New and not improved!

Although I suppose I will get used to it.  Blogger changed its format.  Getting to the drafts where I keep my punctuation was not an easy matter.  I don’t like the apostrophes and quotation marks that show up when I simply type them in as I go.  Therefore, I’ve imported ones I do like from Word, and I paste them into a blank draft so I can pick and choose while emptying out my brainpan onto a page.  This system has served me very well since the inception.

 Harrumph!

I said goodbye to a dear knitting friend last night.  Joy was a deliciously feisty lady who had a stroke last weekend and passed away at the age of 79.  (I would have said she was 18 with experience.)  She was truly well named. The staff did a good job with her makeup, but they gave her a little-old-lady hairdo, and that bugged me almost as much as the fact that her hands were still.

There is a picture of her in her obituary that looks far more like the Joy we knew and loved.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dfw/obituary.aspx?n=joy-lee-brown-stout&pid=157080917&fhid=4250

Her husband, Louie, passed away five years ago.  He was a skilled woodworker, and several of my knitting friends have umbrella swifts which he made.  The knitting shop over by my duplex had a Louie.  I do have a handy little tool which he made before his death, a dowel about six inches long with rounded ends and circles burnt in every inch.  It’s a tool for measuring wraps-per-inch, which is a simple and elegant way to classify the diameter of your handspun and compare it to commercial yarn.  Louie made one for every member of our knitting group, and Joy gave them as Christmas gifts one year.

Today is chemo-lite.  Beloved didn’t sleep well last night: up every hour for the bathroom, but thankfully not for pain.  And he was noisy in his sleep.  Right now he is catnapping on the bed behind me.  I would like to be asleep.  This was the second consecutive Wednesday of minimal sleep, and Thursdays are a long day for me.  Thankfully, the temple will be closed for two weeks after Saturday, and maybe I can catch up a little.  I know I will feel significantly more lively once breakfast kicks in.

You may recall my grumbling that they built an Omni Hotel on the space where I used to park Lorelai for $4 when I was riding the train to work but needed to drive in.  Beloved’s eldest son and bride stayed there at Christmastime and were less than pleased with the service in one of the restaurants.  I had eaten there for lunch a couple of weeks earlier with some of my coworkers and been thrilled with the food if not the speed of service.  Yesterday my attorney took me, and his paralegal, to a different restaurant at the hotel for lunch for Administrative Assistants Day/Week/Whatever.  I had a cheeseburger with my choice of cheese (goat) and Parmesan sea salt fries without the Parmesan, and the other half of my burger and fries are waiting for me in the fridge at work.

There were a lot of disgruntled people at work yesterday.  We had been informed by our office manager and managing attorney that the bonus would hit tomorrow, when in fact it will hit next payday.  I was only marginally gruntled, myself.  The raise took effect on the 14th; we will see the money on May 4.  I was really looking forward to boosting the local economy this weekend, as well as sending some of it overseas to Korea for my next doll.  And we will not be picking up the new BBQ/smoker, either.

Oh well.

This is the part where I go eat raisin bran with Beloved and give thanks for all the things which are going well, which are many and varied, and if I listed them I would be late getting him to chemo this morning and late to work.  Life is good, even if I am viewing it through slightly sleep-deprived glasses.