hand eye crafts

My son was in Richmond from last week into this, and I ferried him to and then from the car rental place.  Why do young people pick such all weird times for stuff?  ANYway, he visited this statue, and took this picture for me: Arthur Ashe.  A true hero of mine, and Briton knows it.  This was very sweet of him. He enjoyed his trip, said it's a very nice city.  I have driven past  Richmond on my way farther north, but have never been in the city.

This has been such a weird week.  The pain, the painkillers, sleeping at odd times, low energy...  It's a good thing it's only Thursday.  Maybe things will turn a corner tomorrow?

My gum is extremely swollen and sore today.  Not a surprise, but limiting when and what I blog today.  Even my therapist noticed, and we spent a lot of my session talking about it.  One of my stitches is out already, which means something, I imagine.  I'm trying not to take all the hydrocodone, so I'll have some for future Monster Headaches. I once had a student (now become an invaluable friend) who has raised two fabulous sons with Huskies.  This put me in mind of all of them.. Evidently, you can make a type peanut butter fudge by combining peanut butter and cream cheese/buttercream/vanilla cake frosting.  You can , but should  you?

Down one tooth, up a pack of gauze pads.  It took three injections to get me numb "enough."  The tooth came out in four pieces, the crown being one.  For as much trouble as that tooth gave me, it was extremely hesitant to leave my jaw.  I've never had a tooth pulled before;  my wisdom teeth were surgically removed.  Until something different comes along, that remains the best pain medication I've ever had.  And I got morphine after both my C-sections. As I type this, the local is still holding, but weakening.  I've taken a roughly equine-size ibuprofen, trying to save the Hydrocodone for later.  I'm icing my jaw, and was told to change the pack every 20 minutes. (No frozen peas ---plain old-school ice cubes.)  I was given an admonition against spitting "aggressively," which I found funny.  As opposed to "laid-back" spitting? Tap is keeping his distance.  He gives me a thorough sniffing every time I come home, and he was quite d...

The University of Florida / University of Georgia football game has been called that for as long as I can remember being aware of the game.  UGA is A Top Party School just any ol' time, but throw in a game against a true rival, tailgating and the like, and the name kind of explains itself. Thousands of people show up pre-game for the festivities, and the majority of them don't even go into the stadium to see the game. I had two male students one quarter who disappeared on, I think, Tuesday before the Saturday game.  They rolled back in on the Monday after, looking very much the worse for wear.  Turned out they had had a kerfuffle with some Florida fans and their heads were repeatedly slammed against a parking curb. Honestly, if you had dropped me in the room on that day without a calendar, I would have been able to tell you exactly where they were for the weekend. Tooth pull tomorrow.  I may or may not be back then.  Depends on how effective the pain meds are.

 About "The Cocktail Party," that is.  It's next weekend.  That doesn't explain my ease of parking and picking up at "Big Box," but I'm all about accuracy here, so there you go.

My prescriptions are filled at a "branch" of a local chain that I can get to in less than 5 minutes.  There is also a "branch" in a large "big box" store farther up (down?) the same road.  If you don't give specific instructions to whoever calls in your prescriptions, they may go to the wrong place. As half (?) of mine did today.* Thankfully, this is the weekend of "The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party," so lots  of people have left town, and getting to and parking at the two places were easier than usual.  Ergo , I got all my medications rather easily, and am now set for Monday's procedure. *Two doctors.  Meds divided between two stores, some from each doctor at each.  That makes no sense.  At all.

 Weird day.  Everything's been a beat or two off, you know?  Fuzzy?  Unfocused?  I suspect you're familiar. This I'm clear on.  My baby girl was all about the chubby and I was all about the barrettes. She  seemed a little unsure about pool time.  I suspect her brother was inside changing so that he could join her.  He would've taken up most of the rest of the little pool.

Hey!  Guess where I went today?!  Back to the oral surgeon!  The very back tooth that I spent (far too many) dollars getting capped now has to be pulled.  Coming up on Monday, with hydrocodone on order.

