Cloudburst

It started raining hard last night as I was driving home--one minute it was just sprinkling, and the next there was thunder and lightning and rain so heavy that I thought I was going to have to pull off the highway and wait it out, except that it was raining so hard that I was afraid to try to change lanes. It was coming down so fast that it didn't have time to go anywhere, so I was also driving through huge puddles, afraid that I'd hydroplane, or that the water would get up into the engine and flood the car.

But nothing happened, and I got home safely. I went out again to pick up Chinese food, and the sky looked like this:

It's been raining pretty much non-stop today, too. It was sunny in the morning, but by the time I decided to leave the house, around noon, it had clouded up and started sprinkling. I stopped at Panera Bread for something to eat, and while I was in there it started raining about as hard as it had last night, so hard that if I had walked outside to get to the car, I would have been drenched. I got a cookie and another cup of tea and waited it out, then dashed to the car when there was a short break in the rain.

The next stop was the bookstore, and I ended up staying in there longer than I had intended, too, because the clouds opened up again and I didn't feel like splashing my way to the car, although this time I did take the umbrella in.

So I really didn't get much done, but I didn't have much on my list anyway, so it worked out okay.

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Snippets

(I walk into Dave's office wearing the sweater I'm knitting on one shoulder, trailing a ball of yarn behind me.)

Me: "See what I'm knitting??"

Dave: "What is that, a sweater?"

Me: "Yup."

Dave: "They have those in stores, you know. Do you need some money?"

I got an email from Yankee Candle Company over the weekend saying that they were having a Buy One / Get One Free sale on selected fragrances. I love Yankee candles, but they're way too expensive to pay full price for, as a general rule. So I went to the store on Saturday, and picked up two big jars and two medium ones, getting them off the big display in the front of the store that said "Buy One / Get One Free!"

I checked out, and the clerk rang up the candles, putting in the "Buy One / Get One Free" code (I'm stressing this for a reason). I paid, and as she was wrapping the candles in paper and putting them in the bag, she said, "You got a great deal! It's almost like you got two for free!!" Um, yeah. Almost like that.

Bob and I went out for ice cream a couple of times last week. It's fun going out at night and doing something simple like that, but I told Bob that we couldn't go out for ice cream every night, or we'd weigh 300 pounds. He said he knew that, but he liked going out together, and I suggested going to Sonic and getting diet limeades, so that's what we've done the last couple of nights.

When we're at home, he's usually upstairs in his office either on the computer or watching television, and I'm usually downstairs either on my computer, or reading. So it's kind of nice to go out and drive around and talk and listen to music and look at the stars. Tonight we went to Sonic for our limeades, and listened to Paramour, an album by a band called Deadman. I've been listening to them a lot lately, and thought Bob might like it, too.

I've been listening to them, and to The Silos a lot lately. I seem to be in some kind of an alternative country mood, or something. Bob says the music I listen to is sad, but I don't really think of it as being sad, I just like the sound. However, I did read a review of one of The Silos' records--I can't remember if it was this one or not--that said, "Not for the clinically depressed."

Bob and I had tickets to see Marc Cohn in Lawrence tomorrow night, but I got an email from Ticketmaster saying that the show had been postponed and would be rescheduled. We were disappointed, but decided to hang on to the tickets and see if we could go whenever they set a new date, if they do. There was no indication of why the concert had been postponed.

I just happened to be reading Google News tonight and saw this news item that apparently never made it to CNN, which is the news site I generally read: Singer Marc Cohn survives being shot in head. I guess that would explain it.

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A walk

The weather finally broke a bit, and it was under 100 degrees when I got home. We went out and picked up burritos at Chipotlé, brought them home and ate (Bob in the living room watching Stargate, me in the dining room reading Undead and Unappreciated, which I picked up a the library on the way home).

After we ate I decided to take advantage of the cooler weather, and went out and walked a couple of miles. I would have stayed out and walked longer, but I had to go to the bathroom, and there wasn't really any alternative to coming home. I've stopped in at Wendy's before, but they frown at you when you don't buy anything to eat, and home was closer, anyway.

I might have even gone back out, but the sun was going down and it's probably wiser not to be out walking around after dark. That's the main reason I got a gym membership, anyway--Bob didn't like me out walking after dark, and by the time I get home from work, it's already getting late. It stays lighter in the summer, of course, but lately it's been about 100 degrees, and not at all pleasant to be outside. I'm just trying to mix it up a little, to alleviate the boredom of walking on the treadmill at the gym for miles. I said something about it the other day to Dave, and he said, "Don't they have televisions?" Yeah, they do, but they're invariably tuned to "The Real World" or something equally obnoxious, so I try not to pay attention, and just listen to the iPod.

Which served up a nice playlist for me:

Love Is Hell - Ryan Adams
Shotgun In Your Dreams - David Knopfler
Your Ghost - Damien Rice
Dreaming's Free - Ryan Adams
Vampires, Mummies and the Holy Ghost - Jimmy Buffett
Angel - Adam Ant
Poison and Pain - Ryan Adams
Trouble - Shawn Colvin
For Once in Our Lives - Paul Carrack
Every Ship Must Sail Away - Blue Merle

Hm. Poison and pain and ghosts and mummies and trouble and hell . . . And it was a really good playlist!

I took pictures.

