Sunday, December 04, 2011

A King's Ransom

I was just wondering today how much is a King's ransom?
Has anyone ever had to get one back?  It seems like it might have happened at one time or another..
What do you think?

Saturday, November 12, 2011

The Balloon Test

Is this you?

So, I was watching a show the other day, and okay, it was Ally McBeal's birthday, and Renee bought her 3 helium balloons and as they walked away from the camera view, she let them go.  Just seconds after buying them, she just let go of the strings.  I don't even remember if she looked up to see them going into the atmosphere or not.


And I wondered, which person are you?  Do you let it go, or do you keep it around the house, maybe move it from room to room, or wear it tied to your clothing, or to your child?   The child does not count in the test.

This is about you.  If someone gave you a helium balloon, what would you do with it?

There is no right or wrong answer, it just interests me.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Maintenance

Suddenly I'm in the maintenance business.  Well, okay, it wasn't so sudden, it was more like a gradual change.
The thing is, as you age, your cat ages, your car breaks down, your roof leaks, your teeth break, the house is crumbling around you and you can never get a hot shower when you need one, and spiders, if you allow them, will spin the whole shebang into one shimmering stretchy bundle, if you did not walk face first into it on the way out of the house every day, and spend the next half hour pulling webs out of your hair.Which basically sums up my mornings.

I know I have aged when I start advising young women to pay attention; that they look as good as they ever will despite what they believe and that it will not last forever.

Suddenly under the barrage of pills I must gulp down on an hourly basis, I have to eat less and move more.  When we were young, we were moving so fast we had to be slowed down, and now, we forget that we danced half the day away, and after that, walked to almost everywhere we had to go.  Particularly in the city, one can walk two miles just getting to work and back.  And in those days I did it in high heels.

I don't know if you noticed when you stopped wearing heels.  Oprah still wears them, you think, so why don't I?  All the makeovers on TV take dowdy home makers and put them in makeup and heels.  That would fix at least 75% of everyone's problems.   On the other hand, Oprah is taking her shoes off even on camera.  If that does not tell you something, then it at least should be pointed out to her.  "Oprah, put your damn shoes on girl, you on camera!" (taking a lot of license here, but Gail might say it like that.)

Have you looked at the skin on your legs and arms lately?  I advise that you don't, it will just make you cry.
Just sit in a bath of any kind of emollient, I don't care, milk, Aveeno, any oil in the house except motor, (but not too smelly, as it may repel people), and hope to be magically restored before you look.

Of late, my skin has taken on the look of wrinkled, hairy silk, or the traditional (and there's a reason they say it) paper.  This makes me sad.  I sit in bed slathering moisture lotion all over anyplace I can reach and hoping to hell that I do not slide out of bed or have to wash the sheets.  (more maintenance.)

I believe that women do most of the work in this world, and then have to work on themselves.
A couple weeks ago, one of my sheets tore and since then I am on a crusade to find something to replace them.  I do not want mushy sheets.  I want nice, crisp percale like they used to make.  They were just a bit heavier than now, and it did not take 3 years, and that is not hyperbole, to get the sticky little surface stuff to lie down.  I have amassed a compendium of complaints.  And that's what happens as you age.

You have little patience with incompetence, and you want everything you like to be manufactured perfectly, and forever. Do not get me started on toaster ovens! And you have to pay so much more attention to a corpse which no matter how much attention you show will never look as good as it did when you were 20, with the possible exception of women on TV who have paid crowds of people to do the work for them.

Do not be completely dismayed, however.  There are plenty of worse problems in the world, and if one can be solved with body lotion, well, it's a cheap fix.  The rest is another story, and you will get through it.
I have to remind myself, no matter how bad it is, and you do not want to know what else is going on here, it could be worse.  In the meantime, you are in the maintenance business with me.














Thursday, September 08, 2011

Nuts to you

I found a walnut in the mail box today.  It's really just an open container, but still, I think the mailman did it, it was too heavy for a squirrel to carry, and it was still in its green husk.

In other news, I had to chase Squirly Mon (his name) out of the concrete urn.  He was reluctant to go because he was burying another damn peanut.  I don't know who gives the squirrels peanuts in the shell, and for sure, they are not growing in the yard.  For one thing, everything that grows in my yard now gets stolen before it reaches maturity, and for another, peanuts grow underground.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Car Trouble

The hub's car woke me (and probably the rest of the neighborhood) up at 4:44 this morning.  The alarm went off and it was some time before I decided it might be my car and got out of bed to reconnoiter.

