Dinosaur Mom Chronicles

Acid reflux. Because exhaustion and random pain weren’t quite entertaining enough on their own.

Mouse and I are at the Pottery Stop in Ellicott City. Scroll down for a look at what she made last time. Tonight’s subject is a duck.

I have never once made it to the Art Night in Oakland Mills, though I always hope to. What I would love would be a crack at a high school art and/or home ec classroom for a few hours. I like painting greenware at the Pottery Stop. It would be fun to sit around doing artsy stuff in an environment where I’m not expected to buy anything. To give them their due, the Pottery Stop people are unobtrusive and friendly, and don’t mind when I sit and watch my girl paint.

This guy has been talking about himself on his cell on the train for over two hours. It is 1:10 AM and people are sleeping. But does this concern our protagonist?

I just finished reading “Life and Fate” by Vasily Grossman. The war parts are better than Tolstoy’s and the peace parts are – ah, but what peace was there to be had in the USSR in 1942-3, anyway? In any event, I can’t believe I waited so long to read it. Definitely not feeling Platonov, though, so I do not feel smarter than I did before I finished “Life and Fate.”

I will eventually mark the occasion on Goodreads, but not now. Now I am in a parking lot waiting for Turtleduck to join me at Ranazul.

I got a Kindle for Christmas – the old school model, not the new kind with real web browsing and such. I find reading on the Kindle very agreeable. I was particularly thrilled to find a copy of A.A. Milne’s “Once On A Time” available for e-reader at a ridiculously low (if not free) price.

My paid writing gig has cut me back from weekly to monthly, which is a bummer in economic terms but kind of a plus in that they didn’t cut me completely when they had the opportunity to do so. Maybe this will envigorate my regular blogging a little. I hope it will.

On Sunday morning I learned that Columbia has no day-time shelters for homeless people. I learned this when my church school boss dispatched me to track down a disoriented lady she’d helped across a busy street on en route to our Christmas party for the kids. The idea was to see if she was still wandering around in the cold, which she was. She had very limited mobility and was pushing her belongings around in a Howard County General Hospital wheelchair. She had hospital bracelets on. She said she had spent the night in the emergency room because of her blood pressure.

It was 30 degrees out. I asked her if she needed help to get anywhere, and she said she needed to get to shelter. She was wearing a winter coat, a pair of light-weight pajamas, and sneakers without socks. I called Grassroots to see where I could take her.

This is when I learned about day shelters and the lack thereof in our area. Homeless shelters don’t usually let people stick around by day, and the one day shelter in Howard County only operates three days a week. The person I spoke with at Grassroots recommended some retail and public locations where she might hang out and wait for a ride to one of their cold-weather overnight sites. It being Sunday morning, none of them were open.

Doesn’t seem like these retail and public establishments where the homeless spend their days – say, The Mall in Columbia – would want to fund some extra days for the day shelter we do have in Jessup? Or maybe establish one in Columbia?

Hocoblogs@@@

Operation Dino Freedom, as I have named the process of divorcing my mother-in-law, is proceeding slowly. Instituting it immediately would probably have pushed us into foreclosure, so we all backed off the ledge after her last eruption. Unfortunately, I suspect that her son led her to believe that we weren’t going to separate from her after all, or that we would only separate on her terms, whatever they may be. I countered that the only way I will consider sharing a roof with her after we relocate to Montgomery County (except in separate apartments of an apartment building or separate halves of a duplex) will be if Dino Spouse and I undertake family counseling.

I started looking up numbers this AM after my belle-mere got mad at me over the progress of the house painting. To be fair, Babushka has been the prime driver of our interior repainting effort. She is a fine house painter. Note that none of us have asked her to paint – she volunteered. But if we fail to share her enthusiasm for a particular approach or, say, rethink a color choice when a room is less than one-third painted and, sweet Jesus, I just woke up, lady, and you’re all in my face before I’m even awake or had a chance to say good morning to my kids or think about breakfast – well, then, she won’t paint anymore. She will not let us use her as a slave anymore. Etcetera. My blood runs cold.

Thank God, Dino Spouse will be home from Florida this afternoon. I am glad to surrender the role of Babushka control officer to my husband. Unfortunately, his surgical site is a-achin’ and a-leakin’ anew after a few days of improvement. I really hate to think that he’s going to have to go through more surgery, especially since all the options that remain involve higher risks of – well, risks of unsavory outcomes.

Now I will go order some groceries from the internet.

How come the 14 year-old can get his sibs out of the roller rink in five minutes but it takes them 15 minutes to get ready when I go in to get them?