Tale of a Shooting Star…

As of Monday night, I’m now pretty much at the halfway mark with my current model set. Woohoo!

I came to the a couple of realizations today. The first is that I haven’t been posting much stitching-related news. I feel bad about that, but since my focus has been on unpublished models, I can’t share my progress, as exciting as it may be. 🙂 The second realization came directly on the heels of the first because, in figuring out that I haven’t been posting must stitching stuff lately, I realized that I haven’t stitched anything for me in several months.

Don’t get me wrong, I stitch the monthly ornament for the JCS ornament SAL I’m part of, but 9 months into it, you start to realize that it’s more like obligation stitching than “me” stitching. It’s often a fun little diversion, but they’re usually fairly quick and I won’t keep the end results, so it really doesn’t count. Except for this month. This month is one of the two ornaments that I’ve been waiting all year to stitch. This month is The Sweetheart Tree’s Merry Christmas Bellpull Ornament. And I decided that, instead of waiting until I had completed the model stitching assignment, I needed a little break, so I started it last night.

So there, some stitching progress. I’ll even try to do a quick scan of my very minimal progress so far at some point this week. Maybe my new rule for this month should be model stitching only on the weekends. That way, I stand some chance of actually finishing the other items on my list for this month. 😉

Kinda like paradise lost, but not. Honestly, though, it’s a good thing that this is a long weekend because otherwise I don’t think I could handle losing an entire weekend day like I did yesterday.

It started with Phoebe having done something to her throat Friday night. I have no idea what she did or when, but I just noticed when we came back from trekking up to West Chester to retrieve a server from “lockup” (that is, the nearest UPS shipping hub that was holding the server hostage pending someone being present to sign for it upon delivery – shah right!) that she didn’t seem to be able to drink water. She would go up to the bowl, dip her tongue in once and that was it. She did this three times in a row, with a minute or so in between, so I knew something was up. I didn’t really give it much thought until she started breathing oddly when we went to bed. She was laying by my feet and every couple of minutes would give this indescribable, rattling kind of “I’m having a hard time getting in a full breath” kind of sound. Of course, me being the hyer-sensitive worried furmommy that I am, I would wake bolt upright every time I heard it. Needless to say, this didn’t do much for my sleep. This would go on every few minutes until she managed to settle into a slumber. At which point I would inevitably end up waking her up by putting my hand on her chest to make sure that the reason she had stopped making the noise wasn’t because she had stopped breathing! (Again, worried mommy syndrome kicking in). Finally, I got over myself and let her be, all the while having dreams about calling the vet in the morning and hoping they had Saturday hours. Eventually, though, she would wake up and we’d go through this cycle… over and over and OVER again. All night long. Until, at 7 AM, I finally got up, took her downstairs and gave her a big chunk of margarine spread to suck on, thinking maybe it would soothe her throat and she’d stop. It didn’t, so the saga continued. Until, at some point in the morning, I heard her lapping and lapping at her water. Hallelujah, the dog is drinking, which means her throat must be better now. Lo and behold, she jumps back onto the bed, curls into a little ball at my feet and goes to sleep without any gasping noises.

Between her and poor Terry snoring at intervals (which is fairly uncommon for him), I didn’t sleep for crud. So, I didn’t manage to get out of bed until 1 PM yesterday. Which, if you know me, my weekend morning stitching ritual and my headache problems, you’d know is unheard for me. I got up, I went downstairs, ate a hearty breakfast (which was now a late lunch) and took a several hour nap on the couch. Which led to muscle stiffness and joint aching, which led to the inevitable headache, which led me to not sleep very comfortably last night, which led me to wake up with aches and pains and ultimately leads me to the headache I’ve been fighting all day. Woohoo! Go weekends!

Seriously, I think I might actually be looking forward to getting back to work on Tuesday. At this rate, I’m not sure I’ll survive the holiday! 😆

Now, back to my model stitching. With luck, I’ll be 50% done (or more!) with the project by the end of the weekend.

Evil, bad, naughty Annette! 🙂

You just had to blog about sudoku puzzles yesterday, didn’t you? *sigh* I saw a reference to them on someone else’s blog (I think it was Melissa’s) a little while ago, but I figured I had more than enough things to keep me occupied and I didn’t need anymore, so I promptly dismissed it from my brain.

Then, wouldn’t you know, Annette wrote a post about it and included WEB LINKS! Darn you! I cannot resist the simple allure of clicking on a little link. Once click and there it was – Web Sudoku in all of its webby, tantalizing, brain teaser glory. One puzzle and that was it. I was hooked. I even went so far as to immediately follow their link to Amazon.com and order two sudoku puzzle books. They shipped today and will be here in a couple of weeks (free USPS media mail shipping *grumble*).

