A post in which I stay home from work*

I was up with insomnia half the night.  The alarm when off and I just felt bleary and crappy.  I've been kind of wondering if I had picked up a bug from Ava last week anyway.  So I was lying in bed thinking what has to be done today?  Work is pretty much caught up.  My month is ending quietly.  National Conference is going on, and although half the office is in a big kerfuffle about it, it doesn't affect my job.  So the short answer was nothing much.  I decided to just stay home today. 

I slept for a while, and then woke up and fell into the internet vortex for a while, culminating in a buddy coming by for a spectacular visit. 

After he left, I started looking around at all the stuff that needed to be done around the house.  I'm going out of town with Mom next weekend for our annual trip.  Since we didn't get to go last year (because of treatment) we're both especially keen to go this year.  We're going back to the beach.  Jason says it is very 'German' of me, but if I have a good time someplace, I like to go back.  This year we'll be staying at the Patricia Grand Resort Hotel. 

But today I was looking around at my house.  It is full of crap.  I have birthday stuff that still needs to be put away.  But to start off with, I was going to make breakfast.  I have a package of tortillas that I bought for suppers one week and didn't finish.  They don't make packages of less than 100 apparently.  So today I made homemade breakfast burritos with soft scrambled eggs, veggie sausage, shaved goat cheese, and salsa.  They were YUMMY!

Breakfast achieved, I settled in to work on my feets.  I need to get them in shape for the beach.  I had bought a new foot thing at the Dollar Tree the other week.  I was skeptical, but I figured for a dollar it was worth a try.  So I got all my stuff together and got out the callus shaver.  Which fell apart as I was getting it out of the package.  So I'm sitting there trying to figure out how to get it back together and getting nowhere, and nicking my fingers to the bargain.  Just as I was about to throw the thing away, I realized that a piece of it had fallen into the floor, which was why it didn't go back together properly.  But when I did get it together - WOW!!  Now some of you may not suffer from the serious Nasty Hoof problem that yours truly does.  But this is the single most effective foot thing I have ever used on my feet.  In short order, the cracked, ashy heel calluses were GONE.  Just gone.  And in minutes.  Unlike the hours of ineffectiveness I have suffered with those long cheese-grater things (which do very little, and take forever to do it), and the PedEgg, which does NOTHING.  So I'm going back to the Dollar Tree next week to lay in a supply of these things.  I never intend to be without one again.  I'll do some finishing with a pumice stone next week, and I'll have the feet of a twelve-year-old girl for the beach.  The rest of me may look like hell, but my heels will look good, anyway. 

Next I put a load of towels in to wash, and started to consider the problem of my grotty shower curtain.  I got one of the cloth ones, which for the most part, I love.  The issue is mildew.  Now they are supposed to be mildew 'resistent'.  They actually coat the cloth with a (invisible) silver wash which is anti-bacterial.  Unfortunately, mildew will win out eventually.  You're not supposed to bleach them because they are polyester.  Bleach will yellow polyester.  So I had read online that you are supposed to used salt and lemon juice to kill and remove the mildew.  I tried that for a while today.  You're supposed to put it out in the sun so that the sun's bleaching effect will help remove the stains and kill the mildew at the same time, but since I don't live in Bombay, I didn't really have a convenient stone to beat my shower curtain over and then spread it to dry.  I did the salt/lemon juice thing for a while, and then soaked it in OxiClean.  That helped, but after washing there were still stains.  So I spread it out in the shower, covered it with salt and lemon juice again, and left it to sit overnight.

While all this was going on, I was watching re-runs of RuPaul's Drag Race on Logo.  They announced earlier in the week that Sahara Davenport had died.  At 27.  Wow.  The cause of death has still not been announced.  They were showing the season she was on the show today.  She wasn't a big favorite of mine, I'll confess, but it is awful to die so young, and I'll admit to a morbid fascination of watching her at what would be the highlight of her career, completely unaware of the impending tragedy.  I do feel sorry for her, and more so for her lover Manila Luzon (admittedly, another who hasn't been one of my favorites on the show, but what a tragedy).  When Sahara was asked to 'sashay away', I tuned out. 

That was about the extent of my productivity today. 

I did feel better later, and thought I would like to go do something, but I had just seen the boys last night, plus they were leaving tomorrow for the Renaissance Faire in Charlotte (as was Rhonda).  I was seeing Miss Kat and Dana tomorrow night to watch the game.  I'm pretty much broke, and even if I wasn't, I'm going to spend a small fortune at the beach next weekend.  So eventually, I decided to stay in with my embroidery.  Which was fine.  I channel-surfed and played some games on the computer, and turned in to be fresh for the day tomorrow.