random thoughts – Day 1,541 – (Friday) – sinking feelings

Today had a lot going on at the office. Like, a LOT a lot. Things were extra busy and the whole team was cranking in high gear. Emails and Teams Chat messages flew back and forth as details were worked out.

Plumbers came to fix the sink.

To add to it all, repairmen were in the office to work on the clogged kitchenette sink. There was banging, clanging, and even drilling, which made it hard to focus on the work that needed to be done. There was loud talk over the banging and clanging about snake length (35? 75? I don’t know) not being long enough. Fingers in my ears blocked some of the sound, but it’s a little hard to type like that.

The sink work continued into the early afternoon, with a blissful short break when the plumbers went to get something or go downstairs or whatever. The fun part is, they will be back next week, and need to move furniture and cut a hole in a wall to access pipes. The sink now has signs to not to use it and a step stool set across the top of it to make sure that one of us don’t empty coffee or water into it out of habit.

The Farmer’s Market opened today not far from the office. The hours were posted as 2:00 – 6:00, and a colleague and I went over at 2:10. A couple vendors were still setting up, but tents with cookies and donuts, hot sauce, ice cream, mead, and produce were ready to conduct business. A boba tea truck sat at the curb.

Not mead.

The mead was tempting, with several choices in both fermented and fizzy versions. The vendor offered a sample but it was the middle of a workday afternoon and I declined. 

Sitting at home, hours later, there was a sinking feeling over the decision to not buy some mead. A Luigi’s Italian Ice was fetched from the freezer. Tasty, but not mead. 

Sometimes I just never learn to buy the thing or do the thing or the whatever. I found the vendor (Blisspoint Meadery in Bedford) on social media (dang, I love the Internet), so I can catch up with them at another market. Of course, that doesn't help me tonight. 

random thoughts – Day 1,540 – (Thursday) – working and hanging

Another day, another mow of the yard. It’s a guess that might be totally wrong, but it seems that I’ve already done more mows of the yard this year than some entire summers. On the bright side, it’s a free activity in the fresh air (pollen-fresh) with no driving required. There was cloud cover when I went out and it wasn't too hot. Even in long sleeves I didn't break a sweat.

In addition to the recently noticed freshly dug (kicked up?) dirt at the backyard end of the deck lattice, there is now a matching mess of it at the front of the house from under the porch lattice. This afternoon, Chuck was spotted again emerging from under the shed with a face full of dried leaves and traversing the yard diagonally towards the house/deck. It seems for sure like the groundhogs are moving to larger quarters. I wonder if they are also the culprits eating the mums and echinacea.

Kiki under a dining room chair.

After the evening mow and during a quick pause in the regular nightly Netflix consumption from the comfort of my usual post-work hangout on the futon, I headed to the kitchen. The lighting was dim and the unexpected sighting of Kiki startled me, which startled her, and she dashed off to the living room, her dainty overgrown nails clicking on the wood floor. 

Most of this week she has been camped out on the stairs during the day and comes out at night to relax  under the dining room table, under and amongst the chair legs. She has mastered evasive maneuvers and hiding out. Thank goodness for in-phone image editing that lets it look I can get closer to her than she usually lets me. 

random thoughts – Day 1,539 – (Wednesday) – quirky weirdness

It’s been a week for some mysterious stuff. Oddball things. Weird things. What in the heck quirky things.

My work computer often has several shortcut icons on the desktop for active project files that are ready to be loaded into the review system or emailed out before being saved as final files on the department shared server. Then they are deleted from the desktop. 

Lately, deleted shortcut icons keep reappearing, without rhyme or reason. Some were deleted a week ago, but in the past couple weeks, files from six months ago and even a year ago have reappeared. It’s like a haunting. Some have been deleted four or five times, but keep coming back.

On Tuesday, not only did old icons reappear, but all the icons on the remote office desktop are four times larger than they used to be. The large print format hot mess continued today on the office-office computer. Awesome. 

