A · Life

I just turned down ice cream. I know.
Well, OK, I said "Let's go get ice cream!" and Z said, "But I need to finish my drink," and I said, "OK," and an hour later when he stood up and said "OK" I'd forgotten what I'd asked him for. And I decided, since he was only going because I wanted to, that I didn't really want to go.
Now, of course, I wish I had, but it's just as well. I'm feeling rather out of shape, and eating more ice cream wouldn't help. Instead, I now have room for more booze! Right? Right?

Anyway. Just so my sole post of the day isn't a mercenary wish list, I'm going to natter on slightly about fabric. Because all I did today was sort of reread things I've written, write more scraps, and reflect a bit dully on things I want to write-- but I thought about it, which is better than nothing!
I mean, I did other stuff, I just didn't find anything else notable.

So. Fabric.
( I am becoming a total snob for natural fibers )
This is a pretty boring entry, but at least I have something up besides a birthday wish list. Somehow those things make me uncomfortable. I think I just hate asking people for stuff. I'm awful at giving people stuff, anyway, so I suppose I ought to be awkward about getting it too.

As an aside, before I get into this: was talking to a Pennsic person and he said something like, You've only been with your boyfriend six years? Shit man, you barely know him, or something like that. And my first reaction was hey, six years is a long time, especially when you're not thirty yet, but then I came home and Z had cut ten inches off his ponytail so it's not quite long enough to stay in place now and it's all hanging in his face like Kurt Cobain, and now all of a sudden he's listening to Nirvana. So, uh, ok, fine, you were right, dude, I barely know this guy.

So anyway. On to the sewing diary.
This is my first plausibly non-SCAish garment, but unfortunately I couldn't find my camera so I don't have any photos of the process. (It was under a shirt. Yes, that's my filing system...)
However. The whole garment was based on a drawing I did of a garment of my sister's, which she got in a thrift store, and it's easy, easy as pie. So here, I'm doing a text-only diary. But I swear it's awesome. This is the best apron ever.

( The Green Apron Of Awesomeness )

Anyway, I'll post photos at some point. If anyone was looking to get into sewing, this is totally a great starter project because I don't think it's possible to screw it up notably. I probably used, hm, 45" wide fabric... I made the panels like 34" long, and the excess parts I trimmed off the top became the waistband and the self-fabric ties. So there was no waste, it's all squares. I'd say four yards of 45" wide fabric, or two yards of 60" fabric, and anything with a high cotton or linen content would do, up to and probably including denim or twill, and down to and including something so sheer it's almost gauze for a more floaty effect. Totally an unfussy project, a couple hours start to finish, and immediately useful.

So she definitely is going in to the vet this week. I figured out what was making her limp: her right hind hip goes kinda out of joint sometimes. I won't say it's dislocated, for sure, but it definitely sends her leg slightly out of whack, and she limps and is distressed until it goes back in. It goes back in easily, I think if she just sits down it pops back in, but she doesn't always think to do that when she's distressed. It seems to stop hurting immediately-- or at least, she's back to being totally fearless again right away. I imagine she probably hurt it initially by jumping off something high-- she's not only fearless, but somewhat clumsy, so it's just a miracle she hasn't hurt herself before.

But last night around 2 am she kept waking me up by sneezing. This morning she came and got in bed with me, which she never does, and she kept having little sneezing fits. I've looked her all over and her eyes aren't particularly runny, nor is her nose, but she keeps sneezing. And she's being very clingy. She's usually pretty aloof, as cats go-- doesn't sit in laps (though that might have something to do with the fact that we have no decent lounge chairs, so there aren't usually really comfy laps available for her), doesn't hang out. But she's sitting at my feet at the moment.
Hm.
I think she just wants the chair, really. She likes this chair, but only if nobody's in it.

