A few weeks ago I contacted the trash service in our area to pay my bill and ask about an additional trash unit. Well, the trash unit never showed up and it didn’t dawn on me that maybe the bill hadn’t been recorded. Then this week, the company tried to call me, only they did not have my phone number – it was someone else’s.  So my trash delivery got cut off. Oh, woe is me. I called them and found out my call had been registered but nothing more, so I arranged for another unit to be delivered. She said it would be here within the week – Oh, heavens, let it be soon. Really soon.

I just had to vent this because even though I didn’t get trashed, in this situation it is the pits and I am bummed out. Maybe I will discover that we threw something in the trash that was important . . . and we can still retrieve it. I doubt this is the case, but you never know where you might find a silver, though dirty, lining.

I will be getting scarves in the mail, handmade from Iowa. Woo-Hoo. It is always nice to be looking forward to something arriving at your doorstep . . . well, until it’s a brown paper bag on fire and filled with you know what. I’ve never experienced that but I’ve heard legends about it.

It is 62 degrees here  right now, but it is supposed to get cooler – 61 and then 60. Tomorrow, though, will find us in the 50’s. It is also raining outside, not hard but wet is wet. It is probably a little blessing for me because if it weren’t raining, I would be obliged to go out by the shed and look closely at what I glimpsed yesterday afternoon: my big woodpile fell over.  It fell on ancient bricks so the jumble is not sitting on the bare ground at least, but that is about it.

It was the woodpile made of relatively-new heavy wood, not my woodpile of older, lighter, let’s-get-the-fire-going-real-fast wood.

I saw the woodpile fiasco after I had done close to seven hours of seriously yucky housework. I do not like housework, as everyone here knows, but I did it . . . and the woodpile fell down. Perhaps it is a sign. This morning my muscles ache.

As I sat here with my aching muscles, I looked at the Kindle book page and for a moment read one of the headlines of the suggestion paragraphs and listings as Books You Have Refused to Look At. Then, I started thinking about some of the books that have been recommended based on my viewing history; I have sometimes wondered if they feel I have a taste for trash. I have also wondered if they might be right, but I’m letting that thought go.

One of the Kindle Daily Deals is a book about a sanctuary of outcasts and is based on the author’s time spent in prison for fraud. The front cover made me immediately think of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and when I read about the fraud part, I wondered about the value of rehabilitation, but that is my skeptical nature, I suppose.

I am not buying the book, not even getting a free sample, because somehow it just offends me.

Ah, my little bean bags, I just looked at the weather prediction and it is supposed to be 65 degrees today, with sun. But that is today and right now it is not even light out and I have a nice heater-warmed afghan on my legs.

I also have a sneeze forming behind my nose . . . or no, I guess not. Well, that was anti-climatic.  Oh, no, it was drips! A dripping nose, well, rats, this doesn’t bode well for enjoying the smell of sun-kissed autumn air of very late October.

I don’t know if my day is going to turn out to be as boring as this post or not. Then again, sometimes boring ain’t bad.

Hyatt Hotels have an ad in the New Yorker, promoting their spa-like offerings. It is a cartoon panel ad showing a woman at the airport with bath care bottles that won’t fit in a plastic bag and discovering, to her delight, that her Hyatt Room provides them. The ad is merging spa with amenities to create the word Spamenities, which is in a script font  in a cartoon panel.

I’m so very sorry, ad people, but what I saw was Spam; it leaped out at me. I did not realize it was an ad at first, I thought it was a real cartoon, poking fun at various skincare products.  Now I see that I  had erred, but I am now thinking, “Well, gee, I’ve seen articles about 29 uses for WD-40 and 65 uses for baking soda” . . . and you get the idea.

I have a yellow hat that says SPAM and a tee-shirt as well, courtesy of LZP, but I think having SPAM on my face is a little iffy – a little too far on the trendy curve for me.

It is about 3 in the morning and after falling asleep reading fairly early in the evening, I  awoke at 1:30 to discover I could not get back to sleep. so I got up and cleaned the kitchen, not thoroughly, but to a greater degree than it had been. My hands now smell like cleansers, not exactly a perfume, but better than they did before. I guess they are “kitchen clean” hands as opposed to “scented soap” hands.

I like the smell of clean hands; I always have. I remember when I was a little girl and being tucked in bed, my father’s hands were always freshly scrubbed ans smelled so comforting. Shane’s paws smell a little different, but that’s okay, I’m a big girl now.

