Fidget

Recently BN and I were made aware of a book-lovers website, GoodReads.com. Your free sign-up will allow you to keep lists of books you have read, are reading, and want to read. You can rate books with a simple five-star scale and go more in-depth by writing a review. You can read other people’s reviews of books, and add comments in discussion threads. Neat! I found the site somewhat clunky to use, but the concept is useful and the visuals are clean.

This has happened many times before, to my immense amusement, but this is the first time I’ve remembered to grab the camera:

I’ll be going about my business at home and suddenly I look out and there’s a cat, perched right on the edge of the neighbors’ concrete wall, staring in our front window. It’s not always the same cat, either! Do they take it in shifts to keep an eye on us? Do they do it when we’re not home, even? What do they find so interesting to watch?! I guess I should be glad it’s not the neighbors themselves staring out the window at us. It’s a bit awkward, the way our windows are placed to be able to see right into each other’s living rooms. And in our case, into our kitchen and down our hall.

There are lots of kitties in our apartment complex. I assume they are owned by the residents, but many of them spend a lot of time outside. On laundry day they watch me going up and down stairs with my full and empty baskets, and sometimes engage me in conversation. I think I must look like I speak cat. They give me that look that seems to mean that they know that I know what they are talking about.

I have been wanting these shoes for more than a year. 3 of my friends have them. Luckily, they are still selling them… Even more luckily, I found a pair in last season’s colors, so mine are green unlike this blue pair from the Keen website. I mean, blue is cute but I wanted the green ones.

Aren’t they cute!? They are perfect for me. I love shoes that can dress up or down; and I love the way my socks show. Now I need to get working on some more handknit socks!

And, if anyone reading this has given me gift money for the past birthday/Christmas, thank for you financing my new shoes! They are just what I wanted.

The other night we were eating dinner and talking about Probability. BN was explaining something to me about Random Graphs and I was bringing up all kinds of complications you’d run into in trying to describe the Internet as an example of this whole probability-related Graph thing. (Cause the Internet is not a simple net, now, is it?)

I was talking animatedly, while opening a new bottle of multivitamins. I managed to peel off the sealed for your protection thingy and dropped a pill out onto my placemat. Still talking, I reached for my bottle of calcium supplements and, without looking, tapped one into my hand then dropped it onto the table. BN’s eyes widened and he pointed at the spot. What I’m about to show you is NOT a posed photo. This happened by purely random chance (maybe not totally purely, we’d have to ask the probabilists): Check it out!

So, when BN were getting married in 04 we made a gift registry. One of the items we registered for was an iron, and for some reason we picked out a really top-of-the-line one, I guess it couldn’t hurt, right? It’s a Rowenta “powerglide 2,” and I think it cost at least $70.00. TB got it for us the following Christmas. Nice!

The iron has been very gently used. I rarely iron clothes; not even once a month! I’ve mostly used it for sewing, and in between projects it’s just sat on the shelf.

And now it’s stopped working. Plug it in, no response. Yes, we tried other outlets… I read the troubleshooting guide online, no help there. What gives?! I’d expect an expensive iron to last a good 10 years at least. It did have a warranty but only for one year, so 3 years later, that’s no good. I don’t think I even got a year’s worth of use out of it, cumulatively. ARrrgh!!

A genius. My husband, that is.

Yep, as if I needed more proof, BN has spent a few days mastering the Rubik’s Cube. He’s got it all deconstructed and can solve it now, while hardly batting an eye. I mixed it up thoroughly for him and he walked me through his solution. The general concepts made sense, but I just can’t hold long strings of sequential images or spacial positions in my head for long enough to ever be able to do this myself. It’s still like magic to watch.

I learned from BN that if you repeat any sequence of moves enough times you will end up with the same configuration that you had at the start. That makes sense, right? (What’s shown in the image on the left is part way through an experiment with this - don’t worry, I mixed it up a lot better than that to challenge BN!) But, the magical part that I still can’t get my brain around is how you change one of those little cubes, move it and rotate it just the way you want, while all the other ones go back to their original positions.

