The annoying thing about being sick is that once your immune system is shot, just as you’re getting over the first thing you were sick with, something else comes along and attacks and then you spend another week getting over that.  I think in the past two weeks I have seen every single doctor in my regular doctor’s practice, and taken half the prescription medications in existence.   And that, I think, is all I want to say about that.

Instead, I would like to say that I’m having a most excellent Saturday, consisting of:

• Making a delicious frittata composed mostly of CSA vegetables and herbs from my garden
• A roundabout nice-weather-enjoying drive to Construction Junction to donate a bunch of light fixtures that will hopefully find a new and better home than our garage, and unloading lots of recycling
• Lots of cuddle time with the cats, even Antigone, who is being disconcertingly nice to me today. Most likely she is plotting something horrible for later, but it’s nice while it lasts.
• Trying out my new ice-cream maker on some quite tasty mint chocolate chip ice cream
• Dancing around the living room to the Hairspray cast recording. Not the soundtrack - sadly, it does not have some of my favorite songs.  Whose dumb choice was that?
• Starting to make headway on reclaiming the bits of my garden that are quite overrun with weeds from the several weeks that I have now been too sick to take care of them properly.
• Playing dorky games involving trying to find the shortest series of Wikipedia links between two random topics - there is a website that does this better than I do, but I get style points for getting from cryptography to Corey Feldman via Neal Stephenson, instead of the dumb website’s route through Cyndi Lauper.
• Waiting for news on a baby who, from the sound of things, may have settled on today as a good day to be born. (Or tomorrow; but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for her parents that it’s today.)

I think this evening Len is making tacos, and we will try out my first ice cream, and then apparently Len has taken it into his head that we are going to watch My Fair Lady, because he is obsessed with teaching singers to pronounce words properly right now.  It seems highly improbably to me that he will enjoy it at all, but then again, he does like The Sound of Music, so who knows?  I suppose it’s still a step up from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, as musicals go.

In some ways, I think it is lovely that many of my most beloved children’s/YA novels are being made into movies of late. The first Narnia movie was extremely pretty and I look forward to more of them, and while I am a bit anxious about the His Dark Materials movies based on the one trailer I’ve seen, I’m also hopeful and am thoroughly enjoying a preparatory re-read.

However.

It is just hideously depressing to be in a movie theater watching previews (before a showing of Stardust, which I am also delighted found its way to movie form), and to spend two-thirds of the preview thinking “Will Stanton…I know that name is incredibly familiar, this must be an adaptation of something I once knew really well. Why does this plot seem not even remotely familiar and also fairly stupid?” And then to find that it is, apparently, meant to be some sort of Dark is Rising adaptation, only with a different name and mostly different plot and entirely different character who happens to have the same name. I would have loved so very much to see really good adaptations of the Susan Cooper novels, and this looked so terrible that I cannot imagine I will be able to bear watching it. And I’m sure no one will do a good adaptation for a long time with this awful one having come out so recently.

I suppose I must instead hold out and hope that someone does a good adaptation of her standalone novel Seaward, which is still one of my all-time favorites. But I should probably be careful what I wish for, because I suppose if someone made that movie right now they’d cast Ashlee Simpson, and I would probably just have to stop going to the movies altogether. Which would be a shame with the Toronto festival less than a month away. (Not that I am counting the days.) (26.)

I keep starting posts and not finishing them. Can’t seem to organize myself enough for a coherent post right now. A few odds and ends instead:

A) My oldest friend in the world came through major surgery with flying colors this week, at least judging by the email updates from her sister (and by the exuberant-sounding emails she’s been sending out herself the last couple of days), and I am so very, very happy about it. Also amused because I happened to come across some old high-school era pictures of her while cleaning out a box a few days ago. My, how long ago everything seems.

B) The annual film festival trip approaches. The full film list goes up tomorrow and in a couple of weeks we’re off and I am beyond excited. I don’t think I get to complain about needing a break after having had nothing but break from April to June, but still, things are intense at work and I’m not able to spend enough time with Len at home since he’s in the middle of a recording project, and I’m really looking forward to us having some alone time together in our favorite city without any work obligations.

C) Last week after my CSA pickup, I wound up chatting at the bus stop with another neighborhood woman who is really into her CSA and the farmers’ markets, and we ended up signing up together for an heirloom tomato class this weekend at one of the local farms. It was all so very poster-girls-for-slow-food I could hardly keep from laughing at myself during the conversation. But I’m looking forward to the class, and it would be nice to have made a local acquaintance other than the neighbor with whom I have a vaguely adversarial relationship because my house blocks her basil patch from getting enough sun.

D) Everyone in the world appears to be having babies. And they are all adorable and awesome, but I do wish some of them lived closer to me. Not particularly wanting kids of my own does not mean I wouldn’t like some local friends with kids for me to play with. Get cracking on that, local friends! There is free babysitting right over here!
E) As of a few weeks ago, we’ve officially lived in the house a year. It is still kind of a mess in a lot of ways, with things in various stages of renovation or being broken, but still, I love this house so very much. It’s a good little house and we have a good little life in it, and I love it with all my heart. Even if we did have to superglue one of the windows shut this weekend because it was broken beyond fixing and we’re not scheduled to replace the windows until next year.

F) I sincerely hope Len decides to write a book one day about being an audio engineer/producer, because musicians are weird, and it is really a shame that I probably shouldn’t write much about them. I wonder if there’s some sort of statute of limitations, because I probably shouldn’t tell the tale of the Multiple Personality Musician while that recording job is still going on, but man, would I like to tell the tale of the Homoerotic Carpatho-Russian Furry Band one of these days.

One of the downsides of being an unbeliever in gods or fate or whatever is that I don’t have anyone to blame when everything just sucks.  And I appear to be having one of those weekends when everything does just suck, and I am sad and angry and wanting to have someone to blame, but alas, nothing that’s going on is anyone’s fault - it’s just a confluence of crappy events.

My parents’ very sweet elderly rescue golden retriever, who I loved absolutely to pieces, died early Saturday morning. I’m sad for myself and I’m mostly sad for my mom, who’s so broken up about it.  I think it’s wonderful that she’s able to take in rescue dogs and give them a wonderful last few years, but it’s heartbreaking.

Then Len and I both got horribly sick - so far with completely different symptoms, so I fear that we may have picked up entirely different bugs and then we’re just going to swap them in a few days, which would really suck.  But in the meanwhile we’re both miserable, and there’s no healthy person in the house to send out for soup and cold meds and stuff, so it’s all coughing and chills and lying around listlessly.

And then blowing all of that far out of the water, I just got word that Shauna’s not doing so well in post-op recovery and is back in the hospital.  Her emails sounded so good, and I’m really worried for her now.  And not sure whether she has internet access now that she’s back in the hospital - but if you are out there and reading this, Shay, I’m thinking of you.

Just all-around sucking.  I want a do-over on this weekend, please.