In Common with Humans

I didn’t spend Wednesday in bed. But I haven’t been reading the Boston Globes, either–just bringing them inside and stuffing them in a pile face-down. I’m going to have to catch up with them pretty soon, but I’m going to carefully extract all the post-election coverage and use it to line the bunny’s cage on Tuesday. Too bad I don’t have a copy of the nude centerfold Scott Brown did for Cosmo in 1982, I could put that in the corner the bunny pees in. :-p I can print out one online, though! (No, I’m not bitter, no, why would you think that?! Of course not!)

I got my income taxes all done and mailed, federal and state. I’m not trying to gloat, I do them this early because I have to. This year I’d paid almost exactly the right amount of estimated taxes through the year, slightly more than I needed to–but I’m applying the extra to 2010’s estimated taxes rather than ask for a piddly refund. I’d just have to give it right back! I paid BLUM’s 2009 sales tax online, on the day it was due, January 15. I always seem to do that! One of these days the Mass. DOR website will be down on the due date for a quarter and I’ll be screwed!

I’m going to be mailing out my very first 1099-MISC form. Look, mom, I’m a real publisher! 🙂 I just wish I’d thought this through sooner, turns out I have to order paper forms from the IRS, I can’t get them online like I do just about everything else. More learning curves!

After I finished with taxes, I got to work on the manuscripts and queries queued up in my To-Do list and I’ve been making solid progress. That always feels good! The proof for the Advance Reading Copy of The Longer the Fall arrived. It looks fine, so I just have some minor corrections and I’ll order the review ARCs.

I ran errands in South Nashua yesterday, even though I hated to take so much time when I was building up momentum on my To-Do list. It takes a couple of days to give a full manuscript a good, careful reading (and the more certain I am that I want to buy it, the slower I go). But I needed a couple of reams of paper at Staples. I spotted a new business on Daniel Webster Highway–something called Used Book Superstore. I decided to stop and check it out.

It’s just that, a big store full of steel library-type shelving, stuffed with used books. They also sell DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs and vinyl LPs, but I wasn’t in the mood for that much browsing. I was very glad I’d stopped, though, because I went through the history section and staggered to the front desk with a basket full of books on the 20th Century, especially the 50s and 60s, which are exactly what I need as I ramp up my research for All the Shadows of the Rainbow. I was thrilled to find so much cool stuff! I also nabbed a hardcover copy of David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, which I’ve wanted for a while. I got eight big books, including two huge coffee-table books, for less than $20. I’ll have to go back after I’ve done some research and made lists to see if they have some older fiction I’d like to find.

It’s nice to see any book-related business doing well–at least that means people are reading! Used Book Superstore has a couple of other stores and they’re opening a new store in Salem next month, they told me. The Nashua store just opened the previous Friday. They don’t buy books or give credit but they take book donations. I think I’m going to give them a couple of “hurt copies” of BLUM’s titles that I’ve got. If they sell, that’s advertising!

When Dell pushed back the estimated delivery date of my new computer, they obviously were just covering their ass. The computer arrived today! It would have been here yesterday, but I missed Fedex by 15 minutes, and it required a signature. (Everyone pause for a moment of amazed silence that Fedex came to the right address, two days in a row. *wry look*)

I haven’t opened the cartons yet, though. I’m funny that way. I’m not one of those people who gets something new and shiny and can’t wait to rip open the boxes and unpack it all and start playing. No…when I get something new, I’m in awe of it (partly because it happens so seldom). I always think about it for a while before I open the box. I have to set the carton(s) down and consider them solemnly, sometimes for a couple of days. Eventually, the implications sink in, and/or the bunny starts eating the corners of the carton, and I find a box knife and start opening. But opening up new stuff is a process for me, and the more expensive the stuff, the longer it takes. I’m already impressed by one thing, though: the boxes feel so light! I’ll have to get into them pretty soon. The special touchpad thingie I bought separately arrived weeks ago.

