It's Raining Here in Maine and 40 degrees

This blue door cheered me up this morning.  Saw it on another blog and thought of my friend P.  I can see this as her shed with the chickens and the goose out back instead of wood.  But she does need a covered spot for the wood.

I wonder, after visiting her,  if I would be as good at living alone.  No one else to blow the snow off the driveway,  check the propane tank,  do the endless number of things involved with chickens and the goose and the two dogs and the cat.  No one else to step up if bills need paying.  My daughter is also dancing to this tune.  But we are nearby and willing to help.

My lunch with my neighbor was a delight.  Noon to 4 pm.  That's an indication of a delightfully long conversation.  I am never happy with a rushed one hour lunch date.  It's better than no lunch date, but I really love to just have a chat.  You know that, don't you?

Today I got my haircut.  Chat with hairdresser.  Chat with receptionist.  Dash across the street to my greenhouse for a chat with employee/friends.  Then back home.  Feeling happy.

I pasted my retail job schedule (which I had posted on a kitchen cabinet door for G) into my journal.  Only about a dozen pages left in this book.  I also copied about 10 recipes off the Food52 site into the journal.  It seems that I begin new journals with the Chinese New Year.  So, I am right on schedule-- but this book has taken 2 years to fill.  This means I have been too busy to do much writing.  I have also not been using the journal to record my daily food intake.

As I page through this journal, I see lots of fashion ideas, pictures of kitchens and gardens, recipes and not so many drawings.  There is the famously unfinished Doodle.  Which spawned the Christmas Doodle Trees.  I also found, tucked into the pages, a set of five renditions of a pomegranate.  In pen, brush pen, pencil, colored ink and collage of drawing and newsprint.  I think they are each 6 inches square.  Really nice.  I should have them matted and framed.

That's the thing I love the most about these journals.  Looking through them--there is always a moment of surprise.  Did I do that?  Did I write that?  Did I save that?  I have found recipes, poems and phone numbers.  Long thought lost.  But, not.  Saved in the pages.  I comfort myself in knowing that if I am ever old, sick and alone someday--I have the journals which predate the blog by about 6 years.  To read, to remember.

And you know what?  if this blog survives, I will also have it.   This is the 10th year that I have been writing here.  Amazing.