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By Lynn, on March 20th, 2008%
I’ve got bronchitis. This is nothing new; according to my doctor, I’ve had bronchitis for over a month now. Back in February I came down with a cold, or maybe a type-B flu, either way, I dutifully waited seven days before going to a walk-in clinic for some antibiotics, because there’s no sense in wasting drugs on a rhinovirus or a type-B flu (though one could have wished that they’d done a better job with the 2007-2008 version of the vaccine.) The clinic doctor confirmed what I suspected: I’d had a cold, or maybe a type-B flu, but it was sinking into my chest and going bacterial. He gave me ten days’ worth of cheap (actually FREE) antibiotics and told me to check in with my regular doctor if I didn’t start feeling better.
I started feeling better by the time I’d taken two of the antibiotic pills and, though I dutifully took all thirty of them, I didn’t check in with my regular doctor. In retrospect, I have to admit, yes: I was feeling better, but no: I didn’t feel great. I’d stopped feeling sick, but my proverbial “git up an’ go” had “got up an’ went.” On the other hand (in my defense) it’s the height of allergy season around here. My normally forest green car is more of a pea green, thanks to the regular (and thick) dusting of pollen it recieves from the local oaks, cedars, and cypress. I’ve been known to run a fever during the spring allergy season, so I wasn’t all that surprised that I was feeling draggy.
Then last Friday I made a major deposit into my karma account: Sandy, a friend of a friend for whom I’ve been doing airport runs for the last year or so, was finally ready to move closer to her daughter. Frankly, this is something that she should have done last summer after she had an automobile accident. The accident wasn’t serious, but it was an undeniable signal that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had gotten to be too much for her. Of course, trying to sell one place and buy another is a bit of a challenge right now (the selling moreso than the buying) and several months were lost on that account; and then her son, who’d been going to come down from Atlanta to help her through the final phases of the move suffered a cancer relapse and is going through a grueling round of chemo.
I could tell there were too many moving parts on the board for Sandy to handle comfortably, so I told her that I’d be glad to drive her car from Leesburg to Ft. Myers and she seemed quite relieved. A date was set, I made return flight reservations, Sandy’s original moving company surprised her with $1000 in extra charges when they dropped off the boxes, so a new moving company had to be found. The new company couldn’t come on Thursday, but they swore they’d be at Sandy’s by 7:30AM on Friday, have her packed out by 10:30AM, which would still give me enough time (barely) to drive the car to Ft. Myers and make my flight back to Orlando.
Which I did, barely, but I was exhausted by the time I got home. Saturday, I felt lousy and Sunday I felt worse…and was croaking like a frog. I should have stayed home, but it was my Embroiderers’ Guild board meeting and I had reports to make, so I showed the flag and then went to my parents for our usual Sunday-dinner pizza (though by then I knew I was going down at the stern and was careful stay at arm’s length.
Sunday night my temp. shot up to 101 and stayed there until yesterday morning when my mom drove me to see my doctor who didn’t even need her stethoscope to diagnose bronchitis…and to offer her opinion that I’d been incubating it since mid-February. No cheap antibiotics for me this time but something called Biaxin which, even in its generic form, weighed in a $101 for 20 pills. To get a jump start on the healing process, my doctor added some steriods too the list and, to give me some rest from the hacking, a cough suppressant that has got to be made with precious metals.
I went to bed after my first round of meds and pretty much stayed there for 24 hours. When I got up this morning, my fever was down (and so was my weight — by three pounds, YEAH! — it’s an ill wind that blows no good, right?) but I’m hardly myself. Simply taking a shower left me woozy and leaning for several minutes and it still feels and sounds as though I’ve got a Geiger Counter buried somewhere in my throat.
I’m disgusted with myself for letting my health get out of hand, though I truly did think that I’d thrown February’s cold and was dealing with nothing more serious than allergies. I’ve really got no choice but to take it easy for a few days…I don’t have the energy for anything more exciting.
All for now…
By Lynn, on March 11th, 2008%
The Kennedy Space Complex sits fifty miles, more or less, due east of the “Wuthering Heights” parking lot, This doesn’t give us a bird’s eye view of Shuttle launches, but it’s usually worth going downstairs to watch them streak away. (We can see other rocket launches, too, but they’re so much smaller that it can be hard to differentiate them from jet contrails.) Night launches are especially good to watch — I’ve been in the parking lot when the entire eastern horizon turned a rusty red.