Turns out, it was not my car, but his, honking and blinking in the pre-dawn hours.  I don't know about the rest of you, but it makes me paranoid to leave the house in the dark to investigate the innards of the car with the front door of the house open. Also, it does not make me feel good to lock the door behind me, making it harder to get back in should there be someone lurking under the giant holly tree.

After the first time I came back in, I had to check the whole house for prowlers.  That does not sound bad until you know that there are 3 floors, a basement with 3 closed door rooms, and a walk-in attic.

BOO! That'll get your heart pumping.  So I don't know how to get back to sleep yet.  I turned on the radio and it is Jazz Fusion time.  Not quite mellow enough for me. I'll just listen to the government fail on NPR, that should be soporific.

Meanwhile the car seemed to be locking and unlocking itself, and Volkswagens have this thing where the lights come on when you open the car door, and also when you turn the car off.  This is a nice feature when you come home from anywhere and have to collect your bags, and coat and things, and the inside lights stay on until you get out of the car.  I believe they may even be called courtesy lights.

The car was just sitting there flashing furiously, and then the lights would turn off briefly, and then they would recommence flashing. I locked and unlocked the car with the key remote to see if that would fix the problem, but it did not, and then, the car locked itself.  Whoa, I did not sign up for this! 

  I got in and out of the car numerous times and played with the inside light controls thinking I had everything off in the front seat, when the back seat lights started flashing at a rapid rate, like my heart from running up and down the stairs in the middle of the night.  It was a very eerie sight.  Someone alert Stephen King, because the car is alive and I don't know what to do.

Okay, now my return key is not working in blogger.  What else is going to short out on me?  Because that's what I think is happening.  The car is wet from 2 or 3 days of rain.  The computer, that's just juju.

I went out again, putting on pants  under my nightgown for the second and third trips.  I opened the hood, but the battery appeared to be at an inaccessible spot in the engine for my height, in the dark.  I thought I could just unhook the battery so the car could not do anything on its own.  That was too much for me at 5 am.

  Eventually, I went out again and got into the back seat and pushed on the lights.  I was gratified, since there were not toggles or switches, that actually pushing on the lights themselves, turned them off. (At least for the meantime.)

Since the last time I got the lights off, I have checked several times.  Everything appears quiet, and the sky is lightening up.  It is 6:20.  If I had a normal job, I'd be waking up now.  When you factor in that I fell asleep at 2am, you will realize I probably got little to no sleep at all.

At least it's not hot out.

It's  a shame, this is another one of those "I got so mad, I threw my drink across the yard"-( Martin Mull ) articles.

Some people tell you how to grow things, or control mosquitoes in swamps, or how to feed the disenfranchised.  I just complain about my extra car.  I could tell you worse stories.  It's not all fairy tale here, but you don't really want to hear about it, and I really don't want to talk about it.

I just thought I'd talk about supernatural car behavior, then go back to bed.























Sunday, August 07, 2011

Good Eats

When you are alone in the house, you can eat anything you want, and the only person you hurt is....oh yeah, you.

The thing is, that when you live with someone, and you normally eat balanced meals, the kind that have protein, carbs and vegetables, not the applestack from minute to win it, and the other person or people know or believe that you are always eating reasonably you generally follow those rules so as not to get caught stuffing your face while supposedly on a diet.  That is to say, until the entire pan of brownies disappears, they think you are in control of yourself.

A while back, half a blueberry cake disappeared and I had to ask 50 questions before I found out that the answer was "my brother and I ate it".  Fair enough, but why the subterfuge?

Now I'm in the house alone, and no one knows what is going on here.  I want to eat the vegetables, I BUY the vegetables and pretty fruits, and I visit them in the refrigerator when I stop by there to see if any ice cream with caramel has appeared there as if by magic.

I'm trying to get off the meat band wagon, and frankly, that one was easy.  Now I am stuck on fried shrimp!
That cannot be totally good for me.  The shrimp themselves are iffy, in that they are probably frozen and sold in bulk to the Greek Pizza shop.  (remind me some time to tell you about the Pakistani Pizza shop, it may be here someplace)  Anyway, those farmed shrimp (and I am guessing here, but it's prob'ly a good guess) that the shrimp are farmed, and as such, they are crowded, and because of that, they are filled full of antibiotics and heavy metals that are floating around in the water from people getting cured of things and flushing their drugs down the toilet.  Okay, I totally did not mean to go there...