Besides, now I have to learn Windows 7 and get all my software ported over and go through all that transitional stuff, and I have GOT to clear up these manuscripts and queries! (That’s why I’m writing an LJ post right now, yep, um-hmm…I’m halfway through a mss and taking a break, okay?)

It is now harder for me to skip a workout than to do one, even when I’m feeling totally unmotivated and don’t want to work out. On Wednesday I was so focused on my taxes all afternoon and evening, I thought I might just skip cycling, but I got so squirmy and fidgety that I couldn’t stand it, and wound up queuing up a tape and doing cycling late. Usually, if I absolutely have to miss a workout, I make up for it by doing two full workouts the next day, or I just can’t stand myself. I know that a major reason I enjoyed Albacon the most of the ten conventions I’ve attended since November 2007, is that it was the very first convention at which I got down to the hotel’s fitness center and did a real workout. (Of course, the evening that I climbed all those stairs at Anticipation–a total of 34 flights up and 17 flights down–was a pretty serious workout, but it wasn’t the same!) I was higher than a kite for the next 18 hours or so at Albacon, even I was amazed at how it impacted my mood.

We’ve been having very nice weather for a couple of days–cold, but sunny and clear–but…I knew they were forecasting a rainstorm Sunday and Monday. I guess they’re expecting quite a storm, because there’s already a flash flood watch posted!. I hope it really does stay as mild and wet as forecast, because if all that turns into an ice storm, we’re toast. 8-(

My major accomplishment last week was getting The Longer the Fall off to the printer. That’s…kind of a big deal. In fact, it’s such a big deal, it really hasn’t hit me yet. Milestones miss me a lot these days. I’m always running too fast, I always have ten other pending projects that are overdue and that’s all I can think about. I accomplish something, it gets checked off the list and tossed into the “OUT” basket and zoom, on to the next thing. That’s how I feel right now–the holidays were way too long and slowed me down far too much. Now I’m trying hard to get back up to speed, and as usual, I’m just getting one massive sucker-punch after another.

But The Longer the Fall is at the printer. I spent four solid days doing the final edit and tweaking. I looked up some last elusive facts and finally got onto the phone with some very nice people up in Maine who were incredibly helpful. I wrote an Acknowledgments page for this book. 🙂 I cleaned up the file and imported it into InDesign. I’ve really gotten good (and fast!) at laying out book blocks. The Longer the Fall looks so much classier than Mortal Touch. It’s got cute little decorative dingbats. It’s got an Acknowledgments page and a page blurbing other titles in the series and a whole page of quotes from reviews of Mortal Touch. (That’s for the ARC, I hope to get some real blurbs for the final book.) Of course, I realized one thing I intended to correct and forgot, after I sent off the files, but I ordered a proof, and I’ll fix that before I order the short run of ARCs to send out. I just got notified that the proof has been shipped, it should be here in a day or so.

Now I need to get the cover design done!

More adventures with Customer Service…last March, I bought a digital kitchen scale to use for weighing and calculating the calories in my food. I’d really gotten dependent on it. I realized that when the foolish thing started to misbehave some weeks ago. I never mistreated it, but the button that powered it on and zeroed out the readout got progressively “stickier.” At first I thought it was because my counters are so warped, the scale wasn’t sitting level. But no…the button was failing. Finally, it wouldn’t work at all. However, if I popped a battery out and back in, the scale would power on, and then it seemed to be accurate. But that was a nuisance–and I found that I couldn’t manage without the scale. I was having enough trouble getting back to my disciplines as it was.

So, I ordered a new scale. The old one, an Escali brand, was about $30 from Amazon.com, I ordered one very similar, but a different brand, from Amazon for slightly less. Then I rummaged around looking up the paperwork on the Escali scale, and found that it supposedly has a five-year “guarantee.” I e-mailed the company, and they replied, almost immediately, saying I could send it in for a “warranty evaluation.”

