just be.

rap and architecture

this is not brain bleach, but WOW is it cool. 

 

we have a new house!

not literally, but it's like it's new. the interior walls have been primed and painted. the radiators have been stripped, primed and painted to gorgeous pewter-toned glory. new level subfloors have been installed and maple hardwood laid over them. the space is now light, bright, solid, and quiet. no more squeaks and shudders. it's gorgeous.

i haven't taken any real after pictures, just a few shots of zuzu in the chair we found along beechwood boulevard and reupholstered, now at home in the second-floor bay window (living room). this beautiful view is mine from the sofa (we've ordered a new one of those, too, scheduled for delivery the first week in march).

zuzu is chilling. jack-jack, on the other hand, is walking around the house pointing out all the things that have changed. this is his job as supervisor, and he takes it very seriously.

toons!

saturday night, mr. bee and i had grownup time! we dressed up (okay, not much, but a little) and went to the toonseum and eleven with our friends liz and manos. it was so fun!

a year ago, i'd finished knitting my sunrise circle jacket but never hemmed it (it has a turned hem around all the edges). it languished for many months; i finally hemmed everything except one sleeve a month or two ago, and then decided that i wanted to wear it last night. so i hurriedly hemmed the sleeve and wore it! it was cozy and soft on a snowy night, so it was perfect (even though it was a little big in the waist--i closed it using a pedestal button, and it puckered a lot).

pics because it happened. i tried posing in front of a decal of bugs on the wall at the museum, but mr. bee kept trying and trying and trying with his phone camera. so that is why there are five shots, and i am sharing them with you because it cracks me up that he kept shooting. he was still unhappy with them, but i was bored of posing :)

the museum is super cool. there was a looney tunes exhibit in the main gallery, then a small keith haring exhibit in the hallway, and finally an exhibit of newspaper comics. AND they do not discourage photography! just no flashes. so i snapped a few shots of things i thought were cool:

the gift shop was excellent. small, but a nicely curated collection of books of and about animation and comics. i bought a copy of metamaus (i have kind of a thing for art spiegelman work and already have the original issues of maus and maus 2, bought a french hardback of maus and maus 2 at an excellent comics shop in switzerland this spring, and bought a copy of in the shadow of no towers this summer finally). i love that it's in our town :)  

a good time was had by all. and of course dinner was delicious :)

in other news, the floors are all finished and the stuff is all back in the house. the radiators are supposed to be finished cleaning tomorrow night. then we get them brought back and loaded into the house, mr. bee paints them, and the plumbers hook them up. THEN the flooring guys come and finish the stairs, and then i can have the organizers come back to finish up the unpacking, and our house will be ours again. AND we're getting a new sofa (espresso, chunky weave). I AM SO EXCITE.

first snow!

this morning brings us our first snow of the season. so pretty! it does make me question our sanity, though: we're about to have all of our radiators taken over to pennsylvania metal cleaning for a good dip and strip. it's the place that did the same for the first radiator we had done, a few years ago when we were doing the last round of major renovations, and that radiator is gorgeous. it's one of my favorite things in the house, actually. (we did that one then because that room was completely gutted, but we couldn't quite swing paying for all of them at once.) it's not cheap, but the result is jaw-droppingly beautiful. all those layers of paint from centuries of redecorating get stripped away (and the radiators are cleaner and therefore more efficient), leaving bare, gleaming metal and all those details of the turn-of-the-century craft shine through. just gorgeous. anyway, it's not really practical to do one at a time because the whole plumbing system has to be taken down and drained before any can be taken out.

