Egg Cookers, Moving and Genealogy

I bought myself an egg cooker. It seems like a stupid, space eating gadget to buy when making hard boiled eggs in a pan of water works perfectly fine. But I told myself with an electric egg cooker I can walk away and not burn the house down. That’s called justifying my purchase to label it a safety device but, darn it, I can’t hear the stove timer go off anymore…or the doorbell and who knows what else. Now if I could figure out a way to justify getting a new blender I’d be a happy camper. The one I have works fine---I use it every day with the high protein diet I’m on---but I’ve got a bug up my butt about owning one that is chrome and black and matches my coffee pot and toaster. Maybe I could pretend that Bush is still in office and he just told us all to go out shopping to help the economy. Practice patriotism with your credit card, I’m still smirking about that idea from a sitting president, no less.

I’ve been very busy on the computer this past week researching everything from vacate lots and new home building prices to used and brand new condos to manufactured home parks and manufactured homes---both new and used. The more I learn the more frustrating it gets. I should have known better, but I didn’t follow Glinda the Good Witch from the North’s advice about starting at the beginning so I wasted a lot of time picking out floor plans and dealers of new manufactured homes when I should have done more research on the two home parks where I’d like living. “Surprise, surprise, surprise.” as Gomer Pyle used to say on the Andy Griffith Show, they don’t have any lots available to place a new manufactured home. (Let’s be politically incorrect here and call them ‘trailers’, ‘manufactured homes’ is too long to type.) My favorite of the two parks is expanding but they don’t know when. Okay, I could wait a year, in fact a year would get a lot downsizing done. But they can’t give me a time table when they expect the expansion to happen. Both parks allow dogs BUT if your dog is a problem then they can tell you to get rid of it. That would be like asking you to get rid of your kid! If Levi barks too much is that any worse than teenagers who annoy old ladies with their skate boards and yelling? I think not! Everything has a yin and a yang. You love your kids and your dogs, hate the noise they make, but a world with too much yin or too much yang would slide off its axle.  

And that dog policy at the “trailer” park is what led me to researching condos in my target area. I found one that is a zero steps community with a clubhouse and social schedule. Perfect. But before I get my head fully emerged in their floor plans I have requested their pet policy and condo fees rate. I hate giving my contact information out to these places but there is no other way to get vital input that will help me decide what I want to do with the rest of my life. Levi will only be seven on the 23^rd of this month. It’s not like I can wait for him to kick the bucket to make my decisions and choices easier and even if he was two feet under---I can’t dig a deeper grave at my age---I’d probably want another Levi in my life. Only next time I’m getting a dog that is no bigger than a bread box, has a bark like a cricket. One of my niece’s daughter-in-laws has a dog that is smaller than most cats and I swear it has a bigger wardrobe than I do. That may be a slight exaggeration but I can’t help it, I have dog-size envy. When I got Levi they told me he’d only grow to twelve pounds and he is pushing thirty, and no, his vet only wants him to lose one pound, so he’s not doing protein shakes with me. Come spring, he’ll be able to walk that pound off, no problem.

I’ve also started working on a genealogy tree and eventual book for my Mom’s side of the family. (I did one for my Dad’s side in 2013.) Already I’ve found a scandal. I’m actually building on some research that was done by my great-aunt in the pre-computer age and she claimed that my great-grandfather was assigned to an Army post at Leavenworth, Kansas but the 1900 census shows that he was listed as an inmate. I’ll bet she never thought that cat would get out of the bag! So here I was at midnight trying to research why he was in prison…most likely for desertion from his infantry post, I suspected. Wrong. When I mentioned this to my oldest niece she was able to find proof that in 1900 Leavenworth was a hospital, not a prison. My great-grandfather had taken a bullet in the head during the war and was mostly likely he was being treated for reoccurring issues. It’s funny how people you’ve never met can come to life when you start fleshing them out on a genealogy chart. Then again, I’m the person who thinks an electric egg cooker is fascinating, so don’t go by me. Most people’s eyes get glazed over from boredom when you talk about genealogy too long, so I’m stopping right here. ©

