More than you want to know / with pictures in These titles mean nothing.

Sunday morning. 9:52 am. I have been up quite a while. I took a nice bath and shampoo and then put my worn clothes back on again. I’m dressed kind of nicely though.

From bottom to top:

• a pair of my stretchy new black Walmart socks

• a nice dark blue pair of Wranglers with none to very little ink on them, they aren’t the kind I really like, they don’t fit like jeans used to, but they are roomy enough until the end of the day when my belly reaches its biggest, then I sometimes unbutton the button

• new pair of light blue sorta low cut underpants

• a beige bra that fits about as well as any

• my Dylan t-shirt that the kids brought me back from the St.Paul concert

• my navy blue pull over sweater that I got at the Depot in Decorah. It’s a mens model from Penneys I think and it’s like new. It flatters my white hair.

And that’s it. If I get colder I’ll put on:

• my Good Will roomy beige sneakers

• my linty black stocking cap cum ski mask

• my light weight, one layer of denim barn jacket type jacket that came from Good Will too.

We’ve had fire the last two nights. I started yesterday’s fire which is always an adventure. I’ve been cleaning the house - meaning putting some of the stuff I can bring myself to part with that is combustible in the furnace. The living room is roomier now. It still is full of stacks of stuff but it’s a good bit better. The floor has been swept twice and the cobwebs knocked down twice and the pretty ancestral rocking chair with the pressed wood back and arms and the cane seat sits facing me from the other end of the house.

I am of course at the north end of the kitchen table. I find the kitchen table impossible to clear off. The only time it gets bare is when the family is here and I am putting on a full fledged meal. One with plates and silverwear and several dishes that have been at least heated up on the stove. As it is I can work on cleaning it. I can stack newspaper and put mail in what passes for away, but there is always still a bunch of stuff left on it.

I could make a list:

• back mesh cap, has green eyelets, must be a Pioneer relic. It’s sitting on a small pile of magazines or catalogs.

• near it are a pale green button from a long ago Threshing Days that I had intended to wear on my corduroy blazer but the pin wasn’t very sharp.

• and a Molson’s Blue bottle cap

• to the left is another pile of printed matter - not a big one, looks like four items to me

• topped with my tape measure that I had at work but since it wasn’t certified I left at home.

• I see a penny and a nickel and anther penny or maybe it’s a lock washer and another bottle cap I can’t identify - it’s yellow.

• I see a few slips of paper - receipts maybe from the Village Farm and Home

That’s the south half of the table. The north half where I’m sitting is more densely populated with newspapers and assorted mail. The surface of the table does not show through. There are:

• Agri News

• Cedar Rapids Gazette, colored comics face up

• a manilla envelope with Jim’s absentee ballot

• a pink copy of something folded up

• his latest e-Bay aquisition - a touching piece of International Harvester propaganda from right before they went toes up

• a flyer from our sweet state legislative candidate

• a big book of Medicare Choices, the time of year is coming when people can change their carriers so there is a lot of mail about that. Probably some of the phone calls I don’t answer are about that too. I do have a plan. I’m going to go with Gundersen’s cheapest plan. I better get on the stick. It will be twenty more dollars a month and doesn’t include drugs so I will keep my current Humana cheapest drug coverage which is less than twenty a month. The Gundersen plan will cover more than Medicare does, will have lower deductibles etc. so I better hop on that before I decide I need to do anything. I have my appointment for tests on the 29th and that will be under my Medicare coverage but I don’t plan to have anything else done until Gundersen kicks in.

• my mail scanner

• my Bible and Missal

• my allergy medicine - Walmart faux Claritin - I take a pill a day and I think it helps, am not terribly sure

• a hair scrunchy

• a rubber band bracelet Katie made

• Pioneer pliers

• my First Nations cup half full of coffee

• my oatmeal bowl and spoon

• the salt shaker

• the black glass vase that holds pens and pencils

• the pyrex two cup measure that holds silverware

• a nail clippers

• my dad’s stapler holding my ‘important mail’ against the radio

• the radio which no longer works

• little blue Acer on which I type.

I told you this was more than you wanted to know.

Here are silage making photos. They were already in FB but everybody isn’t there so here they are again.

Last updated October 05, 2014