The Leaning Cow

Fresh snow is resting on the neighbor’s house – otherwise known as “the green house”; snow on that roof is usually my first indicator of the day’s weather trend. And the bushes are bending with snow. I don’t particularly mind this; it has been a trying few months and the weather-encouraged reclusive hibernation provides a reason to not get busy with lots of restructuring of family maintenance cares. However, tomorrow is March and we need to get started on preparing for mowing and roofing and painting and moving things from one place to another . . . and then probably back again.

On the other hand, I have not yet figured out how to put a lagging paperwork performance in the weather-related category. I’m certain, though, that if I mull over for a while, I will come up with some theory.

Oh, another snow-related piece of news: Der Bingle faced treacherous roads Friday night, so he stayed at the Ohio Redoubt and so did my Hot Heat Burritos. I am in withdrawal. There are NO HHB’s in my house. None. That is an inconvenient truth.

I had trouble sleeping last night and finally I got up about about five and with bleary eyes looked at the breaking news on the computer. An 8.8 earthquake had hit Chile, about 200 miles SSW of Santiago. I know that South America is actually shifted farther east than North America and that daylight was coming soon there. So I turned on the TV and watched for awhile, but news was very limited and my eyelids very heavy, so I went back to sleep.

Well, I am back awake now and just heard it said the tectonic shift was about 10 feet. Pictures coming in from Concepcion are dramatic. Streets there are filled with rubble. They are showing people standing where roadways collapsed and peering into the rift; I think I would be worried about an aftershock pitching me into the giant, black gash in the earth.

I am going to get my hair trimmed, colored and styled today. It will take two hours – the color process, dontcha know. I still have to put on my socks and shoes and find my Sudoku book before I get in the car and drive over to Main Street. This morning I wandered around taking photos of “criminal activity”. I snapped a shot of a Mountain Dew bottle sitting on the rug in the living room, a cereal bowl left at the end of a sofa, good quality stoneware used for cat milk and food bowls. I imagine you can catch the drift of my mood. Perhaps I will sit on a stool by the back vestibule door and when Summer comes in, I will point my finger and scream, SINNER!!!!!!!!! (Mountain Dew bottle)

I am sitting here in my special little spot, after having stood in the doorway to the main gathering room at The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse and  shushed them all to whispers. I am sitting here and I am going to watch Julia and Julie . . . or maybe it is Julie and Julia or Julie & Julia. I don’t know because I got it on impulse at the Redbox and their cases are interchangeable. Okay, I bit the bullet and used the remote to go to the Main Menu and see the actual title. Only I watched a little scroll work dance around from pots and pans to measuring cups and back again without showing the title. Finally, in the Special Sections part, I found the title and it is, indeed, Julie & Julia.

I intended to watch this movie in the theater when my cousin Glenda first mentioned it to me in August. She probably watched it in a theater, but the one week it was here at the local Strand, I simply could not go. This morning as I passed Redbox and took a gander and on page three of titles, I saw it and thought, “Yes.”

I don’t care what this does to the schedule of my day; I simply do not care at all. Not at all. Whoever thought a movie about cooking would seem so liberating to moi. Oops, sorry, the Julia Child influence, dontcha know. Could it be because this Julia and this Julie are fairly eccentric, if not outright weird, and I so identify with that.

I am now at the part where Julia is competitively chopping onions into a huge mound . . .  and i am going to concentrate on watching.

Bon Appetit.

I have always taken it for granted that a house would be dark at night, but many times in the past years since younger generations have been living with me, lights have often been left on. I don’t like to wake up to a house and find lights brightly burning, but that has often been the case. Lately, though, there has been a trend toward the house being darkened at night  . . .  and it feels so peaceful. Of course, I am not sitting here in the dark; I am sitting in a puddle of light because in the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse we like the shank of the evening to have a glow on.

UPDATE: Uh, this isn’t a true update; I started out to talk about Summer and I having a competitive weight loss campaign but somehow it slipped to the back of my mind. So here it is: Summer and I are writing our weights down every morning for a month. She is waiting on me so I won’t expend any more calories than I absolutely have to. This could get interesting.

I have been thinking about the movie Five Graves to Cairo lately. Tonight I turned on the TV to Turner Classic Movies and there it was, starting. I called Der Bingle and told him and then I started to watch. I thought, “Oh, heck, I’ll just lie down and turn the light off and watch . . . “; I fell asleep. I woke up when the clock out here chimed 12, which meant it was 11 since it has gotten out of synch and I am thinking that Daylight Savings Time is coming up anyway. For Heavens Sake, this is disheartening.

Then I remembered I hadn’t taken my medicine and so I did; Sydney wanted to go out and he got the whiff of a strange animal and after he came back in, he determined he just HAD to go back out. He wandered around forever and just as I was ready to march out and grab him, the neighbor’s security light went off and I didn’t have the heart to trigger it back on.  Finally he showed up and I sat down to finish this post and now I hear him nuzzling a treat out of a bag.

Oh, Jeez, it was one of the pouches with the resealable opening and he was rapidly eating into the seal . . . and beyond. He is supposed to be an Australian Shepherd – they obey the rules. They insist on rules; Miss Alice used to turn herself in when she broke one. And he’s doing this.