Well, I thought…why not? I had to fuss around getting all the documentation for the online purchase, and I waited until the new scale arrived, because I couldn’t be entirely without one. As soon as I had the new scale, I packed up the Escali scale and shipped it off, and I guess I’ll see what they say. (The brand is really irrelevant, they’re all made in China.)

I’ve been updating and reviewing financial spreadsheets for the past two years, and getting ready to get my taxes done, and I’m really amazed at how well I’ve been doing. Of course, I’ve been cutting expenses to the bone and I live more frugally than most people could stand to even think about…but not to the point where -I- feel particularly uncomfortable, and clearly it’s been paying off, big time. I can’t believe how much I reduced my expenditures for things like groceries, pet supplies and utilities in the past year–I cut my heating oil bill in half! By Light Unseen Media spent about 50% more but its income increased by 250%! I hope to be really well positioned when the economic recovery gets going.

My new Dell computer’s delivery date has been pushed back a week, now they’re saying January 27. Meanwhile, I was glad this week that I have four browsers (so far!) to choose from, because Google implemented these new “security” measures on gmail and suddenly I couldn’t get into my gmail account at all from MSIE. I had to log in with…oh, it was either Firefox or Safari, I forget which–so I could turn the effing “security” off! (I have Symantec security software, Windows firewalls, a firewall on the wireless router–yeesh, nothing ever gets through.) I am not at all happy with Google these days, but what can you do? It’s like refusing to breathe the air because you’re offended by nitrogen. I’m totally enslaved to the Internet!

After the Patriots were blown out of the playoffs in such a humiliating fashion by the Ravens on the 10th, I will confess: I watched the Colts trounce the Ravens on Saturday with malicious satisfaction. So there! I like Peyton Manning, the Colts’ quarterback, he’s a fine player. (And cute. 🙂 ) It’s just that my first allegiance is to the Pats. But, still…after the Pats losing, and now the abysmal Senate election, I am seriously not a happy camper right now.

Of course, these disappointments are mere irritations compared to the ghastly and ever-worsening news from Haiti. I donated some money toward the relief efforts, but the magnitude of the suffering is simply too vast to comprehend. Thing is…I feel like I’ve seen this coming for years. I didn’t expect an earthquake, but Port au Prince has been poised for something this awful for a long, long time. So much human suffering is 100% preventable, but people just won’t face facts and do what’s necessary.

The past three days have been devoted almost entirely to shoveling snow and collecting a database of genre book review blogs (a task so tedious, I had to shut down every distracting app on my computer–e-mail, browser tabs, etc–and practically tie myself to my chair, *sigh*). Tomorrow, I feel like pulling down all the window shades, unplugging the phones and doing my taxes–or maybe, stay in bed (under the covers) and catch up on manuscripts and queries on Pig! Of course, I won’t (stay in bed, that is–the mss and queries are screaming for my attention and they’re going to get it). But that’s how I feel at the moment!

All my friends who went to Arisia–I’m glad you had a great time! 🙂

…until all the tea-bagger Kool-ade drinking misogynist Neanderthals stop gloating.

There’s no such thing as local politics anymore. It’s really the height of irony that all these groups who pour money into other states’ ballot issues and elections are the first to howl about the federal government interfering with their states’ freedom to make whatever kind of regressive laws they want. *sigh*

No, I’m not bitter, no, not at all! It’s just so frustrating when health insurance reform has so much impact on small businesses, entrepreneurs, the self-employed and other people who are working so hard to escape terminal penal servitude to Huge Corporate Profits.

It didn’t help that the weather totally sucked today. It snowed all day here in Pepperell. Naturally, all the Brown Moonies have huge SUVs (or chauffeurs), the people who need health reform probably had trouble getting to the polls. I left my house at around noon and immediately got stuck at the mouth of my own driveway!! Fortunately, I got free in just a minute or so of scraping snow away from the tires with my boots and rocking the car, but, gods.

