I don’t want to leave my nice warm nest and I hit snooze a couple of times. That just means I ignore the first few woofs before I get up. I throw the covers off and instantly the goose bumps appear as the chilly winter air hits my sleep-warmed skin. It can’t be helped so I try not to think about it. I dig around the bottom of the bed to find my socks. Sometime during the night, my feet got warm and I kicked them off.
I make the bed by throwing the covers up over the pillows in the now empty bed. Mike was already up, as he is most days. I pull duds on my semi-naked body, slip my feet into slippers and turn around to see Ginger watching me, as usual. She backs a little way down the hallway to let me pass as I flip the light on in the bathroom. Checking the mouse trap under the sink is first — no mouse this morning. It always makes me a little sad when I find one there — and I’ll let you guess what is second. Hand washing, inserting partials, a quick run through the hair with a hairbrush and I turn the light off as I leave the bathroom and step into the hallway.
You would think, after following this routine every day for six months, that nothing could go wrong, right?
Wrong!
There have been times when I don’t miss my teeth until I try to eat cereal with no back teeth to grind it on. Ouch! Those gums are tender!
Ginger leads the way to the kitchen and takes her place in the middle of the living room floor and watches the next part of our daily routine.
Check the mouse trap under the kitchen sink — no mouse there this morning either. It always makes me a little sad when I find one there — locate my coffee cup, it’s either on the counter by the sink or the table if I forget to put it on the counter — fill with water and place in the microwave. The microwave lives on a shelf over the stove and I have to pay special attention that I don’t bang the cup on the edge of the microwave plate, something I tend to do often — set it to heat for three minutes — I’ll have hot water, ready for coffee when I come back in with the girls — fill a pan with water and get it heating on the stove. I like to add boiling water to the hard nuggets of cat and dog food to soften it before I add canned food to it, not that I spoil our critters — reach down and get the cat food dish from it’s home under the butcher block. I fill it with fresh food from the breezeway every morning. I don’t like to open the door any more times than I have to, so I try to consolidate trips in and out.
Then it’s time.
I get my jacket from the back of my chair, pick up the cat food dish and carry it to the door where the girls are waiting for me. I have to set the dish down to harness the girls. I’ve only forgotten it a few times and had to go back in for it.
Everything is right on schedule.
“Hold it, Peg,” you say. “I can see where this is going and before you get any further, I have a question for you.”
Okay. Go for it.
“What happens when there is a mouse in one or both of your traps?”
Good question. Yeah. It definitely puts a hinky in my routine, that’s for sure. But I’ve trapped enough mice over the past few months that it’s got it’s own routine. Normally, I’ll only have one mouse in one of the traps. I’ve never had two mice on the same morning. What happens then is I get the trap from under the sink, carry it outside and call, “Here kitty-kitty.” Whichever one is fastest ends up with the mouse. I re-set the trap, put it back under the sink and wash my hands in hot soapy water before continuing with my routine.
Outside, with the girls, it’s cold. Not much snow on the ground though. The kittens are already out and about for the day. Rascal twines around my leg, stopping to bite at my shoestrings. I sing-song a good morning to this big handsome boy and reach down and pet him. Back in on the breezeway, I unhook the girls and fill the cat food dishes before we go inside. As soon as the door’s open, Ginger runs and jumps up on the couch with Mike. I make my way past Itsy, who is fat as a porker and slow as molasses in February, set the cat food on the counter where I’ll pour the water in when it’s hot.
I make my coffee and sit down in front of my computer.
And this is where things went bad.
I open my computer, hook to the internet and go to Facebook to see if anything was going on while I slept.
“Meow!” Smudge says.
Smudge! Oh my gosh! I forgot Smudge!
At some point during my morning routine, I let him out of his kennel. Sometimes as soon as I get up, but always at least by the time I bring the girls back in. This morning I’d forgotten and he was reminding me. I got up and opened his door. That turkey. He always makes me wait to close the door by coming halfway out and stopping to stretch. Then he heads for the food and water bowls.
I settled back in my seat and scrolled through Facebook. There was a video on quilting with your sewing machine. I’ll probably never quilt, on a sewing machine or otherwise, and yet I opened the video, put on my headphones and listened while I sipped my morning coffee.
That cat!
That darn cat!
Yeah, Smudge!
No matter what we do, he just won’t stay off the table! And this morning was no exception. He jumped up on the table.
“Smudge! Git down!” I say in a stern voice.
Smudge don’t care.
