Monday message of no

I made it into town early this morning for the last round of allergy shots for another month. I dread that South Hill location. Some genius decided no more free parking across the street but did not provide more non-free parking so I always end up parking a block or two away and climbing the hill to the Medical building which has a terrifying crane erected out front. By the time I get up there I’m winded and grumpy. Perfect mood for two shots and sitting for 30 minutes listening to jackhammers and nail guns blatting away on the other side of the wall. Last week I tried to do a face plant just as I nearly made it to the car. Now I tromp around the woods and my yard is every kind of irregular surface and I have no problems but the city sidewalks try to kill me. No problems this week but they also decided today is the day to start roadwork around the access to the big P.O. in town. But my stamps are there! I had to go!

Finally mid-morning I sit down to see what fun stuff I can do in the fortress of chaos I call an office. Renew the satellite radio I still haven’t signed up for in the 7 months since I bought the new van? Extended warranty for my 43-year-old RV? Okay maybe none of those are “Important” but the IRS says someone has applied for a job with Wu’s SS#. Now the youngest son has been a full-time student until now so that one concerns me. What could get him flagged? Does he know how to get into his bank account so we can check credit? NOPE! Does Hubbin who set it up have any useful insight? Nope! So once again I’ll sit here while youngest takes FO-REV-ER to call the bank and figure it out. Good time to write a letter…

(Wu comes downstairs and says he got put on hold so long his phone died so I give him mine and tell him to try again. I tried to access the credit report and the website says sorry try again later. Bleah!)

I am so stir-crazy right now. Getting the reservations lined up for this fall didn’t help a bit. It’s very nice outside and I need a break from this house. A friend asked me to go to Idaho last week and then her husband didn’t feel good so we never got to the planning stage. She is THE reliable friend so I need to follow up on that. I looked up cabins at Priest Lake and you’d think they were coated in GOLD. Cheaper just to get the indoor plumbing. I do have the Guard Station booked for June but that feels like an eternity. (Whiny Tunguska!)

The truth is I really have a lot to do right here and feel that I should get to it, but there always seems to be a complication. Last week the dryer quit just as I was going to get all the laundry sorted and start cleaning out closets again. Hubbin stomped around and fussed at it until I had to go empty everything out of the wash porch so he could tear it apart. He did have it fixed in 24 hours but then I had to put everything away. Because he was going to stomp and snort about the mess in the Livingroom too. Here’s the thing, I feel exactly as annoyed as he does when these things happen but stomping and snorting doesn’t win me any prizes so I end up powered down on the couch until I can actually do something.

Once I got the laundry stuff figured out, I put out the fake grass in the front yard and tied the “Timeout Chair” to the table where I like to sit and write. That must have worked because everything was as I left it last night in spite of some impressive gusts just after dark. I don’t think the weight of the table is the trick but that it buffers the wind so the chair can’t catch enough breeze to tumble over. Now I just have to wait for the new umbrella I ordered. Pup gave me a “freebie” from a now-defunct bank and it did pretty well until February when we had the “Hurricane”. I drove by the park downtown today and noticed all the parts of the Expo74 butterfly reassembled and shiny on the ground but it’s still not “aflutter” yet.

I finished Jess Walter’s Cold Millions last night. I really love his writing and the historical details of the region are fun since I didn’t know where the “Italian section” of the town was and never heard the stories about “Union Agitators” battling for free speech in the early 1900s. Heard about stuff on the Westside but not here. His style is just comfortable to read. On Good Reads there was a squawk about it being too political and I guess people have just had their fill of that sort of thing so maybe didn’t have patience for the storytelling. Now I’m starting Nomadland. I watched the movie a couple of months ago and sorry, Francis Dorman’s bland face and bucket toilet didn’t fill me with romantic notions of the road, partly because Bob Wells was allowed to tell a heart-wrenching story about his son which was sad and true and made him look like some kind of aging counter culture sage, which he is not. So far, the book looks much more promising. Such seems to be the case with books vs movies.

(Wu gets the account reset, Yay him! Now the online site is down for maintenance. Boo them!)

Hubbin has a class to teach at 5 pm. It is some kind of Microsoft project manager thing. He hates it and I cannot help. If this banking thing won’t work today maybe I will just drive up to Happy Hill and see if the fire crew has left.

I was having really nice daydreams about Happy Hill last night. There’s a piece of land for sale up there I could LOVE …but the thunderstorms set it afire while I slept. Talk about the Gods saying “No YOU don’t” loud and right quick. I have a load of clothes to donate to the community center anyway. I didn’t make it to my friend’s service Saturday. I still haven’t made sense of it and didn’t need to be public to deal with it. Another person we could call a mutual friend asked me to pick up one of those little flyers they hand out at funerals because she had one from the Brother with whom I was also friends. I would have done it because she said she had something important to do and couldn’t make it but something important was a trip to Vegas to party. Suddenly I didn’t feel like being her minion. I also don’t feel inclined to collect my friends who have passed away like baseball cards.

Life is not all dark. Yesterday one of my mother’s favorite talk show hosts from Portland station KKEY popped up on youtube. This guy gave us a dog, and I once had a public discussion about toilet paper holders. He claims dementia and a series of other health problems but he still tries to share opinions. A very sweet man who didn’t quite make it to the priesthood because he had a nephew who needed a stand-in parent. He’s still so insightful that it’s encouraging that he’s still giving it the old college try.