While We (Humans, Cat, Dog) Were Away….

About mid-way through the morning of Saturday, October 12, I loaded the cat and the dog and their luggage into the car and drove them to our friend’s house, who had agreed to keep them for the 2 weeks we were going to be on our vacation. I had toyed (very briefly) with the idea of taking Molly Wolly Doodle with us, but discarded the idea, not the least reason being our little Toyota was simply going to be too small to carry her, the crate, the ice chest….

I did some more last minute stuff on the computer for work and spent nearly an hour trying to write about the significance of Sunday, October 13. We were leaving for Los Angeles on October 13, I started writing the blog on October 13, 2004 (9 years ago), and my mother died on October 13, 2009 (4 years ago). 9 + 4 = 13. October 13. I finally gave up trying to write anything coherent and resumed getting ready for the trip.

We drove… and drove… and drove… basically following the same route as the old Route 66 and arrived at my home town, at the edge of Los Angeles, a couple of days later, rather aching and sore, but without mishap, except for the fight we got into with our GPS device, which tried to route us through downtown Los Angeles instead of the way we usually go.

The weather was perfect, as only Southern California can be at the end of October.

Transplants from Hawaii bloom happily in the back yard...

spreading their lovely fragrance.

Lots of coming and going and lively conversation…

My sister took me to the beach.

Richard helped my sister’s husband work on the old truck he is restoring…

We went shopping with my older brother at the Japanese market and bought ingredients for a huge pot of sukiyaki, something our mother made frequently. I chopped lots of vegetables and cooked the food...

 

and we ate every last bit of it.

Richard met up with his high school friend from Seattle, and they went to the Santa Monica pier...

where the old Route 66 ends.

While they were doing that, I took my dad to the sidewalk park on a hill that overlooks the runways at Los Angeles International Airport...

and we spent an enjoyable couple of hours watching the planes land and take off.

Saturday there was a combined birthday party for my niece and myself. 

 
Our birthdays are 4 days apart.

 

  I had a lovely visit with my friend from high school. 

 A good time was had by all…

Sunday we cruised to the ocean in one of my brother-in-law’s restored cars and found ourselves at a kite-flying festival.

This brought back memories of the kite-flying contest sponsored by the Parks and Recreation Department that my dad and I entered. We used the crosspieces from an old kite and tissue paper that I decorated with tempera colors and a sponge. Our little kite was rather simple one compared with the fancy ones on either side, but it shot up into the air like a rocket and we won the contest. The kites at this festival, some 50 years later, were quite amazing.

Monday we visited Richard's sister (she wouldn't let us take a picture though), had a little pot luck for dinner with my brother and his wife, and then a riotous game of Kings in the Corner erupted after dinner when my sister and her husband came to say goodbye.. 

We whooped and hollered and some of us tried to cheat, and it was wonderful.

Tuesday morning I gave my father, who will be 89 in about 2 weeks, a hug goodbye and we headed off to a convention in Las Vegas.

The weather in Las Vegas in late October is nearly perfect. It is possible to take a walk around the block and not feel like one is walking in a furnace. We had two wonderful meals at the Coco’s Restaurant, which was around the corner from the motel.

But we also spent a miserable hour or so trying to get into the Flamingo Casino to see the wildlife habitat and nearly got stuck going round and round in the Caesar’s Palace parking garage before we figured out how to get out of there….

We were happy to leave Las Vegas and spent the evening of my actual birthday in Gallup, New Mexico, listening to the familiar sound of rumbling trains passing in the night.

...The Rats Will Play

A little while after we arrived home Saturday afternoon we became aware that things were not quite all right.

I immediately noticed something was wrong when I sat down at my computer and saw that the beautiful Hercules beetle I had found dead on the walking pathway at the end of the summer in the park was missing.

Then I noticed that the jute twine that had I used to attach my scissors to a nail on the shelf next to my work space (to keep them from wondering off) had been cut and was gone. My scissors were no longer attached to anything.

Sunday afternoon while I was cooking dinner I suddenly realized that the Mexican pottery dish my Aunt Betty brought back from Mexico a very long time ago was empty.

When we left, it was full of dried red chili peppers. They were gone.

Richard found rat paw prints in the dust in his office.

We are not sure what else might be missing. Perhaps if we can locate its nest, we will find some of our missing items.

It was good to go away and it was very good to come home.

A Tale of Two (pairs of) Shoes...

