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. ©

The Wellerman Challenge, TikTok, Whaling Ships and Carl Jung

Thank God for spelling apps like Alex. Every time I sit down to write I ask her to spell, cat. I know how to spell that word but I want to make sure she is on the job because nothing is more frustrating to me than having her taking a personal day off from work. I take that back. It's more frustrating when I must be mispronouncing a word and she keeps spelling something I know isn't the word I'm looking for. At that point I'll think of a word that means the same thing and ask her to give me synonyms for that word. There's more than one way to skin a cat, as my mother often said.

Speaking of ways around something, any fans of Tiktok out there? I'm not a member but occasionally Tiktok videos show up in Facebook Shorts and I am a major fan of those. 45/47 was for the Tiktok ban---which people in the intelligence field say is a threat to our national security---until recently when its CEO cozied up to our recycled, old fart of a president to the point that the guy earned (aka bought himself) a prime seat at the inauguration, next to the other media billionaires. But I don't want to write about them today. I want to write about the choreographed workouts called the Wellerman Challenge going around the internet. Those videos keep showing up on my Facebook Shorts. (The power of clicking on one like.) Here's two from YouTube that will show you what I'm taking about. I dare say if you watch enough of these super-fit guys do this challenge, like I have, you won't be able to get that song out of head.

 

   Nathan Evans singing the Wellerman Song

Do you ever wonder if the universe puts things in front of you in patterns of three that are connected? That happened to me with the Wellerman Challenge and a book I'm listening to and a Netflix movie. I discovered them all in the same week. The Wellerman song is about a whaling ship. The movie is about a whaling ship and the non-fiction book, An Immense World, that I'm listening to for book club has a chapter about how whales communicate.

If you haven't seen The Heart of the Sea I gave it two thumbs up. According to its synopsis "the Heart of the Sea isn't just an epic tale of man versus nature, it's also a dramatic recounting of a real attack. The 2015 Ron Howard film was based on Nathaniel Philbrick's 2000 nonfiction book of the same name, which investigates the 1820 sinking of a whaling ship that was caused by a sperm whale attack." 

By chance or the powers in the universe the day after watching the movie I just happened to be at a chapter that explained how whales communicate. It gave me chills and I could imagine a conversation the whales were having at the time and I wondered if they still tell tales about their famous ancestor, Moby Dick, and how he finally got even with those damn whale-killing ships? They might even credit him for the decline in sperm oil harvesting when, in fact, it was the discovery of oil coming out of the ground in Pennsylvania that changed the fate of the whaling industry.

Some people might say I was subconsciously attracted to the movie because the Wellerman Challenge planted the whaling ship theme in my head and that might be true but logic can't explain away how the book chapter entered my life at the exact time it did. I didn't even know whales were going to be covered. 

An Artificial Intelligence explanation popped up when I googled 'patterns in the universe' as: "In psychology, the concept of the 'universe putting things together' is often associated with the idea of synchronicity, which refers to meaningful coincidences where seemingly unrelated events occur together, often interpreted as a sign of a deeper underlying connection or pattern in the universe, sometimes linked to the idea of a collective unconscious as proposed by Carl Jung." Oh, yes, Jung! His theories on dream interpretation was fad reading for me back in the '80s when I kept a dream diary and, oops, I just downloaded a book titled, Dreams, Memories and Reflections by Jung. I listened to the sample introduction and was hooked by this: "He looks at his own soul with a telescope. What seemed all irregular he saw and showed it to be beautiful constellations and he added to the consciousness in the hidden worlds within worlds." 

That last paragraph was my feeble attempt to take an ordinary post and give it a little more depth but instead me makes me laugh at how "wordy" Artificial Intelligence can get and how it could use a human editor. 

Until Next Wednesday. © 

Post Script: I love the internet and Patterns in the Universe! I just ran into another Facebook Short that was set to the rhythm of the Wellerman song only the words are about the Elon Musk's Tesla.

 

The California Wildfires and Crazy-Ass Men

Satellite Image of Los Angles on fire

As I walked the underground route to the other building where the cafe` is located in my independent living facility I was thinking, What am I going to blog about this week? It's about a half a block walk in between the elevators to building one and building two and along the way, every so often, are red letters stenciled on the walls proclaiming, "two hour fire barrier." I've often wondered exactly what that means. Can we safely hide in the underground parking area for two hours before a fire would get to us, or does it mean a fire would have to be out of control in the area two hours before it would burn through to the apartments above? As I got off the elevator my line of sight set me on a course toward the lobby's fireplace to warm up before heading to the cafe`. The underground route is kept at 50 degrees but I was still cold. I'm always cold. 

