Hail

And hell, and all of that too.

It did finally start raining, instead of being just cloudy and dark. And we watched the weather reports a bit before watching other things and then going to sleep. I had to take few pills before nodding off, and then there was this noise. And I can't quite identify the noise, as it isn't something I'm used to hearing. It wasn't quite rain, though there was finally some of that, and most of it seemed to be coming from another room. It rather sounded like someone was tossing pebbles at an air-conditioner. And then it sounded like pebbles being tossed at the other air-conditioners as well. And then the roof, though that hasn't quite the same loud sound as something hitting the metal of the air-conditioners. And then as it slowly dawns on me what that noise is, it really started coming down and was loud. My husband woke up and turned on the television. Seems like that storm we watched on the news that was just going to miss us was the first of several, and we were in the middle of one of the others, in places having golf ball sized hail. I don't think that we got anything that big, but I could be wrong. I picked up two pieces that fell just by the front door. They were a bit more than pea sized, but not by much. There seemed to be a few slightly bigger pieces, but I didn't want to venture out to get them.

The noise died down and it went back to just raining, and we went back to sleep.

I haven't been out to inspect the garden damage, or to see if there's any real damage anywhere else, as it is still raining, and raining a lot at the moment. It's probably going to rain all day, so I might get a short look later, but probably won't get a good look at everything until tomorrow.

The weather sucks

It is nearly the end of March, and we've had point zero something of rain. That's for the whole month. Some of that was yesterday, making this the second driest March on record, instead of the driest, which it looked like it was going to be. It's just sort of cold and damp all week, and not much actual rain. Looking online, I thought that it was going to rain from eleven in the morning til hours after dark, but that isn't what happened at all. It just rained a tiny bit, a sprinkle here and there, and then after not much it would stop and then maybe sprinkle again later. So you would go inside and then come outside and see that things had gotten just a bit wet, but not enough to water the plants or anything like that. I suppose that there's a chance of a tiny bit more rain today, it isn't as likely as it was yesterday, so we probably won't get much, if we get any at all. The good news is that without rain to interrupt me, I got a new asparagus bed dug. The bad news is that I think it was too late for those particular plants, that the roots might have been to dry, or the weather too hot, or whatever. So I might have wasted ten bucks on the plants, in which case I'll have a bed already dug for trying again next year. I'm about to give up on waiting for rain and just give all the plants a really good soak with the hose. I haven't even taken the foam thing off of the faucet. I don't expect a frost in April, but you never can tell. And I'm thinking that's one of Murphy's laws or something, that after you get everything in the ground there will be a late freeze. Anyway, whenever I take the foam thing off we get some near record late freeze, so I tend to leave it on for a very long time. So it's going to be cold and yucky for another day or two. I've had enough of it. Cold and yucky when it comes with beneficial rain is one thing, but this is just a waste. But I suppose in a couple of days it will be dry enough to dig again. Might as well get started on where the fruit trees will go next year.

And then it was back again

So that possibility of a little snow Wednesday turned into a lot of rain followed by sleet. I'm not sure we got much if any snow. But we did get the sleet, so the streets are covered with ice. Not like the really thick ice of last week, but ice is ice, and you can't drive on it. And then the temperature dipped again, to the possibly record lows, and so the ice won't all melt away for a bit. It might get a just a tiny bit above freezing today, but I don't really expect the roads to all be clear until Friday.

So this sucks, again, but maybe not quite as much as before. At least it will be over sooner. And with the ice not being quite so thick, there shouldn't be much of it left to refreeze Friday and Saturday. So I'm still hopeful that I will still be able to go on as planned Saturday night. Now I just have to decide what to bring and what to wear, as I hadn't bought anything new or planned anything really special.

My husband is home. They did at least have sense enough to cancel things before the ice came this time. So there's good news and bad news. With my husband home, I don't get much work done, so the floor is just as I left it Saturday morning. I've made no progress at all since then. The only work I've done is wash dishes. Like all of the dishes that I didn't wash last week (cause it was cold and I just thought I might as well not make myself more uncomfortable by having my hands in the water), and then all of the containers that my husband brought home from last week. And then there was all this stuff I had planned to cook, which I didn't, and has now gone bad, so I'll have to deal with that too and clean out the frig on Friday. So anyway, I haven't been working on the floor, which is just a bit more than halfway done and you'd think I would have finished it all by now.

The good news is that with my husband home a.) I'm not constantly trying to find out the road conditions in Abilene so I can figure out when it's safe for him to drive home, and b.) he's downloaded all sorts of things for us to watch while we're stuck indoors. So we watched a bit of Being Human (which gets a bit weird if you watch that and the American version at the same time) and Primeval and something new called Outcast.

Anyway, I think that things will mostly be back to normal later today, and totally be back to normal sometime Friday, and my husband doesn't work again until Saturday. So it's not so bad, not like the nearly all week thing that it was before.

And then it was gone

Yesterday around noon it finally got above freezing and stayed above freezing enough to melt the ice and snow, or most of it.

It has just been awful here since sometime early Tuesday morning. There was a bit of snow and there was thick ice all over the roads. Usually, it will snow only very briefly here, and usually not enough to stick, and if it does stick it doesn't stay cold enough to stay around for very long. But it got very very cold, and it did not melt (except maybe in places where you put salt and such), and even what you got to melt would then freeze over again and make even more of a mess. And then Friday we were supposed to get a little more snow, and we ended up getting a lot more snow, about five or six inches of snow, and that covered the ice on the roads, which made them even more dangerous.

While all this was going on, my husband was out of town. He was supposed to work Tuesday through Saturday at a place on the other side of Abilene. So he had left to do that Monday, not knowing if all the talk of snow was really anything to be concerned about, and even if it was it probably wouldn't be the same conditions in Abilene. Having talked to several people in the company on Monday at noon, and not being told he should do otherwise, he drove out just after that. So at about nine-thirty or ten, one of his bosses called looking for him to tell him that the first two days of the job were cancelled.

Great. What are we supposed to do about that now? If you don't want him to be at a job Tuesday, you have to tell him Monday, or better yet Sunday, as he would probably leave early on Monday. Even if he had decided to drive out early Tuesday, nine-thirty is way past the time he would have had to leave, even on a normal day. If the ice had only been here, and not in Abilene, he wouldn't have been able to go, and they would have yelled at him for not leaving earlier.

Sometimes his bosses do not seem to grasp that their traveling employees actually have to travel, and that means that they are not here and should not be expected to be here and such.

So I told the boss where my husband was and the number he could be reached at and so forth. A bit later I called my husband to make sure he had gotten the message. He said that Abilene was also covered with ice, so he guessed that he wouldn't be going to work that day, but it was good to hear someone confirm that. But only the first two days of the job were cancelled, cause ice on the road usually clears up by then.

Except that it was really really cold, and the ice did not melt.

Apparently the bosses do not talk to each other, so another boss called here looking for my husband on Thursday to say that he did not have a contact number, so could I call my husband and tell him that the rest of the week was cancelled and that he should just come home.

Come home, in this?

He can't drive a few blocks to the job site, and the customers can't drive from the other side of town to see him, but it's okay to drive from one town covered in ice to another town covered in ice that is several hours away, even though all the road between are covered in ice. Sure. We'll get right on that.

