Sara’s first birthday was celebrated at a park near her home, with both sets of grandparents, lots of aunts & uncles and a host of cousins. We all had a great time (especially Sara, when she was allowed to grab a handful of her birthday cake! LOL!)
The weather was clear and sunny, with enough of a breeze to keep us cool. That breeze is the reason Sara & I are both sporting the “wind-swept look” in hairdos;)
Alternate title: “Right time, right place, wrong day!” Sigh!!
Great news: a much-liked, much-missed and very talented ex-member of my miniatures club is moving back to San Antonio within a few months. She is already making 400 mile shuttle runs to her new house with the sort of cherished breakables you do not want a moving company transporting (Ouch! For a miniaturist, that list can get pretty long!).
One of the club officers sent an e-mail out recently, announcing that Sheila would be here in town for a few days and inviting all of us to meet for lunch at a local bar-b-que. I speed-read through the message, noted the date & details in my calendar and zipped on to the next messages awaiting my attention. Not good!
This morning, I dressed and left Casa Blackburn early to allow for the construction slow-downs I expected along the route. As hoped, I arrived a few minutes early and settled on one of the wooden, old-west themed benches to await the others. Oddly, no one else had arrived by 11:30 AM – boy, that bench felt harder, but the traffic had been bad. By 11:48 AM, I was beginning to doubt my facts, and that bench was becoming hostile! Placing a humbling call to our projects chairwoman confirmed my dark suspicions: This delightful reunion is scheduled for ***tomorrow***! Goodbye, cruel bench! See ya again, soon!
DS arrived this afternoon, back for a few days respite from his temporary exile in Sand City. All went well during his latest trip, except that his company’s travel agent apparently paid absolutely no attention to the location of his store when they made reservations at a hotel in downtown Sand City!! Hey, he can experience grid-lock, traffic delays and slow commutes without ever leaving in San Antonio!
DD continues to cope with sleep deprivation, multiple demands during nearly every waking moment and multiple businesses to over-see (translation: be a loving and vigilant Mom to our cute-as-a-button and very mobile GD, a loving and supportive wife to our busy SIL and and an active businesswoman) all with remarkable grace and patience. It’s a joy to live close enough that we get to see her and share the fun of watching our GD blossom into an inquisitive toddler!
Just my own personal opinion. . . .4 AM is not “morning”! 4 AM is one of those unfriendly hours I dislike seeing displayed on the clock when I am having difficulty sleeping, not an hour at which I wish to arise. However, the travel-planning department of DS’s company seems incapable of recognizing that a 7:30 AM flight requires a 5:30 AM arrival at the airport; they are also (of course) unaware that it takes this chauffeur/mom 30-60 minutes to get alert, flexible and dressed. (Once upon a time – before RA – I could have been up, dressed & gone inside 15 minutes. Alert? Hehe – Not so much!).
Actually, DS talked me into shaving some off of the ‘two hour rule’, so I didn’t leave the driveway until 5:15 AM, aiming to arrive at his abode at 5:45 AM. I’ve never been proud of my night vision, but *hush 44 years* of driving at night with caution have worked pretty well for me. Two blocks from Casa Blackburn. . . . .rain? Rain! Oh, fine – now what I couldn’t see clearly is also a blurry reflection! Add in a stretch of freeway with a no-margin-for-error barricade on my right and the ever-changing detours and barricades at our airport. By the time I had safely delivered DS for yet another flight to “Sand City”, I was a bit of a wreck. (The big, wide tires on my ’97 Camaro turn into big, wide skis in wet weather!)
The rest of my day? Well, it was mostly spent in a series of naps! What happened to the days when I could work & study, skip sleep and hit another day of the same? Oh, yeah – I was younger then!! LOL!
No one slept at all well last night, including the cats! DH was under doctor’s orders to avoid sleeping on the pressure bandage/surgical site; orders I knew he would carefully obey when awake. Asleep, however, was a different matter – the incision is on his preferred sleeping side! He was wakeful because he was uncomfortable – I was wakeful because I was trying to keep an eye on him – the cats couldn’t get comfortable because we kept moving around. I think the total sleep time was 1.5 hours for each of us.
