Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Today's stops and starts.....

I was all set to get started early this morning because I wanted to fit a lot of stuff into the day: seed that back garden and continue cleaning up the pollen that is still falling on everything inside. Plus, I had the regular daily errands to run....since it takes me about two hours to do a post, including choosing music, my first activity was to come up here and start to work. About a half-hour into it, about 7:30 this morning, the computer went dead, and all of Comcast stayed that way until now, 4 PM. No phone, no TV, and no computer. Turns out a cable was cut "accidentally" somewhere and most of south Arlington was put out of commission, including federal government offices in the Crystal City section of the county. How dependent we are on these light-transmitting fibers! All I wanted to do was put up a post on my blog. But somewhere, some real business was disrupted..... so, some accident.

So I ran my outdoor errands early, then came home to do the seeding. That involved plenty of preparation: I picked all the weeds that had germinated in the dirt back there, then raked up the sticks, birdseed husks, and other detritus that had collected, then took another rake and roughed up the surface to welcome the grass seed in its nooks and crannies. That took an hour. I measured grass seed into our little Scotts seed spreader and..........IT DIDN'T WORK!! Thing was stuck in the locked position and no amount of prying, banging or cursing on my part did any good. It was totally useless. There was nothing for it but to put on clean clothes and take myself to the Home Depot to buy a new one. That mission accomplished, the seeding job was finally done, having taken about an hour more than it needed to.

Then it was lunch time, and after that, I didn't feel like doing anything else. I read the paper, picking up the phone periodically to check for a dial tone and see if we were connected in any way. Finally we were, and after rebooting the modem, here I am.

If John Lennon was right that life what happens when you're making other plans, then I guess I lived quite a life today. Somehow I'm left thinking that just today, others' lives may have been more interesting, but still, it was life, and that's better than the alternative.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting day. At least you're not out there choking from all the smoke like we are down here in sunny Florida. I just watched on our local TV station that the FBI is investigating the fires that destroyed 162 homes. They found some heading into foreclosure and ummmm well, they think the owners might have, oh well, you know the rest, guilty until proven innocent or however the saying goes.

Ralph said...

Z&M: Oh, wow! I'll be listening for more details on that. Funny--the fires down there aren't making the news here at all....