So, I had high hopes for tonight, since this is apt to be one of the last night launches. After Friday’s storms and Saturday’s wind, yesterday and today have been perfect early-spring weather with low humidity and widely scattered clouds, but that must have changed after sundown because when I went downstairs (through experience I’ve learned that I can watch local TV until the Shuttle’s cleared the launch tower and still make it to the parking lot in time) I realized I couldn’t see Orion overhead, which meant that there was a high cloud deck.
Two intrepid neighbors were already in the lot when I got there. We used to meet out in the middle of Main Street for the night launches, but Leesburg’s grown in the ten years since I moved here. The city no longer turns the street lights off at 8PM and one really doesn’t want to bump into the people one might bump into at 2:30AM, even with friends on either side.
We stood there a few minutes, telling each other that it had to be the clouds and worrying that it wasn’t. After about five minutes we retreated to one friend’s first-floor condo where we saw that the Shuttle had launched successfully…and promptly disappeared into impenetrable clouds at 10,000′ I guess, they really had to get it launched right now, because NASA doesn’t like losing visual contact with the Shuttle.
I’m glad they’re safely on their way, although I’ve never been convinced that the Shuttle was a good and I’m absolutely convinced that the Space Station is a complete waste of time and money. But I don’t have any pictures to post…not of tonight’s launch, anyway.
Back in 1997, before I actually moved to Florida, I house-sat for my folks for two weeks during which time KSC launched a Shuttle to the MIR space station. MIR launches were almost always night launches and I decided that I’d drive over to the coast to see it. It never occurred to me that I might have trouble finding a good viewing spot — and I probably wouldn’t have, if it had been a daylight launch, but at night, on unfamiliar roads, I wound up on a road I shouldn’t have been on and got emphatically turned away from someplace that I wasn’t supposed to be. Fortunately, the guard who turned me away had a pass to the viewing site at the Canaveral Air Force Station.
There were a couple hundred people standing on the banks of an Indian River lagoon when I got there at about 3AM for a 5AM launch. A loudspeaker announcer assured us that he would wake everyone up about twenty minutes before launch, so I wrapped myself in a blanket and slept beside my car for a couple of hours.
I awoke to the Star-Spangled Banner at about 4:45 and migrated to the shore. The launch pad was a bit over a mile away: we could see the lights with the naked eye and Shuttle itself with binoculars. I was not, in other words, what you’d call close to the launch pad. But when those engines ignited a wall of sound came across the lagoon — it wasn’t the loudest noise I’ve ever heard, but it was, by far, the most powerful — like being hit by an ocean wave. It set me and all the other “launch virgins” back a step or two.
The sky was clear as a bell. I watched the boosters detached and the main-engine shut-off, too — though by that point, the Shuttle was just another star high above the horizon that winked out when the main engine shut off.
I got lost coming home…but that’s another story.
The camera I’d brought with me was nowhere near equal to the task of capturing the launch. You can see it better on television. But I took pictures anyway…I guess it was an item on my “bucket list.”
By Lynn, on March 10th, 2008%
For the third week in a row, I spent Saturday on the east coast. This time it was a meeting of the Orange Blossom Sampler Guild. There were twelve of us at the meeting, most of whom had driven to the coast from the Orlando area. We moved the meetings to Cocoa because we’d been told there were a score of stitchers in that area who were eager to join a sampler guild but didn’t want to drive into the Orlando metro area. We’ve yet to see any of them at our meetings and, while I like the people and we’ve found a nice (and free) room in which to meet, I have to admit, it’s a l-o-o-ng way to go for a few hours of sitting and stitching.
I’m kind of looking forward to next weekend when the alarm clock won’t go off at o’dark-thirty of a Saturday morning (especially since it will be very dark at that hour, thanks to daylight savings time arriving early…again..still.
I continuted the embroidery theme last night and into today because today really was my last chance to stitch up the model for the Penny Rug class I’m going to be teaching for my Embroiderers’ Guild chapter in April. (It’s not that the chapter members don’t trust me, but they do prefer to see a sample of what they’re going to be doing at a meeting before they’re expected to pay attention to the instructions for how to do it.)
It’s about five inches square and made with acrylic felt (recycled acrylic felt, actually — from old soda bottles) rather than the wool felt of the originals. Then again, the originals were a way of getting one final use out of a threadbare coat or other heavy garment, so I feel that I’m keeping with the spirit of the original technique.
