her birthday was actually yesterday, and all day i kept thinking, I HAVE TO CALL AUNT SANDY AND WISH HER A HAPPY BIRTHDAY, but then suddenly it was midnight and the entire day had escaped.
so now, happy belated birthday, instead. i hope it was lovely.
it’s a birthday-rich period of time right now. jim’s b’day is sunday, randy’s is next friday.
and it’s just after six and i’ve been lying in bed for at least an hour and decided i might as well get up, although it irritates me to be up now although i just saw a jogger runing along and felt infinitely lazy and slothful.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY AUNT SANDY, there, at least i’m doing one decent thing at this hour,wishing somebody i care about a happy birthday.
will i accomplish anything else at all today that matters?
at least if i go back to sleep for another hour or two, perhaps i’ll have a less surly friday.
because friday is no time to be surly.
so much has happened since the last time i wrote, and i’m definitely not up for doing all that typing.
it took sears over two hours to fix my flat tire on monday, after they’d said it would take 45 minutes. we had lunch, we wandered around sears, and we spent a lot of time watching the huge gigantic TVs they have there. on one was “the incredibles” and on another was “willy wonka,” so at least there was good entertainment.
but after two hours i was beginning to feel that i lived at sears. also, there are many many people working there although there weren’t many customers and people kept wanting to help us and so this morning i should be happy that i don’t have a boring job at sears trying to wait on non-existent customers.
we were going to leave spfld to go camping by one, or two in the afternoon, but instead we left at 4:15. it’s about a three and a half hour drive down to southern illinois. and it gets dark about 8:30.
we would have made better time, except we didn’t bring a map with us (we didn’t bring quite a few things that we meant to, because of spending the afternoon at sears instead of packing) and so weren’t clear on which exit to take off of I-55, and so we had to take about three different exits and wandered down some country roads for a while before actually going in the right direction.
we got to the campsite at 8:15. fifteen minutes to get the tent up before it got dark.
we did manage this feat somehow, but then our main source of light, the propane lantern i bought last summer, doesn’t work anymore. you are NOT SUPPOSED TO KEEP THE LANTERN ATTACHED TO THE PROPANE because it will corrode and then, even though the lamp looks very shiny and brand-new still, IT WILL NEVER WORK AGAIN.
i clearly didn’t read all of the lamp directions last summer, and at that point MFH and i weren’t spending so much time together so i’d taken my lamp home and put it in the garage after our last camping experience back then, and now it is broken. we threw it away even though i kept saying to him, can’t we fix it somehow? can’t we poke something into the hole in the bottom of the lamp to make it become unclogged. no way, jose.
we had one smaller, battery-powered lamp and a few citronella candles that didn’t give off much light. we managed to make a delicious dinner anyway, and by the time we were finished all the other campers there had gone to bed.
we were at Giant City State Park, which is a very beautiful place, but the tent campsite leaves a little to be desired. isn’t the whole point of camping getting away from it all, including other people? but this campsite was a big wide open place. there were lots of trees, but there was nothing to separate one individual campsite from another, so we could see and hear all the other campers there. it was supposed to hold 14 tents, but on the first night there were only three other tents at the place. when we first got there, many children were running around all over the place, but like i said, by the time we’d fixed dinner they were all in bed, thank goodness.
what would it have been like if all the sites had been filled? VERY VERY CROWDED. who wants to camp like this? do people really crave that much closeness to others?
now i see hordes of both walkers and joggers outside.
time to go back to sleep.
ok then,
just grace.