Odds and Ends

Unlike some of the characters at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I have not finished my sojourn in Middle Earth and gotten on boat and sailed off into the West never to be seen again. Yes, I will be flying West in a week or so to see family in California, but I am still here very much in the middle of the country. Work has been crazy. I just haven’t been able to settle to attend to this poor neglected blog. It's been more than month since I have written anything. Yikes.

I have been expecting to get an e-mail from a woman in a nearby community, who I never see these days but who reads the blog, wondering if I am okay.

Yes. I am okay. Mostly.

Facebook is partly to blame for the silence here. I was sort of coerced into mounting a Facebook page some years ago by the issue manager for a journal I worked on. She thought it would be fun if the copyeditors who worked on the journal had Facebook pages so we could get to know each other. This was a rather radical idea, because up to that point, the journal managers kept the people who copyedited the manuscripts for that particular journal a closely guarded secret. We were not supposed to have contact with each other, and the only way I ever found out who my colleagues were was when the journal manager sent us all the same e-mail and forgot to blind the "cc" addresses.

At I found it is remarkably easy to write a very short “blurb” on Facebook  off the top of my head, and very hard and time consuming to write a thoughtful essay with something profound at the end, which the blog seems to require, and then be done with it.

So… here are a few short blurbs I have posted recently on the Facebook page (but of course, I have had to tinker with them a little because they just weren't quite right):

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Fall is in the air – finally. Someone has splattered the trees with red and orange and gold. It has been unseasonably warm (in fact, we had record high “low” overnight a few days ago), but I actually needed a light jacket yesterday when I walked the dog.

As I got out of the car at the post office to get our mail, a large group of geese flew over, probably more than 100 birds, together but in small Vs of perhaps 10 to 15 birds, constantly calling to each other, merging, and separating. They were lovely to watch as they undulated across the sky. I believe they were headed for a rest stop at a local private lake.

Nearly all of our cousins attended high school in Yuba City in central California, which may still be an agricultural community as it was when I visited them as a kid (if the drought hasn't put the orchard owners out of business), not far from the capital of Sacramento. The area is part of a great flyway and many migratory birds pass through. The athletic teams school they attended were called "The Honkers.” We used to laugh at that name, but I get why they chose it.

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What happens when you wait 4 months to get your hair cut and then finally make the phone call and lurch (I am not quite walking normally yet) into the beauty shop is that the woman who cuts your hair can’t remember how she cut it the last time because too much time has gone by. So you tell her to “cut it short.”

And she does. She cuts it short. Really short.

I am still having a bit of mirror shock. I thought ya’ll might like to see the new me.

(Now, of course, a few weeks have passed and I love it. I really do).

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He is threatening to start a blog that he will call “Leilani-isms” in which he would post ridiculous statements that I have the unfortunate habit of making. Today I was trying to fry fish and wanted to set a timer so that I would make sure and cook it for the right amount of time on each side.

I was having a lot of trouble figuring out how to make the timer work because I didn’t have my glasses on and I couldn’t read the lettering on the small silver buttons (turns out the lettering on most of the buttons was worn off because of constant use, but never mind). I kept having to ask him to reset the timer and he was getting aggravated.

“Well,” I said, “I just don’t understand stuff.”

He looked at me in amazement and then started laughing so hard he had to sit down before he fell down. Well, it is true. I am not a stupid person but sometimes I just don’t understand stuff.