Marking time… page 127

23 Oct 2020 2 Comments

Day 222 – 10/23/2020

Dark rainy morning. Kim had stuff to do first thing, so I’m sitting in the quiet with my coffee, watching headlights bounce off shiny surfaces below me. No warm-up for a few days now, and Monday’s forecast says 31º and snow showers, with a low of 20º. Whoa, baby…

It was fun to get out yesterday in t-shirts and shorts and roam around in the 85º temps. We saw pretty leaves, ate lunch in the car with the windows down, watched an enormous muskrat nibble on greens next to a creek, drove around KC metro just because we could, found what we wanted, and happily crawled back into the cave four hours later. Not old, just tired…

Watched last night’s debate, so that’s done now. Counting down the interminable hours until we know and trying to keep my head busy. It’s chilly, wet, and windy, so this will be an indoor day, which means working twice as hard at holding steady. We have a freeze warning for tonight, so we might try to huddle the mums together and cover them. They’re so perfect we hate to give them up, especially when there are some warmer temps to follow.

Welp, Diary… I’m gonna be boring and tedious for eleven more days and then let’s both hope for a sea change all ’round. Then the next sea change will be when we know we can walk into any restaurant or other business in town, attend any event, gather with friends, without the restrictions imposed by a pandemic. That one will be a pretty big deal, too.

Wow, look at the time… 10am… this day is positively streaking by!

And you thought you’d be getting something new…

Image by Judy Smith

Adapting… page 124

20 Oct 2020 1 Comment

Day 221 – 10/20/2020

Those PickleBallers… “Oh, you kids!” They updated the outdoor rules to read:

Play starts at 10am

Temp at least 45º

Wind low enough to keep the ball in play

Janice, who’s helping keep things organized and happening while she awaits knee surgery, is asking Parks & Rec to hang tarps on the north fence to block the chill breezes… nothing on that yet, but this is a dedicated bunch and they’ll figure it out. Kim’s over there now and I’m guessing a spa soak will be in order when he gets home – it’s still just 45º.

Yikes, sitting here typing and a migraine hits – rare occurrence now. Guess I’ll hit back with some more caffeine and hope it stops at *aura* level. They happen when I’ve been super-stressed, whether I’m aware of it or not, then suddenly the pressure’s off and BANG, migraine. I’d hate to think I’m getting just a little too happy… relaxed… optimistic… but I’m pretty sure the next two weeks will keep all those little blood vessels up there busy. Hoo-boy…

Kind of all over the place with the daily Thought Parade. My optimism is at a slightly lower ebb than yesterday, but not so’s my peace of mind would really notice. The eternity of *Almost There* will pass, but it will require a lifetime’s worth of grit to get there and this “one minute at a time” stuff is cruel and unusual punishment.

Okay. Today. It’s the only chunk of time I need to think about right now. The KIMN8R is home after a couple hours of play in the bracing fall air, he’s making red beans & rice with corn muffins for lunch, and the afternoon does indeed call for a warming soak. Even if life weren’t that great it would be magnificent.

Image by Judy Smith

Stay in line, America… page 119

14 Oct 2020 2 Comments

Day 216 – 10/14/2020

First day of advance voting here. We ordered mail-in ballots but decided we needed the rush of being there… and that was a great call. It’s a perfect fall morning, little breezy, little cool, sunshine everywhere along with the leaves. The line, distanced and masked, was out the door only about 50 feet when we got there, and the whole thing was a smooth operation – eight voting cubbies on two floors, everything sanitized and in order – and the woman who facilitated our voting process in light of the fact that we have mail-in ballots out there somewhere was amazing – she knows her stuff, and we have no qualms that our votes won’t be counted. When the paper ballots arrive we’ll shred them, and that will be that. And anyone silly enough to think you could get away with voting twice has never met the force of nature that is the County poll worker.

