My youngest demonspawn brought me 2 pieces of paper to review today. One was a progress report from her math teacher that announced her math grade is currently at 92% (up from 87% on the last progress report) — although she’s getting the bulk of her best grades on homework and not such shining grades on tests, I’ll take what I can get. (And a huge thank you to those who offered tutoring; I may yet take you up on it at some point.)

The other piece of paper she brought me was this. She’s progressed from emotry to emo-illustration. It’s enough to make a mother cry with pride. (Or not.)

In other news…wake up, medicate gerbil, work, cook, laundry, chase cats off clean laundry, medicate gerbil, crochet, sleep — lather, rinse, repeat. Such a glamourous life I lead. Someday I shall have to write a memoir. (The names will be changed to protect the boring.)

I’m an animal lover and a mom, so I’ve dealt with an amazing variety of mess due to animals and children. You can imagine I’ve been wetted down at one point or another with drool, blood, undigested food, and every other fluid that can possibly come out of a small child. I’ve had cats give birth in my lap. I’ve had a variety of small mammals go poo on me. I’ve also had the moderately rare experience of being vomited upon by a snake. But today was the first time I’ve been peed on by a gerbil. Let me find a container for my joy. *rolls eyes*

Caramel is home again, having racked up another $325 in vet bills. There are now 5 different items that must be syringed into or onto him — the acidopholus, liquid antibiotic, wound wash, neosporin, and (the latest addition) something called Critical Care, which the package states is a “syringe-feeding formula for convalescing small herbivores.” It smells incredibly rank, which makes me very very grateful that I’m not a convalescing small herbivore.

We get to do this whole syringe-feeding, medicating, and wound care routine every 12 hours for the next 3 weeks, since the little bastard has essentially reset his recovery back to square one by scratching out his stitches (the cone eliminated his ability to use his teeth, so he got inventive with his claws).

The gerbil has now, I’m quite certain, cost more than any other gerbil in the history of the world that wasn’t produced by cloning!!! There’s no way I’m letting it die at this point. My stubbornness has kicked in, but good. I’m on a mission now.

If you ever tucked a note inside a bottle and threw it into the ocean, or tied a postcard to a balloon and set it aloft, you just might like this:

BookCrossing

Here’s how it works:

1. Pick one of your books.
2. Go to BookCrossing.com and click on “register book” under the “member’s links” in the left hand column of each page. Follow the prompts to register the book and generate a BCID (BookCrossing ID).
3. Write the BCID in ink inside the cover. Add a label or write the BookCrossing info. You can add some additional markings, stickers, notes, etc to make the book noticeable, if you wish.
4. Release the book. Where? Almost anywhere! (restaurants, coffee houses, those newspaper boxes for free papers, a bus, hospitals, doctor’s offices, anywhere people have to wait, on top of ATM’s, the DMV, museums, park benches, gyms, etc)

It’s kind of like GeoCaching for people who love books – with a lot less hiking! *grin* I’m going to release a few books into the wild when I’m out running errands later!

My day in all its glorious joy…

• Apparently sleep-walked to my alarm (cell phone), then carried it back to bed, and shut off the alarm at some point in-between
• Awakened by concerned demonspawn 90 minutes later
• Misread the clock and thought I had plenty of time to get to the bus stop, then — halfway to the bus stop — realized I was late by at least 45 minutes
• Drove to work, gambling that I had time for the Starbucks drive-thru, arrived at my desk with 3 whole minutes to spare
• One of my coworkers said I looked “very shimmery blond” …since my hair is so very not blond, I figured she was either mistaking my silver streaks for blond highlights, or possibly having hallucinations from working too many graveyard shifts
• Work, blah, blah, grabbed a “nutrition bar” from the vending machine for lunch, work, blah, blah
• Called the employee access line while sitting in traffic on my way home, as I was assured this would get me faster appointments than making them myself, but was told to call & make them myself
• Called the clinic myself, spent FIFTY minutes on the phone to get 3 appointments (one each for me & the demonspawn), none of which were sooner than 3 weeks away
• Made a mental note to call the employee access line tomorrow and whine for better appointment times
• Stopped at Starbucks on the way home to soothe my frazzled nerves with caffeine (somehow it really does work for me, YMMV)
• Got the business card for the gerbil vet from my demonspawn, as I am taking the little long-tailed rat in to be looked at tomorrow
• Managed to grab a quick hug from Geoffrey before he had to go to work
• Gleefully fed the lizard a heaping dish of large crickets, which he set upon as if it was the last meal he’d ever get
• Became perplexed when Claire called me “radiant” — must be the “shimmery blond” glints in my hair making me glow, or something
• Veged out in front of the glowing rectangular boxes most of the evening

Unfortunately I have to set an alarm, because if I oversleep it tends to trigger migraines…but I’m going to set my alarm for the utter luxury of nine hours of sleep, instead of the usual 7-ish. (But with my luck, the goram marching band will be practicing on the high school track & field that I live next to, at 8 am sharp. *sigh*)

Saturday is mostly a blur, since I had the misfortune to not have penciled in some sleep time after my graveyard shift Friday night, so by the time I got to bed on Saturday night I’d been up for something like 32 hours. Even with repeated trips to Starbucks to obtain copious quantities of caffeine, it was not pretty. Things just kept getting more and more surreal.

I rented a car for my trip to Seattle to visit Maggy, because my car has almost two hundred thousand miles on it and can barely make it up the hill near the zoo on Highway 26. I think the car I rented was a Ford. It was very red and very shiny and went really, really fast. I can’t count how many times I freaked out because I glanced at the speedometer and discovered I was doing 80 mph, completely unintentionally.

