Friday, July 3, 1998

        I've been listening to Jimmy Buffett this week, prompted by someone writing and saying that my new spaceship theme reminded her of the song "Desdemona's Building a Rocketship." So I got out "Banana Wind," the Jimmy Buffett album with that song on it, and I've been playing it in the car. As a consequence, all day today, "Jamaica Mistaica" has been running through my mind. "And we promise not to shoot you out of the sky . . ."

        I feel better today. We woke up at about 6:00 to the sound of another thunderstorm, but by the time we got up it had stopped. Then a couple of hours later it clouded over again and rained very hard for about fifteen minutes, then stopped and the sun came out, but as a consequence it's extremely humid. I walked down the street to get the mail this afternoon, and as soon as I walked out the door my sunglasses fogged up.

        It was a quiet day. Bob went out to John's to go fishing and pick blackberries, and I worked on updating some of the pages with the new design, and read some, and went to the grocery store to get ingredients for things to make for this weekend. We're going out to John's for a party tomorrow evening. We're going to marinate big shrimp to take to cook on the grill, and I'm going to make a pasta salad and a bean salad. On Sunday I have a family thing to go to--an annual reunion in Sedalia, which is about an hour away. Bob will be working, so I'll go down by myself. I'm planning on taking more pasta salad and baking chocolate chip cookies. I suppose I should be thinking about doing that now unless I want to get up early Sunday morning and do it . . .

        Tonight I've been painting. When I went out to go to the grocery store, I stopped in a gift shop on a whim to see if they had any little chairs for my collection. I guess it's a collection now, I have eight of them. Well, I have eight now. I had seven until tonight. I bought an adirondack-style chair for $7.00, which I thought was a pretty good price. It was painted a really ugly shade of blue, so I painted it barn red. Right now I'm waiting for it to dry so I can sand some of the paint off the edges, "distress" it a little bit.

        Pyewacket, of course, was fascinated by the whole process and managed to knock over the jar of paint. I had put down newspapers, but she was able to cleverly knock it over so that it spilled across a placemat and the table, both of which should survive. I got paper towels and cleaned the paint off the table, then threw the paper towels in one of the grocery sacks which I had left on the kitchen floor. Of course, she went in the kitchen and immediately crawled into the sack.

        I got her out of it before she got any paint on her, and we've been playing fetch, although not with her object of choice, a pair of nail clippers.

        I've been trying to figure out what I should do with the little chairs. Right now they're sitting on the floor of the dining room lined up in front of the server. I thought about taking down the stuff I have on a glass and oak shelving unit and putting them on there, but they don't really seem to go with the glass shelves. I guess they're okay on the floor for the time being.

        At 9:00 I watched Nash Bridges, which is the only television show that I currently ever actually try to watch. I see bits and pieces of other things, of course, as I walk through the living room, and sometimes I'll sit down and watch something with Bob, but most of the time his channel surfing drives me too crazy and I can't stand to stay in the same room. It seems like he'll stay on one channel just long enough for me to get interested in it a little bit, then he'll flip to something else. It eventually becomes too painful and I leave.

        Earlier in the evening I got a phone call from someone who said she was doing a survey of "television watching, radio listening and newspaper reading habits." I told her I didn't have time and started to hang up, and she said, "Depending on your answers, it could take very little time." I told her I wasn't interested in participating and hung up, but I thought later that I probably should have done the survey. It would have taken very little time, I imagine. I remember doing one of those not too long ago and the reaction of the survey taker was great. She went down the list of radio stations and asked me which ones I listened to, and I said "none." She asked me what local television shows I watched, and I said "none." I know she thought I was just lying to get her off the phone. Not that I would be above lying to get them off the phone . . .