Neither of us has ever been so energized to cast our vote and we’ve been voting since Nixon. And now we wait. We were near this level of urgency in 2016, and we were marinated in the belief/hope that it wouldn’t go south. But it did… so the next three weeks… and hopefully not beyond, please, universe… will be a wonky bundle of angst tied with barbed wire.

Me until we see the white smoke.

We’re so incredibly privileged – we drove three blocks straight south, parked in the courthouse lot, stood in line, signed the required paperwork to keep tabs on our vote, took our time marking our ballots, returned to the car… and by the time we walked back through our door we’d been gone exactly 30 minutes… on a morning so beautiful it could make a grown man cry, on a day when we’re upright and breathing, with eyes and ears to take it all in. Everything about this morning has felt right… make it so, world.

Beautiful inside too, and a memorable place to fulfill a sacred duty, right, and privilege.

Image by Judy Smith

Moving right along… page 114

07 Oct 2020 Leave a comment

Day 209 – 10/07/2020

Okay, Diary… the day I let depression and ennui keep me holed up in the cave instead of zipping over and taking it out on Rita is the day it’s time to wake up. I’ve been in a fog since about Friday… could be fibro-fog, could be a med change catching up with me, could be IMPOTUS and The Endless Flying Circus of 2020, could be all of the above. Whatever, I had Kim wake me up by 7:00 this morning to give me ample time to regain a modicum of functionality.

After a lifetime as a farmer’s daughter, farmer’s wife, and farmer, 8am is sleeping-in for me and if I go past that I might as well burrow in and stay for another 24 hours. Yesterday was simply a wash and I’m tired of feeling anesthetized and numb, so on this sunny Wednesday morning I’ve given myself a serious Come to Jesus talk and Self is starting to get with the program here…

I’ve changed out all my desktop and application graphics over coffee, always a kick in the right direction. Next I’ll have my little bowl of cottage cheese & sunflower seeds and reintroduce my bones to the shower. I choose to stand as a human today – I’m sure I still remember how.

After a few weeks of fall weather this afternoon’s high is supposed to be 90º… a temporary blip.

Image by Judy Smith

Tuesday’s child is full of… page 113

06 Oct 2020 Leave a comment

Day 208 – 10/06/2020

Exciting day here… a specialty company is cleaning all the dryer vents in the building. They open to the outside and involve some lengthy ductwork but fortunately not too many turns, so not as bad as they could be. The techs found a 5″ piece of PVC in ours, along with the expected rubble – could be why I sometimes have to run a load twice before it dries. Alas, they’re finished in our place, so the thrill is already wearing off.

I’ll fix that this afternoon by hanging with Rita, whose plate is growing lighter by the day. Years of experiences during my lifetime and hers convince me that humans tend to give up too soon… just before we break through to the diamonds. We’ll never know what we missed, we just sense there was something we could have had but looked away. With things utterly surreal in the country this morning, knowing there are constructive, helpful things to stay engaged in is taking me a long way. (For posterity, Diary, IMPOTUS left Walter Reed Hospital last night under his own recognizance and returned to the White House shedding virus cells in the millions. His staff is dropping with it hour by hour, and the ones remaining are worried for their safety.)

Everything’s so off the rails at this point, imma hop a hot-air balloon and watch from a bit of a remove. It’s all gonna end up SOMEwhere, sometime… and we’ll live to tell about it or not. Fatalism is my BFF.

Okay, so lunch when Kim gets home… it’s Taco Tuesday! And then some afternoon therapy with Sistah-Woman. Slopin’ on down, into and through another week… it’s good time never stands still.

Image by Judy Smith

The weeks… page 112

05 Oct 2020 Leave a comment

Day 207 – 10/05/2020

And lo, we are delivered once again unto mOnday. Hello bright world, hello color, hello resolve… let’s go.

