WHO IS IN CHARGE?

     Life goes on. I thought that it would be difficult to divide my time between Lera and Roberta, and it's not easy. Plus to the complicated feelings on all our parts, I got tendinitis again! 
     I was OK for about a week. Almost no pain in my foot stricken by gout. Then, one morning, I woke up, and my other foot hurt a lot. I am walking (you can hardly call it that, with me limping painfully with every step) with a cane, try every kind of painkiller that we have at home and still feel like, someone out there really doesn't like me! 
     We pulled all the things from Hanah's room in preparation of laying new floors there. I sorted them out, and now a lot of them are still filling every corner, nook and cranny in the living room. Lera took charge of the situation and made me work further on getting rid of the mess. Little by little, it's getting cleaner, but my "clean" is normal people's chaos, I think! 
     Yesterday, we went to a few furniture stores to look for a new couch. How I made it through the aisles and aisles of sofas, I don't know. To tell the truth, my foot began to feel better after a while. We found a nice, big couch in Big Lots. It's a discount store, and the couch there was much cheaper than items comparable to it in other places. 
     Before that, though, I had to take Lera to the Immigration Department Application Support Center to extend her Green Card (or, an Alien Resident's Card). As we walked into the doors, a poster greeted us. It said: "USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Service] - we are America!". They are America?! I felt the stirring of annoyance and said to a Security Guard, who was looking at us at that moment: "You are America? I thought, I was America!" 
     I have seen too many members of various "Services", who would've liked us all to think that they are the ultimate authority. The KGB reps's narrowed despising eyes and the stolid, narrow-minded cruelty of the American Immigration Service taught me to keep my own mind about whom I consider to be in charge and why I am in this country. "We are America!" Pshaw!