Let Me Tell You About My Day

[copied from dland]

It's day two of The Sinus Headache That Will Not Die, and it's exhausting me. Not to mention my excursion into the cold today, from which I'm taking some time to recover.

I got dressed this morning in layers upon layers, and revived my heavy winter coat which I haven't really worn all winter (in lieu of the jacket which isn't really warm, but whatever) and got myself all put together. I went over to the Sibs' a little after noon, since I was going along to the funeral with them. She was finalizing her going out outfit with what looks like two or three sweaters. Her husband comes into the room wearing slacks and a button-down shirt and answers her request that he wear a jacket by saying he had no jacket suitable for a funeral. She insists that he find some jacket to wear and he comes back with a heavy windbreaker on. She, meanwhile, tops off her layers of sweaters with a heavy shawl. A heavy shawl? It's 15 degrees, with a wind chill of 5, maybe! The only one of them dressed at all appropriately is the 16 year old, Little K.

So we take the ride, maybe 20 minutes, and get there and have to wait a half hour for the hearse to arrive and get ready to go to the grave site. We all say hello to the BIL's sister and her various family members, and drive over to the right spot. (This is an absolutely huge cemetery, actually two or three adjacent cemeteries that merged long ago.) And we walked over to the grave.

It was just unbelievably cold. I was the only person wearing a hat. The Sibs, not surprisingly, was freezing, and I ended up standing behind her to block the wind. The BIL's sister's husband, apparently some sort of rabbi's assistant, led the service and such, and started and ending with two very long and very clichéd poems about the history of the Jewish people and so on. When it came to the actual prayers, he had to ask his daughter to turn the pages in the prayer book because his hands were too cold to work. None of these people wore gloves. I think maybe he could have eliminated the poems, huh?

By the time we got back to the car, my face actually hurt from being scrunched up tight in the cold. That's also when I realized that the headache had multiplied in strength while I was scrunching.

So it's over; I came home and only now, five hours later, am I starting to consider taking off some of the extra layers. (But I'm not still wearing the coat.) My feet are still cold.

Anyway, K had rented Little Miss Sunshine, which we watched this afternoon and enjoyed very much. Very well done, fabulous acting, and many unexpected moments. Thumbs up from Chai and K.

I just installed a little weather thingy in my browser -- it's a Firefox extension, not Weatherbug, which I never liked on my PC -- and it says that the high for tomorrow is 17. I am not keen on K walking around campus in that, since the parking is always so far from the buildings. I told her to keep an eye on the school website and her email to see if anything is canceled.

Well, the kid has just relocated up to her bedroom, so I can now take full possession of the couch and the remote. We've been watching a lot of the various history channels recently, which I may leave on. I'm certainly not watching the Super Bowl, about which I could not possibly care less than I already do, so my choices are limited.

I haven't watched An Inconvenient Truth yet since it's the Hubs' and he hasn't opened it yet, but I saw the producer on TV yesterday talking about some of the "green" things we can all do. We've already changed all the light bulbs in the house to compact fluorescents. I'm considering paper towels from recycled paper. But my big project is going to be not keeping things plugged in all the time that don't need to be, especially those things that recharge your phone and iPod and whatever. I gotta get me another power strip and a label maker and just go ahead and do it, but I never got to it this weekend. Maybe next.

Okay, I'm putting my head down now.


WATCHING THE NAKED ARCHAELOGIST :: ENTRY #1367