Aha! Here I thought it was *my* fault!

Will ye go, lassie, go?

Not sure why that's always the song that I hum (like a camel) when things get really bad. Maybe it's just in my key. More likely it's that the version I know best is the Fred Neill one, and his voice is always a comfort. 'Ev'.

So, let's see where we are... everyone (except me) is sick, and John, a.k.a. Spleen Boy, possibly seriously. We have pretty much no money and, with half a foot of (unexpected) snow outside, no work likely for me. Everything needs tires and the electric bill came in a gray envelope (blue=normal, white=not so good, gray=give us the money dammit.)

Did I mention that I almost burned the house down? Just finished sweeping up the shattered light bulb and vacuuming the soot off the bed. And after I just changed the sheets and vacuumed the room yesterday. Insult to injury. Yeah.

No wonder I'm singing about pulling wild mountain thyme. Wish it grew up here on the hill.

Day 5 without water.

You have to read that aloud, in the tone used to read the journals of the arctic explorers, to get the full effect.

Actually, it's not quite that bad. Cold water we have plenty of - it's the hot variety that's missing, meaning no restorative bowl of water to sit in for hours on end, recuperating from the woes of the world. Something is wrong with the hot water heater, and John has been trying to fix it, on and off, since early in the week. For a little while we had no water at all, making plenty of the cold variety seem such a luxury that I've quit complaining and/or beseeching the gods.

All the clothing and dishes are dirty, as are the humans (well, this one, anyway, although I do sponge off using a big basin of water heated on the stove. The others take *shudder* cold showers.)

I was all set to go get a room or two at the Lincklaen House and order up turkey club sandwiches and a bottle of Alsacian rose, but I realized that the bill for that would be about the same as for a new water heater, so I've taken to my bed for the duration.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll shovel a path through the kitchen, heat my big basin of water and start washing my way through the dishes. I suppose the clothing could be washed on cold. (I suppose I could as well, although it's not too bloody likely.) I could get a fire going in the woodstove and the fireplace and make something warm to eat. But for now, I'm staying in bed, drinking room temperature beverages (read: chilled) and reading, drawing warmth out of the cat instead of the inverse.

Things are nippy up here on the hill.

It begins.

It's that lake effect stuff that looks like picked apart styrofoam coffee cups. It's snowing here, up on the hill. *sigh*

Confusion...epitaph

I always liked King Crimson, although I did (and still do) find their lyrics a little pretentious - except for confusion being one's epitaph. That, I can relate to. Oh yes indeed.

Musically, I preferred (and still do) 21st Century Schizoid Man. Ah, those days of wildly misspent youth.

Anyway, today's puzzle is this: everything that can go wrong either has done or is in the process of doing so. So why am I not concerned? I can't decide if it's some new spiritual maturity or if I've simply slipped a very vital cog. Hope the former, fear the latter.

As the Pennsylvania Dutch (who weren't, of course, Dutch at all, but German - they were called "Dutch" as a perversion of the German word for "German": Deutsch) back home would say:

Yah well.

First Frost

Yes, folks. The grass is all silvery. I think I'll go outside and take some pictures of my world. If I can figure out how, I'll post them.

Bootstraps

bootstrap |ˈboōtˌstrap| noun 1 a loop at the back of a boot, used to pull it on. • [usu. as adj. ] the technique of starting with existing resources to create something more complex and effective : her willingness to work night and day in a tiny basement office was evidence of her trademark bootstrap.

"The origin of this descriptive phrase isn't known. It refers of course to boots and their straps (laces) and to the imagined feat of a lifting oneself off the ground by pulling on one's bootstraps. This impossible task is supposed to exemplify the achievement in getting out of a difficult situation by one's own efforts.

It was known by the early 20th century. James Joyce alluded to it in Ulysses, 1922:

'There were others who had forced their way to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps.'"

We'll ignore, for now, the meaning of inputting simple code into a computer in order to get it to self-load more complex code. I doubt if anyone does that anymore anyway.

So, starting with existing resources, eh? What if all your effing resources are already used up?? Huh?? What THEN?

Simmer down, there.

So many things are unravelling simultaneously, we are deep into the land of Not Funny. As I reviewed them in my mind, they all at first seemed (1) financial in nature (rugby dues, bankruptcy guy payment, phone turned off, insurances seriously screwed up [homeowners' cancelled, auto cancelled despite being paid through next December and all in the hands of someone named Alvarez...], other forms of Stuff due immediately if not sooner) but upon reflection, there are so many, many more.

There's the (2) house, which is in worse shape than the one that Dr Phil spent an hour tsk-tsking over.

There's (3) my body, gaining fat cells and losing brain cells like nobody's business.

Speaking of (4) business, I don't have much these days. That's typical for this time of year, certainly - everyone is sick of his garden and not about to put more money into upkeep. It'll pick up again in a couple weeks, and I do have a major job pending. Still, at the moment, thins are a little dicey.

(5) Family members, too...my mother, my husband, my daughter, all have their health challenges.

I have to stop hiding from this. One can only take so many baths (especially when one has (6) impressive amounts of poison ivy plaguing one's person), and even I can't sleep continuously - although I'd like to try. "Just keep sleeping...sleeping...sleeping."

And always lurking around the corner, the old demon (7) Black Dog. Winston Churchill used to build things out of bricks when things got bad for him. Maybe I ought to try that...maybe stone,though.

And let's not forget (8) the bees that live behind the chimney. How could I forget, with that constant infernal buzzing sound?!? Slowly I turn...

So I guess what I need here is a plan. A plan to use existing resources to make something more effective (please, not more complex.)

That's what I'll be working on in the next few days, up here on the Hill.