Therapy

One of my knees has been bothering me for a couple of weeks. Okay, probably more like a month. It feels like I twisted it, but I don't have any memory of doing anything specific. If I did, it wasn't significant enough to remember. I kept thinking it would get better, but it just wasn't, so I looked up an orthopedic doctor on my insurance company's website and called them yesterday. She got me in yesterday afternoon, surprisingly, and I went in and filled out a TON of paperwork--more than I ever remember filling out at any other doctor's office--took some x-rays, and met with a doctor.

He said he thought it was probably either bursitis or tendinitis, gave me a prescription for a heavy-duty anti-inflammatory, and said told me to go upstairs to a physical therapy office and make an appointment for an evaluation. If it's an inflammation, I'm not sure why I would need physical therapy, but I didn't think to ask that until after I had left the office. If the prescription works, I'm not sure there would be any point to therapy. To strengthen it, I guess. I don't know. They couldn't get me in until Monday, so I figure I'll make a decision later in the week, and either keep the appointment or call the doctor and ask if he thinks I still need it, assuming my knee feels better by then.

Bob's on his annual fishing trip this week, so it's kind of weird around here. I don't really mind being by myself; what I really miss is being able to talk to him several times a day. He can't get a cellular signal where they're staying, but he's come "into town" a couple of times to get supplies, and called me. He called on Monday, and he called today, but he said that's probably the last time I'll hear from him until they start back on Sunday. I forgot to tell him that I went to the doctor yesterday. Not that it matters, I just don't like not being able to call him up. I miss him, and so do the cats.

Although they don't necessarily show it.

I finished up a redesign of Barbara Bretton's site over the weekend:

Barbara is a knitter, and I was thrilled to find the image of the ball of pink yarn trailing a heart. It was kind of difficult to put together, though, but I finally did, and I'm really pleased with it.

I keep forgetting to mention that Jennifer Stumpf sent me a pair of her wonderful earrings--that she made especially for me--a couple of weeks ago. I really love them--aren't they beautiful?

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Live to Bead

Cello went shopping over the Memorial Day weekend, and on Tuesday he brought in several new pieces of equipment--a few new monitors, a new employee got a new Mac, and he bought me an external hard drive. It was an incredibly busy week for me, so I just set it aside to deal with later. You can see where this is going, right? I was working like crazy on Friday; sometime mid-morning my computer locked up and started making this weird tick-tick-tick sound. I turned it off, let it sit for a few minutes, then turned it back on. Tick-tick-tick.

Lovely. Before long, I had an office full of young men analyzing the problem, trying various things, crawling around under my desk, plugging and unplugging, etc. The eventual verdict was that the hard drive had died.

So Cello went back out to the Apple store and bought me a new, shiny, lovely iMac. And to his credit, he didn't yell at me (not that he ever does, of course) when he asked if I'd had a chance to use the external drive yet . . .

Liora bought a pair of earrings from me, and posted a picture wearing them:

I also sent her a charm, and she's using it attached to her handbag zipper:

I have a bunch of new stuff up in the shop, and I made a few more things this weekend that I need to photograph and post. Taking the photographs, cropping and enhancing them, takes a lot of time. I suppose that's an argument for making multiples of the same design rather than making new things all the time, but that's part of the fun.

When Cello was setting up my new computer, he named it Flower Power, which is what Gard named the first Mac that I had there. He said, "You can change it. Name it anything you want," then he changed it himself and called it "Live to Knit." He said, "Are you still knitting a lot?" and I said that I was knitting less and making jewelry more, and he changed it to "Live to Bead."

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Blue Moon

I just realized that the full moon tonight is a blue moon (the second full moon occurring in the same calendar month), so, you know, anything that only happens once in a blue moon could, theoretically, have happened today! (Like me writing a journal entry!)

Blogger has made a change to their text editor where "Now Blogger saves your drafts automatically!" (Exclamation point theirs.) So every couple of minutes it saves, and if you happen to be typing HTML, and it catches you in the middle of typing a tag, you'll get a n excited error message on the order of, "Your HTML cannot be accepted due to a broken tag!" You would think they would have taken that into consideration.

I've discovered over the last couple of years that one of the things that contributes to my overall feeling of happiness or unhappiness is whether or not I have a good book that I'm reading, and a good audio book to listen to in the car. Sometimes I do get into moods where I just want to listen to music and sing along while I drive to work, but I'm seldom in that kind of a mood on the way home; the drive home really needs an audio book.

