If you ever go to buy a new car and you happen to have had personalized license plates on your old car, and the dealer very cheerfully tells you that they can take care of the transfer paperwork for you, do not believe them. They know not of what they speak. Sure, they may have the correct form to fill out, and sure you and they may both make very sure that you sign on all the correct dotted lines, but in the murky and incomprehensible world of the DMV, this is all irrelevant. And when, after nearly six weeks of waiting, you finally receive your registration for your new car – a car which you have been driving around for the aforementioned six weeks with your old license plate on it because you were under the impression that the transfer really was taking place as promised, you will discover that it was all a big fat lie. You will discover this because not only will they send you a lovely new registration form and sticker, they will also send you new license plates. New, boring license plates that have no personalization at all.

This will then require you to track down the nearest DMV, and then take an hour or six out of your busy work day (because DMV’s are, much like post offices, allergic to ever being open during useful hours) in order to take care of the license plate transfer yourself. This will also require you to track down a screwdriver and wrestle the old plates off the car, thereby getting grease and gunk all over your fingers in the process, so that you can bring them in to the DMV in order to show them to the person behind the counter so they can charge you money for the privilege of putting them right back on your car again later.

If you are very, very lucky, you will stumble across a newly built (or renovated – I’m not sure) DMV office which, unlike every other DMV office you have ever encountered, is clean, quick, and efficient, and even more amazingly, staffed with people who actually seem to *want* to be helpful, and also do it while smiling and being pleasant. You will check several times to make sure that you really *are* in a DMV office, because surely there must be a mistake because there is a distinct and noticeable lack of surly, but sure enough, it really is true. And they will commiserate with you for having to do this, and hand you a new little registration form and a new little registration sticker and will send you on your way with a smile and a cheerful farewell and then you can finally remove the stupid temporary registration thing from the window of your new car and feel confident that the license plates you have on your car are the right ones. And you will also remind yourself that next time a car dealer tells you anything, anything at all, that you must not believe them because if they will lie about something so obviously easy to dispute like transferring your license plates for you, they could just as well lie about anything.

Now that the satellite TV is installed, we have turned into what I feared all along – two slothy couch potatoes. The biggest reason has been, of course, the Olympics – although admittedly this week we’re not watching it as much because gymnastics is now over (except for the petty whining and moaning by the IGF). The main exception on my part has been synchronized swimming, except that somehow we did not read the schedule correctly and so did not get the duet finals or the team technical routines taped. So the only synchro I was able to see at all this year was the team finals, which were amazing to watch since of course they *are* Olympic swimmers for a reason, but a bit disappointing because I know how much more I missed.

On the plus side, I am doing huge amounts of knitting lately, since camping out in front of the TV is the perfect time to drag out the yarn and needles. I fear I have become addicted to the Home and Garden Network, and have been watching episode after episode of all the ‘remodel your house on a budget’ shows, followed by some not-so-idle poking around on their website. I did stumble across a picture that is perfect for our bedroom. Isn’t it gorgeous? Now just imagine those chairs a dark green, and the bedding green and blue, and dragon head lamps instead of those cute little white ones, and I still think it could work. Of course our bedroom has crown molding all around the ceiling, and a high peak in the bay window, and if we were going to do this I would really need to paint the ceiling a pale blue to draw it all together, and there is no way in the world I would be able to do that without having to perch precariously on a ladder and somehow try to climb around the ceiling fan which is situated rather inconveniently in the middle. But for now, I am remaining optimistic that it can all work out somehow, insanely high ceiling, dragon head lamps, and all.

We really have done nothing at all productive this week, for the most part. Every evening has been spent sitting in front of the television, watching the Olympics. But really, can you blame us? It seems as if this year they are showing more of the sports than they have ever shown before. It’s all gymnastics all the time in our house lately. Those people are amazing.

This week I did break down and suggest we get cable or satellite TV installed, despite my reservations. So we called and amazingly they were able to schedule an installation for us this morning. What was even more amazing is that the installer came within the time constraints provided – and best of all he came before I had to leave, so I got a chance to get a quick preview.

I left Richard camped out on the couch, his laptop on his lap and the cable remote in his hand, and I reminded him that he should actually think about getting up every once in a while, no matter how many channels he now has to surf. And then I picked up a friend and we drove up to Napa to have tea with a group of women in what has apparently become an official monthly gathering for them. One of the women really likes doing tea, so she does lots of research and finds various places for the group to go, and one Saturday a month they all dress up and go someplace and eat tea sandwiches and tea cakes and delicate little finger foods, and drink tea from china cups and be very girly.

