We fully intended to get our taxes done this weekend but I never got around to sorting through the pile of forms to make sure we have everything (to avoid those mad dashes back home to find some crucial bit of paperwork which we’ve done before, mid return preparation session). So that will have to wait until next weekend. I also fully intended to take all the piles of paper and empty bags and bottles and cat food cans to the recycling center, since the piles have long since outgrown their containers and the looming mountain of squashed cardboard boxes has been eying the cars threateningly for the last few weeks every time we pull into the garage. Guess what else is also waiting for next weekend?

So instead of doing important adult things this morning, we went out for breakfast and had highly adult food (like chocolate chip pancakes) and then we got our hair cut. I have been looking forward to that for quite some time because my hair was getting long and awkward and despite my best efforts I shall never be able to trim my own bangs as well as a professional. We left lots of our hair behind but it felt wonderful to do so, and then we went back home because I had a headache and I took a nap while Richard (who is the coolest husband ever) drove off to the store and bought a birthday present for my older sister. I had already figured out what to get her and had found some likely candidates online, so I could show him pictures, and I have to admit that I was sort of tempted to keep it for myself when he brought it home instead of wrapping it up to give to my sister because her new electric skillet is prettier and shinier than mine. But one must not covet one’s sibling’s birthday presents, so I wrapped it up and scrounged up a birthday card (note to self – buy more birthday cards) and we packed her present and my youngest nephew’s birthday present (now two weeks overdue) into the car and headed up to Napa for the birthday celebration.

On the way my mom called to ask us to pick up candles, so we swung by this tiny little market that’s just around the corner from where my older sister lives, and picked up the coolest birthday candles ever. I wouldn’t have even given them a second glance except that they were out of the normal birthday candles, and then I saw these and thought they would probably work better than loading up an ice cream cake with 37 candles anyway. The candles were individual letters of wax, and they all spelled out Happy Birthday! (with the exclamation point) and they were colorful and sparkly and fun. The only downside was, as it turned out later when we stabbed them into the aforementioned ice cream cake and lit them, they tended to melt a *lot* faster than normal candles and so by the time she blew them out they did not resemble letters so much as strange hieroglyphics, but in a warped way that made them that much cooler.

We gave my nephew his present – a set that included a hat shaped liked a dinosaur head and two squishy slipper feet shaped like dinosaur feet. The best part about it was that when you moved the head around it roared, and when you stomped the feet they made crashing, stomping sounds. And the best part about *that* was even though the electronic roaring and crashing noises weren’t too loud, my nephews more than made up for it by stomping around the house (do I even need to mention that their downstairs is hardwood flooring?) as loud as they possibly could to go while pretending to be big scary green dinosaurs. Thank you, Amazon.com, for suggesting it. And I am not the slightest bit grumpy about the fact that it does not come in adult sizes. Really I am not.

Today has been a day of warm fuzzies. It started with tracking down the perfect Javascript code snippet that I needed to transform an insanely long list of items into a series of nifty nested, expandable lists – a code snippet that turned an otherwise dull HTML file into something which garnered many a ‘cool!’ from various members of our company when I sent it off to the entire organization this afternoon. I am not a web designer by any stretch of the imagination – I know HTML and I can read Javascript enough to be able to modify an existing code snippet (although I couldn’t write it from scratch to save my life), but my limited skills were enough. I expect that this fairly simple HTML document (now with nifty expandable lists!) will gradually morph into something more complicated as the months progress, and I have a sneaky feeling I am going to be stretching the limits of what I know how to do with web pages, but that’s okay. It’s fun.

The second warm fuzzy came when I got home from work, and found a package waiting for me. Last month I signed up for knitting Secret Pal, and shipped off a package to my own Secret Pal earlier this week. So today I got a surprise package of my very own, in which I found what she assures me is a very simple pattern for socks, a skein of superwash wool (so it is machine washable!) yarn in the loveliest mix of blues, and an abundance of dark chocolate, just to round it all out. I have decided that this is the year I will get over my intimdation with knitting socks (it’s the heels – they scare me), and my Secret Pal decided to spur me on with a little temptation. Yum.

And if that weren’t enough, when we got home from choir practice, there was a message waiting on the answering machine for me. Remember that curriculum I sent off a few weeks ago? They did the review of all the submissions today, and apparently I kind of blew them away. The guy who called wanted to set up a time to go over a few edits, so I did that this evening – and the edits, such as they were, were mostly just grammatical. It felt pretty nice to know that I’d done such a good job – especially in something I’d written. I love to write, and I know when it comes to this sort of thing (non-fiction stuff) I’m good at it. Really good. But still, I was the least experienced one in the whole group and I’ll admit I had been feeling a little apprehensive about whether or not I’d managed to do what they wanted. No need to worry – I nailed it.

