Relentless Rain and Microwave Popcorn

I have been eating a lot of popcorn lately.

It was the kind of week that makes the hair on your head stand up straight. Even true for Biscuit, who ran into a bit of static.

When I get home from work, I know I should make a salad or roast some vegetables and put together something that seems like a well-balanced, healthy dinner. Instead, I’ve been throwing a bag of Kirkland Microwave Popcorn (from Costco, the movie theater butter one) into the microwave and calling it good. And also maybe having a few bites of low carb ice cream from Grocery Outlet.

It’s been that kind of week. Again.

(I wonder how many of these weeks we are going to have? Possibly four years worth?)

Popcorn is comfort food for me, pure and simple. An entire bag of it is filling and satisfying and easy and leaves no dishes that need to be washed. What is not to love about that? It was a perfect dinner for a week when Trump was Trumpity Trumping,  Rumpity, Rumping

(Let’s make Gaza the new Riviera! And who should be the new chairman of the Kennedy Center? Me, of course!)

It was also a week of nearly relentless rain around here. There was rain and blustery wind, the kind that wakes you up in the middle of the night and makes it hard to go to sleep in the first place because you are remembering that your next door neighbors just had a tree fall in their backyard that smashed their propane tank. When I drove down the street the other night, there was a CalFire truck by their house and a Campora Propane Truck  in my parking spot. The tank was not leaking, but they will need a new one, and the tree was big and is all over their yard and into my yard a little, too. They were lucky, though. If the tree had fallen the other direction? It would have hit their house, and they are a young couple with a preschooler and a toddler and that could have been tragic.

So I was awake listening to the wind the other night, hoping that one of the beautiful trees that I love that sits a few feet away from the house didn’t decide to fall, too. Thankfully, it didn’t. But the storm seemed to blow rain down my chimney at a strange angle, so that it landed on my woodstove, which spitted and sputtered and sizzled, and I eventually had to pull out my cast iron frying pan to catch the drips.

Good times.

I spent too much time doom scrolling on Instagram this week.  Because of this, I felt compelled to do a couple of things that people on my Instagram feed keep telling me to do: things that are very important to do right now, they say!

I went to all three major credit bureaus and froze my credit reports. This is not a bad thing in any case. I have no desire to open any new credit accounts (a leftover from the days when I listened to Dave Ramsey and thought he was mostly a good guy. I am pretty sure he supported Trump, though, so now I am not so sure about him.)

I also went to the Social Security website and printed and downloaded my current benefits information. I am less sure why so many people on Instagram are saying that it is vital we all do this now. Perhaps they are afraid that Musk is going to erase everybody’s information? Or change it?

So I printed it and put it in a file.

God loves Elon Musk. I know this is true. But I suspect that love for God, love for the planet, and love for other people are not high on Musk’s priority list. Isn’t it ironic that the world’s richest man wants to eliminate USAID, an organization that cares for the world’s poorest children?

It’s easy to wonder where God is in all of this. Maybe Julian of Norwich was mistaken when she said that “all would be well.” But in the end, I need to believe that there is a Divine plan at work with goodness and mercy triumphing, with resurrection. I have to keep walking that path, because what is the alternative? There have been enough instances of Divine intervention and grace in my life to keep me moving that way. I need to keep reminding myself of that when the days seem darkish.

The days have seemed a little dark lately.

The rain keeps falling.

Time for another bag of microwave popcorn.