"Do you guys know about chocolate? You don't? Oh man, this is gonna be huge!"

Today in the bank a little old lady asked me if my father was home from the war yet. It's a little hard to respond to questions like that. Especially since the look in her eyes hinted strongly that she would rant against Herr Hitler and his band of wicked men on only slight prompting. So I just smiled and said he wasn't in the military any more. And she smiled and nodded without comprehension and hobbled away. 

Since the Old Age Pensions came out yesterday we've been very busy at the bank. I got to buy some American Cash, and open a safe deposit box, and cash many many cheques. Yesterday I cleared over one hundred thousand dollars worth ($100,000.00) of cheques. But no, there's no money in this economy at all. 

And today I had a monumentous realization! I figured out why I've been so tired lately! I haven't been eating. Somehow you'd think I'd have figured out by now how to avoid that, but not I! It only takes two days of eating badly for my appetite to go away, and then the brakes are off until I start seeing physical symptoms. And put two and two together to get four. *sighs* It's since I'm working over lunch hour all the time, I've just been skipping that meal. Then it was really hard to get up in the morning, I was so tired, so I wasn't really eating breakfast. Finally, realization dawns today. :D I wasn't loosing weight this time or anything, so it's all good. And I AM getting up for breakfast tomorrow. And I'm bringing a lunch to work. *is firm* That's what I'm doing. 

The Brownie Halloween party was on Tuesday, so we got dressed up for that. Fraulein went as a marvelous Mime, and I, in a brilliant show of bluffing, dressed myself up in a blue satin thing that someone had given the family and called myself the Queen of the Night. Really, if you act as though you know what you're doing, most people won't question you. :D

"Did I mention I know almost everything about almost everything?"

I'm been such a sporadic blogger of late. I think that is because I have no time sense. It's true. There is an event, and another event, and they float disconnected in a sea of rushed images and words. I navigate by landmarks of memory, phrases and scenes that stick in my memory. This is especially odd, since I have a good memory, but if you ask me how long a thing has taken or will take, the odds are pretty good I will have no clue. The only way I know is if I work the math and count back from a number I have, whether that is a time or a date. Of course, this may be how everyone works. :D 

Well, I went for a lovely long walk on Saturday. 11.7 km, in fact. My legs were about to seize up when I got home. But I did get some very nice pictures, which I will post sometime in the future. Oh, and PT may be bringing his Girl Friend home for Christmas, which should be fun! 

I see another reason I didn't post. A signal lack of things to talk about. :D 

But I did make pork barbecue in the slow cooker, which was a success. Also, we're going to have a working shower tomorrow evening at five pm. For the first time in three weeks. 

HURRAH! 

Oh My My

I was trying to figure out what Gid reminded me of at breakfast the other day, and then it hit me. He is starting to look like the pictures of famine victims you see in the news. Huge eyes, fragile hands, delicate bone structure, all the symptoms of tenuous life. 

This is particularly problematic given my tendency to hide from social contact, including my family. Anything where I have to make eye contact and/or listen to someone else's breathing, or even, *gasps*, actually make conversation, I avoid. 

Life is weird. 

"There'll be better days, willow."

I was scheduled to do a ten minute presentation this morning at 9:00am. I was a bit nervous about speaking, given my tendency to start panicking and stammering. As it turns out, I need not have worried about speaking. 

I should have worried about waking up with my alarm clock. When I was happily curled into a small ball in my warm bed and waiting for my alarm to go off, Fraulein came into my room and asked when I was working. I muttered something about nine. Whereupon she just gasped in horror. Suddenly, I was very awake. That was 9:53, when I exploded out of bed and glanced at the clock as I started quick-changing. I was at the bank at 10:02, feeling sick to my stomach. And the scariest thing? No one mentioned it. *cringes* I don't like being incompetent! *cries*

But I did balance perfectly, first go round, and then I made a cake at home.

I also bowed to the inevitable and made a folder for nerdy bookmarks. Because the python site really can not honestly be stored under "travel."

"Who are "They" and why are they putting stuff in my shoes?"

Yesterday seemed to go by really fast. In fact, any time that I'm not at work has been seeming to whoosh by me. I think my time sense is broken. Oh wait...

Our laundry machines have been taken out of commission, so after the mountain of used clothing threatened to fill the kitchen we decided that it was time to take desperate measures. Slonner and I were therefore yesterday dispatched to take possession of the laundromat. Our departure was delayed by the fact that the small ones had taken the laces out of my shoes. They had then tied themselves to the wall with them, as "they were in space and the lines were to make sure they didn't float away." But we got away eventually. 