Don’t mind me, I’m just a little giddy right now. First I got that code thing working, and then I get this rather lovely virtual pat on the head. I think I’m entitled to have just a little squee fest today.

I went to Curves this morning, even though my mom is still sick. I used that as an excuse all last week (well, I did go last Monday but only because I found out she wasn’t coming while I was parking outside the gym, and it seemed silly to just go home at that point) but I decided I couldn’t keep on skipping the workout indefinitely. On the way home I stopped by the store to pick up some milk, since the dregs left in the carton currently sitting in our fridge had started to coalesce into something that shouldn’t really be ingested anymore.

They were pretty empty, it being only about 7 in the morning at that point, but there were huge displays of red and pink – balloons, candy, hearts, and flowers. And as I walked up to the registers to pay for my milk so I could go home and have myself a healthy breakfast (thus foregoing the not uncommon stop by the local coffee shop and bakery) I noticed that one of them was framed by a giant red heart. A big sign hung from the top designating that register for Valentine’s Day purchases only.

It’s a wonder my eyes did not roll right out of their sockets, but I successfully avoided any hysterical laughter in the middle of the store. I imagined that later in the day that register would be doing a brisk business as hordes of desperate men randomly grabbed one of the many glittery, sugary, perfumed treats from the shelves in the hopes of appeasing their wives or girlfriends and proving that they really do love them despite having put the purchase off until the last possible second. Ah, romance. I could just feel it in the air. Or maybe that was just the feeling one gets when one has worked out on an empty stomach, and one has had absolutely no coffee at all so far. Hmm.

On the way home from work I swung by Ben & Jerry’s to pick up a few scoops of Dublin Mudslide as a little Valentine’s Day treat (we don’t really bother with this holiday beyond maybe a card or a goofy stuffed animal). I stopped by a post office to mail off a package to my knitting secret pal (because what good is an obsession if you don’t have an international circle of friends to support your habit?). Richard made jambalaya for dinner tonight and we ate it while watching the reunion show for Extreme Home Makeover – a show we both really enjoy (and one which usually has me in tears by the end because I cannot help the fact that I am a girl and happy endings sometimes make me cry). We discussed plans to go to the zoo next week to see the lemurs. It’s been a nice day for a Monday.

This morning I got up far too early for a Saturday and headed off to pick up a friend before heading down to Santa Clara for Stitches West. Last year it was a little closer, since it was in Oakland, but apparently they outgrew the convention center there and had to find larger accommodations. A bit further, yes, but still within driving distance, giving us lots of time to chat on the drive down.

We got there in time to get our tickets and then join the rapidly growing line waiting for the doors to open. One of these years I am going to actually sign up for a class or two, and maybe make an entire weekend of it, but for now, we stick to just the vendors’ mall. Or in other words, this morning, we drove all the way down to Santa Clara to do a little shopping for yarn, at what was basically the biggest yarn shop on this side of the country.

While eating lunch we ran into a few people we knew – the mother and daughter duo with whom we’d done a field trip to that incredible yarn store in Walnut Creek last month. And they told us that they had taken the train down this morning – and not only did they take the train, they sat on a special knitting car, where they had lessons and prizes and got free yarn! We’d had no idea this was even an option (and as it turned out it wouldn’t have worked for my friend’s schedule anyway) – it sounded awesome. But at least we know what to look for next year – less driving, more time to knit and chat with other yarn-obsessed people, and lots more fun.

I was a little more restrained this year than last year, even though I did make a few impulse buys (but oh, it’s such pretty, pretty yarn that surely it is worth it!). There seemed to be more booths this year than last; by the time we’d made our winding way through the entire hall we were worn out. By the time we were finished it was getting difficult to maneuver through the crowds, so our timing turned out to be pretty apt.

One of my finds was one of those collapsible tapestry bags, which came in quite handy later on in the day to carry the rest of what I bought. When I got home, I left it in the kitchen for a little bit, and you’d have thought it had been marinating in catnip for days by the way the cats reacted. Between Rosemary and Allegra they managed to tip it over, and then they were both all over it, rolling on it, rubbing their heads on it, purring like mad. Good to know that they, at least, approve.

