Monday, December 15, 2008

Blah

The temperature is headed to the balmy 60s today, and already it feels like a spring morning outside. But the skies are a bleak gray, and rain is supposed to start again, and stay with us the entire week, again. I have an outdoor job to do and I want to get it out of the way before the rain starts. I'm helping Steve get a head start on painting the front porch by scraping off all the old paint that's starting to peel. He won't actually be getting to the porch for a couple of months (it has to be warm enough for the paint to dry), but at least this initial grunt work will be done.

I actually started the scraping job yesterday. Not a minute into it, a tiny chip of paint blew into my left eye. We had no Visine in the house and I suffered with the irritation until late last night, when I remembered we had some Simply Saline nasal spray in the medicine cabinet. It worked! (Why didn't I go out and just buy some Visine? Oh, you and your questions!)

So, between the continued minor irritation in my eye, the tooth thing that has not really gone away but is not acute, and a cold that I just can't shake, with its coughing and stuffiness, I feel these days like a collection of parts that are only somewhat inter-operative. Add the constantly gloomy skies and you get blah. A new refrigerator is due for delivery today, so that'll be fun to set up and admire. How grateful we can be for life's tiny diversions!

I'll now shuffle off to the day's adventures. At least my music is bright.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ralph, you planning anything for the big day in January? I read where some locals are renting out their homes for $1000 a night. You should do that and spend the Inauguration in Delaware.

Ralph said...

That sounds fun, Z&M, but the 20th is just another workday for Steve, whose office isn't downtown. Plus, since the trailer isn't insulated, we can't stay there in the winter.

We have friends coming up here from NC to use our place as a base. They're working with their Congressman's office to get tickets for the Capitol grounds. I sent them a story from today's WaPo that makes it look like the tickets will be the least of their worries. The way the city is talking it sounds like the entire region is going to be brought to a crawl, if not a complete standstill, with overloaded subway cars, closed bridges into town and streets closed in town. They're even recommending to people who are planning to take the subway in from the Arlington Cemetery stop to just walk across the Memorial Bridge instead. I think I'll be watching the historic occasion from my 42-inch TV's catbird seat and wish our friends Chuck and Sandy happy hunting.

Kat said...

Ralph,
If I didn't know you'd written this, I'd have thought it was my life. Just don't trip!

Cold is coming.

I'll also be watching in the warmth of my home, maybe a mimosa or two to add to the celebration.

Ralph said...

I can't figure out which little pain in the ass would make me feel better if it went away, Kat. I the evenings, like now, the cold comes back and I'm stuffy again.

One of the refrigerator delivery guys was a Ghanaian, from "between Tamale and Bolga." He asked me if he culd use the microwave to heat up his lunch, and I saw a big ball of silly putty that could only have been fufu, so I asked him if he was Ghanaian. I knew he was northern because of the two scars on each side of his nose. He thought it was so funny that I found him out that fast!