October: Think Pink

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, so think pink!

10 Stupid Things I Have Done Lately

1. Set coffee cup on sliding keyboard tray, then promptly slid
tray back in (caught it in time, thank you).
2. Failed to get haircut with wedding pending. Hey, it's not my wedding, who's gonna be looking at my hair?
3. Agreed to go to NYC for said wedding. Flooding rains and
terror alerts promptly ensued.
4. Bought cool pocketbook that will not stay on shoulder, even
without bulk of winter coat.
5. Bought cool pocketbook that will not fit in locking desk drawer at work.
6. Placed wallet from cool pocketbook into locking desk drawer, then failed to retrieve it when leaving office for field visit. Driving without license in possession=best speed limit enforcement around!
7. Put touch up color on hair (gentlemen, avert eyes please) and on white curtains as well. Actually, white curtains with RED trim: simply bleaching dye out NOT an option.
8. Put clothes in dryer with fistful of change in pockets. What an unholy racket! Had to go back 3 times before all coins were retrieved. Yeah, yeah, I know, money laundering.
9. Made husband responsible for directions to NY (quakes visibly in boots). Might get permanently lost in Yonkers. Might end up in DC.
10.Made list of 10 stupid things but can only think of 9. Maybe
not as stupid as originally thought!

Holidays Greetings to All

Ramadan Mubarak to the Muslim community, with especially warm greetings to Virginia Gal.

L'Shana Tovah to my Jewish friends.

Hope everyone's holy days are blessed with love and the closeness of family.

Blogger Mayday

I have a significant anniversary coming up, and I have to find a gift for my husband. Any suggestions? I'm kind of stumped this time around. I've done the watch thing and the ring thing in the past. Gotta come up with something new. All suggestions (serious or otherwise) will be considered!

Honey

adopt your own virtual pet!

Memories

I took Mom for an ultrasound of her heart yesterday. We don’t have the results yet. Mom and I had a very nice dinner out at the Cracker Barrel (real health food).

Mom gave me some bad news yesterday. The boy who lived across the street from me as a child has taken a stroke and is on life support in a hospital in Philadelphia. I haven’t seen him for years, perhaps decades, but hearing this was a sucker punch in the gut. He was my first playmate, and he is the same age as me. All joking aside, he is far too young to have suffered a stroke.

In my mind’s eye, I don’t picture the tall, kind young man I knew in high school. I picture a six-year-old boy with very blond hair and very blue eyes. We played Cowboys and Indians together, and bantered about whether or not G.I. Joe was just a copycat of Barbie. We ran around outside in our PJ’s on summer evenings, catching lightening bugs and waiting for Mister Softee to come by. We built snowmen and ice forts in the winter.

The only time we ever broke the rules (our moms were almost always watching from a window) was when we snuck down to the creek in his back yard. The creek was off-limits for the obvious reasons (drowning, muck, and mud) and for some not-so-obvious reasons (giant snapping turtles). Mom didn’t have to punish me for going down the crick because Mother Nature stepped up to the plate; I got poison ivy.

We watched the first episodes of Batman together (again, in our PJ’s). We used to climb to the tops of the fence posts in my yard, towels pinned around our throats as capes, pretending to be superheroes. We would “fly” from the fence posts, toppling imaginary villains as we soared to the ground. We ran, we biked, we played, we yelled. We went to swimming lessons at a local creek (not the one in his back yard), and came home in swimsuits yellowed from the cedar water.

I suppose we must have argued sometimes, but I don’t remember it, except for one argument about which of us was older. I think our reasoning was based solely on whose birth month came first in the year, with no regard for which year was in question.

Our mothers fell out sometime during our grade school years, which put us incommunicado as well. I had three good friends in the neighborhood when I was growing up. I lost J to our mothers’ dispute, I lost M because her family got richer and moved away, and I lost S during the Junior High years because she went places where I would not follow (and thank God I did not). Of course, change comes to us all, and I had other friends along the way.

Our mothers have since patched it up, and his mom called my mom this week with the awful news. His parents still live in the house where J grew up, though my mom has long since moved away.

J was like a brother to me in those early days, and I cannot fathom that he is in such grave condition now. Say a prayer for him and his family tonight, if you pray at all, or think a good thought for them if prayer is not your form of meditation.

Hurry Up and Post!

My internet connection keeps going sour (blast Comcast). Gotta try to get a post up before it goes out again. Guess I'm about to embark on the usual customer service shuffle. I've had problems off and on for awhile. It's not unusual to have inferior quality in my neck of the woods-we're not in a priority service area.

