Happy New Year!

Here it is on Dec. 31 and I am not planning to do anything.  I haven't stayed up until midnight in many many years, and this year will be no different.  I do have a bottle of Asti Spumonti (sp?) in the refrigerator, but there is no chance it will be polished off tonight.  One glass is about my limit, and several of my meds say not to drink alcohol while taking them; but I figure one glass won't stun me unconscious.  Many years ago, we went to my aunt's home and had a nice dinner and TV watching for the various time zones.  My uncle, whom I now know was a dirty old man from trying to what we called French kissing back then, always had a glass of Coke and Canadian Club which he always wanted us to taste.  Like maybe one sip and I would tear my clothes off and make wild passionate love right there in the kitchen.  Or something.  He didn't make it to old age since he had Alzheimers soon after retiring.  I wouldn't ask that for anyone, gross or just friendly.  My aunt had an awful time of everything (like getting her arm broken in a fall, going to the doctor's for cast removal, and falling in his parking lot and breaking it again), she cared for Grandma until she passed at 98 y.o.  Then my uncle started getting pretty waffle-y as time went by.  Aunt N caught him turning on all the gas burners in the kitchen and then carrying a skillet full of water back down the hall.  Not to mention leaving the house and wandering the neighborhood unable to find his way back home.  At that point my aunt found a residential lady to look after him, and my aunt finally got a full night's rest.  Grandma had problems too as time went by, asking for her father, and getting dressed and trying to leave, and so forth.  My aunt finally forbid my sister from coming to see her, as she would get her all upset, and crying.  A lot of this I didn't know at the time, living on the other side of the country and too broke to fly home.  This is before credit cards became so prevalent.  So the good old days weren't all that good for us.

The Christmas decorations go down tomorrow.  I can't help without going upstairs and that would be asking for trouble.  Today I got my final package from Yankee Candle, they sent half of it before the 25th and this is the second (free) shipment.  I'll send it to R and she can give me whatever she doesn't like.  It is hard to choose a scent over the phone, the descriptions are not much help.  Citrus and pine, what would it smell like?  Guess we will find out.  The hand mixer that I gifted to myself is nice.  I just need to get upstairs and be able to stand for a while.  The ortho doctor gave me a 'script for therapy on my (uncut) leg, as it is beginning to show the effects of taking all my weight while I favor the one with the replacement knee.  I have been doing the exercises with both here at home, or I would be in even worse shape.  What fun.  But I have seen improvement, if only a bit, to keep me going twice a week.

C is making snickerdoodle cookies and the scents from the kitchen are better than any candle.  He is more precise than me, weighing out the flour and the sugar, rather than using a measuring cup or spoon.  The last batch was scrumptious sugar cookies ( and he ate most of them).  I finished off the toffee that R gave me last night; I could have eaten even more if available.  Still have chocolates to go.  From Thanksgiving to New Years is one yummy thing after another.  I will have to lose weight if I am to walk unsupported.  I won't know how I am doing since the one time I tried to weigh myself I fell.  I will just use the waist measurement to plot my loss.

Lunchtime, once the cookies are in the oven.  Of course everyone knows you burn the last batch, being busy with clean up and so forth.  It's a rule.

Bye for now!

Merry merry

OK, it is Christmas Day and I am here killing time, waiting for dinner.  Yum.  The orange cinnamon  rolls this morning were delish.  The wrapper says, amount per serving, ONE!  They must be kidding, I polished off 6 myself and so did C and R.  Plus I got popcorn, toffee bark, m&ms, enough to sink the good ship Lollipop (reference for readers familiar with Shirley Temple movies).  I am using the hp computer in the blue room, and I keep trying to use a track pad, arg.  Plus all my sites are password protected, and since the MacBook Air uses a fingerprint scan (mostly) I don't actually type in a password.  Google said they would send me a code on my email account, but the email account uses a password too.  I finally got this to bring up my posts on at&t and so here we are at last.  Wish I had something to write about.

