Welcome to the Misadventures of Widowhood blog!

Welcome to my World---Woman, widow, senior citizen seeking to live out my days with a sense of whimsy as I search for inner peace and friendships. Jeez, that sounds like a profile on a dating app and I have zero interest in them, having lost my soul mate of 42 years. Life was good until it wasn't when my husband had a massive stroke and I spent the next 12 1/2 years as his caregiver. This blog has documented the pain and heartache of loss, my dark humor, my sweetest memories and, yes, even my pity parties and finally, moving past it all. And now I’m ready for a new start, in a new location---a continuum care campus in West Michigan, U.S.A. Some people say I have a quirky sense of humor that shows up from time to time in this blog. Others say I make some keen observations about life and growing older. Stick around, read a while. I'm sure we'll have things in common. Your comments are welcome and encouraged. Jean

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Goodwill Hunting, Senator Angus King and Ismo


On the way to the grocery store I dropped off a heavy-ass blender to Goodwill and decided to go inside on the off chance that they'd have a vintage mahjong set for pennies on the dollar. No such luck but I did notice they were selling sweaters for half off their normal price of $6.00. I have never bought clothing at Goodwill or The Salvation Army although I've shopped both places for collectibles off and on my entire adult life. But I've gained enough weight this winter that I'm running out of clothes that fit so I looked through the sweaters. The first and only thing I picked off the rack was a Ralph Lauren, shawl collared sweater with leather trim. With the help of Google's Reverse Image Search I found the same sweater for sale at vintage clothing stores for prices ranging from $180 to $60. I snatched that sweater up and headed toward the puzzles and game department but found an unlocked dressing room along the way. The sweater fit! I had intended to take it home and if it didn't fit I'd just donate it back. For less than a cup of coffee I could do that. Isn't that amazing! The only regret I had in buying it is I got so excited I forgot to read the care tag and at home I learned it couldn't go in the dryer. It tied up my kitchen table for twelve hours while it air dried over a large towel and garbage bags. That's a sweater that won't be moving to assisted living with me, where they turn every special care garment into Barbie doll clothes. Not that I'm planning that move any time soon. But one can never plan too far ahead...that's been a life-long motto that doesn't work as well now that I'm older than television and silly-putty.

My old blender was glass and nearly impossible for me to lift with my right hand and arm which is bothering more and more to the point I'm dropping stuff and a few months ago I had purchased a Ninji, Fitness blender for $59 which only makes single serving size blended drink. Smoothies are all I need a blender for these days. Still, I was reluctant to give up my bigger better, bad-ass blender but my days of trying to make fresh cranberry sauce and forgetting to put the top on the blender thus blasting the ceiling with red berries bits are over. It sounds stupid, I know, but it was a hard decision to close that door of my life even though that blender was just another reminder that I'm getting old and I have to make concessions for my decline in physical dexterity and strength.
Boo-hoo. I am not bad-ass anymore. 

In case you haven't figured it out by now the word I'm enamored with today is "ass." There was a comedian from Finland in Facebook Short Reels yesterday named Ismo and he was making fun of how many ways Americans used the word 'ass.' Dumb-ass, badass, lazy ass, grown ass man, move your ass, half ass and a piece of ass. He joked that you can add 'ass' to anything to make it sound cooler. So expect a few more 'asses' in this post.

Another uplifting thing I saw in the Shorts was a speech given by a Senator from Maine, named Angus King. I would call it a profile in courage and I hope it's the beginning of more people in government pushing back. He stool before the senate and asked the Republicans if there are no red lines that they won't cross. It's a long speech about protecting the constitution and how Elon Musk is at odds with how the constitution is supposed to work. If you get a chance to listen to this speech it will make you feel hopeful. Like hearing the opening solo in what you assume will be an opera of epic proportions as other voices join in.

