What do Pedro Almodóvar films and I have in common? We’re both a little strange. The past couple of weeks have been really nerve-wracking and I’m beginning to feel that I’m on the verge of my own nervous breakdown.

I’ve been having panic attacks with greater and greater frequency, which is highly unusual for me. I don’t really understand what causes them—well, I sort of do, but that doesn’t mean that I understand them. I’m the kind of person who performs in front of crowds of people with little or no stage fright, so why, all of a sudden, would I become terrified of speaking with my parish priest, who I really like? Of course, this makes no sense, but panic attacks have little to do with rational thought.

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Well, my goodness . . . It’s been quite some time since I’ve written. We don’t have the internet at our home anymore and I haven’t gotten back into the swing of posting from the local library. So, more later, because I just logged on here at Roger’s, and we’re on our way out the door.

And this is just one of them. It just seems sometimes like there are whole hours when I just get seemingly nothing accomplished. I’m reading, or knitting, or, too often, on the Internet, and I just don’t like the feeling of “un-accomplishment.”

With books! Today from 11:30 this morning until about 3:30 this afternoon, I was at Paws and Claws. My Goodness, what an onslaught of donations! We can hardly keep up with  them. Naturally, there’s a ton of Harlequin Romances, the bane of the store, in my not-very-humble opinion. And then, what to do with all the duplicates . . . We don’t want to throw them away, but we can hardly keep them. We don’t have the room.

After I got out of there, I went up to Wal-Mart to pick up some groceries, and then stopped into Lowry’s Books and More in Sturgis. Naturally, I had to pick up several things. <smile>

Now I’m finally back to the apartment, ready to load some things onto LibraryThing. A day in books. Bliss!

 

 

 

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This has got to be one of the busiest days I’ve had in a long time.

 

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Such a week, and now it’s Tuesday!

Okay, I promised that I’d put in a picture of the chairs I got from the dumpster. I took the upholstery off because it smelled pretty nasty, and I didn’t want it in my house. So, it’s a naked chair. But how cool! It’s got springs, and it’s in quite good condition. So, bonus! I have two matching ones. I think there may be more stuff today, so I’ll have to look.

Instead of putting the futon back together, I stored the frame in my storage closet and put the futon on some milk crates in the living room for now. It’s actually sturdier than it was before. And, hey, if the place looks like a college dorm, well, that’s just practice for Sophia when she leaves next fall, right!

I also went ahead and boxed up four apple boxes of books that I’ve already catalogued. I can easily get to them if I need to, and now I have room for some more things on the shelves. I think I still need to get another bookshelf. Or four!

I have to continue with the flea spraying, but I need to rearrange some more things. I want to do my mattress, and the rest of my bedroom, so the fleas don’t migrate. Some nasty facts about fleas include:

• Fleas are excellent jumpers, leaping vertically up to seven inches and horizontally thirteen inches. (An equivalent hop for a human would be 250 feet vertically and 450 feet horizontally.)


• However, completely developed adult fleas can live for several months without eating, so long as they do not emerge from their puparia.


• Cat fleas may also serve as intermediary hosts of dog tapeworms. (Hmmm, is it true that getting a tapeworm is a speedy and all-natural weight loss aid? Supposedly, it IS!)

Click on the above picture to get more info on the “tapeworm diet.”
No, I’m not kidding, although I certainly do not endorse it.

In any event, I now have to do a bunch of filing, because the paper here is almost as bad as the books!

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Such a week, and it’s only Monday.

First of all, the cats have fleas, and  you can imagine what a pain that is. We don’t have a very large apartment, and if you have any idea how many books I have see my library at LibraryThing), you know that I don’t have a lot of room for much of anything except them. (I haven’t yet encroached on Sophia’s bedroom, much to her delight, but I’m considering it .) So I’ve had to do a lot of rearranging lately to spray for the fleas. Yesterday evening, I took the futon that’s our couch out  into the hallway and sprayed it, and of course discovered that there was a lot more stuff under the couch than I realized. Plus, the couch has this steel tube frame which is slowly breaking, and it needs to be re-welded. So, I decided to take it apart and jury-rig a new seating arrangement until I can find a wire welder to repair it. So I’m busy with my hex keys and adjustable wrench, and really getting the job done.

