So, yesterday we ventured out into the crazy heat and picked up a new air conditioner at BJs, and put curtains over the doorways to the living room, stairway, and kitchen, and it’s pretty comfortable in here. The cat is having fun pouncing through the curtains. The air conditioner that was stolen was our older one, and it was on it’s last legs anyway. I’m still furious that it was taken (and I really believe it was the teenage girl downstairs or her boyfriend that took it, and probably gave it away or sold it), and we’re going to talk to the property manager about it, but since we can’t prove anything…

Okay, scrap the plans in my last post — we’d have air conditioners, if we didn’t have horrible asshole neighbors who steal things from the storage space in the basement. Jeff went down to get the air conditioner, and found our stuff rifled through and the a/c unit gone. Luckily we have one more — we can use that one to keep the pigs cool this weekend (now the Weather Channel is saying 96 degrees Sunday) . I am so pissed off — nobody has had access to the basement except us, and the asshole neighbors. SO pissed.

Hi! Happy spring! Or, if the weather reports are to be believed, summer — it’s allegedly supposed to be 90 degrees and humid here for the next few days. (Allegedly because the weather folks have been totally wrong lately. I’m hoping that streak keeps up, because ugh, hot and humid.) We’re trying to figure out air conditioning for us and the guinea pigs — we have two window units, so we’re rigging up some thermal curtains to close off the stairway and the kitchen, and we’ll put one unit in the bedroom and one in the living room, and hopefully that will keep things cool over the summer. (We’re not that spoiled, really — the guinea pigs can’t handle that kind of heat.)

I’m thrilled that the Democratic race is finally done, and that Obama is the candidate — I initially liked Hilary Clinton, but a lot of her campaign tactics really put me off. I’m tired and a little brain-dead, so I think I’ll write more about it later. Right now my level of concentration is “Obama yay!”

Work is still… work. I’m trying to figure out other types of jobs that I would be happy in, and that my library background would qualify me for. I’m thoroughly bored with my job, and tired of the day-to-day drudgery that is academia. I do like the actual helping people — it sounds cheesy, I know, but it makes me really happy when I can help someone track down a bit of information they need. So, that I like. I like handling course Reserves a lot — it’s tedious sometimes, sure, but I enjoy it. I just sort of feel like I’ve been in my job for so long that I’m stuck, and not really qualified for anything else.

There is, of course, plenty of knitting going on! I started the Lady Eleanor stole last month…

(click for larger pics)

… but ended up putting it aside in order to knit baby bibs for my cousin’s new baby:

There are also socks in progress, of course:

And, because we are in dire need of new dishcloths, I bought a bunch of cotton yarn and got to work:

It’s great mindless knitting.

Jeff says that picture looks like a knitted thong. Which would be extremely uncomfortable. Ew.

My mom was here this past weekend — we mostly loafed around watching loads of Doctor Who and eating yummy food, but we did take a wander around the Stone Zoo on Sunday…

Bucket full of goat!

These guys were really cute. They had very soft ears.

Handsome snow leopard…

… looking noble.

The zoo has new black bears. They were very hard to get a good picture of, because of the chain-link fence. They were fun to watch though.

This is my favorite picture ever. I had no idea how it was going to turn out, because I was way across the pen from the llama, and the sun glare was so strong I really couldn’t see the viewfinder screen very well. The look on the llama’s face cracks me up. I love it.

The whole set is here. Go check it out!

And now, since I am very very brain-dead, I’m going to watch TV and knit dishcloths.

It was raining a little when we went to bed last night. I woke up in the wee hours to the sound of raining pounding down — I closed the bedroom window and crawled back into bed, where the rain lulled me back to sleep. Woke up later to clear blue skies, bright sun, gorgeous weather. So, we decided to go run some errands and enjoy the sun… except that, by the time I got out of the shower, it was cloudy again, and chilly enough that I grabbed a sweater when we left. By the time we got to Target, there were huge fat raindrops falling. It poured for a while, then the sun peeked through again, then more rain, then thunderstorms (which delayed the Red Sox game for over two hours) and now it seems to have stopped. The storms went on for ages, though.

It was a fujn shopping trip though — Jeff had a Target gift card, a birthday gift from his parents, and he also had a $25 gift check (a bonus from his work) so we got some necessities (hay for the guinea pigs, gooshy food for the cat, nail polish and nail polish remover for me), and he picked out an espresso/ cappuccino machine as his birthday present. The total was over 70 bucks, but we paid something around $23 for it all.

I stopped off at Michael’s and got a bag to organize my many knitting projects:

Yeah, I’m a dork, I took pictures after I got it all filled up. If you want to fully experience my dorkitude, click through to the Flickr version, and you can see that I put in notes describing the contents!

I usually catch the bus to the Orange Line at 7:30. This morning, there were no buses at all until 7:50, when one extremely full bus passed my stop, followed by a nearly-empty bus right behind it. Then, the Orange Line was running with delays, which must have been contagious, because the Red Line was also messed up. A trifecta of T fucked-upness!

Do the dumb things I gotta do. Touch the puppet head.

Jeff and I saw They Might Be Giants on Friday night, and it was excellent! Smallish venue (the Somerville Theater), great crowd, really good seats — it was a great show.

Look, a blurry cell-phone camera shot!

I’ve seen them… oh, at least a half-dozen times since college, and they’re always fun.

The weekend was spent recuperating. I’m old, and going to shows makes me tired and achy! We intended to get up for church on Sunday, but… well, I never even heard te alarm go off, and slept like a log until 11:30. Jeff got up a bit earlier.

My laptop broke last week — I was using it Wednesday night, then closed it for an hour or so, and when I went back to it, it was dead. The AC adapter plug looks odd, like the tip came off or something, and it doesn’t seem to fit into the jack securely. Jeff’s got a similar laptop (they’re both HP Pavilions) and his adapter won’t plug into my computer at all. I’m sending it to HP — Jeff dealt with the purgatory that is their tech support — and hopefully they can fix it. (I have an impending sense of doom, for no real reason except… I love my computer! I can’t afford a new one! I only bought this one back in September!) It’s very frustrating, not having a computer at home. I borrow Jeff’s whenever I can wrest it away from him, but… I miss mine.

Smoke and Cesar, having a moment. (Jeff took this with his cell phone.)

Nap time!

It’s rough being Smoke, I tell you.

I am, once again, wishing I could do anything at all to keep from going back to work tomorrow. I have been in this job for ten years now — when will my boss stop calling me in to her office to tell me off for being a quiet/ shy person? Honestly, it’s making me crazy. I’m not THAT shy, I do talk, but once or twice a year, I get called into my boss’s office and reamed out for not talking enough. And I have no fucking clue how to fix it.

And really, how the hell is the getting chewed out supposed to make me more confident? It just makes me want to never go back to work. I end up crying every night when i get home, because I feel like such a mutant at work, such a freak that everyone around me just despises me. And I have no idea how to fix it. What do I do? I’ve spent ten years trying to force myself to fit in, and it just doesn’t work. Maybe I should just give up, and be the asshole people think I am.

I was looking at my site stats and there are a huge number of hits lately from this site… which, having looked at it, I’m baffled. Hello, you new people — what’s up?

Just try to keep your eyes open…

Jeff needed a new hat…

so I knitted up a watch cap for him out of some yarn in my stash. (It’s dark green — hard to see in the picture. And you can’t really see the cool swirl formed by the crown shaping.)