Lethargy

Sometimes I am just full of energy and get up and go, other times my get up and go seems to have gotten up and gone. Lately the gotten up and gone seems to be dominant.

It is Passover, which means very little, since I ceased to be observant many years ago. However my children observe, and since my oldest daughter lives near by she usually invites me to her Seder to serve in the Grandpa role - that of narrator/leader. The usual instructions apply, keep it short and time it to finish when the food is ready to be served.

This year, as in previous years I was also invited to the Seder hosted by her friends who live nearby. The reason for the invitation was so that I could meet Gerry's mother who was currently unattached. They had been trying to get us together for years, almost as long as I have been living in Northern Virginia.

This year I decided that in the interest of curtailing future invitations I would accept. This is sort of like the office voice mail system. Whenever they leav a message, or a voice mail, the system rings all of the cell phones in the notification list. Each agent is required to have one number that can be called. Problem is that if you don't pick up, listen to and reply to or delete the message, they keep ringing back until you do. So the best strategy is to answer it when it rings.

In any case, the friends home is close to my daughters and when we arrived they were already set up for the Seder. Her mother was in the basement getting ready. When she came upstairs I took one look and regretted having agreed to come. She reminded me of a younger version of my ex, combined with various features of my sister, neither of whom reside on my favorite people list. Suffice to say there was no animated conversation between us, although we did converse with everyone else. On the plus side, the Seder was mercifully short, the food was good, and I got to leave early. On the down side they have two small, loud, twin girls under two and an older girl the same age as my granddaughter Daria. I am still partially deaf

My glider rocker chair arrived on Tuesday and I spent Wednesday morning putting it together. It wasn't difficult, and there weren't a lot of pieces, but the six nuts and bolts that were needed to attach the back and arm rests were in the most awkward spots making tightening them very difficult and when I got my fingers caught in the mechanism, very painful. Then there was the problem of snapping the arm rest covers, and the chair back and seat to the frame. Again very awkward. But now that it is all done it is very comfortable.

My grand kids came to day. My daughter and son in law have been taking days off to stay with them, (Passover and (spring break) but today was one of those days when both of them needed to put an appearance in at work, so I was volunteered to baby sit. My son-in-law drove them to Manassas where I picked them up. The kids came back to my house for the day. The oldest, Lindsey immediately camped in my new chair and Daria the youngest took up residence on the glider/rocker ottoman.

They were well-behaved and I have no really large complaints, well maybe one. They brought food with them, a good idea since there is very little in my home for small growing children with picky eating habits. Their mother provided plastic containers , with among other things, coffee cake and brownies.

They ate most of the food, but my granddaughter Daria reminds me in a way of that Peanuts character Pig Pen, who seems to have a perpetual cloud of dust around him. Well in this case I can tell were Daria was because there are trail of cake and brownie crumbs where she walked, and on, and under, the chair she sat in. She also managed to spill a bag of mini M&Ms on the floor. These were really small, about an 1/8 of an inch wide, and I am sure they are all over the floor and under the furniture