1. I think the term in the construction business is "button up". Today Shawn and Trevor buttoned up the remodel project: the appliances are installed, they cleaned up things, and moved sawhorses, saws, and other thing out of the garage. I'd say I was feeling a little disoriented, oddly enough. We have lived for several weeks without a kitchen and it took me a while to adjust to the reality that we have one now. But, by evening, I started bringing dishes and pots and other non-food items up from the basement and we cleaned them and we started to make decisions about how to set up the kitchen. When the counters are less cluttered with things to put away and we've created some sense of order, I'll take some pictures.
2. While our project was being buttoned up, the Deke and I returned to the Wellness Center and spent an hour or so on cardio and weight machines. I'm noticing the most difference in my midsection (I think the term of art is "core"). It's getting a little stronger. Both of us are sleeping better and we are doing a very good job of encouraging one another to stick to our MWF routine of getting out there.
Before working out, Ed called me after he'd been plowing snow this morning. It's his awful winter job. We met up at The Bean. Joanne, Mom's occupational therapist at the hospital swept in, sat at a table next to ours. I introduced Joanne and Ed to each other and we fell into a fun conversation about Joanne's move to Kellogg, my mom, and her husband's job at Radio Brewing. Before long, her husband, Brendon (sp?) arrived, and the four of us had fun talking more.
When we moved back to Kellogg, I knew I'd have great times with my lifelong friends, like Ed, but I never imagined I'd meet so many new people and make so many fun acquaintances.
3. Back in the old days, when the Deke and I moved to the D. C. area, we spent the first three months living with Molly and Hiram in Alexandria. At that time, I started reading Charles Dickens' Great Expectations on buses and on the Metro and other places, but, for some reason, when I came to Kellogg to help out with Mom in November, even though I brought the book with me, I stopped reading it.
I've decided to return to Great Expectations -- it's quite a different book than The Bronx is Burning. I started it over again and, for some reason, three years later, I'm enjoying it more. Dickens wrote the story in the first person, so everything happens from Pip's point of view. The early part of the story sets in motion Pip living with his cruel sister and kind brother-in-law and dives into a weird tale about a escaped convict whom Pip encounters in the marshes.
When I read fiction, it's marveling at a story's point of view that I enjoy the most and, in the early part of Great Expectations, when Pip is feeling frightened and guilty (he stole from his sister), Dickens brings those feelings alive in the landscape of the marsh. From Pip's anxious and guilt-ridden point of view, the marsh becomes a hellscape of fog, cattle, mud, and darkness, all of it seeming to bear witness to what Pip feels because of the petty crime he committed and the escaped convict he confronts.
I love how Dickens' brings landscapes (and cityscapes) alive with his characters' feelings as these characters project what's happening inside of them onto the physical world outside of them and the physical world comes surrealistically animated and distorted by their guilt, fear, anxiety, and other emotions.
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