My fifteen seconds of fame has apparently been extended (now I figure I get 30 seconds). An email from Bev yesterday morning started it, with the rather cryptic (well, to me) note congratulating me on my article in the Enterprise. Um. What article? I went poking around and, surprise, it turns out that the two papers are owned by the same company, which means the article about us wacky online journalers was on the front page in Davis too, on Monday. I had no idea they were going to do that, so I didn’t manage to track down a paper copy (ah well – my mom will get only the one).

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They came out to replace the back passenger window in the car on Tuesday. Since then, there’s been the distinctive sound of air whistling into the car every time I go more than about 20 miles per hour. I’ve tried rolling the window up and down, figuring maybe it just hadn’t been closed all the way, but no luck. So this evening I broke down and called the number the insurance company had given me for the glass company, figuring it just needed to be fixed.

The person I spoke to on the phone, however, didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in helping me. The gist of the conversation was basically that since the car was vandalized (even though the only thing they did was break a window), this was just one of those pesky side effects I was just going to have to suck it up and live with. He was, in fact, actually kind of rude about it.

Sigh. So I guess the next step is to call the insurance company back and arrange to take the Prius in to a body shop, to get it taken care of. Very annoying.

Yesterday I finally stopped hitting the Snooze button on the little reminder that’s been dinging impatiently at me for the past week on my computer. That curriculum I was supposed to be writing was due by the end of the day today, and I’ve been putting it off and putting it off. I did do a few cursory things on it, like tracking down a copy of the United Methodist Discipline (which I think I shall have to read, cover to cover, one of these days because I am just the sort of strange individual who actually read technical manuals thoroughly, and this is really just another version of that ilk) so I could peruse the social principles and find ways to work them into my text. But I had about half of the thing still left to write as of yesterday when I got home from work. So last night I decided to sit down and finish it off (a day early, no less. Take that, procrastinating gene!)

Richard very nicely acted as editor, reading through each section as I sat in the computer room hunched over my laptop, typing madly. I asked him to be completely blunt, and he did offer me some extremely useful criticisms, which I tried to incorporate in the ‘final’ version. And then, at shortly after midnight, I finished, about 1000 words over what they were looking for. But they did say they’d rather we gave them too much instead of too little, and it’ll go through a more complete editing process, so I’m not too concerned about ending up a little too wordy. And the most important thing is that it is, at least, done. Check one more thing off the list.

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Along with my complete inability to notice that I had misplaced 25 gb of space on my very own laptop, we can add a complete inability to deal with a missing passenger door window. I know that one is supposed to cover the hole with cardboard. I’ve seen this on cars all the time. But we couldn’t find the duct tape (I know it is in the house somewhere, but unfortunately it is not in the drawer where it is supposed to reside) and I wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed, so I tore off a few good sized pieces of cardboard and stuffed them into the window and then used regular clear tape to hold them in place, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

It lasted all the way to work. But on the way home I lost the entire thing while crossing the causeway. This morning I gave it another try (still unable to find the duct tape) and I did lose part of it on the way in to work. But at that point I no longer cared. This afternoon they came out and replaced the glass. Insurance is a lovely, lovely thing.

When I got home from work today there was a message on the machine from the insurance company, asking for additional information on the stolen laptop. Since I wasn’t sure Richard would get home before they closed and I knew he was anxious to get this resolved, I called them back.I couldn’t find where Richard had stashed the receipts for our laptops (since we’d had to get copies a year or so ago anyway for warranty and service purposes), since I knew they would list out all the relevant information. figured, however, that since our laptops were identical, I could muddle through on mine and figure it out myself.

The DVD-CD read/write drive was obvious – that’s right on the outside of the laptop. The software was easy to figure out. But then we got into the other specs and that’s where things all fell apart.

I opened up my File Explorer (because I am a dinosaur and much prefer the old File Explorer and classic Windows functionality to the cartoonish hideousness that is their Windows standard these days) and did a quick properties check. I was actually a little startled to find out that I only have 15 GB of space. Huh. Weird – I thought I had more. But maybe I’m just remembering incorrectly. So I told the guy the laptop had 15 GB, and then I noted that once we tracked down the receipt, I’d have Richard call them back with all the other numbers and facts. Then I called Richard on his cell phone to tell him what they’d asked, and what they still needed, and mentioned the hard drive size.

But wait. I was not remembering incorrectly. They *do* have more space – 40 GB of space, to be exact. Um. So why do I only see 15 GB in my C Drive?

To Richard’s credit he did not start laughing hysterically at me. He very calmly noted that my drive was likely partitioned – that I should have a D drive which would be where all that additional space was hiding.

