Netflix Favorites and Flops and other Entertaining Things

I just finishing listening to one of my all-time favorite books, West with the Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge. My book club will be discussing it November forth on my recommendation and I'm anxious to see if others like the story as much as I do. It's probably my forth time listening to it and I enjoyed it every bit as much this time as the first, maybe more. Multiple exposures to favorite books or movies are like that. You pick up on nuances you missed the first time around and you are more apt to enjoy the build up to the the climax in the story, knowing what's a head. I won't bore you with a full-on review of the book. I did that back in 2021 here in an entire post devoted to the giraffes.

But before I leave that book behind I can't resist sharing one of my favorite passages. It speaks to me and about me every time I try to come up with something meaningful or at least entertaining to write: "In a long life, there is a singular moment when you know you’ve made more memories than any new ones you'll ever make. That’s when the moment your truest stories---the ones that made you the you that you became---are ever more in the front of your mind, as you begin to reach back for the you that you deemed best…[but] what I hadn’t noticed was that my mind was wearing out, too. Even the memories a body holds most dear become like scratchy old phonographs records played too long, fading in and out with little sound and even less fury.” 

Today when I sat down to write I knew I wanted to do a post about some of the Netflix fare I've been consuming. I binge watch about an hour and a half every night and I'm running out of stuff that holds my interest. One of the better binges I've done this month, though, was Your Honor. IMDb says this about it: "A judge confronts his convictions when his son is involved in a hit-and-run that embroils an organized-crime family." If ever there was a series that is a cautionary tale against lying this is it. One lie quickly mushroomed into bigger and bigger lies and bigger and bigger crimes until just about everyone involved was either dead or in jail by the closing episode. I like stuff with strong cliffhangers that keep you guessing from one episode to another and for that reason Your Honor held my interest. 

On the lighter side a ten episode binge called No One Wants This was a good 'palate cleanser' following the mayhem in the above mentioned Netflix series. The trailer labels it as: "An agnostic sex podcaster and a newly single rabbi fall in love; discovering if their relationship survive their wildly different lives and meddling families." The viewer is left at the end to be a little dissatisfied, not knowing if they will get their happy ending. Or maybe it just hinted at happy ending to leave the door open to another season?  Whatever the case, with its quirky characters and half hour episodes I binge-watched it in three evenings. Another series I tried for a total of nearly five full minutes before I knew I wasn't into gross, creepy, sick crime stuff was Dexter. If you watched it and liked it don't tell me. I don't want to judge you.

Another night I watched Netflix movie called No Pressure, filmed in Poland and it's about ten years behind in what American audiences are used to in terms of acting, etc. A reviewer called it "Old Wine in a New Bottle" and I agree. Fans of romantic comedies have seen this storyline of a big city girl who comes back to the country to save the family farm and ends up falling in love with a neighboring farmer/chef/wealthy man---whatever---a million times. I'm sorry, every time I try a foreign made movie I get either bored or hypercritical. 

Not that American film makers have left that tired plot behind. Hallmark Christmas movies have a giant portion of big city lonely people spending their holidays in small, mid-western towns where they find their forever person. I say 'person' rather than guy or gal because in 2022 Hallmark went woke and featured one movie with a gay couple finding-love-over-the-holidays. One movie out of their 170 Christmas movies that year.  The Holiday Sitter was the first ever Hallmark movie where a gay couple was the center of the action.  In 2023 Hallmark added two more LGBTQ movies to their Christmas/love lineup and I'm quite sure this turtle-slow trend is giving the Karen's of the world ulcers and contributing to their sky-is-falling dance against 'the gay issues' in our political arena. I'm so sick of Karens and Kens who want to ban books and movies. And if they insist of doing that why not start with banning the ones that give murderers tips on how to get away with their obsessions? Prioritize love over violence for crying out loud! If a teen or younger kid accidentally sees or reads about someone making love to someone they truly care about that isn't going to scar them for life like watching or reading about a psychopath dismembering a person they've been torturing for weeks in an underground cell. <Rant off.>

Yes, it's Halloween today but the Hallmark Christmas movies have been making their presence known for a few weeks already but I generally don't watch Christmas movies until we get our first snowfall. Then I'll pig out on their sweetness and goodwill toward mankind and the memories of finding love they churn up inside me. It's the only time of the year I consistently select the Hallmark Channel. I am nothing if not a creature of habit. ©

Until Next Wednesday...

