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Tuesday, April 13, 2004

life is better

Why can I never think to make sure that my husband has a supply of clean white v-necked t-shirts BEFORE ten o'clock at night? I ask you. What I should really do is take about $50 of our grocery budget, go to Wal-Mart, and buy about eight three-packs of shirts every month. These will live in the top of our closet and he can simply pull one shirt out every morning and throw it away every night. Simple!

Oh my goodness that actually sounds tempting, except that it would involve a trip to the city which, at this point in time, I feel like I never. ever. want to do again.

Has anyone here ever been to the Bay Area? WHY IN THE NAME OF GOD is the traffic on the 580 freeway east through Livermore ALWAYS ALWAYS so terribly screwed up, EVERY SINGLE DAY, even at 3:00 in the afternoon? There's no accident! There's no lane closure! Precisely how many incapable drivers does it take to turn four lanes into "stop-and-go, and stop, and go just long enough to make you start to think you can actually accelerate, and then STOP and cause everything in your trunk to ram into the backseat so that you don't rear-end the person in front of you who has likewise had to throw his passengers and belongings to the front of the car to avoid hitting the person in front of HIM, and so on"? EVERY SINGLE TIME I ever travel that road! WHY? I took the kids to pick up some telescope accessories for T today and they wanted to see the windmills on Altamont Pass on the way home so I took the circuitous route. Never. Again.

Bad things about today:

• The weird nameless dread that sometimes comes upon me at bedtime is back. It's not that I sit and worry, I just feel that awful pit-of-the-stomach something is wrong feeling and I have no idea why. Is this what an ulcer is like? I wonder.
• The aforementioned traffic which made my shoulders so tense that I wonder if they will ever relax. I feel like a cat with my back permanently arched.
• T is sick and we don't know what with, and if we spend the money to go to the doctor, he'll just give us either the "I dunno, beats me, let's run some meaningless and expensive tests so that at least I look like I have some sort of thought process going on here," or he'll give us some pat and incorrect answer which has nothing to do with anything he learned in medical school except that The Patient Expects You To Have A Clue. It's probably some sort of virus, but it behaves really strangely, with only very occasional bouts of fever. Anyway. He has to work anyway because they are in the middle of some huge project at work and I hope he sneezes directly on his boss's computer keyboard and his boss is debilitated for weeks -- that'd teach him to have a little compassion and let a guy actually use his sick leave without getting an enormous guilt trip laid on him.
• The t-shirt/laundry thing, which is why I am here with you tonight instead of SLEEPING OFF THE TRAFFIC THING like I'd love to be doing.
• Cleaning the fishtank. Apparently, judging by the smell, the bacteria inhabiting the gunk that gets around the rim of the aquarium are the same as the ones in human intestinal tracts. In other words, it was not a pretty smell at all. eew.
• nothing else, today was actually pretty good aside from the above.

• The reptilian THING is a little less alive today than it was yesterday; it's been dying slowly ever since Saturday morning.
• The smell of eucalyptus in Capitola and Santa Cruz.
• The blue, blue, BLUE blue of the Pacific Ocean today.
• The moment when I was standing outside the car near sunset at a gas station, waiting for the tank to fill, drinking a can of diet cherry coke, and I felt like I stepped outside myself and looked at myself like I was a woman in a book, having a quiet moment to myself in a surprising time and place and really enjoying it.
• My daughter singing along with Alison Krauss' cover of "When You Say Nothing At All," which is her "VERY fav'rite" song.
• Cloud shadows.
• Whatever tree or bush or whatever it is that makes twilight smell so good right now.
• Feeling like I'm really living my life again, instead of just looking at it through glass, like I had for days. Yay for living.