A long week

I started my week with a flu shot, the one with the extra kick for seniors. This year the shot was at the drug store. I don’t remember last year’s, except it might have been at the drug store, in conjunction with the pneumonia and the second shingles (I think) shot. Completely benign.

This year’s shot was radically different. As the needle sunk into my upper arm, I felt a cold line travel down my left arm and into my second finger. Then the icy spear went down my left leg, across the top of my foot and into a toe.

When I returned home, I fell on the bed and slept several hours. I’ll try the shot one more year, and if the symptoms repeat, I’m off the shot for a couple of years. How well I remember about ten years ago, when the flu shot put me back in bed for five hours a day, many days in a row. This year it's put me to sleep a couple of hours a day.

We played cards again on Monday, the first time in a month. The church was so busy with one thing and another, plus a new player joining, a date change, all the usual kerfuffle of summer’s end and fall routines commencing. We played hearts.

I making myself focus closely; this season I want to have no episodes of my brain taking a wander in lala land. No excuses, no mistakes. Well, no mistakes that affect the other players. I believe I made it through. I lost by a lot.

The pots of bulbs were watered every time the mandevilla were watered. The water that ran through and out left brown stains on the drive. This was the same dirt that I used last year, without driveway stains. A mystery.

It has been a lovely, warm week, but tonight is the end. Daytime temps tomorrow will be twenty five degrees lower, in the mid-fifties and rain all weekend. We may miss the harvest moon.

This house makes me smile. It's down the street from me.

 And this may be the end of the mandevillas for this season.