This morning I headed off to Napa to meet my older sister, and the two of us drove down to San Francisco, to Pier 39, to join a large crowd of people, many of whom were wearing some form of pink. My sister, as leader of our team, had purchased hats for all three of us, although my little sister won’t get hers til she comes down in July, so at least we had our own pink on, and could blend in with the crowd.

We found what was quite possibly the very last parking spot available in the garage across the street and had a little discussion on how best to stuff our purses under the seats so we would not have to carry them – an effort which was made completely moot by the fact that when we showed up at the registration table we were handed goody bags, full of samples and magazines and lots of paperwork about the organization. And there wasn’t enough time to go back to the garage and drop off the bags, nor was there enough time to get lunch, so we bought pretzels at a stand right near where the practice team was gathering and inhaled them while the perky young leader gave her spiel about safety, and then as a group, we all headed down the pier for the very first practice walk of the San Francisco Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.

We do the Sisters Only weekend every year, but this year, instead of going off to a cabin or a hotel or a resort, we are going to spend our nights in tents with thousands of other people, and our days walking the streets of San Francisco for areally good cause. In a way, it will be just as much a sisters bonding thing as our trips to Reno and Las Vegas, and walking 26 miles in two days will be our ‘extreme’ activity this year, instead of singing karaoke in a bar full of strangers or rappelling down a rope into the vast emptiness of a very deep hole in the ground, like we’ve done in years past.

We’ve signed up as the Sisters Only team, and our team goal for fund raising is $5400 total ($1800 each). We’re each going to have to do a lot of preparation to get to the point where 26 miles of walking is doable, but we’re committed to making it work.

The money raised is managed and disbursed by the Avon Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity with a mission is to fund access to care and finding a cure for breast cancer. The Avon Foundation funds both local and national organizations in five key areas: medical research, education and early detection programs; clinical care; and support services, all with a focus on the medically underserved.

Please help to support my efforts and this important cause by making a generous contribution. You can make your donation online by simply clicking here. Please remember as you’re making your donation that in less than the time it took to read this e-mail, another woman in the U.S. was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Good grief – how did I forget my very own journalversary? I’ve now been at this for six years (well, technically, six years and 8 days).

Here’s the obligatory link to my very first entry, posted on January 15, 2000. I haven’t woken to green mice since I posted that entry, and my little grumpy tortie is long gone, but Azzie still purrs at me and tries to bite my nose, because despite being nearly seven years old, he remains perpetually under the impression that he is still a kitten. Some things always change, and some things always remain the same. Ah, life.

* The title of this entry taken from A.A. Milne’s poem “When I Was One”.

Accomplishments for January:

• DVR installed so we can record Lost and Battlestar Galactica without missing a minute when are not home, or perhaps out of the country – check
• Wills, living wills, durable power of attorney, HIPPA release documents (and other signs of actual adulthood) signed, notarized, filed – check
• Person who prepared wills amused by request to include pet clause and designate Pet Executrix (and back-up Pet Executrix) – check
• Prettiest socks I have ever made completed in time for Mom’s birthday – check
• Tickets reserved for (very delayed) three week honeymoon to Ireland – check (squee!)
• Plans made for this year’s Sister’s Only Weekend – check

Not bad for not even three weeks into the year. Not bad at all.

I was sitting at my computer, idly poking through my regular haunts, checking the latest entries on my Bloglines (and why everyone does not have RSS feeds I do not know, because they make life so much easier), deleting spam in my inbox, that sort of thing. Azzie was sitting on my lap so I had my feet propped on the desk and was leaning back in my chair, half turned so I could actually see the screen. It was evening, so the room was mostly dark, except for the glow of my screen.