I did not notice the message for several hours. My husband expected at least a message to confirm that he didn't have to work that day, but he wasn't going even if he didn't get that message. So he got the message from me, quite a bit late. Coming home was out of the question, even if he had gotten the message when he should have. But he somehow had the idea that it would be safe to drive home Friday, while I knew that it wouldn't be safe til ten am on Saturday.

My husband spent a lot of time in a cafe drinking tea and talking to other people about where they were going, and where they had come from, and when it might be safe to leave. And there was a couple who thought that it might be safe to leave Friday, and that was what they planned to do. Only they didn't get very far when they saw the remains of a wreck and decided to turn back and checked in to the same motel again.

So Saturday morning he stayed in the cafe talking to truck drivers, and he found one who said he'd just come from Fort Worth and that it was mostly safe to drive that way. So my husband called me just before ten (when I suggested it might be safe to leave) and I told him not to be in any hurry, but it did at least look very sunny even if it was still just below freezing here that it should warm up soon.

So I thought I would start to look for him about two, though I didn't really expect him quite then, as I thought that most of the way he would have to drive slower than usual. But he got home even sooner than that.

His six week diet is nearly up, so he suggested going out for Mexican food.

But first, I had a bath and washed my hair.

I hadn't had a real bath since Tuesday, and I'm not sure how much before that since I'd washed my hair. Monday, everything had been fine. Tuesday, there was snow and the roads were covered with ice and it was cold, but you were fine if you stayed inside. But it stayed really cold, and Wednesday morning there were those rolling blackouts. And it was cold inside, and the space heater was nearly useless. I mostly stayed in bed Wednesday, and I just couldn't deal with the idea of getting totally undressed, much less get undressed and get into water. I decided the bath could wait. Thursday, it still seemed cold to me in the house, though either it was not quite as cold as Wednesday, or else I had just gotten used to it, but I still spent most of the day in bed. Friday was better still (inside, cause it was a mess outside), but I kept imagining that the blackouts would come back just as soon as I would decide to have a bath, so maybe it could still wait a bit more. Friday I got out of bed and got some work done, and work means that my hair needs to be washed, even if it didn't already need to be washed. Saturday morning I decided to get just a bit more work done, and the bath might as well wait til it was officially above freezing.

That was probably the best bath I have ever had in this house.

But I was really hungry, or I probably would have just stayed in the bath for a while.

All the ice on the streets were melting. There were puddles of water everywhere, and mounds of slush in the parking lots, but there didn't appear to be anything unsafe anywhere. After eating our late lunch and going to a couple of stores, we came home a couple hours later to see that most of the snow in our front yard had melted away. In the backyard and across the street there was still some snow, maybe in places that had mostly been in the shade, but it was all going to melt away, and on my side of the street you just wouldn't have known that there had been more than six inches of snow Friday.

It was just a miserable few days that almost became a week. And there are people who decide to live this way for months at a time. And I don't get it. I know that they've gotten used to it, but I don't get why after the invention of the air-conditioner that there wasn't vast migrations south and the northern states still have all those people in them, much less that there's a whole country of people who live north of them.

After finally getting through all of that, today at about noon it will start raining and/or snowing again, and that will last on and off til about four in the morning. But it won't stick, and it won't get much below freezing for long, so unless people are actually on the roads when it is happening (which they will be, because today is that damned game), they should be okay. So I will be sure to get all of my business done before noon.

And then we will get more on Wednesday. But again the temperatures are not going to stay below freezing around the clock, so I imagine that it will all be gone long before Saturday, and I have nothing to worry about this weekend.

Yet.

Anyway, I have my fingers crossed.

More bad weather

It had seemed to me that the conditions were slowly going to get better, or maybe I had just gotten used to how bad they were. But we have more snow now, and there is still the ice on the roads under the snow, so it is in fact a bit worse, because drivers cannot see now where the ice is, and while they drive over the snow that will sort of compact and make more ice.

My husband had heard that it might be safe to drive home today. I don't know what he was thinking. I know what the weather is here, and I've just looked at the forecast where he is now, and it won't get below freezing until 10 am tomorrow. So, if you happen to be reading this, don't check out until tomorrow morning, and don't actually start driving until sometime after 10 am, and if you are not home by 6 pm you had better see about getting another room and waiting til Sunday to make the rest of the drive, cause unless the roads are actually dry the melting snow will just start to freeze again.

We had heard that there was more snow coming, we just didn't expect this much. We have like 5 inches, and there might still be more coming.

Two days ago, someone in my family had ventured out, and had called to ask if I needed anything. I said no. I wish now I had asked for a pizza. I have food, and I'm supposed to be trying to lose weight, but I am so tired of it. And I haven't had caffeine for over a week now. No Cokes, not even diet ones. It's hard to sleep sometimes, so I figured that it was better off without caffeine if I could manage. But I really want a Coke, and a pizza, and chocolate, and maybe a hamburger. And some Chinese food. And some nachos. And some hot wings.

C's party has been rescheduled for next month. Now I'm a starting to worry about next week's party, as the weather is probably better next week, but it looks like it will snow again on Wednesday, and I don't know if it will all be cleared away by Saturday. I have already been told that there are absolutely no refunds for the room, so the party would either have to go on as scheduled, or they would have to somehow raise more money to rent the place a second time. The money lost on C's rescheduled party is just coming out of C's pocket. I'm wondering if we shouldn't pass the hat or something, but right now I don't even know how much money was lost.

I have spent most of my time in bed. The bedroom is not the warmest room in the house, but as I just recently decided to get on with taking up the carpet and such, the warmest room is unusable, and the rooms and hallway next to it are full of extra stuff. I got work done on Monday and Tuesday, as the house still seemed pretty warm for most of Tuesday, but not so much on Wednesday. So I just stayed in the bedroom under blankets. Yesterday seemed warmer, but I was in no hurry to get back to work, as I expected it was going to be even warmer today I thought today soon enough. But now I expect it to be cold until after lunch. Maybe then. Still no hurry I suppose. The trash will not be hauled away until Saturday, if then.

Okay, back to bed.

School closed for the Superbowl

Okay, not really. Schools around here are closed because of ice and snow. And it hasn't been this cold here in ten years.

It is unusual for it to snow here, and more unusual for it to snow here and there to be ice on the roads and be this cold all at the same time. We expected to get into the single digits last night, and I think that I missed getting that cold by about two or three degrees, but it is expected to get that cold again (if not colder) tonight or tomorrow morning, and today we're only going to have a high of maybe twenty-one. It won't get above freezing until sometime Saturday.

I'm told that there was plenty of de-icing stuff out and ready to go, not so much for us, but because they were trying to plan for anything that might interfere with the Superbowl. Still, that stuff apparently stops working at about fifteen degrees, and we are still a bit below that now, so regardless of how many trucks go out with it, we'll still have ice everywhere.

So much for going to C's party Friday night. Even if some of the ice melts by then, it will just freeze again, probably during the party, and then I'd get stuck there. I'm still watching the forecast, but probably not, though I'm still surprised how many other people have said that they will go.

We are having what is called "planned rolling blackouts". So the power went off just before seven, and while it was only supposed to be for about fifteen minutes, it was actually a bit more than half an hour, and then at nearly eight-thirty it happened again, for maybe twenty-five minutes, and I suppose I can expect the same for the rest of the day. I have a gas stove, but the house has been modified so that I cannot hook up my gas heater. I am thinking that after this is over I might go and see if I can somehow hook up the heater from the same place as the stove, just in case this happens again, though having a heater in or near my small kitchen will be annoying.

