All I have any urge to do right now is sew.  And my machine is in the shop.  It has something going on with the tension.  It sews four stitches, goes "deepdeepdeep" and stops.  I have to lift my foot from the pedal so that it can sew another four stitches, then lift my foot, then lift my foot, then lift my foot, then...  I actually finished a cloak that way the morning I dropped it off because I wanted to get it done before losing my machine, but it's not a fun way to get work done.

Of course, I have all kinds of things I could be doing.  For instance we are nearly out of bread.  But I don't feel like making bread.  I feel like altering a waistband on Ariel's skirt and making Theresa's nightgown and do those cloaks for the play and...  I guess I could do all the cutting out and serging, but I like to make things and get them done rather than leave projects half finished (I've met myself, half finished projects go on for years and years until I have gained so much weight the original item won't fit even if I do actually finish it).

Oh Phooey!  And Bill's going to want to water walk.  I know I need to do it, but I really don't want to.  I'm just lazy right now and the only thing inspiring me is sewing.

I know I am probably the exception rather than the rule, but I absolutely hate being 'thanked for my service'. I find it offensive. I didn't serve for gratitude. I did a job. I understood the possible consequences of that job when I took it, and I was lucky enough not to be sent to a war zone, but if I had been I would have gone without complaint.

I know this to be true because 6 weeks prior to my set wedding date I was notified that I was being deployed in support of Bosnia. I didn't bitch. I didn't moan. I started processing for deployment and got married the next day instead of whining about the fact that I had already spent thousands of dollars on my wedding and I was going to lose all that money. As it turned out, the deployment was canceled and we had the party on the original date, but I didn't know that was going to happen, so I did what was necessary to follow the orders I had been given.

I really hate being thanked for my service. Especially by people who have never been in. I did a job. I did the job I swore to do. Nothing more. Nothing less.

So at nearly 50 years old I appear to be starting to learn tact. Or maybe just how to deal with religious zealots who are harassing someone other than myself.

In October I was at a Science Fiction convention and this guy was giving one of the vendors (we used to call them dealers, but then that word changed to mean drug dealers, so now we call them vendors) a hard time about her stock. She's trying to get him to stop by telling him it sells and she's there to make money, and he's not about to let it go. So I stepped in and said, "You know the difference between an artist and a craftsman? An artist says, 'I will not sully my art.' A craftsman says, 'Show me the cash.'" It got a laugh and he walked off to harass someone else.

Today I was at the pool water-walking with my friend Bill. Neither Bill nor I have ever met a stranger so we struck up a conversation with a woman walking near us. She started quizzing him about the state of his immortal soul. Bill is trying to deflect the conversation and not succeeding, so I quip, "Oh he's going straight to Hell!" Laugh, laugh, laugh. Subject changed to how mean I am to Bill and joking about how evil Bill is. (Bill definitely didn't mind). Situation deflected.

Tact is not my strong point. Hell, I'd go so far as to say it is my weak point, but apparently I am learning how to step in and deflect that kind of thing without it turning into something *really* ugly.

I had The Dream again last night. This is the dream which any ex-military person recognizes. You know, the one where you are back on active duty (I'm usually recalled to active duty or it turns out my retirement wasn't valid and I have to not only go back but pay back the pension they've been sending me for the past 6 years) and usually you are out of uniform in some fashion (although why the other people in your dream don't see you aren't wearing pants is beyond me).

I've been retired almost 6 effin years! It's time to stop with the trauma dreams already.

It's really hard to type with a nose repeatedly bumping your arm up.

(1) I'd call it a theory, but you have to have conducted experiments to prove it in order for it to be a theory.

Up until about a year ago I ate an awful lot of prepared food. My problem wasn't that I couldn't cook, my problem was that I couldn't plan meals. So instead of cooking the same three things over and over and over, we would go out or order in. The last November my husband was out of work for a month and I *really* didn't want to go find a job if I didn't have to, so I figured out an easy way to plan meals and have been adding more and more recipes to my repertoire. So I started using less and less processed stuff in my cooking.

