The sound of silence

At this precise moment, my house is given over almost completely to the sound of silence.  Indeed, other than the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard, there’s only one other sound — and that sound tells the story of the last few days.  The sound is the washing machine.  In it are clothes that I already washed once, just two days ago.  Back then, on Sunday, I then put them in the dryer, cleaned out the filter, pressed the appropriate buttons — and got called away for something “urgent.”  I headed back up to the laundry room, only to get another “urgent” summons.  And by the end of that second urgent summons, I had forgotten completely that I’d never gotten around to pressing the “start” button.  So, today, when my daughter announced that she was out of jeans, I went to the dryer, confidently expecting to find some clean, dry jeans awaiting her.  What I found instead was a pile of slightly mildewed wet stuff.  So, everything is in the washer again.

As for the sound of silence, that came about because Mr. Bookworm took the kids on the hike.  Because I’ve been bedeviled by a cold that won’t leave me alone, I did not volunteer to accompany them.  I’m also the fallback person, because there is a substantial likelihood that they won’t be able to make the round trip and they need someone who can swing by later to pick them up.  As for me, I’ve cleaned the kitchen, done the aforementioned load of laundry, and am now sneaking in a little time at my blog.

It’s hard to blog when the family is around.  As noted above, I can’t seem to finish anything.  Also, they’re all kibbitzers:  “Why are you doing that?”  “What are you looking at?”  “Why did you say that?”  “Can I use your computer?”  “I need to check my email.”  I get flustered, distracted and, inevitably, stupid.

I do have some things, though, that I do want to blog about, so I’m going to take some time to troll around the internet, then I’ll try to collect my extremely fragmented thoughts and then, with luck, it’s off to the races.