Other people are not having "planned rolling blackouts." They are just having blackouts.

I had misplaced my lighter, but I have found it now. If I get a longer blackout I'll at least have candles and be able to cook.

It is all a bit annoying. When I don't have power, I try to think of things to do other than watch TV, only to figure out that most everything else I think of also involves electricity. I can't use the computer without power. I'm not writing anything at the moment, but if I were, I suppose that I could write without a computer, only that is too distracting now to write anything on paper, and I no longer even have the convenience of a regular typewriter. Or I might want to read something, only without power I don't have a lamp, and much of the time it isn't light enough to read without one. And this morning I couldn't even find my lighter, so I couldn't even have a candle for that. And I might knit something, but again without sufficient light I can't do it at all, and doing it for long without the TV or radio or audio book is rather sad.

So without anything else to do here, I would go run some errands, or go to the theater, or even just go shopping or to a restaurant. But all of that is out as well, with the weather and the roads the way they are.

I decided to drag out a space heater. I haven't used it in three years, and really the last time I had it out was to dry something after a flood. I can't remember the last time I used this heater for it's intended purpose.

Just to show how life is not fair, while I'm thinking that I will have to miss C's party, all will be well by Sunday, in time for that game at that evil to go on as scheduled. And, as I write this, the evil place is being spared from the "planned rolling blackouts" because of security or something, while all the houses nearby still have to do without power now and then. Why couldn't it have been the other way around, with nice weather on Friday and a blizzard cancelling the game on Sunday? I'd be stuck at home on Sunday anyway, avoiding the traffic and such. If the ice doesn't melt much on Saturday, I'll be stuck here til Monday.

I suppose it isn't as bad missing C's party as it would be missing the other party next Saturday, as I have already bought a ticket, and I've been trying to collect charity stuff.

I'm going to go back to bed.

Now I can feel guilty some more

Okay, so we were home, and now we are not. The original plan was to go home and get some sleep and immediately head out again, so that we would have a day to be a tourist before the work week started on Tuesday. Except this trip is now two weeks, so we will have at least Sunday to be tourists, and maybe the Sunday and Monday the following week, so we didn't need this Sunday too. Besides, this Sunday's motel room wouldn't have been paid for, and I thought a day at home would be better.

And I imagined doing all this work and cleaning and such. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this, but I'm trying to paint the kitchen. I wouldn't have started this particular project now, except that since I've already pushed the cabinet out of the kitchen and moved the stove away from the wall, I thought that it would be better to get that area painted before I had to put everything back the way it was. Still everything else is still there, so I'm having to paint this tiny kitchen in four sections. Section one I painted half of a wall under a cabinet where the stove normally is and most of the wall next to it. That went well enough. Section two involved painting an even smaller area, up near the ceiling, and mostly above a couple of cabinets. And that involved standing on a ladder, and though it was a small ladder I decided to put that off until someone else was in the house with me, just in case there was an accident.

So I did section two on Sunday, when we were both home. Only before I started painting I had to take everything down from on top of the cabinets, and found that to be a bit of a mess. I'd never been up there to look before, but in addition to the dust and such that I expected I also found bits of wood and nails and other things that I'm not sure what they were, but that must have been left there by the maintenance guys before we moved in. I don't even know why this stuff was there, much less why it was left there. I don't think much of some of the maintenance guys, but at least they usually clean up after themselves.

I didn't have the energy for that sort of thing, but I did eventually get most of it cleaned. Ten minutes of cleaning, and then ten minutes of rest. I really didn't care to be standing on that ladder for long.

So that ended up being most of what got done that day, cleaning above the cabinets, painting above the cabinets, waiting four hours for the paint to dry, and then painting the second coat. Other than that I finished the laundry that I didn't get done with the day before, and I went out to lunch and cooked dinner. And that was about it. Oh, we cut the grass, and that was about it.

So I still hadn't cleaned the bathroom, or finished packing, or a couple of other things. So after watering the plants I still had to do all of that. And then my husband had a few errands to run, so we didn't leave as early as I had imagined, and it was about four in the afternoon before we got here. Not much time to do anything. But it was raining off and on, so I guess we wouldn't have done much of anything anyway.

Anyway, while I imagined leaving a cleaner house this time, it looks about the same as it did before, except that it has been painted just a little bit more, the bathroom has been cleaned up a bit, and the stove has been pushed back into it's usual place. The rest of the junk is still where it was.

I meant to take a few more things with me. Like, I miss my pillow. Taking your whole bed with you when you travel is impractical, but taking a pillow is easy, and if that isn't enough you can even bring your own sheets. So I missed my pillow all week and meant to bring it with me this time, but somehow I left the house without it, and the extra clothes I meant to pack, and a few other things. Mostly I have the same things that I had last week, except that I've washed them.

And I meant to put something on the bed before I left, just to get it off of the floor, just in case my house floods while I'm away. Flooding in general is horrible, but as far as missing individual things I don't think that there's much I would miss, except for this one thing, and I forgot and left it on the floor, the worst possible place for it.

So of course it is raining here, which means that it will probably rain at home later, which is normally a good thing, but now I'm a bit worried about flooding.

We have to change motels Wednesday, but we were looking forward to staying here for a bit. It has an indoor pool, and we managed to get a whirlpool tub at no extra cost. Except that once we got all of our stuff into the room and planned to take a bath, the jets didn't work. So, to be nice, they said that they would move us into another room.

You wouldn't think that you could make such a mess in only a few hours. Our stuff was all over the room and we had stuff in the fridge, but I really wanted that hottub, so we moved.

The new room is designed for handicapped people. I didn't know that hottubs were part of the handicapped rooms, but there's one here. In fact, there's a real big hottub here. I've never had a private tub big enough for two. I like it. Still, I shouldn't be in a room meant for a handicapped person. But there are more of those rooms here, so I guess that it is okay to use the one, unless a convention comes to town before we check out tomorrow.

Wednesday I will get another room that isn't as nice in a town that isn't as interesting. But Thursday or Friday there will be ice cream, possibly lots of ice cream.

Rain lilies

I found a rain lily in my backyard. I didn't know that they bloomed in July. But this one did, probably because it has been raining off and on since Monday of last week. I don't have that many rain lilies myself, but when they start blooming there are usually quite a few in the field, so I'll have to go and take a look.

Other wildflower developments are not as good. Even before it started raining, I noticed a few sprouts, and they turned out to be bluebonnets. Bluebonnets are not supposed to sprout in June. I had bought a few bluebonnet transplants in the spring, not enough to make a nice display, but I thought that they would make seeds and that next spring bluebonnets would magically appear in the places I wanted them to be. To be on the safe side, I collected some of the seeds, and I planted some of the seeds, thinking that they would not be able to sprout until much later. But there they are.

So after looking on the web, I see that this does happen sometimes. Unfortunately, the early sprouted seeds don't usually produce plants that survive the summer. From what I have read, this is usually not a big deal, as there are usually plenty of seeds left to sprout later at the appropriate time. But I don't think so. I think that most of the seeds I planted sprouted, and I don't know if the ones I left to nature where planted or eaten or blown away. Of the sprouts I saw, there are three tiny plants remaining. They will get terribly hot once this rain stops.

