A post in which I finally receive a visit from the Muse, and begin to Hat

It was a strange day today. Good, but strange.

I’m still trying to lose weight, so I’m hungry a lot. I have this Hat Party coming up, and no real inspiration, plus I have a service date coming up with no menu planned, and the Atlanta trip to see Myz Shay is waiting on Rhonda, who I think I’m going to have to chase down to try to be good to her. Usually when I have this kind of thing going on, I feel all frazzled, the psychic ends flapping around me in a jumble like a mental frustration pencil. But I don’t feel that way. I feel like everything’s gonna work out and be just fine. I feel calm and pleasantly optimistic. I never really knew why people said someone was ‘collected’ before, but that’s how I feel – collected; as if all the ends were tucked in, and my mind was just a neat, cool, self-contained package.

Unusual for me. Wish I knew where this was coming from, I’d like to get used to it.

I did make some calls today to ask some pretty amused people if I could buy a pith helmet from them, but no dice.

After work today I decided that I was going to suck it up, go to Wal-Mart, look around for a bit, and hope that inspiration would strike. Sometimes you just have to court the Muse a bit. I had a bunch of beads and stuff I bought for my hat (the theme this year is Mardi Gras), but really had only the vaguest of ideas what I was going to do with them. And no hat base – which is really key. I hate going to Wal-Mart, but they have a craft section (although it is now much smaller and more poorly stocked than it used to be), a garden department (garden hats, plus you never know when you’re going to find some odd container that might make a good hat base), and I figured they would just have some plain ole hats too (they did, but not the kind I wanted).

Inspiration did indeed strike in the lawn & garden department. After a quick Felliniesque moment walking around with a piece of garden equipment on my head, I had my base. And yay, finally. It was good that inspiration struck rather quickly. I had to get home to pay Khavis, the very nice boy who cuts my grass. He was coming today, for which I was very grateful.

As luck would have it, though, I got struck by inspiration again on the way home, and had to stop off at the Kmart for another hat element. I hate the Kmart near my house. As much as I loathe Wal-Mart, and will indeed shop most anywhere else, I dread going in the Kmart near my house. "Why?" you might well ask. Well first of all, they stock some shelves once every 6-8 months, whether they think they need it or not. Generally, they just run out of stuff and then just never have it again. Also, despite the season, day of the week, or pending hurricane, they have *two*, (and only TWO) checkers on duty. Occasionally during Christmas they’ll have a couple extra, but generally be it Monday at closing or Saturday afternoon, they have two. Period. One of them is always caught up in some kind of dispute, or about to go on break. That leaves One. Line. Open. Almost always with 87 people waiting to check out. Tonight I had a choice of the 87-person line, or the one with a woman who had some kind of issue. I chose the issue line, so of course it went on forever. The woman had found some coupon that was apparently from the late Triassic, but was supposed to still be good. The evaluation took quite some time, involving a leisurely stroll to the service desk, a protracted perusal by both the checker and the manager, and the manager’s return to the register with the checker to actually ring in said coupon, followed by the inevitable wrestling with the cash register which, access code or not, was having none of it. This is how I spend my off hours.

At any rate, I did eventually get home, to find my grass mowed. Lovely. I really, really love having staff. I don't know what I'm going to do when he goes off to college, but I'm not borrowing trouble. He's such a nice kid, and really seems to care about doing a good job - so rare these days. I called Khavis and paid him, but in truth I just couldn’t wait to get started on my hat. So I did. It went well; I have to say, better than I had anticipated. I didn’t finish, of course, but I made some good headway and was pleased.

By about 8:30 I was tired of doing that, so I decided to take a break and read for a while before I went to bed. It was a good evening. I am SO glad that I have a start on my hat. It looks like I should be able to finish it by next weekend, no problem (crossing fingers), which will free up next week for me to prep for my service date. Apparently that confident feeling was justified after all. If I can just avoid public retail space for the next week or so, things will be dangerously close to perfect…