Things I have been doing instead of updating my journal:
Planting flowers. We hired (well, Mr. Karen hired after we talked about it) a landscaping firm to take some scraggly bushes out and put sod in one place and ground cover in a another but that still left a bare patch of dirt in front of the house, so we put some annuals in until we decide on a more permanent solution. We got a whole flat of monkey flowers, a mix of white and yellow and orange and deep pink, some fuchsia hybrids (the pink and purple ones are named Marcia and the pink and white ones are called Betty), a few apricot begonias.
Reading. As evidenced by my book log, my appetite for vampire fiction continues, but I’ve mixed in a few non-paranormal books, too. I’m still waiting for my turn with the library’s copy of Definitely Dead, the latest in the Sookie Stackhouse series. The person who has it now was supposed to bring it back by May 25th, but he or she has not. And there are four of us on the request list for it. How rude. The fact that the person who has it cannot renew it and thus is incurring a fine of ten cents a day (up to a maximum of $5.00) is not making me feel better. When I am queen of the universe, overdue fines will be more if people are waiting for a book, something like normal fine times the number of people on the request list plus a dollar. As much time as I’ve spent thinking about this (I now have my 14-digit library card barcode number memorized I’ve been checking in so frequently) I probably should have just bought my own copy–$14 something for the hardcover at Amazon is not that much, and I could have already read it and been participating in one or more of the three Yahoo groups I found which discuss Sookie’s world.
Quilting and knitting. But not enough to have any pictures to show for it. Soon. Maybe.
Eating my own weight in potato salad. On Sunday, Mr. and I went to Denise’s BBQ and because we were having unseasonably warm weather here it was really too hot (at least for a delicate flower such as myself) to do much but sit quietly and eat and drink in between trips to stand in the wading pool. New yummy food items kept showing up as more guests arrived throughout the afternoon and if I hadn’t sampled them all I would have missed the best potato salad ever. I’m pretty sure it had pickles in it–I would have asked for the recipe but I think it’s better if I don’t know, since I really need to get back on the losing track especially now that it’s shorts season.
Wandering around my house in the middle of the night. Last Saturday I was asleep, earplugs in as usual, when a very insistent noise invaded my head. It took a bit of time for me to realize that I was not dreaming the noise and then a little more time to realize that the noise was not a neighbor’s car alarm (not that most of our neighbors have car alarms) and then still more time to reject the malfunctioning alarm clock theory my brain came up with next and then just a bit more time to finally come to the conclusion that that’s what the smoke alarm sounds like. Yet even then I didn’t think “fire!”–I was just confused and annoyed–why all the noise interrupting my sleep? I got up and followed Mr. Karen downstairs to check things out. We found nothing amiss and smelled no smoke and saw no sparks or flames and the oven was off and the iron and toaster unplugged. We shared a moment of concern when we heard an odd noise that might have been crackling wires, but we figured out that it was a grate rattling as the air conditioning worked almost as quickly as we heard it, so we went back to bed. I felt more scared then. What if there had been a fire? Would those seconds it took me to realize what the noise was and get up prove to be the difference between escaping and being trapped? Why didn’t I think to check the doors before I opened them? What if there really was a problem and we’d missed it in our tired state?
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