My goodness! I'm just realizing that I have all the time I want to make a blog entry! No class to run off to half way through, no chore that needs doing before such-and-such or in between this and that. I am on vacation!
I really do need to savor this, as I savored the 2 1/2 bites of bacon Tom placed in front of me while I worked on my crossword this morning - the last 2 1/2 bites of bacon, presumably. My, how we fly through that stuff when we have it! So to do these vacations seem to go when I'm at home and my world is my oyster. They seem to go a lot more slowly if I'm staying with family but secretly wishing I could be organizing my closets, caulking the bathtub and getting ready for another term of half-hearted housework.
I confess, what I really want to do with my "vacation" is organize my apartment while watching French Kiss or some Woody Allen movie and occasionally sneaking out to a thrift store. I absolutely love the comfort and ease of staying with one of our parents and getting pampered and not dealing with the dust, mold, dirty dishes, dingy bathrooms and millions and millions of books without homes that comprise our little, old apartment. But I do wish I could take my projects with me. What good is relaxing if you can't sort through old photos while you're doing it? What good are movies on-demand if you must sit with your hands at your sides looking straight ahead?
I kid of course but I do so love to be sorting something. Yesterday it was books, of course; I keep them constantly on the move to make sure they're not suffering from excessive dust or any amount of moisture. When you have them lining the walls in stacks and shoved in any available crevice you need to do silly things like this to make sure they aren't being ruined, especially when your place was ill-built before you were born and you can't keep the rain out.
Yesterday it was also papers of mine, mostly sentimental things that I sort through just the same - I can't keep everything; I don't want to. There are always new things.
This isn't at all what I intended for this blog entry. I was going to tell you about Thanksgiving or at least post some pictures. But I've gotten too far off track now. I will tell you that I read Organize Your Life by Amy Vanderbilt. It is one of the books Suzanne gave me for Christmas, and I believe she gave it to me mainly for the sweet 1966 pencil-drawing cover. But actually, this lady knows what she's talking about. Or, at least, she did for the first half of the book. She actually went off the deep end pretty dramatically in the second half, exposing all of her obsessive compulsions and acting as though every women should carry a box stickers with their name and address with them wherever they go. She's also a snob. But who isn't? OK, lots of people, but I'm a snob, and it's quite ridiculous.
In case you're confused about how I could be a snob I'll say that God always has a plan to humble me and I try to go along with it. Thus, I don't seem to have much to be snobby about, nor would I anyway, probably. But Amy V. has plenty to feel superior about and it is clearly a weakness of her's as well. I had a section or two I wanted to share but I'll find them later. I'm much too jazzed-up on my 2 ounces of coffee right now to do that kind of work. I'm off to find something to organize - though, the dark, walk-in closets are a bit intimidating... and so full.
(The photo is by Henri Cartier Bresson - a "french kiss" it would seem. It was a picture saved from my studying, though we never studied that photograph, just Bresson, *sigh* amour... I had to study it all on my own, it was too perfectly sweet.)
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