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

My Super-Doper Weight Loss Discovery

Remember back before my house sold when I was eating my way through my stress and I topped off the 5-6 pounds I gained during the pandemic last winter with a few more? Guess what! They’re all gone now plus a couple of extras and I hit a low I haven’t been at since before the pandemic. How did I accomplish this blissful feat? It wasn’t a planned diet nor did I lose any limbs but since I started the packing process I’ve been so busy that my step counter says I’ve been reaching my daily goal of 6,000 step in the middle of the afternoon---instead of closer to bedtime, if at all---plus for some odd reason I started buying BelVita Breakfast cookies. I don’t know what’s in those suckers but I can eat a serving size package at 7:30-8 o’clock and they keep the hunger away until noon-ish. Not bad for a 230 calorie, flavorful cardboard-like breakfast.

At noon I’ve been drinking an Atkin’s meal replacement shake which is nothing new for me to do when I'm busy and they keep me from thinking about food until 5-6:00 when I’ve been having a Stoufer’s or Atkin’s frozen dinner or take out. It’s been several weeks since I used up all real food in my freezer---chicken, beef, salmon, pork, homemade chili, etc.---and I haven’t wanted to buy more. Same with my pantry, I’ve used up as much stuff as I can. Most of the snack foods are gone from the house and evn if it wasn't by evening when I’d normally be tempted by them, I’ve been too tired to walk out to the kitchen to scout out what's left in the cupboards.

I’m glad I decided not to upgrade my wardrobe before the move. If I can keep this up through the fall and winter I’ll be in a smaller size by spring when I'll have fun wearing out the pages of the L.L. Bean catalog. With a gym roughly a 100 feet from my new apartment door and two on-campus restaurants that will be serving far better and healthier food than I’ll been eating since before the pandemic, there is no reason why I can’t keep this ball rolling to a new me.

And guess what else is new! I got my long, pandemic driven hair cut off. Gone are the sexy locks and in its place is an easy-breezy style. It still isn't as short as I’ve worn it most of my life but I told my stylist I wanted to get rid of four inches and leave two-three to possibly get cut off at my next and last haircut with her. I'm going to miss that girl! She’s helped me grow my hair out to the longest it's been since I was a child. It's been a fun distraction when I had the time to mess with it. Growing it out and getting haircuts every four weeks doesn’t compute for some people but my hair grows fast and needs to be trimmed and thinned like clock work or it goes Afro. Not that there’s anything wrong with having an Afro but that style on white-bread me gives me nightmares of what my high school senior photos looked like when all the cool girls in my class had straight-as-a-pin pageboys.

The son-I-wish-I-had came over this week and we make a game plan for the week of the move which settled my nerves down considerably. His sons are helping Tim load and unload the truck---he's licensed to drive large vehicles and has been doing so for decades. They are all work horses and great people to be around if you don’t talk politics. Tim owns a business that includes moving stuff out of houses and cleaning them up after people move out. He gets a lot of business from banks that have done foreclosures and realtors who sell estate houses. In both cases families tend to walk away from a lot of the contents. Tim will do a good job for me---he moved me into this house---and I’ll be saving several thousand dollars. Not that I’m using him to save money. I was to be his Guinea Pig to see if he wanted to expand his business to offer a service of helping seniors downsize and move. 

We both did some research into the idea, including having him sit in on a couple of free estimates I got from companies who do that sort of thing. In the end, he decided the senior moving service business is not for him. The two businesses we sucked information up from both have retail shops to sell the downsizing stuff they get paid too well to pack up and haul away. They charge $75 an hour per person. Tim's going rate is a two hour minimum for $75 then $35 per hour after that for his wages and $25 for his extra workers. One of the downsizing specialists had actual dollar signs lighting up her greedy eyes when she walked through my house like I was too stupid to know I had some valuable stuff she could charge me to haul away, then sell to line her purse.