So for dinner, I had maybe 6 or 7 jumbo fried shrimp with "cocktail sauce".  I don't know what they  call it, it's a little take out cup with ketchup and a dab of horseradish in it.  So I had that, some onion rings, (okay, that's the first time I had those in months), and some giant light green olives that you have to eat around the pit like hand fruit, they are so large, and a bunch of chocolate chips.  No cookies, just chips.  You save a TON of calories that way.

I am sure there are those of you who will be gasping at the unvarnished nerve of me to admit to such a revolting diet, (that was just dinner) and others who are saying " pish, tosh, I just ate a chicken fried baby whale, and chased it with a red velvet layer cake and a liter of mountain dew!"

  So maybe I am not so far out of control as I think I am.  I am hoping that by confessing to you, my friends and whatever you are to me, that I will try and behave somewhat before you come asking "How's that little eating problem going?"  Or before I bust out of another size of jeans, having already donated all the fat pants earlier this summer, in a burst of optimism.  (OH, NO SHE DIDN'T???  Yeah, I did.

So let this little tale of woe be a warning to you buckaroos.  (I sent something to Texas today, and I saw Rango last night, and I am taking a little license here .)

Stay on the straight and narrow and eat the fresh food before we all explode in a collective self inflicted massacre.  Well, that was weak, but I promise to work on it....















Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Movies I might See

I found a list of movies I might be interested in ordering from Netflix.  I'm not sure of all of them and I am not recommending any of them.  I just thought they looked like a poem, and I have not been so happy with what they pass off as poetry lately in the New Yorker.

so:

Movies I might see

one day
the change up
immortals
what's your number
our idiot brother
thundersoul
the high cost of living
submarine.


Let them read some subtext into that.
Really, is that how it's done?

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Twitter News

I got a message from Twitter the other day.  They said the men's gay chorus was following me.
I turned around to see if they really were.
They could be, but I didn't see them.

Wild Thing

I heard "Wild Thing" on the radio the other day.
It made me think of my very first boyfriend.  I don't know if I was ready yet, or if he was, but he thought so, and after a bunch of years of being the ugly girl, I was flattered by his attention.

He was a surfer with a Beatle haircut and exotic eyes like the the very skies above the beach where we met.

I don't know if either of us was the wild thing.  I don't remember singing it together, but that is the song which reminds me of him as a young man.

He is grown now with grown up problems different from mine but no easier to deal with.  I know where he is, far away from here and that long ago beach.  Sometimes I hope he hears a song and thinks of me too.







Friday, March 11, 2011

You never know

A funny thing happened.
My Father sent me an article from the New York Times Sunday Supplement.

It was about marginalia, the marking up and commenting not merely in the margins of books, but throughout the text, underlining sentences, adding little flourishes of one’s own, including but not limited to stars, brackets, and all manner of marking for reference at a later time.

The writer of the article infuriated me by lyrically extolling his nasty and destructive habit of marking up the pages of books. In fact, to me he sounded overly self congratulatory, actually boasting to writing as much in the margins as there may have been on the original page. To me, this is extreme hubris, and as I understand it, hubris is already extreme.
That he owned the books he had virtually destroyed seemed to me to be beside the point. How distracting to borrow such a volume and try to read through his copious blather? He described just such an incident, and that he needed to borrow back the book while the lendee was still reading. He said that she felt the clean book was somehow lonely.

In my mind this man is a negligent desecrator of the hard work of both author and editor and that instead of creating his own notebook for those meanderings of his mind he preferred to massacre the pristine pages of a new volume.
He even gave historical reference in his defense, possibly not noting that in the 18th and 19th centuries, one did not necessarily have the requisite quill and foolscap at the ready.

I was about to turn the page to finish the article when I discovered that the article sent to me was about soup, and the story about the marginal writer was merely on the outside of the folded pages.

I will probably never read the end of the article, and in any case had read enough of his outlaw ways with the written word. Instead, I will read the soup story intended for me, and perhaps make some nourishing and delicious chowder or stew on this cold and rainy spring day.



Thursday, March 10, 2011

What's in a Name?

I've stopped remembering names.  I don't know how it happens, but some time in the last year I just quit.

I read a lot of fiction.  Not romance, or historical fiction, but genereally sub-humorous prose with zany characters if I can find it.  I like Tim Dorsey and Carl Haiisen ( can never spell that right) but also a lot of women writers, too many to mention.  Once I went through a series of baseball and even golf novels, but that's immaterial here.

