random thoughts – Day 2,302 (Saturday) – independent reading

It has been such a weird week that I didn’t even know what day it was today. I knew it was July 4, but I kept thinking it was Sunday instead of Saturday. I think the heat this week fried my brain. The house has offered little to no relief from the heat and held steady at four to five degrees hotter inside than outside for the past four days. It hasn't seemed to help lowering shades and closing curtains against the sun. I’m apparently living in a sauna.

Earlier tonight (hours ago!), the outside temperature dropped to a comfortable 73 degrees with a steady breeze that seemed to come from the precise direction to avoid every one of my windows. As a result, several hours later, the thermostat is still showing the temperature as 83 degrees inside as the temperature continues to drop outside. I don’t understand.

New best friend.

It may have been Independence Day with lots of activities happening, but, with the exception of a walk around 6:00, I stayed home all day inside the slow cooker. The cookout I was invited to had already been moved to Sunday due to the weather and I just couldn’t justify going alone to a parade or any other celebration full of families, couples, friend groups, i.e. crowds of people who are not solitary singletons in a long-term committed love-hate relationship with their independent lifestyle. I stayed home, laid out on the couch under my new best friend the ceiling fan, ice water nearby, and read. 

I finished The Hunger Games last night and started Catching Fire this morning. I read The Hunger Games when it first came out and didn’t remember any of it. The neighborhood little library had the entire trilogy so I snatched them all a few days ago with the intention of plowing through them quickly so I can put them back for someone else. So far, so good and I’m halfway through the second book.

The frequent library book exchanges and laying on the couch sweating and reading has sent me back to the summers when I was nine and ten years old, before we moved across town. There were no girls my age on our dead-end street and the several boys on the street were busy hanging around with my brother and ignoring me (unless they were torturing me), so books filled the gaping social hole in my life. The early social isolation training came in handy during the pandemic and again in what are turning out to be my recluse years. I’m now in a contest with myself to see how many books I can read this year.

Friends and family on Goodreads, who have jobs and spouses, have been reading impressive numbers of books the past several years and I, without any such real-world distractions and impositions on my time, have read a mere sliver of a fraction of some of their totals. It’s time for me to stop wasting so much time on social media, LinkedIn, and streaming channels. Social media stresses me out, there is nothing I want to watch on cable, Netflix, or Prime, and I’ve accepted the impossible reality of the job market for laid-off people my age and abandoned the search, so it’s time to shift gears. It’s books. For now, anyway.  I shift gears a lot, and in a couple weeks may suddenly be determined to jump out of a plane or weave baskets or start frequenting a rage room to smash stuff or something. We’ll see.

random thoughts – Day 2,301 (Friday) – melting and eating

Day three of hot and steamy conditions. Day three of chugging water, sitting quietly while reading a book and sweating. I feel like I am melting.

Crustless cheesy quiche.

During the cooler part of the morning, a very cheesy crustless quiche was baked. It was loaded with onion, broccoli, spinach, mushroom, and an ungodly amount of cottage cheese, provolone, and Italian cheese blend. It was hearty and satisfying and now there are several future meals I won’t have to think too hard about.

Later in the day, during the evening feeding, there was no desire to repeat the breakfast food or the pizza slices that have been on repeat for several days. I was suddenly wanting gazpacho, but lacked a significant amount of the ingredients in the slew of recipes found online.

The focus shifted to using the recently bought green beans and a recipe was found for a green bean salad. Modifications were made and it became a green bean and broccoli salad. It was pretty good, but will likely be better tomorrow after the flavors meld overnight.

Neighborhood bunnies!

There was a walk in the evening which featured two bunnies in a yard two streets over. There was a breeze and it felt amazing. Unfortunately, the beautiful evening breeze was blowing from a direction in which there are no windows on my house to benefit from the comfort. It was cooler outside the house than in it, where the temperature has hovered around 87 degrees each day. Oy. Too bad the house doesn’t hold heat like this in the winter.

random thoughts – Day 2,300 (Thursday) – fern fun

There was a kitchen tidy-up this morning and a couple containers were brought out to the recycle bin. They had been rinsed last night and set to dry and were ready for the next stop. Standing on the back door landing shortly after 10 a.m. I realized it wasn’t as hot as I had imagined it to be and the back of the house was still in deep morning shade. The oil tank enclosure idea had baked sufficiently and the paint was bought days ago, so I grabbed my yard work shoes and gloves and made for the yard.

Giant back yard ferns.

Something had trampled some of the giant ferns in the clump near the shed and they were laying sideways along the ground, making it easy to choose some for the project. Three large fronds were clipped and brought over by the oil tank enclosure with the spray paint cans.

