Turtle Steps

My new vertical blinds have been shipped and the estimated date of arrival is November 14th. Even if they are riding on the back of a turtle it shouldn't take a week to travel from California to Washington state. Oh well, I'm not going anywhere so I have nothing to do but wait for things. 

I'll just have to cool my heels.

The Past is Past

The awful things that happen during this time of our lives are terrible. I'm speaking of El Paso. 
Those poor families have to wait forever to know if their family member has been shot or were they even there. Hospitals aren't expecting something so horrible to happen so they are understaffed.
How times have changed. When I was a kid we didn't know much if anything about what was happening.
We received a newspaper and I don't recall if it was daily or weekly. It was delivered by the mailman. We lived in the country, I'm not sure what happened in town. Most folks didn't have a radio.
I remember when the Pearl Harbor event happened, we didn't know anything about it until a friend who lived a couple miles away rode over on his horse to tell us about it because he knew our oldest brother was stationed there. 
Now we have newspapers, radios, telephones, television, the internet, and the grapevine.

Life in a Lighthouse

Life in a lighthouse! I guess if you wanted to write a book it would be perfect. You wouldn't be disturbed. How long has it been since you visited someone in a lighthouse? Like never, in my case.

It doesn't seem like people visit each other as we did a few years ago. I think TV put an end to that. In the beginning, you'd visit someone with a TV. Until you could afford one of your own.

Remember the drive-in movies? Wash the windshield and pop a tub of popcorn and go to the movies with the kids in the backseat. You didn't hear a peep out of them until it was over. 

We bought a house that had a front porch and a drive-in down the street. It was a silent movie for us. It wasn't the reason we bought the house. lol

Can you imagine what it was like when all they had was silent movies? Piano players could get a job playing music while the movie was on. Probably a lot of action in those early day films. 

We've come a long way, Baby!

The Passing of Time

I seem to have an abundance of time on my hands, one day just rolls into the next and nothing much changes. When I was employed I had a schedule to follow. Now I get up and have to look at the newspaper to see what day it is. Not that I care because I seem to forget appointments and what day to pay a bill. Some days I even forget to watch Dr Phil. I never forget to feed the cat because she gets in my face lets me know in cat language that it's time to feed the kitty. 
Now I sit here and answer all the robot calls and slam the phone down. Too bad they can't hear it.

Chloe in her earlier days.

Chloe again. Her Daddy is a good photographer.

Chloe

This is Chloe and  Uncle Dennis

Leah and Chloe (cousins)

Jim and Cora Huffman and Chloe

Baffled Bewildered and Befuddled

The other day a girl from the lung doctor called and wanted to set up my appointment. Since I'm an experienced appointment attender, I didn't question the motive. Not to her, but I did talk it over with myself. as to why they would need to see me a year later. I was there about a year ago with a lung problem, but I am okay now. I was told to come in about ten minutes early to fill out paper work. No problem, I'm experienced in that field as well. I got all gussied up and arrived in plenty of time to fill out papers. I gave her my insurances cards and a copy of the medicine, she copied them, and told me to take a seat and wait.
She didn't mention paper work so I didn't mention it either. 
Finally a girl came out and led me to the room after she weighed me, and by the way I weighed my purse as well and it weighed 3 lbs 4 ozs. I thought I may as well get my moneys worth while there. Then she led me to the little room and took my blood pressure. It was extra high for some reason. 
When the Doctor comes in she wants to know what is happening with me. I told her nothing was wrong and I'm feeling fine. Then she asked why I made the appointment.  I told her someone from her office had called and set up the appointment. She decided it was a computer glitch, and it happens sometimes. 
So she dismissed me and I came home. I think it sounds more like an untrained employee, but what do I know. I just do as they say.  

Footnote:
I just received an explanation of benefits from my insurance company. They paid this doctor $72.35 for this so called computer glitch. 

Save it for Last

Senior retirement homes should be called Half-Way houses because that is what they are, half of a house, half as many rooms, a bathroom in half the space, half a kitchen if any at all, a living room with enough room for a chair with a TV in front of it, half a closet. No front porch, patio, lawn, garage or flower bed. When you graduate from that, you go to The Senior Hotel. You have rooms and hallways, and valets and maids to turn your bed down at night. You even have maids to help with the bath. Meal time is fine dining with all your friends, served tomato soup with delicious cat food sandwiches. Who could ask for more?

Not many can afford this fine living, it is not cheap, it runs around $50000 or more a year. You work a lifetime to pay for a home so you will have something to bequeath to The Senior Hotel.

 That is the  long and short of it, but it isn't all gloom and doom.

Now for a few words about the teens.

Teens have a lingo all of their own,

and they always have.