Aside from the wonderful free water, I have the usual complaints about the garden. The rain cools things down a bit, so I could work in the mornings, except that I can't work in the actual mud like I have now. And it is going to rain for a bit more, and by the time it stops raining and the ground dries out enough for me to do any work, it will probably be a hundred degrees again and too hot to get much of anything done. In the middle of summer, there are no tomatoes or peppers to speak of, you just try and keep the plants alive and hope that you get some in the fall. The squash still have not produced a damned thing. There are bean plants, but no beans on them yet. The soybeans just refuse to sprout, and the bugs tend to get more of the other bean plants than I do. The popcorn is doing well, but it will still be months before I can harvest any of it. The sweet potatoes look okay, but again that is something that gets left alone until fall. There are pumpkin sprouts, but I think that I waited too long on those. I have two luffa plants, but one is still very small, while the other is just now starting to really take over the thing it was meant to grow on.

So, that leaves me cucumbers and herbs. To be honest, I don't really cook with the herbs much, I just like the way that they smell and the way that they look, and I like that many of them are perennial plants.

I might be going to Oklahoma for two or three days next week. I don't know. There's nothing really good to do there, and we aren't going to be close enough to Tulsa to stay at my favorite place, it would just be an excuse to get out of the house. I won't be able to go, because of the plants, unless it is still raining, and I can't really believe that it will go on that long. And of course, there's always something more useful that I should be doing. Not that I'll actually get it done, just that I should be doing it.

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that it is raining. The bad news is that it is raining.

So, my husband was off for the week, and he said something about there being work in some other district, but no one had offered it to him. And I said something like we should get ready to go in case they call and offer a trip someplace interesting. And he told me where he thought it might be if someone did call, and that didn't seem very interesting, and I couldn't leave the plants that long anyway. But I looked at the weather reports, hoping that it was going to rain or something so that I could go if they did call. Only about ten percent chance of rain, with no little clouds or lightening icons or anything like that.

I pretty much forgot about doing anything that would have allowed me to go on a trip, cause even if there was a trip I wouldn't go cause of the plants. I went back to slowly digging this hole that will be the future home of a fruit tree. Not a bad hole now, even if it did take a really long time for me to get this far. The kitchen is a total mess and the rest of the house is mostly just as bad, but I have a mostly dug out hole.

So Monday we were out doing something, and my husband said he needed to stop at Home Depot. And as long as we were at Home Depot, I thought that we might as well get four more of those blocks, and so I picked four that didn't look too bad and put them in the cart before we went off to look for screws and whatever else my husband was going to look at. And then one of the workers said something to us, like did we need help or whatever, and then there was the short conversation that you'd expect to have with someone at Home Depot when you don't need any help (or don't want to admit needing any help), and it somehow ending with him saying something like "Yes, but it's going to rain."

And I thought that was a weird thing to say, cause I knew that it wasn't going to rain, cause I had looked at the reports. Okay, I hadn't looked that day and maybe I hadn't seriously looked the day before, but I had really looked maybe the day before that and there was nothing really about rain, and it didn't look like rain outside when we were out. Outside was the awful heat that is usual around here, with maybe some clouds but not yet thick enough to be useful, much less really looking like rain.

So we went on with our business, but I made a mental note to look at the weather again, cause maybe it was supposed to rain later.

Anyway, while we were still in the Home Depot, it did start raining. By the time we found all of the right screws and such and looked at whatever else my husband needed to look at, it wasn't just raining it was really pouring. And he said something about not wanting to take my stuff out to the car in the rain, but I wasn't having that, cause there's this covered part where you can load stuff without getting wet, you just have to wait your turn.

So he ran out to get the car and I waited with the stuff, and he lined up with the other cars. But somehow that didn't seem to go in an orderly fashion, with the only way you moved up the line is if the person in front of you gave up and left. So my husband finally sees and opening and pulls up, but on the outside lane, where you still get wet on one side, and that was the side where there was space cleared for the blocks. And rather than push stuff over to the other side, he just got wet loading the blocks. And he seemed a bit mad about it, but he's the one who couldn't be bothered to move the stuff to the other side, so, whatever. But he didn't stay mad, and we went home.

So of course there's this serious downpour in the next town over where the Home Depot was, but not at home. At home it was quite dry. So we get all wet but our house doesn't get any rain, which means that my plants didn't get any rain. So that was a bit disappointing. Then I remembered having left the shovel and such outside, so I went to collect those, and then we checked our phone messages.

We'd missed a call from his work. They had a job for him, but there were no details. He called, but they'd already found someone else. I don't know if it was a week away someplace cool or just a day around here. Maybe we are better off not knowing anyway.

So that night it did rain here, which is good for the plants, but not good for me trying to finish digging that hole. I can dig after a light rain, but I can't dig in the mud after a lot of rain.

The next day, we got more rain. Anyway, we've had rain off and on, so the temperature has been mid-eighties instead of high nineties, so that's good, and once we even took advantage of the nice weather and went back to the arboretum, where we learned that you have to leave the park at five, not just that they stop letting people in at five. Oh, well. We still had a nice half hour walk.

So it's a bit sad that when I was thinking about it I didn't get ready for a trip and we weren't here to get that message, just in case, cause there has now been enough rain that I could have left for the week if I had wanted to. And that probably won't happen again for a long time.

During a break in the rain, a neighbor had a new driveway poured. I don't like her much, but I hope that the rain doesn't mess up the concrete.

Anyway, the rain is all good for the plants and everything, I just wish that it had waited till I'd finished digging out the hole. Some of it will have to be done over again now, and I'll have to wait til sometime next week before it is dry enough to do that.

One of my readers was saying how she wished she could see my garden. But there is nothing to look at. We did this video last year, and I'm afraid this is pretty much what the garden still looks like. It is more in the planning stage, still. And what work I was doing got interrupted by stupid stuff like being ordered to cut down my honeysuckle. So it looks even worse, cause there are no vines to obstruct a person's view, and no flowers to speak of. It is almost all vegetable plants, and I'm not getting much veggies now. Most of the popcorn plants look good, but I won't be getting the popcorn for a long time yet. For some reason, the squash just didn't work out. It is too hot for the tomatoes, but maybe I'll get a few later. I have a few peppers, but not as much as I'd like. The sweet potatoes look nice, but you don't eat them until they finish growing in fall or late summer. And there are no beans yet. The main thing that I'm getting now is the cucumbers. And I like cucumbers, but I just can't do that much with them when that's all I've got. I'm just trying to keep everything alive until the fall when I can collect the rest of the stuff.

It is four in the morning

This is one of those times when it would have been good if I had the place to myself. I don't feel well. Not that I'm that close to being actually sick, just not feeling well and sleep doesn't seem like an option now. If I were by myself I'd pop in a Star Trek DVD and watch TV in bed until I fell asleep again. But I'm not by myself, so I'm in here.

I have just left the world's longest comment on someone else's blog. The blog wouldn't let me publish anything that long, so I took out all the extra lines between points and then also deleted three paragraphs on points that weren't that important (I can always go back and add them later). I was trying to be helpful while I still remembered what I wanted to say.