and next week begins the installation of our new hardwood floors throughout pretty much the whole house. we're not doing part of the first floor, where there are still dropped ceilings (we didn't do any renovations there earlier) and a kitchen to be renovated, so we'll live there while the work is being done, which will take a couple of months, i think. but the whole second floor except the darkroom and bathroom (which andrew redid a couple of years ago) will get new floors, and the whole third floor except the to-be-built bathroom (it's gutted except for the laundry machines) will be done. "done" in our case means that they (nova flooring) will first create a level surface by laying plywood and oriented strand board (osb) on low spots and then pouring self-leveling concrete. this will happen on all three stories of the house. and they'll add a support post in the basement to accommodate the extra weight. it kind of gives me the willies to think about our house collapsing under the weight stress of three levels of all this wood and concrete, but i'm trusting the pros to take care of things. 

anyway, before they can install anything, the radiators need to be removed, so this is why the dip and strip is happening now. right after the first snow of the season. and right before thanksgiving, which we host every year. they assure us that the first floor will be finished in time for entertaining, but i'm guessing that we won't have radiators back in then unless we can convince the plumbers to bring back a couple at a time. we'll see about that.

so space heaters, warm clothes, blankets, and snuggling will be key parts of our november and december. the results will be worth it--i can't wait! (note to self: take before pictures asap!)

so many things, so little time.

well. there is lots to say and i have little energy to write, but i need to get it all down tonight.

i'll start by saying that andrew and i celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary on saturday, and it was terrific. we dropped the dogs off at the cozy inn (warning: stupid music plays, but you can turn it off at the "music off" link beneath the changing pictures) and headed down to berryville, virginia, for the shenandoah valley fiber festival. it was my first time going to this one, and it was really nice. calm, friendly, spacious, a little warm but not too, and lots of vendors. and most indoors, making weather a minimal concern even if it had been bad. i was not very spendy and bought just two skeins: dragonfly fibers dragon sock in the titania colorway, which is a beautiful tone-on-tone emerald green and a nice sproingy tight twist,

and lizard toes isobel, which is a fingering blend of merino, cashmere, and nylon in a variegated grey and brown.

the dragon sock is earmarked for the tour de sock; my team is the team that rocks (slowly), made up of five members of the rockin sock club, and socks that rock is by far my largest stash, but dragonfly fibers is one of the sponsors and we get double points for using its yarn, so. i am competitive. what?

the isobel was just calling to me from the aisle and i waltzed into the booth and grabbed it, felt the cashmere and knew i had to have it, and THEN realized that it was a yarn by someone i'd met on lazy, stupid, and godless just a couple of days earlier. it will make beautiful weaving. on which more later.

after the festival, we checked into our hotel. we stayed at the aloft winchester, and let me sum up right here, unambiguously so that there is no confusion: DO NOT STAY AT THIS HOTEL. it is pretty. it has a snack bar. that's about all the good i can say about it. oh, and i guess it wasn't too expensive ($116 including taxes for one night). why did we hate it so much? here we go, chronologically: i was too stupid to check where it was located and should have booked something in the old town. my bad. not the fault of the hotel. but a bummer. whatever. so we walk in, and the young woman behind the desk is angrily flipping through a binder. chin on her hand, scowling, nearly ripping the pages out as she turns the pages, looking for something she's not finding. she doesn't acknowledge us (we are in her line of sight peripherally and the lobby was small--we know she saw and heard us) for literally about five minutes. when she finally does, she makes sure to tell us how crappy her day is going and that it's just beginning. this line of conversation continues throughout our (fortunately relatively brief) interaction. at the end of said interaction, she pushes a couple of card keys at me and starts to turn back to her computer problems (also a topic of complaint during our time providing hotel-desk-clerk therapy). so i ask, "what's the room number? is this it?" and i find it written in tiny letters on the card-key envelope. "what's the best way to get to that?" (any other time i've checked into a hotel, the checker-in has made sure to show and tell me my room number and then give explicit directions to the room. not this one. she had Things to Do.) so she tells us and then returns to her work. we head to room 226. it's cool. it's modern. sleek. we settle in for a little nap before dinner.

we walked around the pedestrian area for a little while before dinner, then headed to the restaurant. here's me on our walk. i was a hand-knits fool: february lady sweater, kalajoki socks, and earth and sky shawl.

