fuzzy

 

 

a fuzzy pair

Lyffan and Loki enjoying a rare moment together at the foot of the bed today.  Lyffan moved just as I started to snap the picture - and she is extremely hard to get a photo of most of the time.  I got a few others of her the night before on my phone but they are refusing to transfer to the computer.  

Had a chance to speak French to a cashier at the grocery store - they were talking about being able to speak 'really good French' in a dream, but they can't speak it well.  He did a better go of remembering sentences than I did, although I understood all of what he said.  I remembered a lot more I could have said to him later - just like in English.  I am still thinking of maybe getting a Babbel subscription or taking some of those online lessons because speaking is still the hardest thing.  Just figuring out what you want to say, in any conversation, is one thing.  Then you have to translate it over.  Trying to figure out if I even should speak in Spanish to the truck drivers at work who keep saying 'no english' to me is hard enough.  I did write up a card in what I am sure is awful grammar to give to them with the dock instructions when they tell me that next time.

 

I did the walking route yesterday at the post office, for the first time in about four months.  I normally have my own route to do on Saturdays, but they had circumstances with people quitting and being out on surgery and I had to be shuffled to make sure they had someone there that could do every route.  In the middle of the day I stumbled off one of the porches - not a very tall one, but concrete steps - and somehow did a 'ta-da' type Spiderman crouching catch at the end and stood up surprised that I hadn't actually fallen on my face, instead.  Happy, yes.. but definitely also surprised.  I didn't get hurt, not even tearing up my hand because it was on grass - but I knew I'd feel the extra muscle work today.  I felt ALL my leg muscles today, because I haven't walked that fast for that far for a while - but I definitely feel the opposite knee and thigh muscle responding to the catching pose that I ended up in.  I am not Spiderman.  repeat after me... *ha*  

Being hypermobile is sometimes a good thing, maybe a bit more 'rubber' when it comes to some sorts of falls and catches - and the knee or ankle that might fold up and give out one moment instead of breaking will hurt like a * but 'snap back in place' and be usable - but also you definitely feel it later, comes back on with a vengeance the next day like 'WHAT did I do to myself.. oh right, and that could have been worse, so suck it up and also be more careful'.... and you really have to be more careful with it until it has time to heal, because now it is less likely to have that rubber-response as it has already used up that flexibility and now will tear easier.. and when you tear the skin up like catching with your hands and knees on the ground that is always taking longer to heal up than a 'normal' person would etc.

 

It has been fairly warm and raining all day - but it is supposed to get down to freezing and maybe snow a little tomorrow and the next day.  I am not terrified of driving in it but I have not been looking forward to when that will come and I have to try to get into the new job in that weather.  Mostly, I worry about the hills being icy.  The start time is before dawn, and I don't like the idea of having to be out there trying to get up hilly roads in the pre-dawn ice.  The post office would often understand if I said I didn't want to leave before first light - because as long as I got there and got it done it really wasn't an issue.  The office job is much more linked to timeclock time and being there consistently on time.  They go by 'the points system'.  ie: A late punch counts for as many 'points' as an absence.  The only way to get the minimum amount of points for not being there exactly from 7 am to 3:30 pm is to attend in the beginning of the day and have a doctor's note for an appointment in the afternoon - and that is still a quarter of a point off.  It's one of those systems made by people who don't have to live through it etc... but it is what it is and so far I haven't had to have any 'points' knocked off - because I knew the ice was coming I have just tried to do it all correctly and hope the weather cooperates.

 I'm going to get to bed and let tomorrow 'be tomorrow'.... I was quite tired earlier today and took a nap for a few hours while the rain was falling the heaviest.  Esme went out to do chicken feeding about that time and two of the dogs came and told me they were worried about her and she was 'out in the weather' and I had to let one out and calm the other one down until Esme came back in a few minutes later.  We've all had dinner now and the rain is off-and-on, so they are laying down now.

I have done some French on my phone Duolingo, and Japanese on my computer.

bits

 

I should be sleeping, but woke up to check on the chicken downstairs in the garage, and now I'm still awake two hours later.  I have a luncheon date later today with a post office colleague, which was set up three weeks ago but had to be cancelled.  We're going to the Chinese buffet but hoping to try out their adjoined Sushi bar since the other restaurant I like to get sushi at is strangely closed on Tuesdays.

(Above : Lyffan, sleeping by my computer - she woke up and stared at me intensely when I sneezed earlier!)

