I followed through with applying for my Visa for going to India next month, the part that is online anyway. I still have to go get passport photos and mail the application by some trackable means to the consular office in San Francisco. This trip is going to happen - I am going by myself to India to visit my friends and be far, far away and experience I don't yet know what sensations, which is the idea, idea, idea.



My leg squinch glitch is under control thanks I believe to the wearing of long underwear and snowpants, which are keeping my leg warm thus not allowing the soft tissue to seize up and strangle my leg nerves which then jangle and ululate their painful displeasure causing me to be unable to move around. Not that I imagine myself at all an occupant of a diving bell mind you, mostly due to lack of imagination and the omnipresence of what we in my family have in spades which is self over dramatization. My mother, who sighs deeply and groans often when she is not using English to articulate her unhappiness that she has difficulty moving and is constantly in pain, amen, used to say to me, "Cinderella, Cinderella, Cinderella." Which meant, for those of you who had different childhoods that I was being a punk baby. I'm thinking of my mother because of our yesterday phone conversation in which she sounded old while trying to exude Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step acceptance and gratitude while telling me current event negative experiences of her friends I do not know while getting bluer and older sounding and I true to form let her.



But back to the rain and white-gray sky of our alley view. I've talked on and off about producing a newsletter to be titled "Alley Chat" which I still think could be fun. Our chicken neighbors could write a farm column. Next door our neighbors are redoing their kitchen lighting and adding an indoor trellis to help the kiwi vines (from our kiwi) and restore light to their kitchen since the kiwi are heavy and pulled the hanging lights out of their in-ceiling moorings.



We went with these neighbors (the lawyer and the ornithologist) to the New Year's Eve gala at the Palace Ballroom. The lawyer loved my white top Jim bought me for my birthday in Coral Gables, Florida, but felt my red shoes would have been cuter without the addition of the smart wool black tights. I am back again to my "keep the leg warm" regimen. I told her I used self control not to put a pair of long underwear (lime green for the visually inclined) over the black tights.