From the Dungeon of Pain to the Mahjong Table

A week that begins in a wound clinic and ends in a Mahjong classroom is, admittedly, not everyone’s idea of a balanced life — but for Jean, it’s just another chapter in her ongoing quest to stay upright, amused, and marginally patient with the world around her. From medical mysteries to sparrow‑themed tiles and one very inquisitive student, this dispatch wanders through pain, persistence, and the peculiar joys and frustrations of teaching seniors a game with more rules than Carter had little liver pills… AI

I knew I was in trouble when the instructions for my two‑hour appointment at the wound center included, “Take a pain medication before your appointment.” It also warned that if I was more than ten minutes late, the appointment would be rescheduled. Since I’d already waited weeks to get on their schedule, I was not going to be late come hell or high water. I left fifteen minutes early, thinking I’d use the extra time after I arrived to let my blood pressure come down from the stress of driving. What I didn’t count on was a construction zone that added extra time — not to mention extra stress — to my normal route to the hospital. I got there by the skin of my teeth.

I know what you’re thinking: no one has skin on their teeth, but what do you expect from a blogger who also uses the tired phrase “come hell or high water”? The latter is a quaint 19th‑century way of saying you have “an unyielding resolve to complete a task regardless of extreme obstacles.” My mom used to say it often. “Come hell or high water you’re going to finish your dinner or you'll sit there until bedtime. Liver, back in those days, was my biggest obstacle."

The “skin of my teeth” idiom comes from the Book of Job, verse 19:20. The King James Bible, published in 1611, translates it as: “My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.” I wonder if Job ever imagined his words ending up in The Dictionary of Clichés more than three hundred years after that translation. That was one of my favorite reference books before Google came along.

Didn’t I get off track. Now you know what it’s like to live inside my head. Back to the wound center — which I’d rename the Dungeon of Pain if that didn’t sound too much like a video game. But all kidding aside, it went well. The people were super professional and friendly. The LP helping the doctor kidded at one point, “Remember, I’m the one who gives you Lidocaine gel, and he’s the one who inflicts the pain.”

They debrided the wound on my foot and found formations of urate crystals, which was no surprise since I’d already been told I probably have gout. (And no, I’m not a heavy drinker. In my case it’s a side effect of having stage 3 kidney failure.)

But it was a surprise that they also found evidence of venous ulcers, which they suspect are caused by a leaking varicose vein. Now I’m waiting for a referral call to set up an appointment with a vein specialist. God — another specialist to add to my contact list. But the wound center doctor said we can’t get the wound healed until we get at the underlying causes. Why can’t we go back to the horse‑and‑buggy days when one doctor treated whatever ailed you? Never mind the life expectancy back then was 40 to 45. They also had over‑the‑counter cocaine and snake‑oil salesmen to help you cope.

I have to go back to the center every week for God only knows how long. A few days after that appointment I clicked on my patient portal to read the clinical notes. At the end of a bunch of medical terms strung together like popcorn on a Christmas tree, it said: “Estimated time for wound healing: 4 to 6 months.” Four to six months! And for the foreseeable future I need to stop walking for exercise. There goes my progress with losing weight. If it’s not one damn thing, it’s two damn things — another one of my mom’s favorite sayings.

Change of topic: I taught another Mahjong class of newbies today. Five senior citizens, and four of them will probably make it to the end, but one lady is trying my patience. I’ve been teaching classes once a year at my continuum care community for four years, and there’s always one person who gets hung up on the stupidest things.

When I was doing the history segment of the class, I showed them my one‑bams collection of tiles. They all have birds carved or painted on the fronts, and I explained you can date antique sets by the style of those birds. “I don’t get it. Why are they all birds?” Ms. Dense asked. “Tradition,” I replied. “The word Mahjong literally means ‘sparrow,’ and for centuries that’s how one‑bams tiles have been made.” “But why?” she asked again. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand,” I said. “It’s just an interesting sidebar to appreciating the history and artistry of the game.” She took up so much time with her “why this” and “why that” questions. “Why can’t I use a joker in a pair?” “Because it’s one of the fourteen rules for using jokers. Mahjong has a lot of rules, and part of the fun and challenge is remembering them all.” “But why do they have so many rules?”

I didn’t say it, but I wanted to tell her we’d need a time machine to take us back a century or two to get all the answers to her questions. You'd think that would be obvious with a game as old as Mahjong.

