Hi Mom and family,
It's 4 AM Wednesday morning, a fresh breeze blowing through the window. I love having the security screen on the bedroom window so that I can feel safe about leaving it wide open all night. Ziggy scratched to go out at 3:30 AM, and I couldn't go back to sleep since then. The Siamese cat has come in, jumped up on the high bed, and curled up next to me.Tomorrow very early I will be flying to Oakland.
Monday I woke up absolutely wiped out, albeit with a nice afterglow because the meetup music jam had gone so well. But absolutely wiped out. Which wasn't surprising, after two days of pushing myself to meet my commitments to do, while still feeling such fatigue and lack of endurance from the after-effects of the flu virus. I stayed in bed all morning, dozing, watching movies, and noshing as if I wanted to go back to being forty pounds heavier again.
In the afternoon I forced myself to get up and dressed, and drove to the bank and to make copies needed for the drama club that afternoon. Everything felt as though it took much more concentration and will-power than usual, and it was a grumpy me who pulled into the Boys & Girls Club.
But like the music jam the day before, once I started doing an activity I love, I got caught up in it and forgot how lousy I felt. Funny how our brain/body connection works. It was especially fun because a girl who was in the club last year returned and took part enthusiastically, just as I needed someone to fill a role because two younger gils, much less mature, have stopped taking part due to family problems.
(The family problems were pretty bad, the activities director told me, and another girl whispered that one of their step-brothers was taken away by CPS ---of course I just answered in a monotone that it's not our place to speak of such things.)
Of those two younger girls, one of them, the second-grader, has a real talent for drama and acting, there is even something charismatic about her. I considered going up to the club an additional hour a week to help them with homework, so that I keep the connection with her and make it more likely that she rejoin the club in the future, for her sake as well as mine.
But with less than three weeks to get our place ready for Lyssa and Mike's visit and the inaugural pizza oven party, and the fact that I'm so behind, I had better not take on yet another commitment. I haven't got the tomato plants in either, nor prepared the bed for them.
Besides, the actual time I have to work on getting ready is much less than three weeks. With this four-day weekend to Berkeley, other weekends taken up either with the Renaissance festival or with meetups, plus the weekly afternoon in Tempe for my Arabic lesson, and about five hours of drama club a week, it's actually less than two weeks that I actually have to get the place ready for the party. I do hope that my energy returns!
Yesterday, with the hope of recovering said energy, I spent most of the day in bed watching movies. It's been over a week since I came down with that three-day virus, and the after-effects are going on for a depressingly long time.
I'd forgotten to buy dog food, and had given Ziggy cat food the night before. Yesterday morning I took pity on him and gave him a couple of chicken breasts left over from the recipe I'd made for the music jam. I was glad that no one had eaten, because the recipe did not turn out well. I went back to the new Joy of Cooking and found that I had not followed the directions correctly. They even warned that chicken breasts cooked on lower heat do not turn out tender.
I did have my computer tutoring session in the early afternoon. While my computer tutor and I were having our session at Starbuck's (we worked on putting my scanned drawings into a "gallery" on the "creativity" page of my personal website) his wife and three little kids were at McDonald's, in the large two-story kids' playroom at the back. I stopped by there on my way home to say hello to his friendly wife, and their three lively kids.
"Grace! Grace! Watch me!" Ava, the three year old kept saying, jumping up and down like a spring. She has inherited her father's height, and is one of those kids who is so tall for her age that people expect her to act like a four-year-old.
Here are photos: of Ava and Oliver on the climbing structure, and one of Juliana, the baby, being held by my computer tutor while she reaches for a baby-sized soft-ice-cream cone and then dissolves it.
I asked them to "save the date" for the pizza party, or rather "save the dates" because I still don't know if the party will be the 15th or the 16th.
When I returned home I really regretted giving Ziggy the chicken breasts; the house smelled of dog diarrhea!
I called Dale Sr. later in the afternoon, to make sure that he was returning today from fishing at Roosevelt Lake, as I am flying out tomorrow. He said yes, and it was obvious that he had remembered. He and Jerry G. haven't caught anything at all, and no other people were out there fishing. It's a month early for the spring fishing, but he had thought because we'd been having such a warm spell that the catfish would be biting already. They haven't.
The usual sign is to wait until the Palo Verde trees start blooming, that's when the catfish start biting. Catfish fishing is mostly done at night.
Love,
Lennie
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