lowered expectations

I’ve not been in the best of moods lately.  The reasons are various, and I don’t really want to bore the world with details.  So, that being said, please be forewarned and leave now if you’re at all sleepy or have in mind something more interesting to do. 

 

First of all – graduation.  I’m too late to go to the big pomp and circumstance in Phoenix.  No bagpipes and drums for this old lady unless I want to wait until June 2014.  NO WAY!!!  I might not live that long.  I made an alternate plan to graduate in Nashville in July.   Guess what?  I’m too late for that one too.  Now it’s looking like Louisville or Indianapolis in September.  They’ll likely have graduation with taped music or middle-school kids playing recorders.  Instead of Jon Stewart or Stephen King giving the address, it’ll be Richard Bigmember, mayor of Daylight Indiana, who will give a rousing recount of how he inspired city council to buy a new firetruck for the volunteer fire department.  Ok, it probably really won’t be quite that bad.  Anyway, Daylight is way too small to have a city council or a mayor.

Work.  Have I mentioned about being burnt out at work?  The last cinder became a flake of ash today.  There was hope that some meaningful work might come my way, but that was all dashed today by our corporate executives at headquarters.  If they didn’t pay me so well, I’d have left long ago.  It’s going to take some major creative writing to come up with a reasonable resume that will, with any luck, help me find a way out of there.  I’ve done nothing but meaningless, mundane work for the past 10 years.  hmmmmm...I can probably copy and paste right from my performance appraisals.  Embellishing the trivial has been a long-term career strategy for me. 

So, on a happier note, our apples trees are loaded with apples this year.  Last winter, I trimmed them back and perhaps that made them more fruitful.  Unfortunately, the birds picked the cherry trees clean before the cherries ever got ripe.  So it goes.  Our apples are just a bit smaller than golf balls right now; still rock hard and green.   

got apples?

 

What to do with so many apples?  Apple pie, apple cobbler, apple cake, apple dumplings, and fried apples are about the extent of my apple repertoire.  I used to take a sack of apples to my grandparents’ house on weekends and make a skillet of fried apples for them.  My grandfather liked to put them over vanilla ice cream, but I don’t think he liked eating them as much as he liked watching me peel the apples and cut them up.  When he got old and my grandmother lost most of her mind to Alzheimer’s, he liked to watch me do any kind of domestic work – cooking, folding laundry, doing dishes, dusting, etc.  He said it reminded him of normal life, something he missed when he wasn’t able to do chores anymore.

I finally dug a small flower bed and put Timothy in the center of it.  You might recall I bought him last summer.  He sat patiently all winter waiting for me to give him something to do.  I imagine Gracie will test him tomorrow while I’m gone "to work”.  Timothy and I have similar work situations, except my chains are imaginary and his are real.  If those flowers survive long enough to bloom, I'll post another photo later in the summer.   

Faithful Timothy