preparations

As mentioned previously, I'm working on getting ready for my trip. In advance! Who are you and what have you done with me? Bought a backpack, it will just have to do unless I come across a smaller day pack between now and then, and ordered a pair of jeans online since no one ever has my size. Well, I can find my size just not the proper length. Apparently stores think all women wear 4” or higher spike heels with their jeans and so never stock 'short' in length. And I'm not particularly short. I dug out my old Canon PowerShot (pre IPhone) to take with me and charged the battery and tested it and emptied the sim card since my IPhone tells me at least once a month or less that my storage is almost full so I have to delete the message log and phone log and mail folders and old photos and no I don't want to do the cloud since it screwed up my photos app in Hawai'i and I now have 17 empty albums that I can't get rid of, the photo stream function no longer functions, and within 2 days was wanting me to buy more storage. I've got the electrical converter gizmos. I've checked the average temperature for Portugal for May...mid 50s to low 70s. I've downloaded three English/Portuguese dictionaries because I'm not sure which one will be the most useful. I bought some leggings, something I have never owned, mainly for comfort for the plane rides and yes I do have a shirt long enough to cover my ass to go with them. I got my hair cut, shorter than I wanted but once that first snip is made you are pretty much committed.

this is what 68 years of living looks like

Oh well, it'll grow and will be easy to take care of on the trip.

Guess I'll get out the suitcase on Monday and start assessing clothing and packing the nonessential items like one of my yoga mats. Still need to contact the credit card company and alert them to my travel plans and decide how much cash I want to convert to Euros. Still having some involved dreams of groups of people and being places but I don't really remember much about them.

Whatever the situation was about the shower drain was resolved Wednesday but blah blah reasons why no more progress was made this week. It's all supposed to start happening Monday heard that a million times in my life, said it more than a few too but I'm becoming increasingly detached from expecting any progress at all before I leave which is a good thing. Still need to pick up the rest of the tile Monday and order x amount of bullnose tile to finish the shower edges. Details and loose ends.

Other activities this week...it's dewberry season.

I bet I've picked at least 12 cups so far, maybe one or two more, though mine are about done. Maybe one more decent pick. The dewberries (our native blackberry) loved the flood. They have colonized the front right corner of the shop and spread all along the front fence. I have made and we have devoured one dewberry cobbler and I'd make another if he would just go to the grocery store since the first one involved a madcap drive, or as Leonard says, a bat out of hell, to Judy's house at the other end of the street in the middle of preparations to borrow 1/3 cup of flour to continue.

Here's a picture of the garden a few days ago. Still haven't planted the okra. It could wait til I get back. It probably will.

And a monarch on the love-in-a-mist.