C and R liked the gifts I got for them, especially the $$ .  Money is better than gift cards which don't show how much is left on them, don't show the expiration date, have fees to use, and so on.  I put the money is a little coin pouch, didn't just stick it into a piece of wrapping paper.  I also got a hand mixer with two different blades, and a really heavy metal hand part.  I got it from...me...to me.  I had to have something to unwrap too.  Anyway, they liked the idea of gifting yourself.  Now to find a purpose  to use it.

I didn't have any trouble climbing the stairs, well, mainly.  Going back down we will have to just give it a go.  C holds me up with the gait belt, and can drag me back if I stumble.  I'm wearing my grippy socks to give me some traction.  Wish me luck.  Update:  I made it downstairs, but it was touch and go especially when I looked down to guide my feet on each stair.  Got to do better.

When I was a kid I could hardly wait for Christmas day.  Now it is hard to feel much more than a mild interest.  For one thing, if there is something I want, I just buy it.  The same is true for R and C.  So for a gift you have to find something unusual that they have not seen, or candy that will be gone in a week.  I have to do shopping online.  Just thinking about all that walking at a mall is enough to put me in a bah humbug mood.  And if I am looking for something in particular, I check out Amazon first.

The telemarketers have the day off too, yeah.  At Yankee Candle I wanted to ask about the buy one get one promotion, but when I called, the answer voice said "We are having unusually heavy calls, your call will be answered in the order in which it was received, the current wait is...one hour."  Yikes.  It seems their computers wiped themselves and they had to hand enter each order, taking forever and all of them  screaming "Where is my order?"  Fortunately I bought mine back in November, and if they send me another three candles I will be most happy.  If not, oh well.  But I won't try to call until Jan. sometime. 

The one thing I missed out on while we lived in Miami was snow.  We went to WV when I was a kid, but always in the summer.  The one year Mom drove us to the farm in December was, from my point of view, a disaster.  N and I were walking hand in hand, talking, poking among the grass for a 4 leaf clover, and Mom and my sister (who was so jealous it is a wonder she didn't turn green) and N's mom and dad, and all of them trying their best to keep us from being alone together.  It didn't work especially well, given that when N died we had been married 45 years.  So much for Mom's prediction that N would leave me after 3 months.  Anyway, it snowed some one night and in the morning the trees and plants were changed to a beautiful winterscape. And it didn't last long, but when I went to SC for fresh. and soph. years, there were lots of kids that had never seen snow.  In all, there were a lot of novel experiences those two years but god I was glad to leave them to run their bigoted, racist, holier-than-thou mind warping school behind me.  I never looked back, and I never sent them a damn dime.

Time to go...Bye!

the New Year

I think it is safe to assume that this is the last entry until after the new year.  Although it is true that I would say the same other years and then get so bored that I found myself here at the keyboard, typing away.  So we will see.

A robo call a few minutes ago.  She said she was from AT&T and when she asked me how I was doing, I said I wasn't feeling very gullible today and that she was out of luck, "Sorry!"  What a job to have!   Calling random people, hoping that someone on the other end of the phone would take the bait.  And at this time of the year!  This is why kids need to pay attention in school:  to learn that when the call starts out with a "bloop" they are not actually who they say they are.  And this is why schools need to offer classes that teach modern skills, like this, and things like how to do a budget, the perils of signing things that they don't understand,  how to shop for car insurance, and so forth.  It could be the most useful things they ever learn.  Assuming they are listening.  Teaching cursive could fit in somewhere too.

Not all my Christmases have been merry and bright.  I was thinking of my sister Marlene, 4 years older than me, and how she could bleed the fun from anything.  One Christmas I bought her towels, the nice thick ones, along with all the hand, washcloths, etc.  When she opened the gift, I was chattering away about how nice it is to get out of the shower and be able to wrap up a warm thick towel (I knew she didn't have any).  But then I noticed that she wasn't looking at me.  She was staring at my 2 kids, who each (8 or 9 years old) got $100 because Mom couldn't get out to shop in person for them.  They were saying, "wow".  Mom asked  my sister did she like the towels (which I had paid $89 at Penneys)  and she said, it looks like everyone got money but her.  I was floored.  I've gotten gifts that weren't my ideal thing, but I was still saying great thank you.  I couldn't believe that even she would act that way on Christmas!  Mom, who had the patience of a saint, told her to shut up.   She was a piece of work.  And she has passed and for me she isn't missed.

