Waking up Early and Not-so-Chronic Pain

 

I got up at 5:30 which is three hours before my normal time to 'rise and shine' as my mom used to order me to do each morning when I was kid. "Rise and shine!" she'd yell in the hall between my brother's and my bedrooms, "It's daylight in the swamp!" The sky was starting to show some pinks and lavenders through the bare trees across the green space in from of my apartment, something I hadn't seen in a very long time. Back when I was plowing snow I used to see the sun rise often, to the point that I had better words to describe the pastel mistiness that washes the sky like a watercolor painting in the crisp dawn air. How can anyone not love watching the day come to life?

I looked for the deer they say are often around that time of the day. I looked for the raccoon that leaves tracks in the snow on my deck. I looked for the white tailed skunk I've seen several times but have learned not to talk about it because other people living here freaked out on my report and want to see it and the racoon exterminated. A heavily wooded area was destroyed to build this independent living facility and in my mind we humans need to adjust to live in peace with the displaced wildlife that survived the disruption. White tailed skunks are rare in this part of the country. I researched her on our DNR site and found someone had photographed another white tailed skunk sixty miles away at our state capital. They were as excited as I was to see something they'd never seen before. Not only are the tails white and bushy but the stripe down the backs are wider than our normal skunks. The first time I saw my skunk all that pure white fur was backlit by parking lot lights and she was stunning.

It was a dream that woke me up. In the dream I was telling myself, "it's just a dream, you need to wake up!" WAKE UP!" I was in that state of Sleep Paralysis which happens sometimes when you are conscious during waking up or falling asleep but you can't move any part of your body. It doesn't happen to me often but when it does it rattles me enough that I can't go back to sleep. 

The only details in the dream that I remember are that my husband took the dog out for a walk and they didn't come back. I waited and waited and worried until I got out of bed in the dream and found he'd left me a hug jar of honey on the kitchen table. Dreaming of honey, according to the dream dictionary, can mean a lot of positive things including that the dreamer has a strong support system which I'm going with in this case because that evening I had had long talks with both of my nieces who were concerned about the outcome of my appointment with my orthopedic doctor. One of my nieces and I had even talked about it being time to start eating a daily teaspoon of locally sourced honey to build up an immunity for our summer and fall allergies.

I don't think I mentioned it before but all winter I've been experiencing a lot of pain in my right arm from my wrist to my elbow. And since it's in same arm that I broke my elbow in 1999, I had myself all worried and worked up thinking it was finally time to do something about the botched surgery, as my current bone doctor calls it. I saw him about this same thing (when the level of pain was much less) last summer and back in 2018 when I wrote: "One of the screws that once held the top of the ulna bone to the bottom was floating around free-willy in my flesh. Another screw that looked to be around 1 ½ or 2 inches long had backed half way out and was no longer anchoring the ulna bone to the radius bone like it was supposed to do, and a stress fracture was showing a few inches below the screw." Xrays taken this week showed both screws are free-willy now, but the doctor can feel their heads through my skin and he doesn't think they are causing my pain. Back in 2018 when this was first discovered he didn't want to do anything to try to correct "the mess" because, he said, would be “a major ordeal involving a very long surgery, weeks in a cast and  months of physical therapy.” I was advised back then to never again lift anything above my waist or ever pick up anything over five pounds with that arm. When I forget, it lets me know.

This week the doctor gave me a shot in my wrist as part of a diagnostic procedure to track down why I can't do things like put my right hearing aid or earring in without pain and dozens of other movements that jabs me with pain through out the day and night. And soon I start a 13 day round of 20 mg prednisone as part of his diagnostic process. The most I've ever had of prednisone are rounds of 4mg so I'm a little concerned about side effects but I trust my doctor. If the wrist shot works (which it did like magic but for only 24 to 36 hours) it means the majority of the pain is coming from arthritis in that area but if the pain in my forearm goes away with the prednisone then the source is coming from crushed and arthritic vertebrae in my neck. It's possible that both are in play. Once he figures that out he'll be able to form a treatment plan that could involve a nerve block on my neck and/or gel shots in my wrist---and "other options" we didn't get into. I'm relieved that elbow surgery is off the table. The bones are fussed together though not lined up right, but they are in no danger of rendering my elbow non functioning which I invented and feared in my worse case scenario. If I live long enough the screws could start cutting through my skin and they'll be easier to remove then. Shrapnel tends work its way outward if no nerves or organs get in the way. On a side note: did you hear that Russia is now dropping shrapnel by drones on Ukrainians to maim, not kill them, in an attempt to overwhelm their healthcare system and give them painful fragments they'll have to live with because they aren't all easy to remove?