I've got to get back to work. I have a small chair cushion to cover and an oil lamp to clean---both sentimental pieces from the cottage where I spent all my summers growing up. I need to get that lamp oil up to hazardous waste and return the shoot stapler that I borrowed for the cushion project. It's a wicker chair I used as a toddler and I was planning to used that chair as a toy box for Levi...but we all know how that's turning out. I don't know how to say this without sounding "???" but thoughts of leaving my life with Levi behind in this house is hitting me harder than leaving the memory triggers of husband behind. I saw someone walking a schnauzer yesterday and out of no where I burst into tears. I guess six months of mourning the fact that I'll probably never had another fur baby is not long enough...  ©

The Roll Top Desk and other War Stories from Downsizing Street

The son-I-wish-I-had came over recently to fix a drywall tape that had come loose on the vaulted ceiling in my garage. We keep a running tab of how much each of us owes the other…me for his labor and him for things he buys from me. Money rarely changes hands. This is nothing new. We like to barter and have been doing it for decades.

I had a cool tourist rooms globe, circa 1910, that's easily worth $900 that’s been in our virtual lay-away department since last fall and I asked Tim if he still wanted it or should I put it up for sale. “Where do we stand on our running tab?” he wanted to know. I got out the book and I owed him $563. Tim pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket, counted it out $437 and says, “I’m taking it home today.” Like I said, money rarely changes hands between us and I have strict orders not to tell his wife what he paid for the globe. Tim knows the guys who wrote the collector's guide on globes almost as well as I do and a quick phone call would get it sold, should he ever want his money back. Those guys are like head-hunters for globe collectors. They know who is looking for what.

The tourist globe is an interesting piece of Americana from the days when automobile travel first became popular and tourists were looking for rooms to rent as they used the then newly connected interstate roads. Motels were still nonexistent and travelers often pitched tents in city parks with their blessings. Enterprising people rented rooms out in their homes along the routes and got listed in guide books that were put together by entrepreneurs and visionaries. These globes were hung in the windows of private homes and if the light was on that meant their room-for-rent was vacate. (Motel-6's tag line is a throwback to those early days.) Cross-country auto races were also a gimmick to promote auto sales and auto travel in the same era and newspapers all across the country covered them. I had a small collection of circa 1910 early tourism stuff…mostly photos of auto-campsites and races, a travel guide and a how-to auto-camp book---all of which I sold on e-Bay. I still have a full, disposal paper towel dispenser with cool graphics on the front showing an auto-campsite that I’m keeping for God knows why. It doesn’t offer the same opportunities for show-and-tells as when I had more early auto tourism stuff. Yes, we were that couple who had endless stories about those 'madcap days' when horseless carriages and touring cars caused life as they knew back then to change forever.

That day Tim came over we had already made a barter deal for the drywall repair and fixing a couple of other small things around the house in exchange for an antique Morris-style oak chair that was made by the Royal Easy Chair Company that was patented in 1899. It has a push button, back recliner with seven settings and the only one who ever used the chair was Levi. It sat by the window in the library where he waited every day for pee mail from the canines out for their morning or afternoon walks. It had been his chair since puppyhood. I still catch myself momentarily forgetting he's gone. But I'm digressing from telling Tim stories.

Don had a roll top desk that he bought when Tim and his wife were living across the street as newlyweds 35-ish years ago and while he was here I told him my April goal was to sell the desk and its match filing cabinet. We started looking it over and Tim grabbed the handle to pull the rolling top closed and before I could stop him, it was locked. With the key to open it locked inside the desk. The swear words that came out of me shocked even me. He never swears. Ever. So I’ve always been careful around him not to let even the mildest swear words like ‘crap’ slip pass by my lips. And my swear-fest started the Circus Hour. He kept saying, “Don’t panic!” while we both panicked. “We’ll get it open!” He called a locksmith and got instructions on what he could try and a $90 quote to come out to solve our problem. The suggested credit card trick didn’t work. We googled the brand of lock and found keys online for $9 to $15. We tried pulling so hard that the screws were coming out of the wood until we were afraid we’d split the oak. We even considered filing those exposed screws in half.