Bear in mind that we have had these laptops nearly two years. TWO YEARS, people. I had no idea I had a second drive. It’s right there in the list on the File Explorer. It’s not like I haven’t been staring at it all this time. My CD/DVD drive is drive E. You think it would have occurred to me at least once in the past 24 months to wonder why I had this D drive and what it might be.

I could try to blame this cluelessness on the fact that it is a Monday, except that it hasn’t been all Monday’s for the past few years.

Just dye my hair blonde and call me Muffy. Even us nerds can sometimes be too stupid to own a computer.

Since the article was posted for the Sunday paper, I decided that we ought to get an actual paper copy. I know my mom prefers to have the hard copy, and I’ll admit I was curious to see where they’d put me. So this morning we headed for one of the local coffee shops, and as I was rummaging in my purse for quarters, Richard got out of the car and started heading toward the paper dispenser. Then he stopped. “Well, there you are,” he said. And he was right. There I was, my picture plastered all over the front page of the paper, staring out of the paper dispenser. Wow.

We got our coffee and our chocolate croissants and asked for change so we could get a paper (the curse of the ATM generation – never having cash or change anymore) and then we got a copy of the paper, and I kind of stared at it in a little bit of shock for a bit because I wasn’t exactly expecting this to be a front page sort of article. I can only figure this must have been a really slow news day. Heh.

So much for the good part of the day. Today was the last day of the Lord of the Rings class Richard and I have been joint teaching for adult Sunday school at church. We’d been bringing my laptop to church to show clips from the DVD’s during discussion, but Richard’s laptop was finally back from Sony after being serviced, so today we brought his instead. We did the class, Richard gathered up all the materials, and then he put them all into the car, which was parked right outside the door of the church, and we headed off to the service. It wasn’t until an hour and a half later that we emerged again, only to discover that someone had broken into the car and the laptop was gone.

I am counting us lucky, in a way. All they took was the laptop. When the police came he noted that they likely used a spark plug, held in their hand, to smash in the back passenger window. The glass wouldn’t shatter and make noise, since it’s meant to not shatter in an accident, so all they had to do was then pull the pieces out carefully and quietly, reach in, grab the bag, and run. So the only damage to the car was the broken window. The policeman dusted for fingerprints but none of us were surprised when nothing showed up. It was obvious they didn’t try to take anything else.

Sigh. Once the policeman had left, Richard and I swept up the glass all over the sidewalk and street as best we could, figuring we didn’t want to leave the mess to hurt someone else, and then went home to rummage around and try to find the serial number for the laptop. The police will keep it on file, just in case they run into someone with stolen property, and luckily we’d been smart enough to hang onto the receipt (mainly for warranty issues more than anything else). We dutifully called in the information, but I think the general consensus is that the chances of the culprit being caught are pretty much zip, and I think it’s safe to say that we can pretty much kiss that laptop goodbye.

I will admit to being grateful that at least it was his and not mine. Since he’d just had his in for service he’d just backed up all his data, so he didn’t lose any data. Mine hasn’t been backed up in ages and if mine had been the one lost I am not entirely sure what I would do to try to replace some of that information.

We called and made an insurance report. They’ll send someone out to replace the window early this week. I suppose I should be angry, yelling and cursing, but really, I’m just resigned. Even if the car had an alarm they would have been able to steal the laptop and run before anyone would have made it outside to see what was causing all the noise. No one was hurt. All that was broken was the window, and that’s what we have insurance for.

It being early in the year, this meant it was time for the annual Girls’ Time Out with my female in-laws. The emails started flying early last week, choosing dates and making plans, and the date was finally set for today.

I’m not sure how long my female in-laws have been doing this, but they’ve involved me since I became a part of the family, and it’s been a lot of fun. I drove down to Campbell to meet at his parents’ house, where I got to interact with the very excited puppy. He keeps growing – every time we see him he’s stretched out, either taller or longer than the last time. They’ve been working with him on some simple commands, but the excitement of someone new in the house always seems to be a little too overwhelming and there is often much leaping and licking involved in meeting him. At one point, I’d gotten up to do something, and when I sat back down the puppy shot across the room, completely airborne, launching for my face. I was licked in the eye by an extremely exuberant wiggly thing before I could calm him down and remember that I’m supposed to say ‘Off’ and not ‘Down’ (I am sure I do not help matters any by continually confusing the command words!). Here’s where I am so very glad I’ve been doing the allergy shots. Six months ago I would have likely gone red and itchy at this sort of contact. Today I just burst out laughing and wiped the puppy spit off my face and told him he was a very good puppy.

