Monday, Jul. 19, 2004 - 10:55 a.m.
Greetings,
I’m sitting here eating Kix cereal for my breakfast (sans milk) and sipping Folger’s hazelnut flavored coffee with hazelnut flavored cream (fat free). I’m thinking about composing my usual Monday morning composition – What I Did Over the Weekend. It’s usually my favorite post of the week because I get to live my weekend over again for a few brief, shining moments before I hunker back down and do some work here in Corporate America.
Before I get started perhaps I’ll blather on a bit about the weather today. I think it’s going to be hot for several reasons. The main one is this in New Orleans and it’s July, but also because as I was showering this morning I saw the sun slowly rising in the east (my bathroom window faces east) and the sun was a huge, smoldering red ball of fire, the kind of sunrise I only see on hot summer days.
So there you have it. Mina the Meteorologist.
Now I believe I shall jaunt backwards in time – at least as far as 5 p.m. Friday evening.
Friday Evening:
I walked with J to the garage. She was lugging her cake, her purse, her present and the balloon, which defiantly resisted efforts to get it through doorways and elevators without hassle. While she continued on to the garage, I turned left and cut through the Hyatt hotel lobby to the New Orleans Centre and the hair salon where I observed Thomas waiting patiently for Ida to beckon him to The Chair. (Not that chair, the hair salon chair.)
I was clutching a piece of paper destined for someone in the building beyond the mall so I left my heavy backpack with him (much to his dismay because he was already lugging his backpack and his laptop) and continued on my merry way.
I had to call 9,283 different numbers to get somebody to open the freaking door, but I was able to drop off the paper and return to the hair salon relatively calmly.
I read some of my library book while Thomas got his hair hacked off and then styled and shaped.
We departed shortly after for the parking garage lugging our backpacks, the laptop and a gargantuan bottle of Biolage shampoo.
Crescentwood was hot, but lovely when we arrived home just after 6 or so. I switched on the air-conditioning and poured half of the gargantuan bottle of Biolage into a smaller Biolage bottle which I then placed in Thomas’s shower and I put the big bottle (only half full now) in my shower.
I dithered around doing things like putting peach oil (from Earthsavers) on some of my Study candles, setting out incense (and burning some), switching on my lava lamp and sound machines (crickets and owl in the Study, rain in the bedroom), feeding the cats, giving Meow her shot and then I popped open a Mike’s Hard Lime and welcome the weekend in much the same fashion as I blathered on about in Friday’s (or was it Thursday’s??) entry.
For a while I sat at the kitchen table with Stela purring in my lap and Meow staring up at me plaintively from the floor as I surveyed the neat tranquility that surrounded me. The Caftan Night schedule was on the refrigerator, there were no dishes in the sink, no paw prints on the black tiled countertops and the scent of jasmine incense swirled everywhere.
Then I sat for a bit in the rocker in the dining room and surveyed the new palm tree and pineapple mantle runner and the West Indies style plantation mantle clock (a genuine reproduction!) and, of course, Stela sprawled out on my lap again.
The shadows were lengthening, the birds were heading to their roosts in the trees in the neighbors’ backyards and it was very still and quiet.
I scrubbed out my tub and ran myself a peach scented bubble bath. While the water was running, I put two of my birthday votives (a gift from X, my plantationing buddy) in votive holders and lit them, the lavender glow candle on the toilet tank and my small pumpkin spice Yankee jar candle. The red votive went on the side of the tub for illumination; the green votive went on the window sill because I like to look at the flicker against the frosted glass.
I also put my new Sponge Bob sponge in the tub. (He’s so cute. Sponge Bob is a sponge for bathing purposes. His pants (with attached arms and legs) make a plastic holder for the sponge. When you lift Sponge Bob out of his pants, the bottom half of him is wearing underpants. Hee Hee. Yes, I know this is a child’s bath time toy, but please. It’s SPONGE BOB!) So now when I bathe at night, I have a talking sponge that lives in a pineapple under the sea staring down at me. A mite disconcerting? Nah, not after you get used to his cheesy little grin.
Clutching a glass of champagne (my Millennium Yellow flute of course) in one hand, a library book in the other, I sank beneath the bubbles for a relaxing, long bath.
Darkness fell between the time my chin hit the bubbles and when I decided I was once step away from turning into a prune and stepped out upon my lovely plaid bathmat.
