Want to Find a Brand New Planet? You Can!

My daughter sent me this link in an email today!

A group called Planethunters.org is giving the chance to find a new planet to anyone who wants to try!

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There will be a Burn Notice Marathon on Sunday, culminating in a new Burn Notice movie: The Fall of Sam Axe! Check your local listings.

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In the meantime, tree pollen season (please notice that the season most people call Spring is officially tree pollen season at my place) has been knocking me out. Runny, swollen eyes (only because I haven't gotten any actual pollen in them, otherwise, I'd be temporarily effectively blind), post nasal drip (my sinuses are trying to drown me) and total exhaustion. I can barely stay awake.

This is why you haven't been hearing much from me, and probably won't for a while.

In the meantime, have fun, and happy weekend!

Schedule

First, before I get into scheduling for the rest of the year, I want to say I haven't been ignoring you.

As every year, in the Spring and Fall, the apartment place I live in has a problem with the heat/air conditioning. Or, more accurately, I have a problem with the heat/air conditioning. They couldn't care less.

The heat is either on or off, and the air conditioning is either on or off. They hire a company to come in here and turn the heat off (in Spring), which they say takes a whole eight hour day, and then later they get the same company to come in here and turn on the air conditioning, which they also insist takes a whole eight hour day, and both of these events have to be scheduled ahead of time. Which involves them having to predict the weather and the optimum time to do that. Which, of course, they can never get right.

Their standard answer to my complaint about this is to tell me to open a window. And since we're having record high counts of tree pollen, to which I'm grossly allergic, this poses a severe health problem every Spring, followed in the Fall by the same problem with ragweed. This problem doesn't end with the windows closing, but manages to keep me feeling sick from April to around the beginning of the new year. Every year!

The end result of all this is that we always have at least a week, and usually closer to a month where the temperature in my apartment never gets lower than 80 degrees. It has been over 110 degrees in here already

This is that time. I had a week where the temp in my apartment didn't get lower than 80. All I wanted to do was lie down flat and sneeze and sneeze, blow my nose and try not to drown from all the junk draining down my throat! Then, on Thursday, late in the day, early in the evening, a thunderstorm swept in with a cold front behind it (naturally), and it cooled off for a few days, which is giving me a chance to recover somewhat before the heat hits today and tomorrow.

So, I've been dealing with what is about equivalent to a bad cold. And the worst thing is that it's going to go on for a while. The heat is finally off, and the AC isn't due to be on until the 19th of May, around 4 or 5 o'clock.

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Robin hasn't had a vacation in ages, and was getting to the point where things were starting to be stressful for him, so he decided to go on vacation, which he had scheduled to start on Thursday. So, he drove to Assateague Island to go camping, set up camp, and the temperature plunged and the rain (and thunder and lightening) started. Eventually, he called Holly complaining about the weather and asked her to make a reservation for him at a hotel in Ocean City. I feel bad for him that so much of his short vacation was spent outdoors in the rain and cold. I was out on Friday, and it was chilly enough that I wore my Winter coat, and was glad I did. They said it wasn't supposed to go much above 60 degrees, but it was windy and cold in spite of all the sun.

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On Friday, I was out to get a CT scan of my ear so they can find out why my middle ear is blocking sound instead of conducting it like it should.

I talked to Holly about it before hand, and she said the scan would be very noisy. I mentioned that to the technician before the test. She said that Holly must've had an MRI, because CT scans aren't noisy, and she was right, it made kind of a whooshing noise.

Friday night I told Holly that the CT scan wasn't noisy, and she said "How would you know?"

I waited around, and they gave me the disk to give to the doctor. I thought I might be able to see the inside of my afflicted ear on my computer, but my computer doesn't have whatever special program is needed to view it. It seems odd to me that they'd invent a whole new format just for things like this. I mean they could have used JPEG, EPS, or any other format, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They didn't even use any standard text format for the written summary. The only thing I could view was their logo. I'm disappointed!

I plan to take the disk over to the doctor on Monday and make an appointment. So, we'll see then.

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The digital TV Guide just rolled over to next Saturday, and BBC in America is having a full day of Doctor Who next Saturday! It'll start around 6 am (here) and run through the end of the fourth season, some Doctor Who specials, all of the fifth season, and continue with the first new episode The Eleventh Hour! Then there will be several repeats of the new episode. Check your local schedules and set your DVRs/TiVos!

Episodes to especially watch for include Silence in the Library/Forrest of the Dead (a two-parter: a horror story with a love story embedded), Turn Left, and the finale: The Stolen Earth/Journey's End, with all the major characters that have been in the series recently, including Sarah Jane Smith, Rose, Martha, and Gwen, Ianto, and Captain Jack from Torchwood.

Don't miss it!

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And, finally, to the schedule for this year!

• May 1-2--The Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival The biggest event of it's kind in the United States, the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival is not to be missed! We almost always go on Saturday. The hours say that it's open until 5 on Sunday, but people start packing up at around 3, so you miss a lot if you go on Sunday.
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• Jun 12-13--The Potomac Celtic Festival All things Celtic! Once again, Saturday is the day to go!
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• August 28-October 24--The Maryland Renaissance Festival  We don't usually decide which weekends we'll be going this early, but we usually try to make it twice once in September and once in October.
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• October 2-3--Fall Fiber Festival and Montpelior Sheepdog Trials  This is so much smaller than the Sheep and Wool Fest, but something to tide you over until the next one.

And that brings us up to the cooler weather when these kinds of things don't generally happen.

