I am thinking of napping, even though it is early in the morning. I think it is pressure around my eyes – sinus maybe. I have already worked the Sudoku, checked the headlines, weather and  my email. Oh, the glossy ads in the Sunday paper? I don’t know . . . I think I’ll pass them by.

While I decide whether to nap or look for the Vicks inhaler and aspirin, I’m multi-tasking by thinking about Thanksgiving. It’s coming up. Our family is small. Alison is working. We kind of feast everyday. I am considering making a Countdown to Thanksgiving calendar that requires preparing our home so we wouldn’t be embarrassed (too much) if our hard-working ancestors showed up.

I think we could spiff up the place since we will be sitting here with our faces in turkey and mashed potatoes (homemade) because people bobbed across the Atlantic in little boats, built houses, plowed fields, fought wars. Should their spirits wander in here and gasp . . . for these bozos?

Aha! I was right; we were inundated with Trick or Treaters on Kendallville’s Friday night scheduled “Halloween”. Alison ran out of candy and, believe me, that is saying something. One little visitor at the end reached two hands into the cauldron and pulled out two fistfuls of candy. Robert, Alison and the other kids were SHOCKED. I took pictures, but was absent when the little outlaw struck so we have no wanted poster.

But, as I said, I do have other pictures. ( I went through the gallery picture by picture and indicated the ones to show . . . and somehow not everything worked out that way. I am not going to do it again. I’m just not.)

I pulled lots of stuff out of a walk-in closet yesterday and threw away a lot, set some aside for Goodwill and – suspend belief – did some organizing. I did other stuff too. I was so pleased with myself. Smug. Now today, I didn’t too much, but it’s probably for the best because too much smugness can annoy people. (Like I care . . . hahahahahahahaha.) Okay, a little silliness here.

I’m going to be Kindling for a while and then head off to bed. I need to brace myself for tomorrow because Kendallville is having Halloween Trick or Treating that night. Yes, tomorrow night. I am pushing the job of sitting on the front steps handing out candy from a plastic cauldron to someone else . . . maybe the guy with a cast. He’s a soft touch, though, and we may have to practice with him on candy handout rationing.

Oh, by the way, East Noble has scheduled Friday and Monday as Fall Break and I will have my live-in hooligans here for the whole Halloween week-end. Dastardly school! Fortunately, Summer is in need of earning some money and has asked about jobs three times already. Soooo, maybe I can get some more stuff done without risking a spike in my smugness. Oh, yes, I must bend over my cauldron – not the candy one – and see what I can cook up for her.

I can feel my eyes getting shifty and my lips tightening into a wicked grin. My hands! They are having trouble typing . . . They want to come together and twist around each other. Say, where’s that conniving pre-cackle coming from?

For a period of time I will just write of trivial things. There is no purpose in doing so, other than in marking one day from another. And then I will take spells when I will write more emotionally. I suppose the purpose in that is just actually writing it down for me – making myself find words for it. And maybe so that someday someone will know that I wasn’t all two-dimensional – a pancake, as a friend once described it. I may not have been a great 3-D person, but that I have thought about things, regretted things and  understand that I have wrestled with my flaws – am sorry for them.

So what now? A litany of sad thoughts? The memories I keep in a bottle in the closet as if they were immortal fireflies? No. No. I don’t want to do that.

But I don’t have any AmeliaJake jokies today. Nothing particularly odd happened – no paint cans tipping over – although when I put the lid back on and gave it a tap with the hammer, little droplets flew out onto my glasses and cheek. I was actually in a position where little miss who has worn glasses for half a century and claims she can see through major smears finally decided on her own she should actually clean them. Der Bingle will appreciate that; he started wearing glasses as an adult and I think he’s a sissy for cleaning his glasses frequently. He can’t understand my not cleaning mine.

When he first got glasses, he actually bought cleaning cloths for them! I was so stunned . . . my gosh, didn’t the man have a shirt tail handy?  Wasn’t his breath capable of making a light fog on the lens? Ah, well.

I’ve been thinking about my parents and their being dead. And other things. Lots of “what if’s” and other laments. I believe I’ve been thinking more about the repercussions of being a jerk more than I usually do. No rationalizing; just the facts, ma’am.