There you have it —another exciting week in my world. How did your week go? Bonus points if it involved fewer specialists and fewer people asking "why?" every few minutes. ©

Note: In the early 20^th century a massive advertising campaign inspired the well-known idiom, "He/She has more [things] than Carter has Little Liver Pills." They stopped making Carter's liver pills in 1959 so I can't be the only person old enough to remember this saying.

The first photo below is a collection of very old one bam Mahjong tiles made of ivory over bamboo. My collection (second photo) is much smaller and are mostly Bakelite tiles from the 1930s. 

         

Tiles, Trials, and Trying to Keep My Foot Attached

 If you’re wondering how Jean’s week went, picture me — her loyal AI Copilot — sitting at my digital desk with a stack of index cards labeled Foot Wound, Zepbound, Mahjong, Swearing in a Christian Community, and GLP‑1 Journaling: The Director’s Cut. I shuffled them like a Vegas dealer, hoping one would volunteer to be the star of this week’s blog post. Not a single card raised its hand.

But Jean managed to stitch these topics together like a parade of mismatched floats: medical drama, weight‑loss triumph, apartment chaos, Mahjong statistics, and a cameo from the ghost of her old Ouija Board. Now let’s dive into the week that tried very hard to be a novel but settled for being a blog post instead….AI

What to write about? I could do a long, depressing piece on my foot wound that hasn’t healed since May, even though I’ve been seeing my foot doctor twice a month. I’m finally getting a referral to a wound center for more intense treatment. In the meantime, I could fill a post with dark humor about how I had a nightmare two nights ago about becoming a one‑footed lady hobbling around in Balance Class. One of our residents did have to have her foot amputated and she died less than four months later.

Or I could do yet another crowing essay about my continued success losing weight with Zepbound. (Although I’d have to admit I’m terrified the wound center is going to make me quit doing my daily goal of 6,000 steps and I’ll be forced to sit in a chair all day eating bonbons until I gain back the 30 pounds I’ve lost.) To paraphrase something my mother used to say, “If it’s not one damn thing, it’s two damn things.” For the life of me I can’t remember if Mom actually used the word damn or if it’s something I added when I started finding places to insert it into conversations. I do have a bit of a potty mouth. Or I should say I used to have a more colorful vocabulary before moving into this Christian-based continuum care community. And don’t think that doesn’t give me a few nightmares as well — wondering when that filter in my brain will quit working and the granddaddy of all swear words will come out of my mouth. But maybe I have nothing to worry about on that score because I probably wore out the F‑word during my caregiving days, saying it for both myself and my aphasic husband. Sometimes life just needed a good “Fuck!” back in those days.

I could also do a self-deprecating post about how messy my apartment has become, a fallout from my weight-loss journey. Daily walking, going to the gym, and documenting every aspect of my bodily functions in my GLP‑1 journal is time-consuming. Go ahead — ask me anything about what went in or came out of my body over the past eight weeks and it’s all written down. I could even tell you my oxygen saturation, blood pressure, or sleep apnea number for any given day. The journal also tracks moods, energy, food noise, hunger, and thirteen possible side effects, none of which I’ve had except daily hiccups — which isn’t even one of the listed side effects. Lucky me. The journal is a great tool for people who like answering questions like: What was your win this week? What will you change next week? What do you want to discuss with your doctor or pharmacist? Where was your injection site this week? Etc., etc.

None of the above topics is calling my name this week. But I can hear Mahjong speaking up, and it’s been a long time since I’ve written about that obsession of mine. For anyone who doesn’t know or remember, I’m in charge of our Mahjong group here on campus. I text members the day before our weekly game days to get a count on how many will be there. On game days I set up the sets we’ll need, and afterward I tally the stats, and put the sets and room back together. I do get help with those two tasks. And when I get back to my apartment, I feed the stats to my AI MS Copilot to figure out every player’s percentages of wins vs. games played over the year. I’m the second-highest winner so far, winning 39% of the games I play. Don’t be too impressed by that. Online, when I play against three bots, I only win 18% of the time. Last year online I was at least above the statistical average of 25%. This year’s card is considerably harder — and that’s not just my opinion. I blame my poor stats on that.