Earlier I had a weird dream about someone who looked like an actor. I think his name is Colin Firth. Only this wasn't really that guy, this was someone who would look like that guy, if that guy weren't an actor and didn't have to diet and/or go to the gym to get his next paycheck.

Okay, it is later. I finally did get some sleep. The somewhat disturbing images of someone who looks like Colin Firth are fading. I can get on with my life now.

Only now it is raining. I should have known that it would be raining. I checked earlier in the week and found out that it would probably be raining on Easter, so I had planned to do a lot of work in the garden before then. And I figured to be on the safe side that I should plan on the rain coming in on Saturday rather than Sunday. So I was planning to do certain things on Friday, thinking that it would be best to plant things right before the rain and such. I mostly took the day off on Thursday, except for buying those last few plants. Only by that time the forecast had changed and the rain was predicted for Friday afternoon. Still plenty of time for me to get things done on Friday morning.

Well, that's what I thought. It was already starting to rain about twenty minutes after I went outside. And there was actually talk of hail, so instead of planting things I ended up bringing stuff inside if it wasn't already in the ground.

And so it is raining, and I'm just sort of waiting around to see when that might be over. While it is raining, it would not be a good time to do my scheduled errands, as that partially would have been to go to Home Depot and pick up some mulch. Not something to be done in the rain. I might skip that part for now and do the rest, except for that whole thing about there might be hail or severe weather. Not a good time to be out doing anything at all.

It seems to have stopped for now. If only I had any confidence that this was the end of it for a bit. It just hasn't seemed like all that had been fussed about, so there must be more coming. I should wait.

Later again. I waited another hour or so, and the sky seemed to clear up. I think that it was mostly a beautiful day after that. We only got a little wet. It seemed to mainly rain a bit just to mess up my plans. I went on and got the errands done, and then I went to the dollar theater to watch The Blindside.

It's all good. It probably won't rain again today or on Easter, but it will probably rain Wednesday, so should get plenty of gardening done by then.

The snow is melting.

I think the official snowfall for the area was 12.5 inches, with the previous record for the area being 12.1 inches in 1964. I don't think that there was actually that much snow in my yard, but there was a lot.

The snow in my yard is already starting to melt, while most of my neighbors still have a solid blanket of white outside. We think that is has something to do with our having green plants (weeds), while most everyone else has dormant grass. We have seen a few other places with green grass next to otherwise solid white areas. And there is a snowman at the corner, and another one on the next street over. The snowmen are a bit odd looking. Obviously none of us know how to make one.

My husband seems quite obsessed with the fallen tree branch in our front yard. Someone helped him mostly pull it out of the street when we first found it. That was not to his liking, and he has twice moved it a bit more by himself. He keeps wanting to go to the office to get someone to cut it up or haul it away. I wanted to stay in, and I think that they were busy doing other things anyway. Yesterday he wanted to go to the office again. Yesterday was Saturday, and there's no one in the office on Saturday. It can wait til Monday. In fact, now that it is out of the street, it can wait indefinitely. What is the big deal about a tree branch? Other people around here have to deal with having no power, or leaking roofs, or broken windows, or damage to their cars. Leave the branch alone. Either the maintenance people will come and deal with it next week, or it can just stay there for a while. It isn't even touching the house. It isn't a problem.

Well, he worked on Tuesday as scheduled, had Wednesday off because as usual there isn't enough work to go around, had Thursday's job cancelled because of the snow, had Friday's job cancelled because of the snow, ended up working at a different place on Friday cause someone else got stuck in the snow, got to come home early on Friday cause even though that particular job wasn't cancelled on Friday most of the customers decided to cancel anyway, and then he didn't go to work on Saturday cause even though the roads were now mostly okay to drive on the job had already been cancelled. This week should be almost back to normal, and he is scheduled to work four days.

I am still wondering if they will postpone that scheduled power outage yet again. I will do a lot of cooking on Monday, just in case it is still on. I have heard that most of the stuff in the freezer will be okay, but I'll have to throw out a lot of stuff from the fridge. Of course, it is about time to clean out the fridge anyway.

I have received a jury summons. Contrary to popular belief, I do not have the answer to getting out of jury duty. Not that I'm going to try this time, I think that it is one of those that pays forty dollars a day, and I might as well get it over with next month. I'm a little concerned with the instructions I received. It says something about no electronic devices. That doesn't mean cell phones, does it? Surely they don't expect us to find our way to the courthouse and such without our cell phones.

Saturday we went out to lunch at Cheddars. After all the giggling we did when we were on the road and heard about people waiting hours to get into the place cause it was new, we actually like the one here, though it does not take hours to get in. Having been mostly stuck in the house for days, we decided just to go where we wanted to go instead of looking for coupons and such. We will call it an early Valentine's Day dinner.

I bought some more scrap lumber. So now I have quite a stack of it, though it looks like it will be a while before I can paint it and otherwise do anything with it.

Sunday we went out again. My whole front yard is now melted except for a couple of snowballs. Other people still have a lot of snow or not. And there are a lot of places that only have snow where someone tried to make a snowman or an igloo or something. Big mounds of snow here and there on an otherwise melted yard or field.

After having the nice lunch on Saturday, Sunday evening we just went to Whataburger for some buy one buy one free deal available only to people who had nothing better to do than go to Whataburger for dinner on Valentine's Day. After that we went to the grocery store, and then mostly couldn't remember what we were going to buy since we were trying not to buy anything that needed to be put in the fridge. Then we got a couple of DVDs from Redbox and went home.

Okay, not very exciting. It was just good to get out for a bit.

Still snowed in

Oh, I guess it wouldn't be that bad if I really needed to get out, but I don't need to. It mostly looks like snow, not ice, though I am really not used to seeing the snow this deep.

A big branch fell off of our tree and into the street. It wasn't quite as big as the one that fell earlier, and my husband and someone who came to check on a neighbor pulled the branch out of the street. Also, the tree in the picture from the previous post was damaged, though not as bad as ours.

And it isn't like I really care about this tree anyway. I just don't want parts of it to fall on the house or the car.

It is just now getting above freezing, so snow is falling in big clumps from the trees and the roof. It will probably be very bad tomorrow when the snow melts and then freezes on the streets. But I guess the snow will still be here for a while.

Doesn't matter much. I have no place that I need to go.

After all the talk about planned power outages, my mother's electricity went off. It was not planned. And she doesn't have gas, so she'll have to wait to have a bath or cook anything. She hasn't called yet to say if it is back on. But yesterday she said that she was okay and didn't need anything.

We will just sit around the house and watch movies and make soup.

It is snowing here

And it never snows here. Or at least, it rarely snows here, and most of the time when it does it isn't enough to stick. But the snow is here, several inches of it, and it will stick for a while.

Here's a tree in my neighbor's yard.

It's a good thing that they postponed that whole power outage thing, or it would have been tomorrow. It has been planned again, for the third time, for next week. I wonder if they will have to postpone it again?

My husband's work called and cancelled. This is the first time that he has worked his regular job in weeks, and so of course this happened on the second day. Tomorrow and the next day are probably cancelled too, but that won't officially happen until tomorrow and the next day are here.

We should be doing something useful, but we are mostly either on the computer or watching television in between short periods of going to look out at the snow. We're not much for actually getting out in the snow. That lost most of it's appeal after I turned twelve.

