Happiness is a hot cup

I am quite happy just now, even though my eyes are acting up.  Have been for about a week, in that same old way, but today they have reached the swooping-vertginous-carnival-ride stage, which is very annoying, and makes me feel as though I should be angry with someone.  But, oddly, I am not.  It hasn’t been bothering me on a personal, emotional level at all this time.  For which we are devoutly grateful.

But.  I am happy.  I can feel my happiness like a glowing ball, like gathered light in a Harry Potter movie – “Expecto petronum!” or something like that.  I can gently hold it in my upturned hands.  And it seems to be centered in my cup of coffee.  Not caused by, since it is also a lovely grey and delicately damp morning, but at least exemplified by.  This is a fabulous cup of coffee.  Fab-yoo-LUSS.  Hot, strong, perfectly flavored, faintly magical…really great.  I am drinking it in large sips, and then grimacing with the sharp but not-bothersome pain of drinking a liquid which is hotter than even my mouth can take.  It is nearly gone, and then I will get another cupful before the flavor changes.

It is also caused by the fact that I am alone in the office.  No one here yet.  I can hear laughter and chatter faintly through the wall from the hair salon, and the light rolls of thunder of running children’s feet from the physical therapy office upstairs.  But I think the phone has rung once all morning, so it is only me.

 And by the fact that I have been doing genealogical work, and have tapped into an unknown and un-thought-of vein of good hard facts, which really pleases me.  It’s like sturdy brickwork, constantly strengthening the framework I have already erected.  Which gives me great pleasure.   I mean, there are people’s family trees and all, which are only slightly better than nothing, and sometimes much worse, but this is a cluster of censuses.  Makes me feel very good about this bastion of the family tree.

So.  I am really very happy.

Extraneous decks

Okay, my next door neighbors, about whom I have spoken before, have recently built a large deck in their backyard.  It is very well-made, has a staircase attaching it to the upstairs deck which already existed, and is easily accessible from both floors of the house.  Has a railing about waist high around it, and a two-step stairway stepping down to the yard in front.  I have yet to see them using it at all, which causes me to wonder all over again if they are merely living in this house while beautifying it to re-sell.  Their pile of lawn chairs stays in a pile, and there is nothing on the deck at all, no chairs, tables, candles or tiki lights.  


So, why, I ask you, has the next thing that the young man has been working on been a sort of pseudo-deck-beside-the-deck?  He worked on it for several days without me paying much attention, although I could hear him clinking and chinking his way through a pile of used bricks, tapping off the mortar clinging to the edges, to make sure that it was square enough to fit in the place he was going to put it, you know what I mean.  He dug out a long narrow rectangle beside the deck, and floored it with this brick, and then used the brick to build a dry-stone type wall alongside, where the ground rose up.  It now has a chair and a tiki light and a small table and a decorative fish made of rusted metal on a long pole stuck into the ground next to it.  And it is quite lovely.  And totally extraneous.  So what the heck?

Power Outage

Because of my white night on Sunday, I went to bed early last night, hoping for a long and restful sleep.  When I pressed the start button on my recorded book, I only heard about a paragraph, so apparently I went right to sleep.  But then I woke at about three a.m.  Something woke me, perhaps a distant crash, or something, but as I opened my eyes, I saw the flashing lights on my clock radio, so I knew that the power was out a split second before I saw the sudden pale blue elctrical-looking flash that spread out horizontally before vanishing again.  Probably some drunken resident driving into a power pole.  And then silence fell.  I lay and listened to it with enjoyment.  No sounds of the woman downstairs and her all-night-movie.  No buzzing of the clock-radio.  No humming of the refrigerator.  Not a sound.  But not the absence of sound one gets from the fingers in the ears (although that always magnifies the interior sounds) but just a pleasant quiet so that the movement of tree branches and the drip of occasional raindrops could be clearly discerned.

I thought about getting up and taking a picture off the deck, since the enormous Pietro's Pizza sign and the bowling alley sign, as well as all the other neon signs that keep the area beyond the trees lit all night, would be off.  But I realized something before I got up, and that is, that to take pictures, you need light.  Makes it hard to document the way things look without it.  So I got up and went to the bathroom, and then got back into my soft warm bed, in my cool and quiet room, and went to sleep.

Bet they had rhubarb

The Farmer's Market in a delicate springtime rain!  What could be better?  And early enough in the season (this is the second of the year's markets) that everyone is in a good mood.  There were a few people making help-help-its-raining-on-me faces -- you know, twisting their heads sideways and sort of raising one shoulder, as though Mother Nature would get the hint and stop.  But for the most part, everyone was smiling, kids were calling to their parents -- "Mom, Mom, look, tor-TEE-yas!"  "Oh, Daddy, it's a lit-tle ti-ny pie!"  -- and the smells and colors were a brightly fragrant kaleidoscope of springtime glory.  The music group was playing bayou-style rock-and-roll, and I was NOT the only one singing along "...it was a teen-age wedding, and the old folks wished them well...dee deedle doodle doodle doo..."

Also as a result of the earliness of the year, the booths were very carefully arranged, and very colorful.  I took a few pictures of the heaps of orange carrots, for example, and the buckets full to overflowing with deep blue iris and vivid tulips.  Didn't buy anything, since I am absolutely stony broke, but there also wasn't much in the way of appealing offerings for me.  Vegetables, while pretty to look upon, and all, are not appetizing or appealing to me.  And it's a little early for fruits just yet.  Bet they had rhubarb, though.