I suppose I should be tired today, but surprisingly I am not. Or rather, I am only yawning a little bit and I am not starting to doze off while waiting for web pages to load during yet more research online, and I am not getting more than slightly annoyed by the extremely obnoxious lawyers downstairs who are getting the week off to a fine start by yelling and screaming at each other at the top of their lungs much earlier than normal for a Monday morning. At least it hasn’t degenerated into swearing yet, but I figure it’s only a matter of time. They’ve been doing a lot more swearing at each other in the past week. In a way it’s almost laughable, but in another way it’s a little disturbing.

Richard has gone home from work already due to more cramping, and I sent him an email about jello and pudding and yogurt and other soft, non-intestine-irritating foods we have in the kitchen. Packing lunches is usually pretty easy for both of us since we’ve been actively trying to follow the program and eat lots of high fiber food with fresh fruits and vegetables and low-point chili and soup and such. It’s not so easy when one half of the house is supposed to be on a low-fiber diet for several days, and isn’t allowed to eat any fresh fruits or vegetables at all. I have been having a merry time running through my mental list of recipes trying to come up with things that will be okay for him to eat, yet still low in points. Somewhere along the way I need to find something that fits that category and still uses bananas because there is an entire bunch of them sitting on the counter getting a bit overripe, and making my kitchen reek of banana, and I have already eaten my one banana for this quarter so they’re going to just sit there until I either get disgusted with them and throw them away or I cook them somehow.

I am mulling the pros and cons of solar panels over and over in my head now that we have an actual estimate for them, and pondering whether we really could lower our energy bills any more than they already are (my conclusion is ‘not likely’). I am pondering things I want to do with one of the databases I built for work but having a hard time finding motivation to go beyond scribbling little notes. I am wondering when the vet will call to give me an update on Rebecca and hoping that she has not decided that we abandoned her and is therefore turning her radioactive super powers toward evil instead of toward good. And I am most of all wondering if, just maybe, my entire office went downstairs en masse and told off the obnoxious hollering lawyers, they might actually shut up.

I am starting to slowly get more involved in the reading I am doing for this bible study I’m involved in. Next Wednesday we’ll be discussing order, which means that most of the reading for this week is full of lists of rules – rules on when you should stone an ox and when you should free a slave and how many sheep or goats are to be paid to whom for all manner of wrongs. Despite expectations to the contrary, I am actually finding these rules rather fascinating. I’ve always maintained that one of the reasons for having gods and goddesses and religions in the first place is to instill some kind of order on people because people are usually more afraid of divine retribution than of punishment from other people. What better way to lay out the beginning of a rather comprehensive judicial system than in the form of religious text.

I am not saying this to mock the bible, however. I am beginning to understand just why it is that so many people find the book so fascinating. There are a lot of interesting messages hidden in the words we’ve read so far, and I freely admit that it often takes someone else to point out an interpretation that makes it a little clearer for me. It has not, so far, suddenly convinced me of the existence of a supreme being. But it has shown me the way that people thought, thousands of years ago, and that in itself is worth something.

It has been nice to get something out of the readings from the bible, if only because I am not getting much out of my other reading material right now. Someone posted a link to the BBC’s 100 Best Loved Books list on TUS and after discovering that I’d only read about 40 of the books listed, I decided it might be fun to try to read some of the others. I usually avoid doing this sort of thing with published book lists because they are usually full of the type of ‘classic’s that are foisted on unsuspecting and unwilling students in school so that we might all benefit from someone’s interpretation of what the author was really trying to tell us – whether or not the author might agree with that interpretation or not. But this list included books by Terry Pratchett, so surely the rest couldn’t be all that bad.

I started off with The Alchemist, which is just chock full of flowerly rhetoric that had me rolling my eyes pretty much the entire way through. And then I printed off a list of all the other books I hadn’t yet read and handed it to Richard and he brought me home a stack on Tuesday night from the library.

So far I have read three of the ten books he brought home and I am eying the remaining seven with more than a bit of trepidation. Anne of Green Gables annoyed me the entire time I was reading it. The BFG was extremely disappointing, if only because Roald Dahl wrote other books that were far better written and far more entertaining than this one. And Artemis Fowl should have had a different spelling for the last word of that title because it was just not worth the effort. A number of the remaining books are of the types that usually do not interest me in the slightest and after being extremely disappointed in the first three I am seriously beginning to rethink this grand idea of reading the remaining fifty books on the list. After all, despite the fact that the list included Harry Potter and Discworld novels, it also included Clan of the Cave Bear (the first of a series in which a young cavewoman discovers every conceivable thing that led to the first primitive culture. I still shudder when I think of the time I lost in plowing grimly through those books, naively sure that somehow they would redeem themselves). Surely that addition alone should have indicated that something was painfully amiss.

