From Tome - the new and improved process

Lovely watercolor lines - that I am guessing were done between  strips of a removable tape. The colors are perfect with the stamp. The address is USPS friendly. 

Dec 10: Tome sent this in the Nov exchange and I still haven't sent her Nov-Dec envelope. It's been hard to decide what to send - and not for any reason - other than brain-scramble. The longer it takes for me to decide what to send, the more paralyzed I become. Luckily, I know I have a deadline - because I'm heading in to Chicago on the 16th.

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The giant wind storm that swept though the mid-west a couple days ago didn't do much to Duh Moines. The power was out for about 4 hours. I made it to Chicago the next morning even though I was concerned about flying into the Windy City since the 80-90 MPH winds had been headed that way. It was an odd trip. Instead of the normal up and down bouncing that I am familiar with - it was as if there was an elephant on the tip of each wing - and they were playing teeter totter. As the wings went up and down and I pictured our pilot wrestling with the *steering wheel.* The BigHelpfulBrother is going to enlighten us on what was going on in the comment section. We will also find out what they call the*steering wheel.* I'm hoping he doesn't tell us the pilot must have been a complete nincompoop and that the only reason for side to side tipping is someone named Jarrod or Alex wanted to give the passengers something to talk about. Mario, our fight attendant was very nice. I need to bring cards and pens and make pretty thank yous for the people who introduce themselves at the beginning of the flight.

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Dec 2, 2021

I'm toying with the idea of turning my blog into a type of diary. There are 13 days left to fill in December and I have just discovered the word *combobulate.* Maybe you recall hearing it in early December. In November, I put the topic of my brain injury to rest because I was sick and tired of it and assumed that everyone else was as well. 

Sadly, that little alien pilot (who invaded my brain) is alive and well and he had other plans for me. The best we can do for now is some kind of truce - where I agree to have more patience while things get back in order. 

As mentioned previously, if I have trouble sleeping, I turn on a boring audiobook, set the timer for 20 minutes and it's the best way to lull me back to sleep. On a good night, I only wake up a couple times. On a bad night I wake up hourly. So, my latest sleepy time book has been Hamilton, by Ron Chernow. It was the book that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write/compose the stage play, Hamilton (which I have not seen - which explains why I knew next to nothing about Hamilton or that whole era. Unless there was something significant in the art world going on in any given era, information didn't embed itself in my memory.)

Thirty-six hours of listening. The longest book I have found with plenty of sleep inducing details. I can't believe the revolution actually succeeded. My favorite part (so far) was when they knew of a way to take out one of the top British military leaders - but decided to just leave him alone because he was so incompetent that they figured a replacement might make things more difficult for them.

More than anything else - and maybe everyone already knows this -- but the so called framers/movers/shakers/settlers/opportunistic scoundrels of the new country were a very mixed bag of people with all kinds of issues. There is nothing going on today that is any worse than what was going on then. Except maybe automatic weapons.