It’s chilly this morning, but the PickleBallers don’t much care as long as the sun’s shining. Kim would have crawled out of his skin by now if they hadn’t been able to keep playing outdoors when SPL closed things down, so that needs to go on for as long as possible… ’til frostbite becomes an issue.

This morning we have the case of Schrödinger’s president… he is either ill or not ill, highly-contagious or benign, in hospital or out… and American life limps on. Less than 30 days from an election nobody trusts, we have little real knowledge as to how it might all play out, which is crazy-making. Should we be finalizing our passport applications and choosing the things we’ll take with us… or getting prepared to roll up our sleeves and put the country back together? The truly crazy-making factor is that we may not have a definitive answer for months, not days. But hey, why borrow trouble on a mOnday when I could be making GOOD trouble somewhere??

Every time I’m out here scribbling, leaving my Diary open to the immediate world (and how do they know there isn’t another, grittier one somewhere) I spare a thought for the wanderer who happens upon my blog space. Poor soul doesn’t know me from a ton o’ coal so he or she just has to jump in and run with it (or flee). I inherited a wonky sense of humor from Daddy, added to it in various ways during my Latta years, polished it on John’s delicious sarcasm, and I’ve honed it now for sixteen years keeping up with the KIMN8R. Short story… I’m not for everyone.

And all at once, sunshine pouring in through the windows, hot coffee right here, memory flooding the room, I LOVE THE WORLD. It’s the best place I remember being so far, and it feels worth keeping intact.

Photo Credits: Kim Smith

Image by Judy Smith

Beautiful weekend… page 111

04 Oct 2020 2 Comments

Day 206 – 10/04/2020

Sunday Morning Sunshine… Harry Chapin. I hadn’t thought of either one in years, but here it is back, pouring through the window blinds, and into my ears. Too chilly for outdoor PickleBall this morning, but Kim caught some sun on the balcony a while ago and now he’s heading up to the workout room… and he’ll be riding his bicycle to a car show on the south edge of town this afternoon, masked and socially-distanced in the great outdoors. Thankfully he’ll never shed his Southern California DNA; whereas, my mornings mostly look like this and don’t measurably improve by the hour:

I’m trying not to slide off into feelings this weekend. We’ve kept a temporary lid on TV news and avoided the rest wherever possible… mostly. It does help. The Chiefs/Patriots game has been postponed, apparently due to COVID issues, so there goes the best long-play distraction on the schedule for today, dammit-cwap. So selfish of those guys not to risk their lives for my sanity.

There’s too much beauty around us to worry about it – Kim’s mums on the roof are loving fall and so are we. And today’s Matt’s birthday, so I’m celebrating with him in my heart and via cyberspace, and remembering Danny. ❤️

Photo & Digit-al Selfie: Kim Smith 10/04/2020

Image by Judy Smith

Just keep moving… page 103

24 Sep 2020 Leave a comment

Day 196 – 09/24/2020

Over seven decades of living I’ve collected a laundry list of heavy-duty experiences, but the realities of the pandemic and our crisis of government have combined to generate a climate I’ve never tried to exist in before and I wish the head part of me could be unconscious until late January with no harm done to life or limb. Karma knows I’m not asking for trouble, but I’ve never wanted this desperately to shut my thoughts off, no matter how awful things in my immediate world have looked at times. The possibilities presented by the constitutional crisis we’re being sucked into are so extreme my mind won’t shut up about them and I’ve run out of useful distractions again.

After yesterday’s sound-bites to the effect that “there won’t be a transfer of power,” I said this on my FB page:

“We’d be hatching an escape plan right about now, but no country will take us, due to Covid. Gonna be ‘interesting.’ Sounds like drama but pretty sure America is HERE —-> X.

“We have friends in Canada but they’d be unable to help, with the borders closed. It’s intriguing to see that all the responses to this post have so far been from women – these are the first things we think of when our loved ones are threatened. And isn’t it instructional and humbling to experience what most of the world has lived with forever – that frisson of fear, the knowledge that we.are.not.safe.”

