Everything All At Once...

So I'm home.

Only really I'm at work because as soon as I go home I am too tired to deal with much more than dinner.

And about dinner, thank the gods for Hulu.com, without whose old 70s TV shows there would not be enough of a distraction for me to both cook and eat my dinner as I'd probably fall asleep on the couch and wake up grumpy and sore at about 3:30 AM otherwise.

Settling back into my old routine has been difficult.  I think this is because I hated my old routine.  I think some changes are in order.  More on that later.

Right, so too much is in my head at the current moment.  Mostly having to do with deadlines at work, but I did want to say I'm here, I'm alive.  And pictures soon :).  Cuz we all love the vacation slide shows, I know!

15 Whole Inches, Baybee

So, who knew step one to cutting off all of my hair would involve a trip to the hardware store?

Really and truly?  I figured as much, seeing as my greatest super power at my parents' house is a combination of "it's never ever easy" and discovering something that makes people me shout, "eeeuuuw, what's that!"

This time around I've had such Nancy Drewish adventures as:

• "The Great Mold Adventure"
  
• "BUG!"
  
• "Rust Be Gone"
  

It's the last (for now, the visit is still young-ish) that I had to fight with for my haircut.

Apparently, everyone (but my mom, whose professional shears they were) is happy to use whatever scissors they can lay their hands on to trim their locks.  Well, what can I say, they are all boys and my mom has kept her hair super short for forever and um, can't reach where her scissors were relegated to, possibly since the last time she gave me a haircut (2001 I believe).

So when I pulled them out, I was not all that surprised to find them all rusted solid.  Instead of fighting to see if I could salvage any of them via soap and scrubber, I borrowed the car and visited our local hardware store.  

Unlike the craft store, they were super well stocked and even helpful!  Though, being my father's daughter, I decided to roam the aisles on  my own to find the Naval Jelly and Barkeeper's Friend.  See people, years of being the fencing team's armoury chick, and having to wash stainless steel pots and pans that have seen better days on a sailboat have armed me with lots of rust knowledge.  Besides, the scissors were so gone that I knew if I broke them there'd be no great loss.

Hours later...okay, maybe one at most, I was able to salvage my mom's "Arbolito" scissors.  To give you an idea of how um, aged they are?  The manufacturer stopped making/shipping/selling shears to the US about 20 years ago.  Vintage!

And still sharp enough to cut off 15 inches worth of hair (four semi-easy snips as I had to divide up the hair into pony tails) for Locks of Love.

My baby brother thinks I look super young with short tresses.  At my age...isn't that the goal?  :)

I Must Be Losing My Touch...

You know I don't care much about this, really I don't, it's just kinda weird how 5 people unsubscribed from my bloglines feed in a 24 hour period.  Seeing as they were all private folks?  I never knew who they were to begin with, and usually I don't connect to my blog via bloglines but being in LA it was just something I noticed...and no one who's left really cares, I know.  And it's probably because of online ponderings like this that people are choosing to read other things.

Okay, I'll stop now :).

In other news:

Earthquakes, we've had a few.  

Yep, LA in the Spring is the perfect time for them.  We've had half a dozen small quakes since I arrived.  I've only felt one of them though, the one in the almost 5 range...4.5 or something?  Anything smaller and I am still so much of a SoCal native that I don't really feel those anymore.  But if they are small and sustained?  I think I get flashbacks of the '87 Northridge quake...just because that one seemed to go on for FOREVER.

Knitting, oh has there been knitting.

Not only have a plucked (plugged?) away at Andy's never-ending socks (you'd think I'd have learned from my first experience with size 11 feet?) but I'm down to the toe on a mangled "Fawkes"(I will find a link later...sorry googlers) sock (I did not use the heel nor am I taking the pattern all the way down the foot), as well as one leg and half of another on a super secret present knit that wasn't so super secret before but I unraveled that one completely and have started again using some ohmygod soft and silky stuff.  I'll have more details and maybe a picture or seven later.

See, as usual, I have the camera, I've even taken some pictures...but even if I had a compatible cord with me?  There is no way I'd connect it to my brother's PC.  I am a bit afeared of it, I guess.  (Why yes, I did just have to delete a whole slew of nasties on here, so you know where I stand.)

This wouldn't be so bad, the no pictures thing, except that my niece (6) really really really wanted to learn how to knit!!!  (And because of this, so did her brother (4).  I love the "me too" years.)

