Hallelujah - A Nice Weekend!

Today was a little overcast, but the whole weekend was pretty nice for a change. Maybe that will kick off a good week since we're on "staycation." They are calling for a stormy Tuesday - maybe we'll hit the movie theater that day. We don't have any real plans for the week, other than doing a few chores we've been putting off. Wesley did quite a bit of much needed basement cleaning yesterday and early today, but otherwise, we really relaxed most of the time.

Our area rug has already shipped, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed until it arrives. The pups will like having some more carpeting to lay on. I don't think they're real big fans of the hardwood, but we sure are! I notice them up on the furniture much more often in the rooms where we put the wood floors, but in the bedrooms they're pretty content to lay on the carpet. We will probably have to go out and get a non-slip pad right away to keep the rug from moving around. It's hard to keep things from traveling on the wood floors.

Area Rugs - The Final Chapter

In a rare stroke of luck, my indecisive nature paid off today. The price of an area rug I had my eye on at Overstock.com dropped $60 between the time I saw it about a week ago and today. At least I hope it paid off - I have yet to see the item in person, but I did order it. Wesley asked if I had ordered it yet this morning, so I thought I'd go to the site and see if anything new had come up, but when I saw the price drop, I said the heck with it and bought it. Now I'll be anxious until it arrives. It still wasn't real cheap, and I don't often buy things like this on a the internet. Electronics, yes...carpet or furniture that can vary in color or fabric quality, no. I'll look on the 'net, and then try to find a store that carries the item so I can see it first. This is a gamble for me. Hopefully, it will be great and the living room chapter will be closed, other than accent pieces.

It did turn out to be a decent day today, after overnight rains again, so I'll leave you with a picture of my rug and consider today's blog a wrap.

Soggy Again

I guess we should have thought of this, rather than our tomatoes and peppers. A co-worker sent this cartoon to me and it couldn't be more appropriate. At the rate we're going, we won't have any decent ripe tomatoes this year, because you need hot, sunny days to ripen them. It's still early for tomatoes here, but unless the weather turns around in a hurry, we'll be seeing stuff like blossom end rot and other similar blights.

As you can probably tell, today is another washout. It was supposed to be a warm, muggy washout. As usual, I don't believe the warmth arrived though. It will probably come tomorrow, and it will be so humid we won't be able to do anything fun because of the stickiness. I don't need to start complaining about the humidity. I've told my co-workers that I won't ever crab about sticky summer weather, as long as 1) it's truly summer weather (unlike this stuff), and 2) I can complain to my heart's desire all winter.

I've been planning my November vacation during this lousy weather, just like I do when it's cold outside and I need to have that escape to look forward to. We have our hotels and flights reserved. All we need to do from here is to book the car and any other sightseeing activities.

Migraine 101

I had a migraine last evening, right around dinner time, which pretty much sealed my fate for the rest of the night. As I get older, the migraines I've had regularly for the past 30+ years have generally become less severe. I still get a doozy once in awhile, like yesterday, but for the most part, I can be relatively functional after the initial half-hour flashing aura subsides. I'm always a little out of sync for the remainder of the day when one comes to call. I make sure to avoid loud noises and bright lights, and pay attention to my actions, because as I said, my natural rhythms are thrown off. I become more clumsy, even though I try to maintain my quiet dignity and grace. (For the record, I'm not not a particularly graceful person...but don't tell anyone.) Often times my hands tremble; a couple of times my upper lip went numb; there's a feeliing of steady pressure against my forehead and the bridge of my nose...odd things like that are not unusual. And then there's the headache, that, when it does begin (I don't always get the headache part), is an exquisite form of pain, unlike other headaches. Last night I had a lot of trouble trying to stay on track, so I went to bed early, and now today I still feel "off" and have the remnants of a dull headache, so I called off my lunchtime walk and decided to complain about it here instead.

I'm a little surprised that I have a migraine "hangover" the next day. It's usually a one day deal with me, however, since it started later in the day, maybe that's the reason. Coincidentally, in the midst of my misery, I heard on the news that a study in England found when people fake a sick day from work, the number one excuse they use is that they have a migraine. That, quite frankly, pisses me off. I get really sick of people who use the term as a replacement, or more so, an embellishment of the term "headache." It's not just a headache - or even a bad headache - and it's not a term that should be thrown around by people who haven't been diagnosed with migraines. I don't want to worry about someone thinking I was faking a sick day if I call in with one because other people have cheapened the term either. As I said to someone this morning, I'd wish one on them so they understood what I was talking about, except that I wouldn't really wish one on anybody.

Another Sequential Oddity

Today, we will experience one of those strange sequential moments at exactly 12:34:56, because it's 7/8/09...get it? It's 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9. I heard that some TV station down south is asking people to snap photos of themselves at that precise moment and submit them for posting on their website. It doesn't sound like a very interesting premise for a photo opportunity to me, but maybe I just don't get it. Of course, this only works if you write your dates with the month/day/year sequence. If you use the day/month/year, then you have to wait until August 7th for the "big event." After that, it will be another 100 years before you'll see this one roll around again. It's times like these when I'd like to see smileys that you could insert on the fly on Blogger, so I could pick a nice sarcastic one for this particular application. I wouldn't want anyone to think I was being serious...

Wow, Man...

Do you know these people? Don't scroll down, and take a guess. I saw an article about them online and had to post this photo. Yep, they're the Nick and Bobbi Ercoline. Who?!? They're the young couple wrapped in a much dirtier blanket, photographed for the Woodstock album cover below. Yikes! Time waits for no one. Not that they don't look fine, because they do. They just look 40 years older. They're still together, all these years later. He works for the Orange County, NY Housing Dept. and she's a nurse at a grade school. They got married a couple summers after Woodstock and had no idea that they had been immortalized until they listened to the album later at a friend's house and saw the cover. I thought it was a really nice touch that this couple is still together, after seeing that embrace for so many years; a warm symbol of a very complicated time in history.

Duck & Cover!

Last night we went to the rescheduled fireworks display in Oswego. We had a front row seat, and could see the actions of the ground crew. It was dark, however, and the public was kept back at a safe distance. There were two incidents that looked a bit dangerous to us, and it seemed to disrupt the timing of the remaining fireworks display a bit. Both times, bursts went off right away, before ever gaining any height. We didn't see ambulances, but did see them get the fire extinguishers. We heard some laughter after the first mishap, which was good because it told us no one was hurt, but they weren't kidding around after the second one. I'm sure no one was injured there either, but after two close calls, I'm sure they sat up and took notice.

Unfortunately, the village has only enough money for one more year of fireworks on the 4th, and after that, they will either have to find a different person to take up the cause and solicit for contributions, or the village will have to take on the cost. They're tossing around different scenarios, like partnering with another small town in the area and doing a joint show; an idea that I think is terrible. As it is, the traffic trying to exit the show was as bad as many big concerts I've been to, so doubling that nightmare with twice the people in attendance sounds really unappealing, much as I like fireworks.

Naturally, today is a beauty, because we're back to work. We just can't catch a break on holidays in this part of the country - even in July when you'd think we'd have it made. It was funny to see a few people who had staked out their spot early on the 4th, and had constructed makeshift shelters out of tarps to try to stay dry. We saw this bunch at 5:15 PM, out there in the pouring rain, and of course, they eventually must have had to disassemble and go home once they called it off for that night.

Though they're not great, I was pretty pleased with these shots, since I took them with my camera phone.