ismo

My five and a half hours of sleep last night included a visit with the Diva, in which she had created fabulous tailored and color-coordinated costumes for an elaborate mass re-enactment of Alice in Wonderland. I also had a visit with Tron, in which we were walking down a road through some sugarcane fields. I was reading the manual, which said "Take good care of your cane snake, because it is essential to proper functioning of the ecology." I don't like snakes. I glanced into the cane, and saw the head of a rather large snake. Trying to act cool in front of Tron, I said to myself "Don't freak out--they're an essential part of the ecology." To Tron, I said, "Oh look, there's the cane snake." Once I made eye contact, it started out of the thicket toward us, and I was like "oh shit." But it wasn't really a snake. It had a long snaky neck, but also four legs on which it scampered toward us, opening a large mouth with a lot of teeth. It was more like a velociraptor. "Dang, that thing isn't big enough to actually eat us--or is it?" I said to myself, trying to push Tron behind me. Sigh. It was at that point that I woke up.

The power had gone out just as we were getting into bed. It stayed out until just before noon. We got up and read the papers by daylight. The gas stove still works, as long as we light it with matches. Only the igniters are electric. But I didn't want to open the refrigerator, in case the outage went on indefinitely. It was just our neighborhood. The website said it was because of "trees." Hardly informative. We checked to see if any movies were available, but they were not. So we went out to breakfast. The food was not inspiring. But the nice thing about a power outage is that it makes you super happy to be back in a functioning house. Everything feels like a luxury hotel. Electricity, yay!

The Sparrowhawk mowed the lawn with his electric lawnmower, and I pulled weeds with the new weeding tool. It has a long handle, with a set of prongs at the end, and a lever that you step on to drive them into the ground, and then pop the weed out. It doesn't work quite as well as advertised, but I pulled up quite a pile of thistles. I got too hot before I really wanted to quit, and had to come inside and get ice water. I sat down on the couch, and was beating myself up for not working hard enough. It was then I realized that I had taken off one shoe, become lost in thought, and then got up again and was about to walk away with one shoe on. That's how you know you actually are too tired. . . .