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So, at work we sign our shifts in six-month watches. I have to make a decision TODAY about whether I pick:

A four-day midnight shift with Sat Sun Mon off (9pm-7am) (I have this now)
Or
A four-day day shift with TWT off. (9am-7pm)

In four years of working at the PD, I’ve never before had the choice to get off of midnights. If I took the day-shift slot, I’d get all the holidays off, as this year they all fall mid-week. I haven’t been home for Christmas in four years. But I wouldn’t have weekends off anymore, and god knows I love a good fun-filled weekend.

What to do?

I’m stewing. Must decide tonight. I’m leaning toward the day-shift choice – biorhythmically, my body’s been fucked up for years. And I’m constantly reading how night-shift work leads to brain cell damage, causes higher risk for breast cancer…. This isn’t very fair, is it? Midnights are cool. I like the wee hours, having only made their acquaintance during this job. I had never stayed up all night until I started working, not even during college or grad school, and I remember how odd it was to see the clock click to four a.m. and think of all the people who were sleeping, missing such an strange, quiet time.

Some pictures for your fun:

My ChicKamis are getting out-of-control. What liberties I’m taking! I just have to finish the back (which I’m going to raise again) and the wide straps (which I think I’m going to cable).

**Okay. I’ll admit this much, too. You’ll understand. In the wee small quiet hours between three and, say, six am, there’s not usually much going on. At ALL. It’s great knitting time. Moving to a day shift, I’d lose most of this ability. I’d be a weekend knitter. Sob. You see why my decision is so heart-wrenchingly difficult? Can’t really admit to choosing a six-month shift for its knitting potential, though. Can you?**

And this is my little friend Winter (I’m his fairy godmother). He’s spending three months in Australia. Monica said she had hold him back – he wanted to jump right onto his wallaby friend.

Happy Weekend!

I opened that huge box and bag! It was a time capsule, yes, but it was a time capsule that had only cured for two years, so instead of forgotten treasure, it was mostly just dusty crap. Alas, as was suggested, no yarn stash. I was still smoking then, so didn’t yet need the massive quantities I’ve come to believe are necessary. That came six months later. I DID find my bag of car-wash stuff. Besides that glorious time I paid those people to do it for me, that tells you how long it’s been. Uh-huh. Also found a crap laptop computer that I’m pretty certain I have no interest in turning on. I bought it as a junker about three years ago, and it never worked right in the first place. I guess I’ll make sure there’s nothing incriminating on the hard drive and then I’ll donate it to someone, somewhere.

I did find some of my old jackets in the box, including this beaut that I would have missed sorely had I realized I didn’t know where it was:

In the bag were some of my old clothes and SOME THAT I HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE. I mean it. Did Alyson add her “to the thrift shop” belongings to it? ‘Cause I’ve never seen these Grinch boxers:

But this is kinda cute:

And there were a couple of Eddie Bauer sweaters that are plain but still functional that I’m totally keeping. One man’s trash.

Here’s Adah checking out the haul:

Isn’t that weird? It’s given me the worst itch – I think I’ll gird my loins (what an image!) and clean out my house this weekend. I’m gonna pretend I’m moving. Get myself to that hardhearted place where I can throw out my hanging lanyard tag ID from the Breast Cancer Three Day Walk and a cool looking green candle that I’ll never burn because I miss the person I was with when I bought it. Junk like that. The stuff that I’m totally attached to but would NEVER miss were I never to see it again. I want to have space, blank spots where I could put something, but where I don’t. Where I leave the bookcase/cabinet/countertop empty, just because I can. Yeah. I know it’s a dream, but I want it to come true……

I have so much CRAP!

Two years ago, I was trying to buy a house. I had been evicted from my little moldy apartment in the Oakland hills and instead of renting, I decided I wanted to buy. No, this wasn’t financially responsible on my part. And I couldn’t find a house I could afford that didn’t have iron bars on the windows and gunshot holes in the garage doors. But I lied to myself for a while, and told myself I’d be happy living in an area where I couldn’t step outside after five p.m. While I was looking, I crashed at various friends’ houses. One friend provided me a mobile-home, another the driveway in which to park. I was working midnights then, too, and sleeping in a metal box during the day in mid-summer in Contra-Costa County was miserable. If Alyson used the washing machine while I was sleeping, we’d trip the breaker, and my meager air-conditioning would crap out. I’d wake in a little ball of sweat, too enervated to even walk to house to reset it. There was no working toilet. I crept into Alyson’s house to pee or just tried to hold it (don’t ask about my tupperware experiment).

It was awful not having a place to live. I’m a Cancer, and I don’t really believe all that shite (don’t we all say that?) but home is everything to me. I finally rented an apartment, my sweet little apartment where I’m still happy, gave up the home hunt and started working on paying down the bills instead.

BUT. All this to say that I still had a box and a bag of belongings over in Alyson’s garage. Whenever I visited her, I wouldn’t feel like piling it in my car. She offered to bring it over in her truck, but we never got around to setting it up. While I was sleeping today, J dropped it all off. What’s alarming to me is this: I didn’t hear her unlock and crank open the door. I didn’t hear her dump the stuff in my living room, which must have taken several trips. I didn’t hear her swearing at the Door That Won’t Close, as everyone does. I’m always complaining about not being able to sleep – how was I able to sleep through that? I use earplugs, but I can hear through them – they just muffle the sound a little. I sure as hell heard every note of the Chopin that the ex-Juliard guy upstairs was practicing for an hour (he’s good, but rough on this particular piece). What about a fire? Would I hear the fire alarm? I’m half-tempted to look like a crazy single cat-lady and put up five or six alarms, just in my bedroom. That’d wake me up, right?