Appropriately attired in my golden Mrs. Stoddard caftan, I swirled into the kitchen to prepare a feast of 4 Cheese Lasagna Hamburger Helper. Sounds noxious, but it’s really quite the taste treat. While it bubbled and frothed, I went into my gorgeous Study, lit candles, and listened to the Unholy Trinity (Libera Me, Rakim, Bela Lugosi’s Dead).
Thomas joined me for the feast which we ate while watching The Wicker Man.
(Corn rigs and barley…..blah, blah, blah, something about Annie more corn rigs and barley…)
I love that movie. I bought the special limited edition version with the extra 11 minutes of footage and the interviews and trailer, etc. However, I didn’t realize that there were two disks – one with the extra 11 minutes and one without. Guess which one we watched. Yep, the one without. But it was still a damn fine ride. That sanctimonious Christian martyr bothered the hell out of me as usual. Treating people with a different religion as if they were scum and vermin and stupid. Arggh. He got his comeuppance!
But anyway, that (finally) brings Friday night to a conclusion.
Saturday:
I arose around 8:30 or so, put in a load of wash, made coffee, fed the cats, gave Meow her shot and started to play Sims. Around 9:30 I made some low fat cinnamon rolls (my heart to your heart, I hope it warms your soul) which I enjoyed while playing the Sims until Thomas got up around 10:30 and I plied him with cinnamon rolls and let him check his email while I tidied up the kitchen and did another load of wash.
Then I played Sims again until lunchtime when I made Thomas some Hot Pockets and myself a salad with cheese and ham and Bleu Cheese no fat dressing.
I read some of my book, did more laundry, and cleaned Crescentwood. There was no straightening up of clutter to be done so this went relatively smoothly. I even had time to mop the kitchen floor and the laundry room. I dusted. I dust mopped. I vacuumed. The works.
I even had time to soothe an incredibly terrified cat named Agatha who apparently was cut off from her normal hiding place (in the sofa) when I started that dastardly vacuum cleaner. I found her on the kitchen counter squeezed against the coffee maker. She is black, the tiles are black, so she blended it quite well, but I did see her and had to sit with her in the kitchen for a while to make her stop shivering.
That cat has a perpetual terror of the vacuum, worse than any cat I’ve ever known. Pandora and Stela hide too, but not for three hours. And Meow, as I’ve chronicled before, caterwauls and chases me until I actually vacuum her.
I had time to wash and fold all the laundry and still relax with a book for part of the afternoon before I finally ran my bubble bath (scented with Avon pink bubbles). It was still broad daylight because it was 6:30 p.m. and the sun doesn’t set until after 8, but it was a pleasant time nonetheless.
Clad in my pink caftan I swirled into the living room to watch Mr. Bryan Ferry sing “Don’t Want to Know” and then watched Ab Fab. I danced to Limbo, chatted with Ken, made pizza, and enticed Thomas to join me for a viewing of “Death on the Nile”.
He retreated to bed after Linnet was murdered whereas I curled up on the couch with the cats and doze watched until the bitter end.
Sunday:
Got up around 9:30, made coffee and played Sims until around 11 or so when Thomas woke up.
I ventured outside into the heat before noon to aggressively weed the front garden patch. The damn blue juniper bush assaulted me and as a result I’ve got a patch of red, infected skin on my finger where the needles scraped off at least three layers of epidermis. I think it was payback for last time I weeded when I took the choppers to some of the branches that looked rather sad and dead. Bastard thing.
Our garden does not resemble our neighbors’ garden where there isn’t a whisper of a weed and everything is nice and pristine, but at least the majority of the weeds are gone and instead you can see the bushes and the flowers.
I came inside and took a hot shower and then did a load of wash which meant that there wasn’t one stitch of dirty clothing or used towel in the house. This has never happened in all the annals of laundry I have ever chronicled. It seems the minute I finish the wash Thomas takes a shower and there’s his dirty clothes and a towel that sit around in the hamper until the end of the week, or he discovers something dirty in his closet (and it’s not porn) and so the story goes.
But yesterday from about 2 p.m. until I took my shower this morning, I could truthfully say there was no dirty laundry at Crescentwood.
Upon such modest beginnings, dynasties are born! Or something.
For most of the afternoon I watched episodes of “Little House on the Prairie” (which at one point caused Thomas to do some sort of strange prairie butterfly dance that is just too wrong to describe here) and catnapped. With cats.
Last night I watched the Crocodile Hunter lasso a tiger shark somewhere in Australia and then a show about Nile crocodiles and there was some Sims time too.
The night culminated in me reading a book in bed until sufficiently tired.
And that, she says heaving a deep breath and stretching her cramped fingers, is the whole enchilada.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Until next time,
Olrun
