Action!

Okaasan had a gooood day yesterday.

I gave her a bowl of just washed laundry and the clothes hanger, and shoes for stepping outside to the laundry line - "can you do this yourself?"and she actually got up off the carpet and away from the TV and did it right away - outside hanging laundry like a professional.
I'm not being cynical here. It really WAS hung like a professional. I should have taken a photograph, but the neighbors would think me mad for photographing socks and pants...
The tea towels were hung in patterns like ladders with clothes pegs, the socks and pants hanging just so. It was a marvel.
And she didn't do it just once. After I'd gone out, she went out to the line again and rearranged my badly hung laundry too.
It's this life as a super housewife in the 1950s and 60s, an era when women did hanging laundry with care and thought. Now we peg stuff frantically at all angles as we are already 10 minutes late for work. Well, I do.

So, Okaasan did great. Used to do it almost every day when we first moved here. Has only done it a few times this year.

It was a last glorious autumn day - Okaasan went walking locally. Of course saying that she was going downtown, but not heading there at all. That routine appears broken.
4 hours later and it was dark and cold we started trying to track her on the GPS and phone, but she never picked up the phone and we wondered whether to go and get her from the convenience store coffee counter or supermarket.
10 minutes later the GPS showed her nearing the house....??????....and we looked outside to see Okaasan arriving home by taxi. She had enough money to pay for it and came in clutching a heavy bag of glossy fashion magazines. Home alone successfully and happy, ready in time for dinner.

All good.
But as always - the fact that we noticed that she hung laundry well, and that she took a taxi home from the shops with a heavy bag - shows how UNUSUAL those actions are for her.
To take the taxi she had to make several decisions: deciding that she didn't have the energy to walk, looking for a taxi, checking for money, finding the address card in her handbag...all easy stuff really, but not for Okaasan. A series of decisions.

But she did it.
Goooood.

*....next year World Cup football tickets? We didn't get any on the latest round of FIFA random lottery....try again next week in a who-can-log-into-the-website-fastest ticket application period. 
...and winter snow? THIS year I am gonna have myself a snow blowing monster machine! Dear Son has just bought one off the Internet, by a mechanic who was happy in her/his job and understood what s/he was making. And I will be blowing snow with power this winter - to keep a space in the garden clear for parking when he comes home between ski jobs..occasionally.