“We’re experiencing in real Time exactly what the framers most feared,” King said.“The framers were so fearful of concentrated power that they designed a system that would be hard to operate. And the heart of it was the separation of power between various parts of the government. The whole idea, the whole idea was that no part of the government, no one person, no one institution had or could ever have a monopoly on power, Why? Because it's dangerous," King explained. "History and human nature tells us that. This division of power as annoying and inefficient as it can be, particularly to the executive, I know because I used to be a governor, is an essential feature of the system, not a bug. It's an essential, basic feature of the system, designed to protect our freedoms. Now, this contrasts with the normal structure of a private business, where authority is purposefully concentrated, allowing swift and sometimes arbitrary action. But a private business does not have the army, and the President of the United States is not the CEO of America.” 

I have a busy week ahead with something going every day starting with a super bowl party tomorrow. (I write on Saturdays for my upcoming Wednesday posts.) I don't care a flying fig about the super bowl but our social committee here at the CCC has ordered a meal from a great Italian restaurant in town so I'll go with my little tray of lemon curd tarts to add to the desert table. It's my go-to, always-have-the-ingredients-on-hand dish to pass. I've also got two appointments off campus this week that I'm dreading. 

One of those appointments is with my primary doctor. He never talks about the elephant in the room---my weight. In the twenty years plus I've been going to him he's seen me loss and gain back the same 50 pounds several times over. I want to talk about it this time but at my age and with other medical complications I predict he won't give me anything to help other than sympathy. He's as skinny as the proverbial rail and can't gain weight..."Can't change our genes." I feel quite hopeless on the topic. Stay tuned. I'll let you know in a coming post if my fat ass has a chance of dropping a few pounds. ©

Until Next Wednesday. 

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Tell me About Yourself


I start my mornings drinking coffee in front of my computer monitor. First I check my two email accounts---one is for what I call 'better mail' and the other is for sites that send me newsletters: CNN's Five Good Things, historian Heather Cox Richardson, a few political groups like Red, Wine & Blue. Then I check my blog for comments and I end up on Facebook where my feed shows me a mixture of family posts, video posts from the cast of Saturday Night Live and late night hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert plus posts from the five Mahjong sites I follow. If I have an hour to kill---which I usually do---I'll watch Facebook 'Short Reels' where I'm liable to see just about anything related to kittens/cats, puppies/dogs, furniture flipping, people saving wild animals in dangerous situations and science solving environmental issues like they do in Poland using clams that monitor the quality of city water. A city in the USA uses mussels, too. You could compare them to canaries in a coal mines only the mussels don't die when the water is bad, they just close up and set off alarms attached to their shells.

One of the Shorts I saw today was posted by a guy who was a former Stanford University Admissions Director. What he said gave me an idea for blog fodder and God knows I needed something to inspire me today or I'd go off on another tangent about how our post-election country is on the crazy train to hell.

Mr. Interviewer said one of the first questions they ask is one of the most important and they ask it in an off-handed manner that you don't think is more than just chi-chat. The question is: "Tell me about yourself." The answers come in many forms and often in a rambling way---kind of like I write---and that doesn't rate the students very high. He said the correct way to reply is to say, "There are three things you should know about me." Typical of Facebook Shorts you had to find your way to part two to learn what kinds of things you should list and typical of me I couldn't find part two.

But, still the video got me to thinking about how would I answer that question. How does anyone pick out just three things about ourselves that's going to make an impression on someone you just met? It's a given that your answer would depend on whose doing the asking. A college admissions interview is going to be different from a job interviewer or a stranger at a party saying, "Tell me about yourself." In the deep, dusty corners of my mind I recall asking that very question in social settings. It was probably in the late '60s when I was on a search for a significant other and I read a lot of self-help books. Back then I might have answered that question something like, "Oh, my! I love to laugh. I have a passion for art and I take a lot of night classes." 

