Still Muggy But Not As Hot

I asked Alexa the weather this morning at 7 o'clock and she said it was 72 degrees with a breeze out of the NE.  Bearable.  Then I made the mistake of asking her about the humidity.  90%.  Arrrgh.  I decided to risk it.  It wasn't bad.  I made it around the mile and only noticed that it was a little hard to breathe because the air was so thick and wet.

My new pill seems to be helping or maybe I'm just that suggestible, but either way I'm glad to be less depressed.  I am experiencing one of the side effects--I'm drowsy.  This isn't a bad thing, so I doze off on the couch for a few minutes and yawn my way through a grief group meeting.  Nobody cares and dozing off only made me about 5 minutes late to write with ACJ this afternoon.  No biggie.  Oh, and I wrote for about an hour on another "key" scene.

(blog faster, Barbara, your eyelids keep slamming shut)

After my walk this morning I went out to the Y to work on the machines for an hour and to cool down I went into the big room with all the treadmills etc. and spent a few minutes on the elliptical.  When I went over to get a wipe for the machine I saw this beautiful car looking in the window at me.  It's a Bugatti.  *swoon*  I grinned when I saw that the vehicle nearest it was a big, boxy white Jeep.  Talk about a contrast.


I got ten rounds into the Welcome Beanie I started yesterday, weighed the yarn, and came to the conclusion that there was no way I would have enough yarn for a baby hat.  So I frogged what I had and started over with this blue and green variegated yarn.  The color name is Happy Baby.  It was meant to be.  I also dropped down one needle size because it looked too big for a newborn hat.



There was a big envelope in my mailbox and when I opened it I found a sheaf of Packers tickets and a packet of Lambeau Field grass seed.  My brother, AJ, asked a while back if DS was interested in buying some of his tickets.  Naturally DS and DIL1 said YES! so AJ transferred them to me and I'll transfer them to DS after I've had them a year.  It's all some complex rigmarole but I don't mind and the tickets stay in the family.  I don't know why there's grass seed in there but I read in the paper the other day that it'll be for sale during the 100th year celebration.  If DS doesn't want it, I've got some patchy spots in the backyard where I could scratch it in...



This evening I looked outside and the very air was gold-tinged so, of course, I grabbed the camera and went out to see what was what.  The sky was just beautiful.

17 July--Barbara Malcolm, Horizon. 

The Saturday after my experiment with oil paints I invited Samara over for lunch.  We talked on the phone about once a week but hadn’t spent much time together since December, when we’d stolen an afternoon to exchange gifts at Christmas.  I remembered how busy my boys were during their senior year in high school and laughed in sympathy over Samara’s tales of trying to finish her projects and apply to colleges.

            She sat hunched over a mug of herbal tea saying, “The people who invented financial aid forms are sadists.”

            “I remember.  Do you still need to tell them everything except your mother’s maiden name and blood type?”

            “Yeah, that’s about right.  My poor mom’s tearing her hair out trying to figure out what they want to know.”  She tugged at the braids in her hair and let them fall with a clatter of beads.  “And Granny’s no help.  She keeps telling me to just rob a bank to pay for college.”

            I reached out and patted her hand.  “Not the best plan, I think.  Can’t your guidance advisor help?”

            “I try not to talk to him since he told me how lucky I was that my dad was dead.”

            “What?”  I was stunned that anyone could be so insensitive.

            “Didn’t I tell you?  Man, did Mom blow a gasket when I told her.  It took a lot of talking for me to convince her and Granny that they didn’t need to go to school and ‘give that man a piece of my mind.’”  She got up and refilled our mugs.  “It seems that if one of your parents is dead, and you’re a minority, too, you’re eligible for a lot more grants and financial aid.  But I think he could find a better way of putting it, don’t you?”

            “I certainly do.  It amazes me that someone in a position to guide young people would be so crass,” I said, looking out the window at the wind blowing the loose snow around.  “I hate March.”

            Samara giggled.  “You sound like Granny.  She’s been complaining about the cold bothering her ‘rheumatiz.’  Why do you hate March, Gail?”