Anyway, I’m in the process of re-designing classes that I’ll be teaching starting the first week of September. This will be my forth year teaching. The first year I co-taught with the woman who actually started the group and taught me and four others how to play. But she’s got dementia now and isn’t able to teach anymore. She still plays, but she’s down to winning only 10% of her games and she has to ask for clarification on rules and tile identifications quite often. She handles it well — with lots of humor — and it’s still a delight to play at her table.

In a CCC like ours, my Mahjong classes have drawn several people who were in the various stages of dementia, and when they sign up I’m always hopeful they don’t show up for classes. But who am I to say what someone else can or cannot learn? So if they do show up, I do my best to teach them. I’ve been told I have the patience of Job, but not knowing the Bible story of Job, I don’t fully understand what that means — other than I know it’s meant as a compliment. This year I’m revamping my first class as an introductory lecture of sorts on the history of the game and the Mahjong League, plus showing a set laid out with its suits all together and another set laid out the way it looks when the game is ready to begin. I’ll also hand out a syllabus of what they’ll learn in each of the three classes that will run through September. I’m hoping this introduction — instead of diving right into the nitty-gritty of a complicated game to learn — will cut the dropout rate down because fewer will sign up when they see what all is involved in learning the game.

So there you have it — my past week in all its chaotic, funny, frustrating detail. No wonder I couldn’t settle on a single topic. Life doesn’t always hand things out in manageable crumbs; sometimes it tosses the whole bakery at you. That’s the way I feel sometimes, like I’m getting lost in the minutia of life and overlooking what really matters. Still, even in the mess of wounds, weight loss, Mahjong stats, and the daily business of staying upright and engaged, there’s a rhythm to it all. Even if it is a rhythm that, at 84, is moving too fast for me to gather answers to my own questions about what really matters, what's next, and whether The Great Unknown has a Mahjong table waiting for me. Sometimes I wish I had my old Ouija Board back to answer these burning questions. ©

If Our Country Crashes Can I Return this?

My youngest niece is one lucky woman. She fell down a flight of stairs and ended up at the bottom head first and on her back. The only bone she broke was her big toe and that was so messed up they had to remove the nail bed. She said that hurt worse than anything she’d ever had happen to her and that includes having two babies and a hip replacement. "Yup," I told her, "that's why the Japanese used to do it during WWII to torture American prisoners." 

 

Her hip replacement was in April but the fall—thank goodness—didn’t effect it nor did she have a concussion. I saw a photo of the back of her neck and shoulders and you couldn’t tell where one black and blue mark started and another ended. She has to see her orthopedist about her shoulder but, like I said, she is one lucky woman who I hope will never, ever again break my Cardinal Rule about walking around after you’ve taken a sleeping pill. You have 15 minutes after you take one to get in bed and stay there!

 

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. 

 

I also bought a keyboard skin for my new computer. I

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.

 

Anyway, when I’m not shopping online or working on another custom paint-by-number I've been scaring myself with the possibility of organizing a Mahjong tournament between six o seven CCC’s in the area. The social media guy was watching me set up tables for our weekly game and I happen to mention that was my dream is to have a tournament involving all the CCCs in the area. “But” I continued, “we don’t have enough tables for something like that.” He looks me straight in the eyes and says, “I can make that happen. This is in my wheelhouse.” He named a near-by venue that is one of the classiest places in the area for parties! I don't know if I'm up to chairing an event that large or not but I'm going to avoid the guy until I figure it out. ©

 Until next Wednesday. 

When Patriotism Feels Broken

This past Fourth of July weekend was a whirlwind of activity around my continuum care campus but in between the fun stuff I’ve been quietly grieving the loss of the country I once thought I knew and understood. So I skipped the band concert of patriotic music and a pizza party organized by a 45/47 MAGA supporter. We’re (and by we’re I mean the current administration) has been breaking presidential norms all over the place, not to mention the laws of our democracy. America, I’m tired! I’m tired of the flag waving 45/47 supporters and the greedy, spineless politicians who just voted to put the next generation into so much debt they’ll never see the light of day. And God help us if Japan, who owns a good share of our 36 trillion dollars of debt, calls in their loans. And that 36 trillion doesn’t include the 3.9 trillion the so-called Big Beautiful Bill will add over the next decade.  

