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! ©

Life Changing Secrets and Leg ‘Magic’…or so They Claim

Do you wear compression stockings? If so you might have liked a class I went to this week called, Healthy Legs. The class description started out, “Maintaining a healthy active lifestyle starts with energizing your legs” and I didn’t bother to read the rest. Had I done so, I would have known it was put on by Juzo Compression Garments. I don’t wear compression stockings and after watching three 30ish, skinny model types pushing the idea that, “EVERYONE needs to wear these no matter your age” I did not join the cult. Although they did have styles for everyone---ankle, knee and thigh high, open toed for scandals and panty hose plus garments just for sleeping. Each of those came with compression rates from 15% to 50% and even though they come in some cool tie-dyed and jewel colors, none of those young women fooled me with their “Spanx for legs” jokes. They still looked medicinal.

And it wasn’t just the stockings. You’d need accessories just to get them on---special gloves, a ‘donner pad’ for the floor, donning lotion and a parachute-like device that helps you thread these stocking up your legs. It all made me feel very old for reasons that are probably related to why I resisted having a magnifying glass next to my chair in the living room for so long. Old people gear here and there and before long I might as call my house a nursing home.

Someone asked why the compression stocking she wore didn’t stay up and the answer was: there are two types of human legs---stove pipes and pie shaped and if you are in the wrong type and/or size garment they won’t work. You need measurements taken up and down and around your legs at several places to get the right compression in the right places. The garments has different compression ratings in different parts, the higher up your leg they go. So why compress your legs? Apparently it helps push the blood from your feet up to your heart where it gets oxygenated before the blood returns to your feet. I did not stick around to get a fitting. I will not be asking my doctor next month at my bi-annual appointment if I'd benefits from compression stockings like these ladies suggested. I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and sing, "La, la, la, la, I can't hear you!"

Also this week I went to my book club where we had our best discussion ever. The book that inspired it was The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards. The blurb says this: “…the novel begins on a winter night in 1964 when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins…but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down’s syndrome.” In a split-second decision he asks his nurse to take the baby to an institution and tells his wife the girl was born died. Instead, the nurse left town, keeping the baby to raise as her own---two secrets that the wife and other twin didn’t find out about until after David died sixteen years later. 

Everyone in my book club had a story to tell about babies given up for adoption, most in secret that got revealed years later. One woman found out a week after her mother died that she had an older brother. It seemed her two aunts had kept the secret long enough and they gave her the contact information for the long-lost older brother. She said she felt like her whole life had been based on a lie because her mom had told her she was a virgin when she got married when, in fact, she’d had an affair with a married man. Her younger brother refused to believe it and didn’t want anything to do with meeting the half-brother. Fast forward ten years she hadn’t contact the older sibling, lost his contact information during a move and the aunts died. And she is left to wonder why her mother lied.

Another woman had recently found a message on her phone from a cousin who wanted to get together. “My mom told me a secret about your mother that is going to blow your mind.” She was afraid to call the cousin back. On one hand she wanted to know what it was but her older sister told her, “Trust me, you’ll wish you didn’t know.” The consensus in the book club was that a lot of secrets went to the grave with women in past generations. It was a different time for unmarried and pregnant young women and none of them could have ever imagined how easily their babies-out-of-wedlock secrets could get tracked down in our modern, internet savvy world. There are whole websites devoted to the effort. ©

A Meat, Potatoes and Carrots Kind of Week

Bright and early Wednesday morning I had three guys walking around on top of my roof. The dog didn’t like it. I, on the other hand, was thrilled. They were up there to kill the mold that made the roof look old and worn out with black streaks in the valleys and other places the sun doesn’t like. It was a cheap process---$325. While they were up there they tarred down a shingle that was dislodged in a wind storm last spring and was flopping back and forth. I gave the company owner a $50 tip and told him in earshot of his young workers that I wanted him to take the guys out to lunch for fixing the shingle. Fifty dollars was a bargain compared to what it would have cost to have a roofer come out to fix it, if you could get one to come out for a single shingle. I was a happy camper.

That was the ‘potatoes’ in my week, now on to the ‘meat’---my first time mixing paint on a palette in over seventeen years. The instructor has a stand-alone, two story art studio that looks like a grown-up version of a miniature house for fairies in a forest. She’s a ten year widow and her second husband built it for her. How cool is that! Her lake side yard was private with massive trees and the weather was perfect so three of us sat out on her deck sketching for the first hour, then we changed to painting. The third person was one of my friends from the Gathering Girls. B.L. had not painted in a number of years either but she was bolder getting started and was the first to get her paints out while I was being a Nervous Nelly dragging my feet.

Did I enjoyed the class? The answer is yes and no. The ‘yes’ part was the setting was perfect for what we were doing, the company and conversation was good and I actually started thinking like an artist again. But B.L. and I both agreed afterward that the instructor is not going be a good teacher even though she has a degree from one of the most prestigious art school in the country. For example, she took the brushes out of our hands and painted on our works herself to demonstrate what she thought we should do---painted way too long, to be exact. "Show, NOT do for" was the motto I remember from the hallowed halls of good teaching. B.L. was more generous than me when she said, “Some people can do but not teach” while I thought the large display of her work hanging in the studio was all over the map---many excellent pieces but others not so much. From her online presence, I didn't expect that. And B.L. and I were both shocked when it was time to pay and we found out the price she quoted in an email was per hour, not per class. We decided we’d go back one more time---armed with questions and issues we think she can help us with---then we’ll find a nice way to back out gracefully from continuing the classes, and maybe try to get-together on our own to paint to keep us inspired. 

After the class was over I followed B.L. to a near-by small town in a farming community where we had a leisurely dinner and a serious conversation followed by ice cream sundaes. Everything is better with ice cream sundaes. A Celtic band had just started a free concert across the park from the ice cream shop, so off we went. B.L. jokes that she’s on the go so much she practically lives in her car and she produced two folding chairs from her ‘magical red box’ and we enjoyed most of the concert before I was yawning and we left. It had been a long day and Levi was glad to see me back home again. I hit the bed at 9:30 like a five year old and the next day I unpacked my car of its art supplies, discarded the painting I began in class and started another. And that fact, after all these years of not painting, made the class worthwhile. 

Friday was the carrots in my week. It was time for my monthly cleaning girl to show up. I haven’t written about her since the time I devoted an entire blog to her titled Babies and Broken Promises. She had given up a newborn baby girl to an open adoption and the adoptive parents---back then---were not holding up their end of the bargain of allowing a three hour visit every three months and she was distraught beyond comforting. According to my cleaner, it’s all been ironed out and visits are back on track, but get this: The adoptive parents are paying her to clean their house during the resumed visits. I honestly don’t know what to think about that. What I do know for sure is that I’m glad my problems are not the sort that keep my emotions spinning like pinwheels in the winds. “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” Yup, there are always people out there dealing with weighty issues worse than our own. ©

After Treatment

Before Mold Removed