Rachael

Even before I check email and comments from the weekend (I’ve been very offline), I need to make a very large, very loud public apology to Sylvia and Janine. We were supposed to meet today to spin. Sylvia, by all accounts (and I’ve heard from the East Coast on this one) is a master spinner, and I was thrilled to get a chance to learn at her knee. I was going to pick up sandwiches, then pick up Janine, then cruise out to Marin to spend a lovely day.

Instead, this is what I did. At Lala’s, I woke up early. I had a little sore throat and some major allergies going on. I thought, stretching, oh, what a lovely day to have a lie-in, since I have to go back to work tonight. I’ll sleep late. So I slept a few more hours, and woke up, came home, made coffee, turned on my email, ANSWERED AN EMAIL FROM JANINE, wondered idly what day it was and how soon Tuesday was going to roll around so we could spin together, and then I started saying, "FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK."

No excuse. None. Just forgot and went back to sleep. When I called, Sylvia was grace personified, just glad I wasn’t dead on the highway. I called Janine’s house, and her daughter answered hopefully, "Rachael?" Gah! She was out shopping (thank god she had reclaimed some part of her day), and will call me back and will hopefully still want to be the friend of a sleep-deprived wanna-be spinner.

What I hate the most is that I made them wait, made them give up their day for NOTHING. I know nothing irks me more than someone being late without excuse, but I can only think of one time someone just didn’t show up, and I didn’t take it well.

I’m sorry, ladies. I’ll try to make it up to you. Please forgive me for being a forgetful, sleepy jerk.

(Aside: I did have a dream in all that catch-up sleep that I was housesitting for my friend Monica who lives in Marin, watching her three-year old and her newborn, and that I was arriving at her house after work, realizing that I hadn’t been at the house all weekend, and that baby Luna had been lying in the crib with no food and water for days. I had forgotten to take care of them. I guess my brain knew I had forgotten something in  Marin, just wasn’t sure what. Aargh.)

**later: Janine called and was wonderful. I feel better. Still chagrined, but better.

As of this writing (Sunday), I’m on the cover of the LA Times! Right under the Pope! I’m right under him on the website, too. Permalink to article here.

David Streitfeld was a fabulous interviewer, and I had a great time "sitting" for the piece. Mom, Christy, I’m not going to lose my house — I hope for equity and cost-of-living raises. But David does raise some good questions about the newness of these interest-only loans. I live in hope, however. You know me. And I have a door and a key to it that I call my own.

Woot!

**added later: I will admit that I was not going to blog this, because I did NOT want my family to read it and get scared. They’re already tripped out that I have so much debt. But I got a call this morning from my mother saying to go out and buy the paper, "you sneaky kid," and she had seen it because her neighbor called her and told her about it. She then called the sisters, who called me. I think they were just stoked that there was a picture of me in there. And that’s good.

It comes down to this: I make enough money now to make the mortgage. In a few years, hopefully I’ll have made enough equity to refinance and change terms. If not, it’ll raise by 2% plus principle payment, and I’ll have to get rid of TiVo, cell phone, all extraneous yarn purchases (gulp), but I’d still be able to make it. And honestly, before David interviewed me, I’d had my head so far in the sand that there were grains in my bellybutton. I didn’t want to know what the rate could raise to, I didn’t want to know how high my highest payment could be — and it’s true, I would have signed anything. But now I know. It’s scary, but it’s do-able. Facing fears feels good. (Although turning away from them feels just fine mostly, too….)

It’s a cold, windy day here, and we just went on a walk through Mills College with the dogs, who romped all over the old grounds. It’s lovely. Later, The L Word with friends and knitting, in my little house. Happy.

Two quick things:

LOVE the new Vogue Knitting. I adore three or four things in it, and that’s three or four more than the last one. Also, fab article by our Leslie, and my Kira (of wedding lore) is quoted!

Also: Have you heard the tape yet? The 911 call from the woman having a problem with her cheeseburger? I’ve been sent it from several sources, and while it’s very funny, it’s also kinda bittersweet. People make calls like this all the time. The dispatcher let her talk way too long, I thought. But she probably had her mute-button clicked on in the beginning, and she was probably telling her stunned coworkers what the caller was saying while she figured out what she would say back. (We do that all the time. We say, "uh-huh," click to mute and laugh our heads off (uh-huh) or swear or give our coffee order to the officer making the run for us (okay), while still listening to the caller in our headset (uh-huh). Multitask it, baby.)

And working in a small, mostly white, affluent city brings this call home to me. I’ve taken calls from people on 911 who want me to call them a cab. Or they want me to tell their neighbor to move their car from in front of their house because the car’s ugly. Or they want a cop to tell their husband to stop sleeping around. It’s always funny when people call us to have us make their kids behave, change clothes, go to school.
"Can’t you just send an officer to scare him?"
"No,  we try very hard not to scare children, ma’am."

Or I get this one at least once a week,
"There’s a man walking around outside who doesn’t belong in my neighborhood. You need to move him along."
"How do you know he doesn’t belong, sir?"
"He’s black."
Yep, just like that, in the freaking Bay Area. My jaw drops every single time, and it’s all I can do to not blow my stack (but I get that insta-burn of rage in the top of my head, which I rarely feel any other time).

People just call for dumb things. All the time. I once got a complaint about a man coughing too loudly (turns out he had bronchitis. How dare he?). Once a woman called five or six times in a row, absolutely FURIOUS that we would do nothing about the frogs who were croaking too loudly in her neighbor’s back yard. I could not make this shit up.

Anywho. A brief lesson: 911 is not a room in the sky filled with people who answer your phone call. We don’t all work together. If you dial 911, you’ll talk to a person sitting in a room in your own city (or if unincorporated, your county).

