Secret thoughts were said aloud, watched the faces in the clouds
I feel really impressively rotten. I so rarely get sick, I forget how miserable the experience can be. Not that I am threatening to croak at any moment or anything; as illness goes, I've got a relatively mild sore throat and a stuffy nose. Typhoid, this is not. Still, enough to sour an already epic-level-bad-day.
I don't know how many of the friendly readers will know this, but I scrimped and saved all summer to buy my laptop --it's been a goal of mine for years, one of the few things I have looked at recently and gone, "Wow, I did that all by myself," and felt a little cheer of pride. And, on Thursday, it broke.
Now, I didn't do anything to it. But it just . . . gave up the ghost. Ceased to start up, ceased to work, ceased to anything. I am so angry I could go in for fisticuffs.
Of course, it will have to be returned, and a new laptop obtained from the company. Better than having no warranty, of course! But I've gotten a trifle dependent on the thing; what I'll do without it, I cannot fathom.
For a while in there, to give the day a little extra fillip, my computer was also going to implode, and my MP3 player wasn't working. You want to talk about distressing? That, my friends, was distressing. On the upside, we seem to have sorted out our internet connection issues: redistributing the electrical equipment in our office has given the router an outlet all to its lonesome, and the greedy beast seems sated for now.
In other news: I washed Aurelian yesterday, waxed and detailed the interior. I have a bit more work to do with the protectant inside, but he looks quite lovely. I flatter myself that anything can be as good as a Bentley if properly maintained: I realize that's unrealistic, but let's just conga-line-along with the fantasy, yes?
Meanwhile, Roomie claims the interior smells like bad wine. As I know that nothing has been spilled in the vehicle, I think it must be the air-freshner: no great loss. When I can smell it again I'll toss the damn thing.
Observation: the Toyota symbol looks like male genitalia. Who knew?
In my perennial quest to make this place look like a Pottery Barn ad, I have bleached, vinegared, and scrubbed both the bathroom floor and the kitchen floor, to regrettably scant effect. I don't know why I'm surprised: the stains in there are old enough to beget my grandmother, and stubborn scrubbing now won't do a damn bit of good. I keep trying in any case. Perhaps I can get the paint splatters up.
In the meanwhile, I have settled on covering up the worst of the bathroom floor with the most sinful bathmat I have ever experienced. Honest. I bought it this afternoon (Walmart, where the $9.00 indulgences are always neatly stacked next to the $50.00 trash) and I think I have gone once an hour to stand on the thing and curl my toes into the pile and grin up at the ceiling. It's the small pleasures, I'm telling you.
There was also some hardwood polishing, and I bought casters for the dining room set so we could stop scratching the floor at breakfast. And I washed my silk-blend sweaters again, tried out a cleaning tip I'd found online, about using a vinegar solution on them after soaping, to neutralize the soap. The recommendation appears to have been exactly on the mark: all three sweaters are soft, and despite a distinct vinegar odor, look better than they have since I bought them.
(For those who'd like to know: a quarter cup of white vinegar in cool water, and save it until after you've soaped your silks, as a rinse. Just take the cleaned silks and dip them in, work them around, then hang them. The colors will come out restored and you'll have the texture of silk instead of wet crepe or papier-mache. And as a note: don't, don't ever wring wet silk, because it will tear like the tissue that you just used to blow your nose.)
As for the house: the only things really lacking at this point are a mop that is not worth exactly what I paid for it, and bookshelves. Truly; I can't stay organized like this, and so my books are every bloody place on the floor and in my room. There's just nowhere to put them. Argh-argh-arrrrgggh. My floors. My polished floors, and I can't even see them. This calls for lamentation, folks. Seriously.
I am embarrassed to admit that I am already compiling my Christmas list, and that the first thing on it is a cleaning tool.
-Swiffer Wetjet with Hardwood Floor solution
-bookshelves
-shocks for the car. Honest to God, if I wanted to go off-roading in the Washington University parking lot . . .
-KT Tunstell CD (new one)
The one thing that is not on the list, that I would like most of all but do not think at all likely even if one goes petitioning Saints, is for Moosie's health to stop deteriorating. My dad tells me he ran out of pain pills last night, and I could hear her crying over the phone as we were talking. She's hurting so much at this point that it's painful just to be around her --and worse, not to be, because petting her is about the only thing that helps. I miss her terribly. This is the wrong time to be away, but what's to be done? My dad can hardly bring her to me, and I can't go back for a while yet. Losing Athena is still too fresh. I don't want to lose Moosie so soon. She should have years more in her.
And since I will cry if we keep talking about that, I will close with the best moment of the day, and the one that convinced me that everything could go wrong, but nothing could be truly wrong.
Driving down Delmar today, I glanced up into the sky and saw a crowd of balloons, easily a hundred of them, drifting overhead. There's some sort of race, I'm told, or a fair; and there they all were, bobbing and hovering and beautiful. It wasn't sunset or anything so dramatic --it was just so innocent and self-assured, with the clarity of the sky, and the people strolling and buying, and the balloons over it all. We live in an age of wonders. I just find myself wishing those wonders extended to small dogs and great swaths of the world that did not share in my cloudless autumn day.
