Wedding album

I finished (I think) the wedding mix I'm making for my friend. Here's the playlist and cover art.
The Taco Bell Canon (artist unknown, CD lost)
Spam Song - Monty Python
Heart of Glass - The Bad Plus
Willimantic USA - (artist unknown, recorded before 1950 I think)
Connecticut's for Fucking - Jesus H Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse
My Generation rx - rx
Big Balls - Hayseed Dixie
Seasons in the Sun/Hustle - The Squirrels
Flower Girl - Joe Henry
Herbs, Good Hygiene and Socks - Lovage
Love You Madly - Cake
Gopher Mambo - Yma Sumac
A Hard Day's Night - Peggy Lee
You Oughta Know - Richard Cheese
Always on my Mind - Lewinski
St. Paul's Mix - me (sort of - I mixed it. The artists are Eddie Izzard, clips from Airplane, the Simpsons, the Marx Brothers, Pat Boone, and an anonymous MIDI composer who made a version of Mama Told Me (not to come)).











Now, I just need to hope I still have a date for the wedding Saturday. A____'s family stuff is looking grim.

Dump day

As you can perhaps surmise from the title of this post, today was not a good day. The list is just sort of depressing crap, some trivial and some not trivial. While I'm a fan of venting, putting it all down here isn't going to help right now. I know because I just started to and realized it was only winding me up more. So here's the abridged version.

- A____'s parents can't afford their house and are moving under less than exhaustively planned circumstances next week. Everyone's sick, so A____'s doing a very large amount of the work. Just what he wanted, another move. He's so damned busy and stressed over this (understandably) that he probably can't go to the wedding this weekend with me, which makes for the not super pleasant prospect of going alone. I tried calling some pals, but no one is up for it, or more to the point, everyone's out of town, chronically unreliable, or sick.

- Along the everyone's sick theme, my cat Max is sick. The only thing that was odd in his bloodwork from last week was an elevated calcium level. The vet told me today that this can be a sign of a particular kind of cancer that attacks or affects the intestine, which his symptoms are consistent with. We were really hoping it was thyroid, not because that would be great but because it would be less bad.

-In about two weeks, I will be unemployed and nothing (zero) has come of all the applying I've been doing. Last night, between the cat and the prospect of joblessness, I couldn't get to sleep. This hasn't helped my mood. Not one bit.

So it's officially Dump Day here in Connecticant.
I'm hoping tomorrow is better.

R.I.C.E.

Stands for
Rest
Ice
Compression and
Elevation

Why this snappy acronym today you ask? Because we finished moving. We ended our move on the hottest day(s) of the year, although this is not a record high for PFG moves since my move in 2005 was also on the hottest day of that year as well - both with temperatures around 92°F and fairly dripping with humidity. Last weekend we moved the bulk of the stuff. I say "we" but I mean my fella and two extremely excellent people. That was the end of the help. We were expecting more but this move was whatever the opposite of serendipitous is. Thus we struck out early yesterday intending to push through and get all the stray bits out of the old place and then clean. It's a big place to clean.

I learned some new things about my body and what it now affords me. E.g., I discovered that dusting 3 very large rooms with a long and flexible duster followed by sweeping and mopping said rooms is quite bad for the wrist (literally "unwieldy"), hence my cleaning came to an abrupt end late yesterday afternoon and it was R.I.C.E. for me last evening. A____ went back over while I RICEd, before the monsoon started. He managed to finish an embarrassingly large amount of cleaning by himself. I iced and elevated and then put an ace bandage on my wrist. It felt so much better that I started doing stuff around the new apartment - mostly unpacking kitchen stuff, discarding the "R" part of the equation. After some time, I thought "wow, my hand feels way better. I bet I can take this bandage off now..." and I gave a test wiggle of a finger. Numb. I quickly removed the bandage.

So when you are doing R.I.C.E., remember ice only for 15 to 20 minute intervals and don't try bandaging your own right hand because odds are you won't be able to wrap it properly and it will either be too loose or too tight. Too tight and you're numb (which happens to rhyme with "dumb"), resulting in either
Dumb
Ice
Compression and
Elevation
...or if you're a real winner like me and you go and use your too tightly wrapped hand as a lever to heave up heavy kitchen items for over an hour, D.I.C.K.

I am sincerely hoping that the next move we make, we can afford to pay people to help. It's done and I'm happy for that, but this was not a great move. Not the worst (which was 2002 - I caught lyme disease right at the start of it, had to deal with Tom's evil family who were pointedly not helping, had to help a friend re-claim a cat she had given away in the middle of the move, and then at the end went up Amherst way to look at apartments with my sister who was starting college out there that Fall - all of which was just plausibly tiring and ache inducing enough to have masked the start of the lyme symptoms), but definitely not something I want to repeat.