Hi Mom and family,
It's 5 AM and still dark. It's chilly enough that I pulled my "Sweet Home Blue Chicago" sweatshirt over my flannel nightgown, and the furry throw is wrapped around my legs and feet. But we haven't needed a fire in the house for some time.
The pushy long-haired Siamese cat has jumped up on my lap and is trying to sit on my arm. I won't het her, so she settles for placing a paw on my forearm while I type.
Sunday morning I got up early, ate a healthy breakfast, wrote my blog, showered, and then felt like going back to sleep! Dale Sr. slept in also, the first day he has been able to do that since the pizza oven project started several weeks ago. John Ducette is back up north doing a job there, while the stucco on the pizza oven dries out for about a week. Dale Sr. is supposed to hose it off a couple of times a day, so that it dries slowly and doesn't crack.
It looks gorgeous!
We sat around drinking coffee and watching "Sunday Morning" which we both enjoy. Then I watered the "baby plants" in the lot across the street, pulling weeds as I did so. I'm behind on the weeding over there, and also on other lot, the one I still call "Gary's".
I had made arranged with my friend Sylvia to meet her at Starbuck's at 1:00 PM. I hadn't seen her for quite a while, and we had our usual great, rapid-fire conversation. I'm so glad that she is loving this year's work situation, the teacher she works for. She finally got a deadbeat tenant out of the other half of her duplex and moved in a friend who really wanted a rental.
Before she could move the friend in, she had to scrub it down and using two coats of "Kils" to get the cigarette smell out of the supposed "non-smoking" apartment. Routinely between tenants, she rips out carpet, puts in new carpet or tile, etc.
She always hires a teenager she knows (she seems to find a different one each year) to help her with the work that must be done on each apartment when the tenants change.
Sylvia with a photo on her phone of her new, and fourth, dog:
After she left I spent about an hour on the internet, mostly with the blog about the weekend. It took a long time because I hadn't posted for several days. Then it was time to rush home, as Dale Sr. and I had plans to go for an early dinner and then to go hear one of the guys who came to my last music jam perform.
We ended up eating chili cheese-burgers at a place we'd seen for years but never tried. The restaurants we like were all too full to get in and out of in a reasonable time, I should have remembered that it would be like that on Valentine's Day.
I hadn't been in a "regular old bar" for quite some time, and the "Dog Run Saloon" was not the coolest place. The waitress had on a lot of eye-makeup and dirty hair, not a winning combination, and most of the people in there, she included, looked and acted like a large part of their non-working hours were mostly spent drinking. There was a native American woman who brought in a tray of fake diamond jewelry to sell, and lots of loud raucous formulaic joking going on.
Dale Sr. ordered "cheese curds" as an appetizer. We both ordered chili cheeseburgers, which turned out to be huge, and large draft beers.
I got out my phone and "apped" in everything in, as my friend Laure had shown me, including the large beer. "Wham-bam", I was 2013 calories over my daily calorie goal though I'd entered the place 500 calories under, and only eating half of the huge chili cheeseburger.
(It was a good lesson to me. )
When we came out of there, the sunset was beautiful:
Then we went to the retirement trailer park to hear the two guys who had come to my music jam meetup. Here we are entering the "clubhouse":
It turned out to be rather disappointing musically, but rather sweet. The guy who invited us leads a group at that huge "travel trailer resort", and this group of several guitarists and about ten singers had been practicing their program for a while. (These people are all what we call "winter visitors" if being polite, and "snowbirds" if not.)
(The guy who invited us, an excellent musician himself, is just to the right of the accordionist.)
Different people got up to sing, and some of the singing was off key, but some of it was charming. (What was not charming was that the sound system kept making strange noises. Kathy, remember that guy who fixed the sound system at the BHS reunion? There was no one like him at this event.)
The large audience, who had all been encouraged to wear red if they had any, were hugely enthusiastic as they all knew the performers socially. The accordionist doubled as announcer and recited a hokey, practiced schpiel between each number. A couple of the men who sang romantic songs invited their wives to stand up on stage with them while they sang to them. I could see that mid-westerners and Canadadians of rural upbringing seem less leery of open sentimentality than Arizonans or Californians!
(The only downside is that I still can't get that maudlin song, "I'll Give You a Daisy a Day, Dear", out of my mind!)
It did make me feel a little weird to realize that I was the same age as most of these "snowbirds".
I came home and watched both Downton Abbey and Mercy Stree, even though the dishes weren't done and the house untidy.
Monday morning I felt a little bit tired and grumpy, I almost wished I did not have to get to the Renaissance Festival that morning. I felt more tired than usual that morning, and my voice was a little scratchy when singing.
By the time I had gone back to the glassblower's courtyard to take my usual mid day nap, I knew that I did not feel well and all I could think of was to get home and crawl into bed. Headache, muscle aches, some extra congestion, mostly just fatigue. Happily,I didn't have Drama Club scheduled anyway because the schools were closed for Presidents' Day.
I was in bed all day Tuesday, watching my favorite old movies and not even feeling up to washing any of the dishes or even showering. Dale made an omelet for breakfast, and I had a quarter of it left for lunch, and I still had some leftover diet soup to have for dinner. In the late afternoon, I forced myself to get up and call my Arabic tutor to cancelled my lesson (I always go Wednesday) and also called the Boys & Girls Club to cancel the Wednesday evening Drama club session.
Yesterday, Wednesday, was much the same, except that I didnt feel as achey, nor sleep as much. I would get up from time to time and wash a few dishes, tidy up a bit, and wash out some clothes by hand, which made for a somewhat less chaotic living environment at the end of the day.
Even when sick, I contniued using the app "Losing it" quite conscientiously. Except for that disastrous chile cheese burger & large draft beer calorie binge at the "Dog Run Saloon" on Sunday evening, I have kept under my 1,323 calorie daily goal. If you get some exercise and enter it in, the "app" automatically gives you more calories you can eat, which is pretty cool. Of course, being sick, I haven't gotten any exercise.
An example of how the app helps in weight control is that it stopped me from having a second glass of wine last night, because I was already 24 calories over my daily goal.
Love,
Lennie
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