Not only is it sometimes hard to remember it's 2007, it's hard to believe that January of 2007 is almost over. Time gets away from you when all you think about is the weather. It's like the olden days. I sit around in the long winter evenings, talking about tomorrow's snowfall, and making "handicrafts" to keep people warm.

Tape shows you how things are made. For instance, once I've printed text onto paper, I have a tendency to think of them as a single unit. But let a bit of tape fall against the surface of the paper and lift off some of the ink, and suddenly I'm reminded not only of my own mortality, but of the inevitability that bits of my body will someday be incorporated into someone else's existence.

Mortality also comes to mind when I look down at my arm and see some huge, unsightly scrape. There's a reason girls don't do manual labor, especially if they're older (ahem) women who haven't been used to such things. Women who aren't used to such things tend to forget that the inner elbow is a delicate place.

The face is delicate as well. I've taken reasonably good care of my face during my lifetime. I mean, okay, no, I didn't wear sun block but when I was young, "sun block" meant that weird white gunk some people put on their noses and the young and vain do not slather their faces with white gunk. But I've used moisturizer and stuff pretty consistently. It's a shame my skin isn't better now.

Having a mixed heritage means you get weird skin. I've never been able to find a foundation cream that matches my skin color. I usually wind up with something that makes me look pasty or is weirdly gray or orange. Given the option, I usually tend toward the pasty. (Gray hairs are bad enough, I have no intention of flaunting gray skin.) Although I've been known to blend shades to try and get something closer to reality.

I was digging around in a kitchen cabinet last night and stumbled across the blender. We haven't used it in so long I'd forgotten it was there. The problem with kitchens isn’t so much that they lack counter space (although they do, for people who own lots of gadgets and appliances) as that they lack accessible cabinets. The ones in our kitchen are either at knee level or above shoulder-level, reaching almost to the ceiling. The high ones are nice for storage for things you rarely use, but useless for daily access. The lower ones are just black holes. They're, like three feet deep. Anything that hasn't been used in a week gets shoved to the back and you have to get on your knees with a flashlight to find it. I've thought of installing some kind of barrier to keep things from sliding out of sight but the truth is the cabinets are packed full and I don't know what I'd do with the stuff.

I have, as I've said before, quite a lot of stuff. I'm a stuff kind of person. I don't mean knick-knacks or decorative bits of trash that just sit around and gather dust. I have very little of that kind of things. I mean books and DVDs and VCR tapes and writing materials and drawing supplies and (now) yarn and crochet hooks and knitting needles and suitcases and bags of various sizes (for overnight trips, day trips, carry-ons for long trips, etc.)

I have albums. I haven't listened to albums in decades. I don't even listen to music except at Christmas, so why do I have fifteen CDs and 30 cassette tapes?

I have a double bed, so why do I own a set of king-sized, bright red sheets? I'm going to Goodwill them. Someone, somewhere, has a desperate need for bright red sheets. I can just feel it.

I'm feeling ambivalent about the job hunt. (Translation: I keep forgetting to look for a job in the evenings.) It's not even just that I don't like job-hunting. I know it takes forever to get interviews and that I need to start now if I want to be interviewing by April. I just haven't been able to remember. Somewhere around my apartment is the paper copy of my resume I stumbled across (lost the electronic version in the Big Laptop Crash of '06) that I need to get keyed in. I know where to search (jobing.com, monster, craigslist) and have the sites bookmarked. Why, then, when I get home in the evening, does it never occur to me to go look? I don't mean I'm too lazy or that I'm not in the mood, I mean the idea of searching for a job literally never crosses my mind.

Brains are a weird sort of a thing. Mine resolutely refuses to retain any information not personally of interest to me, even if it's something technically "important" I should be dealing with. Like auto insurance. Remember in December, when I discovered I'd let my policy lapse? What kind of moron doesn't remember to pay their insurance? Anyhow. I just thought about it and I can't remember if I did everything I needed to do to make sure it's set up on automatic payment from now on, so I had to leave the agent a voicemail asking him to call me.

It's a lack of mental discipline, I think. I can remember the things I really care about (aside from "ordinary" incidents of forgetfulness) but I almost never remember things that are "boring" to me. I accept the necessity for insurance. I approve of the concept of insurance. I just think it should be dealt with without my active participation. I need (what's left of) my brain free to think Beautiful Thoughts. Or just, you know, thoughts. To track all the threads.

I have one thread that floats around, pondering The Novel That Will Never Be Written. (I'm still lost in the joy of world-creation.) I have one thread that worries about my mother. (As she, and I, get older, this becomes a more constant refrain.) I have a thread that's remembering the book I'm reading currently (Sharpe's Havoc, Bernard Cornwall) and wondering what's going to happen next. I even have a thread that thinks about work. (You know. Occasionally.) There's the blog-thread...the little voice that's taken to writing mental blog entries out of everything that happens to me during a day. (Be glad that one doesn't have access to the fingers. Talk about boring....) There's a lot going on in my head.

I don't really have a lot of processing power left over for tedious adult things. If I won the lottery, I'd give most of the money away, but I'd save enough to hire someone who needed a job and it would be their task to do the grown-up stuff and leave me free to dink around. (Yeah, I have the R.C. for that now, but she doesn't get paid for it and I'm not really pleased with myself for dumping most of the "chores and bill-paying" on her.)

I dinked around yesterday during a conference call. In spite of the fact that I was sitting in a room with Bernie, I got bored and started drawing. (I need a lot more practice with pens.) I drew a nice thistle, a heart, a table with a bowl of cereal on it, and crummy flower (roses are harder than you think), a really bad tulip that looks sort of like some other kind of flower I can't remember at the moment, and a q-tip.

You'd think stream-of-consciousness would be more linear than this, but it's not that linear, is it? I mean, I'm just typing whatever pops into my head next and it's really boring and all over the map.

I guess that means I should go do some work.

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*Yes, it's a quote. From a James Blaylock book.