Well, this isn't a very long  post, but I wish everyone that reads this has a Happy Holiday (aka Merry Christmas) and a great New Years.  Bye!

Holiday Cheer

The original plan was for the big Christmas tree to be in the living room, and the little one to be in my room.  But while the big tree is happily lighted in the living room, the small tree is unable to be very festive when half the lights are out.  C took it apart (there are only two  pieces) and fiddled with the wiring for about an hour and then gave up.  It is slated for the next trip to the transfer station (dump). So my only festive move is to have Alexa play instrumental Christmas songs.  They sound pretty good, arrangements that I haven't heard before.  My favorite song is Carol of the Bells.  It is a very common Christmas song, but the name isn't very well known.

I have been having a tough time with my IPSY membership.  That is one where a subscriber gets a cosmetic bag every month containing 5 samples (big samples) of makeup, for $10.  I got an email today asking about what sample I would like to choose for the January shipment.  And I thought, Jan?! I haven't gotten the one for Dec. yet.  So I went to their Help page, and it refused to let me log in.  I got the site giving me a temporary password, sent to my email address.  But when I tried to log in, I get a message that the email and password don't match.  And I thought, what?  They just sent me the temporary password, which they sent to the email address, so how could they not match?  But it refuses to log me in.  I sent a message to the help section, but come on, it is less than a week until Christmas, no one will be answering help messages this week or next.  I am about to cancel the whole thing, except I have to log in first!

I didn't go to therapy today.  I was all ready and Chris went out to warm the car up, and nearly fell on his ass.  He had swept the driveway and put down salt earlier, when it was just snow, but it apparently turned it to ice and glassy too.  So he called and cancelled the session; the last thing I need is to fall on MY ass.  His car won't fit in the garage and still be able to open the doors.  When I had the Miatas they were just right for the space, but not a compact car.  This is why I scheduled the knee surgery for the summer (of 2017), to avoid the weather problems.  But the final surgery was in Feb (of 2018) and I am still doing therapy so that Some Day I will be able to get around without the walker.  That would  be my Christmas present times a million.

I got a message from the Big Bank today asking me if I recognized a charge on my account from yesterday.  I looked in all the places a charge might have come from or to, but found nothing.  And I checked everywhere and didn't even find any charge from yesterday, except for the bogus one.  So once again they will cancel this card and send me a new one.  This one was the replacement for the last hack, and yet it is hacked again.  Mutter mutter.  There is a class action lawsuit for a breach of Experian last year, could this problem be due to that?  And if so, do you think they would tell us?  That's what I thought too.


Click on the lady and you will get a bigger image, easier to read.

I just heard that one of my old friends, one I haven't spoken to for years, just found out she has breast cancer.  Been there.  I still get a giggle from this poem;  I have a warped sense of humor sometimes.

Life moves along

Insurance for mobile homes (aka modular homes) has changed since the day when the only coverage you could get was auto insurance.  If you investigate these homes, they don't look like trailers anymore.  Top of the line is $100,000 and up, and is a triple wide, so 70 feet wide and 60 feet long, with nearly any option you want to add.  They are dry walled, taped, textured and painted; once in place they won't be "Mobile" anymore.  Still they are taxed as personal property and not real estate, which is a big saving.  My long range (next year) goal is to buy a double wide and live in it until this house is sold.  It is, thank the tax man, paid for.  Then I can repay the loan for the mobile home and still have plenty that we won't need to eat beans.  The first improvement here is the master bathroom, but I can't do that until I don't need it anymore.  A few days to go elsewhere is doable, but weeks, no way.  The very big incentive to living in a mobile home is that it is all one level.  Homes in this area are almost all with stairs, due to the up-and-down of the terrain.  I may make good with therapy until I can at least do 3 or 4 steps, with a hand rail, but that may not be possible.