This morning, the technology is trying to drive me insane hijinks continued. I have the Jeep set to deliver guidance when I’m seven miles over the speed limit. Out of the blue this morning, as I crept above the speed limit, the voice in the system made the announcement, but in kilometers, not miles. Luckily there were a lot of red lights on the way and I was able to dig into the settings menus and change it back to mph.

A dental cleaning scheduled six months ago was this afternoon. The weather toolbar widget on the haunted computer noted it was 82 when I left the office-office for the dental office. The temperature reading on the dashboard read 30-something degrees. Celsius. There was another dive into the menu settings to set it back to Fahrenheit. So weird.

After the dental visit, I took the longer, preferred route out of town. Turning left out of the dentist is nearly impossible with the volume of oncoming traffic. By turning right and heading away from the highway, then taking a couple more rights to Route 12 provides the opportunity to buy gas at a lower price than found in Lowell. A stop was made at AL Prime for some $3.09 a gallon gas. A bit up the street is the $5 Car Wash, which had no line and no traffic impeding the left turn into the place. Victory!

My car speaks Italian!

Always, when the car is in neutral during the car wash, a message appears on the dashboard screen about pressing the brake and putting the car into drive, or something. Today, in the day of weird technical oddities, the message appeared in what I thought was Spanish, but Google translate says is Italian. Fancy. Very weird. But at least the temperature was back to Fahrenheit. 

In summary, my work computer is haunted by the ghosts of gigantic icons past. My vehicle has decided to convert to the metric system, the Celsius temperature scale, and a foreign language. Surely, these are the early signs of the robot uprising to wipe out us humans. Surprise, confusion, and frustration seem like a solid start. And Italian is a nice touch.

random thoughts – Day 1,538 – (Tuesday) – busting out

Backyard irises.

The yard (and the month of June)  is busting out all over (sing it with me!). Parts of it are already passing peak. The irises have bloomed and gone from the front yard, but out back, they are just opening. The peonies are filled with tight buds that will explode open soon. 

Lily of the Valley has crept a foot beyond the space under the lilac (which was spectacular this year) and into the lawn. The Columbine escaped being chomped this year, but maybe because it was protected by the wall of Lily of the Valley.

Best roses in years.

Out front, the rhododendron was prolific but it was fleeting. The lingering blossoms are faded and new , leafy growth is providing an overall scraggly effect. In both yards, the bleeding hearts have grown bushy and crowd everything nearby.

In addition to the lilac, the rosebush has been a surprise this year. After several years of looking crappy and having few blooms, it was cut back rather drastically. It felt reckless. Desperate. And this year, it is full of flowers and looks the best it has looked in five or six years.

Not far from the impressive roses, another scene is playing out. In a new twist, the mums and coneflower are having problems. For several years, a mum has been added to the front yard, and this year, four have them have come up again. They all started out looking healthy but now three of them seem to be under an ongoing attack. Each morning, the mums and coneflower are newly chomped down to nubs.

Chomped.

Research (aka a Google search “what’s eating my mums and echinacea?”) suggested spraying chili oil and water on the plants to deter the chomping critters. Family Dollar didn’t have chili oil but they had hot sauce made with cayenne pepper, so I gave that a try. 

Once or twice a day, I’m spraying red juice from a pink bottle onto the mums and coneflower, but not necessarily faithfully and diligently, and then I notice they are all chomped down again. I’m generally of a neutral to friendly stance regarding the furry neighbors that invade the yard, but I start to lose it when they eat my plants.

Critters are the reason I gave up trying to grow tomatoes after several years of effort. The cost of the plants and the ongoing labor to keep them alive was hardly worth the annual yield of, at best, three cherry tomatoes.  And now the flowers under attack. Errrrr.

random thoughts – Day 1,537 – (Monday) – sister flashback

Flashback piece from 2021. My sister's birthday. She's still younger than me, and she's still cooler than me.

It’s June 3^rd and my baby sister’s birthday. Even though I was nearly five years old old when she was born, I don’t remember her as a baby. It's like I spent my early childhood in a fog. My earliest memory of S is just a vague snippet of her being toddler-ish in a playpen and my brother and our cousin catering to her every whim. If she looked at something, the boys fetched it for her. Then Mom would tell them to knock it off and let her learn to reach and grab and get things for herself.