I’m also tired of ICE and their cruel and illegal acts being committed against our immigrant population. I’m tired of people thinking it’s perfectly okay to snatch people off the streets, out of labor & deliver rooms, etc., without due process of the law, and put them in detention centers. I’m tired of overhearing fellow residents at the next dinner table talking with glee over Alligator Alcatraz and how fat and happy those alligators will grow while at the same time being served their dinner by the son of immigrants. Did they assume the poor kid doesn’t have ears to hear their disgusting remarks? By the way, the photo up above was posted at the official website for Homeland Security. Let that sink in.

I did go to our fourth of July picnic because it’s not often we get barbecued chicken and corn of the cob and if any of us wanted to eat that day, it was sign up for the picnic or forage for your own meal out in the community. I wasn’t born yesterday so I opted to stay off the busy roads on the third—yes, holiday parties around my CCC are usually the day before the actual holiday so that most of the staff can spent it with their families. Our picnics, band concerts and other outdoor events host all residents from all three buildings and our  townhouses in a fenced-in area between the Assisted Living and Memory Care buildings known as The Park. It’s a pretty place that keeps the inmates from walking away while still giving them access to be outside under a canape of trees with a lake view on one side and a wooded view opposite. A few people from my Independent Living building don’t like to go there because they see their futures and it scares them. I get that but as I tell them, seeing how kind and attentive the aids are with the residents from the Assisted Living and Memory Care buildings is comforting and helps diminish the fear of ending up down there. And after living here in IL for over three years, we all know people who've had to move into AL and MC. 

On the Fourth itself the temperature was supposed to get up into 90s so an outdoors pizza party that was planned by residents from our townhouses followed by watching the firework ended up getting changed. (They have their own outdoors area to gather around a fire pit.) The pizza part got canceled and we were to meet later when the sun was setting and it wouldn’t be so hot. But when one of the 45/47 supporters (who laughed over alligators getting fat) heard that he sent out a text message that he was going to take charge of ordering pizza and we could sign up with him. There were some hurt feelings between the townhouse organizers (who originally had invited everyone in Independent Living) because they didn’t get the text invitation to join in at the IL building where the second pizza party was being planned. A day later that oversight was corrected but by then the damage had been done and a boycott began. I was one of those who skipped pizza but I did hang out with the townhouse people at the fire pit. Originally they had forty people signed up but without the pizza that got whittled down to twenty-five for fireworks. But only six people got together for pizza. The whole planned and canceled then planned again was too confusing for some.

Last winter the MAGA guy who decided to organize the second pizza party caused another turf war over the Bridge Club. At one time they had three tables that played twice a week but he caused so much trouble over rotating players—he didn’t want to play with slower players—that several couples dropped out. Then he poached off the fast players and started a second bridge group. So now we have two clubs run by two different people. Sometimes it can be a regular little soap opera around here which I’m sure is true with all places where people get to know each well. Sometimes personalities clash.

The highlight of the long weekend was Saturday when I got to play four extra Mahjong games. Two of us from Independent Living and two ladies from the townhouses played at one of their homes. Let me tell you playing Mahjong where you didn’t have to be careful not to talk too load or edit which topics you bring up was different than playing in our regularly scheduled games in our pubic bistro. We had fun! I wish I had a table suitable to set up the game to I could invite people to play extra games in my apartment in addition to the weekly games where we usually have three tables. I wish I hadn’t given my card table and chairs away when I moved. I also wish I hadn’t given a folding camp chair away. To watch fireworks I had to bring the walker I used when I broke my ribs to sit on. There have been other outdoor occasions down at the fire pit when we've require we bring our own chairs. With all the planning I did before the move, I didn’t see those needs coming. ©

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. ©

Shoe Cleaning, Mahjong, Good Friends and Old Wives Tales

There's an old wives tale that says deaths always come in threes and that's been true for me this past week. No one especially close to me, but two of those who died effected people I care about. You know how that is…they feel pain and you are left wishing there was something you could say to take it away. Of course, we all know there isn't a thing we can do except act as a sounding board and/or send sympathy cards out to the appropriate people. In this case, I'm sending out a half a box cards to great-nieces and great-nephews who lost their grandfather or stepfather. Additional cards will go to a newly minted widow and her daughter (my niece-law) and the daughter of a one of my old Gathering Girls group members. And, yes, I'm old enough that I now buy sympathy cards by the box full. No one tells you this comes with living into your eighties. 