And then I saw it. Moving across my screen. A black shape – something I didn’t recognize. It was an image – I couldn’t tell quite what because it sort of blended in with the dark background on the current Charles Wysocki picture that serves as my wallpaper – and it was on my laptop and it was *moving*. I started to panic. I’ve been getting the little reminder notice from Norton for…um…far too many weeks now, telling me that I need to renew my subscription, but it usually pops up when I am in the middle of something, or in a hurry, or have a cat on my lap and cannot get up and fetch my credit card so I can pay the yearly fee. So every time it shows up I’ve been telling it to remind me later. I’m usually extremely careful with email and downloads and such, so I’ve been feeling like I really didn’t need to worry.

But now, I was worried. This shape was moving around on my screen and worse yet, I couldn’t click it with my mouse. It was at least two inches across. There was nothing on my tool bar for me to turn off. I checked my list of processes but there was nothing there I didn’t recognize. I mentally kicked myself for not renewing my virus protection and resigned myself to finding a way to save any files I could before giving the hard drive a complete brain wipe and starting from scratch.

And then, as I sat there panicking, the shape turned and finally came into focus, about two seconds before it moved off the screen, disappeared into the dark frame of the laptop, and reappeared on top of the screen edge, taking a moment to pose perfectly, just so I could finally see what it was.

Yeah. It was a bug. But not a computer one, a real one. Luckily not the kind that would make me panic again.

I did what any good cat owner would do, now that I realized that my computer was still safe. I called for the cats and pointed out the extremely large house fly (aka coolest cat toy ever) and then, once it had their attention, I left the room.

And later on, I came back and renewed Norton. You know. Just in case.

Happy Holidailies

It is odd to be back at work after nine days off. Richard went back yesterday, but I didn’t go back until today. And we all stumbled in yawning and bleary, and mostly wishing we could go back home and crawl back into bed and try again tomorrow when we might be more ready for it.

I’d heard there was some flooding around the office but I was completely unprepared to pull onto Garden Highway and see how high the Sacramento River has risen. There are a number of buildings that were built right on the levee, so that half of the building stands on poles and the parking is usually found underneath. Our office building is just such a building, and as I drove toward it I was amazed by the fact that the lower level parking for every single building along the levee was completely underwater. It looked as if the apartment buildings and office complexes and restaurants had all been built in the river itself. And it is disconcerting to walk across a wooden boardwalk and look down between the cracks in the boards and see nothing but water underneath, or to stand on the deck outside our office door and look down at water instead of a grassy bank. It is also more than a bit unnerving to look out the window to my left when sitting down at my desk and realize that the boats which docked right outside our office are practically at eye level, when normally they are down at the same level as the parking garage.

Richard was feeling a bit better, now that he’s on a higher dose of Prednisone (the drug of choices for severe asthmatics with bronchitis!) and also giant horse pills of antibiotics, which he picked up and started on today. So we went out for sushi for dinner, and then came home and watched the last few episodes of the first season of Monk. Richard sat on the floor for part of it, assembling his telescope, and I muddled through directions I printed out this weekend, and managed to get three of the five fingers finished on the pair of half-finger gloves I’m making out of leftover sock yarn.

Things are sliding slowly back into normal, now that the holidays are over and vacation is done with and we are back to work as if nothing had ever changed. I like being home and having the time to putter around on little unimportant things, sleeping as late as I want and actually having time to cook if I can work up the enthusiasm and we have the ingredients in the house. But after a while I get to the point where I need to have something a little more to do. Even if it is just going in to work and marveling over the fact that the park across the river is so far under water that only the tip of the guard shack is visible, or pondering whether the water beneath the deck is deep enough that if we accidently fell in, it would break our fall.

Happy Holidailies

Richard had to go back to work today but I have one more day off. I have been taking advantage of this by spending the entire day in my pajamas and taking long, delicious naps. It has not been all sloth and decadence, however; there were piles of laundry to do (due in part to having house guests, and also to Zucchini deciding that it had been far too long since he peed on Richard’s side of the bed – sigh), so I have been slowly working my way through those. Plus I dealt with all the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen and paid bills and put away a little bit more of the clutter that always manages to accrue after Christmas, and I also did a bit of knitting and made dinner, so it was actually a surprisingly productive day.

