Suzette Haden Elgin's Blog, page 9

Thursday; poem...

Entangled

I am all tangled up now
in the thunderstorms.
Because my beloved son died
during a plague of thunderstorms.

A net of looming black clouds is wound round my throat.
A net of rolling thunder is wound round my arms.
A net of stabbing lightning is wound round my legs.
A net of pouring rain is wound round my spine.
A net of pounding hail is wound round my body
and my body's parts.

Black clouds wound me.
Thunder wounds me.
Lightning wounds me.
Rain wounds me.
Hail wounds me.

Somewhere there is an instrum...

Thursday...

Yesterday -- as you already know -- was a miserable day for me, although we didn't have many storms after all. My consulting project is stalled because the client hasn't yet signed the contract, which means I have a huge amount of work that I could be doing but don't dare tackle yet. The work is all blocked out [in the unsigned contract:] and ready to go, and the wasted time frustrates me mightily. If I hadn't been so miserable I would have at least tried to work on the novel ... but I wasn't ...

Wednesday...

I'm uneasy and fretful today, because of the thunderstorms predicted for today and tonight and tomorrow and tomorrow night. They say this storm system will be out of here by Friday, but that Thursday's storms will be really severe. That's hard on me.

I'll be starting the day by trying to get my laundry done before the bad weather starts, since it's bad for our washer and dryer to go through the intermittent power-offs during the storms.

And then I'm planning to start trying to sort out materi...

Tuesday...

Today we have to go vote. Our polling place is the Old Alabam Schoolhouse, a building that looks exactly like it sounds. The seating inside is church-pews. We'll be taking Sheba with us; George will go vote while I babysit her and then I'll go vote while he takes a turn. That's simpler than setting up her "Watch the house!" arrangement, which involves a dog crate with a folding pen around it, newspapers for emergency use, a batch of little toys, and a tiny bowl of dog treats. The folding pen ...

Monday...

Today we are blessed with bright sunshine -- no stormy weather! Result: I am a whole new person. Sunday I was a flaming pain in the neck, a dispenser of misery and whining; not today. Today I'm different, much nicer to be around; today we are blessed.

[Update at 12:30 p.m. ... now it looks outside as if it were going to just pour rain. We are perhaps less blessed than I thought. Oh, woe; oh, cottonpick!]

[Update at 3:07 p.m. ... it did rain. Only for a minute, but it rained. Faugh.]

I've been g...

Sunday...

Sunday is my day off. Really off. It is -- ironically -- the day I don't do the thirty-minute prayer-and-meditation walk I do the other six days of the week. It was once again stormy weather, I'm sorry to say, but we're promised a dry and sunny day tomorrow; I'm hoping it turns out that way. [Update on Monday: It did turn out that way. Hurrah and gloriosky!]

What I do Sunday morning, after my breakfast of two slices of pumpernickel toast and a cup of coffee, is watch two television shows that...

Catching up...

This has been a very hard week for me -- an endless nonstop sequence of thunderstorms and rain. [There's a poem that explains why the stormy weather troubles me so, at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/631637.html .]

On the other hand, it's been a very good week for George, who has been working down at Michael's shop building, trying to get it into a shape that will let us start packing boxes of things we want to take with us when we sell this place and move, and will give us somewhere to stash t...

Personal note; it's a plan...

During 2009, I kept a "daybook" where I just wrote down what had happened each day. I had a specific purpose; I did it as a Christmas gift for my older daughter. But I have discovered, in 2010, that I miss doing it. I keep scribbling notes about the day's happenings on odd scraps of paper. And it seems to me that LiveJournal is the obvious place for me to start doing it again, in a more systematic manner.

So ... the plan is that every day -- or as nearly every day as I can manage -- I'll do an...

Personal note; eldering; status report...

I haven't posted here for a disgracefully long time; I thought maybe I'd better let you know I hadn't dropped off the face of the Earth.

We've had a wonderful spell of storm-free dry and sunny weather, which has improved my emotional health tremendously; I am so grateful for the break. And so sorry for all the people east and south of us who were hit with the violent weather that passed us by.

I've been spending roughly three hours every day [the number I agreed to:] on the consulting contra...

Personal note; Conestoga...

I need to let you know that I won't be at Conestoga this weekend after all. I'm sorry about that, because I was looking forward to seeing many of you again -- but it can't be helped.

Wishing you a wonderful con!