Spending Money

This last weekend I went shopping. I bought a new chair for my computer desk because the old one broke and I am sick and tired of getting backache from sitting on a metal folding chair. I went to Office Max and sat in EVERY single chair they had. I ended up buying the 2nd best one there - because the very best one cost twice as much and was only a TINY bit comfier.

Then I went to the mall. It was really rather sad. More than 1/2 of the stores were out of business. I broke down and went into Macy's - which I swore I'd never do when they bought out Marshall Field's and changed the name (and I won't go back - the only things I ever bought at Field's were good leather gloves, cooking equipment and Frango mints). They did NOT have the cooking pan I wanted, but there WAS a sale on bedding, so I purchased my first set of 450 thread-count pima cotton bed linens.

Oh

My

Goddess.

It's like sleeping in a cloud. They're so SOFT!! I want to get at least 1, maybe 2 more sets. One for the wash, one for the bed, one for the linens closet.

I ended up getting a replacement pan for the one that gave it's life in the Great Kitchen Chicken Fiasco at K-Mart. It's a nice enough pan, and it's actually a double-boiler so I can melt chocolate and stuff like that without doing a stupid balancing act with 2 pots and a rubberband.

By the time I got home, I was toast. I haven't gone power-shopping like that in years. Traipsing all around through the (shudder) Mall and all was quite exhausting. After wrestling my purchases into the house (the chair box was VERY heavy and exceedingly awkward), I made myself a huge glass of iced tea, smashed my toe into the chair box, swore vigorously and then plunked myself down on the sofa and read for several hours.

The toe is bruised, the chair is still unassembled, (although in progress), and the sheets are... heaven.

I need more hands and another body or 3.

And the energy of an ADHD toddler.

Things are slowly improving at La Casa de Sewmouse. I have had another "burst" of energy, and used it fairly well. The upstairs is in muh better shape, the downstairs still needs a lot of work.

However. My biggest concern right now is my quilt dilemma. I have 3 quilts that I use for my own sleepingness. Veggie I, The Yellow Thing, and Turquoise Stars. The Yellow Thing has issues, as it was the VERY FIRST quilt that I ever made, and I kind of... well... I was stupid then, and I used whatever fabric I had to hand which was, unfortunately, made of all sorts of fibers, and now a lot of the squares from it are just falling apart into clumps of yuk.

It isn't all that hard to fix, since all I need to do is sew another patch of fabric over the one that has disintegrated. Unfortunately, this has to be done by hand in order to not make an utter crap mess of the entire quilt. Also, this is the quilt I assembled and quilted 100% by hand, so I am loath to use any newfangled technological claptrap like a sewing machine on it.

Turquoise Stars also has the disintegration problem. Again due to injudicious fabric selection during my noobie quilter period. I've already patched over one of the stars, but it appears at least 4 more (possibly more) may need attention as well. These stars are BIG, (18") and have to be hand-repaired also to avoid puckering on the reverse. *sigh*

Veggie I has only 1 bad spot - but it is the central square of a rather specific pattern, and AS GODDESS IS MY WITNESS - I do not have even so much as a 3 1/2" x 3 1/2" piece of that fabric left in the old stashola - so I'll have to patch the ENTIRE pattern with a new, similar, fabric.

*sigh*

I would LOVE to use the Ocean quilt in the meanwhile, however that one is off the frame while I work on Kal's Surprise quilt (which after all this time, I suspect he will consider the surprise to be that he actually gets it at all... *slaps self*)

I only thought about the Ocean quilt this morning because co-worker M has a big bag of goldfish crackers on his desk.

New Fire Alarms

Ok, after the Great Kitchen Chicken Fiasco of a week ago, I purchased new batteries for my (current) smoke alarms. After 3 days it became abundantly apparent that this was not the "fix" that was needed.

The alarms went off if the cat walked past. They went off when I opened the bathroom door after taking my shower (that is STEAM, not smoke!!) they went off if the wind blew through the windows. They went off if I cooked bacon. They went off if you looked at them funny, and they LOVED to go off at 2 am. Obviously with fresh batteries, this was not a "low battery" warning - they were just being snots.

So yesterday I went to Menards to Save Big Money, and looked into some new smoke/fire detectors. I figured that after 20 years they probably had advanced in smoke-detector technology to where one could live with a smoke alarm without hearing from it every 20 minutes or so.

Pedro, the nice guy in a blue vest at Menards showed me where the alarms were and we went through them. I bought a more expensive one, because it has a feature that I simply WILL not live without ever again. You can use ANY television remote control and tell it to STFU if it goes off when there really isn't a valid reason for it to do so. You can also tell it to STFU if it decides it's battery is low at 2 am, and it will wait for a more civilized hour to get it's power supply replaced.

Now, granted, the Great Kitchen Chicken Fiasco was a valid reason. There was certainly smoke, lots of smoke, and it was certainly a BAD THING®. But it's now been over a week, and the house barely has any smoke smell anymore, so there is literally NO reason for the alarms to be having fits anymore. The new alarms are somewhat more "hi-tech" looking as well. No more large white lozenges on the wall. These look more like blobs of marshmallow fluff.

