Soon

Saturday:

How is it March already?

The weather has been very mild recently, some days reaching 75F/23C. Skies are clear and very blue. Our fruit trees (cherry, plum, maybe the apple) are either in bloom or about to bloom. I can see birds starting to build nests. And yet, winter is not yet over, not for another 20 days. 

Dave is behind me using the food processor to make hummus for dinner. It's loud. This is one of the consequences of having an open floor plan to this house. The kitchen is at the center of the house and open to everything. You can't cook without the whole house smelling like what you're cooking. If you leave something on the kitchen counter, the whole house looks cluttered and messy. 

I complain about the kitchen enough, I think. Given a choice, I would not choose to live in another house with an open floor plan, especially one centered around the kitchen. 

I'm in a complaining mood today, I think. I'm not sleeping well and for some reason the cat has been insisting on trying to wake me up about an hour after I fall asleep, no matter what time I fall asleep. We make sure he has food and water and some treats before we go to bed--and if I'm up in the night, which I usually am, I check his food and treats and rinse and refill his water bowl to encourage him to drink more--but he still insists on waking either me or Dave up. Last night, it was me. Sometimes I do get up and then he wants me to follow him to his food bowl and stand there while he eats. Sometimes he wants fresh treats. He's not a kitten anymore. I think he forgets that he has food and treats. I also think his sense of smell is fading, so he can't smell the aggressively fishy canned food we leave out for him overnight. 

We're all getting older.

Until last week, Gray Kitty had never been outside the front door. We often let him onto the courtyard which has a very high wall that he can't get over, and we let him onto the patio which has a shorter wall that he once could have scaled, but with his arthritis has not been able to. He's been out the back to where the horse corral is with Dave as his chaperone, but he'd never been out the front door because there is no fence in the front of our house, it's just dusty scrub and fields and neighbors' houses and corals and we've seen coyotes in the middle of the day out there. (Coyotes love to catch and eat small dogs and cats along with the rabbits and birds that they hunt in our area.) But last week, Dave took Gray Kitty out for a walk in the front area of our house. A few days later, they did it again.

And this morning, we let Gray Kitty out onto the short-walled patio and when Dave went out to check on him, he was nowhere to be found. "Check out front," I suggested. And sure enough, Gray Kitty had managed to get over the short wall, but hadn't figured out how to get back into the patio. 

Monday:

It is windy and ugly outside. My phone has been ringing with notifications from the city: Fire watch warnings. Blowing dust warnings. If you have lung ailments or are sensitive to particulate matter in the air, stay inside. It's supposed to rain later, but for now, the mountains have disappeared behind clouds of blowing dust.

I've been doing some laundry today around naps. I've been having some crazy dreams, too, even just when napping. In today's crazy dream, I was in a strange room--strange to me but also somehow my room--trying to figure out how to pin the curtains in the doorway closed so I could take a nap. (I often sleep and wake up in my dreams.) 

After I woke up, Dave and I had a snack together. I had a smoothie (frozen blueberries, frozen strawberries, protein powder, soy milk, avocado) and he had avocado toast (avocado, sliced tomato, Everything But The Bagel seasoning, homemade bread). Now he's back to work and I just finished my Duolingo French lessons. (We do three a day, everyday, and have for the last sixty days. That takes fifteen or twenty minutes a day. One of the new Duolingo taglines is something along the lines that you can learn French in fifteen minutes a day or you can browse social media for fifteen minutes and learn nothing.)

It's Monday, but what did we do with our Sunday? We ran errands (groceries--the guy who brought out the groceries expressed his condolences for Rudy's death as he hadn't seen Dave since December, then the expensive pet food store, Starbucks, Dions, later the mail and Freddy's drive through for a small chocolate malt that we shared). I napped a lot. I journaled. Dave played his video games. We did our French lessons.

One of the things I forgot to do was take some books I've been meaning to drop off at one of the little free libraries we pass on our little routes. I've finished two books so far this year, (I used to read two books a week and sometimes three books a week, but nevermind): How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell and Hungry Heart by Jennifer Weiner. I'm working my way through Rue McClanahan's autobiography about the five husbands she had and the ones that got away. Rue is very vivacious and very tedious--but I often find vivacious people tedious, they're like cartoony, hyperactive leeches, even in print. And in Rue's case, in print and from beyond the grave--fifteen years beyond the grave.

And speaking of graves, the big news for a couple of days was the weirdness around Gene Hackman and his wife's deaths in Santa Fe. Awful stuff. I keep hoping to wake up to some other famous person's obituary--but that happy day hasn't come yet. Hopefully it will be soon. Hopefully it will be very soon.