Barbara J. Hamby

Rearranging our Home Office

Listening to Pavarotti should inspire me to write something, but I keep getting distracted by the music. I hadn’t realized he was nine years younger than I, and he’s gone already.

For the past two weeks I’ve been working on getting rid of a queen bed in the office/guest/bedroom. We bought a sofa bed to replace it and I’d like to get it out of the boxes that are now standing in the hall. My first idea was to find someone I actually knew who could use the bed, but I finally gave up on that as too time consuming. My daughter’s church could have sold it at their rummage sale, but they didn’t have anyone who could pick it up and take it there. Now I have phone numbers of charitable organizations that may take it off my hands and put it to good use. I’ll work on that tomorrow. Maybe, with any luck, by next week I can get this room whipped into shape. A curtain over the messy bookcases storing flotsam and jetsam will help and I can possibly use the bedspread for that purpose.

I continue to keyboard lost poems back into my computer. It’s fun to go back and remember what was going on in my life when I wrote them. A swimming friend asked me this afternoon if I could write a poem about people who talk non-stop. I suspected she was referring to another gal who’d just left, who has cornered me and assaulted my ears before, when I was trying to count while doing my exercises. I do love a challenge, so I’ll have to give that a shot. It reminded me that I was challenged to write one about a toilet a few years back, which I did. I’ll have to see if I can find that one. I don’t remember the name of it; that always makes them hard to find. Somehow, when I transferred work onto this new computer, Vista put my documents into two separate indexes and I haven’t learned how to straighten that out yet. I really hate to spend the amount of time it could take to do so.

Yesterday I spent about an hour gardening in the pots on the deck and was wiped out. I’m such a wimp these days. I keep telling myself I moved into an apartment to get away from yard work, but I do like to have a few flowers. Our potted tomatoes are finally ripening. I think I’ll plant two pots next year. They ripen so late that, even if there are quite a few on the plant, they are green when the first freeze comes. We’re not into fried green tomatoes, so more ripe ones would be better. We are enjoying Indian Summer weather, although it gets quite cool at times, especially at night.