This is the same group for which I was reading Anna Karenina. Although as it turns out I was the only one who actually *read* the book, so any discussion was postponed until the next meeting. Somehow I agreed to read a second translation (because as much as I hated the stupid book I am still willing to give it another chance, except that this time I am going to look for one where the sex wasn’t left out, because I have to have something to look forward to. So instead of the book we talked about decorating our houses, and we talked about tattoos, and we talked about pets, and we drank tea and I had a marvelous time.

Today was the first day of my very own version of Pianopalooza. We’ve got a rotation of pianists who act as accompanist for the church services. It being summer, a number of the pianists were off on vacation or otherwise unavailable so somehow I ended up signing up for two weeks in a row. And then, just because I’ve been feeling far more competent in my piano playing abilities lately, I suggested to my dad that we try that piano and organ duet again, so there will be three weeks straight of me and the piano this month. I am not on the schedule at all in September, which I think is probably for the best because by then the congregation will all probably be sick of me. Heh.

I was actually quite pleased with myself. There was one hymn that was a little more difficult but overall it went far better than it has before. I think I’m getting the hang of playing hymns – it’s not just playing the song note by note; it’s being able to look at the chords and make a last-second decision as to which notes need to be played and which can be left out in the particularly difficult parts.

I had brought my knitting with me, intending to work on that while Richard went to a meeting after church, but one of our friends noted that they had finally caught the litter of feral kittens in their backyard, and so what else could I do but walk down the block with her to her house and play with kittens instead?

They are quite possibly the cutest little kittens I have seen in a while. Momma is a rather scrappy looking medium haired tortoiseshell (she was lurking around outside), but they all look as if they are going to end up shorthaired. However, they were simply covered in a layer of kitten fuzz. They’re just about six weeks old, eyes changed from the gray-blue of babyhood to their ‘adult’ colors. There’s definitely some siamese in the mix, from the tipping of gray on some of the ears and tails. They are still young enough to fall over when they wrestle, and to fluff up their tails like bottle brushes when they stalk fingers and sibling tails, and their ears are too big for their heads, giving them a ridiculously unbalanced look. I did my best to take pictures but they weren’t very interested in sitting still or posing. I could have easily stuffed them all into my purse and taken them home but the last thing we need is more cats, no matter how big their ears are, so I contented myself with just sitting there and letting them climb all over me and trying to convince them to eat their own tails.

********

I realized that I forgot to mention this in earlier entries (probably because I was so busy blathering on and on about my allergy tests), but a few weeks ago my knitting-enabling friend mentioned in passing that there was a new knitting group being held at the library in Vacaville and was I interested in going. It was pretty much as if she had asked me if I was interested in going to visit cute fuzzy kittens (the answer was a big and resounding yes). So that Tuesday night I headed off to the library and took part in my very first knitting circle.

It was amazingly cool. There were probably 15 or 20 women of all ages. I think the little 11-year-old sitting next to me, working on her very first scarf, was the youngest, and quite possibly the sweet grandma type fussing over a Christmas stocking was the oldest. There was also every range of knowledge about knitting – from the lady across the group who was whipping up a raglan with an intricate pattern of cabling, to the two women who had bravely purchased yarn and needles and came to the group hoping someone would show them just what the heck to do with it.

We sat around in a circle and we chatted and knit and those of us who have a vague clue what we’re doing did our best to help out those who didn’t. There was a lot of laughing and sharing of projects and talking about yarn stores and needle preferences and it was just the most marvelous thing. This is definitely going on my calendar for a regular monthly appointment. It was so nice to be surrounded by so many other people – people who all fully understood my latest obsession and who wholeheartedly share and support it.

When I got the first round of allergy tests I made an offhand comment about them testing me for small fuzzy critters. However, I already *know* how extremely allergic I am to mice and rats and guinea pigs and all of that type of creature, so it didn’t occur to me that I would need to get tested for those again. Ha. Turns out that if I want those in the shots they have to test me anyway – and I want those in the shots very badly. It would be oh-so-nice to be able to go to the friend’s house where there is a guinea pig, for example, and be able to spend time there without having to dive for the inhaler and have my voice go steadily hoarse as my throat closes off within the first half hour of exposure. Even more important, it would be nice to be able to go anywhere and not have to worry about exposure to rodents I wasn’t even aware were there.

