Cougar of Simmer

Still tired. I wanted to sleep forever, but only managed to stay in bed till about six, when the thunder arrived. You'd think I would be floating around feeling all saintly after all my caregiving of late, but no, I am in an awful mood and have developed a crystal clear reason why I can never ever write this stupid book. It's entirely possible that I'm right, too. It wouldn't be the end of the world, because there are lots of other things i could be working on, but it would be sad. And frustrating.

I went out for a walk but it was just hard every step of the way, and I was never glad I was doing it, as the Sparrowhawk suggested I might be. It was a trudge, and my feet hurt. I had to go out and do some shopping, because we are meeting friends for a picnic after church tomorrow, so we must bring food. I bought pre-roasted chickens and cut them up, and I have boiled the eggs for deviled eggs, but I'm not deviling them right now. At the moment, I don't feel I will be very good company. Oh, and I will mention in passing that one of our group will not be there because she was on vacation with her mother, in Italy, and her mother died. On vacation. In Italy. I wish these things would stop happening.

Speaking of mothers, the man who finally obtained title to my grandmother's house, after it sat empty for many years because of legal weirdness, has found my mother's address and written to her. The horror! As I may have mentioned, my grandmother's second husband, no blood kin thank all the gods, was a horrible man. He was a real Nazi--not just figuratively, but in fact. He was a hate-filled psychopath who spread misery all around him. This is why the house was sitting empty--because various Nazis thought he had promised the property to them, and they were fighting over it, and my parents wanted nothing more to do with this disaster. So it sat there, apparently stuffed full of papers and memorabilia, because my grandmother was a bit of a hoarder, until this fellow got hold of it somehow. He contacted me last year, I think in hope that I would come and haul away some of this stuff. I consulted my siblings, who were horrified, and and told him none of us wanted anything to do with it. He has sent some of the papers to an Illinois historical society archive, which is just fine. But now he is poking around my mother, and this is the last thing any of us want to deal with. These "papers" could be nice letters from our great-aunts, slightly crazy but harmless. Or they could be more hateful rantings of a poisoned mind. None of us care to find out. What we'd really prefer is if the whole thing just burned down. So I am NOT PLEASED that my mother is now contemplating what to do about this. I've already told her as nicely as possible that I do not feel equal to assisting her in any endeavors related to more crap from her ancestors.

I see a bad moon rising . . . I see trouble on the way . . . I think it's time for this day to end.