My New Chair Has Finally Arrived!

 

This morning was exciting because first our houseguest arrived, and then my new chair arrived. The houseguest is the furry one who has stayed with us before, and she is so well-behaved. I take her on a walk, and then she sleeps for a couple of hours while I'm working. Here is the new chair:

I took a photo of our houseguest napping, but it wasn't that flattering. As a lady, I would not want anyone posting unflattering photos of me online, so I would not do it to another lady. Instead, enjoy this photo of a rosebush by our dock looking golden in the evening light.

Here are some photos of me wearing my medals. This is the Mount Fuji Challenge medal, the first one I got:

And this is the Road to Hana Challenge medal, which arrived yesterday:

And this one is a (sort of) joke: it's a 2020 Finisher medal!

The medal is a dumpster on fire because people were saying 2020 was a dumpster fire of a year, but honestly I really enjoyed the slower pace of life during the pandemic. After I did my first challenge, all sorts of places were contacting me with challenges I could do to get fun medals, but this one required nothing more than me sending them money. Of course, some would argue that completing 2020 was the toughest challenge of them all! I am thinking of doing the Camino challenge, because the other two challenges I did were forty-six and sixty-four miles, or something like that, so they took hardly any time. The Camino challenge is 480 miles, so it would take me months to do. A true challenge!

This is so funny that I have to include it even though I usually don't find poop humor entertaining: since I am approaching a milestone birthday, the doctor's office pestered me to schedule a colonoscopy, so I did, but then Kathbert said I should try to do a non-invasive test where you just poop into a miniature garbage can and mail it back to them. I asked my doctor about it and was told sure, I'm low-risk for colon cancer, so I could do this test. Weird that you have to ask, and they don't just offer it as an option... So today I got the results back, and they were negative. When I told Travalon, he said, "That must be a load off of your mind!" Bah-doom ching!

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Happy Birthday Kathbert and B-Boy

 

Today was a rainy, gloomy, uneventful day, so I'll just post a couple of photos of my new rosary. I got it on eBay, which is never a sure thing, plus it comes from Medjugorje, and I am not sure what I think about that. The photo of it looked really pretty. So it came on Monday, and I didn't take it out of the box until Tuesday at Adoration. And guess what? It's even more beautiful in real life! It has mint green glass beads with lavender roses in them, and a swirly glass cross on one side.

On the other side, the cross is a gorgeous teal color.

You may notice the background is different. The old puffy chair I always sat in finally died, and we ordered a new chair that was supposed to come at the beginning of September. Then they told us it wouldn't be until the end of October, and now they're pushing it back into November. Meanwhile, I needed a chair in the living room, so Travalon got Mombert's old chair out of the Man Cave, and right now that's what I'm sitting in. It's also the background for these photos. Speaking of Mombert, Kathbert is sixty today, so happy birthday! And the Single B-Boy is fifty. Just when I can hardly believe that I'll be there soon myself, tonight I had a bad hot flash, so yeah, fifty is on the way. Perimenopause: it's just as awful as you've always heard.

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The Chair of Doom

Friday night the Rosary Ladies got together for pizza at Luigi’s, then we walked to Our Lady Queen of Peace while praying the rosary. We stopped at an ice cream shop, and I couldn’t decide whether or not to get any until Jilly Moose told me they had something called Snap-o-lantern, which is pumpkin with pieces of ginger snaps in it. Then I tried to get into line, but so many people kept coming into the shop that I finally gave up, and Luxuli said I wasn’t meant to get ice cream that night. She’s probably right – it’s not like I needed it.

Saturday morning Travalon and I went to get coffee before he left to watch The Wizard of OZ on the big screen with Twins Fan, and the family of four cranes who live in our neighborhood were slowly walking across the road. Travalon honked at them to hurry up, but instead they stopped and looked up at the sky, as if they thought the sound was coming from above. We couldn’t help laughing at their confusion, wondering if they thought a giant goose was flying overhead. Then Rich, Kathbert, and I picked up a trailer from U-Haul and headed to my old condo, where Travalon soon joined us, and we began moving all the furniture out. Catzookz and Twins Fan came by with bottles of water, which we welcomed after all that physical exertion. They helped us for a couple of hours and then left to see a movie, and then Prairie Man helped us unload stuff at our new condo. We had dinner at the Nau-Ti-Gal – our treat, to thank them for their help.

Yesterday after Mass Travalon and I went to brunch with Rich, both B-Boys, and Mo-Girl, who told me their daughter named a blonde figurine in their nativity set after me. How flattering! She is two. I remember when Rockstar Tailor and some other kids who are now grown thought I was the coolest person ever, and now they don’t even want to be my friends on MyFace. Sigh… So it’s fun to have a new generation of Famous Hat fans.

In the afternoon Travalon and I took Rodney the Poodle for a long walk at Pheasant Branch, then we went to Capital Brewery to try some seasonal beer: I had pumpkin and Travalon had apple. In the evening we went to an Early Music Festival party. I thought all participants were invited, but it was quite a small crowd, and someone told me it was only board members and big donors. (Many years ago I made a sizeable contribution and am now a Big Donor who gets my name prominently featured in the programs.) The party was outdoors, at a park shelter, so we dressed casually, but other people were dressed for a real soiree. Afterwards we dropped in on Rich, and while we were talking, Rodney jumped up into the Chair of Doom, a popesan chair Travalon loves to sit in. Like Daddy, like Doggy. He curled up and fell asleep (Travalon always falls asleep in the Chair of Doom too), and he wasn’t too eager to leave. It is one comfortable chair – that’s why we named it the Chair of Doom, because once you sit down in it, it’s very hard to make yourself get back up out of it. We have a popesan chair at our condo, but it doesn’t seem to have the same hold on people. Rich’s is just special. I think Tiffy gave it to him.

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'Tis the Season for Free Junk in the Mail

It's that time of year again, between Labor Day and December 25th, when we should all be thinking about what to get our loved ones for Christmas. And just in time for the holidays, my officemate and I received a very special catalog in the mail: the 2008 Apoptosis Catalog. For all those hard-to-shop-for people on your list, why not get them some cellular self-destruction? For some reason we found this so funny that we laughed until we could hardly breathe. Not that cellular suicide is a laughing matter, and this catalog actually has useful products for the lab, but the timing just struck us as hilarious.

Just when the hilarity couldn't seem to ensue any higher, the next day we received a very useful thing in the mail: a new Department Chair. (We work at a medical school which truly is seeking a new department chair.) The quarter is to give some perspective; I scanned the chair for the enjoyment of all four (welcome, EM!) faithful Famous Hat readers. Some drug company sent us a tiny squeezy rubber stress couch, or chair, or actually maybe more of a love seat since it would only seat two people, if they were about five inches tall. Why anyone would need something like this is beyond our ability to comprehend, but it does have handy holes, one on each arm, for holding pens.

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