Mixed Blessings

You know how your day can start out as one thing and end up as something else?  How things can change on a dime?  Or is the phrase, turn on a dime?  What does a dime have to do with change, blessings, or mixed anything?

Before I tell you about today I have to talk about yesterday. I mean they are connected although today’s events can stand alone.  But, yesterday morning I attended my nephew’s wedding.  It was held in an old heritage church and followed by a catered picnic luncheon for about a hundred people.  Perfect size for the church and the celebration. Perfect combination of tradition and casual. It has to be the most delightful wedding I have ever attended (or hosted).  The weather cooperated and those two hardworking  deserving people, now man and wife, who have earned every moment of happiness are off on a wonderful honeymoon.

The word ‘quaint’ comes to mind and reminds me of comfort, simplicity and hard work.  The entire village is a working village as things were in 1914 with a fire hall, blacksmith, and shops.  The grounds, green and lush, made me think of weddings of long ago, before the invention of glitter and glam.  A Piper piped the guests into the church and out again.  The groom and his best man wore kilts.  There was absolutely everything. Minus the modern attire it very well could have been a wedding from a hundred years ago.

Then that same evening, following the festivities I traveled to a nearby town where I attended yet another feast to celebrate our 48th nursing anniversary. We graduated in 1969 but went into residence in 1966.  In those days nursing students lived at the hospitals.  It was an incredibly intense education and applied labor.  And of course the system no longer exists having gone the way of the dinosaur.  Education by immersion.

Oh yeah, the dinner –

Now how can you go wrong dining at a Wine Den.  We had a separate section that gave us plenty of time to circulate and chat for a lovely few hours.

Now-a-days we all live within a few hours of each other, but over the years there were travels to the states, Calcutta, and New Zealand and heaven only knows were else.

Well all  this chatter is about my blessings in the last 24. Nothing ‘mixed’ about them yet.

This morning I awoke thinking I would spend the whole day writing.  In a serious fashion, you understand.  That means closing the door, taking the computer off the internet to avoid temptation, putting my phone in another room, and hunkering down for the duration.  I imagined my great joy and well earned weariness by the end of the day.  I quickly rose excited about the day ahead.

Darn.  Then I remembered I had to go to the pharmacy and pick up a prescription. Perfect.  Do it early before crowds start crowding.  Off I went. Wonderful expedient success and the most cheerful pharmacist I have ever met.  Here she is on a Sunday morning away from her husband and young family, at work.  And happy!  She cheered everyone up and told me, ‘I love my job and people’.  And it showed.

So very cheerily and medication in hand I thought, well before I go home I should just pop into the grocery store next door.  I have to tell you, I LOVE CHILI or chili con carne as they used to call it.  I put lots of vegetables for nutrition with a pork/beef combination and make it very spicy.  (You can imagine not everyone loves my chili but what counts is that I do.)  And I make enough for about 12 meals which I freeze.  I could eat it every day.  Okay I do eat it every day.  That’s just how I am.

So I shop, because this is Autumn (chili season), even though the temp today is going to be 27C or 80.6 degrees F.  I choose to ignore that.

Beef, pork, onion, green pepper, celery, kidney beans, tomato paste and sauce and lots of spice.  Well when I get home I can’t start to write yet. I find myself chopping, cooking, mixing.

Even though my plans changed I still counted the day as one big blessing.

Then: my stirring spoon slipped in the pot and my good yellow top was covered in sauce. ( Don’t even ask why I would not have changed.  The fact is the weekend had gone so well I thought I could cook all dressed up.) I ran to the bathroom sink to immediately rinse out my top, threw on one I should have been wearing, and returned to the kitchen. my stir spoon with a plastic handle had fallen to the stove top and I snapped it up only to discover it was on a hot part of the burner and I ended up holding a hot spoon with melted hot plastic in my palm.  Which I dropped immediately making even more of a mess.

I cleaned up my hand, applied some Flamazine which helped, but I still have blisters on my palm (no I will not show a photo.)

So a top I hope can be saved, as yellow is my favorite color, and multiple burns, but the chili is done, in containers with some in the fridge and some in the freezer, and no I have not started writing yet.

Mixed Blessings but all in all an excellent weekend.

 

The Ooopside of Senior Communication

There is much merriment in the world of geriatric graceful aging.  First and foremost, before you even get close post sixty you would do well to establish a grainy gritty sense of humor.

This is not the humor of your youth, or even middle age.  Like a fine wine that takes time to develop this is The Cadillac of humor, or I guess in this age, given the times, The Tesla of Humor.  Did I get that right?  That very question is becoming The Question of each and every day in some small way.  Did I get that right?  Does that sound right?  Good grief.

