sweepy

Woke from dehydration-- not thirstiness so much as chapped lips and headache-- so I am experiencing more dawn than I usually do. Gosh the birds don't shut up at this hour. Left my window open so it's cold in here.
I haven't seen this side of 6:00 in a while.

The reason I don't like calling in sick to work when I'm not sick is that I feel it activates some sort of karma. The very minute I mentioned to the woman I was sharing a register with that I was calling in so I could attend Dave's graduation, I started getting hurt, and it didn't stop until I came home. ( Read more... )

And oh yes, just as I was feeling wretched and thinking maybe I could leave early, O'Hare got socked in by bad weather, thunderstorms and hail, and all Chicago flights were grounded, and so the bar was mobbed. (Also delays to Dulles [D.C.] but I never found out why.) So I wound up staying late to help the bartender, because of course the cashiers left right on time and the kitchen closed actually a little bit early, because that end of the company doesn't give a shit about flight delays. So I became an untipped coffee barista instead. Pain in my ass. Pain in my already-painful ass. :p

So I feel a bit like a truck hit me. Doesn't help that I was feeling chubby and did some ab exercises yesterday. But what really hurts are my shoulders. (For lorelei_sakti: it wasn't a truck that hit me, it was Brian Whipple.)

Ohh the sky to the east is glowing orange. It's quite pretty, and is making me cast a shadow on my now-orange wall. Look! Almost six o'clock.

I expect I'll go back to sleep for a little while, but I do have rather a lot to do today-- have to do some housecleaning (not too much, not as much as i'd thought-- mostly just tidying) and laundry -- oh! a question! Dave's wearing his suit today, and the pants are wrinkled. I would like to wash them. They have no washing instructions. The jacket states that it is 100% wool and needs professional dry cleaning. Should I assume that applies to the pants as well? But they are not nearly so structurally elaborate as the jacket-- couldn't they be hand-washed? I am simply curious; there is nothing in my wardobe that can't be washed, or hasn't been, but I'd make an exception for Dave's suit because it is pretty damn sharp. I just wonder, as the pants could use a wash. (I am going to iron them, at least. Dave doesn't know how to use an iron! I am astonished. Well, he'd already mentioned, but I am revisited by my earlier sense of astonishment. He's asked me to iron stuff before (he doesn't care, but when going to something attended by his mom, he knows better than to show up wrinkly) but I always do the dryer trick with cotton shirts so have always dodged it before. My iron hasn't been fired up since 2001 or so but yes, I do own one.))

.... aaand, we have a sunrise! Nice sunbeams. Shiny. Sposed to be nice, I think. (edit: I mean, the weather today's supposed to be nice.)
Mom sent me a bunch more photos of Scout. One is quite cute-- she and Snick the cat sitting on the lounger on the patio, both squint-eyed and sleepy. "Looks like you in the morning," I said to Dave. "My ears aren't that big in the morning," Dave said. "Your hair is, though," I answered.
He's shaving off his beard today. I am SO SAD. He might grow it back. I hope so. I like the fuzzy. I've never really dated a fuzzy before. I like it.

Oh, yes, went out with Chris P. last night. I'd link to his blog but he doesn't update it. He's apparently a regular reader of this, which makes his conversations with Dave very funny because he knows most of what we've been doing. Always nice to hang out with Chris, who is doing quite well as a Real! Live! Lawyer now. One of his clients is a rap star, apparently (or so the client says), fighting charges of felony possession of... crack. Untrendy! We went to the Wellington Pub and listened to the quiet Kenny Loggins over the PA, obligingly took photos of the late-60s gentlemen having some sort of reunion at the next table, and discovered that Chris had played little league with the waiter lo! these many years ago. ("He was worse than I was," Chris confided once we'd paid the bill.)

shit

Al is the big lovely blue betta fish, the first one we got. In general he is the biggest and most aggressive of our fish, and he's a big dumb beautiful vicious butterfly. ( Well, things are not going well for Al. )

Edit: Dave says he noticed the symptoms and knows what they mean. The antibiotic he's using says it treats dropsy, so maybe there's hope. The course of antibiotics ends Monday. If Al's still sick then, I say we try overdosing him like last time only on purpose this time. In the meantime, Dave's already done what the website recommends.

Well.

Dave's just shaved off his beard. I have a single photo documenting this, a simultaneous before-and-after, because he shaved half first.
He is so cute.
Will post it in a bit.

Have done some gardening but now must prepare to go to Dave's graduation. Wheee!

B. S.

So.
There's a lovely three-quarters moon out tonight; was looking at the bright fields as we drove home from Rochester and thinking about my night-walking days. Bright nights like this are fascinating to spend outdoors.
Dressed for spring, but found it rather chilly out. Dave was laughing at us, but he was wearing a suit with jacket and a polyester gown over all. "I have bare legs!" I pointed out.
"When I first saw you today," Aunt Ruta commented, "I thought you were wearing white stockings."
Sad but true. Even after my tanning campaign I still look like I'm wearing white stockings. No matter; my thighs like the moon were giving me odd poetic notions as I nodded half-asleep in the back seat watching the moonlit fields with eyes sore from too-long-worn disposable contacts.

Dave is graduated and done now, though he lacks his diploma-- RIT hands out the diploma folder, and then mails out the diplomas, because exams finished only yesterday and teachers haven't graded yet, so who graduated and who didn't isn't certain yet. But! Although he was told he didn't make the printing date, Dave's name did appear in the program, so there. (Also, he's not iffy on any requirements, so he's definitely done.)

Am downloading photos, but am rather too tired to attempt to post them. Later.

Convocation was interesting-- all everybody at once in giant new indoor stadium-thing, and the guest speaker was a Senator from Hawaii, who gave a lovely speech. Inouye is his name, I think, and he's a WWII veteran of Japanese descent who lost his right arm throwing grenades in Italy. Seventeen whole-blood transfusions saved his life. At that point it was US military policy to show the labels on the pints of blood to the recipient: the labels gave the donor's name, rank, and unit. All seventeen that he received were from members of the 92nd Division, a segregated African-American division. So thanks to this African-American blood, the senator said, he has just managed to become an octogenarian.
RIT, if anyone didn't know, is also the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, so there are a lot of deaf people there. The entire thing was redundantly-accessible, with realtime captions on monitors as well as multiple sign language interpreters, and the university president gave his speech (haltingly) out loud and in sign simultaneously, which was interesting and kind of distracting and nigh-impossible to understand at the same time. I find captions and interpreters extremely distracting, and find that I can't figure out what's being said at all. I kept missing whole bits of the lecture in Dave's shakespeare class that I visited this summer because I was watching the interpreters sign the lecture. I am so unable to focus at the best of times... But, I mean, accessibility is cool and all. It just kinda blows my tiny mind.

Between convocation and the ceremony for the IT/CS/Etc. school's graduation, we went back to the car, ate DiBella's subs, and drank a bottle of champagne and a bottle of wine, all while sitting in our seats in the car, the four of us. It was fun, and we couldn't stop laughing by the time we came in for the graduation ceremony. None of us had ever gotten drunk inside a car on a dry campus before.

All told a fun trip. Dave looked very sexy in his gear. He's just so cute. His mom was worse than me, though, about the "great now get a job!" stuff, which made me remember my own graduation and how awful it was, so I'm going to be nicer to him about it if I can manage. He'll find something. It'll be OK.

And oh-- the cousins of Dave's that moved out of this house to get a bigger one are expecting their second child. (Wanting a second child was pretty much their motivation to move out of this house.) So that's excellent. It's nice when things go according to plan. (And their first child is adorable.)