The cold I've been struggling with seems to be a little better this morning. I'm still coughing up some really evil tasting crap, but my head is a little clearer. I haven't had a bad cold for years, and this one caught me off guard. It made me remember that catching a cold can be seriously debilitating. I might be a little more sympathetic when some other person mentions they have a cold.
The weather has been cold at night for a couple of days. The 7 day forecast reveals cool nights for the foreseeable future. It makes a difference here because although I have a short electric blanket I put over my feet at night, I don't heat my house except with a space heater. Getting outta bed in a cold room to put my clothes on is no different than when I was a kid. It's not that I have anything against central heating, it's just that I can't afford it.
I lay in the bed in the mornings until the sun comes up and begins to heat the air as much as it's going to. When the sunlight reaches the top of the red bud maple right outside my bedroom window, then i figure I might as well get outta bed. It's not as though there is a lot to look forward to. I'm old and getting more decrepit on almost a daily basis. If I were young and vital I'd be in some warm, sunny clime by now. I'd be sleeping on the ground probably, but it didn't matter then like it does now.
I read the story of that famous Greek guy who was forced to drink the hemlock potion for some reason. He described death as starting in his feet and extremities and how he was dying from the outer edges inward. I feel that sometimes. It's my hands losing their function that causes me the most woe. If you've ever had carpal tunnel problems you might know what I mean. I hesitate to reach for something to consider how much completing that mission might hurt. Wiping my butt in the bathroom is like climbing the final stage of Mount Everest.
That's what my life amounts to now. After all, this is a journal, and the whole point of it is to write about my daily life, and my daily adventures are mostly about the avoidance of pain, and telling bold lies I don't even believe.
I voted early yesterday. I'd heard about people doing it all over the place, but I wasn't sure I could do it here. When I went to breakfast last Friday the guy who proselytize me to agree with his extreme religious views told me that he had voted, and so I asked him for details about where to go and make it happen. Voting early took some of the election tension away. When the political ads come on TV and I use the remote control to mute them out, they're not quite as aggravating.
I didn't particularly vote for Obama as much as I voted against Bush. That's been my sentiment for the last three Presidential elections. I've intuited how incompetent this guy is to be the President from the get go. I can't imagine going out for a beer with him on a personal level. There is nothing about him that piques my curiosity, and that's a big deal to me when it comes to voting for somebody. If a person can create enough curiosity in me to cause me to wanna spend a while figuring them out, they can possibly get my vote, but Bush, just as a personality, is somebody I would cross the street to avoid. "Oh.... just shut the fuck up, and leave well enough alone!"
I think I've figured out what happened with the commercial fig tree cutting I bought from Lowe's. It started off real good. I planted it over by the edge of the woods on the north side of my house. That gave it plenty of exposure to the sun because that put it on the north side of the woods.
For the first month or so it really looked alive and I was under the impression that this time my brown thumb didn't prevail over my gardening. Then, the leaves began to shrink, and a couple of them even fell off, and I thought, "Here we go again.". I had put a little fertilizer on it, but not a lot. Just enough to encourage it to give it a go. I had a feeling the fertilizer wasn't the problem, and besides, somebody had told me it was probably a mole nibbling the roots.
It never died completely. The grapevine I put out the same day did. Kaput! While the fig cutting wasn't exactly dead, it wasn't looking good. I didn't walk over and look at it for a while because I figured it was a goner, and I didn't wanna witness the process. A couple of weeks ago I walked by it and noticed that it had a couple of new leaves on it. They were small leaves, but they were new growth leaves. My hopes soared. Soon, they were joined by a couple more new leaves, and now they're all full-sized and looking good.
I suspect I planted the bush too deep to begin with. I wanted to have a little shallow ground around it for watering it. The initial growth when i planted it came from the root mass that had already developed in the container it came in. When it used up all the nutrients those roots could provide it with, it went into a decline. That is, until it finally broke through to the ground outside the initial root ball, and the plant made itself at home. I won't really know if it's gonna thrive where I planted it until next year.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
