1. Because of a slight miscommunication, Mom's cleaning woman didn't come on Thursday or Friday, so this morning Carol did some light cleaning in the kitchen and, in addition, cleared up some clutter: the epsom salts and slug killing Coors Light beer went in the garage; the can of chow mein and the breadmaking machine to the basement; three nearly empty bottles of liquor off the floor into a cupboard; she cleared some items off the kitchen table. It may not seem like much, but Mom's kitchen suddenly seemed to have grown, contributing to our halting and careful efforts to expand Mom's incredible shrinking house.
2. I never learned how to be a handyman, and when I undertake the simplest of tasks involving tools, I get nervous. Mom's new license plates for the Malibu arrived in the mail and I took several deep breaths, found a screwdriver, put the new tags on the plates, and succeeded in removing Mom's expired plates and putting on the new ones. Not long afterward, I napped.
3. Carol and Paul's daughter Molly's birthday is on Monday, but we had a quiet birthday celebration today in the Roberts' backyard. When she was born, in 1990, Lynette and I lived out in the country near Marcola, OR and remembering hearing the news of Molly's birth and the stories surrounding her coming into the world in Glendive, MT calls up memories of living for eighteen months in nearly absolute quiet, sitting on our front porch watching elk come down from the hills to feed, chopping and stacking firewood for the wood stove that heated our small rental home, in short, enjoying the pleasures of our brief experiment with rural life, an experiment that ended when I was hired full time at LCC, a job that started in January of 1990 and necessitated our move back to Eugene.
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