Yeah.  This is happening. If you don't know anything about college football, you won't know this, but Vandy has never been a big threat to other football teams.  I've been to, and watched --- that's been rare, because Vanderbilt hasn't been Ia TV draw --- games where the opponents'  fans outnumbered Vandy's two or three to one.  We weren't a laughing stock, but we were awfully close.  This is just astounding.  This is so much fun, and I am so proud of what's going on up there.  We're still behind the Ducks, Twinnie, and that's perfectly fine with me. As regards the "No Kings" protests here, you may have heard about  this .  She wasn't at my corner, or I certainly would have ignored her, too. I'll be channeling my father tonight, shining my boots while watching football.  Not surprisingly, I do everything in the order he did, even sitting (I've been told more than once) exactly like him.  It's a good feeling. Speaking...

If you've ever needed an example of how Athens is FOOTBALL, consider this.  There was a big game here, today, I understand that.  But the fact that those of us who wanted to walk today in favor of preserving democracy were assigned small areas that we really couldn't even walk in... Yeah. Football over the fate of the country, I guess.

As long as I can remember, I've known that my left foot is bigger than my right.  As in, if I'm buying new footwear, I only need to try on the left one.  If it fits, the right one will, no matter how hard a snippy salesgirl tries to convince me that the right one had  to be tried on.* On putting on my little "yoga" socks this morning, this difference was very clear. Pardon my veiny feet and always bent toes, but look how much more stretched to fit the left one is.  Snippy girl, here you go.** Also, Tap's tail makes an appearance because if I sit down, he settles on/extremely near my feet. *You aren't listening to me, are you? ** Clearly, I'm over the years-ago experience.🙄

This isn't a Christmas photo, but it is a Winter photo, and I feel well within my rights to wish for chillier weather and possible sights like this: Hanging upside down!  We rarely have enough wintery weather for icicles, but I can hope. It's a shade cooler here at night now, though the days are still definitely on the Autumn side of the Autumn/Winter spectrum.

 

In all the years of My Headaches, this is a combination I do not remember: sleepy and headache-y.  Maybe it has happened before and one or another of them was strong enough to block my memory of the other. Can't find a graphic of sleepy headache, but this chart warns us all: Do whatever you need to do to avoid a hypertension headache: it makes your hair grow over your whole face!!* When I got up this morning, my right upper army was itching like mad.  Reaching over to scratch it, I realized there was a huge knot there.  My assumption is that both the itch and the knot are reactions to whichever shot I got in that arm.  I didn't ask that day, but again, there's another assumption: there's never been a knot at the flu shot site, so it has to be the TDAP. Not much else going on today.  Football, of course, and I spent time Mod Podge-ing all the bookmarks and bigger pieces I've made.  I'm almost caught up;  just a few more to go under the MP brush and any ...

Y'all.  Stop going through other people's phones.  Nothing good ever comes of it.  Ever.* It's been a quiet day.  It's Vandy's week off, so no watching them on TV.  The Georgia game is away, so traffic has been normal.  I made a lot of progress on Riding    the   Elephant , Craig Ferguson's memoir.  Believe it or not, I cast on for a hat.  Eighty-six stitches, and it felt like it took forever.  Thirty or forty stitches is all I can bear, so who knows whether it will be done by really cold, hat-wearing weather? It's a kit from  Wool and the Gang : the Hands Up hat.  This is it, in the colorway I'm using: You had to know it was purple. *I've been watching police bodycam videos.

So far so good on the post-vaccine front.  I did feel not-so-great last night, but today's been fine.  I think I might still need Covid, RSV and --- couldn't agree more, Twinnie --- shingles.  Actually, what shots I'm told I need has depended on which website's quiz I took.  I see my psychiatrist next week;  I'll seek his considered opinion. Screeching into randomness: Who "invented" the top hat?  How did Inspiration lead to, "Black.  And tall.  Quite tall, as a matter of fact." This may be my reaction alone, but putting flourescent lights in an EGYPTIAN TOMB seems very disrespectful, not to mention just flat-out  wrong.