Mahjong Tournaments and Presidential Election Mailings

Can you feel the excitement building? I'm not talking about the election two weeks and a day off. That's more scary than exciting. I'm talking about my baby that is due October 30^th.  The 'baby' being a mahjong tournament that I've single-handedly orchestrated between our Continuum Care Campus and our sister campus. Gutsy of me, isn't it, considering I've never been to a mahjong tournament and don’t have a clue how they work except for what I've been able to glean off the internet. The only saving grace I have in all this is the fact that none of the twenty players taking part in the tournament has ever been to one either. 

Since I learned how to play about two and a half years ago I've been lusting after attending one of the big city tournaments that attracts hundreds of players, some lasting two days long. Or maybe playing in one of the cruise ship tournaments where thousands of people from all over the world can find a game to play any time of the day or night when they aren't sightseeing the Caribbean Islands.

Can you believe it, my tiny tournament has generated twenty documents for the day. Everything from custom score cards to name tags to the list of prizes I've accumulated to award to the winners---Ten in all plus satin ribbons. Some of those prizes will end up as random drawing prizes but I wanted to be prepared for ties. Our group wasn't keeping score of our games before I came up with the tournament idea and I've been surprised by how often we have ties at the end of an afternoon of games. We've also had to unlearn a few House Rules and learn a few National Mahjong League rules. But the other campus has had to do the same. My point-person at the other campus said she's been trying to get her ladies to play by League Rules for a couple of years and she loves that this tournament is giving her an excuse to teach them. People going down to Florida in the winter can come back with crazy House Rules and they get adopted to the point that players often don't know the difference. It's common, if you can believe the "chatter" I see on the four mahjong Facebook groups I belong to. Getting us all on both campuses to play by the same set of rules was the very first step I took on this tournament odyssey.

The Life Enrichment Directors at both campus are as excited as I am. Ours is providing water bottles, cookies, ink pens and two of the prizes and their campus is providing free transportation. My biggest challenge has been figuring out the table rotations so that most of the players get to play with most of the other players but making sure that with each game players plays with at least one person from their own campus. I'd be ashamed to admit the number of hours I spent trying to come up with an algorithm that works for these table rotations. Finally, I enlisted the help of a statics and math major/college grad student who works here as a waitress when she's not in classes. She said she loved the challenge and the funny part is we both came up with the same algorithm! But it took me two weeks and her one weekend. And I wasn't trying to re-invent the wheel. I did try to find an algorithm for table rotations already worked out online but I discovered that my tournament is too small for that to be available. 

Okay, enough about that. How about a report on our get-out-the-vote effort here? The twelve (known) democrats on campus and I have been writing letters and postcards two and three times a week. So far we've written over 500 letters and 100+ postcards. The day this blog post goes live will be the last day we'll do them and we're aiming for 600. The letters are sponsored by the Sierra Club and the postcards were for the DNC. We address the letters by hand and add to a pre-printed paragraph that tells the recipients where and when to vote. It's interesting that they have us write five non-partisan letters for every five letters we write supporting Kamala for president. The non-partisan ones go something like this: "Voting is easy. I find that if I make a plan to vote I'm more apt to get to the polls. I believe voting is important. Every vote cast is a voice heard and every voice heard helps shape our country. Please use the immense power of your voice and vote to help protect our country." 

The partisan letters---at least the one I chose to copy---goes like this: "I believe the state of our democracy is at stake. I am voting for Kamala Harris because she has a strong track record for protecting our environment. I also want a president who prioritizes decency, honesty, freedom and respect. I hope you will go to the polls this year and help protect our country and the planet with your vote."  

These letters are going out to just Pennsylvania and Michigan voters who are registered but don't always use their voting privileges and who are also present or past members of the Sierra Club. I don't know if they have any real influence on those who get the letters but it feels good to be doing something---anything---to help get Kamala elected. We can't elect a man who recently said that the January 6th Insurrection at the capital was a "day of love." We can't elect a man who literally tried to over-throw our constitution that day and has no respect for the Rule of Law. I've also seen a lot of people spiraling down into dementia and Trump's is on full display at each of his rallies. If his fans are honest with themselves, they see it too. Or maybe they listened to him a few days ago when he publicly admired the size of a pro-golfer's dick and they said to themselves: "Yes, this is the kind of man who should be the leader of the free world---a disgusting, vile and dangerous pot stirrer who prioritizes himself above all others." I hope not. I hope fence sitting Republicans will put country before party and put a stop to the drama that Trump churns out day after day.

I truly do want a president who prioritizes decency, honesty, freedom and respect and Kamala Harris is more qualified than any man who has ever run for the office in the past, having serviced in all three branches of the federal government---the legislative as a U.S. Senator, in the executive branch as Vice President and in the judicial branch as Attorney General of California. There are 29 countries where women are their heads of state. It's about time we added to that statistic.

