Anyway, all better now, except the skin is peeling off my thumbs and fingers where the blisters were.
So last night, having successfully demonstrated that the city trashfolk will haul away garbage bags full of cut-up carpet, we finally cut up the rug and pad that's been in the basement for years now; at least since Teh Dawg's illness, and I think before that. It was also covering nice hardwood floors, and got really quite disgusting because of the pets. So during one rearrangement of the furniture, we rolled up rug and pad and stashed it on the basement floor. "Later" finally came, and it's on the curb this morning in black plastic bags. The neighbor lady wanted to know if we had a body in the bags.
Having learned my lesson about molds or whatever, I wore my gardening gloves, a jacket, and a face mask while we were doing this. I only overheated a little; the air was really quite dusty, so I'm glad I wasn't breathing that stuff. I hope it won't give toxicfur an asthma attack (I suppose that would have happened last night if it was coming).
This past weekend, our church softball team finally pulled out a win. So we're now proudly 7-1, with two games left to play, against other teams with only one win. We might win the Episcopal Division, at least. Much of what happened was that they committed more, and more critical, errors than we did. But we also batted just 10 people (the rules allow for everybody who shows up to bat, at the manager's discretion), which allowed, a few innings at a time, some kind of team spirit to develop. Dunno.
After we got home, I went upstairs to change clothes, and lay down on the bed for a moment. Calcifer jumped up on the bed and snuggled up into my armpit. He's a people-cat and likes to snuggle.
A minute or two later, toxicfur brought the dogs back inside, and Rusti, the Jack Russell terrier, came looking for me, found me on the bed (which she can't see over the edge of from the floor), and jumped up on it.
Landing, more or less, on top of Calcifer. He retreated across my face, pausing to pivot, hiss, and strike. Rusti, to her credit, has learned that cats are not something to mess with, so she jumped down again and went away. I ended up with two scratches and a puncture wound below my left eye, and a gash in my left eyebrow that bled for a while. I thought for a while he might have actually scratched my eye, but I guess I'm lucky or something. I'm sure it looks worse than it feels; I'm hardly aware of it unless I scratch my eyebrow or something.
This summer, a colleague and I hosted a summer intern, in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, funded by NSF and DOD. Our student was bright and hardworking (a curiously rare combination which is wonderful when you find it), curious about things, and willing and able to advance the field a bit. We're working over the paper he left us with, hoping to punch it up a bit and submit it to the journals in a month or so. It'll look good on his grad school applications, having a first-author paper in the mill.
Rewriting & revising go on apace.I've signed up for a novel writing class at the local adult education place. It starts in early October, so that'll give me a timeframe for getting through this revision, and composing a synopsis I can share with the class. It's kind of fun, in some ways, but it's also very easy to write stuff that just doesn't fit anywhere, since I'm not writing it in order anymore, and I'm not all that familiar with what's gone before (vs. what comes later).
And that's it for Tuesday, looks like.
| < Some good, some bad | Finally got internets at home working again > |
