Saturday, January 26, 2002

shop window at Hog Wild

"What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me."

Robert Browning, Rabbi En Ezra

FFP is up around seven. He has to go to an all day marketing meeting for the ballet. I fall back into a sleep. (I should have hit the sack before three and not been lying there awake for half an hour.) I'm dreaming and the phone rings. I answer the one beside the bed and there is a dial tone. I think it's line two, wonder why FFP isn't answering. I struggle up (no line two by the bed, fix that one day) and realize it is a phone in my office.

"I'm calling about the Lincoln Town Car you have for sell."

I go back to bed. I realize that I was dreaming that we were sleeping at another house. My dad and sister had rousted me out to go to another house. I wanted coffee something awful. I thought of going out to get it. Then I thought: what do I have to do? Either read the newspapers or make coffee. So I'm in this bathroom, trying to make coffee or reheat it or something and I keep coming up with a cup that is empty except for a few scattered grounds. Then I go back in the other room and there is coffee brewing in some odd contraption (it looks like the reservoir where you pour coffee but there is coffee in there).

"Thanks for making coffee," I say to FFP in the dream.

"No problem," he says.

"I didn't make the bed at the other house," I whine. But my sister says we will have several days to go back there and do it, that she will be here a few more days.

After the phone, FFP comes down from his office.

"I dreamed you made coffee," I say.

"Oh," he says, "I heated up some from yesterday." (With Capresso on the blink, we've been making coffee into a carafe so it isn't heated again. He's used the temp control on the microwave to heat it to a drinking temp again. It doesn't taste as bad as you might think.)

"I'll make coffee," he says.

"You don't have to. It was a dream."

I struggle up a few minutes later, put on a silk and cotton long-sleeved T-Shirt and a sweatshirt and jeans and heavy socks. I go into the kitchen. There is ground coffee in the filter, dry and the carafe is full of pure water. I am puzzled. I transfer the water to the reservoir and make the coffee.

When the coffee was made, I thought, I'd better write that down! (Yeah, I knew you were on the edge of your seat about wrong numbers and coffee dreams and coffee apparatus.)

We decided to walk in our own neighborhood today.

Well, it's all relative. We decided to walk down North Loop to Lamar. When we were that far, we decided to go on to Flight Path Coffee Shop. And then, of course, we had to walk home. I figure we did about five and a half miles with all the twists and turns. A very good walk. I was actually getting pretty weary at the end.

We saw two chickens in a yard, a dove in a yellow cage in another yard and a woman in her front yard with a cat and a pot-bellied pig. But I took pictures of shop windows.

Flight Path has added an outdoor living room (covered patio with old couches and stuffed chairs that look like they came off the curb somewhere). They've added wireless Internet access for laptop users. And, of course, it's no longer noisy now that Mueller is becoming a 'mixed used urban village' or something. (Hey, I wonder if it will be fun to drive over there and walk the dogs?) There is now a store selling hookas next door to Flight Path. Surely FP is the coolest coffee shop in town. If only they didn't have the gut bomb Upper Crust style cinnamon rolls instead of the good Sweetish Hill style tradition bound ones. Well, I had a cheese scone.

We walked home through a little draw, across a creek, between the northern reaches of the letter streets and the UT recreation fields and then across a field near the state complex. (This town has too many untaxed parcels of land!)

I took Mom to the hobby store after that. An elaborate trip to get a package of 99 cent letters although she did end up also buying an address book for her secret pal. Then I took the cell phone back and exchanged it for one that was backlit better and more readable for her. (Teaching her to use new technology is always fun.) That was a pain because the cell phone place was crowded and now I have to go back again at some point and exchange the case and auto charger for the other phone.

That took way too long and when I got home I had to eat (salad, rotisserie chicken, more salad with some of that good salami I found in the frig on it). I then had to shower up. I got a few minutes of stuff done around here before we went to see a performance at Zach Scott.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch was funny and fun and well done, I thought. The woman playing a man (Susanne Abbott) was awesome and had an awesome voice. Hedwig (Andrew Rannells) was great and so wonderfully funny and striking physically.

We passed by the champagne-like substance (it was opening night) and went home to read in our chairs.

JUST TYPING
If you take joy.
In studying what your neighbor wears.
How they move.
And in observing that women wash their hands twice as fast as they use the toilet.
Life is always interesting.