I don't know how many of the friendly readers will know this, but I scrimped and saved all summer to buy my laptop --it's been a goal of mine for years, one of the few things I have looked at recently and gone, "Wow, I did that all by myself," and felt a little cheer of pride. And, on Thursday, it broke.
Now, I didn't do anything to it. But it just . . . gave up the ghost. Ceased to start up, ceased to work, ceased to anything. I am so angry I could go in for fisticuffs.
Of course, it will have to be returned, and a new laptop obtained from the company. Better than having no warranty, of course! But I've gotten a trifle dependent on the thing; what I'll do without it, I cannot fathom.
For a while in there, to give the day a little extra fillip, my computer was also going to implode, and my MP3 player wasn't working. You want to talk about distressing? That, my friends, was distressing. On the upside, we seem to have sorted out our internet connection issues: redistributing the electrical equipment in our office has given the router an outlet all to its lonesome, and the greedy beast seems sated for now.
In other news: I washed Aurelian yesterday, waxed and detailed the interior. I have a bit more work to do with the protectant inside, but he looks quite lovely. I flatter myself that anything can be as good as a Bentley if properly maintained: I realize that's unrealistic, but let's just conga-line-along with the fantasy, yes?
Meanwhile, Roomie claims the interior smells like bad wine. As I know that nothing has been spilled in the vehicle, I think it must be the air-freshner: no great loss. When I can smell it again I'll toss the damn thing.
Observation: the Toyota symbol looks like male genitalia. Who knew?
In my perennial quest to make this place look like a Pottery Barn ad, I have bleached, vinegared, and scrubbed both the bathroom floor and the kitchen floor, to regrettably scant effect. I don't know why I'm surprised: the stains in there are old enough to beget my grandmother, and stubborn scrubbing now won't do a damn bit of good. I keep trying in any case. Perhaps I can get the paint splatters up.
In the meanwhile, I have settled on covering up the worst of the bathroom floor with the most sinful bathmat I have ever experienced. Honest. I bought it this afternoon (Walmart, where the $9.00 indulgences are always neatly stacked next to the $50.00 trash) and I think I have gone once an hour to stand on the thing and curl my toes into the pile and grin up at the ceiling. It's the small pleasures, I'm telling you.
There was also some hardwood polishing, and I bought casters for the dining room set so we could stop scratching the floor at breakfast. And I washed my silk-blend sweaters again, tried out a cleaning tip I'd found online, about using a vinegar solution on them after soaping, to neutralize the soap. The recommendation appears to have been exactly on the mark: all three sweaters are soft, and despite a distinct vinegar odor, look better than they have since I bought them.
(For those who'd like to know: a quarter cup of white vinegar in cool water, and save it until after you've soaped your silks, as a rinse. Just take the cleaned silks and dip them in, work them around, then hang them. The colors will come out restored and you'll have the texture of silk instead of wet crepe or papier-mache. And as a note: don't, don't ever wring wet silk, because it will tear like the tissue that you just used to blow your nose.)
As for the house: the only things really lacking at this point are a mop that is not worth exactly what I paid for it, and bookshelves. Truly; I can't stay organized like this, and so my books are every bloody place on the floor and in my room. There's just nowhere to put them. Argh-argh-arrrrgggh. My floors. My polished floors, and I can't even see them. This calls for lamentation, folks. Seriously.
I am embarrassed to admit that I am already compiling my Christmas list, and that the first thing on it is a cleaning tool.
-Swiffer Wetjet with Hardwood Floor solution
-bookshelves
-shocks for the car. Honest to God, if I wanted to go off-roading in the Washington University parking lot . . .
-KT Tunstell CD (new one)
The one thing that is not on the list, that I would like most of all but do not think at all likely even if one goes petitioning Saints, is for Moosie's health to stop deteriorating. My dad tells me he ran out of pain pills last night, and I could hear her crying over the phone as we were talking. She's hurting so much at this point that it's painful just to be around her --and worse, not to be, because petting her is about the only thing that helps. I miss her terribly. This is the wrong time to be away, but what's to be done? My dad can hardly bring her to me, and I can't go back for a while yet. Losing Athena is still too fresh. I don't want to lose Moosie so soon. She should have years more in her.
And since I will cry if we keep talking about that, I will close with the best moment of the day, and the one that convinced me that everything could go wrong, but nothing could be truly wrong.
Driving down Delmar today, I glanced up into the sky and saw a crowd of balloons, easily a hundred of them, drifting overhead. There's some sort of race, I'm told, or a fair; and there they all were, bobbing and hovering and beautiful. It wasn't sunset or anything so dramatic --it was just so innocent and self-assured, with the clarity of the sky, and the people strolling and buying, and the balloons over it all. We live in an age of wonders. I just find myself wishing those wonders extended to small dogs and great swaths of the world that did not share in my cloudless autumn day.