My Life on Post-it Notes

Note: This post was written and scheduled to go live earlier this week but it got bumped back to make room for the computer woes post. I still haven't had time to deal with that fly in my soup and the laptop I'm working on is too old to use as a landing place for my lost photos and documents that should be safety up in a cloud named Carbonite. Hopefully, next week I'll get at it.

Moving on: I'm a huge fan of Post-it Notes. One wall of my computer wardrobe is filled with the colorful little scraps of paper and I have a tin box filled with them as well. Or I should say one wall was filled with them. Everyday I've been working at dismantling bits of my office space inside the wardrobe and taking down my Post-it Notes is part of the process. Everything in the wardrobe is gone, now but the computer itself as it waits for help to move the wardrobe out of the kitchen. By the way, I've tried the Sticky Notes app to keep the clutter at bay and digitalized but I'm a visual person and it just isn't the same.

Over the years I’ve gotten militant about putting quotation marks around stuff I write on Post-it Notes that are sentences I’ve copied out of a book or heard on TV or in a song, so if I ever use that quote I can properly credit the line. I would hate it if someone plagiarized me and I wouldn’t want to accidentally take credit for someone else’s note-worthy thoughts. I often jot down my own phrases or sentences as well so the quotation marks are necessary on other people's words. Once in a great while I’ve found an unquoted phrase on a note and think that it couldn't have come from my brain. So I’ll do a google search to no avail which means, apparently, I do come up with a pleasing string of words from time to time. In past year, though, I’ve started adding “by me” to bits and pieces I think are Post-it Note worthy. I’m old and I need to learn that I don’t have the time to retrace my steps when if I did something thorough the first time I’d save a lot of head scratching and asking myself, Did or didn’t I write this?

A small orange note I’m looking at right now just says, “nuh-uh” while a larger blue note says, “Treasures of Darkness.” I know why I wrote the first one. I often want to use words like that when I write but I have no clue how to spell them or to get Alexa to do it for me. (She hates me and the way I pronounce stuff.) The “Treasures of Darkness” note I had to google to figure out that it was a book title of a book I actually liked and went on to read the entire series minus the one due out in December. Apparently, when I wrote the note I wanted to be sure not to forget about the author’s upcoming book which I did forget and I’ve vowed---yet again---to make the Post-it Notes I jot down a little clearer so I don’t have to waste time googling why I wrote them in the first place. (That last sentence is messy and murky but I assure you, it will makes sense if you read it over again.) And apparently, I like the word ‘apparently’ today because this is the fourth time I’ve used it.

Moving along: On a tiny yellow Post-it Note I wrote, “Fissured Tongue, 5% of Americans.” Yup, you get the door prize if you guessed that I have a fissured tongue which I found out in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep and I obsessed that it was a symptom of some dreaded disease I’d picked from reading a book set on another planet. Nope, it’s not but I did start brushing my tongue after that night because those ridges and valleys can harbor a host of yucky stuff. But I’m comforted by the fact that my dentist checks for mouth cancer twice a year. I’m not suggesting that a fissured tongue has anything to do with cancer. It doesn’t. However, I figured if the dentist found anything else worth mentioning---like my fissured tongue---she'd speak up about it.  

A lot of my Post-it Notes are things I write down and don’t need to keep past the next day like the hours a certain place might be open or their address. Lately, I’ve accumulated a lot of notes with measurements…moving boxes, furniture, PODS. One note I just threw out had, “High Sierra by HBE” which was the company that made some canvas camping and travel gear that I was going to sell on Facebook Marketplace, but I gave them to Goodwill instead. Apparently---fifth time if your counting---I don’t purge my Post-it Notes often enough because I found a bunch of them about migrating my subscriber list on this blog from Feedburner which is a done deal now. (If you haven't migrated your subscriber list yet, that July 1st deadline is closing in on you.) Another note, a medium sized yellow one, lists foods that are rich in potassium---bananas, spinach, broccoli, sweet potatoes and cucumbers. 

And these lines from the website Escape Adulthood I though were Post-it Note worthy fun: "If you think the dictionary should be made into a movie. If you were disappointed to learn that Fifty Shades of Gray was NOT a home decor manual. These are signs that you might have Adultitis."

I tend to see my world as potential ideas for self-published books which comes from spending a life-time documenting where I've been and it occurs to me that if a person were to publish all the Post-it Notes they write in a year, it would tell a story of who that person is. My story would be of a frustrated, bad speller who is easily impressed by lyrical sentences, a woman who has the memory of circus flea. (Circus fleas, I’m assuming, have slightly better memories as other fleas roaming the earth.) Throw in a little germaphobic tendencies and obsessive planning and my Post-it Notes book would write itself.

