Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Goin’ Fishin’…

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I need a vacation.

This is crazy. At five in the morning, EVERY morning, Ruby the Corgi Pup whines me out of the sack. After letting the dogs out, I sit down in front of the computer to answer the email and read the news and finish off what I imagine will be about ten or fifteen minutes of some client’s project.

Two hours later… Yeah: invariably, two hours later, at 7 a.m., I shake off the computer-induced hypnosis, get up, feed the dogs, water the plants, realize it’s too hot to take the animals (or me) for a walk, so fix something to eat and a pot of coffee. Write a blog post while finishing off the coffee. Post it to Twitter and Facebook, which has inexplicably canceled FaM’s feed.

Then work begins. I park in a leather chair with my feet on an ottoman and a computer on my lap, and the only thing that moves is my fingers. Hour after hour goes by.

By noon or 1 p.m., I haven’t moved in four or five hours. Literally have. not. moved. But the brain has gone numb over the clients’ copy.

Get up and fix lunch. If it’s hot, I go swimming, briefly. Then it’s back to the leather chair with my feet on the ottoman and a computer on my lap. Continue working on client stuff until the dogs start to lobby for their dinner, around 6 or 7 p.m. By now I’ve worked almost nonstop for 14 hours. During that time, I’ve barely moved. I’ve had exactly zero exercise, other than walking to the fridge and pulling out some food.

Is it any wonder I’m getting fat again? The wonder is that I haven’t had an embolism by now.

This has got to stop. I have got to get away from the computer.

Ergo, VACATION starts as of today. For the next seven days, I’m not even touching a damn computer.

To keep Funny alive, we’ll enjoy some old posts from back in the Day when Funny was young and lively and I was employed.

Interestingly a week’s worth of classic FaM posts — the site has been in business since 2007, so there are a LOT of classics — reveals how much brighter my mood was in those halcyoon days. And…some of these posts actually are funny! At one point along the line Funny really WAS funny about money.

So you should enjoy them. And with any luck, a week away from Electronica will mellow your humble writer’s mood some.

Watch this space…starting tomorrow.

 

Cranky as a cat

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Betcha can’t guess what this is:

roachtraps

THAT is a dog-resistant cockroach-bait cage, custom designed to keep Ruby and Charley from eating the cockroach poison laid out there to catch the latest resident of the garage. The rock on top keeps Ruby from pushing the old fan cage over to the wall and then flipping it up with her nose or a paw so she can get at the roach baits and scarf them down. The wood chip, retrieved from the grill fuel, is there so Roachie can get in, since the fan cage’s wires are too close together to let her through.

Three of those are placed strategically around the garage just now.

This morning alone, I have walloped my bare feet on those damn things not once, not twice, not three times, but FOUR GODDAMN PAINFUL TIMES! Don’t think I’ve broken a toe (yet), but it sure as hell hurts.

I’d managed to get rid of the roaches. Haven’t had any around for years. The new resident is a different species from the usual babes we have here in Arizona, the big brown fellows who live in the damned palm trees. This little guy is shorter, fat, and almost black. Looks a great deal like the Broad Keys roach. Cute.

And where do cockroaches come from? I’ll tell you where they come from: They travel in goddamn politically correct PAPER GROCERY BAGS, that’s where they come from.

Cockroaches inhabit warehouses, and they inhabit shipping containers. When cartons of grocery bags are stored in warehouses in transit, roaches find them, chew on them, and take up residence in them. They lay their eggs in the stored grocery bags. So when the paper grocery bags arrive at your house, helpfully given to you by politically correct corporations like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, the roach eggs hatch. And pretty quick you have happy throngs of roaches running around your house. Or garage, if you’re smart(?) enough to store the bags out there, or if you throw them into the recycling bin that you store in the garage.

So. Yes. The politically correct grocery bags discarded in the politically correct trashbin: That would be where the roach came from.

Woke up crabby as a cat this morning, and the cockroach bait waltz did not help things.

Sat down at 5 a.m. to finish off a client’s project and ship it off to him. Figured it would take about 20 minutes. Got up from the computer at 7 a.m.: two interminable hours later. Two interminable hours of tooth-grinding electronic ditz.

