From Fire Works to Letting it All Go

My weekend was out-of-the-norm starting with Friday when I had to stay home all day because a power washing company was cleaning my deck, the eaves, driveway and sidewalks. The deck had to be done in advance of a staining crew that showed up on Saturday and will come back later for a second coat on the flat areas. I’ve never seen anyone stain using mitts like you’d use to wash a car and, boy, did they get the job done fast and neat. The two man crew did my huge deck with its 250+ spinals in half the time that it’s been done before. One of the past crews sprayed the stain and another used rollers and brushes. I was impressed with mitt staining. And for the bonus round points the guys didn’t have radios blasting at full volume to annoy me and the dog.

The eaves troughs had to be cleaned well in advance of the 4^th of July. You would not believe the amount of dry pine needles they took out of my eaves. Still, I always make sure my hoses are hooked up this time of the year because I live in a neighborhood of people who are in love with fireworks and I’m afraid they’ll start my house on fire. I’m constantly picking up fireworks debris between the 4^th through Thanksgiving. Here, they are legal on ten designated holidays plus the day before and after---not that anyone follows the law all that closely---and, yes, I’ve even seen them on Christmas. Praise the Lord, do you think He likes things that go boom at midnight and lights up the night? 

Since I was stuck home two days in a row, I re-read my 2014 blog entries, checking for typos and glaring sins against the rules of punctuation. I’m way behind the time when I had scheduled myself to slurp them all up into a hard copy book. I’ve been doing that every year with my blogs so I’ll still have access to my blog entries when I get too old to remember how to turn on the computer, but not so old that I don’t want to glance back at my past from time to time. Reading through my 2014 misadventures it became clear that in the third year of widowhood my social life got more and more wrapped up in the activities at the senior hall. Not sure if that’s a bad thing or a good thing. It’s just something to put in a jar and re-exam later on. But the scary part is some of the stuff I did last year had already slipped off my memory radar. What next? Will I finish peeing and not remember if I wiped myself? Oh, well, as long as my bladder still holds out and I make it to the bathroom each and every time, it’s all good. 

Speaking of which, am I the only person on earth who is sick of seeing so many ads for Depends Adult panties/diapers on TV? If I believed their surge in the marketplace I’d have to believe half the women at the senior all are sitting around peeing their pants as we speak. The ad that annoys me the most shows a woman at a theater and she’s laughing hard and a voice-over is talking about just “let it go.” I’m surprised they didn’t use the voice of Queen Elsa from Frozen to belt out a verse or two of the Let it Go Disney song. They probably tried but couldn’t get the rights. The commercial probably bugs me because when I go to my monthly Movie and Lunch Club I’m the only one who has to get up during a film to use the bathroom. I’ve often wondered why I'm the only one. Ohmygod, it just dawned on me! Maybe I’m not! Maybe I’m sitting next to a dozen plus women wearing Depends! How am I going to get that visual out of my head before next Friday when we meet again? I don’t mean to make light of people who need them, but do we really need the Depends Underwareness Campaign encouraging every man, woman and child in the world to show off their pee-in-me skivvies? I say, “Hell no!” and I rest my case hoping a jury of my peers agrees. 

Growing old has so many sink holes we all hope to avoid, but deep within we each fear one of them will swallow us up if we don’t keep ever so vigilant. Keeping my brain sharp worries me more than the other sink holes of aging. If one day I’m wandering up the street talking to myself and the neighbors are worried that I’ve finally punched out of reality, I hope I’m reciting the following dialogue from The Help movie: "Every day you're not dead in the ground, when you wake up in the morning, you're gonna have to make some decisions. Got to ask yourself this question: 'Am I gonna believe all them bad things them fools say about me today?'" And if my answer is “no” then I’ll know I'm sharp enough to go back home and find something to do that doesn’t involve training my bird watching binoculars on the neighbors. I’m quite sure that’s listed as a no-no in every etiquette book published in the Western Hemisphere.  ©

 I can't find the commercial in the theater but here's another one for Depends. They have a 5-6 of them.