Come morning, the lack of sleep presented no problem. . . . .for the cats! They simply retired to their favorite daytime nests and caught up! Different story for the humans in the house: 7 AM signaled the start of another day. DH took the pressure bandage off; the predicted swelling and bruising around the surgical site was present, but mild. The incision is longer than we expected, but will subside gracefully into one of his “character lines” when it is fully healed.
I knew we would have most of the family here today – DSIL is still working extended hours, DS returns to El Paso tomorrow for another *period of exile* and computer tracking showed that my Kindle would arrive at Casa Blackburn sometime today. (Click http://tinyurl.com/yvy2lr to learn more about Kindle.) Watching us, it would have been difficult for an observer to decide who the long-awaited (well, it has felt long!!) Kindle was coming to. Everyone except our adorable grand-daughter (quite happily occupied with speed-crawling, furniture inspection and stand-sit practice) was misidentifying passing car sounds as the arrival of the UPS truck throughout the afternoon! LOL!
It finally came, and I’m in love with it! It is supremely easy to navigate, the text is clearer & easier to read than many traditional paper books I’ve read, it is light in weight and easy for my wonky hands to hold while it capable of storing something as weighty as War & Peace! It is also the matter of a few seconds (using the Kindle – my computer is not necessary!) and a reasonably low price to add any book I choose to its digital library! I’ll never completely turn my back on bookstores and libraries, but the Kindle has suddenly made reading a much more portable activity for me!
We had a wildlife parade going on this evening, right outside our patio door. As usual, we set out food for our tame little backyard stray feline. Shortly after sunset, we looked beyond the TV screen to the patio and realized that was Not our little black cat enjoying the kibble. . . .that was a rather large skunk! Sometime later, we noted that the skunk had been replaced by a hungry opossum. Meanwhile, our stray stayed curled up on her chair, surveying her dinner guests from less than two feet away.
Time for sleep – I have to be up at 4 AM to get DS to the airport! We’ll all be glad when this beastly commute is over & done!
The clock radio woke us up at 7 AM, and that’s when the day stopped being *normal*. Normal would have been the two of us spending an hour consuming caffeine and reviewing on-line news and new e-mail (probably in our jammies) on separate computers before DH started working and I started. . . .whatever. This morning was much different; following a recent diagnosis of basal cell carcinoma, DH had a 9 AM appointment for a Mohs micrographic surgical procedure, and we were preparing to (possibly) spend the entire day at the surgical center. Books, quarters for vending machines, cell phones, wallets and materials for my newest miniature needlework consignment all found space in my tote.
Google the Mohs procedure if you’re interested; in theory, it involves precision mapping of each biopsy and immediate pathological examination. In practice, it means the surgeon excises the tumor plus a margin and sends the patient to the waiting room (for one-to-two hours) while pathology is done. If any cancerous cells are detected, the procedure is repeated. The preparatory literature warns patients that this cycle may be repeated several times; in plain English, Don’t Make Any Other Plans For The Day. The *plus side* is two-fold: 1) This procedure boasts the highest cure rate for many skin cancers, including BCC and 2) It doesn’t require multiple visits to a surgical center and (multi-day) tense waits for lab results! By 1 PM, we were on our way to the pharmacy (for pain meds – I’m flat out) and the comfort of home. (Comfort is a relative term – He had a pressure bandage on and the excision location (twixt lower eyelid and nose) made glasses a bit awkward to wear.
MLK Day – DH was off for the day and DS is home between ten-day work-shifts. DSIL (Daddy to my adorable 10 month old GD), however, was committed to office projects which wouldn’t end till 9:30PM!
The weather was pretty awful for the MLK parade and errand running; fairly dense fog (which thickened to travel-advisory status this evening) with rain dripping through it. Good reason for a gathering of the clan – minus DSIL – at Casa Blackburn for a computer fest and beef curry!
Our grand-daughter was pulling out her new “magic tricks” in fine style: she loves to wave Hi and Bye-bye; has become quite adept at walking her way from play table to terrarium to grandfather clock (not “Look Ma, no hands!” yet – but she’s getting close!) and definitely has added a new word to her vocabulary. “Cat!” (said without the troublesome T) announces each sighting of one of our fur-kids.