 

dinner was AMAZING. i'd found (thanks, google!) and reserved a table for two at one block west. again, unambiguously, i'll offer this: DO EAT AT THIS RESTAURANT. so good! i started with this fabulous composed salad:

(oops, sideways; i'll figure out how to fix that). it's a mixture of asian pears, butternut squash, and spiced pecans with an apple-cider reduction. omg so good. also excellent french bread. very frenchy. i had a hanger steak with dragon-something (a theme!) wax beans and black kale. i love hanger steak. :) and then we shared a flourless chocolate cake called le bete noir. it was warmer and had a different texture from other flourless cakes i've had--almost like a flan, except that i don't like flan. not custardy, just soft and warm like that. omnomnom.

and then we were completely stuffed and drove back to the hotel. we were surprised (and, i confess, unimpressed) to see the desk clerk cozily adjusting the shirt of a young man who was enjoying the attention quite a bit, both enjoying pounding music and a lively party going on around them in the lobby bar. we were grateful to be headed to the peace of our room.

we thought. but we could hear EVERYthing from our room. we were annoyed. but we watched some tv and went about our business and tried to ignore them. this was doable until we tried to go to sleep. at 10:15 (yes, i am old), i phoned the front desk and asked about how late we should expect the music to be going on. "about 12:30, maybe a little later," came the answer. no apology, no concern. so i hung up. what could i do? 

then andrew suggested that we request a different room, so i called back. she had one more room, on a higher floor and at the other end of the hotel. why the hell hadn't we been given that one in the first place? i do not know. so we moved and had a decent night after that. but never any note of concern or apology from the desk clerk.

the morning-shift guy was a whole different kind of employee. genuinely aksed how our night was, just a general air of here-to-serve. too bad he hdn't been on the night shift.

we headed back to town for breakfast before hitting the road: the amherst diner. another good choice. not speedy, particularly, and not any prettier than any other old diner, but a good diner. i'd go again.

and that was our weekend. i'd spent a lot of it stressed and worried, despite the beautiful scenery and wonderful company, because i am having endometrial ablation tomorrow morning and had received a call friday afternoon saying that they couldn't clear me for anesthesia because of an abnormality on my ekg. so i'd worried all weekend about how i was going to chase down doctors and tests to get cleared by wednesday morning, given that i have a rush project at work right now that really needed to get to the author by COB today. (it didn't. sorry.) but monday morning i was able to get all the paperwork faxed and signatures transmitted, so i'm all cleared for tomorrow. i'm very nervous still, mostly about the IV needle (i HATE needles, serious phobia, like the only thing i'm actually phobic about), but also about the anesthesia not working and going through what i went through five years ago in the colonoscopy. but i remind myself that needles are not (generally) fatal and that i have survived being raped and the rape-like colonoscopy and that i shall therefore survive this thing tomorrow. i will be grateful to be under anesthesia finally and not worrying about this any more.

so. weaving: i start an eight-week course on weaving at the pittsburgh center for the arts on saturday, and i am SO excite. i learned to weave this summer at woven art in lansing but haven't had anyone here to help me learn more, and there are a few more things i'm ready to learn. the classes are three hours every saturday, and i am so excited to learn and make some more fun stuff.

and of course nerd wars and tour de sock both start on saturday, so those will be good for keeping me busy. 

oh! and i almost forgot: we brought nova flooring out today to have a look at our dr. seuss-ity house, and it looks like they might be the answer for us. we hope to have an estimate in a couple of days. now to choose actual flooring! i'm SO looking forward to entertaining at home again. :squeezesigh:

cats and their neuroses

we did have some regression in the litter-box department for about a week. it was tearfully frustrating for me, thinking that we really *were* going to have to surrender jack-jack and chloe to a shelter and declare ourselves true failures in this effort. we had a perfect week and then a perfectly awful (pee outside the boxes every damned day) week. i was discouraged.

