e-Bay, Diaries, Babies, and Alexa the Bitchy Virtual Assistant

I have my dining room table back! Since the end of August it’s been e-Bay Central and since I don’t like listing in the winter when the roads are iffy and unpredictable, the last of my auctions for 2018 ended this week. No more running to the post office. Ya, I know I could arrange for pickups but I’m a control freak when it comes to e-Bay. I have a 100% feedback rating and I want to see with my own eyes that packages I put in the system get scanned---proof that can keep an e-Bayer out of the weeds. In just under three months I sold nearly $3,000 worth of mostly lighters and tobacco related advertising pieces. My husband had weird collections and of all the things I’ve sold since he died, this batch was the hardest and least fun to list. Why? Because tobacciana collecting has dropped off significantly here in America but it’s really hot in the Orient so I was getting a lot of messages written in broken English that had me scratching my head. I will start do some more e-Baying next summer---I have a box of transportation advertising under my bed that needs to go next---but for now, I’m free to tackle other projects.

One of those projects I’m tackling this winter is to go through decades’ worth of old diaries that I think I’m finally ready to dispose of but I’m thinking about picking out a few passages here and there to put all in one book along with some old photos. One or two pages with an iconic passage from each year of diary keeping. I could start from a point in the 1950s when I saw Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis at a live concert. I’m pretty sure I can make a book like that work (just for myself, not for mass marketing) and it sounds scary fun to try. Scary because once I commit to a project like that there’s no turning back, no restoring pages and diaries that I’ve read and shredded.

I’ve often wondered if the fact that I’ve never been a mother plays into my obsession about wanting to create something that will last longer than I will. It must be nice to look at a child that came from your womb, that you’ve mentored and influenced and think, “I made that, that’s my legacy to the world.” A fellow blogger who has cancer and is near the end of her life gave a baby up for adoption 50+ years ago and through a popular DNA test she was recently re-connected to that child. Reading her story and her bio-son's loving post about his adoptive mom---he’s a blogger too---was amazing. I don’t have a secret child out there but it was not uncommon in my generation for unwed mothers to go away to have and give up their babies in secret. And secrets like that revealed later in life come with unpredictable results.

I remember a day when I teased my husband that someday he’d answer the door and there on the steps would be a stranger with a suitcase who’d say, “Hi Dad!” It never happened but that day he and a neighbor went around and around about whether or not he’d feel instant, fatherly bonds with a child he never knew about. She said he would, he disagreed. She was a parent. Don never was. Recently, I was reminded of our ‘hi dad’ conversation when a random guy was being interviewed on TV and was asked if he had any children. He replied, “God, I hope not!” Cracked me right up. A woman might answer a door someday to hear “Hi Mom” from a stranger but at least she’d know with 100% certainty that the ‘hi mom’ scenario was in the realm of possibilities. Guys who might have sown a few wild oats in their youth could never be sure that it couldn’t happen to them.

Change of topic to my fur baby: Levi my mighty schnauzer had to go back to the vet’s office this week to get a follow up test on his Lyme disease. It’s been six months since his diagnosis and treatment, and I haven’t noticed any difference in him. He’s still doing the chicken-on-a-hot-plate dance that’s an early symptom of the disease, but he's as spunky as ever. I won’t know the test results until Monday but before leaving the place we’d run up a $350 bill that included the blood work, a winter’s worth of flea, tick and heartworm prevention meds, two ear cleansings, two weeks’ worth of antibiotics for something on his lip and a tissue analysis of the junk that came out of his lip. We have to get the infection cleared up first before the vet can see if there’s an underlying issue causing the lump that apparently bothers Levi because he's always digging at it.

And while writing this I learned that Alexa won’t spell ‘pussy’ as in pussy infection. She just told me, “I’d rather not answer that.” Okay, turning ‘pus’ into an adjective probably isn’t a real word which is why I wanted confirmation on how to spell it in the first place, But come on, she didn’t have to cop an attitude about it! I tried to ask a couple of times, enunciating clearer each time, but the bitch wouldn’t spell what she wrongly thought I was asking. And how does Alexa know I wasn’t writing an article for Cat Fancy Magazine and really wanted to spell 'pussy' as in pussy cat? Instead, she probably put me on a list of people who sexually harass virtual voice assistants! ©

The Vet and the Benedictine Nun

May is the month when Levi gets his yearly appointment with the vet for blood work and the vaccines required for getting the county license tags. Recently they’ve changed the law so licenses and rabies boosters are due every three years now so technically going every year to the vet is no longer necessary, but life-long habits are hard to break. My lifetime, not his. According to the paperwork Levi the Mighty Schnauzer was “ten years, three months and two weeks” old on the day of the appointment but before we got out of there I think we both felt liked we’d aged a month and in dog years, that’s a lot.