So I traipsed off to the local big-name craft store that was in such disrepair I couldn't believe it (dear god my mom lives in ghetto-ville), and found ONE pink and ONE blue (the last of each, I think) Vanna's special yarn, and after digging through the mess at the bottom of the needle display, I found 2 pairs of those uber-cute matching children's knitting needles.

And there are pictures!  But I will add them later.  Just imagine pictures of pudgy hands trying to hold knitting needles interlaced with my mom's hands helping my nieces fingers find the yarn...and about five minutes later what my nephew decided he really wanted the yarn for :).

My mom thought I'd be crushed.  Maybe 20 years ago when dealing with small fries was frustrating.  Something magical must happen at 30 though; or maybe it's just the culmination of all my kid experience.  I just like the fact that they are playing with the yarn and think their needles are cool.

My niece wants a hat and when she is "tired" of knitting or needs "to take a break" I take the knitting and fix the oopses and knit a few rows more.  We're going to make a "square" fold-n-sew hat which I'm sure many of you will know it when you see it but I have neither the words nor the time to search for what I mean just now...the nephew wants to play fire-trucks again.  I'm game.

On the Ground...

84 degrees is quite a shock after Seattle's high of um, what was it? 59?

I spent about 10 minutes at a wee little park with my niece and nephew after dropping off my little brother AT HIS PROM (!!!  I is old), and I think I'm a little sunburnt and a really lot tired.

But hai!  I'm here!

Some Good News, for a Change...

For those of you following the whining saga of my former life as a Sailing Adventurer ^(TM), I will stop tormenting my land-lubbing friends (love ya' lots, honest) and just post it here to have it done with.

I received a surprise call while at work on Monday...just after I hit "PUBLISH POST" or I might have edited/amended/changed the ending.

So the Irish Rose is soon to be called something new. She deserves a new name, she is so no longer the same sailboat we found abandoned in Alameda. Instead she was, until recently, an abandoned and damaged hull + pieces on the Big Island of Hawai'i. I do hope this doesn't become a recurring issue in her life. But, yeah, so many parts and pieces gone and missing that really now, if the tales say a boat has to be torn down to her bare bones before she can be renamed without bad juju about? This would be the closest I'd ever want her to get.

Why the new name? New owner. A (to me) wonderful Peruvian man and his wife (?) have taken ownership of my girl and want to make her into their Sailing Adventuring home.

He LOVES my boat. You can hear it in his voice, the sadness at what he found, the joy of telling me about finding the owner of the mast and bartering his carpentry skills to buy the mast back, the ecstatic giddiness of my extensive knowledge of the boat's history...

I think my little girl has found the right man. A mother's heart is at peace here.

