Saturday, November 05, 2016

Saturday morning random

* I had to run cross town late in the day yesterday to get something. Coming back on one of the main drags, I tried to let a flustered woman out of a parking lot - I had seen her waiting for a long time as our line of traffic inched through.

Well, she hesitated, because she WAS pulling out across traffic (going the other way),  and a guy behind me in a Hummer decided he wasn't having any of that, so he laid on the horn (at me). Had he been in a Civic or a similarly small car I would have thought, "yeah, no" but I was concerned that if he was JUST angry enough, his front grille (and he had one of those aftermarket "cowcatcher" ones) could do some damage to the back of my car. So I pulled through, meaning it was a little while longer before she could get out.

But it made me both sad and angry. Sad in that I was thwarted in trying to do something nice for someone (and I have BEEN that flustered woman, though in that case, I would have been much more prone to just flip my blinker to the other direction and try to get out in to the main flow of traffic, and then find a side street where I could loop around). And angry because everyone is so short-tempered right now and also that Friday is no day to be out on the roads.

And also, after I got home, I realized something about myself: I'm becoming increasingly unable to chalk things up to 'this is water' moments (that is: to take a deep breath and go "but maybe the person being difficult has other stuff going on in their life" but then again the road we were on were the wrong direction for the local hospital, and it wasn't a time of day you'd expect a funeral to be happening, so I don't know. Maybe sometimes people who act like jerks are just genuinely being selfish instead of being temporarily self-centered because they are so worried about something else).

But yeah.

* I am still going to Sherman today. I need to. I need to get out and get away and go to a couple antique shops and get my dad's Christmas present and see if I can find anything for my brother and sister in law that would be better than what the local gourmet shop has (I am already buying them a joint present that has to do with cooking but I want to get them each something small of their own)

And I want to go to the Target and look at their Christmas stuff and their toy section and buy some fairy lights and maybe some of the little clips for holding them. My plan is to put up a string around the entryway between my tiny foyer and the living room, and put it on a timer set to come on shortly before I get home on a typical day, because come Monday it will be getting dark as I come home and I just need to come home to something that is
a. Bright and pretty
b. Feeling vaguely welcoming.

I'm feeling the loneliness that sometimes comes with the choice to live alone hard this week. If I were more impetuous, I would have gone to the local shelter and brought home a cat even though my house is NOT cat proof (I'd have to do that first) and even though I'm kind of allergic to cats and even though I am home so little many days that it would be unfair to a pet for it to be alone so much.

Coming home to an empty house every day is a drag sometimes. Oh, some days I'm happy to close and lock the door on the world, but I don't like being the only sentient being there. (Well, right now, I'm not.....I saw the first mouse of the fall so another thing I have to get is snap traps. I hate killing them but if I live trapped it and let it go outside it would just come back in. The occasional Mediterranean House Gecko that shows up here is a lot more welcome, because they won't chew up stuff and they don't urinate everywhere, at least not that I know of)

* I'm trying to plan out my path. I really want to go to the antique stores in both Denison and Sherman but also to the "Town Center" (that's where the Target is) and maybe the Five Below and finish up at the grocery store. It's not an easy path to figure out minimal drive distances without backtracking....

* I saw a guy out putting up outdoor Christmas decorations at his house yesterday so NO IT IS NOT TOO EARLY and anyway if I can remind myself of Christmas this month, particularly remind myself of the faith-related aspect of Christmas (And even the timing: we don't know the actual date of Christ's birth but it was set for close to the winter solstice. At that time it was because the pagan groups were celebrating a holiday and the Christian fathers wanted to pre-empt Christians from going in for a pagan celebration but also give them something to celebrate, but frankly, I look at it and think it's meaningful that it was picked to happen a couple days after the solstice, when the hours of daylight are getting longer again after their shortest point - the light is literally coming back into the world. )

And I need to be reminded of that. I need to be reminded that the Light is still here and in fact never left, as ugly as some people can be to each other and as discouraging as events are.

Interestingly, after "favoriting" a few things (and adding a couple other composers) to my Pandora "Music is supposed to make you smarter" station (it started out with Hadyn and Mozart but I had to add to it after getting the same pieces over and over again), it now plays a lot of choral music, especially the very traditional (mostly British) church choral music. And I like that. Because it reminds me that there are bigger things out there than whatever problem I am enmeshed in. And I just like British church music anyway. (For someone who grew up in churches in the tradition of the Stone-Campbell movement, my sentiments tend to be very "high church" - I find the liturgical colors meaningful, I find the traditional choral music meaningful, I use the litany readings. Of course, a good thing about belonging to the denomination I do? I am free to do that because a lot of those matters of style are up to the individual members)

I HOPE no one winds up complaining about, say, "Praise to the Lord, The Almighty, The King of Creation" coming across my Pandora while they are in my office (though stranger things have happened), but I could argue that I need it for myself and it is part of my freedom of speech - I am not proselytizing, it is merely my aesthetic choice on some level.

* I might also buy myself a latch-hook kit if I see one I like, even though I have too many projects going right now; there is something about the simple repetitive process that can be done even when you're too tired to concentrate on cable crossings in knitting that appeals to me. (Cross stitch would seem similar, but every time I've tried counted cross stitch I've messed it up because I get off-count. Maybe needlepoint, from a printed canvas, would be similar. I don't know. But there aren't any needlepoint shops where I'm going and I find the craft stores don't seem to have as large a selection of that).

1 comment:

CGHill said...

For what it's worth, one house in this neighborhood had the Christmas lights up this past Monday.