Tale of a Shooting Star…

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. 😉

So, I broke down and called to make a doctor’s appointment today. I’ve been having pain in my left hip joint on and off for a couple of weeks. I’m fairly sure it’s bursitis (swollen bursa sacs in the joint – the bursae help lubricate the joint, I think), as I was diagnosed with that back in high school. I’ve had problems in the past on the 4-hour car ride to my parents’ house and it used to set in around hour 3. The doctor told me before that I could take a mega-dose of four 200mg tablets of ibuprofen before the ride to help keep the pain at bay. I figured I had it licked when I didn’t have any pain on the way up to Connecticut.

The past couple of days were okay, until… youch! There it was, starting before lunch and lasting most of the day. Now, you have to understand that I have three strikes against me for developing a problem in my hips. I’m a side sleeper (yes, I know I should sleep with a pillow between my knees, but that kinda hinders the snuggling process a tad :wink:), I cross my legs when I sit – left over right AND I’m a computer programmer by day and a stitcher by night, so I sit on my behind all day.

Anyway, we’ll see what the doctor says. I’m sure I need more exercise, but when I have trouble just standing up at times, it’s tough to make myself walk normally and DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) is right out. I’m glad that I was able to get in with the P.A. on Friday. I like her a lot, as she helped me deal with my migraines by getting me into physical therapy for my neck and shoulders and giving me the prescription that will knock out the bad ones once they’ve started.

But, I digress. And I need to get off of the computer for the night. Those models aren’t going to stitch themselves (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it :lol:)!

There’s nothing much to report. We drove to southern New Jersey on Saturday afternoon to visit with Terry’s parents. We got home around 10:00 PM, watching some T.V. and went to sleep.

I did several loads of laundry today whilst model stitching for hours. There’s a lot more of that to come, as there are several parts to my current assignment and at just under 33% completeion right now, I’m think that I’m a bit behind at the moment. I have a feeling that this coming Labor Day weekend will be a marathon stitching weekend. With any luck, I can complete another 33% of the project. Completion of all parts is too much to hope for, even in an extended weekend. I’d be hurting after a true marathon stitch like that!

As usual, I can’t share my progress with you. Sorry! Someday I’ll be able to post pictures, but in the meantime, you’ll have to be complacent with my vague updates. LOL.

I have to chuckle to myself at the recent posts on other stitcher’s blogs about trying to get back to a rotation. I’ve truly given up on that for the rest of the year, I believe. It’s pretty much emergency and deadline stitching at this point, with the model project taking priority, then a small baby sampler due at the end of September (which I don’t have a prayer of finishing in time). After that, it will be the Christmas Ornament exchange from the Stitching Bloggers Exchanges board. And then two gifts for Christmas time. Plus I’ll have to finish all of the ornaments I’ve stitched this year into a giftable form. That will be a marathon finishing weekend. 😉

So, yeah, any sort of rotation or stitching for myself is completely out of the window until 2006. It’s already been a couple of months since I’ve finished stitching anything for myself anyway, so I’m used to it by now! This seems to be how every fall progresses for me since I’ve gotten back into hard core stitching. 🙄

In the hospital the relatives gathered in the waiting room, where their family member lay gravely ill.

Finally, the doctor came in looking tired and somber. “I’m afraid I’m the bearer of bad news,” he said as he surveyed the worried faces. “The only hope left for your loved one at this time is a brain transplant. It’s an experimental procedure, very risky but it is the only hope. Insurance will cover the procedure, but you will have to pay for the brain yourselves.”

The family members sat silent as they absorbed the news. After a great length of time, someone asked, “Well, how much does a brain cost?”

The doctor quickly responded, “$5,000 for a male brain, and $200 for a female brain.”

The moment turned awkward. Men in the room tried not to smile, avoiding eye contact with the women, but some actually smirked.

A man unable to control his curiosity, blurted out the question everyone wanted to ask, “Why is the male brain so much more?”

The doctor smiled at the childish innocence and explained to the entire group, “It’s just standard pricing procedure. We have to mark down the price of the female brains, because they’ve actually been used.”