So I just got an email from my mom half an hour ago saying that Baby Sister and Surprise Husband are going to be in Albany from tomorrow through Wednesday.
...
When I spoke to her she said they would be driving through Buffalo and would visit me, "at some point" on their way to Albany, and I hadn't time in the brief phone conversation to nail down when that would be but I had assumed, since they were still in Nevada, that it would be some time, since they planned on swinging through Chicago and doing some visiting there. So I made no plans, expecting to hear from her again sometime next week.

Tonight I am driving to Syracuse. It is more than halfway to Albany. Had I known that my only chance for the forseeable future of meeting this Surprise Husband would be to be in Albany early this week, I could have easily made plans to continue my trip from Syracuse a couple more hours to Albany, and stayed there a couple of days.

I could have made such plans up until about eleven a.m. today.

But I did not know that this would be the case until, yes, two p.m. Which is three hours too late to make any plans, and two hours too late to make any last-second plans, and one hour too late to make any last-ditch-desperation plans. Too late. Too, too late.

Am I being totally irrational to find myself furious just now?

I must be crazy.
Silly me.

This is really not helping my desperate attempts to be in a more positive mood. Really it's not.

My right ear suddenly went deaf about an hour ago, then started ringing. These things happen sometimes but it is maddening me at the moment.
I think I've been having what greygirlbeast refers to as dreamsickness. I keep having strange dreams that I wake reluctantly from, and I spend the next few hours struggling out of the strange senses-- of urgency, of confusion, of disillusionment-- that linger after the dreams. I've taken it easy all week because I've had this odd post-Pennsic funk, both mental and physical, but it's showing no signs of going away. More unpleasantly, it's manifested in being easily annoyed with Z-- who, I might mention, has been in an odd mood of his own, so there's that-- so in general, things just aren't cheerful. And my ear won't stop ringing.
So that's what's in progress at the moment. Pthbbbpt.
( the sad tally of things I'm not feeling up to doing )
Not now, though. I have things to do and places to go today. Mostly I have to trek to Syracuse to see many of my teammates play in a roller derby bout. It's an informal, one-year-vet-only version of our travel team, and so not really our travel team at all. But I just can't muster any excitement about roller derby yet. I'm not ready for the off-season to be over. I'm not ready to go back to it. Which is a bummer; it's going to be an exciting year I'm sure. I just can't... make myself happy. So I'm going to go be a loud obnoxious excited superfan in a city over two hours away, and hope that kick-starts things.

Maybe I'll bring my cross-stitch with me and get some of it done...

So my baby sister just got surprise!married in Nevada in the midst of a cross-country trip with some dude whose name I had to ask her (and which I can now pronounce but can't spell-- it's either Zack or Zach, and I don't know whether that's short for Zachary or not). She evidently would have liked me to be shocked-- not because she is one who enjoys provoking shock in particular, though she certainly does delight in contrarity-- but my reaction was "That's hilarious!" Which might have offended her, but honestly, one doesn't get surprise married to some dude if you're not looking to offend anybody, which in my book means get ready to be offended right back.

There's much less drama over this than it sounds. "I hadn't known you were dating," I said, to which she answered, "we weren't," which also sounds awfully dramatic. But the thing is, Z and I have been shacked up for six years and we never really dated either. I honestly have been on like two dates in my life and they were awful (unless you count yesterday's unpremeditated lunch outing, which Z retroactively referred to as "a lunch date"-- does that even count??). I don't date. My family, we don't really date. It's not our scene. We make pretty quick decisions about this shit and are either right or wrong. (So far, I'm counting more "rights" than "wrongs", so it seems effective, but then, we also don't necessarily tell one another about the strikeouts, so I could be dealing with flawed data.) It's not complicated and fraught affairs of the heart. No, it's pretty practical shit, really. Not that it's unsentimental, it's just, well, sort of not.