We ate dinner in front of the television so we could watch a few more episodes of the first season of Monk, which we actually started watching last night. Richard’s parents came up yesterday to take him out to dinner for his birthday, and the Monk DVD’s were one of his presents. My parents came along for dinner and we all smashed into a booth at one of the few places that were actually open on New Year’s Day, and had Italian food and coffee and then came home and ate spice cake with chocolate frosting (because that is Richard’s favorite cake) and ice cream. My parents brought him books on colonial times from their trip to colonial Wiliamsburg and I think my mom and I will be doing some arm wrestling to see who gets to read them first after he is done with them. And his parents brought him, among other things, a didgeridoo (actually, that was from his youngest sister) and a very cool telescope. I suspect once this weather we’ve been having finally clears that Richard will spend quite a bit of time either outside in the backyard trying to find things in the sky, or inside scaring the cats with his new noisy toy.

Happy Holidailies

When I got up yesterday morning my back was still sore, but it had subsided into a mostly low-grade ache. This was a good thing, considering that I needed to collect all of Richard’s birthday presents from where I’d stashed them around the house, and this included the complete Calvin and Hobbes collection, which has been living in the trunk of my car and is rather heavy and not the sort of thing one should be carting around if one’s back was wrenched.

I made a coffee cake for breakfast with some experimental streusel (it involved mini chocolate chips and toffee bits, because we happened to have them both in the cupboard) and wrapped all of Richard’s presents and the cake was just about ready to come out of the oven by the time Richard woke up. So he made coffee and I made glaze for the cake and we ate breakfast at the dining room table for a change, since that’s where I’d stacked all his presents. And in between bites of cake and sips of coffee he opened them all.

He’s had a low-grade fever on and off, and has been coughing and wheezing the past day or two, so we spent his birthday in a quiet and low-key way. We went out only once, to get lunch and swing by the grocery store for the ingredients for our New Year’s Eve dinner. We’d originally planned to go out for dinner, but with him being sick and me still recovering, and more importantly, with the rather crazy weather we’ve been having, I’m glad we stayed home instead.

We made pizza fondue for dinner, and while I was shredding the cheese Richard noted that s’mores would be a lot of fun for dinner, since we haven’t used the s’mores maker he bought for me in a year or two. So he zipped back to the store to pick up marshmallows and graham crackers and chocolate bars. And then we put in some movies – March of the Penguins and Miracle on 34th Street (the original with Natalie Wood) and stuffed ourselves silly with bread and melted cheese and toasted marshmallows and chocolate and sticky goodness. In my family, the New Year’s tradition has always been to go get lots of ice cream, gather up all the leftover Christmas cookies and candy, and do our best to finish them all off. It’s always been our own version of ‘drinking to excess’, except that our version doesn’t leave anyone incapable of driving, or hung over the next day. Richard and I didn’t exactly do the same thing, but I think cheese and chocolate to excess was in the right spirit.

So now here is the part where I am supposed to get all maudlin and think back over the old year and list off all my dreams and hopes and goals for the new one, and declare that 2006 will be better than any year before it. Except that I cannot really find it in me to care, you see. New Year’s Eve has never been a huge celebration for me. It marks the end of the year, but only because someone arbitrarily decided that this day was the last day of one calendar and tomorrow would be the start of the next. In the grand scheme of life this means nothing at all except for some people it is an excuse to go have a party. And I am certainly not knocking excuses to go out and have a party, if that is your thing, but it just isn’t mine.

We watched the ball drop in Times Square (on television, of course) because that is tradition, and outside in the street we could hear people setting off firecrackers and blowing horns. But inside, it is just another night that happens to also be Richard’s birthday, and today is just another day, and I learned long ago that making resolutions that are set to start on the first day of an arbitrary calendar really doesn’t mean much or change anything.

Still, I know there are a lot of people who might be glad to be done with 2005 because a new calendar does offer a frame for what could be a new, shiny chapter in someone’s life. So on the first day of 2006, here’s hoping that good things come to those who need them, and that if you really want to make those resolutions come true, that this be the year you find the strength to do so.

