Daily Doses

Thursday, I had a day of adventure, roaming around town to my favorite junktique and so forth.  It was a good day.  I took a few forgettable pictures, but it was nice to be out with the camera until the rain came.  It spattered on the top of the roof of the parking garage I was shooting from enough to run me in, and so I transferred to the local bookstore where I found some things to read, sat for a long time outside there once the rain had passed reading a new book of Billy Collins.

Yesterday, I cleaned pretty much all day long.  I mopped, vacuumed, sunned the feather mattress, flipped the regular one, did endless loads of laundry, scrubbed fixtures, generally reclaimed the house from the edge of doom.  It's still not company-ready, but I feel a quiet sense of satisfaction when I walk to the kitchen for a glass of water or a Diet Mt. Dew.

Today, I've been online some catching up, but mostly I've been reading and listening to music.  I got a double CD from Billie Holiday that I've been listening to nonstop for the past two days, but exquisite as she is, I feel too much like too many of her lyrics too often, and she's started making me sad, so I've switched back to the long and elaborate playlist I've put together from a bunch of music I was recently gifted with by a friend and some stuff I already had.  Throw Nanci Griffith, Wilco, David Wilcox, Avett Brothers, Josh Ritter, and Pierce Pettis together and let them spin.  Mostly, this list doesn't make me sad, except when it does....  I'm trying to weed out the ones that break my heart.  I'm tired of things that break my heart right now.

I'm settling into the summer.  I'd like to see more of my friends, but that's probably not going to happen much.  They've all been more or less eaten by their children or just simply disappeared off the face of the world, so I will try to work in a visit here or there and work on my trips alone.  The big one is coming up in a little while, and I'm getting everything ready for it.  I'm actually looking forward to the drive up.  If I can avoid having to change another tire on the side of the freeway in North Tennessee, I'll enjoy just being behind the wheel watching the world unfold in front of me.  Maybe this time I will bring back a picture of the giant metal chicken from that gas station/chicken joint.

After that, I've decided that this is the summer I am going back to Ocean Springs, and this is the summer I'll go find the ruins of Windsor.  Those I can do in a day.  I might try to do Graceland this summer, too, but only if I can get somebody to go with me since that will be an overnight trip.  I'd love to see Memphis again, go to Sun Records, do the whole thing properly.  Maybe I can find somebody who'll go.

Now, though, it's time to finish up here and get back to the book.  It's nice to be in this lazy pace after the frantic pace of the school year.