The sick chicken is still drinking, but I followed the instructions on a site and gave her a ten minute soak in warm epsom salt water yesterday, and she actually hasn't been quite as happy since then.  So, I'm not sure - She isn't eating anything - just drinking, and standing up and moving a few steps, but not running around.  We gave her a good look over - all three of us, and couldn't see any external damage or anything obvious except where she had lost some feathers with the yuck that had been on her (that we washed off).   I stopped putting her in the cage and just left her in the kiddie pool because she isn't moving around much and I wanted to reduce the stress of putting her in and out of the square opening in the cage.  

I put 'electrolytes and vitamins' in the water I was giving her, and she is trying to drink out of it all by herself when I'm not there (drinks much more I think when I squeeze the bottle for her right there, but Mark says that is a false observation) - so I might try to find a better way to set up the waterer for her later.  There is food right there available for her, but she hasn't even tried to take any out of my hand since yesterday morning, and that was just one piece.  Really, I'm just not sure she is going to make it - I needed to get to her sooner and Esme told me yesterday that she had been 'broody' and not wanting to get off her nest for several days, so maybe she had been without food and water holed up in the house longer than we realized.  It's so hard sometimes when you have twenty of them to notice some of the less obvious things you'd notice more if you only had a handful.

I finished the second blue crochet bag - and a few dishcloths, and am thinking about making a few toys in a simple style that I saw and liked.  But I said that yesterday and I knit another dishcloth to finish up the yarn I had - so we'll see.  I took a try at making a stand for the bags out of some things I have - pvc pipe and a wreath ring - but will have to keep working at that, it needs a more stable base.  I've been looking at a lot of yarn online - so many different kinds unlike anything I have, but I'm not willing to buy any of it sight unseen, especially.  

recipe : olive oil, frozen white onions, half a tomato, soy sauce (2 caps), garam masala, about 1/4 tsp or less, brought to a sizzle, add about a 1/3 cup of water, brought to a boil - then added a chunk of the jasmine brown rice that had been cooked yesterday : Esme said it was good, not too strong of spice (Minerva was drooling by my elbow the entire time I was eating), but the rice was 'chewy', not bad, but different  we had the same rice in a fried rice with egg yesterday and she hadn't noticed the chewiness then, but it was only a few hours cooled off and not in the fridge all night - I'm still evaluating whether I need to buy some biryani masala, this was pretty good this way

Still doing mostly French - touched into Chinese.  Played the meadowlands ranch (in the Stardew Valley game) up to the end of Spring - about to build the barn.  I was in the second year on the other game before I decided to try that - somehow I always start over more interested in trying some other method etc. 

Cat in Space, yarn and bank errors

 

 navy blue cotton thread cone

ordered this thread online to try to weave something in all cotton - it is quite a bit thinner than I thought IT would be, but about the thread width of what I had previously wanted for another project.  So, we'll see.  It said I have 800 yards of it to try probably both projects out.  Been making a bit more progress on the navy blue weaving - did a big block of the blue and will be switching back to the red in a bit.  I have to pull it over the top to continue weaving soon.  I still didn't take the navy and green acrylic mat off the other small loom.  I did make a big waffle-weave dishcloth for the sink (needed a new one) and two potholders, both in just plain red yarn.  And that was my weekend, other than grocery shopping and working much more than usual.  It's Tuesday and I'm saying the weekend is done now, so see what that tells you about that /ha /sigh

This morning I was up from like 3 am to 5 am then even slept in and would have forgotten about the small route they had put me on except something nagged me in the back of my brain - and when I checked the schedule again yes lo and behold, there was me scheduled for it.  So I put some of what we were supposed to get done today off to tomorrow and went and did that.

It rained some yesterday and a lot this morning - and then even a bit more.  The garden appreciated it and nothing looked flooded.  I bought one more pepper plant for the garden when I went for chicken feed, and planted it after I got home.  

rant : 

I had a hassle with the electric company and a fee that was really their mistake, but I paid it, unhappily.  I was disappointed in their logic, and felt down quite a bit yesterday after I talked to them because it just didn't make any sense what had happened - they should have known better trying to double cash a 78 day old check when they were already paid in full (for the three month bills since then!) - there was no way to win-for-losing ...I would have gotten some fee from them or the bank any way you slice it apparently - yet, THEY 'have to get their fee back' from me and the girl was very bubble-gum chew and 'but yea, that happens, we don't like, control it or anything, it's all the computer now'.  Well then, the computer can be better, can't it?  Can't it? 

