(I, the amazing AmeliaJake, was tired last night, so this morning I am going to put a capital “A” on my amazing and correct typos. I have also actually downloaded pictures . . . and found out, by the way, I am a gnome.)

We started out on a trip to Crate & Barrel today and we wound up going to more places; sometimes we were lost and sometimes we were not. It is part of the road trip adventure for folks 60+. We feel okay about knowing mostly where we were and in is interesting to look on Google Maps and see where we actually were when we didn’t know it at the time. Well, we knew the general vicinity of where we were at all times – at least we knew we had not crossed any state lines.

Here is an intersection where we stopped for gas when we were not really certain as to how far off course we were in our meandering around what was we intended to be Northern Cincinnati. The street sign out there says “Avenue of Champions”; unfortunately we had not had our Wheaties that morning and our guardian angel had already alerted the emergency squad.

The picture below is cropped so you can’t see my gnomeness in its full glory. (Joan, I’ll email you the full picture.)

Gnomy AJ, Joan and Steve.

The best part of the day was getting to see my good friend Joan and the dicey part was sitting across the table from Der Bingle at Mimi’s when he received his order . . . liver and onions. It was under the heading of “Comfort Foods” but, personally, I think that was a little private joke of Mimi’s. I didn’t watch him eat it, but I think knowing what was going on affected me adversely. I started to get a headache and then had the distinct urge to get up and grab the man across the aisle who was being really loud and ripping his fat, bald head off.*  So I took aspirin and Tylenol and came home and sucked down a Diet Coke.

The atmosphere at Mimi’s.

*Der Bingle says this is a personality trait I share with Maxwoo.

Today I was walking down the frozen food aisle at the grocery when I noticed a sale of quick microwave little meals. I am so partial to meatloaf and there was Michelina’s face and the suggestion, “Let Mama feed you” and I succumbed.

I took it one home and followed the directions to open a corner of the lid. So I tore the box open and looked for the saran wrap type covering I expected to find on the usual little blackish microwave dish. Aha, there was a surprise – no saran wrap stuff, no dish. I saw a frozen thin slab, so I picked it up in disbelief and leaned it against the box and photographed it.

Now you may be wondering how I got such an intact picture of the box when I had no idea of taking one until I had seen the slab inside. Well, guess what? I bought two. Auuuuugggggghhhhhhh.

As I clicked into this site today, I noticed that a post consisting of a death notice and an obituary followed one about my having a sinister sounding deadly cold. And then there was yesterday when I did not post anything. Even I was inclined to wonder: Am I dead? No, if there is a trend, it is slower moving. I am still here.

But here’s a twist that has some of my pals at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse staring at me – I came in remarking that after having watched tons of crime shows on Cable TV about domestic murder, I had suddenly realized how fortunate I am. I  have never, ever even had a passing idea that Der Bingle might “do away with me”.   I have taken it for granted that I would not be found drowned in a bathtub “accident” or crumpled at the bottom of the basement stairs. Well, I have thought about being crumpled at the bottom of basement stairs, but not because I was pushed or a step was sawed and weakened or whatever.

Rose – Oh, that is Rose below. Rose is one of our sweetheart patrons who is a comfort to everyone.

Rose asked me outright, “Why would you even think about this?” Well, I don’t know; it just popped into my head. And, of course, I don’t let things pop right out. No, I have to crawl all over them and go oooooh and ahhhhh and poke here and there. I make Rose sigh and order sassafras to her iced green tea when I get like this. But she keeps coming back because she is, well, Rose.

This current traipsing into the thought processes of AmeliaJake apparently gave her pause because she stopped sipping her tea and said actually she had never worried about being found with her seams ripped open. See, Rose likes me.

I am thinking cold, as in aching, coughing, sinus pain and a miserable night. I usually say I have “a cold” but this little baby feels like it is in a different category – a Stephen King category; it hovers in my chest and around my personality like an unpredictable, looming doom. Therefore, I call it “the cold”.  And today I decided to throw something scary at “the cold” and sat down in the middle of a good deal of mail that has accumulated about Mother’s death. Up until now, I had just let it stack up and then let the stack fall over and then start a new stack.

Now, I have a trash bag of processed paper. And I feel better as if “the cold” has taken  a solar plexus punch. However . . . there is this matter of income and property taxes and car titles and oh, gosh, lots of stuff.

Ah-Choo

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.