Grass and Sky

I spent the better part of today figuring out how to be a Princess In A Castle, and with an hour and forty-five minutes to spare, I'm finished. I've built myself a sandwich placard castle, complete with portcullis and functioning drawbridge. I made a medieval princess hat (the tall, conical kind with gauzy stuff coming out the top) that sort of stays on my head - oh, I still need to put an elastic strap on that, so not quite done - and I've decided on an outfit. Shift from Calvieri girl outfit, bodice and skirt from Five, and combat boots (a castle needs a strong foundation). I'll be sure to get pics of the whole outfit tonight, but in the meantime, here's Mal storming the castle.



To complete the proper look, I (almost certainly ill-advisedly) took a scissors to my bangs in order to trim them down to reasonable length. I then proceeded to mousse and spray my hair down so tight not even a hurricane would budge it. Which means it should be good for another ten minutes or so. Now I just need to figure out make-up and I'll be all set.

Zoe is utterly and ridiculously in love with her little remnant of bias tape. She drags it around all day long and begs me to play with her constantly. I often wake up in the morning to find it on my bed, waiting for me. It's just too bad that from a human perspective it's such a boring toy. I can only maintain interest in waving two feet of bias tape through the air for a very short period of time before I start wishing she'd entertain herself with it. But it's the first time in two years that she's found a toy she truly loves and can't destroy, so I'm pretty happy about it anyway.

Mal's favorite toy these days is a ball of aluminum foil. Which he destroys within a few days. But I also wake up to find that sitting on my pillow some mornings, lol. It makes me wonder how they manage to entertain themselves when I'm not home.

After taking a few days off from eating, Mal was pretty desperate for food this morning, so I got up a little early to feed the kids. Afterwards, I went back to bed and let myself have a slow, snoozy morning. All three cats joined me at one point, which I only realized when Maggie got up and left. But I just happened to have a camera on hand, so I got some photographic evidence of Mal and Zoe being adorable. Note: the angles are a bit awkward, as I was still in bed trying not to disrupt them before I got the pics.

( Cats looking cute behind the cut )

So many dreams last night.

Dream 1) Babysitting at some random person's house. Very cool house, playing in all sorts of weird attic and basement spaces, having a party. But then I had a headache and the mom of the house directed me to a big bag of pill containers, saying there was Tylenol in there somewhere. After rooting through the bag for a while, all I could find was little plastic vials of unlabeled liquids. Yikes!

Woke up from that dream very crampy and in need of advil. Luckily, it was much easier to find than the drugs in the dream. I was awake for a long time after that, though, waiting for the advil to eventually kick in.

Dream 2) I had to take Tookie to the vet (in dreams, I usually still have Tookie, not Mal or Zoe) and I was driving this old VW Beetle. No trouble getting there or parking, but coming back out afterwards with Tooks - not in a cage for some reason, just loose in my arms and squirming like crazy - I realized I had parked at the far edge of the parking lot. When I got to the car, it was unlocked and someone was messing about at it. They weren't trying to steal it or anything, they just wanted to see something. So I got Tooks into the back seat and got ready to go. For some reason I was driving from the right seat even though there were also controls and a steering wheel on the left. And as is typical of my driving dreams, I was only just barely in control of the car. I was never really able to make the car stop completely, even when I had the breaks jammed flat to the floor (this is standard Meesh car dream stuff), I was narrowly avoiding collisions with people and other cars and then driving a little too fast and recklessly once I got on the road. My view of the road was more than a little bit obstructed, as well, by big lumpy things on this side of the dashboard. And then I came to the crest of a hill, with yellow caution lights warning everyone to slow down. As I went over the crest, I saw two things. One, it was a very long way down to the bottom of the hill. Two, despite other cars managing somehow to drive on the road, it's angle of decline was well over 90 vertical degrees and there was no way to stop myself at this point from simply tumbling off into the void. And as that tumble started, I gratefully awoke.

Dream 3) This one was equally vivid when I woke up but has become a little less distinct since then. But it was, in some ways, sort of like a Harry Potter world, although not at all like HP. There were two groups of people living side-by-side, but only one group knew of the other. That group may have had magic or something, although it certainly wasn't wand-waving, spell-chanting. I was more or less a non-magic person who'd been welcomed to the magic side by one particular family. And we had a variety of adventures, none of which actually involved anything even remotely like magic. But there was skiing, and a helicopter, and a group of the magic people who were vastly offended and felt threatened by my presence. It was fun, but I'm having a hard time describing it properly.