Our first stop was Lisa’s Tea Treasures, which has been the traditional gathering place for our Girls’ Time Out for the past three years now. We met two other women there – coworkers of my mother-in-law – so it was a nice sized group sitting around the table. It is always a little surprising just how full you can get on a plate of tiny, bite-sized tidbits of food – tea sandwiches, mini tarts, tiny little croissants, scones with Devonshire cream, ginger cookies with lemon curd. By the time they brought out the dessert I could barely finish even half, although since it was a slice of incredibly rich and dense chocolate cake it felt almost criminal to leave so much of it behind.

Next up, a chick flick. We’d all heard great things about Sideways, so we all piled into cars and headed off to the theaters. I wasn’t sure what to expect about the movie at all, but I ended up loving it. It really is a chick flick, in its own way, even though the two main characters are men. It’s at times funny enough to have us laughing out loud, and at other times poignant and sad.

I think if I hadn’t had to leave there might have been another hour or two after the movie of lingering and chatting and possibly more eating. But it was getting late and I had a two-hour drive still ahead of me. So we all headed back to Richard’s parents’ place, and we hugged our goodbyes, and I got back into my car and hit the freeway and the cruise control button, and somehow made it back home before midnight.

I was still pretty wide awake even though it was getting late, so just out of curiosity (because they told me the article might run this weekend) I went to the website of the Fairfield Daily Republic, and hey, what do you know. The article was posted. My 15 seconds of fame has come.

I should have known things were going too well. Friday Allegra stopped eating; by that evening she was listless and dehydrated. Luckily we had no big plans for the weekend beyond sitting at home so I could finish up this doll for my niece’s birthday (which was on Saturday so it will reach her a little late – ah well). So I could be home to occasionally grab Allegra, stuff some food and pills down her throat, and stab her with a little needle to dump fluids under her skin to keep her hydrated.

I told a friend today that I feel as if I am on an emotional roller coaster with Allegra. I wish she would either stabilize, or just get sicker and be done with it. Not, mind you, that I am eagerly anticipating her death – I just want to know. Watching her go up and down over the past few days has been extremely frustrating. There is never any clear answer to the question of how far I should go. I firmly believe that quality of life for the cat; what’s best for her, should always take precedence over my desire to keep her around because I’m not ready to lose her. But where do you draw the line? I told myself this weekend that if she did not respond to the treatment – hydration therapy, force feeding – that this would be the end of the line. I have told myself that if it comes to it, I will give her a week on any drastic treatment, since that seems like it should be long enough for there to either be improvement, or for her to let me know in whatever way she can that enough is enough. But it’s so easy to be calm and rational about it when she’s not sitting there, lethargic and dehydrated, and you are faced with the prospect that ‘someday’ might just very well be now.

The happy ending to the story is that this time, a few doses of sterile fluids under the skin, a few quarter pills of anti-nausea medication, and a few rounds of force feeding (which she tolerated far better than I would ever have imagined) and she’s now right back to being her perky and opinionated self. Plus now that I’ve had a taste if some of the bad side of kidney disease I’m prepared for the next bout – and I do not doubt for one instant that there will be a next bout, and a next one after that, and so one and so forth.

I had to call my old college roommate on Friday because while I know how to give fluids (it’s insanely easy if the cat’s being cooperative), I hadn’t a clue how to actually set up the bag with the infusion drip set and I knew she would be able to talk me through it. She’s the one I spent four years fostering baby kittens with, so she and I have been through a lot over the years. One of our first litters was a group only a few days old, where they all got sick and all but one of them died. The one who survived had some issues from being abandoned and orphaned and from being sick. And now that little kitten who I will always remember as this tiny black and white thing barely big enough to fit in my hand, even though I have seen him often enough as an adult, is her oldest cat. Between the two of us, in between all of our cats, Sebastian still is the oldest, at 13, but then comes that little holstein cow-patterned runt. During the conversation she mentioned that a friend of ours who’d also done a lot of fostering, back in the day, had just had to put one of her oldest kitties to sleep. And she asked me, when did we get this old? How did this many years pass without our noticing, so that our babies are now starting to die?

You don’t think about it when you look at the little kitten in the cage; when you are coaxing this hamster-sized thing, whose eyes are still not even open, to take formula from a bottle. You do not think about the fact that in far too few years you are going to likely be trying to convince them to take food from a plate for a far less hopeful reason; that you will be trying to get them to swallow the pills without fighting or spitting them back out; that you will slowly accumulate a small pharmacy of needles and syringes and bottles and bags to keep them happy and stable just that much longer, and that eventually you will have to make a decision you do not want to make; eventually you will have to watch them die.