I just can't bring myself to it today.
I bought myself slippers at random while at target with Ula last week. I promptly developed a cold and stayed in bed for an entire Saturday (my first Saturday at home by myself with nowhere to be, mind), but I don't believe those things to be connected, necessarily.
The reason I mention this has to do with a late evening's adventure last night when it was required of me to go out of my apartment, down the stairs, out the front door, around to the back of the house, down the newly re-done (thank you, Howard) stairs and flip my fucking breaker. Again.
We moved the fridge. I am convinced that all of the things that are happening in my house are as a result of moving the fridge. I could have been content to live with a kitchen whose accessibility was severely hampered by the bottle-neck effect of the world's most ridiculously large for one person fridge placed right next to the stove giving an already narrow and dark kitchen the feel of a very strange vaginal canal leading to and from my womb-like bedroom (which I've decided to decorate like a cloud, just in case anyone was wondering). It's not that I'm a prude or anything, it's just that I really do have better things to do with my brain that actually have to go through the thought process every morning that 'I'm just now being born into the world. Again.' And believe me, I would. I'm very routine oriented when I feel like it.
The fridge was, therefore, moved to a much more acceptable spot and now holds a place of prestige and honor and occasionally acts as a very tall and not remotely cushion-y cushion for the terror twins who like to hang out there while I bathe. Don't ask, I don't know. And everything in it promptly froze. Which has been mentioned before, so I may continue.
With the fridge moved, the next project was the attempt to prevent wind from coming through the house by putting plastic up on all of the windows. There are ten in my cloud-room alone. This was not going to be, and in fact was not, a single evening's adventure. Now, I have been putting plastic up on windows since my parents discovered this wonderful new thing many many years ago. Which means that I have been used to using a hair dryer to shrink the plastic so that you can't hear the plastic billowing in the wind or see wrinkles - in effect, the only real purpose I can see for using the hair dryer is to make it look as though there is no plastic holding back the winter coming in through the windows that it will cost many thousands of dollars that not one of us has, to fix. I'm sure that there is some other, rational, not cynical explanation, but I don't know it.
If you ever come over to my house, you will notice that the plastic on the windows billows and is very visible. Because the hair dryer was not used to tighten it. Because I blew the breaker. Three times. I got tired of blowing the breaker every time the hair dryer got turned on. We turned off all of the lights in the house, lit candles and unplugged the clock. We forgot to unplug the fridge. And blew the breaker. At that point it was 7 at night and dark and I was tired. So I went to the bar with Ula. We had earned it.
A few days later, I was moving the second of two bookshelves from one side of the living room to the other and deciding how much more I was up for doing that evening when everything went dark. I had blown the breaker. I had Nothing plugged in! Nothing. There were only 3 lights on. And I blew the breaker.
So, I turn off lights when I leave rooms. I am comforted knowing that my heat is gas and the electricity in my cloud is on its own circuit, therefore guaranteeing that I will be warm even if I am in the dark. I have developed a very uncanny sense of time passing. I never bathe right before leaving the house, as I cannot dry my hair and have not pursued getting the toaster oven I would love to have, because it is something which gets plugged into walls and they are walls which I distrust.
Living alone means that I have lots of projects: going through boxes and sorting stuff, baking things, finishing craft things, starting craft things, cataloging my books, reading, listening to radio, cataloging my books, writing letters, exploring themes, cataloging my books.
In order to catalog my books, it is necessary to decide on the specific items of information which will be listed in combination with the title, author, publisher, edition, year of publication, pagination and illustration, if applicable. I have decided to include at least one quote from each book and perhaps some indication of whether I have read it before, if I remember why I have the book, etc. As I have no computer, but do have much paper and binders and a typewriter, it seems appropriate to use the typewriter to record the information I would like on some of the filler paper that I have collected over the years and to the put that paper into one of the many binders that I have, and perhaps to decorate that binder using the other kinds of resources that are at hand.
The sticking point is the typewriter. It's electric and makes a certain amount of noise, particularly when it's on my desk, which is wood, which is sitting on a wood floor which is the top of the ceiling of my downstairs neighbors. I do not want to rattle at them, so I decided to make a sort of pad to put between the typewriter and desk. I decided to use yarn for which there seems to be no other purpose and found a nice stitch (star stitch, in case you are interested) which I worked into a sort of frame, 24 x 18 inches, give or take. It was intentionally large, the cotton I used shrinks considerably when washed, which I did next. and since it's going to be stitched with ribbon to a piece of fabric and then to batting and a backing to make a sort of not quilted knotted-quilt pillow, I wanted to do what I could to make the piece square, which it didn't naturally want to be. So, I plugged in the iron.
It blew the breaker.
By the time I got outside, slippered and coated and ready to head to the back door, down the stairs to the basement and almost immediately back up again, there was no wind, the sky was as black as the clouds and light pollution would let it be, which was something like slate gray and the freezing rain had begun.
I stood under a tree in the backyard and smoked a cigarette, not wanting to walk up the snow covered back stairs, and also not wanting to be seen on the well-lit front porch by passers-by. It was unbelievably quiet. There weren't many cars to be heard and none to be seen moving down my street or through the intersection several feet away. Frozen rain crunches underfoot and as long as you don't make any sudden moves, is really not slippery. I paced back and forth ducking under the lowest of the evergreen branches under which I had taken shelter for my cigarette.
My fingers were a little cold, but with a hat and a coat and no wind to speak of, the winter wasn't so bad. It helped that my feet were warm and felt sturdy against the weather on the sidewalk, a thing which for a pedestrian is an odd study in ice and snow and salt and human habits. I really like my slippers. I'm glad I bought them.
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