I’m going back to bed – not going to stay up and have an incredibly early start to the day. We’ll just call this practice for true Monday.

Sometimes, my mind is like a kaleidoscope and goes quickly from one condensed thought to another and I just let it happen. No one subject or memory makes me slow the pace and meander around, exploring that bit of the past. I don’t know if it is that I don’t want to get deep into emotions or if the series of flickering pictures is a practice session for the “life passing before  your eyes” experience  that people talk about when they sense death coming. Odd thing to write, I suppose, but odd often has interesting aspects, and should be appreciated . . . in moderation, I suppose.

What am I getting at? I know, I’m asking that also. I don’t know why I am writing basically nothing. I realize, though, that when I am thinking of nothing in particular, I notice the coolness of the glass in my hand, the hue of the sky, the warm weight of soft wool on my knees, the paintings on the wall that are always there, but I never seem to see, the pattern in the comforter thrown over the back of a wicker chair. It’s kind of pleasant.

I am on my next antibiotic for my “complicated UTI” and have 10 days of three daily pills that are supposed to be taken an hour before or 2-3 hours after eating. Gee . . . It’s SO complicated. That was not sarcastic; it was sort of a sighing, frustrated remark. I suppose this sounds gross, but I almost wish they would tell me to come in and lie down and have a little tranqy medicine and be flushed out and air-dried. Hey, I tried to tell you it was gross. Eh, it ain’t that bad.

Anyway, that is how my day is starting. I was awakened by some cramping in my bladder. When I was first diagnosed with this UTI, it was because I had taken a home test to be a baseline for my daughter-in-law. I was surprised to see the telltale purple. The doctor asked me what symptoms I had been having and I said I didn’t think any, really. Later, I would come to realize I had been too eager to accept “growing older pains and aches” stoically. Now, that the former uncomfortable sensations are officially infection symptoms, they seem worse. It is human nature.

Well, I had intended to comment on my day starting and then go on to other things, but just turned around and did more urinary talk. Obviously, I am a little too tuned in to it. So I am trying again:

I don’t know what I am going to do today. That probably means there was no need for the elaborate work-up to this paragraph. My writing is like my talking: I seldom let lack of content stop me. Now my great Aunt Sara was different; Mother always said Aunt Sara kept quiet until she had something worth saying. She was smart, Aunt Sara. Quirky, though, and the subject of many stories – such as the one in which she rode to town in an old turn of the century Buick with her head out the window because her hat would not fit inside.

Her first husband was Sherman, a smart gentleman who travelled all over the United States, selling Encyclopedia Britannica to schools. He was older than Sara had been in some war and developed a bad heart and the family in Indiana never really knew much about his death, but Aunt Sara went to work for the Veteran’s Administration in Washington D.C.. We have a picture of her with her office staff, but that’s all we know.

We also don’t know where L.D. came from; he was her second husband and we don’t think his name was L.D., put that’s what Aunt Sara called him so we went along with it. Oh course, I was less than one when I meant her; she arrived in a delivery truck, sitting on an upturned crate while L.D. drove and my father later said it was packed like a cube. Mother said that was when Grandma might have had a heart spell. Not really, but it was shocking. As L.D. reportedly told my father, “She thought I had money and I thought she had money.” Obviously, although quite intelligent, Aunt Sara could have used a little more intelligence information.

Aunt Sara was maybe four years older than Grandma – and I know somewhere I’ve written this before but I’m doing it again – and was Grandma’s father’s youngest sister. My great-grandparents basically had two families: three boys and then a long interval and three girls. And, as long as I’m being informational, Aunt Sara originally had an “h” at the end of her name, but somewhere along the line, she dropped it – maybe it got heart trouble. We don’t know.

She dyed her hair red but she was a good worker, according to Mother. She and L.D. came to visit up until I was about five and then I don’t know what happened, although she apparently started travelling around the world . . . alone. She sent me a copy of A Christmas Carol she had purchased in London.

Then, by the end of her life, she had settled in New Orleans and finally, the family went and got her and she came back and then died. Oddly enough, I just realized I have no idea where she is buried. Now there’s a project for a little research.

I don’t know if these past spontaneous paragraphs about Aunt Sara were spit out by my mind in spasm or not, but I did read that in older people UTI’s can cause mental confusion. Just as long as I don’t put my glasses in the microwave . . .