General

I’ll admit it, I’m a field band nerd. :) Of course, it’s been 10 years since my last field band event. (No, I won’t make you do complicated math, I graduated high school 10 years ago in June, and I was 17, so that would make me…26. For the next 5 weeks.) Last night I went to my brother’s last field band championship – he’s a senior this year, and he’s lead snare – at the Dome in Syracuse. They had just moved up a class from the one they won two years in a row. They didn’t win (ok, they took last place) but they looked and sounded great! (Can you tell I’m proud of him?) I took a whole roll of film, which will hopefully come out since I haven’t used film in about 2 years… I also picked up a tote bag with a french horn on it. Yay! Now I can carry my band music in style. I did need the new bag, really, honest and true! My band folder was too big to fit in my normal music tote, or really in any of the tote bags I have. Honest. It has nothing to do with my bag addiction.

…did we just start it or end it? I can never remember. Anyway, instead of getting my lovely extra hour of uninterrupted sleep, I got woken up at 2 (or 3, depending on which clock you looked at) by a frantic doorbell. My first thought was that the house was on fire and someone was trying to wake us up. But I have no way of seeing the front step without opening the door, and I couldn’t bring myself to open the door. Especially with the way Molly was reacting – I’ve never heard her growl quite that seriously before! Turns out after talking to the neighbors, it was a prank – it wasn’t just our house. Surprisingly, even the pumpkins on the front step survived the ordeal…and I’m planning on installing a peep hole in our front door for next time.

I’ve never hit a deer. Until last night, I’d never even had a very close encounter (which is amazing considering I’ve been driving back country roads for 10 years now). Deer are really, really, stupid. I suppose I should know this from the fact that a deer ran into the back passenger window of my parents’ mini-van when my brother was driving several years ago. He didn’t hit the deer – the deer hit him. The dumb deer last night chose to run between two approaching cars that were oh, maybe 200 feet apart and going 40 miles per hour…one of which was mine. We both managed to stop. We were probably 20 feet apart by the time we did, and the deer passed right between us. And thankfully, the person behind me wasn’t tailgating, so when I hit my brakes he didn’t rear-end me. (Although, I figured it was better to be rear-ended than hit something in front of me – especially in the wagon, where the rear of the car is way behind me, and I couldn’t remember if there are airbags in it or not.) At least I know my brakes are good. We all figured out that we were still alive, there weren’t any other deer in the immediate area waiting to jump out, and moved on. I think I’d like to avoid encounters that close from now on, though – aside from the risk of injury and damage to the car, I’d feel truly awful about killing such a beautiful creature. Even if it is dumb. :P

I know. It’s only a Halloween costume. But it was the first time I’d ever put a zipper into anything…and it came out terrible. I knew I could do it better. So last night I ripped the zipper out (carefully) and put in a different zipper, with the proper type of zipper foot. What a difference! Of course, I still haven’t hemmed the thing, which might have been a better use of the time, but how long could a hem possibly take, anyway? Well, at least I’ll know the zipper looks good, even while I’m tripping over the skirt! :)

Which would win in a fair fight, glass or porcelain? More specifically, a glass spice jar or the top of a stove? Believe it or not, the spice jar won. Now I have a two-inch rectangle on the front edge of my stove that’s chipped down to bare metal. The jar of parsley is alive and well, however, even after bouncing off the edge of the stove and hitting the floor. That’s what I get for actually cooking instead of ordering out. :P

On the way to work this morning, there was a car in the left lane that was driving rather below the speed limit. I took a look and thought I saw the woman driving the car put a map down on the passenger seat. So, fine, she’s lost and driving a little slowly. Big deal. We passed her, and I looked over again…and she was reading. Not a map, not even directions, but what looked like an essay or something – several pages stapled together with lots of text on the one on top. This baffles me, almost as much because I can’t read in the car without getting very carsick, as the fact that this woman was driving along at 60 miles an hour, reading! That has to be more distracting than having a conversation on a cell phone – there are a million things you need to look at while driving, and a document propped on your steering wheel isn’t one of them. I really hope she never causes a terrible accident, but I also really hope she gets caught someday. (The irony of it is, we passed a state trooper during this whole incident, but he was looking too hard for people speeding, which she wasn’t, to see her reading. Or maybe that’s when she put the paper down for a minute – I’m not sure.)

Wednesday morning I was in the shower and I kept hearing “bark….bark, bark….BARK”. Now, mind you, Denis was downstairs with the dog, so I couldn’t figure out what on earth was bothering Molly. (This wasn’t the usual frantic alarm bark she uses to let us know that there’s a C.A.T. on the front lawn.) Apparently, there were three people out there (at 6 AM, in the rain) planting 50 flamingoes in our yard. It’s a fund raiser the local marching band is doing, where you can pay to have the flamingoes sent to someone’s house for 24 hours. My parents decided to send them to us… Anyway, I couldn’t get any good pictures before we left (it was too dark and rainy), and by the time we got home it was almost dark, so I dug out my tripod and played with the long exposure setting on my digital camera. I think it actually came out pretty well!

I haven’t blogged in two weeks. I was having a hard time with a project at work, and didn’t want to complain about it. It’s kind of pathetic when all you have to blog about is an annoying work project. :P I haven’t even really done much knitting lately, either. Actually, I do have some great pictures of Molly, but I haven’t gotten them off of the camera yet – I’ve been kind of anti-computer outside of work hours. I did start on my Halloween costume yesterday. About time, since I have a party to go to in 11 days and I’m going camping this weekend… Non-rehearsal evenings will be busy for the next two weeks!

Knitty.com is fantastic! It makes me want to design something to contribute! In the meantime, though, I’m almost done with the first of the mystery Christmas projects – I’m going to have to find a way for non-recipients to view these things, since waiting until after Christmas is a long time – and since it’s going so fast, I found a project to make for myself. :) Unfortunately, it calls for Colinette Point 5 yarn…at $19.50/skein, that’s going to be one expensive vest. So, I rolled all of the change in my bedroom and came up with just enough for three skeins and the needles I need for it. It must be a sign.

So, I worked from home yesterday so that we could have a new furnace installed. Yay. I thought, this will be great – no interruptions, I’ll get tons done… Mistake #1 – I forgot that everyone who might usually stop by my office also has my phone number. Mistake #2 – not finding “doggy day care” for Molly. Molly was, to say the least, very disturbed by all of the banging and rattling going on in the basement, and spent the entire day barking at each and every heating register on the first floor. Continuously. Just in case, of course, I didn’t realize the danger that at any moment might spring through the registers into the main floor of the house. Mistake #3 – not understanding what the installer meant by, “you should open your windows, there will be some smoke when you start the furnace the first time”. Try prodigious amounts of smoke, pouring through the house, causing all of the smoke detectors to go off. (Side note: I didn’t realize that the different smoke detectors in the house beeped at different pitches and rates – I guess this would let me know where the smoke was at any given time?) And, of course, being vertically challenged, I couldn’t reach the detectors to rip out the batteries. Finally, I relocated myself, my laptop and Molly to my parents’ house to try to salvage the rest of my workday. What a relief to come into a quiet office today.