simply for the sake of feeling guilty

    I started my car yesterday for the first time since Monday. It was a great thrill. I'm not being facetious--I'd thought it would require a jump start at least, and probably a tow to a garage (or, God forbid, the Honda dealer) and a few hundred dollars worth of work that I really wouldn't understand before I would be able to drive it again, probably after being scolded for "allowing" whatever was wrong with it to have occurred in the first place. I'd emailed my dad about it on Thursday night, just to keep him in the loop, thinking he'd be pretty ticked if he found out about all this later and hadn't had a chance to get his 2¢ in. He called me while I was in the shower yesterday morning and said, "It's warmer down there today. Get outside and try to start it. NOW."
    Uh, OK.
    I did, and it did. Hey, wow! Dad knows stuff. Turns out, if he was right, that it's the solenoid. He described it as the magnetic thing that gets the juice from the ignition switch to the starter, or something like that, when the key is turned. In cold weather, it freezes open. Or closed. Something like that. (He was more technical than this, and it's very cold, and I'm hungry, and he was annoyed with me. Bear with me.) "Back in the old days" they used to just open the hood and bang on it with the handle of a screwdriver. He was telling me this on the phone when I called to report that all was at least temporarily well. "I guess I could show you how to do that...." I said, "When I open the hood and start banging on things, that's when real problems start." He laughed. We agree on that one.
    So. Car started. Fast idle kicked down within a minute, so there's nothing wrong there. Heated up quickly. I let it run while I cleared off the 8" of accumulated snow from 4 days of sub-zero weather. Decided to take it for a spin to heat the engine a bit. Went around town, long enough to get the needle off COLD on the oil temperature gauge. It barely took 10 blocks, which was another good sign. She's a good little car, even considering all the bad things I said about her this week.
    No charge. That's got to be the best part! Delayed, overdue thanks to the people who went out of their way to help me out, regardless of my stubbornness: Fluffy & husband; Sleek (sorry I was so snarky); Asking Man; college BFF & spouse; and pretty much everybody at work.
    So, once the car was running, everything was back in order. I was feeling very good and FLUSH with cash - not only had I not had to pay to have the car fixed (yet...I'll be getting at least a new solenoid when I'm in the home state, if not the whole starter/solenoid/ignition/battery she-bang. We'll worry about that later, la la la), but my lack of car had meant I wasn't wandering around spending money on other things. My checking account balance was crazy - I haven't seen 4 digits this long after a payday in months. What to do, what to do?
    I took a nap. And then another one. I got up and made a reasonably-sized to-do list. Then another nap. I accomplished 3 of the items on the list (3 of the 8), which is not too bad. Wrote a long and HTML-complex blog post for a work-related blog. Later, integrated the link to that post into the sidebar (which, boohoo, I find particularly tedious and almost never 'remember' to do). And repotted some plants. That was a BIG project. Those plants have been in the repotting stage for more than a month. Some cuttings have been floundering in a cup of water, rooting up and out of the cup, and I never even replaced the water. They were cut out of a funeral arrangement (they are donated to my place of work very frequently, and they're just a death trap for plants unless they are perfectly matched by light and water needs!) that had another plant in it; that plant was still in that soil, drying out so I could cut off the roots from the other plant. Drying, by which I mean it hadn't been watered since I'd brought it home in late November. It was just sad.
    But no more. They're in their new pots - the plant in one and the cuttings in two - and my own plants that had been skimpy on soil were refilled and watered. It's probably the only task that I do that gives that degree of accomplishment, because I can see them flourishing when I've done well. My plants are very happy here.
    And then I ran out of energy. I read a few chapters in my current obsession book, God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right, and started but did not finish a pedicure (my toenails should be "Nice Color, eh?" before the day is through today). Went to bed early.
    Got up this morning VERY early, to steal the newspaper before someone else did. Read only Postsecret - my reward for dragging my sleepy ass out of bed - before falling back to sleep for another 3 1/2 hours (wow, I can barely believe that's true). Got up again, had some breakfast, caught up on the blogs & my email, read the newspaper (I'm starting to get excited about Tuesday, not just because of the 50" plasma [gag] or because it's my big brother's birthday), and started writing this post what seems like an hour ago. I'm really rambling today, aren't I?
    I think my point was that I sometimes write to-do lists knowing damned well that I'm not going to do all the stuff on them. I've had one rolling around in my work bag for a week that I haven't even touched. This weekend, I needed to sleep. I was tired, the week seemed longer than most, I was sad and angry about inexplicable things, and I miss the Cat's omnipresence even though I know that she really, really needed some time away and some sinshine (hee hee - a great typo for Vegas, huh?) and sunshine in her life. The world is righting itself, as always. After I post this, I will get cracking on the smallest item on the list, which is in the way of the biggest item on the list. I can do the last 3 while I watch football, which starts in 2 hours. It's all under control.
    Not "guilty." Just scattered and working under a schedule not of my own creation. And smiling because, really, when are we in control of anything?