While I was warming up I decided I should write about the terrible wildfires in California but it's such an over-whelming disaster that I didn't know where I'd begin. It's heartbreaking and sad to see so many people's lives torn apart with years of hardships ahead of them to rebuild what they've lost. Not just homes but entire neighborhoods, business districts, churches, schools and jobs. Just finding temporary shelter would be over-whelming. Then comes dealing with insurance companies---if half those people even have fire insurance. A lot of companies quit selling and even revoked existing polices in California that cover fires. And there's sure to be studies, meetings and endless fights over new zoning and building regulations and new land use restrictions. Many people won't be able to afford to rebuild and will end up selling their ash-filled property to developers.

And while the fires are still out of control and raging we have the president-elect not offering words of support or comfort, not pledging disaster relief help but rather he's playing the blame game to renew an old feud with California's Democrat governor who he blames for everything. 45/47 could be asking his de facto V-P, the richest man on earth, to pledge some his "pocket change" to help rebuild the infrastructure in the effected areas. But he won't and I'm guessing Elon wouldn't do it anyway. Neither one of these man-boys have a philanthropic bone in their bodies. Elon Musk is too busy blaming the fires not on hurricane force winds in an area that hasn't seen rain since last May nor on climate changes. He's blaming the fire departments for, "prioritizing DEI over saving lives and homes." In other words he thinks having women and people of color working in the fire departments are the cause of not getting the fires under control. Both these man-boys are masters at spreading disinformation.

And I don't know who started the bitching about having over 900 incarcerated prisoners working among the 7,500 California firefighters, but it wouldn't surprise me if these two clowns had a hand in that as well. Granted, the 30 inmate fire camps in the state to train prisoners to fight fires have been controversial since their inception a few years ago but still, I don't get the timing of the critics bringing the controversy back up now, while those inmates are actively putting their lives on the line. On one side of the issue is Kim Kardashian who is advocating to pay the prisoners more than the $1 an hour they are paid now and on the other side of the issue are the people who think the prisoners are taking jobs away from other people and/or are putting the communities in danger while they are not behind bars "where they belong."

I also don't get why governor Newsom's is being vivified by the incoming president and not getting any credit for building up the state's aerial firefighting fleet so that it's the largest in the world, has nearly doubled the number firefighters on the ground since 2018 and has vastly expanded the program to do controlled, low intensity burns to keep the forest floors free of under-grown in over 400,000 acres annually. California's fire response here and here.

 

A few years back I was invited to hike in a Michigan park where a several weeks earlier the fire department had done one of these fires. It was eerie walking through the area because it wasn't until after we'd finished the trail that we learned that it was a controlled burn---we'd started at the end instead of the beginning where they had a notice posted. The objective is to get rid of dried leaves and dead wood on the forest floor that fuels the wildfires---the very stuff 45/47 STILL claims Newsom should have been "raking up." Sure, then what? Bury the stuff? Not that California or any other state is going to do controlled burns in neighborhoods like what we see burning on TV. My point in bringing it up, is I'm upset over ALL the finger pointing while lives are still in danger and fire fighters are working around the clock and fire-displaced Americans have to search for shelter and food. There will be plenty of time for finger pointing later on when all the facts and factors have been investigated and studied. I'm upset---but not a bit surprised---that our president-elect is showing his true colors once again. He's an agent of chaos. Always has been, always will be. 

 

45/47 will be the president in a few days but he spends more time on his crazy-ass ideas to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal than the wildfires crisis at hand. His nasty-ass attitude has also resulted in a serious threat from Argentina to revoke our air force's privilege to use one of their bases as a stop-over. He's fighting with other world leaders when he should be getting a team ready to hit the ground running to help California. But, no, he sent an envoy to Greenland to mess with them instead! Heaven help us, as my mom used to say. If I was into investing money I'd buy stock in a company that makes blood pressure medications. I suspect they'll be a lot of it sold over the next four years.

Until Next Wednesday. ©

 

Shoe Cleaning, Mahjong, Good Friends and Old Wives Tales

There's an old wives tale that says deaths always come in threes and that's been true for me this past week. No one especially close to me, but two of those who died effected people I care about. You know how that is…they feel pain and you are left wishing there was something you could say to take it away. Of course, we all know there isn't a thing we can do except act as a sounding board and/or send sympathy cards out to the appropriate people. In this case, I'm sending out a half a box cards to great-nieces and great-nephews who lost their grandfather or stepfather. Additional cards will go to a newly minted widow and her daughter (my niece-law) and the daughter of a one of my old Gathering Girls group members. And, yes, I'm old enough that I now buy sympathy cards by the box full. No one tells you this comes with living into your eighties. 