The latter woman who died shocked me the most. I hadn't seen her much since I moved three years ago although we did occasionally talk on the phone. To this day those bi-monthly lunches we Gathering Girls had were some of the most fun times I've had in my life with gal-pals. I never had to be on my best behavior with them---never had to hide my political views or my lack of a church family like I did with my Red Hats Society group or in my current living situation. She beat breast cancer once but lost the second battle with it. 

I'm going to turn this around to happier thoughts. As I sit here I'm in a very clean apartment even though my monthly cleaning lady doesn't come until Monday. How did that happen? you might be asking. The son-I-wish-I-had and his wife came to take me out for lunch and she'd never seen my place. I wanted her to be able to look to her heart's content without me being embarrassed by a layer of dust or the things that seems to clutter up the corners like my Mahjong set and mat and an assortment of footwear that has a way of gathering around the only chair in the apartment that is low enough for me to put them on and take them off.

Tim has been a great friend for decades. He will even get a 10% slice of my estate when I die, should anything be left over at that point in time. The way the price of everything is going up and up these days, I'm starting to worry that I'll outlive my bank account. I'm obviously not worried enough that it stopped me from signing up for Retail Therapy Sessions through the holidays. But I've reigned in that horse in case anyone else named in my estate was worried. 

Have I told you guys about my last big splurge? I sent off the lightest and darkest Mahjong tile from my 1930s Perching Parrot Bakelite set to a service that matched them up with enough orphan tiles so that I can turn them into jokers. You have to do that with all the early sets if you want to use them to play American Mahjong. At the risk of boring the non-players reading this, I also bought on eBay one wooden tile for my new/old 1923 Babcock set. What are the odds that I'd find something that small and old to complete the set? I love people who recognize that there is a lid to fit every pot in the world of collectibles and I only had to pay ninety-nine cents to win that auction. The seller, however, is charging me twelve dollars to mail it. He should have had his opening bid higher but he hedged his bet with his shipping charge. I don't care but some buyers would ding his ratings for that. I see it as a miracle that someone across country had a tiny, 100 year of thing like that and went to the trouble to find it a home. We are kindred spirits. 

Tim and his wife spent three hours with me and that laugh-filled visit combined with 2025 popping up on the calendar put me on a manic streak. I've been so productive every since, checking off stuff on my to-do list that I thought would take me deep into January. One of those things involves the Gogooda shoe washing bags pictured up above, bought during one of my Retail Therapy sessions. I have two pairs of tennis shoes that were both looking grubbing but are still in great condition. Magic erasers and other shoe cleaners weren't making much difference. Looking at the price of new shoes, I decided to try these bags out and I am happy with how the first pair came out. Those bags even have pockets inside for the laces and the soles. I may pre-treat the second pair for even better results. 

The set (2 bags and two shoe trees) cost $23.00 at Amazon and were very quiet in the washing machine. (I have a shoe rack for my dyer which makes shoe drying quiet as well---first time I ever used it.) If my little "infomercial" tempts you, don't buy the yellow ones as a few of the reviews mentioned the color bled on to their shoes. 

Normally, I'm able to talk myself out of something I didn't know I wanted after until I saw it. But the siren call of Retail Therapy that gives us a temporary high was my rebellion against the week when I wrote about the Swedish Death Cleaning. I don't do Retail Therapy to fill an emptiness or other need inside me very often and I don't recommend it so there no need to plan an intervention for me, thank you very much.  ©

Until Next Wednesday.  

 

Before

 

After

How I'm Surviving the Holidays

How did is get to be December already? And why have I started my annual pilgrimage to Diet and Exercise Mountain already, a full month before I'd traditionally do it?  I've got the answer to that second question. It's the fact that I've stress-eaten myself into gaining so many pounds this year that my clothes are getting uncomfortably tight and I refuse to buy a bigger size. I'm so serious about this that I'm not entering the gingerbread house building contest this year. Aside from the fact that I can't have all that candy around tempted me night after night as I'd add layer after layer of gum drops, gumballs, life savors, pretzels, cotton candy, twisted licorice, etc., etc. on a cookie house put together with Royal Icing. I also want to give some of the others residents at my CCC a chance to place in the winner's circle this year. Between shopping for just the right candy and building a gingerbread house, then decorating it, I'd be on a sugar high for over a month and once you're riding on that tiger's back it's hard to get off. And think of the money I'm saving. Gingerbread house decorating is expensive when you do things like buy a box ice cream cones because you want one to cover in spearmint leaf-shaped confectionery. Last year a bought an entire bag of something just to get a star shaped piece of candy for the top of the aforementioned Christmas tree. I need to go get on the scales. I think I gained a pound just writing this paragraph. 