We have in the past theorized that my baby sister is actually a reptile, but I know this is not so. We Kelly girls have our own strange internal lives, and were not raised to dance the nice social dances and pretend to feel the Hollywood fancy shit. Kill yourself for a man? Hah! Kill him, maybe, but more likely just get on with your goddamn life because you have shit to do, honey. (Though maybe you could give your sisters his home address "by accident" and see what happens.) Our father's first gift to our mother, during their courtship, was a garbage can, because she needed a garbage can. They got engaged because our mother said, well, I had decided that if nothing happened to keep me in this area, I was going to go live somewhere near the ocean, so if you haven't any pressing need for me to remain here, I'll just be off now, and our father said, Actually, if you wouldn't mind, could we get married instead? And she said, Oh sure, and the four of us were born. Well, not immediately. But pretty quickly.

We Kelly girls (she wasn't a Kelly girl yet but she soon was), we don't fuck around.

I still don't know how to spell his name, but I suppose it's not really any of my business. I'll find out if/when my sister decides whether she's taking his name or not. And I suppose I'll find that out when she sends me her new address.
Not that she's moving in with him yet. But still.
Whatever. It's not really my business.

That's not intended to sound cold-hearted. I'd be proud of her if I wasn't pissed off at her.

Why am I pissed off?

Because God-damnit, you know how many people are going to start bugging me about when I'm getting married? And even if they don't, my twenty-ninth birthday is in like a week or something, and I'm going to be dealing with all these imaginary people that I think are thinking about it, because I am not entirely a Kelly girl at heart. Well, I am, but I don't always remember that-- it's the stupid fucking novelist thing, it drives me insane. I've got hypothetical people having hypothetical opinions out the goddamn wazoo twenty-four seven. I can't even have a goddamn dream as myself.
(Although all of them have been about Pennsic lately. Weird.)
It was actually a milestone goddamn event for me when I actually had a sexual fantasy as myself last week, though what confused the everloving hell out of me was that I was having it about someone I wasn't actually interested in.
You can't have it all!!!

But anyway, I digressed. Yeah. So let me articulate my extremely Catholic views on marriage:
It's a sacred institution.
You don't just get married because you fancy yourself in love with someone.
You get married because you have a legal reason to need to be tied to that person.
Basically:
Children,
Property,
Insurance/Inheritance/HIPPA/Retirement.

My mother thinks this is mercenary. I'm just going back to the real traditional values here. You don't marry someone because they have pretty goddamn eyes. Don't be shallow. This is the goddamn law here.

I've been shacked up with Z for six years. I don't really need to "make a commitment" to him. I have a goddamn commitment: I no longer know what I own and what he owns. We have a goddamn cat together. We can't fucking break up. Christ, it would be the end of days. He's my best friend. I don't know what the hell I would do without him. He's been the most important person in my life for a really long time now-- as in, basically since college. I graduated, spent about a month in my mom's house, tore my hair out, and ran away to his place and just never came back. That's pretty much my whole adult life. I don't think I need some man in a skirt* to make me say it in front of everyone I know for it to be real. I don't need a piece of paper.
I need a piece of paper if there's any reason that a lawyer is going to have this be his business. And there are a lot of reasons like that out there. Just not at the moment, really.

I don't know if my baby sister's ideas mesh with mine totally, but anyway, that's my take on it. She felt the need to become legally incorporated with this dude; fine. I'm just bummed because the other half of bothering to get married is basically having an excuse to throw a huge party for everyone you know, and I feel gypped. It's kind of the consolation for having to go through a big legal hassle, slightly more festive (but only slightly-- we are Irish after all) than a funeral which is roughly the same thing only the other end.

Eh. We don't fuck around.
___________________________
* "man in a skirt" is a direct quote from my grandmother Kelly, incidentally, I believe on the topic of birth control. She was about 85 and watching TV, and said somewhat irately, "What's some man in a skirt doing telling me what to do with my body?"
I miss my Grandma Kelly a lot, I sure do. Her funeral, incidentally, was a hell of a party, but I'd really rather not have another one like it anytime soon.

