Yikes -- I haven't posted since the weekend! I really am still alive, and I'm doing FINE, healthwise. Lungs have pretty much cleared, my ankle is only occasionally cranky, and I'm hardly using my cane at all. I am totally busting it at work because my department is VERY far behind and some of the docs are squawking about things that didn't get done, but a) sometimes it's hard to know which fire to put out first and b) if the department is unstaffed and The Powers That Be won't give us a part-timer to make sure that doesn't happen, it's not like we COULD have gotten those things done, right? I worked an hour over tonight, so I get to leave early tomorrow, and thank doG it'll be Friday at last.

This is an extra good thing because I have to go grocery shopping in a bad way (had originally planned to do so tonight, but oh well) and the stores will be jam packed tomorrow night because...we're expecting 2-4 inches of snow early Saturday. Yeah, all my Northern friends can laugh. That's actually a significant amount around here, and it'll be the first storm of the season so everyone is out of practice anyway.

Other than that? Well, I had to show off my newest icon. :::sigh::: I'm glad I'm posting this right before bed, the better to have sweet dreams. Yes, I am pathetic, but I don't care. Two years and counting...I don't think this obsession is going away anytime soon.

I'm getting all rambly here so will stop. Snuggly pillows await.

Leave it to me to have a delay in the most powerful part of my reaction to yesterday's trade.  I guess I was in shock in the immediate aftermath.  Today, however, while doing my usual blogosphere cruising, it occurred to me to check the following link: 

http://www.csnne.com/wickedgoodsports/justin-masterson-on-being-traded-07-31/   (yes, I'm too lazy and on the fly to TinyURL right now)

Then I cried for real.  When I got to the last paragraph I sobbed so hard that I aspirated a bit of coffee and had to cough strenuously to get it out of my lungs.  I'm fine now, but just so sad.  What an incredibly classy and thoughtful guy.  He can rest assured that he'll have fans in Red Sox Nation no matter where he goes.

I made a Justin icon a long time ago but never liked it much so deleted it.  In the past day I've seen some of my f-listers using theirs or uploading new ones in his honor, so I just made this one, which I like better even though it's nothing fancy.

I have to laugh at myself, y'all.  Even though he's replaced one of my main baseball cuties (who still looks utterly adorable pouting on the bench), I'm realizing more and more that Nick Green is indeed quite hot -- I can even overlook the oddball eye placement.  He's doing a great job at shortstop, too.  I'm quite impressed!

Looks like I'll be fooling with more iconage when I return from my trip.  Well, my new icon from today (jaybay WHUT?) will need some company, I reckon.

My newest icon!  That's the city/county building complex in downtown Asheville, taken from the ridge that runs just east of town.  I tinkered with it a little bit on Picnik, and I really like the way it turned out.
 

That's all for this evening.  I'm going to go lie by my open bedroom window, where it's cooler than here in the kitchen, and read a bit before I go to sleep.  Hope things are well with my f-list!

Hey all, what's going on?  I think I may have just missed a rainbow (although the sun retreated behind the clouds again), but couldn't get outside to check without putting mud boots on, so I decided to pass.  For probably the last 45 minutes we've had an impressive downpour that is just now letting up.  Now don't get me wrong, I love rain; however...my little house sits at the bottom of a sloped driveway, and when it rains this hard it takes no time at all before the water runs down from the street and overwhelms the drainage system that sits just outside my carport.  The result?  A couple of inches of standing water in the carport and for several feet beyond, and it takes awhile to drain after the rain stops, and it sometimes stays muddy for a couple of days.  Amazingly enough, in all the years I've lived here, the water has never come into the house, not even when we got walloped by back to back hurricane remnants in 2004.  I have that to be thankful for, but it does get inconvenient at times, especially if I really need to go somewhere when the carport is flooded.  I've developed a system of stretching out to open the cardoor and more or less leaping into the passenger seat and crawling over to the driver's seat, LOL.
 

That's about it from here.  And yes, I'm still catching up on comments.  Almost done, actually.  Hopefully later this evening.  I hate when I get behind on that, because I don't want my friends to think I'm ignoring them (I'm not...really).

Smooches to all!

ETA: And...we have rainbow!  It blossomed from barely there to bright -- not knock-your-eyes out bright, but a lovely full arc, with the faintest of doubles.  Wheeeee!!!!

Happiness (after being angstified last night, as my f-list knows) is getting a good night's sleep after being so tired that I actually fell asleep while reading in bed and didn't wake up until 8:30 this morning, at which time I was momentarily puzzled as to why my bedroom light was on.

Happiness is deciding that it's okay to spend the day being a slug...for the first time in three weeks!  I didn't even get out of bed until noon, such was the depth of my laziness, but I'm not beating myself up about it because I deserved it.