BN and I are avid tea-drinkers; we generally like loose-leaf black and green teas from Allann Bros. Coffee and Tea Co, our local Starbucks-alternative. But, I tried a tea bag “Cocoa Spice” at a friends house and recently picked up a box at the grocery store… now we are hooked. It’s a low-caffeine tea, perfect for cozy evenings at home, and it has chocolate overtones and coffee undertones. With spices, sort of like chai.

The brand is Yogi tea, and there’s lots of spiritually-themed text on the outside of the box. On the tea-tag itself, there is a pithy maxim, like a fortune from a cookie. When we discovered this, BN read his aloud: “Enjoy the warmth and love of your soul.” Mine? “Keep up!” (Yeah, slacker! Pull your weight or we’re ditchin’ ya!)

I think my intelligence is being insulted here.

And yes, the crescent-shaped objects you can see through the clear-plastic jar are, indeed, cashews!

Oddly, the peanut oil doesn’t seem to count as an allergen. Seems like people with peanut allergies would be more concerned that it contains peanut oil than the remotely possible equipment contamination.

OK, not shaping up to be such a great day. It’s that happy monthly ritual of writing checks to pay off all the people who let us live in our apartment, use electricity, make phone calls, and buy things with plastic.

After I’d balanced my checkbook against the online transaction list, written checks, tried one more time to find the credit card statement I’d misplaced, called to check my balance, noticed it was twice as high as usual, wracked my brain to remember what I’d bought that was so expensive, called the cc company back to verify my recent expenditures, and assured myself there wasn’t anything fishy there… I realized they hadn’t received my payment last month. So another round of calls, voided and re-wrote the payment check, ran it to the mailbox. I managed to get the late fee removed, but I had to pay a fee to stop payment on the check that had gotten lost in the mail.

All this took a lot more of my morning than I’d planned. You know what though? Praise the Lord, we are doing just fine. We have the huge blessing of zero debt. I know that is so rare for couples our age.

So now I’m really hungry. Munched some nuts, planning to make a smoothie after my shower. Smoothies are such a great breakfast - I make mine with frozen strawberries and bananas, orange juice concentrate, yogurt, and soymilk. The blender is usually so full that I fill up two cups - my nifty plastic-with-straw-valve-lid cups from Tupperware!

Everything was going great. Then I slipped putting the top on one of my cups and HALF of the smoothie landed on the FLOOR!!! Dinglebuckles!!! I hate cleaning and I hate wasting food. The waste couldn’t be helped, and guess what - the kitchen floor was way, way overdue for a mopping. So I did.

The scary thing is, this is not the first time this has occurred. Last time was worse, though - I was living in my tiny studio, and my friend PL was picking me up for a field trip to the city. She arrived just as I was putting the lid on my smoothie, and it exploded, shot across the room, and plastered PL with sticky pink goo. I was unscathed, but not my cupboard doors, floor, or carpet. Or, the fashionably dressed PL. She already knew I was a spazz but this was at the top of the list of dumb things I’d done in front of her. Sigh.

Well, I’ve been busy with some real human interaction, so the electronic social life has been on hold. My sister MA came to visit from the Bay Area. We picked her up at PDX, it was her first solo flight. We drove into Portland for tacos and then headed home. A busy day!

MA is in the exact middle of our family. She has 2 older sisters (including me), 2 younger sisters, an older brother and a younger brother. She is about the same distance in age from me as she is from our youngest sibling. She’s almost 20, and spends a lot of time working and volunteering with preschool and elementary kids; knitting, and hanging out with her friends and fellow college group folks.

While she was here (5 days in all) we were fairly busy in a relaxed sort of way. We went to the ladies luncheon bible study, the Little Red Farm nursery, to church on Sunday, and out for ice cream with the L’s, all of which were good chances for me to show off my sister to various friends from the Chapel. We shopped all the craft/fabric/yarn stores, and did a fair amount of knitting. We went for walks in our hilly neighborhood, baked lemon bars, went out for lunch and coffee, and ate lots of good meals here at home, too.

It was really nice for me to have someone, in fact a special sisterly somone, to visit with during this time. BN is completely booked, studying for Quals, so I welcomed the diversion.

To my Middle Sister: come back soon!

To my other family members: she did it, so should you!