Today started far too early, at about 12:30 this morning when Richard woke me up in a lot of pain. Normally I can wake up fairly quickly, but I had just fallen asleep only about an hour before and had a hard time dragging my brain out of the fog. Luckily I managed to wake up enough to drive him to the hospital (although I think it was to our benefit that there were few cars on the road to distract me because I’m not sure I was entirely awake even then). We spent the next six hours at the emergency room while they poked him and prodded him and took blood and filled him full of painkillers and made him drink nasty concoctions of dye and ran a cat scan and finally determined that he has diverticulitis and is pretty lucky that it was caught before he had to be admitted for surgery. And hey, it’s been probably a year since I’ve taken him to the emergency room (because the last time he went he was in Riverside and had to go by himself), and at least this time it wasn’t due to his asthma. One can always find the bright side to anything if one looks hard enough, even after one has spent six hours in one of the most uncomfortable chairs ever manufactured from cheap molded plastic listening to blood pressure monitors and loud drunken people getting mad because no one asked them to give a urine sample, or explaining to extremely patient policemen just how it is they happened to ‘run into’ someone else’s teeth.

So by the time we got home there was only time to catch a quick nap of about an hour before we had to get back out of bed and somehow make ourselves presentable and coherent enough to interact with the guy who came out to evaluate our house and give us an estimate for solar panels. To summarize – yes we can put them on our roof, yes we could probably avoid ever paying for electricity again, and by the way those things are expensive, even *after* the state rebate, which we may or may not get because that program has been running out of money much faster than expected. We agreed to at least put in the application for the state rebate funds, which gives us a few months to think about them, and for me to panic about what we would need to do to get this started, and for us to remind ourselves that if we’re going to be serious about our impact on our environment, this is a really good first step. But it’s expensive. Really really ouch expensive.

And then it was off to the pharmacy to fill Richard’s prescriptions of some heavy-duty antibiotics and painkillers and also to find a picture frame for one half of the wedding gift for the wedding we went to this evening, and while we were there I decided I might as well get a flu shot because I have been saying I should do this for years, and I am somehow convinced that if I get a flu shot I will miraculously avoid the several-month-long sinus infection from hell I have been getting every winter for the past few years. And then back home to eat lunch and then try to sleep for another hour before we had to get dressed and hastily wrap the present and find the card for the reception and go to the wedding.

The wedding was lovely, as weddings usually are, and the reception was far too much fun, or at least it was fun for those of us at our table, where we spent most of the time amusing ourselves by taking wild and wacky pictures with the disposable camera they put on our table, voguing with our plates in the buffet line, and making lanyards from the raffia that decorated the table, and very little time actually paying attention to what was going on with the bride and groom and everyone else. And none of that fun had anything to do with the fact that Richard and I have had very little sleep since Thursday night and he was heavily doped on vicodin, I am sure of it.

We’ve been treating Rebecca for her hyperthyroidism now for probably about three months; the last six weeks of which have been spent chasing her around with a finger full of goo twice a day that has to be smeared in her ear. To say that she does not enjoy the process is putting it mildly. And admittedly we’re not all that crazy about it either.

This morning was, I am hoping, the very last time we will have to do this. This morning we smeared the goop into her ear and then bundled her into a carrier and she yelled at me non-stop the entire drive into Sacramento, where she was poked and prodded and weighed and examined and then we left her there – left her for most likely up to ten days – so that she can be treated once and for all and hopefully return home to us with normal thyroid function once again. The fact that she may also return home to us slightly radioactive for a short period of time (thus prompting weeks of anticipatory glow-in-the-dark super-kitty quips) is just a slightly annoying side effect.

The procedure seems fairly simple. She doesn’t have to undergo any surgery and she doesn’t have to be put under anesthesia. She just gets an injection of treated iodine which – if all goes as planned – goes into the thyroid and destroys the parts that aren’t working and once she reaches whatever acceptable level on their geiger counter, we can bring her home.

It has a 95% success rate – good enough odds that we were willing to go for the procedure. Plus, the loss of twice-a-day cat-ear-smearings isa definite bonus. And so far, things look really good. They just called to let us know that her goiters (I love that word) weren’t too huge, and that she’d already been treated, and is doing just fine. And most important of all, they told me that iit was just the ordinary, run-of-the-mill hyperthyroidism, which means that her chances of recovering normal thyroid function after this is all over are pretty darrn good.

