Light and Momentary

Argh

I mean, Alleluia. Happy Easter. But also, argh.

Remember a couple of months ago when I was having trouble with losing things? I've been mostly better. But. Tonight I emptied out my prescription vial and put my last three antiviral pills into a little ziploc bag to take in my purse tomorrow. Gone. Vanished. Into the ether.

Where could they be? I have fished in the kitchen garbage. I have retraced my steps. Hey, you can almost sing those lines, and then come in with... But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

I suppose if I were a wiser and more mature person, Lent would teach me good habits that I would carry over into Easter. Unfortunately, I usually spend Easter eating too much chocolate after a season of fasting. (Note to me: temperance is a virtue for all seasons.) And my Lenten resolve to be patient about having shingles has vanished as well: blah! shingles = icky! I want this rash to go away noooooooww.

This week I have been so grateful for pharmaceuticals. (<-- not a sentence that ever came out of my mouth before shingles) I am trying to imagine what it would be like for these hundreds of spots to swell and blister and burst and crust over with NOTHING anybody could do about it except point me to the ibuprofen (or the narcotics). Noooooooo thank you. This is quite enough of a drag as it is. I shook those last three pills into my little bag with real gratitude, thinking that I would pay a whole lot of money for them. Where can they be? Where where where?

Tomorrow is not a good day for me to try to get in touch with the nurse practitioner who prescribed them, or to try to replace them if that what she recommends. I'm hoping six days of antivirals will do the trick. But I'm really hoping they turn up before I have to be out the door in the morning.

If you find my little plastic bag with three fat blue pills in it, please speak sharply to it about not running away like that. And have a blessed Easter Monday.

Good Friday Thoughts

On Palm Sunday I took the boys to an early Mass. We were a few minutes early and I knelt down to enjoy the quiet. As it turned out, the priest was 15 minutes late, so there was a lot of quiet to enjoy. Someone sat down to play a piano piece while we were waiting. It was a little strange: the guy wasn't especially technically skilled (plenty of missed notes), but the piece spoke more clearly than any music I ever remember hearing. Without words it told about the Passion, a hymn of praise and a terrible lament woven into one.

Any Roofers Out There?

I have shingles. I think I'm too young to have shingles, don't you? The nurse practitioner was rather grim about shingles, offering me narcotics along with the antiviral drug. I declined the narcotics for now. We'll see how it goes.

Why I drove almost 1100 miles in a 33-hour period

That's my newly-baptized nephew and his big sister, with their daddy and my two older boys, who were *fabulous* about all that time in the car. I was going to go alone but I'm glad I didn't. :-)

Clue Phone

Remember the wacky professor who taught my first stats class? He used to say, at least once a week, "Ring ring! clue phone!" He'd answer the imaginary phone and explain the folly of whatever idea he was critiquing. I woke up this morning to the ringing clue phone: when I am as tired and discouraged as I was last night, the only thing to do is go to bed. Weeping may endure for a night, and all that. Blogging the discouragement doesn't get me any further forward. Ergo, poof!

This weekend I am going away with Alex and Marty for a family event, leaving the younger guys here with Elwood. Early next week we are having some work done on our basement which is supposed to dry out the leaking. Then we'll move the Legos downstairs, which we hope will end the hassles over getting them picked up so that no one sprains an ankle walking through the middle boys' room.

I am drinking a positively foul cup of coffee. I do not like black coffee -- I can drink it but it's more penance than pleasure. I did not discover until after my pot of coffee was brewed that we are out of cream, out of milk, out of canned evaporated milk. I considered putting yogurt or Alfredo sauce in the coffee, but then I discovered, way at the back of the fridge, a can of sprayable whipped cream from our Mardi Gras sundae party. It wasn't that it had gone bad (which makes a person wonder -- what are they adding to cream to keep it stable for more than a month?), but nonetheless I think I might have been better off with the yogurt.

Maybe Pete and I will take a walk downtown and get a replacement. It's been warm here for a few days, which makes me wonder if there will be crocuses and hyacinths peeking out. Perhaps even some brave forsythia? Blooming forsythia, I do believe, is good for the soul.

Time Change Strikes Again

You should go to bed. You will be nicer tomorrow if you go to bed.

Yeah, yeah. Let me just check my email once more. Oh, look! The new music selections for cantors. Not "Were You There?" AGAIN! Wonder if "Beautiful Scandalous Night" might fly? I'd have to check the lyrics. It's probably easy to find them and the chords, though. I'll just get my guitar and see...

Go to bed go to bed go to bed.

Here it is! Terrible key for me though. I'll drop it into E. Why do I like to sing in the key of E so much? Oh, wait, that diminished seventh is a bear in the key of E. D, maybe? Yeah, that works. Hey, wonder if I can still remember that song I wrote in E twelve years ago. Had that nifty little--

--Bed bed bed bed [here sing like They Might Be Giants]

Gosh, I have no calluses anymore. Time to put the guitar away--

--and go to bed

--did somebody say something? Say! I know! What if we took the log cabin blanket we've been knitting and added a right triangle onto each of its square sides? Get out the tape measure and see if that would make it about the right size. Let's see, 42 inches divided by the square root of two, then multiply by 2 -- yeah, that's a great size! Let's start tonight!

You know that means you'd only be halfway through the knitting, right? Are you crazy? Weren't you going to bed here?

Yeah, okay, I won't start knitting. Only halfway? Really? Should I play with the measuring tape some more? No, I know what I'll do! I'll write a post about how I should be in bed. And then just check my Bloglines one more time...

News!

I just found out that I won a departmental award that comes with a $1000 prize. It's given in honor of a wonderful professor emerita -- I was lucky enough to work with her as a master's student and I learned so much from her. Award notifications were supposed to happen earlier this week and when I didn't hear anything, I assumed they'd chosen another applicant. Turns out they issued paper notifications in our campus mailboxes (how twentieth century) and only followed up by email today. Hurray!

Pictures

Boy unattended with a sheet of stickers.

Apprentice pancake flipper in action.

Baby, it's cold outside.