Spirographs

All the ladies are wearing black skirts with floral patterns on them. It's been like that for the past two days. The one walking up the stairs in front of me today had an abstract motif. It was in purples and whites and the edges were hard not round like regular flowers. Its pattern was like the result of an especially odd wheel you picked out then drew from spirograph.

Something sweet got spilled on the government courtyard walk near where I eat my lunch. Numerous bees were walking around in circles licking it up with their bee appendages. Don't bees clumped together in a bunch seem cuddly? But you know better. You're hearing a buzzing sound even if you're too far away for the sound to actually be reaching your ears.

It's bright out still. September. But if I want to get up in the morning for a walk before work, it's too dark. Besides, it's better I should pay attention to the news for a change, isn't it? Jacob's friend's dad was in it. He was the guy who when the truck that crashed into the sleeping lady's bedroom of the condos by the 401 came down from his unit to find his neighbours in a state of shock.

I saw a monarch butterfly. I saw a yellow butterfly. One time when Larry and I were arguing and I was in the kitchen and he was in the living room I saw a black and white woodpecker with red on its crown in the lilac bush outside the window and I wanted to tell him but if I moved or called to him I would scare it away so I didn't even though we were arguing and I wanted to so much so there would be something nice and sweet between us. I kept looking at it, its beak nudging into the lilac branches and it kept staying. It didn't leave for a very long time; maybe a minute or two.

Weeding

I weeded the back garden yesterday. The good thing about weeding at this time of year is the weeds are weakening. They don’t grip the earth in the same kind of life or death way. Most of them come out pretty easy. It’s a good excuse for having not weeded earlier.

I think one of the reasons the weeds are feeling this way is because their heads are in full blossom. The force of their life is in their seed. But what I did was squeeze the weed heads between my fingers so the seed pods or fluffs couldn’t scatter all over and sink into the soil and seed new weeds. Ha ha, I thought, to the weeds, as I placed their seed in paper garden bags, I have outsmarted you.

My hair dresser told me I should wear my hair so this bang section sweeps across my face from the left side over to the right. Before I just pulled it straight back. It looks really nice. It looks sophisticated. Except it means the bang hair tends to fall into my face sometimes covering my right eye. This feels nice too, like I’m an unkempt street urchin who doesn’t miss a trick and with a smart mouth to go along.

Except when I’m gardening. Would the damn hair get off my face already? I have to keep brushing it back plus my hands are covered in dirt from gardening and the dirt is getting all in my hair and my face repeatedly.

To deal with that, I went and got this hair clip I bought like three months ago that’s been sitting in the bottom of my purse and now has something all sticky on it. I don’t know what it is. It has the consistency of tree sap only there’s no way that’s what it is. I certainly haven’t been near tree sap over the past few months. It's been a very long time since I've been out in the garden.

So after a while some of the hairs started falling out of the clip so I had to take the clip off in order to get them back in only I couldn’t because the sticky stuff on the clip was sticking to my hair and it hurt too much to take it off. I sat down under the red maple in a lawn chair and eased it out. It wasn’t that bad.

The wind was blowing through the leaves of the red maple and it was making rustling sounds. There were just a few leaves on the ground from its leaves beginning to fall. There was nothing beautiful or exciting about these leaves because the leaves of red maples don’t change colour in the fall.

I had to get something hard and skinny to dig in the cracks of the hair clip to get the sticky stuff out but couldn’t see anything useful. The tree rustled some more and I decided to try one of the stems of one of its leaves. I pulled one off the tree. It worked okay. I got some of the sticky stuff out. But the leaf stem was still too supple from being so recently alive. Then I looked down on the ground and there was an old thin hard twig that finished the job off perfectly.

I went to pick up Jacob from school then to get some wine. I was looking for this one particular South Australian wine Larry and I got last time but couldn’t see it. Jacob was pulling this special plastic basket that you put your wine in with wheels on it like the kind of rolling-on-wheels suitcases people pull behind them in airports. He kept rolling it around under my feet and complaining I wasn't asking for help when I was enjoying just looking on my own.

Then I went to ask for help and he said, finally. We sampled some wines from the Asass region in France which is near the German border and which used to keep switching back and forth between being part of France then part of Germany. Only Jacob was embarrassed I was getting him to sample the wine too because he’s only twelve and doesn’t like breaking rules. So I told him to have some crackers and cheese which were also part of what was being offered for sampling along with the wine.

