Rainy Randomday

I've noticed I'm doing more Randomday posts than any other kinds lately.  This is probably because I am neither knitting nor quilting enough to provide steady blog fodder; I haven't been taking too many pictures, either, and although I've been thinking plenty of deep thoughts, they're not always blogworthy or, even if they are, it might not be prudent to put them there.  Or I simply don't have enough energy.  That's the huge factor, actually.  No matter how brilliant the deep thoughts that I might have, it takes that little bit of extra energy to type them up and hit publish.  So you are going to have to put up with proportionately more randomness for awhile longer.  Of course, some people actually like the random.  But I apologize if it bores you.

Rain.  Today was very rainy.  There is a tendency to have a slow seepage into the basement on days like this, and we can just hope that the ground doesn't become any more saturated.  Tertia accompanied me to the grocery store and we both felt very cold and soggy afterwards.

At school there are so many kids with colds and flu, and finals week is this coming week.  I gave the pretests for the final exam to those who were present Friday.  But I still have about 5 to administer.  Hoping that I don't come down with it too.

Daniel is back at college, taking RA refresher training and preparing to start second semester.  The house seems much lonelier without him.

I had a long-postponed eye exam Friday.  They dilated my eyes, I think for the first time ever, and I just wanted to go to bed and not look at any lights afterwards.  For most of my life I have never even had corrective lenses at all, but about 4 years ago I got glasses to make me look more strict and teacherly, and also to improve my slightly hazy distance vision.  I usually wear them only while teaching and take them off as soon as I get home at midday.  I don't wear them at all during weekends or over summer break.  Well, it seems that I will be needing bifocals, or the more euphemistic term, "progressives."  Right on schedule in my late forties.  And the real reason I went, the nasty floaters/ squiggles on my left and dominant eye, turns out to be one more diagnosis that medical science can do nothing to help me with.  Something like "vitreous detachment" but it's not as high-ranking as a detached retina and they basically tell me I'm stuck with it forever or until it decides to go away on its own and no idea when that might be.  So it joins the sudden sensory-neural hearing loss, dyspnea, mild neuropathy and a few other ideopathic conditions that just aren't trendy enough to do anything about.  And people wonder why I'm not proactive about scheduling doctor visits.

Occasionally Direct TV will give us a weekend of premium movie channels and Steve will queue up several movies of interest... the girls and I watched the first two Hobbit movies this week, and Steve and I watched The Butler last night, and tonight it was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  We might break into Divergent soon, and looking forward to seeing Despicable Me, which Quarta says is quite good.  I want to see the 3rd Hobbit movie in theaters, but I'm not sure if that will happen or not.

This past week has been one of recuperating from the Last Noel, which was held last Friday.  We had a good 70 or so people at a loose estimate, and plenty of leftover sloppy joe mix in the freezer.  This morning we finally packed up all the Christmas decorations and Peter carted them downstairs, but the desiccated tree is still lying forlornly where it was dumped on the front lawn.  Well, maybe it's not so desiccated now, with all the rain falling on it today.

The day before Daniel had to fly back to college, he bottled his blueberry-plum wine from last summer.  It is a very pretty color, and the extra that we sampled is a nice flavor, more approachable than the previous year's all-plum wine.  I really need to take some pictures.

Speaking of drinkable things, I am now a true Portland-area neo-hippie, for I just started brewing my second batch of Kombucha.  They sell kits at Natural Grocers and I bought one before Christmas.  It turned out okay and I'm trying another batch.

For a randomday where I didn't think I had much to write about, this is a long post.  It just proves that I will write about anything rather than grade a stack of verb synopses.