We ended up spending three and a half hours in the Laundromat. And for most of that time we had the place to ourselves. And we filled it. Just to show you a glimpse of the enormity of the task that is laundry in our house; at one point we had five washers and seven dryers running. At the same time. It took two car loads just to get all the laundry up to the Laundromat in the first place. So Slonner and I suspended our time senses and stuffed machines. It was fun. :D

In the evening, Fraulein and I watched Enemy Of The State. I like that movie. *grins* It has sufficient conspiracy to please me, and that is saying something. I need to go through it to collect quotes. 

Oh, and at 10:30 I found out that a paper I said I would write for fun was due tomorrow. That is, before I go to sleep. *stares blankly at the screen, and then swallows hard* I really wish I had actually thought about the subject I said I'd write on... Yeah, I jury-rigged a paper, of sorts. It's held together with finishing nails and hope, and has gaps in the logic you could drive trucks through. There is no continuity from paragraph to paragraph, and it ends with a half-page quote which has nothing to do with anything. So just like all my papers, right? :D No. This one is really REALLY bad. I'm not showing it to anyone. If I had planned to share it around, I would have done a preliminary sweep for logic. 

It was fun, in a hard, Oh-my-word-my-brain-has-atrophied-when-I-wasn't-looking, WHERE ARE MY QUOTES AND CAN I QUOTE A NOVEL, Why? Just why? Sleep is looking awfully good right now, sort of way. Maybe I'll do another one and actually spend some awake time on it. *laughs merrily*

Oh. I'd better get to work. Ciao!

What if you fight your way through to the good and it is also terrible?

Life is so much more cruel and more beautiful than we would like to pretend. It is our culture's tradition to avow that everything works out the way we want it to, with no deviations from the plan. No surprises, except for the ones we were hoping for at the back of our minds. And it's such a lie. Life has a way of driving you to the ground gasping for air. Fate likes to strip the comfortable woolly blinders off our eyes and make us actually look at the world. 

This is a circuitous way of saying, of course, that God has other plans.

My imagination is just not able to encompass the incredible vastness of the future. It is more tender then I can think of, and more bitter. There is more sorrow, and more love, more joy and more pain. The future is unfriendly and so welcoming, uninterested in little me and decked out in banners for my arrival. There are more surprises than I can comprehend, though surprises are not always hand in hand with happiness. 

I just can't get my head around it. 

How do you prepare yourself for a child under the age of three who is on a morphine drip for eight hours a day, and yet who still gives away her candy to her friends when they visit? How do you even look in the eyes of a person who is withdrawing the contents of their entire bank account to fly across the country and take care of their best friend's daughter after the death of the best friend? What do you about people who will get up four hours before the sun to cook a meal for guests, and then drive the meal out to the guest's house when they can't make it across town for the dinner? What will make you expect a little boy who has started to say that it hurts to be picked up- in imitation of his idolized older brother who is dying of cancer? 

It's like we can only see the previews in black and white, no audio, and then the full feature is in HD, surround sound. 

"I'm sorry. I- I, I react to a certain doom a certain way. It's a bad habit."

Working at the bank continues to be fun, though it also has its share of nerve-wracking moments, such as when I discovered my cash was out by almost ten thousand dollars earlier this week. You try to think out paying that back, and the numbers very suddenly cease to be abstract. It all turned out to be an accounting error and I was only actually out by $0.65, which is much better for my blood pressure.

You also overhear some inadvertently hilarious conversations. Case in point;

Two elderly men talking.
"How you doing, my son?"
"Not bad, not bad at'all." *inhales and sucks on his teeth* "Had a heart attack last Sunday."
"Yes, well, 'orrrible weather we're 'avin', eh?"

I just about laughed in my customer's face, but managed to swallow it in time.

What else has happened? Hmmm. Well, I had a rather surreal moment this morning when I glanced up at the weather channel and they were showing something about the orbits of Venus and Mercury while talking about solar storms. I've been thinking in Science Fiction of late in preparation for Nano, and I had one of those moments when you're not quite sure which reality you inhabit. Similar to when I was on a WWII kick and heard the air raid siren go off.

 *blinks* "What was that?" 

I never did find out why the Weather Channel was talking about extra-terrestrial weather, but I am reasonably certain that it wasn't because said weather promises to interfere with the heavy shipping three-planet route. 

And in other news; despite weighing about as much as a winter coat, Gid is now taking 25% more Codeine than an adult would per dose, (and he's talking every four hours,) as well as slow-dose Morphine. They don't stock narcotics in town, so Mommy and Daddy are going on a Date to the next town to pick it up.