Inconvenience

This will seem mad, but sleeping for two consecutive nights uninterrupted, even by a dream, has got me discombobulated. I’d adjusted to being woken two or three times, administering Willow’s twice-daily medicine at 3 am and taking my own thyroid medication at that hour, having so belatedly discovered that middle-of-the-night is the optimum time.

Waking on Monday, I couldn’t understand why Grant was banging about in the kitchen in the middle of the night, but then discovered it was 6 o’clock. My first thought – something was wrong with Lily. She always wakes me long before this and she’d been silent all night.

But according to Grant, she’d sung as always, loud and long several times.

How did I not hear her? It was unsettling, sort of the way I felt after I was given fentanyl as a sedative for a medical procedure. It separated the cognitive part of my brain from the rest of me for some 12 hours during which I’m told I appeared to be functioning quite normally, however I have never been able to recollect any of it.

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When I slept solidly through Monday night as well, I woke feeling dopey.

A solid night’s sleep is a good thing, but the fact that I managed to adjust to having my sleep disturbed is proof of how adaptable we are, though I suspect it would be unwise to re-acclimatise to peaceful nights!

After breakfast I decided this was the day to begin removing unneeded items. A while back, I’d got as far as finding a box and had placed a one or two of things in it, but it had sat on my desk for a couple of weeks and itself become clutter. It was getting on my nerves.

But very soon I realised why it is I never get around to sorting out my muddle. It’s because there is no such thing as doing it in manageable stages. I ended up finding things long unseen, deciding they could stay, but needed to be placed elsewhere, which led to finding other things….and so on. Finally, when I called a halt to the exercise for now, there was the question of what to do with the box.

The contents is not actual rubbish, or it would have gone in the trash. It includes, for example, three old cameras and my father’s binoculars which are useless to me with my eyesight and Grant has a better pair.

My cupboards are already over-full of stuff in boxes. Where could I put another? In the end, I managed to shove it in with the rest so it is out of sight, but hardly out of mind. One of these days I’ll open one of these cupboards and the whole lot will fall on top of me.

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Feeling less than satisfied with myself, I sat down at my computer apparently still in the mood to organise. Perhaps I’d just take on one of the albums in my photo archive, have a quick look and maybe make a few deletions.

The one I chose was entitled “Fall sky” which seemed appropriate.

Well it was, when I created it in November of 2020:

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And it was fair enough to place a flock of geese in that same album:

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But it appears that unintentionally almost everything for the next 3 months went into that album, so I found myself re-directing photographs of all the cats we had back then. I’d always thought there should be more when I searched, but I hadn’t thought to look in Fall sky.

That winter we had a lot of snow, so there were a good many pictures of it and that was also when I created my first “ice sculpture”. Because the temperature remained below freezing for a long time, the water bowls were constantly frozen. As I turned them out to be refilled, I began accumulating a lot of building blocks – or at least that is how I began to view them.

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Looking back, I think I preferred it to my later attempts, when I thought it would be clever to make different shapes and to add food colouring, given that the new containers would not be water sources for wildlife.

It was the kind of project that needed to be spontaneous. Over-thinking it began to make it seem like work. I spent too much time outside freezing my hands and the cold really got into my joints and spine.

It was still fun, but I enjoyed the first project more.

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After an hour of ploughing through all those old memories, Grant popped up to ask if I wanted to go with him to the village and it seemed like a good excuse to break away, though it turned out that I was almost done with Fall sky.

At the post office I collected the usual handful of bumf and a long awaited item – sort of.

Ten days ago, my friend Tim told me he was sending me a “surprise”. Something small in size, obviously, but I had no clue what it could be. I imagined something that would remind me of our travels together.

How long should a piece of mail take to travel from Brooklyn to Cambridge, NY, just up the Hudson? After 9 days there was still no sign of it, but this morning:

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“Rapid processing”, eh?

Some years ago I ordered an out-of-print book. I can’t remember why, but I wasn’t all that surprised when it didn’t arrive. Weeks later, however, I received the same sort of plastic envelope I got today, containing the book cover.

Receiving a book cover but not the contents was rather an inconvenience.

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