At one point Tim looked at me and asked, “Are you laughing or crying?” “A little of both,” I replied. “This reminds me of the time Don took the drawer out of an antique National cash register and couldn’t get it back in.” The elderly man who ran the antique store where the register was up for sale was freaking out and so was Don who spent the next hour trying to get it back in place. He took the drawer out to show the guy that on the underside of those old Nationals was the date it was built, the model number and other interesting things only the release latch on this guy’s register wasn’t working properly. It was working by the time Don took it apart and put it back together but the old guy's daughter had to be called in to calm shop owner down while Don worked on it. After that day neither Tim or I would let Don touch an antique cash register which wasn't easy because it was one of his favorite "parlor tricks." Tim was with Don that day and, thankfully, I wasn't but the story had been retold so many times I felt like I was.

Back to the roll top desk. “Don’t you have a bunch of skeleton keys around here we could try?” Tim asked. “I had over 250 keys and I sold them all on e-Bay,” I told him and then I got out a 4"x"6"x1" tin box of extra keys for things I still owned to show him how few keys I still had left. Don and I took a lot of kidding over the years about the volume of our keys. We both had every obsolete key to every single thing we ever owned plus we bought skeletons whenever we found them. Not to mention we had keys for 15 vehicles that we used for business---all with locking gas caps---a four family apartment building, a storage pole barn, padlocks on gates, 3 houses plus keys to our parent's houses, 2 snowmobiles, countless tool chests and filing cabinets. We also had keys to the maintenance rooms at a shopping mall and a multiplex theater where we had to go when we needed to turn on the parking lot lights when we did snowplowing, power sweeping, fixed potholes or painted yellow lines in the middle of the night. And did I mention we had locking showcases in our vendor spaces at several antique malls? For Christmas one year I made Don a fancy wood key rack and tooled leather key tags to ID and organize all the business keys. Took me forever but it was worth it. Don loved it!

And guess what we found in the tin box I showed Tim at the end of our Circus Hour. a key carefully labeled "extra key for Don's roll top desk." I apologized up one side and down the other for wasting an hour of Tim’s time and putting us both through a lot of stress. I even offered to credit him for an hour of labor on our running tab and he says, “I got another great Don and Jean story out of it so I'm good,” and he ended by saying he wants to buy the desk and filing cabinet. He just needs to work on his wife a little bit because when he came over that day, his wife said to him as he was walking out the door, “Don’t buy any more of Jean’s furniture!”  

I offered to give Tim the $563 I owned him if it would make his wife happy to come home from my place with something other than a barter---keep the globe in lay-away a little longer. But I think he was afraid with all the people coming to pickup Marketplace purchases someone will see that tourist globe, offer me more than the $900 and I'd cave. It already happened, twice---not the caving part but the rest. Tim is restoring a vintage Airstream camper up at his cottage with all mid-century vintage kitsch stuff. Apparently, there's a whole network of retro travelers who seek out and pay good money to go back in time to vacation like we did back in the 40s, '50s and '60s. The tourist globe will serve a similar purpose to the way it was used back when it was made only it will go in his cottage window instead of the Airstream's window that is permanently parked next door. When he gets it finished I'm going to reserve some time to stay there. ©

My Hodge-Podge Week

GATHERING GIRLS:  Why do all the bloggable things happen in one week? Monday started out with another long brunch with my Gathering Girls pals. And if I haven’t said it before, let me tell you that with the except using the F-word, I’ve never had friends that I’ve felt so completely free to say or do whatever silly or irreverent thing that crosses my mind. To misquote Sally Fields, "We like each other, we really do!” and that’s all the sweeter because we only met three years ago proving old dogs can learn new tricks. Unfortunately, though, our numbers keep dwindling. We started out with seven but Monday only three of us dined together. One was flying out to Arizona, another won't go to restaurants during the pandemic, a third lady was sick and one of our original gal pals had to drop out of our group for health or eye-sight issues---I don't remember which. Call me 'old'. I can take it.

