The Neon Nurse's Charting

An unusual amount of the tasks and projects I have been trying to do forever seem to be coming together. This vaguely worries me. But I'll take it.

A chore I just finished involved sorting through four boxes of books sent to me by a small library in Colorado. (It's a little sideline of my regular bookbiz; I act as a volunteer broker and sell a few books for non-profits like schools and libraries.) We have a joke that it isn't a REAL booksale unless you find copies of Elements of Style, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Bridges of Madison County. There were none of those in the lot, but there was...a dictionary. *sighs* Out of the four boxes, there are SEVEN books that are worth an attempt to sell.

Anyone have a friend born in 1956 who really likes words? This 1956 Webster's New 20th Century Unabridged is in fairly nice shape and has a cool embossed cover. About 5" thick and heavy! $5 (that goes to the library) plus postage, gimme a shout.

You can always see all our books at http://www.neonhearts.com If you want.

Earlier today I posted something on a LiveJournal group called Metaquotes, which I had MEANT to do several days earlier, but somehow had not. I explained my lapse thusly:

"...as we all know, I have the laser-like focus of a kitten with ADD on catnip crack in a yarn store full of crickets.

On a good day."

Sadly, that is not much of an exaggeration, because as I was chatting with Damaris a little while ago, something she said made me suddenly realize I had FORGOTTEN to take Mike to his doctor's appointment for his check-up. An appointment I had to make because of forgetting the LAST one....

My only excuse is that I have been working really hard at the Living Room Project. (Well, and also the yarn and cricket thing.) In my defense, I DID get the sailfish repaired and placed on his new wall, and the top of the entertainment center put back together.



I had been planning to catch up on some emails tonight, but instead I am going to go rest my brain at Damaris's house, watching a few episodes of Season 3 of The Sopranos. That's always good for an attitude adjustment!

Here in my own little computer corner, where it is always a little colder in winter than anywhere else in the house, it is now hotter. My frog on the wall says it is 88 degrees. Yes, I am in the same room as the air conditioner, but the air circulation is not optimum, I suspect.

I tried out the glue I bought to fix my sailfish snout. It said on the package that it sticks strongly and quickly to everything but human skin. Today must be Opposite Day.

Minor Things kept going wrong in an irritating way all day. Or maybe it was just me...at one point I caught myself staring intently at a bookcover, trying to find the bit that said what address I was supposed to be mailing it to. This is not what we in the biz like to call Productive.

Also I have been cranky and grouchy to my whole family all day. I suck as a role model and possibly also as a human being. Witness the self-pity inherent in the system.

Bottom line is that I seem to have overdone things a bit Saturday and Sunday. My face and hair are okay, but the rest of me hurts. I already take so much aspirin I'm starting to develop a "Bayer" tattoo across my chest. Now I am starting to regret being so brave and strong when I was in town and NOT stopping to pick up some blackberry brandy....

Oh, screw it, I'm off to town.

Found a light kit for the fan. Took the base apart, connected the wires, went to screw it back together...and found that my eyeball measurement of the two bases were...about what you would expect from MY eyeballs, accuracy wise. Sigh. About 1/2" off. And the doggone light kit was only $2!! Wah!

Also, the epoxy and other goodies I bought to help repair the fish have mysteriously vanished into thin air. I think Caro helpfully put them away before going to town to do some (more unpaid) work at school, and I am too tired to read her mind and learn where they are.

At least I have managed to make a path to the basement stairs, so I can go get some books I need to mail tomorrow. So long as I can manage to crawl back UP them, it's all good!

Yay, today is supposed to *only* 99 degrees. Nice drop from the heat of the beginning of the week.

