There is sun coming through the window. There is a cozy chair in a quiet room.

Naturally, there must also be a cat.

When you are sitting on the imaging table, wearing nothing but your socks and two awkwardly designed hospital gowns, and the first thing the radiologist says to you, shortly after ‘Hello’ and ‘So how are we doing today’, is ‘So, did your doctor prescribe you any painkillers for this?’, it is definitely far too late to rethink that whole concept of reading about the procedure online and thinking ‘hmm. it says there might be mild cramping. Oh, I don’t need to take anything for *that*’.

Or in other words, I finally had my test this morning – the test that was the final follow-up to the thing I had done last summer. And in case the paragraph above didn’t clue you in, it was not fun. Not remotely. And I really could have used a rather hefty dose of preemptive painkillers. If I ever have to get one of those again, I will know better. By the way, I sincerely hope I never have to have another one of those tests again. Just in case you were wondering.

I had intended to go to work directly after, because after all, it was going to be no big deal (what with the remote possibility of mild cramping – HA!), but after I was done and the nurses were commenting on the fact that I was looking a bit more pale than when I first came in, and all I could think about was how quickly I could get home and commence with the better living through chemistry (aka Tylenol), I decided that it probably made more sense to just call in sick instead. If I ever have to do this again, I will make sure it is scheduled at the end of the day instead of at the beginning (again with the hoping there will not *be* a next time), and I will also consider maybe having someone drive me there and back, because driving while you are pale and shaky and in a wee bit of pain is probably not the wisest thing to do. And it doesn’t help that my trip home took a lot longer than it usually might, because they were doing roadwork on the freeway overpass and there was a lot of waiting until bored men holding stop signs finally let the very long line of cars go by.

The good news is that Tylenol kicks in fast, and aside from some residual twinging, I was feeling much more like myself after a few hours, so I took advantage of being home and caught up on some knitting (I’m up to ten of twenty five squares for my mom’s afghan done now), and can look back on it and find the humor in the whole process. But lying there on the imaging table this morning, trying very hard to remember to breathe because holy crap, ow, ow, OW, laughing about it was really the last thing I could imagine trying to do.

Things I have done in the past seven days:

• Received a save-the-date notice for my high school class’s twenty year reunion
• Discovered that the simple substitution of pumpkin instead of applesauce can turn a breakfast food from bland to incredible
• Reminded myself yet again that no matter how many times I may keep on trying, I will never be able to bear the smell of cooked spinach without gagging, and including it in an otherwise wonderful vegetable soup was a very horrible mistake
• Enjoyed the lovely double whammy of vicious sinus pain plus migraine headache and all the nausea that accompanies them both
• Finally finished the huge yarn and needle stash reorganization project I started in December, complete with removing the table from the library, thus finally clearing up room for actual guest bed type furniture

Things I have done in the past seventy two hours:

• Knit the first five squares for my mom’s afghan. Only twenty more squares to go
• Made a scarf for my little sister
• Wrapped up my niece’s birthday presents and handed them off to my parents to take up to Seattle with them
• Finally had my referral to radiology go through
• Scheduled what will hopefully be the final part of the process I started last summer
• Went to knitting night with friends and had a wonderful time

Things I have done since I woke up this morning:

• Finally broke out the cute little bread machine Richard bought me for Christmas and tested it out by baking two adorable little loaves of bread that only took 45 minutes each to cook
• Watched eight episodes of season one of Scrubs, back to back (have I mentioned lately how much I love Netflix?)
• Watched a rather predictable, but nonetheless charming movie (Last Holiday)
• Learned how to do the following:
  • Double knitting on straight needles (creating a tube)
  • Double knitting in the round to make two distinct items (two socks at once, here I come!)
  • Intarsia
• Started making a turtle (How could I not make this? People, it has a detachable *shell*!)

I made my second platelet donation of the year yesterday morning. I passed my iron test, but discoverd that there is another test that I can fail besides just whether or not I have enough iron in my system. This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten coffee on the way to the blood bank, but that’s the only explanation I can think of for why I failed my pulse test – too much caffeine in the system. Luckily the nurse gave me ten minutes to sit back and ‘think calm thoughts’ and when she retested me, I barely squeaked in under the wire. Add ‘no caffeine’ to the list of things I should be doing (or not doing) in preparation for next time.