Gonna grab some cheese to have with that whine.

Okay, all better now.

I rescued a little treasure this week and she’s taken up residence on my desk as a daily caution against backsliding, although she and I both know the risk is minimal. Maggie makes me smile for all the reasons.

I’ll go hang out with Rita today and the rest of the world will come ’round right for a while. Odds are we’ll laugh ’til we cry, and maybe let the tears be therapeutic before we wipe them away; we’ll accomplish enough to keep her energized and encouraged; and one more day of WTF-is-coming-at-us will have been dealt with in productive ways.

And all the women said, AMEN.

Image by Judy Smith

The hours… page 99

19 Sep 2020 4 Comments

Day 191 – 09/19/2020

Up at 5:30, looking at the quiet street under my windows… dark and still out. Hearing the morning trains passing through, and wondering what kind of sunrise is being staged just below the horizon. It’s a masochistic act to be awake this early – it stretches the hours like taffy and they feel exactly that thick and cloying – but early-to-bed, early-to-rise is a fact of life and I’m not giving up the early-to-bed part right now, especially heading into another time change. Oh jeez, time change. At least this one’s the easier of the two. Right now, with all of us confused as hell anyway, would be an opportune time to lock this one in – since it’s the real, actual time that God made – and be done with it.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died yesterday and my blood ran cold when I heard. 2020’s fourth quarter may end us, but there’s no way out except right through the middle, so I’m linking arms with my people and staying ’til the closing credits.

And Saturday is here again, with its sweet routines and self-granted permission to do less than nothing. I’ll take it. If I can find a comfy enough hole to settle into I’ll slide on through another weekend and live to tell about it.

There’s a slight pink tinge in the eastern sky, but the sun is a no-show. Oh well, it’s not like we count on it every morning…

Ope – there it is, big, orange, perfectly round, floating in a sea of gray. And life goes on…

Photo Credit: Kim Smith

Image by Judy Smith

The weekend… page 98

18 Sep 2020 4 Comments

Day 190 – 09/18/2020

It’s a morning for thinking thoughts and writing some of them down, just to touch base with me at week’s end. Kim’s playing PickleBall in NoLaw, then has PT out at Ortho’s new facility, so I’m without adult supervision for the next four hours. Oops…

Sitting here soaking up the quiet makes me think of the young professional couple who are moving to our building after experiencing life in one down the street with its noisy all-hours party vibe. I doubt they’ll regret their decision, based solely on the peaceful easy feeling here and the way we let each other be. It would be a steep challenge to achieve this atmosphere in a place where everybody’s renting and most are short-term.

We still have The Skies of Doom from all the fires, a sickly yellow tinge that portends no good, but the sun’s shining through and I just noticed something that made me smile. For about three years a spider has had a summer home on the outside of the big window next to my desk, first in the left-hand corner, then at some point moving to the right. It looks like a fat-bodied garden spider and it’s there at dawn every morning, then hides for the day and comes back out around dusk to prepare its web for dinner guests. The window-washers bring their crane-lift once a year and scrub the glass on all five floors, and for three years running they’ve removed my 8-legged resident’s condo, only to have it reappear the next morning in the same spot every time. The windows got a bath yesterday and my arachnid friend was on the J.O.B. when the sun came up this morning. Google says garden spiders have a lifespan of about a year, so I’m dealing with successive generations here. Wow, the loyalty! It’s all about location, location, location, baby. 😂

Early fall temps have settled in for a while, with daytime 70s and 50s overnight. It was cool on the balcony yesterday with a breeze going, so I came in and put on the socks Kim brought me from 3rd Planet, and kept layering until I was comfy again. It’s the unvarnished me, looking like my Grandma Wagner, feeling utterly Zen, and keeping the fun in funk. For posterity…

Image by Judy Smith

Breakthrough… page 96

16 Sep 2020 2 Comments

Day 188 – 09/16/2020

It finally happened. Not because energy welled up from within and burst through my fingertips, but because disgust overwhelmed my ennui at last. Yesterday I studied the smears, smudges, and assorted rubble in front of me until I found myself on my feet, transferring everything to another surface while I decontaminated my desk and surroundings. Today the clean expanse glows, and holds only one extraneous item – so far. My monitor is free of dust and spit-takes. The 3-layer cart next to me has been unloaded, sanitized, purged, and repopulated with nothing but the priority goods, based on need or the shot of Happy they deliver.

