Yesterday feels like a series of blips and moments rather than a stream of events.

There was a meeting in the conference room that's across the hall from my office for most of the morning. They didn't close the conference room doors, so I closed mine. By the time they broke for lunch, my office was stifling. I went into the conference room and stole the last chocolate-covered doughnut. I figured it was just compensation.

Fifteen minutes later, I had to have a very firm chat with Particle about how kicking Mommy's spleen was not an appropriate response to chocolate.

I'm so ready for the weekend. I discovered this while I was playing a game of solitaire at work, and I tried about eight times to drag a black Jack onto a red ten before I figured out what I was doing wrong.

Matt and I (mostly Matt) loaded our packed-up comics into his car and drove over to the library to donate them. When Matt asked for a cart or something to load them onto (we had one long-box, two short-boxes, a regular cardboard box, and six or eight paper grocery bags full of comics) the guy at the information desk directed him to - of all the absurd things - an abandoned grocery store cart. Ukrop's, to be specific.

Matt took the cart out to get the first load, and the guy at the desk pulled out a receipt and started filling it out. "Hmm... Books/magazines, video, audio, other... I think I'll mark this as other. Comic books... About how many, would you say?"

I pondered. Matt had done a fairly specific count when he packed them up, but hadn't told me the number, and could no longer remember. He'd estimated on the drive over that it was more than 500, but less than a thousand. "Um... About 750?"

The guy looked, just for an instant, like a cartoon character with eyes bugging out of his head. "Seven hundred and... fifty."

"I'm guessing."

"That's a lot of comics."

"Well, we've been collecting them for years."

Matt got all the comics in two trips with the grocery cart. I got the impression the library would probably not keep them, but sell them at their next book sale, to raise funds. That's fine. Share the wealth.

Then we went to dinner. Since we were over on that side of town anyway, we went to Peking, which is a Chinese food buffet place. I was about halfway through my soup when my phone rang. It was Kris.

"Hi!" she said. "I was just wondering if you guys wanted to meet at La Tolteca for dinner!"

"Um... We're right in the middle of dinner now," I said.

"Yeah, I know. I saw your car in the parking lot and wanted to play a joke."

Kevin had called earlier to day that the hospital was finally planning on moving K.T. out of ICU and into a regular room after seven. He'd even given us her room number. So instead of going home to wait for the 9:00 visiting hour at ICU, we went straight down to the hospital. We got there around 7:45.

We made our way to the correct floor, and followed signs toward her room number. Except the rooms we were passing were counting in the wrong order - that is, we were moving away from the number we wanted to reach. We stopped at a nurses' station to ask.

K.T.'s room was way down the corridor, in the next building. (There's a spanning corridor between the buildings, thank goodness.) We trudged along. I got out of breath. (I know I'm out of shape, but that was ridiculous. Yay, pregnancy, I guess.)

Finally, we came to the room. Matt knocked gently on the mostly-open door and peeked in. It was empty of occupants. We looked at each other, blinked, then trudged back up the hall to the nurses' station.

The nurse who'd helped us before looked up. "What's wrong?"

"She's not in there. Can you tell us whether they've moved her yet?"

The nurse typed K.T.'s name into her computer. "Hmm... Nope, looks like she's still in ICU."

Matt and I looked at each other in concern, then trudged back up the hall even further, toward ICU.

The ICU nurse who told us that they were prepping K.T. for the move was more than a little curt. Another man was lingering in the hall with us, hoping to check on a friend of his who'd been shot several times.

After a bit, he came back out to where Matt and I had found some benches to wait on, by the elevators. He cursed a lot about the nurse's rudeness. They hadn't been willing to let him see, or even give him an update on, his friend. He cursed some more while he waited for an elevator.

Eventually, both elevator doors opened. He muttered another curse under his breath and got into one.

"He's about to be even madder," I observed.

"Why's that?" Matt asked.

"He got onto the elevator going up, not down."

I got slightly worried as 8:00 approached - the sign in the hall said no visitors were allowed after 8. But it turns out that the visiting rules at the hospital were only loosely enforced, at best - there more so that they could remove troublemakers.

They finally brought K.T. out. We followed them back to her room, waited while they got her settled, then went in to visit.

We stayed a little more than an hour, chatting between an assortment of nurses and attendants visiting to take measurements and give treatments. K.T. was in relatively good spirits, considering her predicament. She said she was feeling much better and was hoping that maybe after the doctor saw her today, they'd let her go home.

Though they hadn't said anything about it, so I don't know whether that was an expectation based on her previous experiences, or just wishful thinking.

--Liz