I think that the driving looks bad, but it is just mostly the way it looks. Tomorrow there will probably be more in the way of solid ice that is really bad to drive on.

A couple of weeks ago, I was all ready to get out the rakes and shovels and other garden tools and get to it. Now I can't even see where the garden beds are. There's that much snow on the ground.

Still, I expect that it will all be gone by Monday.

Just some stuff that might get annoying

Well, the no electricity thing has been postponed, as they say that the new date will be drier and warmer. It does look like it might be drier, which I am sure is very important when dealing with electricity, but I do not think that it is going to be warmer. Looking at the predictions, it might be just a little bit colder during the day, but at night it will be much colder, and instead of we might or might not have a freeze the night before we will now have five or ten degrees below that the night before and possibly the night after.

So this will not be good for those of us who do not have a permit and such to heat the house with gas (and I am one of those people who does not have this ability), and it will really be bad for us if for some reason they do not get the power back on at the scheduled time. The upside to the change is that there might be different movies at the dollar theater, and we now have four more days to eat what is in the freezer.

Tomorrow is the party, and I still haven't decided what to wear or what to bring.


No matter how many times that I go to the store, no matter what lists I write, there is always something that I forget to do or something that I forget to buy. Often the thing that I forget is something essential, like cooking spray or tissue paper. Yesterday I did manage to get the tissue paper, but now I've run out of cooking spray.

I still haven't finished the pilot's scarf.

I don't think that I have done anything particularly useful in weeks.

Sometimes I would just like to get rid of my stuff, get on a bus, and see where I end up.

Only I don't think that I want to take any long bus rides in February.

The first week of February is almost over. Three more to go.

Today was weird

So, I live in Texas, in a part of Texas that rarely gets really cold, but unfortunately not in a part that is warm and sunny all the time, and I live nowhere near the beach. But anyway, in this part of Texas, with some extra work, one could probably garden all year round, though I am not one of those people committed to doing that extra work, and I would rather not be doing that much work at all. Still, after a week of really nice weather, I thought that it might be a good idea to get started on the spring stuff, and of course right when I decide that is what I should do, then it rains and it is going to freeze later and all of that.

Now the thing about getting started with the gardening is that if you start a particular project that you have to get certain parts of it done before it starts to rain again, or else it looks worse than before you did anything. So, if you were going to turn over a bed, and you get it done before it rains, then that is fine. And, if you decide that it is still too cold and do nothing, and then it rains, then that is fine too, except that you will still have work to do later. But if you decide to turn over a bed, and you don't get done with it, and then it rains, and then you have a bit of a hole in the ground which then fills up with water, and the hole is then surrounded by piles of dirt, which during the rain turn into piles of mud. And then it looks really ugly, and the job isn't finished, and then when it is dry enough to try again you probably didn't save that much time by getting started on it earlier.

In fact, sometimes you have made more work for yourself, as the piles of mud might get to be really wet piles of mud, which travel a bit and it is really a hassle getting the dirt back in the state that was meant to be so that you can plant stuff.

So that is very similar to what has happened here, except that I was moving some dirt from one place to another, and hadn't quite got to the part of digging the hole, but I still a lot of what was almost usable dirt and is now a lot of really wet mud. I was attempting to mix the dirt with sand and compost, and I didn't get much of that done, and I will have to wait for it to get really warm again before I can finish. And while I am waiting for it to be nice warm weather again, it all looks a bit messy, even more so than last week before I got it into my head to get out the shovels and such.

I haven't done much house cleaning this week, as I was trying to do this little garden project instead, and I wanted to do a lot of work before it rained. And then that other stuff happened, and then the rest was just the usual bit of everything taking a lot longer than I imagine. And it is quite wet now. I had thought that I would at least do some work outside this morning before it rained, but I guess that it rained some last night that I did not notice until I went outside this morning. Not a really good rain, just enough to get everything wet so that gardening was out of the question.

So then it was back inside, and I got a bit more rest, since there didn't seem to be any rush to do anything. There was then a phone call from my mother, which I won't get into now but maybe I will post about it later. And then I thought that I would get started with the prep work for lunch, and then I would watch a video before going to the library so that I could take everything back. And then my husband walked in the door.

I wasn't supposed to see him again until Friday night. But there was some screw up at work. I might have made fun of this before, but my husband always seems to work for someone who cannot connect the idea of "working out of town" with "he isn't home." So they will send him out of town, and then they will call here looking for him, when they know that he isn't here. The first few times that this happened, I really panicked and thought that he was missing and must have been in a accident. Over time I just get used to the fact that these people who are supposed to know all about going out of town and such still just don't get it, and that they can't be bothered to look and see which is a person's home phone and which is a cell phone, or even bother to find out if there is a cell phone, and so they just call here, and no one ever makes a note that this is not a cell phone. And they will also never make the connection that supplies needed at the site should be sent to the site, and not to the house when he isn't home, and possibly there is no one home, and possibly the packages left on my doorstep would just get stolen.

So that was the first thing that happened, that this new person called my house to talk to my husband who was more than a hundred miles away at the time. And I had no where to forward the message to, and it wasn't an important message anyway. It wasn't anything like tomorrow's schedule has been changed. She just wanted to know how things went.

So that was Wednesday. Thursday morning, my husband went to the site and waited out in the car until someone eventually showed up to tell him that they had cancelled a couple of weeks ago, and he wouldn't be needed today.

Now, he should have called to make sure that Friday's schedule hadn't been changed and then just gone on to the next site. But, having the whole day off, he came home instead, having not paid any attention to the weather reports. He just thought that he would stay here and get up really early in the morning rather than spend another night in a motel where there is nothing to do.

It is going to be cold and rainy, and possibly there will be freezing rain either tonight or tomorrow, and staying here tonight is just out of the question, unless the schedule had been changed, which so far doesn't seem to be the case. So it was decided that he would stay for lunch, but not dinner, and that after spending a few hours with me he would drive on to the place where he is supposed to work tomorrow.

So, after we got all that worked out, it was time for lunch, maybe a bit early but close enough. I finished cooking, and then went ahead with my original plan of watching some silly video, only now my husband was watching it with me.

The video was Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and I had grabbed a lot of videos from the library, knowing that it was probably going to rain and that I would probably not have any TV to watch, but maybe getting this particular video was a bit too much. But how bad could it be, right?

I hope that I pushed the wrong button or something. It seems like you have to select either the version shown in the theater or an even longer version, or something. So I selected the theatrical version. Or, at least, I thought that I had. If this was the version shown in the theater, I just can't imagine what was added later.

Anyway, someone said the "F" word every five minutes, and there was full frontal nudity and everything.

Okay, so in the three or four hours that I'm trying to have a nice afternoon with my husband, half of it was spent on this dumb movie. And then there was other stuff, and then there was more food and then there was a trip to the library, and then he headed out.

And now I'm wondering if that was all a mistake, that he should have left right after lunch, and now he's going to get stuck in all this rain, if not worse.

Hopefully in about an hour or so he will call and tell me he has a nice warm motel room.

So now I have this odd bit of having one more night to myself, even though I did not have the day to myself, and the only thing that I got done was cooking lunch and going to the library. Anything else that I had thought I would do today will probably have to be done tomorrow, and it probably won't get done then either.

