When I am not feeling well I like to take my mom’s china teapot out and make a big pot of earl grey tea. It’s just one of those comfort things that reminds me of my mom. I wish I culd replicate her soft boiled eggs on buttered toast, too, because that would make a perfect antidote to whatever was ailing me.
I’m still battling whatever it is that’s beating up my glands and lymph nodes. It’s strangely low key, it makes me tired and my neck (but not my throat) hurt a lot, but it ebbs and flows. It will pass.
Last night we went to see Hanuman, King of the Monkeys. Good show, extremely cute. A friend of David’s did the music for it. Afterward we went to Cafe Latte to celebrate Brian’s birthday with the other people from Ball’s Cabaret. Fun time, ate too much, got too tired.
I was getting irritated with always running out of bread flour when I want to make bread so I was planning on buying a big 50 pound bag of it on line from a place with �ber-che�p shipping, but the grocery store came to my rescue, they had bread flour on sale for 50% less than I was going to buy it for. I picked up 15 pounds and I’m hoping to get another 20 or 25 when I go grocery shopping today.
Not much else, I’m tired and whatnot. David is performing tonight. YAY!

Last night I came home, laid down around 6pm and did not get up again until this morning. I have a sore ear, a swollen salivary gland and a matching set of giant lumps on either side of my larynx. I do not have a sore throat. So the possible options are ear infection or lymphatic cancer. I’m going to vote for ear infection.
So I went to work, did a few things, wrestled with my excel issue (I know exactly what I want the end result to be, I know what the middle part SHOULD do to get me to that point, I don’t know quite how to make the middle part do what I want it to do. Also, when they upgraded my computer they forgot the ODBC drivers so I am not able to link separate excel documents. whatever, boring) and then came home again. All I want to do is sleep.
Discovered that livejournal wants to hump my website 6 ways from sunday! Just checked my stats for February and there are about 8000 links from Livejournal users, not such a big deal. The real deal is that I come up on all these LJ image grabbers which means some dillhole is linking to a picture of mine. Strange? Yeah, totally, but I’ve come to accept that there are some strange people out there. You people have problems.
I totally missed my 5 year anniversary with this website. It was on the 19th of February. Oh well, there really wasn’t much to cover that was not covered in the 500th post extravaganza I did a few months ago.
I’m going to go make some soup and watch some movies. Later y’all.
ps I discovered that I can pass 8th grade math!

I got to watch the video online! I got to watch the video of me running the red light. I suck so bad, there was no way around it. Crap. A couple people have told me to go to court and fight it, but seriously, there’s no way I can go in there and be all “I’m fighting this on the grounds that…yeah, I have no grounds…”. It’s kind of funny, though. Dammit.
I finally made the pea soup I’d been meaning to make. It’s simmering away right now.
I also finally made the moroccan squash stew I’d been meaning to make. I had to have David open the cans for me, the cyst is making it impossible to work the can opener (the cyst and the fact that my can opener sucks balls). The stew was good but too tomatoey, I think I’ll go lighter on the tomatoes next time.
ALSO!!!! I made quinoa in the rice cooker! I didn’t know if you could or not but I figured since the instructions called for covering and simmering that would pretty much be what happened in the rice cooker. Easy enough. It worked, though next time I will use less water.
Made a loaf of banana pecan bread in the machine but it turned out a bit mushy, might have to tweak the recipe.
AND! I forgot to mention this before, but when I got back from lunch I was sitting there pulling my hair out trying to make a pivot table work in excel (it worked the first time, calculating mileage by department but the second time around it only calculated the number of instances that the department was listed in the mileage chart. What the hell? The moment I figure this out I’m going to mainline whiskey)…anyway, I’m dealing with the excel issue and there’s a knocking on my office door…and there’s my sister and her friend Michael! YAY!! and they come bearing gifts!! DOUBLE YAY!!! Seems they, along with my mom, decided I’d done such a nice job on the food and since I had lost a couple platters to the cold, unyielding hardness of the kitchen floor, they bought me 4 serving dishes as a thank you. A small round, a medium square and a large round all in white and a shiny metal serving tray. They even remembered that all my serving dishes are white. Nice. I had worked really hard on the food, not just cooking it, but planning it, trying to find the right combinations and flavors so that there would be something for everyone. I truly believe that this was one of my best parties and I guess my sister thought so too. Thanks.
I’m off to pack lunches.

They totally got me and I knew they would. Fuckers. They’ve installed those retarded cameras to catch people running red lights because obviously the cops are too busy down at the Krispy Kreme to do the jobs themselve (mock bitterness! I promise). Anyway, they got me on Park Ave and 28th St. I knew the cameras were there, so I can’t really be pissed at anyone but me. And of course it was one of those moments where the minute I hit the intersection I knew they were going to nab me. I’d spent the drive to work behind a succession of blind/retarded elderly ladies, by the time I’d gotten this close to work I was ready to kill. Fuckity. $142. Anyone know how to get me out of this without having to go to court? Dammit. I hate knowing I was wrong and there’s no real way out of it.
Got my referral for the orthopedic surgeon today, will hopefully get my wrist back from the zombie cyst that has taken over.
What did I do this weekend? Some crocheting, a little bit of cleaning, saw the Oscar nominated short form documentaries at the Riverview. I got home early today so it’s dishes, dinner and maybe organizing my yarn a bit.

Been a long time and there are a million photos. I’ll only bother you with a few. I promise.
I made homemade buns! There were tasty good, I used a honey wheat recipe. I probably should have cut and weighed the dough to make consistent sized buns and I should have stretched them more to make them flatter, but I don’t care. I have nice buns.
And here’s Ghengis and my focaccia bread. He’s a good fella, the littlest of the fellas and he approves of the focaccia bread.
Aaaah maddie does it get better than this?
Sometimes life is like this and sometimes life is like THIS. It is warm, it is happy, it makes me laugh in my belly.
People, the grand finale…the perfect moment…THE HIPPOSAURUS!!!! You honestly cannot imagine how happy it makes me to hug this thing, to look at it! and to share my chocolates with it.
So, there are your pictures!