Abbie's Real Life Blog

It has been cold this week, with frosts and freezes each morning, and that is why today I have reason to be grateful for two of the luxuries in my life: flannel sheets and garages.

I use flannel sheets from fall through spring, and they are delicious.  Cotton sheets are cool to the touch and necessary in the summer, but on Monday night this week it was very apparent that I should have switched back to flannel for the winter, because they’re just not workable for cold weather.  So I pulled out the flannel sheets and put them on the bed last night, and what a difference!  They’re so warm and cozy and comfortable… I love sleeping in them.  They make such a huge difference.  I prefer keeping the house at cool temperatures (mid or low 60s overnight in the winter, so the heater doesn’t run constantly) but piling some big warm blankets on the bed.  Cold air on the face, warm toes.  Perfect.  So I am singing the praises of flannel sheets today!

And garages!  I am a total convert to the garage lifestyle.  Sure, I’d love to live in a more urban environment, maybe be able to walk to work while still having plenty of space for my dog, but having a garage is one of the greatest things about living in the suburbs.  I don’t know why people own garages but then fill them with so much junk that they can’t park their cars inside.  And people do that!  Why?  Garages are so wonderful!  Today I had parked my car on the street and had to spend an extra ten minutes warming it up and defrosting it so that I could see through the windows.  And I got to think about twenty-eight years of my life where a garage was not part of my lifestyle.  Cold cars, hot cars, shoveling out a car parked parallel on the street after the snowplows had come through and pushed more snow on top of it… running through the rain, remembering to lock it every time I got home, slipping on the ice, scraping off the ice… Now all I do is open the garage door and back out the driveway, unless it’s one of the once-a-year snow events where I have to actually shovel the driveway first.  My car stays a comfortable forty degrees even when the temperature is around zero, just from the inefficiency of my home heating (because the garage sure as shit isn’t heated), and I can always run out and grab something without putting on shoes.  Lovely.  Garages are wonderful.  I sing the praises of my garage!

Don’t think I don’t count my blessings, name them, name them one by one!  I just named two!

The temperatures are supposed to be higher tomorrow, possibly a high of 70 degrees tomorrow, which will make it very comfortable for Tracy and I when we go to stand around for hours on the University of Missouri Quad, waiting to hear Barack Obama!  Yes!  An Obama rally in town tomorrow night!  We are very excited.  It doesn’t even start until 9:30pm, and we will likely be far, far from the stage (we will probably not even see him, like the time we went to the March for Women’s Lives with 700,000 other people, including Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem and a bunch of other major female luminaries, but all we could see was their images on giant television screens set up on the Washington Mall- we couldn’t even see the stage, let alone the speakers) but it will still be cool and one of those I-was-there-and-it-was-awesome kinds of events.  Worth staying out late on a work night!

The Obama Variety Show airs tonight on the major networks (except ABC).  Unfortunately, the roofers replaced my satellite dish when they finished the roof on Friday, but they did not connect it up right so although I can get all of the obscure cable channels, I can’t get any local channels at all, including the networks.  My hope is that CNN or CSPAN will run it.  Of course, I would have probably watched it on CNN anyway.  I watched network news last week for the first time in awhile, and I was pretty stunned at the number of political ads.  You see some on CNN, but not near the number as on network news.  I really do live in a swing state; we get all the political ads PLUS big rallies by major Presidential candidates!  I definitely didn’t see that in blue-state Maryland.

My boss has been out of town for the past couple of weeks.  I admit, I’ve been slacking a little.  Just a little!  I have to get back up to speed on some things and get a couple of projects done.  So I gotta get on that.