The latter woman who died shocked me the most. I hadn't seen her much since I moved three years ago although we did occasionally talk on the phone. To this day those bi-monthly lunches we Gathering Girls had were some of the most fun times I've had in my life with gal-pals. I never had to be on my best behavior with them---never had to hide my political views or my lack of a church family like I did with my Red Hats Society group or in my current living situation. She beat breast cancer once but lost the second battle with it. 

I'm going to turn this around to happier thoughts. As I sit here I'm in a very clean apartment even though my monthly cleaning lady doesn't come until Monday. How did that happen? you might be asking. The son-I-wish-I-had and his wife came to take me out for lunch and she'd never seen my place. I wanted her to be able to look to her heart's content without me being embarrassed by a layer of dust or the things that seems to clutter up the corners like my Mahjong set and mat and an assortment of footwear that has a way of gathering around the only chair in the apartment that is low enough for me to put them on and take them off.

Tim has been a great friend for decades. He will even get a 10% slice of my estate when I die, should anything be left over at that point in time. The way the price of everything is going up and up these days, I'm starting to worry that I'll outlive my bank account. I'm obviously not worried enough that it stopped me from signing up for Retail Therapy Sessions through the holidays. But I've reigned in that horse in case anyone else named in my estate was worried. 

Have I told you guys about my last big splurge? I sent off the lightest and darkest Mahjong tile from my 1930s Perching Parrot Bakelite set to a service that matched them up with enough orphan tiles so that I can turn them into jokers. You have to do that with all the early sets if you want to use them to play American Mahjong. At the risk of boring the non-players reading this, I also bought on eBay one wooden tile for my new/old 1923 Babcock set. What are the odds that I'd find something that small and old to complete the set? I love people who recognize that there is a lid to fit every pot in the world of collectibles and I only had to pay ninety-nine cents to win that auction. The seller, however, is charging me twelve dollars to mail it. He should have had his opening bid higher but he hedged his bet with his shipping charge. I don't care but some buyers would ding his ratings for that. I see it as a miracle that someone across country had a tiny, 100 year of thing like that and went to the trouble to find it a home. We are kindred spirits. 

Tim and his wife spent three hours with me and that laugh-filled visit combined with 2025 popping up on the calendar put me on a manic streak. I've been so productive every since, checking off stuff on my to-do list that I thought would take me deep into January. One of those things involves the Gogooda shoe washing bags pictured up above, bought during one of my Retail Therapy sessions. I have two pairs of tennis shoes that were both looking grubbing but are still in great condition. Magic erasers and other shoe cleaners weren't making much difference. Looking at the price of new shoes, I decided to try these bags out and I am happy with how the first pair came out. Those bags even have pockets inside for the laces and the soles. I may pre-treat the second pair for even better results. 

The set (2 bags and two shoe trees) cost $23.00 at Amazon and were very quiet in the washing machine. (I have a shoe rack for my dyer which makes shoe drying quiet as well---first time I ever used it.) If my little "infomercial" tempts you, don't buy the yellow ones as a few of the reviews mentioned the color bled on to their shoes. 

Normally, I'm able to talk myself out of something I didn't know I wanted after until I saw it. But the siren call of Retail Therapy that gives us a temporary high was my rebellion against the week when I wrote about the Swedish Death Cleaning. I don't do Retail Therapy to fill an emptiness or other need inside me very often and I don't recommend it so there no need to plan an intervention for me, thank you very much.  ©

Until Next Wednesday.  

 

Before

 

After

The Holiday Ups and Downs - A Widow's Sadiversary

Over Christmas I had one of those deep cries that leave you feeling exhausted to the bone. Not to worry, it was a good cry with happy tears mixed in with a tinge of regret. It came out of the blue in an unexpected way and place. I was sitting by the fireplace in our lobby waiting for my dinner reservation time when I opened a Christmas card from a great-nephew on my husband's side of the family. I haven't seen or talked to Mike in probably five years but I have dutifully sent my annual Christmas letters to him until I stopped writing them last year. Out of his card to me fell a two page typed written letter, the first letter I've ever got from him. In part it said…

"I personally want to thank you for all that you did for Uncle Don after his stroke. I know that's it's not something you need to be thanked for, as you loved him and that's what we do for those we love. I personally have always recognized how much effort you put into those years of care that you provided to him. You will always be my Aunt Jean and if at any time there's something that you ever need help with, I want you to never hesitate to reach out." Then he gave me his phone number and email address and then he went on to write about some of his favorite Uncle Don stories and I read them with tears streaming down my face.

