random thoughts – Day 1,330 – (Tuesday) – number one

I’ve known for weeks, months even, that today was election day. Today the city website was finally consulted for guidance and to kill time before going. The sample ballot for District 4 Precinct 4 was located and showed a few city roles and no ballot questions, which was a relief. The questions are usually killer. So wordy. So confusing. I was thrilled there were none this time.

While sipping coffee and watching the clock, I debated the whole going out to vote thing. The ballot was so minimal that I seriously considered skipping it. In the plus column was the satisfaction of fulfilling my civic duty. The minus column was dominated by laziness. 

I tooled around on the city website for close to a half-hour after the polling sites opened before finally guilting myself into going to vote and mobilizing to do so. If local people can care enough to run for local office I need to care enough to go vote, even if it's "just" a few city council school committee seats. Jacket – check. Keys – check. Wallet with license – check. Waze app set with directions – check.

According to the navigation program, it was a seven-minute ride from the house. Cross over this road, turn here, turn there, and suddenly, allegedly there. Except I was in a residential neighborhood on Homestead Road and Waze was informing me I had reached my destination. This was definitely not the elementary school on Enell Street, but that is what I get for entering the destination name instead of looking for the street address. But I noticed a cute little cape house for sale on the street and made a note to look it up.

This was the first time since abandoning Garmin, the clunky predecessor navigation system, that I ended up in the wrong place using navigation. Very unlike Waze, and being misdirected was definitely not an activity I wanted to deal with before the usual caffeine allotment, which was at home in the coffee pot on the warmer.

While driving through the neighborhood looking for the correct location, there was a challenge. There was no parking available on the street in front of the entrance to the polling site. I looped through the parking lot where all the marked spaces and several improvised places were occupied. While exiting the parking lot, I turned a corner and after a second or two, wondered why the parked cars were all facing the wrong way. Ummm…. nope. It took a second to register that I was going the wrong way down a one-way street. A u-urn got me re-routed and scored a spot on the street.

The polling site is the location for two districts/precincts to vote. Four or five people ahead of me were directed to a check-in table to the right and I was sent to the table nearest the entrance where I was the only person checking in.

After marking the ballot with the provided black felt tip pen, it was fed into the machine and the clerk said, “ok, it went to 001.” When I said, “what?” she said mine was the first ballot for my precinct. That was certainly not something I expected 45 minutes after the place had opened and I’ve never been the first person to vote. I laughed and said, “yay, I’m number one!” and we both dorky laughed and I left.

Supper.

After the unexpected thrill of casting the first ballot in my district and precinct it was just another day of reading and answering mails, reviewing things, making notes on things. Broccoli, mushroom, cheese quiche for lunch. Ham and barley soup with toast for supper. Just another day. Except I was crowned the first person to vote in my precinct without even trying. Why can’t being number one at something be this easy more often?  And now I also wonder how many people voted behind me. 

random thoughts – Day 1,329 – (Monday) – recurring

For chunks of my life, there have been recurring dreams. Not always full dreams, but very often the same or similar settings. Bridges. Water. Bridges over water.  Laurel Hill Cemetery (Fitchburg). A massive hotel. An airport. Stuck in traffic on the way to the airport. My locker in high school. The dorm in Boston where I spent one semester of my collegiate academic life. At home during a home invasion.

When I was a kid and in high school and college, there were dreams involving water. There were oceans, lakes, rivers, pools, and I was usually in the water, but not in a fun way. It was almost always under the water, being tumbled as if in a clothes dryer. Gasping for air. Panicking. Drowning. I would wake up with my heart pounding. As a result of the water dreams, I was not an awake life fan of swimming. Much later in adulthood, I read somewhere that dreams about drowning represented feeling overwhelmed in life. That certainly fit.

Dreams set in high school were the typical ones – I can’t find my locker or remember the combination. I show up at school on finals day and realize I forgot to attend class all semester. The finals dreams was said to represent feeling unprepared for whatever is going on in awake life. Yup.

The home invasion dreams were vivid. I was usually with the boyfriend at the  house we lived in together, and several armed, masked people were busting down the doors and entering the house with a lot of yelling and weapons raised. Once, the setting was the massive apartment in Worcester I moved into later. After that boyfriend and I broke up, those dreams stopped, and it was no surprise reading that home invasion dreams have to do with not feeling secure.

In the airport dreams, I would be in a taxi headed to the airport with time running out to make it in time. I’m ripping through my purse and baggage, frantically looking for my passport. Then I realize it’s still at home or I never even had one. One time, the passport was found, but at the airport the escalators and stair cases flipped like the slats on window blinds and formed a smooth metal pyramid that I had to scale to get to Paris. This dream category is still a mystery. 