This concludes my unpaid political announcement. ©

Dentists and Voting Twice

There is a dentist office within walking distance to where I live that I've gone to for two and a half years. The dentist who previously took care of my teeth for nearly twenty years left his practice during Covid and his practice was bought out by a just-out-of-dental-school girl---young woman if I want to be political correct. The one and only time I saw her I really didn't actually SEE her at all. She was dressed in a head-to-toe pink hazmat suit and goggles. So was her dental assistant but the receptionist bravely had forgone wearing the hazmat suit and goggles but she had the full face guard and mask on as the other two wore. It was a surreal experience but that wasn't the reason I never when back. I mean who could blame them for protecting themselves during the height of the pandemic, a pandemic made worse by then President Trump who, at the time, was telling people about drinking bleach as bodies were stacking up in refrigerated trucks outside of hospitals. We tend to forget how bad things were back then. Now, we learn that Bob Woodward has Trump on a taped interview admitting---I say bragging---that he sent Vladimire Putin a Covid-19 test machine in the early days of the pandemic when we didn't have enough of them to go around to the hospitals here in the States.

I thought about all this while I was getting my teeth cleaned this week by an overly perky dental hygienist. The Woodward reveal must have put me in a surly mood because I was doing an amazing job of being borderline hostile to Miss Mary Sunshine. My replies were short, usually one word at a time---as if you can do more than that while your mouth is full of instruments. Why to they feel the need for a running conversation at a time like that? And why did I feel like making her work even harder than she was at trying to connect to me? When she announced she was finished, I couldn't believe it. It felt like she'd barely touched my teeth. There was no scaler tool used to scrap plaque off. It's done with sound waves now and what little poking around she did felt like she was applying about as much pressure as Tinkerbell could use. I was disappointed!

The next day I got three requests to fill out a survey about my visit to their humongous practice. The first two I ignored and the third one I opened, then filled out. I was kind and I didn't bad mouth the hygienist or the job she did. But I'll admit that I did start to type a comment about her trying too hard to be perky. Then I backed those words off my computer screen about as fast as I typed them in. What the heck was wrong with me? In a world full of hate and indifference I'll take perky and trying too hard any day. She was young and trying to put me as ease and I was being grumpy and jaded by something that had nothing to do with my teeth cleaning appointment.

I do miss my old dentist though. He was a friend before he became our dentist and there was nothing we couldn't say to one another but the guy liked to nit-pick and one time he wanted to remove two of my silver fillings. I hated to see them go. I’ve had them since my teen years---I was in my 60s at the time---but he thought they were worn out and in danger of cracking thus would damage the teeth in the process. He showed me photos of their surfaces to make his case. I told him I was sentimental about those fillings. He said, “Get over it.” And that’s how I ended up on his schedule to get two, new shiny white fillings. In a few weeks I'll be getting a new crown to replace one of those fillings. I'd put this off for the past year and finally consented to the work. I don't entirely trust dentists not to make up stuff that needs replacing. And why does the proposed work miraculously always cost what's left in my dental insurance plan? But I'm not one to gamble either on letting things go thus costing more in the long run.

Change in topic: I voted twice. Sixty-eight people in my building have to do that. We were sent ballots with the wrong school district candidates the first time and those ballots, if sent in already, will get rejected. There are a few people here who have no sense of logic and one of them was at a lunch table and she was worried she'd get in trouble with the law if she filled out the second ballot. No amount of trying to explain that she won't was getting through. "How will they know I'm not trying to vote twice for president?" "Because they set their machines up to invalidate the first ballots coming from our building so you'll only show up as voting once when you send in your new ballot." I was talking to MAGA voter and I wish I'd just let her think that using that second ballot will put her in jail. I use the tracking-your-ballot website to check on my vote and this year I'll actually have something interesting to see between the two ballot numbers I have to check on. When I told her that she said, "You can do that?" Duh! "Yes, that's why it gives the web address for tracking on the envelope." (In 20 point fonts, no less.) I could feel my grumpy and jaded persona creeping back in and I changed the topic to the hurricane. And that got me even grumpier when someone at the table parroted the lies Trump has been is telling about FEMA's response, lies that have just today the news is reporting have resulted in armed threats against FEMA workers at a couple of their staging sites. Why are some people so quick to believe the conspiracy nonsense coming out of Trump's mouth over that of the boots-on-the-ground disaster personal?  ©

Bathrobes and Property Taxes

Do you know what I dread the most about the time when I (may) have to leave my Independent Living apartment and move down to the Memory Care or Assisted Living building? Aside from the fact that I'd be losing either my mental or physical agility? That's a universal dread here in the land of continuum care living. But the fact that I'd have to get dressed in the mornings on someone else's time schedule is not and I will hate that. (Here I go again, borrowing trouble from the future.) I've never been one to start out my day by popping out of bed and getting into a shower, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as my mom used to say. She was not a morning person either. 