They were the best of shoes…. they were the worst of shoes.

And here I am being silly with one of the great opening lines in literature.  At any rate, I do have tale to tell about some shoes, and it is finally drawing to a close.

The story begins early last summer when the local department store had a “two-for-one” sale on athletic shoes. I hurried on down soon enough after the sale started that there was still a fairly decent selection of shoes to choose from.

I found two identical pairs of Reebok shoes in my size. They were comfortable and seemed well made, and I bought them both. They weren’t the most expensive shoes on sale, but they weren’t the cheapest, either
.
I started wearing the first pair, and they were great…. Except I noticed that almost immediately the heel on the left shoe was wearing down much quicker than the heel on the right shoe. Lots of people have an uneven gait – me included – and so I get it that the heels wear down at different rates, but this was a bit above and beyond what normally happens to the shoes I wear.

Finally, by winter, I decided I better start wearing the other pair of shoes, and so I put the removable ice cleats on the first pair so I could take the dog outside without risking life and limb in case there was an ice storm.

I began wearing the second pair of shoes, and almost immediately, the stitching on the top of the right shoe – where the leather parts are sown together – began to unravel. It didn’t really affect my ability to wear the shoes, it just looked awful. Several times I made attempts to sew it all back together. This was not very successful because it was at the toe of the shoe and I couldn’t get my hand in far enough inside the shoe to get hold of the needle.

The heel on the left shoe of this pair was just fine.

At this point a rocket scientist would have been quite useful, because the solution to this problem was obvious but it took a while for me to get there.

We're into May now, and the department store had another sale of athletic shoe, and seeing that there was no way I was going to be able to repair the shoes I was wearing, I came home with Sketchers; again, not the most expensive shoes in the store but not the cheapest, either. I did not wear them immediately though because being one of those "good to the last drop" sort of people, I decided I could get a  "a few more days" out of the older pair.

One day not too long after this, I was rummaging around in the storage area looking for something and I happened to pull out the first pair of Reeboks with the ice cleats (remember the ice cleats?), and the light bulb finally went on.

The left shoe of the pair I was currently wearing was perfectly fine.
The  right shoe of the pair with the ice cleats was perfectly fine.

Left…. Right… Yep!. So I got a “new” pair of shoes out of it, which I continued to wear until about a week ago.

“Oh,” said my aerobics instructor “You have new shoes!”

Yes, indeed I do…

So comes to an end the tale of two pairs of shoes that morphed into three pairs of shoes… leaving me to wonder why it sometimes takes so long to figure out easy solutions to problems.

A Molly by any other name

It took us a few weeks to settle on a name for her after she walked into our home and our hearts. And it was within a few days after we started calling her Miss Molly that we began ringing the changes on her name.

• Molly Wolly Doodle
• Molly Pollywog
• Molly Wog
• Wog Molly
• Mog Wolly
• Magical Molly
• Molly Malone
• Molly MgGee
• Molly Brown
• The Divine Ms M
• Molly the Trollop

• The Mollynater

The Mollynater?

That Terminator is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

She is a terminator all right. She is relentless in her search for rats and chipmunks. So far she has caught and killed a mouse. After she ripped apart our Internet cable looking for a mouse in the hole where the cable comes into the house, we have had to be very careful about leaving her alone in the house. 

She has been to two different groomers, and both of them put bows on her when they were done. One stuck it to her ear and the other put it on her collar. We find this amusing, because she is not a bow-wearing sort of dog.

Were she to suddenly morph in to a woman, she would not be wearing a dress with “ridiculous looking frills and furbelows,” to borrow from Marilla Cuthbert in the Anne of Green Gables novel.

No sir. She would be wearing combat boots and dungarees, brandishing automatic weapons, and across her chest would be bandoliers bristling with large-caliber bullets.

It is Sunday afternoon, my day off. And in a rare moment for me, I am not watching a video or a DVD, I am not listening to the radio, I am not reading a book. I am sitting on the couch, and she is stretched out on her side next to my leg, and I am petting my dog. Her coat is still very short from her recent session at the groomer and is very silky. I find my fingers moving down her back, touching the knobs of the vertebrae on her spine, running over the faint washboard of her ribs, and tracing the outline of the big muscle in her thigh.
 
