Monday, January 11

Slept late again, this morning, until around 8 a.m., and then did a treadmill session and resistance exercises. Mother came over after that and put color in my hair in anticipation of getting a haircut tomorrow. Mother has opted out of getting hers trimmed, since she says her hair is too thin to get it cut every month.

Other than that, I didn't accomplish much beyond doing some laundry before lunch. After lunch, Hubbie and I ran errands...to a grocery store to get cartons of cottage cheese, but there was none; to a grocery store pharmacy to pick up a prescription, as well as lasagna noodles and Mozzarella cheese; to the bank; to the health store for salt-free seasoning; and to the WDCS for a few groceries. I also looked for clear plastic back protectors for wire earrings, but there were none. I'll have to check later this week for the back protectors and cottage cheese.

Back home, Mother and I organized scrapbooking and card making supplies before stashing them away. We'd dragged everything out Saturday so Sis could find what she needed to make a couple of screen door birthday cards, and decided that since it was all out, it was an opportune time to get it better organized.

If the weather holds (higher temp like today), our scrapbook club will meet next week, so Mother and I will need to plan a few pages beforehand. But until then, we needed to clear the living room for my second birthday party next Sunday, when my children and their spouses will be here.

After that, I programmed the DVR for movies this week, and read the Sunday newspaper, as well as our town's daily edition. In our local paper, I learned that a lady who has served on both the community theater board and the arts council visual arts committee with me lost her house to a fire last Thursday morning. She lived alone, but, thank goodness, she is unharmed. I'm sure the members of the board and committee will individually and collectively do whatever we can to help her.

I know what it is to lose everything in a house fire, since it happened to me many years ago, when my family was very young. As is always the case with house fires, the most difficult material possessions to lose were family photos and heirlooms. But the fortunate thing was that we were all safely away from home when it burned.

Supper tonight was chicken noodle soup. I know that seems strange after having fried chicken yesterday, but we wanted a warming meal, and soup is best for that. Besides, chicken noodle is the easiest of the soups to make. We had the soup with whole wheat mini bagels.

Mother went home after supper, and Hubbie and I did the usual...watched TV. We saw "The Claim," an R-rated film set in the winter of 1849 against the frigid-looking but stunning backdrop of what is supposed to be the Sierra Nevada Mountains, though the movie was really shot near Calgary, Alberta. Three people arrive in the gold rush town of Kingdom Come...a woman and her daughter, and the leader of a railroad prospect crew. These three and the man who runs the town are the central characters in the film, whose lives interwine in unexpected, and sometimes tragic, ways. The film stars Wes Bentley, Peter Mullan, Milla Jovovich, Nastassja Kinski, and Sarah Polley. The R-rating is for brief nudity and sexual content, and violence. It's a harsh story about a harsh pioneering time.