The object of your humor is nothing more than yourself.  Yup, better learn to laugh at yourself.  Start young.  It makes it easier in the dim lit of the top ten ( 70, 80, 90, 100).

A sound chuckle after an Oops achieves a lot of things; it saves those around you from gazing too long trying to make sense of what you have just done or said,  it gives same said audience a chance to chuckle (something they may not be doing much of these days. They can be a serious lot, these young’uns, can’t they?), it increases your ever slowing circulation (always a plus), and it gives you a moment to get your head on straight and try to figure out just what the hell  you were doing in the first place.

The downside is laughing, depending on your circumstance and effectiveness of medications, may cause some urinary incontinence. (I never thought I would see the day when adult pull-ups were not only necessary but the subject of cocktail party conversation.  Now is that right?  If people still socialize in such groups are the groups even called cocktail parties anymore?)

I swear, I over heard a conversation last evening, note ‘over heard’ cause no way I would be a part of such a group, and it went like this. “Oh, I tried that brand of Pull-up and did not like it.  I get mine in bulk at….”  Honest.  I kid you not.

Anyway one of the joys of senior communication is making plans to speak to someone half a world away.  See?  Again, I kid you not.  She is literally half a world away.

She, of course if Judith Baxter whom you are, or if you are not, might want to be familiar with through her blog I choose how I will spend the rest of my life and Books&MoreBooks2017.

So we know she is a day ahead and seventeen hours or something.  But for me the easy way is that she is always, well most of the time, eight hours behind me (and one day ahead).  We did well over the last couple of years with our skyping EXCEPT when those damn clocks change.  She is the opposite of seasons so when I have summer, she had winter.  Except in winter the clocks go back an hour (you know, Fall back and Spring forward.)

Yes there are times we just plain get befuddled with what the other side of the world is doing.  And then there is Senior Logic where what is eight hours in our minds  becomes six hours.

Every tried to contact someone when you are two hours away from reality?  Uhuh. Not successful.  It has nothing to do with time zones or planet placement.  Now that is what I call the Oopside of Senior Communication.

FITFS ..and Chattering About It

Our Following in the Footsteps today is known as The Chatter Blog.

First I must take a moment to say thanks to my supporters and cheering voices.  I am empowered and probably a little bit cheeky at this point.  We all need to get a little cheeky now and then!

Colleen Brown – even her name has a poetry to it which is a good thing because every thing she creates has flow and rhythm and humour and wit and passion.  Her very first post was on Sept. 13, 2009.  And her very first statement was, “I don’t have any wisdom to share.”

Well, she certainly proves herself wrong on a daily business.  Don’t you love it when people prove themselves wrong especially when it is about themselves?

Colleen is prolific and hilarious and when she is not killing us with laughter she touches our hearts with sentiment.

She bikes.  Hence the bikecolleenbrown of her addy.

She loves her Irish heritage. Oh and just a bit of a warning to the enemies of planet earth – you won’t get far with this black belt defending us.  Can you imagine – a black belt?  How long it took and all the hard work, focus and strength it took to reach it.  Wow!

Colleen is part of my core group – from the beginning – and if she has not heard from me for a bit she will fire off an email or FB message making sure I am still in the land of the living. My favourite though it is hard to choose is from May 20, 2011

She writes great fiction – though I tried to find it on her site and could not — so Colleen if you would like to direct us to that wonderful woman seeking out her past and finding much more I would sure reread it.

So what can I learn from Colleen?  Get it down, get out, write write write!  The choicest morsels come from the heart ( that in no way means I eat organ meat ingestion – ugh!)

Have a wonderful day and please do catch up with this writer!

Fall Feelings of Futility

Fall Feelings of Futility

I had a thought today on the cozy heart warming pleasure there is in taking a fall walk through rustling leaves.

I find the sound of shuffling my feet and kicking up the russet carpet to be a very satisfying one as listening somehow takes me back to childhood. Not to any one particular event mind you, just a feeling of youth.

That gentle comforting thought lasted through the first step into the yard as G2 and I headed out for a little fun bagging leaves. As I gathered piles to scoop up he did just the opposite. I tell you that child got lots of exercise and fresh air and I got a healthy dose of frustration until finally I got into the fun of it by developing a sense of humor and so in our own way we worked away and I found I just needed to work faster than he to make headway.

But there is a question that crosses my mind now and then, generally at this time of year. Why do we even have to pick up leaves? It seems to me that leaves provide a warm blanket, a sort of protective layer between the lawn and snow.  Is that not one of natures natural fertilizer?  That the leaves will rot and provide nutrition to the lawn?

It will be obvious to all of you by now that I am not a gardener of any sort, and I hope my question doesn’t sound too silly, but really doesn’t it make sense?