Well whaddya know, a positive post from me for a change!  I may be tired and sore, but I am EXTREMELY grateful to my mother, who made the drive up here today (she's just a half hour away, but she doesn't like to drive that far at her age) to help me out around the house.  We did the laundry, four washloads worth, then she fixed lunch, partly from my fridge, partly from stuff she had brought along, then afterwards she did the dishes.  She also cooked some asparagus for me to eat later.  Then she changed out my moldly shower curtain liner and vacuumed the part of the house that I live in day to day.  By then it was time for her to go home, because she won't drive after dark, but maaaaan, what a lot to get done.  I'm still pretty hobbled by my ankle, so needless to say her efforts were MUCH appreciated.  I tried to tell her I owe her one (or ten), and she said, "But that's what mommies are for!"  LOL...

Just puttering here for a while before bed.  I had trouble with foot spasms again last night, got maybe six hours of sleep, and am fervently hoping that tonight will be the charm.

Has it really been a week since I've posted?  I think that's my longest hiatus since I've been on LJ.  It's been one of those weeks, though.   Just so much going on that I hardly know where to start.
 

My stomach is rumbling so I will (mercifully) stop writing and go fix dinner, after which it's time to tackle a good-sized backlog of e-mails.  Thank goodness for the holiday weekend so I don't have to try to do them all at once!

Y'all already knew it was going to be a girl because I've been talking about it for awhile now.  Welcome to my new niece, Emma Claire!  She was born this morning around 5:30 Oregon time, weighing nearly 8 pounds.  Everything went fine per my mother's report.  Guess I'll give them a holler out there and leave a congratulations message on their voice mail.

More later, perhaps.  I'm trying to make the best of being home from work this early, so it's time to dig into a bunch of e-mails and overdue comment replies.  :D

I'm sorry I've been such a bucket of either sadness or grumpiness lately, but golly, there have been more than a few rough spots, what with chilly coworkers and faltering self-esteem and all...and then I had a couple of rude shocks this week.
 

This just hasn't been a good week.  Dammit.
 

I have a zillion things to talk about, so please excuse the rambling.
 

Okay, I think that's quite enough babbling for one night.
 

The evening really got away from me, y'all.  I have a lot of catching up to do here as far as comments, etc., but I felt sort of fatigued today and promised myself I'd get a good night's sleep tonight so I can be on top of it at work tomorrow.  So much for spending quality time here on ye olde eljay.

I had a good day, though.  Was up and out of bed by 9:00 this morning, which is unheard of for me on the weekends, but I had a lunch date with Mom.  Hadn't seen her since before Christmas, and today was the day I finally met the guy she's been seeing for...oh, maybe a couple of years now?  He's VERY nice.  We had a lovely visit, then he excused himself so Mom and I could catch up.  We spent most of the afternoon chatting while looking at her electronic picture frame, which has about an hour's worth of pictures that my sister sent from Portland (so I got to see how big my niece and nephew are getting, among other things), and I also read a pile of Christmas letters from various friends of the family who Mom still keeps in touch with.  I got home and was about to fix supper when one of my cousins called me up because she needed an ear, and I listened to her vent for about an hour.  By then I was pretty darned hungry, and after I ate I did paperwork, which I only just finished.  So here I am.  Where did the time go?

Oh...one last thing.  Got an e-mail from my sister last night, and to my surprise (and delight) learned that I'm going to be an aunt again come June!  Interesting that they just finished moving into a 3-BR house that they bought AFTER they found out she was pregnant, and they've already outgrown it.  Guess they'll be doing something about the unfinished basement sooner rather than later.  :D

Hope all my f-list had a lovely day!

My mood today has definitely been helped by one of the perks of life at my office: On days like Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve we run on "Saturday schedule," which means the clinic downstairs only sees patients in the morning, but only as late as patients are actually scheduled.  Once the doctors finish with their patients, everyone (doctors AND staff) can go home.  As luck would have it, today our last patients were scheduled for 12:00, and the doctors must have worked fast, because we were all out of there by 1:00.  Yippee -- I can spend even more time being a slug!  I suppose I'll do something productive here in a minute, but I've enjoyed this afternoon.  I've mostly just puttered on line, although I did call my family in Oregon in response to an e-mail from my sister.  Seems that the weather out there (you think New England got snow?  HA!) has fouled things up for UPS, Fed Ex, and the postal service, and some of the presents I ordered haven't yet arrived.  She wasn't home when I called (she had just left on foot for the grocery store with a sled on which to pull the groceries home!), but I talked to Mom and she told me all about the piles of snow, the biggest snowfall in Portland in some 40 years (my sister sent pictures -- very impressive!).  I'm jealous, although I'm enjoying the relatively balmy temperatures here after that one day of serious cold earlier this week.  One of these days I do hope that the weather patterns give North Carolina a nice snowstorm so we can get in on the fun that everyone else has been having...it doesn't take much snow to shut everything down around here.  Wouldn't I love a good snow day and the free "snow pay" that we get at work?!?
 

