I am tired of What Not to Wear, and A Baby Story and Miami Ink and LA Ink and all these other things I see listed on The Learning Channel. I forgot Ten Years Younger. Is the house flipping on TLC? I just don’t think these are “learning” shows; yes, I could see a few shows about tattooing and how the way you dress may not be to your best advantage. Show us a few examples and then get outta there.

Now, mysteries – both medical and criminal are interesting. How many pregnancies and births do you want to watch – even if you are pregnant for the first time. How about genetics?

This appears to be a real griping day for me. Yes, I have seen a trend here. Must think of something positive to say . . . Uh, The History Channel – it’s pretty good.

Here’s my deep dark video secret: I am drawn to watch the campiest movies you can find, such as the brain transplant where the mind of a beautiful model was put in the head of so-so looker. Oh, the made-for-TV disaster flicks. Sometimes it is so hard, but my family depends on me to maintain my reputation. Manos, Hands of Fate of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a good example of the lengths to which I go to be the camp champ; I’ve seen Manos TWICE at least.

All by myself I found Gerry, a film in which Matt Damon starred. One scene was him walking across the desert and lasted about ten minutes . . . walk, walk, walk, walk, walk. I think that is my “career year” movie.

Say, I may have written about this before . . . so . . . maybe . . . it is rotting my brain. But, hey that movie was made five years after Matt Damon made Good Will Hunting, so perhaps HE watched Manos, Hands of Fate one too many times.

The snow is gone, probably because the temperature has climbed through the night and day to 57? and is supposed to hit 60K. Everything is wet and if you were using the moss on the north side of the tree for guidance out of this land hereabouts, you’re direction is would be well-marked. The sun is above layers of gauzy overcast and I would imagine anyone flying high up on a flight from San Diego to here would just about cry when the plane descended and entered the gloom.

I keep thinking: My ancestors settled this state – maternal in the north and paternal in the south . . . What WERE they thinking???

Anyway, I took my trusty – not really, it’s plastic – rake and went out back. It was like raking washcloths, wet ones, ones that had been used by a kid and left wadded up in odd shapes. I didn’t rake a whole lot, but those leaves were heavy and clinging to the ground. I picked up sticks too, although I really am not fond of that job; I sincerely suspect that some sticks hide and then pop out when I think I have got them all

Tonight it is to rain. And tomorrow is a high of 48? and wind. Yes!! Wind, I love it. Dear, dear wind, please dry us out. We need to dry out and have a temperature above 50? so  I can finish staining the fence. Last summer was so brutally hot that we put it off to fall and then the weather was just not good for painting. This is what happened: We painted and painted when we could and I told my grandson to just “paint around”  the one woodpile and we would move the wood and paint that part later.

We got caught and could paint no more, so we left the wood, until we needed a fire. Then as we drew wood from out variously seasoned piles, the unpainted portion of the fence appeared. It really stands out now. I’d post a picture, but WordPress has not resolved the upload problem – probably a good thing.

I am thinking of starting a fire to drive out the dampness and fill the air with the cozy and comforting (to me) scent of wood smoke. A couple of Yankee Candle tarts and we’ll be all set.

It wouldn’t be so bad in this state if at least it had a romantic and adventurous history. No one yearns to go to Indiana; to add insult to injury, we used to be the Northwest Territory. Not anymore, Oregon and Washington have that nickname – – and they also have mountains and seacoast and tales of horses and buffalo and all sorts of things. Excuse me, but I have never heard of the Indiana Trail.

Even North Dakota says rugged individual and strength of character. And it’s next to Montana, home of the Big Sky and Chet Huntley.

So why am I here? Shoot, that’s a darn good question. I don’t know, maybe it gives me confidence – I can face problems and say, “Ha! I am not fazed. I have lived in Indiana, the Great State of Non-Descript.

Have you ever heard, “Eli Manning, you just won the Super Bowl, what are you going to do?”

“Why, I’m going to Indiana!”

Oh, wait a minute . . . maybe I should have thought this sarcastic comment out.

I like having this Internet connection; I like having a word processing program that just lets me go back and delete without an eraser; I like having a printer, no having to painstakingly type each word and use thin paper so the erasures would not show so much. I love this stuff – cable TV and DVD’s and digital camera pictures going on the computer. Ipods and digital recorders, cell phones – heck, I thought cordless phones were cool. It took me forever to realize I could actually walk away from the main phone base.

However, I sometimes think I would have liked to have lived in the old days – not the old, old days, but the ones where Rudy Vallee first crooned through his megaphone and everyone seemed so cheerful singing, The Stein Song. Sometimes I sit here with old songs coming out of itunes and visions of raccoon coats in my mind.