They dragged out a new set of little testers and set up one arm and poked me full of yet another line of spots (alas, not enough to make more alien nipples, since I know you were all dying to know) and sure enough, they all exploded rather dramatically. So dramatically, in fact, that when one of the nurses came in her eyes got really big and she called in the second nurse to see just how quickly I was reacting, and really, it is not at all comforting to be sitting in a clinic where their main business is the diagnosis and treatment of allergies and have a nurse call in another to look at your arm and say something to the effect of ‘check this out, I’ve never seen anything like it’. The one who was administering all my skin prick tests just grinned and noted that apparently I really did know what I was talking about when I said I was allergic to pretty much every small fuzzy critter out there. I’ve known about the mice and rats and rabbits and guinea pigs for years, but now we can add gerbils and hamsters to that mix, by the way, which I hadn’t been sure about because I haven’t been around either in a very long time. So that grouping of allergens will be added to the mix for my shots.

In the meantime I got my first set of shots for all the trees and molds and oh yes, those nasty little dust mites, that I tested positive for last week. My arm erupted in a lovely rash almost immediately and I somehow managed to avoid scratching at both shot sites to stop the insane itching that resulted. I am crossing my fingers that this rather special side effect of the shots (that would be the rashes and the itching and did I forget to mention the lumps?) will eventually subside. I got two shots today, and when they add the small fuzzy critters I will get three each time (although Richard was quick to point out that he gets four each time, since he is basically allergic to the world), but they’re quite good at sliding in the needles without much more than just the teeniest of pinches, and I am telling myself that it’s a good thing I don’t mind needles or shots, and that in a few years this is all going to be worth it. By golly, it better be.

In the continuing saga of me and my sinuses, the doctor suggested that I have a cat scan run, on the off chance that all my problems are not linked to allergies, but instead to me being somehow sinusly deformed. So this morning I got up and headed off to the hospital extremely early in order to get a cat scan done before work. I amused myself (and possibly only myself, since everyone else I said this to just rolled their eyes at me and gave a rather weak and barely polite laugh) by noting that I did not see the point in getting another cat scan because I get (actually fuzzy, four-legged) cat scans several times a day and they’ve never turned up anything (Richard responded by noting that perhaps I simply do not know how to interpret the results the cats provide). But aside from being incredibly lame with the sense of humor (hey, it’s Monday, and it was early in the morning), this is the first test like this I’ve ever had done so I was kind of looking forward to it, just to see what they were going to do.

Luckily I brought my knitting with me because I ended up sitting there a lot longer than I had expected to. It turned out that several people called in sick and they had to call in a supervisor to figure out what to do about the schedule. However, they only told those of us who had dutifully shown up early, and were then made to sit around and wait and wait and wait, when I gave up and went to the window and noted that my appointment was at least half an hour overdue. In the afternoon one has to expect delays, but when one is scheduled for the very first appointment in the morning it’s a little harder to be patient.

They finally got things started and came out and gave all of us in the waiting room half-hearted apologies, and then I got my cat scan. They had me lie down on a narrow table and then the guy raised it up and positioned it underneath this big white arch and I was told to stay perfectly still and they took pictures of my head. I was hoping there would be computer screens or something where the scans would magically appear like they always do on those oh-so-realistic hospital dramas on television, but alas, I did not get to see inside my own head after all. Oh well.

As if to teach me a lesson for waiting so darn long to get this started, it took practically no time at all for my referral to the allergist to be approved. The first appointment was last week, during which I met with the doctor and we discussed, among other things, my unruly sinuses, my various allergies to small fuzzy critters, and those pesky migraines I’ve had since the age of eight. He brought up various treatment options, like nasal sprays, but considering that the last time I took nasal sprays I got those oh-so-nifty (ha!) heart palpitations several times an hour, which lasted for a few days even after I stopped taking them, I surmised as how those might not be such a great idea.

So after the initial consultation with the doctor, I made a few more appointments, and this week I got my allergy tests. It was actually kind of fun, in a slightly warped kind of way. I went in and they put little pen marks in lines down the inside of both arms, and then pricked near those pen marks with various allergens. On my right arm I had a plethora of pollens – trees and grasses – and on the left arm slightly fewer pin pricks, including dust mites, dogs, and cats.

I have to admit it was kind of amazing how quickly all those pinpricks exploded into big misshapen rashes and hives all over my arms. The worst of the pollens were a few trees (walnut and olive, I think). I am pleased to report that I’m not allergic to any molds (at least not the ones they tested me for, that is). However, on my left arm I developed a respectable sized hive for the dog test, and quite an impressive lump and rash from the dust mites. I am really, really, really allergic to dust mites – which live, of course, in everything, no matter how much you clean, so there is no time of year or season when I can ever escape them except maybe if I move to Antarctica or move into a glass bubble. And I’m not entirely sure that even then I would be living a dust mite free life, because they are apparently quite hardy little suckers for being mostly microscopic in origin.