Not surprising I got my love of bathrobe living from my mom. It made Christmas shopping easy for my dad because he caught on to her favorite gift to get year after year. Can you believe it, my mom's all-time favorite bathrobe is still in existence? It's a long, chenille robe with a peacock on the back, circa late 1940's (photo above). It now resides on a mannequin in my youngest niece's bedroom. When I gave it to her eight years ago she promised not to fry bacon in it, but I'm pretty sure my mother did that too many times to count. Just because she liked living in robes doesn't mean she lounged around in them. I'm the same way. I like to be comfortable when I do housework. And if I need to defend myself even farther, when I was younger I used to break out into pressure hives from my clothing so I had to change out of what ever I was wearing a couple of times a day. After months of experimenting we ruled out laundry products and fabric content. Even today, I'll get out of my day clothes as early as I can in the evenings and stay in my robe as late as I can in the mornings. Neither of which is allowed in the MC or AL buildings.

Still on topic, back when I had a dog I once took him to the veterinary because he had a bright purple nose. I was really worried. The diagnosis was “it’s a fungus” and the cure, he said, “was worse than the disease.” What a quack he turned out to be! The next week our dog groomer picked all the crusty, purple stuff off the dog’s nose and showed it to me and a light bulb went off in my head. It was exactly that same color as my new, purple chenille bathrobe. Turned out the cure for the “fungus” was a good vacuuming. I just googled how to prevent chenille from shedding and I got an answer that was labeled "AI Overview." It said: "Vacuum your chenille item regularly to prevent future shedding." Artificial Intelligence really is better than my own, self-made intelligence. I was vacuuming the floors in the entire house when I could have been just vacuuming my bathrobe. 

That winter I was so sick brightly colored dust bunnies around the house that I’d taken to wearing my chenille bathrobe inside out hoping that would contain the little fuzz balls from jumping ship. I'd washed that robe a zillion times and it still created those pretty purple dust bunnies. I'd even find them on my keyboard! But I wouldn't dare wear my bathrobes inside out now that I'm old because it could be used against me in a sanity hearing, if my nieces caught me doing it. “Yes, sir, Mr. Judge. My aunt can’t even dress herself without getting her garments on wrong side out.” The older I get the more I want to write notes about why I do this or that and leave them all over house and in the pockets of the things I wear. My nieces would find pocket notes, I think, because I'm pretty sure they were aware that after my mom died we found ten and twenty dollar bills hidden in the pockets of her out-of-season clothing. 

There is no clever transition from writing about bathrobes to property taxes. So I'll just jump in here by announcing a new topic. For the last four months our tenacious Residents Council here at the continuum care complex has been trying to get to the bottom of why our property taxes went up 19% this past year and also why we even have to pay property taxes at all, given the fact that we're a non-profit and we don't even own our apartments. Some other states don't tax non-profit care facilities and some counties here in Michigan don't either. It's a topic of conversation you're likely to hear discussed around here on a weekly basis and there's even a bill stuck in the State Senate that addresses this very issue. The Residents Council has been over to our State Capital prepared to testify and they've paraded a bunch of speakers past us for meet-and grills---I mean meet-and-greets. Our tax assessor and city mayor, our state representative, a non-profit lobbyist and our CEO have all been been brave enough to stand in front of a bunch of angry, elderly people to talk about taxes.

Anyway: If you are looking into CCCs as a living option be sure to ask them about property taxes. We were all caught off guard by how much that adds to our yearly expenses. This past year it was $3,000 to $6,000 depending on the size of our apartments. Our sister campus is in another city and they pay half that amount. Our meet-and-greets have been well attended with over-flowing crowds and a common complaint is that our Benevolent Fund, that is contractually obligated to take care of us even if we run out of money, might not be able to handle us all if the tax rates keeping going up. (I'm not the only one who borrows trouble from the future.) They have nine million dollars in the Benevolent Trust Fund but supposedly they can only spend the interest. No one can beat me at the game of borrowing trouble from the future. Already, if you run out of money while living here you are subject to sharing a room but I worry that if there too many of us who runs out of money the CCC could revert back to their humble beginnings a 100 years ago and turn a few buildings into a poor farm for the elderly where we'd sleep in bunk rooms lined up a dozen to a room and we'd have to work in the community garden, kitchen or laundry if we'd want to eat. On the bright side, even that would be better than what I used to worry about before moving here and that was I'd end up living in a refrigerate box under a bridge. ©

Until Next Wednesday! 

