12-15-12  (or 15-12-12 depending on where you are in the world)
Arriving at the neighborhood pool I am met by the hateful “pool closed” sign yet again. This same spiteful sign taunted me as I arrived the other day but turned out to be a false alarm as several people (pooligans?) were in the pool already. The pool was deserted on this day however except for the man on deck with a pool cleaning net so I settled into a deck chair for what I imagined (naively) would be a 10-15 minute skimming/cleaning of the pool. This was no ordinary pool skim/clean though ladies and gentlemen. No, this was beyond what you or I could imagine a pool cleaning could possibly be comprised of. This was ocd pool man extraordinaire.  OCD is not among the howevermany “ishes” I myself may foster though anyone might be able to make use of some of the determination this man took in his task. He was maddeningly thorough, skimming back and forth in neat rows like a passionate corn-on-the-cob eater in earnest to not miss one nib of pool flotsam. Once done with the skimmer he hooked up what looked to be a carpet sweeper to a long hose and proceeded to roll this instrument to and fro over every centimeter of the pool bottom. Meanwhile I squirmed, writhed, gnashed my teeth, sat on my hands, wailed silently, begged internally, wished for an end, sent brain waves and willed him to finish but this man had his mission and was not to be deterred by some silly woman on the sidelines who just needed to do the backstroke. It would take as long as it would take (and it would take close to an hour!). The upside was, once I was fiiiinally able to get in the water there was an absolute absence of any floating hairish detritus, no chumwhuppets, no swimsketch o-rama. Patience, hard as it is to come by, does have its rewards..

We have had some seriously crazy rain these past couple of weeks.  This is the kind of weather (a good wild rain) that would make me want to invite a readerly-writerly friend to go somewhere open to drink a couple glasses or so of wine and write, all Hemingway-like.

Every day in the late morning a food truck drives through the neighborhood playing a tinny music box sounding “Home On The Range” loudly which I find both cheering and comforting. The song seems out of place here, but then again, so am I. From this song I always wanted to take for myself the personal tagline – “Seldom is heard a discouraging word”