Anyway, that is the rationale for moving, if only I can find a nice community of upscale homes that have a vacancy.  The two-edged part of this is to find the lot, and only then order the home.  Probably have to pay the going rate for a month, just to keep it available.  So complicated.

The cat with the expensive food is doing better already, eating well and acting up (NOT akaking up). I hope she continues to improve, I feel defeated when they get sick and then the vet treats the symptoms and not the cause.  She and the other 3 cats are completely indoors so how do they catch these things?  One of those puzzles.

There was this strange noise last night around 10 pm.   It sounded like snow sliding off a metal roof, which is completely impossible, for one, I am on the lower level, no roof for here, two, no snow, three, snow doesn't bark.  When C looked all he saw was the neighbor-across-the road dog trailing a length of chain.  He ran away when he saw C, I hope he got back home without strangling himself.  I thought he just dragged his chain across the downspout, but seen in daylight there was no damage visible.  Another puzzle.  Update:  we never saw or heard that dog after this night.  Either he ran away and tangled his chain, or they found someone to re-home him.  I hope he wasn't hurt.  Owners can be so clueless and the pet suffers.

Well, I am ready for bed.  The therapy today was difficult as I am sore from the fall, and even cancelling the part that puts stress on my left leg didn't completely fix it.  I am so tired.  Bye!

Brrrr!

I am waiting for the bathroom to warm up before I take my shower, it is only 64 when I first went in there.  At those temps I could reasonably put the soft drinks outside and shut down the refrigerator.  Anyway, I thought I would get another post going here.

I have a good friend in SanFran that I worked with in the Olllddd days.  I last saw her in 2001 on her yacht/boat and her note this year says she is moving from Hawaii to a gated community in Sarasota, with all the mod cons.  I have to admit, I am a teeny bit envious, but that is life, some are poorer and some are richer.  She invited me down once she got settled.  However, there is the step/stair problem, so I figure I will have gray hair (check) and walk with a cane by then (I wish) before I make it there.

I knocked this computer off and it landed on edge on the squishy carpet, and seems OK now.  The cover was a little loose, but it popped back on and there isn't any problem I can see.  I also knocked over the can of Coke, but it fell directly into the trash basket upside down.  Small mess ensued.  I think I will adjourn for now and get that shower before another mishap.

The laundry is done (mostly by C) and put away.  There is still my gold silk shirt to tackle, unfortunately the stain is on the right side right in the center of the front.  Right now I could wear it under a jacket or sweater, whereas it will be hard to do even that if there is a big hole there.  I have a replacement that looks pretty much a duplicate, but it is made of polyester.  For me that means no dry cleaners; their price doubles the cost of the shirt after one or two trips there.  I just need to have a go at the stain, good or bad, get me off the fence.  It occurs to me we spend more time and effort on our clothes, even when they are cheap or designer made, and use them if they wear out pretty quickly.  My dry cleaners' items stay in their plastic shrouds, except when I need to find something "special".  I wish I could remember how this one got stained.  I have an Oscar de la Renta blouse that I glopped salad dressing on.  When It was cleaned, I warned them, but the result is a large slightly lighter color on the front.  It is completely invisible in low lighting.  At home I wear a cobbler's apron at dinner, or even change to an old t shirt to avoid messing up something dressy.  As if anyone would notice.

C is off to the vet to get the prescription food for the oldest cat.  She is too thin and this food is very appealing to her.  It is $100 for a large (10 pound) bag, so we have to isolate her when the other cats want to check out the new food.   They are very plump, even the one that looks thin until you pick her up, oof!  I counted how many cats we have had over the years, and it is 28, more or less.  You have to  realize this is over 45 years, and always multiple cats at the same time.  The amazing thing is that I can still remember their names;  Luckily I can't remember their vet bills.