Right now I'm reading The Highly Effective Detective, by Richard Yancey. I picked it up off the "new books" shelf at the library a couple of weeks ago, and just started it last night. It's about a man who receives a small inheritance when his mother dies, and uses the money to realize his life-long dream of becoming a private detective.

He rents an office, buys furniture, and hires a coffee shop waitress as his secretary, then sits back and waits for the clients to show up. One finally does -- a man who witnessed a hit-and-run accident where a big SUV ran over a family of goslings. He takes the case seriously, and (according to the jacket copy) it turns out to be a bigger case than he counted on. I'm not very far into it, but I'm really enjoying it so far.

In some ways, it reminds me of the last audio book I listened to, Traveler, by Ron McLarty. Mr. McLarty reads the book himself. Normally I stay away from books read by their authors, but McLarty is a character actor, and a wonderful reader. I listened to his first book, The Memory of Running, a few months ago, and it was just wonderful.

McLarty has a knack for creating the "everyman" character; it's almost like nothing much really happens in the books, but they're such wonderful character studies that you really don't notice. This one did have a mystery in it. It's about a New York smalltime actor/sometime bartender who gets a call that an old childhood friend has died. He goes back to his hometown and talks with old friends, visits his childhood haunts, and reminisces. Along the way he discovers that his friend's death wasn't entirely natural, and he becomes a sort of detective, eventually finding out the truth.

The title, "Traveler," refers to a bullet that had been lodged in his friend for about forty years; it also, I think, refers to the protagonist's journey back to his hometown and, ultimately, to his childhood.

Both books are excellent. "The Memory of Running" is also about a man dealing with the death of a loved one. In this story, the parents of an overweight, chainsmoking factory worker are killed in an automobile accident, and he finds out that his mentally ill sister has also died, in California. He decides, on the spur of the moment, to ride a bicycle across the country to claim her body and find out what happened to her.

There are flashbacks in this book as well, to his childhood--I don't normally like that kind of thing, but here it's done so effortlessly that I enjoyed it tremendously. McLarty's characters were referred to in a review as "big hearted, warm, and mournful," and that's a pretty apt description. More or less a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people who, in some ways, transcend that ordinariness and become larger than life.

The book I'm listening to now is John Sandford's latest, Invisible Prey. I always enjoy Richard Ferrone's reading of Sandford's work, and I expect to enjoy this one over the next week or so. It's one of a long series, and while I read several of the first ones, I think I've listened to all of them. I find that I actually pick up a lot more of a book when I listen to it. I tend to skim, I think, when I read, so a lot of times I'll buy or rent an audio book even if I've already read the book. It's an entirely different experience.

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Trapped like a rat!

Dave went out to lunch yesterday, and he left Jojo with me. I told him he could shut the door, but he said he'd just block it with a chair. I've got this green plastic chair in my office, and he drug it over and put it in the doorway. I said, "She can just walk right out under it!" and he said, "She won't."

And she didn't. She tried really hard to figure it out, but she never did. I guess maybe dogs don't really crouch down and creep under things, or at least she doesn't. Or maybe as sweet as she is, she just isn't the sharpest dog in the pack.

Assessing the situation:

I'm so cute! Won't you please let me out?

Trying to figure it out:

I give up!

I love it when the dogs hang out with me. Simon is pretty much attached to Dave at the hip, and if Dave's out, Simon just lies under his desk and sighs mournfully. Jojo's bereft when he's gone, too, but when he's there and all's right with the world, she's much more gregarious. She'll pick up one of her toys or a bone and walk around and visit everyone. She brought a rope toy in the other day, and wanted to play tug-of-war with me.

She's an awfully sweet dog.

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Photo Shoot

Liora left a comment the other day about buying semi-precious stones, and how I wanted to be sure to have a record of what I was buying. I took some pictures of my organizational system, and though I'd post them. I know probably Stefani would be interested. :) (Click each picture for a larger version.)

I have five clear plastic storage boxes that I bought at the craft store. I bought mine at Michael's, but all the craft stores have similar ones. I like these because the bottoms of the compartments are rounded rather than square, which makes it easier to get the beads out.

I have one that is filled with only semi-precious stones:

One has mostly metal beads, and some crystals:

This one is mostly glass:

This one is a lot of miscellaneous stuff -- some metal, some stones, some glass, some vintage plastic:

This one has some stones, but is mostly charms and findings (ear wires, headpins and eyepins, jump rings, etc.:

This small box holds twelve different colors of seed beads, each in their own little screw-top container:

Sometimes I work at the dining room table, but I usually work at my desk. I stack the bead boxes on the ottoman underneath.

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