Life has been gliding smoothly along without too much of interest happening these days, mostly just the warm but mild pleasures and subtle pains of day to day existence at home in Seattle with dogs and Ian. One thing that is interesting: as I've been budgeting (for real! I'm still keeping up with it! After a month!) instead of refilling my home with sweaters, I've actually found that my home FEELS FULL AGAIN, and I'm thinking about clearing out the next layer! You might think that I should hold off on jettisoning sweaters until a different season—it IS spring in the Northern Hemisphere, after all, and so maybe I'm listening too closely to immediate sensation (who needs sweaters in Spring?)—but let me and my immediate sensation tell you this: here in the Northwest, any season is sweater season, and therefore any season is appropriate for clearing them out. I've been thinking about all my piles of clothes and shoes—not only the sweaters—and what I truly use and what I don't, and how to get rid of the surplus. Garage Sale? Consignment? Simple donation? Hand-me-down to friends and relatives? It's all very exciting, all over again, this clearing out process.
As far as singing out my soul, that's coming along at a snail's pace. A s l o w snail. You see, I have taken the idea somewhat literally, and am trying to write a song, one that I've been chewing the cud on for several years now (I'll be sure to be done with the cud before I begin to sing). I thought I had made a breakthrough with the chorus yesterday morning, but then I realized as I was driving to an appointment later in the day that I had, in fact, practically plagiarized another song. Imitation being the purest compliment notwithstanding, in songwriting, it is illegal. Anyway, I took a different tack yesterday evening, and while the whole thing sounds like a honky mess at the moment, I might be on to something. Don't look for me on YouTube any time soon.
Speaking of different tacks and other things watery, we tried this morning to have our boat de-winterized so that, if the rain ever does stop for longer than 23 minutes, we can enjoy a spin around the lake. Maybe it's just our luck with Seattle Boat Company (our marina operators and a little bit my nemeses), but when the team from (their rival) Lake Union Sea Ray arrived to have our boat taken out of dry stack and dropped in the water so they could work, our boat was unavailable, and would be for at least a week. Um, hello? How about an email or phone call letting us know that this might be happening? Or even, how about a response to the text I sent you late last night alerting you to the need to get the boat down? You could've contacted me this morning and saved a lot of time and hassle—mine, yours, and the poor technician simply out trying to do his job. It turns out (after calling three levels of marina operators, ending up with the highest, who knows my name from previous issues with them) that the owner of the property (Seattle Boat is only leasing for their dry-stack marina) had chosen this week to fill in potholes without informing even the marina operators. Of course there was a huge hole right behind our boat, rendering it impossible for the giant Marina Bull forklift to reach little blue-striped Dogfish. It's okay, though—Seattle Boat has a huge metal sheet that they will put over the hole tomorrow morning—since I went through the trouble to ask for a month's moorage refunded—and get our boat down and over to Sea Ray, free of cost. I grudgingly say fair enough; I'm not missing out on anything. Today does not seem to be a day with longer-than-23-minute dry spells.
I climbed again today at Stone Gardens, between talking to levels of Seattle Boat marina management, and again my fingers are clumsy and swollen and rock-burned and my arm muscles look BAD ASS (I just checked them out). Here's a situation to muse over: one of the things that I have a hard time gauging, understanding, and preparing for, in my life as it is right now, is when I am going to need food, what kind, and how much. My long habit has been to have a 16 oz latte in the morning (split quad), which I savor as I laugh over the comics, puzzle over the Sudoku or the crossword, read my morning email, and now sum up my daily budget. After I've been up for an hour or so, I eat whatever is on offer in our house—toast with peanut butter and banana, rice pudding I made the night before (with ¼ the sugar but twice the large, juicy raisins), granola, protein smoothie. I then take a bunch of pills and go on about my day, usually at home until after noon, as the body often reacts—to pills, coffee, food, comics, who knows what all—unpleasantly, to varying degrees, before noon. Anyway, this morning was a coffee and rice pudding morning, and it was a late-ish morning, and so I wasn't hungry for lunch before I met my friend at the gym at one(ten). We climbed until about 2:30 and then I took the dogs out for a walk at the nearby botanic garden.
Dogs and I were barely inside the garden gates when I realized that I was almost dizzy with hunger. Ian seems to stay in the hangry (a word we learned from our dear friends in Texas) stage indefinitely once he reaches it—tetchier and tetchier, and more and more sure the world is out to get him; Hoover is hangry unless he is eating. Today I, however, passed completely through hanger without even noticing, straight into Imminent Full System Shut Down. My stomach groaned and burbled and began eating up my body, starting with my brain, which made the world look dark and disorderly (and made me forget I was wearing my sunnies in the woods). I lurched around the park, desperately urging the dogs to poop so that I could get back to the car and bolt down some Brazil nuts (the snack that lives in the car) and an apple (the snack that I'd brought). All I could think about were those nuts and that apple. Perhaps coffee and rice pudding aren't enough fuel if you're going to be lifting 160 pounds up and down precipices for over an hour.
As you can tell, I made it back to the car, though, and the dogs didn't poop—bonus walk! I survived on my snacks until I arrived back at home and then enjoyed a leftover bowl of the halibut green curry we had for dinner last night. Ian's home early to distract hangry dogs—Hoover began hooting at me at 4pm on the dot—two hours early—and Spackle at 5pm on the dot—and all in all, it's been another fine day in Seattle.
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