Hey everyone. If you haven’t figured it out by now I’m feeling very under the weather with a bad cold. It’s knocked me out and writing a blog post has not been a priority, especially when my brain feels like mush.

When this happens, check Instagram. It’s far easier for me to write two sentences on IG in order to alert everyone that I’m not posting than it is for me to sign into the blog and do all the things I have to do once I’m there before I can even write a post.

If you don’t have IG, you can look on the right side of my blog – at the bottom is a widget that shows my latest IG posts. Click on it and you’ll get an update.

Thank you so much for your concern, my friends.

We’re also dealing with a lot of snow (more coming today) and I can’t help Don shovel. And dangerous wind chills.

Anyway, I’m slowly – very slowly – feeling a bit better.

Happy Wednesday.

Here’s how our day started off:

We woke up at 5 am. Way too early.

Later, as I walked toward the loveseat Don was sitting on, he cleared everything off the sofa so I could sit down next to him. Except, it turns out, his glasses, which I promptly sat on and broke. This evoked much crying on my part. He needs his glasses. They are also glasses with expensive progressive lenses. (I broke the frame, not the lenses.)

Later, I saw a shield bug stuck on a spatter guard in the dish rack – how it got in the house I don’t know – and as I tried to free it and put it outside, I ended up unintentionally killing it. I feel very badly about that because I do my best to save all the bugs that get in the house. It bothers me.

I cried some more.

We have a dangerous winter storm headed our way on the weekend with several inches of snow, ice, and wind chills of 20 below zero.

I’m edgy and worried about that and I can’t stop thinking about Don’s glasses. He said it was his fault for leaving them on the sofa but I think it’s my fault, which has resulted in both of us feeling guilty.

Maybe I should go back to bed and bury myself under the covers for the rest of the day.

Ah well.

I’m going to take a shower and go for a reset for the rest of the day.

Happy Wednesday.

A different viewpoint – cords and all. We don’t stress a whole lot about cords here. I mean, I try to tuck them behind objects if I can, but let’s face it, they’re an everyday reality in our lives, so why worry about them?

A magazine doesn’t live here, we do.

I’ve been thinking about bankruptcy and Sears this week. It makes me sad. Sears was such a part of my childhood years in Dearborn, Michigan. There was a Sears in Lincoln Park, which is very close to Dearborn, and we spent a lot of time there. My parents didn’t have much money and Sears could always be counted on for affordable merchandise. We went there at least once a week. When I was a little girl, I would ask my mom to take me to the doll displays and I would stand there for quite a long time, gazing up at the dolls, telling my mom and dad what dolls I wanted. When I got a bit older, I would walk to the handbag section – or purses, as we called them then. Heck, I still call them purses. I loved purses! I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to carry one.

Dad got his lawnmower and tools and ladders there. When Mom learned to sew, we would spend hours looking through patterns and fabric.

You could get anything and everything there.

And, oh, the Christmas catalog! I spent hours pouring over all the photos of toys, turning page corners, marking what I wanted (which was always a lot!) The day that catalog arrived in the mail was magical.

Mom and Dad would order things through the catalog. When they came in, we would drive to the store to visit the catalog pick-up counter.

Sears was the be-all and end-all of shopping experiences when I was a kid. There were no local branches yet of J. L. Hudson, which was the flagship department store in Detroit – that didn’t happen until the mall craze took over. (J. L. Hudson is gone now and has become another friggin’ Macy’s. Don’t get me going on that.) Anyway, J. L. Hudson was downtown and a Christmas visit to the store was a dream come true. Magical, wondrous. The downtown branch eventually suffered due to more and more people moving to the suburbs and the ups and downs of the auto industry. It closed in the 80s. In true Detroit-at-that-time fashion, years later that glorious building with wooden escalators was demolished. No more. All trace of it gone. It broke my heart.

I moved to other cities where I saw the same thing happen eventually; Wanamaker’s became Macy’s. Jordan Marsh became Macy’s. And of course, Marshall Field’s became Macy’s as well. When everything is the same wherever you go, you’ve lost a great deal.

But back to Sears. As an adult, I rarely went there. My tastes changed. But that doesn’t diminish my sadness at what has happened to that once great store, which carried everything you might need. There are Sears catalogue homes all over our country, built from designs and kits that were sold by mail order. You could order your home! Forbes called them “the American Dream that came in a box.”

The thing about the American Dream is that it sometimes fails and fades away. And we’re just left with memories.

My thoughts today.

Did you have a Sears in your life?

Happy Sunday.