December 29, 2008

• I’m Barely Awake

  I’m not sorry I stayed up late, but I AM having a hard time moving around quickly this morning!

  I got hooked watching “House” on TV last night.  Literally, last *night* because it was 10pm when I had to watch the next one and then the next one and then the next one.  Add up those hours and you have 1am as a finish time!  Then the dishwasher needed to be started, the dog let out and in, my hair taken down, the computer turned off, the house alarm set . . . . I slept well.  I didn’t wake up until 8am-ish – the bare minimum of sleep required by my body!

  Why hooked?  I’ve only seen the end of one episode where House is in a bus wreck and a girl is seriously injured.  The girl turns out to be a doctor friend’s (of Dr. House) girlfriend.  The End!  That’s all I’ve ever seen.  Last night they played the shows in reverse order.  Why?  I have NO idea! 

  FIRST SHOW:  You saw the doctor friend packing up and getting ready to quit the hospital and move away, and House keeps telling him that just because his girlfriend died, he should take a vacation – but, NOT quit his job.

  NEXT SHOW:  You see that the girl is on life support and how they try to save her, but she DOES die.
  
  NEXT SHOW:  You see the bus accident and what led up to it (I had only seen the last 10 minutes in the past and didn’t know WHY they were on a bus together), so I sat through that.  Okay, that’s how she was injured and I saw WHY they couldn’t save her.  Just watching this one show (the only one I had seen) made me think she had died.  You can imagine why the episode that shows the doctor quitting and getting ready to move away peaked my curiosity (I didn’t realize they were dating) and why the next show that showed them trying to save her made it necessary for me to re-watch the first show that started the whole chain reaction.

  Well, maybe that sounds dumb to you and you “can’t see why I watched TV that late” but, I did.  I was hooked. 

  The fact I used to work in hospitals (emergency rooms, to be exact) is the reason I find this show, with its strange maladies and plagues, so interesting.  For the longest time, I had wanted to be a doctor!

  I felt it was safe to go to sleep after that last show!  If there was more to the story, I didn’t want to know! LOL!

  CHANGE OF SUBJECT:

  I showed Jesse the patio the other day with the rain on it and big cracks in the one section of cement slab.  I told him I didn’t remember cracks being on the patio in this past summer. 

  
  He couldn’t remember if the cracks had been there or not.  He tended to think it had always been that way.  I felt sure I would have remembered seeing cracks as big as these.  Chunks of pebble size cement are coming out of the cracks in different places.

  So, I dug through my blog archives and found this picture from October.
  
  Same piece of slab, no cracks.  Uh, oh!

  Further more, we noticed (last week) a crack in the ceiling in the bay window dining room.  That’s the part of the house that connects to this piece of cement slab patio.  Horror of horrors!  I do hope the back of the house isn’t falling into our back yard!  I don’t think insurance covers foundation problems, unless the leaking roof, for the past few years (after we asked them to replace our roof the first time), leaked water down the walls and into the ground under the patio?????  Maybe if that’s the cause and they denied us a new roof 2-3 years ago, we could place a claim.  Scary thought! 

  Speaking of cracks.  Do you see the small hairline crack on the inside of this coffee mug?  I’ve had this for almost 20 years and just love the cup.  It’s from a friend who moved to Texas and sent it to me. 

  A field of Texas Blue Bonnets.
  

  As of Saturday night, this is all I have left of that cup – a picture.

  Chirper Elzabad, who, for a night, was called, “Chirper Just Plain Bad”, knocked it off of the counter onto the tile kitchen floor.  The cup shattered and flew everywhere.  That was the night Jesse had taken the girls to his mother’s house.  I had planned to eat a simple hotdog, take a shower, and then R-E-A-D – something I’m determined to do more of in the new year.

  My hotdog was heating when there was a horrible crash of glass.  Chirper flew off of the counter top and ran.  I felt sick when I saw the source of the noise.  This cup was not only eye appealing to me, but represented a long friendship with the giver of the cup.

  I turned off the heat under the hotdog, began to pick up the pieces and saw the small shards EVERYWHERE in the dining room rug and the tile & throw rug immediately under the sink (from where the cup had fallen).  Chirper came back and I shooed him away until I raised my voice at him in anger.  I got a broom, but quickly realized I would need to vacuum.  Fortunately, my Kirby vacuum has a hard floor setting and that’s what I used in the kitchen on the tile after the broom swept pieces from under the cupboards.  Then, I saw it had gone into the laundry room and Sampson’s little hallway.  Pieces of itsy bitsy ceramic were EVERYWHERE.  The mug’s handle was under the lip of the refrigerator!  I shook the area rugs onto the tile and then vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed some more.  I figured I might as well sweep the room that has the kitchen table, while I was at it.

  Finally, I set the vacuum back to its carpet setting and vacuumed the dining room carpet slowly, to be sure to suck up every bit of ceramic.  You could hear the little pieces clicking in the vacuum as they were removed from the carpet pile.  That’s when I saw something in the formal *living room* and tried to vacuum it up.  (I wasn’t wearing my glasses)  I finally bent over to pick up the stubborn white piece of *something* and it was another piece of my mug!!!!

  Chirper knew he was in big trouble and made himself scarce.  I finally (after an hour of cleaning) began to heat the hotdog again, ate it with 4 dozen cookies.  Maybe not THAT much, but the binge DID include a lot of fudge!!!  I didn’t see Chirper until Sunday morning.  He didn’t even sleep with me that night!  I slept in late and when I woke up, I went to the den.  Bless his heart, he gingerly approached me and I patted my lap to invite him up.  He purred like crazy and tried to get me to kiss him by nose-butting my chin.  He looked so repentant!!!!

  I thought a lot about forgiveness.  I thought about how children break things and how angry that makes us.  I thought about children’s little hearts and spirits and broken coffee mugs.  Children made by God and coffee mugs NOT made by God.  How we treat our possessions (sometimes) better than our children’s hearts!  Yes, a heart can mend (unlike my coffee mug) but does it fully mend, or does it mend with scars????

  Looking at my repentant cat made realize how our children are just as repentant but don’t always know how to approach us with their little, “I’m sorrys.” 

  From TV, to cracked cement, to cracked cup, to children’s hearts . . . where have I gone????  I’m thinking I may need to look at my children’s hearts more next year while I’m trying to work in more time to read books . . .   What’s the most important thing in the long run?  Not my cups, nor my books.

  Today’s To Do List:
  *  Jesse’s laundry  (already started)
  *  Create dinner (need to go the freezer first)
  *  Pay property taxes (oh joy!)
  *  Pick up “stuff” here and there around the house

  Looks like a warm day (today and tomorrow over 60°) and the girls want to ride their bikes, which requires me sitting out front monitoring the streets while they ride.  Maybe I can sit in the driveway with a book????

  Be blessed  ~

  • 11:30 am
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