THE ARGUMENT: Tuesday I had an argument with the dog, both of us speaking at full volume. Here’s the back story: My computer sits around the corner from the laundry room. In addition to what you’ll usually find in a laundry room is the door that leads to the garage and to another door leading outside to the dog’s yard. It’s also where Levi’s water and food dishes sit side-by-side. Yesterday I had my head lost in Facebook and Levi started in on me, acting like he wanted to go outside. Or so I thought. I opened the door to the garage and ordered, “Outside!” He took a leisurely stroll around the car and came straight back inside instead of heading to the outside door. Two minutes later he was begging again with the same results. After the fourth time I yelled at him to go get in his bed and he disobediently ran for the living room couch. And why not. I’ve let him treat the couch like a time-out, no scold zone so many times it’s actually become one. Five minutes later he was back in the laundry room again, this time banging his water dish against the wall and with a demonic look on his face that let me know that he knew my Facebook polluted brain was malfunctioning and not receiving the mental telepathy we usually share. It was so dry my heart sank, knowing he must have been without water all morning long. Levi accepted my apology but he put me on notice that it better not happen again. And don't you dare call the Old People Police! I'll deny the dog neglect ever happened.

HOUSE CLEANERS: Wednesday I lost my cleaning service, or rather I should say they lost me. After my favorite cleaner quit to go back to school the service hasn’t been able to find anyone to replace her who is willing to clean in my neighborhood. If I had a bigger house that took longer than 2 to 2 ½ hours to clean or they had other clients near-by, that might have changed things. But given the fact that they charged me an average of $74 per cleaning and the person who actually does the work only gets $30 of that fee I can see why no one wants to hop on the expressway from their offices to come through the heart of town to get here for a lousy $30 a month. I've all but resigned myself to cleaning my own house again---I did it all but the last 4-5 years of my life, so how hard could it be to get back in the groove?  I'm even warming up to the idea of earmarking the money I'll save for something special for my new home.

PARTY AT THE CCC: Thursday I had to make a $20,000 payment on the unit in the continuum care campus where---with any luck---I’ll be living by this time next year. Their marketing managers usually invent a reason to bring those of us who have already bought into the dream out to the building site around the time when a scheduled payment is due. This time they called their social-distancing party a “Topping Out Celebration.” The construction company brought a large truss up to the sales building and we all got to sign our names on a grid, after which we were supposed to watch a crane haul it up to the third floor roof and ‘top out’ the building. But it was raining so hard they decided to put that part off for later and we ate yummy falls treats instead. If the chef who prepares all the food for these events wasn't so young or me so old, I'd be in lust with the man. The only thing my husband could make was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and even then he go the proportions all wrong. An inch of peanut butter, Don? Really?

THE PORCH CEILING PROJECT: Friday the son-I-wish-I-had came over to paint the ceiling on my porch, to finish off our barter agreement. One of the reasons I can’t wait until after the election is over is because he’s a Trump supporter. I love this guy, have known him since before he got married, had three kids and 12-13 grandkids. We were neighbors for years and he worked for my husband and after my husband’s stroke he helped us more than all my other family and friends put together. I thought I knew him well but Trump has brought a side out of Tim that I’d rather not know about. It makes me sad and we tippy-toe around politics so carefully you’d think current events are freshly laid eggs in a hen house. But his Facebook posts---all I can say is I’m shocked at how much Kool-Aid he’s drank. The election can't come fast enough! No matter which way it turns out the true character of our country will be exposed. God help us all. ©

 Photo at the top was taken on the campus of the CCC.