Lair of the Lost Girl

A little while ago a client gave me a PetSmart gift card as a thank-you for helping them through a particularly emotional end-of-life visit. It was sweet, and an utter surprise, and I decided that since it was a gift I was allowed to use it for something frivolous, rather than stocking up on cat food and kitty litter.

So yesterday umbran and I were out running errands, and I decided to bring the gift card along and get a treat for our cats. And I found the coolest, cutest little toy/furniture thing.

It's adorable. It's this little S-shaped bed/cave/scratching pad, and it's got sections of carpet and rope and burlap, and they can lie on it or hide under it, and it's exactly the kind of thing I'd never actually spend money on but have kind of always wanted to spoil my cats with, so I went ahead and got it for them and proudly brought it home and displayed it in my living room for them.

.....and they won't touch it.

I've tried moving it around, and putting it by their current (battered cardboard) scratching pads. I've tried hiding food on it and under it. Rubbing it down with catnip got one cat to sit on it briefly, but other than that.... nothing.

These are cats who lurk next to boxes as they arrive, sometimes not waiting until they're unpacked to climb inside. Who covet their $5 battered cardboard scratch pad and fight over who gets to nap on it. Who have, on occasion, tried to climb inside sandwich bags.

Go figure. My cats are too humble for fancy toys like this.

One of the things that being in a wedding party entailed was finding something wedding-appropriate to wear. I hadn't realized just how much of a challenge this would be.

For this wedding, the brides decided that, rather than pick out one single dress for all the dress-wearing attendants to wear (considering our range of sizes and shapes, that would have been a nightmare), they were just going to pick a color and have us all find something that we liked. And, wanting to go along with a fairy-tale/foresty theme, they asked us to wear something green.

Did you know there are "in" colors each season?

Did you know that green isn't "in" this season?

Neither did I. The perils of being fashion-unconscious. (I think I fall perilously close to fashion-comatose.) Anyway, after hunting through Macy's, Lord & Taylors, Nordstrom, and every other dress shop I could find, I had found one bad seafoam prom dress and a ton of nope.

So I went online. Where I found maybe half a dozen dresses, divided evenly between 'incredibly casual sundress' and 'way too sexy,' neither of which felt quite right for a semi-formal wedding, especially standing up next to the brides.

Green is hard, yo.

Thankfully, my friends are open-minded and willing to embrace non-traditionally-Western attire. And I live about a mile or so from an Indian Bridal shop.

I cannot say enough good things about Chhabra Bridal. The people there are incredibly helpful and friendly and cooperative; they understood that I was looking for something to wear for a Western wedding, and within five minutes of stepping in the door they had more beautiful green sarees and lehengas and salwar kameez laid out for me. (If you are ever looking for colorful clothing? This is the place to go. It was like shopping inside a rainbow.)

And oh my god, everything in there was beautiful. And they custom-tailor the clothes, and will walk you through wrapping and draping until you've got it down just right, and I wish I had an excuse to shop there every day. As it is, I need to manufacture reasons to dress like this more often....

( pictures of the Best Bridesmaid Dress ever, hidden for those who don't care.... )

Okay. Usually I know better than to come to the internet for medical advice..... but I'm kind of at the end of my rope here, and running out of other resources. Apologies in advance if this edges on TMI.....

Does anybody here know, off the top of their head, whether the process of de-leading a house can make someone sick?

For the past two weeks, give or take, I've been throwing up just about every day. At first it was just at night, but yesterday it was every time I ate. I'm still keeping down at least part of what I eat, so I'm not in danger of blacking out or going severely hypoglycemic, but it's scary and no fun.

I've tried OTC anti-nausea meds; no help. I've tried skipping a meal, no help. Tried living on plain rice and toast and yogurt, no help.

I thought it was stress at first, but things are actually calming down right now, even as my signs get worse. I know I'm not pregnant; there's no pain that would go along with gallstones or pancreatic disease, no signs but nausea.

And yesterday I realized. My signs are worst when I'm home - yesterday was the first day I ate all 3 meals at home, and I lost every one of them. They're worst when I'm upstairs, at the side of the house closest to my neighbor's. One of my cats started throwing up a couple of days ago. My husband mentioned feeling kind of sick, though he thought it was just because he was worried about me.

