Er, yes, so yesterday was not the best of days, at least not for writing a coherent blahg entry. Today. Hmmm. Yes. Work was pretty calm, like it is probably 99% of the time. Lots of folks were already out for the holiday weekend. I met Mouse for lunch and then, when I reached a good stopping point a half hour before I usually leave, I closed up shop. Drove home and indulged in a bit of online shopping before hoofing it downtown to meet the GG at the Old Town bar for dinner. (Er, after I paid the summer property tax bill. Please DO NOT MAIL IT until the last day of July.)

Online shopping? What the heck. I hate to shop as a rule and hardly do much more than grokkery shopping on a good day. But. I have been wearing my current pair of Chaco hiking sandals day in, day out for almost two years. They are holding up but I feel like the soles are getting just a leetle wee bit on the thin side. I remember my last pair of Chacos at a similar age. Uber Kayak Woman, Mouse, and I escorted Radical Betty out to Round Guano Island for what turned out to be her last trip there, at least by water. Who knows what she’s getting up to these days… Anyway, you can read about that little fiasco here if you want. You’ll read about a very steep dirt/gravel slope up from the boat launch. The Chacos I was wearing that day were pretty much threadbare on the bottom and I had to sort of slide down the hill to get back to my kayak. Since I was also helping get Radical Betty down the hill, that was a bit difficult. And then, just a week later, this happened. It’s getting to be about that time again and I decided I was gonna be ready for it this time around. So, Zappos is sending me a new pair. Third verse, just like the first, little bit louder and a little bit worse.

Oh, and some earrings! Why? Just because. Y’know, I didn’t get my ears pierced until I was 37 years old. Why? My parents didn’t approve of it when I was a teenager. Small town, respectable church-going family, yada yada. “Nice” girls didn’t pierce their ears, blah-de blah-de. My parents only played at being authoritarian dragons and I probably could have put up a fuss and gotten my ears pierced but I chose to fight other battles instead. And then I just didn’t get around to it for a long time. My own kids? That was one of the things that wasn’t a battle for me. I decided that long ago. As it turned out they were in 1st and 4th grade when I took them out and got their ears pierced. I remember it because it was the day their Grandma Sally died. Sally died in Florida and the GG called me from there early that morning and I gave the beach urchins the news just after they woke up that day. I offered to take them out of school for the morning. We could go out for bagels or something, just to hang out together. They considered that but they decided to go to school instead. They loved Sally but they didn’t see her very often and I don’t think they knew exactly what they should do or feel. I may have needed to be with them more than they needed me. They went to school and so did I, to do my volunteer work there, which, at that time, was reading with at-risk kids. In a way, I thought that Sally might have approved of that. And after school? We trundled off to the mall to get the beach urchins’ ears pierced. It sounds a little weird now. I know we had been talking about doing it. I’m not sure exactly what prompted us to do it *that* afternoon but somehow, it was a fitting thing to do.

Anyway, when I first got my ears pierced at the advanced age of 37, I went nuts buying earrings for a while. Now? Not so much. In fact, I don’t even wear them all that much these days. And no, the holes aren’t closing up, thank you very much. But I do still have lots of pairs that I like and today, I ordered some holly yashi hoops with danglies that I’ve been coveting for a while. Am I bad? I know I am taarrrred.

But hey, it is 4th of July weekend and people are setting off faarrrworks all over the neighborhood and I love it! It reminds me of the days when the GG and Burke would “compete” with faarrworks. It wasn’t until a while after Burke died and the bomb squad came, that we knew he was probably spiking his with a bit of dynamite!!! (-:

This entry was posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.