I just cannot resist brain teaser puzzles. I hate math, but this is a simple number puzzle. Even though it’s all a matter of numbers, there is no math involved, other than counting to 9… over and over and over again. Let’s face it, folks, if you can’t count to 9, then you need to go back to preschool. 😉

So, thanks and mild grumbling go out to Annette for sharing her sudoku addiction and enabling it to be mine, as well! Yay! Grrr… 😀

Now I know some of you are not going to believe this, but I have never had a serious episode of getting soap in my eyes… until today.

There I am, in the shower. Lathering my hair with this lovely Aussie 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner that I found recently when it happened. I vaguely felt something running down my forehead. It felt like water, so no big deal. I went to wipe it away and WHAMMO! Searing pain in my eye, the likes of which I have never known before in my lifetime. I immediately start howling and jam my face under the running water of the shower. Blinking furiously, I try to rid myself of the burning liquid that I now knew to be shampoo in my left eye. Of course, at this point, my husband had come into the bathroom to find out what all the fuss was about, so I turn off the shower, open the curtain and start bawling.

Yes, I’m sure I was quite a sight at that point. A head full of shampoo that was threatening to slide down onto my face and finish off both eyes, dripping wet, sobbing loudly. Terry managed to get the eye wash and cup out of the cabinet and filled it up. I jam the cup onto my left eye, tilt my head back and roll my eyeball around in the socket like mad, trying to rinse everything out. I repeated this another four times until I gave up hope of getting rid of the burn. Of course, by this point, a little tiny bit of soap had wormed its way into my other eye, so I rinsed it out once or twice, as well.

Still in pain, still soapy and still crying, I finally gave up and turned the shower back on so that I could rinse off that evil agent that was still clinging to my hair. Bad, bad shampoo! Still desperate for relief from the chemical burn that had scorched my eye, making it a bloodshot, squinty mess, I sent Terry downstairs to retrieve my moisturizing eye drops from my purse. Surely moisturizing drops will soothe the burn, right? Wrong. I put in two or three drops only to find that the pain worsened. ARGH! You have GOT to be kidding me! Not taking no for an answer, I added two more drops, wiped the excess out of my eye, waited a few minutes and added even more. By this point, the drops were no longer aggravating my eye and since I had been crying, they actually helped restore some reasonable amount of nearly natural moisture.

With a deep sigh, I resigned myself to being in pain and looking like a hideous monster with a bloodshot eye, finished getting ready and headed into work, now thoroughly late, of course. And that’s how my Friday started. How was yours? 😆

BTW, by the time I got into work, I was actually able to open my eye most of the way and a lot of the blood vessels had calmed down. Several hours later, the torment has pretty much ceased and I’m feeling semi-normal again… at least as normal as I get. 😉

Okay, I know that a lot of you are being introduced to the ugly world of comment spam on your blogs. I’m sorry to say, I’ve been dealing with it for months, though it has gotten worse recently.

Christine D., I can trump your 5 spam comments overnight. My tally overnight was 23 comments, only 2 of which were valid. I have to approve all comments before they actually make it through my blog, but I’m getting tired of even doing that, so I think I’ll be installing a word verification plugin on my blog this weekend.

For those of you who use Blogger, many of you have already discovered the word verification feature that you can use. My only request to you (as a non-Blogger member) is, if you turn on word verification, please consider turning back on your anonymous comments. Please, please, please! I can no longer comment on so many of your blogs now, and that makes me sad. I know how much I enjoy getting comments and I’d love to be able to return the favor. Thanks! 🙂

Burger King or McDonald’s?

Well, I figured this one out for myself today. I’ve been craving a McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish for a couple of days, so we decided to go out and grab some fast food for lunch. Terry wanted an angus burger from Burger King, so I thought I would try their BK Big Fish sandwich.

And the answer is? Well, the Big Fish sandwich was much larger than the McDonalds sandwich for the same amount of money. This was a plus. And it had lettuce and onion and other sandwich-y stuff. Plus. But the tartar sauce had this vague aftertaste of mint or something to it. Minus. And there was no cheese. BIG minus.

All and all, I’ll be sticking to my tried and true McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish in the future. Maybe it has something to do with having worked at McDonald’s for a couple of summers many years ago. Or maybe not. But, for me, it all comes down to the tartar sauce. Make or break. And I like McDonald’s tartar sauce FAR better than Burger King’s.

Sorry, but when it comes to fish, the King is dead. 😉