Taxes, Shoes and Marigold Movies

I’ve been going to the same CPA to get my income taxes done for decades. I trust him and so I was glad when he got married late in life and had a bunch of kids who are now approaching their college years, keeping him from retiring. With any luck he’ll be in the work force until after I die. The drive through town to get to his office takes from twenty minutes to an hour depending on traffic tie-ups, construction and accidents. It was a twenty minute trip this week and for that I found out I’m getting a large refund. As soon as it comes I’m making another trip through town to the Apple store where I’m buying myself an Apple Air IPad. I’ve been fighting the urge to get one for a long time. I mean how tech connected does a woman my age need to be? I have a great, desk top computer with a fabulously big screen and ergonomic keyboard, a laptop with a light-up keyboard, Wi-Fi, a Kindle, an IPod, three cable TVs with remotes so cantankerous I swear they’re possessed by demons and I’ve got a smart phone which I might as well call a texting machine because that’s about all I do with it. 

The last time the furnace man came to the house to clean it, he tried to talk me into getting a programmable thermostat and I said, “No way! I’m already in tech overload.” If I screw up a TV remote it’s just an oh-well inconvenience, if I screw up a thermostat it’s a hand-wringing service call because it would happen in the dead of winter. When the time changed recently I had to reset digital clocks in devices until the cows came home and there are still two I can’t do---the one on my electric tooth brush and in my CD player. I refuse to spend a half day trying to figure them out because the set up buttons are so tiny a stalk-eyed fly would have trouble seeing them.These Asian flies, by the way, have incredible eyesight and their eyes are at the ends of long antennas. And from the department of Useless Trivial is the fact that the male with the longest antennas always win when two of them go-face-to-face to gain the rights to mate with a girl stalk-eyed fly. I guess males throughout the kingdom of living things are all obsessed with measuring the size of their external equipment. Wow, how did my stream of conscience take me from my CPA to stalk-eyed flies?

After the tax appointment I had another appointment at the shoe store. Yes, you read that right. This shoe store is a specialty place where you go if you need great support for problem feet. I’d never been there before but all the foot doctors in town highly recommend the place. When I got there I had to fill out a history of my feet issues and they took measurements of things that had never been measured before plus I got a lesson on foot anatomy with the help of a moving model of foot bones. That was interesting. It showed how shoe pressure in the wrong place can make your foot hurt and in the right fit can relieve pain. A half hour later I walked out of the store with a new pair of walking shoes, a pair of sandals---sandals with so much support I literally ran around the store!---and on order is a pair of gun-metal grey Mary Jane’s that are made in Israel. I’ve never paid so much for shoes in my life---$168.00 for the Mary Jane’s---but I was way over due for dress shoes I can wear to weddings and funerals that don’t come with three days of pain after wearing them. This is huge because now I can wear skirts and dresses again which I’ve shied away from buying for decades.

Also this week: With my Movie and Lunch Club (which is sponsored through the senior hall) I saw The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I knew the committee would pick that one because of the large assemble of elderly actors and actresses in the cast. It was an okay movie to me, but not anything I’d recommend. It didn’t seem like a stand-alone film to me and of those in our group who had seen the first Marigold movie, they said the first one was better. Even so, I was the odd man out; most of the fifteen ladies loved it. I agree with the movie reviewer from IBNLive who wrote, the film is, "warm and fuzzy…but also over-plotted and occasionally contrived.” And don’t get me started on the romance between Richard Gere’s charming character and a sour-ass woman. Gag me with a spoon then stand back so I don’t vomit on your shoes. But no movie is a waste of my time if I come away with a few great lines to savor, and I did. 1) About being terminally: “There’s no such thing as an ending, just a place where you leave the story;” and 2) about being afraid of taking the offer of love before you: “Sometimes it seems the difference between what we want and what we fear is the width of an eyelash.” ©

Stalk-Eyed Fly