It’s sort of interesting, in a depressing way, to observe what happens to me on visits to the town where I grew up.  As soon as we get anywhere near that area, every muscle in my body starts to tense up, I get pounding headaches, and it pretty much doesn’t let up until I’ve crossed the state line to get the hell out of New Jersey.  Pity a perfectly decent state (Newark notwithstanding) had to be ruined by growing up there.

I live for the day my parents finally sell the business and retire somewhere else so I can proceed to ignore the state for the rest of my life.  Even if that does mean I have to start going to South Carolina instead.

Ah, well.  Other than that whole “Jersey makes me violently ill” thing, I had a nice whirlwind trip to see the family and catch Christopher Plummer in Inherit the Wind.  What’s not to like about a trip that involves being twenty feet away from Christopher Plummer?  Except that I fear a Sound of Music rewatching may be in my future soon, and that just never goes well.

Anyway, now I am home, and I have a few more weeks before the new job starts.  So I am mostly alternating between planting stuff in the garden and obsessing about my cat Dimitri, who has high glucose levels and is starting on insulin therapy today.  I am feeling highly uncertain about this whole “giving him shots twice a day” thing.  We’re going in for cat-injection training this afternoon, and hopefully it will go well, but I really wish my favorite vet were around to walk me through all this and talk over options with me.  She won’t be back from maternity leave for another six weeks, though, and leaving Dimitri untreated that long isn’t an option.  So I guess we’re just going to plunge in with the insulin type/dosage the new vet recommends, and see how it goes.

In the meanwhile, I console myself by planting tomatoes and sunflowers and roses, and watching my spinach and snap peas and basil grow.  And being glad that I have time off right now to deal with the many vet trips and the learning process this whole feline diabetes thing is going to involve.  Though it would also be nice to have paychecks coming in to help defray it.  Here’s hoping the pet insurance ponies up.

For someone who has always done logic problems for fun, I think I have a minor glitch in my logical thinking system.

Yesterday, I needed cash, but the ATM across the street annoys me by having massive usage fees.  Which is when it occurred to me that the zoo, also across the street but a slightly longer walk, has ATMs belonging to my bank.  And since I have a membership, I could get in free and use the ATM.

I don’t know what possessed me to think I would have the willpower to walk into the zoo, use the ATM, and walk out again.  From the ATM it’s just a few steps to the tigers, and once there, you might as well check out the lions, and they’re so very close to the zebras…    I’m such a sucker.  Two hours, two sets of digital camera batteries, and a vast quantity of photographs later, I finally stumbled back out of the zoo, footsore and thirsty.  But I did have the cash I had originally gone looking for.  So this plan sort of worked - if only I always had a spare two hours every time I want $20 for pizza.

I need to get out and check out some of the random little neighborhood stuff around here more often.  Being interested in gardening has made me aware of all these little local gardening-related events, which makes me wonder what else I’m missing.  Today I headed a few neighborhoods over to the “Friendship Flower & Folk Festival,” which promised vegetable and herb transplants from my favorite little local farm, plus folk music.  Little did I know there would also be loads of incredibly cheap used books, plus tasty baked goods with proceeds benefitting the local Montessori school.  It was a little tiny event, but lots of fun.

Plus, I got to spend a couple hours out in the beautiful weather, watch a bunch of really cute kids dancing around to the folk music, and came home loaded down with pepper transplants, several different types of herbs, a dozen or so used books at fifty cents apiece, organic brownies, and white chocolate chip almond cookies, at a grand total cost of about $19.   A fun and cost-effective use of a morning, I would say.  Books, plants, and chocolate.  If only there had been cats, it would have been the perfect festival.

However, I feel no urge to do anything else productive today.  I’m thinking about settling in with some lemonade and a movie for a nice evening of sloth.

I need to be out the door in five minutes to catch a bus into Oakland for the Race for the Cure. Just wanted to pop in and say Grandma S, this one’s for you. We miss you.

I hate being sick when you’ve been sick for days, show no signs of feeling better anytime soon, and it just starts to feel like you’ve always been sick and always will be.   I am so very, very tired of coughing and not being able to breathe and not being able to get enough sleep because I keep coughing myself awake.  I have just one week left before I go back to work, and I wanted to spend it gardening and fixing up the house and buying new work clothes, or at the very least reading and watching movies, but today I was so exhausted from not-sleeping and from coughing that I couldn’t even manage to water a plant or focus on a book.  I pretty much just lay in bed and stared blankly at the TV all day without remembering anything that was on it.

No fun at all.  I feel slightly better tonight, but maybe that’s just the effect of a different cold medicine I’m trying.  Here’s hoping I feel human again sometime soon.  Certainly before I go back to work, since I would rather not start my new job by coughing my germs up all over my new coworkers.

Being deathly ill has also meant missing out on a visit from the estranged half of my family, in town for my brother’s graduation tomorrow.  I can’t decide whether to be bummed out about that or not - I would really have liked to see my brother and sister, and who knows when I’ll have another chance since I assume he’s leaving town after graduation.  But the full family extravaganza taxes my emotional health even when I’m physically right as rain, so in the state I’m in right now I’d probably just break down and wind up sobbing into my dinner.  Probably best for all concerned that I opted to stay home.

However, on the happier side, Len is upstairs right now playing around with his acoustic guitar, having just changed the strings, and it always makes me happy to hear him play, which doesn’t happen nearly often enough these days.  So there’s one nice small thing that happened today, apart from me coughing and being miserable.