I sang that song thinking of Elgar, and it went well, though it's pretty well impossible to do sustained high notes while crying. Both the widow and the mother of the man whose funeral it was played pieces on the piano, and if they had the discipline to do that, I certainly had to be able to sing my bit.

It was a nice service. People told funny stories, so there was laughter as well as crying, and lots of music.

Lots of work after that. Lots of work is good, but I worked till 8:30 (took a break to cook and eat dinner with the menfolks) and then had work-induced insomnia. That's where you wake up repeatedly all night thinking about spreadsheets and stuff.

When I worked at the store, there were times when we couldn't get everything done because it was just too busy. I used to say, "We can't do anything more than we're doing right now. We have to do as much as we can, and start again tomorrow." I'm saying that to myself right now. We also had dreams involving the laminator and stuff like that. I think maybe there are times when there's too much for the brain to process during the day, so it has to carry it over into your sleep. Not restful, that.

It's spring here, now. Beautiful, and things are budding, and frogs are peeping. High time. I'm writing about fall colors -- indeed, fall colours -- for my Aussies, but loving the spring. I'm also doing an Easter Countdown at the chocolatier's blog, in case you're getting ready for that holiday. We'd love to have you come over there and talk with us.

I'm singing at a funeral this morning, right after class, and I have a 6:30 rehearsal for it.

I'd never seen or heard this song before, but when we played through it yesterday after church, I was quite impressed by it. Then I looked for it online to solidify it in my mind, and I find that there is only one recording of it ever, and it's horrible.

I'm trying to keep that interpretation out of my head while I prepare it.

Singing at funerals is hard for me because I'm a terrible cryer, and this song has some very high notes -- a high G at one point. I've also just recovered from that illness and literally haven't sung in a month, so I really don't know how this is going to go. I did sing it yesterday for the family, and they gave me very specific notes and critiques on how they wanted it done.

Prayer and lots of fluids are in order here, I think.

Friday I taught my class, and I had a meeting with The Computer Guy a bit later than that. Rather than going home, therefore, I stopped off at the fancy shopping mall between the place where I teach on Fridays and his office, and took myself out to lunch.

I went to the very large bookstore there (a chain, but I enjoyed it anyway, and they had the latest issue of Practical Web Design) and also to Sephora, where I bought a lipstick.

Having had this mad adventure, I went on to the meeting. It was just like our usual meetings, until the New Guy came in. At that point, we got into a philosophical and artistic discussion of form, function, and aesthetics. 

Back when I worked with people, I always enjoyed shoptalk of this slightly elevated kind, and I guess that's  probably the only thing I miss about working with other people, so I was glad I stayed for a little bit of that. When I got home, though, it was a mad rush to finish up the blog posts and get everything done before the family festivities, and no actual cleaning got done.

Both the girls came for the weekend, and we had  a nice balance of playing Rock Band and talking about their adventures, business meeting, and family time. We had lunch with my dad, and my birthday present yarn arrived. This is make-make flavor baby alpaca, and it's amazingly soft and pretty. I think it may have to be a shawl or scarf of some kind. I also worked on my Telemark sweater a bit while we chatted.

My dad brought us a DVD of an old home movie, which we all watched. We have never been much on home movies in my family, though we had a lot of them in the family I grew up in, so the kids were pretty amazed by it. My brother's kids were in it. His children have a set of matching names: Kari, Corey, and Casey. We all found it a bit confusing, but my husband reminded us that he for some time thought it was Kari, Corey, and Crazy. We had forgotten about that.

"We were so skinny!" #1 daughter remarked, and #1 son said, "Yeah, you've really beefed up a lot since then," with a bit of sarcasm. A silence ensued. #2 daughter had been out on the town the night before with The Computer Guy and some buddies of his, and one had informed her that she was "very sharp and pointy." The girls have been trying to gain weight this year, without much success. I've been trying to lose weight, also without much success. This weekend we've had fried chicken, doughnuts, pizza, and a lavish restaurant meal (I had grilled fish; the girls had things in cream sauces) and have had no exercise of any kind. By Monday, I will have gained five pounds and they will have lost half a pound, I'm quite sure. Sigh.

#2 daughter has just left, since she is music minister at a church. If she drives fairly briskly, she'll be there in time to conduct this morning's service.

I've finally finished reading Why Does E=MC2 and (Why Should We Care?). I quite enjoyed it. There's a lot of math, I must warn you, so some people might not enjoy it all the way through. In fact, the reason it took me so long to read it is that I was reading it with the Science and Philosophy Book Club, and I kept posting at the site and waiting for responses. It seemed rude to go on to the next chapter when some people hadn't yet finished the current chapter.

Apparently, we lost some people along the way.

The point that the authors used to sum things up at the end was that we need free-ranging thought, in combination with training and education that encourages rigorous scientific thought, in order to get new ideas and new applications of knowledge. Training people for a job and keeping people's minds on what's profitable doesn't result in important new ideas.

All of us who are involved in education should remember this.