Yesterday I guess several planets came together or something, and we were finally able to make some major strides in our Living Room Project. One of the obstacles had been a treadmill that weighed about eleventy hundred pounds, that we wanted the World's Best Son-in-law Nigel(1) to come help us shift from one side of the room to the other. But before we did that, we moved the desk/bunk combo (all by our ownselves!) halfway across so I could do another long-hanging project. (*tries and fails to think of a good "I'll be in my bunk" joke. Moves on.*)



Unfortunately when I bought these fixtures (back in the 20 minutes we felt flush after getting the tax refund), I didn't notice they came without "light kits", the little cluster of bulb holders that give you actual room light. So now I have to go try to find chrome ones. Still, this one is pretty, and it works, two very good things.

Today we are busy putting things back in new places, cleaning as we go. At this minute I am resting before starting the biggish job of rehanging the sailfish. Which has, of course, turned itself into a more complex job because it slipped off the box I had it sitting on to measure it, and the nose broke! So I have to go buy some epoxy glue and putty....

(1) In case anyone doubts Nigel's qualifications for this title, in addition to lifting heavy objects yesterday, he insisted on helping out with an unexpected emergency which was WAY above and beyond the call.

You may remember me mentioning Sheila, one of our dogs. She was actually crazy, and not in a cute, endearing way, I'm afraid. Sheila was a rescue we took in, but despite intense effort (from both sides), she just never got really...normal. She bit several family members over the years, appointed herself the Fun Police in the turn-out pen and barked like mad when the other dogs tried to play, and in the past few years refused to come in the house at all, in any weather conditions, unless dragged (or when she found a way to BREAK in). Her one saving grace was that if Mike went into the pen and caught her, she would reluctantly go on a walk with him.

So yesterday when Nigel and Damaris showed up, they noticed right away that Sheila was NOT barking at them in her usual hysterical volume 11 way. She was dead, laying on the ground beside the ramp where the dogs go in and out of the house, and in a strange position. Her head was sort of tucked under her chest with her face down, almost like she had fallen off the ramp. (Or was PUSHED?) She's been eating, they had water, all the others are fine. Kind of a mystery. Well, she WAS our oldest dog, so who knows?

As it has been so very hot lately, her remains were not in the best condition they could have been, and I'll just stop right there. But while Nigel did the furniture moving, Caro went to dig a hole. As soon as he was done inside, he hurried out to help finish the job, despite it being...well, really gross.

Once the sad task was done and the pen cleaned up a bit, we put the two who are more outside dogs (Appy and Climber would fight to the death if they ever got the chance) back in. What was sad and weird is that Buddy and Appy sniffed around a little bit...and then they started to frisk and play, as if they were celebrating being able to do it would being scolded.

Bye, Sheila. I hope you'll learn how to have fun in your next life.

"Today is National Day of the American Cowboy. The U.S. Senate passed the resolution May 12. U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Denver, was an original co-sponsor of the measure."

So Cowboy Up!



Or CowGIRL Up, if you prefer!



I have already done so, by getting up and getting hard to work first thing, before bnreakfast even! Yesterday I sorted out a lot of boxes of things to go out to the shed...but the prevailing winds have tended to be from the south lately. Since the front door FACES south, and the outside temps are over 90 by just 9 o'clock and over 100 by noon, opening the front door anytime during the day pretty much ruins all the hard work the poor little air conditioner has tried so hard to do.

So up and at 'em, me. Boxes on porch, check. Front door closed and locked, check. NOW turn AC on--check!

Tired now.

According to the NOAA site, it was 107 degrees in Lamar when we got home yesterday at 5 pm. It was still 101 just before sundown.

Naturally this was the day Mike had a braces appointment in Garden City, Kansas, and we'd decided to make a mini-vacation out of it and take all the kids to the zoo there.

Surprisingly, it wasn't that bad. I will put up a link to some of the pictures later. (I am making myself work on it only a little bit at a time, in between doing actual work.)

For now, here is a very amusing sign we passed along the way.

John asked why I never post any pictures of me. I thought about answering how I was like a shy and delicate flower and trembled at the thought of anyone noticing me...and you can all just get up off the floor and quit laughing now.