Seriously though, he kept calling her mine throughout our conversation, and it kinda hurt every time...especially when I would correct him and say "no, your boat." My Irish Rose, but his...um, he hasn't quite decided on the name, but he wants it to be the equivalent of "Ocean Flower" so as to keep the floral theme going. Yes, tears. But yeah, it definitely will be his, you can just tell.
~~~

And on a different more EEP note...I leave for LA on Friday and have not even started figuring out what all I need/need to pack/etc. and everything. The best part is that I'll be at my mom's house, so I can pack some undies and dirty laundry and will still be good :). I am silly, I know.

It Is Not A Tumor

Okay, hai, long time.  I may win space-cadet of the year soon.

So did you all know that yesterday was mom's day?  Yeah!  Happens every year shortly after 5 de mayo and yet, can you believe I almost missed it?  Again?

But I did indeed finally pack up and send my mom her ripple socks, whose picture and post I can't now remember and am being too lazy and hazy to link to just now.

Good thing I even remembered to call pretty early in the morning because just about 2:30 PM after my friends J & L left for home I collapsed and proceeded to have a migraine-style headache that I've deduced was not a hang-over but maybe an epoxy-cat-over.

Okay let me 'splain a little:

There was a "welcome spring" party on Saturday at Tim's house.  Yeah, I know it's May, apparently spring really needs coercing in the PNW, and we were to wear plaid and paisley to please the gods and bust a pig-shaped pinata while we were at it to scare away some bad juju or other and as with most of these parties, burn things.  Yes, that party, did you get the flier as well?

Last year there was a similar party (without the plaid, paisley, or pig...but definitely with the fire) where in a new "portable" fire pit was christened and what is that smell?  Is it the pit?  It smells of plastic and epoxy and is the pit on fire?  Bah, we're just drinking too much and are having a group hallucination or something.

Right.  So when shortly thereafter everyone caught some lung-bug, no connections were ever made...maybe cuz we drank too much?  I'm not sayin' nothin'.

This year we are older and wiser and used such terms as "pace" and "moderation" and also maybe only sat a few minutes at a time around the same fire pit because, ugh, what is that smell?  Is it plastic?  Epoxy?  Is the fire pit ON FIRE?!? And besides, there was "Rock Band" to be played and um maybe I got 100% belting my lungs out in a very angry rendition of the Beasty Boyz' Sabotage, thankyouverymuch, but yes, my throat does sting a little because you get really light headed when you have to scream for five minutes straight to get those "awesomes" to flash across the screen and your palms are sweating and your nervous and really?  100%?  Well I need to get some air and instead of air inhale way more epoxy smoke of death that is healthy for anyone...

So the next morning, my head is a little groggy and my nose stuffy but yeah, a shower would be awesome...like my score...until after scrubbing and scrubbing my hair I'm wondering why no one told me I reeked of so much smoke!  How horrid!  I shampooed my hair three times and still no good and then I realized it was because the smell, the buring and slightly epoxy smell?  Was IN MY NOSE.  

I'd inhaled so much of it, that it was still here...probably looking a whole lot like toxic black tar (I have an overactive imagination, what can I say) coating the inside of my lungs and sinuses and yeah, so not good.  And no dosing of Advil or Sudafed or Netti Potting made it feel all that good...and then came the headache.  I haven't gotten one so bad since the burning tires incident back when I lived in Mexico.  Apparently pyromania knows no racial lines, just sayin'.

I threw the cat-thing in because I am preeeeeetty badly alergic to one of Tim's cats, so I thought it best to not inhale too much of her (you know what I mean) at the party.  She was technically someplace else, but unless you are deep cleaning your place?  There is cat dander and hair where you'd least expect it....like where I stashed my purse and sweater, for example.

We'll Make Great Pets*

I've been trying to figure out the best way to lay out all these things and, well, there isn't one. So hello, and welcome to my disjointed and stunned Monday night.

So I really hate it when Mike Judge is right.

To whit, the H1N1 panic being blasted like so, is not that far off the reality.

The reality, that I could only wish I were making up, was in my "day 1" perusing of Flu-demic filled news. I wish I had saved at least a screen shot so you could feel my discomfort and spread the crazy out of this corner of the world to dilute it a little. A comment left on what I want to say was the Seattle Times website had a person freaking out because s/he has Mexican neighbors and OMG s/he is going to get teh Swine Flu! From her neighbors! Who are Messican!!! And therefore infected! Cuz they are Messican! (Okay, s/he stopped after the first exclamation point and the rest is me, but you get the idea.)

That was about the time I posted my previous 2012 commentary. Cuz really, sometimes, if you don't laugh, you cry.

I explained to someone else closer to my sphere of influence that um, no, actually, most of the folks catching the bad flu in the US were actually not Messican but 'Mericans who had vacationed in the land of my ancestors as most of "my people" in the US, in Washington State in particular, were not likely to be heading to Mexico any time soon. And probably hadn't been for years, because, well, we either lack the funds...or (please don't shoot me) the papers.

And, no, I do not know why so many more Mexicans are dying from the flu than others in the world, but my guess is that if you live in the D.F. you may as well be smoking 5 packs a day, so if you catch a virus that kicks you in the respiratory balls? Yeah, not gonna be a good outcome if your lungs have been thrashed your whole life, you know. Or, okay, yeah, you got me, we are dying because we are not as cool as you. Is that what you wanted to hear? Or can you drop this line of questioning already if you don't like my initial answers?

Your theory sounds just as plausible as mine or my dad's (which revolves around narco-trafficantes and their need to fight back and kick some ass and whoops, where did that vial go). Hmm, maybe my dad's been watching too many of those mexican drug trafficker movies.

And, because I'm tired of it all already and need a little more laughter in my life, did you know that Mexican Ranchera music, the kind with the big horns and the guys all dressed alike and almost marching to the beat as they sing about their horse or their truck or their woman, have entered the 21st century with such modern classics as, Maldito Texto. A-yup, a song about a woman breaking up with a guy via text message. At least she won't give him swine flu that way.
~~~

10 days until LA. If they don't shut down the airports my plan is still go!

* Cuz you were good and read to the end: Porno for Pyros, Pets (Personally? I vote for the Martians.)