sometimes you feel like a nut

...and sometimes you don't. Today's a day when all I can write is blahg, blahg, blahg. Perhaps tomorrow will be more productive in the blogospheric realm. I think I ate too many tomatoes tonight and I've been robbed of any creativity I might have possessed. Tomatoes are related to virulently poisonous plants! As Teddy Roosevelt once said (while eating sausage and reading about the meat packing industry), "I've been paizened!"

avast ye mateys

I'm going to see "Pirates" tonight and nothing can spoil the anticipation. Of course, if some little bugger sits behind me and kicks my seat or tosses popcorn all over, I might just have my own version of walking the plank right there in the theater. Just call me Captainette Jan. Did they have female captains? Probably not since women were considered bad luck on a ship. Besides most women would want to try not to smell bad, look filthy, and otherwise act in a coarse and vulgar manner, so I guess being a landlubber is a good thing. Room service, please!

knowing when your life is complete

All of us have lofty goals and aspirations about what we expect and want from our lives, but sometimes we are not sure when life is complete. We are not confident that we are finished and have no need to set even loftier goals. Today I have discovered that my life is complete. I now have all that I need to feel "whole"--a dustbuster, a Swiffer (regular size) and a brand new Far-Reaching Swiffer! I didn't realize I had reached the culmination of my goals for "nirvana antisepticus" (a.k.a. house-cleaning heaven) until I used my new, long-handled Swiffer today while cleaning my house. I can now die a happy woman (with a dust-free set of ceiling fans and hard-to-reach knick-knacks)! Life is sweet...and now it is dustus absentius.

when dustballs scatter

I am in the middle of a light housekeeping adventure this morning--on my day off. This is an indication of two issues in my life: 1) I don't have one, and 2) what little there is that pretends to be a life is often devoted to the exemplification of the phrase "Cleanliness is next to Godliness".

So there I am sweeping my kitchen floor when a dustball I am trying to sweep into my pile of floor flotsam takes off running and I realize that it has legs and isn't dust at all. Nope. It's a spider, and it's running for its little life. My quandry becomes--kill it or trap it and escort it outside with a stern warning that I get the inside of the house and spidey and all his/her friends and family get the outside. This spider is faster than I am (no special feat that) and I don't capture it, so I now realize that it will probably become one of those six spiders that I am destined to swallow this year, and knowing that I sleep with my mouth open most of the time, I am sure that I get more than my "share" of spidey meals every 365 days! For additional information on this subject read my Christmas letter of 2005. I do believe that most of the spiders I inhale in my sleep are already dead by the time I swallow them up and get my little protein "snack" because I am a drooler and they probably drown if they get anywhere near my mouth. Sometimes I dream that I am drowning and wake up to find that my pillow is fairly sloshing with saliva, so what chance would a spider have? I've had dentists complain about my salivary overproduction as they turn up that spit-sucking instrument to highest intake. That has its downside though because it can "adhere" to my tongue or the inside of my cheek and it takes the dentist, his assistant and the dental hygienist to extract it from my mouth. Life is always an adventure!

So here's the lesson about dustballs that move (and other creatures). If you don't want spiders ganging up on you and broadcasting to the spider nation that you need to be taught a lesson for trying to squash one of their fellow creatures, go easy on the dustballs and never eat shark in any form. I have a theory that, if I eat shark or anything closely related to it, any time I dip my not-so-little self in the ocean, all the sharks will be able to detect that once-upon-time meal of one of their "own", and they will put me on their radar screen, and I will become a magnet attracting them from all four corners of the earth, so I stick with fish sticks or McDonald's fish sandwich in hopes that I will be safe in the waters that cover 75% of the earth. Better yet, I'll be even safer if I just keep my swimming adventures to a chlorinated body of water, a.k.a. the pool where the only shark that lurks is plastic and can be deflated with one poke of a well-filed fingernail!

Sundays in the park with George...