The more truthful answer is that I am usually the one WIELDING the camera, so I don't get to take too many of myself. But I went hunting and found some from Mothers' Day:



So...that's me, eh? And Damaris, my eldest. And my Mothers' Day flowers the pesty pup keeps digging up.

I was feeling slightly pusher-y about putting in all these pictures of my assorted crazy descendants. But then I got to thinking, grandparents are something of a minority in the blogging life, so those of us who are have to hold up the side, eh?


That's Marisa as the lovely spokesmodel, twin Morrissey (who got the wand out of her nose with no trouble), beauteous daughter Damaris and of course Mad Scientist Zach, all standing in front of a big Pallet O' Potter.

Of course this is not an actual abandoned child, but my grandson Zach, passing the weary hours until midnight when he could at last achieve his dream, a copy of HP6.

I forgot to say last time that this pic and the one of the girlie who apparently had a tragic mishap with her wand were both taken by my daughter Damaris, who is also responsible for the children in question.

When Wands Attack!

(This is, of course, Morrissey, from the other night at the store.)

My timing, though accidental, was excellent.

On Friday, Caro and the local public library finished up their joint summer reading program with a Harry Potter Party. Games, prizes, costumes, the works. It was well attended by excited children and an assortment of exhausted adults. I had to leave early, though, because some friends of ours were having a yard book sale and I had to go be helpful there.

I was helpful until I had helped myself into a good approximation of the Jellylegs Jinx. Went home and rested until it was time to go to the Midnight Selling of the Book at Wal-mart. Caro says two years ago there was a special table set out, and everyone in the waiting line chatted and had fun. So we came with our young ones, and a CD of Harry and the Potters, and glow stick wands, ready for some wizard rocking. But this year, the Wal-mart employees would barely admit that some sort of sale of some book or other MIGHT be happening after midnight.

So the small crowd just stood around in little quiet groups, a few fiddling with their wands, which didn't really glow that much under the fluorescent lighting. Right around midnight someone came out towing a pallet of HP books. The crowd of about 25-30 people walked over, picked one out, and went to stand in the check out lines. It was all sadly muggle-ly mundane.

I stayed up reading until time to take some aspirin. Went to sleep, got up, said Ow, took some more, went back to bed with the book. That accounted for most of Saturday. So it was lucky that, on a day when I really needed to lay down and let my legs recover from too much exertion, I had something special to keep me entertained as I did it.

Non-spoiler observation: I liked it. JKR improved in the areas that bothered me so much with the last one, so I was satisfied.

Yesterday it was at least 105 here, maybe more. When it finally dropped below 100 I went back to my friends' sale and took away another carload of books. So I am somewhat tired again today. But I have many new books to sort through, so that's a good thing!

I haven't posted this week because nothing much of general interest has been happening. I sell my books, (ooh, yesterday we sold a $100 one and a $150 one!) pack and mail my books, and putter around working on the big living room re-derangement project. Can you stand the excitement?
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It's bad enough to get those spam-calls from mortgage companies. But I've noticed lately that if I check the Caller ID record, I'm getting two or three in a row from some companies. At first I thought maybe that was how their dialer was programmed, but it seemed awfully inefficient. Then I realized a more likely scenario. Phone workers are calling up and getting the parrot. That's our answering service message that goes, "Rrrawk! Pretty caller! Pretty caller! Raaawk! Leave a message, get a cracker! PRETTY caller!!" and so on.

I think they are listening to that and leaning over to their buddy in the next cubicle and saying, "You gotta call this one...."
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Damaris made me laugh and laugh last night. She was telling me of all the trials she had to endure at her first day of Girl Scout Day Camp, being the rookie leader who all the more experienced ones pass the crummy tasks off to. "Everything is running so badly," she complained, "the way you know it wouldn't if *I* was in charge." It's such a Damaris thing to say. And no less endearingly egotistical just because it's perfectly true.

If it helps set the background, this is the child we started telling when she was six, "Honey, today's not your day to run the world...."
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MIke explained to us last night, after stuffing himself on the salmon we broiled for dinner, that he could not eat any salad, because he would 'splode'. And then went on to detail how that would result in body parts scattered all over the living room.