It being a little overcast, breezy, and not too crushingly hot, the dogs & I went for a pre-breakfast walk. But by 7 a.m., rush hour was well under way. We could not get across Feeder Street Northwest. I finally gave up and turned around. So we went back into the westerly end of the ‘hood by way of circling around to the house and collecting at least a few steps of our doggywalk. Naturally, we encounter some guy with a great Dane-like thing (ears uncropped, so he probably got it from the pound or some such), off the leash. Dane is real interested in two rabbit-sized corgis. Dude manages to grab the dog and starts struggling trying to get the leash on. While he’s wrestling with that, I dodge down a side street and shortly get out of sight and out of mind.

That cut about two blocks off said doggywalk.

Fed the dogs, fed myself (after a fashion), and then decided to pay the $251 bill outstanding to the Mayo Clinic.

Medicare and Medigap paid about $75 of the $325± said outfit billed me for the pointless annual physical they demand you show up for in order to stay on their rolls. The Mayo wishes to purge itself of Medicare patients, since we’re not very profitable — Medicare keeps prices down more efficiently than do insurance companies, which themselves work pretty hard at the task. The way they get rid of you is with this rule: if you don’t spend some money there every year, whether you need care or not, you can’t come back.

Since hospitals in Arizona leave quite a bit to be desired, it’s very much in one’s interest to stay with the Mayo.

So I’d paid the little bit Medicare/Medigap remitted and finally decided that was as much as I was gonna get. Paying is a hassle unless you want to send a check — I prefer to put these bills on the card so as to get credit toward the cash kickback AMEX provides. To pay with a card, you have to dork around on their website, which, the last time I looked, is a true, dyed-in-the-wool PITA. Alternatively, you can call and hang on the line until you get through to a CSR, who’ll take your credit-card information.

This is another hassle: they first tell you the wait is “longer than five minutes.” It’s not: it’s about two or at the outside three minutes. Then they while away your time nagging you to go to their website and pay there…ignoring the obvious fact that if one wanted to fart with the impenetrable website, you would not be farting with their phone tree. Would you!?

So I finally get through to a lady and at that point things proceed quickly and smoothly. Once you get a human on the line there, the place is pretty easy and pleasant to deal with.

Now I decide nothing will do but what I have to clean up the unholy mess I’ve allowed to accrue in the Funny Farm…speaking of things impenetrable. I have the bad habit of setting things down where I finish with them and then erasing them from my mind. I don’t even see the piles after awhile.

It takes over an hour just to pick up the litter, throw away the trash that should’ve been thrown out in the first place instead of left to accrue like dust on a tabletop, scour the pans I left to soak in the utility sink, stub my feet against the roach cages, wrestle two loads of laundry into and out of the washer, unload and reload the dishwasher, scrub the toilet and bathroom…arrrrhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I. Hate. Housecleaning.

Just hate it. Why? Because it is a hopelessly futile endeavor. You can clean until you’re blue in the face and a day later the place is littered and dirty again. What is the point?

The cordless phone in the kitchen died. After a significant period of puzzling, I discovered it would recharge in one of the other recharger cradle thingies. More puzzling and dorking around took place. Finally I decided the kitchen recharger had given up the ghost. Threw it in the trash, leaving a homeless handset and a disgusted human.

Lovely.

This morning I take the extension out of the living-room cabinet, which entails moving a VERY heavy piece of furniture across the tiles, climbing in behind it, unplugging the cord, unstringing it through the hole I’d drilled in the back of the cabinet, and dragging it into the kitchen. And of course pushing the VERY heavy piece of furniture back into place and centering it under a picture.

Plug it into the outlet, set the phone handset on it, and…it doesn’t work…

WTF?

Maybe the outlet has died. I plug it into another outlet. It doesn’t work.

So this morning between banging around and emptying the trash into another collection bin, I happen to study the moved recharger, which flickers off when I pick it up. Then realize…wa-a-a-a-aitaminit. There’s nothing WRONG with the thing. The wire has come loose at the connection to the base.

Could it be?

Now I go to retrieve the discarded charger from the garbage. Naturally I can’t find it. I have to dig all the way down to the BOTTOM of two weeks’ worth of trash and garbage to pull the damn thing out of there.

And yeah. When I push the wire connection together firmly and plug the damn thing into the outlet, it comes right on!

Crap.

I decide I’d better not put this one into the cabinet, because I suspect the loose connection will come apart again, and that is another emergency-if-I’m-on-the-floor extension. Don’t want to find that thing dead when I really need it.

So I have to push the VERY heavy piece of furniture out, wrestle with the wiring again, wrestle some more to put the phone back and replug it, and push the VERY heavy piece of furniture back into place. Again.

