“Have you heard of Morris dancing?” my husband asked.
Curious I looked it up. Morris dancing a a type of English folk dancing in which the dancers wield sticks, swords or handkerchiefs. This description intrigued me even more so I watched a video of it on You Tube.
“See. This is your heritage,” I said to my husband.
“Yeah, no wonder I have such bad time,” he laughed.
“I think I’m getting fat,” my husband announced. He pulled up his t-shirt to expose his flat, white stomach, pinched a bunch of skin and said, “See.”
My husband is very thin, so I’m not sure how to take this. “Are you making fun of me?” I ask.
“You’re paranoid,” he said. “I’m not making fun of you. I’m just telling you that I’m getting fat. I need to start running again.”
When we got up the next morning, I suggested that we go for a run. I really want to run and haven’t been able to successfully make myself a runner yet. You can read my running chronicles here and here and here. I didn’t do any better at this whole running thing this morning either.
We went the hilly way. After running over the bridge near our flat, I’d already had just about enough of this whole running thing. “How long have we been running?” I asked my husband. I was so sure that we were halfway finished and it was time to turn around and head back home.
“Four minutes and thirty seconds,” he said as he bounced along.
I stopped. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I looked down the street that was all down hill and kept thinking I’m going to have to run back up it. “I’m walking. Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”
He jogged away. He kept getting farther and farther away until he was out of site.
I figured he’d be coming back soon so I sat on a bench and waited and waited. He didn’t come back. So I walked all the way down the hill to the roundabout. I didn’t see him anywhere down their either. So I went back to the bench and waited some more.
Then I started to get mad because he had the keys to the house and the cold wind was giving me an earache. “I can’t believe he just ran off and left me out here to freeze with no coat,” I thought. “He didn’t even tell me which way he was going.” I figured the best thing to do was go back to our flat and wait for him on the front stairs.
After walking for a little while my anger started to turn into worry. “What if he gets hit by a car or has a heart attack? How will I know what’s going on? I can’t even get in the house.” This is how my brain works. Before I got too deeply into panic mode he came bounding up behind me and all was forgiven.
That’s the last time I’ll be running outside in this cold. Apartment running will suit me just fine until the weather warms up.
I must be hard of hearing. That’s the only excuse for the difficulty I have understanding what people are saying to me in a noisy room. Having a conversation in the midst of the buzz of many other conversations going on all around you is hard of a lot of people, but I think it’s harder for me. It’s probably even more difficult for the person I’m trying to have the conversation with, because it usually goes something …
Other person: Isn’t the weather lovely today?
Me: Pardon me?
Other person: I said, isn’t the weather lovely today?
Me: I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. What did you say?
Other person: The weather, isn’t it nice today?
Me: (I have no idea what was just said to me, but I know it ended with day and was a question. If I ask her to repeat it again she’ll be annoyed, so I’ll just have to guess.) I’m doing well. How have you been?
Maybe the problem isn’t really my hearing. Maybe I’m just a really bad guesser.
I’ve thought about learning to read lips. I’m good at reading. I especially like reading novels and take-out menus. Learning to read lips should be no problem.
I’m on my second attempt of making sourdough bread. I thought my husband would be enthralled by the process of getting a sourdough starter going, so I just spent a few minutes telling him all about it. When I was done he turned to me and said, “And then I came down this street…”
My stepson has been having problems reading at school. He’s been complaining of headaches and eye strain, so it was time to take him to the eye doctor. Of course, he needed glasses. Jealous of all the glasses wearing going on in the family, my husband got his eyes checked too. We all knew that my husband needed glasses. He used to have some that he never wore. When we moved we found them under the computer desk with the lenses so scratched no one would ever be able to see out of them. So, he threw them away.
We all have very different approaches to wearing glasses.
Wearing glasses is old hat for me. I’ve done it since I was in 4th grade. My lenses are constantly smeared and smudged and I just ignore it. I’ve learned to see around the smudges. I only clean my glasses about once a week. I figure why even bother, they just get smudged again in a few minutes.