With any luck, tomorrow will be a quiet, productive day. I’d like to get a thousand or so words added to Modern Magic (and maybe figure out how to hack the background color of the blog so it coordinates a little better with the borders and title.
Technorati : techstuff embroidery
By Lynn, on March 9th, 2008%
I should be working…in the sense of writing words for “real” publication rather than words for my blog, but once I get in experiment mode, it can be difficult to stop.
The current experiment is something called “Zoundry,” because, as noted, previously, I’m not doing this for myself, but with the idea that I’m going to find a way to teach my dad how to blog and, frankly, the server-side WordPress interface is way too complex, not to mention that the actual composition window is way too small. So I went Googling for Wordpress Desktop Interface and found a bunch of front-end processors, of which Zoundry is donationware, thereby making it my first choice for experimentation.
This morning, when I could have been exploring Zoundry (or writing), I was, instead, indulging my passion for blackwork — a counted thread technique that shows up well in the Holbein portraits of Tudor monarchs. So well, in fact, that it’s sometimes called Holbein work.
Okay…it’s not black blackwork, but trust me, if Elizabethan embroiderers had had access to the kind of colorful threads that are available now, they would have used them all…on the same piece. The piece above is called “Tangled Up,” and was designed by Sally Rudkin, who is designing the kind of blackwork I wish I could imagine. (And if you visit the link, you’ll see that it’s nowhere near finished… not the center motif, which has unfilled segments and not the border, which I haven’t even begun!)
(And now I’ll be able to tell how (and if) Zoundry uploads graphics!)
And I better do my uploading now, because we’re under a tornado watch until seven PM and I can hear thunder rumbling in the west.
Powered by Zoundry Raven
By Lynn, on March 6th, 2008%
Almost every morning for the last eleven months — usually while I’m going about my morning chores: making coffee, feeding the cat (undoing whatever chaos she’s created overnight), retrieving emails and the newspaper — I get a great idea for a blog entry. I’ll even parse it out in my head…formatting, graphics, all that stuff.
It would be wonderful…then LIFE intervenes and by the time I think of it again (if I think of it again) the shades are drawn, the lights are out, and my head’s on the pillow.
Eleven months, because — well, blogging never quite rises to the “must do” stratum of my “to do” list. And that, sad to say, is because it’s only something that I want to do, not something that has to be done by a specific deadline, or something that I’ve promised someone that I’ll do.
So, why is there an entry now? Have I suddenly and unexpectedly cleared my “to do” list? Not hardly, but I have made a promise. Lynnabbey.com is not my only website. I’m the resident geek for two other sites: chainstitchers-ega.org (which I maintain for my Embroiderers’ Guild chapter) and peekskillhighalumni.net, which is really my dad’s website…all nine-hundred-plus page of it.
Dad’s become the unofficial archivist for Peekskill High School (Peekskill, NY) from which he graduated in 1940. He’s made pages for all the graduates from pretty much all the classes between the 1920s and 2006, and now he’s looking for ways to make the site more interactive…more sticky. That’s where I come in: It’s my job to untangle the directories when they get fouled up and to make the things that Dad wants real.
We’ve tried a guestbook, but we were collecting more drive-by entries for dubious websites in the former Soviet Union than legitimate entries. We’ve tried forums, but they’ve proven to be somewhat less than user-friendly. That leaves blogs…plural: one for Dad and another for one of his correspondents who used to write for a now-defunct Peekskill newspaper.
I can neglect my blog, but if my dad wants/needs a blog for the PHS site, then I’m going to have to learn–really learn–how my own blog works, so I can teach him.
I think it’s safe to assume that this little corner of the Internet is going to be going through some fast and furious changes/experiments/trials and tribulation. Who knows…maybe by the time I’m done, I will have formed a habit of blogging.
And now it’s time for an experiment…
The above was a picture I took long ago, when I was working in Manhattan. I had just gotten an SLR camera and was able to indulge my fascination with architectural details. It was a black-and-white photo until I fed it to my scanner and began playing with it in Paint Shop Pro (I’m too cheap to have PhotoShop).
And the experiment is: can I get it to display in the blog….
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What I'm working on these days
Exiled on Main St.
Short Story
Status: Active
Word count: 5500
as of: 7-12-2010
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Look Who’s Talking…