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.

I have been thinking about the movie Five Graves to Cairo lately. Tonight I turned on the TV to Turner Classic Movies and there it was, starting. I called Der Bingle and told him and then I started to watch. I thought, “Oh, heck, I’ll just lie down and turn the light off and watch . . . “; I fell asleep. I woke up when the clock out here chimed 12, which meant it was 11 since it has gotten out of synch and I am thinking that Daylight Savings Time is coming up anyway. For Heavens Sake, this is disheartening.

Then I remembered I hadn’t taken my medicine and so I did; Sydney wanted to go out and he got the whiff of a strange animal and after he came back in, he determined he just HAD to go back out. He wandered around forever and just as I was ready to march out and grab him, the neighbor’s security light went off and I didn’t have the heart to trigger it back on.  Finally he showed up and I sat down to finish this post and now I hear him nuzzling a treat out of a bag.

Oh, Jeez, it was one of the pouches with the resealable opening and he was rapidly eating into the seal . . . and beyond. He is supposed to be an Australian Shepherd – they obey the rules. They insist on rules; Miss Alice used to turn herself in when she broke one. And he’s doing this.

He probably heard me snoring during Five Graves to Cairo and figured if I was that old, he must be getting up there and could start tweaking the protocols.

We stare at each other and I have a feeling we are thinking the same thing because he is rolling his eyes at me and dog sighing.

My son wears glasses and his insurance covers Wal-Mart; so he ordered a pair from there. The promised delivery date was between 7 – 10 days.  That was on February 8th. When Alison checked today I was in the store and when I met her at the front door, she told me they still weren’t in. I said, “I’ll be back.”

I went into the eye place part of the store and inquired about putting a trace on the glasses. A very nice lady said she was already doing that per Alison’s asking if they were in. She could tell me they had been “farmed out” by the first lab. I asked if I could stand there and see what had happened to them and she politely told me it would take some time, so I asked for a copy of the prescription.

She couldn’t give me that because the doctor was not in and would not be until Wednesday. And I asked, “Don’t you have it on the computer?” She went to see if there was a copy on file; there was not; it was just on the computer . . . and Wal-Mart policy is it could only be sent to another Wal-Mart.

I could take the delay; I could take the lack of information about the delay; I found the inability to give us a copy of the prescription before Thursday unacceptable. And I took her so, adding that I realized it was not her fault. I was calm, but definite. She promised to see what the problem had been.

Later, she called and said she had contacted the doctor and he had called the other doctor who was on duty to write the prescription for glasses out so we could have it.

She went the extra mile . . . which meant she marched to the drummer of good service and not to the dictates of the Arkansas Empire.

US 6 – The Grand Army of the Republic Highway – runs coast to coast and here in Indiana, in Northeastern Indiana, it is a weather dividing line. The East Noble School Corporation straddles it and so, with rain to the south and sleet and snow right here a few blocks south of US 6 and just snow to the north, conditions are, as they say, variable. And it is line of variability that is giving East Noble a two-hour delay this morning. Most school systems are going because they have either rain or snow; our system is bisected by the dreaded “mixture” line and that is good news for Summer.

When she awoke, her mother told her of the delay and she exclaimed, “Why didn’t you wake me up and tell me so I could enjoy it more?” Alison thought this was funny, but, to me, it was perfectly understandable. It is called prolonging the savor – or something like that. Probably goes along with the hitting your head because when you stop it feels so good syndrome.