A few weeks ago I was bored and poking around online, and decided to look for information about synchronized swimming. I’ve known about the Masters swimming program for people over 18, but could never find a team close enough to join. Well imagine my surprise when I actually tracked down a team in Sacramento. It’s only been around for a few years (and I get the sense that the website has been around for even less time), which is why I’d never been able to find anything about it before. There was a day or two of worried frustration since their website’s hosting company was having issues and I kept getting errors trying to reach their site, and then more anxious waiting while I fired off an email to the contact person and waited impatiently for a response. But the whole point of this rambling is that I found a team. I found a team! I get to swim again!

I admit my timing couldn’t have been worse. They swim in outdoor pools, at night, which means that because of bad weather, they shut down at the end of October and don’t start up again until February. Plus due to previous commitments I can only make two practices for the rest of the season (last night and one more Sunday night in two weeks). But none of this matters. What matters most is that I can swim again. And I hadn’t realized until I got into the pool last night how very much I missed it – not just the swimming, but being in a pool with other women who understand this sport – who *get* synchro.

After last night’s practice I can see already that while I’ve still got the strength for it (thank you biking and Curves), I need to do some serious work on flexibility. It was quite an effort to extend my leg straight enough for even the simplest of figures and I didn’t try anything too complicated last night. But I know it will all come back, especially once the season starts up again.

There is a faint smell of chlorine in my hair and a nose clip in my purse. I am already visualizing choreography with every piece of music I hear. After twelve years without any ability to practice my favorite sport (and the only one in which I was ever any good), all is right in my world once more.

********

On a completely separate note, TUS has been involved in an interview project, where we take turns asking people five questions and they have to respond in long and rambly essay answers. I finished mine this weekend. You can go read it here.

Yesterday I decided that it had been far too long since my car was actually cleaned inside and out. So this morning we drove into Davis and had our customary breakfast of cornmeal waffles with pecan butter, but then passed on the regular jaunt over to the farmer’s market in favor of joining the long line of cars at the car wash downtown in order to rectify the situation.

My car is now sparkly clean and dirt free inside and out. Well, mostly. While they oh-so-carefully detailed the dashboard and the windows and vacuumed all the seats and floors and mats, for some mysterious reason they left the cup holders alone, leaving behind a thin layer of grit and a few ancient coffee spills. I suppose if they had to leave anything at all it’s better they left something small but still, it strikes me as odd that they didn’t even vacuum them out.

********

Every year around this time since I moved to the area back in college I have noticed the handmade signs along the freeway announcing the annual corn maze and pumpkin farms. And every year I drove by them and think maybe it might be interesting and then promptly forget all about it until the next time I see the sign.

So this morning, on our way home from waffles and car washing, I spotted the sign and this time I decided I’d waited long enough to check out the corn maze. We headed down one of the back country roads for a few miles and finally tracked it down by the fact that it is surrounded by a few acres of pumpkins.

For whatever reason I had always assumed that the corn maze would be some cheesy thing for little kids. I was so very wrong! We paid our $6, they handed us a map, and it was at that point, looking at this extremely detailed map with teeny tiny paths drawn in, that I realized just how huge this thing really is.

The corn is, of course, tall enough that you cannot see over it. So you have no choice but to wander the paths and try to decipher the little markers set up at every junction to figure out where you are. It didn’t take much time at all before we were both completely turned around and had lost all sense of direction – and this was with one of us carefully scrutinizing the map at each turn to try to lead us out. At one point we tracked down a little wooden staircase that was tall enough to climb above the corn stalks. However that wasn’t much help since only the paths nearest us were even vaguely visible, and it seemed to be there only to emphasis just how vast this cornfield really was.

We found our way out using the map but had to miss a large portion of the maze because I needed to get home (today was Painting Day at the office). I think we’re definitely going to do this again though – and maybe we’ll try to scrounge up a few friends to bring along – friends who will have just as much fun as we intend to, trying to muddle our way through this thing without using the map at all, all while working on the plot of what is sure to be the next best cheesy horror flick (because really, what better place for unspeakable evil to stalk and kill another flock of plucky teens than in a corn maze?).

Richard and I have signed up for NaNoWriMo again. We didn’t do it last year because our job had us traveling and there just didn’t seem to be a feasible way to handle that much writing when on the road. But we did it in 2001 and really enjoyed it. Granted I wrote 50,000 words of what was probably one of the worst novels ever created in the history of writing, and after getting the word count verification I promptly deleted every single file associated with it. It was so terrifically bad that if it had been paper, I would have burned it, page by page, all the while cackling with mad glee. So I am not expecting that this year will be any different (although Richard thinks I ought to at least let him read my 50,000 words of babbling drivel before I send it off to the ether of oblivion this time). However, this year I am pondering taking a different approach, and working on a collection of shorter stories, all bundled together. There is still nearly entire month before NaNoWriMo starts for me to change my mind on that. We shall see.

