Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Aestlight shawl

Originally uploaded by addlepated

I finished my version of the Aestlight Shawl over the weekend. It was a really enjoyable knit, although the edging got a little tiresome after a while. You can see more pictures of this shawl here.

Forest Canopy Shawl

Originally uploaded by addlepated

Woohoo, I’m back on the needles again.

I did the Forest Canopy Shawl in Wollmeise Vergißmeinnicht.

Mods: I repeated the body pattern 15 or 16 times, whichever got me to 307 stitches on the needles. I did 12 rows of the border repeat, adding beads on each twisted stitch. I blocked the bejeebies out of it.

This year our tamales were made with:

Lard we rendered ourselves,
Feral hog we killed and butchered ourselves,
And serranos we grew in the garden.

On another note, I was baking chocolate chip cookies earlier and was moving one of the loaded cooling racks around and one of its supports collapsed and ka-WHOOSH, there was a waterfall of hot, aromatic, butter-laden chocolate chip cookies pouring off the counter and right onto the dog.

For one brief, shining moment, the dog thought that it was the BEST NIGHT EVAR and his big brown eyes sparkled with a canine tear as he ducked his head to investigate the manna from heaven and I screamed, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! GO KENNEL!” and he realized that he probably did something very wrong to make the cookies happen and went to cower in his box as I burned my hands cleaning up Floor Cookies.

They only have a little hair on them.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Surprised kitty is surprised.

I have now spent 8 hours of my life trying to get Dragon Age to work under either Crossover or Parallels (both of which have been reported on the interwebz as being successful by someone or another) to no avail. My Windows partition is only 20 gigs, which is the minimum amount of bloody free space required to run the bloody game, so to run it under Boot Camp I’d need to use an external hard drive. I’m having twitchy flashbacks of trying to install The 11th Hour. I might need therapy.

Max lost his purr. He’s been one lonesome kittyman since Icey’s been gone. Stuck to me like glue, and gained a pound to boot. He’s just not happy being an only child – something similar happened happened when Maddie died.

So we got Max a kitten. Meet Jasper.

He’s a red spotted tabby Oriental shorthair, 14 weeks old. As soon as I brought him into the house and opened the carrier, he and Max started purring at each other, then Max started grooming him.

Jasper brought an upper respiratory infection over with him, so the two of them are a bit under the weather at the moment, but they’re still pretty happy. As you can imagine, the kids are thrilled to pieces to have a kitten. He’s pretty cute. 🙂

Icey took a turn for the worse on Monday night, and by yesterday she was in bad shape. I made the difficult decision to put her to sleep. She laid in my arms and purred until she was gone.

I brought her home so we could bury her in the back with all the other kitties. Hub laid her on the floor and unwrapped the towel. The girls gave her a last pet. Kona nosed at her for a minute, like she was confused that her kitty buddy wasn’t getting up. Max was very skittish for a long time, but eventually he came over to see her, too. He sat next to her and groomed her, like a family member bathing their loved one in preparation for the grave. We put some pipe cleaner toys in the box with her, and the girls put in some cards they made saying how much they loved her.

We laid her to rest in the back yard. My daughter read Rainbow Bridge, because I couldn’t.

Farewell, sweet Icey, 2004-2009.

So nice to be able to see.

I had been getting a ton of fearsome headaches and tried everything to make them go away. Finally, after my daughter said she was having problems focusing up close (and getting headaches herself), I decided to make us both eye doctor appointments. Hers was easy – same prescription in both eyes, handled with off-the-rack drugstore cheaters. Me? My prescription has changed significantly in two years. Astigmatism worse, myopia better.

It had been a few years since I last had contacts, and I never tried extended wear, so I got a trial pair. Which didn’t work. So I got another trial pair, which also didn’t work. And so on. I tried every single brand of extended wear toric contacts there are, and finally when I got to the last option available, Purevision Toric, I found one that worked. I can wear them for days (technically 30) at a time. Cool. They were $70/box at the doctor, or $37/box online. Combine with a $50 rebate and I get a year supply for $100.

But one of the main reasons I’d been putting off going to the doctor is that my last pair of glasses was over $350. Welcome to presbyopia! Then tack on $100 or more for prescription sunglasses, and it’s no wonder I don’t want to go back every year. This time was different, though. Based on recommendations from Ask Metafilter and elsewhere, I took a whole bunch of measurements of my current frames and headed over to Zenni Optical to order some specs. I decided on this pair for regular and this one for sunglasses. My progressive lenses with anti-glare coating and a pair of polarized sun shade clip-ons cost $61.85. My sunglasses cost $14.90 (I paid more for non-RX sunglasses at Walgreens last week). I got both pairs less than 2 weeks after ordering.

I haven’t taken them in to get them checked for accuracy, but they feel pretty right to my eyes. The only problem I’ve had so far is a nose pad breaking, but that was my own stupid fault. One should not attempt to adjust the nose pad angle by grabbing on the nose pad and yanking. I called Zenni to see if I could order replacements and they said they would send me three pairs of pads, screws, and a tool to put them in with, all for free.

So, to sum up – between Zenni Optical and ContactLens.com, I got a year’s supply of contacts and two pairs of glasses (one progressive) for $175.