Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Nothing in the water but H2O

When we were at the ball game a couple weeks ago, Ted remarked that I hadn't been blogging lately.

I have the usual reasons: I can't really blog about the work stuff that is preoccupying me, and most of what I had been writing (posted or not) was sort of, well, whiny. Then, if I came up with something that amused me, like the Fonzie statue, I'd start writing about how '70's sitcoms molded my mind, but then I'd get sidetracked by a news article about a disaster and I'd feel guilty about being so frivolous when there's tragedy to be depressed about...etc.

The other day I heard Badlands on the radio. I'm no huge Springsteen fan, but he has some lyrical passages that I do love, and one is

For the ones who had a notion
A notion deep inside
That it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive

...so, I've been trying to lighten myself up a little. Maybe somebody else might appreciate the Fonz statue, but if not, it still made me smile. And that attitude sort of took me back to another short-lived experiment, the one where I was going to try to enumerate good things every day, instead of dwelling on every little thing that pissed me off (even though, let's be honest, the angry stuff is usually funnier. If I'm not careful, I may end up Ned Flanders.)

Anyway, that's why I'm so freakin' chipper all of a sudden, in case you were wondering.

(And for today, I'm really appreciating Pepco. We had some crazy, Great Plains weather yesterday...tornadoes. In Maryland. We don't get tornadoes.* But when I got home last night...following an hour and forty five minutes of absolute anarchy on the roads...our power was out. I was starting to ponder losing the refrigerator full of food when, at 8:15, there was light. Today I was hearing estimates of Saturday evening for some people to get their electricity back, which would seriously suck, since it's going to be in the 90's the rest of the week. So, I'm not sure why I'm a lucky one**, but I'm very grateful.)

* Actually we do, a couple a year, but since they don't have the impact of a midwestern tornado, I forget about them til the next year, when I say "We don't get tornadoes!"

**I do have a guess. Most of the power lines in my immediate neighborhood are buried, so outages from trees taking down lines are over at the substation, where hundreds of people are affected, so that's the kind of repair they do before going street by street.