Spicer’s Sweater

Here’s Spicer in her sweater — like a wooly little armadillo, as Paige said. I don’t know. She’s pretty cute.

Below I offer you her picture in the sweater when #1 daughter got it for her last Christmas. I think she’s lost some weight since then.

In any case, the sweater keeps the bandage on, and it ought to help her wound heal.

I sang the girl group song in church, thinking of Brenda Lee. Or maybe it was Peggy Lee. I don’t know. I’m not up on girl groups. The pianist thought it would be cute to sing the word “teardrop” with a very short second syllable followed by a rest, to make it sound like a drop, but I thought I might laugh if I did that. It was hard enough for me to sing, “Take me, I’m yours” with a straight face. Actually, I think I did a good job, and it’s not a song I would ever have thought of myself, so it was a good opportunity to expand my repertoire.

Then CD and BigSax and I had a pleasant chat about vermiculite and high availability servers. This just goes to show. I’m not quite sure what it goes to show, exactly, but something about friendship.

I came home and continued searching around for data on the people I’m interviewing with today. I managed to find lists of the people I would presumably work with, if I’m guessing right about the department I’d be in, but somehow none of those people seems to be on facebook, linkedin, myspace, SEOmoz, or any of the other places you expect to run into people around here.

It seemed strange. One of the guys appears to play soccer, but that doesn’t exactly give us a bond, does it? I found hints that they might use Dreamweaver and MSOffice.

But don’t you expect to be able to find more than that about a person? I mean, I have their actual names and everything. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe they’re really cagy and always use secret aliases except on the school’s website.

Anyway, my hope of being able to say, “I think you know my friend So and So” or “Aren’t you a member of XYZ?” is dashed.

I went ahead and made the cookies for rehearsal. La Bella is pledged to come get them from #1 son if I don’t make it back in time.

My cookie press has a plate for making pumpkin shapes. When the press is well-behaved, you can make heaps of cookies in minutes, pressing them out at a rate of three seconds apiece in pretty rows.

The cookie press was not well-behaved. I made a few dozen cute little pumpkins, even though I frequently had to peel the cookies off the press by hand and form them into pumpkin shapes, with optional cursing.

I also ended up with a couple dozen grotesquely misshapen pumpkins, which you see on the plate at the front. This in spite of my trying two different recipes.

After a while, I was so maddened by the whole process that I stirred a cup or so of ground chocolate into the batter and rolled it out to cut cats and bats from it. Three kinds of Hallowe’en cookies for rehearsal and a plate of rejects to enjoy at home.

I then made a third recipe, and I can’t explain why I did such a thing, except that I guess it had become a quest by then. I still had trouble with the pmpkins, so I switched to an easier shape, added enouogh red food coloring to make the dough look red, and extruded a bunch of festive red cookies for the freezer. I now officially have Christmas goodies in the freezer. Hidden under the flax meal.

Today is the road trip and interview. I’m torn between not getting my hopes up too high in order to avoid disappointment, and being completely confident that this is the best thing for them and for me, and that therefore it must be what God was planning when I lost my job and then had the opportunity to work with so many different people and circumstances during my freelance stage that I am now quite expert. Nothing like a little all-or-nothing thinking to start the day.

I’m well prepared, at least. They should be quite impressed at how much I know about their website, or at least at how much I bothered to find out. I printed out the map to the place, I know where to park, I’ve packed up books and knitting to distract myself from the freeways. I’m going to make a hearty breakfast — my husband, apparently in agreement with #2 son regarding preparation for big events, has requested bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, and toast — and make a really early start so we can get lost without being late if it comes to that.

#1 daughter can’t join us for lunch after all. However, she did call and give me a pep talk and tell me about a couple of clients she’s sending my way. That’s good. I have enough stuff in the wings that, if this doesn’t turn out to be right for me or for them, then I should have plenty of work to do anyway.