Capisce

 

From an email chain with a business associate. I had replied “Capisce” to an email she sent, and her response was, “I haven’t heard that word in a very long time.”

Picked it up when I was married to the children’s father, long ago in a universe far, far away. He was born in Manhattan.  Funny story: he was WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) but had olive skin and (gorgeous) dark brown eyes. (Are you old enough to know of or remember Omar Sharif? Eyes like that.) When he was growing up and riding around on public transportation, religious men of various faith traditions would ask him, “Are you ___________, my son?” the blank being Italian, Jewish, Greek or Russian Orthodox, you name it. And when he got into conversation with another native New Yorker, he would talkreallyfastlikethis. So yeah, from him I learned capisce and a whole lot of other useful and useless things. And he gave me five amazing kids.

In other news, there has been no knitting, but I did ta-daaa! finish reading a book. A real book. With paper and everything. I think it's the first book I've completed this year. Up until very recently, the year has been mostly a blur of tired, sick, and sick-and-tired, which plays hob with attention span and memory. I am also closing in on finishing The Mysteries of Udolpho, which I would have finished by now if I were still commuting to work. (I listen to the scriptures on the drive in, and to audiobooks on the way home.)

It is bitterly cold outside. Winter storm, stay off the roads, yadda yadda. I'm still ~ barely ~ feverish, so I will not be hitting the trail anytime soon.

I had another wonderfully productive day at work. My goal for tomorrow is to muck out my personal mailbox, as the To-Do's and the resource mailbox are both miraculously and momentarily under control.

You have no idea what a relief that is. I'm still using the shiatsu neck massager several times a day, but my shoulders are hovering just above where normal shoulders would be, rather than up in the vicinity of my earlobes. And this afternoon I took a short break to try a chest-opening exercise I read about earlier this week, the one where you brace your forearms against either side of a doorway and lean forward. My left shoulder doesn't whine, but the right shoulder and ribcage are definitely hollering their version of childbirth words. This is because I spend the vast majority of my sleeping hours curled up on my left side, and my right shoulder rolls up and forward until it grazes my ear or chin.

Probably more than you wanted to know about my sleeping habits.

The spring catalogue from Gudrun arrived in today's mail. There is a dress I love that is early-bird priced at $89 and I have a $50 coupon because of all that I invested spent last year. This year's goal: spend even more and get a bigger coupon at the end of the year. I already know that I want all of the new petticoat colors that are currently being offered.