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Miscellaneous Sunday

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Only 11 more hours until I am crowned – and no I don’t mean becoming a member of royalty.

Talked to L today and she went ice skating. I’m betting she’ll be stiff tomorrow since she hasn’t been ice skating in years. It was a Girl Scout event. She went since she is on the state board of the Girl Scouts. She got to talking to some of the girls and mothers and they just kept skating around the lake again and again and … until they went in to warm up. When she went back out to skate some more she realized how tired her legs were. So when I talked to her this evening they were already beginning to stiffen up. Something tells me that tomorrow morning will be interesting.

Molly and I went walking today before it turned cold this evening. Not another soul in sight as we walked. The temperature was just low enough to scare people off from the outdoors (or else they were all busy watching the playoffs). In any case it never did turn all that sunny. That is the one thing I miss most in the winter. This area gets 330 or more days of sunshine each year. Probably 25 of the 35 overcast days come in the latter part of December, January, and early February. So not only is it cold at times, it can be gloomy.

I find it interesting that so many of the blogs I read bemoan the dearth of topics to write about at this time of year. I find that I have literally hundreds of topics to write about, with more arriving via alien rays into my tiny little head every day. The problem is finding time to do justice to the topic of the day. I have fallen into the bad habit of writing this blog shortly before heading off to bed. That means that if I have procrastinated long enough, there is not enough time to do anything other than blither and blather for a bit and then head off to bed. So that means either I need to get more on the ball (and maybe even write a few entries in advance), or reach acceptance of the random nature of my posting. I’ll try to let you know once I come to some resolution of the problem.

As a help to those bloggers short of topics at this time of year, let me leave you with this thought:
    The trouble with reality is that there is no background music to clue you in on what is about to happen.

Seems like one could get several posts out of that thought alone, including tracing the evolution of movie soundtracks from the silence of early talkies to the complex musical foreshadowing of today. Have at it.

tooth, weather, wind

The Century Mark

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This is the 100th post on this blog. (Go ahead and count, I’ll wait … see I told you!) Yea me. Poor you.

The faux “yea me” is how I feel about the weather today. The winds came and the winds went, but mostly they stayed with the cold to make it feel downright nip out there. Wind chills were in the negative numbers all day and not a skiff of snow to show for it. There was snow to the west of us, but none out here in the valley. A good day to just curl up and do something indoors.

My temporary cap on my broken tooth from this post and this post finally disintegrated into a lot of shiny pieces of metal in my mouth this evening. It wouldn’t be too bad, but the ground away part of the tooth is now exposed to the air and to temperature variations. Thank heavens the permanent cap is ready to be put on Monday morning bright and early. Chewing and hot and cold is right out the window for the next 24 hours. I figure if it really starts to hurt, I’ll go drag my dentist out into the wind. Serve him right taking so long to get the permanent cap in place. One advantage of a small town is that I know where he lives, so it is hard for him to hide.

Tonight the wind has been swirling enough to bother Molly. So she has been going from window to window doing the whimper-woof thing that dogs do so well. I figure she is telling the bushes to hold it down out there. It must have tuckered her out because she is now sleeping at my feet as type this in. She looks a lot like a dead piece of road kill all splayed on her side. If you don’t watch for the bellow of her sides, you might think she was dead. I’ve never been able to figure out how dogs and kids can be going 90 mph, running full tilt and then suddenly curl up and be out like a light bulb. I vaguely remember being able to do that many years ago, but the older I get the more things hurt and the harder it is to just drop off to sleep. How about you? This is Molly as I type. The black blob in the lower left corner is a piece of my leg

As a parting gift, here is the view by my keyboard. Note the piece of the broken cap circled in red (and a couple of old ring boxes from a bunch of stuff I am sorting through). I should have made it a mystery photo and asked people to identify what each item was. I might have had a poser given the poor quality of the picture and the oddity of the subject. Oh well, next time.

