Potpourri

Thank you all for your comments on my countertop decision. I’ve received different answers here at work too. It’s pretty much evenly split between the choices. Yes, it would help to have the floors. I may just delay having the counters to wait and see how the tiny samples will look against my wild floors. The floors can be replaced more easily than the counters, plus there aren’t throw rugs to conceal bad counter choices.
Here’s a line my eye fell on while preparing a manuscript for design. I like it. From The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men by Randy F. Nelson, available next fall from UGA Press. A guy is talking on the phone:

“Where are you?” she said. Just a disembodied voice from very far away, like a conscience.

Yesterday I spied our Fearless Leader walking out of Jittery Joes in Five Points and around into the Hodgson parking lot. I yelled his name out my car window, but his turnaround was delayed. Then I called him and told him I was the culprit of the drive-by shouting.
Here’s a bit of folk medicine. Some of the women at the family Christmas in Griffin were talking about breastfeeding, and I learned there are all sort of complications that can arise, including breast infections. Ow! Apparently my great-grandmother–who had nine children, never went to a hospital until she was ninety-something for a pacemaker–advised that to cure breast infections, take a hair comb and actually comb the breast. I was told it worked. Fascinating. I also learned that one of the women in my family filled bottles before there were breastpumps by holding the bottle to her nipple. I guess like a soda dispenser? Bodies are so amazing. And yet usually this process is so secretive. At least to me.
I think I’m over my heartache. At least mostly.
I’ve been house and kitty sitting, and I have really enjoyed (1) having a space to myself, (2) having a cat sleep with me at night, (3) listening to the homeowner’s music and reading her books. I’ve been rereading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and have been enjoying it. I think I may start to write again. She suggests in the first chapter to start writing about your childhood, but that kind of stuff bores me to tears. So I think I’ll start writing about the drug store and other Crystal-related activities, see if I can inspire some microfiction in her voice. I want to feel strong like her. Writing through her eyes makes me want to kick with steel-toed boots. I’m afraid I might pick a fistfight at a bar. And I have a craving to ride a mechanical bull. Or a real one. Or a cowboy.