Wednesday

Well, so far...

Mattress flipped over.
2 our of 3 laundry loads done
swim swammed
id lost

My house cleaner came early and, as always, busts in and gets started. I think she scares most of the dirt and dust away before she even takes a hand to it. She said her daughter was probably coming and I said well, is/when she does, I'd like the 3 of us to flip the mattress. I CAN DO! I do all the time my house. I can do. She is like a bull in a china shop which is not what you want around your things but she's so well intended and I honestly don't have anything that precious. She had that mattress nearly half done before I could ask 'so how do you want to do this?'

She only knocked over a lamp and my already broken spare phone. 'Where sheet. I do next.' So I gave her a sheet and completely forgot that I wanted the mattress pad to go one first because it was still in the dryer. No biggie. The biggie was getting the flip flipped and now it is.

My drivers license, visa and discover cards are in a little case. Nothing else. Some time between the time I got to the pool and the time I got back inside here, it disappeared. I'm thinking it's down in the car - fell out of my swim bag. I'll go down and check in a bit. It's all replaceable - annoying but doable. I'm not going to get all stressed about it. It's not like I need it tonight to go clubbing. I'm probably not even going to do that this week.

And speaking of this week, we got winds a commin'. They are telling us to batten down the hatches and forgodsake put that yard furniture away or clamp it down.

DoberDan - I just learned my first Bosnian. It means Good Afternoon. She tried to teach me another but I told her I could only do one at a time.

I guess I'll go down tot he car now and see if I really do have anything to worry about.

UPDATE!! Clubbing now possible. ID was on the front seat of the car. I retrieved it, put Discover card somewhere else and swapped in card with email address and phone number.

Here's last night's bear...

Flying in the paper cup

When I was 6, we moved from Kansas City, MO to Winston-Salem, NC. I had to learn to add m'am and sir to every response to an adult. I spent the second half of the first grade trying to wade through my teacher's thick southern accent - not very successfully, actually.

Next door lived Stevie (my age) and his sister (a couple of years older). They got bicycles that year for Christmas. The bicycles came in a giant wooden box just like the box that my litter cabinet came in yesterday (hence this remembrance floated to the surface).

But, instead of tossing it like I did, they set it up on the back yard. Stevie's dad was a pilot for Piedmont Airlines which was a major airlines in the South back in the day. They got sold to an airline who got sold to an airline who got merged with another airline that got sold to an airline BUT in 1955 they were a BFD and Stevie was all about airplanes.

He took his crayons to the inside of the wooden box and created his own airplane complete with cock pit dashboard, and passenger seats with windows. He called it his Paper Cup. Getting to take a trip in Stevie's Paper Cup was huge. It was a special invitation and I loved it. I had a little pink suitcase that I would pack and take with me. He provided running commentary and the flight. I do remember we always seemed to land and take off from a runway called Niner-Niner.

I traveled a fair amount in the 1st and 2nd grade. It was wonderful to sit in that little wooden box and go anywhere Stevie wanted.

Years later, I was sitting in a physics class trying to figure out the ramifications of actually dropping the class since I was clearly going to fail it when the professor suddenly caught my attention. He was talking about the aerodynamics of a small airplane and called it a Piper Cub. Piper Cub???? you mean not Paper Cup???? OMG really??? Fortunately I was sitting on the back row so not too many people heard me laughing out loud.

My tweets

• Wed, 10:11: The Stranger is a newspaper that started at exactly the time… https://t.co/32X1q117IS https://t.co/JHrNJKI57G

Very productive

All of the laundry is washed and put away. The bed has now been remade to include the mattress pad. The house is very clean. The house cleaner got lost in her work today and did at least half again as much as she usually does. And the house shows it. Very nice.

And I made 3 dolls and I got the next swimsuit all done but the elastic (which, on a swimsuit, is not minor but still...)

This windstorm is getting a whole lotta press. There are warnings everywhere you look or listen. I do hope it turns out to be more warning that wind. Sitting here in a 110 year old building surrounded by buildings as big and high as this one or bigger, on asphalt, gives me a bit of a bullet proof vest, I hope, against both damage and lack of electricity. BUT I will be making sure every gadget I own is charged to the max.

Amazon Prime for the win

I have a tablet on my dinner table and during meals, I often peruse AskMetaFilter or flip through Zolt News or read magazines.

I hate the individual magazine apps. The library's magazine app isn't much better so last year I bought a year's subscription to the Texture app and it's almost worse than the other two. I just want to flip pages and read words. I don't want to have to click on shit to see words and then try to guess how to get back to where I was. I had vowed to go back to tree killing old fashioned paper magazines when my Texture subscription expires.

Except. Now. Maybe... I won't have to.

When I turned on the tablet tonight there was a little note from Amazon saying that they had books and magazines free for me to read as a Prime Member. And, I'll be damned if they don't!! There are now lots of free, very interesting looking books. But there are a pile of really interesting looking magazines.

And they are the kind with all the words on the page and you must flip through!!! No more guessing or clicking. Just flip, read and flip. People, Entertainment Weekly, Martha Stewart, HGTV and more. And they are on my phone, too. I'm so jazzed about this. I feel like there's got to be a hitch somewhere but I haven't found it yet.

Very cool.