mellicious | Entries tagged with friends

I'm not doing NaBloPoMo this year, and I'm not even sure if Holidailies is going to happen this year at all, but I find I can't start thinking about the holidays without wanting to write stuff down in a journal-ish format. That habit seems to have gotten ingrained with me. So I'm going to try to start writing, and we'll see how it goes. I'm not going to try to write any kind of a coherent catch-up post or this will never happen at all - I know how I am about that. Maybe later, but not to start with. The best you're going to get for now is random-ish stuff.

----------------------------

We had dinner with Art last weekend, which I guess is why I was thinking about him earlier. Some of you may remember hearing about Art back when - he was my mother's boyfriend, and he just turned 89 years old last week. He lives in the same apartment complex we do nowadays, but we really don't see him often, which is why we periodically call and ask him out to dinner. (Usually we go to one Italian place that we all like - Angelo's. We tried to vary this up and took him to our favorite Chinese place last summer, but this time we were back to Angelo's.) Art is getting very deaf. I'm not sure if he has a hearing aid - actually I'm pretty sure he does, but he doesn't wear it. Every time we see him it seems to be a little worse. On the other hand, if you're 89 and that's the worst problem you have, I guess you're doing pretty well. He has assorted other aches and pains, too, that's probably not the worst problem he has, really, but on the whole he's holding up remarkably well.

One reason we don't see too much of him, apparently, is because he spends all his time at the Senior Citizens Center a couple of blocks away. (We are not far from being old enough to hang out there if we wanted to - I think the lower limit is 55 - but we are not quite there yet. Darn.) He works out, and then he stays for lunch, he told us. He has lunch there every weekday, he said. It costs $1 for lunch. We spent some time wondering who subsizes these lunches, because somebody must. I wonder if it's a federal program - although I'm sure the city picks part of it up too. Friendswood is a very affluent place, but apparently similar programs exist in less affluent places, too. (And I seriously doubt that Rick Perry's Texas is picking up the bill.)

----------------------------

Like (apparently) half the women in the world, I continue to be obsessed with my nails. I've been informed by such luminaries as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that it's not just me (not to mention just by half the women I know, online and off). I have been trying to restrict the worst of my nail-related nattering to Google Plus, where I can keep it mostly to the circle of people I know are also similarly obsessed, plus a few crazy people who have at least expressed some degree of willingness to listen. But it will inevitably spill over here if I write here for any length of time, so be prepared! For example, at the moment I am involved in taking off what I had on - which was glittery and is rather involved just to get off - and deciding what to replace it with. Which may end up being something similar - it was coppery glitter over brown, and seems very seasonally appropriate to me. (What I do on G+ is usually a more involved explanation than that, delving into brand names and how many coats and such, but I will certainly refrain from going into that much detail here.)

I am so happy to have a job where the color of my nails is a non-issue - nobody cares if they're glittery or black or bright orange (all of which they have been at one time or another lately, what with Halloween and everything). I'm also happy to have a job where I don't have to hang around for 8 hours every day whether or not there's anything to do. Seriously, you have no idea how happy that makes me. I am finding that I very much do not want to go back to the world of the 40-hour week. Of course, the other side of that coin is that I need to go do some work so I'll get paid enough to pay for all the nail polish and other goodies I keep buying. So I think I'll post this and talk more later.

We just got back from dinner at Trudy's (North). The sheer volume of orange t-shirts in that place was overwhelming. But the fact that I had a couple of margaritas may have affected my judgment and/or sensitivity to the color orange somewhat.

The Longhorns seem to have won the game this afternoon - against Arkansas, this was, for those who don't automatically know these things. It was 17-3 pretty early on and I lost interest. Incidentally, I believe I checked when I first booked this trip to Austin months and months ago, to verify that it was not in fact a football weekend. Another thing in my life that Ike fucked up. (This was supposed to be the bye weekend, so the game from two weeks ago was pushed back to today.) However, aside from an awful lot of southbound traffic on 183 earlier and the aforementioned preponderance of orange garments, it really didn't cause us a lot of trouble, so oh well.

The quilt show was very nice. I went around with Anjea and her mom, which was sort of a hoot. Her mom is very opinionated, that was the hoot part. (She was, for example, aghast at a quilted grasshopper with only 4 legs. The conversation went something to the effect of: "But it's not accurate!" "It's artistic license, Mom." "I don't care!")** I did take some pictures but I don't know where the card reader I bought in Celina is, so I don't know when you'll see those. The Best of Show quilt, in particular, was really stunning.

Both of our bosses were heard from today, apparently for completely unrelated reasons. Mine wants me to do some stuff involving sending a couple of e-mails. Rob's wants him to come back to work on Tuesday, which was a bit of a surprise. We figured all along he was likely to get called back earlier than I was, but we still didn't expect it to be quite that soon somehow. (Although that will be 2-1/2 weeks since the storm, actually. Time flies.)

Which means I really need to make some hotel reservations for someplace for the next couple of days, in case we have no power at home still (or worse). Typically, I have been avoiding this. I may continue to avoid it until tomorrow morning, or not, I don't know. I know that I don't want to arrive in the Houston area tomorrow afternoon and have to wander around looking for a hotel. I am going on the assumption that hotel rooms are not as hard to find as they were a week or so ago, since a lot of people have gotten their power back and - presumably - gone home.