comedy, movies, weather

Enjoying the warmth

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Today was one of those odd really warm winter days here. It was in the low 40’s until about 3pm when the winds died and the temperature climbed all the way up to 56. So that’s when Molly and I went walking in the park. We saw many different dogs and people as everyone seemed to rush out to enjoy the nice. After all, the forecast for tomorrow is for a high in the low 20’s with snow. It figures, since today melted the last of the old snow off the ground. Now that I have fulfilled my designated task of blithering on about the weather …


Do you have an unexpected weakness for some forms of entertainment? I do. One of my guilty pleasures is oddball romantic comedies, the cornier the better. So of course I must note that TBS is showing “The Prince and Me”. I haven’t quite decided whether this movie is truly bad and corny enough to qualify as a guilty pleasure yet. It might just be that I like movies with Julia Stiles in them.


One of the things I find interesting is that one can become engrossed in a a corny romance like “The Prince and Me” , enjoy it, and even imagine it is a really good movie. But then all one has to do is see a few minutes of something like “Bringing Up Baby” or “Adam’s Rib” with Katherine Hepburn to know that there is a difference between really good and merely entertaining. It would be interesting to hear what my young friend (any one younger than 30 qualifies as “young friend” as one gets older) has to say. He is a writer and film maker that usually has a pretty interesting take on such things. I know he reads this blog from time to time, so maybe he’ll comment.


Enough for tonight, I need to get back to my guilty pleasures …

Conversation, family, food

Thursday, are you sure?

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You know how some days of the week just have a particular feeling? Somehow today should have been a Sunday or maybe even a Saturday. It just feels that way deep down in the tips of my toes. (And no, it is not due to any vestigial hangover or anything else. I drank and partied not to bring in the New Year.)


Yesterday when I dropped by Mom’s to pick up some Christmas stuff, it was decided it would be nice to have a few people over house for New Year’s Day. (By virtue of being a people I got invited as well.) So Aunt J and Uncle J (Mom’s brother and his wife from 90 miles up the road), Ruth, Marlene, my MIL and Mom were all present at the appointed hour. Of course there was food galore. Just when you thought it was safe to come out from behind the leftovers, here was a whole new feast. (It seems like seasonal denial the way good food keeps appearing in front of my face even as the holidays pass. I think it is a plot by the universe to make sure that I continue to overeat. The universe is a malevolent place!)

The afternoon following the meal was originally planned for Mexican Train, but the conversation got going and we never got around to playing cards. It was a worthy trade off. Just sitting around with family and acquaintances, carrying on good conversation for hours on a variety of topics with no background blare of TV is so rare. It is one of those lost pleasures of Sunday afternoons that I remember from my childhood. That is precisely what we did for hours and hours.

The breadth of topics and viewpoints that can come up in diverse group like today’s is interesting. I was the proverbial spring chicken of the group. Everyone else was between 65 and 95 years of age. There were rabid democrats and colorful republicans and political agnostics. There were conservatives and liberals. I enjoy the give and take and respect of others viewpoints. (Actually, it could just be that we are all going deaf and …)

I also enjoy it because it is a chance to hear stories from the childhood of Mom and her family as well as stories that go back to the times and conditions even before her birth. I also heard some stories from Uncle J about my great grandfather that I hadn’t heard before. I knew my great grandfather only as a figure from early grade school since he died about the time I was in third grade. But Uncle J had a relationship with great grandpa that had elements in common with the relationship I had with my grandfather. It is interesting to see how there is that family continuity through the years. Many of those grandfather/grandson relationships will be very different current generations because of the later ages at which families have kids. It will be interesting to see what develops to replace them.

Well, time to sign off and prepare for the oddness of “one-day week” Friday.

New Years Eve

Happy New Year!!!

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What more could one ask for – cold and breezy! Only snow is missing to make it complete evening.

In keeping with the time honored traditions:
        The year past:  “could have been better.”
        The year ahead:  “it will be better.”

So now that I have all the standards out of the way, I can ramble on in a pointless manner appropriate for the evening. I haven’t been a big New Year’s Eve partier for years, so this is usually a calm and collected evening that many times ends before midnight with the siren call of my bed. Tonight is going to be no different. So
here’s to ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ……