Just a dream and the wind to carry me

I've had this song stuck in my head all day.



Can't really complain, it's a nice little song. It's part of a mix I downloaded from iTunes based on that Yacht Rock series. Soothing. Smoooooth. And probably, of the several mixes I listened to very loudly today, one that my neighbors would find least objectionable.

I got a lot done today. Got up at a reasonable hour, went to Target and Whole Foods, came home and cleaned a crapton of stuff out of my fridge. Filled my whole garbage can (not just from the fridge). I vacuumed. I dyed my hair (thank God, finally! My roots were like a mile and a half long).

I had a good soundtrack for all of this. A nice mix of country, R&B, techno, gangsta rap...and, you know, loud, which is key.

I unplugged my iPod-blaring alarm clock (which, I never use it as an alarm, so, I'm not sure why I take up valuable bedside table space with it) and moved it to a more central location. Which, um, unfortunately turned out to be the bathroom...


I did a mountain (mountain) of dishes today. Again with the "finally."


Maggie and I thought about planting a flag on the top. Dish Mountain.

I then made a pie. Okay, not so much "made" as, removed from the wrapper and baked. It's from the Vermont Mystic Pie Company, which I bought yesterday when I was postcall and woozy and it somehow made me nostalgic (the box is a Stephen Huneck design, who is this local artist in Woodstock, VT, which is one of my favorite little towns). Mmmm, it smelled yummy. And in fact, it was yummy. But it also set off the smoke alarms.

Dude.

There are two smoke detectors in the hallway between my bedroom and the kitchen. Remember, my whole house is, like, 700 square feet. It's barely three strides to the kitchen. One of them, fortunately, is soft, but persistent. The other one is PIERCING and starts saying "Fire. Fire. Fire."

I did not know my smoke detector talked.

Maggie got worried. She was literally standing in the doorway, ready to bolt for her dog door, seemingly paralyzed by ambivalence about whether she should evacuate or not, for, like, two whole minutes.


So there's all this blaring and beeping and the one detector is telling me (quite calmly) that there's a fire and then there's me, jumping up and down like one of my patients the big raving lunatic that I am and waving a cutting board frantically at the detectors and screaming "Nothing! Is! On! Fire! Stop it! Stop it! STOPIT!!"


I think she finally went outside in sheer embarrassment.

I gave up for a little while once I got the talkie under control and just let the other fucking thing beep. I wandered outside, I took some pictures of the cool pink flowers I found randomly growing in my yard today. Sparrow (who came over later to do laundry) said they're called Surprise Lilies.


I was, indeed, surprised.

Pretty, though, aren't they?

These are, by the way, the um, exaugural (I'm not sure that's a word...well, it is now) pictures of my trusty Fuji Finepix. Because I've been having a lot of issues with darkfield photography, the slow shutter, depth of field, etc, etc. So my parents bought me a kickass new camera for my birthday. I'm so excited!! It should be here in a few days, and I'll be sure to take lots of exciting high-ISO fancy-pants pictures when it does.

Probably mostly of Maggie.

In less good news, my grandfather went into hospice today. He was diagnosed last week, I think, with "bone cancer" (who knows what the hell that means. Nobody else in the family speaks medical, or wants to, so it gets frustrating for me when bad things happen. I'm thinking this is multiple myeloma). He'd been on dialysis, getting chemo and radiation, and for whatever reason today they decided to stop dialysis and go to comfort care. Which, may well be a fine idea, I'm not trying to malign it.

It's such a complicated situation, that side of the family...well, more on that some other time. Right now, I just need to go to bed and pout.