Molly sighs, and stretches a little, and then gets up and leaps the 4 feet from the couch to the recliner, where she rearranges the blanket until it is “just so” and curls up and goes to sleep. And I turn on the radio to listen to the medical program that comes on at 2 p.m., and stretch out on the couch, and I also fall asleep, something I never ever did before she came.

Growing season

One doesn’t really need the calendar to know Fall is here: the sun and moon have shifted in the sky, shadows are getting longer, and the days are getting shorter.

Today Nature agrees with the calendar that Fall officially starts tomorrow: it is perhaps the perfect Fall day – brilliant blue sky, just a very light breeze, and much cooler than it has been. Perfect weather for taking the Magical Molly for a brisk walk in the park; well, not exactly brisk because she has to stop very frequently for the doggy equivalent of Twitter—to read the messages and leave her own—and I let her get away with it most of the time, because, most of the time, I am really not the leader of the pack.

We had a nice rain a few days ago to wash the dust off and perk everything up. Almost everything is still green and gorgeous and the fields and rights of way are putting on a last extravagant show of purple and yellow asters, little bushy plants with white flowers, and tall Jerusalem artichokes with their sunflower-like flowers. But the subtle shades of Fall are here too, the hedges of burning bush that people have planted are beginning to turn their distinctive colors, and the poison ivy, Virginia creeper, and sumac are starting to show some color as well.

Our son’s tree that was planted last April was little more than a stick with a few leaves on it...

 and barely noticeable behind the plaque. 

Last summer, we hauled water to it and the three other new trees that were planted in the row. Our efforts as unofficial caretakers of the trees were not wasted: They all survived the terrible drought in good shape, and they survived the winter as well.

The tree that was planted next to our son’s tree a few months later is also a tulip poplar. The irony is not lost on us that this tree was planted in memory of one of the power brokers in town, a successful businessman for many years who was a wheeler and dealer and mover and shaker in town politics, part of the Old Guard who ran things for many years: a “somebody.” And next to it, the tree of someone who was a “nobody” as far as the “important people” were concerned. Death: the great equalizer.

We have only had to take water to the trees a couple of times this summer. Most recently, earlier in the week a few days before it rained. They got plenty of rain this spring and summer and both of the tulip poplars shot up and out and are almost equal in size, especially given that our son’s tree had to make up for a broken main stem that occurred shortly after it was planted.

Our boy's tree looks strong and vibrant...

and should be in good shape for the winter.

Nature is still wearing her summer clothes, but soon enough that will change, and warm days will give way to the colder days of Fall, and the summer clothes will be put away before the onslaught of Winter, leaving visible the bone structure of the landscape...

But then fall comes, kicking summer out… as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.” ― Stephen King, Salem's Lot

The Bucket Hat

My beloved likes to wear hats and never leaves the house without a hat on his head. He has worn a variety of hats since we moved here, but he doesn’t collect them. He finds a hat, wears it until it disintegrates, which often takes years (unless it happens to be a straw cowboy hat that I accidentally sat on during church), and then he finds another hat.

In addition to the cowboy hat that met an early end, he has worn a cloth touring cap, a Greek fisherman’s cap, and then he found he liked the bucket hat style and so began wearing them. Eventually he found a bucket hat with pockets on the side that that was perfect for carrying his mobile phone, and he wore it for years. I repaired it several times, as best I could, after it started to fall apart.

Then, a woman church, who is able to work minor miracles with a sewing machine, noticed my not-so-subtle repair said she had a pattern to make a bucket hat and could make him some.

So they struck a deal, and she made some practice hats out of material she had on hand to work out some bugs in the pattern, which had to be altered to accommodate the pockets.

We gave her some heavy denim that I had acquired from somewhere to make another hat.

After our son died we did not have too much trouble clearing out his clothes, although we still have all of his shoes, for some reason we can’t explain. Some clothes we gave away, many of his clothes were ruined because of his job at the sawmill and went into the trash, and some–mostly his T-shirts–we kept to wear ourselves.

Much later, though, we found a pair of jeans that were in good condition that he had stashed some place that we had not thought to look.

Richard asked her if she could make a hat out of the jeans, and she said she could. So we gave her the Levis.

Over the course of the summer, she has brought several hats for Richard. And then, finally, she finished the last and best hat of all.

Now Richard is being shaded by a very special hat made of something that belonged to our boy…

a hat that will last many, many years.

No channels

In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.

Yakov Smirnoff

 Last week we made a major decision – for us especially – to have no TV channels at all.

