Whoosh! What a day

My day started early with an appointment to be fitted for new hearing aids. I’m excited about this, especially since I have a difficult time hearing on my cell phone. I don’t even want to talk about how old the ones I have are, but the new ones will be about a third the weight and half the size. Sound quality is dramatically better, and I’m told I will be able to talk on the phone without holding it to my ear. Noisy restaurant? No problem. I’ll just put my phone in front of you, and then both the phone and my aids will transmit. Can’t wait.

And after all the fuss I made about getting my car back, I don’t get to drive it often, so it was a treat to go all by myself to the hearing clinic. Made me feel like a grown-up girl. Also made me sad, because even close to our neighborhood I discovered new houses, new condos, buildings that have sprung up overnight. Development is destroying what was a neighborhood of modest charming bungalows, particularly around the university, and replacing them with condos and the dreaded stealth dorms. I am so dedicated to preserving the inner city that this destruction hurts.

After that, the day was a mess, though mostly in a good way, I guess. The mowers who couldn’t come last week because of rain came today and plowed through about five inches of weed growth—fungus killed much of our grass. What excites me is that they leveled off the ground cover, so now it should grow thicker instead of leggier. But they were noisy folk. And then the air conditioner guy came and was here for two hours. Don’t get me wrong—I’m as grateful as can be, but it was my nap time. 

While he was working, I was struggling with computer problems, one of which I finally resolved but not to my total satisfaction. The other, an email glitch that keeps me from communicating with two groups I value, continues to plague me. Most frustrating.

A bad day too because it started with Jordan delivering the news of a neighborhood tragedy, a family who lost a grown daughter in a wreck. Later in the morning I heard her ordering a large sandwich tray, fruit bowl, tea, etc. and I asked who we were feeding. It was of course for the bereaved family. It struck me that the custom now of assigning different nights to different people to provide a full meal in such a situation is a good solution, but I was raised to believe you cooked for the bereaved. I have made and delivered a lot of casseroles in my day, and somehow the idea of “store-bought” food seems a little less personal. You used to take a ham, or a big bowl of potato salad, or a cake. I remember once taking a batch of blueberry muffins (homemade of course) in a pretty basket. The times, they are a-changing.