We look, she said, like we've been heavily sedated

In which our intrepid heroine cobbles together a series of drafts and submits them for your enjoyment, eye-rolling, astonishment, and/or general mockery.

Notes from Thursday:
I'm still not thinking like a photographer, or I'd have snapped before and after pictures. LittleBit and I began our day-off-together with half hour massages at the local massage therapy school. It was her first massage, my umpteenth. I started getting massages about a year after my mother died. The title of today's post is from what LittleBit said after we walked back to the car.

When we were done, I booked a full-body massage for my birthday next month. And we dropped my red leather tote off at the shoe repair shop to see if he can fix the place where lugging 40-50 lbs of *stuff* on a regular basis, has blown out the bottom. He didn't look hopeful, and I'm thinking that I have just repurposed it as a lovely red leather knitting bag that will stay home and hold WIPs. Even with what I paid for it, it's less than one of those lovely Lantern Moon [?] bags would have set me back.

Between the shoe repair shop and home there is now a baklava bakery, and we came home with samples of the traditional baklava and small pans of pistachio baklava and something called harisa that has a blanched almond pressed into the top of each square.

I'm not always happy about change, but if it involves a variation on a food I love, or something with ingredients that I know I like, that's different.

LittleBit is taking a nap, after washing down her baklava samples with a good slug of water. I'm ready for a mug of milk and a doze and a nice stretch of knitting. But first some lunch: the last of the salmon, cut into squares and layered on party pumpernickel that's been lurking in the freezer way too long. And a Jonagold apple, my second-favorite after Pink Lady. I'm amazed at how a blitz in the microwave can resurrect bread that's past its prime. The leftover brownies are not even tempting; I guess I'll have to pop them into ziploc snack bags and throw them into the freezer for lunches next week. Today I only want to eat things that are healthy.

This, too, shall pass...

Notes from the cusp of Thursday and Friday:
Memo to Ms. Knitingale: You are not allowed to be so funny at 12:51 am. I realize you were funny much earlier, but that's when I finished the movie [mmmm, Tommy Lee Jones, am I happy to live in TX or what?] and logged on while waiting for the milk to kick in and read about the deer not-vomiting on your feet? shoes? My kid is sleeping, and I'm trying not to howl with laughter and wake her up.

One of the girls threw up on my feet once. [Once was enough.] She was about ten, and there was some sort of bug going around, and wouldn't you know, she got it. And I was standing in the hallway talking to one of her siblings when she came barreling around the corner toward her bathroom. And I was in the way. And unlike LittleBit, who is possibly the tidiest barfer in the known universe, well let's just say this child's talents lie in other directions. She had the most hopeless, horrified look on her dear little face as she opened her mouth to ask me to please move, and something other than words came flying out.

Firstborn had her very first boyfriend over, and they were sitting demurely on the front couch, and he cracked up when he heard me say "Oh bleep, honey, why did you throw up on my feet?" I don't think any of my kids had ever heard me use barn language before. Or ask such a ridiculous question, for that matter.

Notes from Friday:
One of LittleBit's friends spent the night on Thursday, and we all watched Wednesday night's movie together, to much howling and ice-cream-eating. "Man of the House" with Tommy Lee Jones. Not as brilliantly deadpan a performance as in "Men in Black"; he actually loosened up and got goofy in this one.

Notwithstanding that the girls are teenagers, both woke around 9:00, and we headed to the YMCA to work out. I did ten minutes on the treadmill and 20 on the recumbent bike and about an hour on the various instruments of torture in the weight room. Then we came home, and while they cleaned up, I found the article on the local artisan chocolatiers, and we had ourselves a little road trip.

We also hit Sam Moon's, a local shopping institution that in spite of living in Texas for nearly 30 years I'd always managed to miss before, and got two purses and a pair of sunglasses for LittleBit, and a new bag for me.

We did all kinds of shopping for her on Thursday: hit the recycled-fashionables shop for her, where they sell trendy things that the rich brats wore once and got tired of, and got her two pairs of heels for church, and some leggings and a ruffly skirt to wear over them [not for church, I hasten to add], and new jeans, and then to Steinmart where we got her a Harve Benard jacket and a Jones New York black pencil skirt and a white linen blouse and a lovely 50's-retro skirt that Donna Reed would have loved, all in black and/or white.

This kid has way better taste than I did when I was her age, even though I was making all my clothing from good patterns and good fabrics. Part of it, I think, is having four older sisters, and part of it is having a mother who is more into fiber and fashion than my own mother was. Mom had great taste, but as we lived in Idaho there were no opportunities to satisfy it. I remember when she made herself a pantsuit [back when pantsuits were new] from a Bill Blass pattern and looked *terrific* in it.

A flashback to Tink with me Tuesday:
If Fiberjoy can have her "walk with me Wednesday"s, then I claim Tuesdays! Made lots of progress on LittleBit's sleeves, both during my breaks at work and at Knit Night. Noticed on one of my work-even rows tonight that my count was off. Turned the needle over and comprehended that I'd dropped half of one two-stitch cable element, about two rows back. *sigh*

I tinked that back and more or less repaired it. As I reached for my row counter, I discovered that the preceding row should have had an increase on each edge. *deeper sigh*

At which point I realized that I was suddenly very tired. Work has been exhilarating and intense; my backup, the data clerk, has been on vacation since early afternoon last Thursday. Which means that I have been answering phones, pulling faxes, and entering all the new lawsuits into our system. But the cool thing is that the class I took last week has inspired me to tweak my paperflow management [I have no idea if this is making sense to anybody but me; just nod and smile] and making me both more efficient and more effective.

So while yes, I'm extremely tired, I've also been extremely productive, and reasonably cheerful into the bargain. I'm home, and I'm safe, and I'm loopy with fatigue. I think I have just enough energy left to take out two rows on each sleeve, adjust the row counter and my post-it placemarker on the graph, eat a brownie, and enjoy a mug of warm milk before lights out.

Further musings on Fiberjoy's comments of last Sunday:
Oh yeah. That whole "Thy will be done" thing does not come easily for me. I would not be at all surprised to learn that Brother Right is deaf, and has his eyes closed so that he can't see God signing to him.

[When I was in the interpreting program, one of my friends was married to a deaf man. And when they fought, she would close her eyes and fold her arms. Talk about giving somebody the "silent treatment"!]

Or he might be somewhere close, with his fingers in his ears, saying "La la la, I can't hear You." I have been known to do that myself. Though not so much since I started knitting, because I might accidentally invent a home lobotomy kit.

I came home from church on Sunday and foraged some lunch. Then I sat down with my scriptures and did what I should have done, first thing. And then I tinked that row and a half. One of the things I realized today is that if I'm tinking a single row of cables, I don't have to put them in their original order. I can just leave them twisted on the left-hand needle and *carefully* knit or purl them back up when I get to them.

Old knitter. New tricks.

Notes from today:
OK, y'all, I think we're caught up. This is going to be another busy one. Swimming at 10:00, yoga with Firstborn and middlest-granddaughter at 11:30, and a wedding reception at 6:00. I'm tired just thinking about it! And, I fear, precious little knitting today. I need to take out about four rows on one sleeve, as I made the same mistake as on Tuesday. I've fixed one of the sleeves but not the other.

Had the monthly dinner last night with Brother Sushi, at RockFish. My turn to buy. I had a cup of the red pepper crab soup, and the crab penne, and insufficient self-discipline to save half for lunch today as I normally would have done. We'll blame it on the workout. Yeah, that's it!