It has been a long week, high pulse and dubious iron levels not withstanding. My body cannot seem to figure out how to adjust to the chilly weather, so I either wear my sweats and wool socks to bed and then kick off the covers because I am too hot, or leave them off before I crawl under the covers and then huddle in a tight little lump trying hard not to freeze. Add to that the fact that I have had a hard time falling asleep in general, and consequently I haven’t been getitng much in the way of restful sleep. Is it any wonder I tend to inhale as much caffeine as possible in the morning the instant it comes into view, just to try to bring myself back into focus? Last night at choir practice I, and the bass sitting next to me, could not stop yawning – huge mouth-gaping yawns that we could not control, no matter what we tried to do. It made for interesting breathing techniques – or lack, thereof – in a song that requires us to not breathe for a length of time that would be doable in normal circumstances, but not quite so doable when you never managed to catch a breath before you started. I felt sorry for the choir director, since every time he looked in our direction we were trying desparately to either cover up a yawn just starting, or recover from the one that had just passed. It’s a good thing that there is a weekend looming, and that there will be at least once chance to try to sleep in and recover.

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Random things, in no particular order:

Proof that my guilt complex is alive and well – I finally scrounged up a new shoelace for Checkers (she has been without one for a number of months now, ever since her last one disappeared) and she got so excited when she saw it that it made me feel like a horrible cat mom for waiting so long to replace it.

Reason number 721 why I love Netflix – the first four seasons of Scrubs are now in our queue, ready to wing their way to our house so we can watch every single episode that we missed by never remembering to actually watch it when it was originally aired.

Mississippi Mud ice cream from Baskin Robbins is proof that the unthinkable really can occur – there really is such a thing as too much chocolate (I know, I never would have believed it myself!).

Anyone who has not yet seen Little Miss Sunshine should go out and rent it and watch it immediately. Seriously. This movie is funny and poignant at the same time, and there are times when you do not know whether you should be laughing or crying or both, and it is simply wonderful.

Rehearsal for the women’s choral ensemble starts back up next Monday, so tonight was the last time I’ll have to go to the Monday night knitting group at the yarn store until April. Last week there were so many people who showed up that it was kind of a madhouse, with the two yarn shop owners running around trying to find enough chairs and looking more than a little shell-shocked that the store was literally bursting at the seams with knitters. This week it was a smaller and thus slightly more manageable group. We even had a few younger knitters show up, parents in tow, who sat together on the sofa and discussed whatever it is that young girls discuss, while their parents either knit with the rest of us adults, or sat quietly and read a book (we did encourage the girls to sit with the rest of us, but they wanted to sit by themselves, and they seemed happy, so..). I finished my baby sweater and cast on for the bag that I’m test knitting for a friend (notice the distinct lack of afghan knitting so far – next weekend, I swear!) and had a wonderful time knitting and chatting and storing it all up for the next few months until I get to do this again.

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Seven years ago today I posted my first entry for this journal. I’ve seen a lot of other online journals come and go over that time, and to be honest I never expected that I would be able to keep my own going for so long, but hey, what do you know. Happy seventh journalversary to me.

There were grand intentions this weekend of tackling the mountain of recycling in the garage. But in order to get to it, we would have had to do some serious scrambling, since the recycling center doesn’t open until 9, but the first haircut appointment was at 10, and it takes about 20 minutes to get there. So….next weekend. And in the meantime I shall dream wistfully of one day living in a town with curbside recycling pick up. Sigh.

Today is my mom’s birthday, so there was the usual flurry of emails trying to schedule a time when all the family (in the area) could gather. Now that are are all adults and some of us have small children with busy lives, and all of us work full time and have things that pile up on weekends (recycling not withstanding), it is always a challenge to try to schedule birthday gathering appointments. Due to conflicts on all sides of the family, we ended up finally settling on Saturday lunch as the prime window of opportunity. Richard had a writer’s group in Sacramento and since he is the temporary leader of the group, he couldn’t skip it. But the rest of us all converged on a restaurant in Fairfield, which is the midway point between where we live and where my older sister and her family lives, and over salads and sodas and fried shrimp, we gave my mom her birthday presents. From me she got a small bag with a skein of yarn in it – a skein which I promptly took back from her after she opened it, because it (and nine of its little clones) are destined to become an afghan, as per her request, but I simply have not yet had time to start on it. People keep having babies and there was Christmas knitting last month and a short pile of other knitting (shop samples, test knitting, husbands who have been wistfully pointing to the holes in their felted slippers in the hopes of being given replacements for several months now), and so I figured the only way I was going to make room for getting this thing done was to gift it pre-knit, which would then force me (through a clever method of self-guilt) to get to work on it.

This morning was the usual swirl of recorder practice and choir practice and church. After the service, a few of us went next door to walk through the (very old) parsonage, since its last tenant moved out. As chair of the Board of Trustees, I’m responsible for everything to do with church property, and this little house needs some work. It’s larger inside than it looks, and it’s got that quaint victorian type charm (it was built in the 1800’s), but there is no insulation and the bathroom really needs to be completely gutted and replaced, and the floors in the largest rooms are so uneven you can literally see the ups and downs, and there are people on the building committee making noises about redoing wiring and stripping off the siding, and also, quite frankly, I was really curious to see what it looked like, since it’s not exactly polite to go strolling through a house, peering into closets when there is someone living there.

