April 5th, 2006

We saw the fox again last week. This time he was running full out across one of the islands in Webster Park. He looked small and lithe. I love seeing him. Sophia was walking with us and I said,”Look! Look!”. Later she told me that she thought I was mad at her because I was yelling. I told her I just hadn’t wanted her to miss it. Also the rabbits have started to appear everywhere and yesterday I saw my first butterfly of the year.

The azaleas around here are the scrawniest, saddest azaleas I have ever seen. Last year I did not even recognize them because they are so puny. On the other hand, the tulips are amazing and everyone has them in their yards (including me. Huzzah for perennials and thanks to the unnamed prior owners of my house who planted them).

I miss crepe myrtles and it’s weird to me that right now trees either have blossoms or bare branches. Where are their leaves?

If it breaks fifty degrees here everyone starts wearing shorts. It’s crazy.

This past weekend our family had to go into the basement during the storm. Even having a basement is still halfway unreal to me, much less taking refuge in it. The siren went off and everything. I’ve been through a hurricane, but never any kind of tornado. No one does the sirens for a hurricane because, well, who wants to listen to sirens for the hours it takes a named storm to pass over you? Tornadoes seem so random compared to hurricanes. They just start up and touch down willy nilly. You could get none, you could get ten. It’s a good thing I have Kurt around to tell me not to close all the windows, and to tell me stories about going out in the hallways in grade school during tornado warnings and putting a book on his neck. Does that even work? What’s the book supposed to do?

This town is fanatical about baseball. Is it that way everywhere in the Midwest? Someone was telling me last week she was going to buy a TV (she currently does not have one) just to watch Cardinals games. The guy who came to install our new furnace (yes, our furnace died last week. It made me sad and hurt our pocketbook.) was whooping and hollering because someone something something grand slam and used to play for the team that our team was playing against yadda yadda. I gather it was good. I smiled and nodded.

I love living here because my polling place is walking distance from my house. This morning I took Sophia with me to the polls and I voted using a punch card (a system which I like a lot, by the way, far better than electronic voting). They had all sorts of notices about hanging chads, including one on every booth that said “Got chad? Check your ballot for hanging chads” or something similar. Sophia kept asking me,”What does got chad mean, mama?” She’s reading everything in sight. I showed her the ballot and where the chads would be, but I don’t think she got it. After I’d finished voting, she got to put the ballot in the big old box, though I had to lift her so she could reach the slot.

iTunes says I was listening to Of These, Hope from the album Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ by Peter Gabriel when I posted this. I have it rated 4 stars.

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