St. John – the 2nd day of Christmas

First, I feel the need to make it clear that today is the second day of Christmas, not the third.  You don’t start counting the 12 days of Christmas on the 25th, but on the 26th.  This is why January 6th, also known as Epiphany, is the 12th Day of Christmas, also called Twelfth Night (see also: Shakespeare’s play).  If you doubt me (why would you do that?), get out a calendar and see for yourself.  See?  I’m right.

Anyway, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, why, yes, we’ve been having a very nice Christmas.  :)  It’s been an odd Christmas.  Quieter.  Different.  We’ve got kids in the family again, particularly a treasured step-niece who has four families to divide her Christmas between, so we went to the afternoon Christmas Eve Mass instead of Midnight Mass.  This small change meant juggling around our whole schedule for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  For the first time ever in my life we opened our Christmas stockings on Christmas Eve instead of waiting for Christmas morning.  Christmas Day became an odd, formless day of hanging out with the family in between meals.   The most excitement we had was when Boy-O and AP ganged up on me Christmas morning, turning what had been a comfortable coze on the couch into me being tickled mercilessly, while wheezing helplessly with laughter and making a token attempt to defend myself by sortof flailing one arm around in the air.

A lot of us have been moving a little slower this Christmas.  Rosie fell down the steps at Aunt B’s house the day before Christmas Eve, scraped up her arm pretty badly, and twisted her knee horribly.  She had been over there helping paint Aunt B’s living room, her Christmas present to Aunt B and Uncle J.  So she spent her holiday walking with a cane, and icing her knee every twenty minutes.  Yesterday she was able to bend at least mostly comfortably for the first time in days, which was great.  Between her knee and her still-recovering back, she’s been giving the ice packs a work out this December!  I fell also, on the same day.  I caught my foot somehow when I was at the top of the steps on Mom & Dad’s front hill.  I couldn’t catch my balance again, and when I realized that I was about to take a swan dive down the steps, I managed to tip myself sideways into the ivy-covered slope of the hill.  This would have broken my fall almost entirely, if it weren’t for the small terraces Mom’s made in the hill, edged with river stones standing on edge.  Still, I got off pretty easily, with a bruise on my hip and missing some skin on one forearm.  It’s funny – when I get injured, after the being shook up part passes, I feel like a little kid showing off their latest scab or scar or whatever.  I take it around to everybody and make them admire it.  Of course, then I get things like my Dad kissing it to make it better, so maybe there’s a method to my madness.

I had grand intentions of Getting Things Done on the day after Christmas (aka The 1st Day of Christmas).  I was going to maybe finish knitting Mr. T’s socks, and at least get started on sewing myself that gray wool skirt I’ve been daydreaming about, and do some housecleaning, and maybe even a load or two of laundry.  Needless to say, none of that happened.  Well, I did clean the house some, but unfortunately just to that point where the uncleaned parts of the house look even worse, before anything looks any better.  And then somehow it was 6:30, and I needed to get cleaned up before I headed out to Mick’s birthday celebration.

Today has been one of those days at work where time just disappears, like it’s been one long, gray movie montage, and suddenly it’s five o’clock and time to go home and you think, “How did I get here?”  Because of all the holidays and things, I only have one more day here at Job2, and one more at Job1.  Today I got accidentally copied on the e-mail announcing my going away luncheons, and the collection for my good-bye gift.  I’m very excited about my new job, but still, this is hard.  I’ve been very fortunate in my co-workers every place I’ve worked.  I’d like to say that I’ll keep in touch with them, but the truth is that I’m really horrible at keeping in touch with people.  I have the best of intentions, but I never remember to call.  I write letters and then don’t send them.  I still care, I’m just awful at showing it.  So this really is good-bye.  I hate saying good-bye.

Still, it’s Christmas, and a good Christmas, a better Christmas than I’ve had in years!  Tonight is my parents wedding Anniversary (over 40 years – woot!).  All of us are going to gather at the Family Homestead, and make hors d’oeuvre-like things, and hang out.  Maybe we’ll watch a movie.  Mr. T and Sae will hopefully make an appearance, though I heard this afternoon that The Duchess and 007 won’t make it to Dayton in time.  But still, we will be together, and it will be good.  And then tomorrow there will be presents.  :D

St. Ambrose

First of all, I would like to start by thanking all of you for your amazing response to my last post.  I even got a few e-mails from friends & family members weighing in on my situation!  In the end I decided to go with the hospital job.  It was a hard decision, and I worried over it all day Monday.  I decided to sleep on it, and when I woke up Tuesday I knew what my decision had to be.  As soon as I made up my mind, all of the trouble and doubt of the previous day cleared away, and I was back to feeling pleasantly excited about the new job.  It seems like such a great opportunity – I feel a little like a child waiting for Christmas when you know a particularly delightful present is going to be under the tree.