I got very little sleep after waking up for advil at four, just enough to cram those dreams into. And oh lucky me, today is picture day. Somehow, I almost always end up looking pretty rough on picture day. Maybe I'll just pull myself out of the group picture this year.

Did I mention that the cats have all been taking turns with a sneeze-o-rific cold the past few weeks? Zoe and Mal both had a few days of sneezes. Zoe gets sneezy all the time and it barely bothered her. Mal almost never sneezes and it freaked him out, poor boy. And now Maggie the loaner cat has it. And boy, she's not messing around. She's got the biggest sneezes you could imagine coming out of a little cat body, and then she huffs and snorts for a while, and rubs at her nose like she just inhaled pepper. She's not at all happy with this. Today is day three for her, and that's about how long it lasted for the others so I'm hoping she starts feeling better soon.

Hockey tonight. Go Pens!

Such a sucker for my kitties am I. After thirteen months of Mal and Zoe keeping a careful distance, I turned on my little desk lamp in my very dark living room and spied this:



They were so very casual about it, too, like they sleep back to back all the time and couldn't understand what all the fuss was when I went running for the camera. *hearts adorable cats*

Sewing weekend with eve11 went really well! No internet for the whole weekend while I sewed. Thirteen or fourteen hours of dedicated work got me through the bodice and sleeves, which are all finished and attached. My fingers are, once again, sore. Even with the thimble, I still managed to make myself bleed several times (only once on the fabric, and then only a tiny bit, on the lining, phew!)

Eve's kitties are a little older than mine and much more relaxed around sewing projects. They both wanted to snooze on the fabrics and instructions, but neither of them really wanted to play with the fabric and instructions. I got home, spread things out, and Mal immediately started attacking the fabric. And then Zoe wanted to play hide and seek under the bunched up skirt pieces I was working on.

It was a high calorie weekend. I really need to stop at the store on the way home from work tomorrow and buy salad stuffs, because I ate a ton of deliciously fatty foods this week, ending with take out gnocchi (almost drowning in olive oil, yum) and part of a chocolate brownie. So delicious, but so not part of my diet. My dress will fit if I stay the same weight, or continue to lose. If I regain any weight, it's not going to work so well. So, tomorrow I'm back to salads and very light meals.

And now, I'm exhausted. I can barely keep my eyes open and see no reason to try. I'm off to beddy-bye now, in the hopes of actually sleeping for a change.

I'm home! It was a great vacation but I'm glad to be back in my own little apartment, with my two little kitties.

lyda_pearl met me at the Boston airport and we drove up through New Hampshire Saturday evening, getting to her place shortly after 10pm. Sunday we took a woodsy dog walk to Mascot Pond.

( Come for a woodsy walk with me )

After resting up from our walk, we went to dinner at a local pub/restaurant called Saalt. Great atmosphere and great food. We went for another walk afterwards and the sky was just so beautiful!



I didn't have my camera with me on Monday, but we went for another walk in the woods, a little quieter this time, and mostly just took it easy. It was less cloudy but super windy. A great day for sitting on the porch and reading a book.

Tuesday was full of clear blue skies. We didn't walk quite as much (only four miles instead of eight), but we took a boat ride. LP is a part time boat captain for the Heritage Park this summer, so she gets to give river tours.

( A lot more pictures this way )

Oh, the things you see while waiting for a bus.

Last month, I got up way early too catch a bus downtown to take the train to Harrisburg for poppy_queen's baby shower. While waiting for the bus at 6am, I noticed an advertisement for one of the local newspapers. The smaller of the two local newspapers, with a strong focus on Pittsburgh sports and news, very little national or international coverage, as far as I can tell without actually ever reading it. This advert was proudly proclaiming that its circulation was up, while the bigger newspaper's circulation was down. Accompanying this claim was a stack of newspapers, as seen below.



