Clouds drifting by

I'm watching an old British show, The Royal, in which a song from 1964 is playing. The song is called Tobacco Road (by The Nashville Teens), and the lyrics are shown in the subtitles (which I always use). At one point, the original line is "in the middle of Tobacco Road", but the subtitle says "in the bathroom".

The night before last I had a very unsettling incident in the middle of the night when I got up to use the bathroom. My basement room is fairly long, with the bed at one end with a chest of drawers next to it acting as a nightstand, then an L-shaped couch along the wall next to that, then behind the shorter side of the couch a short hall leading to the stairs up to the main floors of the house. On one side of the hallway is a bathroom/laundry, and on the other is the girls' art room. Some light comes through the two small basement windows so it's not completely dark in the part of the room where the bed is during the night, but over in the hallway there is hardly any light. So I came out of the bathroom at 2 am or whatever time it was and somehow veered into the open doorway of the art room instead of going straight along behind the couch, and suddenly I had no idea where I was because I was feeling around for the back of the couch and only encountering empty space. I was completely disoriented. I started to step forwards into the space and my foot felt the small step down (only an inch or so) and just as suddenly I realised where I was and was easily able to make my way back to bed. (But meanwhile I had bumped my forehead against the door frame of the art room - ouch.)

Three months ago I went to my Kaiser portal and changed my mailing address. At the same time I contacted the National Finance Center, the people who handle my premium payments, to let them know my new address. Three months later I discover that the Kaiser website is still showing my previous address, and also three months later I have still heard nothing from the National Finance Center about the address change and the change of health insurance planto one which operates in Connecticut, in spite of repeated emails plus sending them an actual letter in the mail three weeks ago. I am absolutely and completely fed up with the incompetence of both Kaiser and whoever is supposed to be handling my premium payments. I suspect that because the National Finance Center is part of the Federal Government, the person who was handling my case might have been fired, but Kaiser has no such excuse.

This morning I had a text from the real estate agent suggesting that I needed to buy some vacant house insurance and giving me a link to an insurance agent who works with his company. The issue of insurance had not occurred to me because I knew the existing house insurance policy had not expired, but turns out insurance companies don't like insuring empty houses. So it looks like this will be one more thing for me to have to pay for until the house sells.

It snowed some more overnight and we ended up with about 19 inches/48 cm of snow. My son in law and Violet both spent quite a lot of time outside shoveling the drive and clearing off the two family cars, both of which were sensibly parked right up near the road. My car, which is way at the back of the drive, is still deeply under snow and has many yards of deep snow between it and the nearest of the other two cars. (The drive is very long.)

I've been badly neglecting my car; I haven't driven it for about three weeks, and now I'm regretting that because it doesn't look as if I'll be able to get it out of the driveway for at least another week. I rarely need a car but it doesn't make sense to get rid of it because when I do need to go somewhere I need it; almost nothing is within walking distance here as it was back in MD, and there is no useful public transport as there also was in Maryland.

I had another bad sleep night last night; I was woken up by some acid reflux less than an hour after I went to sleep, and then couldn't get back to sleep again for another couple of hours or more. My son in law brought home some gluten free bread from Wholefoods for me before the weekend, when we were a bit worried about a bread shortage. It's different from the gluten free bread the rest of the family eats and which they can't eat because it contains eggs, and I'm afraid it's the cause of my acid reflux, because it only came on after I had my first piece of the new bread yesterday and nothing else in my diet is any different than usual.

Yesterday while I was working on a granny square for my next blanket project, Eden asked me if I could crochet a scarf for a doll. I said yes, I could, and she asked me to start making one immediately, and then kept asking me if it was almost finished yet. So today I've been crocheting my fingers to the bone finishing the doll's scarf. All the girls really like it, and I'm very happy they are so happy with it. It's made with a beautifully soft acrylic in a pretty off-white colour which they chose from the small selection of random balls of yarn in my stash. I was planning to use the same yarn for some of the squares in my blanket, but it turns out squares made from it are slightly smaller than squares made with my other two colours, so I'm thinking of using it to make a whole off-white blanket after I finish the coloured one since I've got several balls of it on hand. (It doesn't take long to acquire a stash even when you start from almost nothing.)

At 1 pm it's -13℃/8.6℉ and it's been snowing steadily since about 7 am. The snow is so heavy that houses about three or four houses away are almost obscured. I think we've had at least 6 inches so far. So far we still have power so it's very cosy in here.

Violet and Eden walked through the snow to the house of some friends who live about two blocks away for what Aria described to me as a Lego party, which sounds like a good way to pass the time on a day like this.