I think the nurse who was running my tests thought I was a little odd because I was finding all this so very amusing. But hey, who wouldn’t see the humor in having one’s arms explode in rashes and hives so badly that my skin felt as if it was on fire. There was also lots more humor to be found in the fact that near the very end of the time period for the test the spot where they put the cat allergens gave up and decided maybe it was going to react after all. I always figured my poor immune system gave up on cats a long time ago, but it turns out that my allergy to the cats was probably just masked by all the others (like dust mites. Yeesh!). Or maybe my immune system really did give up on the cats before the tests, but felt a little fiesty during the test because it thought it finally had a chance.

There was also much humor to be had long after the test were over and I went home. The lumps from the dust mites and the trees hung around for over a day afterwards. But the coolest part of all was that I had two neat little rows of holes on the inside of each arm which lasted even longer than the big lumps, and which looked as if I had developed a whole set of oddly located alien nipples.

So there we are. I am allergic to lots of things, including microscopic creatures, and to top it off I now have two arms full of alien nipples. I can nurse alien babies from my arms. Unless, of course, they happen to be related to walnut or olive trees. Or dogs. Or dust mites.

Today was a mostly lazy day, during which I did a lot of knitting and also finally finished Anna Karinena. Last night at the gathering Beth suggested I look for a different translation and perhaps that might make it better, but honestly, by that point I was 500 and some odd pages into it, and the thought of starting over from the very beginning was not appealing. Plus, I am not entirely sure that a different translation will really make me love this book (or heck, even *like* it) because ultimately, the plot will remain the same. Although they did point out that this particular translation left out all the sex, which leads me to wonder whether that might have at least added a point of interest – or perhaps humor – to an otherwise dreadfully dull story.

So now I am all ready for the tea and book club, with three weeks to spare, in which time I can cheerfully forget all the important details about the book except that a few someones have an affair and someone commits suicide and lots of someones are very self-absorbed and clueless and really, I am still missing the whole point of the book.

I mentioned a gathering, didn’t I. Last night was a little gathering of the Sacramento area TUS’ers, and I do mean little. There were only five of us, but we met at Café Bernardo and I had a bowl of delicious red lentil soup with just a hint of curry, and a hunk of chewy sourdough bread, and we sat around and talked about gardening and pets and insane relatives, and had fun. The other people I met are nice and funny and it is always good to be able to put faces and voices to words on a screen.

Yesterday was not as lazy a day as today, mainly because we ended up sliding inexplicably into a healthy food kick and a fridge full of fruits and veggies. It started with the farmer’s market in Davis, where we usually do not buy very much. But yesterday we were somehow inspired, so I picked out mushrooms and corn and white peaches and a monster honeydew melon that could double as a deadly weapon if you dropped it on someone’s head, and Richard picked out strawberries and multi-colored cherry tomatoes and we both successfully avoided saying anything too snarky to the silly little people collecting signatures to get Ralph Nadar on the ballot. And then on the way home later we saw a sign for a you-pick place that we have passed perhaps hundreds of times since we have lived in this area of California, except yesterday was finally the day we decided to check it out. So we followed the mostly well-placed signs and parked and were given baskets and vague directions and off we headed to pick berries.

Apparently we lucked out, because this was the last weekend of the season for berries, and somehow there were still plenty of them on the vines. Richard likes berries, while I cannot stand them, but I still had fun plucking them for him. We filled two baskets with red raspberries and one basket with golden raspberries, even though we had only intended to get one basket of berries in the first place. But there was something rather compelling about lifting up a berry branch (gingerly, since they tend to be a little spiky) and finding perfect little berries hiding underneath leaves and then gently tugging them off into your hand.

When we had exhausted our patience with berries we then wandered around until we tracked down the peach trees so we could pick a small pile of yellow peaches to add the the rapidly growing pile of produce in the back of the car. And after that we decided it was time to quit. So we went home and ate cucumber and tomato sandwiches for lunch and split half of the monster honeydew melon, and sometime between lunch and when I left for the gathering in Sacramento Richard inhaled most of the raspberries. The white peaches are sitting in a bowl on the breakfast nook table, where I am hoping they will hurry up and ripen because I intend to turn them into a pie fairly soon, and I would prefer it if they were soft enough to comply.

Update on the Prius, since I’m sure you all are just dying to know how it’s going. No, really, you are.

