Morning Routine: After getting up and using the bathroom, I
walk through the house opening the blinds and pulling the shades up. Then, in
the kitchen I’ll wash my hands a second time in hot, soapy water just in case
one sleepy morning I forgot to do it before leaving the bathroom and those
shades and blinds have some yucky-do germs on them. As a personal foible, that’s
harmless enough. I’m not a total germaphobic but I do wipe down shopping
cart handles during flu season with the store provided anti-bacteria wipes and
I am afraid of those shade and blind controls. No one ever washes those wands and
knobs. No one. Nowhere. Including me.
With that ritual out of the way, I take a cup of water out
of the refrigerator (that I measured out the night before---foible #2) and I pour
it in the Keurig coffee maker then turn on the TV and the computer while it’s
brewing. With my coffee in hand, I’ll check my blog and others in the blogging
community first, then I’ll see what’s new at the political debate site where I
frequently post. Eventually I’ll get around to Facebook and email although often
these will have to wait until evening if I get too wrapped up in my earlier cyber
stops or I’m working on a new blog entry.
The dog has his own routine. Levi gets up earlier than I do,
moves to the library where he can watch for pee mail deliveries from our four
legged neighbors going by the house, then he goes back to sleep again for a few
hours. But he thinks the blender is an alarm clock so when I pull the second
cup of water out of the refrigerator to make a protein shake, Levi comes out to
the kitchen to get a few pieces of fruit. Next I’ll get his feed and fresh
water ready and while he’s outside doing his morning business I’ll be drinking
my breakfast. Mid-morning it's back to the bathroom to get a shower or
sponge bath in preparation for whatever in written in my day planner. The dog
parks himself on the end of the bed where he can watch me in the bathroom doing
all that. He’s either a pervert or sad because he knows there’s a chance I’ll
be leaving him alone soon after.
The dog and I might live a boring life filled with routines
and foibles but ‘boring’ is a good thing when compared to the perils of living in
a world without the opportunity to develop them in the first place. People
don’t grow up aspiring to be Syrian war refugees, for example. Circumstances
beyond our control can change the trajectory of our lives in the time it takes
to spray paint the word “Boring!” on a
subway wall. Don’t do that, by the way, I doubt you’re young enough to outrun
the graffiti police. The point is no matter how pedestrian our lives get we should
never forget to be grateful for that. End of mini sermon; yes, I’m writing this
on Sunday. Below will be written on Tuesday after balance class.
I put off doing my homework for balance class until the last
minute. When I finally did it I suppose I was in the Scarlett Club of Denial
because I thought I was too young to be asking myself if I agree or disagree
with stupid questions like: 1) Falling should be accepted as a natural part of
growing old, or 2) If I report a fall to a doctor s/he may think that I can’t
take care of myself. Already I’ve learned to use a pencil when checking boxes in
the workbook because if you don’t answer “correctly” the workbook asks you to
write an essay on how you can change your mindset. It’s like the workbook was
trying to yell, “Pay attention! You know damn well the next fall could put you
in a nursing home!” But all I really heard was a condescending blah, blah, blah.
Foible Alert #3: Yes, I can be stubborn when I think a workbook is talking down
to little old widow-ladies like me. Give me a list of ‘dos and don’ts’ and a
set of exercises and wish me luck! Good-bye, nice meeting you.
In class, however, when the twelve of us were sitting around
discussing our workbook questions and answers I was forced to knowledge (if
only to myself) that the whole point of the workbook homework was to get us to exchange
our fears with constructive behaviors to avoid falls. Fears, if left to fester,
can make our world grow smaller and smaller.
And while we were sitting in class someone tried to drive
through the wall just a few feet away from us, a classic old person mistake of
stepping on the gas pedal instead of the break. Emergency vehicles and help and lawyers from the office next door came like a swarm
of locust and, thankfully, her car took the most damage---front grill, hood and
fender. The steel I-beam inside the wall she hit kept the car out of the
building. If she had tried to park just one space over, she would have ended up
through a large window and on top of our table. We were lucky! Like I wrote up above,
it only takes a split-second for the trajectory of our lives to change forever.
©
In
other news— Well, there really isn’t any unless you count the
fact that I did a little stress shopping this week. I know, at my age
why am I still accumulating stuff? Sometimes I look around at all the
stuff I kept after downsizing three and a half years ago to move to
my continuum care campus and it makes me feel guilty that someday it
will be the responsibility of my nieces to dispose of. But this time it was both my
nieces and Amazon Prime’s big sale that is responsible for me
buying a portable DVD player for $34. They are both super-fans of the
series Mad Men and for a long time I’ve
wanted to be part of their conversations about the show so my oldest
niece loaned me DVD’s of the first few
seasons. But I was having a
lot of trouble getting my new-ish Roku TV and my DVD player to work together.
Finally, I put in a maintenance request but the maintenance guy for our
building couldn’t get it to
work either (which made me feel good that it wasn’t just an old
person problem). He was going to send the
IT guy out which would have
cost me $45 and when I was bemoaning this fact to my youngest niece
she sent me a link
to the portable DVD player that she uses. Snap decisions were made and I
found myself putting the DVD player in my cart. I love the idea of
not having to sit in the living room to watch movies, though. I’m
not sorry for the purchase and now I can look forward to donating my
old DVD player to Goodwill and checking out the movies that they have
for sale dirt cheap.
That
was an expensive phone call between my youngest niece and myself. I told her
to keep her eye out for a used card table when she goes out garage
shopping and I was telling her how having one will benefit my social
life because I’ll be able to invite people over for impromptu
Mahjong games. We were both looking at them on Amazon as I was
showing her what I wanted and lo and behold one jumped in my cart
along with the DVD player. The prime sale had it marked down to $50.
I was a little remorseful over spending the money on that because I
could live without one by asking players to meet in the public areas. But later on I recognized that this was as much about stress spending over the state of
the world as it was about the bonding conversation I was having with
my niece.
Stress
spending or stress eating. I haven’t been doing the latter so I’m
making up for it by spending money. My desk, for example,
will soon be all decked out with a full drawer-sized mouse pad that
looks like an oriental rug. I ordered one that came in the wrong size and it had to be reordered. It came from China and they don’t
want that first sent back so its 24 inches are adding class to the top of my desk while waiting for the 20 inch pad to fill the computer's pull-out drawer. 
usually eat my
breakfast at my computer and cleaning my keyboard is a chore I no
long have to worry about. The skin lifts off so you can run it under the faucet. Once I spilled a glass of water on my
keyboard but I got lucky and was able to save it. The skin at eight bucks plus shipping is worth it. Or so I tell my credit card.
And
to round out my stress spending the Amazon truck has been stopping
often with new, tiny paint brushes as I search for the perfect one.
After the fifth try I think I found it. And for anyone out there who
loves to do paint-by-numbers I found a product that makes a
difference when the paint in those little tubs gets stiff. It’s a
slow-drying thinner for acrylics. There are lots of brands but the
photo shows the one I bought. I’ve read reports that you can even
bring back tubs that are all dried up with these acrylic thinners if
you take your time, over several days. By the way, I live less than five miles from the Amazon's distribution center and they stop at my complex three times a day, so I'm not feeling guilty over making small purchases from time to time.
