September 26, 2003

• What’s wrong with this picture?

  
  

  

  
  

  That’s a trick question, friends.  There are almost more things wrong with that picture than I could enumerate.

  
  

  For starters, the mysterious masked Old Fart in that bed is my very own ArmsMerchant, who has told me he wished he didn’t have to foot the bill for the food for “that damned dog,” MY dog, that dog there in the bed, with its head on his arm.  But that was some time ago, and the old guy has warmed some to the dog, just as the dog has mellowed some with age and training.  I guess Greyfox no longer objects to Koji’s existence, or to his presence in our pack.

  
  

  Then there’s the fact that when the dog sleeps with me he usually curls up down by my feet, and almost never gets as chummy as these two are in this picture.  What’s with that, anyway?  And, likewise, when I sleep with the Old Fart, except for some notable spooning and cuddling exceptions, if I were to lay my head on his arm, he would fidget and fret about his circulation being cut off.

  
  

  Another problem with this picture is that I’m not in it.  There they are in my bed in the wee small hours of the morning.  I’m the one who’s already got all the ringading symptoms of sleep deprivation from driving up and down this valley several times a week, and trying to sleep between the railroad tracks and a busy highway in a hard narrow bed with an old man who snores in between those times every couple of hours he has to get up and pee.  This is my bed.  I should be in it.

  
  

  That didn’t happen because last night the house filled up with smoke from the woodstove.  That woke me, and Doug and I eventually determined that smoke was leaking from the stovepipe because it was clogged with creosote.  Or so we thought.  Unwilling to climb on the roof to clean the chimney in the dark, I opted for cleaning the autumn leaves out of the exhaust fan in the bathroom, and increasing the ventilation in here to clear as much smoke as possible, while letting the fire die out to facilitate the chimney cleaning this morning.

  
  

  When we got up on the roof after daylight today, we found that the clog was just some leaves that had blown across the top and stuck to some creosote there, building a plug just at the opening.  Piece of cake.  The pipe needed a cleaning, anyway, and got a thorough one.  That involved taking the shop-vac up to the roof to suck up the bits of creosote I knocked off the walls of the pipe, and then to reverse the suction and blow the clogs out of the vacuum cleaner hose, seeing how far we can shoot the stuff.  It’s always sorta fun, but my recent near-total lack of more than a few uninterrupted hours of sleep, for a week or more, was an inhibiting factor.  I did it.  I just didn’t get into it as I usually do.

  
  

  Unwilling to screw up my days and nights, I’m determined to stay awake until dark today, anyway.  I am not good for much, except laughs.  The guys have been having a few laughs at my expense.  I wasn’t exaggerating the ringading part.  I’m ditzy and dopey, and keep fumbling and stumbling, dropping things (thank the Xanga gods for spell check in xTools, and thank HP for the backspace key on this keyboard) as is usual when a fibromyalgic like me loses sleep.  Do you know how it feels to have your muscles full of lactic acid?  Yeah, me too.

  
  

  Later… oh, and about those guys in the pictures… cute, aren’t they?

  • 8:34 pm
  • 7 Comments