My parents invited us for dinner, and since it was my mom’s birthday, I baked her a cake (after some quick searching online to find a recipe that would fit my dad’s low-sodium diet) because everyone should always get a cake on their birthday. But otherwise, we finished off the day quietly, me manically knitting, first to finish Richard’s new slippers, and then to plow through nearly an entire baby sweater in one sitting (because the best part about knitting baby sweaters is that they are very, very small).

The news was chock full of dire warnings of freezing temperatures for last night and the next few days, with warming stations set up around the area, and even the possibility of snow in the Sacramento Valley. When I woke up this morning, there was no snow (alas), and the only sign of it having frozen the night before was the little lake of ice in the middle of the backyard, where the water from the sprinklers tends to puddle. And yes, we did turn the sprinklers back on, because it’s been a rather dry winter so far and even though we are all about conservation around here, there is only so long the fruit trees can go without water before they shrivel up and die. Although, considering that we did not go put little Christmas lights all over the tangelo and grapefruit trees last night to ward off the frost, it may be a moot point anyway.

Anyway. When I got to work, I noticed it was pretty cold, but I didn’t think much about it because, since our office is in an old and kind of ‘eclectic’ building, the temperatures tend to swing wildly throughout the day. So I turned on my space heater, as I usually do, and then started wondering why it didn’t seem to be doing any good. This is about when my coworker came over, also noting it was downright nippy in the office, so the two of us went over to the thermostat to investigate. And that is when we discovered that the thermostat in our office had apparently decided it wanted to stand in solidarity with the freezing temperatures outside, and thought we would all prefer it to be a nice, balmy 62 degrees.

The problem with this thermostat is that none of us have ever figured out how to make it work. They set it up when they installed it, but over the last year or two, each of us has tried to muddle through the array of buttons and incomprehensible instructions, trying to change the preset temperatures, but never with any luck. So my coworker and I did our usual routine of randomly stabbing at buttons in the hopes we might trigger something to happen, and then when that didn’t work, I tracked down a passing maintenance guy and decided it was time to let the big guns have at it. We have found it rather amusing that it took two of them to come in and do the random stab at buttons and inspecting of vents (indicating that it is not that we are all singularly stupid when it comes to thermostats, but that this thing really is incomprehensible to all), until they declared that it was possible that the thermostat might actually be broken, and then left, promising to come back later to see how things were progressing.

It appears, however, that at least some of the random button-pushing done by either my coworker and I, or by the maintenance guys, seems to have worked. After an hour or so the temperature in the office finally started to creep slowly upward. By the time I was sitting down to my highly nutritious lunch of microwave popcorn and peppermint hot chocolate (guess who forgot to bring her lunch today?), it had finally just about reached the temperature it should have been when we came in to the office this morning.

Yesterday, as the afternoon was stretching on for what seemed like forever, and the hands on the clock were taking their own sweet time inching toward 5pm, my coworker noted with a groan that if we thought this was bad, wait until next week, since that would be *five* days and not four. It’s hard to go back to a full time schedule after the holidays are over, especially after the last few week of December which are always filled with a hundred different reasons to get out of work. Leaving early for holiday dinners. Days off for the holidays themselves. Taking time off in between for whatever reason we can come up with. And then January hits – and with it, an entire stretch of over six weeks without a single holiday to break up the monotony (and January 1st does not count, because it only starts the month off) until sometime in mid February. No matter how much you might love your job, working in January is hard. And the hardest week of all to work is the week after vacation.

But aside from the pain of returning to work, it’s been an otherwise quiet and nice sort of week. Work and home and even time to watch a movie or two – one of which was Art School Confidential, which started out far more promising than it ended. We even did some new-to-us cooking, finally tracking down just what the heck to do with the portobello mushroom caps we bought on a whim last weekend (the first experiment turned out delicious; the second night’s experiment was the sort of cooking where we each took a bite, gave a little shudder, looked at each other across the table, and then he ordered the pizza while I scraped the remains into the disposal).

We’re slowly starting to make some progress on clearing up the library. I did some major reorganizing of my yarn stash on Monday, and we moved the big shelf into the computer room, where somehow Richard managed to wedge it into the space between the window and my secondary desk (and I do mean wedge – that shelf isn’t going *anywhere* after this. I’m not even sure how we will ever pry it back out again), and I cleared off enough shelf space above my computer desk so my slowly growing knitting library has space, thus clearing up more room in the newly wedged shelf unit for bins of yarn. This year I am starting off with grand plans. This year it is going to be all about reducing the stash, and I am off to a fine start with work on a pinwheel baby blanket made from some vintage pink swirled yarn that’s been sitting in one of my bins for far too long, waiting for me to make up my mind what to do with it. I still have to take down the big folding table that’s in there (which means tackling the random piles of stuff that are on *top* of the table first), but once that’s out of the way, we can start thinking about how best to turn the library into a temporary guest room space, since it’s about time we had something to offer to friends besides the rather uncomfortable (and slightly broken) futon downstairs.

