Friends and Pens

I have a friend that has been visiting his grand daughters in Saskatchewan for the past few days. He asked when he left if I would clear his walks of snow if it happened to snow while he was away. Before I answered, I checked with the Weather Channel and the forecast was sunny and warm until he returned. Of course I told him I would be more than happy to look after his walks. The way that I figured it is that I was building up some positive Karma and he would owe me for doing nothing. Not a bad bargain.

He phoned me today (he was supposed to come home today) and said that one of his grand daughters was ill and they were staying an extra day or so to look after her. I don’t think I will be out of line if I ask for a doctor’s note, just to verify the kid is actually sick. You see, the warm weather has quite literally gone south and a deep arctic freeze is settling in with accompanying snow. To make matters worse, I have been sick as a dog today. Well, sicker than a dog because although Buster spent as much time in bed today as I did, he didn’t go through nearly as many tissues as I did.

Why would anyone choose to drive eight hours in a snow storm just to avoid shovelling a couple of inches of snow? I said he was my friend, that doesn’t make him very smart. In fact I guess the argument could be made that makes his judgement suspect.

Hopefully I will be much better tomorrow and I will shovel the walks. I will still get the Karma and he still will owe me, but now I will have had to do the work. Why is it that oft time’s things just don’t turn out as I plan?

I have been practicing my penmanship lately, since my fountain pens arrived from China, but the practice doesn’t seem to have had any effect. I suppose that it will be one of those “wax on…wax off” sort of things. One day my hand writing will be its normal, illegible scrawl and the next day I will have a beautiful flowing script that will make grown men envious and women swoon.

When I print or write the individual letters in lower case, they look well rounded and quite frankly they are a treat to look at. You would never know that I created them. When I try to join them together on just one small line, I quickly revert to my normal scrawl. The upper case letters just seem odd to me, especially the written ones. Sometimes they look to be more like hieroglyphics that our modern day script. They just don’t seem right somehow.

Maybe I should create my own writing and then even if it is messy I can say “No, that’s the way the letters are supposed to look…really!”