Our love affair with the TV since we moved here in 1981 has been an intense and expensive journey.

It was immediately clear the first day we hooked up our television to the TV antenna on the roof that we are in a very bad spot for receiving the TV signal from the local network stations in Springfield. Other people were getting good reception, but not us.

We lived with it for a while and then decided to pay the local cable company to bring the cable to our house… and pay we did: $750.

We had the cable service for a while but became increasingly unhappy because we had to pay for channels we did not want to get the channels we did want. And, of course, the monthly fee kept increasing.

And then the huge satellite dishes became available. So we bought one of those. I’m not sure how much that cost – probably close to a $1,000. It was wonderful. We had access to all sorts of channels that didn’t cost anything – like channels from Canada with interesting programming that we couldn’t get here. One year, for example, we watched the Winter Olympics broadcast from the Canadian station, which was entirely different from what American television was offering.

Better yet, we didn’t have to buy a package deal for those that weren’t free. We could pick and choose the channels we wanted to pay for.

And then they did something with the satellites and we couldn’t pick up the signals any more, so we stopped using the huge dish and went to Direct TV and subscribed to just about everything.

Every year the monthly bill for Direct TV increased just a little, and when it finally topped $100, we cancelled all of the premium movie channels. We thought we couldn't live without the movies but discovered we could indeed get by without them.

And then the bill started started increasing again.

We took a long, hard look at what we were being offered on all of the channels we were getting for our $78 a month and decided about 90% were garbage and did we really want to pay for the huge selection of reality TV shows that we had no interest in watching? Toddlers and Tiaras? Here Comes Honey Boo Boo?

No we did not.

We have been without television for a week.

Oh, we still watch the television. We have numerous videos we have recorded ourselves and DVDs, and we can watch some programs we like off the Internet for free or for a small monthly cost.

I am amazed at how peaceful we both feel. We are no longer sitting in front of our respective televisions – he in the bedroom and me in the living room -- several hours a night flipping through the 200-some channels trying to find something to watch. And what a difference it has made in the noise level in the house without the barrage of heavy metal soundtracks that seem to go with most of the programs these days.

I have found a week in that I don’t miss the few programs that I actually watched from week-to-week. I certainly don’t miss the commercials, except maybe, the Cheerios commercials.

Wearing the air

Toward the end of July, back when the moon was full...

 my cousin in Hawaii sent me an e-mail with this phrase… 

Last night the moon was s-o-o-o beautiful. We are wearing the air tonight… there are clouds in the sky and rain will come our way later tonight, as forecast.

At the time she sent that e-mail, we were experiencing a rather unusual summer. It was unseasonably cool and we had gotten a lot of rain. 

For some people, too much rain. Local gardeners who come to the Farmer's Market complained that they lost some of their vegetables because the plants drowned. Of the cactus I put outside for the summer, at least one has died because it got too much water.

However, the summer we seemed not to have had, and which most of us were grateful not to have had, has returned in full force now that the children have started back to school.

Now, of course, we need some rain. The water level in our rain barrel, which was full to the brim, will soon be used up as it is doled out to the few things I have growing in containers: basil and parsley, and the double impatiens...

that my friend Judy gave me 3 years ago as a rooted slip in a glass jar and which is now about 3 feet tall. The original plant grew many years ago in her mother's yard in Indiana.

It is very hot and humid, which will push the heat index in this part of state close to 100, if not over 100, by days’ end.

Last night when I left the house at about 6 p.m. to take Molly Wog for her evening stroll, huge columns of white puffy clouds were forming on the horizon, but no rain is in the forecast. Even so, the air seemed to settle down around me like a coat.

It did indeed feel like I was wearing the air.

Entering mid-geezer-hood

When my lovely, funny, bewildering, and sometimes exasperating beloved husband staggered out of bed yesterday morning and began getting dressed for the day, I thought it might be fun to take a picture of the birthday boy in his birthday suit. I think he has exceptionally fine looking buns for a 70-year-old man, except of course I have not seen the buns of any other 70-year-old men so I really have no idea how they measure up. Moving right along….

He did not think it would fun. Dressing commenced without the camera making an appearance.

Ten years ago, when he turned 60 years old, we teased him about joining the ranks of “geezer-hood.” Now he is 10-years into it, and perhaps in “mid-geezer-hood.” I am not sure how one determines if a man is a geezer. I think some element of eccentricity should be involved, and I am not sure if being a geezer is more of a state of mind than it is of age. At any rate, I think he is eccentric enough.

