The shift monitoring the Houston Chronicle power reports noted that someone had power on Quentin’s street. We are keeping our fingers crossed.

We have been cleaning and mowing and washing and steam cleaning and  . . .gasp . . . gasp . . . cooking because we simply cannot keep monitoring the internet for signs of electricity at Quentin’s and any good news in general. So we are keeping busy . . . so we don’t lose our collective peanut butter mind! Well, back to the rugs and steam cleaner.

Aha, I have found that CenterPoint Energy in Houston is showing maps of the outage areas with restored sections in green. So, I have a Quentin vigil. But is there someone at the desk live updating areas or are they only going to issue one or two updates a day.

Ack, I went to their actual site and see the next update is planned for noon. I think they should be on the phone with me all the time, telling me exactly what they are doing to get Q back online. That’s how I am . . .Are you there yet? There yet? There yet?

Oh. I didn’t publish this when I thought I did. Okay. Well, anyway, I checked the CenterPoint site and 2pm EDT, the company updated the report. Quentin has no power and it looked as if more power had actually gone off in his area.

Yes, I want to rant, but I am not going to do so here. I am going to set a good example for Summer – but she won’t know it because not ranting is not noticeable. This is really hard for me. I don’t know which wants to move more – my fingers or my mouth. It is a good thing I don’t have smiting power.

I just heard from the Q and he has no power and was up most of the night. He sounded tired. I thought I would write more . . . but I just want things to be all right.

Your grandmother is thinking of you.

Last night I watched a show on the Animal Planet about venom and the creatures that have it – the deadliest ones, based on potency, habitat, aggression level, amout of venom delivered per bite and something else I have forgotten.

It crossed my mind I would have bad dreams. (I actually pulled an afghan over my head when the cobra came on.) I did have dreams, but they had nothing to do with snakes. I dreamed my hair was filthy and we had to be on a bus to an amusement park and I was riding a bike to downtown Chicago to have my hair cut and wound up barefoot in the mall. Back at home, I could find no nice clothes to wear and my hair got dirtier and dirtier, straggly and stringy and packed with grease.

Fortunately, I did not dream of the “You Asked For It” episode we saw –  decades ago  – in which an Indian woman kissed a cobra on the head three times. Her sisters had died attempting it. That was back in the days when home videos (movies) were not featured on TV. We saw it on one program and then it was over and I don’t think we saw it again. But we remembered it, oh yeah.

Now I think it is on YouTube * (narrated in what sounds like Russian), but that is old hat – there is a video of a man who kissed a cobra 51 times.

*This could be one similar to the one we saw.

Alison and I moved two sofas today; Robert watched . . . because he has that broken, shattered, fused “surgified” leg. We even had to move him twice, by the way. One sofa was ditched – the one in the den; another was moved from living room to den. We had to move a lot of clutter to accomplish the job. I am definitely considering becoming a minimalist . . . Although whenever I walk into a house as neat as a model home, I think, “Where are your things!?”

I don’t know what those people think when they come into my home and see all my clutter and special things lying around – oh, like a part of a brick from the high school my grandmother graduated from in 1900, a Christmas moose I didn’t have the heart to put away, old greenish-blue glass insulators from another time, a straw hat hanging form the lock on a window.

I once was on the beach in San Diego and heard a middle-aged couple not far away talking about her mother’s home. The man said he had already targeted a bookcase that needed to be organized. Gosh, he’d be busy here.

On September 9, 1939, Kathryn and Emory were married in the parsonage in town. It was a Saturday night, and as Kathryn says, most people were in town anyway. They were going to be married at 6 pm, but Emory’s mother said to wait until 6:30 pm, because at that time, both hands of the clock would be on an upward journey.

Don’t look but I am posting because I want the telephone to ring and my daughter-in-law to be ready to be picked up. Her shift ends at 7:30 pm but she often has to stay because of charting and/or admissions. I was waiting to go get her . . . and waiting . . . I thought if I started posting, the phone would ring. Hey! It worked at the word “started”.

It’s mirrors, dontcha know.

Summer is like me; she procrastinates. She has a leaf project due tomorrow and was short a couple of leaves.  I remembered my father was at the fairgrounds with me about 12 years ago and remarked about the shagbark hickory trees there. He knew all the trees and bird songs and things about nature someone who grew up in a rural area would know. He was a boy in the 20’s, living in a county that bordered on the Wabash. So, this evening, when push came to shove, I saw my dad at the fairgrounds in my mind’s eye – perhaps in my heart – and took Summer to get a hickory leaf.