Can you believe it, I was in the work force from 1958 to 2001 and I only had three job interviews in my entire life. One was for the telephone company and---dub!---dyslexic me failed the test involving looking up numbers. Those where the days when you could call an operator by dialing zero and the operator was expected to know how to sound out the spelling of surnames. Another interview was for a wholesale floral company and the interviewer tried to put his hands up my sweater. I ran out of that place, too shocked and scared to look back. 

The third interview I must have had but I don't remember it. It's enough to say I got the job of selling clothes in the boys department in a large, upscale department store. I stayed there a year while I built up my own floral design business enough to quit. I left on good terms and the store's owner frequently bought flowers from me because he liked to support, "new businesses." He was a great employer who appreciated his workers where my former employer thought floral designers "were a dime a dozen." He got that idea from silly women who'd tour our greenhouses, retail shop and design rooms and would say things like, "I'd work here for free." Ya, they'd have loved the 12-14 hour days we put in around all the holidays. They'd have loved a boss who paid women a third less than the guys doing the exact, same jobs because "they had families to feed." It was the sixties and I'm shamed of our country right now because we're going to have to fight the same Civil Rights and Woman's Rights battles all over again or we'll find ourselves living in a chapter of The Handmaiden Tale

And don't get me started on tariffs. 45/47 said Denmark is getting one too, "until they cede control of Greenland." Sometimes watching him speak it's hard to tell if it's really him or one of the cast members of Saturday Night Live---the words coming out of him mouth are so ridiculous. Like him saying the terrible plane/helicopter crash last week was caused by Diversity, Equity and Inclusion hires, which was his way of drawing attention away from the fact that on his second day back in office (at Elon Musk's direction) he dismantled the Federal Aviation Administration and put a freeze on hiring more air traffic controllers at a time when they are known to be understaffed. Rich boys playing tit-for-tat and this 'tit' came because the FAA fined poor little Elon's SpaceX twice for failing to follow licensing protocols when he did his rocket launches. And now Musk and his band of young tech nerds---one isn't even out of his teens yet!---has unlimited access to the U.S. Department of Treasury's payment system! One of the ways we need to fight back on 45/47's Shock-and-Awe or Wrecking Ball approach to 'governing' is to support/subscribe to a trusted news source or two because 45/47 is now going after the free press and public broadcasting with a vengeance. And once they're gone we're doomed.

Back on topic: How would I answer the 'three-things' question today? If you couldn't tell by the paragraph above, I've been stalling because I really don't know. But let's assume I'm not being asked because I'm looking a job or going back to college in my old age. In a social situation, after all these years I could still naively list that I love to laugh and I still like art but it's no longer in the top five loves in my life. I still enjoy taking classes but I no longer drive at night…and I'm not crazy about daytime driving either. Any classes I take are here on campus or from YouTube. Still stalling…

It just dawned on me that answer to the 'three things' you should know about me came conventionally in a fortune cookie that I got at our celebration of the Chinese New Year buffet. It said: "Your mentality is alert, practical and analytical." Everyone at the table agreed that the fortune fit me. Of course, I also got to laugh too because one of my table mates made us all read our fortunes a second time adding "in bed" to the end. ©

Until Next Wednesday. 

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Losing Blog Subscribers, Teaching Classes and Chronically Tardy People

I don't know how your week went but mine flew by. It seems like the older I get the faster my days disappear and often I can't remember from one to another what I did with my time beyond the routines of an ordinary life---bathing, eating, checking the mail room and email, watching the news, a Netflix mini binge, etc. Some people think that elderly people take more time to do less stuff and I can see why they think that. Just getting dressed, for example. There are drops and creams to apply, hearing aids to put in and in some cases, compression socks to put on. Then there are prescriptions and supplements to remember. And dare I say sometimes I have to decide if it's an anti-diarrhea pill day or a stool softener day. Too much information? Okay, let's move on.