DS and I braved the ugly driving weather for a quick trip to Al-Tex; I needed a new, compact soldering iron for a class in LED wiring tomorrow. The Guys from Texas are going to guide six women (armed with soldering irons) through the mysteries of electricity! LOL – maybe we should take them Valium as a thank you gift!
As a Mom, today is one of the Really Good Days! DS is flying in from his temporary assignment in “Sandy City, TX” this afternoon and all of us are gathering at his sister’s this evening to celebrate (a tad late) DSIL’s birthday. (Stretched-out-birthdays are rapidly becoming a Blackburn tradition – LOL!
Of course, yesterday’s decision to stay warm, dry and near DD & GD has a fee to pay today. The extensive/expensive tour of the supermarket, stashing many bags of food-stuffs in their assigned places and getting SIL’s gifts wrapped must be accomplished before I point my little red sporty-car toward the airport and let out the reins. (Sure wish the local police weren’t *packaged* in a rainbow of hues – makes them very hard to detect! Yes, I do realize that is their plan.)
I’m looking forward to being surrounded by my family this evening:)
I reeealy dislike alarm clocks on weekends. It’s not as if the RA allows me the luxury of “sleeping in” very often anyway, but arising at the demand of a chirpy-voice radio DJ or the beat of a C/W song should be exclusively a work-week activity! Still, I dutifully arose and put bare foot to cold floor at 7 this morning; it’s the third Saturday of the month, my day to “herd cats”, Club Day.
The morning challenge (of converting me from stiff/sore ogre to presentable human being) was rendered somewhat more problematical by yesterdays’ thorough ‘wetting and chilling’ episode. It was also accompanied by an on-going internal dialogue; “You have to attend, you’re the president”, “You can’t hold a hair brush, how are you going to hold an art knife”, “You need to be there to keep activities moving along”, “You haven’t even worked on the current project”, “You enjoy the social time with them”, ‘You’re not going to be pleasant to be around”, ”You have to do the two-week food shopping today, and you don’t have a menu or shopping list yet” and on it went.
Since the stiffness wasn’t letting up, the outside temperature was in the “ouch” range and the drive across town was looking longer by the minute, I finally gave myself permission to do what my other club members do (some often, some occasionally); skip a meeting! I called my club treasurer so that no one would send out a search party, and suddenly had lots of time for the (mostly sedentary) task of planning what to feed us! (Since “US” can vary from one to five adults on any given day, plus a grand-daughter with a precocious palate, three voracious house-cats, five or six feral cats and a wide variety of demanding wild birds, it requires a bit of planning!)
Once I had the menu set (not in stone – I try to build in a lot of flexibility), my cookbook consulted, the pantry/refrigerator/freezer reviewed for “possibles” and the shopping list completed, I felt a lot better, but I wasn’t too keen on making the trek to the market. Fortunately, daughter & grand-daughter arrived to provide conversation, laughs & cuddles and the perfect excuse to delay the shopping expedition until tomorrow!
You are growing so fast!
Slowly (verrrrry slowly), several of my projects are progressing:
1) The miniature yo-yo quilt (commissioned last Sept.) is nearing completion. It is requiring about the same amount of time as its catalyst (the SAM’s auctioned quilt), for the same reasons; it’s an insane undertaking for someone with wonky hands! But then, I haven’t laid claim to sanity in several decades:D
2) My Tower work-bench is becoming more organized. . . . . .each time I go hunting around on it for some missing tool or material! LOL! The miniatures display room? Um, well, let’s not discuss that, O.K?
3) A pair of pants DS has been waiting for are now waiting by the sewing machine. Hey, they’re on the right floor, at least!
4) The total re-do of three miniature “shops” (The Petal Pusher, Le Beastro Pet Supplies & Sound Advice) in a new barrister’s four-shelf unit, and permanent installation of Wakefield Public House (Pub) in the fourth shelf is finally moving forward.
5) Now that I know what I was doing wrong on my Grand-daughter’s Christmas stocking, I can go back and do it right!
6-7-8 & 9) Will have to wait their turn!
What about the gazillion mini-kits (flowers, plants, furniture, books, fire-works, dolls, airplanes, tiny houses, etc.) which haven’t even been assigned a task number, you ask? Well, when the RA truly slows me down, I shall have something to keep me occupied, won’t I?