He probably heard me snoring during Five Graves to Cairo and figured if I was that old, he must be getting up there and could start tweaking the protocols.

We stare at each other and I have a feeling we are thinking the same thing because he is rolling his eyes at me and dog sighing.

My son wears glasses and his insurance covers Wal-Mart; so he ordered a pair from there. The promised delivery date was between 7 – 10 days.  That was on February 8th. When Alison checked today I was in the store and when I met her at the front door, she told me they still weren’t in. I said, “I’ll be back.”

I went into the eye place part of the store and inquired about putting a trace on the glasses. A very nice lady said she was already doing that per Alison’s asking if they were in. She could tell me they had been “farmed out” by the first lab. I asked if I could stand there and see what had happened to them and she politely told me it would take some time, so I asked for a copy of the prescription.

She couldn’t give me that because the doctor was not in and would not be until Wednesday. And I asked, “Don’t you have it on the computer?” She went to see if there was a copy on file; there was not; it was just on the computer . . . and Wal-Mart policy is it could only be sent to another Wal-Mart.

I could take the delay; I could take the lack of information about the delay; I found the inability to give us a copy of the prescription before Thursday unacceptable. And I took her so, adding that I realized it was not her fault. I was calm, but definite. She promised to see what the problem had been.

Later, she called and said she had contacted the doctor and he had called the other doctor who was on duty to write the prescription for glasses out so we could have it.

She went the extra mile . . . which meant she marched to the drummer of good service and not to the dictates of the Arkansas Empire.

US 6 – The Grand Army of the Republic Highway – runs coast to coast and here in Indiana, in Northeastern Indiana, it is a weather dividing line. The East Noble School Corporation straddles it and so, with rain to the south and sleet and snow right here a few blocks south of US 6 and just snow to the north, conditions are, as they say, variable. And it is line of variability that is giving East Noble a two-hour delay this morning. Most school systems are going because they have either rain or snow; our system is bisected by the dreaded “mixture” line and that is good news for Summer.

When she awoke, her mother told her of the delay and she exclaimed, “Why didn’t you wake me up and tell me so I could enjoy it more?” Alison thought this was funny, but, to me, it was perfectly understandable. It is called prolonging the savor – or something like that. Probably goes along with the hitting your head because when you stop it feels so good syndrome.

Yesterday I was up digging through a drawer from Mother’s and found a few things. It kind of seems appropriate to post pictures today since, if you look at the two posts below, it is down memory lane day.

Great-Great Aunt Sara(h)

This is the envelope sent to Sarah who had married Sherman Malcolm, a travelling Encyclopedia Britannica salesman – I kid you not. He met her when she was teaching in Michigan. My grandmother thought he was a very nice man and gave her son Malcolm as a middle name. Sherman used to go out and ice fish on Aldrich Lake when he and Sara(h) visited  Grandma where she lived in the first decade of the century . . . and somewhat longer. That was the house that had been unoccupied for awhile and there was a rattlesnake nest in the basement.

And this is what came in the envelope from Bloomington – Sarah Wisler’s transcript from IU. She still had the “h” then. I guess as long as her father was paying her tuition, she had the “h” and dropped it later. I don’t know exactly when, but she did.

Here she is when she was older and on her second husband; at least I think this is Lloyd Dennis -she called him L.D. and so everyone else did as well. They liked to travel but came back a couple of times to stay with Grandma when I was little. L.D. and Aunt Sara where there off and on from when I was about one to four or five. I have a copy of “A Christmas Carol” she sent me from England in 1953. My dad said L.D. told him that he and Aunt Sara each thought the other one had money.

This is the front of a Christmas card LD. gave Aunt Sara and the inside is below . . . Beware.

I think L.D. had a different style than Sherman did.

Okie dokie, this plate did not come out of the drawer, but it was here and I took  pictures of it front and back; there are five others in the set. Great-great Aunt Sara(h) got them in Washington D.C. when she lived there and worked in the Veterans’ Administration. Don’t know where I’ll put them, but somewhere. Oh, my friends at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse are grumbling, not to mention my foes. I’ve got plates from Grandma Lydia too. Once when I was showing LZP the sugar jar, I lifted the lid and found a Fisher-Price man Quentin had dropped inside.

Okay, here’s the situation: LZP sent some photos and newspaper clippings to Der Bingle and I posted the clippings but they ate into the sidebar so I am moving them down by putting these pictures in a separate post. Because that is all I can figure out how to do – 0ther than making the clipping teeny tiny at first look . . . before you click on them.

Anyway, here’s LZP and Der Bingle’s dad . . . and there Grandma, who has the same first name as out piano player her at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse.

William A. Vance Jr. Graduated high school 1944. Passed away July, 2006

Maybe at Biloxi at end of training or in Italy. We will update this question after batting it back and forth.

My personal favorite. Learning to fly while still in Carthage High School. I’m going to see if I can find an old post that links to that letterman’s sweater.

Lydia Akers Vance. Our piano player has her first name and Quentin has her maiden name as his middle name.