I can’t believe this man is now 70 years old.

I am wondering if 70 is now the “new 50?” Even though his beard has turned white, his face still looks so young to me. He says he has started to "feel" his age, no thanks to added aches in pains in various joints. Even so, he just doesn’t seem like an “old guy.” Perhaps that is because I am getting old right along with him, although 6 years behind, by 2 months and 1 day.

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!''

I am glad that we have had the chance to grow old together and am looking forward to some good “best” times ahead.

Yes, we have no Italian

We were finally able to use the gift card we were given for the Macaroni Grill (which closed down and was the topic of an earlier post) at another restaurant in Springfield where we have previously had a good meal.

Because we can eat whenever we want, rather than when the boss decides, we tend to eat early and so we were among the first people to arrive at the restaurant. We were seated in a lovely side room, which was empty, and the server took our orders. Richard asked for a salad, and she asked what type of dressing he wanted.

Italian.

I am sorry, but we do not have Italian dressing.

And she rattled off a list of dressings that they did have and he chose one and the meal proceeded.

I did not order a salad. I ordered soup, so I did not have the chance to ask for Italian dressing and be told that they didn’t have any. Besides, I would have ordered Ranch dressing, which they did have.

Not long after, this exchange, two older women with loud voices were seated in the booth behind Richard. The waiter came to take their order. They both ordered salad, and he asked them what dressing they wanted.

Italian.

I am sorry, but we do not have Italian dressing.

Humm, I thought to myself…

Four young professional people were the next to come in, and they were seated at a table across from me. The waiter came and took their order. At least one person ordered a salad. My ears perked. He asked what type dressing was wanted.

Italian

I am sorry, but we do not have Italian dressing.

Then an older couple and a single woman came in but I could not hear the exchange between them and the server because they were too far away. It would not have surprised me if they had ordered salad with Italian dressing.

Aside from the lack of Italian dressing, we had a very good lunch. But the attitude of the restaurant left me wondering: Why does the restaurant not offer Italian dressing? It’s not like there is a shortage of Italian dressing, as might have existed when the song Yes, We Have No Bananas was written back in the 1930s.

Just from what I overheard, it is obvious that the customers want Italian dressing. Shouldn’t one of the restaurant’s goals be to keep customers happy by giving them what they want (within limits, of course)? Having Italian dressing on the menu doesn’t seem like it should be that big of a deal.

Richard loves salad, and he has a big salad every night after dinner. And tonight, as he always does, he will have it with Italian dressing.

Now the fun begins...

Since July 4 I have been negotiating the activities of daily living with my left hand.

My father is left-handed. One of my brothers is left-handed.

I am not left-handed. I am most definitely a right-handed person, and I am often not very well coordinated with that hand on the best of days.

There were times in the past 5 weeks (give or take a few days) that the frustration level of trying to do things with my left hand resulted in crying jags and, I am sorry to say, an occasional word.

At about 3 weeks in, I suddenly remembered seeing numerous images of English people eating with their forks in their left hand, but turned upside down. And much to my delight (and the state of my clothes), I discovered a method to their madness: any food that could be impaled on the tines of the fork could be stabbed with the fork upside down and easily gotten to my mouth, without first take a side trip somewhere else. 

On Thursday, I had a follow-up appointment with the orthopedic surgeon, and left the splint in the trash can and walked out with just the sling and instructions to begin gentle range of motion and stretching exercises for 3 weeks. If all continues to progress well, then he said he will write orders for me to have physical therapy with the “Samsonite Monkeys,” which is the term he used for the people who will administer the physical therapy and which came from an old television commercial for Samsonite luggage.



I am not sure what I expected that I would be able to do with my right hand when I came home, but I quickly discovered that it wasn’t much, at least at first.

And the muscles in my arm, especially around my wrist, that had been used almost not at all for 5 weeks protested with vigor at being asked to do even the simplest thing. I can't rotate my wrist so my palm is up, for example

I know that sometimes praying for patience means we are then put in difficult situations where we get to practice having patience.

Even though I can see some progress in what I can do -- even in the last two days – I can now feed myself with my right hand, and I can take a shower by myself (which I think disappoints my dearly beloved just a little), I am still in a difficult situation.

Do I dare ask for patience? I need some!