This morning, right before it was time to get up, there was a weird dream in process. I was with several work colleagues staying in some unnamed town for some unknown reason. We were preparing for an excursion for which I was dressed inappropriately in a summer dress and sandals. I wanted shoes and socks because my feet were cold and a jacket from my room which was oddly allegedly my real room at the dorm in Boston. The dream building didn’t come anywhere close to matching the dorm building and the hallways and room numbers kept changing so I couldn’t find my room. My feet were freezing, I was waiting for elevators and jogging through a massive and constantly changing building and getting frustrated knowing that people were waiting for me.

When I woke up, my feet were also cold in awake life because during the night they got hot and I took off my socks. I felt confused from the dream, but it was time to wake up which also felt like a relief. I don’t remember reading an analysis for dreams with buildings that keep changing. My best uninformed, off the cuff, winging it guess is that it has to do with how life keeps changing. Or something.

Candle.

The slippers for my chilly feet usually live somewhere near the bed, wherever they are tossed the night before. One foot found its slipper right away, but the other one was off to the side. I bent forward to grab the slipper and the upper left of my forehead slammed into the corner of the small dresser that sits near the bed. Hard. It felt like here was a dent in my head, but there was no blood. Nothing like a blow to the head to kick off the week.

Downstairs, instead of immediately starting the coffee, an ice pack from the freezer was applied to my forehead. Looking in the mirror, it didn’t really look like much of anything. Coffee making was done with one hand while the ice pack was held to my head with the other. 

Now, 14 hours after the event, it’s me, a two-wick “Autumn Wreath” Yankee Candle, a cup of blueberry tea, and the lump on my forehead. The discoloration of a bruise is sure to come, and I’ll be wishing I still had bangs to hide it. If only smashing my head had been part of the sleeping dream instead of the waking reality.

random thoughts – Day 1,328 – (Sunday) – election season

With the election on Tuesday being a local level event, it feels like the most low-key, quiet election I can think of. It's quite nice. I've seen lots of social media drama about the Fitchburg election, but nothing about Lowell's.

The last local election had a steady stream of people stopping by the house to chat and leave a piece of literature. I felt popular and slightly important. This year, if  I didn't already know there was an election on Tuesday, I wouldn't be able to tell there is an election. I still haven’t seen a sample ballot and don’t know how many offices are even up for election.

There are signs downtown in storefront windows, but I don't know which ones apply to me and I'm usually walking too fast to pay attention to them anyway.  My neighborhood has hardly any yard signs, there have been only a handful of postcard mailers, and nobody has knocked on the door to attempt to woo my vote.

For local leadership we have a city council, mayor, and a city manager, but the voters don’t choose the mayor. The city council votes for the mayor from the council membership. That is a process I don’t understand, but I’ve met our current mayor several times at non-profit events and I really like him.

In any event, this year’s few political promise laden love letters are all from city council candidates. The council used to be entirely at-large representation, but now we have a mix of at-large and neighborhood councilors like most other places where I’ve lived and voted. Blue is the most popular color in this year's crop.

There was one mailer from the current city councilor for my district but I can’t tell if it’s just a “hey, remember me, I’m your councilor” reminder or if there is a challenger. If there is a challenger, I've gotta say, they're doing a really crappy job of making their interest known and the incumbent has my vote purely on familiarity and effort. 

Tuesday could be fun. It usually takes longer to drive, park, and get into the building where I vote than to actually cast the ballot. I don’t expect anything different this week, unless there are some of those lengthy and confusing questions that usually require a legal degree to understand. We’ll see.

random thoughts – Day 1,327 – (Saturday) – author talk

There were a few interesting events I saw listed for today. The problem was, I saw them earlier in the week and couldn't remember what they were. There seems to be a move away from using Facebook Events, which are easy to track and receive reminders about. The new tendency seems to be straight Facebook posts which can be liked, but after that, they are hard to find again later. Newspaper notices are even worse.

Today I remembered there was something to do with an author at LaLa Books but then I couldn’t remember if it was today or tomorrow. It took a bit of digging and hunting in Facebook and on the store's website to finally find the information and confirm the time. 

The event was an author’s talk and reading with Charlie Gargiulo, author of Legends of Little Canada at 1:30. I managed to hunt down the info in time to attend the event and arrived downtown with enough time to visit nearby Gallery Z which had many tempting artworks at affordable prices but for which I lack suitable wall space. 

Author Charlie Garguilo
at LaLa Books.

The talk was interesting and I’m glad I made it there. Written in the voice of an 11-year-old boy, the book is about the Little Canada neighborhood of Lowell and Charlie’s own experiences with the discomfort of moving to a new city at age 11 and after forming friendships in the neighborhood, seeing his friends disappear one by one as the families were displaced under urban revitalization. I can relate to the personal upheaval of moving at that age, and growing up in Fitchburg gives me an appreciation of the the ethnic neighborhoods of a mill town. 

