Long annual journey to Borders bookstore on Camelback and 24th Street

I make this journey once a year.  I always wonder what I am going to get as I am given to impulse buying once I get there, and this year was no different.  I had been reading in Time magazine about the novelist Jonathon  Franzen with a new novel out called "Corrections".  He was on the cover incidentally, so I thought he must be pretty good.  "Corrections" was my present to myself.  I also bought Sarah Palin's latest book so I could see for myself how she writes and whether liberal friends are right to sneer so much at her knowledge and style.  I bought a book which shall be nameless I paid full price for, which I am going to send to one sister to pass on to the other two.  That way they will all get a good read.  I will send them each a package of lighter fare.  I have so much fun picking out books to send my family. 
I already have most of the books I am going to give at home that I acquired throughout the year one way or another. While at the bookstore I bought a hot pretzel with cream cheese in  the middle and hot spicy apple cider drink.  That sufficed until I got home where I warmed up chicken soup I made yesterday with organic chicken thighs I bought at the Farmer's Market.  That was totally delicious.
As I came through the lobby an arts group was singing Christmas carols and passing out cookies which was nice. It was well attended by residents needing a little touch to stir their memories of Christmas pasts.  I was too tired to wait for carols and took a little plate of cookies and crackers to my apt. and sank into my easy chair for a little nap following my soup.
Now I am up checking the Internet for new blog entries and family news.  I watched a video someone sent about his paranoid schizophrenia in response to the video I posted of Raymond talking about my play The Prince from Saturn.
I decided I should post another entry to kind of take the edge off the one I wrote this morning about 6 am about the nation in a state of squabble.
I read Raymond's latest blog entry and listened to a song he had posted about getting through December. It was kind of a melancholy song but nice.  He talked about a new event he is staging to the Paisley Violin next Thursday night at 7 pm..  I am going to bundle up and go to that.  I think it will be fun.
Sue Baker, an actress Raymond cast many times in plays, said she enjoyed the stories Raymond told in the first segment of this series we are doing on the history of Playwright's Workshop Theater and plays he wrote, I wrote, and a whole bunch of other people wrote.  We filmed four segments, and there are more to come.  We started thinking of some great happenings connected to other plays. But we only filmed four because we wanted to see how those went and whether the setting was right.
Didn't you just love it when Raymond kind of raised his voice in the video saying "Oh my God!" and his dog Baby thought he may be in pain and jumped up and licked his hand.  I  thought boy, that dog is sensitive to every nuance of Raymond's voice. 
I talked to my sister Ann in Utah briefly this morning.  Sister Margie had to move her husband again to another facility, and said he was upset and confused.  His children found somewhere rather than hospice.  I remember when our mother had to be moved from one place to another when something would happen. We were all up in the air and calling each other all the time to try to decide what was to be done about the latest crisis.
Mother was a wild woman quite a while before she settled down in the last place she lived which must have seem like home to her.  It was in the same town where she had bought her last house, an old fashioned stone one she spent months remodeling until it was really cute and attractive.  Mother loved to remodel and did it all  her life.  The last care center was also in the county where she had resided many years, so she knew a lot of people.  In fact, when she moved in three distant cousins were also there and they managed to have some conversations before Mother dropped into her twilight years of saying hardly anything.  This was strangely peaceful because she had spent so many agitated years before that saying inappropriate things to perfect strangers.
At Christmas she labored for days over Christmas cards she was still sending to a list of 300 people she could not seem to pare down.  One of her grand daughters received a card from her that said, "I think of you day and night."
That message was kind of touching somehow as well as funny.  Made me wonder what she wrote on some of the 300 cards she was still sending.  She finally got to complaining about all the work she had to do at Christmas, so finally was persuaded that she could stop sending Christmas cards and people would understand.
She had to be watched because she was very fond of the senior President Bush and would send him money if she had any.  Once when she didn't have any money, my sister intercepted a card from her to President Bush with a Chevron gas credit card in it she said he could use as much as he wanted to. 
She told me once she had no money, and I said well, if Margie gives you any, you immediately send it to President Bush.  She said, I am going to send President Bush money any time I want to!  And you girls aren't going to stop me.  Course if you are going to steal my bank accounts there is nothing I can do.

I wonder if I will be doing something as flaky in a few years.  I am going to watch for the signs.  Ha. Although I don't suppose I will be able to tell if I am flaky.
Tomorrow I am going to have fun wrapping parcels to mail. My Christmas cards are all signed, stamped, and ready to go, and there is nowhere near 300 of them.  Same list most every year.  That's good because that means no one has died.