Back on topic: All and all things are looking up. I've got a busy March in front of me including some promising looking art classes taught by a college professor and my sense of feeling old and defeated has lessened just knowing a have a path towards feeling better. I'm still struggling to get in enough exercise to make a real difference but nicer weather is on the way so that will help get me outside walking again. By then my fellow residents will quit walking around with ashes on their faces and filling up the calendar with 'churchy' stuff. If that sounds irreverent or disrespectful, I'm sorry. I'm not a fan of the Easter season and listening to how beautiful the Stations of the Crosses ceremonies are, which are repeated here four weeks in a row. I just can't relate to the somberness of the occasion and the bitten-by-the-spirt looks in the eyes of those who take part creeps me out. Not to mention my mom died on Easter which led to a trauma filled couple of years making peace with her very preventable death. 

Nope. I'll buy yellow Peeps but that's the extent of my Easter celebration and this year even that didn't turn out well when one of my table mates at lunch told me my four pack of tradition yellow marshmallow rabbits was pure sugar and not good for fatty-two-by-fours like me. Not her words but implied. More on that conversation in my next post. ©

 Until Next Wednesday...

 

I spent a lot of time trying to track down the author of this poem with not luck and I hate that he or she isn't being created properly. If anyone recognizes it, please leave a comment!

Soulmates, Reoccurring Dreams and one Regret

 

I've had the Winnie-the-Pooh quote at the top of my blog since sometime in 2012, the year my husband died. "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard" made sense back then on a widow's blog but lately I've been think about giving my blog a makeover to better reflect where I'm at in life now. But a quote or meme of a grim reaper peering down my neck would scare off too many people. Except for Dawn, of course, author of the Bohemian Valhalla blog. She has what she herself describes as gallows humor and her images often have me scrolling as fast as my little fingers will go to get past the sculls and other dark-side photos she shares. We live entirely different lives but she's one of my favorite bloggers. 

But I'm getting off track because today I want to explore the idea that maybe I still haven't said goodbye to my dearly departed husband? And do people in the form of their soul-energy stick around after they give up their physical bodies? Enough things happened in the first couple of months after Don died that had me convinced souls to have as much trouble letting go as those of us left behind do. For example I rarely wore my wedding ring when we were married. I kept it hanging on a pin inside my computer wardrobe and Don would remind me to put it on when we'd go out. In all the years it hung on that pin it never fell off…until the day a minister came to the house to help me plan Don's service. After the minister left I found the ring on my keyboard, right in front of the monitor. It fell off that pin several more times under similar circumstances in the first few months after Don died. How could I not believe in signs from the other side after that? It was either believe in and be comforted by the signs or use my sense of logic which finally kicked in and told me to suck it up, that I was slamming the computer door harder and faster for the first time in over a decade and that was causing the ring to bounce off the pin. Still....

In the past few months I'm getting signs again that he's close by and I'm wondering if this is common with widows this far out from Death Day or could it just be common with people who are entering the dying process. (No, I don't have an expiration date prognosis, I'm just feeling old and worn out.) Maybe our dying is more than just the dying of the physical body. Maybe the body and soul parting is a reversal of our nine months in the womb sort of thing? Back when Roe vs Wade was debated in the Supreme Court I followed the testimonies of leading scientists and scholars from the major religions in the world that helped the justices decide the case. None of those experts could agree on when life begins and when a soul enters a fetus to make it human was a big part of the discussion. Scientists have a better understanding on the physical side of the equation now but religious leaders still don't agree and they never will because they are basing their opinions on various ways to translate the Bible. So it stands to reason no one really knows when a soul departs our bodies at the end of life either. And whose to say that it happens at the exact same moment for everyone. 

My dreams about Don are increasing in frequency---almost nightly. But I don't know if that means anything because I'm also dreaming about the dogs I've had over the years as well. I get the dog dreams. In my daytime hours I find myself longing for the companionship of a dog. I watch too many Facebook Short Reels of dogs and I have five dogs living in my building that I see daily from a distance. My next door neighbor has a dog that looks similar to my Levi. He was a Schnauzer and Robbie is a Scottie Terrier. But it breaks my heart that Robbie doesn't like me. To be fair he doesn't like most people but he literally leaves the room when I come into their apartment. Maybe the reason I've started reading romance books again is a longing for the found-your-soulmate vibes you get from those kinds of books? Two people fitting together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, what's not to like? Don't read that as I want another man in my life. No! Way! Jose! Great relationships take time to build and I'm running out of time.

Sometimes when you read a widow's blog you can get the impression that the marriage was all hearts and flowers and hand holding. I call it the 'Pedestal Versions' of the marriages that widows tend to present. And I was guilty of doing that, of writing mostly about the peaks and ignoring the valleys. But damn it, in our defense those of us with Pedestal Husbands found out that when our guys were alive we often took them for granted and all those annoying things we might have complained about simply were not important in the grand scheme. (Let that be a cautionary tale if you still have a spouse.) My husband was far from perfect. He did stupid guy stuff like hold the blankets over my head while he farted in bed. I read a scene like that in romance book last month and I burst out laughing, then I almost cried. Who would have ever guested you could miss a fart! 