I bought a copy of the book and was able to read the first two blissfully short chapters while standing in line to have the book signed by the author. There was once a time that I thought by this point in life I'd be reading from and signing my own books at events. I vaguely remember the me that used to have a spark and the occasional dream. 

A friend was also at the reading, and afterward we stopped in at Ayer Lofts Art Gallery. There was a show of pen and ink drawings of local architecture. The detail in this artist’s work is always impressive, and many of the pieces were tagged with the coveted red dot that signifies “sold.”

There was no solid plan after the author’s talk. Heck, there was no solid plan before the talk and it was a miracle I made it out of the house at all. It's easy to get sucked into Facebook, Netflix, and stupid phone games and suddenly hours have escaped.

While sitting in the car in the bank parking lot a block from the book store, options were considered. More downtown art galleries? St Vincent de Paul Thrift Shop? There is always Market Basket, one of my most popular default activities.

When I arrived at the street near home that leads to St. Vincent, the turn was taken. Along the way, I remembered it was open house Saturday at Western Avenue Studios. I was in the wrong lane to make the left turn, so I proceeded straight as recently planned and went to the thrift shop.

At St. Vincent’s, I bought a glass candle holder, a glass tree, and a metal heart painted in aqua that seemed like it would work in the kitchen. Luckily, there were no sweaters or clothing that caught my eye. Sadly, there were none of the elusive style of soup bowls I’ve been seeking for years. Leaving the shop, the decision was made to skip the studio open house, skip Market Basket, and just go home.

At the house, while scrolling through Facebook, I saw photos from one of the other events that flirted around the periphery of my memory this morning which never made it past “I think there was something happening this morning, but what?” It was a guided walk through a historic cemetery in Leominster, led by a local author and historian. Crap. 

random thoughts – Day 1,326 – (Friday) – tgif

There were the usual morning events except I switched up the Friday thing and instead of wearing a bank logo shirt so I could wear jeans, I wore regular office dress pants so I could wear a lightweight cashmere sweater. That was because I misread the weather forecast (a regular event), and thought it would be colder today. Instead of being like Wednesday’s cold, it was sunny and not as chilly, which I realized after I got downtown. 

Friday morning.

I left a little early to stop at the gas station for air in the tires. The dashboard display began glaring at me in red lighting on Wednesday when it got cold. The only remedy to this is more air.

Around the corner from home and on the way to work there is a Shell station with an air pump. The last time this station was visited for this purpose, there was a sign that the air machine was out of service. This morning the card reader wasn’t working and it was taking coins only. Another station further down the road allowed the tire mission to be completed.

A bit further down the road, I realized I had neglected to grab anything for lunch. Or breakfast. It wasn’t like I prepared it and left it on the counter, I hadn’t even thought about it. By the time I thought of it, I was closer to work than home and there would be no going back to correct the situation. There are options downtown, I’m a big girl, it would be okay.

The sun was shining and a breeze fluttered the tattered flag atop the now empty Lowell Five Bank building on John Street. The walk to the office from the garage was pleasant.

Once in the office, there was an idea to go to City Hall for the last day of early voting then grab something at Subway on the way back. Then I remembered City Hall closes at noon on Fridays and the voting plan was scrapped in favor of going to the regular voting place on Tuesday instead.

There were some leftover pastries from Wednesday in the office fridge. Strategic timing of the slightly stale small pieces of carrot cake and German chocolate cake were washed down with coffee and served as brunch.

There were some of the usual monthly screw-ups from the usual vendor that added some spice. The to-do list was chipped away. Once again, I neglected to tear myself away from the desk and get outside. Eventually it was time to leave and that was a happy moment.

The tree out back.

The drive home allowed a few minutes to contemplate the unsatisfactory lunch and the desire for a better supper, preferably with some “real” food. Within 20 minutes of arriving home, I had a plate of freshly assembled mushrooms, onion, black beans, salsa, and leftover rice topped with queso and a side of corn chips. And it was good. Best thing I’d eaten all day, but the bar was pretty low in terms of both quantity and quality. 

In the back yard, the big tree is still clinging to its leaves, with only a few on the ground. Raking isn’t needed yet, but mowing is and may need to happen this weekend. So much for the combined mow/mulch activity. Maybe I'll get lucky this year and the leaves will fall/blow into the yard of the tree owner. That would be sweet.

random thoughts – Day 1,325 – (Thursday) – eat at ralph’s

Eat at Ralph's & Live Forever.

A text from Louie, a long-time but seldom seen friend, arrived on Wednesday. It was sent to three of us -- Sharon, Denise, and me -- and read “Burgers at Ralph’s tomorrow? 7pm?” Ummm, yes please. Hell to the yes to the company, the venue, and the food plan. With this group, I would probably have said yes even if the food venue was someone’s compost pile. 

