Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Monday Morning Chat

Tuesday is my Monday morning, the first day of my work week on the Memory Loss floor, and I'm relieved that I woke up this morning feeling peppy, having been pretty wrung out by Saturday afternoon.

Just a bit of chat, here, before work...

I'm sitting drinking coffee in my living room watching the sky change color--the time change this past weekend means it's still glowing over the tops of the buildings that form my visible horizon.
Through the doorway, I can see a big blue lump under a comforter: Marz, sound asleep, with DVD boxes of Starsky and Hutch on the floor nearby.

In front of me is a wide pot of "watch-them-grow" bulbs that I splurged on for my birthday, and the little daffodils are blooming, surrounded by the greens of hyacinth and tulip and some little purple flower, yet to bloom.

These plants grow so fast, they could be frightening. Funny we don't have more horror stories about plants. Day of the Triffids and the Little Shop of Horrors are all I can think of.

Today will be an easy day at work (fingers crossed)--- a field trip on the little bus will take up most of our time. We're going to Half-Price Books, because the Activities Dept. got a gift-certificate for Christmas. I think we'll buy DVDs. It'll be interesting to see what people might select. 

Personally I'm more excited to go next month to an exhibit of Minnesota artist George Morrison. I want us to try assembling a wood collage like his.

This is one he made with drift wood. >

It's a short work day today. This afternoon, my sister is coming over, bringing presents from the trip to Venice she and my father just returned from. They always go somewhere abroad for my birthday.
OK, not "for" my birthday, it just so happens it's during my birthday that they're in Paris, or Palermo, or, this year, Venice.

Do I sound bitter?
I'm mostly not (anymore). I do wish I had a close, loving parent alive, and I don't. We kids got divvied up: I was my mother's, my sister was my father's. 


As my father ages though (he and Leonard Nimoy were born the same year, 1931), I'm more and more grateful that he and my sister are so close and can watch out for each other. My father is quite well, but I notice some slippage. He got a little lost last time he was in town and came to pick me up at night.

______________[pause]

So... I've been thinking about a Social Media Policy for the Thrift Store that Julia and I are composing. I spent yesterday afternoon at the store, sorting craft donations--going through bags and bags of UFOs (UnFinished Objects)---mostly half-done needlework items.
I straightened them out and put them all in a box, 50 cents each.
It'll be interesting to track what sells and what languishes.

My favorite thing was making a display of wooden spools of thread. The spools are expensive: 50 cents each, because they don't make wood spools anymore---they're all plastic.

I gathered all the many scattered spools in the craft-donations bin into a pretty tin box with a hinged lid. On the inside of the open lid I pasted a quote from Pippi Longstocking, about how lucky she felt to find an empty spool––
“Such a sweet, sweet little spool to blow bubbles with or to hang around your neck on a string,” she says happily––
and how she was going to go home and make a necklace out of it "right this minute".

Will the spools sell better with a literary reference?
I don't care, I just love setting little scenes like that. Being a volunteer means you don't have to justify your use of time in dollars.


I bought a spool myself---a wee little one stamped "silk buttonhole twist"--in honor of the Tailor of Gloucester, though it's just brown, not cherry-coloured twist.


OK, and now, I'm going to bike to work. 
It's warm! Weirdly so: 37ºF right now, due to reach 62 today. Remember on my birthday five days ago, it was –6.
We always have weird weather here on the plains, but I swear it's gotten weirder in recent years.

Anyway, off I go into the wonderful warm---and it's sunny too!

Nice chatting with you, as it were:
I hope you all have a lovely day.

4 comments:

The Crow said...

Thanks for sharing your morning cuppa, Fresca! I love reading how other people see the world around them.

Hope your day goes beautifully, with lots of joyful, interesting events to savor, then tell the rest of us about. Like crows do at the end of the day when they come together with their roost before going home for the night. They share their stories, their adventures. Treetop meetings are their form of blogging - noisy, chaotic to human ears, but so satisfying for the crows.

(Loved your description of Marz!)

Fresca said...

Thanks, Crow--I always like it when people chat about their lives too.
I was probably partly influenced by you writing about birdsong in spring---though yours was more poetic.

Michael Leddy said...

I liked reading about your morning, Fresca. We human beings are interesting company!

I’m still weirded out by the time change (I did a double take this morning when I saw that it was already 10:00), so the title and first sentence of your post had me buggin’ before I realized what was going on.

Fresca said...

MICHAEL: I'm glad you enjoyed reading it--I enjoyed writing it!