lazy saturday

As always, I started out this day with grand ambitions -- laundry, housecleaning, sealing the sunroom windows in plastic, paperwork for school -- and so far I have:

- become conscious
- made coffee
- journaled
- watched videos on the Internet
- found more checks so I can pay rent (but haven't written the rent check)
- made tea

So productive.  No wonder my housework never gets done.

Right now my tea is steeping, wrapped in a thick yellow kitchen towel, in the big brown English teapot I found for two dollars at the Salvation Army several years ago.  I absolutely love this teapot.  It has several features that previous teapots of mine have lacked: a small metal tip on the spout that apparently serves to keep it from spilling when poured, a stamp on the bottom that says "made in England," and a built-in internal strainer in front of the spout that means that I can use looseleaf tea and not need a strainer over the cup.  Delightful.

I may need to knit a tea cozy one of these winters.  Right now the kitchen towel suffices, and I am not allowing myself to knit anything until I finish knitting the infernal blanket I've been making for my sister for the last four years.  I designed it myself, and it's going to be beautiful (lots of smoky purples and blues broken up by pewter eyelash yarn: I was going for "ocean" or "sky" but Chris said, when I first pulled it out at his place a month or two ago, "That looks like a Muppet skin!"  I hate that he's right), but I should have thought a little harder before using sock yarn and size 7 needles.  It's taking forever and I'm so sick of the project I'm tempted to do what my petite grandmother always did and stop with a lap blanket.  But no.  I will soldier on.  Fucking blanket.

Also I'm running out of looseleaf black tea, so the time has almost come for me to return to the seedy Russian grocery store and see if they restocked on Assam.  They have great deals on imported tea, and you can get a pound or so for thirteen or fourteen dollars, whereas at Wegmans you'd have to sell your car and half your soul for the same quantity.

Hard to believe it's only Saturday.  I awoke from dreams of exploring Incan ruins and geeking out over thoughts of long-dead human beings having once lived what they must have considered mundane lives in those very spaces to the sinking conviction that it was a.) Sunday and b.) noon and I had wasted the remainder of my vacation.  So to check my phone and learn that it's still only Saturday was like a little gift from my subconscious.  Which is good because I've done nothing worthwhile with my time today.  (But it's vacation!)

It doesn't help that it's a dreary, rainy, foggy day.  I hate this weather in winter.  It should be blizzarding out.  Something about that always motivates me to nest.  This shit?  This shit just makes me want to go right back to bed.

Man, it feels nice to be back on this blog.  Like coming home.  Funny to think that you can click back for glimpses of me ten years ago now.  So much has happened.  So much has changed.  I'm still not quite sure how to go about documenting all of that, so for the time being I'm electing to relax into enjoying the sheer act of writing again, and rambling on about my own mundane life.  The other things will come up when it's time.  No point in forcing it; that's part, I think, of what has kept me from writing for so long, the sense of obligation to discuss my various transformations into the person I am now.  (Some things haven't changed.  I'm still mulish about obligation.)

Well, if I'm not going to do anything else today, I might as well at least get the sunroom windows sealed in plastic.  My heating bill and my bank account will thank me.  At least this year I don't have to go around caulking the edges of all the windows, since last year's labor has held up so well; it really shouldn't take too long.  It's just the jungle of pothos tendrils that will hamper the whole procedure.  (Over the last few months of busyness and generalized anxiety -- god, I'm terrified of dating -- I've let them kind of go, so now I have to prune back the vines that are full of dead leaves.  Sigh.  Poor plants.)

All right.  Once more to the breach.  Must save on gas.