Another good day

I was exhausted after my trip to the beach with Melina; she is living her life at a breakneck pace. Since I have an empathic link with her, I had a little contact headache and palpitations of the heart for two days straight...

Yesterday, after Melina had gone to her dad's, was like this:

• I spent more than half an hour tearing the place up looking for my Yiddish homework! I could only find half a page of it! I was sure I'd done it!
  
  Eventually, in despair, I decided to do it over again. It was at that point - and not before - that I realized: I'd never done it the first time. No wonder I couldn't find it! Would this excuse go over if I were still in school?
  
  As I rushed to finish the homework before class began I cursed that half hour of running around looking in miscellaneous piles of paper. It made me late to Yiddish class.
  
  
• I talked to our teacher, Sheva Zucker, about my cockamamie wish to go to a three-week Yiddish Immersion program held in Paris in July. If the airfares weren't so expensive I'd have booked a flight already.
  
  
• Then I went to Bob's house to rehearse. The Pratie Heads will be doing a free outdoor concert at Durham Foster's Market on Saturday, April 29, 4-6:30, and I think Sara Foster will be barbecuing! Be there or be square!
  
  We're working on reviving some of our old material (we shake our heads and say, "how did we ever think that up?") and putting together new things too.
  
  He bought me a Danish and a Diet Coke, which reminds me of that recipe I linked to the other day, for a Blooming Onion and low-fat Miracle Whip...
  
  
• Then I rushed home and baked cookies for Mike the neuropsychiatrist, who comes for a singing lesson on Saturday afternoons and stays for cookies and milk and a painting session (or sometimes welding).
  
  He also brought back the bookshelves I'd ripped in half for him on my table saw last week. I'd recommended this course of action because he tells me he has 100s (1000s?) of cds stacked in miscellaneous corners in his house. I have been very happy with the two cd storage units I ripped for myself out of one too-deep bookcase.
  
  But I had ripped mine when they were dismantled, so I could feed them through the saw one board at a time! Mike refused to dismantle his bookcases, so I had to just feed them through my table saw whole. That's quite an unwieldy process.
  
  This meant the inner shelves, which the blade couldn't reach, would have to be sawed by hand (or jigsaw) later.
  
  He'd taken them home and tried that, but had sadly nipped little bits out of the shelves in the process. So he brought them back to be cut again, hoping that the next time he cuts the inner shelves he'll do a better job.
  
  This reminded me of some old Loony Tune where a big log gets fed through some machine and comes out as a toothpick. Soon this bookcase will be too shallow to be anything but a spice rack.
  
  Then we painted (you can see our efforts in recent posts) and ate cookies.
  
  
• Then my friend Judy, whom I met online but who has since become a "real" friend - by which I mean somebody who's never going to disappear without a word of farewell - came by to get me and we went to see "Thank You For Smoking." I was curious about the movie because the book was written by one of my Yale classmates, Chris Buckley. The movie was funny and true. We laughed a lot - our language needs a word for those special "laugh-to-keep-from crying" tears...
  
  ... and we talked about people we know who died from smoking-related illnesses... for me, that includes, among my own nearest and dearest,
  
  
  1. My father's father - emphysema and heart
     
  2. My mother's father - emphysema and lung cancer
     
  3. My mother - too hard to explain
     
  4. My mother's twin sister - lung cancer
     
  5. My father's second wife - lung cancer
  
  I spent my childhood in cars and rooms with closed windows and my mom smoking nervously away, hour after hour...
  
  Judy dropped me home and I collapsed, happy despite my morose review of smoking-related mortalities.

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