Coming home from another grueling day at the office and calming my frazzled nerves with a CD recorded by my cousin Mark, who is a professional classical guitarist and lives in the Bay Area.  It's funny, I put it on because I've played my usual calm-down CDs to death, and the audiostream on my Internet radio kept on rebuffering, which got frustrating.  I hadn't listened to Mark's CD in awhile and it's very nice music by which to write posts and reply to comments and PMs.  And...having such a talented musician in the family makes me smile as well.

ETA: I could get used to this "happiness challenge" on a longer term basis.  It's a good way to stay thankful even during the rough times.
 

Ugh -- I hate that the baseball gods conspired to give us a day game tomorrow (er, today...it's past midnight now).  I work until 6:00 if I take a short (1/2 hour) lunch.  I had thought about asking my new supervisor if I could leave early (with some excuse such as a doctor's appointment) and make up the time later this week, but unfortunately, she was out all last week and I don't want to ask her on the same day.  So I guess I'll just bite the bullet, work as scheduled, and catch the tail end of the game when I get home.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my question about future journal content.  Sometime soon I'll be digging through old handwritten journals and photo albums so I can share pieces of my checkered past.

I wasn't nearly as productive today as I had planned.  So what else is new?  The highlight of my day was pretty cool, though.  I called one of my aunts in New York, who I hadn't talked to in months, and we spent FOUR HOURS catching up.  My ear hurt so bad by the end of the conversation, but it was worth it.  Her branch of the family is going through some craziness right now.  I had heard bits and pieces of it from other family members but it was enlightening to finally hear what's really going on.  I just hope all their angsty things resolve themselves in time.

I have to get up at 6:45 so had best make my way to bed now...GO SOX!
 

I wanted to say a bit about the conversation with my cousin up in NY, and then some other *good* family stuff as well.

The conversation was a real test of my sleight of tongue.  Much as I love my cousin, she is a Yankees partisan who absolutely hates the Sox.  And of course, I used to be a Yankees fan too, not the vindictive kind, but she has no idea that I switched sides.  NO IDEA!  So there we were on the phone, and of course the conversation eventually turned to baseball.  I think I did a damned good job of deflecting any suspicion.  

She was talking about how "we're starting to come around," and of course I haven't been paying much attention to the Yankees other than noticing the standings and occasionally checking on the meager few players who I still retain any fondness for.  So there I was, clueless, and trying to act like I wasn't in fact clueless!  I told her that because I live out of the NY market I watch anything and everything that comes down the pike on TV (which actually is not the case right now, because for the most part I follow the Sox and check on a handful of isolated players elsewhere).  That was one way to let her know that I don't keep up with the Yankees all that much without telling her WHY...but I did end up dropping a couple of names into the conversation because right before we got off the phone I was telling her a story I read about Bobby Abreu from his minor league days, when he played single-A right here where I live.  It had to do with him not speaking any English back then (he was all of 18 at the time and had just arrived from Venezuela).  That led to a discussion of the other Latin-American players on the Yankees and their command (or lack thereof) of English.  The ones in question are really young, around Jacoby and Dustin's age.  I told her maybe it's just a function of age and years of service because the 30-something Latin-American players mostly do just fine in English.  I mentioned Papi and Lugo in particular, and then said that I have a little bit of trouble deciphering what Manny says in interviews.  My cousin started laughing.  "But he grew UP here in New York!"  Yeah, I know that, from 13, as did Lugo.  Why Manny is harder to understand I don't know, seeing as how he's been here the longest of any of them.  At any rate, my cousin didn't seem to wonder why I would be so familiar with what those guys sound like.  Maybe she figured that I would have heard them in interviews because of the rivalry, but in any case she didn't express any anger whatsoever, so she *absolutely* had no clue that I've jumped the fence, because all hell would have broken loose if she had figured it out.  Anyway...I found the whole conversation amusing and more than a little bit reassuring.  She and her mother are the two family members who would be seriously angry with me if they knew the truth, and I had been feeling apprehensive about talking to them as a result.  So...it's all good now!  Now I just have to break the news to my sister, who rooted for the Rockies in the WS because she couldn't get past the rivalry, but she's not a "hater," and as my nephew is going great guns in T-ball (see below), no doubt much baseball will be discussed in the immediate family over the next many years.

I just HAVE to brag on my nephew, y'all.  He's currently 6-1/2 and, besides being far ahead of his peers academically, he's athletically gifted as well.  He plays soccer and T-ball, has shown aptitude in golf, and enjoys running around the yard with a football calling his own plays.  Of most interest to me, of course, is how he's doing in T-ball.  Well...let's put it this way.  Last season he turned an unassisted triple play.  Yes, he did.  His coach told my sister that he's never seen a kid do that (I actually didn't realize that was such a rare play until it happened in the bigs a couple of weeks ago for only the 14th time).  Oh yeah, and he's apparently learning to switch hit and recently got an outfield hit off of a pitcher rather than the tee.  I can't wait to see what he does with this, and am of course giving him plenty of encouragement.  Got him a bat and a satchel full of T-balls for his most recent birthday! You go, little guy!