And! (Now with picture!)

I forgot to tell you that my mom dyed my hair for me.
I has no grayz! Not one person has noticed without my pointing it out to them.

This is me taken with my cell phone in natural light. No makeup. And no grey.

Back from a weekend away.

Had a great time talking with assorted wonderful people about politics, skylights, and expanding houses. And then we did active things like jumping rope, jumping into a pool, watching the wildlife (I got thisclose to a wild deer), sitting on a screened porch while the rain came pouring down outside, and playing Scrabble. For the record, the Scrabble Player's Dictionary (4th Ed) doesn't include "jew" but it does include "nazi."

Discuss.

I Added Some More Folks to the Blog Roll -->

And you'll notice that they have the little asterisk indicating I've met them in real life. They are high school friends who also took McCourt's class and who write much better than I do.

(ETA: also added a political blog. It's asterisked, but it's a cocktail party meet, not a high school friend! Also added Rev. Songbird who I was missing for some unknown reason.)

I need to clean up the rest of the roll pretty soon. Several out-of-date links.
(ETA: Done, for the most part.)

Also, if you link here and you'd like me to link back to you, send me an email! My email is liz AT (mylastname)household DOT com. I don't promise reciprocal linking (f'rinstance, I tend not to link to blogs that are purely about selling things, or to ones with really mean commenters and no comment policy in place to control them), but I love broadening my blog community.

Small whine.

I really want to go to the Sock Summit.

Question about stats

You may have noticed that I'm keeping track of days and doors there on the right -->

I have it broken down by days, doors, and average doors per day. But the truth is, I don't do the same number of hours per day. So...to keep the stats more honest, should I break it down by doors per hour instead of doors per day?

F'rinstance, on weekend days that MM has a playdate or a babysitter, I can do six to eight hours of steady door-knocking. Most weeks I do three to four hours per night on Mondays and Tuesdays (I have a sitter take MM home from daycamp.)

I do tend to do about thirty doors an hour, except of course for last night, when I only did twenty, but to be fair, I did have general anesthesia the day before.

Tell me, friends in the interwebs, which way best satisfies the stat geek in you?

All done!

So Sunday was unpleasant, as was Sunday night into Monday morning, but the procedure itself was fine.

Anesthesiologist: "I'm going to add the anesthesia to your IV now. You'll feel a little dizzy."
Me: "Oops! I forgot to take off my glasses!"
Anesthesiologist: "It's time to wake up now!"

Seriously.

And the Gastroenterologist's report says I did excellent prep. So Sunday was worth it.

And I slept for 19 out of the last 24 hours.

And I don't have to do this again for another 10 years.

Today I am missing out on a picnic I wanted to go to

Instead, I am staying in the house drinking lots of fluids and eating Jello. Am I sick? No. I am not.

I am prepping for a lovely procedure tomorrow morning.

The prep involves a bit of unpleasantness.

Basically, they're checking to make sure that all that todo back in May hasn't done any damage.

So far, I can tell you that orange-flavored Jello isn't half bad. I will report out on Peach (Edited to add, Peach isn't as good as orange, but still edible) and Lime later. I will not report out on orange-flavored Gatorade with added preparatory ingredients (Edited to add, tastes fine, especially cold).

So you're not going to see me at the doors today or tomorrow. And I really think that's a good thing.

...And one he would have torn apart.

"Who is speaking here? You never speak that way."

Dark Chocolate

More McCourtish Posts

Lost:

He's Serious

A Recipe for Takeout

Posts that read like a Frank McCourt assignment:

Taking a Stroll Down Memory Avenue
The Nurse
Dreaming of a Ham Sandwich
Some of the Most Wonderful Sounds in the World (written the day HP7 was delivered to my house).
The Essay I Wrote for Nearby U.
I Am (although he would have made fun of how stilted it is).
Works So Well, I Should Patent It

There are others, but these are the ones that spring to mind.

Doing Doors in the Rain

Was still fun and rewarding, but involved complicated fussing with the rain poncho which slowed me down. Also, it was too hot to wear the poncho and I got sweaty, so I took it off and just carried a few sheets at a time with me and just enough literature for those sheets' doors. 'Cause the literature was getting wet and puckering.