......and for the past two weeks, my neighbors have been having their house professionally de-leaded.

I can't go to the ER; MassHealth still hasn't cleared up the glitch with our insurance. Their latest suggested solution is that if we give them more money they'll activate us again, but this is the solution we've already tried at least 3 times, and I don't trust it to actually work (they won't guarantee it in any way).

If I can at least get some sort of idea as to whether I'm being a hypochondriac versus whether I'm onto something, I can hold out until my next morning off, try to get in to see my doctor, and work from there - but I don't want to pay out of pocket for a blood lead level if I'm just being paranoid.....

So I've been sick for the past week, and in spite of that I've been putting in a run of 10+ hour days doing relief work (I overbooked myself for this month, not anticipating how busy I'd be with hospice). So I promised myself and those who love me and worry about me that I'd take this weekend as downtime.

This meant that I spent most of yesterday in an exhausted semi-doze on the sofa, indulging in Guilty Pleasure TV. Which, in this case, meant Project Runway. Yes, it's silly. But it's entertaining, and the plot is something I can follow even when on heavy cold meds. And this season there's a woman from Boston in the running, and she's adorable.

But the most recent challenge was for the designers to make clothes..... in 3D.

I'm serious.

3D clothes.

As opposed to.... I have no idea. All those times they just held a sheet flat against their model?

There was also much drama and squealing about the use of 3D printing in making the 3D dresses, which mostly amounted to little plastic stick-ons. I'm all for technology, and progress, and all that, but there's a part of me that really wants to mandate replacing the phrase '3D printing' with 'extruding,' just to counteract the glamour factor. The process becomes a lot less sexy when you realize it's the same thing they've been doing with Cheetos for sixty years.....

Okay - I promised I'd write here yesterday, or the day before, or something like that, but life is kind of blurry and hectic and stuff like that, and I've been busy hospicing my butt off.  Seriously, like 300 miles and half a dozen house calls in the last 2 days.

But somewhere in there <lj user="umbran"> and I also made it to the Topsfield Fair, because it is a fall tradition and because I need my annual fill of deep-fried Oreos and giant pumpkins, and because this year I decided to try my luck in the crafts contest.

The Topsfield Fair is a big, delightful, traditional county fair, with 4H exhibits and flower and garden contests and sheep-shearing demos and deep fried everything on a stick, and a fairly prodigious crafts competition.  They have categories for just about anything you can imagine, and I love browsing and seeing all of the beautiful things people create, and every year I promise myself that next year I'll enter something of mine, and then forget.

But this year I'd finally made a showpiece - a rainbow shawl, from yarn I spun myself, that I was happy enough with to actually look up the rules for entry.  And, when I got to the website, I found out that there was a contest for hand-spun yarn, as well.  With a division for blends and synthetics.  And I'd just finished spinning my first custom-designed blended fiber (I wanted to get a certain effect, so I spun up two different kinds of yarn and plied them together).  So, what the hell.  I entered that too.  It was free, after all.

So we went to the fair yesterday, and we walked through the garden displays and hugged my friends at the forge and gawked at the freaky feather-footed chickens, and stopped by the sheep barn to pick up my yarn.

Where I was handed a 'Best In Division' ribbon and told that my prize money was in the mail, and that next year I really ought to consider entering more divisions.

And then we went to the crafts show.

Where my shawl was sitting next to a blue First Place ribbon.  (No; not best in show, but still first place in crocheted clothing).

I am utterly agog.  I was mostly entering for the sheer personal amusement of being able to say that I did.  I had no thoughts of actually winning, and I swear nowhere on the site did it say anything about prize money.   And I still think of myself as a novice spinner; it's only recently that I've even gotten to the point where I'm happy enough with my finished fiber to actually crochet with it.

Yowza.

I am an award-winning fiber artist.

It sounds all fancy and stuff when I put it that way.....

So.  Lesson learned this week - one of the upsides of having short hair is that it makes throwing up 75% less dangerous.

I've been dealing with a neck/shoulder injury for the past month and a half.   My right shoulder will always be more prone to injury, after my multi-year war with misdiagnosis, surgery, and car accident, and a particularly odd maneuver at silks class left me unintentionally hanging by said shoulder, rather abruptly and jarringly.  And, since then, I've been doing an awkward and frustrating dance of waiting not-quite-long-enough, getting mostly better, and then winding back up right where I started.

