Soup and Medicare Wellness Tests

I was influenced by a late night TV commercial to crave a bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich that I could have made at home but cooking didn’t appeal to me anymore than having a Slim-Fast diet drink for lunch which I contemplated doing in an attempt to lose twenty pounds by the next morning for my bi-annual appointment with my internist. The choice between being good and letting the Campbell’s commercial rule my life was postponed because I needed to get to the post office before they closed for lunch. As it turned out, they hadn’t even opened that morning because it was Columbus Day. Bummer! 

On my way home, my Chevy Trax auto-turned itself into the Guy-Land Cafeteria’s parking lot, probably thinking I needed some comfort food to compensate for my disappointment at the post office. They usually have tomato soup but that day it was vegetable beef and barley. I moaned and groaned and the chief cook and bottle washer assured me that it goes great with grilled cheese. He had no reason to lie to me so I went for it. Ohmygod! Was he right! It was the best soup I’ve had since my mom was alive to make vegetable beef and barley soup. I’m surprised I didn’t have a Meg Ryan, When-Harry-Met-Sally organism right there and then which would have been embarrassing, given I was the only woman among the twenty male patrons. Am I wrong? Women would have understood it was the soup, not the sea of gray-haired old men I was excited about.

The next day on my way home from seeing the doctor my Chevy Trax did it again! Only this time it turned into the Breakfast-Only Café. Apparently it thought I needed to celebrate the fact that the god of doctor’s scales was kind to me and didn’t give my internist any reason to tisk-tisk me for being a bad girl in the kitchen. Or maybe he couldn’t get a word in edgewise, my mouth was running like a rabid coyote. Not that I’ve ever seen a rabid coyote but fast moving coyotes are a common thing in old cartoons, aren’t they? The doctor was going over the Medicare Wellness questions about depression which got me started on how excited I was about my future move to the CCC. Or maybe I was trying not to get caught in a lie about having throw rugs on the floor. What’s Medicare going to do if you answer that you have them? Send the rug police to your door to confiscate them? 

The doctor said he goes right by the lake where I’ll be moving to on his way back and forth to work and I joked that he could stop by for surprise throw rug checks. He laughed and said he’d do that. He’s been my doctor for over twenty years, was my husband’s doctor, too, and I can joke around with him but I don’t usually talk so much at my appointments. I shouldn’t have this time either because he was already running forty-five minutes behind schedule. I guess I wanted to be sure he didn’t think I was one of those depressed old people that the Medicare questionnaires are trying to root out because I really needed a refill on my Ambien sleeping pills. 

Medicare would probably frown on a doctor giving a depressed senior a prescription of Ambien. Or maybe not. Maybe they’d encourage them to prescribe a double dosage to save the system money if we offed ourselves. Just kidding, of course. I can’t take those wellness test questions seriously. I will go to my grave lying about the Oriental rug in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. I just hope I don’t go to my grave because of that Oriental rug. If that happens, my niece has my permission to add a sentence to my tombstone that reads: “She lied on her wellness questionnaire and this is what happened.” 

This week the dog also had an appointment with the vet technician for a recheck on his teeth. At his spring appointment, which covers everything a dog can get at a yearly wellness and vaccinations appointment, the vet pronounced that Levi’s teeth were clean enough not to need his yearly cleaning but he wanted this recheck in the fall. This time the vet tech said he's got some tartar on one side of his mouth which means he's only chewing on one side of his mouth. "We should probably get in there and check out why he's doing that." They made him an appointment for cleaning on the first available appointment which was the Friday before Thanksgiving. But on the way home I decided I might cancel it. I only chew on one side of my mouth and I don't have a bad tooth. He's been getting his teeth cleaned every spring since he was three and I'm mad at myself for allowing the cleaning to get postponed to snow season. Not going to happen again! ©