********

I have been reading about this Sweet Potato Crack thing on TUS for months and wondering what the heck it was. This afternoon I finally got so fed up with what I was doing at work (I am gathering data, but the data is on a website where some idiot requires Macromedia Flash on every single stinking page and that means each page takes about a minute to load!) that I left early and swung by the store to pick up two sweet potatoes. And then I went home and chopped them up and mixed them with a heap of garlic and olive oil and thyme and salt and baked them and when they were all done and the entire house just reeked of garlic I tried a bite and realized right then and there not only why this recipe has its particular name, but also that if Richard didn’t get home pretty darn soon there wasn’t going to be any left for him.

I am thinking that the next step is to try a combination of this and the yam chips I have made in the past, and I am also thinking that I really ought to track down kosher salt and use that instead of regular salt since that *is* what the recipe calls for. I am also thinking that maybe I really ought to stop making extremely garlicky things on the nights when we have choir practice and spend two hours doing lots of singing next to lots of other people.

Tonight, I am baking cookies. I am also doing laundry and checking email and trying to clean up the house a little bit because things are starting to pile up in places, and also trying to catch up on all the reading for the bible study (this week it’s about 40 chapters of Genesis – or at least the part that deals with Abraham and Sarah and all his descendants – all about how a bunch of people lied and cheated and tricked and got rewarded for it. Yeah, I’m cynical).

Mainly, however, I am trying very hard to pretend that the election didn’t really happen, here in California, and that when I wake up tomorrow morning somehow the general public will have found at least one working brain cell and this election didn’t really end up in such a complete and utter disaster. Really, I should know better by now. After all, I need only look toward the White House at the Shrub to get evidence to how short in supply working brain cells really are.

But I digress. I am baking cookies. This is because at the very first session someone (okay, it was me) thought it would be an incredibly spiffy idea to have theme snacks. The first session was pretty easy, since it was all about how the bible is made up of different types of writing (so I brought a snack you could build out of layers, because the bible has layers. Like a parfait. And speaking of parfait I think I need to see that movie again). This week, however, the theme is covenant, and frankly, short of baking something that would require me to use an oven mitt to remove it from the oven (because oven mitt rhymes with covenant. Shut up. *You* come up with a better idea!), I was at a loss. Finally I hit upon making Mexican wedding cakes (also known as Russian tea cakes and probably a whole host of other names but basically they’re butter and powdered sugar and nuts and flour all rolled into little powdered sugar-covered lumps and they are really good) because a wedding is a sort of covenant and why in the name of all that’s holy did I think that theme snacks would be a good idea?

I had dinner with my mom tonight while Richard was off volunteering at the library and that was fun, because we had a chance to talk and laugh and eat virtuous salads, followed by decidedly unvirtuous desserts. And then I swung by the grocery store and picked up walnuts for the cookies (which reminds me – I am not allowed to buy any more nuts no matter how badly I think I need them because there are now three half-empty bags of them in the freezer, ensconsed next to the umpteen half-used packages of mozzerella cheese, all of which I keep forgetting I have) and a can of pumpkin because it is October and thus the season for pumpkin spice cake for breakfast, and now I am home. With the cookies. And the laundry. And oh yeah. That stupid election.

I would have liked nothing better than to sleep in this morning, after being out late last night at craft night (although I’m glad I went because I am *this* close to joining the shoulders on that sweater I am knitting for my youngest nephew and then all that’s left are the arms and the neckband and by golly I might get this thing done by Christmas after all). But we ended up getting up far too early for a Saturday because we were meeting friends at their house before piling into their nice large car and driving for several hours down to Hollister, which is where the Renaissance Faire is now being held.

Luckily the weather decided to be nice and lovely. This is crucial for a Renaissance Faire trip, if only because we like to go in garb and that style of clothing was never really meant to be endured in California’s hot summer climates.

Our friends were all dressed up and Richard wore his outfit as well. I, however, resorted to renting an outfit once we got there, because one of the skirts I’d hastily put together a few years back refuses to hold together (the elastic keeps coming undone and then I have to feed it slowly through the waist band again using a safety pin and my fingers and this is really, really tedious) and my bodice was also falling apart (probably because if we’d had any sense my friends and I would never have put the seams on the side, where they would get the most stress when said garment is tightened). I did, however, wear my clunky fair-appropriate shoes and brought my belt with me, both of which looked oh-so-lovely with my shorts and my t-shirt when we swung by a bakery to pick up breakfast.