I think I might have to stop letting him watch either the Channel 7 News, or Cartoon Network.
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Speaking of Mike, I must remember to ask his orthodontist next week how it is that salmon, steak, pork chops and pizza do not get caught in Mike's braces, but other forms of food he doesn't like are such horrible braces magnets....

I have four kids frolicking in the pool just now, and so it is momentarily blissfully silent inside the house. I'm going back and forth between working here at the computer (and doing e-comm stuff) and working on my living room project.

As you may recall, I started a push back in March to completely re-derange everything. That ran a little slow because of the knee problems, but I have been slowly pecking away at it.

On Wednesday, I finally got down to the last layer on the old fainting couch (circa 20s or 30s, we think), and pulled the removable half of the top off. I had vaguely remembered there were some pictures stored in there, but oh, my, what a treasure trove I found! It was like a time portal back to the 80s and 90s, and in a few cases, even earlier!

There are pictures of Mike as a baby (including his newborn shot!), ditto my grandson Zach, photos of the three big kids when they were all still at home, long lost but not forgotten pets, a boatload of tae kwon do events, plus some even older, like my 24th and Damaris's 4th birthday.

We think maybe the batch of those pics were some that were Damaris's that she left with us for safekeeping at some point, for some forgotten reason. This is wonderful because about, oh, 10 or 1l years ago we had the first of several basement floods (this one caused by the hot water tank breaking) and I lost almost my entire collection of photographs. So these few non-lost ones are now extra special.

I am going to experiment with making copies by using my digital camera. I do HAVE a scanner, but it's old, and I don't have any desk space for it, and blahblahblahlazycakes. I will try very hard not to pic spam you all into gibbering madness. Or no more so than any of you already might be.

Color me impressed.

As you may recall me mentioning, we live in a fairly remote rural area, and sometimes when it's stormy, the power goes out. This is an annoying thing in general, but worse when you work on computers and can lose hard-slogged work at the whim of the gods of electrical connectivity.

So we bought a battery backup thingie a few years ago, and when it started getting old and crotchety (as they do after a few years), last fall we got a big shiny one made by APC, which has enough battery power for both our set-ups plus the hub and router and all. It cost about $100 with the shipping.

Our electrical company provides (for a modest monthly fee) something called a Storm Trapper that is like a surge protector for the whole house, so with that and the surge protection that comes with the battery pack, we felt pretty secure. Except (as you also probably remember) the phone line does NOT feed through the Storm Trapper, so that went a surge came in on that, the poor battery pack had to sacrifice itself for the good of the other appliances.

Right, cutting to the chase. When I contacted the APC company, they emailed back promptly to say that the warranty was still good and if I shipped back the old one, they would send me a new one. In fact, if I wanted to provide a CC number, they would cross ship, not even waiting for mine to arrive!

So I sent the old one via UPS on June 29, and just a few minutes ago UPS drove up with the replacement!

Moral of the story, if you need battery back-up and/or surge protection, APC is a good place to get same.

I did a lot of posting on LJ today, but lots of it was silly quizzes and stuff. In order not to clog up people's mailboxes, here are the highlights.
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11:15 When I woke up this morning, I was having a dream where there was a commercial playing in the background, and one of the voices on it was Walter Brennan. So I had to lay in bed for an extra five minutes trying to remember what TV show he had famously starred in when I was a kid.... (That was one of the quizzes.)
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2:15 Whew, I just reassembled our smoker on the patio and then inserted a large beef brisket, with the intentions of feasting tonight before going to the fireworks show. It's sunny out there!
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3:30 OK, HERE'S a site that will keep a television fan enertained for hours:

http://www.poobala.com/crossoverlist.html

Because of chatting with Armoire_man and also my clone, another odd factoid bubbled up in my brain. Had I not heard that the three shows Petticoat Junction, Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies were located in the same TV universe? Yes, it was true--and also Hogan's Heroes!!

