#182: sinful Caesar sipped his snifter, siezed his knees and sneezed

A fire engine and the deputy fire chief just raced past the coffee shop window and it makes me nervous. Only 20 minutes ago I was in a stakeout next to the bank, spying on them until I could figure out if I needed to leave the warm comfort of my car and start reporting on something. But that was then and then was a boring medical call... Now where are they off to?

Oops, there goes another fire engine, but minus the lights, sirens and reckless speeding. So everything is probably OK. (Famous last words).

Oh, and here they come back. Yay. Absolutely nothing going on. I will continue to sit here and drink chai.

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I have Thursday off from work and by a happy coincidence it looks like Thursday might be the only time we're going to see sun this week. My plan ever since I found out about this day off last week was to go hiking -- come sleet, come hail, come all the powers of hell. I even broke down and finally bought heavy duty, gonna-go-out-to-do-some-commercial fishing quality rubber boots. XTRATUF! They're are going to last forever...or at least 6 years, according to Marta. (Also, I bought a hardhat, but that's a different story. The guys at the store looked at me in wonderment, trying to figure what on earth I would need with rubber boots and a hardhat especially since I was mostly communicating in grunts and hand signals. Industry makes me uncomfortable. I become acutely aware that I work in a pansy profession and the only calluses on my hands are the ones on my fingers from playing guitar and that I couldn't gut something if it jumped into my lap begging me to and that I'll likely call something a ship when it should be called a boat and fake my way out of that sort of situation by calling everything "a vessel").

Anyway, I'll likely still need the boots to deal with mud, but maybe I won't need layers of garbage bags and multiple knit hats and maybe I'll get some sunlight on my mushroom-white face, cause my cells to swell with vitamin D happiness.

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Christmas was lovely. I feel...sanctified. Something like that. I needed some love and good food after the madness last week and I can say with surety that I'm more sane now and can remember things again. I went shopping last Thursday for a few remaining Christmas presents and honestly can't remember very much about it all. There were Christmas presents at the end of it, as if by magic. Well, we're past that sort of crazy now, I think.

It's really quiet this week in the courts and the county. Cops hasn't given me much of anything recently either. Almost all is well with the world, I guess. Chaos can't reign forever. It also needs frequent naps -- chaos and I are the same that way.