Or Sundays in the cemetery with Mom. One is an example of pointellism (sp?) and one is an example of "what's the point?" Okay, I spent the afternoon after church traipsing around two cemeteries in two different towns trying to find dead relatives. My Mom couldn't quite remember where the graves were (and I hadn't visited them in over 20 years so I was useless) except she knew that they were by a big tree. Well, both cemeteries were filled with big trees all around, so that certainly didn't narrow down the locations. Eventually we found almost all the graves and decorated them with new floral arrangements. I wonder what the spirits of those who have passed on think when they see those left behind wandering around a field of graves, sticking artificial flowers into the ground or into metal vases. I guess for some who are left behind there is a sense of connection in doing this. For others there may be some guilt--see yesterday's blog to get the scoop on this. For a few, it is done to honor the memory of a friend or family member. It just seems a little weird. If we really want to honor someone's memory, shouldn't we be doing something positive in the world to make it a better place? Wouldn't that be better than plunking down money for flowers that will fade or scatter in the wind. I always liked the graveyard scene from the play, "Our Town"--it was full of wisdom about how the living behave when relating to the dead and how they lack perspective. Next year I think I'd like to donate the money I would spend on this cemeterial ritual to a good cause that allows the dead to honor the living.

guilt trips...the vacations you never want to take

Today was Saturday. My usual routine is to run from chore to errand to chore and continue this procedure until I either run out of items on my To Do list or I collapse, whichever comes first. The older I get, the sooner the collapsing occurs. I have found myself taking little cat naps in between big chores and making excuses for why I shouldn't start the next item on my list. Hangnails are a great excuse! I even give myself a very long "break" and, if I'm not passing out on the couch, I search for movies on TV that I can watch so I can have at least a two-hour break. Once I start watching the movie I feel it is very impolite to turn it off. Those actors are doing their very best to entertain me and who am I to "click" them into oblivion. Besides, then I'd have to actually go back to working. Ha!

Part of my compulsion for doing all these chores and being able to check each and every one off my list is that I'm always on a trip...a guilt trip, self-imposed. I will be on my death bed, ready for the last breath of life and hoping that when the movie of my life flashes before my eyes, it won't involve only dustbusters, Swiffers and whirling-cupped vacuum cleaners. There is a little voice in my head, actually a very loud and pushy voice, that tells me I have to have a clean house and it must be cleaned every week without exception or I will die instantly and people will come to my house and discover that I was a secret slob and that dust bunnies abound. That same voice tells me that my lawn must be mowed and my flowers clipped when their blooms are drooping (heck, my blooms have been drooping for some time and no one has clipped them
--thank goodness). Ms. Voce Grande tells me that everything must be put away, my bed made, my towels hung precisely (no extra piece hanging down in front of the other or, heaven forfend, crookedly), my spices alphabetized (one reason to have minimum spices in the cabinet), my clothes must never touch the floor, always be hung up and I must never mix types of clothing--there will be no pants hanging with blouses or skirts mixed in with sweaters...no, no, no. And so I've always got my bags packed and a ticket in my land for Never Never Land and we're not talking Peter, Wendy, Nanna and the gang (or Johnny Depp). My NNL consists of never failing to feel guilty if everything isn't crossed off/checked off my list. However, as I am getting older (and trust me these years aren't golden) I am also learning this amazing concept--what doesn't get done today can probably be done another day if, indeed, it needs to be done at all. And if I die and people come to my house and are appalled by the dust bunnies or dishes in the sink or an unmade bed, they aren't people about whom I care, and they're probably just returning from or about to embark on a guilt trip of their own. So I'm unpacking my "baggage" and storing it in the loft in my garage and I'm putting my To Do list in next week's calendar...maybe I'll feel an obligation to read it and do some of what is listed there and then again, maybe I won't.