but we seem to be back on track now. i'd moved the boxes away from the wall to create a few inches of space on all four sides of each box. this was on someone's advice, though i can't remember whose for sure. i think it was the behaviorist, but i was collecting advice from so many sources that it's hard now to remember. anyway, i did that, and every single day i would find pee behind one or more of the boxes, between the box and the wall. it was always on top of one of the pee pads, which made it easier to clean up (yay chux!), but still. frustrating.

but i decided, screw the advice, i'm pushing the boxes back against the wall again. all four boxes, flush against the wall. still several inches of space between the boxes for sweeping and such, and still room in front of the boxes, and still nothing above the boxes, baby gate still keeping the dogs out of the room, and full visibility to and from the boxes. just pushed them back against the wall. and not one accident since then. all the elimination has been in those four boxes all week. yay jack-jack and chloe! 

cleaning the boxes has become part of my daily routine. i usually do it as soon as i've done my own potty business in the morning, before go downstairs for breakfast. the boxes stay clean, and it's really not a big deal at all, it turns out, because all the boxes are in one room, so it's just one fell swoop of scooping into one trash bag and it's done. i straighten out the chux (which get bunched up with the paw sweeping) as i go. takes maybe a minute, and everybody is happy.

we'd kept the painters out of there last week, which means that it's the least-finished room in the house now (we'd painted the walls years ago, in a lovely color of--surprise!--blue, but andrew had stripped the trim). i don't have any idea how we're going to make way for the flooring to go in and still give the cats a place to potty all day (god, i HOPE it's just a one-day project in that room), but we are officially okay putting new floors in there. (again: yay chux!) molyneaux has sent someone out with a few samples and to take preliminary measurements; she'll phone tomorrow to set up a time to bring out more samples, and we should have new floors very soon. we're thinking medium-toned medium- to wide-plank hardwood; i like the finer grain of maple and cherry more than oak, but we'll see what she brings. this is not something that seems easy to shop for online, even just window-shopping.

a raveler turned me onto the blog the way of cats last week, and today's post is relevant, so i thought i'd share it.

all six of us are in one room today, which makes me very happy. the furry four are sleeping, and andrew and i are (duh) on our respective laptops. i have black-and-gold knitting to do during the game, which we hope hope hope is better than last week's debacle. go steelers!

color my world!

i never thought i'd see the day. we are actually finally getting paint on these walls.

we bought this house in april 2004 and lived in the first-floor apartment for two years while we rented the upstairs (two stories) apartment to another couple. we kicked them out in october 2006 and started renovating. tore down the wall separating the apartments, ripped out carpeting (hallelujah), and tore down loose plaster. i lurved demolition.

that round of renovation lasted about a year, maybe a year and a half. i've kind of blocked it out. they tore down dropped ceilings, sistered joists, tore down the decrepit, and polished up the old. but we've had barebarebare walls and ceilings since then in about two-thirds of the house, just waiting to soak up some paint and meanwhile dusting us with bright white plaster every time we brushed up against them. the visible joints and peeping-through previously textured walls mock us almost as much as the c. 1957 cracking linoleum tile that was splattered with plaster, paint, joint compound, and god knows what else; the frighteningly bendy wood floors; and the mismatched, partially torn-out vinyl flooring. the place is, in short, a mess. and not just because we're lousy housekeepers.

so a few months ago, angie's list offered one of its big deals on painting services. the contractor had excellent reports from angie's list members and was rated highly by the better business bureau, so we bought up the deal and brought the guys out for an estimate and walk-through. fast-forward a few months (the soonest we could get on their schedule), and they're suddenly here. (they were supposed to start the last week of this month, but they called andrew yesterday and were like, "we're coming tomorrow morning at 8!" we are not turning them away.) of course, this is all while i'm physically feeling like shite and having a slew of medical tests and procedures to try to make that better; it's not awesome having workers in the house amid all that. but it's totally awesome having the work done, so suck it up, right? right.

