Hello again! I am calling this week logistics, because next Friday I am participating in an open house at the CTE center of the college where I work. Like an idiot, I opened my mouth and said, I used to do school tours in museums! I’d be happy to help! And that is how I found myself trying to figure out how to handle over 400 middle and high school students descending on a smallish campus full of dangerous things. You haven’t LIVED until you’ve fully contemplated what 20 or 30 7th graders could get up to in a college welding studio. I mean I have spreadsheets and I keep waking up at night, as well as roping in my friends and relations to help. I will report back when it is done! If I survive.

The past couple days have been logistical exercises as well, since Four has been sick, poor mite. She ended up coming to spend the night with me on Thursday and on Friday and, although she is on the mend, she is not fully better, so those nights were not great. I don’t remember my own children crying in their sleep and waking up every two hours in floods of tears when they were sick but it is entirely possible I have blocked it out. I am fervently hoping to block the last couple nights out just as soon as I can. I am very tired. I have been tired since Thursday. I have actually been tired all week, so tired I have barely been able to keep my eyes open, so getting four or five hours of sleep in short terrible bursts has not been, uh, ideal. I think it’s allergies. It had better be allergies, because my window for being sick this month has closed and another one will not be opening until June. This is America, baby. Sick days need to be scheduled.

So anyway – this is a post about anyway – yesterday morning I woke up before Four. I went to give my brother his pills and found that he had had a problem with the catheter bag coming unfastened during the night. OK. So I started helping him clean that up – he had been trying to do it with toilet paper, which is a good illustration of the horrible fucking nightmare that is dementia: it’s logical, but not sane – when Four started yelling for me from the bathroom. So I put the mop down and ran in to help her out. Then I went back and forth. I don’t remember when I had started the grits, but that was going on too as well as feeding the dog and the cat and the fish. The fish! cried Four, there’s a problem with the fish! So I left the mop and the grits and went into the living room where Four earnestly explained to me that Purple was gone. I looked at the tank.

Purple was indeed gone. Raptured, no doubt. Aquarium fish are sinless and thus get raptured on the regular. They just vanish bodily into the ether, leaving all their worldly goods behind. I like to imagine them swimming up, up, up into the clouds and then spending eternity swimming around heaven in shoals of tiny sparkling fishes. Or I would if I believed in heaven but, sadly, I do not. So it’s also possible that something – I don’t want to know what, but Pink is getting awfully large – eats them. Or they get swallowed by the filter. I don’t know what happens, but Purple is not the first fish I’ve had abscond mysteriously from a fishtank and I’m not going to probe too deep into the great mysteries. Raptured, I explained solemnly to Four. Gone immediately to heaven. She was disappointed by the lack of a funeral and then rhapsodized for a while on the greatness of Purple. Nobody can rhapsodize about the amazing qualities of a fish one would have sworn they didn’t really notice much like Four.

The grits were fine and Four’s mom came and took her away with a to go order of grits. My brother and I had grits and eggs and the rest of the weekend has just been the usual logistics. Trying to make some art and clean up and do the laundry and figure out the week’s meals and do the shopping. Walk the dog and try not to freak out at the price of groceries and gas, meet a friend for coffee, run back and forth to the car rental office to logistically help son who rented a car – you get the picture. And! In good news I got a new to me camera lens and it is not terrible! I also got another one and it is, so I’m returning it, sigh. Because returns are not free, it cost me $25 to figure out that it was an APS-C lens, which is to say, designed for a crop sensor. That means that it vignettes to a hilarious degree on a full frame camera like, for example, my beloved if crotchety Canon 5D Mark III. In my defense I did look at DP Review and some others and nobody, but nobody, mentioned that tiny fact. Sigh. Oh well! At least I’ll get most of my money back.

The photos! On Sunday all I managed to accomplish was cleaning my room, but it was as always a herculean task. Please click through to enjoy the full glory that is my underwater chest of drawers. I am proud of it; that’s a great work of art right there. 😀 😀 My room is not actually tilted but there was no way to straighten it without losing most of the painting on the upper left and I’m fond of that painting. Monday I went to Fred Meyer and took this depressing photo of an abandoned giant teddy in the rain. Tuesday was the logistical walk through for next Friday’s open house day in the rain and I like this one. The subreddits I read are always full of “PNW vibe!” photos; I feel this sort of captures that, lol. Wednesday I took some film to the post office and took this directly outside. Not every photo can be wonderful. On Thursday I got the new lens! It is a 90 – 300mm zoom which is not really as much of a reach as I hoped for, but, I could afford it, so we make do. And it’s quite light, which is nice. We will get used to each other and the photos will improve, but in quick order, here is Mr. Binks, a heron and an osprey.

Here is hoping that we all have a good week and nothing political happens at all. See you next weekend!