The stories could only have come from someone who loved and respected Don. And it was clear that Don's and his grandfather's gift for storytelling was passed down to another generation. Mike's humorous stories came from sharing many years of deer camps. Don had taught him and his two brothers to hunt and Don was dead serious that the teens learn to be safe, lawful and ethical sportsman above all else, but they also swapped practical jokes and tall stories in the evenings. After Don's stroke when I got Don involved in an organization for wheelchair bound hunters Mike volunteered to be his deer camp guide. Each disabled hunter had to have a personal 'guide' to help with urinals, medications, snacks, coffee, etc. I was going to do it before Mike heard about the program and stepped up to the plate. After Don could no longer qualify on the shooting range to go to deer camp Mike kept on volunteering to help the organization and other disabled hunters.

I like where I live but once in awhile I'm reminded like with Mike's letter how much I miss being around people who knew my husband. I don't know if all widows and widowers feel this way but I don't think anyone can ever really know me who didn't know me when I was half of Team Don and Jean. We took unconventional paths through life and they didn't take us past the same benchmarks that most couples find. People who knew Don and me back during the 42 years we were together see ME and dare I say anyone who follows my blog sees me, too. People who came into my life after he died see the bare bone facts of my life but they don't match up with the accomplishments and contributions I see in myself. Does anyone's? 

A couple I often sit across from at the Monday farm table dinners don't see the real me for sure. They were high school and college sweethearts, married and had two children. She picks at me all the time while her husband sits there with a smirk on his face that seems to say, "She never listens to me either." Week after week she tells me I'm too shy and I should volunteer to help her do crafts over in the Memory Care building or teach a painting class, etc., and I'll say, "NO, no and hell no!" "But you'd be so good at it." And I'll reply, "Being good at something doesn't mean I want to do it." "You're just shy and I'm going to help you get over that." If Don were sitting in on those conversations he'd tell her to knock it off, knowing that that kind of pressure has the opposite effect. (My mom didn't call me 'stubborn' without cause.). God, does that make me a woman who needs a man to define her? I meant to write 'defend her' but maybe that spelling error fits too so I'm keeping them both.

The first day after getting Mike's letter I felt euphoric but the second day at the lunch table I crashed into feeling alone in a crowd. It was the day of Christmas Eve and people were talking about their plans with family. Everyone was so happy. So-and-so had borrowed wine glasses from someone and someone else was borrowing folding chairs and it hit me that I was feeling lonely. I'm not a recluse around here by any stretch of the imagination but I'm also not as interwoven into the micro-cosmo here as others are. I don't borrow or loan things. I don't exchange baked goods or recipes. I don't go off campus shopping with others. It was a conscious decision when I moved in to hold myself back a little because I've always required a lot of alone time for art, crafts and writing, but at times like that I have questioned if I'd made the right decision---if I shouldn't have tried harder to make a few close friends. On the other hand, six people have died since I moved to this CCC and that predictable statistic was the other rationale I used for not getting too close to others. Some people living here----maybe 15 of the 75---have gone to all six funerals. You live in a place where everyone is old, they're  going to die. I've lost enough important people in my life, thank you very much.

In all honesty I think the loneliness has been creeping up on me because I've been dreaming a lot about Don lately. Typical widow's  dreams of him getting lost and me not being able to find him. He died in mid-January and every since then I've gone through a funk the first two weeks of January. I call it my Sadiversary Season and I think Mike's letter just started the downward spiral a little early this year. If the past is an accurate predictor of Jean-ism by the 15th of the month I'll be my old self again.

Happy New Year, everyone! I'm off to our big fancy-pants dinner followed by game night and a ball dropping at the ridiculous hour of nine o'clock. ©

Until Net Wednesday. 

 

After one of Don's post-stroke days of hunting when the guys all came back to the staging area for a meal and an evening around a campfire. It's quite the operation to get wheelchair bound guys out into the woods. Along with the above mention personal 'guide' two other volunteer help get the guys in trucks and hunting blinds. And a nurse is also only a walkie talkie call away. They had great fund raiser parties during the year, too. I have nothing by great memories of the Wheelin' Hunter's non-profit.

But this is how I remember Don's hunting days the best---with a long lens camera in hand. Every other year for decades I'd go out west hunting with him and he never shot at an animal while I was with him because he knew I wouldn't want to see one die. On opposite years he'd go with a friend or family member.