Fortunately, the rain stopped after the first street. But then the mosquitos came out. And they LOVE me. Yum yum!

So, for tonight, I'm going out there bathed in bug repellent - and you'd better believe that I'm doing doors rain or shine. Bugs or no bugs. Because I AM the Doorbell Queen.

65 doors last night.
87 the day before.
588 total in 8 days.

Frank McCourt died yesterday

He was my favorite teacher in High School. He was funny, and cranky, and made fun of Ernest Hemingway ("We went fishing. It was good.")

Our assignments in his class were to read short stories by famous authors and then to write a short story about something we knew in the style of the short story we had just read. Mr. McCourt insisted that we only write about things we knew - even if it was a fictional story it could not include people whose lives were very different from our own.

I will write more about him later, but I think I won't be able to top what my classmate, Daniel Radosh, says about him in his blog.

Goodbye, Mr. McCourt. I will always be so grateful to you.

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

Annoying and yelling and awful is he.
If high pitched whining is something you wish
Then you'll find this cartoon to be just delish.

MM is ill and Nickelodeon is having a Spongebob Marathon.

Somebody please send earplugs.

Thank you.

The truth about doing doors

My favorite doors are apartments. They go really fast and you can spend more time talking to people who are home since there's less time waiting for someone who isn't to answer.

My least favorite are two-level homes without doorbells. I never know if I've knocked loud enough.

My least favorite walk sheets are the ones where there is a lot of walking and not so much doors.

My favorite walk sheets are the ones where you can park your car once and chart a path that has you knocking every door without retracing your steps EVER.

If you weren't home when I knocked on your door, you'll know it was me who came by if, on the literature that was left rolled up between your door knob and the jamb, there's a note that says, "I'm sorry I missed (your name)!". And a little dash and my name and an arrow pointing to my face in the picture of Mr. Spock, MM, and me.

I love talking to people on my walk sheets. My favorite encounters are with folks who are out gardening or washing their cars or walking their dogs. I like being able to stop and chat with them without having to ring the doorbell to summon them from what they were doing.

I don't know how many doors I'll knock by the time this is over, but I know I'm going to savor the time walking outside, meeting nice people (and some grumps), and having stories to tell.

84 doors today

That's all I've got to say.

Goodnight, all.

You know you are built like a chesterfield

When you find bits of your lunch down in the sofa cushions. As it were.

Knocking on those doors

Today was not the best day, door-wise. I finished up that pack from a couple weeks ago (first time the gate was open since then), and then found out that my directions to the next location were just a smidge off. By about a half-hour's drive. So I called TerrificCampaignManager, and he texted me the correct directions while I got an iced coffee. Then I started on that new pack and got a call from my SIL who had taken MM to the movies that they were done with the movie earlier than she expected so I went to pick up MM from her. All told, I put in an hour and got 30 doors done.

Sigh.

Still, two minutes a door is a good average. But...I wanted to get in more hours.

Again, sigh.

In any case, I just finished entering my walk-sheet data from the big pack, so that takes some pressure off the staff.

Now it's grocery-shopping time and then I'll do some phone calls.

Important Announcement

Look! I'm so proud!

To dye or not to dye, that is the question

Whether 'tis nobler to have frizzy ventral locks of silver
Or to take hours in a salon and by coloring smooth them?
To dye, to be gray no more and by this dye to say we end
The heartache of frizzy brittle natural locks that age is heir to?
'Tis a consumation occasionally to be wish'd
To dye, to maintain, to maintain...ay there's the rub
For in that coloring what roots may come.

Seen while getting the car scrubbed

...the weirdest commercial ever. At lunch time. On a Summer weekday. On CNN. For a product the purpose of which I thought was not able to be talked about on television during daytime hours. Which I will not be using the name of here.

I believe it rhymes with Decks Kens.

This was an "HBO shows this feature only at night" commercial, people. And it was at lunch time. On a Summer weekday. On CNN.

I am........

Speechless.