This year, Lynn will not be joining us for some or most of the fun things we'll be going to. She's having more eye surgery, this time for cataracts.

I'm really upset that she won't be going, but even more upset because of the reason. I wish her the best with the surgery, and wish her eyes were just OK and didn't need the surgery at all, but I am thankful that what's wrong is something that can be fixed. We're going to miss you while we're doing all these fun things! Maybe you can get to go to the Renfaire in the Fall, if you can get off work!?

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The high today is over seventy, so it's already getting uncomfortable in here, and it'll be even worse tomorrow. It's supposed to cool off a bit on Tuesday and Wednesday, but there will be more heat and indoor pollen before this is over. Don't worry if I don't blog every day. It'll just be the heat!

In case I don't blog as often as I'd like, have a wonderful week!

Earth Day Is Tomorrow!

Earth Day will be celebrated tomorrow, and I thought you might want to know about it ahead of time so that you could pull together some way of celebrating it, even in a very small way.

Here's a picture of the Earth Day flag. You can find out lots more at the above link.

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I haven't been ignoring you. The weather has been changing around here, and it has consequently been very warm in my apartment. It cooled off Friday night, so it was a reasonable temperature here on Saturday morning, but when I got home on Saturday, it was over 90 degrees and rising.

And I've been neglecting to take enough medicine, so I've been feeling bad enough that between the heat and the discomfort, and the tree pollen that comes in the windows because I have them open to try to cool off, I haven't been sleeping well.

The medicine is very long-acting. I can back off quite a bit and not feel the effects for a couple of months, so it's easy to lose track.

Tree pollen doesn't usually cause allergic symptoms for me (unless I do something to irritate my eyes), but I am allergic to it, and what happens is that I build up lots of histamine in my system. Which makes me sleepy. Histamine is a big cause of tiredness and sleepiness. A healthy person usually has some histamine circulating in their system. It assists in wound healing (which is why a scratch or cut itches during part of the healing process). That's why people love caffeine so much. It's a histamine blocker, and wakes you up in with your morning coffee.

I found out about the heat in this place. It turns out that during the construction of the building, they ran water pipes through the cement, and the place is heated by a boiler that pumps hot water throughout the building. So, even with the heat turned off, the heat is still turned on in the building. The floor in the kitchen was quite warm yesterday and it's not warm today, so maybe they've decided to turn off the heat today. I'm told it takes about 8 hours to turn it on or off, so it's not something they want to do on a daily basis. I can't wait until they turn the air conditioning on!

So, I haven't been doing much. Anything that I can do makes me feel warmer and more uncomfortable. So, there hasn't been much to write about.

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One big thing that I did yesterday was to do some more art for John. I put together a poster for the Steve Canyon series of DVDs. I did a smaller one for him to take to the Reel Stuff Film Festival, and he said it was very popular and there was spirited bidding on it. I'll let you know when it's available.

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On Saturday, Holly and I went to Occoquan and walked around a bit. We went mainly to see Off the Beading Path, which is a wonderful store full of beads there. I bought some number beads to make a counting device for knitting, a beautiful goldstone bead that's black with lavender sparkles, and another pewter charm, the latter two for stitch markers.

Holly bought me a tiny pewter "pocket piece" that says "Wishes Come True" on one side and "A Wish for Success" on the other side.

I'm really tickled with it.

Later Saturday, before the heat got to me really badly, I pulled some fingering weight yarn out of my stash and did a practice piece for the shawl I plan to knit. This will look much more open in the lace yarn I plan to use.

This is my own design, not the design from Knit.1 magazine, so I want to test it first. I knitted more than this, but didn't take a photo of it, and it's already been unraveled (to scavenge the beads).

The shawl in the magazine had two panels, and I thought that it wouldn't have a straight edge across the wide side if done that way. As you can see from my sample, two panels produce a slight point in the long edge. I know that they relied on blocking to make it straight, but I thought I might like three panels better.

When I got this far, I realized that the long edge would be close enough to straight that it could be blocked straight without much of a problem. But then, when I went to unravel it, I like the handkerchief hem it'll have with three panels.

So the design process favored three panels, then I changed my mind to two panels, then back to three.

I learned several things from the sample: I will have to run a lifeline every so often, I have to do another sample of the stitch I invented for the border, and I want to design an edging for the bottom, which will need another sample. So, there's still a batch of work on this before I even start knitting. I think I also want to cast on more stitches to start and graft the long edge border together.

The yarn for this is probably sitting downstairs waiting for me. I didn't check mail yesterday. I was too busy (or unbusy)  trying to cool off (and doing the poster). The first batch of yarn was shipped on a Wednesday and arrived on the Monday of last week. This batch shipped on Wednesday, and so I think that there's a good chance that it arrived yesterday, or maybe today. I have to pull myself together and go check.

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While trying to cool off, the "activity" I've found that generates the least heat is lying down reading, so I've been doing lots of that.

I'm currently reading New Moon, the second book in the Twilight series. I got mixed up. I don't know if it was Amazon or me, but I thought it was the third book, so I've already read Twilight and Eclipse (which is the third book), and now I'm back to the second. I have Breaking Dawn requested at the library. I was number 30 on the list to get it when I requested it on Sunday, and number 24 yesterday and I'm 23 on the list today. Even though that sounds like a long wait, they have 35 copies of the book, so it will not take too long.

I finished Turn Coat, and loved it. It's a typical Dresden Files story, so how could I not love it? If I say anything else, I'll start into a description of the plot and dump a lot of spoilers on you.

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There's a new Reaper and Fringe on tonight!

I have to get going and do something to cool down.