New Year’s Resolutions and Revelations for the Widow

A new year is here and I’m sure it will be March before I let my guard down and revert back to writing 2014 on my checks. I’m as predictable as my yappy Schnauzer greeting his squirrel friend when she comes to our bird feeders. I try to get him to only bark when the squirrel leaves the ground feeders’ station to crawl up the pole but Levi still doesn’t get the difference between high and low, even though I let him outside on the deck when I see the squirrel eating from the hanging feeders. To his vermin chasing genes it’s like giving a glass of wine, a cannoli and kiss to an Italian. Okay, that’s a stereotype and we’re not supposed to do that anymore but I’m half Italian so I’m going to let it slide.

I haven’t made any New Year’s Resolutions yet. I put myself on a no-media schedule for the three days leading up to the holiday and the two days after so I could completely ignore the holiday and all the news people talking about last year’s big stories and this year’s celebrations around the world. This was my third New Year’s Eve since Don passed away and the no-media thing worked well for me. I wasn’t sad, depressed, teary-eyed or any other adjective I could put in front of my name. I did do a little toast at midnight with a few sips of wine but then I threw the rest of the glass down the drain. If I’m going to ingest empty calories I’d rather have a cookie. But I’ve been good these past few days and when the sugar monster wants to be fed I give him an organic, rainbow carrot. There you go, blood and guts, if you work hard enough you can turn that into glucose.

For the year 2013 instead of writing resolutions (which I usually did before my husband passed away) I choose to embrace the one word mantra idea that was floating around that year. I chose ‘courage’ and I even found a ‘courage’ charm and a Cowardly Lion charm that I wore on a chain whenever I’d go someplace where I felt my newly minted widowhood would be a tested for its strength and courage. It did the trick, it really did. I’d touch that necklace and be reminded to push forward into uncomfortable situations. Now, I don’t need to be pushed; going places alone no longer bothers me.

For 2014 I resolved to take and post more photos on this blog and if you follow it at all you’ll know that resolution got broken rather early in the year. My smart phone takes more photos of my thumb than anything else and my favorite camera is too heavy to lug around. I also picked another “widow’s mantra” to see me through the year and that turned out to be a mixed bag of marbles and feathers. I had picked ‘seek contentment’ and I envisioned that happening by doing two things: 1) Keeping a tighter lid on my expectations, and 2) using the social circles I had established in 2013 to find a few good friends within. I felt I had the bones to have a more satisfying life and I just needed to flesh them out. So here it is the dawning of 2015 and I can say I’ve gotten a good handle on managing my expectations over this past year---move that one over to the ‘success column.’ But I’m about ready to call it a big goose egg on finding a few close friends. I have many friendly acquaintances in the Red Hat Society and at the senior hall but I don’t see any of them developing beyond that. Hanging out in those two groups, though, is something to do and is good for a few laughs but that’s about it.

So, I’m off to Emerald City to ask the Wizard of Oz for a friend. If only it were that easy…but on second thought, maybe it is. When Dorothy, Toto and the trio of misfits they picked up along the way saw the Wizard didn’t they, essentially, learn they already had it inside themselves to get what they all sought? Sure, they believed in the Wizard long enough to think the useless items they got from him had special powers, but by the end of the movie Glinda the Good Witch set them straight on that score. The power was in them all along. And for me that lesson does apply, meaning if I look at my life through honest eyes I already have good friends---relatives and others I’ve known for decades who have been there for me, and would be again if I had a true emergency or I just needed to talk.

Hey, that gives me an idea! For 2015 I think I’ll pick for my mantra: “Hoe the row you’ve already got and don’t go off looking for new seeds to plant.” I don’t need new friends as much as I need to cherish the ones I’ve got.  And wouldn’t you know it, e-Bay has a Glinda the Good Witch charm I can get to remind me that I already have what I’ve been moaning and groaning was missing in my life.

