Thursday Thirteen

1. The wind sure blew a lot last night. It howled, moaned, and screamed as it raced around the corners of my house.

2. We had rain yesterday. Hurrah! We've been in a drought and needed it badly. Now it needs to do it again in the next four to five days.

3. This week would have been my parents' 57th wedding anniversary if my mother had not passed away. This is a very long time. As it was, they were married for 38 years when she died of pancreatic cancer in 2000.

4. This is also the anniversary of the week when I first met my husband. Well, I knew him from riding the school bus, but this is the "official" boy-girl meeting. I was 19. He was 23. We met beneath the goal posts at a LBHS-JRHS inner-county school rivalry football game. We'll have been married for 36 years this November. Yikes.

5. My parents met when my father asked if he could catch worms underneath a tree in my grandparents' yard. My mother went out to help him and fell in love. Or so she always told me.

6. Yesterday I started drinking beet juice extract. It is supposed to help . . . something or another. Blood, veins, overall health? I don't like beets so I'm mixing the stuff in water and downing it as fast as I can. I don't suppose it can hurt anything.

7. My dental checkup yesterday went ok. I do have a new spot on the "watch" list - an old cavity filling that is apparently going to need to be replaced in the next year or so. For now it is ok. Go teeth!

8. Recently our local TV stations did some sort of tuning and if you receive the channels over the air, you had to reset your TV. I receive channels over the air in the bedroom so I reset the TV. I lost all of the NBC stations. I called my local NBC station yesterday and the very friendly tech guy said I needed to move my antenna. Unfortunately, my antenna is the kind that sticks to the wall, and when we tried to move it, it tore away part of the drywall, so we stopped trying to move it and left it there because otherwise we would have to fix the hole and paint. Apparently I need a new antenna (one that won't stick to the wall). I guess the one on the wall will just hang there like some kind of modern art until we get around to painting, which I don't anticipate happening for quite a while.

9. Back in the summer, I had a superficial blood clot in the calf of my leg. I still have a huge knot there and it is discolored. I don't know if this is normal. The blood clot occurred on July 11. So for three months there's been an issue there. (This is the main reason for the beet juice extract.)

10. I bought a Lord of the Rings music book because it showed in the "glimpse" on Amazon that there were guitar chords. Guess what. Only one song has guitar chords. The rest is for piano music and I've been reading guitar tab so long I don't really remember how to read piano music, especially the bass clef. Damn it.

11. It is 10 a.m. here. When you are reading this, it will be 10 a.m. somewhere else, maybe. Do you ever wonder what happens all around the world at specific times? And how can the world end today when it is already tomorrow elsewhere?

12. I eat too much chocolate. I need to stop but I simply cannot seem to give it up. I wonder if it's an addiction, like cigarettes or my husband's chewing tobacco.

13. The other morning, it was foggy when I woke. This would have been Monday. The moon was full so the fog was rather eerie. As it grew a bit lighter, I saw turkey after turkey walk by my office window. I got up and counted 25 of them. About 20 minutes later, I went into the kitchen, and the backyard was full of deer. I have figured out how to open the patio door very quietly and stick my camera out between the slats of the vertical blinds to take photos of the deer. I did this. I was clicking away when the does all stopped and looked to my right. I thought it might be a buck, so I went to the window in the other room to see. It was a pack of coyotes! I squeaked a little, and didn't think to take a picture. No, my first thought was, "there is a pack of coyotes outside and I left the patio door open!" So I raced back and closed the door. The deer were gone, of course, and by the time I got back to the window, so were the coyotes. Such is life on the farm some days.

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 626th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.