Makeup and Maintenance

Life is going by so fast it’s a wonder I’m not getting nose bleeds from the speed. Is that even a thing? Christmas has come to the stores and a few bloggers and I haven’t even bought my Halloween candy yet. I never buy it early because I’d start eating it and have to buy it a second time. I hate that Halloween always starts me on a sugar binge that lasts until the January diets cycle around. I used to buy miniature bags of popcorn and pretzel bags but as my then-young neighborhood started popping out more and more children I got priced out of giving those out. Neighborhoods change. I used to get 140 kids, now it’s down to 70 to 80 kids. I still buy animal crackers for the tiniest trick-or-treaters because the dog and I love having them left over at the end of the night. 

Moving on. I went to a Mary Kay makeup party/luncheon. One of my Gathering Girls friends has a daughter who is a top sales representative, her full time job that earns her a free car to drive and she just got home from a Mary Kay Caribbean cruise and she took her mom with her, expense free for both of them. While I was getting my face made up I asked if the party was a makeup intervention for me because I’m the only one in the group who doesn’t wear anything but lip gloss and eyebrow cream. When I buy makeup it turns rancid before I can use it up because I don’t go anywhere often enough to bother wearing. I also don’t trust my old, cataract encrusted eyes to be seeing color accurately enough to plaster on all that stuff. I see older women who wear colors that are too bright and fake looking and when I mentioned my fear at the party, several of my friends assured me that they would tell me if I was doing that. Sure, famous last words. 

I have to admit that my before and after photos did show a flattering difference but all I bought was an eyebrow pencil and a tub of lipstick which cost me $30.74 and an extra trip to pick them up a few days later. I did love the feel of the Mary Kay sugar scrub for your lips but I figure I could smear a couple of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on my lips and it would have the same effect for a fraction of the price. Still, the party was fun and I got an email from the daughter a few days later thanking me for “playing along” and being “a free spirit” which left me scratching my head about the latter. I guess makeup demonstrations with seniors bring out the silly in me. The same thing happened when I went to a fashion and makeup show with my future neighbors last summer. 

With all the lip service (no pun intended) given to striving to be our authentic selves it’s a curiosity that painting our faces up has endured since the days of the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra. Oh, yes, turning eyes “green” with copper ore and drawing black lines around eyes with Kohl is the foundation of all the Mary Kay and Avon parties. What we forget is that men, back in 4,000 BC were every bit as besotted with their superficial appearances as the women were but somehow they managed to leave the practice of wearing eye makeup back in the pages of history until this century when metro-sexual men started in again. Why? Why did men stop using makeup (except for powder) and why on earth would they start spending the money and the time again when they were free of all that fuss? By the way, archaeologists believe the practice of the Egyptians giving themselves the ancient version of our modern-day smoky eyes may have had a practical purpose of reducing the glare of the sun. Okay, I guess that makes sense, judging by all the war movies and football players I’ve seen. 

Moving right along, again. Yesterday was a house maintenance day and it’s a relief to finally get my gutters cleaned out. One of them had to be taken apart to get a mass of pine needles out. That particular downspout was causing a waterfall when it rained to pour over my front sidewalk which would have caused a dangerous, icy mess in the months to come. There’s always something. 

Yesterday an arborist also spent three hours trimming my shrubs. He’s eight-two! I had a hard time booking him because he bowls on Mondays, goes somewhere else fun on Wednesdays and cuts lawns on Fridays. On Tuesdays and Thursdays when he trims shrubbery I was always booked up. I had to cancel a RSVP to attend a lecture to fit him in. The lecture was one I really didn’t want to miss. It was given by two people: one the daughter of the Japanese ambassador during WWII and the grandson of Eisenhower’s Chief of Intelligence. I saw them interviewed on TV afterward and know I missed a fascinating perspective on the war. But I enjoyed spending time out in the yard. Between the downspout guy (who was upbeat and fun to be around) and arborist both being here for hours, I was dead tired from raking and holding the ladder. But it was disappointing that neither one of them noticed my new and “improved” eyebrows. Should I ask for my Mary Kay money back? ©


NOTE: If anyone wants to see the 'after' picture of my makeover last week, click on the page at the top that's labeled 'What I Write About.'

