One Half Buddhist, One Half Christian, One Half Pagan

Tonight:
- Lowes or Home Depot and get a window box, whatever hardware I need to mount it, and appropriate soil.
- Grocery store for milk
- make supper

Tomorrow:
- co-op and/or farmer's market for veggies, meat, sprouted plants if they have any I want to try growing
- decant some peach/whiskey cordial into a smaller bottle
- make supper

Sunday:
- Easter w/Tom's older brother(s?) and family

- pick up my winter coat from the dry cleaners
- Stop at the grocery store. I need lunch meat, ingredients for chocolate no-bakes, and ingredients for peanut butter fudge. I may end up buying one of those 5 pound buckets of peanut butter... I should probably also get some regular groceries.
- Wrap the gifts I'm giving tomorrow.
- Make no-bakes for Tom's family Christmas gathering
- Maybe attempt making peanut butter fudge

Body: My back was bad for a while, but ibuprofen seems to have done its job. Also, in the catagory of things I need to remember to tell my doctor about at my next appointment, sometimes I've been getting dizzy & light-headed when I stretch. Not fainting, but feeling a little like I did just before the one time I did faint.

Book Review: I finished If the Buddha Dated: A Handbook for Finding Love on a Spiritual Path last night. It had some good advice, but most of it boils down to "Be yourself. No, really. From day one. Be who you really are. If you're not sure who you really are, figure that out first."

Reading: I started reading The Kalevala: Or Poems of the Kaleva District last night, but ended up turning the lights out before I had finished the introduction.

Hearing: The Commonwealth Club of California's podcast is mostly drowning out the passive-aggressive co-workers being bitchy.

Etsy find: A really interesting black & silver necklace

Project Follow-up: I got the cordial filtered, and discovered that I need better tools for that job. The strainer is fine, but I don't have a good container to filter into. Dinner was yummy and fun. And... I didn't get around to assembling the swap. Maybe this weekend, more likely Monday.

Tonight's Project: Tom & I are heading out of town this weekend, so tonight's project is to get home and on the road as soon as possible.

Randomness: Welcome to the world Taya! Tom's brother & his wife had their little girl yesterday. I can't wait to meet her. :-)

I spent Saturday afternoon with Tom's family. He had previous plans, so I went alone. The afternoon was a low key kind of baby shower for his sister-in-law, and was a nice family gathering. I left around 9:00, and was about half an hour up the road when I hit a patch of ice just as I was coming back to the driving lane after passing someone.

I spun out, and went nose first into the side of a hill. My airbags went off just like they're supposed to, and I was buckled in properly, so I'm OK other than some scrapes on my nose and some stiff and sore muscles. My car has some pretty serious damage to the undercarriage (the tow-truck people told me what, but I'm blanking) and may turn out to be a total loss.

My phone wasn't working at first, but some Good Samaritans let me call Tom (the only number I had memorized) on their phone, and when I wasn't able to get in touch with him they let me sit in their car while I tried to get my phone working. Once I got it working again I was able to call other people, and they stayed with me until Tom's brother Ed got there. Ed stayed with me and helped with did most of the work of dealing with the police and getting my car towed, then took me back to his house. Ed's daughters had gone into one room for the night (without even being asked!) so I could have one of their beds, and I stayed there until Tom came and picked me up this morning.

There are so many ways this could have been so much worse. I could have spun left instead of right, and gone off a 20 foot embankment into the south bound traffic. I could have hit the hill at a slightly different angle, and flipped the car. Someone could have come along before I collected myself enough to move my car out of the traffic lane and t-boned me. I could have not been able to get my phone working again, and been stuck in a hospital or police station until I could get in touch with somebody.

Thank you to Ed & Christa and their girls, and thank you to everybody who sent good wishes.

We are home safe and sound!

We went canoeing in a state park on Monday and to a very pretty public garden on Wednesday. We ended up going to Sea World after all on Tuesday, and it was more fun than we expected. Thursday we spent all day at Kennedy Space Center, and went back on Friday morning for a in depth tour. Then we hit the road north.

When we weren't doing touristy things, we were hanging out with Tom's parents, sibs, and nieces and nephews, which was also a lot of fun.

Sometime in the next hour Tom & I will be hitting the road for his family gathering in Florida. We'll be gone through next weekend.

We'll both have our cell phones, and since his in a iPhone he'll have regular internet. I might be able to get on line sometimes, but no guarantees.

I found this blog post a few weeks ago, and have been thinking about when I should try it for myself. This weekend it occurred to me that this might be a good project for kids, and since I'm going to be spending all of next week in Florida with Tom's siblings and their kids, I should bring the ingredients down with me and see if the small ones are interested in making their own candy some evening or rainy afternoon.

I'm going to bring mint flavoring, but I'm not sure what other flavors would be popular. Any suggestions?

Thanksgiving was good this year. We went down to Ron's (Tom's brother's Father-in-law) as usual, but this year Mom & the kids joined the gathering. The kids had a blast playing with Tom's nieces, and Mom enjoyed having the chance to hang out with adults. The food was delicious and plentiful.

Friday was my last day at ACS. There have been a lot of changes there over the last few months, the biggest of which was a new pay system. Instead of paying us a straight amount an hour they had started something called ABC (Accomplishment Based Compensation, I think). Under ABC, they pay us a few cents for each form we enter into the computer, they pay us one rate for the time we spend working but not on countable things, and a different rate for breaks and other times we aren't doing anything work related at all. It worked out in such a way that pretty much everybody's average income went down by about a dollar an hour. They also created new draconian rules about what we could have on the floor, and started enforcing rules that had existed but that they had never enforced before. Overall in the course of about 2 months it went from a pleasant environment in which to do boring work for a reasonable wage to the next thing to a sweatshop. I put my two weeks notice in, and will be doing temp work until I find something new.

Yesterday our friends Mark and Christina had us and Sunny & Jaime over for a second Thanksgiving dinner. They cooked, and everything was very good. Afterwords we sat around and talked for a couple hours.

Today is a lazy day. I have no plans, and I don't think Tom has any either.

My birthday gift from Tom arrived today.

He got me March of the Penguins and The Visual Culture of Wales: Medieval Vision.

Now, the movie is cool. I was hearing good things about it when it was first in the theatres, and thought it sounded pretty interesting.

The book though...

I have been lusting after this book for over a year now. When I opened the box and saw it in there... Well, I'm suprised none of you heard my squeals of joy! It's full of color photographs of actual artifacts from medieval Wales. Statues and carvings, stained glass windows, manuscripts and paintings. Tons of stuff that will be very useful to me in trying to build my Welsh persona for the SCA.

Thank you so much beloved!

In the last few days I've also gotten cards from my Grandmother, who included a couple of old family pictures, and from Tom's sister Sara.