Re: the font of my blog looking weird, if it does, for some posts. I lately went mano a mano with Blogger and I don’t have to tell you who won. Adding injury to insult, the struggles generated so many HTML errors that my blog got flagged as a “spam blog,” whatever that is.
The day before Memorial Day, I went without Tom (he had left for a five-week bicycle tour of the South of France) to Sacramento for a birthday party for Eva and Sarah, which was well populated and very nice. A long table full of mouthwatering edibles was set up in the backyard and we ate outside as the sun set.
On the train trip there, I was joined by three tiny girls, ages four, five and six, who sat facing me, and their grandmother, who sat next to me.
The parents of the girls were both deaf and were seated across the aisle. All three children had long hair in braids: one with blue eyes and blond hair, one with dark eyes and dark hair, and one with reddish-brown hair and a ruddy complexion. They were adorable.
After we’d all been talking for some time, the most talkative one—the middle one—announced, “We’re chit-chatting.” The youngest one confided that she was “in pre-school, but I’m on vacation right now.”
After I returned from my retreat in mid-May, I took a couple of additional vacation days, so I was off work clear through Memorial Day. I really enjoyed having several relaxed days to myself at home, and it was also good because it’s not unheard of for there to be some type of conflict right after a retreat. In fact, near the end of this one, during a question and answer period, another retreatant said she ALWAYS gets in a fight with someone right after she gets back from a retreat.
I suppose that’s because one is ultra-sensitive for a while? Or maybe one just gets used to the silence and to being around people who are on their absolute best behavior?
Sure enough, when I returned to work on Tuesday, I found myself feeling extremely annoyed with the slurping co-worker and said something critical to him, which I’d avoided doing for months and for which I had to apologize later. (Hence the need for a class on integrating meditation with life.)
The following Sunday, I got a call from Nancy, whose partner Terry was traveling with Tom in France, saying that Tom had not been seen by his two companions for five hours. In the end, he was missing for more than 48 hours, and there was much concerned consultation on the phone between various parties, and plenty of speculation: why didn’t he call? Was he lost? Was his bike broken? Was he, heaven forbid, lying in a ditch somewhere?
When night fell the first night, it was gloomy to think of poor Tom goodness knows where, all by himself, unable to speak a word of French and without a cell phone. The second night was more so. But on the third day—by which time Ann had called the State Department for help finding Tom, and Terry had contacted the local police in France—Tom rolled up and cheerfully announced he’d taken a wrong turn a couple of days back. Ann said that was good; she would now tell the State Department he was found. She said he replied, “Mom!!!”
Various theories had been proposed and developed during the fifty or so hours: He was lost, he had suffered mechanical difficulties, he was having trouble making an international phone call, he had met two comely young French ladies and decided to stay with them permanently, he had deliberately dropped out of society. It turned out that almost all were partly true (he had not deliberately dropped out of society, and it was actually two English paramedics).
Apparently only one person in Tom’s group of three had a cell phone—which Tom didn’t have the number for—and they had not made a plan for what to do in case they got separated, though, as Nancy said, it happens at least once on every such trip. It was a big relief when Tom was back in hand, and good to know he had been perfectly unconcerned himself.
I’ve been working on replacing more incandescent bulbs with CFLs, though I still think the latter die too soon, and I’m still worried about mercury in the water. At the moment, I have two “daylight” CFLs in the bathroom, and it’s so blindingly white that when I step out of the bathroom, the rest of my apartment looks like it’s drenched in melted butter. In fact, when I just look out of the bathroom window, the dull yellow wall of my own building and the off-white paint on the next building appear as luscious shades of gold and pearl.
Every other CFL I’m using is “soft white,” which is nice and yellow, plus I still have some fixtures where CFLs won’t fit. Cole Hardware on Fourth St. is ordering me smaller 23W CFLs that might do the trick.
No comments:
Post a Comment