Help! Help! I’m being oppressed!
By cloud cover. Actually, it’s too thick to merit a thin, just stretched over top, short little name like cover. I’m being oppressed by cloud duvet. By cloud quilt. By cloud down comforter. It sounds very cuddly and warm, doesn’t it? HA! Sweden in January is anything BUT cuddly and warm, I assure you.
Had another toss-and-turn, mostly sleepless night last night. (Have since heard, right here on my computer, that several of YOU didn’t sleep well either, what’s up with that? sympathy insomnia?) Anders didn’t sleep well either (and NOT because of any alleged snoring, thankyouverymuch, he just didn’t, that’s all), and we were both awakened from our nonrestful halfdoze at 5:30 a.m. by the phone ringing. It rang twice before either one of us registered what it was, and then we just laid there and listened to the last 2 rings, because we knew that after 2 there is no way, even if you LEAP out of bed and RACE across half the house to the phone and press YES, that you will be in time to hear anything but a *click* and then the mocking dialtone. I lay there slackly, blearily hoping that it wasn’t someone calling to tell us something awful had happened to someone, and then zoned out again until I was RUDELY awakened by that damned alarm clock, which will NOT LEAVE ME ALONE in the mornings.
I checked the messages after I had showered and was greeted with the following, in a non-familiar male voice: “cchshs slsladddlslldccch hrrrms…hum..awell, night” *click* It sort of sounded like my Uncle Sam, but I don’t know why he would be calling me. No one has called today to confess to getting all confused with those wacky timezone thingies, though.
Martin and I are doing a jigsaw puzzle together (which made me regret once again the self-inflicted loss by stupidity of my grandmother’s folding card table). I had forgotten how much fun they are, and how satisfying that feeling when you snick a little rounded end into place and the picture becomes one piece more complete. He finished a 250-piece puzzle by himself during the weekend, and while we were admiring it, we talked about my jigsaw puzzles, of which I have a handful that I saved from a wild-and-crazy youth, but agreed after looking at them, that most of them were way beyond his ability.
One of them, now long gone, a photo of blueberries, strawberries and raspberries, all red and blue and green with no discernible pattern or differentiation possibilities, was way beyond MY ability, and reduced me, after I bought it years ago, to actually sticking corresponding numbered stickers on the backs of puzzle pieces and the photo on the box, because GEEZUS there is only so much puzzling of 1000 nearly identical red and blue berry bits one can handle without cracking up.
In googling around on the internet, trying to find a picture of it, I found a couple of freakishly obsessed thorough sites devoted to Springbok Jigsaws which had THIS one listed: Black Diamond!
We had that puzzle when I was growing up. It was AWFUL. My sister could put it together really fast, which always made me want to punch her. She had a great eye for that sort of thing, which was also really useful when we were lying in the patch of clovered grass off the back patio in Nebraska, looking for 4-leaf clovers. Every few minutes, while my eyes were bugging out of my head and crossing with effort, she’d reach nonchalantly over and say, “There’s another one.” PUNCH!
One of my old jigsaws, however, despite being 500 pieces, seemed easy enough to handle, and Martin and I have started puzzling it out. It’s called “I Heart Hearts” and I have a poster in the same theme, which I hunted down and purchased after spying it on the wall of Prince’s bedroom in Purple Rain. These are only 2 of my lapses into sentimentality in regards to household ornamentation, for which I offer rueful apologies…it WAS the 80s, after all (the poster is in the closet, in a pile of thought-better-ofs, and NOT on a wall somewhere, so you can let out that breath you were holding in dismay). It’s great fun to sit at the dining room table, hunched over a pile of pieces, Martin in his pajamas, while we hunt for the missing part of a particular heart, or crow with joy at completing another one or steal a piece that has the right color from one another’s workspace.