The temperamental phone is working again. Let’s hope it persists.

Do you wonder why, at 12:04 p.m., I want a bourbon and water?

P.S. WHY IS IT that you can proofread a blog post a half-dozen times and STILL not catch all the stupid typos in it??? I am SOOOO TIRED of having this machine display my idiocy!

 

 

Yay! Choir’s Back!

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So today we have an all-day choir workshop, a shindig that’s fun, tiring, and sometimes challenging, followed by one of our annual potluck dinners. Then tomorrow the regular choir season starts. Hooray! I love it!

Our beloved director is back despite some fairly challenging surgery over the summer. He seems none too much the worse for wear. Two of our other favorites also each enjoy ead their own Adventures in Medical Science over the summer…ain’t life fun? We have eight new people, a passel of professional and near-professional singers, and plenty of younger folks. All of which makes for an awesome group.

The choir is going to perform at Carnegie Hall in the spring. Wish I could go with them. But of course I couldn’t possibly afford a plane trip and several days of food and lodging in New York City. Even if I could, there’s no way on God’s Green Earth that I would subject myself to the bureaucratic bullying required to get on a commercial airliner today.

One elderly woman in the church — a very sweet and nice lady — tried to take a flight across the country. She was in a wheelchair. An obvious terrorist, eh? The TSA singled her out, harassed her mercilessly, would not let her through to her gate, parked her in the middle of a concourse, and left her there. By then I had already decided that I would never ride a commercial plane again; that just confirmed my feeling. If I can’t get there by car, I don’t go.

LOL! And since my car is now too decrepit to leave the city and I’m too lazy to do battle with a rental car company, that means I don’t go much of anywhere.

It’s ironic, because I joined this choir largely because I wanted to travel with them. They regularly do international tours. The year I joined they were slated to go to Italy, and I had a job: I really wanted to go on that trip. That was the year of 9/11. The State Dept was warning Americans to stay out of Italy and the south of France, many of the choir members were nervous about flying,, and the director decided discretion was the better part of valor.

By the time the next opportunity came along, I was unemployed and not about to spend any of my tightly pinched pennies on something that wouldn’t keep the roof over my head.

Oh well. There are better things than gallivanting around a world you’ve already seen several times.

Speaking of gallivanting, now that the oven-like skies are cooling a bit, I’ve GOT to get some exercise. The bike’s tires again dissolved in the garage’s heat, so those will have to be expensively repaired or replaced. Once the thing is working, though, I can get around the North Central district a ways, which burns a few calories. Really should go back to the mountain, but I can’t think of many things that bore me more than trudging up and down a crowded, overused mountain park trail. There are just too many people at North Mountain now. And you can’t get a place to park at Squaw Peak now at any time of day.

SDXB discovered a nice mountain park in Glendale, which seems to be better maintained — or less thumped by crowds — than the Phoenix parks. Trouble is, it’s a bit of a drive. That makes it hard for me to work up the ginger to traipse over there, especially since you have to navigate a freeway to get to the place. Another innocent driver was shot to death on the 51 here — just driving along minding her own business when some shitheads started pursuing her and, when they caught up, shot her in the head. So my feeling is, unless you have bullet-proof glass, stay off the freeways.

Oh well. Time to go! The nice thing about a church is that it leads you to contemplate something more positive than real life. 😉

WHY does it take old people so LONG to get out of the house?

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Have you noticed that, as a phenomenon — those of you who are no longer young pups? It seems to take for-freaking-EVER to get out the door, whether it’s in the morning for an early meeting or for a mid-day or evening excursion. And it’s crazy-making.

No doubt it would be crazy-making for a young adult companion, too, if I had one around. Can you remember waiting for your mother or grandmother to make a last-minute run to the toilet, whether she needed to go or not, because God Forfend that she should have to use a public loo? We would be running right on time and just as I was grabbing the doorknob to usher her out the door, she’d make an about-face and head for the back of the house.  😀

Well, I have no fear of public bathrooms, but that notwithstanding, it seems like I never can get out the door on time. And I find myself wondering why…what am I doing differently now that I didn’t do when I was a kid?

When I was TA-ing my way through graduate school, the university invariably gave me 7:40 classes, every goddamn morning. At the outset, we lived an hour away from campus; later we moved downtown, shortening the commute to a mere 40 minutes. But to that drive time, add time to park, hike across the campus to the decrepit TA office, try to get in, walk to a public phone and call a campus cop to come unlock the door, wait around till he showed up, get whatever stuff I needed, and then hike to the other end of the campus to meet my classes in the engineering or math building. So I probably left around 6 a.m. I don’t remember eating anything: I probably didn’t eat breakfast at that time.