Fern fronds were held against the sides of the enclosure with one gloved hand and outlined with either moss or fossil colored spray paint with the other hand. There was spraying, and stepping back to decide where to put the next outline and pretty soon it was done. It was peaceful, meditative work, and based on the absence of new paint on my sneakers, less messy than when I used a similar process on a deck umbrella a bunch of years ago. Maybe I’m getting better at paint control.

Done!

By 11:15, and before it became hella-hot, I was done and had returned to the confines of the house to resume chugging water. And just like that, a project was knocked off the house to-do list. The total cost was $26 and around two hours. It was enjoyable enough that I may start painting the shed right away. I have a picture of the siding color chip and can probably get paint in a close enough color to get a jump on it soon instead of waiting to take a siding scrap to the store.

Working on the shed will keep my mind off all the planting that it would be dumb to do before the siding is installed because it would be trampled. The shed will involve some scraping and then brush work, and maybe a spray paint layer afterwards if I’m feeling extra about it and recreate the fern effect done on the oil tank enclosure. We’ll see.

random thoughts – Day 2,299 (Wednesday) – hotness

As promised and foretold in an endless stream of media accounts declaring the heat advisory and scorching temperatures across the country, it was hot.

Mom and I went shopping this morning. The first stop was Ollie’s Bargain Outlet for a couple things. I looked at sheets, but the only 100% cotton ones didn’t have a deep enough pocket for my mattress. Mom had a mission which was fulfilled.

The other stop was a few doors down at Market Basket, where we threw ourselves into the crowd. Shopping carts were scarce and store clerks were wrangling them as best they could, which included taking them from customers in the parking lot as soon as they were emptied. 

I had just grocery shopped a couple days ago and was along mostly for the company and the cheese ends usually available near the deli. There were no cheese ends today so I wandered around the store, dodging the many shoppers who had the glazed look seen at any mall right before Christmas. The best part of the trip was that the stores were air conditioned.

The temperature was in the 90s outside, and 85 in my house despite my efforts to block the sun from entering. It was humid and there was no breeze, except for the living room ceiling fan which I sat under all afternoon, drinking endless glasses of ice water and reading a book

The bedroom is currently closed off with the window A/C unit chilling the space before bed. I am most definitely missing the central A/C in the Lowell house. One heat advisory day down, three more to go. I used to think there is no such thing as too hot, but I am ready to reconsider that position.

random thoughts – Day 2,298 (Tuesday) – dancing it out

Dancing the summer at Saima.

It was week two of my summer trip down Denishawn memory lane. Today, there were ten of us at Saima Park, executing the barre and center of the floor routines, and then dancing the memories. We were able to run some of the big group dances with moving parts in the form of a sections with a soloist, duos, trios, and quartets. We aren’t prepping for a show or anything stressful, so it’s pure fun. 

It was fun, and a healthier way to spend my one-year anniversary of being laid off than sitting at home simmering in an unemployed stew of if only and what if. It’s time to move on in every way possible, and for now that means dancing it out and shaking it off.

Last week, I was sore for several days after class, but it felt good. Today I’m already feeling it in my legs and glutes. Maybe it’s from what feels like a million plies and I’ll take it. In the weird way my body handles environmental temperature, my arms were cool to the touch and my feet were cold while my head and torso were sweating. So weird. But I sometimes get chills when I eat spicy food, so I’ve given up trying to comprehend.

It rained while we were dancing, and when I got home, the evening air was deliciously cool and breezy. The shades had been lowered against the sun early in the day, but tonight they were raised for the evening air to blow through the house. Of course, all good things must come to and end, and the breezes stopped shortly before a skunk sprayed nearby, and the fragrance is hanging in the air and my nostrils and the back of my throat. It must be tome to close up the fortress again. 

Gonna get hot, hot, hot.

From Wednesday morning until Saturday night, we are under an excessive heat warning, so the next several days should be fun to navigate while it is hot, hot, hot. Between the heat and it being a holiday and popular vacation week, the beaches will likely be packed, so I won’t set my hopes on being there. It might be a good time to go to the movies and every grocery and retail store in the region, spots where I generally tend to be chilly. I can test the spicy food and chills situation, too.

random thoughts – Day 2,297 (Monday) – adulting

Somehow, the end of the month snuck up on me and there were only two days left to get my car inspection done. Once upon a time, there was a strategy for this, which was to schedule an oil change in June and have the sticker done then, too. Other times, the “strategy” was shrieking, “crap, it’s the 30^th” and logging off the work computer to drive two streets over to Hank’s Garage for the task.