...(and there my faith in logic becomes Stoic Spock and I have to reorient that not everyone is this stupid, I'm sure... )  Esme and I have had this discussion about similar things - in the car, describing how many people don't think ALL the time, they simply don't have to juggle five streams of thoughts that are overlapping and reminding you about this thing and that and doing calculations - their mind is focused on one or two things at a time that are right in front of them usually and when they finish with it - they move to the next thing, and sometimes their minds are even just blank, and they like it that way, they often aim for it.  They don't watch a show or read a book and have it reverberate with a hundred other connected thoughts for weeks and years later.  They're definitely not estimating the number of cows in that field or thinking about dispersion patterns or trying to compare the electron shell diagrams of Strontium and Tin while driving to work.  They don't remember the last things said in one place returning like echoes of the past when you return there, or have a constant back-checker making math calculations adding things up and dividing percentages after they leave the supermarket.  

 

Strontium and Tin

 

They probably don't have a 'collision detection' system running all the time about what calamities might befall everything around you - people running into each other, cars on the highway, things falling, burning, breaking, times and schedules (it helped today, with the 'boy you should look at that schedule it looks weird from here (here being looking at it for thirty seconds last week)) - it involves everything announcing what could go wrong with it in some extra 'awareness' box like a red light on your mental dashboard that won't stay off... my mom called it the protector instinct, when we discussed it when I was a bit younger than Esme, before I got a good handle on it - it can get really loud some days when I've already got too much to juggle and keep track of actually doing myself and yet sometimes especially with radio or music I can tune it down to a normal level.  This is how my brain works - and Esme has some extent of it, and she finds it annoying at the very least but does understand it.  I know I'm being cynical in some percentage except, that she listens to my philosophy rant and says it 'explains a lot, actually' - about the world she sees, about why we are always anxious (because we don't 'turn off' our brains)  and why everything so spectacularly doesn't work in many places, even after a millennia of people fighting over the right way to do things.

Anyway, gah.  The more I think on it, the more lost I will feel about it having no solution.  So, I'm weaving, and knowing I need to sort a hundred other things in the house and I've only begun to do so in my head here and there and pick up and move a few things at a time.   There are one or two things in 'space' I would like to lay hands on again and I know where they are or were before the storage container fell a few months ago, and that I put them safely somewhere new, but when I tried to get them earlier today I didn't take the time to feel 'down the rope' to where they were now.  Instead I ran into something else that would serve, and grabbed that up, and hung up the phone on finding the thing until later.  I've done mostly Spanish today and will do my Russian program in a a bit. Hopefully, I can continue and finish running the errands tomorrow.

 

 

Lyffan in from the wet outside, after her dinner.  Mark had seen her chasing frogs when we first called her for dinner - after a rain like this there are hundreds of little hop frogs that appear all over - she was 'completely occupied' he said - and  so we watched a bit more of a movie for another hour and then all the cats were finally ready.  Now she is sitting here sorting out her belly fur and trying to fit in this too small of a space, and maybe knock my garbage can down.  Minion usually sits here - right next to my computer space, but she is downstairs taking Loki's chair away from him that he has been in all day.  I saw him stretched out in the hallway floor and that's unusual for him, peek in the bathroom and there she is licking her feet in his chair with Charlotte lying on the rug saying 'I don't get it - but I'm not involved, I just sleep here.'   As I type this Lyffan has now fell asleep and is shaking her paws and whiskers chasing some outside creature in her sleep.

 

seems relevant short story idea : several geeks in a big office with headphones on jacked into some machine they haven't been told exactly how it works yet.  And yet someone is standing there with a clipboard trying to see what the results are.  Hey, do we just say 'Aliens, Hello?' or what?  How are they going to hear us?  Where is the microphone?  Do we just think really hard : 'Hello?'  No, man, you have to try something original, like 'And here we are back from Planet Earth with another line of smooth jazz and greetings to tell you, 'hey, we're listening'.. to what though?  How does all this work?<--that was the line of reasoning in a dream this morning just before my alarm went off.  

Of Feathers and Wheat and little ink sketches

somebody, Lyffan cat, is bored in all this ice and snow

and deciding to try to eat the decorations

 

 ink and colored pencil

And I updated my Cloudfolios a little because they said it had been so long 

https://www.cloudfolios.com/MarieLamb/
 

cats reluctantly inside from the rain

 Minion and Lyffan curled up during a cold rainstorm outside

 

Lyffan is sleeping on the little woven mat I made and placed on the footstool

 

Mid June

 

Nasturtiums, morning glories, hosta and lilies blooming, peppers and tomatoes coming onto their vines, green beans, harvested potatoes and all sort of greens.