Today I won’t leave the house until I’ve consumed a couple mugs of French press coffee and something to eat.

I didn’t have a dog to feed and make secure before leaving the building. Today I have two of them.

At first we lived in an apartment: one door to lock. When we moved to our first house, there were four doors to lock up, but again: no dog to wrangle inside or outside. And at six in the morning, only one of the doors would have been unlocked, just long enough for me to dodge out to the car.

Today — having enjoyed two home invasions during my lifetime plus an attempted rape plus the Incident of the Cat Burglar on the Roof — you may be damn sure I live behind locked doors and windows. Eight doors, to be precise. Two sliding doors, each with three separate locking devices in various positions and at different heights from the floor; three exterior doors with deadbolts and locking handles; three steel security doors with hardened dead bolts that will break your effing drill if you try to drill the lock open. That would be…hmmm…FIFTEEN LOCKS to have to secure, and to have to check before you leave the house.

No, make that SIXTEEN. Back in the dark ages, we did not have computers that stored our entire personal and business lives, computers whose loss to a burglar would amount to a major catastrophe. Sooo…I didn’t have a solid-core door on my office secured with yet another drill-proof hardened dead bolt.

A locked door functions in exactly the same way as a set of stairs does. Whatever you want is on the other side. Forget your purse: you have to find your keys, wrestle a deadbolt open, retrieve the purse, wrestle the deadbolt shut. Oh, forgot the file you were supposed to bring? Find your keys, wrestle…wash, rinse, repeat. Sometimes two or three times before you can get out the door…

Come to think of it, there was no e-mail. So there were no messages to check and respond to before you so much as brushed your teeth. That surely saved a lot of time!

When the neighbors divorced and we got custody of their German shepherd — my first German shepherd, my greatest German shepherd, my greatest dog — that of course added dog feeding to the morning race-around. By then, though, I had paid my dues in the TA department and was no longer teaching wee-hours sections. And all Greta ate was kibble: nothing could be easier.

Today’s dogs eat fancy kitchen-made food that has to be measured out on a kitchen scale. The food competition must be refereed, lest blood flow.

Still pretty sure that at that point I probably didn’t eat breakfast. If I did, it was something like cheese and fruit — nothing that had to be cooked. We made our coffee in a Chemex, which didn’t require much time or attention.

No one ever heard of hauling water or tea or coffee around in the car with them.

Today I won’t leave the house without a car-friendly mug of iced water or hot coffee.

When I was a pretty young thing, I wore contact lenses. A pair of nonprescription shades resided in the car or in my purse. I most certainly did not require three freaking pairs of prescription glasses to navigate the world. The progressive glasses, which I need for driving but which do not work for living inside the house and which, goddamn them, render a computer unusable, are always, invariably, every freaking day on the other side of the locked office door, a discovery always, invariably, every freaking day made as I’m sticking the key in the car’s ignition.

A forgotten item that is remembered once you’re in the car, then, requires you to unlock and relock two deadbolts: one to the kitchen door and one to the office.

And when I was a pretty young thing, often I didn’t wear make-up. Today I would frighten small children if I left the building without slathering the requisite three layers of opaque crud over the face.

Back in the day, I grabbed my purse, ran out the door, slammed it and locked it behind me, jumped in the car, and drove away.

Yeah. Okay. It makes sense now. It is objectively true that forty years ago getting out of the house was faster and easier than it is today. And maybe it’s not a function of age so much as a function of our times.

Do you find that to be true in your neck of the woods?

Summer is y-goin’ out

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Lhudly sing huzzah!!

Another beautiful morning, as the heat moderates and the days grow almost imperceptibly shorter. And lookee here! The wee Easter lily cactus that clings to life in the shade of the devil-pod tree expresses its joy:

EasterLilyAugust2016It’s been in that pot for years and barely grown, even though it gets a great deal more water than it should. The burly fellow next to it is a golden barrel cactus, given to me a very long time ago by my friend KJG. It was a housewarming gift…so arrived here 12 years ago. Strangely, in all the years it and its companion in front have been here, I’ve never seen either of them bloom.

But Easter lily cacti in their various varieties bloom in wild profusion.

