Migraine

This is going to be one of my shortest posts.  Migraine, heading for the dark and quiet place.

Bumper Sticker for the day:  "DUCK TAPE:  turning 'No!  No!' into 'MMPH!  MMPH!' since 1943."

Hair today goon tomorrow

As I sit here dieing (my hair) I am reminded of how long I've been doing this.  Decades, let's just leave it at that.  Why couldn't I have taken my mom's inheritance, she who didn't ever turn gray from her light blonde.  Instead I start going gray at 25.  I plucked them out back then, stopping when I realized I was making a bald spot.  Another swell thing about going old.

So when the doorbell rings by UPS with a package, and you are still in your nightie, do you answer the door?  That's what I thought.  Well I answered, but I was wearing a long T shirt, so hopefully not too obviously night wear.   Of course the UPS driver is also a friend and the owner of a black Newfoundland, about the same age as ours.  And probably he has seen everything in the course of his deliveries.  Got to get dressed earlier in the day, instead of just lolling around until noon.

When I was young, one of the most common things you would see is girls wearing hair rollers as they ran errands and so forth.  The wire mesh ones with a scratchy brush inserted in the roller.  No one thought much of it ~ this is before (and here I really show my age) blow driers.  The first time I had my hair blow dried I stopped on my way home and bought one, and when I got home I tossed all the rollers and my bouffant hair drier.  What a feeling of freedom.  Now I am sure there are none of those rollers left, outside of a movie prop room. 

I am going to start accumulating a list of all the things that I remember having that don't exist any more.  Things like pogo sticks (too dangerous) and pop beads (swallowing hazard) and chemistry sets (!!).  Some of them I can't think of why they are missing other than going out of style (like most board games) and weird stuff (like silly putty, or pet rocks, or chia heads).  Not that I want those things back, most are good riddance.  Just that it is interesting.

bumper sticker for the day:  "The older you get, the better you realize you were."

Lame post

I had a post half written when I realized that it was so dull, even I didn't want to read it.

And now I am stuck trying to write something that isn't just as lame as that one.

When my kids were little, a LOOONG time ago, I would read them a bedtime story.  Once in a while they would ask for a REAL story, one that I made up from scratch.  Pressure!!  So I did what any mother would do for her kids ~ I plagiarized!  After all, what are the odds they would read a similar story at day care?

So of course they DID recognize one of them and insisted that their mother had made it up herself.  Quick!  Salvage ttime ~ so I told them I must have read the story and then forgotten and used it myself.

But if I fob off my readers here you'll catch on right away, so I can't write some lame send-up about Paul Ryan, as much as I would like to.  So I'll just include a link to satire site The Onion. and you can read the article that says "Admit it, I scare the ever-loving s**t out of you, don't I?" by "Paul Ryan".
It says it all.

Bumper sticker "Originality is the art of concealing your sources."

Wordless Wednesday

Wishing you all "well"

Family

This, my friends, is my grandfather.  We never met ~ he died when I was 4 years old, but in all honesty I doubt we would have met had he lived another 35 years.  A bitter divorce and total disinterest together made him uncaring about his son and family.  We always sent Christmas cards, and got ones in return from his second wife, but when we sent word that Nana had died (in 1969), back came the reply from his stepdaughter that grandfather had passed in 1955, didn't we know?  The second wife had developed Alzheimer's and couldn't place who my dad was, or thought that she had sent word of his death at the time.  No mention of Dad as son, or my sister and me as granddaughters in his obituary.  So Dad lost his mother and his father at the same time.  He is buried at Gettysburg.

I am having trouble with my genealogy on this line, simply because there are so few players ~ and a name not sufficiently unusual to screen out similar sounding families.  Grandad was illegitimate, never acknowledged by a father, and as far as I have found, he had no other children himself.   So half of his antecedents are a mystery, and likely to remain so.  The ones that remain, on his mother's side of the family, suffers from the bane of all genealogists : given names that are repeated over in a family.  In this particular case, Josiah had a son John, who had a son Josiah, who had a son John and on and on, so there are only the dates, birth to death, to distinguish one from the other.  I bet their family reunions were hell.

Anyway, enough of that.  I've spent a fair amount of time cleaning house, I've really let it go too far over the last year and a half, I simply felt too bad through the chemo and the adjunct therapy.  But our house is our main asset, and we can't let things slide that need attention.  Hence the painting and so forth.  One project accomplished just seems to point out all the other projects left to do.  Oh, for a handyman to keep us from getting any further behind!  I mean, the hub is nearly 70 and I cringe when he goes up the ladder to clean gutters...

And how about the Olympics?  I cannot watch very much, I hate when an athlete flubs up, knowing how many grueling hours they had spent practicing, practicing just for this moment.  I want them all to do OK, and leave feeling they have done their very best, regardless of their score.  But more than that, I want them to smile, smile, showing us that all that work was worth it, medal or no medal...

Bumper sticker of the day:  "We have enough youth,  how about a fountain of smart?"