The polls were really busy. The poll worker for my precinct knows me now, she even remembers my address! 🙂 Pepperell was covered with campaign signs for Brown, I don’t think I saw a single Coakley sign anywhere. The only campaigners outside the polls were all for Brown. He carried this little one-horse armpit by a 2-1 margin. Pepperell has a lot of knee-jerk conservatives and truly stupid people, I’m afraid. I’ll bet all the Level-3 sex offenders voted for Brown (yes, we have a bunch of them). :-p

I ran a couple of errands but being on the roads was no fun today. When I got home, I went down to the end of the driveway and shoveled back the snowbanks until the driveway mouth was twice the width it had been and was clear down to the bare ground (and “ground” is the word, my driveway is unpaved). At least the comparatively mild temperatures meant that was a lot easier than I feared it would be. But it snowed all afternoon and was still snowing at sunset.

I finished the first, biggest phase of this huge book review blog database project, I have the initial list compiled. Whew, what a job! Now I need to go through it and sort out places to query for reviews, especially for Cat the Vamp. It’s just hard to keep plugging onward when I’m feeling so bummed out. 🙁

I’m building a database of book review blogs (more on which later) and I noticed something..interesting last night. Repeatedly, if I was looking at a book review blog with Google ads in the sidebar, what I saw was an advertizement for Scott Brown, the extremely questionable Republican candidate for United States Senate. Presumably, the ad was keying in on my IP number (which usually comes up as Lunenburg, MA because that’s the “home address” for my ISP). The Scott Brown campaign–or someone who is very invested in seeing him get elected–must have paid a huge amount of money for Google ads that would display based on viewer’s IP address on just about any type of website or blog whatsoever. That’s just a bit…scary.

I’m holding my nose and voting for Martha Coakley, chiefly because I don’t want to see Brown get in. I don’t like Coakley. I voted for Khazei in the primary. Before the primary, I read, in its entirety, the long multi-part Boston Globe series profiling each candidate in detail. I think “debates” are a total waste of time, and don’t accurately indicate how a candidate will perform (except in debates :-p), so I don’t watch those. I’m a bit grouchy that Coakley won the primary. Why is it that women politicians always seem to have the same unpleasant character flaws? Why can’t we ever get a woman candidate that I can actually admire and relate to?

I’ve gotten a lot more direct mail flyers and phone calls from Coakley’s campaign, but this Google ad thing is brilliant (I reluctantly and uneasily concede). That’s the kind of thing that got Obama into office. Coakley’s campaign has seriously missed the boat. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens tomorrow. At least we’ll still have John Kerry! 🙁

I’ve gotten some of those robo-poll calls from obviously right-wing sources, asking about gay marriage and abortion and whatnot. I’ve replied to the polls and really let ’em have it. The more I can wreck the curve on their results, the better! But I even got one on my cell phone last night–it was turned on and charging, and I was very surprised when it rang. I can’t dial out from my house on my cell phone but the phone will receive calls here, weirdly enough. Go figure!

So, I made a donation–well, By Light Unseen Media did–to Doctors Without Borders for the Haitian relief effort.

I considered carefully before I made this donation. It is a very unpleasant fact that scammers, crooks and con artists swarm like maggots when disasters like this occur. You don’t even want to know how much aid money and other donations intended for victims of Katrina really went to hoaxers and swindlers. 🙁 They’re very clever, convincing, technically savvy and keenly aware of psychology. Americans have a tendency to throw money at bad situations out of guilt, or peer pressure, or memes (“dial this number on your cell phone!”) and not always think about where their donation is really going.