Saturday, I have to cook something or bake something, or just give up and buy something. Sunday I have this thing to go to, and I have to either bring a dessert or a vegetable. I suppose tomorrow or the next day I will go shopping and see what speaks to me.

Excuse me a moment while a go and reheat my hot chocolate

It is cold today.

It is 18 degrees or something like that now. It is very rarely that cold here. Rarer still, it is going to stay below freezing for days. At some point Wednesday night or early Thursday morning, it dropped below freezing, and it is going to stay below freezing til sometime Saturday or maybe Sunday. That just doesn't happen here very often. It will get below freezing overnight, but then about lunch time it will warm up again, even if it is only temporary and freezing again the next night.

Well, I did not think this was going to be any great deal to me, as I do not have a job or school now, and I have no great need to go out and do much. And even if I did have someplace to go, cold is usually just cold, and it doesn't mean anything particularly bad unless it also comes with ice, and for there to be ice there has to have been rain or snow or something before the freeze, or sleet or something during the freeze. And there had not been rain that I could remember, and last time I checked they weren't expecting any, so I probably did not pay that much attention.

When ice is expected, we all go out to the grocery store and load up on stuff. If we don't do this we will run out of eggs, bread, milk, tissue paper, etc.... And while we are there getting that important stuff, we might as well load up on ice cream and cookies and spaghetti sauce and chips and who knows what else.

This practice has always seemed a little odd to me. The tissue paper I cannot live without, but even if I run out of milk and eggs and bread, that does not mean that I'm in danger of starving to death. There is still plenty of stuff in cans and stuff in the freezer. Would it be that bad if we ate our cereal without milk, or if we baked cookie dough and the frozen pizza and ate those for breakfast instead of eggs?

Okay, so it was just supposed to be cold, not ice on the roads, but it just happened to be Wednesday, and the grocery ads came in the mail, and I thought that I might as well get some stuff before it got cold. And there did not seem to be that many people in the store, except that there was fighting over particular parking spaces, and everyone who did get into the store seemed to be in line at meat counter.

I rarely need anything from the meat counter itself, but the thing I wanted either wasn't in the case or it was marked wrong, so I had to stand in line. Except, I couldn't figure out where it was that I was supposed to stand in line.

Usually, when there is a counter like this for meat or seafood or for cutting fabric at the fabric store, you have to wait in line and probably take a number if it is busy. And usually, it is only busy on Saturday, and the rest of the time you just walk up and get what you want.

So, there are all this people at the meat counter, and all I want is two pounds of chicken. Now, if this is all one long line, the line probably starts way at the other end of the counter. If, however, there is a separate line for chicken and a separate line for beef and so on, I cannot stand in line there, or else the guy dealing with the chicken will never see me.

So I asked a couple of women in line if it was just the one line, and they ignored me, cause I wasn't speaking Spanish. So I asked a few more people, and they didn't seem to know either, they were just waiting where they thought someone might notice them. And I couldn't see if there was one of those things that gives you a number.

So, I gave up trying to be nice and walked up to the employee nearest the chicken and asked him if it was just the one line, and he didn't seem to understand what I was saying either, but he did not send me to the back of the line and I got my chicken after he finished what he was doing.

Okay, so I have chicken and a bunch of veggies, and I pay for my stuff and go home. Usually, I might go to a second store and get more stuff, but the temperature dropped somewhat while I was in the store, and I decided to skip it. Besides, it was getting too close to five o'clock for my liking. You do not want to be in that store at five o'clock.

So, I have food, I already had tissue paper, I don't have to go anywhere, etc.... And my husband's schedule sucks right now, but that also means that he doesn't have to go anywhere either. Wednesday was his last day for the week. We could stay indoors and cook and be warm.

Of course on Thursday, he insists on eating lunch at Arby's. I say that I don't want to go out, and that we have food, but he says that he has to go out anyway to drop off a package, so while we are out we might as well eat at Arby's while we are out. And as long as we are going to Arby's, we might as well go to that other grocery store, as the Arby's in located in the parking lot of the grocery store.

So now we have a case of ramen noodles and a case of mac and cheese, and we have tortillas and a few other things. And we have crackers to eat with our soup, if ever we get off of our lazy a**es and make any soup. And it will be much colder today than yesterday, and there is that whole wind chill factor thing, and we really have no excuse to go anywhere today.

I did notice some odd things when we were out yesterday. It was cold, but somehow it wasn't that cold except for a gust of wind here and there, but to hear all the talk I was thinking that the wind was going to be constant.

And there were puddles of water on the ground. So that was odd. For one thing, I don't remember it raining, so where did the water come from? And it if stays below freezing, shouldn't it be ice instead of a puddle of water? Still, the actual ground temperature is a bit warmer than the air, but the way everyone was going on about the cold, I was surprised that it got warm enough to melt the ice.

I am still not sure where the ice came from. I was paying attention until Wednesday, and there wasn't supposed to be any ice, just cold. But now there is water on the ground, and Wednesday night there was talk of having the sand trucks ready to go, and Thursday morning there was ice on the bridges and overpasses, and there were cars stuck on them, and some areas were closed while they tried to get the sand trucks where they were supposed to go, and the schools were "delayed" and a few of them were closed.

Anyway, I am not terribly cold, I'm just wishing that maybe someone would have given me some soft boots for Christmas, something that I would just wear around the house when I am too lazy to put on real shoes.

And my hot chocolate has gone cold again.

We are expecting snow today

I wouldn't believe them, except that it snowed on Christmas Eve. Yesterday was a fine day, though we found out it was a bit cool to spend much time in the park after we did not bring our coats. But today it is supposed to start snowing at about lunch time. We must remember to go out and buy a few things first, like lottery tickets.

My husband has bought about five or ten pounds of this gourmet Italian bacon stuff. While I would have no problem eating about five or ten pounds of regular bacon, given enough time, I think that I'm already getting a bit tired of this stuff. It is really good for some stuff, but it isn't what I am used to, so I guess that I would rather not have it for breakfast. Anyway, we will go to the grocery store and buy a few things so we can eat this fancy bacon the way it is supposed to be prepared.

I did not find the matching yarn yesterday, so I will put the current scarf aside and start on a completely new one. I have three skeins of soft white yarn, and if I run out I will keep the label so that I can buy more matching yarn. After all of this practice, I should end up with a really nice scarf, though at this rate the pilot will get his Christmas present for Valentine's Day, which would totally be the wrong message.

Speaking of Valentine's Day, that is when the club usually has a fundraising auction, so it is about time that I start looking around to decide if I am going to put anything into it.

I had better get dressed now if I plan to go anywhere before the storm.

The seventh day of Christmas

The sixth day of Christmas was yesterday, actual Christmas Day itself. I didn't do anything. While it isn't unusual to do very little on Christmas Day after we've already had our main family thing the night before, it was unusual to do nothing at all. Mom called once just to see that we were okay, and that was about it. Mom didn't invite us to do anything, and no other relatives called to suggest anything. If grandma was up to having visitors, no one mentioned it to me. And my brother did not call to suggest watching a movie.

Which was just as well, as I spent most of the day with a bit of a headache. Other than that I tried to work on a scarf while I watched some of my Stargate DVDs. Before yesterday I hadn't found any serious problems, but now it looks like disk five mostly doesn't work.

