Goddamn (intelligent) dogs knocked over the babygate to my basement bedroom, opened up my backpack, went through it until they found the bag of Cadbury Mini Eggs I was hoarding and ate them. _

Inspired by being forced to clean my bedroom because the house is being shown tomorrow and reading about someone being interrogated by Nazis, last night I combined them in a dream and I had to clean my house in order to prove to the Nazis that we could continue to live here. _

I sat here this morning for no apparent reason and deleted things off of my Netflix queue. Now it is really short, and I don't know what to add. Suggestions, please? I don't like extreme violence, and I generally prefer upbeat movies to tear-jerkers. _

Yesterday, on a whim, I tried to make meringues that were flavored like Thai iced tea. I had this powder that I bought at Whole Foods a couple of years ago, and I mixed it with the sugar before adding it to the eggs. I then panicked, because I forgot that I used less eggs than I usually do and was convinced that the egg whites weren't stiffening. I was going to bake flat cookies, but when I pulled the whisk out I realized they were holding peaks, so I piped, and stuck them in the oven. They are tasty in an extremely coconutty way. They don't taste much like Thai iced tea. I have spent years trying to figure out what kind of tea they serve at Thai restaurants, and have failed miserably every time.

Then, right as it was time to turn the oven off, my sister, grandmother and I decided to go to Finale for dinner and dessert, and we had a lovely time. We dropped a box of Trivial Pursuits cards in my purse, to read at the restaurant, to compromise on the "game or go out" dilemma. We need an easier version to play with my grandmother, which is disappointing. Finale really is a spectacular restaurant. Everything we ate was delicious. I think of the many desserts we wound up sharing (we got a plate of "sharing desserts" and had a coupon for a free creme brulee), the creme brulee was the tastiest. Perfect, vanilla bean creme brulee with fresh fruit on top. Yum, yum. _

My office is closed for two weeks for Passover and renovations. My natural sleep cycle has reasserted itself with a vengance, with me waking up past ten and lying in bed slowly waking up while reading blogs, comics, facebook, twitter, and The Secret Garden on my Kindle. Around 11:30 I was draggd out of bed to take the dogs out for a walk before the rain really started coming down (which meant it started raining hard as I got to the end of my alley, and went back to not raining hard as soon as I got back inside). And now I am sitting here, with a small pot of overly-sweetened chai tea and a novel that I selected at random off of my bookshelf when I was helping my grandmother find something in my old bedroom. And Rachmoninoff, which I am sure I have misspelled. _

All right, Martin was right. I was sure I read an email from Netflix once instructing me to put the barcodes facing through the hole for easier processing. _

Oh, god, I hated Twilight. This pretty much sums up why I gave up. (I almost never give up on books. I read fast enough that giving up never seems worth it.) _

I have decided to experiment on Martin's assertion that it doesn't matter what direction you put your Netflix movie into the envelope. I have put one movie in with the barcode facing out of the whole and two without. And I will see tomorrow if I get emails at the same time telling me they were received. _

Also, I finished the bind off on a sweater, which needs me to lengthen the arms and pick up stitches and knit three inches. And I watched Dr. Who with Christopher Eccleston, and got really disappointed when I remembered that it's not coming back for two more weeks, not next week. (Just because this is the last week in March that my office is going to be open doesn't mean that March is ending. Passover is confusing.) _

My grandmother yesterday developed a nasty cough, the sort of deep cought where you think you might throw up or break your ribs coughing (not that I have ever had nasty coughs). She fought us yesterday over taking some Robutussin, but her doctor convinced her it was okay, and then gave my mom a series of things she should keep an eye out for, which included a fever over 100.5. Which it went over last night as she was going to bed, so the two of them spent last night at the Mass General ER. I slept poorly, because my mom had promised to call to tell me how she was doing when they knew, and she never called. I woke up at least once an hour to look at my phone to see if I had missed a call. They found that her sodium is low (she tries to avoid salt because she has recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure, but it is still weird, because she eats cheese and potato chips), her blood oxygen was below 90%, and they found something that was probably pneumonia in one of her lungs. And a minor urinary tract infection, but... She was released at like 5 am on antibiotics., despite running a temperature and having low blood oxygen (and sodium) because the hospital doctors thought she might be in danger of getting other infections/diseases from being in the hospital, and gave my mom a list of things to keep her eye out for, and to call the doctor and/or bring her back in if certain things happened. Like, if after she had been on the antibiotics for more than 12 hours and the Tylenol had worn off, if her temperature was still high (it has been fluxuating all day) and to count her breaths per minute (apparently, people usually breathe about 8 breaths a minute, and if you are breathing more than 13, it is because you don't have enough oxygen. Did you know it's really hard to count your own breaths per minute? As soon as you try the count, you breathe differently). None of us really said anything about it to each other until after her temperature had dropped and she was breathing more normally, but we had all been very worried that this could have been the disease that kills her (it probably still could be the disease that kills her, but we are hoping that we are out of the woods now).

