I woke up feeling "off," as they say. I'm afraid of something, and it'll take some time and/or effort to find it, face it, become it, move on. May even come to realize it's just me feeling beaten by the chain of colds plaguing me this season. I know it's partly because I've been eating more than I want to take responsibility for. Almost an entire life with such a disease? condition? fate? has produced an expert at surrendering to pain instead of resisting it. Realizing there's a problem I'm trying to control is the hard part.

Aside from the feely stuff, my dead coffee pot as of yesterday afternoon, didn't help. This morning I readied it anyway, clicked it on in hopes that my love for coffee could spark one last hoorah; one more warm, delicious pot to comfort me before sending me off to choose a replacement.

Not a drip of a response.

So I made a cup of tea and dumped the cold half of it out when I remembered the stovetop percolator my mom was getting rid of in preparation for the move to her new vacuum shop. I wanted it for the simple fact that I grew up enjoying the smell of percolated coffee at my grandma's every Sunday, and there it was, pack-ratted in my basement, ready to oblige. Yay!

Then I went on to explain to a fellow book club member why I brought my own coffee today, "...because it was freshly percolated!" But she was preoccupied. Sweet dreams of percolated coffee to her, tonight. (Our new book is one I've wanted to read: Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven.)

In case you didn't know it, or in case you didn't know that I know it, life is funny.

Drying off from my shower an hour before book club, I was thinking and feeling a mix of things (I should know better than to think things!). While being *ever* so grateful for the two weeks off from Dr. Bob Jackson, the nazi astronomer, and eager to return to my journal, I had one loaded what if question. "What if I was sacrificing inspiration for free time?"

And just seconds before the morning's bad vibes could fuel the committee's fire to burn me with, my shaken towel--the towel I had dried my arms with and was about to put on my head--produced a spider and it landed in the tub.