I am SO not in the mood to work today. Fortunately, except for my own book and for rehearsing tomorrow’s dog and pony show, there isn’t much to have to do, at least so far. But  history tells us that every time the dust settles, a new shamal will blow in forthwith.

Still…fall is y-cumin’ in, and here in Arizona, fall is our second spring. Soon the plants will revive, flowers will bloom, vegetables will thrive.

So I’m thinking maybe instead of (ugh) working all day, I’ll disconnect from the computer and spend the day gardening: pull out the dead stuff, haul off the pots whose residents have fried, maybe even buy a new plant.

One of my favorite indoor plants has some sort of infestation or disease that seems to be killing it.  This is probably the time to get rid of the thing.

TalaveraPlanterIt’s living in a fake terra-cotta pot. I’d like to buy a new talavera pot to take the place of the dying plant in its plastic pot. Maybe I’ll run over to Whitfill’s, buy one of their pots, and then move on to Home Depot in search of a tree-like houseplant to live there. That would kill some time and continue the job of murdering the budget.

Heh! I love those things. One like that would look SO PRETTY in that spot, and then maybe I would feel less crabby.

Then I could go so far as to refill the hummingbird feeders and the seed dispensers for the ordinary birds. That would be good.

It would’ve been good if I’d kept those filled for the poor little critters when it was hotter than the hubs of Hades and I was too lazy or too timorous to stick my nose out the door. But better late than never. I suppose.

What I’d really like to do is get a couple of those raised gardening bed kits and set them, side by side, in the sunny spot in the far northwest corner of the yard. The view of that space is blocked by the orange trees, so I wouldn’t have to look at a truck farm from the back patio and the pool. But if I had two long, narrow troughs set up with enough space for a pathway down the middle, I could reach all parts of the raised garden without putting my back out.

Probably could build something like that with a few two-by-sixes. It would be easy.

Still feeling more or less out of sorts today, though better than the past two days. Last night I refrained from dropping another melatonin pill — or half thereof — yet still slept seven hours. So presumably one of two things has happened:

• either a residual amount of the stuff remained in my system, which would explain a lot; or
• a couple doses somehow realigned my sleep cycle with the sunrise.

Whatever, I suspect the generally shitty way I’ve been feeling has something to do with this drug. Guess I’d rather feel shitty from not getting enough sleep than shitty from the side-effects of some chemical.

I’ve also been unduly affected by the death of my client and friend, the Mongolian Bank Magnate. It makes me feel terrible. And that’s unreasonable: he lived to 68, a decent enough age, and he had a great life.

But still…from the perspective of early old age, 68 seems pretty young. He was a vigorous man with a young wife and a little girl just ready to toddle off to preschool and a great deal more that he wanted to do in this world.

He died of pneumonia incident upon leukemia.

Damn! What awful luck.

Especially when you think of the legions out there who so richly deserve such a fate: rabid terrorists and child molesters and drug dealers and tobacco magnates and pharmaceutical company billionaires and clowns who would ride into the presidency on a tide of hatred and fear and all those who would take away from the world rather than contribute to it…

Oh, hell. What can one say?

I am going to cultivate my garden.

Plumbing Blues…Everything Blues

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RainDrop_on_rose_leafOh F!ck It. That’s about all I can say.

I give up on trying to go to the last art lesson. I give up on all of it.

You know, every single time I have the temerity to indulge myself with some little luxury like a month & a half of art lessons for $175, convened by a city museum in a beautiful historic house, every goddamn thing that can go wrong BREAKS AND FALLS ON MY HEAD!  It never, ever fails.

I was up in the air about going out there this morning, anyway. The damn city has closed 32nd Street, a big thoroughfare and one of the roads I take to get there. Last Thursday, just the city’s getting ready to shut it down jammed up Glendale Avenue for miles to the west. I had to make an eight- or ten-mile detour to get around that mess reach to my meeting in Scottsdale.

To get over to the Schemer gallery this morning, I’ll have to make my way through three neighborhoods to reach a north-south road that I can turn east on. Then drive all the way down to Missouri. Then east on Missouri, which will drop me in some of the worst traffic on Camelback right at the tail end of the rush hour. Then easterly, easterly, easterly, easterly through bitchy traffic. It’ll take about 40 minutes to get there — that’s a drive that should take 20 minutes.

And y’know what?

I don’t wanna.

My scheme to keep the water turned off at the frontyard standpipe, turning it on only when the irrigation system needs to run, did NOT work.