Ralph’s, once called Ralph's Chadwick Square Diner and now called Ralph's Rock Diner, has been known for its burgers forever. They are still on the menu, but with a few more items that I didn't read from the whiteboard because I didn't really care. Back when the menu was just burgers and chili and I was in the place every week, the motto was “Eat at Ralph’s and Live Forever.”

Three of us met in photography class at the Worcester Center for Crafts, which we attended religiously on Thursday nights for years. The photo crew was so much fun and we all clicked and each week after class we went to Ralph’s for beverages and socializing. Damn, those were great times.

Crater field.

It had been so long ago that I couldn’t remember when the four of us were all together last, but it was at the same diner, before the world skidded sideways. You know when I mean.

The drive to Worcester from Lowell was the usual bundle of fun. Route 495 was awful until it got worse. Waze re-routed me onto route 62 in Berlin where I very nearly hit a deer, which made the traffic jam on 495 seem less awful. 

The access point to Ralph's from Prescott Street led to the dirt parking lot at the side of the building that was even more magnificently rutted than ever. Approaching in the dark, it looked like a field of craters with bonus water and a great way to lose a front end or bust an axle. Luckily, there is paved parking in front of the diner.

And then, there we were, back in the diner. Older. Wiser. More tired.

It was fun. We ate burgers and had beers. We caught up on the topics of the day like "what day is this, anyway?" and our jobs and vacation time and art museums and book clubs and other random topics.

The pinball
stall survives.

Then, a few hours later, at the hour where once upon a time we began our night, we were saying goodbyes and wrapping up for the night. Before hitting the road again, I visited the bathroom for the pre-emptive pee. Much of the ladies room was like I remembered it from decades ago. This wasn't necessarily a good thing. It used to feel quirky and charming and fun, but now it felt like I do -- kind of tired.

The big stall still has a massive mirror mounted low on the wall where you can watch yourself toilet. The smallest stall still has the old artwork for “Eat at Ralph’s and Live Forever” with the image of the original Ralph (may he rest in peace). It's painted on the stall door and has been preserved by being painted around. Behind the door, a part from a pinball machine is still mounted on the wall over the toilet.

It’s nice to have stable touchpoints. Like friends. And the still crazy bathroom in the crazy diner/bar/music hall. And a place to eat with the promise of living forever. 

random thoughts – Day 1,324 – (Wednesday) – chilly snap

It got chilly today. Of course, the gloves that were in my work bag when it was cold a month or so ago, had been taken out of the bag when the second and third encores of summer took the stage. The trip from the door to the car was so quick that I didn’t really notice the weather, but when I started the car, the dashboard lit up with the low tire pressure alert and the heated steering wheel and seat were automatically on.

By then, I was already in the car, and not interested in going back into the house for gloves and a hat for the walk from the garage to the building. It was a calculated decision to suck it up and take the cold. While descending the staircase in the garage I met a colleague and we walked together to the building. The conversation helped to distract from the cold. Out in central Mass, snowflakes were falling, so it could have been worse.

The day at the office passed quickly. There was a team meeting with a great conversation about the local banking competitive environment. It felt like a throwback to my days in a marketing agency and I loved it. It’s the sort of thing I expected a lot more of in this current role, but unfortunately, it’s not something I usually get to be part of.

After that, I had a webinar about use of Chat GPT in marketing which was interesting. As I logged in to the webinar site, I landed in the middle of a conversation between the presenter and the moderator. A voice with a very Southern accent was talking about being raised Baptist versus Pentacostal and another voice chimed in. The exchange was something I heard a lot of while living in Tennessee – that the Pentacostals go into the liquor store through the front door and the Baptists slip in through the back door. The two voices laughed and I rolled my eyes in the safety of a camera off and muted mic scenario.

The content of the webinar was interesting with one slightly annoying tweak. Every time someone logged into or out of the meeting there was a chime sound. Beth has joined. Sam has left. Jane has joined. Over and over. Thank goodness it was only a 30-minute presentation. And I now know a little more about AI created content.

Not done yet.

After work, I checked on the tree in the backyard neighbor’s yard. The leaves haven’t fully changed color yet, and the yard has few fallen leaves for me to deal with. For now. 

The tree makes it seem like it’s still early October but the early darkness says otherwise. Come the weekend, the clocks will be changed in the semiannual manipulation of time and it will be dark even earlier. The extra hour of sleep will be nice for that one night, but beyond that, I’m not really a fan. 

According to the forecast, Thursday will start chilly with a low of 29 degrees, but after that, it will be a few more days in the 40s and 50s. Not so bad. Could be worse.