 

purple potatoes from our garden

LANGUAGES: (with some synesthesia thrown in)

 A little graphics art project I did very quickly one night to remember the transformations in Finnish.  I did a good update in Finnish this month, after doing an update on Romanian last month and sort of letting that sit a bit.  I'm also touching on Japanese, and Spanish and French and throwing in a bit of this and that and so forth.   Japanese makes me feel 'my brain is actually rearranging this stuff as I hear it- and then rearranging it to produce the sentence again and I can FEEL it trying to figure it out)  Finnish is more in the 'oh, that word transforms a little in this situation, and combines this way in that - got to remember that and get the vowel marks right'... I do know there is much more in Finnish it has yet to actually present to me, but I'm almost halfway through all that DuoLingo has to offer at the same time.  It's a bit daunting how 'easy' it is and yet how 'hard' I've been told it will be.  With Japanese, both of those are up front, I feel it's hard, I know it's hard, and yet I keep understanding more in ways I did not expect to understand (it feels like a different liquid in the channels of my brain) so I keep coming back. 

 I threw in a few lessons of Chinese to see how the number systems compared, since they use some of the same symbols.  Then we watched Kill Bill series and I understood more of what they were saying in Japanese, but still, not enough.  I also found a decent program for teaching Latvian (Apsveicu!) and was trying that out but my spelling is absolutely awful and that program does require you to get it right to advance so... Ko jus teicat?  Just try to spell 'iepazities' on the fly...  still, it is hard to find resources for it at all, so I was excited to get the chance to work on it more than the children's site I had found and reading the news site when I'm in the right mind for it and remember to go check.

We renewed our library cards, and Esme got a book on electricity.  I found a book that captured my interest with the prose, hard topics but I'm pushing through it - 'Find Me', by Andre Aciman.  Not something I would have picked up having known what it was all about, but the author did weave a beautiful scene and a fast tale full of rich details, so I'm pushing through and seeing what it has to show me.  The thing that grabbed me was that on the cover it said 'by the author of Call Me By Your Name', which is an anime Esme and I saw about a boy and girl who 'meet' on a train (this story also starts, oddly, on a train), alternate 'swapping bodies in dreams' having to relate to being a different gender and different expectations from their families they don't really know - and when they figure out what is going on they 'write letters' (while they are each other, they leave each other diary entries) to one another, but then towards the end we find out that they are actually in different times, about three? years apart, and the boy ends up saving the girl's life by writing to her not to be somewhere at a certain time that he finds out is a disaster her and her family apparently died in, and she listens to him and ends up surviving, to meet him in the real future.  I'm not sure, now, if this is the same author of that anime story - I'll have to look that up after I finish the book but not before.

Esme got her glasses renewed and we pick up the new pair today.  We've been playing more board games, card games, such.  I want to get her more engaged this summer and also taking care of herself better.

 

Our cat, Lyffan, whose name means frog (not seen is her brother Loki, he was inside sprawled on a countertop near the food) sniffing the Nasturtium flowers I had picked.  Our Minion cat is thirteen years old, the black tortoiseshell, she is doing well but has dry skin issues (like her daughter Doxie had much earlier in her life) yet is still so stubborn about wanting to be outside nearly all the time I have to call her in and sometimes go pick her up bodily and bring her in to eat dinner at night. 

My brother's birthday is today.  I sent him messages.  My birthday is next week.  I ordered myself a tamagoyaki (Japanese omelet) pan I had been thinking about for a few months, and a new colander for my vegetable washing.  Mark said we might go out somewhere for a lunch or something closer to the day - although honestly I always feel like Father's Day and my birthday collide some - ever since that year when I was a kid that I was told 'you can't have a party, Father's Day is the same day as your birthday, no one will come, anyway it's summer and there isn't anybody to ask who isn't already doing something'...and I decided oh, so, nobody will come...  I did have a few little parties here and there, not saying I didn't - but I was told that because of where my birthday fell in the month it was really just going to be overlooked by most because they were busy.  And that became okay - my birthdays are for me then, to decide where I am in the Universe, and reflect, and that has been mostly what they have been all my life since with a few nice recognitions, an indulgence, like a new pan or a special sandwich here and there, but primarily 'pearls on a string' thinking back where I was last year, where I am now... 

Esme has asked a few months ago to try more salads, so we've made two that she enjoys so far.

Green lettuce, black olives, tomato, no dressing (she tried two, doesn't like it at all)

Green lettuce, black olives, mandarin oranges, sometimes with cooked chicken patty cut up and placed on top.