Knitting Cybrarian

And it looks like...

titbit
Originally uploaded by lauragayle

this.  Here's my knitted prosthesis.  Made from Classic Elite Cotton Bamboo.  The pattern is TitBits from Knitty. 

What else?  Dolores, the Fibertarian candidate and I met up with the Yarn Harlot on Monday night.  Stephanie was delightful.  Dolores was... well, my car will never be the same again.

We were featured on Franklin's blog today.  I'm sure it'll go to Dolores's head.  It always does.

And, it was an exciting morning in the Music Library.  Two snakes were captured by the glue traps.  Yeah, that's the nature AND the EWWW! category.  And a patron left their sweatpants and either underwear or swimsuit at the library entrance.  Let's hope the 1970s streaking rage hasn't returned!

What a week

I stayed home this morning.  Just exhausted.  Let me give you a few highlights and lowlights of this week:

• There are mice in the house.  Portia killed one early Wednesday morning, but one skittered from underneath the stove yesterday morning.  Preheating the oven to 400 drove it out from its hiding place.  Portia was licking herself and didn't see the little thing dart out.  However, she's spent the better part of every night on Mouse Patrol. 
• And we've found mouse droppings in several places in the kitchen.  Which means that we've been cleaning everything in the kitchen.  My dear student assistants, please don't worry.  I washed all the kitchen bowls, utensils, and baking pans before and after I made things for you.  Using very hot water, strong, antibacterial detergent, etc.  And we're using bleach to soak any number of things.  Ugh.
• I work at the Local Yarn Store (LYS) most Saturdays.  Yesterday morning I got a tearful phone call from my Saturday co-worker.  One of her closest friends had been killed a few hours before in a botched robbery attempt.  There are not enough words or hugs to give comfort. 
• Even sadder is that this is the second friend to be killed in less than a year, and a third friend (one that we both knew) died in a car wreck a few months ago.
• Another dear friend came to the LYS asking me to finish seaming a knitted jacket and block it so she could wear it to her mother's memorial service.  I'm honored that she asked me.  I'll also try to keep from crying when I do it, as I knew her mother too.

Back to cleaning.  Joel's done much of the vacuuming and pulling things out, and it's time to put order to the current chaos, now that various things have dried. 

Did I mention the snake in the library?

Mickey's Peach

  mickey's peach 
  Originally uploaded by lauragayle

Alas, Disney marketing has saturated the produce section.  This peach sticker tells me that Mickey endorses it, but tells me nothing about its quality or state/country of origin!

How many cents of my purchase went to the Disney enterprise?  And why are we doing such a poor job of getting people to eat fruit that we need to have Disney characters endorsing said fruit?  Next thing you know, green beans and spinach will have Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck ties around them.  Eggplant will have Belle from Beauty and the Beast. 

Egad.  I miss the days when Dad would bring a bag of peaches home -- his brother would stop by his work, or one of the farmers he knew would bring a bag of fresh picked peaches by when they ran into town for supplies.  No labels.  No refrigeration.  Locally grown.  Rinse, cut open, eat.  The juice would run down your chin and onto your shirt.  Yum.  No Mickey Mouse needed.

Yuck

Last night I didn't feel so great.  In fact, the last two nights I didn't feel so great.  But this morning I woke up nauseous with acid reflux and it went downhill from there.  I stayed home today, which was a good plan.  I don't think I would have made it in to work with frequent stops.

Her highness has been most attentive today.  I've slept a lot in-between bathroom sessions.  Portia would lay near me on the bed, or lay on her Kitty Pi bed in a corner near me.  When I'd get up to drink water and see how long I could sit up, she'd follow me to the living room and lay under my feet.  Cats have their own ways of showing affection, and this one is so very sweet and gentle in her ministrations.

unbelievable...

I was in the restroom at work this morning, doing what one usually does, when I heard another library staff member enter.  She was ON HER CELL PHONE, clearly involved in a conversation.  The phone volume was loud enough that I could hear the other end of the conversation.  This staff member did not end her call, but continued on with her conversation throughout the whole noisy visit to the restroom.

Did the person on the other end of the conversation really want to hear all of that?  Did I?

There's a time and a place for everything, and the restroom is NOT the place for cell phones, unless one is calling for help!

Yuck

I'm even finding dried yellow gunk in my eyelashes, corners of my eyes and my EYEBROWS!  How'd that happen?

Now I really have seen everything

Really. Or at least on this one fellow.

This is a family-friendly blog, but this may be a bit of a mature subject, so reader be warned.

As my friends know, I drive a big old ’87 Ford F-150 truck. Sits high. It also has mirrors that fold out and in. Today, I was sitting at an intersection, and another older truck pulled up next to mine in the left hand turn lane, but its right hand mirror was just about an inch from mine.

I was a little concerned about how close this vehicle was, so I looked over at the vehicle to my left. At first I noticed the driver did not have his shirt on. Then, I noticed… that he was… um… circumcised. Oh yeah. And in the words of one of my friends, “making himself comfortable.” Quite… comfortable. Happy even.

I rolled up my window and turned on the A/C. When the light changed, I drove through the intersection and looked in my rear view window to see that this vehicle didn’t have a front license plate.

Should I have used my camera phone to capture the moment? Possibly. But since this vehicle wasn’t displaying a front plate, it would have done no good – I couldn’t have captured a non-existent plate.

Anyhow, today was the day I saw everything. Walked around a store for a while to try to shake the “IIICK” feeling.

My gay friends thought it was a compliment, though.  Let’s just leave it at that.

That danged wart

Went to the podiatrist AGAIN.  I go every two weeks now because the plantar wart won't die.  Or at least its offspring won't.  So every two weeks I go to the podiatrist, and he gets out a scalpel, scrapes off the dead part of the wart(s) and uses liquid nitrogen to freeze off the remaining wart(s) and/or any new wart(s). 

This all started with surgery on the mother wart and now trying to eliminate the offspring warts that keep coming along.  Right now my foot hurts like h&** (this is a family blog, after all) and I came home early, missing out on a reception and rehearsal just to put it up and be able to grimace in the comfort of my own home.

I'm tired of this.  Truly.  Yuck.  The topical anaesthetic stuff didn't work this time.  Three ibuprofen is helping, but I'm so tempted to use a chaser of 3 fingers of Scotch...