Another reason why I'm not entering to contest is it's time consuming and I'm back to feeling like I'm running out of time in my old age to finish all the things that need doing and/or I want to do. Naturally, being a self-indulgent kind of person I usually end up doing the fun stuff before things like mattress turning, closet and filing cabinet purging, starting my income taxes and fine tuning my estate plans. And being a worry wart I've accumulate a lot of necessary distractions from what our reality will be after January 20th. My upstairs neighbor says she's just not going to worry about it. Easy for her to say, she's 93 and a prime candidate to be shipped off to the glue factory and she says there's nothing we can do to change things. I don't agree but that's not the post I'm writing today.

What projects are on my agenda right now? I'm working on finishing a landscape painting that I don't like but I need to cross it off the list so I can go on to a more inspiring painting, another customized paint-by-number of one of my niece's grandsons. She asked me to do it from one of her favorite photos. When I ordered the kit from the Asian import company they made it and sent it out the same day when others I've ordered from them took several weeks to product before putting it on a slow boat from China. I think they were trying to beat the coming tariff increases this time, same as me. After that is completed I want to try to repaint some of the tiles in my new 1930's Bakelite Mahjong set that my nice gifted me a couple of weeks ago. I've watched two videos on how to restore them and it doesn't look that hard to do. The only part you can't do over and over again until you get it right is putting the tiles in the oven to 'age' the ones that are lighter in color than the rest of the set. I won't be doing that on this set but I've love items made with Bakelite my entire adult life so I'm fascinated by the change-the-color-process. I might try the process on some orphan tiles I've accumulated in my hunt for one bams.

On Black Friday I took full advantage of the sales and also bid on a 1923 wooden Mahjong set. Won it! It's missing one tile that I think I can duplicate over at the wood shop and then dink around to get the aged paint color just right. But I won't let myself play around with that project until I've condensed and purged some stuff on a bookshelf in my den closet. That's my plan: for every project I do that's fun I'll alternate it with projects that need to be done, be it deep cleaning or downsizing here in the land of I won't live forever. Do I sound manic? I would be if all the plans in my head actually come to pass. They won't. But half a list accomplished is better than nothing and without a list that's what would happen.

I did manage to carry out a project for the common good here on the continuum care campus. Our mail room cabinet where we store out of seasonal decor, Mahjong sets and boxed puzzles was in desperate need of cleaning and organizing. It's always been a fight for space as the puzzle boxes seem to breed in the dark. So I took it upon myself to move the puzzles to our library---after getting permission from the woman who man's our library. She's self-appointed but was an actually librarian before retirement and she's done wonders with our library here, doubling it's size and rotating books between ours and the library in our assisted living building on campus and the county library's donation box. Book seems to breed in the dark around here, too. It felt good making space where it was needed and giving people better access to the puzzles.

I've also started gearing up for another project in the community. Starting in mid January I'm teaching three two hour classes in how to play Mahjong followed by a month of monitoring a newbie table of players during our regular club's playing time. I teach with a lot of hand-outs so I'm set up folders for the class attendees this time around. 

But the biggest thing I'm doing to get through the season is what I'm not doing. I skipped going go the choral concert, the brass band concern, the Christmas plays and live nativity, the bus tour of city lights and I won't be enjoying cookies-by-the-fireplace Christmas morning. And I didn't join the decorating committee who spent last week decking the halls with every wreath, garland, tree, ornaments, candle sticks, nativity sets, lights, reindeer and red bows on the planet. I am, however, going to the Christmas buffet, a sing-along, a cookie decorating party and the White Elephant Gift exchange. And I just returned from seeing a ballet company of girls 13 and under who performed to music from The Nutcracker. 

There truly is something for everyone to do around here and no pressure if you want to sit out any or all parts of the festivities. Well, I shouldn't say that. I've been taking heat for a week for not building a gingerbread house this year and I'd like to punch the woman who keeps nagging me about my decision. ©