Windchimes

can't figure

I got a bad case of the blahs after starting to write about my trip to France. I have my doubts about the exact cause, but then, blahs causes are the sort of thing that's hard to put your finger on. Could be worries of surgery scheduled on Tuesday. Nothing serious, necessitates only an overnight stay, and that only because the doc wants to monitor my calcium levels. They sometimes spike after this kind of surgery. He's going to remove three and a half out of four overactive parathyroid glands. I'll have half of one left. No emergency here, it's just that overactive parathyroid glands rob the body of calcium over time. So it's not urgent I have it done right away, but I won't like what happens if I don't have it done pretty soon.

In the meantime, I've been teetotaling. Now THAT could very well be my blahs cause. I made a nice dinner this evening, and drinking water along with it was just downright depressing. Had to let myself have half a glass of wine while sitting on the front porch afterwards.

Still, I think I'll write about memories from my last trip to France as they come to me, instead of trying to systematically write a chronology of them.

We got an alarming water bill to go along with our previously received(recieved? I always go back and forth with that word) electric bill, which made us suspect a hidden leak. Cliff crawled under the house, and sure enough, a chunk of water pipe is missing. The leak from there soaked insulation on part of the air-conditioning duct, overweighted it and it fell off. So, Cliff has a Sunday handyman project, but our next water and power bills should be significantly lower.

Been trying to go through the SLAM forum, to rate and comment on all the entries. Currently, there are 19 entries I've not commented on, and I sometimes feel absolutely at a loss in that area. Last summer, when I took that creative writing class, we had to workshop three of our classmates' submitted works everyday, and that part of the homework usually took me two to three hours. Of course, some of those were 2 and 3 page stories (and some were longer). Most were poems...and I think most of us felt very grateful when someone submitted a poem for workshopping (We each had to submit one item for everyone else to comment on during that intense month). It was a great class....loads of other stuff to read, of all sorts, and we had to create a portfolio of four creative writing items and show four revisions of each one. That's five pages if a poem fits on one page, per poem. The professor gave us a very useful checklist for revising as well.

How'd I get started on all that? Oh yes...I should probably be doing SLAM reviews but I feel incapable of doing any more at the moment, and it seems I may never catch up.

I've just GOT to get one thing out of my system. Can we limit use of the word "caress" to when we're talking about that brand of soap? blah.

J.H. Larrew
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