But the worst guy thing Don ever did was once he yelled at me (instead of a neighbor) when the neighbor backed his car into my parked car, doing hundreds of dollars worth of damage. “You should have known better than to park directly across from a driveway!” Don shouted. The next day when I called him out on the fact that I was legally parked he said words to the effect that he was just trying to use it as a "teachable moment" for the teens who were helping us paint a house that day. "Sure, Don," I shot back. "You just taught them its okay to raise your voice to a woman, you yo-yo! And for a stupid-ass unfair reason!" Those teens were fatherless boys who looked at Don as a role model. And to this day I regret that I didn't defend myself on the spot and that he unfairly pinned the blame of the accident on me in the first place. I console myself with the fact that for three years we could barely ever leave the house without those neighborhood boys tagging alone and with a few notable exceptions, we role modeled the hell out of them as to what a healthy male/female relationship looks like.  ©

My Eclectic Reading List

Sometimes the reactions the women in book club have to certain things that happen in books make me feel like I was brought up in a brothel or a shack on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak, because I'm rarely shocked by some of the life experiences we've read about. And for the record I probably didn't even know what a brothel was until I was in my twenties, I was as naive back then as a few of my fellow residents around here still seem to be. But I am a woman who cut my reading teeth on romance books and over the years I've read all the sub-genres of romance from super straight-laced Victorians to Historicals to erotica to Amish Romances and Rom-Coms. The latter is my current favorite. Quick to read, don't tax my brain, occasionally make me laugh out loud. What's not to like?

The point I'm trying to make is that I'm rarely offended by what an author thinks a reader needs to know to carry a plot forward but when an author crosses over to write gratuitous sex scenes it's pretty easy for me to spot and that can get pretty boring. I quit reading Susan Stoker's military romances, for example, because she included S&M in two books and I don't care how much she tried to justify her characters liking the Fifty Shades of Grey antics in the bedroom, I don't believe they belong in any book marketed as 'Romance.' It's not mentally healthy nor good for women (or men) to be sold a bill of goods that whatever happens between two consenting adults is just fine and dandy. It's not. Don't even try to tell me about safe words and how pain and pleasure are supposedly only a fine line apart. I'm never going to buy it. 

Our book club here on the continuum care campus is reading a coming-of-age book that no one seems to be enjoying and no one is owning up to having picked it for our reading list. It was the conversation at our Monday dinner table and I was shocked to learn that two women in the club were offended by the description of the sexual scenes. One woman quit reading Maame after the first one (Chapter 5) where the protagonist lost her virginity and another lady was considering doing the same after the second one (chapter 7). I was totally confused because I couldn't recall either scene and I when I got home, I searched the book and I found out that neither scene was more than a page of description and rather bland description at that. What did that say about me that I read them and they didn't even register, much less register as something that could easily offend anyone. I was even more confused by the third and final sexual encounter which was a four on a scale of ten for hotness. I was braced for a down and dirty, page after page affair based on the negative comments I'd heard. Didn't happen. But I was happy that the main character finally got some pleasure out of these consensual encounters. All in all it was forgettable book.

Our December/January book club selection (discussed in February) was The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. It was over 700 pages long which is why we allowed two months instead of one to read it. It's a family saga style book that covers three generations and I've never liked that kind of book. Every day for two months I spent an hour in India and at first I was enjoying the expert writing and colorful descriptions of a part of the world and a culture I knew little about. But about three-forths of the way through the novel it felt like I was back in the work force with a quota to make every day. I ended up quitting the book about 125 pages short of finishing. I just didn’t care anymore. The others in book club told me I missed the best part. 

We also read The Book of Lost Names by Kritin Harmel which was based on a true story about a young woman who used her art talents to forge documents for Jewish children who were being smuggled out of harm's way during WWII. I loved that book. I also loved The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christry Lefteri which was about another part of the world I knew little about---the Syrian War, the refugee camps the displaced population lived in and what it took to immigrate to a safer part of the world. In both of theses books the authors were able to make you care about their fictionalized characters. When reading stories based on real events I'm often amazed at what the human spirit can endure and come out the other side with most of their marbles still intact. 

Other book Club sections: An Immense World by Ed Yong is a book that I'm sure I wrote about already and How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith which I'm sure I haven't written about. All I have to say about the latter book is that it's always interesting in book club when we read something that involved black history or a black point of view that our resident Trump fan feels obligated to defend racism. Gotta give her credit for standing up for her beliefs no matter how out of touch with reality and common sense they are.

