Monday, Today

Sunday night I couldn't sleep at all. My sleep schedule has been thrown way off by god knows what, PMS, the weather, some shift in reality. I know from long, hard-won experience that it will take me weeks to balance it back onto its knife-like edge. For now, I'm sleeping between seven p.m. and eleven-thirty or twelve at night, then again from five or six until six-thirty or seven. In between those hours, I'm a zombie, both from sleep deprivation and the return of the allergies that the snow had temporarily quelled.

So those are my woes.  This was my Monday:

I got up, made Dave's lunch, changed out of my pajamas into a different set of pajamas and got back into bed. A little while after, I got a text from my mom asking if I wanted to go to the waffle place for breakfast.  I did, so I got up and got ready, got dressed in actual clothes, and waited for her to come pick me up.

Breakfast was a terrific buttermilk waffle topped with goat cheese and port-soaked cherries and coffee. My mother had a bacon buttermilk waffle with eggs and coffee. It was good, but I knew I'd pay the price later for eating pure carbs for breakfast. Sometimes it's worth it.

During our visit, we talked about my former stepfather and how he recently remarried, less than two years after he and my mother divorced. I never liked him very much, nor did anyone in the family, though we all tried to get along with him for a long time for my mother's sake. He was barely tolerable as a loud-mouthed, un- an underemployed bum mooching off my mother, but then he got into a big time racket and became the pastor of a franchised location of a big box church. After that, he became completely intolerable and my brothers and I just threw in the towel and just gave up on him. Now he's on to wife number four. Good riddance.

My mother wanted to go to Costco after breakfast, so I tagged along. Dave and I were at Costco just last Thursday, so I didn't really need anything. But of course it's impossible to go into Costco and walk out empty-handed, so I bought a sleeve of 175 paper bowls, 12 giant rolls of paper towels, and a corn broom to replace the one that I use to sweep the patio. My old corn broom has spent several winters outdoors and is much the worse for it.

After Costco, we went by a big local Asian market, Ta-Lin. My mother had never been there before, so we wandered around a bit looking at the things. I bought some natto to make natto maki and/or natto spaghetti (yum!) and two sets of Japanese cookie cutters shaped like plum and cherry blossoms that I will use at the studio. (I was going to buy some fried tofu skins to make inari sushi, but they didn't have the kind I like. Ditto with the mayo, as they didn't have Kewpie brand.) My mother bought some ginger candy from Indonesia.

I went up to her apartment complex to help her unload her Costco purchases and carry them up to her apartment. Then she brought me home where I changed into my pajamas and tried to pretend to sleep. After years of insomnia, I'm good at pretending to sleep. The Brain isn't fooled of course, though it does like the quiet.

I finally did get in a bit of a nap just before Dave got home. I had decided to skip pilates, so I stayed in bed.  Soon after he left at six, I fell asleep. I was awake for a few minutes when he got home around 7:45, then again when he popped in to drop off something for me for dinner (vegetarian sausage, sauteed onions, brussels sprouts with horseradish, which he put in the refrigerator). Around 11:30, I woke up and had my cold dinner.

I putzed around through the middle of the night, placed an order from Sephora, shopped online at Amazon. I watched a few episodes of MASH that I skipped during my binge watching last week. Now it's dawn again, time to start a new day.  Maybe with enough coffee...