Category: general

02
Aug
2020

WHAT TO DO

Ermagerd, it’s already August. How time flies when you’re… oh, never mind. Time isn’t flying, actually. It’s moving, at least. All the things that I usually look forward to about the fall and the holidays feel very far away and unattainable right now. Everything is still canceled. Things are still closed. We’re not seeing friends or going to parties. I don’t know if anyone is planning on hosting a crayfish party this year, but even if they were, I’m not sure we’d go. We have no info about Karin’s starting university in a…month? some weeks? We have no date and...

26
Jul
2020

NEWS FROM THE INSIDE OF MY HOUSE

Where do people go when they stop blogging? How can they stand not knowing what’s going on in the lives of the friends they’ve made online? How can they stand not knowing how the story continues? Even though I can go weeks without posting, I can’t imagine stopping forever. Or, well, I can, but I don’t want to. I like having this record of my life, my thoughts, my obiter dictum. I still think about blog friends, online friends, who left the blog world years ago. Just dropped off, stopped writing, as if no one cared that they were gone....

21
Jul
2020

MOVING FORWARD, MOVING UP, MOVING IN

Anders is on vacation and so far, he’s made an awesome start on his vacation project, which is redoing the entire deck and making the glassed-in porch bigger. In 2 days, he’s already ripped out and removed the entire deck and the porch walls. Tomorrow he has a trailer all day to take multiple loads of wood to the dump, and on Thursday he’s rented a container to remove all the sand that was underneath the deck. Right now, he’s doing a side project: removing the stump of the plum tree. Not easy! I am still working. If I can...

06
Jul
2020

BERNICE MCNALLY PANGBORN 1916-2020

My last grandparent passed away today. I’m sad about it, but at the same time, she lived an unbelievably long life and she went peacefully at the end. Just think, if she had managed to hang on for just another 3 weeks, she would have been 104 years old. Still, she beat her own mother, who was 2 weeks shy of 103 when SHE died. It was really tough at the end, for my mom and my sister, who have spent the last three weeks caring for her around the clock. Thanks to the pandemic risks and travel restrictions, I...

04
Jul
2020

PATRIOT ACT

It’s the 4th of July today but we aren’t celebrating. We had tentative plans to attend a social distancing picnic with the AWC at the beach, but the weather and pandemic fears caused it to be cancelled anyway. It’s been raining steadily all day, an unending downpour in various degrees of severity from drizzle to hard-enough-to-bounce off the asphalt. Ah well, the lawn needed the water. Despite the rain, we were super busy today. Anders was up and out of the house before 8 am to fetch a rented trailer van and as soon as he came back we filled...

01
Jul
2020

LIFE, VEGETABLES & OTHER TIMELY TOPICS

Every day mostly the same. Same routines, same meals, same feelings. I wake up, I shower and dress. I work, I eat something. I read something. I walk on the treadmill. I do laundry. I play games on the iPad and think about writing. I call my mom or my son. I talk to my husband and my daughter. I water the garden and the vegetables and admire the roses. Sometimes, something changes and I see a couple of my friends or we visit Anders’ mom (from behind plexiglas, when it’s not raining). In our garden, there are tiny green...

14
Jun
2020

SSSH

No one knows how to just listen anymore. Every conversation, at least ones that I am often part of, seems to turn into a sort of subtle one-upmanship. I don’t think people do it on purpose. I certainly don’t do it on purpose. But I find myself doing it too, and it bothers me, both when I do it, and when people do it to me. The fact that they do it unconsciously bothers me, too. It’s as though no one is actually listening to anything you talk about except in the context of how it applies to them and...

13
Jun
2020

SHUUUUSH

Do you ever just feel paralyzed by the too-muchness of everyday life? I feel that way a lot. I seem to be stuck in a major rut and I’m not sure what to do to shake myself out of it. I WILL, I know, eventually, but I sure feel kind of stuck right now. Every day blurs into the next, and I can’t decide if that’s okay or not, to be honest. It’s been windy here all day today. All the green things are shaking and shimmying and the constant rustle and shuuush of everything is both soothing and annoying....

05
Jun
2020

FROM A DISTANCE

I’ve been sick since Tuesday night, with a head cold and I’ll tell you, like I’ve told everyone else who I’ve told I was sick, this past week, no…no fever. Just a miserable head cold, coughing, sore throat, headache, fatigue. Karin had it last week and as usual, passed it promptly on to me. I was working from home at the beginning of the week and was supposed to transition into the office yesterday but stayed home and worked. Today was a half-day so I stayed home today as well, but would have anyway, since I’m still snucky. I told...

24
May
2020

TIME KEEPS ON SLIPPIN’ SLIPPIN’ SLIPPIN’

“We’re in a time machine…you and I, right now. It’s stuck in one gear and it’s slow as hell, but it works. It’s bringing us into the future.”* That’s a line I just passed in a book I am reading and it struck me quite hard. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and I love stories about time travel, and all the different ways that different authors handle the idea of time travel; what the possibilities are, what it might MEAN, how it would work or not work. But this is the first time I’ve read something...

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