Sunshine!

We had sunshine this afternoon and into the evening.  I was so glad to see it that I plonked myself on the couch in the shaft of glorious sunlight and happily squinted until time to go to my grief meeting. Ahh, it was wonderful.


This morning I filled the feeders and it took a long time for the birds and squirrels to realize it but they finally did.  The Bluejays were loud and boisterous as usual.  I keep wondering how to tell the males from females and there's no way.  They look alike.  I have three good bird books--Audubon, Smithsonian, and Sibley--and none of them say how to tell them apart.  But I did learn that they're monogamous.  Who knew?  I thought for sure with their loud mouths and raucous boasts that they'd be all polygamous and proud of it.  Nope, there he is all loyal and true.  Birds, just when you think you know something...

This afternoon I hauled up the two bins of yarn I have ready for the knitting guild's swap/giveaway/sale tomorrow evening and put them into the back of the car.  I'm debating whether to get the old dolly down so that I just have to make one trip from the car to the meeting room.  And I also need to remember to pick up some canned goods for the food pantry at the church where we meet. (I'm glad I thought of that)

Also this afternoon I submitted an essay I wrote a couple years ago to the Midwest Review.  They charge $5 per submission and my essay is a robust 526 words which means that I paid about a penny a word for the possibility of being published.  I don't care.  It felt good to send something out for the first time in about eight years.

At tonight's grief meeting I added the last rows onto Car Knitting Warshrag #15 and finished the edging with single crochet when I got home.  Which means I head to the basement tomorrow for more cotton yarn to replenish the car knitting project bag and get it back into the car.





20 November--Barbara Malcolm, Spies Don't Retire. 

            Sonia was not looking forward to the Literary Roundtable meeting.  It was bad enough on regular nights to be stuck in a room with a bunch of other women trying to be polite to that bitch Irina Roskova.  If she didn’t know better she would have pegged Irina as the spy in that couple.

Sonia had always thought George’s job was romantic in a scary sort of way.  She was a bit smug all those years when George was actively out in the field and she had to keep his real location a secret.  Not that she always knew exactly where he was.  Most of the time when he called the reception was bad and she was sure the call was being routed all over the globe through a series of cutouts to disguise where the call came from.  When she thought about it George could have been in the basement or in his workshop calling her and rattling a piece of cellophane near the phone.

Her neighbor Harriet’s husband Max was in the Royal Navy serving on submarines for about fifteen years.  Harriet used to joke that for all she knew the crew kissed their families good-bye, hopped on the submarine, submerged and stayed right in the harbor for anywhere from six weeks to three months.  She sent her letters to a Navy post box number and received Max’s letters in return with holes in them where the censors had cut out any even vague hints as to the location of the boat.

And God help anyone who mistakenly called a submarine a ship; it was a boat as Max was quick to tell anyone.  “You can put a boat on a ship,” he would pedantically say, “but you can’t put a ship on a boat.”  Then he would laugh and go on to say, “Not if you want the boat to sail again, that is.”  After they had heard him say it a few hundred times, Sonia, George, and even Harriet would mouth the words along with him.

Max and Harriet were planning to visit them next week and Sonia was really looking forward to having her old familiar neighbor around for a month.  Happily, they were not staying with the Clemments; according to Harriet she would be more comfortable if they stayed in their own place.

Sonia had found a nice little bungalow for them to rent at a small resort near their home called Happy Holiday Homes.  A Dutch woman and her Indonesian husband owned it.  The bungalows had full kitchens, a roomy dining area that opened into the living room with a cable television, a spacious bathroom, and a pair of bedrooms with air conditioning.  Each bungalow had its own covered front porch with a patio table on it; in addition each one had a spigot and rinse bucket with pegs mounted on the end wall of the large porch for rinsing and hanging wet dive gear.

A month after they had moved to the island this past year all three of their grown sons, with their wives, and all eight of their grandchildren came for two weeks over the Christmas holidays to scope out the place their parents had run away to.  Sonia had done some checking with people who had been on the island longer than they had and Happy Holiday Homes got high marks for comfort, cleanliness, and hospitality.  It had the added benefit of being just a block from the Clemment’s house.  The bungalows weren’t on the beach, which made them much less costly, and besides they had a perfectly nice beach for everyone to use.  The grandchildren had spent many happy hours puttering in the sand with pails and shovels, darting into the shallows to cool off and haul water for their daily sandcastle building.

Although there might have been room for everyone to stay with them, George and Sonia decided that paying half of the rate for renting each son and his family a bungalow was more than worth it in the peace that descended on their spacious home once everyone had gone back to the bungalows to put tired children to bed.  It also gave them a chance to visit with each son separately when their wife would decide that the little ones would nap better away from Granny and Grandpa’s house.

Tomorrow morning I have my session with T the Trainer.  I have the distinct feeling I'll need a nap tomorrow afternoon.
--Barbara