the 1980’s when I worked for Texas Instrumets. Since I intended them to be my “forever dishes,” I got 12 of everything (except serving pieces) to allow for breakage over the years. So far, I’ve been lucky.

In the knitting news, I’m still working out the increases on the hexagon blanket and as yet have nothing to show for it. I’ve also started a 9-bladed pinwheel “beanie/skullcap” for my impending baldness using an “oddball” skein of Malabrigo Sock in the colorway “Tealfeather” that was left over from the Sweet Irene shawl. (I had four skeins; the shawl took three and a smidge.) The hat is extrapolated from the pattern for the 9-Bladed Pinwheel shawl. I’m using US 1 (2.25 mm) needles, a set of DPNs to start it and a 16-inch circular needle. I may write up the pattern, but then again . . .

• Used to be the Brownfield Highway. Renamed in honor of Marsha Sharp for reasons.

A Slight Miscalculation . . .

Because I was asleep at the needles, I had to rip out three rows of the hexed afghan, and when I took it off the needles to do so, it quickly became obvious that an increase of 12 stitches every other row was WAY too many. No choice but to frog the whole thing and start over. (*&^%$#@!) Am now increasing 6 stitches every other row. That was this evening.

This morning I was out and about by 11 a.m. I buzzed by mom’s bank to hit up the ATM for cash to pay mom’s monthly beauty saloon bill which I will have to do Friday after I get the stuff that keeps my white blood cell count from cratering. Then I went to Best Buy. They had a HP Pavilion desktop on sale for $449.99 with Windows 11 preinstalled that looked to be just what I needed. I got the last one they had on the last day of the sale, so extra points there. My estimate was not far off. I got out of there with a computer and Microsoft Office for $654.48. Still sitting in the box, because . . .

Tomorrow I’m going to get a piece of glass cut to go in the hutch of my china cabinet. Two or three moves ago, the movers broke a side panel in the hutch portion and I never got around to replacing it. As a result, things get dustier quicker. This afternoon I unpacked the last two boxes and put them out for Housekeeping to recycle. No more boxes! Now things feel more open and more homey.

This is what goes in that top part of the china cabinet that’s missing glass. Now I have to get the glass tomorrow so I can put all this away after I’ve installed the glass. Last big push to get everything squared away before Thursday when I get the COP infusion.

My reward for getting the china cabinet fixed and the stuff put away in it will be to set my new computer up and start the transfer of stuff over to it. Once I get this last bit of stuff put up, the only thing I have left now is to get the maintenance guy to put a plastic storage bin on the top shelf of my closet so I can put that last yarn stash bin in the floor of my closet. Oh, and get him to fix that one blind that won’t raise.

So, Anyway . . . .

Woke up this morning dabbling in this thought puddle: So women already have to play the men’s game because it’s the only game in town, and they have to use the men’s rules and the men’s cards, and the men change the rules halfway through the game at random and then they insist on all these elaborate arcane handicaps, and then change what you have to do to win three fourths of the way through the game and we still win, and men immediately launch into this big rant about how we take unfair advantage and how ruthless we are and how unfeminine that is, and going on and on about it, and we’re having to stand around listening to it while we’re doing the teenage eyeroll thing and thinking, “Oh, grow TF up already. . . ” So I’ll just park that here like a piece of chewing gum. Strange morning.

My BFF called last night from Outer Houston and we talked for four and a half hours (!). I mean, sit the phone down and gab while we’re making and eating dinner and cleaning up after and talking about books and music and fashion and where our heads are at right now and our respective creative processes and where each of us is going with our respective version of it. (She’s very eye/visually oriented, has a fine arts degree, paints, draws, was a scientific illustrator for the Carnagie Museum in Pittsburg for a zillion years, and I’m very verbal/ear oriented, have a degree in English (Rhetoric), etc.) (In a parallel universe, we might have done graphic novels; I the story and script, she all the drawing.) We both love music but we use different types of it and in different ways and want different things from it — another interesting conversation thread from last night. That transmogrified into an exploration of our respective creative processes in and of itself, and how it involves different circuits in her brain than it does in mine (never mind that I’m on the spectrum and wired differently anyway).

We’ve both become devotees of the Boomer Goth fashion look, it seems. (She bought some black pretend leather slacks and black ankle boots with tire tread soles. She has the height to pull it off.) (You have no idea how funny the whole concept of “Boomer Goth” is; we laughed uproariously about it all evening.) We both have that slightly off-kilter world view, only tilted at different angles (but that’s OK) and the same offbeat sense of humor. We’ve been friends since age 14 and we have that whole private language that only comes from long acquaintance and little shorthand referents that nobody else can get because it’s one of those you had to have been there. . . .

She was put on clonazepam (Klonopin is the brand name) for like 20 years for chronic anxiety and is finally off it now. Her brain is coming out of the drug haze, and she is astonished at how many of the symptoms she attributed to “old age” and nerve damage from hazardous chemicals she was exposed to at her museum job were actually side effects of the clonazepam and are now dramatically improving now that she’s not taking it any more (not to mention all the foods she stopped eating because she thought she’d developed a food allergy to them, but that were actually clonazepam side effects affecting her digestive system.) (Stevie Nicks has gone on record as saying if she were to ever meet the person who initially prescribed clonazepam to her, she would want to murder them because of what the drug did to her brain for eight years.) After over 20 years, my BFF is finally reconnecting with her art — drawing and painting, and rediscovering what she thought she’d lost forever. It’s like she’s having her own personal private Renaissance.

We talked about books and she wants to start reading (and rereading) again, which is problematic at the moment because of her cataracts, but her first surgery will be in March. But once she gets past that, she’ll be able to get back into it. And all of this is happening to her as I’m about to start dealing with chemo brain. Again.

We had a front blow through last night. It blustered and blew all night. I’ve transferred my yarn stash but it hasn’t made it under the bed yet. Sufficient unto the day . . . I’m probably going grocery shopping tomorrow morning, but I may blow it off until Monday so I can check to see if the Market Street at Indiana and 50th has a Goodwill Donation truck in their parking lot. I need to offload my car so I can load it up with those drawer bins.

Will eight drawers fit into 4 under-bed bins? Just barely . . . .

I love my little kitchen. The peninsula could have barstool seating on this side of it, but I have my metal filing cabinet (with bowls of knitting on) and the printer end of my computer desk pushed up under it. Anyway, I eat at my computer desk most of the time anyway. I have ample cabinet storage (although I’d rather have more drawers than shelves). Still, I have a place for everything and the “above” cabinets (above the refrigerator, microwave and sink) are all empty because I have more room than things to put in it.

Here’s my little pet Italian Stone Pine and the orchid I inherited from mom. I need to repot both of them. I have the stuff to do it. My windows face northwest, and there are deciduous trees in front of them, so currently I have a lot of bright indirect light. (The Stone Pine can take full sun and would do well if planted outside.) I’d like some more plants, but I’m undecided/picky about which ones. I’ll have to wait until the trees leaf out to see what the spring/summer light level is like and let that be my guide. I’m thinking a shallow, pretty bowl with succulents in wouldn’t go amiss. . . .

All Quiet on the Southern Front

The only thing left to do at this point is to hang mom’s pictures in her room. In order to get this done, a work order has to be submitted to the Carillon House maintenance crew, to which I have no access. The person I talked to said they would ask the nurse on the floor to put in a maintenance request to do so. We’ll see what happens. If I did it, I would have to put a step stool and tools in my little cart and haul them over, and I couldn’t hang the big one because it needs the kind of anchors which you have to drill into the wall, put in a plastic sleeve, and then put the anchor bolts in. When maintenance comes over to hang them, mom wants me to tell them where to put them. I suggested that perhaps that was something she might want to do, since it’s her room and her pictures, but apparently not. Her only opinion on the subject is that the clock that was in the room when she moved in was not centered over the TV. She picked up on that after about 30 seconds of being in the room.

She’s gone back to sitting in her chair with her eyes closed, and the door to her room closed. They have been bringing her meals in to her because apparently, she doesn’t want to get up and go to the lunch room, which is less than twenty feet away, even in a wheelchair. To be fair, she is most comfortable when she’s horizontal (i.e., reclined in her lift chair) and least comfortable when she’s vertical (i.e., sitting in the wheelchair or standing upright), and this is entirely related to her severe degenerative scoliosis. When she’s vertical, that puts downward pressure on her spine, causes the slipped disk to bulge, and that puts pressure on the nerve. Her hyperkyphosis also restricts her lungs’ ability to expand in her chest, which is worse when she’s sitting upright and the weight of her upper body further restricts lung expansion, so she can’t take very deep breaths. This contributes significantly to her poor exercise tolerance. Just sitting in a wheelchair and being pushed over from our apartment in Pointe Plaza to her room in Carillon House was exhausting, so I think it’s a fair assessment to say she cannot sustain the amount of physical activity required for her to live in assisted living, let alone “independently” with my help. We tried it. It didn’t work. Carillon House is where she needs to be. She’s 97. I’ve seen the x-rays. What’s surprising about the situation is that she made it as long as she did living on her own. Anyway, she’s where she needs to be, with skilled help available 24/7.

I’m still facing a move myself, which I’m told won’t be able to happen before the first of the year. There have been people moving in to Carillon, mostly to Windsong, all along since we came over here in September, and more are scheduled to move in. I have to wait my turn. It’s just as well, though. I’ll get a chance to slow down, take it easy and catch up on my sleep.

Yesterday evening I got out my Waves on the Wine Dark Seas shawl and knitted on it for the first time in two months, while catching up on the YouTube channels I follow. (It’s twice as big now as it was in the picture.) It was wonderful. The body of the shawl is seed stitch (*k1, p1, repeat from * to end of row), which you have to pay attention to.

It also has 7-stitch knitted on borders on each edge, each border different, and the s1 wyif, k1 edging that I flat out stole from the Paris Toujours pattern by Isabell Kaemer.It’s made from sock yarn (alas, the colorway has been discontinued) on a US6 (4.0 mm), so it’s going to take a while.

I was a bad girl and ordered some yarn (everything was on sale!). I got 3 skeins of Malabrigo sock (440 g/ 402 m, 100 g) in Tiziano red (100% Superwash Merino), and 7 skeins of Valley Yarns ‘s Southampton yarn, 75% kid mohair/28% mulberry silk, (230 yds, 25 grams) in “ruby” which will be held double– to make what, though, my little knitty brain has not yet divined. I got 5 skeins of Cloudborn Superwash Merino fingering (384 yds/351 m, 3.5 oz/100 g) in the colorway “Ocean.” I got 7 skeins of Cloudborn Merino Superwash sock twist (467 yds/427 m, 3.5 oz/100 g) in the colorway “Caribbean (which will be something epic!), and 3 sets of Cloudborn Merino Superwash sock twist minis (557 yds/530 m, 125 g, 4.35 oz per set) in the colorway “blue warbler.” Merry Christmas to me . . . !

Yes, I know the reds don’t quite match, but holding them both together will work. Trust me. The bright red will add pop to the more matte red, and the matte red will add depth to the bright red. The sock sets will make a fabulous fade . . . fade what, however, has yet to be determined. Since my neurodivergent brain works differently than neurotypical people’s do, I find it easier (and more fun) to write my own patterns rather than follow other people’s. Stay tuned.

I mentioned that the movers broke the gooseneck on my LED floor lamp when they bent the top of it over nearly double. When you position it horizontally so it shines over your book/work, the “stem” very slowly wilts and the light ends up shining on the wall behind you. Maddening. Taping it only slows the wilt. Got a new one that stays put and has a height adjustable pole.

These lamps always remind me of the “ray” thingie on the Martian “saucers” in the 1953 movie “War of the Worlds,” with Gene Barry as the “I told you so” scientist and Ann Robinson in her first leading role as the obligatory pulchritudinous female costar who screams and/or gets hysterical. The scenery was well chewed in that one.