December 13

Like money running out of a faucet is what I hear as the furnace fan just runs and runs without quitting, especially when we have had to click over to emergency heat. The outside heat pump deal has thrown the breaker and won't accept power to itself again. I can flip off the inside unit and flip on the outside, where it doesn't run or anything, but when I click the inside back on off it goes. Got a repairman scheduled for around nine this morning.

Life does and always will consist of highs and lows. The older you get doesn't seem to change the height of the highs but the lows seem to get deeper and deeper. I hold the lack of income/money as the largest contributor to the continually lessening buoyancy of the lows as well as circumscribing the height of the highs. Sure hope that sinking low doesn't require us to float a loan! How would we ever be able to repay it?

I'm going to left to deal with the repairman myself as Dory is going to slip away with Ruthie for a pop out of the low for a quick breath of whatever high she can achieve at Boonville. Bless her little heart. She tells me the only reason she is going is so as not to let her good friend Ruthie down. She wants to stay home among us dregs here at the bottom but poor, poor Ruthie really wants to make one last visit there before she heads out to Yuma and doesn't have anyone else to go with her. The visit had been planned a few days earlier, so she says she is sorry but she absolutely cannot let her good friend down.

No problem. While she and Ruthie are packing their little digestive containers with shrimp and all the other dishes along with the huge desert choices at the free buffet, I'll just have me a piece of chopped ham rolled in a leaf of lettuce. May have a couple of them today and a few chips too, worry makes me hungry.

Every winter, the brain cells that know how miserable the cold is, freeze and die. It takes all summer for them to grow back, and then it's winter again and the whole ugly process starts all over. P. J. Tracy