thumbs are as long as noses

yesterday i swished out to the car in my long, light and cool, summer skirt to go to church and found the duck dead.  totally dead. ding-dong-duck-dead.  a dead duck.  a duck on the water. it is surprising how little i feel in a situation like this.  i don't feel dread.  i don't feel dismay or fear.  i don't feel anything.  i just got out of the car and swished my way across the park and trekked to church on foot.  as i went i had a talk with God about something that has been on my mind lately.  do you ever have problems that just don't come out  right in your mind no matter how many times you think about them, and puzzle over them...like until your puzzler is sore?  i just don't see.  i just don't understand.  i don't see my path.  i don't know what's right to do.  i talked to God about it.  i told him all my befuddled thoughts.  i asked for help to see clearly where i am blind.  i don't know what's blinding me.  it could be my emotions, or neediness.  i just don't know.

i talked to him as i walked along the pedestrian/cycle path under the oak trees on garden city road as my skirt swished. i may have looked odd but no one seemed to be around so i felt free to chit chat with Diety.  half way down the road a mini van pulled over and picked me up.  it was yumi.  thanks partly to her and partly to brother gurney's slower style of announcements, i got there before the opening hymn.  sometime during the meeting i acknowledged to myself that i needed to uninstall candy crush from my phone if i wanted to live free of candy crush addiction.  so i did.  there were some very good talks with pieces in them that touched me the way i needed.

junior primary was super sparse.  that's all i'm saying about that.  senior primary was super silly.  you know the defiant kind of silly kids can perpetrate? at one point i think i did threaten sending them to sunbeams...  it was the kind of day when we didn't feel like we were on the same team.  i regret that.

it's fun having krystal in choir.  we're choir best friends.  for a while there were only 2 basses and 3 altos.  after a while a soprano showed up.  i was sitting beside her and it seemed that she was always a beat or two behind the rest of us.  but who am i to judge?  it's hard being the only one in your section.  i know that.

after choir i had a 20 minute nap in which i can confirm that i did realy and truly drool.  it's a fact.  then i got hometaught.  it was a message i needed.  bro. roeder tried to jump start the duck but she was as unresponsive as a blue corpse getting the shock paddle treatments.  "meh," she seemed to say "that's all you got for me?  wake me up when you're SERIOUS. zzzzz...."

i brought or took (i have no way of knowing which usage is correct.  their distinction does not exist for me, kind of like the sounds of 'l' and 'r' for a japanese person, or 'b' and 'v' for a korean) a very fine large watermelon to potluck.  when we actually got around to eating, which was longer than i would have wished, to be truthful, but this is not surprising anyone who knows us, jordan made some delicious bbq-ed chicken which was consumed by the masses the same way a fire eats the dead prarie grasses.  all around the eating areas people were giving other people chicken because there was no chicken left.  i gave dad my secon piece of chicken minus one bite.  mom and dad brought a yummy salmon with an even yummier salmon stuffing.  there was a good good good potato salad and spaghetti too.

it was hotter than i had much endurance for in evan and esther's house and yet when i went to the door, it was deliciously cool.  why do bad things like this happen to good people like us?  there is no easy answer.

later that night we ate watermelon and yummy gooey cinnamon buns.  and then we all spilled out onto the road and douglas, josh and caleb raced a 100metres.  douglas won.  then the kids raced.  then sarah, evan, doug, douglas and caleb raced.  douglas won, and sarah came in third a hair behind evan.  dad was particularily keen that sarah race.  when i left a while later, people were still racing.

friday morning i woke up with verty again. i missed work.  but on saturday i went to the stake pioneer picnic.  i wasn't feeling particularily better, but i promised sister cook to work the juice table and sarah and katie wanted to meet there and who am i to deny a sister?

i got there at 11:30 and there was nary a sister or clarke family member to be seen. i kept busy the next hour and a half filling up cups with tang for the insatiable crowds.  this actually dyed my fingers orange.  this is not right.  i had some yummy tacos.  i watched some tug o war.  katie and sarah arrived around that time.  and after that mom and dad.

later i joined mom and dad in the shade.  i was woozy so i wanted to lay down.  but laying down makes the world spin.  i lay down anyways and dealt with it.  spinning doesn't last forever.  soon i was thick with nieces.  the shade got too cool for us so we kept inching out into the sun until the shade would overtake us again and we would inch forward again.  

there was some disagreeableness with cherry pits.  one got spit into my temple, which i did not much enjoy.

we took a long time deciding what to do next.  dad was almost run over by a truck as he lay in the grass.  my flip flops WERE run over.  more than ONCE.

in the end i went home and katie and sarah went back to mom and dad's.  they were supposed to come to richmond for some togetherness time before katie had to catch the ferry but sarah ditched and by the time katie came, it was just time to drive them.  meanwhile i bought two beautiful watermelons at steveston market.

um anyways i just want to say that i had a shower last night in prep for having to get up earlier to ride my bike to work tomorrow because of dead duckage.  and in the shower i shaved my legs.  i know people do different things when they shave their legs, but i just bend over and shave them.  that's all i do.  as i stood bent over  i felt the vertigo coming and sure enough it soon felt like i was shaving on a merry-go-round.  but i stubbornly refused to stop.  let it be a merry-go-round then.  at which point vert took the speed up a notch.  top notch.  but i was done so who cares?

why do i get vert?  i'm not elderly.  i have not had a head injury that i know of!  maybe it's just because of that first vert a couple of years ago.

let's say vert again.  vert.

ok, i'm going home.

vert.

vertyvertvertvert.

vert i go.