Happy Holidailies

I woke up this morning to the sound of rain pounding on the roof, much the same sound as when I went to bed last night. When I went downstairs to make breakfast and wrap Richard’s birthday presents, I looked outside and it was evident just how much water the latest winter storm had dumped. Normally when we get a heavy rain we get a little pond that forms in the middle of the path in the backyard, right where the white peach tree stands. This morning the pond stretched all the away around the raised flowerbed, covered the bottom step to our back porch, and joined up with a new pond on the other side of the yard, behind the garage. So much water in such a short period of time that the ground is too saturated and it simply has nowhere else to go but there. I’ve joked occasionally that a house with a dragon on the roof really ought to have a moat, but this morning, when it looked like we might be halfway there, it wasn’t quite so funny.

Reports of worse than just flooded backyards have been trickling in throughout the day. My older sister up in Napa lost power for a few hours during the day, and parts of the main town were flooded. News reports mention mudslides and people being evacuated in Napa, Sacramento, and other parts of Northern California. The 80-680 interchange was shut down in Fairfield/Cordelia, likely due to flooding. My brain is having a hard time wrapping around all of this – we just don’t get this kind of extreme weather in this area, and yet, here we are in the middle of it, with another storm supposedly on the way.

I assumed the flood in our backyard was the worst it got in our immediate vicinity, since we’re not close enough to any creeks, rivers, or lakes where larger scale flooding might be a problem. I’d not thought about clogged storm drains, nor would we have seen the problem anyway, since it occurred just around the corner down the road. But as we left the house for the first time in the day, to go for lunch, the neighbor noted that our street had, indeed flooded. We passed city trucks and men in bright orange jumpsuits still poking in and conferring over various storm drains, and the line of debris from the flood was clearly visible halfway up a number of the neighbors’ driveways.

The storm literally blew itself out eventually, but high winds are so common around here that I doubt anyone would have noticed anything unusual. As it was, I only paid attention to the fact that there had been wind because the streets were dried so quickly after the deluge.

The weather people are saying that we’re due for at least one more huge storm to sweep through the area, likely tomorrow. But in the meantime there is wind outside, and even more startling after the sogginess of the night and the morning, there is bright, lovely sun.

Happy Holidailies

Because I have had the week off and my mom also had some time off, we decided to go off shopping together. My mom came and picked me up, since I am still not completely 100% with the back and driving, which requires occasionally being able to twist the back, is out of the question – and we headed off to the mail because we’d heard stories of grand sales at a few stores.

We had lunch first, at Mimi’s Cafe because their buttermilk spice muffins are amazing. Apparently my mom and my sisters went there yesterday for lunch and my little sister, who has recently finished school to become a pastry chef, spent a bit of time crumbling her muffin into tiny pieces in an attempt to figure out what all was inside. I have high hopes that she is able to reconstruct the muffin recipe, although I suspect that it might not be a good thing in the long run because they probably are far higher in all the bad things (fat, calories, sugar, you name it) than any of us want to know.

Next we hit the mall – or at least a small portion of it. I’m still a bit slow with walking, so mostly we stuck to two stores. The first was Lane Bryant, because they claimed to have huge sales, and even though their smallest size is often a bit too large for me, we thought it might be worth the trip. The tales of grand sales were grander than the sales themselves, despite the presence of deceptive signs in the front promising huge savings. Okay, I should give them credit – there were huge savings to be had if you did not mind an original price that was perhaps twice as much as it would have been in another store, for things that fell mostly into the categories of cheap, tawdry, or both. It’s a bit of a disappointment because both of us remember when Lane Bryant used to carry nice things that were made with decent quality and were appropriate for professional women to wear. But I suspect we are clinging to a memory that has not existed for quite some time, and perhaps there is no need to enter that particular establishment ever again. So instead, we headed off somewhere else, and managed to find a few things there that were meant for actual adults to wear, and for significantly better prices – even without the sales – than we would have paid for something that we wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing anyway.

