Ever since my cell phone did a swan dive into one of the toilets at Linens'n'Things, it has been slightly wonky. Oh, it did all the phone things all right, but the charge light remained on constantly, draining the battery so much that it had to be charged every night. The couple of times I thought I lost service completely was due to the battery being drained completely. The switch on the side that raised and lowered the volume barely worked.

So on Tuesday, which was James' birthday, we went to Longhorn for supper. I was so grateful to him for staying up with me while I was sick that I had given him all his gifts Monday night: the DVD set of Band of Brothers, The Astronaut Farmer (this was actually "from" the fids), and a Webkinz. The latter had a tie to his past: when he was on his own after his Navy service, he had owned a half-beagle, half-dachshund named Berengaria or, as he called her, "Little Bear." He described her as looking like a beagle with a dachshund's "clearance." Some bastard poisoned the poor dog some time later. So I put a tag around the beagle's neck that said "You can name me what you like, but I am a girl and my name is Berengaria." And so she is.

I was still feeling pretty bad when we went to dinner, but the salad and half the steak (the rest went for lunches) perked me up a bit, so we stopped at Verizon to get new phones. I ended up getting another Samsung because I hoped our old charge cords would fit (they don't) and James got the "free" phone, which is a Motorola. Both of them are wired for Bluetooth if we need that, and both of them accept Verizon's GPS service. You can get it monthly or, if you just need it once, you can buy it for the day. I thought that might be useful in a travel situation. You can also put a MicroSD card into the phone so it can serve as an MP3 player.

At home I snapped a photo of Schuyler to serve as a wallpaper and spent a frustrated hour trying to download a couple of ringtones. I could not get the Lassie theme again, so I settled for The Waltons, and for James' ring picked the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme. (I was going to get "Linus and Lucy" for the main ring, but the arrangement they had was dreadful, and George Winston's "Moon" did not call attention to itself well.)

James was very disappointed to find out that they had both 633 Squadron and Battle of Britain music—but only as a ringback. Sigh. He got the Battlestar Galactica theme instead.

Today I plowed through more purchase orders and at lunch did something I've been putting off since last summer: fixing the curtain in the master bathroom. For some reason they are putting these big square windows in new home bathrooms. I would rather they had regular windows that opened to let out shower steam and circulate fresh air in the bathroom, but evidently that isn't done any longer. (Probably some nonsense about drafts. Sheesh.) Anyway, I have not wanted to cover the entire window because it faces east and I like the morning light coming in, but I could only find tab-top drapes (I didn't want to put up a permanent curtain rod but wanted to use a spring rod; the only spring rod wide enough to span this huge window was a thick one for use with a shower curtain, so I needed tab-tops) or valences, nothing about 25" long.

Finally I just bought the longest tab-top valence I could find and put it up. Last winter there was no one living in the trailer behind our fence, which is elevated enough that one can look into our bathroom, but this spring someone moved in; luckily the trees leafed quickly. (Although, I suppose if anyone is weird enough to get their kicks looking at a fat white broad, that's their outlook...) I had bought a wide piece of cream-colored eyelet edging to sew at the bottom of the valence, which brought it to required length, but had resisted for months sewing it on.

My mom always looked at me, incredulous: "You cross-stitch! How can you hate to sew?" Cross-stitch is painting with a needle and thread. Sewing is...well, sewing. Interminable hours with a needle and thread connecting two pieces of material. I had a pint-sized sewing machine that I had salvaged from her attic, but I have no manual for it and I haven't figured out how to get the thread from the bobbin up to the foot plate where the threaded needle would connect the two threads in the sewing process. And I was still afraid I would muck it up and have to rip out all those seams.

In rummaging around the sewing box, I found the Stitch Witchery stuff. It's basically iron-on stuff that binds two pieces of material together. So for better or for worse, that's what I did. Looks good.

While I was messing around with curtains I washed the ones in the dining room/kitchen and this time ironed them. I hate empty windows—I don't know how people in these show houses on HGTV bear them—and I had just put them up with wrinkles, which I couldn't stand anymore. The ruffles on the dining room swags weren't as bad to iron as I feared, so they are already back up.

Labels: birthday, electronics, house

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:16:00 PM

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