Luke... I am your mother

I am definitely in the wrong business. I took the drapes in to the dry cleaners before dropping the girls at school yesterday. They gave me a discount of $9 per panel, because there are no pleats, just simple cleaning and pressing. Ordinarily they charge $15 a panel! I have four damask panels and four panels of that long off-white fringe that looks like Cher’s Infinite Farewell Tour. For $120, I would have had massive heart failure requiring the presence of silver-haired paramedics with twinkly eyes. For $72, I just have a stomachache.

Why do they need cleaning, you ask? I’ve gone 55 years without taking drapes to the cleaners, why start now? Because I think I discovered the source of those pesky albino moths that liked to kiss my computer screen at dark-thirty. When I took down the drapes, there were cocoons and empty pupae in the folds of the drapes. Serious ewww-ness! I am a girly-girl but not a screamy-girl, so I grabbed handful after handful of newspaper and whisked the mess into the trash.

It seemed wise to make sure there were no more surprises lurking in the rod pockets and hems.

I also drove past the new temple of football-ness on the way to work yesterday. There are big curvy steel thingies rising high into the air. Presumably this time around the Cowboys have enough money to put a lid on their stadium and keep all the stupidity inside?

No apologies to any of you who are football fans. I hate, loathe, and despise football. I went to a real rah-rah high school where if you were in the pep club, it meant that you had to stand and scream for the entire length of the game. I lasted one semester, sold my uniform, and used the money to buy the needlepoint canvas that was my Christmas present to Mom, but which I did the actual work on.

It took about three years to finish it, because we did not yet have a decent needlework shop, and the manager of the notions department at the department store was somewhat indifferent about reordering materials – until we learned that one of Mom’s co-workers at the hospital was the son of the general manager of the department store, and then I got a personal phone call from Mr. Manager asking me exactly how many skeins of DMC tapestry yarn I needed in each color, and would I like it yesterday?

I still hate football. But when I married the children’s father, I bought my wedding gown from that department store because I was so pleased with Mr. Manager.

Holy Cow, I’m ahead of the Harlot on MS3? I finished Clue 5 before I went to bed last night, and she’s mid-Clue-5 as of her posting? [OK, she finished a book. I finished the Eternal Move. And I’m still ahead?] We will chalk this up to her having three teenagers chez elle, whereas I only have one, and a fairly low-maintenance one at that.

Yesterday was my day for seeing things. I saw a bumper sticker for the Texas Archeological Society. I could be a member in good standing, after our recent move. I saw the company that dispensed my C-PAP, and got it properly fitted to my head, and reams of instructions. I saw my sleep specialist, who was alarmed that my subjective scoring on the sleepiness scale was worse than last time, until I told her I had only just picked up my machine. I get to see her again in a month.

The nosepiece on my machine is different from the one I used in my second sleep study. It looks a little like a displaced SCUBA mouthpiece, with two little jobbies that nestle in my nose. And it is wa-a-a-ay more comfortable than the other one. I didn’t quite sleep through the night, but I didn’t wake as often as last time, and there was no pain or discomfort around my upper lip, just a little weirdness as the pressure ramped up.

I have one harness to keep the contraption plugged into my face, and a second one to help keep my mouth closed. Think of the worst case of hat hair you have ever had, and multiply it by a factor of a gazillion. I haven’t tried to fluff-and-spray my hair yet. Usually I only have to wash it every other day. But if I can’t get it to stand up and salute on Day Two, that may have to change.

Oh, and I sound like Mrs. Darth Vader. [Hence the blog title.] But I woke a few minutes before my alarm, and I’ve already done the first row on Clue 6 of MS3. This has all the makings of one terrific day.

Postscript: The most important things I saw yesterday were not things. I dropped LittleBit at work and drove over to Foat-Wuth-Ah-Luv-Yew to see Secondborn and 2BDH and the Bitties.

Bliss!