(no subject)

It's about 65 degrees here this morning. This is not normal Texas-in-May weather. By May we don't normally see anything under 70, even at night. We had crazy weather blow through here yesterday, though, and apparently that was the usual mess that gets pushed ahead of a cold front - the second one this week! Like I said, very unusual for us this time of year.

The good news is that the cold fronts seem to have blown all that pollen away, or something - my sinuses have subsided to sort of a dull roar, anyway, which is more or less their default state.


I hope everybody in the Boston area is okay - I have heard rather alarming things from a couple of people, and it's bad enough that it even made the news here, an awfully long way away.


This was a rather tiring weekend. Saturday I did docent duty at the Historical Home Tour, which is an annual thing they have in Galveston. Somehow - I have no idea how - I had managed to evade getting talked into doing this before. But it was sort of fun. I met groups at the top of the stairs of this particular house and showed them a quilt hanging in the hall and took them through a sitting room and a bedroom, and told them some family history and then about the cool furniture in the rooms - and managed to get the phrase "burled-walnut half-teester" out of my mouth a dozen times or so without tripping over it, amazingly - and then handed them on to the next docent. (I did way more than a dozen rounds of my little tour,* but I kept forgetting to say that part, darnit. Because when I forgot, a lot of people never looked up at the top of the bed, and the half-canopy thing is pretty cool.)

Then after I got home I played marathon Guild Wars with Col, because, you know, he's gonna be gone a few days, and we had to make up for the lost time in advance! And Rob & I went to the grocery store in there somewhere, too. (Lemme tell you, Wal-Mart on Saturday afternoon is an experience in itself.)

Then yesterday I went over to Mom's, which is always tiring these days, I'm afraid. I don't know why I've started finding her so hard to deal with all of a sudden - this really didn't hit me until a month or two ago. She's just, well, flaky. Very, very flaky. It's exhausting, and also scary, because I'm afraid it's just going to get worse. If she didn't have the brain tumor I would think she was getting Alzheimer's, because that's what it's like, you know? Like the very early stages of Alzheimer's, where the person just forgets random things and is sort of vaguely out of it, and you can't quite pin it down. We went through that with my grandmother, so that's the first thing I think of.

Oh, also - Mom calls me this morning and puts Art on the phone, and we have a conversation that goes sorta like this:

Art: The computer won't turn on.
Me: Well, have you checked the power cords and things?
Art: Yeah, all the lights are coming on and everything. (Pause.) But it's not actually the computer, it's the screen. The computer's coming on fine.
Me: Oh. Well, have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?
Art: Yeah, we did that.
Me: Well.... (trying to think of something else to do)
Art: Oh, wait, you mean there's a button on the screen itself?

Now, in their defense, their monitor puts itself to sleep when they turn the computer off, so they don't normally have to touch it. But still, aargh. I think I was very polite for getting hit with something like that at 8:15 in the morning, on the whole.



*Little tour = tourlet? Ugh, maybe not.