If you wonder why these even weekly updates come so late, it's because, unless you choose some frantic activity to replace work when you retire, there's not a lot to write about. There's only a lot to write if there's an emergency—and those are certainly unwanted. My prayer to God is "I want to be bored." But then there's always that danger of boredom, too, which makes you depressed. So I do wish for something nice to do, but those options are truncated now that it's gotten hot. Neither James and I can bear heat any longer—it exhausts him and makes my heart do trippy things when we're exposed to heat too long. This is why we figure this year's DragonCon—which was just announced to be in-person this year—will probably be our last. Maybe we'll day trip or something further on. Wish more small conventions would come to the fore. We miss WHOlanta and Anachrocon. Will try to attend Spycon and the Harry Potter con in the fall. We have tickets for Libertycon, but they postponed it, which was a good thing, because the hotel prices made my jaw drop.

 

This week, for instance: good stuff, but nothing earthshaking. Alice and Ken hosted a Memorial Day picnic. Alas, it was on Sunday, so James had to stay plugging at the computer, but I brought him home a burger and some sides. Met two of Alice and Ken's church friends, Emma and LJ, who were also fannish. Spent the rest of the evening watching the National Memorial Day Concert on PBS and crying through most of it. This year they did tributes to people who have otherwise been missed: battlefield nurses in Vietnam and the firefighters and police who walked into the World Trade Center on September 11 and never came home (along with those who died in the buildings). I find that twenty years later 9/11 still makes me sob uncontrollably and feel afraid.

 

Monday I finally took all the scrapbooking stuff to Goodwill. During the week I put up the last of the Command caddies so it looks less frantic under the sinks. On Wednesday the visiting nurse, Jewel, came. We love Jewel and will miss her, but are crossing fingers that James' leg stays okay and we do not have to have a nurse any longer.

Thursday we went to Sam's Club for Kraft cheese slices and mandarin orange cups, then did the rest of the shopping. On Friday we completed the new set of towels by stopping at the Bed, Bath & Beyond Akers Mill store and getting a set of bath sheets and hand towels in indigo, then swung by Hobby Lobby. Incredibly, they already have an aisle of Christmas "picks" (the stuff you make into bouquets) going up! I grabbed a few things for the yard since all the summer stuff was half off: metal birds on stakes, a duck plaque to go on one fence post, and a metal owl to go on the other.

Saturday we frustrated ourselves for nearly three hours apply for a Veteran's ID card for James. You can get an annual park pass to National Parks for free if you are a vet and have proper ID. It took ages because they told you could use certain scanning formats for the documents you had to submit to confirm your ID, but you couldn't then use the same format (I scanned them as PDFs) to actually apply for the card (I had to rescan everything as a JPG). Then when we went to submit the rescanned stuff only then did they tell us you could only have a certain file size. I had to pull all the images into Paint Shop Pro and reduce the size and the colors to fit the specs. Someone who had no computer knowledge would have been flummoxed by the whole process. As it was, we were totally frustrated when we finally got to have lunch at 2:30 p.m., and picked up ice cream at Baskin-Robbins for a reward for putting up with it all.

Oh, for Friday lunch we finally tried Pho24, which closed down last year just on the day we were going to try it. It was quite good.