remember all the fun of the aquatics center?

Upon bracing and pushing so hard that I made my sternum pop in a truly disturbing way, I must conclude that only one of my windows is open-able.

On a more positive note, a list of good things about today:

1. I'm getting a new fridge. The old one turns off and refuses to come back on. My landlord was over yesterday to look at it and called this afternoon to tell me that he'd bring me a new one. Huzzah. Negative note to temper the joy: the old fridge was off all weekend when I was out of town and my milk curdled. I was gleefully preparing coffee and decided to check the milk and almost died. So I had to walk down the hill while the coffee was brewing to purchase more milk. I picked up some broccoli, lettuce and crackers too, got to the counter and realized that I'd forgotten my debit card. Which leads me to positive item # two.

2. Upon forgetting my debit card, I prepared to leave in wrath without my purchases. The clerk asked me if I would be able to come back later...he could, so to speak, put everything on a tab because I only owed $5. "Just come back sometime this evening with the $5 and we'll call it good." Lovely.

3. I went back home and discovered I'd made the BEST COFFEE. I don't know how it happened. Magic or Providence or Intervention or something. Usually my coffee is terrible because I still haven't figured out how to use the darn machine. But this coffee: the best.

4. It was beautiful outside today. In my many walks up and down the hill to and from the grocery store, I got to appreciate how Spring-like it was. Stupid February, what's your problem? Raising my hopes with your warm weather, inducing the camellias to bloom, all with the sun and the clouds and the river being blue. I hate you, temperate February.

5. But anyway. I got to bask a bit in the sun. I really am not a gloomy day, stay long into the nights person. I think my basic makeup is already too depressed, I need kind weather and mornings to balance myself out. If I were a night person on top of it all...what an awful thought. The night is for sleeping in. That's all. There is nothing else useful to be done with it. I do like taking walks at night, but only if it's the kind of night that's more like day. Those don't happen very often and I'm not sure how to describe them anyway.

6. If I find a cheap and chaste swimsuit for under $20, I'm going to start swimming at the Aquatic Center. This has the potential to be both a terrible and wonderful idea. Wonderful because I love being in the water and I want to brush up on my swimming so that I can be awesome. Terrible because, you know, aquatic centers.

Oh horrors of my youth: third class kids (the ones who could breast and back stroke) peeing in the deep water near the diving boards where, in the extra darkness and deepness of the waters, the yellow cloud could mushroom out unnoticed; ancient army sergeant lifeguards (Jaimie and Laura, if you're reading this, remember Jennifer and how she'd sneak up behind you and pull your head down while she pushed your back up, "NOW KICK! KICK! KICK!"?), or young, slangy lifeguards all blond and towel-swaddled ready to sneer down their adorably freckled noses at you as you slumped and stroked for dear life, inhaling water and wanting to die; the cool older kids who could jackknife off the obscenely tall and scary high dive and we were all in awe of them, but they ignored us and probably said mean things about us while they swam laps; the old (emphasis: OLD) women who took the showers in a vast naked siege of sagging, shameless flesh each morning after they finished with water aerobics and just as we second swim class little girls filed in in our bright swimsuits, skin turning blue in the morning cold, horrified by what we could not tear our eyes away from.

How it all comes back: the smell of chlorine and wet concrete, the embarrassing ways of swimsuits, how swim caps would make your forehead have creases in it like a Star Trek Klingon, the thrill of being in deep water (16 or 18 ft, if I remember right). Oh it was great.

The Astoria Aquatics Center...we'll see.