leaving work early, or how not to be cranky on Friday

Today is Friday. It's the beginning of a long weekend. Almost everyone has Monday off, so we'll all be planning wonderful things to do with our "extra" time. I used to think an extra day meant I had more time to do more work or chores or tasks. I used to be young and foolish. Now I am old and often cranky on Fridays (before a three-day weekend or not) because I'm tired by the time 5PM rolls around on Friday and on the way home from work, I always run errands like filling up the car with gas (and helping the gazillion dollar gas cartel), grocery shopping, going to the post office (just put a bag over my head and ask me to breathe deeply to see if I can get some oxygen and some sense back into my brain--because who goes to the PO on Friday late afternoon?). By the time I am half-way through the grocery store I have assaulted three people and threatened at least two little kids who dared to look at me with smiles on their sticky little faces! Then, when I finally get home, I have to schlep the groceries into the house and put them away. On a hot day, this chore is tantamount to climbing Mt. Everest while facing in the opposite direction of "up". Then I open mail, shriek when I read my utility bill or some other monopolistic company's monthly charge, I change clothes--into the scariest outfit on the whole earth, guaranteed to keep away all intruders and most friends, and I proceed to catch up on paperwork, write letters, do e-mail and now I do blogging as well. Then I fall down on the couch, and, just as I am proving that gravity really works, I remember that I haven't had dinner and I go scrounge through my newly-purchased food items to see what I can fix quickly so I can go back into my living room to try proving gravity works...again! Then I turn on the TV and watch programs I generally don't care about or I get hooked on a movie because I really like it or it's so cheesy I just can't help watching, thinking somehow, sometime it will improve...and it never does. I am the essence of hope gone wrong. In my brain it's always springing eternally. Maybe that's why I often feel dizzy--all that springing going on and all. Anywho, that is why I love the fact that I left work early today--two whole hours early, because I actually still had some energy left and I was able to walk through the grocery store without glaring at other shoppers, mumbling to myself as I shuffled through the cans of tuna and boxes of shredded wheat, and I left the store feeling happy, knowing that it was still "early". I came home and tossed some clothes into the washer and I'm not contentedly blogging while they agitate them little selves in soapy water. I will have all the chores and errands and to do items done earlier than the time I normally arrive at the grocery store. This is good. I want more of this. I plan to petition my Congressional sycophants, oops, I mean representatives so that I can ask for "Early Fridays" as a means of creating good mental health for all of us. And if they aren't willing to help me with this, I'll just buy a blow up, look-a-like of me and put it in my chair in my office and leave work at 3PM on Fridays. Bet my boss won't notice. He likes to leave early on Fridays too! I think we have a plan...

me thinks i'm in love...

How many ways can a person wax rhapsodic about it being almost Friday. On my way home from taking my Mom to dinner and shopping at Michael's for flowers to put on graves at the cemetery this weekend--only a few select people like me know how to have a really fun Memorial Day! Bet you're jealous!! Double jealous!! But I digress...back to the future. On my way home I realized that tomorrow was going to be Friday, the end of the work week, the beginning of the lllllllllllllllloooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggggg weekend! So I thought Woohoo!! I thought ZippetyDooDah! I thought Hooray for Hollywood--well, actually I didn't think that at all, but it does have a nice rhythmn to it, don't you think? I thought Huzzah! I thought Hip, Hip Hooray (but not for Hollywood)! I thought Wowsers! I found there were plentiful ways to express my enthusiasm for Fridayness, but then it was still Thursday, so I contained myself, rolled my window back up, and stopped wagging my tail--oh wait, it was Lassie who stopped wagging her (really his) tail. In case you haven't picked up on my theme for today, it's Fridays. We get one every 7 days. That means that every 7 days I am happy, I look forward to something (other than flower placement on graves), I realize that I can pretend to have a life--it's all a big lie, but so far, only those reading this blog (small crowd to date) will know the horrible truth that I have no life worthy blogging about. Yep. Fridays are our friends, and not the invisible kind that I seem to spend too much time in the company of--oops, some grammatical dangling is going on here. But, because I still have one more day to pretend to know what I'm doing at work, I must, alas, forsake the blogspot so I can go nonnies and wake up ready to slog out another day on the job site. But then, guess what, it will be F-R-I-D-A-Y. And that is why me think i'm in love.

what's with shrink wrap?