It's not a great picture, I took it with my phone at 6am, but you can probably see clearly enough that the newspapers shown are in, what, German? So the newspaper publisher is either proudly proclaiming that it's German readership is up, or really proud of it's sales in Germany. *shrugs*

Then, this past weekend, I happened to be waiting for a bus in Oakland. There was some work going on down in the sewer lines under the street, and so there was a truck and some guys hanging out on the street.



Here, take a closer look:



Yep, it's a rubber hand, covered in (one would assume) fake blood, hanging from a utility belt on the side of the truck. I love my city. I really do

( And since I'm already posting photos, I think I'll throw up a few more that I've taken recently. )

Luckily, I'm not in school anymore and don't have any homework lying around, because if I did, Zoe would certainly eat it. The girl's gone paper crazy! She uses those sharp little teeth of hers to rip up everything in sight. When I get dvds from Netflix, I have to hide the envelopes if I want them to be in one piece when I'm ready to send them back. Good thing she's so adorable, or I'd have to send her back.

Mal had me worried yesterday evening. He puked up a hairball but didn't feel any better afterwards, wouldn't eat, etc. Finally puked up a little more, and had a small piece of salad dressing packaging in it (the individual serving packet that you get with pre-packaged salads). Poor guy, he loves to lick and chew the package after I've used the dressing but he's never swallowed any of the plastic before. I'll have to be more careful with the packaging from now on.

I can't believe it's June already. Summer is here, ready or not. I always find myself wishing for just a little more of that lovely spring weather, and looking ahead to fall. It seems unfair to hate summer so much, when it was the highlight of the year for my entire childhood. No school! Let's go outside and play, play, play! Spend all afternoon at the local swimming pool, riding bikes, climbing hills. I don't remember ever minding the humidity or the heat as a kid. Now I go outside and wilt. All the strength and energy drains out of my body and all I want to do is turn around and go back inside. Or at the very least sit down somewhere and be a very passive observer of the world around me. Unfortunately, when one spends one's day supervising highly active and disaster prone one-year-olds (good grief, we've got such babies this summer) passive is not a word in one's vocabulary. Yeah, provider of happy memories or not, I hate summer. September can roll around any time it likes.

Note to self: when making oatmeal in the microwave, please remember to put the water in.

I do believe it's time to start looking for a new microwave. I got my current one second hand a few years ago and it already had a big, burned out spot on one side of the interior walls then. It's ticked along well enough since then, but this seems to have put it over the edge, with billowing clouds of smoke pouring out of said burned out spot. It was definitely NOT the oatmeal that was smoking.

I learned, to no great surprise, that Mal is afraid of the noisy smoke detector when it is going off. He sat in the living room, staring at me as I tried to swat the smoke away with no success, crying every bit as loudly as the thing was shrilling. On the plus side, I now know that the battery in my smoke detector is still good, despite being something like 2 years old. On the minus side, everything in my apartment smells like smoke. Now I just have to hope I can put the blasted thing back together when I get home from work. Why don't smoke detectors come with off buttons?

In other news, there was a hockey game yesterday. Final score was Penguins 2, Montreal 0. That's right, folks. Marc-Andre Fleury earned himself a shut-out. Only his second one all year, and his first playoff shutout since May '08. It was a fun (read: nail-biting and crazy-making), dueling goalies sort of game. It all came down to a question of who was going to crack first and in this instance the answer wasn't Fleury. I love Fleury, a lot, but he's had a pretty mediocre season, so it was really nice to see him making the big saves and standing tall in net.

It's going to be a long day. I managed something like four hours of semi-decent sleep before my arm started screaming at me (no great surprise there, either, since yesterday was not exactly Be Kind to Injured Arms Day). Advil did pretty much nothing, so the second four hours involved lots of tossing and turning and 'will this be a comfy position? Why, no, it won't.' I finally gave up on sleep altogether about an hour and a half before I usually get up, which may at least partially explain the brain fart that allowed me to explode my microwave. *sigh* And we're having a room party at work, which means I won't get home until late.

This room party, incidentally, is the Year End, Grandparents and Special Friends Picnic and Cinco de Mayo extravaganza. All the families signed up to bring chips and dip (apparently no one could think of anything else even vaguely appropriate - unimaginative, lazy group). There's going to be a lot of dip and not much else at this party.

In the meantime, I'm going to be happy that my coffee brewed perfectly fine, and go help myself to a second cup of liquid life support.