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 . . .

I just wrote about taking more direction in my life – well, I wrote about it in so many words – and then I find myself thinking somewhat later: “Ah, maybe I should be DOING something.” See I didn’t think my complaining post through; I was just venting about being someone running from hole to hole in the dike, although I think my original reference was to dealing with downward-rolling balls of various levels of disaster.

But now, dear me, pushing Publish didn’t make it go away. So I am whining because I will either have to maintain the status quo which forces me into action or DO SOMETHING ON MY OWN MOTIVATION. I should have just kept my fingers still and just hum-drummed myself to the next problem and relaxed a little under my afghan. Now I have put myself in the position of putting my moving limbs where my mouth is. It’s like an assignment. Shoot.

Okay, I’ve got to make this seem like a puzzle, a riddle. It’s got to be something I figure out and not plod through, if I am to get started. That will involve lying to myself because there is always some plodding. Sometimes I do manage to see the plodding as Okay, just another try . . . okay, one more . . . maybe if I turn it this way . . .

However, I think this is a case where lying to myself is going to be the crucial part of the endeavor. Most everyone knows I believe it is all right to lie to yourself as long as you know you are lying to yourself. I know, I know – that cancels everything out, but if you say it real fast, it sometimes works. I think it is some phenomenon in physics or insanity.

On the other hand, when you are faced with an assignment, I have found that thinking about planning on how you are going to do it sometimes produces the feeling you have actually done something. It’s not a good thing in the long run, but it helps you stay warm under the afghan for a bit longer.

Say, you don’t think taking the time to write this post was a delaying action, do you . . . Oh, wow! I feel another What About Bob? moment coming on.

After reading some of the posts – at random – from my old blog, I am starting to get the idea I should take my life back. Well, I mean I think I am getting too involved in trying to keep up with messes instead of dedicating myself to creating my own. Oh, let me think about this . . . Could my former insouciant mess-making be at the core of some of these present avalanching MESS-BALLS that keep rolling at me. Oh, wow! Could that really be!? Gosh, hey, do you think so? (Am I channelling What About Bob? here? Who cares.)

My usual response these days: Whatever.

Last evening I read a cheap Kindle book about extremely capable old people in the workplace being fired and then being recruited by a company to have intensive surgery and re-enter with workforce looking 20 years younger and still having their vast experience. The main character was 55. It was not a cheery evening and I seriously thought about not continuing, but as more and more “young” people turned out to be “oldies” I was curious about the ending. I should not have been; it was written by an author who should have simply written, “Sorry, I ran out of ideas.” Instead, he basically wrote, Whatever. I suppose there is a lesson in this Live by the whatever, die by the whatever.

FROM ROSE: Warning. . . warning . . . warning. AmeliaJake just typed mindlessly along until I was able to intervene.

Ah, we have managed to avoid the really traumatic back-to-the-routine of early morning chaos with the phone ringing at around 6am to leave the message: Foggie Delay. Okay, it didn’t say that; it was a very controlled recorded voice announcing the delay. I don’t know if they said fog or not – delay was the only word we heard.

Because East Noble is a fairly large geographical district, thanks to the consolidations of the 60’s and 70’s, fog, snow, icy roads can be way down in the southern part of the county and they call it system wide. I once interviewed the man who made the “go, no go” call for an article that was intended to explain to people the policy behind the decision. This guy got up at 4 am every morning and drove the known “tell” spots on the routes – well, unless it had been an obviously clear night with not indication of anything pending. I think there are the “ice curves” and the “fog dips” and the degree of still falling snow on county roads vs. the plows’ work. I’m boring you. I suppose it is a hazard associated with reading this blog. Does anyone need an early morning boring warning call?

Der Bingle in Ohio has snow that is sticking to the grass. He called to sound the alarm, although, being east of us, he is usually the one who gets the alarm from us. Soon we will be seeing Christmas inflatables, I am certain. I always like to end on a cheerful note. (That’s not really true but it’s the sarcasm I was after.)

But I am not ending because I just realized I had forgotten to mention the Halloween inflatables on Indiana 9 opposite the military school and marking the corner where I turn to head to the LaGrange House. And, of course, it is important that you know this . . . Stream of consciousness is often not a good thing . . . so now I am ending before I venture into those areas where angels fear to tread.

THIS IS ROSE AND I AM TAKING CONTROL OF AJ UNTIL SHE CAN CONTROL HER BRAIN/FINGER CONNECTION. Yes, it’s a hard job, but someone has to do it before the mob gets too irritated.

I went to Fort Wayne today, dropped someone off at a clinic door and waited in the parking lot. I do this whenever we come here because this is the view looking east: Camera looking east.

The temperature was right at 50 and the sun was in an out. I was wearing a sweater, a long skirt and boots and getting outside of the car and just breathing and seeing was a treat.

Were I to look south, I would see an enormous low area of grass; it’s a flood plain and I didn’t take a picture today for no reason, other than that the person’s appointment was quite short.
I did have time to take a selfie: I call it Camera looking west.

We came straight home – no GoodWill – because she was feeling poorly. Now that’s a word I haven’t really used before. My paternal grandmother used it occasionally; I wonder if it is one of those words that pop out of your genetic code when older age turns them on. It kind of makes me shudder to realize I used it. Who knows what is going to start spicing up – or down – my language.

Oh, yes, I don’t remember if I mentioned I commissioned a scarf to be knitted, only it turns out it is called a shawl. See, how it creeps up on you. Well, at least you don’t need teeth for peanut butter, although I’m not certain about the extra crunchy.

Fall break ends tomorrow so you may hear screaming and complaining, but it won’t be from me. You might hear, “I don’t know where YOU put your backpack.” That would be me.

I was at the LaGrange house, looking around for something and I noticed – after heaven knows how many years – that this wall mounted cookbook-based bookcase had a row of  little drawers along the top of it.  (I’m betting it was the cookbook thing that had me shying away from that piece of furniture.)

Anyway, I opened them, And found recipes . . . of course. In my mother’s handwriting and numerous clippings from newspapers. No wonder I like restaurants with honky-tonk or roadhouse themes – eating in a nice dining room with four star food is, I whine, like eating at home at Mother’s . . . every day of the week.

I believe I was dreadfully spoiled and did not appreciate my mother in this area for a long, long time.

But, on with the drawers: Not only were there recipes, but an Erma Bombeck (remember her) article on too much cleanliness, as in housekeeping. I also found two snapshots from 1949 of Daddy, Great Aunt Sara and me and one of someone who I think is in my family but from a long, long time ago and with an indiscernible background. Come to think of it, the 1949 pics are from a long, long time ago. I am going to scan some of the recipes and maybe I’ll post them here. There’s one for Homemade ice cream, but I’m not sure if it’s Mother’s usual one or another one she thought she might try. I’m thinking she had the usual one memorized, but then again maybe she wrote it down for someone else.