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Moblogging

After much research, I got a new phone over the weekend. A few months ago Blogger introduced mobile blogging, and I really wanted to do it. But in order to do that, I needed a camera phone. I loved my old phone, and really didn't want to get rid of it, but for the last few months it had been getting harder and harder to charge--I'd have to connect the charger, then wiggle it around to get it to make contact, and then lay it down gently so that it didn't get disconnected. Sometimes I couldn't make it work at all until I'd tried it a dozen or more times, and I knew that one of these days it was going to fail completely.

When Bob's last contract was up, he got a nice phone completely free, so I was kind of hoping for that, but I never got one, so I just decided to go ahead and get a new one once I was eligible for a reduced-price phone. He got a cool camera phone, too, but it's really small and I wasn't sure it was what I wanted. I wanted to stick with Motorola because that's what I've always had, and I was familiar with the menus and things. They had a nice-looking camera phone (the V551) that looked a little larger than the one Bob has, so I went to the Cingular store on Saturday and looked at it in person.

It wasn't the greatest deal in the world--$149 with a $50 mail-in rebate--but it's a nice phone, and I'm very pleased with it. I think it takes terrific photos for a camera phone.

And now I have a moblog.

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Catching up

I seem to have added a new category of anxiety dream to my repertroire. I have the height dreams (including the rickety stairs ones), and bridge dreams (which I suppose also incorporates height), and water dreams (and sometimes bridge over water dreams, and of course the rickety bridge over water dreams), and the driving off the bridge into water dreams . . . Also the travel anxiety dreams, i.e., forgetting to make reservations, forgetting to pack, missing the plane; and of course the getting lost ones. Last night was a new one. I had a knitting anxiety dream.

In the dream, I was supposed to go somewhere with some people--I don't know if it was just for the day, or for the weekend, or what. It seemed to be people from work. They were waiting for me, and I was late because I couldn't find some yarn that I wanted to take with me. I was in the middle of knitting pair of socks, had finished one and had started the next one, and I was afraid that I would run out of yarn while I was away from home.

This is a very real fear among knitters, not just me, but it's one of the things that I think about and plan for when going out of town. What am I going to knit? And what if I run out of yarn? The chances of actually knitting while on vacation are fairly slim, but if I don't have something to knit with me at all times, then I'm assured of having a nice long space of time with nothing to occupy my hands.

I knit in line at the post office, while waiting at the license bureau, at movies before the movies start, and occasionally at stop lights.

So anyway, in the dream I was searching everywhere for another ball of sock yarn. I looked in the linen closet (which was apparently my parents' linen closet, funnily enough), and in all the drawers and everywhere I could think of, but couldn't find this one particular ball of Opal sock yarn that I knew I had. I found some really ugly acid green acrylic yarn with fuzzy black "flags," and I briefly considered taking that and starting a new pair of socks with it, but even in a dream, that didn't sound like a good idea.

The situation with the cats is getting better. A few nights ago we tried leaving both of them loose in the house when we went to bed, and that seems to be working fine again. The problems tend to start after I get up, and they both want to come into the bathroom with me, or when we go downstairs and Dinah wants to sit on my lap and Pye wants to sit in the window. That seems to be too close for comfort.

It's been so stressful and upsetting, and I absolutely could not figure out what to do, but things are beginning to calm down and it seems like everything might finally be okay. Last night was a breakthrough of sorts--I woke up in the middle of the night when I felt Dinah climb over me to the middle of the bed where Pyewacket usually sleeps. By the time I was awake enough to figure out what was going on, I could hear the sounds of a bath in progress--Dinah had requested a head bath, and Pyewacket was accommodating her.

I nudged Bob, and whispered, "Pyewacket is washing Dinah's head!" and he said we'd better separate them before it went on too long, but I asked him to leave them alone for just a few minutes more. Generally what happens is, when Pyewacket is finished--whether or not Dinah is finished--Pye will nip her, and that didn't seem like a good idea. After a few more minutes of washing, I reached down and picked Dinah up and put her up by me. Then Pye sat up and looked at her, and Dinah hissed, so I think I made the right move.

The rest of the night was quiet, and there weren't any incidents this morning, either, so while I'm sure it will be up and down for awhile, at least it doesn't look like we'll have to get rid of Dinah any time soon. Thank goodness.

Let's see, what else? I got flowers at work yesterday! Cello sent them--yellow roses in a dark blue glass vase. Gorgeous. And Bob has a pet toad at work. He said there's a toad that apparently lives in his watering can, and when he goes out to water the flowers, the toad clings to the side of the can and rides along. Bob says he's careful to leave a little bit of water in the can and to set it in the shade when he's finished.

And like everyone else in the world, I'm reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I'm going to have to hurry up and read it this weekend, because I know I'm going to accidentally find out the ending if I don't finish it soon. Friends who don't read the books (there are more of them than you might think) keep threatening to accidentally reveal the ending to me, since they don't have any reason to avoid finding out. Dan was teasing me on iChat this afternoon, and I was going, "La la la, I can't HEAR you," and then he admitted that he couldn't even remember who it was, because it didn't mean anything to him. He said maybe he'd find out, and then pay Dave to shout it out when I least expected it. Boys.

Oh, and speaking of books, I just finished listening to the audio version of The Time Traveler's Wife. What an amazing book! I'm looking forward to actually reading it now, rather than listening to it, but I might have to wait awhile since the ending was really wrenching. I told Misty that I'd been listening in the car, and she said she wasn't sure she would have been able to do that and drive at the same time, and I totally understood that. The morning that it ended, I had to sit and compose myself for a few minutes before I went in, wipe the tears off my face, and hope that no one noticed that I'd been sobbing in the car.

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