anyway. so today i needed to choose colors. i knew just what i wanted (brace yourself, because this is a big shocker):

 
it's woad (via). it is the color i would want to be the only color i could see if i could see only one color. i love it. it makes me happy.

so don (the painter) handed me the sherwin-williams color deck and told me to have at it. i looked first for the closest match i could find for the woad, and i chose distance. (weird to have that as the color name in our bedroom, but there it is.)

 
all the rest of the colors pretty much work up the lightness scale on the same card. the hallway and stairwell outside the bedroom will be bracing blue:

 
and the second-floor rooms will continue up the scale. here are some crudely colored-in floor plans:

 

 
 
all the ceilings will be bright white, and all the trim will be semigloss white. i'm very excited. next week, the floor guys come, and it's going to be like a regular house finally. our house will be a very, very fine house.

 

happy again

you might have been following our saga chez bee, in which the cats' constant (almost daily) peeing outside their litter boxes (not on clothes or furniture, thankfully, just within a few-foot radius of the litter boxes) was bringing me, my marriage, and our household to our knees. we were pretty sure that we were going to have to surrender the cats to the shelter, which would be a death sentence for two cats that were known to have bad litter-box habits. they just don't get adopted.

this had been going on for about three years (since shortly after we adopted them) and was so much worse than just "i hate cleaning up after them" or "i hate that smell." the smell, first of all, permeates everything, every part of the house, and really dominates one's brain in its presence. but it also stains and can ruin flooring, and this was happening in the dining room (so, no company almost ever, for someone who used to entertain regularly and have monthly dinner parties, and a terrible welcome-home greeting because it is situated smack dab between the two entryways to our house) and in my craft room (talk about saddening and frustrating, having my precious craft room, with its beautiful light and wonderful storage and my favorite color on the wall, become a place that i was loath to enter, let alone spend time in). it was virtually the only topic about which mr. bee and i ever fought, and we didn't fight nicely and healthily about it. it really was dominating my life and my psyche in terrible ways.

once we agreed that rehoming or surrendering was likely to be the solution, i became despondent. i cried constantly, couldn't sleep, couldn't think about anything else.

finally, i found a behavioral consultant who would work with us, despite the fact that she is more than a four-hour drive from us. i found only three consultants through the international association of animal behavior consultants who were within 200 miles of us, one in central pennsylvania and another in virginia. the one in central pennsylvania pretty much dismissed the idea (of working with us) out of hand; the one in virginia took forever to get back to us and still wasn't especially useful (thankfully, by then, we'd been working with debbie via phone and email and were on a path to a plan). i posted in three groups on ravelry and got lots of help, support, and advice from folks there. i read a ton of books. and i took the cats to the vet AGAIN.

this time, i really laid it out for dr. ben, explaining that this was really the end of our rope and that we were serious about rehoming or surrendering the cats if we couldn't make this stop. we are finally at the point that we are ready to paint and refloor the whole house, and we simply couldn't do that if the cats were going to ruin walls and floors. and we couldn't keep living in this shithole that the fixer-upper continues to be after more than seven years of living in this uneven, unfinished crapshack. not even for these wonderful, sweet, funny cats.

so dr. ben's advice (combined with some of the advice i'd received from other sources) was this: get four boxes (one for each cat for each function because some cats like to use a different box for peeing than for pooping) and put them all in one room. allow a few inches of space around each box, and put pee pads on the floor all around and underneath them. the pee pads would make detecting spots easier and make cleanup easier as well. and they would stop further damage to the floors and walls. in each box, try a different substrate (because cats). see what they like (use) and don't like (use) and keep working until we find what works.

