The week so far

We went to see Blindness on Sunday. It was mostly what I expected. It was Day of the Triffids, only without the triffids. It's mostly about what horrible things people will do to other people, and when things are bad and people need other people the most, some of them will try to be helpful at first, but as the problem gets worse more and more of them do more and more ugly things to each other.

There is no explanation of why everyone goes blind. It is an illness, and it seems to spread either through the air or by touch. The first victim we see suddenly goes blind while driving. He is then taken to an eye doctor, and the next day most of other people who were waiting to see the eye doctor go blind, and the eye doctor goes blind.

At first it is thought that isolating the people going blind will stop the disease from spreading. So the eye doctor and his patients are taken away. The eye doctor's wife is not infected, but as her husband is being taken away, she decides that she can't stand to be separated from him, and so she pretends to be infected and they take her away too.

The infected people are taken to an empty sanitarium. There are probably still a few of those left. At some point it became illegal to lock people up just for being crazy, and you either had to get them to volunteer to be locked up, or you had to hear them threaten to hurt themselves or others, or you had to wait til they actually did hurt themselves or others. Most of the crazy people did not volunteer to be locked up, so the places were mostly empty for a while, and then some of them hurt themselves or other people, or threatened to hurt themselves and other people, and they were locked up again, but enough of them remained free to have lots of empty buildings here and there. And presumably they keep using the newer and nicer looking buildings, so the empty building where the infected blind people are sent isn't very nice at all.

It's an okay movie. Most of the time it is not a really scary movie, but there is violence. Not a date movie.

On Monday, my husband was unexpectedly called to work out of town for the rest of the week. On the one hand, I had been looking forward to having the house all to myself next week, so having this week too is a good thing. On the other hand, it wasn't a planned thing and there was no time to really think about where he was going and did he need to pack anything that he hadn't already packed and such. So he left a few things that might have been useful. And however much I might want to have the house to myself for a while and plan to do all sorts of useful things while he is away, it does seem to take me a few days to get used to it, and I have trouble getting to sleep, etc.... So at this rate, I'll maybe get around to doing something useful around here by about Friday.

The first useful thing I decided to do was go to the school Monday morning and deal with the whole recycling clay thing. So the first thing is to take out the clay that has been soaking in water in the recycle bin and spread it out on canvas for to dry out just a little bit. And then there is a machine that we put the old clay into, and if we mix a bit of clay that is starting to get too dry with a bit of clay that is still too wet, the machine will make it all into usable clay. But you can't put in actual dry clay, and you don't add actual water either.

So there was a bit of clay that had been on the canvas since Saturday, and I had to get out more clay from the bin. Only we'd already gotten out the stuff that was easy to get to, and now much of it was really stuck to the bin, and I soon had trouble getting any of it out with just my fingers and small things like forks. So after only an hour or so I left, saying that if I was going to get any real work done I would need to come back some other time with some gardening tools.

I have already complained of how I looked after class on Saturday. How I looked Monday was maybe two or three times worse. I didn't actually fall into the bin, but I was leaning over it at such an angle that I got my hair into the water and clay. So that wasn't pretty.

Tuesday I went to the school with the gardening tools. I mostly brought the little hand tools, but just in case I also put a garden hoe in the car. I spent three hours getting clay out of the bin and through the machine. It was a lot of work and my back hurts now. But the stuff stuck at the bottom of the bin is now half removed, and now that I've reached the bottom of the bin the rest should be easier to get at.


It doesn't look too bad outside, and today would probably be a good day to go out and work in the yard and start to get a few things ready for next spring's garden. But I feel so awful from the clay recycling that I'm probably just going to stay in and wash dishes and watch DVDs. The thing about recycling the clay is that I started doing it because I didn't have the eight or nine dollars here and there to buy bags of new clay. I've now put in almost four hours work. If I get eight dollars worth of clay out of it then I've earned like two dollars an hour. Only I haven't even quite earned that, since I had to use gas to get to school and back twice now. By the time this is over I'll have probably spent eight dollars on gas. But I suppose that someone had to clean out the recycling bin eventually, so it might as well be now and it might as well be me. It does get hard on the back though. And I've often decided against trying to get such and such job because I don't want to do stuff like this, cause no job is worth getting hurt and worrying about a possible permanent injury, and here I am doing all of this work over a couple of bags of clay worth eight or nine dollars each.


This morning I learned that there is more ongoing drama about the upcoming party. I'm just sort of sitting here waiting for more people to talk about it. I don't think that I'll post it here, because it is so far a long bit of business and I think that it will have to be a post all by itself.


So now I will got back to washing dishes and watching animated Flash Gordon, and seeing if I can get through the day without going to McDonald's and trying to win a million dollars. It would really be nice to win a million dollars, and just eating some fries and having a soda would be nice if I had the cash.