Weather, Or Not

Brain saying nothing, though it gibbered mindlessly on waking from an unintended nap a short time ago. All WTFy and late, lost Sunday gasps for air and goes down for the third time, probably never to be seen alive again. Maybe the corpse will be dragged from Yesterday Lake tomorrow, bloated and beginning to reek, but the chances it will speak then are nil. The story is gone, nothing will remain henceforth but this imperative, snatched from oblivion at the last desperate moment:


( Sunday Verse )

For Thanksgiving I boiled three hot dogs instead of two, and dipped them in imported Dijon mustard. Luxury, I tell you! Especially the not actually needing to cook anything. Tonight I baked a couple of sweet potatoes, and boiled the other three hot dogs from the package. Needless to say, Black Friday dinner was way more festive than Thanksgiving dinner. And I feel almost... accomplished!

The cold snap continues, and I've had recourse to the bed with great frequency, burrowing under the covers as deeply as I can and inevitably nodding off for a long (or short) late autumn's nap. I'm pretty sure I'm enjoying some pleasant daydreams while drifting to sleep, but I don't actually remember them. I'm just going to trust myself on this because it makes my dull, sad life more bearable. There's difficult shit I should be tackling well before the year's end, and I've shamelessly (well, no, I lie. There is considerable shame, in fact) put it all off again and again. Sin at leisure, and repent in last minute haste is what I fear will result.

I was going to post a video of one of the songs I've been procrastinating with, but have suddenly (unsurprisingly) been overwhelmed with the urge to go back to bed again. In old age I'm like a kid with his naps. Must avoid crankiness. At all costs.

Sleeping the gray days away, and haunting the cold nights like a pale ghost (which I am&mdash pale, I mean, not a ghost... just yet.) I'm getting no direct sunlight anymore, though (when I remember) I do take a vitamin D supplement. My sister sent me an assortment of vitamins, but I rarely remember to take them as I find whole pills impossible to swallow, which may be a factor in this particular instance of memory failure. When I do take them, I must chew them, then wash the vile shards down with water as quickly as possible. The vitamin D gels are easier, as I just suck the gel until it dissolves enough to be punctured with a tooth, and then squeeze out and gag down the oily liquid and wash away the taste, along with the flattened and partly dismembered carapace of the gel capsule. Such are the delights remaining to me in my dotage.

But the sleep, that's the real surprise. I've been plagued by insomnia so much of my life (and still sometimes encounter it) that I'm always a bit shocked when I wake from one of my unintended naps. Today, for example, I took what I intended to be brief refuge from the chill under the blankets and ended up falling asleep for some four hours. A similar nap had occurred Tuesday evening, when I inattentively let my phone run out of charge and got under the covers while waiting for it to power up enough that I could reconnect to the Idernets, and then after waking remained compos mentis only a couple of hours before crashing back into the metaphorical hay until near dawn.

Then when I checked the forecast about ten o'clock this morning, today was predicted to have a high of 55, but when the unintended map on which I then embarked ended the room was so dim that I was sure I'd slept through that peak and would soon be going to the mailbox in the dark if I did not rise and quit the warm covers immediately, but it turned out to only be a few minutes short of three in the afternoon. The clouds had so thoroughly failed to burn off while I slept that the predicted high had been reduced to a mere fifty degrees, which we had already reached. WTF, California.

It now looks like it will remain cold for the rest of November, but unless the forecast is changed (a pretty likely event) the first week of December will uncharacteristically mild, with highs in the sixties every day. Forecasts are by no means certainties, but I'd surely be delighted if this prediction were fulfilled. It's nice to have a warmish break in a chilly month, and it could certainly moderate December's utility bill. But for now there is no break. There is even a heavy fog advisory for the Central Valley, especially around the delta. Maybe it presages an old fashioned valley winter, or maybe it's just a fluke. We haven't had such a winter in quite a while, so if we do get one I'd expect some serious and probably deadly pileups on the highways, as a lot of people will have forgotten how to drive in those conditions, and a lot of recent arrivals wouldn't even know about it.

But Thanksgiving fog! Now there's some holiday nostalgia! I don't know if we'll be getting any heavy fog this far north, but if we do I'll having mixed feelings about it. I dearly love a nice fog, but I won't be able to get out and walk in it the way I used to. That will make me sad. But then things are pretty sad these days anyway, so maybe it would be worth it. In for a penny, in for a pound. Is that what that means? Hell, I don't even know anymore. I guess that's sad too.