so i implemented operation clusterbox the next morning. i threw out the cabinet in which the craft-room cats' room box had been, moved my work table to the other side of the room (so that the boxes were completely open because cats), and used get serious to scrub the floors [spoiler alert: WAY better than simple solution or nature's miracle, imo], using a blacklight to make sure that i had cleaned all the spots. i laid down pee pads (i've since been advised to use pads made for handling human incontinence instead, both because they're cheaper and because they're not treated with pheromones to attract puppies; those are on order but haven't arrived yet) across the whole area where the boxes would go, overlapping the edges a little for complete coverage. then i arranged the boxes:

• box 1 is a shallow sterilite bin containing seven pounds of world's best multiple-cat litter
• box 2 is a deep sterilite bin containing the same amount of the same litter
• box 3 is a scoop-free box
• box 4 is another shallow sterilite bin; we originally had it empty but, after it went untouched when the others were getting used, we added another litter we've used before, swheat scoop.

things are SO MUCH BETTER here i can't even believe it. we are at almost exactly three days (72 hours) since beginning operation clusterbox, and we have had exactly one accident that i know of (there could have been one in the first 48 hours in the dining room and i wouldn't have known it because the carpeting was still down and i didn't get down there touching actual fibers), and even that one was JUST behind one of the litter boxes so was probably just bad aim. they are consistently using the two shallow boxes.

the cats' room hardly smells at all and is very easy to clean both accidents and the litter boxes themselves. the dining room smells MUCH better; i tore up everything stained that i could yesterday, down to the floorboards, then used the get serious on the floors, but i couldn't get the last of the stained carpet out. my husband is home from his trip now and will take care of that, and then i can do one more pass with the get serious (which is AMAZING stuff that i cannot believe is not in every home in the world) and the blacklight to make sure that all the odor is out.

my stress, anxiety, frustration, and sadness levels, all of which were through the roof and really dominating every corner of my heart and mind for...well, for months or and parts of even *years*, are pretty much zero now, which is a feeling i haven't had in i can't remember how long. definitely years. i have great hope that we have seen the last of these problems and that the cats will live out their long and (i hope!) healthy lives with us.

wow. today was a shitty crafting day.

not a shitty day all over, but a really, really, spectacularly shitty crafting day.

i had set aside a few hours today to warp my loom for the first time alone. (i'd done it only once before, in class, with a buddy to help and of course the instructor guiding us every step of the way and checking our work.) i had anticipated that it would be difficult, both physically and mentally, because i wouldn't have my buddy's help and i wouldn't have nancy the instructor there making sure i did this or that and checking my work and telling me what to do.

i planned out my project and wound my yarn, set up the loom and warping peg, and was all ready to do business. sort of. we didn't have two tables on the first floor, where i (unwisely, it turns out) planned to undertake this effort, so i clamped the peg to the arm of a chair. my initial frustrations (so many--our dining room, where i was working, has a litter box in it that at least one of our cats chooses to only *nearly* use sometimes, so the room itself is not exactly sweet smelling; the dining room is also full of my crap that i don't put away; and i hadn't turned the room air conditioner on before beginning, so i was hot and frustrated anyway) were compounded by my asshole cat jack-jack trying to play with the yarn. (he isn't an asshole because he likes to play with yarn. that's just kind of regular cat stuff. but he's an asshole. you'll just have to trust me on this.) i got him to stop that, and he perched on the chair that held the peg and seemed to sort of chill for a while.

the frustrations were increased because my instructions were from class and were definitely written FOR class. not for doing this on one's own with no one to ask questions. so i did some things wrong and wasn't sure about the correctness of other things. but i soldiered on and muddled through and all that.

when i was humming along and being VERY proud of how well i was doing and how pretty the warp was looking--i was using some denim-blue superwash worsted i'd bought at a fiber festival a few years ago and was also very smug about using up stash--and even smiling broadly at how joyful this whole process had finally become after my earlier frustrations, POW. the warps ALL snapped high in the air off the warp peg, and the chair holding said peg tumbled to its side, and i saw jack-jack leaping away into the kitchen.

