Reimagined Saturday

Ongoing tech challenges notwithstanding, I woke up refreshed this morning. I work this Saturday and it looks like a nice one (and no Asst Man). After weeks with no rain at all, we’ve had rain for days —and nights, including last’s —and it looks spring green out there. Plus fallen autumn leaves. 

Last night Big Boss was to give a talk to the Society that runs the thrift stores and parish charitable group, and he’d asked me the day before if I could lend him a bear I’ve repaired—he wanted to use it to illustrate how broken things (including our broken selves) can be restored.

I dropped off a bear AND a doll for him yesterday —the girlette Puck who’s gotten a bionic leg —purple and multi-jointed (from a broken action figure), and Pyx the Unknown Bear, who’d been donated with his button eyes safety-pinned to his ear for reattachment. I’d also mended a tear in his white fur with a flowered patch. 

 

I wrote a note saying “re-imagined” might be another way of thinking about what happens rather than “repaired”

or “restored”—we are not returned to the way we were but become something different. Sometimes strengthened, sometimes fragile at the broken places.

It’s all alchemy.

Yesterday’s food shelf haul had changed to autumn colors too—nothing green… And nothing very great for making work lunches except the butternut squash—I’ll make soup. 

Would my coworkers eat quiche?

Thousands of strawberries though—you could take two flats if you wanted—each flat holding maybe 20 cartons of berries. I couldn’t carry them, or I’d have taken them for work.

Butter was in abundance too:

“Take a whole box, or two!”—each box holding 10 lbs. I rarely cook with butter but took two pounds. Got home and one stick had black spots on it-/put them all in the compost. And the same with the Indian naan bread—every piece was fuzz moldy. 

Ah, the ongoing adventures in the humiliations of poverty. Now I understand why Mr Furniture won’t eat my lunches—I’d told everyone where the food is from—and he calls it prison food. He’s right—this food isn’t good stuff from generous people, it’s food fit for pig troughs from grocery chains happy to offload what they can’t sell. It’s cheaper for them if a charity hauls it away than if they have to pay garbage service. I expect they get tax credit too. 

…Once again, I knew this but I didn’t have the personal experience of being on the receiving end.

The food-shelf workers where I go are as respectful as can be—I love ❤️ them!—and I know they work to cull the donations of actual garbage, the same as I do at work, but the food is ALL on the edge of sell-by dates, and while that doesn’t matter for canned goods, it does for everything else. You have to cook or freeze everything immediately, and who has that sort of storage room?

So, yeah—grocery shopping it is not.

Once again, a wealthy volunteer has given me a gift card to Aldi to buy lunch-makings—that’s better—I can plan a meal.

Yay!