Today and tomorrow I’m working out at the construction site for the new hospital making badges for all the contractors and others who are working on the building.  So far it’s been rather slow.  It was busy for a bit this morning, but that finished off with two really, really cute construction workers, and since then I’ve had no one.  Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit busier.

It’s been a rather exciting week at our house.  First there was my dilemma over jobs, and then Rosie seriously injured her back.  She was lifting weights, and decided to do some squats even though she knew her back has been extra sensitive lately.  Sure enough, her back went out, and since then she’s been confined to the futon in the living room.  This has proven problematic when it comes to things like, say, making it to the bathroom on the second floor.  However, we’re enormously lucky that The Absent-minded Professor just finished his college term and is home for the holidays.  He’s been waiting on Rosie literally hand and foot.  (“AP, could you put my socks on for me?”)  Little by little, with the help of ice packs, muscle relaxants, and pain killers, she’s been starting to regain a little mobility.  This afternoon she had a doctor’s appointment, which I hope will help even more.

Funnily enough, one of the side effects of Rosie’s injury has been a major uptick in the number of movies I’ve been watching.  Monday night when I came home from swing club to find Rosie incapacitated on the futon, AP had just put in Sweeney Todd to help distract her from the pain.  And while Sweeney Todd is an excellent movie, it’s maybe not the wisest choice for a situation like that.  Fortunately, I had just gotten Crazy, Stupid, Love. from Netflix, so we put that in instead, and all of us in the house, even Johnnycakes, ended up sitting around watching it together.  Just about every movie with Steve Carrell ends up being awesome, but I also have to say that I now see why Ryan Gosling inspires internet memes.  Then last night Cinder brought over Attack The Block.  I only meant to stay up a little while I finished up some internet surfage, but I ended up staying for the entire movie, and really, really liking it.  And, well, this has been fun, but I gotta start getting some sleep!

St. Jane Frances de Chantal

Somehow I misplaced a few days this week.  It’s been a bit disorienting.  Last thing I remember it was last Friday, and I was thinking about all the things that had to happen before the bed bug exterminator came on Monday (we actually ended up rescheduling for Tuesday – we needed the extra 24 hours to prep).  Then it’s all one huge blur of packing, exhaustion, coffee, and many, many plastic bags.  Now it’s suddenly almost a week later and I’m on the other side, feeling like I’m recovering from the mother of all benders.  My head hurts, my body is sore, I want to sleep all the time, and I have that feeling like I know things happened, but I don’t really remember them very well.  But little by little I’m starting to get back on my feet again.  The exhaustion fog is starting to lift, and things are starting to get put back into place.  Maybe today I’ll even get around to putting the curtains back up.  Maybe.

This is what my house looks like right now: all of the rooms are empty, echoing shells with totally empty furniture placed randomly in the space.  Drawers are out of dressers, chairs are on their sides.  There are no curtains on the windows.  A few of the rooms, mostly bedrooms, have been reassembled.  Tuesday night I got my bed put back together, and then yesterday afternoon Rosie got hers put back together too.  My clothes are back in my room again, but except for essential toiletries and a very few very important papers, everything else is still in storage.  Storage in this case means the basement, which is full literally to the rafters with all our stuff.  It is full top to bottom, all the way from the bottom of the steps to the far wall, with one tiny walkway through.  This walkway has already been vitally important.  Tuesday night as I was trying to get my bed reassembled so that I could sleep, I discovered that my pillows had been bagged up and taken down to the basement with everything else.  When I went down to find them, they were on the top of the pile in the absolute farthest corner and I had to figure out a way to fight my way back to retrieve them.  I think it’s a very fortunate thing that I’m not claustrophobic.

Everything is sealed in plastic.  A few things are in the XL and XXL Ziplock bags, but buying those in quantity gets very expensive very fast, so the majority of stuff is in plastic garbage bags sealed with zip ties.  At the beginning, every bag was conscientiously labeled, but as we got down to the wire, that went out the window.  It’s was a very interesting guessing game yesterday trying to figure out which bag had my curtains in it.  These curtains are pretty important – my bedroom has three walls of windows, plus two glass French doors into Rosie and Johnnycakes’ rooms.  Last night I had enough energy to find the bag of curtains (we still haven’t found Rosie’s bedroom curtains, or the curtains for the living room), and to put them through the dryer to decontaminate them, but not enough to actually hang them up.  Hopefully I’ll be able to do that today.  But we’ll see.