I checked The American Institute of Philanthropy and Guidestar. I already was familiar with Doctors Without Borders, and highly respect them. They’re on the ground in Haiti right now–literally, since they were unable to land at the airport there and had to land in the Dominican Republic with an inflatable hospital and truck it overland into Haiti. I also felt I owed them something for all the free maps of the world they’ve sent me in their direct mailings over the years. *wry smile*

Everyone should follow their own conscience, of course. But if you want your efforts to really be helpful to the greatest possible extent, do some research, double-check your recipients and select your options judiciously. Don’t allow yourself to be bullied or pressured into taking action–and please don’t do that to other people. I really get impatient when I’m essentially ordered to “donate money now!” or when I hear self-righteous, patronizing importunings about “just give up your Starbucks lattes for a week and donate the money!” and that kind of bullshit. I live a very frugal lifestyle and I never make impulse or frivolous purchases. (I’ve never set foot inside a Starbucks and I don’t even eat out.) I do make donations to good causes. That doesn’t mean I have money to burn. These days, that’s true for a lot of us. We’re digging through the lint in our pockets anyway because that’s what what principled, empathetic people do. That doesn’t make it easy. That’s why we want to be sure that every penny will count.

Happy Birthday, octoberland!

I’ve been increasingly fidgety about having no clothes that fit, and hating all my oversized, baggy, too-big clothes more and more. Most of what I own is not only too big, but stained, frayed, poked with holes, faded and otherwise worn out. But I don’t want to spend a lot of money on clothes. So, I’ve been reading size charts obsessively, watching for sales, and looking at online bargain websites like Overstock.com. This led me to actually go shopping this Saturday, which normally I never do. I hate being out in Saturday crowds when I can go shopping on weekdays. But I got a flyer for Building #19, and they had batches of two categories of clothes I wanted–tights, and kids’ sweatshirts–going out on the floor on Saturday, and I decided to go to the Building #19 in Nashua and try to get a few things before they were all picked over. So, yesterday I drove up to 101A and went to Building #19, where I got a bunch of tights (Danskin, no less!) and a few tops, all for somewhere between a steal and song. (I’m wearing double pairs of tights under my jeans, which have two benefits: warmth, and when I break for my workouts, all I have to do is pull off my jeans and I’m ready to go. I hate changing clothes for workouts, fooey.)

Then I drove down to Pheasant Lane Mall to check Sears and other stores that were advertizing big post-holiday sales. That was a mistake. I’d been a little surprised that 101A and Building #19 weren’t busier. I found out where everybody was. :-p Then I got into the mall and was uniformly disappointed in either the selection or the prices. Okay, I’ll stop being coy: I now wear Girls size 12 jeans. My hips are too small for juniors or women’s sizes. Even size 0 is too big. I wanted size 12 “skinny jeans.” Well, the stores either had skinny jeans at more than I wanted to pay, or jeans for acceptable prices but not skinny jeans. I’m going to end up buying all my clothes online–or hand-sewing everything! 🙁

I keep thinking about the dinnertable conversation on Christmas Eve. Z.’s eldest daughter, who’s about 20 I think, is 5’8″ and heavy. She and I both got to complaining about clothes shopping. She was complaining that everything on the racks is too short for her, because she’s tall. I was complaining that everything on the racks is too big. I can’t help wondering: can anyone buy clothes off the rack that actually FIT? Is this the reason that 90% of the people you see out doing errands and non-job-related chores are dressed in baggy sweats, shorts or t-shirts–because that’s all they can buy that fits comfortably enough that they’d wear it by choice?!? Heavy people complain that everything is designed “for fashion models,” tall people say everything is too short, short people can’t find anything that isn’t too long, women who wear anything bigger than a B cup can’t find blouses and shirts that are cut curvy enough, I have NO curves now (except muscles!) and I can’t find anything that fits me correctly or that is small enough! Just exactly who ARE these clothes being designed for, really? It seems to me that they’re all aiming for some mythical “average” that only a tiny minority of bodies actually conform to.

Raise your hand if you can believe that it’s already the 10th day of 2010! Yeah, me, neither!

If I fondly imagined that I was going to come bouncing off the long holiday hiatus and shoot right into work, exercise, dietary disciplines and new plans and resolutions like a bright shiny new bullet…I was kidding myself, ha. (Well, I have been exercising. But that is all!)