But that was okay, because freeway drivers in Seattle are special. Apparently they think doing 70 mph on the freeway in heavy traffic is normal. Perhaps even acceptable (WTF?!). I couldn’t decide whether to be more astonished or terrified, and settled for singing along with the radio very loudly and dedicating each song to whatever god would please just let me live to see my children again.

Other than that, it was a delightful visit! Maggy has the prettiest brown eyes, and I kept catching myself just wanting to stare at them. And she hugs so well that it took a bit of self-restraint to not just keep hugging her. Our conversation went all over the place, in the most delightful ways, and I’m sure I talked entirely too much. I want to say about a thousand brilliant things about the day, but I’m about to fall asleep. Damnit.

Seven years ago today, my beloved Geoffrey and I were handfasted. It was 9 months after we’d moved in together, on the Autumnal Equinox (Geoffrey’s favorite Sabbat — I’m pretty partial to all the cross-quarter Sabbats, myself), near the top of Mt. Tabor just as the sun set. The ceremony was basic, but not in the least simplistic or lacking. It was exactly what it should have been — vows made to one another as individuals creating a family, and to our gods as a true partnership, witnessed and celebrated by a handful of our closest loved ones, amidst nature’s elements and at a time symbolizing balance and transition.

I love having multiple anniversaries — the day we started dating celebrates mainly the emotional connection, the day we moved in with one another celebrates the practical commitments, and the day we got handfasted celebrates our spiritual promises.

I wouldn’t have missed any of it for all the world.

It’s a good thing I never got into teaching (unlike my favorite aunt, who is retiring from school teaching after 30 years, and who incidentally was one of Geoffrey’s teachers 15 years before I met him!). When trying to help Anxiety with her math homework, I am teh mega lame-ass.

It’s not that I’m not good at algebra; quite the opposite. I’m pretty darned good at algebra! But I’m lousy at teaching: I can see the answer, but I can’t explain to her how I got it.

Example: a stupid “story problem” where 3 sisters sold cookies to make money. Sister A sold twice as many as Sister B, who sold the same amount as Sister C. They were also given $15 in donations, making a total of $655. How much did each sister sell?

I know the answer is that Sisters B & C sold $160 worth of cookies each, while Sister A sold $320 worth of cookies. I can even sort-of explain it by saying the equation is “2x + x + x + $15 = $655″ and therefore x=$160. But I can’t explain to my child where that equation came from. It just popped into my head. And I know it’s right without doing the math, the same way that I know that 51 is not a prime number, or that 5% of 160 is 8, or that there are too damned many zeroes in a googol.

My math and my verbal do not play well together. Damnit.

I have never thought pirates were cool. Or charming. Or interesting in any way. And it’s kinda sad that the stupidity of the day in question was brought about by Oregonians.

Let’s see…Tonya Harding, Bob Packwood, Elizabeth Diane Downs, and the Talk Like A Pirate people. Can we PLEASE have an Oregonian get famous who isn’t a total twat?! It would be such a nice change.

I’m awfully disappointed that Damnation Alley, one of my favorite sci-fi flicks, isn’t out on DVD and therefore can’t go into my Netflix queue. The movie may have been less than stellar cinema (hey, it starred Jan-Michael Vincent and George Peppard), but you can’t beat swarming killer cockroaches for great fun!

I’m awfully glad that I didn’t waste a spot in my Netflix queue on Silent Running, and only wasted 90 minutes of my life on watching it on Comcast OnDemand. It wasn’t a total waste, as I spent most of that time crocheting, while waiting for the movie to somehow redeem itself. But it never did. Between Joan Baez’s highly annoying warbling, and Bruce Dern’s mediocre acting & unappealing face, the vast majority of the flick was dreadfully boring and/or just plain cringe-tastic. Why do so many of the “classics” — not just movies, but also books and music and even artwork — suck so horrendously?!

Netflix makes recommendations based on movies you’ve rated. The damned recommendations it makes don’t go away until you either put the movie into your queue, rate it (thereby stating you’ve seen it), or declare your disinterest in the film. Because I tend to like Mel Gibson (except for that Passion movie, what a bloodbath — and not in a good way!), Netflix has insistently urged me to get We Were Soldiers. Now I certainly enjoy a war movie every now and then — I highly recommend Enemy at the Gates — but after seeing too damned many movies about Viet Nam (most notably the circle-jerk that was Apocalypse Now), I finally declared my abject disinterest in the flick. I’d rather watch “Mad Max: Elderly Wheelchair Races.”

One reason I really like Netflix (for the most part, although the uber-red website is so very tedious) is that it’s nice to be able to track down most of the flicks that I’ve wanted to see at one point or another, and couldn’t for one reason or another. Lately I’ve been on a few different jags, watching several movies in a row that have a common theme: sci-fi, British royalty, polyamorous or otherwise non-traditional relationships, Irish dance, quirky documentaries, Mae West, and the occasional comedy that isn’t (I hope) totally stupid. (Yes, I loathe comedies for the most part. Unless they have Adam Sandler, especially if he’s beating on Bob Barker or kissing Drew Barrymore.)

But I still only have 40 movies in my queue.

Little things can make a halfway decent day slide right into the pooper. But hey, a bit of cheery linkage from someone you love, and a smidgen of retail therapy, and things don’t seem quite so bad.

The cheery linkage (from my Number One Internet Fanboy) was this. I lurves me some Anne Taintor!

The bit of retail therapy was ringtones! I now have Poison by Alice Cooper — to signify a call from my beloved Geoffrey, of course! — and What I’ve Done by Linkin Park, which is now my default ringtone setting. (The other ringtones on my phone? Mr Brightside by The Killers, I’m Not Okay by My Chemical Romance, And We Danced by The Hooters, Basket Case by Green Day, Everything by Alanis Morissette, and Christmas Eve Sarajevo by Trans-Siberian Orchestra.)