On Fridays I drive 20 minutes to pick up my groceries through a grocery order pick up. Most weeks I leave the kids home or take our daughter to my parents and leave my son home to hang out by himself, something he doesn’t get to do very often.

This gives me almost an hour to myself to listen to music or an audio book while I drive. I usually listen to an audio book and lately that book has been dramatizations of Jane Austen novels. Right now I am on Mansfield Park.

Listening to the book led me talking back to the characters and then talking to other cars around me when I reached the “city” (slightly larger town than our town) in a very posh British accent.

Life is depressing at times and I guess being goofy provides a nice distraction. The only thing is, my doors and windows are closed when I’m doing this craziness so no one can hear me. As I left Aldi after my pickup, though, I suddenly wondered if I had been speaking in a British accent to the girl who was loading my groceries into the trunk. I don’t know if we are supposed to or not, but I always get out to help.

When I did, I remarked on how lovely the weather was that we were having. I was joking because we’d been having sleet, then clouds, then sun, then sleet all day long. Oh and it was only 37 degrees and the wind was blowing. She laughed when I made the comment about the weather but a few minutes later when I was driving down the road to go home, I couldn’t remember if I’d asked her about the weather in my normal accent or my British one.

She may have been nervously laughing at me. Like how you would laugh at a crazy person and hope that appeases them and they don’t go over the edge any further than they already have.

Hopefully she just thought I was being silly if I did use the accent. She’s waited on me long enough now to know I am a little crazy, but mostly harmless.

I sent some voice messages to my friend Erin to show her how I was talking to the drivers around me and I have to be honest – I think Erin probably starting searching online for the symptoms of a split personality.

The poor woman has got to think I am crazy.

Erin and I connected through our blogs and she’s mentioned more than once she would love to meet me in person. I truly feel she might run for the hills if she met me in person because I’m not only crazy but I look a bit like a cross between a hobbit and a troll – well, at least on the days my hair doesn’t want to cooperate like today when it was all puffed out and windblown and not windblown in a sexy model kind of way. Wind blown in a crazy woman talking in a posh British accent in small town USA way.

I played my son the voice messages I had sent to Erin in Instagram and told him I might need therapy.

“Might?” he asked.

Using the silly accents is one way I deal with stress at times and I usually only do it front of family.

I do need therapy but being silly is a type of therapy for me and this week I needed it after realizing I have a lot more trauma from my former job as a newspaper reporter than I like to admit.

A book I was reading for a blog tour triggered some of that trauma and sent me into a weird head space for a couple of days this week.

I sank further into that weird headspace when I found out that the woman who was my roommate when I was in the hospital with Covid in 2021 had passed away in November and I didn’t even know it.

She lived about an hour from me and I didn’t stay in contact with her like I should. I saw her account on Facebook and thought I’d see if she had added anything that might indicate to me she was still alive and kicking.

I’d texted her a couple of times and she’d say she was doing well.

We weren’t friends on Facebook since I’d only really known her for four days in the hospital -where I listened to her almost die a couple of times.

(You can read more about that here:  https://lisahoweler.com/2022/11/28/remembering-miracles-can-happen/  )

We weren’t really friends in real life but I should have kept up on her. I should have visited her when I visited the area where she lives.

I’m very disappointed in myself for not checking in on her more and for it taking me this long to even know she died.

I spent most of my week trying to avoid ruminating on my sadness and that probably wasn’t healthy.

As I dealt with that, my son was dealing with the fact that the woman he rescued last summer had passed away a couple of weeks ago and yesterday he ran into the woman’s daughter in the local store.

We tried to see her a couple of times but she either wasn’t home or the last time she was in the hospital and we didn’t know it.

The daughter told my son how often the family thinks of him and appreciates how he saved their mom so she could have more time with them before she passed.

That was an emotionally heavy thing for him as well.

We will try to lift some of the heaviness today by taking a family trip to a town 45 minutes away for lunch and to visit a used book sale at the library in that town.

Tomorrow we are going to watch The Husband in a play he is in. It is a reenactment of the War of the Worlds radio show and The Husband is playing a couple of different parts in the play. It should be fun.

We are also glad this weekend that my sister-in-law is recovering well after her weeklong hospital stay and is celebrating her birthday today.

The whole week wasn’t heavy, thankfully, and I was able to get some reading done and plan for some blog posts I want to write, including:

One on The Little House on the Prairie show

One on what spiedies are and their history

One on foods exclusive to Pennsylvania or our region of the state at least

One on mystery shows I recommend in addition to the ones I’ve mentioned before

One on YouTube channels I enjoy

One on the history of Nancy Drew books.

I have a lot of blog post ideas but now I need some time to write them, which will be hard since I plan to start writing the third book in the Gladwynn Grant Mystery series soon.

That was a bit about my week this past week. How was your week last week? I would love to know. Let me know in the comments.