Currently I torturing myself with a Post-it Note with the words: Maggie’s Song, Chris Stapleton. I heard it for the first time this week and burst out in tears. It’s a country western song about a dog and you know the drill with dogs that are featured in movies and songs---they always die at the end. Maggie’s Song is no different and I only have to look at the pink note to chock up with thoughts of Levi not making it to the finish line of us living on a lake come October. And sometimes in the dead of night I wonder if I will make it, if the stress will kill me before I get there. In the daylight the logical part of my brain takes center stage and I know I'm doing the right thing at the right time in my life, and for the right reasons and everything is going to work out according to plan. If not, I'll alter the plan to suit how it does turn out.

I leave you with another one of my Post-it Notes, a dedication that I found in a not-so-good book by an author new-to-me, T.L.Swan. The first line made me laugh but by the time I finished reading her dedication I'd moved over into the that's-so-cool zone: "I would like to dedicate this book to the alphabet. For those twenty-six letters have changed my life. Within those twenty-six letters I found myself and live my dream. Next time you say the alphabet remember its power. I do very day." ©

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Levi and the Music in my Life

Levi had to go back to the vet recently for a recheck of the pus pocket on his lip. It cleared up nicely on the antibiotics but he was still digging and scratching the area constantly. This time we were able to see a 'skin tag' we didn’t see before and it freaked me out when I discovered it a few days before the appointment because I thought it was an embedded tick. Between the veterinary, her tech assistant, me and Levi’s cooperation the vet was able to pronounce that what I thought were legs coming out of the ‘thing’ were not. We were also able to see that the salivary gland near the upper lip where the pus pocket was two weeks ago was enlarged and the vet was guessing it’s plugged and that’s the source of the annoying itching Levi was experiencing. 

She put him on a twice a day drug for itching and it’s been like a miracle. I’ve only seen him digging at his mouth three times in four days since starting the pills. The plan is to reduce the drug down to once a day after a two week trial, hoping to give the salivary gland a rest and chance to correct itself. Going into surgically open it up or remove the gland would be costly and an unnecessary risk at his age. Better to do it with his annual teeth cleaning next summer, if the pills give him enough relief to wait and he's not running a fever. As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, “It’s always something.” 

Changing topics: I’ve been in the car a lot lately which means I’ve been hearing a lot of music. I don’t listen to it in the house but I’ll explain that later. Yesterday Thomas Rhett came on The Highway XM radio channel singing the last choir of his latest song, “Now I'm twenty-five and I'm drinking wine with my wife at home. Got a couple of dogs and a couple of songs on the radio and we sit around and we laugh about how we used to be when all we cared about was turning sixteen.” The song progressed from looking forward to sixteen, then to eighteen and twenty-one…always looking forward to the next benchmark. That’s what I’ve done my entire life, never happy with the here and now. That is until I got so old the next benchmark is dying and I find I don’t know how to live in the here and now.

Honestly, I don’t understand why people don’t like Country Western music. The songs are mini stories about looking back and looking forward and enjoying where you’re at. They’re about crying and laughing and loving. Sure, a few of the songs are about pickup trucks and hard drinking but more talk about things like skipping rocks on a river and watching sunsets with the one you love. And there’s a lot of practical advice in Country Western songs like in this one Kenny Chesney sang to me yesterday: 

“Scared to live, scared to die

We ain't perfect but we try

Get along while we can

Always give love the upper hand

Paint a wall, learn to dance

Call your mom, buy a boat

Drink a beer, sing a song

Make a friend….”

I don’t listen to music in the house is because 1) it makes me too moody, and 2) I get lost in the song writer’s creativity and that stifles my own if I’m trying to write. Getting lost in their storytelling makes me forget to eat, pay bills and wipe my…dog’s feet when he comes inside. You thought I was going to say something else, didn’t you. I thought about it but I pride myself on not being crude enough that I’d say “wipe my ass” in public. 

When I was in college I took a class on Music Appreciation and we studied classical pieces side-by-side with those written by the new-at-the-time Beatles. The professor predicted that the Beatles music would be around in four hundred years. Years later I got to hear an entire concert of Beatles music played by a full orchestra and I was blown away. The professor was right and I loved his class but the only time I listened to classical music after that was when I was plowing snow. Rachmaninoff’s Flight of the Bumblebee and Beethoven’s 5^th Sympathy could keep me awake like no other tip or trick of professional truckers. I still have my old cassettes but no way to play them without my pickup truck. 