When the exterminator came, he said we had prepped very, very well, and that he thought the treatment would probably be very effective.  However, we’ll have to wait and see.  The awful thing about bed bugs is that there are many pesticide-resistant strains out there, so while poison will kill most bed bugs most of the time, sometimes it doesn’t.  The only way to know for sure is to just live in the house, and see if any of us get bit again.  Most places need to have the exterminator out to retreat problem areas at least two or three times.  The good thing is that we won’t have to do the whole house prep for those, just the affected areas.

The heroes of the week are my family.  Indy and AP came and worked like dogs right along with us, staying until 3am, then going home to sleep for a few hours, and returning at 7:30am again to help us finish up.  Boy-O helped whenever he could, and AnniPotts too.  Mariah came twice to help, which is a amazing since she’s pretty much busier than God.  She also brought us a casserole, which I thought was very sweet.  Also, I think that’s the first time anyone’s brought me a casserole when I was in a time of need.  People brought my parents food when my brother died, but this is a first for me personally.  Mom and Dad had us over to dinner on Monday, serving the meal out in the back yard so we didn’t have to worry about changing into clean clothes before we came.  And then there’s Aunt C, who financed the exterminator and provided us with the desperately needed emotional & logistical support (she gave us a plan, which is so huge), and Aunt M, who helped finance all those plastic bags.  I remember how alone I felt the last time I had to deal with bed bugs.  This time has been the direct opposite of that, and I am so grateful.

God willing, hopefully the bed bugs are gone.  Now we wait and see.

St. Lawrence

(c) Gail Fischer Photography

At long last, my dears, I have Sae’s official wedding pictures to show you!  And just so you know, all of these pictures are copyright Gail Fischer, Mr. T’s aunt, who generously gave them her services as a wedding photographer as her wedding present.  This is a picture of our whole family just after the wedding.

(c) Gail Fischer Photography

Here is Sae helping Fleur get ready.

(c) Gail Fischer

And me helping Sae get ready.

(c) Gail Fischer Photography

Fixing the veil.  Sae’s earrings and the bead flowers in her hair were hand made by Indy.

(c) Gail Fischer Photography

Isn’t she lovely?

(c) Gail Fischer photography

All the girls outside just before we walked down the aisle.  Note that Sae is not holding her bouquet.  This is because when we got into cars to come down to the church, we left the bouquet behind and 007 had to run back and get it.

(c) Gail Fischer Photography

 Mr. T and his best man waiting at the back of church.

(c) Gail Fischer photography

So happy!

(c) Gail Fischer photography

Before the altar.

You may kiss the bride!

(c) Gail Fischer photography

The Kiss of Peace with Fleur

(c) Gail Fischer Photography

And with me – Sae really likes this picture.  She thinks it shows off the veil nicely, and I should use it on my ravelry project page.

(c) Gail Fischer Photography

And then off to the reception!

(c) Gail Fischer Photography

Aren’t my parents cute?  They took ballroom dance classes together just so they could dance at Sae’s wedding.

(c) Gail Fischer Photography

And they lived happily ever after!

St. Teresa de los Andes

This afternoon as I was sitting at my computer, vetting songs for tonight’s DJing and thinking about whether I’d rather blog or work on some rather urgent housework, AP came into the room (he had been over hanging out with Rosie) and said, “A bunch of us are about to go see X-Men: First Class – wanna come?”  I dithered a little (that pesky sense of duty, plus general scarcity of money), but when he said it was still matinee prices, I thumbed my nose at my sense of duty and went.  Rosie, AnniPotts and I piled into the back seat of AP’s old Volvo, Indy grabbed the front seat, and we headed out.

We got exactly two blocks before AP took a speedbump a little fast, and this happened:

That’s one of the support struts (or whatever they really call them) of the car, now poking up through the back dashboard, right behind where Rosie’s head was.  It turns out that soon after AP bought this car about two years ago, he was informed by his mechanic that the car’s body was basically rusting out beneath him.  It was only a matter of time before it gave completely in some way, and that would be the end of the car.  (Which explained why the car’s owner had been willing to part with it for so little money.)  It seems that the day was today.

Here’s another view, complete with AnniPotts reenacting her shocked surprise, and Dad looking on.  We were so close to home that, after some consultation with Rosie (who Knows about Car Things), AP just carefully drove it home again.  So far AP seems to be taking this in his philosophical stride.  He knew it was coming, after all.  And you have to admit that if your car is going to start to break into bits while you’re driving it, while you’re going less than 20mph two blocks away from home is not a bad time to do it.  Much better than, say, gonig fast on the highway far from help.  So things could be much worse.

Still…