S as a sassy kid, with our dog Colette.
I had this outfit in navy blue.

The many photos in the family albums starting when I was a newborn in Mom’s lap prove that I was a child, even though I don’t recall my earliest years. There are slightly fewer photos of my brother, and fewer still of my sister, especially without all the rest of us crowded into the frame. Evidently, by the time the third kid rolls around, the fascination with documenting every little thing is gone. 

There is a memory fragment of S being in the hospital for a few days when she was a toddler. We often had the same outfits, but in different colors. The summer I turned seven and S was two, my family went camping in Canada and S stayed with Mummu.

When I was nearly eight and S was three, my family went to Texas. In the summer. In a black car with no air conditioning and no planned stops at hotels, motels, or Holiday Inn. In those days, our car had “a hump” that ran front to back down the center of the floor. On regular days, the kid sitting in the middle of the back seat usually had their feet on the hump and was eating their knees. For the long drive to Texas, Dad cut a piece of plywood to set on the backseat floor to create a level surface over “the hump.” It eliminated the floor space, but created a flat surface for a kid to sleep. One kid slept on the back seat and one on the makeshift floor, and my sister slept in the flat space behind the seat and under the angled back window. All the way from Massachusetts to Texas and then back. Ah, the carefree days before child car seats and seatbelt laws. 

S, the cool one,
with our dog Colette.

Although I don’t remember her birth, I’m pretty sure S exited the womb and entered the world way cooler than me. While I holed up in my room reading, she was out with friends and on cheerleading squads, first for church league basketball, then later for high school varsity football. While I worried about winning spelling bees and practicing my penmanship, she cultivated social skills and formed lifelong friendships. While I spent my high school years working at DeMoulas and being stood up by Saturday night dates who never showed up, S spent her high school years working at the best donut shop in the 'burg (MaryAnn's!) and dating the captain of the football team.

All these decades later, not much has changed. She is still the cool one. She is clever and creative and funny and generous. She has three amazing, beautiful, and intelligent daughters. Her social circle is large  and for years before the pandemic, her house was frequently the site of gatherings for the Sunday football games. I keep thinking if I ever grow up, I want to be just like her.

Happy birthday Sis!

random thoughts – Day 1,536 – (Sunday) – kiki nails

Queen of the stairs.

Kiki has changed her favorite hangout spot from the living room chair to halfway up the staircase. Unlike her previous stretch spent on the stairs, I am now allowed to approach, sit two steps below her, and pet her. Amazing progress. I am also allowed to slowly walk past her and continue up or down the stairs. Before, she would run downstairs and either hide in her bed or go into the living room and hide behind the couch when I arrived at the staircase.

When she hangs out in the dining room later in the evening, she sits under the dining table, sometimes watching me in the living room, and seems content. This might be a case of jumping to conclusions, but it seems she is settling in and becoming more comfortable. Of course, we are on the brink of another traumatic event, as I need to figure out how to trim her too long nails.

Keeks isn’t hostile, but she’s not yet a lap cat or cuddler and might never be. She's quick and crafty and has a great grasp of distance. She pulls her paws away when I touch them. It’s just scary to think that there is a good chance all the carefully cultivated goodwill and trust could be destroyed when I try to clip those nails.

Corduroy clouds.

This evening, because I’m a chicken and instead of terrorizing Kiki (and me) with the nail clippers, I went outside and sat on the deck and read. The air was warm and the clouds reminded me of corduroy or ripples. Later, I pulled some weeds before heading back inside. Then it got all glamorous with cleaning the litter box and prepping the trash. Anything to avoid the long overdue nail clipping and its imagined consequences. 

random thoughts – Day 1,535 – (Saturday) – revived

It took seven full days of doing not a lot to decompress from whatever mysterious crap lives in my psyche, soul, gut, tense shoulders, insomnia, wherever. Today I finally felt human/ awake /alive again, which seems worth logging for the unscientific boredom/self-knowledge self-study. 

