Recap

So, the weekend.

It was busy, but fairly uneventful. I got the oil changed Saturday morning, then ran around and did some errands, including a brief trip to the yarn store to buy a project bag. While I was there, I noticed that Cello's mom's store was across the street. I never really knew where it was, and had never been there, so after the yarn store, I went over and introduced myself to her--I talk to her on the phone all the time, but we'd never met. So that was nice.

Then I did the regular bank, post office, library, grocery store Saturday thing, Bob cooked a steak outside for himself for dinner and I had a baked potato, and then I took a nap, woke up, and went back to bed at around 2:00 or something.

We're getting our house painted this week; not my choice really, although Bob says we need it. I defer to him on those kinds of things. Since we live in a fourplex, all four of us have to agree on things, or, I guess, a majority have to agree. So on Sunday I and the three other women who live there met in my front yard and decided on paint colors. Four women trying to agree on the color to paint a house. Yikes.

It wasn't too bad. I, of course, was the one willing to compromise the most. The one who was the pushiest surprised me--I didn't expect that. She at first wanted all of us to antique our front doors. I told her I wasn't antiquing my door, but she could do whatever she wanted with hers. We kept going back and forth on colors, mostly neutrals, thank goodness, and finally decided on a fairly innocuous sage green, with a darker greenish-gray trim, and almost-black doors and shutters.

The black doors were what the pushy one was insisting on, and then she said we would all need to buy black porch light fixtures . . . Again, I said she could do whatever she wanted, but I wasn't spending any more money. (Later, Bob said he might look at light fixtures, and that's fine, I don't mind, but man. If you have those kinds of strong opinions, buy a detached house!

If I had been choosing colors on my own, I would either have stuck with the current colors (the house is kind of a khaki, with cream trim and dark green doors and shutters) or go with something just slightly darker, but with lighter trim. I don't like the look of a light colored house with dark trim, but I was told that it's the newer look to go that way, so I shut up and said I could live with it.

After our little paint meeting, I went out back and used the leaf blower for awhile, which I find to be really hard work. Just because it's heavy, I guess, and the bag of leaves is heavy. Then Bob came home and raked leaves for awhile, and I went upstairs and got deathly ill.

I don't have any idea what it was--I hadn't eaten anything that I could point to. I had eaten some Hollandaise sauce that had been in the refrigerator for awhile, maybe that was it. And probably a combination of that and stress. Whatever it was, I felt like I was going to die, and I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and my face was as white as paper. I've always read that phrase in books and never really experienced it, but I now have a reference point.

I laid down and dozed for a little while, and felt better when I woke up. I went downstairs and found that Bob had raked the rest of the yard and had filled about a half dozen trash bags. So now we can start working on reseeding the lawn. It would be nice to have grass again . . .

I didn't feel much like cooking dinner or doing anything major, so we called and ordered pizza for dinner, and that turned out to be a fiasco. About the time it should have been arriving, I got a phone call, and it was the pizza delivery person--a girl, someone new. She said she couldn't find the house, and told me where she was--several miles away. I told her what the main intersection she should be looking for was, and I figured that would be the end of it, that she would say, "Oh, right!" and hang up, but no, I was apparently expected to talk her in.

So I stayed on the phone with her as she read off the streets that she was passing, and told her where to turn. She was completely clueless, and kept asking me what landmarks to look for. I hadn't exactly been prepared for that, and when I couldn't immediately come up with a landmark for some particular intersection a few miles away, I got an exasperated sigh.

Eventually she reached the main intersection, and I told her to turn right; we then had a brief argument about that, because she thought she should turn left. I thought for a moment that maybe I was wrong, so I told her to turn south, and she acted like I was confusing her on purpose . . . Then she said, "Oh, yeah, you're right." Fine.

So I'm waiting, and waiting, and I finally go out on the front porch, still holding the damn phone. I told her the house was about halfway down the block, on the right-hand side, and she asked me what kind of car was in front of it. I stepped out, and Bob's van was farther down the street, so I said, oh, there's a brown van in the driveway next door, and she said, "Huh. Looks maroon to me." At that point, I'm about ready to tell her to throw away the damn pizza and forget it, then I see her go by. I say, "Are you in a silver car? You just drove by," and she says yeah, and hangs up.

I think, finally this ordeal is over, but no. She never shows up. I wait, and wait, and finally call up to Bob, "Well, I guess I'm going to have to go out in the street and look for her," and then she comes walking across the lawn, saying, "Oh, sorry, I went next door." Um, did it ever occur to you to look at the house numbers? Or even the person standing in the lighted door giving you block by block directions?

I gave her a tip against my better judgement, but I'm sure it wasn't enough, by her standards. She sounded pretty annoyed that she had to deliver it to me anyway. You just sort of expect those people to know where they're going, right? Do you suppose pizza delivery people are in such short supply that it doesn't matter whether they can find their way around the city or not? And the pizza was cold, of course.

This week itself has been pretty uneventful, except for the fact that Dinah ran outside when I went to get the paper this morning, for the first time. "Well, heck. Pyewacket gets outside all the time, maybe I should try it." She raced out and got about halfway down the sidewalk before hesitating, and I snuck up on her and scooped her up. Her little heart was racing. I think it's Spring fever, they've both been acting crazy the past few days.

And then I almost got killed coming to work this morning.

The exit off the highway is a bad one. The exit ramp is also an entrance ramp, so I'm trying to get off at the same time as (potentially) other cars trying to get on. I started to get off, looked up over my shoulder at the entrance ramp, there was no one there, so I pulled off, and then from out of nowhere, a police car comes hurtling right at me at about 80 miles an hour, no lights, no siren. He hit the siren when he saw me, I guess, but there wasn't anywhere for me to go, and thought maybe he was after me--maybe I didn't signal right or something.

I pulled over as far to the left on the ramp as I could, and he fishtailed around me and pulled onto the highway. I sat there and shook for a few minutes. Man, what a start to a day.

Like everyone else who writes a somewhat daily journal or weblog or something similar, I'm struggling with what to write. I don't want to write about the war, but it seems frivolous to write about anything else, almost. And I dramatically say that I almost got killed this morning, and that's what it felt like, but no one was actually trying to kill me.

I guess I just feel like I need to acknowledge it, to bear witness, but for my own emotional peace of mind, I need to separate myself from it as much as possible. Bob's watching it a lot on television, and when I got to work Monday morning, Dave came in and said, "Did you watch the war this weekend?" I think there's something wrong about the media coverage, but I haven't thought about it enough to analyze it. It's a war. It's not entertainment, and I don't want to see footage of captured prisoners, or bombs going off, or buildings burning. But I feel guilty for that, too. The bearing witness thing. I'm safe, the least I can do is acknowledge that I know it's going on, and be aware of it, and be compassionate.

I am aware of it. It makes me terribly sad. I try to be as apolitical as I can be, but sometimes it's hard.