The faire is nicer in its new location. There are more trees, more shade, and it’s a little hillier. The only drawback is that it seemed a bit more cramped, as if they hadn’t left enough room for everything and had to stuff it all in at the last moment. But otherwise it’s just like I remembered it – dusty and noisy and full of a crazy mix of people in typical garb, as well as the requisite few in some form of armor, Viking garb, kilts, or sporting wings. I do not get the wings thing, frankly, but they seem to be quite popular with the teen girl set. I suppose these, at least, are slightly more colorful than the whole Goth thing that was so prominent in years gone past.

We wandered around the booths and saw jousting and rather clumsily choreographed swordfights. Our friends’ little kids got made honorary knight and lady by the ‘queen’. We saw someone eat fire and juggle 10-pound bowling balls. We ate shepherds pie and strawberry shortcake. There were trolls with tusks and slow deliberate actions. I broke down and bought a new bodice because I really did not relish trying to make a new one, and we also found a dragon print (white brush strokes on a black background) that had to come home with us. I remembered how to breathe in a bodice, and I also remembered how incredibly wonderful it feels to finally take said bodice off at the end of the day.

We drove home after it got dark, stopping only briefly to get hamburgers and soda at McDonalds, and then once the kids fell asleep in the back seat, the rest of us had a spirited discussion which famous people are hot and which ones would be good in the sack and which ones we’d just rather not see naked, but who are still allowed to sit in our bedrooms and read us poetry. Okay, that last bit was mainly between me and the other woman, but still, if the entire cast of Hunt for Red October is looking for work, my friend and I are willing to supply the books of verse. Except for Alec Baldwin, who is exempt from poetry reading because we have far better things for him to be doing. And that is all I am going to say on that.

Last year, because we were in a job that had us always on the road, Richard and I signed up for permanent absentee voter status. Then we promptly forgot all about it and it’s a good thing Richard figured it out eventually because when they sent us our absentee ballots for this ridiculous farce of a recall election California is staggering through, I nearly threw them out, thinking they were only the sample ballots I’m so used to receiving.

Luckily this did not happen and the ballots have been sitting safely on the kitchen counter. The booklet of all the candidate statements, however, has been living in Richard’s car because for amusement, while we would drive somewhere, I occasionally open it at random and read one of the statements from the myriad list of crackpots who are running for governor. I cannot seem to choose which one is my favorite, since currently it is a toss-up between the loony who said that if we vote for him, the seventh seal of Armageddon would be broken, or the guy who gave as the reason to vote for him “I breathe.” Which frankly, when you stop and think about it, makes perfect sense, since if you look at the list of candidates, breathing and a pulse is apparently the only qualification required to run.

If you caught my little snarky comment above, it should not surprise you in the slightest to know that I voted against the recall. I think it is a ridiculous waste of time and money and am extremely disappointed that there wasn’t a proposal included on the ballot that would allow us all to line up and smack the imbecile (that would be Darrell Issa, for those of you playing along at home) who was so convinced he could actually *buy* this election that he dragged the rest of the state down into the gutter with him, repeatedly upside the head. And don’t even get me started on the sheer inexperience of one of our main contendors for governor – Arnold Schwarzenegger – a man who refuses to answer any questions without getting time to script his answers in advance, and whose sole thought for how he is going to ‘fix’ California is to go in and ‘cut spending’ without once offering any suggestions for how this might possibly be handled. Apparently the legislature will be so bowled over by his inability to keep his hands off anything female they’ll just jump right to it and play along.

Right now all I want is for this recall to fail. I want it to go away; to slink back into the cesspool of shame from whence it came. I could care less about the qualifications of whoever is the governor, if only because it doesn’t take much rational thought to figure out that the national recession and the Dot Bomb is more responsible for the current state of California’s debt than anything a mere governor could do – especially since the rest of the legislature cannot stop the party-line back-biting and bickering long enough to pass a budget on time.

I want this recall to fail, because if it succeeds, it sets up a dangerous precedent that is going to make a nightmare of politics in our future. Disagree with the person in charge? Find someone willing to spend a chunk of change, and get a recall on the ballot, allowing an extreme minority to vote in the successor. Why worry about how much money this is going to cost the counties to run this special election each time? Who cares that that money had to be taken out of the budgets for essential public services that are already strapped to their limits? Lets just throw a million-dollar tantrum and pretend that will make it all better.

When the laughter over this idiocy is over, this state – and the rest of the country – is going to have to live with the results. And I’m not sure that anyone is ready, if this recall succeeds and we elect ourselves a “Governator”, to handle the fallout from what those results could be.