random thoughts – Day 2,306 (Wednesday) – shopping

The weather pendulum has swung back to the warmer side of things after a couple cooler days. Mom and I went to the air-conditioned comfort of the duchy of Kohls in the kingdom of retail. My list was short – look for outdoor décor and sneakers on clearance.

Bird for the yard.

The odds were in my favor, the yard décor curse has been broken,  and I found a figurine that I liked (a bird). It was less successful in the shoe department and the other departments I breezed through. Mom didn’t find anything she wanted to buy.

Our next stop before heading home was a consignment store we both like. There were two racks of clearance clothes in the sidewalk. The pants I liked didn’t fit right, but I found a raincoat for $2 and a blue full-length gown, brand new with tags, for $1. The gown has perfect seaming to easily be taken apart and turned into a dance skirt and a top. There was another clearance rack inside and I got several items to use for head wraps, plus a pair of like-new Skechers sneakers for $10 in the not clearance stuff. Once again, Mom found nothing to buy. Usually, the roles are reversed and I’m the one leaving empty-handed.

random thoughts – Day 2,305 (Tuesday) – dark dancing

Tuesday brought rain, chill, and dance day. The ride to dance faced a traffic jam within minutes of hitting Route 2. Luckily, the backup was near the exit I had planned to take and I was able to get out of the mess.

Dimly lit dance day.

At our practice hall, there was a sensor of some sort beeping. It was ongoing and regular, like a slow metronome. And there was no electricity. Despite the many windows on three sides of the hall, the cloudy dreary day meant a dimly lit space. 

Someone had our music on their fully charged phone and someone else had a really cool speaker in their dance bag, so we chose to proceed. There were jokes about dancing in the dark.

Most of us know the barre, center work, and choreography by heart or close enough to get through it, but today we learned something new. Specifically, balancing is a bit harder in the semi-dark. The little speaker, which was actually a shower speaker, had great volume and colored LED lights and now we all want one. There is one in my Amazon cart right now.

We think Mrs. Rice would have been proud of us for not wimping out due to a tiny obstacle like the absence of electricity and the presence of a shrill beep. If it hadn’t been raining, we might have even danced outside under the pavilion, just like a core cluster of the group did throughout the pandemic (even in the winter). We are hardy stock.

random thoughts – Day 2,304 (Monday) – reading, walking, and thinking

The weather was cooler today and it was a relief. There were cool breezes flowing into the house. The air and all the backyard trees reminded me of my family’s vacation camping trips in Maine when I was a kid.

Hitting the southern Maine coastal area and living in a cloth house was a change of pace from our life in a proper building. Not completely, though. We sometimes got a site with electricity and I think at least once we brought a portable TV and electric frying pan in addition to the usual outdoor living and cooking gear. I have a memory of sitting outside our tent with a campfire and watching a TV set on the picnic table. Or maybe I dreamt the part about the TV. I’ll need to check with Mom and Sis.

The house held to the pattern of the heat wave. Even with the windows open wide to benefit from the breezes, the house held steady at four to five degrees warmer inside than out.

It was a quiet day, which is the current norm. There was reading on the couch – Mockingjay (the final book of The Hunger Games) was started yesterday and will be done by bedtime tonight. There was cooking and eating. 

Another walk,
another bunny sighting.

During the evening walk, there was the spotting of a brown bunny in a yard and one of the neighborhood outdoor cats in the street. The turkeys are still pretty scarce. The several usual neighborhood cats have been scarce and Mom and I wondered last week if something had happened to them, but the white and tortoise one was out this evening. 

I’ve been noticing people’s plantings, yard décor, and exterior lighting in search of ideas for my own house. Someone one street over has a large planter that I like in the form of a fish on its back with its mouth open to the sky. It reminds me of a much smaller similar matched set I had that I left behind in Tennessee to save space during the move, thinking I could find them again. Not the case. There have been years of regret over my abandoned yard décor which included a bird, two fish, a Buddha head, and a heart. 

Some very poor choices have been made during moves, mostly because I stupidly thought I could replace items as easily as I found them in the big box stores the first time. I even asked AI why yard décor is so frigging ugly and stupid since 2016 or so and got a very long answer about mass production and the prevalence of cookie cutter houses and people wanting to show their personality through yard décor. Ok, cool. I get the philosophy of yard decor. But why are the only things available gnomes, frogs in yoga poses, toadstools, and metal solar light flowers that look like a bad drug trip (and cost a fortune)?

random thoughts – Day 2,303 (Sunday) – floating

Today was dedicated to floating. My friends live down the road from a lake and this afternoon the three of us gathered up the floats and headed for the water. The lake was surprisingly quiet for a summer Sunday/holiday weekend. Over the course of our time on the water, there was a pontoon boat out, a jet ski, a couple paddle boards, a kayak and a canoe, a sailboat, and us with our inflatable floats in a small inlet down a couple stone steps from a small beach area.

To the lake!

The quiet was perfect. We bobbed in the water for about 90 minutes, drifting this way and that in a small area. A guy and his young daughter were there when we arrived, and there was adult conversation about the various houses on the lake while the girl used her swim mask to explore the lake floor.  

Later, a couple arrived with their two very well behaved dogs and the humans had a chat with my friends about their respective homes, chickens, goats, and the local bear. 

The dogs had different approaches to the water. The Jack Russell Terrier spent all his time swimming to fetch a ball, return it to the beach, shake himself off, stand there admiring his prize, then letting the humans know he was ready for another toss. The companion dog, a pale yellow larger dog of unnamed breed, gingerly approached the water and took a very long to time to enter it while her make human petted her head and encouraged her to come have fun. Then she walked around a bit in it before she was done.

Time was gooey. We weren't on a schedule, so we didn't need to be mindful of it. It was relaxing floating on the water, which felt smooth and silky. A perfect Sunday, really.

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.