** I don't get the impression that Anjea will mind this bit of levity at her family's expense. I hope I'm right about that! (She can retaliate with funny stories about me and my sister, if she cares to, having been witness to a bit of my family's craziness as well.)

(Incidentally, the icon has no particular relevance to anything. It just amuses my slightly foggy brain right now.)

I went to Austin saying that the main thing I wanted to do - besides see my sister, of course - was shop, but we didn't actually end up getting any shopping done to speak of. Saturday we started out to shop, and I'm still not exactly sure where the whole day went, but the only place we actually went shopping was Waterloo Records. We did go see my nephew (and his dad), which is always nice. He is almost 17, which seems unbelievable. Pretty nice kid, though, on the whole.

I didn't realize that it'd so long since I'd been in Waterloo - when we walked in I realized that the last time I was there, most of the records were still on vinyl. I do think I'd been in the "new" location once, maybe, but most of the time I was in Austin, they were over on the other side of Town Lake, further down Lamar. Or maybe I hadn't been in that store at all - when did they move, anyway? I know they were there by the time I started coming to Austin more often, the last five years or so, at least. Before that I came so seldom for a long time that I'm not sure of anything.

We ate lunch at Hut's - which hadn't changed a bit in 20 years - and dinner at El Arroyo, as I said before. That was a new place to me, but it was really good, and it was nice to get to talk to

anjea, when my sister let us get a word in edgewise. Luckily (well, sort of) she went for a couple of long smoke breaks. (I've been trying hard not to say anything about her smoking. I don't think it'd do any good.)

I told Anjea that the worlds were colliding because she met my sister, who of course calls me by my real name, while just about everybody I know online (except possibly

karen_d) calls me Mel, even if they know perfectly well what my real name is. I never quite know what to tell people when that happens. When I meet the "online people" in person, they always say, "Well, which one do you want to be called?" and then I get all indecisive. I guess really, I'd just as soon be Mel. As I've said many times, I don't like my real name very much anyway. If we move to Austin when we retire - as we've been saying for a couple of years we're going to, and retirement for us is not all that far away - I may be tempted to just change my name. Not legally, because legally my name is already a mess - but I might just start calling myself Mel in general. I dunno, we'll see, we still have a good while to go, and I may feel differently about it by then. But it seems like that would be the best time to ever do it, if I decide I really want to.

My sister is trying to become an artist - by which I mean, one who actually makes money at it. She's always had a flair for design, and an original style, and she has developed a technique which does seem to be something a bit different, so it does seem like there are possibilities in this. I've only seen a couple of the pieces she's made to sell, but I really like some of them quite a lot. She's supposed to send me pictures and if she does I'll put some of them up. She has a website up already but she keeps saying it's not finished so I guess I shouldn't link to it yet.

I don't have to go in to work til after lunch tomorrow - if I wake up in time, I may go see if they can color my hair in the morning. I've never been in there in the morning, but surely they open by 10 or so, I would think. That ought to be enough time. I have big old gray roots that are driving me crazy - and it's only been two months since I got it done, I don't know why they look so bad already!

I have been reading people's entries from Holidailies, of course, and people's entries from my Livejournal friendslist, and a number of these people are knitters and talk about going to Stitch & Bitch. And it makes me jealous. I'm tempted to take up knitting just so I can go to Stitch & Bitch, which is silly, because I don't want to knit. I don't even know if there is a Stitch & Bitch here. I just want to go.

There are quilting bees, of course, which amount to the same thing, but I haven't found the right group. I probably haven't tried hard enough. I went to a bee that met once a month in Clear Lake for a couple of years, and I liked it, but what I need is one in Galveston. I guess I'm going to have to start going to the Galveston quilt guild again, and get into the bees from there. I didn't really try when I joined the one time before.

A couple of my work friends have joined a group that meets once a month and makes handmade cards. I think it's some kind of commerical thing like Creative Memories, except for cards instead of for scrapbooking. They've invited me to go and I think I might, after Christmas. You are expected to buy something, of course, but apparently not an onerous amount of stuff, and if I'm really thinking about making my own Christmas cards next year, I ought to get some supplies for this anyway.

What this is about, at least partly, is that I think I need more girlfriends. I don't need really super-close friends at this point, I'm too independent and prickly to want a whole lot of close friends who will be all in my business and need a lot of friendship-maintaining, plus I'm not at a point in my life, with my mother and everything, where I have a lot of energy for that kind of thing. But I could really use some not-quite-so-close ones.

Does that sound sort of heartless? I wonder. I don't think that's how I mean it. You can't just create a good friend overnight, anyway.

Profile

mellicious

December 2024

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Syndicate

Style Credit

Base style: Crisped by timeasmymeasure
Theme: Barren Winter Trees by flatlanders

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jul. 7th, 2025 09:07 pm

Catchy Name Needed

Looking for a name since 2003

Entries tagged with friends

Hi, anybody home?

Football weekend in Austin

So, Austin

I want to Stitch & Bitch!