Happiness is the first warm day in awhile...into the mid-60s, and we're supposed to stay more or less this warm for a full week!  I actually had two windows and my kitchen door open for several hours, so the house got a decent airing out before the sun went down and I had to bundle up again.

For all of the above...I'm thankful.  Just had to share.  Plus, I had to show off my newest icon, because I can't have just one Saadiq icon.  Yeah, I know, he has really strange looking ears, LOL.  Anyway, I was hoping that my CD shipment would arrive today because I can't wait to hear that new album, but alas, the U.S. Postal Service must be lazy too.  It's up for three Grammys, and I hope tomorrow night's awards ceremony brings good news for "Ray Ray."

I guess I should try to get something done around here before day's end, so that's all for now.   :D

I am a bit of a horndog today.  Really.  :::sigh:::   At least I was inspired to make a couple more icons, which is a good thing.

The crankle is about good to go.  It was a little bit red/swollen by late last night, but I slept with it propped, lounged in bed for way too long this morning, and it looked fairly normal when I got up.  I'm not enjoying some of the side effects of the antibiotic (sometimes those are as bad as the illness that's being treated, LOL), but this too shall pass.

I'm spending another quiet day alternating between catching up on electronic correspondence and doing piddly things around the house (dishes as well as taking my injection for my MS a week late but better than never).  It's been a somewhat lost weekend but I really can't complain, seeing as how I was very productive last weekend and am feeling pretty motivated in general.  At least I had a good reason for being a slug.

Onwards.
 

Whew -- thank the universe that tonight's LJ server crash (or whatever that was) is over with!  I've been going through withdrawal here, but at least it allowed me to get some chores done, and now I can play on here with impunity until bedtime.

Before I sit down to reply to comments, I've got a couple of things tumbling around in my brain at the moment.  First, it was one year ago today that I bought this wonderful computer (my lifeline for real).  It was also the day that I started having chills and fever and eventually landed in the hospital with pneumonia, missing two weeks of work.  I feel really fortunate that with timely visits to the doctor and by taking care of myself I have been able to avoid serious illness since then, because I never EVER want to go through anything like that again.

The other thing...I have a sinking feeling that I may have committed an icon faux pas in the form of making something extremely similar to someone else's icon.  Trouble is, I have no idea WHO that someone could be.  Sometime after I posted that "le sigh" icon of Coco in yesterday's entry, it occurred to me that it looked eerily familiar and that I may have seen something like it in the past.  So please...if ANYONE recognizes it as an inadvertent copy of their icon, PLEASE tell me so I can delete mine.  I don't want to be an icon thief even if it was unintentional.  :(

That's it for now.  I've got a pile of comments to reply to...and ice cream to eat.
 

I went and did it, you guys!  I added icon space...for a total of 105!  And then I promptly uploaded about 20 of the multitude of icons that I've made (some of which will never be seen because they were weird experiments like close-ups of eyes, or they were of Manny, or things of that nature).  I also set aside a whole lot of pictures from my "Sox miscellaneous" folder for future icon use, because I know the current ones are mostly Lugo and Coco and, well, you know...with Coco being gone and Lugo being a lot of people's least favorite player, I suppose I should give the rest of the team some air time.  And I'm enjoying fooling with patterns to make abstracts.  So look for a bunch of other icons as time goes on.  For now, I'm just really, REALLY happy to have more space to play with, and I'm also happy to be able to use some of the ones I have without deleting the tried and true ones that folks are used to.

WHEEEEE!!!!!  ::::is giddy:::   (simple pleasures for simple minds, or so I've heard)
 

I'm in Coco withdrawal of late, especially with the rampant speculation that he'll be elsewhere next season.  I don't know what possessed me to do this, but I did an interest search here on LJ to see who else had him listed in their profile, and what did I run across but someone, iconic_plus, who both makes and collects icons (I didn't figure the latter out right away).  One of her posts was about "icons I like," and the icon for THIS post was in it.  Not realizing that she collects icons, I thought....wow, it's uncanny how closely her icon matched mine...great minds think alike...or something like that.  Then I noticed that the famous "Jacoco hearts" icon thatwrennette made was also in that post (and credited).  I looked again, and sure enough, that WAS my icon, properly credited!

I've gotten a couple of compliments lately from folks on my f-list about icons that I've made, but I totally didn't expect to find a shout-out on someone's journal who I've never even heard of!  I'm rather proud of myself...and thinking that this winter, in my vast spare time (when I'm not trying to declutter this messy house), I may try to learn REAL icon-making skills, you know, the fancy kind.  Now I just have to hope and pray that the guys who I enjoy iconing don't end up on the other side of the country, because it would really suck to start all over with making proper Red Sox icons, yes?