It's nice to feel a bit better, but my endurance level is still quite far below normal.
Thursday I felt well enough to get up and get dressed. I did some of the dishes which had mounted up, some yard work, and did some errands.
When I went to give the chickens fresh water, I found that one of our chickens had died, the big old Plymouth Rock. (Well, they're all old, as hens go.) I buried her deep in the oleander compost pile. Lyssa had originally brought seven chickens, as pullets, and we lost two of the Amaurcana ones over the years. Now we have four.)
They are laying quite well now that it's warmer, but I know from the last few years that this is just their "first spring flush" of laying. They are really too old to be good layers. Maybe after the Renaissance Festival is over, I'll look around to find a good source for chickens, and put these long-time hens of ours in the stew-pot. (There is a Mexican family on the same street as Dale Sr.'s "man-cave" which sells chickens, but I might want to find some pure-bred ones.)
But they sure still are good at shredding yard waste for compost, and they are great recyclers of kitchen scraps!
We are not allowed to have roosters here, only hens, so our flock does not get constantly replenished like Madelyn's does.
Dale Sr. was doing some clean up of the liquid cemet run-off which had hardened and built up on the ground where the little cement mixer was standing. This involved taking a tamping rod and breaking it up in pieces. He brought the flatbed trailer over and we both loaded it up with some trash from the job, and other trash, and cement pieces.
Thursday was an overcast day with a slight breeze, which made it nice.
It felt good to rake the excess bits of cement from around the pizza oven/smoker, because it's so beautiful. I also repotted a trailing rosemary into a very large pot between the ornamental cement benches around the orange tree.
Repotted rosemary:
In the afternoon I did some errands: I paid both phone bills (as we'd seemed to lose both of them this month), went by the post office, did the most recent blog, checked e-mail, meetup pages, and Facebook group pages at Starbuck's (I've about given up on checking all the regular Facebook messages, it takes so long) and stopped by Safeway for groceries. It felt good to be out and about again, but I still became tired more easily then usual.
I got an e-mail from Cate, the woman who had come to my last music jam "meetup". She pointed out that I'd scheduled my music jam meetup the same time as "the one in Mesa", although she'd asked, and I'd agreed, to schedule them on alternate Sundays. I felt bad about that.
Yesterday I had planned a big list of things to do, because I had meetups scheduled Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon, but planned to be out at the Renaissance Festival Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. But I found that after a couple of hours of effort, I would need to lie down, feeling sweaty and spent. In other words, not completely better yet! I decided that I might just go out to the Renaissance Festival Sunday morning, but definitely not try to go Saturday afternoon.
I did get a few hours of watering and weeding done in the lot across the street, interspersed with naps. It felt good to be outside, though frustrating that the weeds are starting to get ahead of me.
In the evening I finally finished the hanger for the little Navajo rug which Dale Sr. is giving Dale Jr. and family. I did this while watching/listening to an excellent "American Masters" program about the life of singer-songwriter Carole King. Her songs bring back so many memories!
Photo of Navajo rug with hanger. It's shown stuck into the curtain loops, but we are giving him hooks to hang it from.
Dale Sr. was on a mission to find and buy those long-handled impletments called "pizza peels" which are used to take the pizzas in and out of the pizza oven. He was trying to call the number for Andrews Restaurant Supply, the store he'd always gone to in Mesa, but couldn't get them to answer. He'd tried to go there on Wednesday but found that they had moved, which I could have told him (though I couldn't remember where they had moved to).
I tried calling Lawson, because he always knows everything about local happenings. He said that Andrews had gone out of business, but to give him a couple of minutes and he'd see what he could find. He called back and gave his dad the address of another restaurant supply place.
Dale Sr. returned later that afternoon, mission accomplished: two "pizza peels" and a metal brush, equally long-handled, to use to push coals to the back of the pizza oven. Dale Sr. said that the place was huge, like a Home Depot of restaurant supply stores.
Here's a photo of the two "pizza peels" and the metal brush:
In the morning I had received a call from Cate, the woman who had e-mailed about my scheduling glitch. She said that she'd decided that she would prefer to go to my music jam meetup because "she felt more comfortable" as the people at the other one were so much better musicians than she. I thanked her but encouraged her to go to whichever one she wanted to. I got the name of the other meetup so that I could join it, if only to find out what dates they were scheduling theirs.
In all of this reaching out "beyond my comfort zone" to meet new people through these meetups, I'm finding that the main difficulties arise not from the discomfort with meeting new people (which was expected) but from the complications of keeping different things straight. In that way it's kind of like waitressing, where, similarly, I thought that dealing with the people would be the difficult thing, but found that the difficult thing was keeping all of the orders straight with the different tables.
The difficult thing with waitressing, for me, was the milk! The other drinks were all brought to the table as soon as one turned in the ticket to the cook, but if someone ordered milk, that was supposed to be brought with the food. By the time the food orders were ready to go out to the table, I'd always forget the milk.
Love,
Lennie
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