It’s cause to wonder what else could happen right under my nose. Will I wake up one morning to discover that the WTF Basket has been whittled down to a sentimental note and an invoice for the t-shirt I really am going to send back? Will the two bins containing The Dread Unsorted find their way into the light and be forced to give up their secrets? My carelessly-hoarded stockpile of duplicate photos, bad photos, totally unnecessary photos… the ever-accumulating email… my series of I Need To Clean That Out folders… will all of that magically come up missing some glad morning? Stranger things have happened.

Since progress and success are not without price, I paid for my random foray into the real world with sciatic pain off the charts, but in my own masochistic way it was worth it. Might see what else I can get into… not sure if it’ll be instigated by ambition, boredom, being grossed out, or all of the above, but anything that moves the story forward is acceptable currency.

Image by Judy Smith

Sunshine again… page 93

12 Sep 2020 Leave a comment

Day 184 – 09/12/2020

Mist, rain, autumn air… the stuff moods are made of. By September, melancholy starts to scoop me up and set me down in other places, in other times, and the memories are crisp. Every sight, sound, and aroma speaks of the past, distant or close, and the fact of being alive registers in conscious ways. The missing… those who’ve died and those who’ve chosen to absent themselves from me… and the handful for whom I’ve done the same… those losses are still grieved. Acquaintances, friends, extended family… the attrition is never easy and each exit leaves a mark. Endings are hard and they’re rarely the end, so with the arrival of fall every year the goodbyes all have to be replayed, reabsorbed, reconciled… while the beauty of the season both breaks our hearts and renews us.

Over a lifetime, I’ve accumulated a few blues-beaters in my medicine bag, including humor, music, reading, writing, good conversation with people I love… and let’s face it, food and drink. But sometimes the only right response to a stretch of bad highway is sass and sarcasm… and movin’ on down the road.

Image by Judy Smith

Life, it’s good… page 89

06 Sep 2020 4 Comments

Day 178 – 09/06/2020

A few words about today: It’s Sunday, it’s beautiful out, and it’s my birthday. It isn’t a milestone other than the fact I’m still breathing, but this year’s observance has been couched in hours of pre-meditation, by which I mean 2020 has been one uninterrupted disaster and I never stop thinking. So what I’m putting in my thoughts today is this wonderful poem…

I want to age like sea glass.

Smoothed by tides,

but not broken.

I want my hard edges to soften.

I want to ride the waves

and go with the flow.

I want to catch a wave

and let it carry me

to where I belong.

I want to be picked up

and held gently by

those who delight in my

well earned patina and

appreciate the changes I went

through to achieve that beauty.

I want to enjoy the journey

and always remember that if

you give the ocean something

breakable it will turn it into

something beautiful.

I want to age like sea glass.

~ Bernadette Noll ~

Image by Judy Smith

Making lemonade… page 87

30 Aug 2020 Leave a comment

Day 171 – 08/30/2020

The temp at 9am is 66º and the sun’s shining through a light cloud cover – perfect for PickleBall but only two other players showed up so Kim pedaled back home and we’re on computers until hunger takes over. It’ll be omelets because even though we toss a lot of traditions out the window we have our rules. And a nice spa soak and convo since that’s in the Sunday playbook too.

Life right here in this place is lovely and wonderful so why does everything else feel especially grim this morning? And having asked myself that question… where do I start?