I've been busy pondering very important topics and issues today. High on my list is why shrink wrap exists. What a waste of plastic trees. Doesn't anyone care about how many plastic trees it takes to make shrink wrap? I'm concerned.

And I think shrink wrap was invented to frustrate the elderly. Pretty much everything you buy has a shrink wrap "envelope" or worse, a hard plastic "covering" that requires an entire set of Craftsman tools from Sears to open. Let's not stop with shrink wrap or plastic wrap, let's add those nuisance twisty ties and teeny-tiny screws used to keep items firmly secured to their cardboard backing--the screws for which no teeny-tiny screwdriver exists. I've been told that this is done to prevent thievery. Ha! People are not going to spend 20 minutes in the store, in full view of a security guard or camera, wrestling a package to the floor trying to remove the wrap or twisties or the screws. They'll just take the whole dang package and wait until they're home where they can open/unwrap/unscrew/untwist to their hearts content until they are able to extricate the treasured item from its "protective shield".

But back to the elderly. When you get old you can't see well. Your hands hurt and aren't so strong anymore. So there you are wanting to listen to Lawrence Welk's 1001 favorite bubble-brained hits and you can't get the shrink wrap off the CD. You've paid for the CD. You didn't steal it. Your stereo is waiting to launch it into the living room, polyester suit and all (Lawrence's suit, that is), but you can't get the wrapper off. You've tried scissors and now have a large gash in your thumb. You've tried a screw driver and have discovered just how dangerous a weapon that is as you remove it from the soft, fleshy part of your palm (and, yes, pretty much everything on the elderly is soft and fleshy). You've tried a BIC throw-away razor, but all you've done is shaved most of the hairs off your knuckles. Finally you riffle through the catch-all drawer and you reach past last year's dentures, your ball of rubber bands, and the coupon for the free mambo lessons you've been meaning to take as soon as your lumbago eases up, and voila, you find the knitting needle. You poke and poke and strain your eyes forcing you to use some Murine so you can see clearly and then you poke some more. Finally, you poke a very small hole in one corner and you feel like Secretariat being blanketed with roses at the end of a great race. Poke, poke, poke some more and you are able to grasp a very slender string of plastic between your shaky thumb and forefinger. Slowly you pull and the string becomes a hair and then disappears and the unveiling ceases. You turn on every light in the room, put your CD under the brightest bulb in the house (obviously, at this point, you don't feel like you are the brightest bulb) and you lick your fingers hoping that this little sliver of plastic will be caught in the strand of spittle. Two hours later, you have managed to turn the little sliver into a 1/16th of an inch strand and have a 2" long "opening" in the shrink wrap. You take a short nap, eat a cookie and drink some milk and then you're ready to conquer the task. Another hour passes and you have managed to remove that strand around the entire circumference of the CD and you tear away the remaining shrink wrap, triumphantly shouting "Huzzah!" You march over to the stereo, push the eject button and find out that what you have only plays tapes. I think it's time for another nap and perhaps afterwards a letter to your Congressional representative about the conspiracy theory of shrink wrapping and senior citizens. Lawrence will have to wait...

May 22nd, a Tuesday, all day...whoever invented Tuesdays. They're kind of a nothing day. It's not the weekend. It's not the first day of the week (back to school or back to work) that everyone can gripe about. It's not the middle of the week when all of us starting counting down to the weekend. It's not the fourth day that is the slider into the final day of the week and Tuesday certainly isn't Friday--the day that everyone loves and uses exclamation points after and looks forward to from Monday morning on. Nope. Tuesday is just a kind of in-between day--kind of like being the middle child of three or the second child of five. Sad Tuesday. But now it's almost over and that means it will be the middle of the week in just a few hours! Woohoo!

