Leavings

Stuff's going on but nothing earth shaking so let's just sift through the stray stuff.

~ I'm in love with my DVD rental place. This one is a short walk away from my apartment and since it's fully automated it never closes. Things in Germany that never close are rare indeed. You get a magnet strip card that gets you inside, you pick your DVD from a machine where it scans your fingerprint so no one else can use your card and then your DVD is dispensed from another machine that also loads your account with money. Shove in a twenty and you're set for a while. I'm in love with these clever little machines - all that touch screening and magnet stripping and fingerprint scanning. I love playing with them so much that we're now watching DVDs at an alarming rate. Nevermind that I already have DVDs I've never watched. Nevermind that I have movies from my digital TV service saved on my harddrive recorder. Nevermind that I have two episodes of Rome recorded and have yet to watch them. I have more stuff to watch than I have time but until the novelty wears off this place, I'm destined to hike up there each day.

~ I'm worried about my mother. She called late last night - 12:30am, actually - to tell me she'd had a terrible night the night before. She suffers from diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and Alzheimer's disease and now she's got terrible pains and spasms in her legs at night. Neuropathy, she said, although I'm not sure if that's the name of a condition or if it describes the condition. It's bad enough that she's enduring this but when she told me she was hallucinating as well - her Alzheimer's causes that - I got a little alarmed. It's bad enough to try to deal with terrible pain but seeing the ceiling move and roll can't be of much comfort.

She's supposed to be seeing someone today. I can't get her or my sister on the phone so I'll have to wait for news.

~ I am so backed up on laundry it's scary. Down to the grayed, tatty panties again.

~ I was reminded tonight as I was making a chicken sandwich for my supper that I must always cut my sandwiches in half. Diagonal is preferred but vertically is acceptable as well. I do this because growing up my mother never cut our sandwiches in half. My schoolmates? They had nice sandwiches cut in half. Some cut in quarters. Those who really had their mother's number had crustless sandwiches. I once asked my mother to cut the crust off my sandwich and was given a lecture about how crust was nothing but bread that got a little browner than the rest and it was a waste of food to cut off crusts and those mothers who did the crust cutting were nothing but indulgent tools of their children! Cut off your child's crusts and the next thing you know you'll have kids that disregard curfews! Sneak out of the window! Steal from the liquor cabinet!

Hell, we didn't even have a liquor cabinet.

~ Lipstick shopping. I haven't had a new lipstick since before Christmas and this must be corrected.

If they sold lipstick at the DVD rental place I'd set up a cot in there.