I didn’t really regard myself in “post holiday back-to-normal” phase until Tuesday, because Monday night was Parish Committee meeting. I’m the Chair, but I’ve missed the last two meetings because of my video production class. So, on Monday I needed to spend some time in the afternoon reviewing the minutes and e-group posts, and writing up the agenda for the meeting. We met at the minister’s home (this saves us having to heat the church just for our meeting, which costs a ridiculous amount of money). The meeting went fine and it was nice to get together with everyone again. One fellow committee member had brought me some food she wanted to give away (I believe they’d been left by her visiting son, who eats a diet like mine)–dry lentils and barley and beans. My car got stuck in the minister’s driveway briefly when I left after the meeting, but fortunately I was able to extricate it with a only a small fuss and didn’t have to ask for help.

When I got up Tuesday morning, finally done with all the obligations and plans and committments that had tossed my work routines and disciplines into the air like so much green salad for a whole month, I was suffering from “decompression crash syndrome.” All I wanted to do was sleep, and I’m still having to fight off the constant sense that I can’t really buckle down to any project more ambitious than cleaning the litter boxes because I’ll just have to stop in the middle and go do other things and not get back to it for days. That anticipation of interruption, whether real or illusory, is the single biggest reason I don’t get things done. 🙁 The little fuss with my dad and the Heart Station on Thursday didn’t do my productivity any good, either. However, I’ve been working on review queries for Gideon Redoak and Cat the Vamp, and possible cover blurb sources for Krymsin Nocturnes and The Longer the Fall.

I also completed and submitted two writers’ grant applications this week. One I’ve applied for before, the other is new. I used some of the draft of All the Shadows of the Rainbow for the sample manuscript of one application, so I’m already getting that book out into public view. I also posted the synopsis to my author website, if anyone is curious about it.

One of the grant applications requested an “artist résumé.” I’d never actually written up a comprehensive artist résumé for myself. I had selected components of such a résumé scattered in numerous places but I hadn’t put them all together. So, I spent a number of hours this week completing that. When I had it all finished, I was really amazed. The damn thing runs for more than four pages! I sure look busy–and I also look like I’ve been pretty serious about writing, at least articles and reviews, for the past several years. Seeing a lifetime’s work all lined up like that really puts my artistic work (writing and design) into a new perspective!

At any event, preparing both those applications also took up a lot of time, with material submitted electronically and by snail mail. Now I just have to wait and see what happens. Meanwhile, I’m wondering if I can get a small business grant and maybe hire an intern or something. After all, I’m paying authors royalties! Just a little nudge and I can actually, you know, Create A Job! That’s worth some stimulus money, don’t you think?

I’ve been catching up with errands and shopping that I simply hadn’t gotten to, with all the time I spent with family, and two Fridays in a row being holidays. I finally got a hair cut, whew! It felt downright weird to be doing Friday errands on Friday this week. I also did a lot of cooking on Friday–not so much because I really wanted to, as because I needed to make up some batches of food, and I had things that had to be used. I cooked two kinds of soup–lentil/turkey and bean/bacon–tried out making a loaf of whole wheat bread with pumpkin, which worked very well, and made another batch of my “healthy” oatmeal cookies with pumpkin and no butter or fat at all, which also worked very well. Trouble is, I wasn’t really in a cooking mood, and by the end of the night, I felt like I’d been doing nothing all day but wash dishes. 🙁

Yesterday, I started working on the Very. Last. Edit. of The Longer the Fall. I want to get the ARCs out this month. I don’t know if I’ll make it, but if I do, I can set the release date for May. That’s what I’ve been doing today, aside from a short Readercon meeting that I telecommed into, and bumming over today’s utterly dismal Patriots game. I need to get cycling done, though!