When to dial 911: Call 911 for life or death emergencies, for medical problems, or when property is being threatened or attacked at that very moment. For example, if your house has been burglarized during the day while you were away, that’s not an emergency (look up the seven digit number for your local police department), but if you see someone actively breaking into a home, dial 911.

Check with your state, as things are changing rapidly, but try not to dial 911 on your cell phone (unless you see an emergency on the freeway): You’ll most likely get a highway patrol dispatcher, who will have to figure out where you are and then transfer you to the right city’s dispatch center. In Northern California, you can easily be on hold with highway patrol for more than five minutes, and then they still have to send you to the right agency, where you might be put on hold again. Program into your cellphone the seven digit phone numbers for every single city you’re routinely in, both police and fire dispatch, if they’re not combined (most are separate where I live). Best thing to do in any emergency: use a landline if it’s safe to do so — it’s answered immediately, and you don’t have to know where you are — the address will show up automatically on the dispatcher’s screen, which is good, because you’ll be too freaked out to remember the address of the house you’ve lived in since you were five.

Shoot. I meant to just quickly share that link, and then I got all preachy, huh? Comes down to this: Be safe, know where you are, have a great time, and knit a lot. (And for my sake, if you get a nice dispatcher, write her chief a note — in five years, I’ve only seen this happen once here. For the cops it happens all the time, but people forget the helpful voice who figured out what to do with your problem pretty durn quickly. It would be a really big deal for her/him, this I know.)

And this: Happy weekend, all!

Tummy is better. Thanks for asking. It really wasn’t that bad for that long. Just violent. Whew.

I got up this afternoon (finally managed to get some good day sleep!) and found the new Vogue Knitting magazine on my coffee table. The knitting elves have been very, very good to me. This will make my night at work tonight so much better. I usually save knitting magazines a) for work, when I need to escape in my mind the room that I physically can’t leave for 10-14 hours and b) the bathtub, if on my weekend. There ain’t NOTHIN’ like lying in that tub until the water runs cold, reading about knitting. Unless you’re me, and it’s within the last two weeks, and you’re reading about spinning. But you know what I mean.

[I just got an email from Lala, responding to my thanks for the magazine and she says: "I’m glad you like the magazine. I try to be a good provider. At least of the necessities."]

Yesterday I dyed my hair with a punky teenage Loreal color called Funky Cherry — came in a mousse can in a metallic package, and it was cheap, and I gotta say, if you’re gonna dye your hair, there is no better method than mousse. I don’t know why they all don’t come this way. It was thick and gloppy and I just pushed it into my hair and there were no drips, none at all. I did accidentally fling the can behind the toilet, spattering the back wall with blood-like drops, but I washed most of them off, and since the only time anyone will notice will be when the toilet is moved out of the way, I’m sure the person noticing the stains will have bigger problems.

And I curled my hair. I’m loving this longer haired thing — takes more time, but it’s fun. Here:

Okay. I’m going running now. And then back home to bathe, quickly, and then to spin again. I’m a woman possessed. I talk about it so much perhaps I don’t really have that much time to do it. Yesterday, I grabbed exactly 20 minutes to spin. Today I might get an hour or TWO before work, and that’s very exciting. Must run. Mwah!

You know what you really, really shouldn’t do? Eat a bunch of vitamins, and then ten minutes later eat some salt’n’vinegar chips. Five minutes later, feel really sick and bolt for the bathroom, hand over mouth, scaring co-workers. Find out only after scare that the vitamins were in a base of sodium bicarbonate.

Yes, I mixed vinegar and baking soda in my tummy. This clears drains, people. It was not fun. But the Exploratorium has a good bomb for you to try with the kids or when you’re up at four in the morning with nothing to do but mess around with kitchen supplies and listen to Dinah Washington. Or whatever. Not like I’d do that in my kitchen sink for fun. What do you take me for? 

Burp. Excuse me.

I’m having a hard time getting and staying online lately, something to do with my phone service. Normal people call the phone company when this happens, I suppose. Me? I was glad to have the time to spin. (Yes, I will write. But right NOW is for spinning.)

Seriously, it’s getting to be addictive. I slept three hours in a total of sixty over the weekend, mostly because the four hour slot I was supposed to sleep on Saturday night (extra shift on Easter) was used up with fiber insomnia. What if I hold the wool like this? What if I adjusted the band just this way? What would it be like to spin alpaca? The question was raised why I just didn’t get up and spin a little while, and the answer was: I was too MAD about being awake. So I just kept my eyes squinched shut, willing myself to sleep, watching the wheel spin ’round in my head.

Is this how crazy starts? It might be.

Now, when I think of MDSW, I’m thinking about roving and combed top, not yarn and cute little sheepdogs (yes, we’re going! Woot!). (Also: When I think of MDSW, I think of what my friend Monica heard when I said it out loud: "Maryland Sheep and Wolf Festival." She was horrified. Let’s all call it that, shall we?)

And before I run back to the wheel (o lovely lovely wool), I must show you what I got over the weekend, in addition to the best homemade enchiladas ever.

I got some Cadbury Creme Eggs.

Forty-eight, to be exact. (Lala bought fifty-two, actually, but her brother got some along the way, as is right and good.) She just kept pulling them out of bags, and then more bags. Boxes and boxes of happiness. Sheer chocolate goodness. Come on over. I have plenty.

And in fact, I have the Last Egg in Oakland. We hit the stores yesterday, looking for sales, but all we could find was this one, which Lala found abandoned at the bottom of a cart full of scary sugary baskets.

Yes, that’s Koigu. No, I didn’t set up the purse to highlight the wool — if I had, I now realize it would have been good form to have moved the pad. Oh, wells.

Now. Back to spinning and eggs and the imminent but welcome sugar crash.