  • Is it because despite all documented evidence to the contrary, too many people still see COVID-19 not as a worldwide pandemic killing an inordinate number of humans, but as merely a flesh wound, an inconvenience. “It’s a flu, we’ve seen this before, it’ll fade away… like a miracle.”
  • Is it because our racial divide is being used to foment civil war and people are choosing sides and picking up weapons?
  • Is it because there’s so little common ground left where we can meet friends and family and remember who we are, together?
  • Is it because we’re in a state of limbo and extraordinary breath-holding, waiting to know if our fractured democracy can hang in until the nightmare ends, or if America will be saddled with a tyrant and his progeny for the next few generations.
  • Or because when I say these things out loud I lose friends.

A puzzle… who could ever solve it…

Imma go have breakfast with the cook.

Image by Judy Smith

And life goes on… page 86

28 Aug 2020 2 Comments

Day 169 – 08/28/2020

Temps have been in the 90s for days with a real-feel of 100+ but tomorrow should see a temporary end to all that and we’re here for it…

We spent a wonderful evening this week with Rita and mutual friends, socially-distanced at our fav Mexican restaurant in their big outdoor courtyard, and it was food for the soul. We’ve missed all of that. But hey, the college students are back in town and already nine Greek houses on The Hill are quarantined. I can’t stop looking at this graph… it took us about a month to get the hang of it, but we were stellar until the end of June when our Phase 3 reopening was in progress, and then the chart goes whack and by the first part of August, with the 20k student population moving in… not a happy picture, COVID-wise. The university is the lifeblood of Lawrence, so it’s discouraging to see the trend, and it means that time in the public domain will continue to be at a premium for the foreseeable.

In other news, there’s not much that’s fit to print, and the rest is mundane. We get up every morning and life happens while we do our best to be adult about it, with a fair success rate most days. As someone said recently, It Is What It Is.

It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. 💋

Image by Judy Smith

Previous Older Entries Next Newer Entries

Winnowing the Chaff

56,892 spam blocked by Akismet
Playing for Time

"How did it get so late so soon?" ~Dr. Seuss

Mitch Teemley

The Power of Story

John Wreford Photographer

Words and Pictures from the Middle East

Live Life, Be Happy

Welcome to my weekly blog on life's happiness. We are all human and we all deserve to smile. Click a blog title or scroll down. Thanks for stopping by.

Wild Like the Flowers

Rhymes and Reasons for Every Season

The Last Nightowl

Just the journal of an aging man looking at the world

Jenna Prosceno

Permission to be Human

Flora Fiction

Creative Space + Literary Magazine

DanVenture Travels

tonysbologna : Honest. Satirical. Observations

Funny Blogs With A Hint Of Personal Development

ipledgeafallegiance

When will we ever learn?: Common sense and nonsense about today's public schools in America.

Alchemy

Art from the Earth

Russel Ray Photos

Life from Southern California, mostly San Diego County

Phicklephilly

The parts of my life I allow you to see

Going Medieval

Medieval History, Pop Culture, Swearing

It Takes Two.

twinning with the Eichmans

Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 6,000,000 visitors since 2014 and over 9,000 archived posts.

Life with an Illness

FranklyWrite

Live Life Write

Social Justice For All

Working towards global equity and equality

Drinking Tips for Teens

Creative humour, satire and other bad ideas by Ross Murray, an author living in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada. Is it truth or fiction? Only his hairdresser knows for sure.

john pavlovitz

Gretchen L. Kelly, Author

KenRobert.com

random thoughts and scattered poems

Margaret and Helen

Best Friends for Sixty Years and Counting...

WordPress.com News

The latest news on WordPress.com and the WordPress community.

Musings of a Penpusher

A Taurean suffering from cacoethes scribendi - an incurable itch to write.

Ned's Blog

Humor at the Speed of Life

Carrie Rubin

madmanknitting.wordpress.com/