After the shopping my mom brought me back home because my back was twinging a bit. Richard has been home all day, happily doing something with various Linux operating systems, or something, because for some reason that makes no sense to me (much like my obsession with yarn makes no sense to him, I suspect) he finds great joy in wrestling with kernals and operating systems and seeing how close he can come to getting his computers to crash. He has also been staying close to his nebulizer because even though it looked earlier as if he’d managed to avoid falling under the influence of this latest winter cold from hell that has been making the rounds, our optimism appears to be premature. We’d originally planned to go to The Firehouse tomorrow night for their New Year’s Eve dinner, because there are fireworks in Old Sacramento and we’ve done this before and it’s always marvelous food and a lot of fun. But with both of us either getting over the death virus, or coming down with it, we realized it was likely better to just stay home and celebrate in a more subdued manner, with Kleenex and cough suppressants and large quantities of ibuprofen and the rest.

There were reports that a few more rounds of winter storm were coming our way and that seems to be the case, since the rains started a few hours ago and it’s pretty much now pouring out there. Neither of us is up to going to the store or out to dinner, so we ordered pizza and gave the delivery guy a large tip for making him brave the storm to bring us food.

Happy Holidailies

I spent today mostly babying my wrenched back, with only short trips out where I knew the amount of walking I’d have to do would be minimal. I have been walking around a bit duck-like, and Richard has permission to laugh at me because I am laughing at myself about this too. My back may hurt but how can I not find the humor in the fact that I have to prop myself up just to stand up straight? Also, ibuprofen is my very best friend and I know that in a day or two this will all be over and I might as well laugh about it while I can.

There was a brief detour to meet a friend at the yarn store in Davis, which was not having as impressive a sale as we had been led to believe, but which still prompted me to pick up three skeins of brightly colored wool to make myself a cute little felted bag, and two skeins of sock yarn that will produce socks with the loveliest purple stripes. We will not discuss the fact that I got a pile of sock yarn for Christmas and I have not even touched the sock yarn I bought in Ashland during the knitting retreat in November because one can never have too much sock yarn. The next trip was off to the allergy clinic so Richard and I could get our shots, since we are now both back on a monthly schedule and I am determined to keep us on it so we do not have to have them any more often than necessary.

In between trips out of the house I have been camped out on the bed knitting. It’s the most comfortable spot in the house where the cats can be near me, or even on me, without my needing to contort my body into back-displeasing postures. I finished my secret project and started on the felted bag, and I am currently toying with casting on for at least three other projects, just for the heck of it, because I have this delicious sense of freedom, now that Christmas is over and I have nothing whatsoever that has to be done. It is time to make frivolous things just for me, like some socks, and maybe a new cardigan for myself, or even perhaps another lace shawl that I will never wear and which will drive me crazy making, but which I will adore knitting anyway.

Despite what I’d thought yesterday, it turned out that we did get a short final visit with my little sister and niece and brother-in-law. They all went to the Jelly Belly factory for the tour, where I heard that they got to see some of the machines waving at them, but then decided it made more sense to come back to my parents’ house instead of heading back to Napa, because my parents’ house is closer to the airport. So I went over to spend a little more time with them, and give them a few more hugs goodbye.

My little niece spent a good portion of the time we were there standing in front of Richard and jumping up and down in circles so that his outstretched hand would bonk her lightly on the head, all while giggling madly. She kept insisting that he do it, so apparently it was a marvelous game, and in fact as we were all leaving – them for the airport and us for home – she declared that her Uncle Richard was her favorite because of the head-bonking game. We figure we’re not holding her to that because five is a rather fickle age for who is one’s favorite, but it was still pretty darn cute.

A friend called, finally back in town, and since we have been trying to hook up for ages, we made dinner plans in order to pass over presents for Christmas and his birthday. It was fun to linger over dinner and pie and catch up on what he and his wife have been up to, and it was with regret that we finally had to head home and say goodbye.

Happy Holidailies