Friday the 13th.

I am not superstitious about this date, but I always take notice. It makes me smile, and I have to wonder if there are still people on this planet who fear this particular calendar date as if their life is going to collapse. "The sky is falling... the sky is falling...."   To all the Chicken Littles of the world--- relax..... if you get out of bed and put both feet on the floor, it's a good day, no matter what the date is.

Speaking of both feet..... my husband has one leg elevated these days. He pulled a muscle in his calf after spraying a wasp's nest with that canned stuff that makes you "spray and run."  He ran too fast, or didn't run the correct way.... the result was a swollen calf and a black & blue ankle. Ouch.  Advil, bandages, ice packs... that's been the treatment for about a week now.  Plus a slice of bread pudding from the Funky Art Cafe.  Delicious desserts heal all things.

We're still waiting on the air-conditioning repairman, the one who sounds like Gomer Pyle.  We're waiting for him to give us more information on the system he wants to install here for the second and third floors of this big old house..... and he's waiting on my husband's decision.  The latter cannot happen before the former, even though Gomer thinks we should just 'pick one and get it done.'  (Easy for him to say--- he's not the one writing out the check.)  And this is the same a/c guy who told us that our old a/c system up in the attic was haunted by a poltergeist.  I kid you not.

The Library up on the third floor.... that has been put on hold for the time being.  We don't want the carpenters to come back and finish the trim up there until Gomer installs the new system. No sense in putting up the little access doors to the attic space and then have them unhinged so the a/c crew can get in and out of there.  Once again, it's that former and latter progression.  It pains me to watch the HGTV decorating programs where a crew comes in at 7:00 in the morning and leaves at 9:00 in the evening and their make-over is complete.  (The magic of television editing, I'm sure now.)

We have had some rain........ good pouring-down no-nonsense rain.  The pond is filling up again......... there are puddles in the driveway, and most of the dry cracks in the fields have closed up and the grass seems downright soggy. Amazing what a good rain can do.  It can also leave flooding, which happened in some of the Houston areas.... and of course they showed those neighborhoods on the news this morning.  With every heavy rain, you can bet the ranch that the TV news programs will show those same flooded streets.  What I would like to see (and what would really be news) is a report on how those particular streets were fixed, how the drainage was improved......... so the same streets wouldn't flood each and every time.  Has that ever occurred to The Powers That Be in the city of Houston?

We didn't walk this morning, because of the rain..... plus we also had some thunder this morning, to make sure we were paying attention.  Pre-dawn cell-phone texting went something like this:
Are we walking this a.m.?
Are you kidding?
Not me.
Not me either.                                                                                                                                            
(All of that is gramatically correct, except for the punctuation marks. There is no question mark key on my cell phone. Future generations, after years of research, will come to the conclusion that texting in the early 21st century completely destroyed the English language.)