Ten-Finger Exercises

Can you ever be too neat?

This cough is still hanging on, but I have felt better today. Bill was gone until dinner. Plenty of time to write, but also the first day in a week or so when I actually got some things accomplished. Nothing big, just laundry and cleaning, but things that have been ignored for the past week while we were both sick. Haven't even done much cooking, which is just as well since Bill has his flight physical coming up in a month. It's a good time to live on meat and salad, and I don't have many creative ideas about that.

Before we got sick we had just returned from 10 days in Florida visiting Bill's kids and grandson, who just celebrated his sixth birthday. They don't read this, so I can talk about them, right?

It's taken me till now to get us there. Bill said he wanted to go but couldn't sit down with me and make plans. He told his son J that he wanted a schedule of when the boy Z would be with him and when he would be with his mother. They are divorced and share him on a weekly basis. Son said it was easy enough to figure out and didn't come up with any dates except not Christmas. Z wouldn't be with him, and the rest of the family was going to J's wife's family's place in Tennessee.

I found some good airfares one night when Bill went to bed early and woke him up to see if he agreed. Not my best plan, but I was feeling desperate. So it turns out we arrived at the beginning of a week when Z was with his mom. No problem. They switch on Fridays, so at least we were with him for the weekend and half the following week. The other complication was that daughter, E, whose house we were staying in, got called to South Carolina for the week to take depositions and wasn't back till Friday either. Still okay. J, who had been gone for a week to in-laws, had to work some days. Even though he works out of his home, we were limited in the time we could see him. AND, it was 28 degrees there! Not exactly the weather we wanted to spend much time at the beach. The house stayed cold as well. The heating system worked, but it seemed to struggle to maintain at 65. Those fancy stone counters in the kitchen sure were cold!

We liked E's house, a '60s style rancher that she bought last summer with wood floors and a living room as long as a bowling alley.Everything was very Pottery Barn and very neat, a little bare, although she says she's finished decorating. There was no comfortable place to sit and read, and bar stools on a cold counter aren't my idea of a place to eat either. Nevertheless, it was fine, and the first time we haven't paid big motel bills while we visited, which was a big plus. Bill immediately went out and bought a bath mat for inside the slippery tub, and a coffee maker so he could have a whole pot, not just a cup at a time.

J and his wife S have just remodeled their house and it looks like a model. No, not even as cozy as a model. Everything is beautiful. But when I put my purse down, it got moved. When I put my book down, it got moved. There was nothing on even an end table, let alone no sweater on the back of a chair. She admits willingly that
she's OCD. Brags, is more like it, and J has gotten that way too. Well it's certainly better than the opposite, but I have to say it's neither comfy nor welcoming. I'm glad I'm not subject to it very often. They're probably even gladder!

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I'm back to add this comment which I should have made before. Bill's kids are fine, upstanding people and I'm very proud to know them. They've always gone out of their way to be nice to me. They're just very, very organized, and that's a language I don't speak. But then they don't speak poetry or writing or knitting or making soup in the soup kitchen, or church even. And that's just who we are.