The lady demonstrating the wine acted like there was something she knew that was maybe about us that she wasn’t telling. She was elderly. I tried not to look at her face too closely because if I did I would notice how deep her wrinkles were and she might see my noticing them in my eyes and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. So she had the power. Which I think is what made her look like she had a secret she swallowed that was still stuck in her throat and that might jump out any second if she wasn’t careful.

Our new driveway

Workmen leave things behind. As far as I know the first crew that came out, the crew that dug up the driveway readying it for repaving didn’t leave anything. It was a while ago, at the beginning of the summer. Weeds grew in it, among the stones, while we waited for the city to fix the curb first.

First a guy came by with a drill device and legs to hold his truck study while the drill drilled to drill open the curb so the next group of city guys could drag away the old chunks of cement the next day. They’re the ones that left a pair of gloves on Helen and Oscar’s lawn, our next door neighbours. Helen is very critical of our ability to maintain our property to her standards so the moment we saw what they’d done, leave gloves on her lawn, we quickly removed them. These guys also left a bunch of boards covering the newly dug out section at our driveway’s entrance presumably so no one would fall down inside it, hurt themselves and sue the city for damages.

The city’s sidewalk pouring guys came next. After them the city crew to fill in the road pavement section. They removed the boards that were covering the hole that used to be there before it got paved again and left them in front of Helen and Oscar’s house.

Then the guys we hired to pave the driveway came and paved the driveway and they left behind a rake with black tar on its rake prongs. It’s leaning against the basketball stand.

Perhaps the city guys who did the road part paved after the guys we hired to pave the driveway. I can’t remember which was first.

No one’s come back to get the gloves. No one’s come back to get the rake. No one’s come back to take away the long boards and the short ones still sitting on the road in front of Helen and Oscar’s.

Larry and I are both getting worried about how the boards on the street in front of her house must be making Helen feel. Helen and Oscar are one of the original owners still living on the street. Their across the street neighbours, and ours, who have also lived on the street since the beginning told Larry about all the nice people on the street but Helen wasn’t included. They told Larry she was in an entirely different category. Oscar wasn’t included on the nice list either by virtue of his being with Helen.

Helen goes out everyday in a windbreaker or a winter coat or a coat in between those two, dressed two degrees more protectively than everyone else, always in sunglasses and a suitably protective hat, for a walk for her health. Usually around ten in the morning. When we first moved in she told us that things had been touch and go for her for a while. She had been seeing doctors. Strict adherence to a walking regimen was one of the measures that was going to keep her alive. Then she got used to who we were and the only words she had for us were criticism.

Critical lines

Larry and I stayed up super late watching the final episode of The Wire, Season 5. I felt guilty. Larry’s always talking about getting to sleep at a good time. And since he’s identified it as a problem he has, getting to sleep at a good time, then what I do is think that my new job as his most ideal and supportive spouse is to suddenly, automatically and devotedly, instantaneously be good at helping him with his problem and never have the same one myself.

McNulty went crazy in season 5. A homicide detective for the Baltimore police department, McNulty staged dead bodies he’d found, during the course of his work day to make it look like there was a serial killer was on the loose so that he could siphon monies allotted to the new fake serial killer investigation to an older actual drug and murder investigation for which funds had been cut.

Talking about it this morning, Larry still felt higher ups in the department should have showed more sympathy to McNulty’s situation. I didn’t really think so. I thought McNulty had crossed a critical line. Although if Larry had been all hard about it and said McNulty deserved everything he got, I probably would have been arguing for more leniency too.

Larry says some friends are just too much work. I know this could be me making Larry sound bad but, isn’t it true? Why work so super hard at maintaining friendships in which the supposed friend doesn’t really get or value you the way you need a friend to? What is the point of that? Isn’t that just politics, really? Which there’s nothing wrong with. Which has its value too. But shouldn’t you know the difference?

I’ve had this sample of perfume on my desk sitting under my monitor for a long time. For months. I just put some on. It is so stinky. I think I’m going to wash it off or at least try to wash it off. I hope it washes off. If it doesn’t wash off, I hope it partly washes off. It’s very strong. It smells like baby powder and burnt tire rubber with a touch of skunk thrown in.

I’m doing laundry for Jacob’s first day back to school tomorrow. There’s some kind of leak going on in the laundry room. The floor near the washing machine is wet. There’s beads of water coming up between the seams of the tiles of the recently replaced laundry room floor. It’s not a lot of water. It could be nothing. Jacob was messing around in the laundry tubs yesterday. Maybe it has to do with something he did then. I wish we still had the old wrecked floor down there. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about figuring out the solution to the leaking water issue so much.

Jacob is at a friend’s house. It’s really gorgeous out. I changed the calendars. It’s September.