unsurprisingly, my mood improves as my cold recedes.

Yesterday I was still a little fragile from the lingering head cold and the two straight days of migraine fun time. Today I am (so far) much cheerier, for the following reasons (this is not an exhaustive list):

• my Old Navy stuff arrived last night, and even though I think I'm going to return some of it, I'm still always happy to get packages
  
• it will be my birthday soon
  
• I think I'm pretty well on top of things at work, to the extent that there is a top of the things and a person can be on it; we're definitely going to be screwed soon, but it's not because of me nor is it anything I am capable of fixing, so I'll be happy with the fact that I'm doing what I can
  
• even though I missed rehearsal last week, I still did well last night, because hi, musicianship, and it always pleases me to feel like I'm singing well (and section-leader- and director-type people might notice)
  
• I know this isn't The Filter Where I Talk About That, but I've lost sixteen pounds (and counting) in the past about five weeks, hurrah
  
• the lotion I used today is the same stuff I was using this time last year, so the scent reminds me of Oxford, and in good ways

I'm a little alarmed by the cheeriness, because I am customarily not one of those perky people, but today I am in good spirits. We'll see if I can't hang on to that even through the staff meeting (full staff meeting = ugh) this afternoon.

doctor who this week

Okay, nine minutes (or a season and a half) in, and my main thought ( is: )

And then, of course, ( I think: )

it's hard to tell black from charcoal when the light is dim

I had a housemate once who normally wore stockings instead of pantyhose (and really did prefer them, Coupling be damned, because why would she have put up a front with me of all people?) -- an added benefit being that if she got a run in one, she didn't have to ditch the whole pair.  Right?  Makes sense.  But the girl dressed in the dark a lot of mornings, for reasons that were never clear to me, and used to come home from work in the afternoon with tales of how she didn't notice until the big important meeting with some high-up federal muckety-muck that she was wearing one blue stocking and one black stocking.  Or one cream and one leg-colored.  And so on.

And then one time I was folding my laundry in the living room, and I folded a pair of stockings together just as if they were a pair of socks, and my housemate was astonished.  It had never occurred to her that you could keep stockings in the drawer in pairs; why, if she put them in the drawer that way, she'd be sure to have two stockings of the same color every day!  (It wouldn't solve the problem of whether she mistakenly put on navy stockings with a black suit, but that's a separate issue.)

I, for my part, was baffled at the suggestion that a person wouldn't pair up the stockings before putting them in the drawer.  I gathered from the conversation that in fact she didn't match her socks, either.  Am I crazy, that I match up my socks when the laundry is clean, so that what I'm grabbing in the morning is not two socks but rather one pair of socks?  I mean, there are certainly weeks where the clean laundry just lives in the basket, and then I'm grabbing two socks, sure.  But assuming I'm putting the laundry away in the first place -- is it weird of me that I put the socks away in pairs?

This post brought to you by ... a basket full of socks, in black and three shades of grey.  Of course.  :-)