            I leaned my head in my hands.  “Oh, for a lot of reasons. Bert died in March and so did my pop.  The weather’s usually crummy and winter’s gone on way too long.”  I got up and started clearing the table and loading the dishwasher.  “I thought that redecorating the living room would be enough excitement for this winter but now I look at the rest of the house and think it’s too dull for words.”

            Samara looked around the kitchen.  “Well, this room does look like old people live here.  Maybe you could paint it a more cheerful color?  Or change the knobs on the cabinets.”

            “I was thinking of that but I’ve got a better idea.  Want to help me spiff up my studio this afternoon?”

            She jumped up so fast her chair nearly tipped over.  Her quick reflexes caught it and she turned to me and said, “You bet.  What do you want to do?”

            I dried my hands on the tea towel.  “Grab your jacket.  I’ll tell you on the way to the hardware store.  Do you think your Mom would let you spend the night?”

            I outlined my plan for redoing my studio on the drive into Kingman.  Samara was intrigued by the idea I had gotten after watching one of those decorating shows on cable TV.

            We had a fine time at the hardware store.  Just as I’d thought, Charlie had everything we needed to put my studio ideas into effect: bright white paint, big eyebolts and turnbuckles, and stainless steel cable. Samara got the giggles looking at the hardware in all the tiny drawers that went up to the ceiling and Charlie’s old-fashioned manners had her blushing.  He showed us new painters tape and something called a painting pad that would make it much easier to keep the edges even.  But when Charlie recommended we get a stud finder, I thought Samara was going to wet her pants laughing.  I got the giggles myself trying to explain that it was for finding wood in the walls to put the bolts into, not the other kind of studs that her dirty little mind had imagined.

            The weak afternoon sun was fading when we got back to my house.  Samara called her mom and got permission to spend the night.  Then we got started.  It didn’t take us long to empty out my studio.  We put the painting table, a rocking chair, and the old dresser where I kept my paints and supplies in the living room and propped the bed on the back porch.  Unless one of Clara’s kids needed it, I’d call the Salvation Army to come pick it up later in the week.  Samara and I rolled up our sleeves and started painting three of the walls and the ceiling bright white.  The fourth wall, the one I thought of as the gallery wall, we painted pearl gray.  Once the walls were dry, we took the painting pads Charlie had recommended and, while I painted a flat black edge all around the gray wall, Samara painted a gray edge around all the white walls.  The little pads worked great and made a nice neat stripe.

            By the time we were finished with the stripes we were both pretty hungry, so we cleaned ourselves up and went into the kitchen for a bowl of soup.

            After eating we measured two-foot stripes from the ceiling to just above the floor on the gray wall.  Then we used the stud finder to place the long eyebolts on either side of the wall in the black edges on each of our lines.  We made sure that they were secure and then strung the cable between them, like steel clotheslines across the wall.  The bolts stuck out about an inch from the wall when we were finished.  I had bought a couple dozen shiny steel clips and I used them to clip my paintings to the cables.

            We stood back and admired our handiwork.  “Oh, Gail, this looks so cool,” Samara said.  “I wonder if I could do this in my dorm room.”

            “Probably not, I’m sorry to say.”  I threw my arm over her shoulder.  “If I remember the rules from when we took Sam to college, you couldn’t even hammer in a nail to hang a bulletin board.”

            I felt her arm go around my waist and squeeze.  “Too bad.  This is absolutely awesome, Gail.  Everyone who sees it will be totally jealous.”

            By then it had gotten late, so we stopped admiring our work to haul my table and the dresser back into the room.  I let Samara shower first while I dug out some pajamas for her.  After I showered, we fixed some microwave popcorn and flopped in front of the television to watch a DVD.  Neither of us stayed awake to see the end.

I knitted on Car Knitting Warshrag #14 (the project that lives in my car door pocket for waiting room and open drawbridge knitting) at the grief group this afternoon.  One of the moderators commented that I must be feeling better because last month I didn't knit.  Hm.  Also I got a call from one of my Class of '65 classmates who lost his wife just a year ago and we're meeting for coffee on Friday.  I see him at the monthly lunches and it's hard to talk with all the jokes and sass talk flying around the table so it'll be nice to sit and chat without TT making punny jokes.  Gotta stop. Time to sleep.  Trainer session tomorrow at 9:30--early because there's a trainer meeting at 10:30 which is my usual time.  Ah well.
--Barbara