What A Long Strange Week It's Been...

In which I attempt to briefly explain where I've been...
"Briefly" - Ha! Who's the wordiest girl in town???

Feel free to skip today's offering, and come back another day when the knitting* and cooking and reading, etc. will (hopefully) resume...

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It all started on Saturday, over a week ago. Through sheer stupidity and general all-purpose house-keeping ineptness, I managed to chemical burn my hands. The left hand, not so badly. The right one, I'd say was about 70% covered with burns, blisters and ick.

Peh.

Haven't I warned you all that I'm really, really, really not good at being a homemaker?

Let's just say that I obviously skipped the part in the big old Martha Stewart book that explicitly stated that I should wear gloves before attempting to bleach down the entire front of the house.
Did I already mention that my stupidity played a huge role in this?

So - I'm pretty much worthless for days. I can't knit, I can't write, I can't type, I can't use my hands for anything - basically, all I can do is sit around and dwell on how stupid it was/I am.
The only thing I hate worse than a painful injury is one which is both painful and stupid. I don't think you get much sympathy for those.

And sleeping? Well, that wasn't happening. Stupid swollen hand kept me up Saturday/Sunday/Monday and Tuesday nights. Peh somemore...

Wednesday: Should have gotten some sleep, but didn't. See, it was getting to be time for the big yearly neighborhood festival - and I was charged with hosting the kickoff party on Thursday night, for all the neighborhood kids. And I'm a worrier and a fretter. So not much sleep happened. Got about 3 hours.

Thursday: the party went off (yay!) despite having to move it to a new location with less than 6 hours notice. Stupid rain!
It's difficult to move a party for 150+ kids, but it all turned out OK in the end. But it took forever to get the party broken down, and then I was all wired from it all.
And - you see where this is going - not much sleeping happened.

Friday: I made an interesting discovery. When you get too sleep deprived, it's kind of like being drunk. But not the cute and fun kind of tipsy you might hope for.
Nope - this was the vaguely nauseous kind of drunk feeling. The kind where you know the party should have ended a few hours ago, and it's gone on too long, and it's probably not going to end well...

And, all groggy and loopy, I went to meet my friend The Caretaker for breakfast. He was stopping off in town on his way to visit his folks in another part of Georgia.
He's one of my absolute favorite people on the planet. And I've not seen him in over a year and a half.

And bless his heart, he sat down and ate breakfast with my sad, incoherent, drooling self.

I suspect I told him the same stories multiple times. He managed to not look bored. He politely didn't point out that I literally had the shakes as I reached for my first Diet Coke of the morning. He kindly figured out the math on the check when I couldn't wrap my brain around how much was 20% for the tip. (Admittedly, I'm not the biggest math whiz at the best of times. But I can figure a tip. Usually...) I get the feeling that my half of the conversation sounded something like this:

aggle aggle aggle gak!

And this, of course, is how I *entered* Festival Weekend. Which is always a weekend of nothing but fun and a departure from my real life. This year was no exception...





Just a few photos, to give you the flavor of the weekend.
It's a crazy couple of days...
(I wore my tiara the whole time.)

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And of course, the whole thing with Schecky's poem making it onto BoingBoing? That was exciting beyond all belief. I had no idea...

Thank you to everyone who read it and had nice things to say. Schecky was just thrilled to pieces that people read his poem, and that they responded positively to it...

I'm awfully fond of my boy, Scheck. He's a good egg**...

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Which brings me to this week - I am frantically playing the "catch up" game. I keep trying to remind myself that I can't just take more than a full week off from my life, and expect to be all caught up in a day. Yet, impatiently, that is exactly what I want to happen!

So, I'm baby-stepping through my poor neglected house (the laundry! Sweet Cracker Sandwich, you wouldn't believe the mess around here...), the poor neglected email, the poor neglected blog-sphere...

It's been a rollercoaster ride around here - so I suppose a return to normalcy is due. Knitting, reading, cooking should all resume shortly...

xo!

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*Remember the knitting? How I used to at least attempt to be a crafty girl? Yeah, I almost don't either...

**He and I love this site....