Adults:                                          Teen:

Call or phone                                Text

Visit                                              Hang out

Aced it                                          Smacked it

Old or antique                              Teek

Good friend                                  We’re tight

Not going steady                           Single

Clean your room                          It’s not dirty

The Cleaning Fairy, Me.

This morning I went into a cleaning frenzy. It only takes one episode of ’Hoarders’ to do it.  There is no way in hell or any other place that I will allow piles of garbage and other wonderful collector items to stand between me and my table or bed. I even have a favorite chair and couch that fit into that category. I had to empty the canister on the vacuum cleaner. That is a challenge that boggles the mind (that is, if you have a mind). You cannot just set it back in there, it has to be adjusted with exact precision or it won’t work. It finally happened and by now the adrenaline is running in high gear so the job was a breeze. This included floor scrubbing and dusting furniture. Now I am exhausted and thirsty so I am having an ice cold can of aspartame, phosphorus, potassium benzoate, phenylketonurics, sometimes known as diet Pepsi.
It is a beautiful day on my little part of the globe. I think there is rain heading this way. It will first hit the coastal area and then we get the tail end of it. The weather prophet said there could be snow in the mountains. It’s summertime, when is it going to stop snowing?

Time Does Not Wait

Now we are going paperless. The wheels of progress never slow down. First it was the Pony express, and then it was the Postal Service, now its Electronic mail. On my last visit to the Doctor’s office I received a web address and a pin number. I came home and set it up. I now have access to my medical record with that doctor, and can make an appointment or cancel one on line. It shows my blood pressure and weight, and other things. I think it’s great. Lowe’s also has a setup like that. When I bought a new hot water heater, the clerk told me how to set it up. Now I can go to the website and see when I bought the heater and how much I paid for it. Don’t you sometimes wish you remembered how old an appliance is? I know we can keep those records in a file, but this eliminates the paper, and all those binders (with or without women)

 Now if they could develop an electronic method to rid your house of the excessive junk it would be a perfect world. I'm trying to get rid of my collector items. My collector items seems to be old towels, dish towels, sheets, and even underwear. Why do I keep those things forever? I know I can't take them with me when I die, but just in case...

I am working on it and am slowly, very slowly moving things to the throw-away bag and box. I have a box of old books in the Van to deliver to The Goodwill. They've been there for a few weeks, but I have good intentions. 

Trees and Groceries

There comes a time when you have nothing left to eat, and you go to the store. I thought Sunday morning would be a perfect time to go to Walmart. I was sure it would be nice and quiet over there. I assumed I was the only person that doesn't go to church, well evidently I am not the only one that doesn’t attend church on Sunday Morning.  Everybody and their uncle attend Walmart on Sunday morning. It was a testing of the nerves to weave in and around people trying to find what I wanted. Some folks block a whole aisle so they can have a chitchat conference with their next door neighbor. Those are not my favorite people. When you've spent your last nerve and try to leave it gets even more challenging.  I try to choose the aisle with the least people. I have over twenty items and I need to use one of the slow ones. It doesn't matter which one I choose, the pause button always get pressed. So you stand in the paused line so long, you get acquainted with the folks behind you and the ones in front of you. Finally I get through the line and come home. When I pull into my driveway, wow ! there had been a disaster.
My next door neighbor had the tree in their front yard split and a huge limb fell onto the front of their house. It must have happened last night and I didn’t notice when I backed out of my driveway to leave. The part that hit their house was the smaller branches so maybe it didn’t do any damage or not much anyway.  I just now talked to a neighbor’s and she said the wind blew really hard last night and it rained. I slept through that event.  That is one of the reasons I had a huge blue spruce taken out of my yard a few years ago. The trimming guys said if you do not keep the small branches trimmed out of the top of those spruce trees and you get hard winds, the wind can’t blow trough the tree it will easily blow one of those spruce trees over. Not only that, but the grass can’t grow under it very well and it shed a ton of needles that need to be raked out every year. 
This is how my exciting day has gone so far. 