Since my husband’s gotten his new glasses, he spends more time looking at himself in the mirror saying things like, “I really look good in glasses.” He keeps his glasses very clean. He’s always cleaning them. If even the tiniest smudge appears on them, he cleans it off immediately. “How can you see out of those things,” he often says to me while closely examining my glasses.
My stepson’s method for dealing with his glasses is the most unusual. When he does wear them–which is almost never–he puts them up to his eyes while holding the arms. He rarely ever lets them rest on his face. Instead, he holds them up off of his nose takes a quick look at something then quickly removes them, returns them to their case and shoves the case in his pocket. He treats them like some kind of disease.
The reason he was having problems reading is because his bad vision is straining his eyes. If he wore his glasses all the time, he wouldn’t have this problem reading, but of course he won’t wear them. Instead, he’s gotten some reading glasses somehow, from somewhere–the kind of reading glasses old people buy from the drugstore. He insists on wearing those to read because his eyes are bothering him. His eyes wouldn’t bother him if he wore his glasses, but you can’t tell him anything.
Now that we’re all bespectacled we can go out together as one big, happy nerdy chic family. Some of us are nerdier than others. And some of us are chicer than others. But we can still all get along.
Our neighbor is vacuuming again. I swear she vacuums 5 times a day. What are they doing up there? I mean really. They’ll come home for a weekend away and within 10 minutes of walking in the door, the vacuum is running. I just don’t get it. I sweep once a day, usually. Okay, I admit it. I only sweep every other day, but the floor looks clean. Aren’t appearances all that really matter?
It’s Guy Fawkes Night. All this time I thought it was Guy Forks Night, but I was recently corrected. Apparently, this holiday has nothing to do with forks which is unfortunate because I was quite enjoying the idea of celebrating guys and forks. They’re such useful inventions. Well, I guess guys aren’t really an invention. Anyway, none of this matters because it’s not about that, this night is all about Guy Fawkes. So here’s my understanding of what we’re celebrating.
Guy Fawkes was a Catholic who was being oppressed by the Protestants. He and some other Catholics decided to show the Protestant powers that be that they weren’t going to be kicked around anymore. So they rented a cellar beneath the Parliament building. Obviously, they had few national security concerns back then. I mean what were they thinking allowing Catholics to rent out the Parliament basement.
These Catholics were up to no good, let me tell you. They put a whole lot of gunpowder in the basement with the idea that they would blow up the Parliment building killing the King, his family, the evil Prostetant overlords and a few Catholics as collateral damage. It was a great plan, until they got caught on November 5, 1605. They were all drawn, hung, and quartered. And now every November 5th, the English celebrate this by setting off fireworks in their yards.
Despite my dislike for hypermarts, we went to Tesco’s today to pick up some things that we needed–essentials like rice noodles, peanuts and coconut milk. In the parking lot of Tesco’s, there are these car wash guys. They push these little black carts and wear the required neon green reflective vests that all blue collar workers seem to wear in the UK . I don’t know how much it costs to have one of them wash your car because our car is such a heap that we’ve never bothered to wash it.
Normally, the car wash guys are a group of African men who gather their carts together in a group towards the center of the parking lot and loudly chat and laugh. As you walk by they call out to you, “You need a wash?” To that question we always make a joke about the pitiful state of our car and say it’s beyond washing.
Today things had changed. The car wash guys were spread out. One man with his cart was positioned on the crosswalk at each row of cars. The men were all Eastern European now. Gone was the happy car wash mood. It was replaced by disdain. As we passed each man he looked at us like he wanted to get into a fight. I could just imagine them saying, “I will wash your car. Then I will kill you and stuff your body into my little black cart.” Maybe they just don’t like their green reflective vests.
I thought I really enjoyed my ride flight on the London Eye. Then I saw the pictures taken of me on the flight. Looking back maybe I didn’t enjoy it at all. How else can I explain all the crazy faces I was making?
