Friday, January 15, 2016

Tired, so tired—and bizarre news items

Ever since the holidays I’ve found my days eaten up with errands and doctors’ appointments, grocery store trips and household chores like laundry and kitchen things. I look around my house and see all the things that need to be done. Physical therapy twice a week also takes a chunk out of my week. And sorting papers for the tax return looms as a big chunk of time. The result of all this is that by Friday night I’m exhausted and ready to sleep all weekend, which of course I won’t do. At seven in the morning, I’ll be wide awake.

Every night I swear I’ll go to bed by ten—I have yet to make it before about 11:15. I seem to get a second wind in the evening, get lost in whatever I’m doing, and keep thinking that any minute I’ll go to bed. It won’t happen, especially tonight when I have Jacob who likes to stay up late on weekend.

His mom comes home from a travel agent “fam” trip to Costa Rica tomorrow night. His dad is going to a party, although reluctantly because he has to go alone. So I’ve promised to fix Jordan salmon—which Christian won’t eat. I’m loving getting back in the kitchen more, even if it does make my back scream at me.

I’ll be glad to have Jordan home for lots of reasons, among them the fact that she wants to pack up my Christmas decorations herself—she’s tired of my grocery sacks and has brought plastic bins—one is already full of all the greens I took down. I doubt the rest will fit in the second bin, but I’m ready to have Christmas off my dining table. I think it’s all the first baby steps toward our consolidation or merging households—as we sort, things inevitably get messy. And I, who used to swoop through the house, picking up empty coffee cups and other detritus that bothered me, don’t have the energy for that. I note things that need to be done and think, “Tomorrow.” Really welcome the three-day weekend coming up.

Lest this sound like whining, I’ll admit that bizarre news items have convinced me we live in an age of loons. There’s a legislator in Tennessee who want to inspect the privates of every child before they use a restroom to make sure they go into the correct one for their gender. Apparently he’s concerned about transgender transgressions. How many transgender school children do you know? And I’m quite sure that’s against the law. We spend hours teaching children and grandchildren about inappropriate touching, and then this nut job comes along. I’ve noticed that Republicans seem particularly concerned with our privates and what we do with them.

And now, in Texas, it’s legal to open-carry a weapon into a mental institution. How safe does that sound to you? We can’t do background checks but we can give mental patients a chance to snatch someone’s gun and open fire. Our Fort Worth Southwestern Exposition and Stock Show now also allows open carry with “certain restrictions,” though I never did see what those restrictions are. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, and one of the friends I had lunch with said sometimes she likes to go to the stock show but not this year. She has made a promise to herself not to enter any business that says “We welcome open carry” and to leave immediately if she finds herself in a business that allows it, signage or not. I so agree with her. It’s not that guns scare me—the people who parade them that scare me.

The same friend wondered aloud today if people were as crazy 500 years ago and concluded they probably were. We’re just seeing the 21st-century spin on it. I’m not so sure.

Okay, I’m going to bed and wake up in a happier frame of mind. Everyone needs to kvetch once in a while.

 

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