This is a question for me, dear friends, not for you. I would never presume to question how you spend your time. I, however, am at home, in the lumpy uncomfortable armchair in the ill-lit living room, and I am feeling a little odd for it. Granted, I’m not here out of pure sloth; rather, I made the decision to stay in today, partly because there are things I want to do in town tomorrow, but mostly because I am going out tonight, to an event about which I am remaining circumspect lest the guest of honor happen to surf by here. I have it on fairly good authority that she is traveling today, and thus will be offline until tonight, but I also know that as soon as I make that assumption, she’ll be right here, on the pretext of “just need to check my email one more time, dear!”, and hey, presto, I become the weak link in a well-kept secret. So mum I must remain, at least until later this evening or tomorrow morning. In general, Saturday mornings are the days where I go to the market and load up on bulky, cumbersome produce, or I go to the gym, or I run all the errands I say I’m going to run every night after work and then never do. It is a time for bodies in motion, and thus all this sitting still is making me feel the slightest bit guilty. This could be due to what an old boyfriend once called “your weird outsized sense of Calvinism,” which, outsized though it might have been, was never great enough to actually make me do something, but just great enough for me to feel wretched about it. You would think that twenty intervening years would cure me of this sort of thing, but here we are.
Can’t you just be thankful that it’s a beautiful day, and you have time to spend reading, writing and enjoying yourself before you have to go out? says the kinder, more philosophical voice in my head. Excuse me, have we met?, sez I. At least go mix up some bread dough so that Lloyd can have sandwiches this week, you lousy bum, chimes in the Neighborhood Bully in my head, who holds no truck with this touchy-feely-why-can’t-you-just-enjoy-life nonsense. Quiet, you, sez I.
Now would be a good time for a little thanksgiving, and an acknowledgment of the mysterious ways in which the universe works. Those of you who are fans of Fuzzy Logic Knits, the website of the brilliant, funny and beautiful Lee Ann, know that the past year-plus has been a frightening and maddening one for her, thanks to both the presence of an aneurysm in her brain and the time she had to spend waiting for the mighty province of Quebec to get its poop in a group and get her into surgery. On Wednesday morning, she and her husband went to the hospital, where she was prepped, kept waiting for four hours, and finally told that due to a pair of emergencies that had descended upon the hospital, as well as a family emergency for her doctor, surgery would have to be rescheduled. Come back next week. No, we don’t have a date yet. After the worst of the shock-and-fury storms had passed, Lee Ann and Spiff decided that what they needed was a long weekend away at a nice bed-and-breakfast, only to be told by the hospital that they had time for her surgery on Friday after all…
While Lee Ann was navigating her way through all this chaos, her dear pal Stephanie, a/k/a the Yarn Harlot, decided to step up to the plate. Stephanie has been going through her own less-life-threatening-yet-still-exhausting travails. Less-hardy types like myself might have just thrown up their hands and gone back to bed, but Stephanie decided to consider every mishap a welcome sign from the universe, a sign that as long as the Bad Karma Sprites were busy kicking her around, they would be too busy to pay any attention to Lee Ann or her doctors. Friends of both Stephanie and Lee Ann offered to take up the challenge, inviting the universe to bestow flooded basements, wine-soaked socks, dropped stitches and burned casseroles upon them. I likewise made this offer, but the gods were not terribly interested in it, offering up only meager challenges like a couple of dropped stitches and the accidental snorting of coffee out my nose. (No, I will not elaborate.) I was sure that LuthorCorp would give me plenty of bad karma fodder, but except for one particularly crunchy phone call, the day was eerily smooth. C’mawwwwwwwn!, I shouted at the universe in my best Smoking Cabdriver voice.
When I got home, I saw a familiar-looking envelope on top of the pile of mail. Is that a jury duty notice I see? But Lloyd just served on a jury, for the third time in twelve years—ah, yes, that would be for me. Fair enough, as I haven’t been called for jury duty in about six years. Only...don’t jury duty notices usually come in the envelopes with the blue stripe? Why is there a purple stripe on mine?
IMPORTANT: GRAND JURY SUMMONS ENCLOSED, shouted the purple stripe.
That’s more like it, I said to the universe.
This morning Lee Ann’s husband sent an email annoucing that the surgery went well. If recovery goes similarly well, Lee Ann could be home by early next week. Thank you, Karma Sprites.