I love this car. I really do. There are a few things I wish I could change – like the fact that it beeps quite annoyingly when I put it into reverse, but yet it refuses to give me any beeps or flashing lights or *anything* if I accidentally get out of the car with the lights still on. But otherwise this car makes me oh so very happy. Although I fear I have become obsessed with my mpg lately. I used to only use my cruise control if I was on a long stretch of freeway with few cars in sight; now I use it every chance I can get. I used to keep my highway speed at about 10 miles over the speed limit; now I am one of those pathetic little people in the slower lanes, toodling along as a more modest 3 or 4 miles above the speed limit (or even sometimes – gasp – the speed limit itself). And I do this all because the car shows me my average mpg and I so very much want to make that little number go up and up and up.

I know, of course, that I shall likely never see that mythical 55 mpg that the car supposedly gets, because I do mostly freeway driving back and forth to work. But this morning when I got to work my average mpg for this tank of gas sat exactly at 46, which is the highest average we’ve had on this thing so far. Not, mind you, that that’s saying much, since I think we’re on perhaps the 4th tank of gas and those previous tanks averaged between 44 and 45. But still, we have already established years ago on this journal that it does not take a lot to excite me. So naturally, knowing that I am now getting 46 miles per gallon has me all giddy. Hey, it’s not much, but I take what I can get.

********

Last night we sat down and watched Mystic River. I admit that initially I had absolutely no desire at all to see this movie because I was under the impression that Clint Eastwood was in it, and I loathe Clint Eastwood (or rather, his non-talent as a movie actor, not him personally) with a very deep and abiding passion. But then Richard pointed out that he only directed it and was, in fact, not in the movie at all. Besides, Richard really wanted to see it and it showed up from NetFlix, and I still have two more skeins of yarn to work into that damn afghan I am making and what better place to knit than in front of the television, after all. So we watched it.

I think Richard summed it up quite succinctly when he noted at the end “Well, that certainly won’t win the ‘Feel Good Movie of the Year’ award.” It is definitely not a movie to watch when you want to feel light and happy and certain that all is right with the world. But it was very well done, for all that it wasn’t exactly cheerful, and I think I might have actually liked it, and I am not just saying that because it did not have Clint Eastwood in it after all.

A few months ago a friend mentioned that she gets together with a group of women from time to time and they go for tea. There is one woman who is in charge of tracking down places to go, and when she finds a new place, the group gathers, dresses appropriately, and goes off to have a ladylike tea.

It sounded intriguing, since I’ve had so much fun going to the tearoom with my female in-laws. So the friend invited me to come to the next one, which is going to be in Napa near the end of August.

Since its inception the group has grown beyond just meeting for tea. Recently they decided they should also become a book club. I was actually supposed to go to the one previous to this upcoming tea, and had read the designated book (“Five People You Meet in Heaven”) in anticipation. It wasn’t necessarily my type of reading, but it was short and I skimmed it in record time and decided I could at least converse intelligently about it. But then schedules and life got in the way and the last tea did not work out. And then I found out what we are reading for the upcoming tea. Of all the books in the world, someone apparently had the bright idea of picking Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”. All I would like to know is why.

When we were at Costco this weekend I saw it on the sale table, so grabbed a copy, figuring this way I wouldn’t have to worry about library fines (I am notorious for forgetting to turn my library books in on time). Later that afternoon I sat down and opened the book, figuring I could crank out a few hundred pages while Richard was off at his movie.

Ha! It is all I can do to force myself to read more than a page at a time. Right now it is sitting on the breakfast nook table and I have determined that I must read it each morning while eating breakfast, because at least that way I am forced to plow my way through 30 or 40 torturous pages at a sitting before I can escape. The length is not the problem – it’s a long book, true, but I’ve been known to devour 800+ page books in less than 5 hours, and to read more than one of such lengthy tomes in one sitting when the urge strikes me. The problem is that I am finding this book horribly dull. I read for pleasure, and this book gives me none. If I did not *have* to read it I would never have purchased the darn thing in the first place – the subject material does not interest me in the slightest, and my eyes may just fall out of my sockets will all the rolling they are doing as I shudder through page after page of weak, simpering women and men tiptoeing around the niceties of a society I am eternally grateful I never had to endure.

I am assured that it does, eventually, get slightly more interesting. I am, however, already nearly 250 pages into the book and I see no sign of this happening any time soon. But I shall persevere. After all, I had to read some equally dull and painful literature back in high school, and somehow I not only survived unscathed, I managed to churn out papers on that inane drivel that earned me top grades every time. So I have no doubt that I’ll make it through this one too. Somehow. Painfully. Even if I have to break down and use CliffNotes to do it.