#1 son brought me a birthday cake yesterday, and the mailman and the UPS driver both brought me books, so it was pretty festive. True, the books were my rentals from Booksfree and some work-related stuff, but it felt like presents. My parents gave me an Amazon gift card, too, which I spent on something utterly frivolous.

#1 son wrote "Happy Birthday" on the cake himself, giving it an interesting rune-like quality.

Then the stupid dog decided to cry all night. I did get up at 2:00 and let him out, but then I put him back to bed and he commenced whining again. He is still whining. I have had very little sleep. He's lucky he's still alive.

I do have a huge amount of work to do, actually, so I guess it's just as well.

I've done some other stuff. I went to the eye doctor and found that I have increased pressure in one of my eyes, so I have to go back next month. I met with The Computer Guy and got some progress on projects. I did one row of knitting. I went grocery shopping at Target. They do have groceries there, but not fresh produce. Still, it is February, so none of the produce is really fresh. The frozen stuff is probably fresher than the stuff that has come in from Chile.

While I was at Target, I threw a pair of jeans in the cart. My other pair of jeans -- which I wear every day -- had lost a tooth from the zipper. This caused me to remember that I used to have a birthday tradition of buying clothing. I'd go to the Land's End outlet and buy whatever pants, shirt, and underthings they had in my size. A novel I read recently had the line, "They should put expiration dates in men's clothes so they'll know when to stop wearing them." I'm sort of like that.

I was doing better for a while. I made clothes for myself and occasionally even went shopping. I tried things on before buying them and paid attention to the colors and enjoyed being reasonably well dressed. But I have backslidden. I haven't bought clothes, unless you count a briefcase and a handbag, since last May.

So I gathered up my online coupons and went to the Coldwater Creek outlet and bought pants, shirt, and underthings -- what they had in my size. This might be a step up in stylishness from Land's End. I'm not sure. I do think it's kind of sad that I've backslidden in this way.

I also haven't had my hair cut recently. Or filed my nails (as opposed to cutting them with scissors when they get in the way of my typing). And I'm all out of magical unguents to keep my face from sliding off, or whatever those skin care products for older ladies are supposed to do.

Oh, well. Maybe now that I've noticed it, I'll improve.

yep.

Roizen and Oz went on after their chapter about work and money to write about love and sex. Their chapter on this subject contained some surprises for me:

• The uterus is like an anteater. I won't go into details; the bare fact that the two have anything at all in common is startling enough.
• Men find the smell of doughnuts arousing.
• There are different types of sperm that do different jobs.
• Men think about sex once every 52 seconds. Women think about sex once a day. I always wonder about these claims. How can you accurately measure what people are thinking?
• If a couple has sex once a month, and they change that to once a week, the resulting increase in their happiness is equivalent to an increase of $50,000 in their income. Actually, the WSJ reports just about once a year that people earning $90k a year are no happier than those earning $20k, so I'm not sure that this means anything at all. But once a month suggests that they should bring home some doughnuts or something.

The advice on love and sex included daily exercise, avoiding saturated fats and simple carbohydrates, and accepting the adaptive nature of the pair bond. The authors also said that the pair bond is designed to last for about 5-7 years -- long enough for offspring to be able to fend for themselves. After that length of time, they said, you have to spice things up a little. They suggest thinking what your spouse would really like you to do, and doing that.

However, they also said that while people seem to be designed to live in pairs, pairs of friends or family members or a person and a dog work just as well. Research doesn't support the idea that cats make good life partners. So if your romantic relationships always end after 5-7 years and you have no offspring, you should get a dog or a dear friend to live with.

Now you know.

The cool thing about making decisions about knitting is that they can be very absorbing and very detailed, and they matter very little. This allows you to revel in the decision making without any worry over the consequences.

What you see here is my stash of Knitpicks Telemark. Once I swatched with this and counted up how much of it I have in which colors, it was clear that this really has to be a Fair Isle type of sweater. I love the Poetry in Stitches patterns, and Alice Starmore's lavish Celtic stuff, but what I actually have is 4-6 balls each of four colors and  one ball each of two more, and all the colors are rather wintry and somber. So I went through all my Fair Isle books, regretfully setting aside the one that has things like octopi and rocket ships, and came up with a fairly complex pattern with a nice vertical columns effect rather than the traditional horizontal stripes effect.

I also did some sewing, beginning to make up that teal chiffon top. 

I'm enjoying it -- there's a lot of handwork and it's very nice and drapey, and by the time I put a jacket over it, it'll hardly matter what it looks like.

The truth is, when I go outdoors nowadays I nearly always have a jacket on, because I'm going out to teach or to have meetings.

Is that sad?

When spring is properly here, and I'm fully recuperated,  I'll go out for hikes and stuff.

At this point, I feel like one of those brave invalids they used to have in children's books. They always looked off into the distance and spoke movingly of the things they'd do when they were well, and the cherry trees bloomed again. Then they died.

I'm glad they gave up those characters. Children's books shouldn't have things like that in them.