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I just came home (slept at Lala’s) and I’m home for a few minutes before I dash out to work, but it smells funny in here. Not funny cat-like, thank goodness, but funny like I need to clean the garbage disposal, or like the apples are too old on the counter.

I’ve had NO time to clean, NO time to blog or read blogs. This weekend promises to be short, also, since I’ve got plans for almost every minute of it. (The Whoreshoes playing in Oakland on Saturday! Come see!)

But the cats remain obnoxious, and isn’t that the most important thing? I’ve fed them, so my job is done here. They hate their new prescription food, so it sits on the floor until they’re almost dead with hunger. Then they eat and glare at me. They’ve both lost weight, and that wasn’t actually the plan. It makes them more obnoxious as night, though — they know I’m at my weakest and will get up and give them the equivalent of Pop-Tarts in the middle of the night, just to shut them up.

Bath full! Must run!

(I haven’t even had time to see the last twenty minutes of the Amazing Race, and that’s just a sad state of affairs. Okay, bath REALLY full.)

https://rachaelherron.com/i_just_came_hom/

I just got this in the mail, and came right to the computer screen to copy it, so you can read it. Oh, oh!

The envelope is addressed to Rachael and Partner, at my address.

Inside is a sweet card decorated with hydrangeas (the embossed old-fashioned fancy kind of card), written in an older person’s hand. It reads:

Dear Girls,
Myself and my family want to thank you from our hearts that you loved our house as much as we did. Your thoughts and your letters made us happy and sad that it didn’t work out. We just want you to know what a wonderful feeling it was to our family that someone loved it almost as much as we all do. Good luck in all you do.
– Little Red House and the Family That Lived There.

It’s from the owners of the house! The house that we thought was for us because we DID love it that much, our wagon-wheel cottage. It makes the owners real, and I’m so happy they wrote — my imagination creates an image of an elderly woman in an assisted-living residence with her children around her – they know that they would have loved to have given us the house, but they had to go with the highest bidder (oh-so-much-higher than we could have ever bid) because they residence is expensive, and little Judy’s going to Dartmouth and is going to cure cancer, and they DO need the money. But they’re happy that someone else saw what they saw. And we did. Isn’t that what matters, in the end?

How lucky and happy we are that they wrote. (I love that she wrote to The Girls, and put Partner on the envelope. Isn’t that nice? The handwriting is over seventy-five if a day. I love that.)

What everyone will be watching! Two must-see trailers. THIS one might be a little scary for me, but THIS lighthearted chick-flick is going to be great! Oh, I just can’t wait. (Thanks to the banjo-girl for this.)

So tired. Assorted animals, mostly Adah, kept me up all night. And this working 5 days a week at the crack of dawn, nay, EARLIER than that, is for the birds. Will be so glad when the in-house training is over. I can do anything if it’s just three or four days a week. You know? Yawn.

I spun a little and knitted a little yesterday. That was nice. Oh, and Anthony Bourdain is my new boyfriend. HOT. Who cares about the food? Just wanna watch him smoke.

I am learning so much. My head is going to fall right off in about six minutes. It will simply get too full of knowledge and fall off and roll around and laugh and say, "You know too much! That was it! I’m done with you! I’m moving on and going to get on the shoulders of someone who doesn’t think, like you used not to."

My old job was 911/police dispatch for a small local agency. My new job is fire and medical dispatch for an enormous geographic area, and there are about one million more things to learn than I ever thought there would be. I keep learning that we control and manage the resources for areas that I never would have thought about, both geographically and politically.  It’s great, but totally overwhelming sometimes. I have to call the state leaders when? And send fire trucks to other states how? We do THAT? You’re kidding. I used to read blogs. That’s what I USED to do.

Luckily, I’m going through training with a nice boy, who knows as much as I do about dispatching. I would be totally freaked out if all this learning was directed right at me, by my lonesome. I don’t think that would be fun.

The guy is sweet. He is. But he doesn’t ask many personal questions. Yesterday, I realized that while I knew his girlfriend’s name and job and where she bought coffee and where they ate every Thursday night, I thought it prudent to ask (after eight nine-hour days), "Do you know I date women? And that my fiance is a girl?"

He said, "Really? I knew this girl at my last job who was having triplets with her female partner." And that was ’nuff said on the topic of me. I told you, he’s sweet. Rather cotton-ball-like, and I can’t explain that. He just is. Smart, yes. Just doesn’t ask too many questions. I can respect that.

Maybe next week I’ll prove to you that I still knit, although in reality I’ve knit maybe twelve rounds of a sock at work, and perhaps twenty rows of a lace handspun scarf at home this week. That’s it. Someday I will knit again….

Happy weekend!

This is why I leave writing about the music up to my girl.

https://rachaelherron.com/this_is_why_i_l/

I saw Yarn!’s Janis knitting the neatest socks ever the other day. She was knitting self-striping socks from an unraveling piece of beautifully dyed machine knitting. There. Think about that for a minute. Dude.

Here you go. Isn’t that the best idea ever? Check out those gorgeous pieces in the gallery! Look at those kits! Dye your own socks! Nancy Roberts is a geeneeyus.

From her site:

So
what is this inveterate hand knitter doing using a knitting machine? A
knitting machine is yet another tool she can use to personalize yarn
creation. With a knitting machine, she can quickly machine knit
stockinette fabric for multicolor dyeing. Dyeing in the fabric, unlike
dyeing a skein, allows her to produce a yarn with longer repeats of
color, which means in turn that a single color can circle the
circumference of a sweater many times before merging into a new color
or shade.