Monday morning random

I'm in a vaguely annoyed mood today.

Two reasons: 1. Saturday, when I made my weekly obligatory trip to Mart of Wal (disclaimer: there are a few items I regularly use that the Green Spray doesn't carry (they're small, they can't have everything). Otherwise, I wouldn't shop at Wal-mart because some of the other shopper's behavior gets under my skin (which is why I go at 7 am on Saturdays) and they also have the annoying policy of shifting stuff around regularly and dropping brands or items). I like to keep "good" chocolate - think Lindor or Ghirardelli - on hand.

I like a little square of chocolate now and then, and even though the YOU SHOULD NEVER EAT SUGAR EVER news stories are probably coming in a few hours (60 Minutes apparently had a feature on it last night), I like my chocolate. (And it's supposedly good for you).

 Wal-mart USED to carry quite a nice little selection of this. I guess I was one of the few that bought any, because they took away most of that section and replaced it with more bagged candy like those little Snickers bars and stuff. And don't get me wrong, I like Snickers, it's just when you're told you only get "150 'discretionary' calories" or somesuch a day, you want to spend them on the best thing. And now they don't carry the Lindt sea salt bars, which was one of my favorites. So: no more easily-obtained fancy chocolate for me, I guess. (I'd order it from Amazon, but we're already hitting temperatures in the 90s...so I don't want to come home to a puddle of chocolate seeping from a UPS box).

I guess I'll have to stock up on my rare trips to the Target in Sherman. This makes me twitch though because it brings out all of my selfconsciousness about "Fat girl buying five candy bars at a time" even though I know those five candy bars might be for the next six weeks.

Also, the local Mart of Wal is apparently no longer carrying the "artisinal" breads, which were actually tolerable to me for the weeks I couldn't make time to bake bread. Well, damn. I'm really disappointed. (And of course, this reduction of stock comes right at the time when many people are curtailing driving long distances because of the cost of gas. Phoo.)

We NEED a large better grocery store. As I said, Green Spray is great for the basics, but they can't carry everything because they're small. Or, alternatively, I wish the Green Spray had a decent bakery. They carry bread, but it's all the Mrs. Baird's/Wonder/Texas Toast variety, which I don't care that much for.

 2. I woke up from a rare interesting-but-not-distressing dream, and I would have liked to continue in that dream world: it was a story about Nero Wolfe's granddaughter (Yes, in the world of this dream, Wolfe had had a secret affair which produced a child, who then grew up and had a daughter of her own, who grew up to herself become a detective. Her parents named her Phaelenopsis as a nod to her famous grandfather's famous passion for orchids, but she disliked the name, so went by Fay instead).

 I wish my brain did more fanfiction-for-dreams instead of the usual vaguely-distressing sort of dreams I have.

*** I mowed the lawn for the second time of the season yesterday. I guess it looks like I'm back to weekly mowing now - I could barely force it through the regrowth in the back yard. (This new mower, though it cuts better than the old one, does take more musclepower to make it work. Not that that's a bad thing).

 I also did the front yard...my next door neighbors were working on their yard as well (the cop, and also the single woman cop who lives in the garage apartment that the cop and his wife has). The lady-cop commented that I was "going old school" when she saw the push mower. I shrugged and said I'd had bad luck with gas engines in the past. And then she remarked that it seemed to cut pretty well.

Yes, yes it does.

 I did wind up almost doing myself in - it was 85 and pretty humid and I was very shaky and sort of chilled feeling when I got done. So I tried taking my temperature. Mowing the lawn under those conditions spiked my temperature up to 99.3. So I gave myself a fever by working in the yard. (It went back down after I showered and drank some water.) I guess next time I either have to do it earlier in the day when it's cooler (provided there isn't a heavy dew, like we've had of late) or much later in the evening, as it's beginning to get dark.

 I also slowly started cleaning house. I think this will have to be a spread-over-several-days thing, because I have so little free time at the moment that I get really resentful when I start thinking about "When I come home this evening...I'll spend all evening cleaning house."

 I attacked my bedroom first. Normally, that's the last room I get to (if I get to it at all) because I'm the only one who ever sees it. But I had earlier re-organized my CD collection (most of which lives in my bedroom) and I got to thinking again about how pleasant it would be to be able to relax in the evening, sitting on my bed knitting or reading, with whatever not-available-on-the-radio-and-especially-not-available-on-my-local-market-radio music I wanted to listen to. (I have lots of unusual interests in music. I like British choral music (As well as Welsh choral music). And Scandinavian nyckelharpa and fiddle music. And French chanson. And that doesn't even include all the classical music).

But to do that, I wanted my room to be picked up and clean. So I did that - with a detour to do a little cleaning in the guest room (mainly, getting stuff off the guest bed, which is where I store my quilts, so I could change what I had on my bed, and put away the several I had had out for when the weather was colder). Incidentally, I found a use for that giant free "We Love Fine" bag they sent me with my last t-shirt purchase: yarn storage. So I now have my "overflow" sockyarn in a bag with steampunk Rainbow Dash on it.

 I didn't have much time to relax and knit after I got the room done, but I did spend about an hour listening to "The Voice of Wales" and knitting on the socks that will be my mom's birthday present. (Also, perhaps a word about how I arranged my CD collection. About 2/3 of the disks are from the "classical" (I always feel pressed to add "sensu lato" to that, because my music training tells me that TRUE "classical" spans from Haydn to perhaps Schubert, and really MOST of my "classical" collection is actually Baroque, with some Romantics thrown in). I organize those disks in roughly chronological order of when the composer was active. (I admit, I had to look up some of the later people, it's harder for me to remember if Saint-Saens came before or after Debussy) This kind of thing pleases me. I guess it's funny that my house and office are so often such cluttered messes because I really do enjoy organizing things.

(Maybe it's more that I get hung up on the minutia of organizing one little thing, and let the rest of the place go to pot. Or I get overwhelmed by the fact that both places, I have insufficient storage, and so some things just don't have a good place in which to get put away).

 (Funny little childhood memory: when I was a kid, and my brother and I would get our Easter baskets? Rather than eating much of the candy right away, I would arrange it into pleasing patterns in the basket, doing things like sorting the jellybeans by color. I was a weird little kid.)

 So the top two and a half shelves of my CD case are devoted to arranged-by-composer's-era, then I have a section of general British music (some of it being CDs that have different pieces from different eras on them, some of it being 20th century "British Light Music"). Then I have a section of compilation CDs that have different composers on them...On the next shelf I have stuff that roughly falls into the category of jazz, but I don't really have it that well arranged (then again, I have far fewer jazz CDs). Next comes world music, arranged by country. (Irish and French are the largest categories...). On the bottom shelf I have a mix of stuff, some pop, some unclassifiable stuff (a CD of frog calls...) and my Christmas music.