Flooded Field

The fields were flooded during the last rainstorm. It is raining again today but it is more like what I call a dispiriting drizzle.  I wasn't dispirited though. John was feeling better, the unpruned vines with their feet in the water made interesting reflections, and a huge flock of starlings wheeled across the sky in the undulating formations only starlings can make. Mt. St. Helena was draped in mist, only her top revealed. It was quite lovely.  There was even a flock of egrets fishing in the vineyard rows. I thought this was one of those shots that looked better in mono than in it's rather washed out color.

 I suggested that John sleep in the guest room last night where Spike and I wouldn't disturb him and he wouldn't disturb me. I had asked him if the Advil (ibuprophen) helped and he said, 'not really'. I asked him how many he took and he said 'one' (a sub-clinical dose). We changed that to three, the amount recommended by the nice doctor at the emergency clinic and added to that two acetaminophens, also recommended by her. and we retired, before 9pm to our separate rooms.

It all worked even better than I could have hoped. For a man who had been groaning in pain the day before, he seemed almost back to normal this morning. Kathy, who gave up an hour of her week off to see him, told him all the things I had told him, more kindly and patiently than me, did all her physical therapy tricks on him and he is feeling even better.

It probably wasn't the best thing for him to do but it couldn't be helped. We had to go to the grocery store. As we had expected it was absolutely heaving with humanity,  filling the parking lot wheeling their carts through the store . The aisles, never wide enough, were crowded with queues of people waiting to check out. The fish counter, our main objective, had a disorganized mob of people, most of whom were there for crab, a traditional Christmas Eve meal here.  I left John there, list in hand, to buy the seafood, including a crab, whilst I plied the narrow aisles like a salmon swimming upstream, peering through the people patiently waiting with their carts to check out. John was still waiting for some scallops when I went and joined one of the queues to check out*. Most people were fairly cheerful, resigned to waiting and aware that everyone else was in the same boat. One man came around the corner, saw the line stretching back to the dairy department on the back wall and laughed. I told him that was the best response I had heard. John brought me the seafood and went to take Spike for a walk around the shopping center, his second such walk in as many weeks.

It was a long wait, but the store had all hands on deck. They are efficient and pleasant and things went pretty quickly. They did not, thank goodness, have people stocking and restocking the shelves, which they usually do, nor were there very many clueless individuals rearranging everything in their carts in the middle of an aisle. Most people left the store smiling, relieved to have made it out with whatever they considered essential.

It's all part of Christmas week and most people are well prepared for it.