TL;DR

TL;DR is an abbreviation which means, TOO LONG; DIDN’T READ.  People use it for all kinds of things.  In this case, it’s a bunch of boring rubbish about how I feel.

Frankly, great.  I would feel even better if I was more productive, but honestly, I feel purty darned good.

The kinds of things that make me happy:

I will have mentioned Jeff hung my clothesline (he saying ‘drily’ that he would never use it as he finds clothes dried on a clotheslines stiff and uncomfortable) but I didn’t mention that I used it for the first time yesterday.  I find line-dried sheets one of the great blessings of a Vancouver summer.  If there’s anything sexier than bed linens straight off the line, I don’t know what it is.

I will have mentioned Miss Margot, ne plus ultra, ad nauseum, oderint dim metuant.  I don’t suppose I’ve mentioned that it takes her an average of two minutes to kill, toy with and eat every housefly that comes into the house?  She makes hilarious pigsnorty noises while she’s hoovering it up.  She also tends to greet every possible foodstuff with grunts and squeaks of joy.

Have I mentioned that she has taken to preceding me into the bathroom every morning so I can brush her?  Her mood varies from happy to irritated while I do this, depending on how many matts in her fur she got overnight (pixies mischievously braid them into her fur) but she knows it’s part of her routine and makes no effort to prevent me from picking her up.  Depending on her mood, she either starts biting the brush right away or lets me go right until I’m done.  And I brush her twice a day, every day.  Frequently I brush her more often than that, and she’s a Persian so I have to get the crap out of the fur under her eyes. Persians, to compensate for the fact that their eyes go round corners before they do, produce voluminous dark brown tears.  She puts up with me looking after that, too, although I’ve learned to do that twice a week rather than twice a day… fooling around with her eyes too much hurts and she ends up squinting like Popeye.  If I hose her down with saline and mop up it all slides off so I don’t pull any hair out. I know, gross.

I LOVE MY BED.  It’s quiet… DOES NOT CREAK at all.  I love the colour, and the fact I now have a storage locker for all of my crap, and so can have a nice clean floor all the time. Yeah, right.

I feel good about my progress.  The atheist liturgy and the zombie movie and songs are taking up all of my cycle time.  I am not practicing guitar and mandolin; a lot of that is delayed grieving; instead I grab instruments and figure out starting notes for songs and then put them down again.  Mike inspected my nails and said “You’re not practicing.”  So, so busted. And just to prove I’m still working on stuff, I just emailed NPR for permission to quote from Penn Gillette’s This I Believe.

Barbecued pork chomps and salad and onions and home made naan for dinner last night.  Damn, Farm Town meats does good pork!  Best I ever had.

Read a biography of Patrick O’Brian.  Candidly, I think his abandonment of his children can’t possibly make up for his work and if I had to trade the whole series for him not being such a jackass I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d still have Dunnett, and she WASN’T a jerk, as many many people have testified in person and print.  This is very petty of me, but I am a very petty person.

Gizmo scarcely smells like skunk anymore.  That must have been so hard for the poor guy.

Time to do more laundry, run the dishwasher, call the carpet cleaning dude, and get my desk up from downstairs.  There’s a corner of my room that looks lonely without it.

I light a candle for travel luck for ScaryClown, who’s going to a wedding in Italy.  Magnifico!

I light a candle for both of my kids, who are having a hell of a time finding a job as the economy shrinks (biggest contraction in fifty years) and the youth employment rate is the worst in a decade in BC.