Very, very pleased. Really. Very.

My baby sister Susanna and her husband Matt just left my apartment, heading up the highway to the airport. They arrived from Colorado Springs last Thursday, and this is Monday, so -- carry the one -- they have been here for five days. Really a very nice long visit, and I should not be sad, I should be dancing around enjoying the peaceful emptiness of my rooms. But I am. Sad, I mean. Just as I am always sad when I drive away from Mom and Dad's, or when Ruthie gets back on the train. These people are members of my family, and especially Ruth and Susanna, are people that can I count on, no matter what, to love me. If I am spotty, or clumsy, or badly dressed or fat. This past weekend,(por ejemplo) I was having some sort of allergy, and my right eye was swollen, bright pink and watering. I looked like a girl with Down's Syndrome that I knew when I was small. But no one avoided looking at me, or mentioned my off-putting ugliness, or anything.

Wait a minute, I don't mean to imply that Mom and Dad will NOT love me if I am fat or spotty, since obviously they will. Which is what I meant to imply. OBVIOUSLY they will, so it doesn't count. Although I do love them both dearly, they are my parents, and they will love me, even if I waddle up to their door at five hundred pounds.

But! In spite of my blueness, let's talk about this visit. First of all, though, I need to go and start a load of towels, since we whipped through them this past weekend. Back in a minute...

Okay, back. Towels whushing back and forth, back and forth. Where was I? Matt and Susanna arrived on Thursday morning, and I was so very glad to see them, especially my dear Suzette-Suzanne, but also my brother-in-law Matt, who is not only one of the best guys I have ever met, but my son Joe's hero, and my baby sister's husband. So you see. We hung around the apartment and exclaimed with affection at one another for a bit, and then ensconced them in my (very clean, ahem) bedroom, and drove off in their cute little rental to buy a hat or two. It seems that Matt's favorite brand of hat manufacturers has a branch in Northwest, so over the Fremont bridge we went, and spent several hours wandering up and down NW 23rd, which used to be my absolute home. If I ever need to leave this apartment, I will be heading back there to Myrtle's house. It was a sunny day, with a bright blue sky, and we all bought sunglasses at Urban Outfitters, and looked in many shop windows, and bought a total of four hats, (one for Susanna) and had brunch at Bertie Lou's in Sellwood, where I made Susanna pass out. Bad Beth!

Then home again, where Joe and his girlfriend Catt joined us, and visited with us until it was time to make our way to Gino's in Sellwood for dinner with Mickey and Billy. And THAT was a good time, let me tell you. Matt and Billy at one end of the table talking away nineteen to the dozen, Susanna and Mickey earnestly conversing across them, and me and the kids at the other end. Lovely.

The next morning we had breakfast at Sully's, and packed up the car and headed off to Ocean Park. The drive took a little longer than usual, mostly because Matt is not a speeder like me, at least in country he has never driven through before. But we arrived shortly after lunch time to happy laughter and chatter from Mom and Dad, who love Susanna best of all their children, since she was their last, and their only experience of an only child. She and they made the trips to and from Mexico together, and they experienced at last what it was to have a child who sneaked out of the house at night, and openly defied them on a regular basis. Thus they love her best, which does not bother me in the least. I fully understand it, and if it were not for Ruthie, my best and dearest friend, I would love Susanna best, too.

Our stay there was one hundred per cent delightful, in spite of my wretched eye, and I enjoyed it. We spent three days and two nights, and came home yesterday afternoon. Ate dinner at the Ram's Head, which Matt really enjoyed, and then came home and visited and chatted and talked until midnight.

And then today, this morning before their flight left, we drove over to Northwest again and ate breakfast at Besaw's (where I had not been for some ten years)and which was very enjoyable, with excellent coffee and very good brioche French toast. We then went to Pioneer Place, where Matt and Susanna took me to the AT&T store, and put me on their family plan, and bought me a cell phone.

You heard me! I now have my very own cell phone, which cost them nothing, since the rebate being offered more than covered the cost of it, and the monthly fee for unlimited texting and a lot of talk will be ten dollars a month. Ten dollars! A month. Wow.

I have been playing with it all morning, although now it is charging overnight. I have texted Susanna, and taken two pictures, and entered Mickey's phone number in the Contacts list. I am joining the modern world!

I am really very, very pleased. Really. Very.

Right Back to Sleep

Okay -- I am finally, just now, coming to life. I overslept this morning, because I stayed up too late last night reading a book that I have already read, and knew how it ended. But it was both too well-written to want to skip a single page, and also too scary not to get it resolved. If I stopped and left the story unfinished, then the one-eyed handsome psychotic killer with the wealthy enabling parents would have been lying there in the bed beside me until morning! Can't have those monsters roaming the peaceful greeen countryside, can we? (to quote Mitch Leary/John Malkovitch) Anyway, it was also a cold night, and I put the afghan from the chair across my already heavily covered bed, and so by morning I was absolutely cozy. I won't do that tonight. Gotta have some discomfort to make the waking up easier! I should drink a large beverage, cover the bed scantily and open the window wider.