This past week a lot of my time was taken up with preparing for and teaching my second in a three part series on how to play Mahjong. I have a good group of students this year but it started out crazy. The sign-up sheet limited the class to six students plus a waiting list. Before retirement, two who signed up were college professors, one was a high school principal, another was a high school teacher and one had traveled the world as an engineer in the gas & oil industry.

The sixth person who signed up had also been a teacher, in a small town in Northern Michigan, and I was hoping she wouldn't show up. And she didn't. She always come for dinner reservations fifteen minute late and she's the last one to walk into a lecture or party. A lot of people cut her slack and blame it on age but like my husband did, she comes from a farm community so I don't think it has anything to do with her age. Her tardiness gives me flashbacks to my husband who was notorious for being late. I even have a grade school report card of his where the teacher noted Don's frequent tardiness. I called it being on farm time because he had chores to do before school. Those cows wouldn't milk themselves. His youth set up a life long habit of him always running late. Finishing your chores aka work always trumped being on time.

I've told this story 12 years ago so if you've been reading my blog for that long you might want to skip this paragraph. One time we got invited to a family reunion and my mom didn’t want us to show up late so when she passed the invitation on to me she set the time back an hour, telling me it started at 1:00 instead of 2:00. I knew it was important to my mom for us to be on time for this event so when I told Don what time it started I told him 12:00 thinking we’d then get there by 1:00. Don in turn said something like, “This time we’re not showing up late and embarrass your mother!” so he wrote down 11:00 in his day planner. Months later when the reunion day rolled around all these ‘time swaps’ were forgotten, but wouldn’t you know it’s the one time out of a hundred when Don was determined to be on time and we showed up for the reunion at 11:00. Of course, no one else was at the park three hours early. No tables were lined up for an event of that size. So we called my mom thinking we had gone to the wrong park and that’s when it came out all three of us had backed the start time up by an hour. We had a good laugh but that wasn’t the end of the story. We had three hours to kill before the reunion began so Don wanted to run a few errands. I should have known he couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone to swap long-winded stories with and if you haven’t guess by now, we ended up being late to the reunion.

As it turned out Farm Time Fay didn't show up at all for my 1:30 class even though at lunch someone reminded her that she was due upstairs in an hour. She has guardian angels who try to keep her on track like they're border collies herding stock where they need to go. Always calling her when she due some place and isn't showing up. I'm not one of them. Forty-two years of dealing with someone who was chronically late was enough for me. But her not showing up was not fair to the person on the wait list who could have come had we known Farm Time Fay decided to stay in the dining room for a cooking demonstration instead.

My students told me that I'm a good teacher. It might sound like I'm bragging but I agree. I've study the game and broke it down into understandable blocks, I write comprehensive handouts and have the patience of Job. When we mix this year's newbies in with our seasoned players we'll have eighteen. I manage the group, send out text messages the day before to get a count on how many are NOT playing---usually one to three. I set up the game sets and have the players draw chips to assign random seating. I keep track of the weekly winners and I'm the go-to person for rules. And I have several mahjong shirts to wear on game days, like those around here who follow sports teams wear their favorite team's gear. At a lunch table they often bore me to death talking about the latest game and once in awhile I'll bore them with the latest thing I learned about the history of mahjong. It's a fair trade.

New topic: the last time I wrote about 45/47 I lost a noticeably number of subscribers, so I'm thinking I should quit or drastically cut down on writing about the psychopathic elephant stumping around in the White House. But I'm torn because as tempting as it is to ignore what is going on, the unchecked power trip he's on is setting us up for a dystopia at the worst and a dictatorship at its best. The breakdown of the Rule of Law is always the first step and it was a giant first step when 45/47 rebranded the 1,500 January 6th insurrectionists as political prisoners. 1,500 juries and 1,500 judges from across the county put them in prison but in one stroke of a pen 45/47 created himself an unrepentant, private army of 'Brown Shirts' ready to do his bidding to intimidate judges, lawmakers, witnesses, etc. It's a page taken right out of Hitler's playbook. And that should scare us all. ©