I mostly feel better now. The seventh day of Christmas (and the eighth day of Christmas), is a shopping day. So I am just sort of sitting here, debating with myself if and when to venture out. I don't especially want or need anything in particular, and I probably won't get any really good deals for about a week, but I will probably go out and have a look anyway. I'm thinking that a bit before seven would be good. That is when Target will open. And then there is Walmart, which I would avoid today, except that I again need some yarn, and I would rather just try there than head out to Hobby Lobby again. I love Hobby Lobby, but it is a bit far away for what I would like to do today, plus it is right near the mall and I don't want to deal with the traffic. I just want to look at a few things and go back home.

And I am wondering about the ice. There was ice on the 24th, though there did not seem to be much actually on the streets. But I do think that there was probably ice on the parking lots, since there was ice on the driveways and sidewalks. And it hasn't been enough above freezing for it to melt, and since there were no cars driving about to wear it away, whatever ice was there on the night of the 24th must still be there.

If I knew that for sure, I would just stay home. As it is I will probably get dressed as soon as I finish this and go have a look for myself.

On the fifth day of Christmas

Our family will have a tradition for several years, and then it will change, and then we will have a different tradition for years after that, and then later it will change again.

So, after we were not little kids who believed in Santa Clause and all of that, we had the tradition of exchanging gifts on Christmas Eve after we ate dinner at a certain pizza place. Then, that particular pizza placed closed. Soon after that, my sister requested that we go back to exchanging gifts on Christmas Day.

And then she got married, and we went back to the idea of exchanging gifts on Christmas Eve, after we have dinner at a nice restaurant.

So that was the plan for yesterday, to exchange gifts after we had dinner at this certain restaurant, where we would eat oysters and fried alligator and other such things.

We don't get a lot of snow here, and even when we do it usually much to look at. It doesn't stick. Or there isn't enough of it to cover the ground. It usually melts before the day is over, so, if you want to see snow, you had better go out and look at it when it is actually snowing.

What we do have once in a while is ice on the ground. It might rain or snow, or sometimes make that sleet or freezing rain. Most of the time this will either happen at night, or if it has happened during the day it might melt and flow out into the streets, where if it gets below freezing during the night, it will freeze. So we sometimes have this ice on the roads, but it usually seems to be something that you have to deal with in the morning, unless you are one of those people who has to drive around a lot at night.

Yesterday we had various weather conditions happen during the day. First, there was a bit of rain, which wasn't bad, and most of it was gone before I got around to doing anything. We had a free Whataburger for breakfast and went to the grocery store for a few things that we forgot to get. Not anything Christmas related, just stuff that we were going to run out of, and the stores probably won't be open today, so we had to get the stuff yesterday. And then we went home, and it was snowing a bit, but it just wasn't cold enough yet for it to matter much. We had a lot of snow in chairs and planters and such, being just a bit cooler off of the ground that snow doesn't melt as fast.

So it had snowed, but there wasn't much snow on the ground to look at. But according to the news reports, we would probably get more. My brother called to say that we might have cancel dinner.

Well, it didn't seem that bad. There was a bit of snow on the ground, but there wasn't yet ice in the streets. The ground was for the most part wet, not frozen. Still, it might get worse later. It was just too soon to decide anything.

Later my mom called. My sister was offering to cook something if we wanted to cancel the restaurant reservations and just go straight to her house, since the plan was to go to her house after dinner anyway. My mom didn't want to put my sister to that much trouble, so she suggested going to a different restaurant that was closer to her house.

I did not think much of this going to a different restaurant idea. That would still mean that we would have to get out in traffic twice. If it was safe to go to a different restaurant, it was probably safe to go to the one that we had originally planned. What would make me feel safer was to go straight to my sister's place as she had suggested. As for making my sister cook, we could just order a pizza instead.

We went and got another free Whataburger for lunch while we waited to see if anyone had a better idea.

So we ended up going straight to my sister's place, about an hour earlier than we had planned to meet at the restaurant. And then if we heard that it was going to get ugly, we could go home earlier.

The pizza thing nearly didn't work out. As it took so long to figure out ordering the pizza, it was slightly after six, and the first place that we called closed for the day at six.

We ordered five pizzas from the next place. The wait was a bit longer than usual, but not that much longer since we decided to pick them up instead of having them delivered.

While we were eating pizza, there was more snow.

Well, if it is going to get bad, it is too late now. And if it got really bad, we were safe at somebody's house, not at a restaurant that we would have to leave no matter what.

We exchanged gifts. My siblings seemed to like what we got for them. We got a gift certificate to my husband's favorite restaurant and I got DVDs to all of the Star Trek movies. All eleven of them.

This is my year for getting DVDs, and I am pretty happy with them.

When we were ready to leave, there was ice on the ground, but not so much in the streets. The driveway and sidewalk I just could not walk on, and inched along until I could walk on the now snow covered grass or the mostly dry street. Once we were driving home, the ice was not much of a problem, except for the "bridges and overpasses" and the frozen puddles of water that were mostly near the curbs.

So that was nice enough. I don't expect the weather to be much of a problem today, but I don't think that there are any plans to speak of either. I will just sit here and wait to see what happens.

I woke up too early this morning

And, since I had the house to myself, I actually decided to watch TV and such. When there is no one else in the house, you can do that sort of thing.

But now I am tired and wanting to go back to sleep. Again, since there is no one else here, I could do that if I wanted. Or, at least, I could try. But it probably won't work. The sun is up now and everything.

I think I will fry an egg and see how I feel after that.

The giant heap of stuff next to the bed has become a smaller heap of stuff, and maybe it will get smaller still and I can at least put the stuff in boxes to be sorted out later. At least, I tell myself that I will sort out the boxes later. Anyway, stuff in boxes on the floor is a bit neater than just stuff on the floor without the boxes.

I guess I did the easy stuff Tuesday, though it didn't seem easy at the time. Maybe it is more accurate to say that I did the obvious stuff Tuesday. Wednesday I still through away another bag of garbage, but it took longer to find that much stuff I didn't want anymore. Finding that much stuff today would take longer still, so I think I will stop trying at about lunch time and switch to something else.

Two more days and nights with the house to myself. On Saturday I have plans. I'm looking for stuff that could be made into Halloween decorations. Halloween is getting close now.

My husband found another hundred dollars. I guess he won't get stranded out of town now.

Yesterday, the power went off, then on, then off, and then it went back and forth so fast I didn't count. And then it just stayed off for a while, but still less than an hour. I gave up and read a bit of a book. I don't read much anymore. My eyes aren't good and I don't enjoy it like I used to.

It rains a lot now. It doesn't just pour down rain day and night, but we do get wet for a little while, and it doesn't stop long enough to dry out from last week. All this water going to waste. I wish I had been able to start a fall garden. But at this point the seeds would just get washed away, and I don't have money to buy seedlings.

The water that isn't going towards growing vegetables is just making the grass grow. I will probably get a complaint letter on the door.

The fall bulbs I transplanted are starting to bloom. I'm not sure if I'd call this a success or not. Most of the bulbs are still too small to flower, so maybe next year. And I did get some flowers. And maybe some more will bloom later. They usually come in waves, depending on when there has been enough rain. So I don't know if this is all of them, or if this is just the first wave.

I'm still thinking of going back to bed.