Thursday, August 20, 2015

Cotton, Hay and Rags

Women are irrational, that's all there is to that!
Their heads are full of cotton, hay, and rags!

--Henry Higgins

I hate insomnia.  I could barely keep my eyes open last night and thought I was going to sleep early, but the minute my head hit the pillow, I was wide awake, my head full of cotton, hay, and rags.

My mind flitted back and forth among a bunch of topics, none of which having any substance.   I started thinking of time travel.  I'm currently reading Stephen King's "11/22/63," in which a man is shown a portal into 1958 and is encouraged to use it to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing Kennedy.  It's a very thick book, so it isn't simply as easy as finding and killing Oswald and the little glitch is that whatever you do in the past, if you return to the present day and then go "down the rabbit hole" again, it's a re-set and wipes out everything you did before.  It's all very complicated but fascinating.

So I lay there, trying to get to sleep and thinking about time travel and if it were possible, would I go back in time to change anything...and could I change anything?  I always come back to the same position as far as my personal life...there are things I would love to change, but if I changed them, it would completely change my present life and did I want that.

If I could prevent Paul's death, for example, of course I would do it. But that would mean giving up knowing Steve Schalchlin and the tremendous change he had in the course of my life, and that would be sad.

The past is the past for a reason and best to leave well enough, the good and the bad, alone.

Then I thought out our new refrigerator and the anticipation of having it delivered on Monday.  It turned out that making the choice was very simple.  I am tired of a side-by-side freezer and wanted a freezer on the bottom.  There were several models I liked, but only one fit in our small little hole in the wall.  It would have been nice to take the 22 cubic foot model, but it was one inch too tall, s we went with the 19 cubic foot.
 
I was mentally arranging things back in the new fridge when Polly started "woof"-ing and then in a mini second zipped down the hall and out the back door, barking, with Lizzie in hot pursuit.  I got up to bring them in and close the door, noting that there was nothing my human ears could pick up that would have set her off.

Polly has supersonic hearing, those big ears never sleeping, even though her eyes may be closed. I can whisper "treat time" when she's in the living room and she is at my feet in a second, so who knows what she might have heard outside.

I started thinking about what to make for dinner tonight, realizing that I don't have to worry about that now until Sunday, since Walt is going to Tahoe with his sister, her husband and Ned today. I'm staying behind because I have a show to review.  It's always nice when I don't have to think about planning a meal for awhile.

I wondered what I was going to write about in this journal entry in a day when I had done just about nothing except nap.

I thought about the girls going off fishing with their parents recently and how I never went fishing as a kid. I remember going out with my grandfather in his boat once, with a rope with bacon on it, trying to catch crab, but never did.  Never held a fishing pole in my life.  How lucky the girls are and how much fun they are having in their childhood.


The thoughts flitted about like atoms bouncing off a wall and bumping into each other.  I finally gave up and went into the recliner.  I've discovered a new trick for getting to sleep.  It's been hot lately, so I don't want to settle in under a blanket, but somehow if I use a blanket on my upper half, so its around my neck and face it seems to put me to sleep.  It was 3 when I settled in and I seemed to go to sleep almost immediately, waking up at 6:30.  It wasn't a full night of sleep by any stretch of the imagination, but at least I did get some sleep, though my head still feels full of cotton, hay and rags.

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