Other than book club selections I've read three popcorn romances by Pippa Grant---books you read in a hurry and quickly forget. But based on the reaction the ladies in my book club had toward the sex scenes in Maame I'd never share this author's books around here. Reading Pippa Grant's descriptions would put a few ladies into cardiac arrest. ©

 Until next Wednesday.

A Little Bit of Everthing

I only eat at the lunch table here on the continuum care campus on Thursday, Friday and sometimes on Saturday. I love the lunch table. It sets 14 people and they come and go between 11:30 to 2:00 with some people staying the entire time and others eating and leaving for what we call the second shifters to take their places. l usually try to sit near the middle of the table so I can listen to and/or join in the conversations going on at either end of the table.

 Politics are rarely ever talked about at the lunch table but on Thursday I eavesdropped on five known MAGA supporters talk about Kennedy's confirmation to head the Department of Health and Human Services which includes oversight of the CDC and Food and Drugs. A well known vaccine skeptic, Mr. Kennedy has spread conspiracies theories about them to the point that my Liberal Ladies group (who eat together on Tuesday nights) is worried we're going to suffer another pandemic before 45/47 is out of office. Among the other things being cut by Executive Order is funding to any school with a Covid vaccine mandate for staff and students. These five MAGA fans were saying things like, "There really wasn't enough testing done on the Covid Vaccine" and "I won't be getting any more Covid vaccines until they prove they are safe." Thirteen billion dosages of the vaccine have been given to people world-wide! How much more 'testing' do they need?" 

They went on to talk about how Kennedy wants to get rid of all the additives in our foods and by then cynical me was thinking about how much the Republicans made fun of and had hissy-fits over Mrs. Obama's White House garden and her project to teach city people how to grow, cook and eat healthier foods. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in an alternate world. It's certainly a tribal world. Ideas are only good if your team is pitching them.

One night I challenged myself to watch Fox News to see how they were covering the demonstrations across the country over firing all the people in USAID and they didn't even mention there was any push back in the courts or in the streets, in fact they were praising Musk for the fine job he was doing gutting USAID and other government agencies and "saving the tax payers trillions of dollars." If that were true why is 45/47 calling for the federal debt ceiling to be raised 4.5 Trillion dollars? Could it have anything to do with Musk getting 8 millions a DAY from federal contracts for his SpaceX project? We can't buy grain from U.S. farmers to send overseas to starving people because that's "wasteful USAID" but there's no oversight what so ever on how that eight million dollars a day to go to Mars is being spent. And what's the point of colonizing Mars---the goal of SpaceX---when we can't even agree on which groups of people here on earth are worthy of getting our tax money.

Another one of our hard core MAGA supporters died this week. He was such a nice, gentle guy. But a man with Pro-life and Trump bumper stickers on his car. Married 75 years. he lived a life devoted to his Church, his wife and large family. He held his wife's hand where ever they went and they never had a meal at the lunch table without praying (out loud) over their food. He was a one issue voter who could overlook all kinds of 45/47's sins in exchange for his promise to "save the babies." I try to remind myself of this couple when I'm about to I spout disrespect and hate towards all MAGA people. They are many things but most of them are not evil. 

Yes, it's very tempting to sit here and write a bitch session about everything that is annoying, wrong or downright scary going on in the country right now. The current administration's bull-in-china-shop approach to governing is destabilizing the entire world. And they are proud of that fact. If I was two years old I'd be that kid who'd be laying on the floor right about now, kicking my fat little legs up and down and crying while the adults do their best to ignore my temper tantrum. But I'm not two years old and in my eighty+ years of living I've learned enough to know that I'm the only person who can hop on the metaphorical white horse and save myself from what ails me. Unfortunately my armor is not shining at the moment from falling off the damn horse too often because I worry too much about things beyond my control.

But I can save myself from my continued weight gain which is  pretty much what my doctor told me last week that I have to do. He did look up a medication that he thought would be safe for me to take, but it requires a daily shot in the belly and he stated Medicare wouldn't cover it. So he asked me what has worked in the past and I made the mistake of being honest, confessing that lots of time spent exercising worked better than anything. He was what I predicted he'd be: sympathetic about how much I hate being fat and I hate exercise but he told me none the less to start walking three miles a day on the treadmill. It's been three days since I saw him and I've been to the gym three times since but I've yet to make it the full three miles. 

He also gave me a prescription for some liquid iron for my blood and a nasal spray for a persistent cough I've had all winter. My blood work showed that my Stage 3 Kidney Disease has not progressed---good news. But something I answered on the Medicare Wellness questionnaire must have triggered an automatic reply because a few days after my appointment I got a list on my patient portal for places seniors can get help with food or housing insecurities or mental health issues. I do not need a list like that but sadly for those who might, many of those services listed probably will get cut by President Musk. ©

Until Next Wednesday…

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. 

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. 

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.