Hi.

Yeah. Um. So I feel tired and lazy and fat. I ate a lot for dinner; even though I snack all the time, I rarely eat a lot at one meal, and I feel like my tummy is growing outward before my eyes.

My day was not as busy as I had hoped, because those nasty little freshpeople are not coming in on their own for their ID cards as they should.

[Pause.]

An hour later ...

Anyway, so I've got to ask the principal to make an announcement that they'll be checking for freshmen ID cards next week. That ought to wake them up a little.

So I took a pause because K happened downstairs and somehow we got onto the topic of jewelry, and we decided to look through what I laughingly call "my jewelry box." You know, if you have an actual jewelery box -- and I've had those in the past -- it's like telling anyone who breaks in that here it is, all my valuable stuff is pre-packed for you in one convenient, portable storage case; bye! Anyway, I'm not good at conventional stuff like that. I have four big gray storage boxes, cardboard, stacked on top of each other on a file cabinet in the corner of my bedroom. My jewelry, so called, is in one of them in an assortment of trays. Getting to this box is like decoding a puzzle, what with all the stuff on top of it, which is fine because I rarely need to look at it. But it was fun.

I have very, very little in the way of good jewelry, which is also fine with me. I have a lot of the costume things my mother loved, although I also have a couple of very good pieces that were hers: her wedding band, which I wear every day, and an opal wedding band that she wore every day (which is why she gave me her original ring years and years ago.) I have Grandma Ida's engagement ring, which I wrote about recently and yes, I'm wearing it every day, and Grandma Sadie's diamond watch, which, how did a living human woman, especially one that heavy, have such a tiny wrist? I have my own engagement ring, very pretty but not terribly valuable. I think that's it. My jewelry box is filled with memory type things, mostly, and a variety of costume jewelry that I used to wear, and things that people have given me, either as gifts or as souvenirs brought back from travels. I like opals; R brought me opal earrings from Australia. She brought my mother an opal pendant, which I now have, too.

I have bracelets and things I wore as a child and as a teenager, and both a bracelet and a ring woven from leather strips that I bought from a street vendor in high school. Really, I never throw anything out. I have about a dozen cheap watches that don't work.

Ooh, and a really cool watch, that I set and wound, and I'll wear it on Saturday -- we're going to a wedding -- if it's still running. Have to remember to wind it every day; there's a flashback. It looks something like the watch on this page; the face is similar, although the style of the watch is a little different. When the watch is running, the two circles in the center rotate and create a kind of kaleidoscope. The red hands tell the time. How did I come by such a fancy shmancy device? In fact, I have two of them:

When I was about twelve, I think, my father knew someone who knew someone who knew someone, and he was offered some kind of deal on these really expensive watches. I remember that we all drove into the city on a Sunday -- stores were not open, even in New York City, on Sundays then, but this guy opened special for us *ahem* -- and my mother, my sister, and I each picked out a style that we liked. My mother got one with a square case surrounding the dials, which I now have in addition to the petite round one I picked out for me, like my sister's. I never knew what the deal was, but it seemed a little outside of the normal practice of business to me even then, if you get my drift, but since Jack was the most honest and moral man alive, I don't know.

I also don't know if the watch works, but if it does, I'll wear it. If I can figure out how to take a little movie of it running, I'll post it for you. It was very cool. Hey, it was the sixties.

Okay, time to post and go into my long-awaited food coma.

WATCHING LAW & ORDER :: ENTRY #1583