Into the Rainy North

Final preparations are underway for our first vacation of the year.  We’ll be heading up to the Bay Area this week, hitting Hearst Castle, Monterey & Carmel, San Jose and San Francisco and visiting my brother brionv and his fiancee, my aunt, and sekl and non_seqvitvr. We’ll also be attending WonderCon for the second time.  We had fun last year, but figured on making it an occasional trip rather than something annual.  Then we decided to go visit people in the area, and found out the best week (i.e. when   was going to be done with her current job) was going to be the week leading up to the convention.  If we were going to be in San Francisco anyway, the con was cheap, so we might as well go.  (Then the perfect timing became irrelevant, but we had already bought tickets to the con, and I’d already arranged for the time off, so we were at least partly anchored to this weekend in San Francisco.)

It looks like this trip is certainly going to mirror last year’s trip in one more aspect: rain.  Someday we’ll have to schedule a trip up north at a time that it’s expected to be sunny.  (I’m guessing February isn’t it.)

Disappear-ring

One of the side benefits of going on a restricted diet to try to identify what the heck new allergy I’ve developed is that after working off the holiday weight gain, I kept going.  I’ve been hovering in the 150-155 range for most of the past year and a half, climbed up to the 155-160 range around Christmas, and have dropped down to the 145-150 range.

There’s only one problem: Back when I was fitted for my wedding ring, I weighed somewhere between 170 and 180.  And it’s been cold lately, so my fingers are even smaller than usual.

This morning while making my lunch, I stopped to washed my hands.  As I dried them on the towel hanging from the refrigerator handle, the ring slipped off, landed on the floor, bounced a bit, then rolled right under the refrigerator until it pinged to a stop against something metallic.

Ordinarily I would have used the plumber’s claw to retrieve it, except for one detail: I haven’t been able to find it since we moved.  alenxa suggested using a BBQ skewer, so I took a flashlight, lay down on the kitchen floor, and looked for the ring.  Fortunately it hadn’t rolled too far back, but I still had to flatten my hand and reach under the refrigerator to get the skewer far enough in.  It took a few tries, but I got it back.  Katie helpfully finished my sandwich while I went to change into a shirt that didn’t have dust all over the cuff.

To top it off, it fell off again at work while I was leaning my chin on my hand.  It took a while to figure out where it landed, until I realized it had fallen into my shirt pocket.

New task: get ring resized.

Pride and Predator

This reminds me of the apocryphal round-robin story written by two people with very different sensibilities as to what makes a good story: Pride and Predator. Starts out as Pride and Prejudice but then an alien lands and starts stalking everyone.

It’ll either be awful or it’ll be hilarious.  Possibly both.

Current Mood: 🙂amused