Come Swim In My Stream Of Consciousness!

A post just chock-full of random-y goodness today! First, some of you may be experiencing the same difficulty as The Sheep viewing the sidebar of this blog. Mozilla and Firefox folk are OK, I guess. But we of the IE persuasion need to scroll waaaaaaay down to see the usual run of blog bling. Dunno what happened here...I didn't do it. I just woke up from a nice nap yesterday, logged on to check comments and discovered the mayhem. Can't fix it, would probably only screw it up so I'm leaving it. The main content seems fine.

Next up: One Final Dentist Story! I'd forgotten about this part until I was chatting with camadsmom last night ( a marathon phone call, if there ever was one!) and just needed to share it. I promise to give all and sundry a break with the dentist-drama after this.

I was feeling pretty sore on Friday after having been bounced around during the previous day's TCI training. I'd thought that my hindquarters might be hurting since that was the part of me that hit the mat so often, but, to my surprise, it was actually my upper back and shoulders that were stiff and achy. I'd spent much of the afternoon held in the classic "I love me" pose with both arms immobilized from behind in a sort of straight-jacket wrap. Once I got to the dentist and was settled in the chair of doom, Dr. DeSade realized that he was missing a vital piece of his torture paraphanalia. He reached behind the chair, whipped open a drawer, lost control of the drawer in his enthusiasm for abusing me, and smashed it right into the back of the chair, just behind my head. The resulting "cringe" on my part led to a super-nova cramp in the shoulders. I looked at him with my most withering "teacher" face and said, "OW!" He thought that was quite amusing. He did not know about the TCI training. I hate him.

I had planned to get the oil changed in the truck today, but ended up just hiding in the house with lots of chocolate and self-pity. I'm only about 1000 miles past due...it can wait. While indulging in my self-imposed exile I managed to get past the cast off for the thumb hole and am now in the home stretch for fingerless glove #1:

I have reworked the pattern for the Reflecting Hearts rug several times. I also managed to inadvertently center the rug incorrectly and place a hooked portion over the gripper strips. This resulted in several pulled loops once I attempted to reposition the rug. It was easily fixed but, since I've already blown my shot at the pearly gates with the language used on the SOS sweater, I figured I might as well let rip with some good old cuss words just for the heck of it. So therapeutic! Once that was fixed, I was able to hook along without difficulty:

I'm pretty pleased with it thus far. I think it will come together well. I had a basic design in my head when I started: sort of a Pennsylvania Dutch thing, I guess. It's still heading in that general direction, but I do enjoy fiddling with stuff as I go along so it'll probably go all Picasso on me before I'm done. That's just part of the fun!

We've got a couple weather situations coming our way. Tonight looks like it will be pretty icy and tomorrow morning could get dicey. Tuesday's not looking so hot either. I haven't really been keeping up with the forecasts since my "no-school-predictor-vibe" has been so off the mark lately. I'm thinking that we might miss at least part of a day, but we'll have to see.

I'm hoping for a nice, quiet evening as I prepare for the week ahead. I have not been in my classroom since last Wednesday so I'm sure that there will be some heavy-duty damage to repair. We've had some "issues" with the newer students even when I'm there to supervise and, since little ones tend to stress out a bit when things are changed, I can only imagine how it went in my absence! I'll just do my Deep-Sheep breathing and hope for the best!

Wish me luck!

SA