This year it’s all different with no job to be working at from home during the week, no inspection station spitting distance from home, and not much urgency for life maintenance tasks because all the days are mostly empty and things can easily be delayed until tomorrow.

Anyway. This morning, I was checking the day planner I often forget to consult and saw “car inspection” on this week’s to-do list, having been carried over from last week’s list. The state website listed  three or four inspections stations in town, with two of them about a mile away down the street. The closest location was the Chevy-Jeep-Dodge dealership so I went there first. Unfortunately, it was 11:45 and the inspection guy was in the middle of an inspection and then was going to lunch until 1:00. I was invited to wait there for an hour and be the first car after lunch, but I declined (and also marveled about the one-hour lunch, because for nine years it was a measly 30 minute lunch break at the bank).

First in the queue.

I drove down the street to the other inspection station which was a large brick complex with a tow yard, auto repair bays, and activity in the lot with flatbeds, tow trucks, delivery vehicles from parts providers, and those of us waiting for inspections. I was the third car in the inspection line. The A/C was on, the radio was playing, and my phone was put to use with a game for the wait. It was about 35 minutes later when my car was collected by the mechanic and I was invited to wait in the office.

When my car was put into the inspection bay there were three cars in the queue outside (again). The office A/C was running on the Arctic setting and I was freezing, but standing in the asphalt parking lot in the heat felt kind of weird and dumb. Around 1:00, my car was brought back out to the lot and I was on my way. There were now four cars in the permanent inspection queue on the next to the last day for June inspections but mine was done with a day to spare and I was feeling pleased.

After the triumph of the annual inspection, I went to Dollar Tree for tin foil, but it’s dumb to buy just one item there so I browsed the whole store and also got a can of tuna, a can of mandarin oranges, a bag of coffee. News flash -- school ended in my town last Wednesday, and the back to school displays are being installed at Dollar Tree now. Basically, parents, teachers, and students had about five minutes to shake off school before having to think about the upcoming school year. That is cruel.

The shopping was marred by some old dude wandering the aisles and whistling random warbling notes and humming random noises. He seemed to be one aisle away from me no matter where I was, until he ended up two people behind me in the very long checkout line at the one cashier, still whistling. I don't know why whistling grates on my nerves like it does, but I was tempted to drop my items and flee the store to get away from it. 

I chose to be a responsible shopper, completed my transaction and declared the adulting tasks done for the day. And the month. Until I begin again with the bill paying and chores and to-do lists for July. Adulting is like being on a never ending gerbil wheel.

random thoughts – Day 2,296 (Sunday) – years ago on june 28

Oceanside Pier,
Oceanside, California, 6-28-2012.

On this date in 2012 (June 28) I had recently arrived in California from Tennessee and hanging out with two of my cousins who had fled New England for better weather and a different lifestyle.  I had fled New England for Tennessee after one too many harsh winters, then fled Tennessee temporarily for a vacation with a change of scenery. 

During my Cali vacation, I stayed at the home of one cousin for half the week, then went to the other cousin’s home for the rest of the week. It was fun, even though the weather was the midst of the “June gloom” with cloud cover, chilly temperatures, and fog.

On June 28^th, a cousin and I had been to a very fancy and beautiful gym in Carlsbad that put to shame any I had ever belonged to. Later that day, we went to Oceanside Pier. During the course of the week, both cousins and their menfolk and I went to a concert at the San Diego County Fair, visited breweries, and rode a train from Carlsbad to San Diego to eat dinner. 

During the week, I also enjoyed a yoga class taught by one of my Cali cousins, and many other fun things that were not in my usual Tennessee lifestyle. My cousins were great hosts and made it a great vacation for me with a blend of touristy things and cool places where the locals eat and socialize.

Long Sands Beach,
York, Maine, 6-28-2013.

Seeing the photo of Oceanside Pier in Facebook memories today sent me back to that fun vacation week along the Pacific Ocean. The same memories feature for today included a photo from a vacation exactly one year later in York Beach, Maine. that is the year when Mom, my sister, and I rented a house one block from the beach for a week. 

In York Beach, we rode trolleys, went to the beach, walked my dogs, and ate seafood and ice cream. York Beach was so welcoming, the colorful seaweed even coordinated with my sneakers during a morning walk with the dogs. Unlike the humans and all the other dogs on the beach in the early mornings, my dogs were not fans of the beach.

Beach towns are fun. For various reasons, in recent years I have failed to get myself to a nearby beach. This needs to be corrected this summer.