No, what I really ought to do is remember to get some batteries for my alarm clock, so that I am not trying to be woken by my clock radio. I mean, it works and all, but -- it isn't sharp and unpleasant enough, and it doesn't wake me all the way up, just enough to turn it off. And then right back to sleep.

Squawk Beep Squawk

You know for someone who loves -- loves! -- to write as much as I do, it's very nearly worrying that I have spent so long without even the slightest desire. In fact several times I have thought "You know, I should write that down on my blog," but then felt not the slightest answering urge, and in fact, felt a negative reaction to the idea! Worrying. If someone else were watching this happen, they would probably try to get me to go see a doctor.

But otherwise, I am quite happy in my life -- not with my energy level, but with everything else. I would like to comment on something, though -- perhaps this a rude behaviour which is so commonplace that no one thinks it is rude anymore, but I certainly hope not.

I'm at work, and the phone just rang, with an Asian woman asking for my boss. I told her he was not in the office, and offered her his cell phone number. She agreed, and I began to tell her what it was. As she repeated the numbers back to me, she was entering them into the same phone she was talking to me on, so that a loud squawk-beep-honk was filling my ear. After the 5 - 0 - 3, I protested. "Please stop that!" I said. "That's right in my ear!" She said, "'Uh, yeah, 4 -8 - 1?" SQUAWK-BEEP-SQUAWK. All the way through to the end of the number.

So is this an acceptable level of idiotic behavior nowadays? It better not be.

So...what am I thankful for, exactly?

Whoever came up with the -- aphorism? quote? saying? old saw? -- my brain is not working so well today, so I don't know what this actually is -- but the phrase, "It never rains but it pours" was thinking about my day yesterday. Hang on to your hats because it is a long story. Okay, here we go.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. I was slated to celebrate Thanksgiving with my cousin Mickey and her family, at her house. My part of the meal was to bake five pies and take them with me. Now, pies are best about eight hours after they are baked, so the best thing to do is to bake them the night before, and then they can have cooled and settled and be ready to transport and to eat. So I had assembled all my ingredients, and was ready to get home from work on Wednesday night and begin baking.

I arrived at home, checked the mail, changed my clothes and was in the act of tying my apron strings, when floomph! The power went out. It was about six pm, so already quite dark, plus raining so overcast, so there was no light visible anywhere. Blackness. I began immediately to light candles since I have quite a few around the house, and soon had four tall tapers in the kitchen lighting it quite well, and I began to make pie pastry. I soon had the pastry for five pies prepared and divided and wrapped in plastic wrap, waiting for the power to come back on so I could start baking them! I had just started to mix the pumpkin custard, when the lights came back on. Total outage time: about one hour. Not so long, in the overall scheme of things, but an awful lot of time when you are supposed to be baking five pies, one after the other, and your oven will only hold one at a time.

So this sort of explains why I was too busy and too tired at the end of the evening to go and sit at the computer -- I just went to bed, and therefore did not notice until the following morning, Thanksgiving Day morning, that my computer was not able to gain access to the internet, and therefore I not only had no e-mail access, but also no phone service, because my phone service is computer based.

So, the long and the short of that story is that I have just now gotten off the phone with Quest, for the second time this morning (you see I had to wait until I came in to work before I could call them -- no phone service at the house!) and the first time they hung up on me, after I had finally convinced the Indian woman who answered that I was, indeed, a Quest customer, even though I was not calling from that number. And they are unable to assist me, because I am not at the computer in question. She was able to tell me that it is merely a connectivity problem, since the signal that the modem is receiving is full and strong (I had told her that already) and that the computer was just unable to recognize it. Guess I'll be trying agin when I get home from work.

The other half of the raining-pouring story, however, is that when I woke up on Thanksgiving morning, my stomach was hurting. Or at least, my interior abdomen was hurting -- who knows what organ -- and it had bloated me hard and tight and was making it very difficult for me to move around or do anything except curl up into the fetal position and gasp. This has happened perhaps four times in the past few months, and each time has seemed like the end of the world (or at least my corner of it) and after about an hour and a half, has faded away and left me feeling fine. It does not strike after any specific food (this time I had drunk some chocolate milk, but wasn't eating because, duh, Thanksgiving!!) nor after any medicine, although I had thought that possibly I was taking too many of my acid reflux prevention pills, and had cut back on them. I did manage to dress and comb my hair and all, since I could not call my cousin and tell her that I wasn't going to make the drive to her house since a) I had no phone service, and b) I also had the pies.

