A horrible cold has kept me from doing, well, pretty much anything but the minimum.  I have slogged through the week, eagerly waiting for Friday, wonderful Friday.  I have planned, scheduled, and organized this Friday a week in an advance simply because I can enjoy an expanse of time.  Hurrah for Friday! 

In addition to shopping today (on a Friday instead of my usual trek to Trader Joe’s after dance class on Saturday), we will be driving down to Portland to check out my sister’s first art installation at a gallery.  Needless to say, the days of casually perusing my sister’s studio for cast off paintings and classroom art may be dissappearing.  Her work is now commanding decent money and it might get awkward if I pressure her to give me something for free.

In other news, our rug finally showed up looking NOTHING like the pictures on overstock.  NOTHING.  However, the rug is passable and fits well into our living room decor.  Instead of bright colors the whole thing is sort of an earth toned mess…I think the colors are vegetable dyed, so a certain level of inconsistancy in the tones and shades were expected.  At this point the rug serves as shelter for the bamboo floors and that’s all that matters.  We had our first dog visit the place last Saturday, and the floors fared well.

When the sky isn’t hanging low along the horizon, real autum colors have appeared.  The city has slowed down.  The Rolling Stones were in Seattle on Tuesday and it was if traffic stood still….The traffic was so terrible that buses put themselves in neutral and pulled up the parking break.  Cars sat through traffic lights as they changed again and again with no movement on all four sides.  The traffic will eventually be the end of me…it will for certain drive me out of the city.  That and we haven’t seen our yard waste bin, even though we’ve asked for it twice from the Recyclers.  Our mail stopped forwarding and ended up in a huge clump in Kris’ mail box.  Thank goodness he hung onto it for us.  What’s wrong with basic services?  This is when I feel the city at its most massive.  Gone are the days of Fort Collins when we had milk delievered to our door, I knew the mail man personally, and you could call animal control about a barking dog and they would come.  Now, if you’re interested in narking out a yapping chihuhua you’re encouraged to “talk it out first, understand that cities are loud and you’re just going to have to deal with a certain degree of noise.”