(no subject)

[gwyn]

Thanks so much for all the birthday wishes on my flist, and special thanks to killabeez for the lovely flower arrangement that was waiting for me when I got home, and to sdwolfpupfor the birthday hat and card, and feochadn for the pretty pink pictures. The night before, movies_michelle gave me this box of cards called "How to Cook Everything" --italics theirs -- and I figure that if they are that adamant that it includes everything, I will be set for life. I bought myself a couple of cookbooks, too, last weekend, and I feel fairly well-armed should the kitchen ever be finished.

It was an interesting day. Interesting in that way you say it when you don't know what other word to use that's safest. I went out in the morning to have a spa day -- I'd made an appointment for a lavish massage and pedicure at this place I went to a couple years ago, when my co-workers gave me a gift certificate after sis_r died. That had been a weird experience, and I was still too wrecked to appreciate it, so I thought I'd go back and try again. It was fun, if very expensive fun, and I got this incredibly wonderful brilliant purple polish on my spiffed-up tootsies, somewhere between grape and plum, called Disco Inferno. Really, how can you go wrong with that? It matched my purple Hawaiian flower flip-flops perfectly. But I wonder about my planning sometimes; afterward I needed to run errands and go to the cemetery, and this was one of the coldest weeks of the year where they've been talking about snow all week.

So there I am in my bare feet stopping at the flower store to get some flowers to take to the grave, and then it starts raining this very cold hard rain, and I had to also go to the plumbing supply store for this part that I can't seem to find. I called Brent and figured he'd be at my house, but he was in a class, so I ended up having to special order it and I don't know if it'll arrive in time. The hardware store was cold! Then I went down to the cemetery, and at that point it was really raining, and I could not for the life of me dig the flower cup thingie out of the ground. Mud had gotten down there in between the cup and the sides, heavy clay mud, that was acting like crazy glue, and I was bending over, in my very wet cold bare feet and my jacket and shirt riding up in back so that rain was pouring down my back and ass, desperately trying to get this thing out of the ground and wrecking my fingers and getting dirt and mud all over myself. Finally it came loose and I decided that I really didn't want to walk all the way over to the water spout and just put the flowers in the cup, hoping maybe some rain would get down in there. My sister would have laughed herself sick over all that, so I guess it was appropriate. She would have laughed AT me, too. Such was our relationship. I suppose most people don't go to the cemetery on their birthdays, but there you are.

When I got home, Dad was there traisping mud, water, and leaves all over the new floors. Sigh. Somehow, I think because I must have accidentally clicked WishList when I was on a page, a mixmaster type standing mixer got on my wishlist, so that was what dad gave me. I didn't have the heart to tell him I'd never inteded to get one. But a couple people have pointed out that it might yet come in handy, so i will stow it away and see if I can find some uses for it later. It's so typical of me to put something on my wish list accidentally. In a color I don't like.

Then katallison came over and she took me to dinner at a lovely Thai place that I had never been to, even though I drive past it all the time. We had a great meal and then came back and watched the first couple eps of this season's Dexter, so I can try to get her caught up, and had great conversation and some of the chocolate mousse torte she brought me (along with some red table wine called Fruit Bomb -- I'm not making that up! -- that didn't give me a migraine yay!), and really, you cannot ask for a better birthday evening than that.

It really means a lot to me when people include sis_r in their thoughts, and i thank you all for acknowledging that it was her birthday, too. I dream about her pretty much every night, and they are always very bad, stressful dreams, where she is always sick or dying or injured, and I am trying somehow to help her and failing miserably. I've also been dreaming, since she got sick, about fan cons. They are never really like the kind of cons I know, and they are always strange and fraught, but they often have my friends in them, so there is that. There is one that recurs in theme -- that I forgot to go to the vid show at "Escapade" or some other nonvidding con. The one I had the other night, it was like the third year in a row I'd just forgotten to go, and they feel so real to me that I had awakened actually believing that somehow, I missed the last couple vid shows at Escapade. I mean, I volunteer on the vid show. It is so weird. I keep hoping that someday, I won't associate cons with stress and pain, and that when I dream about them and my sister, it will be nice. I don't know if it'll ever happen, but it would be nice.