Music played an important part in a different stage of my life. After my husband’s stroke I was back to singing childhood songs in the car everywhere we’d go. Songs learned before the age of five are stored in a different part of our brains, his speech therapist said, so singing them is a way to try to kick-start lost speech to come back. It didn’t work and after a year that "homework" faded out of our world but for the rest of his life Don often belted out, “Jesus likes me. Yo, you know” and every time I’d reply, “I think Jesus loved you when you were a kid." At that point he’d switch the only other song he could (almost) sing, Happy Birthday. Of all the things I’ve written over the past nearly two decades of writing on the web, my favorite humorous essay was about Don and his two songs. If interested, you can read it here. But be warned, the word ‘ass’ does come up. ©

Another $100 Day in Widowhood City

 

Levi’s day at the doggie foo-foo beauty spa by sheer coincidence always falls on the same day that I run errands. I love errand days otherwise known as my $100 days because that’s what they usually end up costing me. This time I started out by going to a big box store to find a hair dryer and an electric can opener. My old hair dryer still works great but I’ve had it since the 70s and it’s starting to fight with the electrical receptacle when I try to unplug it. When you find yourself googling what to do when a hair dryer catches on fire it’s time to say, “Enough is enough!” It’s a two-step process, in case you’re wondering, starting with unplugging the dryer and ending with putting it in the sink and don’t use water on it. 

The cordless can opener I bought claims it walks itself about the can. I haven’t tried it yet. I need to give up my hand-held old style can opener because my bone doctor wants me to avoid doing any hand/wrist action that torques my forearm enough to cause pain. This is the second can opener I’ve hauled home from the store. When I tried to push the lever down on the first can to poke the cutting blade into the can it didn’t pass the torque test, so I packed it back in the box and returned it. 

On my list of errands I had to get gas and go to the car wash and as I was passing by the cemetery where my husband's headstone is at, I was prompted to turn in for a quick visit. The minute I went through the wrought iron arch between the fieldstone walls I started puckering up, well on my way to spilling tears. But I didn’t. My unexpected melancholy changed to anger as quickly as a blink when I walked over to the stone and saw that is was almost entirely covered over with quack grass! His neighbor’s stone, a veteran of the Korean War, was only showing “KOR” and I had cleaned and edged both these gravestones the end of May! I’m going to go back after a good rain to pull that grass out but it won’t help much. The whole area is full of quack grass. They obviously aren’t doing any weed and feed treatments this summer. I’ve never seen it that bad! 

Shortly after leaving the cemetery the Y2 Country channel on Sirius radio had me smiling. I love the way those country/western song writers can turn a simple idea into a song like Zac Brown’s Keep me in Mind aka ‘call me’ if you’re ever between boyfriends. Or like Brad Paisley singing:

“…I'd like to see you out in the moonlight

I'd like to kiss you way back in the sticks

I'd like to walk you through a field of wildflowers

And I'd like to check you for ticks.”

“I’d like to check you for ticks.” Who knew those words could be so romance. I laughed out loud the first time that line came up in the song. I was still smiling when I went to the bank to get some cash, which I do every time Levi gets a haircut. I was wearing a pair of squeaky cross-trainer summer Crocs that announced my arrival as I walked across the marble floor of the empty bank. I don’t use those ATM machines that dispense cash. God, if we don’t start putting our feet down---literally---and go inside of places like banks and post offices and go through grocery store lines with human cashiers---we’ll all be going weeks without seeing a single person. And people need the greetings and how-are-you-todays, even the have-a-nice-days are better than no human contact!

After the bank I went to Starbucks for lunch---a bacon, Gouda and egg sandwich and a seriously strawberry Frappuccino. (260 calories for the latter and 370 for the former. No wonder I struggle with my weight!) I wanted to eat inside for the human contact but every chair was filled with 20 or 30-somethings all wearing ear bugs and starring at their devices. Clearly they don’t need real people when virtual ones are at their fingertips. I ate in the car with Kenny Chesney singing about a girl who thinks his tractor is sexy.

The outgoing message on my cell phone says, “Please leave a message but be aware I’m old and I might not find it.” When the doggie foo-foo beauty parlor called to let me know Levi was ready to be picked up I must have been out of the car---all three times. Silly people. I always drop him off at noon and pick him up at 4:00. I could never forget to pick up Levi the Mighty Schnauzer. ©