It’s a paranoid day, apparently.

This is how Adah sleeps on my feet all day:

And now I’m off to open the box and the bag and figure out what I’ve been happy living without for the last two years. Reason says I should just trash them unopened. But curiosity gets the better of me…..

I’m so pleased that I have so many grammarians as friends! Of course, grammar and knitting are similar – tricky little bits to be manipulated, pushed and pulled; not everyone looks to see how something is made, but if one does, each stitch/word is important in strengthening the whole.

Okay. I may be pushing the analogy.

But I love it how y’all pulled out the books and looked it up for me! This could push my laziness to new extremes. Don’t spoil me. After reading the excellent comments, I’ll keep writing Ds and 1990s, but I’ll try not to be so annoyed when I see it written the other way. Humph.

I’m a wee cloudy this morning/afternoon. Last night I pushed my tiredness and cold-remnants right out of my head and went out. First, I went to the local hang-out, which is scary mix of old and, um, old. I read a novel recently that was set in Oakland in the late sixties, and the author described the White Horse in one of the scenes. The furnishings are still the same. So are the people. I counted, no lie, three mullets. We had been looking forward to the karaoke. But when it started with a rousing rendition of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” we moved into the pool room. We didn’t dare come out for a long time.

I then heeded my best judgment even less and drove over to the City to meet this girl. She sometimes reads this site, so I hope it won’t come as a shock to her to learn that I’m totally using her for her bar. Well, she’s cute, too. But damn, it’s a good bar. You could sit, by yourself, for hours at the White Horse, and only the crazy Hawaiian shirt guy would talk to you. I’ve been to the Wild Side West perhaps four or five times, and people hug me when I walk in. It’s technically a women’s bar, but it’s also the neighborhood bar. I met Paul last night, who lives around the corner and edits the Bernal Journal. Nope, you can’t make that up. While I try to limit my alcohol intake to a reasonable level (I swear I do, yep yep), there’s just something about bar culture that I fit into. Gawd, I miss smoking, though. Eighteen months.

I’m trying to slyly (all right, I’m not that slick) make myself a part of this crowd. I had a bar once, that I loved. I lost it in a break-up (even though we had drawn up the pre-nup-bar papers), and I’ve been looking for one ever since. I wrote about going back there, not too many months ago, with a girl I was seeing. We were chased out at the end, great huge ugly slurring men screaming “Lezzbi-yans!” after us. (I really think they thought it was an insult.) Guess it was a good thing I lost that bar.

So now I’m waking up slowly. No hangover – I didn’t drink more than a few beers – but I’m sleepy and slow. Back to work tonight. I was given the heads-up by a friend on today’s Fresh Air: Terry Gross interviewed Niki Caro, who wrote the screenplay for and directed Whale Rider. I rarely listen to talk radio, but I turned it on and pulled out my knitting. It was a wonderful interview (catch it if you can) and I remembered how soothing it is to sit and actually watch my hands move with the yarn. Usually I’m watching the computer or the TV while knitting, multitasking my little heart out. This was calming and so nice. Terry Gross, though. Humph. Why does she bug me, just that littlest bit? She thinks she knows everything, doesn’t she? Okay. She does. But still.

I need confirmation from my beloved Grammar Avengers. Now that I’m done with grad work, I’m more of a Grammar Aficionado. I know the rules, and I’m annoyed when others break them. But I also know that in my own haphazard writing I break the rules or simply don’t notice that in haste I’ve used the wrong form of a word. Ugh. What was once unbearable is now almost acceptable. Laziness? Age? (At thirty-one, I can now say I’m in my mid-thirties. You think?)

But help me, please. I may be wrong.

In referring to grades received, it would be incorrect to say “I received all A’s.” Right? Shouldn’t it be “As,” without the apostrophe? Like “CDs for sale,” or “I’m in my mid 30s.”

In the new Harry Potter (god bless, I finished, what a ride), there are multiple references to Harry receiving D’s.

Am I mad? Am I flat-out wrong? Someone back me up. Every time I hit another sentence that had “D’s” in it, I had wild one-sided conversations with myself – no, her editors wouldn’t have let that happen, there must some kind of exception when it comes to letter grades, no, I know I’m right, it’s three in the morning, I could be wrong.

Grammar aside, I’ve started a new little sumpin-sumpin. Apparently addicted now to tanking, I’ve decided to cable another tank up. I’m going to make the bottom third in this simple cable pattern, with the top half remaining firmly ChicKami-esque, since I lurve that pattern. We’ll see.

And I leave you with a snap of Digit. He’s outside the window, in the barren window box (I planted a lettuce-seed sampler there, and got nothing but ugly looking spouts), crying for me to notice him. How could I not notice that face?

It’s done! Made with Baby Bernat in cotton, using Bonnie Marie’s awesome pattern. It has a few mocha coffee spots on the front, and I’m a little alarmed at how the stripes in the bust kind of striped out into wide swathes of solid color, but it’s cozy and soft. I used the fabulous wide strap version, but I raised the neck in the back.

Okay, weird pose. I was in a hurry to go to work.

See the mocha stain?

Raised neck.
Oooh la!