So, that has been my day. She has been sleeping most of the day, and half heartedly reading The Help. I tried to get her to read something lighter and paperback, but she wasn't particularly interested. (She really wants me to read The Help, so she can lecture to me about it, I suppose.) Jamie made fluffy tapioca pudding with the egg whites all beaten and folded in, and we ate it while it was still hot and we moved the extra television into her room and all watched Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. (Also: I really enjoy both the book and the movie of Miss Pettigrew, but I think the threat of the oncoming war make the sudden changes for Delysia and Miss Pettigrew more understandable in the movie than it was in the book.) _

Is Blodeuwedd flowers or owls?

I tend to think owls, but I like the flowers sweater much more. _

My sister and I have this theory that people who reread books were read to as children, and that people who don't reread books weren't really read to as children. I wonder, now, if it's a generational thing, actually. No one in my mom's generation or older rereads books, and they weren't really read to as kids (my uncle without children claims that yes, they were read to as kids, why, she read them Pinnochio and that horrid German book about the kid who dies because he grows out his hair and fingernails and plays with matches and leaves the water running; and didn't really understand when I tried to explain that there is a difference between knowing which took books your mother read to you as a little kid and having my mom who read to us constantly). So, I wonder which causes the actual correlation, generation or having been read to.

I reread all the time. I tried to explain it once to someone who doesn't reread as like revising an old friend, and I think she thought I was nuts. _

Yesterday, I saw a book for sale at Borders called Precious, Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. _

From briely looking at Mike's brilliant visual representation of the memory on my harddrive, I'm guessing I'd clear up a bunch of space if I deleted my Sims downloaded clothes and stuff. _

Things which are infuriating: in planning the beach trip for my mom's birthday, Peg and I, who are in charge of details, invited my grandmother. Jamie has invited my grandmother. On Monday night, I asked her if she was thinking she'd like to come along, and she said "oh, I don't know dear, you and Jamie invited me, but I don't think I'm really invited." I assured her that she was, that she has been included in all of the emails about this trip and reminded her that I had helped her to read them. She didn't really believe me. Connor called her yesterday morning to make sure she understands that she's really invited, and it wasn't until then that she really believed it.

I really can't stand my grandmother's blatant sexism. All summer, when I was her caretaker, I would try to tell her things that were or weren't safe for her to do, and it wasn't until my uncle would come over to corroborate that she would believe me. _

Is there anyway to make like a pie chart of my computer to see which folders take up all my memory? (OS X 10.4) _

Daylight Savings Time kills me every year. Flying across the country or flying across an ocean do nothing to me, but lose an hour of sleep to random arbitrary decision to change things by an hour and I am dead. _

Because I am easily swayed into rewatching Dr. Who and Martin was blogging about it, and I was kind of thrilled that Sally Sparrow was nominated for an Oscar, I started watching again on Netflix Watch Instantly. Wow, did that first episode suffer from pilot syndrome. (Pilots suck. I try not to decide whether or not to watch a show based on the pilot.) _

Beach house: reserved. Not the week that was our first choice, but it will work and it has fronts on the ocean and has a private walk to the ocean. And allows dogs and is awesome (it is now "our" beach house, I figure, since we will now have stayed in it for three years). I miss Hatteras Island terribly, but it is so much further than Nags Head. Even if we do have friends who live there, and the awesomest bakery is there (it is two hours, we checked that out last year. Jyles and I discussed heading down for egg sandwiches and apple uglis, and decided it wasn't worth it.) _

Sent from my phone. Please excuse any typos.
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