I reached for him, got a hold of his collar, picked him up and tossed him to the floor — not hard. I don’t want to hurt him. He laid there on the floor and looked at me with innocent eyes.
Not two minutes later he gets up and jumps from the chair to the table. “SMUDGE! GIT DOWN!” I say a little more sternly.
Smudge don’t care and flops himself down on the table.
“GIT DOWN!”
He rolls over.
I reach for his collar and he swipes at me with his claws and nips at me as if we’re playing. One of us is not. I got a hold of him and tossed him off the table again.
Not two minutes later he’s up on the table again!
I toss him off again.
He gets on the table again.
I toss him off again.
He gets on the table again…
Do you see how this routine goes? It’s this way all the time until I get fed up enough that I toss him outside, and I was fed up. I stood up and reached for Smudge …
Clang! Splash!
That, my dears, is the sound of a nearly full cup of coffee falling over, hitting the laptop, and spilling all over my keyboard.
Without thinking, I snatched my laptop and flipped it over.
“Dang nabbit!” I exclaimed, ripping off the offending headphones and dropping them on my chair. I’d forgotten I had them on and when I stood, the cord pulled the cup over.
“What?” Mike asked.
“I knocked a cup of coffee over on my laptop.”
I took Smudge and tossed him out the door and came back to assess the damage. What a mess! I dried my laptop and shook it a few times.
“I’d turn it off and unplug it,” Mike advised.
I’d already pulled the plug and now I shut it off and took the battery out. There was no liquid in the battery compartment. I sandwiched four paper towels between the screen and keyboard, turned it upside down and set it aside. Then I got to work on all the rest of the mess.
All of my scratch papers that lived under my computer, with all of my notes, were ruined. I tossed them. The dominoes got wet, but could be dried with no harm. My mouse pad got wet but could also be dried. The coffee ran from the table to the chair. My lap blanket, that lives on my chair, got wet. The floor got wet. After drying the table, I dropped the towel on the spot on the floor and stepped on it. I got everything cleaned up and sat down to confront the hole in my heart, aka, the empty spot where my computer usually sat.
“You’re addicted to that computer,” Mike said as if it were a bad thing, and something we’ve gone around about a few times before.
“You’re addicted to the TV,” I rebut. Our TV is on ALL the time. We don’t have a TV in the bedroom and Mike has a hard time falling asleep without a TV on. “I’ll tell you what. You go a day without TV and I’ll go a day without the computer,” I proposed. Somehow, he never takes me up on that.
Me, without my computer, is like a fire without wood; a potter without clay; a knitter without yarn; a singer without song.
Hey! The last two rhyme! But you get the point.
My computer isn’t just a way to keep tabs on family and friends I’d never hear from otherwise, it’s a way for me to keep and edit all the photographs I take. It’s also the way I write my letter blogs; the way I’ve been writing all the stories I’ve written for the past 19 years!
Am I justifying?
Would I still write if I didn’t have a computer?
I don’t know, but with spell check, the ability to insert pictures, and electronic mail, computers definitely make writing easier.
Later in the same day, when we got the mail, my new ink cartridges were here!
Yay!
I have refillable ink cartridges in my printer — which makes printing my letters for the people who still get it snail mail — a whole lot cheaper. But once in a while one of my cartridges will go bad and the printer won’t recognize it anymore. That happened with my gray cartridge two weeks ago and the printer won’t work at all with a bad cartridge. I got on a website and found a place that had a whole set for $10! “I’m going to get three sets,” I told Mike. There’s one problem I won’t have to worry about for a while, I thought.
The package came and I immediately suspected something was wrong. I opened it up and found out I had three of the same cartridge — and it’s not even the one that went bad!
Sigh.
I got on the website and took a better look. Despite the fact that I checked my order over at least three times, I totally missed the place where it clearly had a spot for you to pick the cartridge you wanted for your ten dollars. I didn’t see it. The picture showed a whole set, do you think I had seen only what I wanted to see?
I’ve contacted the company by email, confessed it was totally my fault and I’m a dumb-ass, but I don’t know if they will let me return the cartridges and get what I had originally intended to buy.
Although I didn’t have a very good day that day, my week got better.
My handsome nephew Eric is home after being gone for 21 months. He ‘friended’ me on Facebook and I had a nice conversation with him.
I’d heard a rumor that Eric and his long time girlfriend, Jasmine, had gotten married, so I asked him, “Did you and Jasmine get married?”