The thing is that I am reading along and I cannot keep the characters straight.  I pick up the book and look in mid sentence where I left off, (I can remember where I left off, that's interesting), but I do not remember the story line, or who these people are.  I have to say that if left to my own devices I will read 3 or 4 books a week, and that often the character names overlap so that there may be the same names in consecutive books, or even similar story lines which is purely coincidental, but it adds to the confusion.

I look at the page and wonder is Rory the doctor with a disabling disease, or is she the housewife living multiple lives in another dimention?  I don't really know until I have back tracked a couple of pages or just gone forward to see what she does next.

The last book I read had so many characters that I treated them as I had when I read the "Russians" in my youth.  The names were so cumbersome I just used the first inital, and raced past those crippling amalgams of consonants jangling in my mind.  Eventually, in a burst of inspiration I quit reading them altogether. The book I was reading did not have difficult names, just too many to keep straight.

I forget the names of neighbors and people I meet sporadically, like at once a year parties.  I may have spoken to them for an hour, but guaranteed, I will not recall their names 5 minutes or a year later.  They, however remember mine, and I have no idea why or how they do.

I will remember your name if I have known you for 20 years or so, but last night in a dream, I forgot the names of some very dear friends.  It could be that I have not seen them for years, and they did not look like themselves as sometimes happens in dreams.  I woke up troubled.

I'm kind of worried, but most people say we are all forgetting things, and there is some stress to consider.

The thing is, if you run into me and I appear not to know you, just introduce yourself again.   I will remember you or be happy to meet you.  Does it matter which?

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Ms. Information

I've been looking for work sporadically although I am in dire need.  The Etsy is slow going and no computer in the house does not help.

I was wandering aimless in Chico's the other day.  I'm not really a Chico's kind of person, more like Salvation army, (the Sal) these days.

I was approached by two sales women, and told them that I had no idea what I was doing there.
Somehow, the next thing I knew, one of the girls told me she was nervous about her upcoming wedding.
"Well, what's the problem?" I butted in once more where anyone else would fear to tread.
She told me they kept adding to the wedding list, and it was out of hand.
"So, tell your boyfriend (of 10 years) to put all new people on a list and have a separate party after the big day." 
She liked that a lot.
"I wonder if you could give me another opinion," she continued, "the girls made me register for gifts but we have been living together for 10 years and I have everything, and don't know what to do with all the new stuff!"
Easy, I told her, just keep all the new stuff and donate all the old stuff unless it's heirloom or something.
"Wow", she said, you should wander in here more often!"  "Not only will I have great new stuff but I will get credit for doing good for others!"  " I love that."
Just another day for Ms. Information I thought.  How can I make money doing this?
Let me know if you have a problem or a solution.
I'm open to both.

Thursday, February 03, 2011

What's in a Name?

I have to have a tooth extracted.  I had it worked on last year, and it has hurt ever since.  I have bounced back and forth from my dentist to the endodontist who did the root canal, both claiming the tooth to be fine, and neither claiming blame for the pain.  "that's his tooth" said my dentist.  Now it's infected and I'm just having it out.  The dental Surgeon's name is Wank.  Yes, he's a wanker.  Omygod, that's ridiculous, but it sounds like yank and that's close enough for me.  I am nervous and expecting pain and misery which is basically what I have now, but with the addition of bleeding.  (That's nice dear, could you change the subject?)

The thing is, I have noticed lately that people are once more becoming what their name tells you they are, as in mideval times.  So the woman doing my alterations is named Taylor, for instance.

One day I went with a friend who was getting Lasik Surgery on her eyes.  I don't know if you can get it any place else, but that's what we were doing.  She was holding on to me so hard, the doctor must have thought we were a couple, and when he finished explaining the proceedure, he asked "do you have any questions, Meg?" 

I said "Well, Dr. Foot, I would feel a lot better if your name were Iris or something, but other than that I have no qualms."

So that's my day, how's yours?

Feel free to write me. 

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Visit me wouldja?

I might mention the shop is still open. Chandeluse.etsy.com. I have loaded it with home made (hand made) valentine jewelry and boxes.  Still working on cards.  I never print them out correctly so it's difficult, and for a woman who hopes to become a writer, I am surprisingly bad at greeting cards.

Remark

Sorry I have been MIA.  I have to type at the library and I have 9 minutes left so i gotta keep this short.
I was talking with the hub and he said :
Fast food always has cheese in it somewhere.  Whether you order a milk shake or a salad there's cheese in there somewhere.

I hope it makes you laugh too.