The place I take him is an animal hospital with 4-5 vets on duty and on appointment day they had a dog come in that had been hit by a car and all their other patients got backed up in the waiting room. Pooping dogs and peeing puppies and other canines like Levi biting at the bit wanting to play with the cats in cages and the other dogs on leashes. It was a manic zoo. Finally we got into an exam room and when the vet walked in he started the conversation with, “I need to tell you that I might get called out during Levi’s exam. There’s a couple next door with a cat that is getting put down and when they are finished saying their goodbyes and are ready for me to start the process, I’ll be called out.” Been there, done that with this very veterinarian so I understood and said appropriate words about that being hard on everyone. Then I started puckering up. I could feel tears coming and I didn’t even know the damn cat in the next room! I kept it together but it wasn’t easy, especially when the vet got the tap on the door and the whispered words came next, “They're ready now.” Who is ever really ready for that?

The in-and-out in 15 minutes appointment took an hour and a half and for once Levi’s teeth looked good but he’s still getting them cleaned later this summer. His heart and lungs sounded good and the vet couldn’t find anything wrong with Levi’s knee joints and I’ve been worried about them. The next day I got the other test results by phone. His canine CBC chem 11 levels were in normal ranges. Except they say he’s got Lyme disease and he needs another blood test and possibly treatment! I was so shocked I asked them to double check to see if they were reading the right dog’s blood work. He takes all the precaution drugs for ticks, fleas and heart worms and I’ve never seen a tick on him. I’d already paid $224.55 and they wanted another $69.50 for a new test to put a finer point on the Lyme situation. What are you going to do, say no? I did say no to a suggestion that I should also bring in a urine sample to see if the Lyme disease has damaged his kidneys. More accurately, I said, “Let’s see what this new test says first.” And for anyone wondering how you get a urine sample from a dog, you follow him or her around with a pie pan and stick it underneath at the right time, hoping you get your hand out of the way in time. The things we do for love.

I was not in a good mood after the phone conversation with the vet tech and when I clicked the phone off I looked up and saw two mourning doves mating on my deck railing. “Get a room!” I yelled. I wasn’t sure they’d be back this year---I quit putting birdseed out near-by to discourage mice in the basement---but apparently old habits are hard to break in the bird world too. They’ve been hanging out on that railing and building a spring nest in a near-by pine tree for years. I won’t be able to use my living room door out to the deck for a couple of weeks without scaring the doves and they, in turn, scaring me as they fly out of the tree.

The next day I went to Book Club and managed to show up at the right time. Every so often we’ll change from our normal 1:00 to 12:00 and I'll get there as the book discussion is ending instead of beginning. Not this time. The book we’ll be reading for June is My Mrs. Brown, but I won’t start it until I finish a self-published book on my Kindle, written by a new blogger friend, Dee Ready. I knew from reading her blog, Coming Home to Myself, that she’s an excellent writer and the topic of her book intrigued me enough to finally download a copy from Amazon after two weeks of indecision. Prayer Wasn’t Enough is about Dee's years spent as a Benedictine nun in the late 1950s and '60s but given the fact that I call myself an agnostic I wasn’t sure how I’d relate to the subject.

I’ve read 75% of the book and I’m still fascinated by the details Dee shared about living in a strict convent---the clothing and its care, the steps and vows required, the daily routines and prayer schedules, the traditions of the order, the image of hundreds of nuns living all in one place, and, of course, the self-discovery she went through as she struggled for self-imposed perfection. I’m not at the point in the memoir where she leaves that life behind but already I know I'll read the book Dee hopes to publish next covering her ten years after leaving the convent. We’ve all gone through transitions in life---some bigger and scarier than others---but not many of us can say that we’ve been a devoted nun in a former life and certainly not a nun given a name like Sister Innocence. ©