that kind of a day

I don't know if others do this, but I have a rather childish habit of wishing for flawless days and lumping all things unpleasant into others. Rather than spacing things out, I create your classic miserable day that has not much to show for it (relatively speaking, that is; my life right now is blessed with very few really miserable episodes).

Today was slated to be such a day.

And so of course I let Ed sleep -- may as well, right? -- and I get up at sunrise to open up the coop. I make my way to where we usually place a dish for the stray cat, Cammie, hoping she'd come around before the cheepers found her food. (She didn't and they found it eventually and ate it all. I hope salmon and turkey giblets agrees with their diet.)

I step out on the grass and boom! I get hit in the head with a crusading wasp or some such insect. It's been a long time since a stinging hornet or bee got tangled in my hair but this one did and I had a sore head from the sting for the rest of the morning.

On the upside, it was a pretty sunrise!






Breakfast was delightful too...






...albeit abbreviated because I had a dental appointment. Now, your classic miserable day should have a root canal scheduled for it. But how about this: my root canal, done some 18 months ago, never healed properly (it flares up especially when I travel, which is somewhat frightening, as you really do not want to go searching for a good endodontist on, say, the Isle of Islay, though perhaps they use whisky to dull the pain, which might have its virtues). So I was scheduled to have it redone. If you dislike root canals, you're going to especially dislike retreatments, which use pain as the barometer of what the problem might be. (How about now: does this hurt?)

On the upside, I really like my endodontist and we exchanged some good stories about life's transitions, especially those pertaining to our children.

Afterwards, you'd think I'd settle down to a pleasant session of reading and writing on the porch. The weather is just perfect for it! But first of all, I really don't much care for the book I'm reading (it's junky; I love books that are gripping, leave you with a pleasant feeling at the end of it all and are well written -- it's a surprisingly rare combination, considering how many books are published each year) and second of all, it's also a good day to do the side mowing. (Side mowing is what I call the mowing of places where the big mower wont reach.)

I haven't done this since prior to the wedding.  We have a lot of wood chips on the property and when I work the hand mower over chipped areas, I send the damn things flying in all directions, many of them my way. I always forget to put on long pants (and they would have to be pretty thick to withstand the attack) and so I get my legs banged up from flying chunks of wood. (If you zoomed in closely on my legs in photos from the wedding, you would have noticed the bruises. There were many and no, they did not heal in time.)

On the upside, I racked up a good number of steps on my stepping app while pushing the hand mower.

Now, I could have resumed writing. Or picked up another book. But no -- I decided to work on my travel budget for the remaining trips I have scheduled for this year. That's never a pleasant task because the imagination always exceeds available resources and so the job is to scale down and make do (for the remaining trips, I'll be staying mostly in rooms with kitchens, or at places that offer half board).

On the upside, working on trip budgets does remind me that I do have travel in my life and after my beloveds and the farmette, nothing thrills me more than thinking ahead to a trip. It's a thrill that even Ed, who knows me too well, fails to fully understand. [Conversation this morning: so why go away if you like it here now? And me, for the umpteenth time: I'm programmed that way. I loved it when I was a teen, I love it as an adult. Time will tell if I will love it when I am so old that can no longer fully hear or see my environment.]

And so long as we're doing unfavorite tasks, I tell myself, why not downsize my book collection some more? I set a goal of 40 books that I will be giving later in the day to the library. That's not especially unpleasant, although it was rather discouraging to see how many of these books had a bookmark stuck in the middle -- as in: I bought the book on impulse and it was not good enough to finish.
 
At some point though, I say to myself -- enough! Time to exhale a little. And I take a look at my flower beds...











...and I do sit down on the porch. On the not so upside, I declined politely the endodontist's offered Vicodin and so, of course, I suffer the consequences.