Hope

I live in a 70s apartment building kind of a socialist modern type thing of poured/cast concrete construction. The floors in my little studio where I have lived for the past 10 years are simply asphalt tile over goop over about a foot and a half of well-cured concrete. I like how it is cool and smooth on my bare feet in the summer time.I have a neuropathy that makes it feel like I am walking on lumpy  tubesocks even when barefoot so the smooth floor is nice to give me kind of a baseline reset when the neuropathy gets bad. But tile-covered concrete is very unforgiving when, say, you drop your $500 asus-Garmin gps cell phone. (spell-check wanted me to say ass-Garmin, or anus-Garmin)

It's not the fall that destroys the 500 dollar investment, it is the sudden landing on the concrete. Moment of impact equals velocity in feet per second divided by time of application of force in seconds and values of applied time under 1 second can yield some very large moment for a relatively short drop.
My old Nokia flip phone which has been my salvation now through 3  different self-inflicted disasters tends to not take focus very seriously.

I dropped my phone
And after an intense hour in the T-mobile store where the guys are just as nice and competent and helpful and patient as guys can be and another hour online I am right where I started when I picked it up off the floor.

Fucked.

I pay $5.99 a month insurance, but since this phone is no longer made or supported by Garmin the insurance insists that for my $130.00 deductible and the twelve monthly premium payments I have made for a total of $203.00 out of pocket they will send me a generic android phone and boast of their useful service. Bullshit. My little Garmin is a gem, it does navigation on my sailboat, and it tracked me through 11,000 miles on greyhound in and out of coverage, and even when I had zero bars I still knew where the fuck I was, even way the hell up there in the Canadian Rockies.
But I got options.
I know how shit works.
So I got on Ebay and bought a dead-but-intact garmin-asus for $40 and the CPR shop at Mall 205 will swap out the glass for another $40 and good to go. Which gives me hope. And that is not the only reason. Hope grows on trees up in here in Northwest Peeazortlin...

The poor little delusional flowering ornamental plum tree here in the courtyard at Williams Plaza thinks it is Spring and so it grew these over the last two nights.

 Even though February isn't hardly half over this tree isn't even the first one in NW Portland to make us some fresh green to brighten up our shabby rain-sodden lives. And I am grateful, even though I know good and well that it could all go horribly wrong if the jet stream goes crazy and starts some shit with an  arctic air mass. But, as my sister-in-law says, "we live in hope"