Idle essays

Rescued another little old lady.

It’s not 8 a.m., and I’ve walked Cassie about half a mile, run a tenth of a mile (which is not very far), rescued the old gal, bicycled about two miles, and jumped in the pool. Pretty quick, it’s off to the Costco to buy a pair of jeans that fit.

Yes. By the light of dawn I came across another elderly damsel in distress, trying to make her way along Feeder Street. She could barely stand on one leg and was trying to hold herself up against a wall. Looked to me like she’d had a mild (I hope) stroke.

Stopped and asked if she needed help; she said she was in a bad way but lived right around the corner. I said I’d get my car and drive her, so ran the dog back to the house and picked up the chariot. Asked her if this had ever happened to her before; she said no. I said, “Maybe we should go to the ER instead of to your house.” She said no, her son was at home.

When I got her the two hundred feet to her house, she revealed that her son was asleep and she didn’t want to wake him up. 🙄 I suggested maybe she’d like me to go in and roust him out. She, understandably, wasn’t anxious to have a stranger in her house, to say nothing of one that would create a little drama.

She said she’ll be 80 next weekend. Hope she makes it…still kickin’.

The old gals around here are dropping like proverbial flies. Must be the climate change.

Down to 136.7 pounds this morning! That is 1.7 pounds short of CardioDoc’s announced goal. In theory.

Whereas CardioDoc thinks 135 is a healthy weight for an old bat of my build, I’m targeting 130, for a couple of reasons. Main reason is that these bright and shiny weigh-ins occur the minute I roll out of the sack in the morning. By early afternoon, the weight has gone up a couple of pounds. So, IMHO, the real weight is two or three pounds higher than the morale-boosting dawn figure.

And also, you know and I know that shortly after I arrive at the goal weight, I’m gonna backslide. So I figure that under the best of circumstances, an ego-stroking 130 pounds at the crack of dawn will mean the real figure hovers around 132 to 134. And if I decide to scarf down a pizza with a couple of beers, there’ll be some wiggle room in the calculations.

At any rate, all my pants and shorts are literally falling off me. Even the stretchy jeans look like sacks held up with a belt. So I need to go over to the Costco and buy a couple pair of blue jeans in a smaller size.

My friend Harriet, who lost her excess weight in the wake of colon cancer surgery from which she has recovered and never gained it back, urges me to donate all the “fat clothes.” Her theory is that if you have nothing in the house that you can fit into, you’ll be forced to avoid gaining the weight back.

However, I’ve found that not to be true. After I lost a comparable amount of weight on the Atkins diet — this was about eight or nine years ago — I got rid of all my size 12 Costco jeans. And that was fine for about 18 months, until I decided I simply had to have some pasta!

Pasta is my comfort food. And I believe it needs to be ingested with beer. Dark beer. Guinness. Young’s Double Chocolate. That sort of thing…

Well. Within minutes, of course, I gained all the weight back and didn’t care because I’d missed my pasta so much!!! I had to go out and buy another wardrobe of jeans, the garment of choice around here.

That was fine when I had a job. But now there’s just no way I can afford to buy a whole closetful of jeans. Two whole closetsful: I’ll need several pairs now, and if I throw out the Gloria Vanderbilt Collection and then fatten up again, I’ll need several new pairs of 12s.

So. My plan is to wash all the baggy jeans, fold them up, and stash them in the garage. Then if this whole project turns into a Fail after a year or two, I’ll at least still have some pants that fit.

In another 15 minutes it’s off to the Costco in Paradise Valley, which a) is upscale enough to have a better choice of loot (and their wine selection is better — got one of the worst bottles of wine ever from the Safeway yesterday…it’s not even good enough to cook with!), and b) is close to a Sprouts, a Whole Foods, and a Trader Joe’s, allowing me to pick up my weekly dose of fresh produce and absurdly coddled meats in the same shopping trip.

Happy Saturday!

Funny will probably be out of commission for a few days. I’m sick as a dog, having picked up some kind of enteritis to complement the unremitting hip pain. Mountains of work are incoming; I missed the deadline for the corporation’s annual report, a fiasco aggravated by the fact that the idiot Corporation Commission’s website is not accessible on a Mac and emits printable forms in a format readable only in IE, which I refuse to install because of its chronic security issues; and I haven’t done the course prep for the online magazine-writing course.

{sigh} My poor old dog. If I’d known how much pain that GerShep was in — the vet said virtually every bone in her body was arthritic — I’d have put her down a lot sooner than I did. Wish there was someone to extend the same favor to me.

LOL!! Speaking of IE, here’s a hilarious review of the program as it relates to Apple.

MacFanBoy, meet Allosaurus.
State of Arizona, meet the 21st Century.

Okay, so I finally got around to confronting the dead coral snake, also known as my latest Fail in the bead necklace department. When the thing fell apart, only about half the beads shot off and scattered all over the floor. Only about a third of them rolled under the freezer. Since the thing was about three times too long, this was not the end of the universe. Nor of the coral snake.

Spent a fair amount of the day pulling hundreds of seed beads off the broken strands of upholstery thread and stringing them on wire. Added some grayish glittery Swarovski beads here and there. This helped a little to mute the reptilian look. Instead of trying to make it one continuous loop, I attached a craftsy-looking clasp, mooting the how-to-run-it-all-together headache. And then I added a little “tail” to the thing, with a little silver dragonfly at the end.

These ministrations resulted in a pretty versatile affair: you can wear it in one long flapperish strand or wrap it twice around your neck, and you can let the dragonfly dangle seductively down the back of your neck or turn the beads around and wear the charm in front.

Not such a ridiculous disaster now…maybe it’s even good enough to offer at the upcoming silent auction. Will have to think about that.

Then it was on to experimenting with designing the proposed Anglican rosary, now that the pretty little Mexican cross is in hand. The various mounds of jasper I’d ordered from Fire Mountain hadn’t arrived, but I had an old cross that predates my last period of apostasy.

For the beta version of the rosary project, then, I used the old choir cross, which looks kind of like pewter, five 10-mm beads of aventurine or amazonite (not sure which it is), 28 rondelles of African jade, and heaven only knows how many 6-mm beads of gray feldspar. The color combination went pretty well with the pewtery cross. I used silver- and gold-toned glass seed beads as spacers.

Not a bad effect, but way, way too long. I’d strung three feldspar beads to function like a “chain” between the actual prayer beads, and that was just too many. Eventually I’ll take it apart and rebuild it…am thinking it should have no more than one feldspar spacer between the aventurine and African jade pieces — but maybe not even that. Maybe none. It may be that the silver and gold glass beads alone will suffice.

Along about the time this got finished, the mail arrived, bearing the new jasper beads. The variety called “fancy jasper” is really very pretty. I expect I’ll use the ten-mm fancy jasper for the cruciform beads and the “invitatory,” and then fill in the “weeks” with autumn jasper, a lovely, warm stone. A hundred sterling silver beads came in package, too; they’ll make very classy spacers.

Thanks to the beta version, I think one of these silver things between each bead will suffice. 🙄

I’ve got some turquoise rondelles and tubes laying around in there, liberated from long-defunct pieces of jewelry. I’m thinking one or two of those could decorate the dangle from which the crucifix is suspended, highlighting the Southwestern effect.

My friend Carol came up with two really cool old stone crosses. Since I’ll have enough beads left over to supply the entire parish with these things, I may make those into rosaries, too.

How d’you like these gladioli?

$1.99 for five long stalks of these things, at Trader Joe’s yesterday! Hot diggety!