This: I was just outside with Mike, trying to see if we could put the cover back on the deck furniture. Our elaborate piling, draping, and tying had lasted pretty well for a couple months, but a windstorm last week exposed everything. We found the blown-off cover still iced fast to the deck, so on the way back into the house, Mike said, “Did you cut the tops off this hydrangea?” (Darn, he caught me.) Of course, the work of a deer. I’m bummed because we planted a couple oakleaf hydrangeas a couple years ago with the hopes of them growing tall and beautiful and overflowing with blossoms, like the ones in our friends’ garden that we so admire. Last year I think we got one blossom; looks like this year will be the same. Stupid deer — go eat the junky neighbor’s stuff, would ya?
That: We stopped at McD’s yesterday morning to use our 2-for-1 breakfast sandwich coupon. I got my coffee and was waiting for the young girl (teens-20, maybe a college student) to move away from the cream & sugar spot on the counter so I could move in. I watched in disbelief and fascination as she proceeded to load her coffee (a medium, at most) with no less than 10 (TEN) sugar packets and 4 (FOUR) creamers. My eyes got wider and wider as she methodically ripped and dumped packet after packet and the pile on the little corner of counter got bigger and bigger. She must be playing a joke on someone, I thought. “Here, so-and-so, I got you some coffee….ha ha.” But no, she was just calmly ripping and dumping, as if she’d done this many times. I nudged Mike, to make sure he was observing this, too. After a while, she finally stopped, put the lid on her coffee, and left the restaurant. I tried to imagine what it would be like to drink such a concoction. Hot sugar water with a little coffee extract in it? I imagined her day…hamster on a wheel, talking a mile a minute like one of the Chipettes. The image stayed with me a long time…clearly my mind doesn’t have enough important stuff to think about.
The other thing: Why is it that Mike and I feel guilty for spending a weekend at leisure? We both work hard all week, and when the weekend comes, we feel we should be doing more, and more, and more. Especially with house projects (the endless sunroom and now, our basement stairs and lower “landing,” for lack of a better term). Yesterday was a lazy, mostly unproductive Saturday, and now, today, we’re lounging with our laptops, coffee, and day-old donuts, listening to the Roots and Rhythm Mix on YEP, and dreading the thoughts of getting up and doing something. What’s the adage…we’ll rest when we’re dead? Sometimes it feels like that, and I know I work way less and lead a way less busy life than most other people I know.
But, I better go and figure out how to spend the day productively…taxes to do, bills to pay, wood to sand, and far too many things to clean, straighten, organize, empty, throw away, or otherwise attend to. You know: this, that, and the other thing. Always another other thing.
That destructive siren, sloth, is ever to be avoided.
~ Horace
Writing by Ear 