I just returned from seeing Shrek. They say (whoever "they" are) that three times is the charm. Well, "they" weren't right, not at least about this sequel. It's cute, but not as clever as the first two. It has its moments, but then so does a mosquito while it's biting you and giving you a one in 10 chance of developing West Nile Virus. I don't know if the writers were the same. If they were different. If they just ran out of gas--and at over $3/gallon, that's easy to do. I was fortunate enough to be in a theater with parents who felt a 2 or 3 year-old should be staying up past bedtime to watch a movie that won't capture his or her imagination and will make no sense whatsoever, and whose child entertained all of us with delightful shrieks and constant talking in between the high-C notes. Yep. That's why I paid $7 to enter the theater. Although, when the action and comedy lagged on the screen, I had the pipsqueak to entertain me. I arrived too late to buy popcorn, so the sideband entertainment was helpful.

Today the Northern California valley had a second day of block-buster winds. Like to wear all your hair slicked back--face the wind. Like to wear the Beatles mop top, turn the back of your hair to the wind. Confused about what look will be most flattering, let the wind decide. I only have about 3 hairs, so my options were limited. The North wind makes people cranky--besides messing with their hair or in my case hairs. Those who suffer allergies find that their nose feels like the schnoz of one of the presidents on Mt. Rushmore and those who don't have allergies just use the wind as an excuse for being peevish (and if you don't know what this word means, it will give you a chance to use the dictionary to learn a new word). The weather forecasters promised us just one day of wind, but the wind moved in and decided to stay a while. I want to know how the weather forecasters keep their jobs since it appears that more often than not they have the weather forecast wrong. Who gets paid to make mistakes day after day without any consequences? I want that job, although I'm not sure I want to point at a map that isn't really there and talk about depressions and barometer readings and partial cloudiness. My weather forecaster is my hand. I stick it out the window in the morning. If it feels sweaty, it will be a hot day. If it gets wet, it will be a rainy day. If it turns blue, it will be a cold day. If it collects small, white, cold bits in it, it will be a snowy day. Pretty simple and always correct.

That's about it here in the sunny, WINDY climes of Northern California where the peaches are ripening on the trees as I type. Yum. Almost makes up for the tofu, bean sprouts and perky people who live here.

Today is May 21st--a stellar day...if you're a stellar

This is a first attempt at blogging. My children (now adults) tell me it's completely easy to set up and that I won't have any problems navigating my way through the "choose this" and "choose that" portion of developing my own personal blog. But then these are the same children who told me that I would lllooooooovvvvvvveeee the flume ride at an amusement park which caused me to open my mouth so wide, that I was able to swallow three small children and a Maltese on a leash! Yep. It was a really fun ride. (And my oldest son captured the gaping maw on his digital and proudly displays it at every family function.) Although I felt a bit full after the third child and the Maltese, I still had room for cotton candy. But did I learn my lesson? Nope. These same children, who claim to love me and send me nice cards and goofy poems on Mother's Day, also told me I would love the water splash ride made especially for "easy gliding". Well, it wasn't easy and I wasn't glidin'. I shot down that wiggly pipe like a greased pig at a bacon festival!! I didn't know, until I hit the bottom pool (and who made them so shallow that an old, chubby lady who is out of breath, can't find her footing for several minutes?) how much water I could swallow in one gulp. Let's just say I won the "Who Can Do The Best Imitation of Niagara Falls" contest. At least, so far, on this May 21st day, I haven't swallowed anything larger than a gnat (don't mow the lawn at dusk--just a thought for the vegans in the audience) and I've had some water, but it was totally voluntary and all came from a drinking glass... So now I have fulfilled my life long dream--blogging without any goal or theme or sense of where I'm going or where I've been and I feel so much better for having done that. Well, actually my life long dream is to find a wad of cash somewhere that is totally not identifiable or traceable or reported lost or stolen and to spend the rest of my life explaining to people who read blogs why certain sayings are inaoppropriate--like saying "I sweat like a pig," when a pig doesn't sweat at all--or discussing the physical and mental anomalies of our world--like how we can elect individuals to office who morph overnight (right after the votes are counted) and turn into Play-Doh-for-brains political figures. At least with Play Doh, you can put the smushy stuff back into a can and close the lid tightly. Well, that's enough for a Monday. I have to go move the sprinklers in my yard...