When I turned the two shut-off valves back on this morning, I got sprayed in the face with some kind of backwash: water had been building up under pressure in there and it came squirting out when the valves were opened.

Then the damn irrigation system  hung up on zone 3. So I had to turn on each zone manually…BUT…

Ah yes, but…

That allowed me to see that Gerardo was right when he said there’s another leak! He’d noticed a wet patch near one of the orange trees and said it looks like a pipe’s broken under there. But the water system had been running, and that tree is watered with a standing bubbler that floods the irrigation basin under it. I figured water had leaked out from under the river-rock dam I’d built around there.

Wrong.

Turning on the water this a.m. created another wet patch in that spot…and the water had yet to come on under the trees.

So that’s going to be another expensive fix.

Gerardo charges about $80 to $100 to dig up the piping, find the leak, pull out the low-grade PVC pipe Richard installed, and replace the rotted length with new PVC. Since I’m having to get it fixed about once a month now, I guess it’s time to replace the system or shut it down altogether.

If I shut down the irrigation system and leave it off — as I’ve done with the ovens that gave up the ghost (again) — I’ll have to drag hoses around the yard once a week in the winter and every day in the summer. This yard is almost a quarter of an acre… The alternative is to let all the plantings die. And of course…the yard is the main reason I live in this house.

It costs $4,000 to $10,000 (depending on who does it) to replace one of these systems front and back. It will entail digging up the landscaping and repairing all the damage where new trenches have to be dug. So…if Gerardo does the job? My guess would be $4,000 to $6,000.

So. Resurfacing the aging swimming pool this winter is now out of the question. So is putting any leftover savings into a Vanguard index fund. Every penny I’ve managed to pinch is going to go into paying the $750 or $800 overage from this month and then rebuilding the irrigation. That won’t leave anything to get my teeth fixed, BTW.

The pool is not an emergency. It will be OK for another year or two — won’t look great, but as far as I can tell there are no leaks in the gunite, so…it should hang in there.

The plumbing? That is an emergency.

OMG! A thrasher just caught a gigantic bug! At first I thought he’d nabbed one of those accursed paloverde beetles, but now I see it’s a carpenter bee, a funny and mostly harmless creature. That’s too bad…but something was wrong with the bee — it was already stressed, allowing the bird to catch it with hardly any effort.

Good bird! These birds do catch the accursed paloverde beetles (of which we seem to have a slight dearth this summer, lhudly sing huzzah) and, more to the point, they eat ants in gay abandon.

Well, that was a Moment of Nature interlude, entertaining enough in a morbid way. Maybe I won’t kill myself after all.

When I went to turn on the computer at 5 this morning, the better to respond to emails, emit a receipt to one of the Chinese scholars, and return copy and an invoice to another of those worthies, the damn thing was hotter than a two-dollar cookstove!

I’d left it plugged into the recharger…despite having noticed that thing was running pretty hot yesterday afternoon. It had recharged the battery 100%, but the whole lashup felt like it was ready to combust.

Shut down shut down shut down shut down shut down shut down force quit force quit force quit force quit SHUT DOWN DAMMIT!

Finally got the current versions of the really large files I’ve been working on saved to DropBox, shot off the correspondence to the Chinois, and managed to close all the open programs, shut down the computer, and set it on the cool floor tiles.

It seems to be OK for the nonce. But obviously, another expensive catastrophe is brewing there.

So I don’t know whether it’s the prospect of thousands of bucks going out the door for things that I do NOT want to spend money on, or whether it’s the endless confinement in the house through this hot, penurious summer, or whether it’s the fact that the art thing turned out to be kind of a bust because in my age I seem to have lost what little talent I had (at one time I actually could draw pretty well…but no more!), or whether maybe the melatonin stuff is doing something to me but damn it! I am so depressed. Sometimes I just don’t even see the point of hanging around. If it weren’t that I can’t imagine what to do with the dogs, I would be out the Cosmic door by now.

Guess I could just take them down to my son’s house and leave them there while he’s at work. Doesn’t seem like a very polite way to say good-bye, though.

Last night I cut the 5 mg melatonin tablet in two and swallowed the smallest part. It did seem to keep me asleep until almost 5 a.m. — close to seven hours. And I do feel less crazed than I did yesterday morning. But still: not very happy. I suspect the drug is affecting the mood.

There may be worse things than four-hour nights.

Image:
Acagastya. CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38313449