They better work. I'll be putting them up this weekend.

Mr. Nibbles takes a shower?

Mr. Nibbles is a little grey squirrel who hangs out on the top of the fences around our back yards/gardens. I call him Mr. Nibbles because he LOOKS like a Mr. Nibbles. (Stock Photo - this is NOT the real Mr. Nibbles, but it might could be his cousin Phil.)

Usually he looks very cute and fluffy, and scampers ahead of me along the fence as I go in or out of the gateway. I talk nice to him, and although he remains respectfully far from arms length away, he doesn't scamper frantically, but hops along as if he knows I won't hurt him.

Today, however, part of me was a little afraid. Perhaps there was no reason, but Mr. Nibbles was soaked. Wet thru and thru, his tail looked like a bottle brush, and he looked a little fierce.

It's been raining a lot here lately, sometimes with some really heavy drenchpours that seem to come out of nowhere - and I guess that I would be grumpy too if I got into one of those, but Mr. Nibbles was also a little less "wary" - I got awful close before he scared me enough that I stopped - pointed to where I was headed and suggested he hop on down.

He did hop that way, so I continued on, talking to him the whole way, and got through without incident.

I hope he is ok. I hope he is not sickly or something bad. I hope he is just angry and wet.

We have a bumper crop of skunks in the neighborhood this year. Every night one of them goes off. It is not nice to wake up to the fragrance of Eau de Pepe LePeu.

I hope Mr. Nibbles is all right...

Ginormous Gophers Take Over My Subdivision

Film whenever I get around to it... (edit: Photos Below Now!!)

There are ENORMOUS holes all over the subdivision. Surrounded by yellow crime-scene tape on sticks and covered (partially) by weatherbeaten plywood slabs. There are small hills next to them. One can only assume there are exceptionally HUGE gophers invading the subdivision!

Well, either that or ComEd is replacing their underground cables.

And while option 2 is probably much closer to the truth (considering that is what the guy in the hi-vis vest who was operating the digger thingy told me this morning), the mental image of ginormous gophers is much, much, much more fun to contemplate.

Photos:

Hmm. I wonder if this thing still works?

Ok, yes, I am a lazy blogger. Whatever.

There's a lot going on at work, a lot going on at home, and just so many hours in the day.

How about that Rand Paul, huh? What an interesting (Translation: Idiotic) person! Apparently he thinks that there should be NO government regulations at all on any "private business". So there should be no consequences for BP, there should be no oversight on the financial markets, there should be no reason for Woolworths to let dark-skinned people eat at their lunch counters. Take this a step further - and I do honestly believe that Rand Paul is just FINE with child pornographers - it is their private business, and if enough people are disgusted by it, it will magically go away, even without government involvement.

Did you hear that, Glenn Beck? Rand Paul supports Child Pornography!

Speaking of BP - Shame on you, British Petroleum. I for one will never again purchase gas at one of your stations, and I will make sure that the investments for my IRA do not contain any of your stock. If they do, I'll divest the holdings and go greener. Boycott BP. Please.

I remember back when I was a kid - we were taught that there were 5 "Great Lakes" in North America - but only 4 of them were actually "living". Lake Erie was dead. The fine people of Ohio had dumped so much industrial toxins into it that there were no fish, no plankton, nothing, living in what had once been a great lake. The Cuyohoga river used to catch on fire every summer (spontaneous combustion!). It saddens me greatly that although we've managed to rejuvenate Lake Erie, and the Cuyohoga river is ... well... much less polluted and not prone to conflagrations anymore, the British have managed to destroy the Gulf of Mexico. I suspect it will be "dead" for generations. *sigh*

The weather has gone from chilly to "I wish I had air conditioning" rather quickly. I also wish I had a nice outdoor grill. My old one got destroyed by the aluminum siding guys a few years back and I haven't bothered to replace it yet. Perhaps this year. I got some "greek marinade" chicken breasts from Caputos. I have a feeling they would taste awesome if they were grilled, but since I don't yet have a grill, I'll just broil them in the oven.

224 of 625 Yes, I know - I'm a sloth.

My Maserati does 185....

Wow. Never saw one of those before! An actual Maserati - driving down the street in the lane next to me. Pretty blue with silver shineys on it. I don't think it was Joe Walsh. $125,000 dollar car. Imagine that. You could buy TWO of my house for that much.

WTF it was doing in Bloomingdale is beyond me. While Bloomingdale does have it's share of lawyers and assholes and business owners (was that redundant?) it has never been what I would consider a hot-spot of Maserati ownership. Perhaps this was a STRANGER in a Maserati. Sounds like a great title for a cheap, trashy murder mystery.

I got called a motherfucker this morning. I find this interesting. Most guys don't refer to women as motherfuckers. Bitch, etc, yes - but motherfucker is usually reserved for other males. Of course, this was a wetback* who screeched it at me, so perhaps it is a cultural thing.

