Tall hot blond +

  It’s been a … week since I wrote here.  Yesterday was the 18th anniversary of the Great Hanshin Earthquake, aka the Kobe quake, of January 17th, 1995.  What would have been my 29th marriage anniversary would have been last week too..

It’s been a hard week.

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We have had a week of sunny weather, after the fog burns off in the mornings.  Ironically, on tonight’s news, we were signed as the 5th cloudiest city in the US.  Spokane and Seattle are cloudier, as are 2 big cities in Alaska.  Today, there were no clouds in the afternoon sky.  I’m thinking that if tomorrow looks like today did, then I have to drive out into the Gorge.  There are frozen waterfalls out there to see.

Some people mentioned that I "take the same shots over and over".  This is not true  I do go to the same places to take pictures, but none of them are "the same thing".  Each is its own moment in time, and, well, if the audience doen’t like my pictures, it’s easy to go elsewhere.

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This week has been the intro to Zoloft, an anti-depressant.  My schedule has been all messed up – in bed by 5 and up by noon?  I’ve always been kind of a night-owl, but that was getting ridiculous.  I’ve been tired all day, on the first full dose day.

The Unemployment did not come last week.  It ended and I used up a lot of minutes calling them – busy most all of the time, but I finally got through and restarted the UE.  It still did not come last week, and this week, I got the last 50 dollars of that claim.  I got a letter today saying it had been approved for "tier 2" of Federal Unemployment.  The letter that I’ve been expecting from Japan has not come either.

It’s been a bad week.

***

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Last week saw what would have been my 29th wedding anniversary.  My former wife is one of my oldest or longest-held friends.  She is Japanese and lives in Japan, but came to see me in March for my 50th birthday.  1984 is getting to be longer and longer ago.

The wedding didn’t last, but our friendship has.

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Got your attention with that title, I hope.

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On Saturday, my Food Stamps, aka The Oregon Trail Card, had renewed at the beginning of the month, and I took a 31 mile round-trip drive to get some good hamburger.  The meat in the local QFC is only "ok" and is sort of expensive, and the beef at Winco sucks, so I take the drive out to Gresham and buy "good" hamburger for dinners I fix.

The GPS gives me a different route to the meat store.  (I love the smell of that place!)  That GPS routes me up I-205 to US 26 and out 26 to the meat store, but the better route for me is to take OR 224 – which begins a few blocks away – to where it splits from OR 211.  I drive 211 out to 242nd Ave. and take that north to Gresham, and the meat store is only a few turns up the highway.  They do sell hamburger from 3% fat to 20%.  I used to buy the 5% beef, but I found I like the fat and get the 10% meat now.  It makes a good Hamburger Helper dinner.

On the way home, I was in the mood for a cup of coffee, and thought, well, I’ll just stop at the MacDonalds in Damascus.  It was getting late in the day though, and traffic in and out of the Mickey D’s is… not easy.  I had been thinking of stopping to buy some Hamburger Helper, and realized that there is a Safeway store in Damscus, and that it was easier to get in and out of than MacDonalds, so I stopped there.

I took a shopping bag into the store and filled it with the makings for a couple of dinners, paid for it, and began to walk out.

I still wanted that cup of coffee though.  Fortunately, Safeways have little Starbucks in them too, so I thought, well, I’ll just get coffee there.  It’s 75 cents more than the Mickey D’s across the highway, but 75 cents was cheap to avoid the hassle of going there.  I saw a sign on the Starbucks kiosk, that they had "blond" coffee, a light-roasted coffee that’s appealing in the afternoons.

There was a pretty young dark-haired girl working in the kiosk.

I hear voices in my head sometimes, and one piped up with, "Gimme a tall hot blond!"

It sounded good in my head… so I said, "Gimme a tall Hot Blond!" and laughed.

Fortunately, she laughed too.

Maybe this Zoloft will kick in stronger and make the days brighter.

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