And this week I finally wised up and accepted that I need to actually take the time and effort to let myself heal.  I formally dropped out of silks class (I've missed most of this semester anyway), made my nearest and dearest promise not to let me take on any heavy lifting, requested a referral to PT, and started taking the heavy-duty pain meds, since NSAIDs haven't touched my pain for years now.

And dear gods, I'd forgotten how much my body hates opiates.  Oh, they make the pain go away, at least sort of.  I think.  Or at least they make me not able to recognize clearly whether I'm in pain or not.  But I'm also fighting a blinding headache, too disoriented to focus on anything more complex than reality tv, and currently unable to hold down anything more complex than weak tea.

I'm so not sure this is worth it......

"The Book Lover's Cookbook,"  Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen

I think I first saw this book on a trip to Plimoth Plantation - but that was when I was in the middle of the original Cookbook Project, and had declared a moratorium on buying new cookbooks.  Still, I put it on my wishlist, and shortly after the original project ended, a good friend bought it for me as a Christmas present.

The real problem is that, since it's a mixed collection of recipes, anecdotes, and quotes from books that relate to said recipes, that it's a much denser book to look through than most cookbooks, and more fun to read than to browse for recipes.  Which means that, for a couple of years now, I've been slowly and lovingly working my way through it, reading quotes and pages from James Herriott and Ogden Nash and Fannie Flagg and Margaret Mitchell and idly glancing at the recipes as I mostly savor the writing *about* food.  But I promised myself that I'd use this book next.

Since my garden has, for the first time in years, finally given me a bumper crop of zucchini this summer, it was easy to decide what to make.  About 13 pages into the book is a recipe for Priceless Zucchini Bread (with a quote from Andrew Rooney).  Given that it looked like a fairly straightforward and reliable recipe, I gave it a try.

This may be one of the best zucchini bread recipes I've ever found.  Sweet but not cloying, moist but not greasy, with a little bit of chewy crust.... perfect.  And the recipe makes two loaves, so there's now about 2/3 of a loaf in our freezer.  And if I don't think of something to do with the 2 zukes currently in my fridge soon, there may be more.

I want to use this book more - I just have to finish reading through the quotes and excerpts first.....

Hey, people in the greater Boston area and people who may know people who may know people in the greater Boston area....

Can anybody recommend to me a good videographer?  Friends of mine are looking for a videographer for their wedding, and I'm trying to help them hunt down someone who can do the job.  Any advice, pointers, or suggestions of people would be greatly appreciated....

Those of you who've known me for any length of time have known that I've had the same haircut for, well.... for a long time.

I was a victim of the 80's.  I had a bad shag perm in 8th grade (my mother was convinced that it would make me more popular.  It didn't.), and I hated it with a fiery passion.  I vowed at that point, in 1988, that I would never cut my hair again, and never suffer through an atrocious short cut like that again.  And I've kept that vow.

I spent most of high school growing my hair out, and most of college growing out my bangs.  My hair is naturally ramrod-straight, so I've had long, straight hair for my entire adult life.  Somewhere around my second year of vet school a friend persuaded me to dye my hair red, and since then I haven't really made any serious changes.

That means my hairstyle is nearly old enough to vote.

I've set foot in a salon precisely twice since then.  Once in vet school, at a place that specialized in long hair, to get a miniscule trim, and once about two years ago, when my hair was falling apart, to get it shaped and tinted with a temporary color that didn't really take.  Other than that, I've looked about the same.  And over the past few months or so, I've been fighting a back-of-my-brain urge to Change Something.

Since I use henna, I can't really color my hair with anything else.  But temporary dye could work.... though that didn't seem quite right.  And just change for the sake of change didn't seem right either.  Still, I wanted *something* different.  So when GISHWHES came up, I promised myself that if there was an item on the scavenger hunt list that involved doing something weird to your hair, I'd consider it an omen and throw myself on that grenade.

And there it was.  Item #166 - cut at least 10" of your hair off and donate it to a wig charity.

So.

( Want to see what happened? )

For those who've been following my adventures in aerials, here's a bit of what I've been doing so far.

It's not the best video, and I really need to get better at pointing my toes, but.... here's the fruits of about 10 months of practice:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/25955903@N03/19613467453/