Home and native land

For the second week in a row, I'm blogging on a day other than Friday. But it'll take me at least three days to finish this post, whatever it's going to be about.

It's 9:45 PM now, and I'm watching the round-robin slapping scene in "The First Wives Club." I think I'll be up for a while. I had more coffee than usual today, including a rare Starbucks. It tasted like 1996.

Wait, J.K. Simmons was in "TFWC?" Who would have predicted that he's the one who'd eventually win an Oscar? Ivana (not Ivanka) Trump, too. "Don't get mad--get everything." I wonder what she's doing now. She would probably have LOVED to be First Lady.

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I'm on book 4 of The Cazalet Chronicles now. Spoiler alert, if you're planning to read the books, as you certainly should, Rupert is alive! Of course, I suspected that he was. The surprise was in how it was revealed, and in what he was doing during the time that he was missing in action, not so much in the fact that he had actually survived.

So other than poor Sybil (cancer), all of the Cazalets survived the war--no one died in combat, or in a bombing raid. Now they have to survive something altogether different.  After the initial joyful relief of the war's end, the Cazalets and the rest of England are war-weary, poverty-stricken, and depressed. 1946 was a bleak year in England.

It's raining today. My son and I spent part of the morning and most of the afternoon delivering mulch for Rockville High School's annual mulch sale. The rain continued; sometimes a drizzle, and sometimes a heavier, steady rain. Everything seemed dirty. Well, we were hauling giant bags of topsoil and mulch in the rain, so everything actually was dirty. And now I'm sick. My eyes are burning and my throat is raw and my body feels like it's been through a fight. Bleak.

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But speaking of the opposite of bleak (Were we not speaking of the opposite of bleak? Well, we are now), there are few things more fun than watching your team win a playoff game in overtime, live. I'd never been to a playoff game before. We ended up sitting in what was obviously the section reserved for Maple Leafs fans with anger management issues. Canadians aren't as nice as everyone thinks they are, and the Capitals' overtime win didn't make them any happier. No exaggeration to say that we were lucky to get out of Verizon Center without witnessing off-ice bloodshed. It was awesome.

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Sunday. The rain ended, and we had a few hours of thin, chilly spring sunshine. It's gray now at 4 PM, and tomorrow is supposed to be a cold and rainy Monday. I'm going to make a pot of chili.