Spring Break is over and I an sitting Indian fashion on the end of the sofa, about 45 minutes away from taking Alison to the hospital and getting kids to school – except one. The middle one, the one who is autistic, developed a sore throat and fever on Saturday and got antibiotics at the After Hours clinic yesterday. Let’s see, Cameron was sick, then Summer was sick (You don’t want to be around Summer when she is sick.), Alison was sick and some time in this Time of Germs, I was sick. I think we will be between three weeks and a month of having someone home and not at school.

I have been staying late up on some of the Spring Break nights, because for most of my life I have been a night owl.

I had to leave writing that last bit and on my return, about an hour later, I realize that for a lot of my life I was actually a night owl and an early bird. But I am too old for that now – too old to stay up to two and get up at six.

I can remember staying up all night and all day and late into the next day and not thinking a thing about it. But lately I have read that while we sleep, our brain is making more chemicals that we need to . . . oh, think. So, getting sleep is a duty; yes, that’s it – a duty. Well, I think I’ll do my duty tonight about nine.

I was going to post a picture of the walnut tree in my mother’s yard that is leaning quite a bit following a microburst storm (we think) two years ago. It is impressive, but I think there may be a glitch in the new WordPress upgrade because it says my pictured failed the upload criteria. Heck, it’s a tree. You know, one of those things only God can make.

I decided not to put up with days of logging into WordPress only see “Please Update staring at me. I have done that before; it gets annoying. So right away, I said, fine, just automatically upgrade me. And the little tiny, tiny elves in my computer ran around and did it – really quickly. Then I had to update my database and they did that too. I call them e-elves. I also have nano-elves, but I tend to think of them as the little guys who hope into my body with vitamins and medicine.

But they moved all the furniture around here on the Dashboard page, and other pages as well. It is cleaner looking too; I guess that means no more eating in the WordPress room.

Rats, I already tripped and wrote this first on  a page not a post.

I listened to an interview this morning where someone made the point about political correctness having the effect of putting the importance on what people feel they should say think as opposed as to what they really do think. My mind works in weird ways. As I was about to move away from the page, I looked at the banner of cows and into my mind popped:

My cow burns at both its ends,

It will not last the night. 

But, oh my foes and oh, my friends,

It gives a lovely light. 

Now, where the heck did that come from? But this isn’t anything to do with political correctness because  I don’t want to burn cows. Obviously, this must be symbolism, a Freudian thing. Or maybe it is just a silly attack – my mind wandering on to the remark: Emily’s first draft was not quite there, yet.

Weather.com is saying we should have sun today, at least mostly sun. Well, good, I hope so; I really do. I have seen this before, blue happy skies in the early morning and then clouds rolling in, first a few and then a lot. I want to believe there will be sun (mostly sun) all day. Of course, right now I am looking at the blue sky through snow on the evergreen branches on the north and west side of my little porch office.

I have, during these months of winter, been able to pick-up a 12 pack of Lipton’s Diet Green Tea, Peach flavor. Now, I haven’t done it often, but when I have, there has been a pack for me. Not now. Knowing I would be wanting a lot of iced tea soon, I checked out the stores and found, “Yes, we have no peachanas.” Well, rats. I really liked that peach. They had lots of the flavors I don’t care for, but no peach and my only hope was that the new berry flavor would do. Today I tried it, and it is okay. Different from peach, but better than the others – much better.

I love to drink iced tea in the summer. That I am drinking it poured over ice out of a bottle would be news to my grandmother. She always made hot tea and it was poured over ice that cracked. It had no flavors other than “tea” and back then I had no idea there were different kinds of tea, anyway, let alone flavors. The glasses were tall and thin and the spoons long and graceful; condensation formed on the outside. As I grew older, I learned by example to run the glass slowly over my forehead when we were sitting on the porch. Of course, you didn’t do that at the dinner table.

I was so fortunate as a little, little girl. The war was over and people were happy; people gave you the things they had wanted in the Depression. My father took graduate courses in the summer on the GI Bill and one year we were in Bloomington for the whole year. We lived downstairs from a Chinese gentleman who had a daughter my age  – only she was in China with her mother and couldn’t get permission to come. I’m told he used to come and see me and that I was afraid of him. I have no idea why and now I feel sorry. And somehow I have come back to tea – tea in china cups with a man from China during a Midwestern winter.

I feel sorry for the cute little pseudo-orphaned polar bear cub at the German zoo who was brought to – uh, let’s call it – “really bigness” by the people. Knut is the bear whose picture has been on the Internet news a lot lately – you know the one, the picture where it seems he is trying to bite, eat, whatever a kid and would have succeeded had it not been for the Plexiglas barrier his face rammed against.

As I understand it, the people who were with him all the time, the ones he thought were friends and family, decided it was time for him to live like a bear, alone in his cage. (I guess they call them enclosures now.) He has, in a very real sense, been abandoned. This time he is no longer the incredibly cute little polar bear cub and some people in the zoo community are calling him – forgive me – a psycho bear.