Dreary Day

Post # 209 

      What a weekend! I slept through it! I am not sure if it is the new medication, the depression, the weather, or just me being exhausted...probably a combination of all of that but I have slept about 18 hours out of every 24 the past three days.  I have to stay awake all day tomorrow to take care of my granddaughter.  Casey has a cold so she won't be coming in to relieve me at noon so I will need to stay until 5:30 or later so the plan is to stop and get a 44 oz caffeinated soft drink on the way at 7 a.m. 

    This morning about 4 a.m the dogs woke me up to go outside.  I just got them back inside when the lightning started.  By the time I was back snuggled under the covers the rain started coming down just furiously.  It sounded so awful I thought about getting up and seeing what the heck was happening but I was so sleepy, so warm, so comfy I thought if my single wide trailer gets blown away I might as well be wrapped in this warm blanket!  I am still here so we did not blow away!  It was very cloudy all day.   Almost 7 p.m. and it is drizzling again.  Suppose to get down to 25 degrees tonight so I had gone out and sprayed my car windows with vinegar.  I read that if you do that you will not have frost on the windows.  About the time I got in the house the drizzling started so I guess my vinegar will be washed off.  Will have to try that again another day to see if it works.   I don't have a garage so leaving here at 7 a.m. means scraping heavy frost of the windows on these cold nights.  



my dogs love Travis, no matter what is on his "hay-ED"



     Yesterday I had two good visits.  My daughter and grandsons came over and I enjoyed them so much.  I had a hard time waking up from my afternoon nap (side effect of my new medication I suppose---or just my regular depression brain fog) so I didn't get to play a game or cards with them.  We agreed we will do that in two weeks when they get to come again.   I told my grandsons I was getting rid of a bunch of things and one was a clown wig.  Travis decided he needed it. I am going through junk I have in my room and getting rid of everything I don't really need. 

    My son is a barista at Starbucks and when he got off work Sunday he came over for dinner.  It was a cold evening.  I had beef and vegetable stew in the crock pot and made cornbread....one of my favorite meals.  He is just the most interesting person I know.  I love our conversations.

My son Trey, when he came over last night

      His entire life he has been a learner.  If he is interested in something he learns everything he can about it, and amazing to me, he can remember it and share it in the most interesting ways!   When he was just a little boy, barely reading but reading everything he could find out on exploding ants, dinosaurs, elephants, giraffes ---just anything, he could talk for an hour or two about the subject and we all told him them he was destined to grow up to become a college professor.  He is working his way through school.  I have no doubt he will be a professor one of these days, as well as an author.  He is just a talented young man.  He plays the drums, can throw a pot and make beautiful ceramics, when he was in his early teens he did great watercolors, he writes, he cooks and once thought about going to school to become a chef, but writing is really his passion.  One of the interesting things he taught me last night was about Lake Vostok, which is buried under the ice, yet liquid, miles underneath Antarctica.  I did a little research so I could make sure I remembered the facts correctly----4 kilometers of ice stand between the lake and the surface.  In 1957 the Russians established a remote base in Antarctica, the Vostok station.  The coldest temperature ever found on Earth (-89°C) was recorded here on the 21st July 1983. In the 1970’s a British team used airborne radar to see beneath the ice, mapping the mountainous land buried by the Antarctic ice sheet. Flying near the Vostok base their radar trace suddenly went flat. They guessed that the flat trace could only be from water.  20 years passed before their suspicions were confirmed, when satellites finally revealed that there was an enormous lake under the Vostok base. It is one of the largest lakes in the world – at 10,000 square km it’s about the extent of Lake Ontario, but about twice as deep (500m in places). The theory was that it could only exist because the ice acts like a giant insulating blanket, trapping enough of the earth’s heat to melt the very bottom of the ice sheet.   Amazing!  I would never have known about that had Trey not brought it up in conversation.  His conversations are like that!   Trey is taking a geology class.  We talked about the Oklahoma earthquake and he explained in detail about earthquakes.  We talked the holidays (we both would like to sleep through them), we talked about art therapy.  I told him about another blogger's yellow iris painting and we talked about that was therapy for her whether she knows it for sure or not.  We touched on politics---we both hate it, we talked about child development.....he has a great understanding of the mind and of development in young children.  We talked about cats (his girlfriend has one) and dogs (mine) and the funny things they do.   Not in a morbid or sad way at all, we talked about death, Steve Jobs final words, hospice (if I were not such an emotional mess I would want to work in hospice), assisted death (one of his favorite author's, Terry Pratchitt, has Alzheimer's and has been investigating pushing for the right for assisted deaths in the UK where he lives).  I told Trey about a woman I saw on The Texas Country Reporter  that has a pair of Clydesdale's, an old wood and glass hearse wagon and she takes people on their last journey to their grave slowly in quiet and dignity.  I do not want a funeral, I want to be cremated and my kids take me to the mountains and dump me out and them have a good time playing cards and games in a cabin for the weekend instead of spending money on a funeral.   If I were having a funeral, and money no object, being delivered in that horse drawn wagon would be cool, though.  

        My daughter, Casey, came over tonight and had dinner with me---leftover stew and more cornbread.  It was nice to have her visit too.  I am lucky to have my kids here in town.  This weather stirs up her fibromyalgia and then to have a cold on top of that is just the pits for her.  I hope the cold germ skips me.   Trey and I talked about how sick I used to be.  When I worked at the library I had bronchitis a couple of times a year, a cold every other month, migraines.  Nausea all the time.  My asthma was much worse. One year I had pneumonia twice.  I think all the dust on the books in the library really was unhealthy for me.   

      I just watched J. R. dance on Dancing With the Stars.....my goodness, that was a beautiful dance!  I think he is just awesome.  I need to go to bed but I love to watch DWTS's and J. R. will dance again before 9 p.m.   

     My feet do not hurt at all! I am not sure if it is the Cymbalta or if it is because I have slept since Friday afternoon and therefore have not been standing on them for 3 days but it is heaven to not hurt! 

     Back to my cleaning things out of my bedroom...In my former life, among my part time jobs was selling jewelry.  I haven't done that in two years and I never wear jewelry so I am putting all my Premier Design jewelry samples on Craigslist soon if you know anyone who would be interested.   

     Casey picked up a library book for me last week, Mrs. Jeffries and the Mistletoe Mixup by Emily Brightwell.  I haven't been able to concentrate enough to read a book since last summer and over the weekend I sure could not since I couldn't stay awake.  I have been trying to start it since Thursday and haven't gotten beyond reading the first three pages over and over.  Maybe tomorrow I can.  I used to pick up a book and read it cover to cover in one sitting in an evening.  I haven't read a Mrs. Jeffries book before.  This is # 29 in the series but I wanted to start with it since it has a Christmas theme.  I put a hold on it at the library when I read about it on http://www.cozy-mystery.com/ new releases.  Have you read any of the series?  What did you think?

   Oh, crumb!  I finished watcing Dancing With the Stars, and now Castle is coming on! I like Castle....what to do, watch it or go to sleep so I will be wide awake tomorrow?  Guess I will catch this episode of Castle later...  goodnight everyone!