He was not the guy driving the Maserati. Just in case there was any confusion about that. He was the passenger in an older-model conversion van with dingleballs hanging from the top of the windshield. Not to be stereotypical or anything... At least he wasn't playing Mexican Oompah Polka.

So Comcast sent me a new modem. Apparently my old modem is antiquated. It certainly is big and clumsy and ugly as sin. So they want me to replace it with this new modem. The letter inside the box says to follow the directions in the enclosed booklet. Right. The enclosed booklet is for someone who does not have Comcast set up yet. My guess is that if I followed their instructions they'd reset my home page to Comcast.com, erase all my bookmarks, and add a bunch of annoying toolbars. So I did the online chat thing with "Jennifer" this morning who says I can just plug-n-play the new modem. Will try it tonite. Better to do it tonite than discover tomorrow that I can't get into the weekend raid group!



*Yes, I know it is un-PC for me to call him a wetback. I have no proof that he's a potential member of the Mexican Olympic Team. It is rude and unkind of me to suggest it. Unfortunately, that is the risk he took by calling me a motherucker. Paybacks are, like me, a bitch.


218 of 625. Would have been more, but I BROKE the needle!

Being Counted

This whole Census thing has me laughing. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota (R-loonytunes) has complained that it is an "invasion of her privacy" - even though said Congressdoofus seems to have forgotten that the Census is Constitutionally mandated - and that she SWORE AN OATH to uphold and defend said Constitution in order to get her cushy job.

Apparently the criminal trespassers don't want to answer it either. I'm ok with that. See, the Census is used to determine congressional representation in the different states, and I personally don't think that the illegals deserve representation. No Representation Without Taxation!!!

Now, I don't like the idea of splitting up families, and I understand the folks who scream about sending baby Americans back to Mexico - or Poland - or Rumania - or WHEREVER - with their parents who are illegally trespassing on American Soil. I am, however, opposed to the "anchor baby" part of the Constitutional 14th ammendment. I would much prefer that the words "born to a legal resident or citizen", rather than just "born" be part of the wording. We really don't have to worry about the whole "negro slave" issue anymore, as it is no longer relevant. Emancipation Proclamation and all that.

Commuting

Stuck in the traffic jam that is the entire city of Addison this morning - and has been ever since they began road work on the Eisenhower Expressway - for absolutely no reason I can even vaguely fathom.

I am driving alongside a Porsche ragtop Carrera (sp?), a lovely little silver beastie with shiney, shiney, shiney chrome wheels. We stop, yet again, for the aforementioned unfathomable reason, and I notice that there is something red inside the shiney, shiney, shiney chrome front wheel. It looks vaguely like a McDonalds french-fry box. I am embarassed for the poor Porsche driver, in his sexy, expensive automobile that I could no more afford to insure than purchase - but then I notice that there is another red thing in the shiney, shiney shiney chrome rear wheel as well. On more intense scrutiny, it appears that the red thing has the word "Porsche" on it in white.

Probably something to do with the brakes.

However - Porsche? It looks stupid. It looks like someone stuck McFries in the shiney, shiney, shiney chrome wheels of your hideously expensive sporty automobile. Nothing says "appropriate color for brakes" than black, dears. Think little cocktail dresses and unobtrusive stereo systems and I'm sure you'll get my drift. Verstehen Sie?

Oh the apple trees are beautiful. All covered with little white flowers (that will doubtless all end up stuck to my car windshield when it rains next) - but for now, it's as pretty as the fairy lights that cover the same trees at Xmas time. One can notice these things while sitting in the middle of the road like a dead oppossum

It really is true, here near Chicago we only have 2 seasons - Winter and Road Construction.

Progression

In WoW, I belong to a "progression" group - we meet once a week and work on progressing through a very large, very difficult dungeon. It's co-operation, strategy, tactics, expertise and fun all rolled up.

IRL (In real life), I've managed a bit of progression as well. I have managed to fill the LARGE tin with cookies and mailed them off to the girl-child. I hope she likes them. The first batch are small and a few of them are kinda "burned-y" on the bottoms. The second batch are larger, totally unburnt, but not made the "traditional" way, because I couldn't find the right kind of chips. I think they'll be ok, though, because I kind of sneaked a little taste off the edge of one.

So... COOKIES AWAYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!

Kal's quilt is progressing again - I managed to get past the mental blockage that was keeping me from finishing the 2 rows I'd been working on. So, 8 of 25 rows done, or 200 of 625 squares - almost 1/3 done, and the Radio is playing "Bad, Bad Leeroy Brown".

There are just not enough hours in the day for me to do all the stuffs I'd LIKE to do along with all the stuffs I GOTTA do. This sucks, and not in the good way. I need longer days. 27 hours, maybe.

One of these days, I gotta get me a passport. I need to travel. I need to go see somewhere that isn't USA, Niagara Falls or Tiajuana. Hell, I can't even go back to Tiajuana or Niagara without a passport anymore, TYVM, George W. Asshole.

Found the charger for Dad's cell phone. Now all I need is to get him to get me the phone numbers of SPTLM and his neighbors/friends so I can program them into the phone so he has one-touch dialing.