Azzie is….well, how do I put this delicately. He’s very adorable, in a Nermal kind of way (all big-eyed and fluffy and cute) but he is unlikely to ever win a battle of wits against an overripe tomato. Let’s just say that where normal kittens usually figure out the whole cat-in-the-mirror thing by about ten weeks of age, Azzie didn’t get it until he was about two or three years. And we will not even discuss how he can get himself lost behind the (see-through) shower curtain. I merely mention this to provide background for the story.

Azzie is enamored of the DVD player. Ever since we got it, he loves to watch the drawer open and close. It fascinates him. Every time we watch TV, he comes scurrying into the living room just as we are about to get up because he is convinced that us in the living room = magic DVD drawer opening/closing. Naturally, because he is so very cute about it, we usually oblige him (also, it’s hysterical to watch). Every time the drawer opens he gets all quivery and excited, and hunkers down and gets all wide-eyed and he does this Every. Single. Time. The beauty of having the brain power of an overripe tomato is that the whole world is exciting and new every time you wake up.

So last night, we were doing the usual DVD-drawer play time, him hunkering down, and even occasionally scooting up to rear up on his hind legs, prairie dog-like, to wave one paw at the drawer, and I was busying myself in the kitchen, when Richard starts laughing hysterically and telling me to come quick. So I come back into the living room, and there is Azzie, in front of the DVD player, flopped over on his side, in the classic ‘cat submission’ pose. I’m not sure *why*, or what inspired him to suddenly decide to surrender to the mighty DVD player, but there he was, flopped over, feet in the air, tummy exposed.

Clearly, whatever the confrontation had been, the DVD player has now won. However, I do not know whether to laugh hysterically when I think about it, or fear for the safety of our planet. It’s a sad, sad world when your household appliances can dominate your household pets.

I awoke this morning early, to the unmistakeable sound that told me that I had better watch where I walked when I got out of bed, unless I really wanted to feel the charming squish of cold slimy hairball between my toes. I awoke again to the same sound, a half an hour later. By the third time, I realized that getting any more sleep was going to be impossible, especially because it occurred to me that there might be more landmines besides just the three I’d had the pleasure of hearing, so I finally got out of bed, and cleaned up the mess, and fed the cats so that if they insisted on continuing to hork great piles of slime loudly onto the floor, they would at least do it downstairs, out of hearing range.

We went out for breakfast because Richard wanted chocolate chip pancakes, and since this was his birthday, chocolate chip pancakes were what he got. And then we figured as long as we were out, we might as well do the massive grocery run we’ve been needing to for the better part of a week, so we went to CostCo and stocked up on fresh veggies and fish and laundry detergent and then on to the grocery store to get everything else.Somehow it seemed appropriate to be doing such a full scale grocery shopping trip on this, the last day of the calendar year. Stocking up in preparation for a new year of healthy food and healthier living.

This afternoon I put together two small lasagnas and popped them into the freezer, and decided it was time to try out the new apple peeler-corer-slicer contraption we picked up the last time we went up to Apple Hill. So I pulled all the old apples out of the fridge and any that were salvagable were processed quite quickly using that very handy little device, and were dumped into the crockpot with some cinnamon and apple juice and chopped dates, and they have been simmering in there now for several hours, in preparation for being turned into apple date butter, which I will pour into jars and seal for later in the year.

Richard got one of his birthday presents yesterday – the lemur I ‘adopted’ for him from the San Francisco zoo – and he knew about the main present, which is the purchase and installation of a new stereo system in his car that will let him plug in his MP3 player. So neither of those was much of a surprise. However, I am pretty sure that his third present came as a surprise, because few people would ever guess that for their birthday they would get a felted jellyfish.

We had such a late breakfast that we didn’t ever get around to eating lunch, and my parents took us out to dinner as a birthday treat for Richard (he’s getting three birthday dinners in a row, which works out quite well, all things considered). We never got around to making any sort of exciting plans for this evening, so we’ve basically just spent a fairly quiet day and except for the New Year wishes from the clerks at the grocery store, it would be easy to think this was just any other day. I think that the one nod we will make toward the end-of-year festivities will be to turn on the television at a minute before midnight, just to watch the stupid ball drop in Times Square, and maybe I will go downstairs and put some apple cider on to mull, just for the heck of it, while I am mashing up the apple butter and working ever closer to putting aside the very last bits of this year to savor in the next.

Tis the season for Holidailies