What was I thinking? My soul mate is gone and a dozen brand new friends isn’t going to fill that void and that is a simple fact of life in the wild and crazy territory we call Widowhood.  ©

A New Plan for an Old Widow

One of the catch phrases I’ve used throughout my life has been, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.” I’ve liked learning about many different things over the years and I’ve often wanted to do this or that off-beat profession. An artist, a tailor, a photographer, a teddy bear maker, a dog trainer, a writer, a furniture restorer, a basket weaver and I even tried my hand at making floor coverings. To this day the-son-I-wish-I-had stills teases me about making my own Linoleum. When he helped us move after Don’s stroke he found an area rug I had made and he couldn’t get over the fact that someone would actually make their own Linoleum. “Who does that?” “The Colonists”, I told him, “and people during the California Gold Rush when canvas off from sailing ships was plentiful and carpeting was not.” 

A summer or two ago I ran into a woman at a summer art fair who was selling handmade Linoleum area rugs.  (They're actually called floor clothes but they are the forerunners of Linoleum.) Hers were no better or worse than mine were and that old longing to march off into the sunset doing something different than the norm washed over me again. Woo is me, I guess I was just ahead of my time. That may be the excuse I tell myself for not taking my rugs on the art fair circuit, but the truth is that I get bored easily. After I’ve learned the ends and outs of doing particular craft it no longer holds any mystery for me, and I lose interest.

A professor of a ‘Women in Transition’ class I took in my forties when I went back to college to finish up my degree told me that the trick for me would be to find a career that was always presenting new challenges, new projects that changed often enough so I didn’t get bored. For that class, we had to research five careers we thought we might like and narrow it down to one that fits our personal assets and she considered my desire to keep on learning new things to be an asset. Believe it or not, that opinion changed my life. It was a light bulb moment. I no longer thought of myself as a loser who couldn’t find herself. I no longer felt guilty for spending so much time and money gearing up for hobbies and crafts that I didn’t stick with once I got good at them. That class taught me that it’s the process of learning that I like, not the finished products. Wow, why hadn’t I thought of that? It could have saved me a lot of negative feelings.  

I investigated the five careers and settled on the same career choice I wanted to be right out of high school: an architect. Oh boy, I thought, I can still do that! And that may have been technically true but in practical terms it was pointless for me head in that direction that late in life. After studying the government forecasts for the field, I learned that computers were going to drastically downsize the number of architects needed and by the time I would get a degree in that field there would be a glut of people all fighting for fewer jobs. In the end, I went for the degree I could get in the shortest length of time because, when it came right down to it, I just wanted to finish what I had started back in the 60s. Graduation day was one of the happiest days of my entire life.

What does all this have to do with the price of tea in China, as my mother used to say when something said didn’t seem relevant to the topic under discussion? A lot. On Christmas Eve I was telling my niece about a cottage I came close to buying just before Don had his stroke and how much I loved the area it was in. It’s close to where her daughter just bought a house and considerably closer to where my entire family lives. “Aunt Jean, they still sell little houses in that area,” she said. “You could still find one.”

Could I really? I thought about what is holding me to the north end of town---a house that is perfect for aging in place, a senior hall that is bustling with activities. Could I find a place and remodel it to overcome the first and find a source of activities to replace the latter? I hopped on Zillow, the real estate website, and all week long I’ve been looking at property within my budget. I found a cottage on a lake about a mile from where my nephew lives and with a little remodeling it could work for me. Zillow posts a lot of pictures so I was able to draw up the floor plan to that house and figure out what it would take to make it better suited to my needs. I did the same with several houses and googled how far away one in particular is from the doctor, the dentist, my nieces, the hospital and my favorite grocery store.

So Zillow is going to be my new best friend and maybe, just maybe the little cottage I wanted before Don’s stroke will come up for sale again. Tiny places on the lakes around here tend to do that often enough and if I keep going to Zillow long enough, I might come up with the almost-perfect house. I designed the house I live in, working closely with the architect and our builder and it will be so hard to leave it behind but the pull of being closer to my family is strong, too. At least I have a new dream to keep me busy in this new year…that is until I get bored again. ©