A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. -- George Bernard Shaw

Reading: Dark Heart, Margaret Weis and David Baldwin

Listening to: Indigo Girls, Strange Fire

July 25, 1999

Where Did This Come From?

I get the feeling I will be asking this question a lot during the coming months.

I woke up early this morning and decided to take a quick run to the grocery store to pick up a few things that I forgot to get yesterday. The grocery store is never crowded early Sunday morning, and I wanted to get my errands done before it got really hot. I finished my errands and came back home, all ready to settle in and watch my favorite program, CBS News Sunday Morning. The cable was off. Damn and double damn. I tried to watch it in the kitchen on my little TV (which isn't hooked up to cable), but the reception is terrible. Basically you have to sit there and not move a muscle. Otherwise, the picture starts to roll or the screen goes blue.

I don't know when the cable came back on since I gave up and went back to bed for a while. When I got up again, the cable was back on, but there wasn't anything I wanted to see.

So, on the to leaning tower of books in my room. Actually, the pile of books I tackled yesterday was in this cradle that I've had in my room since I moved back here. I do not remember the cradle being in the house where I grew up (which is not the same as Mom and Dad's condo, where I live now). Where did it come from? I have no idea. Mom and Dad will probably sell it when they move the rest of their things out of here. It's of no use to me except as a repository for books, anyway.

I miss the house where I grew up. It's a big, white colonial. We had a big, eat-in kitchen and a formal dining room. My family had a hard-and-fast rule about dinner time. We always ate between 6:30 and 7:30. During that hour, you were not allowed to have phone calls. Woe unto the one whose friends forgot the rule. Mom was very strict about it. I think it was because it was the only time we saw Dad.

We had a nice living room and a solarium, which we couldn't use for at least half of the year because it was unheated. That was my favorite room in the house. On the one wall that wasn't windows, we had bookshelves, and I used to love to curl up in there in a blanket and read. The TV was in the solarium, too. We were only allowed to watch TV for one hour a week, so it didn't get a lot of use. We only had three stations -- the local CBS affiliate, the CBC, and PBS, so I don't think we missed much anyway.

My room was the smallest bedroom, but it had a balcony. We weren't supposed to go out on the balcony. It was more for decoration than for anything else. In the winter, when the snow was heaped up against the downstairs windows, my brother and I used to leap off the balcony into the snow. We almost gave Mom a heart attack once when she happened to look out the dining room window and see both of us rushing past the window.

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