Spell "ragspwaggler," or else.

Do you ever sit somewhere that's not your usual perch and notice how--from that vantage point--there are some rather serious lapses in the thoroughness with which you vacuum up dust and animal fur? Of course you do, unless you're quite meticulous, or someone else who cleans your house is.

Mostly, I'm not ready to go to bed. It's 10 pm, but I did not sleep wonderfully last night (something about the dog voofing at the bedroom door, and me--not quite with it--interpreting that to mean "I have to go outside, or else." Since "or else" has not happened in over 10 years, I needn't have worried...but I was half-asleep, until I ended up having to chase her around the back yard at 1:30 am, so she'd come inside and I could go back to sleep.) The result was that I took 2 short naps today, and am therefore not ready for bed.

Last night I was in a spelling bee. The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, to be specific. That was the show we saw last night at the Annapolis Summer Garden Theater. Somehow I ended up as one of 3 audience participants--last one standing, in fact--eliminated precisely where they intended me to be eliminated, by a word that may not be a word at all, but sounded something like this: "ragspwaggler." If you can identify a word similar to this, please do let me know. Until then I was doing fine with "jihad," "cow," and "apoop." I know I had to be stumped at that point anyway, by hook or crook, since the actor in the boy scout costume, who'd been whispering me my cues, got booted (by dint of script) just one song and dance before, and I'd have been left high and dry without a killer word to trip over.

Jeff enjoyed seeing me "perform," and had 3 of his kids nearby to keep him oriented in the meantime. This morning Becca asked him if he'd liked seeing me in the play. He smiled blankly. Sometimes you can't tell if all has been lost, or if the question just didn't make it through the language processing filter intact.

Today I found myself having to speculate on the investment value of retaining certain life insurance policies, initiated by the hardware store a number of years ago, when Jeff was still insurable. In order to do this, you take out your Hewlett-Packard 12-C financial calculator, and input the monthly premium, an interest rate you think you could reasonably expect investing elsewhere, and the number of years of such an investment (which is equal, in this calculation, to the number of years you suppose the insured will live). It is a task that is both bizarre and impossible, because you're deciding how to gamble based on someone's longevity and, particularly with Alzheimer's and its variants, you can't possibly guess anyway. As it turns out, the policy under consideration falls under the joint purview of my brother-in-law and me, and will be something we need to hash out after I speak to the agent on Tuesday morning.

Perhaps by then I will have written 2 more paragraphs in my silly book. I am glad to be back in that saddle, though it seems to have put the squeeze on Japanese study. I am sure though, that ragspwaggler is not a Japanese word.