This morning is still and overcast, white cloud overcast. The sun may appear but in its own good time. Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy the coolness of the morning. The only sound is a dog endlessly barking. It is somewhere down the street, and the bark is unfamiliar.

My eyes are a bit better. The swelling has gone down, and I can “clearly now” from the worst eye. The strangest symptoms are the bumps still in the corners below the eyes and the red underneath both eyes. I look like some science fiction writer’s vision of the raccoon from hell. The second symptom, the itchiness, is only spotty now so that too is on the mend.

A giant branch broke off one of the pine trees in the backyard. I never heard it. It must have happened last night when I was sleeping. I was surprised to see it when I did my morning survey from the deck.

Today seems like a throw back Sunday. It is so very quiet. Even the barking dog has stopped. I am reminded of Sundays when I was a kid. We never really played outside or made much noise. All the lawn work was finished on Saturday, and there were no Sunday errands. The stores were closed. Sometimes I wish we could go back to those Sundays.

The other afternoon I watched a movie new to me: The Wasp Woman made in 1959. It was wonderfully bad. The owner of a cosmetic company is visibly aging so women aren’t buying her stay youthful products. A doctor who has been experimenting with enzymes from a wasp successfully used his formula to make Guinea pigs younger. Janice Starlin, our cosmetic queen, wants to be the first human. The doctor is reluctant but agrees. Believing the process is going too slowly, Janice, our soon to be wasp, breaks into the lab and injects herself several times with the formula. Now here’s my favorite part: the doctor realizing the formula causes test subjects to become violent goes to tell Janice but gets hit by a car and falls into a coma; of course, he’d get into an accident. Telling her would ruin the plot. Janice then keeps using the serum causing her to transform into a murderous queen wasp wearing a dress and high heels. I’m thinking a dressy queen wasp beats a fly any old-time, even a talking fly.