It's Thursday with a heavy agenda. Hunkering down for winter - stuff that should have been done by now. When it snowed a little earlier in the week, it was a wake up call that we should expect an early winter (good if it holds off but we should expect it and be ready for it). What's on your winter preparedness list? These are some of the things on mine:
- putty the windows. I use the same stuff my Dad used years ago. It's clay-like putty that comes as a roll. You press it into the cracks of the windows and it easily pulls off in the spring. If it's done neatly, it's unobtrusive.
- Got a cool thing for under the door to keep drafts from flowing in. It's a double channel of fabric into which you put foam cylindrical rods. You slip it under the door - nothing to fasten - it holds itself in place with the foam barrier on both the outside and the inside of your door.
- Turn off the outside water and put the hose away.
- Gutter guy coming today now that the last leaves have fallen from the elm tree.
- Leaves raked and disposed of.
- Garage door serviced.
- Snowblower tested - fresh gasoline and additive at the ready as well as the starter extension cord.
- Shovels inventoried and placed by doors
- De-icer purchased.
- Car tires inflated for winter
- Ice scraper in car
- Winter emergency items in car - shovel, ice grippers for getting unstuck, sleeping bag, water, granola bars.
- Gloves - dress and work accounted for
- Yak Trax accounted for.
- Wood pile covered
- Fatwood kindling purchased
- Furnace serviced
- Currant bushes covered.
- Grills put away
- More!!!!!
Last night writing group. I led the prompts. One was picture collages with 4-5 disparate pictures taped together - bizarre images - the challenge to weave them into a story. The second prompt was a list of the 90 weirdest phobias. The last prompt was a list from the hilarious website Stuff White People Like.
Here's what I wrote for the picture prompt I chose which had a picture of a boy and girl kissing, a jellyfish, an armadillo, and a woman dancer with finger extension that made her look like a webbed animal. I ended up substituting a horseshoe crab for the armadillo (an armored animal).
I met Derek for the first time in Sandwich - Cape Cod. His family was vacationing in the next cottage over so we ran into each other here and there, mostly on the beach. He wasn't friendly, scowly actually, but his parents were really nice, let my mom pick their wild beach plums for her famous Beach Plum Jelly. His dad always had a big smile for me. But Derek, not so much. I know now he was shy and self conscious - physical deformities will do that to a kid. And really it wasn't so bad. I didn't care or really notice much his club foot or his webbed fingers. He had some kind of digit malformation in the womb. His mom said it was because she ate too much horseradish when she was pregnant.
We became friends on July 4th when I was ten and he was twelve. I remember that day vividly because I can, even after all these years, remember the searing pain. And really, I'd expected it to come from the horseshoe crabs that exploded in population that summer - something about the warmer than normal Gulf Stream that warmed the Cape before it veered out across the Atlantic to the English coast.
I was peering anxiously at the ocean floor, treading carefully, evaluating every rock-look-alike to be sure it wasn't really a prehistoric dome of a crab with a foot-long spear coming out its butt. Looking this way, so intent on dark brown orbs that skittered over the sandy ocean floor, made me careless to the other danger at hand. The warm Gulf had also brought schools of jellyfish - clear, nearly invisible, except a refraction of light now and then if the sun's rays caught them just right.
Like a dog with its tail on fire, I ran from the surf, screaming. Derek was first on the scene - knew immediately what had hapened when he saw the red welts on my lower back. A piece of jellyfish had lodged itself in my bikini bottom. Screaming still, I ripped off my bathing suit bottom, unconcered to be naked. I rolled back and forth in the sand, crying for my mother.
Derek ran off. "Asshole!" I thought. I had just learned that and other unsavory but useful words that summer. I crawled on my belly in an attempt to get help from my house.
"Hold on." It was Derek and his dad.
"Dad, you've got to! I know what I'm talking about!"
"Are you sure, son? This is really weird."
"Youre the grown up. I'm not going to do it!"
I looked with astonishment as Derek's dad pulled down the zipper of his cut-offs, revealing the first man-size penis I'd ever seen.
"Stay still. I'm going to urinate on you. Apparently the uric acid will neutralize the sting," he said with soothing authority.
"Are you serious?" I sobbed, not able to take my eyes off his crotch, fascinated despite the agony I was in.
"This will work. I saw it on an episode of Friends," Derek offered.
From that day on, Derek and I have been together. he was one strange knight in shining armor that July 4th - webbed feet and hands and all, but somehow knowing his dad had just peed on me gave him the courage to befriend me and eventually declare his love.
All for today! Shay reappeared - he's been MIA, staying at his friend Josh's for weeks now but now he's back and ready to pitch in with the winter and Thanksgiving prep. Your challenge today - you guessed it - evaluate your winter readiness!!! Maybe you can use my list as a jumping off point to your own efforts!
Peace,
Sarah
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