 

This is my mom wearing the robe pictured above the Christmas my dad gave it to her. That's me with my eyes shut. I didn't take good photos even as a kid. My mom made the matching drapes and slipper covers on the couch. I just bought a clothe laptop case with the same pattern and colors. What goes around comes around.

 

This Cave Woman Writes

Have I mentioned how much I love 23andMe? Of course I have. I've written about my DNA tests so many times that people in cyberspace know intimate details about my body like that fact that I have an innie belly button and my eyes are brown. Having 'brown eyes' isn't exactly an intimate detail but not having a second toe longer than my big toe is and that's one of the useless facts that was revealed to me by me spitting in a little tube and sending it off for testing. I did this several years ago and they keep sending me new discoveries as the science keeps unlocking the mysteries of our genes. It's mind boggling to think about the improvements in our healthcare system when they are able to isolate the genes responsible for certain diseases. They'll be able to target and/or totally eradicate some major heartbreaking conditions. Of course, I might not live long enough to see it happen but my nieces and nephew will. It's not that far off.

This week 23andMe sent me new information about my Neanderthal gene variants. I have 32% more of them than their other customers. There are 7,462 Neanderthal traits in genome and I have 228 of them in my DNA. I've written before that on their website is a forum for customers and I found a thread about having a lot of Neanderthal genes where people were joking around about how they have to trim the hair on their toes or put Band-Aids on their knuckles from dragging them around. One woman confessed that once a month she wants to tear her husband’s arms off and suck the marrow out of his bones and now she knows why. All jokes aside, Neanderthal variants supposedly come into play with allergies and infertility issues which has my name written all over them.

How does one get Neanderthal markers in their genes? This is what 23andMe says about that: "Genetic variant that evolved in Neanderthals and came back into the human lineage when the two groups interbred. Because you inherit variants from both of your parents, you can have 0, 1, or 2 copies of the Neanderthal variant at each marker. We report your total number of Neanderthal variant copies, which is therefore a number between 0 and 7,462. However, nobody has all 7,462 — the most we've ever seen in a 23andMe customer is less than 500."

One of the newest things 23andMe reported about my Neanderthal genes is that I have one copy of the marker rs7169404 which is associated with not feeling 'hangry' when I'm hungry. I so must have gotten that one from my dad's genes because my mom definitely changed dispositions when she went without food. I also got two copies of rs3807714 regarding a preference for sweet vs salty foods. Thanks Mom and Dad. I get to blame you both for passing on our ancient ancestors lack of will power when it comes to sugary and gooey deserts. And the fact that I look at eating salads like as punishment for overeating sugary and gooey deserts? I get to blame my Neanderthal genes for not liking leafy greens. Picture me beating my fists on my chest and shouting out that I love a medium rare T-bone steak almost better than I used to love sex back in the days when I was having both. I love meat!

(At least I think I used the word "Sex" far enough into this post that the internet crawlers won't find it and spam me with advertisements. One that used to spam before I learned not to use the 'S' word in the title of my posts flooded my comment section for a cream to "enhance my sex life.)

Okay, time to change topics. What else did I do this week? I've been busy. Twice I took part in a letter writing campaign to get out the vote for Kamala Harris and our group of 12 (known) democrats here in the CCC are going keep doing two sessions a week through mid-October. I also went over to our sister campus to play Mahjong and to nail down details on a Mahjong tournament that was my brainchild to do. What a lot of work involved! More on that in a future post.

Also on the calendar this week was an infusion for my bones. That was different this time because I was the only woman there out of the 15 stations aka La-Z-Boys where we sit while hooked up with the IVs. The guy next to me was so young, cute and buff that my curiosity was peaked as to why he was there but he never woke up the entire time. First time in the ten years that I've been getting infusions that I've ever seen anyone sleeping. My younger self wanted to crawl up in his chair and spoon him. I usually pretend to read while people watching at the infusion center, looking for blog fodder but this time the book I grabbed at the last minute kept me reading. I take a book based on its weight rather than its content and I had picked a 140 page book off my shelf titled, A Guide for the Perplexed. Copyright 1977. It's filled with yellow highlighter and my handwritten notes in the margins but for the life of me I can't remember this philosophical book. But by the time my infusion was finished I concluded that I must have been a lot smarter back in the 1970s than I am now.©

Until Next Wednesday...

Photo credit: On the 3rd of August 1908, the 3 Bouyssonie brothers discovered the first complete skeleton of a Neanderthal man and the first burial site.  The remains were first studied by Marcellin Boule from the National Museum of Natural History; he described this man as the missing link between man and ape.