now, the most likely explanation is that the tension from almost 200 (because yes, i was just a few inches away from being finished) worsted-weight warps became too much for the chair holding 10-pound jack-jack (note to self: not his fault that he weighs only 10 pounds OR that i hadn't put something heavy on the chair, like, say, a case of seltzer or something) and pulled it over, sending jack-jack flying into the kitchen for cover. but my frustration said, "dammit, asshole cat jack-jack! it is your fault that my warps just went into the air!" and i swore up a storm.

i swore up a storm while attempting to solve the problem of the no-longer-under-tension warps. i dragged some furniture around to try to find something heavier to anchor the warp peg to. i tried resmoothing the warps into place and looping them around the peg. i assembled my loom stand and put the loom on the stand and tried using the opposite end of the table as tension. eventually, i thought i had a workable warp. it would definitely be the ugliest, least even warping job anyone had ever seen, but i thought i could try.

i was being an idiot.

i went on to the next steps, again making mistakes because i didn't know some important things not written in the instructions (or maybe they're there and i just didn't understand or see them). but the thing is, those mistakes would have been a lot easier to undo had i not made 10,000 of them already and had i not been in the crappy-ass frame of mind i was in because of the pile of frustrations i'd already been experiencing.

but i had and i was. so those mistakes resulted in such a tangled mess of warps, some not even making it through the heddle any more, that i ended up throwing away the whole thing.

you read that correctly. i had to cut the yarn off the loom, gathered it all up in a huge, sweater-sized ball of beautiful denim blue, and stuffed it all into the trash can.

there was more; that's the reader's digest version, more or less. but the point is that i wasted hours i really didn't want to waste and hundreds of yards of yarn i also wasn't too excited about wasting, and ended the afternoon in one of those frames of mind that really requires a pint of ben and jerry's and a very silly movie.

happy father's day n'at.

these are things that make me happy: i bought this ball winder the first year i went to maryland sheep and wool. i made anna crazy looking frantically for a ball winder because i had to wind my new yarn RIGHT NOW. forget the fact that i did *not* actually end up winding any that night (migraine + setting up for after-party). and that this winder has sat in its original box since that very night.

 

now i am happy because i have it set up with my beautiful swift on their own table, not our living-room coffee table. i can wind yarn happily and peacefully. well, except for chloe. no matter how much the table shook while i wound and no matter how much the ends of the swift's arms ruffled at her fur as it spun, she had.to.be.right.there.

i wonder where she gets that from.

and then there are things that make me less happy, like sweating profusely while simply standing on the porch waiting for steven to go for our couch-to-5k run/walk this morning. it had to be one million degrees out there.

to distract myself, i took a few photos of the plants that might be poison ivy (depends who you ask).

it has this creepy red feathery beardy stuff growing on its stems.

that is not the sort of thing that makes me happy.

but steven arrived shortly thereafter, and we went for our week 2, day 1 workout. i am very proud of us for going. it's a good habit to develop. i love the walking-with-steven part, and the breakfast-with-steven afterward part (steven is very fun) (i'm convinced that he's the only reason i go). but the running part? i hate it. like, a lot. i call the woman telling me when to run and when to walk (on the iphone couch-to-5k app) a bitch and tell her to stop bossing me. i tell her i hate her. i complain constantly about all the parts of me that hurt (which are abundant) and how hot it is (which is very). but i know that it's good for me. and if i am able to avoid a migraine afterward, i feel awesome (see also: smug) afterward. today i got a little migraine, but shockingly little, considering how hot and muggy it was.

other things that make me happy didn't happen today (other things that do make me happy also happened today, like pulling a clump of fur from the always-shedding luxo's hip, and taking a nap, but they're not what i'm about to say, so.). like having breakfast with a beautiful young woman whom i haven't seen since she was about 16 years old. and finding out that she's still funny and smart and interesting. and that she's going to hook me up with an improv group! i LOVE improv and have always wanted to do it. apparently, there's a place where the audience can participate on teams. i am so.there.

oh, and happy father's day, of course. :) good fathers make me very happy, too.