Paranoid Me and Politics

I just set one of my posts to revert back to a draft because it was annoying me every time it appeared in my side bar as one of the most read posts last week or last month. If it had been a topic someone would find in a Google search on a widowhood issue, I’d understand its popularity. But this blog post was a review of the movie, The Post. For a long time I thought maybe someone bookmarked that post as their way into my blog but doing the math on how many views it gets beyond the norm that would mean one person would have to be coming here to read six times a day. Finally, I dug a little deeper and figured out that most of its 3,357 views were coming from Russia. And paranoid me got the idea that maybe that post is being used somehow to teach Russian disinformation specialists something about the American mindset, of how some of us ordinary citizens feel about our freedom of the press. The movie, if you’ll remember was about The Post Newspaper winning a Supreme Court ruling when they exposed a three decades long cover-up commonly known as the Pentagon Papers. The next two paragraphs are from the blog post that I removed from public viewing:

“Near the end of the movie they quoted Justice Hugo Black’s argument for ruling in favor of the two newspaper’s right to publish the then-classified Pentagon Papers and against Nixon’s attempt to control the press and I was able to google his words. They’re important words, words that matter today every bit as much as they did in 1971 when the court ruled 6 to 3. Black wrote, ‘In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.’ 

“And that’s why Trump’s attempt to erode the credibility of the press is so dangerous. It’s why we need to remain vigilant against his corrosive, dictatorship-inspired tactic of calling any news he doesn’t like ‘fake’ news. It’s why we all need to put on our dissidents hats and stand up for this basic building block of our democracy.” 

Well, what do you think? Why would so many Russians be interesting in reading that blog post? And why are so many Americans so willing to be complacent to Trump’s attempts to destroy our freedom of the press? Some of my in-law relatives are like little parrots, repeating Trump's hate-filled tweets on Facebook and raging about “fake” news this and “fake” news. They love him to his rotten core. The fake news has been out to get him from the start! they say. Maybe so. We've never had a more corrupt and dishonest person in the White House. What is the Press supposed to do, look the other way when he metaphorically wipes his nose on the White House drapery? Poor mistreated Trump!

I honestly feel numb right now to the impeachment inquiry going on. When are the good people in the House and Senate going to start supporting the rule of law that keeps our democracy solvent? They have a legal duty to investigate and hear any evidence that may point to wrong-doing and decide if it’s valid or not. Trying to obstruct people from testifying before Congress is taking a page right out of Nixon’s play book but there were enough Republicans, back then, who left their partisan hats in the cloakroom and placed the country first. I don’t know if we can count on the current crop of lawmakers to do that. 

I’ve heard it said that they are afraid of Trump, that he can destroy their careers with one nasty tweet. What have we come to if that could possibility be true? Does Mr. Trump really have that much power over the voters (or donators) in any given district? Maybe he does. Trump-the-sociopath seems to have a way of dealing out corruption and cronyism, and de-constructing American values in plain sight that makes his fans believe that it isn’t corrupt or illegal or immoral at all. In their heads, it’s all just the press and the democrats trying to make mountains out of mole hills.

Some people think we should put all our energy into getting Trump voted out of office and not bother trying to censure him though the impeachment process, but what message does that send out to the world, not to mention the next president to come along? And with an administration that isn’t bothering to beef up our cyber security to protect our next election from outside interference does it even matter if we vote our brains out in 2020? With a little help from his Russian friends, he could still ‘win’ even if he actually losses. Trump has even found a way to mess with our Federal Election Commission's ability to operate in a meaningful way by not filling empty seats. And why not? That tactic has worked well with the EPA. ©

Note from the management of this blog. Polly Anna will be back next week.