About 2 months ago I decided to work my way recipe by recipe through cookies in the cookbook my mother gave me when I got married in 1983. A couple of those recipes are now definite favorites. So last weekend was Capclave. At the end of the convention, there was food left over in the con suite. Since I am one of the hostesses for the club, John and I ended up taking it home with us. On Tuesday I got sick. I wanted something sweet but I wasn't up to cooking, so I stole a package of muffins from the Capclave stuff.

I could taste the preservatives. I had never been able to taste preservatives before. So, here is my thought:

I think that all these preservatives which we eat are part of what is making us fat and unhealthy. I think that if we ate the exact same things as we currently eat but without the preservatives at the very least we would be more healthy and we might even be less fat.

Now all we need is for someone to do a government study and prove or disprove it.

Erica warned me that she might have given me the flu. I think she did. I'm going back to bed.

So I am almost done with Unseen Academicals. Parts of the book are laugh out loud funny. But I feel like it is suffering from what I like to call Heinlein syndrome (Heinlein got so popular that he was able to refuse to let his editors edit and so his last books could have used some serious editing). It is good. But it doesn't have quite the same flavor as Sir Pterry's other books.

Now, I'm not sure if that is because it really isn't quite up to snuff, or if it is because I know it was written after Sir Pterry's diagnosis of Alzheimer's and am being more critical because I am expecting the flaws. However, since I didn't find out until after I had read Nation that it was written well before the Alzheimer's and was reading it with the same critical eye and not finding the same flaws...

One of the problems I see with it is a problem that you see all of the time with writers who have long, involved, on-going series set in specific worlds. This is that there are so many nods to characters who really aren't part of the book. Bledlow Nobbs (no relation) is an example. Having read all of the books I see the humor in that, but if I had happened to pick this book up cold, it wouldn't be funny even the first time. If I had been his editor, I would have told him to cut out a batch of the one-off references to characters in other books and to expand the roles of some of the other characters, but I'm not his editor.

And I'm certainly not his publisher. For all I know, he was told to add all those other characters in in hopes of selling more books. Which I'm sure it does, but I'm also sure it weakens the current book to do that.

I've been force feeding the books to my husband by way of audio books at bed-time, and John keeps wanting Vetinari to have a romance (actually, I think he wants him to get married, but I think it helps if the romance can be extended over several books) so having Lady Margolotta show up will please him (when we finally get to that book in about 10 years time). Since I haven't finished the book yet, I can't spoil it since I don't know where that is going.

All-in-all, I am enjoying this book as I have enjoyed everything I've ever read by him, and I would put it on a par with Moving Pictures or Eric even though it doesn't seem to have the same wacky flavor as either of those. To a die-hard Sir Pterry fan I would definitely recommend it. To a new Sir Pterry reader I would say, 'Start with Guards! Guards!.

I guess I won't have to ask John how work went today.

http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/4285515.html

Edit: I didn't realize that this wasn't viewable by people who weren't members of the community. The short of it is that this is a report about the earthquake(s) in the Pacific and concerns that tsunamis will hit Hawaii and American Samoa.

So I'm sitting at my sewing machine actually getting work done when Henrietta (doggy #2) starts doing the Lassie "Timmy is in the well" dance. So I follow her. I thought she was hungry when she led me downstairs, but she turned the wrong direction and turned into the computer room. So I sat down to compose this post and she is happily curled up on her doggy bed beside me. Apparently she wanted me do computer work so she could lie down on her bed.

So John works in the Secretary's Operation Center for the Department of Health and Human Services(1). He needed to find out where the Red Cross centers were in American Samoa because of the recent fun weather they have been having. So he went to the Red Cross and with some research discovered that the centers were under the Department of Education. He made the logical leap that the centers were probably schools. So he told the big boss who told the watch officer to ask the woman at the Red Cross whom he was on the phone with if the centers were schools.

Her response? "Why do you want to know?"

So far everyone who has heard this story has had the same reaction, "Because we're Health and Human Services and we have a need to know?!"(2)



(1) These are the people who are responsible for coordinating disaster relief.