“We’ve been married since 2012. I thought everyone knew that. We were married at the magistrate because we couldn’t afford to have a big wedding and invite everyone,” Eric replied. “How is Granny doing?”
“Granny is doing pretty well for the shape she’s in,” I told him. “Aunt Patti takes such good care of her.”
“That’s good. I’m glad she’s doing OK. I’d like to talk to her if you could give her my number when you make your daily call.” I smiled at that. Eric knows I call my mother everyday. He went on, “I also want to thank you for sending me your letters. I really enjoyed them a lot. I look forward to them every week and they’re great. Thank you for still doing them.” My head swelled three times it’s normal size to hear this. Eric continued, “There was one that you sent me that had some old pictures in it. I’d like to have a copy if you can get it.”
“I’d be happy to send you a copy but you’ll have to narrow it down a little for me. Which picture was it?”
“It was in the letter named This And That and you had to pick it up at the post office.”
Well, that was a bigger help than I could possibly have hoped for. He actually gave me the name of the letter! I went back through my archives, the whole way back to February of last year, until I found the letter blog titled This And That. I opened it up and the first thing I see is my daughter smiling out at me. My heart aches as I study her beautiful face, looking for any hint that in less then two months from the time I took this picture, she would be gone — but I didn’t find a single clue.
I sat and read what I’d written almost a year ago, looked at the pictures of Miss Helen in her beautiful sitting robe, sad because I’d told her Mike and I would be leaving the area.
My favorite Jersey Boy, Mr. B, was my next subject in that letter blog. He’s wearing a headband for 50’s night at the nursing home.
Then there it was. There was the picture I had to go to the post office to get. I’d forgotten. This collage had belonged to my beautiful Aunt B and her daughter Shannon had sent it to me after her mom had gone on home to be with our Lord.
I scrolled past and saw all the photos I’d added to end that letter with.
The old schoolhouse —
—birds, bugs and cats; old beer cans and fence posts.
But how about this?
The daffies, my favorite flower, were coming up! In Missouri! In February!
Spring comes to Pennsylvania too, it just come later, that’s all.
Now that I knew which picture Eric wanted, I had to confess to him. “I don’t have any of the pictures from the collage. I’d sent them all to Uncle Paul but he never got them. I’m guessing they got separated from the envelope in the mail and they’re gone. The best I can do is send you a picture of the collage.”
“That’ll work,” Eric replied.
The whole time I was working on this project for Eric, I had a niggle, a little itch in the back of my mind. And now I asked Eric, “How did you find the name of the letter? That was a great help in finding the picture you wanted.”
“Because I have all the ones you sent me. I brought them home with me so I could read them again and for the pictures. I love them.”
Now I’m really flattered and I told him so.
“I used to read the ones you sent to Uncle Mike,” Eric revealed. “I had all of them but I’ve misplaced them and can’t find them anywhere.”
“I’ve got a bunch of the letters I sent to Uncle Mike. When he died your Uncle Rick gave them back to me and I didn’t have the heart to throw them away.”
“Oh, that’s where they are. I knew we saved them all. I just loved the way you would put things. It always makes me feel like I’m there. And I always thought you took the best pictures of nature. Uncle Mike taught me a lot about flowers and bugs and I always loved learning about nature.”
It’s a sin to be as prideful as I felt when Eric told me all of this.
“And the family news was always great because we are all so spread out, we could always know what was going on with everyone through your letters.”
“Eric, I never knew how much my letters meant to you.”
“I never had the chance to tell you because of moving around a lot.”
Sometimes, you never know who’s life we touch.
With that, let’s call this one done.
“WAIT!” you exclaim, “WAIT-WAIT!”
What?
“You never told us how your computer turned out.”
You’re absolutely right. I didn’t, did I. While my laptop was drying, I pulled my old laptop out of storage and fired it up. At Mike’s suggestion I Googled what to do if you spill coffee on your laptop and this is what it says:
I checked a bunch of websites and some said to take your laptop apart. No way am I doing that. Another site says that most laptops are spill resistant these days and if anything was going to happen, it would have happened right away. I didn’t have any popping or sizzling so I was hopeful there was no damage. Nonetheless I was really glad I’d backed up all of my pictures and stories less than a week ago. I left my computer to dry out overnight and the next day it was just fine.
Thank goodness!
And now, I have a question for you. Is the spilled coffee my fault, or Smudges?
And now, now, we will call this one done!
And remember…
You’re all in my heart.
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