At Pennsic I had a terrible time with my stupid phone because I had not brought the wall charger, only the car charger, and the car charger, for no reason at all, didn't work. Plugging my phone into it would turn the phone on, but would not charge it. Somehow, it just wouldn't charge. John and Beth from Maplewood saved my bacon by having a Motorola charger that was compatible.

Now I am at home. The wall charger is not here either. I didn't pack it, but I didn't leave it where it belongs. Did I pack it after all, then, just not in a place where I could find it in two weeks of searching? Well how the hell am I going to find it now? I've got a lot of damn stuff to unpack. I'm doing my best, but I'm not done.

Meanwhile,
I cannot charge my phone,
and it is dead.
Stone dead. Won't boot up. No battery.

I have a family situation and everyone is probably trying to call me, but I don't know if they are or not, or who. I can't call out on the house phone, as there's no long distance on it. I just got an email from my mom that said "Call me". I wrote back but I know she doesn't check her email more than once a day: Mom, I CAN'T call you.

People assume telephones too easily.

I haven't time to sort it out now; I'm on my way out the door to go skate, to see if my wheels have rusted in the three weeks since I last rolled.

But in the meantime. If anyone in my family ever reads this. I. Can't. Call. You.

Later.

How nice, she just stepped on my keyboard and made it so I couldn't type into text-entry fields in Firefox. No idea how she did that. Closing all my windows fixed it...
But anyway.
It's what she did while stepping on the keyboard, rather than whatever keystroke sequence she hit, that worries me.
She got three paws onto the keyboard and then paused as she was lifting her right hind leg from the ground, mewed in distress, and withdrew backwards.
She's done that a few times over the last week. Z said he came in once (before I got home) and she was sitting on the floor crying, and when she tried to walk she limped on her right hind leg. He caught her and consoled her, and then she got up and walked away and was fine for three or four days.
This morning she was walking across the living room floor and suddenly stopped, cried, and was limping on her back leg again. She lay down where she was, crying, and I immediately got down beside her and investigated. She let me touch her leg. I flexed the toes, the first "ankle"-like joint, the joint that on a horse would be the hock (backwards knee thing); I flexed the hip part. No distress, no reaction, all moved as they should. No blood, no feeling of a scab under the fur, nothing. She batted at me with her paws at one point, but I couldn't tell if she were playing; she made no sound and didn't use her claws on me. When I was done prodding her she got up and walked away and was just fine.

So that's three times now, over the course of a week, that our otherwise healthy, just-over-a-year-old cat has displayed signs of distress related to her right hind leg. Other than that she is normally active, chasing birds (and catching one the other day, grr), jumping up and down from things, tearing around the house, being her normal self.
She is licking her right hind foot rather intently at the moment, but showing no real signs of distress; she was licking the rest of herself too. (She's moved on to her tail now.) She lets me touch her, lets me poke her, lets me do whatever I like and is not fussy about that back foot.

What the heck can it be?

I'm seeing a lot of expensive vet bills punctuated by a shrug and a "keep an eye on her" in my future. Grrrmmmble. Well, as long as it's not, like, kitty toe cancer or something. :(

Sadly there are no photos of me at Pennsic. Well, there is one, taken rather close-up, and I am making a horrid face, the way I do. So in effect, there are no photos of me at Pennsic. Which is just as well. There were no mirrors at Pennsic and nothing to keep me from making Bad Garb Choices, so I undoubtedly did not cut a very dashing figure; it is just as well that I may keep my memories of Pennsic unrelated to my actual appearance there.
Chita-chita is the cutest kitty, incidentally. Which is not relevant to this entry, but there she is.