Nothing like having had a bad night, and then getting up to a message on my answering machine from the Heart Station at U/Mass Medical in Worcester asking me to call them at my earliest convenience–that’s it, no further details. The best thing I can say is that it’s times like these that I’m thankful that -I- don’t have heart trouble!

I called. It wasn’t an emergency, but they were concerned because they couldn’t reach my dad. They said that they’d heard that dad’s defibrillator had been “shocking,” his doctors down there wanted to see him, in fact had scheduled him for an appointment that afternoon, and they’d left several messages at dad’s house and he hadn’t called back.

This was not automatically panic-inducing: dad has rehab on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, he’s awful about checking his home answering machine and the Heart Station didn’t have his cell phone number. Someone also told the nurse, while we were talking, that dad had picked up his prescriptions that morning (they obviously have a record of that via their networks). So I gave the nurse the cell phone number, but of course, since I’d just gotten up, the computer was booting up and I had to open Outlook to get the number from the Contacts list, and Outlook took forever to open and let me get to my Contacts.

As soon as that call was complete, I called dad at home and he answered. He started to tell me this long shaggy story, prefaced, as always, with, “you know that…” No, dad, I don’t know because you never call me!!! He probably talked to Jill at some point and told her, but I don’t have a clue! But the gist of the story is this: dad was kept awake on Monday night by his defibrillator–or so he assumes–making a very odd “buzzing” or vibrating sensation every 2-1/2 minutes. It wasn’t making a “shock” indicating a problem with his heart (he said that was a miscommunication–retrograde Mercury, grrf). Since then, he’d talked to his doctors up here and the manufacturers of the device and everyone was baffled. Even the manufacturer said they’d never heard of anything like that happening. The defibrillator has some kind of remote service whereby dad can connect it and send read-outs over the phone, too. The “buzzing” sensation never recurred.

Dad said he’d gone to rehab Tuesday and today and he felt fine–in fact, he said he felt really good today, it was one of his best days in a long time. He was not happy to hear that the Heart Station wanted him to drive all the way down there this afternoon.

He called them and called me back and said that he was going down for a 2:45 p.m. appointment and they were going to run a lot of tests. If, in the worst case scenario, they decided to swap out his device for a new one, he’d have to stay overnight, but it’s a simple procedure. He’s already gotten “upgraded” once since he initially got the defibrillator implanted, I’m pretty sure. He insisted that he didn’t need a ride and he’d call me if he had to stay for the night at U/Mass Medical.

So, I spent the afternoon waiting for news about that and finally called dad’s house at 6:00 p.m. (Saying that he’ll call me if he has to stay in Worcester does not, with dad, mean he’ll call me either way!) He was home–I woke him up from a nap–and said that they had run all their tests and hadn’t found a single thing wrong. The phenomenon remains unexplained (unless it’s somehow linked to the extremely discouraging developments the day before with the New England Patriots, and that’s not outside the realm of possibility!). Dad said he was “dead tired” from the long drive and the tests so I kept the call short–I was just glad that he was safely home.

This has been a very weird week–I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve been having trouble with my DSL connection for the first time in months, and my digital kitchen scale has conked out. This computer hasn’t been behaving itself. The cats have been absolutely berserk, fighting and rampaging around the house, I don’t know what’s gotten into them. I’ve been very out of sorts, and yesterday I got onto this eating binge and couldn’t stop. I literally ate myself sick, that’s why I had a bad night, my tummy was all unsettled. I don’t even have a roll of Tums in the house because I’m just never sick (my medicine cabinet has two bottles in it: acetaminophen and Benadryl). And in fact I wasn’t that sick last night, just restless and uncomfortable enough to sleep badly. As a result, I’m “dead tired” today, too, and I’d be dragging even without dad stress. 🙁 I need to perk up, though, because I still have workout tonight!

Happy Twelfth Night/Epiphany/Orthodox Christmas/Three Kings for those who celebrate them! It’s Carl Sandburg’s birthday today. 🙂