About an Outage

I am frequently up by 5 and when I am not, I am almost always up by 6 with 6:30 being about the absolute latest.

But not on Sunday morning after a somewhat rough night, bodily speaking.

I had slept past 7, which is when the power went out. This was a scheduled outage, but in the way our luck runs, we had not been forewarned. If we had been warned, I would most likely have made sure to arise before 7 to make the coffee.

Even without warning, on almost every morning of the year, I would have had the coffee on by 7 because that is what I do. But not on that freakin morning. No siree, Bob! (Or whomever you might be.)

And so, two sad-sack 72-year-olds found themselves driving to Tim’s for coffee. We then took our drinks to the park, and as the morning was a tad chilly, we sat sipping it in the car. (The ‘it’ being sipped in this case refers to the coffee and not the morning or its chilliness although in a poetical sense, I did somewhat drink-in the otherwise fine morning.)

It was delicious, the best cuppa in a long while. I don’t know how that happens, but happen it did.

Later, I went out for a second cup. Also Tims. and it was not very good. Go figure.

I mean the coffee packets are standard issue, day after day, year after year. So why should cups be so variable? I beggars the imagination, it does.

Back to the park after my slight digression: as I sat there drinking coffee as well as drinking-in the ambiance of the park, I found myself once again contemplating the spider web.

You see, a spider lives in the car mirror, the one on the driver’s side. Always the driver’s side: never the passenger side.

This has been going on for years now although I have to assume that it is not the same spider. In fact, one year, the spider of that particular season blew off on the highway. It was a sad parting, especially for the poor arachnid.

We have shot the hose in there and torn down the web — to no avail. The web is always always always rebuilt in lickety-split time.

And I don’t really like to tear down all of that work, so I leave it up for quite awhile in an effort to let nature take its course. I mean to say that I feel badly for she of many legs, especially since I never seem to see any provender enmeshed in the webby result of her dutiful travails. I don't know how she survives in there for month after month without any apparent food.

I tried to take a picture with my phone whilst there in the park. It didn’t turn out very well, but it does offer some proof that I am not making this up and that I have not completely lost my marbles. I mean to say, just because I am 72 . . .

. . . now what the heck was I saying? And where am I anyway?