However, when I got there, I was quite incapable of bearing the loud, hot, crowded aspects of her house, full of happy noisy people, so I managed to pull her aside and tell her that I was going to leave immediately, and why. She was unwilling to allow me to go quietly home and suffer until it got better, and extracted a promise from me, that I would go instead to the emergency room. And then find a pay phone somewhere and call her.

Oh, boy. What IS it about emergency rooms? This was Thanksgiving Day afternoon, and I was the only person in the waiting area, and I was in significant pain, and I had medical insurance. Surely they should have whisked me back to a room immediately and given me a bed to curl up on! But no, I had to go back out to the waiting area, and sit on a molded plastic chair for at least half an hour, until the same woman who had taken my information came out and called my name, as though the room were full of people, and she had no idea which one I was. I then was able to curl up on the bed, since it was another lengthy wait before the doctor (who was at least ten years younger than I) appeared and made a humorous remark about overeating my turkey and stuffing. I was able to tell him with only a little sharpness that far from overeating, I had not, in fact, eaten anything that day, but had merely drunk some coffee and then some chocolate milk. "Oh, then you must be lactose intolerant," he said. "Well, since this is NOT the first time in my forty-six years that I have drunk milk, I don't see how that can be right," I said, only slightly sharper. But he was prodding my (hard and distended and so painful!) belly, and said that since I had already had both appendix and gall bladder removed, that really only left indigestion to be causing this degree of bloat. And I should go and see my regular doctor about getting an appropriate diet to follow, byee! Happy Thanksgiving!

This morning, I am slightly better. Still painful but no bloating, no appetite, but no feeling of horror at the thought of food, and some sadness that I missed the dinner at Mickey's, since Billy's turkey is always the very best. And five pies! All made by hand! Sigh...

It is, however, a beautiful blue Fall day! Sparkled with yellow and russet and maroon, as the leaves continue their flamboyant parade. Or something like that. Sorry, my descriptor is not working so very well this morning.

And tomorrow is, at the very least, another day!

Records

Today is pie-making day. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, I have accepted an invitation, once again, to my cousin Mickey's house, for the Mistler family Thanksgiving, and I am bringing the pie. So when I get home tonight I am assembling and baking pies. Two pumpkin, an apple-walnut-raisin, a blackberry custard and a pecan. Five pies. Putting them together will be the easy part, but baking them is going to take hours. So I will be up late. Me and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

I am really, REALLY enjoying my sweet little new camera! I take a picture or several with it every day, and I have had it for a month (nearly) and it still has not needed to be recharged. Very happy about that! I am sending pictures to everyone I know and posting them online, and really enjoying owning a camera! For the first time since I was a teen-ager. I love making records of things.

I'd Like to be In One

This is the week that I am on jury duty, and yet I have only been in the Jury selection room for half of one day. Much better than the process in Multnomah county, fifteen or so years ago! Although that room was much more comfortable, with couches and a television and shelves of books to read (all trash, but still...)

This room had only stiff upright chairs, although padded, and about half the room had tables to sit at. I was called in the first jury-go-round, and lined up in careful order and walked over to the courthouse in careful order, and filed in to the jury seats in careful order. And then the judge spoke to us for awhile, and the two attorneys spoke to us for awhile, and then I did not get selected to be one of the six they needed. So back we went, but instead of settling down to wait until five, I caught the bus back home. I approve of this system! And then I was able to call in last night to find out that my number had not been called for today, so that was good too. I will be glad to do jury duty every year, if this is how it is! But I would like to actually get on a jury occasionally!

I would like, I think, to be on a jury that had some meat to it -- a murder or a kidnapping, with high-priced attorneys and lots of evidence that had to be kept track of. You know I enjoy reading (and watching!) coutroom dramas, well, I'd like to be in one, as well.

Big and white and soft

Nameless Agent came into my office to ask me if I knew the whereabouts of some office furniture today.

"Do you know what happened to those big white overstuffed chairs?"

I reminded Nameless that I had started working here after the move from the Division Street office.

"So you haven't seen them? It's a couch and two chairs or a loveseat or something. And they are white overstuffed chairs, really soft and comfortable." Nope, I said, I had never seen them, but they could ask Doug when he got off the phone. So in a few minutes, Doug hung up.

"Doug," bleated Nameless, "Do you know what happened to those big white overstuffed chairs?"

"What big white overstuffed chairs?" Doug inquired.

"From the Division office, you know the ones from the waiting room area? Big and white and soft?"

"Noooo..." said Doug thoughtfully. "I can't picture them. Can you describe them?"

"Well, they're white."