Thursday,
February 13, 2003
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back to my old new self? I try to get up early but it doesn't work. When I do I decide not to go work out right away. First I'm going to review the counting book. Looking for egregious typos I might need to fix. Like a three-year-old would know. My niece can cover for me. I also finish up the scattered entries for this journal for the last three days that I couldn't begin to deal with for some reason. Before I know it, it is 10:30. I'm going to have to make something more of this day. I'm going to have to get this stuff mailed. A friend calls. To tell me another friend has breast cancer. Geez. It never ends does it? We are of that certain age where things happen to our friends besides car wrecks and stuff. And so. I decide to get my great nephew's package off to him. I'm not going to gift wrap the things but rather let his mother dole them out as she sees fit. I'm too lazy to pack them up. I decide a 'pack and mail' is the answer. We need some cash and FFP assigns me to go to the bank. I do. I decide to go see about my friend at the nearby hospital. It's a very inhospitable hospital at the moment with construction. Some people look like they've been lost for days in the hallways. I find my friend who looks great considering that she is less than 24 hours after surgery. Mad at the staff, enjoying the pain drugs, determined to get well. Yeah! I tell her anything she needs, call me. I'm retired. I have time. I do, don't I? I decide to take the money home. I do that, stow it in the safe, check on stuff. Then I go to mailing place in Tarrytown. I thought I might get some Pez dispensers from the Tarrytown pharmacy for my great nephew's package. They don't have any but they have this cute little Monsters, Inc. light so I get that. Then I take the books, puzzle and stuff to the mailing place and they put it all in a FedEx box for me and ship it off. I head for the club. I am dragging a little. Probably because it is almost one and I haven't eaten. I get through my 45+ minutes on the bike. The TVs are an odd display today. The two middle ones show news shows with all the drama of hand grenades in Gatwick airport, high security alerts and impending war. The two outside ones show soap operas, interspersed with ads for kitchen gadgets and such. I work out my upper body. I don't do the free weight part, though. I'm hungry. I head home. At home, FFP gets the mail and, seeing some 1099's, tells me I can start sorting the taxes. I look at him numbly. I need to eat, I'm thinking. So I eat half a grapefruit and a little chips and cheese and grab a shower. Then I go up and sort my dad's tax stuff and make reference copies of everything just in case and get it ready to go to the CPA. I start looking at our stuff. I get about halfway through it, just familarizing myself with what's been collected so far. I find one piece of paper we need as a basis for something and consider this a victory. I'll work on this another day.
There is an art exhibition opening down at Blanton (which is really the art building since the Blanton won't be built for a couple of years). We are invited. Maybe we donated something. Maybe they hope we will. I feel we should get out to this type of thing. It's sort of raining. We even go back for my fish umbrella (the handle is a fish) that my birthday buddy Deb gave me. It's a great umbrella. We park near the building and someone pulls up behind us and is waving. Only the streetlight is reflected right in his face so I have no idea who it is. It's James Armstrong actually. We walk over to the building together. The students waiting for the shuttle buses grudingly yield enough room for us to pass single file. James says, "No one wears a jacket any more except us old folks." He is wearing a sport coat and FFP and I are wearing our black leather jackets that people accuse us of being identical when, in fact, mine is styled like a sport coat and FFP's more a jacket. They feel the same, though. Very soft. People get stuck in a style, I think. You go through different styles, you have money and buy sports coats or leather jackets or a collection of pastel Members Only jackets. Then one day you run out of money or maybe just the will to acquire. And you wear whatever you were buying at that moment for a long time. Same with the art on your walls and your furniture. You evolve for a while and then you don't. We go inside. It's a mob scene over the free wine and the chips and nuts. There is a lot of room inside with the art, though. A collection of early sixties paintings and some drawings and ethchings from a couple of collections and a few old paintings including a tiny Rubens study. We go around looking at the art and talking to people we know. We sit for a few minutes watching a black and white film that looks like a black hole developing or something. We begin discussing eating. One gal tells us that she and a girlfriend are going to Asti. We consider this. But on February 13 people go out because February 14 was already reserved. We leave. We drive by Asti but we aren't in the mood for the crowd and we go home without much discussion. I bake a potato, FFP mics some bacon and some canned spinach and reheats some chicken. I put a bunch of stuff on the potato like yogurt and broccoli and a piece of the bacon and nibble carrots and drink a lemonade soft drink. I'm hungry because I've failed to eat a whole lot today. Soon I'm full enough. We watch a CSI which is super-sized (they are really using this term on network TV) to an hour and a half. FFP watched a Survivor show earlier. I kept my nose stuck in my book. I read on the commercials, too, for CSI. I'm feeling a little lost.
I've felt all day like I fell through the rabbit hole. What about the old self I was supposed to be getting back to? I don't know if it is my continuing fight against allergies or a cold. (I haven't taken anything for it because the drugs do give everything a surreal aspect. I drank some green tea while watching TV tonight.) I actually wasn't sniffing or headachy too much today. My stomach has been upset, though. Maybe it was my friend's illness that I found out about. Maybe I'm just now realizing that I fell out of work and have landed in this world of running errands and working out in the middle of the day and I'm not sure what to do with myself. It's hard to say. But it's definitely a weird feeling. Maybe it's looking at tax stuff, too. That's certainly a good way to fall into a rabbit hole.
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heart day is coming...trying to put together a card for FFP
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170
JUST
TYPING