Of course, the morning that I decide to disassemble this couch is the morning that the maintenance man, Jim (who is really a great guy, just so you know), comes to the door with the announcement that he is ready to install my new refrigerator. I mean, I can’t even get the door open more than a foot.

“Jim, you guys were supposed to give me a couple days notice, so I could move things around!”
”Sorry,” he shrugs.
”Could we put it off until you’re here the next time?”
Well, that’ll be two weeks, since next Monday is a holiday.”

Yuck! The current fridge is useless. I make the snap decision.

”Well, can you give me a little while to get things around?”
”I can come back after dinner.”
”Okay.”

And the race begins. I’ve basically got to rearrange the entire living room. I pick everything up and make these huge piles (hoping all the while that Juniper, the considerably more active of our two cats, doesn’t decide to jump (hence the name) on all of them for fun, because I don’t think they’re very stable. Then I have to move a bunch of stuff around in the kitchen, too. More piling.

More tomorrow, including pictures of the great antique chairs I dumpster-dived while Jim was installing the fridge!

I developed this concept while I was in my communications class at IPFW back in 2003. We had been talking about metaphors for America, especially the melting pot one. But I had told my group I wasn’t satisfied with that one, because it seemed to me that in a melting pot (like a fondue, for example), everything you put in was, obviously, melted together and turned into one mixture. But while that may have been the experience of many immigrants of the past, it no longer seemed to be the case. So we needed a new metaphor.

So I proposed the salad bar. With a salad bar, you have many choices. You start with the basic lettuce mixture, which is usually the largest container in the bar. Then there are many options, such as cheese, chopped eggs, green peppers, croutons–it just goes on and on. You can take as much, or as little as one wants of any or all of these options; or you can take none of them. You can even skip the lettuce altogether and just have, say, potato salad, chocolate pudding or something else entirely. Another thing about salad is that while there are many ingredients, and they are combined on one plate, they still retain their uniqueness. Because they are not cooked together, like in a soup, there is no homogenizing of taste. In each bite, you can still taste the cherry tomato or pineapple.

I believe this is a far better metaphor for the experience most people currently have in America. We have a sort of generic "American" culture–that’s like the large bowl of lettuce. Most people take this as the starting place: it contains things like having dinner at McDonalds, shopping at Wal-Mart, and doing turkey for Thanksgiving and Santa Claus for Christmas. These things are part of the "typical" American lifestyle. Then there are the options, like the sunflower seeds and shredded carrots: those would be like being Catholic or celebrating birthdays with a cake and candles. Some people opt out of the tossed salad altogether, and just go for the side dishes: they would be groups like the Amish; people outside of the mainstream.

All of these groups partake of the salad bar, because they are here in this country. If you live here, you’re going to be part of the salad bar experience; but how you make your salad is up to you. What you take is your choice. If you want to pack your plate full of mandarin orange slices and cherry tomatoes, or just cover a bowl of lettuce with ranch dressing is completely up to you. You can even make more than one trip, and have a different type of salad each time.

Since I originally proposed this idea, I’ve discovered that what I thought is hardly unique. I just think this shows how very apt it is.

Here’s Osmaíra in the back of the limo.

Today I played piano for the quinceañera of Osmaíra Martínez. I was afraid I’d be going solo, but one of my singers, Luz Piña, showed up unexpectedly and that was great. Osmaíra’s was very beautiful and everything went off without a hitch. Things were a little late getting started, but that’s nothing new. The weather was stellar, in my opinion. Even thought it’s late August, it was in the mid-60’s, just right for tuxedos and dresses with crinolines. I’m just so glad to see girls make a public profession of their faith.

This is a picture of our church, St. Joseph’s.

If this were a real post, you would have a real post to read. Hopefully I’ll add to this one later, but now I have to go to Sophia’s football game, where she’s cheerleading.