But there are lots and lots and lots of shows where there were crossovers written in. Go and look and be amazed!
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3:45 Someone else had a meme going around asking you to list happy things.
I liked how my happy things I posted for my friend Dawn came out, so I am posting them here too. She asked for sensory pleasures:

Sight: As an amateur photographer, I can be entranced by how light falls on and/or shines through just about anything. With a thunderstorm every night for a week now, we've been seeing some really good mixed clouds, sometimes with rain, sometimes at sunset.

Sound: Hmm. Maybe I will stick with my storm week theme. We have a metal roof, so when it rains, it sounds AMAZING.

Touch: Mike sometimes comes in and snuggles me to wake me up. He sys, "I want some of your warm skin." The other night we were sitting on the porch watching the approaching storm, and we scooted close so we could both get some of the other's warm skin.

Also, just as it is starting to rain after a hot day, if you walk on a sidewalk the sun has been shining on, wisps of warmth and steam rise up around your legs, sort of playing tag with the cool breeze coming off the storm front. That's neat.

Taste: If there was hail with the storm, the bruised green smell is so strong it's almost a taste. (Wait, I should have saved that for Smell!)

Also, I once said good sushi tastes like a kick in the nose feels. Except in a good way. I like sushi.

Smell: I live across the road from an alfalfa field. When it's in bloom and the wind is from the south...well, heaven must smell just like that.
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7:20 We have had to transfer the brisket to another venue. Partway through the cooking process the heating element in the smoker burned out. Oh, well, I paid $5 for it 13 years ago (I remember the auction because I was hauling newborn Mike around in one of those chest carrier thingies) so I can't say I didn't get my money's worth out of it.

On the plus side, the radar is showing clear skies from here to the mountains, so barring any big changes the fireworks show should be a go. Also, we have achieved cherries.

Excellent holiday proceding on schedule.
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10:45
We are back from the mad fireworks extravaganza, over near the Sand and Sage fairgrounds. It was the usual reasonably good show, slightly different this year because they seemed to have deployed some of the lesser light-ups in alternate launch spaces, possibly to give a more surround-sound look and feel to the show. We weren't sure about this, but our county (maybe the whole state?) has restricted personal fireworks to things that do not fly up in the air or make a seriously loud noise. And yet there were HUNDREDS of those kinds of fireworks going off all over the designated area, and surely not EVERYONE went down across the border to Texas to buy illicit firepower?

Anyway, probably 1/4 of our 9,000 citizens were parked all around the ballfield, fairgrounds, high school, ALCO parking lot and all the streets in between, lighting off their own stuff while they waited for the real show. Which wasn't bad, really. I even saw one I don't think I've ever seen before--a sphere with a secondary charge that formed a perfect green cube inside it.

Anyway, we found a great parking spot where there weren't any street lights shining in our eyes, it didn't rain, the breeze kept the bugs away and the only thing bad at all was Mike got his fingertips pinched in the car door a little.
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Hope yours was just as fun and fulfilling!

Boy, there's nothing like having a day when you don't HAVE to be any certain place by a certain time, you can just plug along and do stuff at your own lollygagging pace! And tomorrow is another one!!

What I have mostly done today so far is catch up on old email and sort some boxes of Stuff. I also scored an IMAX NASCAR DVD for Mike on eBay (Did you know Sunday is often the best day of the week to get a bargain deal on eBay? People are out and about instead of home at the computer, so there are fewer other bidders to compete with!) and put up a poster for him, the big Polar Express one.

I noticed something different about my legs recently. They still hurt, but in a new way. It took me a bit to figure it out, but I think it's changed from just hurting on an ongoing basis to hurting because of being used. When I first get up in the morning, they only hurt a little, which is a big change. And when I walk around, I find I am actually bending my knees and flexing my feet and ankles, rather than shuffling and lurching along lock-kneed like I'm wondering where I can pop in for a nice little snack of "BRAAAAAAAIINS!!!!"