The Tea Party

A Hen Party

where they serve wine

As a young one, and newly married, I found life somewhat boring. My neighbor invited me to go with her to an afternoon party. It was called a tea party, she said.  It’s just a bunch of friends and neighbors getting together for card games and monopoly. I asked if she was sure it would be okay because I had not received an invitation. She assured me that it was fine because her sister was having the party and she could take anyone she wanted to.  So we went to the party.  They had card tables set up and cards and games and women were already playing cards when we arrived. It seems the drink of choice that afternoon was wine and not tea. I don’t recall even seeing a teapot.  I wasn’t too keen on drinking wine, but I didn’t want to come across looking like a geek, so they served me a drink of wine. It was horrible, but I kept sipping on it.  The music came on and the laughing kept getting louder and louder. Someone refilled my empty glass, so I sipped on it. The card games did not seem very serious to me. Someone refilled my glass. As time wore on, I also began to see the humor in everything. Someone had refilled my glass. We had so much fun that day. I finally realized it was time to go home. My husband would be coming home from work and I had to get there before he did. I didn’t think he needed to know what I had been doing. The party was breaking up and she took me home. My husband came home on schedule that day.  I’m trying hard to act and look as normal as I could, but the wine had turned me into a cackling hyena.  When he told me there had been a traffic jam at First street and Lincoln Ave, I went into hysterics. He said, “that isn’t funny, what’s the matter with you?” I told him it was the way he said it that made it funny.  Now, I thought I had said something extremely funny, so I laughed real hard again. It was at this point, he gave me the breathalyzer test, meaning he took a sniff of my breath.  “What the hell have you been drinking?” he asked.  I told him that I had gone to a tea party, and had been drinking a little tea.  This was followed with more peals of laughter.  He said he suspected someone had spiked the tea. So I cracked up again, I thought he was hilarious. He then got into police-mode and began to grill me. Where was this party? Who drove you to the party? Who drove you home from the party? Who was at this party? I answered all the questions between spasms of laughter. I fell asleep on the couch. I have this old diary, a journal of my memoirs.    

Frustrations

So how was your day?

 A few blogs back,  I told you about my Cable bill being $38 less than normal. Well, that was a short lived fantasy. Today I get one and it's $38 more than it normally is. So I called and talked to someone, I don't know if she was from Guam or New Zealand, but she sure wasn't from around here. I had a hard time understanding her and she had an even harder time understanding me. This is the gist of the conversation. It seems that I only paid part of my bill last month. So they tacked that part I didn't pay to this one. I told her I already had that part figured out, but why did you tell me last month that the bill was $38 less than normal? I got frustrated trying to make sense of what she was saying. 

Well okay, no need to argue with her. She is just doing her job.

War on Ants

I have had an invasion of sugar ants. I have scrubbed everything from top to bottom and have ant traps all over the place and they still come and bring all their relatives. They found my dishwasher.
 I started half-way washing the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. Did that help? No, it did not. I am not going to wash my dishes with ants in there so I take the dishes out and run a cycle of hot water first. That gets rid of the little devils from the dishwasher, but they return. 
I think they are being resurrected from the dead. I tried a different brand of ant traps and no relief. If you can find the ant-highway, there is a product you can put on it so the little unsuspecting fools will take the bait back to mommy dearest and it is supposed to kill her off, and her whole clan. Well, dream on because I cannot find the highway or they can't find the bait. Where is the road map to the ant highway? It’s worse then getting rid of wild morning glory in your yard. Have you ever tried to get rid of that stuff? Nothing short of a nuclear bomb will do it. 
Why are all these pesky things picking on me. First it’s the rust streak in the toilet and now these ant creatures. Does anybody have a cheap anteater for sale? I think it’s time to sell the house and let it take over. I’m losing the war.

Introvert Meets Extrovert

I remember when life was even more boring then it is now. I was living in an apartment on the backside of a house. Any time I have ever lived in an apartment I have lived in the backside of the house. I have lived in three apartments in my lifetime so I guess I haven’t set any records in that competition. This was the time my husband was called back to active duty during the Korean Conflict. He was stationed in Japan and I was stationed in Yakima in a backside apartment. I had a nine-month-old son. The landlord and her family lived in the front apartment. Her name was Lorraine. I have had two very good friends in my life named Lorraine. Just thought I’d throw that in. This Lorraine was a few years older and we spent a lot of time sitting in the lawn chairs under the shade tree by the side of the house sipping ice tea. We discussed everything under the sun, but that was about all there was to do. I was very upset when she told me one day that they were moving and would rent out their apartment to somebody. Who am I going to talk to now? I’ll just write more letters. Now I was writing letters to my husband and my family in Oklahoma. I should have been stationed in Oklahoma during that time, but things have a way of never working out the way you would like. 
Things perked up when the new neighbors moved in.  It was a couple my age with four feral kids. Her husband worked and she stayed home with the kids. We now had noise and kids running amok all over the place. She was a deplorable housekeeper so she didn’t spend any time doing housework. We packed up the kids in her car and took off. ‘Stay home’ was a concept she had never heard of.
We saw everything in this town. We saw everything in this town more then once. We would take a lunch and go to the river so the kids could play. Sometimes we invaded the park and go swimming in the pool. We went to movies and the library. I wasn’t bored any longer. I almost forgot that I had a husband overseas. Time moves on and you begin another chapter in your life. No two chapters are alike. 
Till next time.