(2) Just in case it isn't obvious to those who don't work in the disaster relief field, if you are sending someone to a stricken area, it is nice is they have some idea of where to go once they get to that stricken area.

So on Tuesday I went to see Dawn. It was both wonderful and weird. Our rapport was as if we had been in contact the entire time, but we were actually strangers getting to know each other. But strangers who walked in already loving each other. I don't know how you can be both a stranger and a best friend at the same time, but we were.

Dawn and I went out for lunch and took Henrietta (my dog) with us. Luckily, it was this little hole-in-the-wall Chinese place where I could sit and watch out the window. When we arrived, it was overcast and since Hen does better in the car than out, I left her in the car. About half way through the meal I realized that we were getting just the beginnings of shadows outside, so Dawn and I took our meals out to the tables in front of the Italian restaurant next door and brought Hen out of the car before the sun actually came out. Hen appreciated my left over General Tso's Chicken and Dawn's left over Chicken with Broccoli.

Then Dawn drove us all over Carlysle and showed me the various places she had lived and places that were important to her. We chattered the entire time. Then we went back to her house and visited some more and took her dog and Henrietta for a walk around the property. Hen is so well behaved that I could leave her off the leash, but Miles is not so trustworthy. When we got back to the house her husband was in the living room smoking up a storm, so we moved out to the porch. As much talking as we did, I'm amazed that I didn't come away with a sore throat. The best part of it all is that both of us have sworn we aren't going to lose each other again and plan to see each other again over Columbus Day weekend.

I did OK last year, so let's hope I do OK this year too.

OK, not officially. You have to go a full year without a period to be officially through menopause, but I am clearly headed there. My period is a month late. Apparently Kindra being home all of the time was the only thing keeping me semi-regular and now that she is gone, my body says, "Fuck this shit." I wonder if I will start back up when she comes to see me, or if I have finished?

I've done a pregnancy test (twice, two weeks apart), and I'm in the right age range. So as far as I am concerned, I'm either a crone, or pushing cronehood really hard. I have mixed feelings about this. You see, in my head I am only 20 years old, but the calendar disagrees. And heck, look at my user icon, that's not all that out of date. I definitely don't mind giving up bleeding messily for 1 week out of 4, but being old and getting closer to dying sorta freaks me out.

I'm starting to calm down about it (you can't maintain that level of emotion indefinitely).

Last week I had some sort of contact with her every day and missed her so intensely it wasn't even the beginnings of funny. This week I've had some sort of contact with her every other day. If this is a trend, by the time she comes home for $mas I may no longer be needing to contact her on a daily basis. I'm still thinking about her every day, and still missing her like whoa, but at least I'm not trying to eat her life as bad.

The worst thing about my trying to eat her life is that I knew I was doing it, but it hurt so much to have her gone that I just couldn't control myself. So instead of driving her insane and contacting her all of the time, I've been doing things like sending her the bras she forgot to pack and gathering Kitchen stuff for her to take back and buying her a nice knife to cook with and... I may be thinking about her all of the time, but at least I'm not driving her insane with it.

Having found Dawn helps. The distraction was really good. And I really am genuinely thrilled about it.

So I've been posting about finding Dawn all over the place because I am so excited and just have to share. One of the forums I posted in was Boring People here on LJ. I got a whole batch of "that's amazing" responses, but one person said, "CLICHE". I guess life can be cliche.

I'm just so glad Dawn found me.

So John is out and I am upstairs. I hear the vacuum. "John? John?" Downstairs. The family room is totally dark, the vacuum is running and the dog is smiling at me. Don't know what she was trying to get to, but she clearly put her foot right on the switch.

I've just found my best friend from middle school. She tracked me down using one of the dozens of sites where I had put my name out there hoping she would find me and want to contact me. I can't believe it. I've been searching for her for 30 years. Her parents moved to Carlysle, PA when we were teens and I saw her once after that, but then she moved again and she lost me too. Apparently she's been looking for me since the late 70's too.

ABOUT THE WRITER
Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald.( Dave Barry is hilarious )