Snowing and assfreezing cold

Work is, like, amazing.  I feel like I’m looking at the stars, and they’re just the little lights you get when you’ve hit a wall abrumptly (deliberate typo).  Yet everyone is so nice, and I feel so fortunate.

Katie is refusing to answer the phone or talk to me except a terse ‘alive’ on facebook. I have no idea if she even typed that message.  Some folks you can’t do favours for, so I’m going to do myself a favour and just ignore all of this. 

Ziva, how I love your heater.

I really, really need snow tires.  Not enough tread and too much slippery from cold road surfaces.

Elizabeth Wake, a long dead relative, wrote this

Day Dreams

Sitting idly one even
In fanciful vein
Childhood’s wonderland golden
I live o’er again

Beyond the horizon
I see far away
The crimson red sunset
The farewell of Day

How oft I have fancied
Thus gazing afar
Beyond the horizon
The better worlds are

Here shadows may darken
And bleak winds may blow
Away over yonder
If we could but go

There’s sunshine & gladness
And beauty for aye
Across the green landscape
Just over the way

So when the clouds gather
And winds whistle chill
Beyond the horizon
Away o’er the hill

I dream the blue heavens
Are cloudless and fair
And peace like a river
For aye floweth there

Safest happy delusion
For well do we know
Beyond the horizon
No mortal can go

None reach its fair border
Though run we all day
For far as we travel
Tis further away

Regifting

Jeff is off to the island, blackberry jelly in tow.

Katie is elsewhere, although she was here most of the day yesterday.

I lunch with Sue today.

I have managed to get SOME things off my list but not as many as I’d hoped.  Right now I am going to make coffee and settle in with some grotesquely religious and or twee Victorian poetry.  One of my near relatives didn’t have the option to bookmark links to poems she liked, so she hand copied them out.  Good thing people had better handwriting in those days.  My job is to transcribe the poems.

Eddie is only too well aware what it means when Jeff packs a bag and leaves before dawn.  He came up to me downstairs, wailed softly twice, and jumped up for a scritch. He then went looking for Katie.

I can hear Margot quacking off in another room.  She quacks when she’s exercising and she quacks when she has strong emotions.  I suspect this quack was triggered by a quick trip outside via the cat door.

Patricia gave me a lovely sweater to regift to Katie.  Katie loved it but it was that little bit too small, so Katie and I drove down to Suzanne’s yesterday to give it to her, and my goodness…. that was the right thing to do!  She looks awesome in it and pronounced herself well pleased.

1800 dollars poorer, I emerged

I have expensive hobbies, by damn.  I went to pick up Ziva and between all the brakes and calipers being replaced (the rear calipers being more expensive as being entwined with the emergency brake) and three engine mounts (which instantly reduced the engine noise on acceleration to a “healthy roar” as opposed to this weirdass growlyticking which a noob like me could mistake for bearing noise) I had to reach a little deeper into my pocket than the original estimate.

Another unintended side effect was that the engine idle revs finally dropped below 1000, which is where it’s supposed to be.  It had been up over 1200 for a couple of months, probably starting when the first engine mount collapsed.  When the car is running perfectly and brand new, excuse me, idle revs are supposed to be 750, but I’d settle for her revving under 1000, as there’s a little issue of gas consumption.  It will be interesting to see if the mileage gets better as a consequence, but even if it does it won’t likely be too noticeable, maybe 20 k on the tank.

Katie and I watched (or she fitfully snoozed through) the first three eps of The Wire.  I shook her awake for the explanation of chess as if it was the drug game; it’s one of the best pieces of writing in the show, and that’s going some.  It was also interesting to see how each character was introduced, not as if this was a first episode, but as if you’re joining a continuing story and it’s your job to keep up.  Of course I noticed dozens of things I hadn’t the first time around.  Like Deadwood and Saving Grace and Homicide, it repays repeated viewings.

Katie’s off at Dax’s now.  She knows he’s no good for her, and still she goes. (Part of his current attractiveness is that he’s living with a young married couple with a two month old babby).   His latest is to suggest that they go to a casino…. on her money.  Her response was “Put the money in my hand and we’ll talk about it” so I guess not all the sane has rubbed off yet.  Sigh.  Given her parental history (mater and pater) of absorbing troubling amounts of abuse and neglect, she could go like this for years, and we’re coming up on 8 years they’ve been spinning around each other like a couple of eccentric Kuiper Belt objects.

Now that I have a car again (I wasn’t planning for her being gone for two whole days) I have a very very very large running around list.

The temporary crown went on without mishap.  I am getting a blast of cloves into my mouth from it every once in a while, and thinking of Katie K every time I do, because she’s hideously allergic to cloves.  I wonder how that makes dental work for her. Anyway I recommend Dr. Katz.  He does precision work and is very civilized, and what the heck else does one want from a dentist anyway.

Birthday roundup

I banged on Jeff’s door at 6 am: “Where’s my present where’s my present where’s my pre—-sent!!!!??”

“Sheesh.  Close your eyes and open your hands…”

“Sheeeeeit!  All five seasons of THE WIRE with special bonus features!”  Happy dance.

Last night Tom and Peggy feasted me (Jeff, Paul, kids in attendance, w00t!) with Roast Beast, roast taters’n’garlic, peas, corn, and Katie brought a fabulous pumpkin swirl cheesecake and Peggy made her unbelievably awesome gingerbread cake.  It migrated home.

Happy happy sigh.

Katie and I walked home from their place – I slept quite soundly.

The Castle episode was loads of fun (I love how Becket does not cave to pressure to ‘believe’) and the House episode WTF!? Since when are patients s’posed to die??

Now I have to go to the dentist to get a crown.  Happy birthday to me!  Also, must get to the krankenhaus and bail out Miss Ziva, who is a very, very expensive habit.