At the end of each of my son's  podcast  episodes, he and his colleagues recommend a movie or a book or some music.  I'll step into that today and sincerely, highly recommend It's for rent on Amazon.  Briton and I have been waiting for the opportunity to see it, chiefly because of the two there on the poster.  (They do still have movie posters, right?)  That's David Strathairn (an extraordinary actor) and Jane Levy (a big favorite of Briton's;  this is the first time I've watched her --- she's wonderful.)  If I made a robust, concerted effort to admire Strathairn any more, I could not.  The man is spectacular.  On a kind of side note, the first time I ever saw him was due to my Redford fandom.  This can serve as another recommendation, actually: Quite a cast (yes, that's Poitier peeking in.)  The only person missing from the poster is Ben Kingsley.  I do enjoy Sir Ben. I got my flu and my TDAP vaccines this afternoon....

 Does anyone else have, like, lots  of scissors in their "workspace?"   Despite that, does anyone else find it hard to locate a pair when you really need them?  " I JUST HAD THEM!"   And then do you ask the dog if he's seen them? And your dog is never  any help...

Wrens are rather marvelous, don't you think?  They are my favorite, though a bird that I truly dislike isn't coming to mind. On the subject of birds, I came across these two photos displayed just like this.  They're charming individually, but this is kind of magical. The tooth that was capped about six weeks ago has been giving me trouble the past couple of weeks.  I was waiting for the first of the month (when money shows up) to go back in and have it looked at, and today was the day.  The tooth is extremely sensitive, and what my dentist said was that as much trouble that that tooth has been, I probably needed to decide between a root canal and an extraction.  That's hardly a choice at all, frankly.  So in a couple of weeks, I'm going back to the dentist who did my implant (actually implantS) and get that ball rolling.  My current mood:

     Friends, our world has come to the point that people need instructions on how to hammer. A friend once told me that her daughter looked up a YouTube video to learn how to vacuum.  Vacuuming wasn't modeled at home? Am I the only one shaking my head so hard over this kind of stuff that I'm getting a headache? And somehow the mother of the little nail polish girl giving  her the polish doesn't bother me.  On that: I just realized that the table where she has the polish shows no sign of spillage.  I'm even more impressed with her.

Those of you who are still capable of knitting may be beginning your Christmas gifts. This might work for a present: Give Barbie a handknit.  I do love a dramatic cowl.  The more I look at this, though, I think it might be the earrings stealing the show. I regret not fully appreciating the Barbie clothes my mother knit and sewed for me.  Store-boughts were SO expensive (relatively), and she had a never-ending supply of scrap fabric and leftover yarn.  Not too long ago, I came across a dress and coat set made of boucle'.  The dress is a brown/light blue/white tweed, and the coat is solid brown.  I seem to remember a tie belt for the coat, but it got lost somewhere over all these years. No big surprise here: my Twinnie also favors the chocolate Tootsie Pops.  Good thing there are miles between us --- fighting over our favorite might get ugly. This photo makes me so, so happy. 💅 Our girl is serious about what she's doing.  And look at her fingernail...

 At some point, I discussed my enchantment with  Snyder's Butter Snaps .  For some reason, they are nowhere to be found here right now.  I did, though, come across Butter Rounds. They aren't the same, no matter how cute they are in the bag.  They're really, really salty.  Whomever the local Snyder's distributor is, let's hope it picks up its game. Whenever I'm due a delivery, I make little snack bags for the delivery person.  Fruit, chips, candy, snack cakes, a bottle of water, etc.  Recently, I bought Tootsie Pops, which begs the question: Which Tootsie Pop flavor is best? Now, as much as I love things purple and things grape, this is a no-brainer for me.  Chocolate.  The chocolate ones. I think there are seasonally-released caramel ones.  Those might be interesting And no, I don't know how many licks it takes to get the center. (I can hear his voice so clearly;  can you?)

Taylor Swift's record, I mean.  Which seems to be the whole of Internet content today. Perhaps the rest of us will be relevant tomorrow.

Going through the Kroger app to make my grocery list, I come across this: The thought that someone would need to buy bacon grease is fully weird to me.  Even a True Non-Cook like me has a supply of bacon grease in my refrigerator.  Sure, you buy bacon because it's, uh, bacon , but an extra plus is then you get a cooking basic, too. Maybe it's just a Southern thing, but bacon grease is used to flavor some dishes, used as a base for others, used as a frying medium, and, at least in my childhood home, as a salad "dressing". *  Not having a "thing" of bacon grease is unheard of.   Is this just an us down here  phenomenon? *Recipe on request.

Thank you, Dr. Goodall.  You taught us well.