In a bit of something like irony, yesterday while I was trying to do my Pennsic laundry and hang things out on the clothes line to bleach in the sun and collect nice sunshiney smells, something was going on and the air was suffused with alternately woodsmoke and burning-other-things smoke smells. We're thinking it may have something to do with a building that burned down late last week about a mile away-- the oldest building in our village, as it turns out-- but we're not sure. So all the clothes I washed the Pennsic Funk out of now smell like... smoke. Yes. I may be re-doing some laundry. Also, like an idiot, I decided to pre-wash a whole bunch of green fabric I bought on clearance, in my load of darks. This was a great idea, except that one of the items in this "dark" load was... a towel with a picture of a leopard on it. The leopard now has green spots. All my black socks came out lovely, though.

But! I have my Pennsic photos online, and should be meticulously crafting a loving blog entry about them, so I'm going to go get right on that. I had to buy a Flickr Pro account to get them up, since I had 498 photos online and felt like, well, since I've been using the service for like four years, I might as well get a paid account. It's an experiment. We'll see how it goes. I'll hopefully be more prompt at getting photos up now that there's no limit on how much I can upload.

Anyhow, I will be writing up an entry to splain things, but in the meantime, here's the link to my Pennsic flickr set.

Rolled into my driveway around 7 pm last night, car stuffed full of sandy-damp junk. I didn't pack really, I just sort of backed my car up to my tent (I was parked near a drivewayish area so it was easy, unlike most people), bundled it all into the car, and then went and worked for three hours on the common-area takedown stuff.
So I'm home from Pennsic.
It feels really, really, really weird to type. Everything else, I've adjusted to with little to no problem-- as if I'd just taken a really long nap, as opposed to living in another world for two weeks-- but typing, whoa. Having some trouble here. Pardon any typos.

I had a fantabulous wonderful time at Pennsic and have many, many things to say about it, pictures to post, etc. I am absolutely going to go back as many times as I possibly can. I know I was fortunate in that the weather was absolutely ideal the entire time-- it only rained maybe twice, never terribly hard; there was some wind but not much; it never got over 85 degrees; it wasn't very humid. Etc. It was perfect weather-- though I know a few who got heatstroke up on the Sweaty Geti, and the one day I spent more than 5 or 6 hours up there taking classes and shopping, I myself stumbled home pretty worn-out and slightly unsteady on my feet with heat stress, it was never unendurably hot down in the Swamp.

But at the moment, I'm trying to take my time back on the computer in small doses.

I definitely met people I'm going to want to keep my whole life-- Big John With The Kilt, and his diminutive firebrand of a girlfriend Danielle from Kindred, and Kilij and Z-I-can't-spell-the-rest from Wicked Monkey, Regan from St. Jones' Mission, and Amber "Multipass" from Vagabond, and I made the fleeting acquaintance of innumerable other people that I will certainly miss (I will especially miss the pizza from Die Fledermaus-- it's not delivery, it's Die Fledermaus!).
To say nothing of my own camp mates, but since I will probably be joining the SCA, and regardless will be in Rochester for various reasons, I do not need to feel quite so melancholy about leaving them.

I think I can sum up what I loved most about it, before I burn out on computering entirely, however (I have been on for hours, trying to get through email and catch up on LJ-- anything important I'll just have to hope that it gets repeated because there's just too much for me to sort it comprehensively):
Conversations. You can just sit there and have lengthy and interesting conversations with the most fascinating people, for hours and hours, over various quantities of alcohol or whatever (those quantities including "none at all" more often than you'd think). Nobody's playing loud music, nobody's got a TV blaring, nobody's texting. Nobody's on their Crackberry, or at least not much. And most importantly, nobody's really on a schedule. Nobody's just hanging out and marking time until something better happens-- this is what they're here to do. The most structured / artificial use of time I personally witnessed was several highly amusing and intense rounds of a competitive card game called "Pit", made yet more awesome by our replacement of the game's bell with a small squeaky-toy lizard.

In short, it was basically the most mellow time ever. I have discovered a wonderful group of people with whom I can have a wonderful time.
I will be back. Oh yes. I will be back repeatedly.