Hanging With Pets, Chores, Computers And Me

This is race day Saturday here in the Rogue Valley. For me that doesn't mean spending more than eight hours with high octane noise while dodging dirt clods, elbows and insects. Events like that hold all my panic triggers: noise, crowds, flickering light, basically any excess of sensory stimulation especially when combined with social expectation.

I tried to go to one of these dirt-track race events the first year we moved back to the valley. I spent most of the day either reading, writing or working my needlepoint. I got little out of it beyond my main purpose for going which was to have the ability to visualise the stories my husband and his mother told about it afterwards. Now I know where the pits are and the announcers stand, the flag, the concessions stand, the restrooms and the parking lot. I know what the ambiance of the day feels like. I don't much care for the heat and dust or the long waits between the action which I can't see in the moment it happens anyway. Unless it happens to happen exactly where I have my six or seven degrees of visual field aimed.

Once was enough. Since then I have enjoyed my Saturdays between April and October in other ways. The first three years I spent the day doing laundry, cleaning the room my husband and I share at his folks house, working or playing on his folks PC and playing with their dog, Sweetie, and our two cats, Gremlyn and Merlin. For two seasons after that, I spent the day and often the night as well with my husband's Grandmother. This year she needs more expert care than I can manage so I again have race season Saturdays for hanging with myself, the pets, the chores and computers. Though now there is only one cat while there are two computers. With multiple web sites up hankering for content and attention and plans for more in the works, there is less time for computer games and plenty to keep two computers busy for eight to ten hours.

Speaking of multiple web sites: Sunday Serenity Edition #2 is open for participants. If you'd like to join in, post something on the theme of serenity on your blog and then leave your link in comments. Then visit other participants and/or spread the word to your blogging buddies to help build the community. I'm off to prepare my Sunday Serenity #8.

I started posting these for myself as a kind of therapy shortly after the library closure in April, to ward off the incipient habit of associating Sunday with the loss of Gremlyn who died on a Sunday in March. My husband noticed how much I enjoyed preparing the posts and suggested starting a meme. Last weekend he offered to set up the hub and take on some of the promotion tasks. He had the hub created almost before I finished nodding my head. I was supposed to spread the word in my TT this past Thursday but forgot.