I've gotten so accustomed to being connected that I feel a little bit lost when the connection goes down for any length of time. I like being able to look up the meaning of obscure words at 3:00 am. I enjoy setting off on an adventure through arcane historical detail just for the heck of it, without putting on my shoes or digging out my library card. And, especially, since this is a year without travel in our household, I like being able to take off on flights of fancy to Europe or the Caribbean to dream about my next vacation.

Blast Comcast!

Sick Pup

I came home from work last night to a sick pup. It was too late to see the vet, so we had to wait until this morning. They had to double book us, but we've spent a small fortune there (literally) over the last 15 years, so they fit us in. My husband was off today, so I did not have to miss work, thank goodness. I have to use some time next week to take Mom to an appointment. It adds up fast.

As I suspected, the pup has a bladder infection. What was my clue, you may ask? Perhaps it was the trips outside every hour or so all night. ALL night. Heavy sigh. Bad week for sleep. It's hard to stay on your game at work when you're exhausted. Both the AM and PM breaks were spent running out to get coffee. Great. I probably won't be able to sleep tonight, after all that caffeine! At least it's Friday. No work tomorrow, might even sleep in a little.

The important thing here is that little M is doing much better today. The antibiotic is kicking in, and she is sleeping soundly right now. Sleeping. Lucky dog.

A Literary Meme

Directions:

1. Grab the nearest book.

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

5. Don't search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

The sentence: "Passions are roused."

The book: "The Screwtape Letters," by C.S. Lewis.

I got this idea from Pax's blog. Ironically, I had this particular book nearby because it came up in a conversation with Pax last week. I pulled it off of the bookshelf to take a look at it, and I left it by the computer.

Half Asleep and Too Stupid

Haven't been sleeping too well lately. I fall asleep, and I sleep soundly, but I don't stay asleep long enough. Still groggy in the AM, however.

Made the coffee this morning. Half asleep and too stupid, forgot to put the removable basket into the swing-out thingy. Came back 20 minutes later: coffee all over the countertop. Good morning, Merci!

Can't complain. At least it stayed on the counter. I can picture it now: 2 old hounds (15 and 13+) lapping up black coffee from the kitchen floor, me chasing them away with a roll of Bounty and a mop. Coffee and old dog bladders. Bad combo. Guess I actually lucked out! That's it then, guess this is just my lucky day!

Hope yours is lucky, too. ;-)

We have a friend who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. He lives in Long Beach, MS, and he works in the casino industry. He's OK, and we'll see him soon. We're confident that he will recover materially. We haven't heard the details of his story yet, so it's too soon for us to gauge the amount of emotional trauma that he endured and the impact that it will have on his life. We do know that he has family and friends ready to help, and he has education and job skills, all of which will make an enormous difference in his recovery.

Our friend asked us to visit the Gulf Coast many times in the past, with a visit to New Orleans as one of the highlights. We planned to make the trip sometime; wish we had done so. Perhaps in future years we will be able to visit a newer, safer region that sets the standard for economic and social equity.

With such an enormous area impacted by the storm (an area the size of Great Britain), and with tens of thousands of people displaced, the effects of Hurricane Katrina reach far and wide. How many of you know someone affected by the disaster? Have you done anything to contribute to the recovery effort?

We have contributed to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, and we plan a contribution to an animal welfare organization, as well. We might send a donation to Habitat for Humanity when the rebuilding begins in earnest.

Just thinking about my previous post and wondering: what other paths might you have followed in life? Do you ever think about changing direction? How would you go about it?

After a conversation with my friend Zelda today, I got to thinking about the road I took to get to my current place in life. If the outcome was predicted by the courses where I shone during my college years, I'd be a theologian (Systematic Theology was the pertinent course here) or I'd be designing and analyzing standardized tests (Psychological Tests).

The Systematic Theology class in question was a quake-in-my boots experience. There were four other students in the class. The prof had just been promoted to Dean of the School of Theology (or SOT, a graduate school for ministers-to-be). He asked if we would mind meeting in his office, and we agreed to do so, of course.

The class met twice a week for one and one-half hours. Each student had to teach one class session for 20% of their final grade. I was terminally shy at the time, so this was pure, unadulterated torture for me. My mouth and my throat dried out, and my voice went painfully hoarse. I mean actual, physical pain.

A take-home, open-book, open-note test (you could choose 3 questions out of 4 to answer) was another 20% of your grade. The rest of the grade was based on reports and essays. This was the semester that I lived at the SOT library. I was there when it opened, I was there between classes, I was there when it closed. I knew the stacks better than the librarians.

Needless to say, I did NOT become a theologian! However, I highly recommend the educational method outlined above. I worked harder and learned more in this one class than in most of the others combined, and it was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.

I'll mention my prowess in Psych Testing in a future post. It relates to the history of the computer as an educational tool. In other words, I went to college before the dawn of digital enlightenment, before computers had Windows, mice, or color monitors...