All the plants look fine in the upstairs dining room.  They have all done well  without me, all but the Christmas cactus, which croaked.  Years ago when we moved to WV from CA (and never mind what you saw in Horse Whisperer) you can't leave a horse in a trailer for days and days so I arranged a transport with a company that does this all the time (and ignore the bite marks and the raw part of his tail).  So we put the cats in the biggest of carriers, and put the Husky in the trailer with them.  When we stopped for the night, all the beasts came into the motel with us.  Oh, but what I meant to say was I transported all my plants on the hay shelf at the front of the trailer.  Quite a few.  And when we stopped in NM, even though it was April, all the plants were frozen and black the next morning.  I still haven't found some of the types of plants, must be a West Coast biome thing.  Anyway, at that point in time plants were the least of my worries.  I  had R in the intensive neonatal ward in CA, weighing all of 2.5 pounds, another car back in CA that a drive away company would eventually get to us in WV,  our house had been loaded into a moving van, and I had to stay in M's house until they released R and we flew to FL, where mom lived.  I was so stressed, when we met in the AirPort I handed R to mom and said something along the line of "here".  The wonder is that I kept it all together for those incredible weeks.  So the loss of one Christmas cactus is a small matter.

part two

I, once again, have fallen, this time against the sharp corner of the craft table.  It all happened so fast, I think I may have slipped on the newspaper laying on the floor.  I will have a dynamite bruise on my shoulder, and my knee aches like a **** well, a lot.  C had to come and pick me off of the floor, get me onto an ottoman, and from there into bed.  All this happened 20 minutes before leaving for therapy, so I didn't go.  The next appt. is on Friday, I will see how I am doing Thursday night.  I'm not sure I will be able to get onto the massage bench,  not to mention doing the exercises.  I thought I was on my way to using a cane.  HAAA!  I can't even rely on my walker, it goes down with me.  C was supposed to go to the auto dealer to pick up R while her car was being serviced and take her to work, but she got a loaner car.  What would I do if he had been gone during my upset?  Just lay there, I guess.

It's strange to have no horses and no dogs.  Mainly the horses, I looked out my bathroom window and watched Maybe and Willie peacefully grazing, or standing nose to tail so each tail clears the other's face.  It has never been the riding I miss, it is watching the horses as they do their horsey things.  When Willie died, it was Maybe screaming at night that alerted us to see only one horse when there should have been two.  I felt sorry for Maybe, alone every day.  Sometimes when the kids at the neighbor's screamed at a certain pitch, I would see Maybe jerk her head up and neigh back, thinking it was another horse.  As I said before, they are herd animals, and they need their buddies.  Anyway, I miss all three of them, as they went one by one, in their 20s.  It is sad our companion animals live such a short time.

The farrier came on Sunday and took a whole lot of gear and tack, everything from buckets (heated) to blankets.  I am glad they will use them, I am sure the farrier doesn't earn much for very hard work (especially in the winter) and what would I do with it all?  Ebay it all, piece by piece?  He was jubilant every time he discovered another item.  I have no idea where he will put all that he has, he only has a run-in shelter for his horses and not an actual barn/stable.  His wife says they will put most of it in the spare bedroom.  We found one thing in the aisle, a shed snake skin, I was glad to know there are snakes in there and not rats (or mice).  Years ago I told the guys at work on their farm to bring me a gunny sack with a snake inside; I would turn them loose in the corner where the hay sits on pallets, and bingo! no more rats.  For a while.  I am not afraid of most snakes, only the viper ones I leave alone.  Rattlesnakes like: cottonmouth, copperhead all types of timber rattlesnakes, for example.

We should have a smaller water and electricity bill this year, I hope.  They both have their own meters, and the only draw this time is the electricity in the tack room to keep the hose flexible.  Why do we need water now?  Beats me.

I need to lay down and rest my achy bits so I will leave this here.  Bye!