In other notes, my fitness watch, which, although the accuracy is questionable, logs sleep and tells me I have not been sleeping very much. Last night’s alleged rest was a mere four hours and 55 minutes – typical once upon a long time ago when my friends and I were club scene socialites, but less so since becoming a sleep-loving recluse who has strived for a solid eight hours for the past decade or so. The average sleep duration for the past month is allegedly six and a half hours. What, what? That might explain some things.

Anyway. On the first day of feeling alive and like a human in a while, I dressed to leave the house and actually left the house. The shopping bag with clothes and jigsaw puzzles to be donated was brought to St. Vincent de Paul, where some of the items had previously been purchased. The lack of a dressing room means sometimes I buy, wash, and mend garments before trying them on and and discovering they don’t fit. Today’s items that were re-donated included a blue and white striped cotton shirt which had sleeves that were too tight. Another item re-donated was summer weight denim trousers that were laundered, worn once, and determined to be too large.

Peacocks.

The donations were deposited into the bins in the vestibule, and then, as predicted earlier in the week, there was wandering of the uncrowded store for a relaxing hour. This week’s financial support in the form of purchases included a pair of soft, summery, harem style pants in black with peacocks at the bottom of the pant legs and waist, a teal shirt to go with drapey, summery pants I intend to wear to a wedding later this month, a kimono style summer bathrobe in black with peacocks, a frame, and a pack of file folders. 

Buying two items with peacocks on them was not intentional, but the rejection of a pair of red and white striped cotton drawstring waist pants was. Since arriving home, thoughts of the striped pants keep intruding and there may be a trip back there tomorrow to see if they are still there and if fate declares it, they will need to be bought. Other recent purchases seem to suggest delusions that I will be summering somewhere other than Lowell, like The Hamptons, Nantucket, or The Vineyard, all places I have never had the opportunity to visit.

The remainder if the afternoon was a luxuriously gooey stretch of time. There was an initial idea to return to the Grecian Festival for one of the Greek dancing lessons, but there was a failure to consult the schedule in a timely manner and when it was finally checked, both sessions had already happened. Oops.

There was internal debate about attending the festival to see the Greek dance demonstration and eat supper, but when all the elements for solo attendance were considered – parking, crowds, lines for food, cost for food, nobody to talk with – the idea was dismissed. It was all still so fresh from Friday night.

Besides, the avocado bought on Wednesday was finally perfectly ripened and ready to use. It was smashed and mixed with garlic and lemon juice and spread on lightly toasted olive bread, then topped with Kalamata olives and sliced, perfectly ripened tomato. So quickly prepared. So already paid for. So delicious. No parking or queuing in line required.

A post-avocado burst of energy led to a flurry of activity. The outdoor rug was unrolled onto the deck. The table base was carried out from the shed and the glass top was rolled across the lawn. Once the table was assembled, the four companion chairs were schlepped from the shed two at a time. Everything was wiped down with vinegar and water and arranged on the rug. After that, it was time for outdoor R&R in the late day sun.  

There was a smidge of self-congratulations for my near-total self-sufficiency, cultivated by previous relationships with men whose failed promises led to me doing everything myself. Fun note – some of those guys later commented (accused?) that I “don’t need anyone.” My confident reply was sometimes, “you made me what I am today, I hope you’re satisfied,” which Mummu used to say in a sing-song manner.

Outdoor R&R.

The funny part to all of this is that Mom and Step-Dad offered to come this weekend to help me set up the deck stuff and specifically the umbrella, which I can’t do on my own due to the depth of the table and the lack of depth of my reach and upper body strength. At the time of the conversation, I wasn’t sure I wanted to bother setting up the table, chairs, and umbrella, because last year, they were used only once. Mom reminded me that it rained all last summer and I insisted it might not be worth the effort. Today, it was sunny and beautiful and I felt less dead, and changed my mind.

Tonight, I sat at the newly assembled and cleaned table with a Finnish Long Drink on ice and the book for book club and got myself to page 288 of 452. Ugh. The book is taking forever. I really miss the days of tearing through books cover to cover on one or two sittings. Life was different then. Or maybe the books I read at the time were.