It’s painful. When my granddaughter got her first B+, she lay down on the floor and sobbed; her grandpa lay down beside her and told her it was all right. I think I want to lie on the floor for awhile; I don’t think it will ever be all right, yet I’m betting I’ll eventually get up.

I am adapting; it is not easy. New jeans style from CJ Banks. Actually, I thought my jeans genes were just fine, but no, the designers had to do a little therapy. More Spandex.

First I thought they had just changed the cut – offerring four styles with MODERATELY CURVY on one end of the spectrum and CITY on the other. I didn’t look at the composition of the fabric –  I mean denim is denim. Well, no. My trusty almost entirely cotton jeans now are being produced with scads of spandex. I ordered a couple of new pair this week and when I looked at them I thought, “What is this?” But not that calmly.

I decided I needed to find a new manufacturer and looked on the Internet, only to find out that most of the plus size petites are now spandex-ized. Anyway, I put the new jeans on and they didn’t feel too bad. And people said they looked good on me. So, okay,  maybe I can adjust.

Only there’s this thing: the old jeans stretch and stay stretched. Open the waist button and they fall down. The new ones stretch out and stretch back in as you bend, but if you open the waist, they want to slowly retract to their packaged-size. It is an odd sensation.

I wonder if this is like women going from corsets to girdles . . . and to control top pantyhose. But now to denim spandex? Oh, I’m on the old lady end of the spectrum.

Yesterday Summer and I painted the garage door and today I painted both sides of the vestibule storm door and  one side of the big door. Not that this is a big deal, but it is for AmeliaJake. Now, though, I’ve kind of got the urge to paint my way through the house – walls, trim, all rooms . . . the same color. I need to distract myself before I paint Shane.

JUST KIDDING, QUENTIN.

I did read up on Wagner power painters and apparently they clog a lot and take an awful lot of cleaning afterward. Sigh . . . it could have been so cool.

Okay, so this is what happens when you start going through old boxes. This is AmeliaJake at about Summer’s age. She had a nifty response: “You have a funny-looking face. Did anyone ever tell you that. You don’t look like a girl – too much testosterone.”

For a couple of days I’ve been doing hands-on, arms-engaged, legs-revved up chores on two different floors. Yes, I could have said stairs. I want to go back and revise the first sentence to eliminate the unintentional rhyme, but somehow it has put a thought in my head: Back off the keyboard, sister, or your fingers get it. It’s too early to argue, and I am too sore and stiff. Old muscles, dontcha know? I’m waiting for the aspirin to kick in.

Not that I’m not glad it’s morning – officially by the clock that says seven in the dark. I was glad to really wake up from my dream of trusted people terrorizing me. I “woke” once during the dream, but I was still dreaming and when things continued as they had been, I held my head and was terribly distraught. Sometime later I did awaken, but I didn’t trust it for the first few seconds.

Then I was relieved, greatly so; but I am stiff and sore. That I can handle . . . well, Bayer and I can handle.

Cameron takes the trash out on Wednesday night – unless Monday is a holiday and then he takes it out Thursday night. Of course, Tuesday and Wednesday could be holidays as well, but it’s not as common as the Official Government Mondays. Not that this has any bearing on my point, other than last night was Wednesday.

Cameron came up to me out of the blue – well, black night – and said, “I thought someone stole the garbage cans.” Not what you would expect to hear, especially when you know said cans are full of garbage. This is what happened:

I abhor putting out trash that isn’t in the cans; I stomp it if I have to. I climb up on a stepladder and step onto a piece of cardboard I have placed at the top of the mound of air-filled trash bags. And the level goes down by about a third; it used to be a half but my ranting has earned a bit of improvement, although the people with whom I live are recidivists. Big old frustrating recidivists!

Yesterday it was raining so I did not brace the cans against the outer garage wall; I wheeled them inside the garage where I stomped. I did not notice the bulb was kaput on the garage ceiling. The cans are dark; the garage was dark; the space where they usually  sit was empty . . .  Oh, my gosh, someone stole our garbage cans!

But then he found them and that’s all she wrote.