Monday, November 12, 2007

Sorry!

I'm a very bad, probably very boring blogger. It's not that I haven't thought about my blog growing stale over the last couple of weeks. It's just that I haven't thought of anything really worthy of imortalization on screen.

Lessee . . . Dad came to visit. Which means we survived the panic clean beforehand, even though my 19 year old vaccuum cleaner tried to committ hari-kari, and Lucas decided that while he was happy to give up his bed for his grandfather and sleep on the couch, he thought it would be pretentious to act so out of character as to clean his room. "I'm a teenage boy, and Grandpa knows this, Mom." End result: Rick installed a new closet bar, a new bookcase and a new hamper in there. I installed a new bedding set & pillow, vacc'd, shoveled, and did my best to wash the windows. (That western light really shows off the cat nose prints in the evening. I kept telling myself that Dad would only be seeing morning light in there, anyway.)

Also, had my fifth, yes, fifth root canal last Friday. I started getting nervous when I did the inital exam. The dentist took one look at my x-rays and said, "We're going to be getting to know each other." Oh, good. But he's a nice guy, and even though an infection in the bone below the [dead] nerve kept me popping pills for a few days, it worked out in the end. And the nitrous didn't hurt either - although Rick was nagging me to sneak an extra shot of it into a bottle for his car.

And then I replaced my winter jacket, since it was starting to get cold and my old berber fleece job was really looking worn and thin. I picked out a standard looking parka with a fur trim collar, and thought it was adequate and (at $80 on sale) within my budget. It was nice when I got out of swimming class on Monday to feel the soft fur against my face. But on Sunday, Tasha noticed that it was really nice fur - too nice. So we checked the label, and discovered that it was real!! Ewwwww . . . . I should have checked, but it never occurred to me that such a reasonably priced jacket would have genuine dead animal attached.

Now, don't get me wrong. I wear leather and wool, eat eggs and dairy, and serve meat to my family without a qualm. But fur has just too much baggage associated with it, and it's something I can easily do without. And it's kind of disgusting, in my humble opinion. Like I said, "dead animal." But this is the great part - I called Kohls and explained the issue, and they took back my week-old jacket with no tags and gave me a full refund. Cool. And then I found another jacket, with very nice fake fur around the collar, for $20 less - which gave me the opportunity to participate in their clearance rack and take home a neat lace-print skirt, which I'm wearing proudly today. So, a win all around. (And it was really nice of Kohls to work with my quirky value set and take the jacket back like that.)

Um, what else? I'm knitting like crazy to finish Christmas projects in time for the big Thanksgiving family gathering in Michigan. Still to go: about 1/2 of the final sock, and some nose warmers for the little guys. (Curious? Check knitty.com and check the pattern archive for "nose warmers." They're a hoot!)

So that's the major developments, more or less. Just another day in the life. (Or a couple of weeks, actually. Again, sorry about that.) And since every blog entry should have a photo or two, and since I really don't have anything pertinent to show, I'm going to resort to that famous standard of blogs everywhere: cat pictures. Enjoy.