What's Hapnin'

Two Fridays ago I went to Razzoo's for lunch and coming out of the bathroom I saw my little flag. I had made those for 4th of July to hand out to my Meals on Wheels people and I had an extra one and gave it to the girl bartender that day. I thought it was sweet that now it's part of the restaurant decor.:
My husband's out of town so this seemed like a good time to paint the other hallway. I thought I'd be further along, but I do have everything prepped and can roll out of bed later today and get started.
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And Saturday I found shoes for my Mother of the Bride dress:

I found that picture on the internet. The real shoes don't have that peachy glow. They are a cool grey knotted Thai silk. And they are Rocket Dogs! I thought that was crazy. They are very pretty but I haven't a clue as to how to walk in them yet. I will practice every day.

Friday! Now Ten Degrees Cooler!

What a difference a week makes. Last Friday was around 103° and the forecast for today is 93°. It was so hot last Friday that after MOW I didn't even eat lunch where I wanted to eat lunch. The place I wanted to eat lunch is in a sort of strip mall area and I would have had to park far out in a flat open parking lot. The place I actually chose for lunch was an individual restaurant where I could park near the door, and walk over a little bridge that crossed a cute little pond with fountains in it. It was an easy choice.
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And then I got home and these poor three fellows were working in my back yard:

That one guy was wearing a long sleeve shirt. And those dust masks? I ran those out to them. They were sawing through the fiberglass spa and pulling their shirts up and holding them over their faces. I felt so bad for them. I ran in the garage and grabbed those masks. Then I came back inside and made large cups of ice water for them.
I was so happy when I saw them pulling out the bottom. And now we have a big open sand pit.:
You might think Barney would be using that for nefarious purposes, but he thinks it is still a water hazard. I know this because I tried to put him down in there and he reacted like it was water and scratched the bejeebus out of me.

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Our original plan was just to put 16 new long boards across that spot, but we decided to have all of that part of the deck removed and resod the yard with grass there. That will make the deck smaller and therefore cooler in the summer. When I designed that deck I didn't know the rule of heat. That deck was too big and our backyard was about 6° hotter than my neighbor's backyard. As Dad used to say, "Live and learn."

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But that project is for next month and for now I'm just happy that it's 10° cooler.

The Good With The Bad

We had a fun birthday dinner night with my daughter, her fiance and her best friend (the maid of honor to be) but on that same day, my father-in-law fell and broke his hip.
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My daughter loved the little crown and flashing light button that I bought for her. I told her, "I have no memory whatsoever of my 26th birthday, so I want to make sure you remember yours." Of course the fact that her wedding dress came in that day will probably make her 26th birthday more memorable than the silly fun items I bought at the party store.
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Tuesday early evening my father-in-law had surgery on his hip. He was not a good candidate for pins and so they cemented his hip back together. We spent an hour at the hospital with my MIL waiting for my FIL to come out of surgery and then the three of us went out for dinner. We got back just minutes before he was taken to his room. He was pretty out of it from the morphine but at one point he asked if he was at Cattleman's Steak House. He seems to be doing okay.
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After our seriously hot 107° degree day on Sunday, a norther came through and Tuesday saw a high of "only" 90°.
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My brother and Mom have made their flight reservations for my daughter's wedding in October. That's exciting. And they will be here a little longer than I had originally thought. I'm looking forward to their visit.
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Oh and we had our hot tub removed. I''l post about that next time. I'm tired.

26 Years Ago Today

In the wee morning hours of August 23rd, 1984, I was having a bad dream. I dreamed I was back in my 9th grade Algebra class. There I was sitting in my regular seat behind Jackie. It was one of those very realsitic dreams. Mr. Wilson's classroom was perfectly recreated. There was no dream-like quality to it. I started having bad cramps and was horrified. I knew the cramps meant that my period was starting right then and there and I knew I did not have any tampons with me.
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After a few agonizing minutes, I woke up and was so relieved that it had been only a dream. I let out a deep sigh of relief when I realized I was at home in my bed. Then as I started to happily drift back off, I realized that the cramps were not part of the dream. They were real. As I was half asleep, it took me a few minutes to realize what was going on. I was already 9 days past my due date. Yep, those weren't period cramps. I was getting ready to have a baby.
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We got up, called the doctor and grabbed my bag and headed for the hospital. It turned into a long day. One of the funniest parts was when they were making me walk the corridors pushing my rolling I.V. I ran into one of my Lamaze classmates. Her husband was pushing her down the hallway. She was holding her new baby boy and they were heading home. After we chatted for just a few minutes, the went on their way. When she was maybe 15 feet down the hall, she said to her husband, "She looked terrible." Her husband was all "Ssssshhh. She might hear you." Which I did. It didn't upset me at all. I don't know why but it made me smile. There's nothing wrong with looking terrible when you feel terrible.
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At noon I went back to my room to watch my soap and some nurse came in there and was all, "You need to be walking." I said, "Too bad. I'm taking this hour off of walking to watch my soap." People can argue with me all day, but they can't make me do something I don't want to do. She finally gave in and promptly at 1:00 she was right there. Fine with me.
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Later that afternoon, they started talking "Ceasarean" and I would have none of it. When they sent someone in to shave me for surgery, I was all, "No. I'm going to have this baby naturally." Finally someone came in with dire predictions and warnings and guilt-tripped me into okaying the C-section. Which of course led to my classic stupid question that I asked in the operating room: If I'm having a C-section, why am I still having labor pains?
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It took longer than usual for me to wake up in the recovery room, and they were starting to get a little concerned, but I've always believed I was just getting in some make-up sleep from having gotten up so early. I finally woke up and my husband gave me the news: It's a girl! My parents popped in and then left to go eat dinner. They tried to get my husband to go with them. We both thought that was weird. Anyway, they finally wheeled me to my room and we stopped by the nursery and they handed me my 9 pound, 14 ounce prize:

So that's what I was doing 26 years ago today. 26 years. Wow.

And in this corner...

Dad would have been 74 on Wednesday, the 18th. I have been thinking about him a lot lately. Today there was a crazy burst of rain on a burning hot day and a truck made a quick turn and spun out. I immediately thought, "If Dad had taught you to drive, you would have known better."
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We watch a crazy reality show and we were discussing how shocked this one broad will be when she sees herself and I said, "You never know how you looked until you had your picture took." It was one of Dad's favorite sayings and it's not really about photography.
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I can't begin to describe how much I love that picture up there, because Dad absolutely lived in that corner of his kitchen. He was a stand in the corner dude. I ran across an old picture from maybe 1990 when I was married to my second husband and he was standing just like that in our house! I couldn't believe it.
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I miss Dad all the time. When I hear a funny joke, I want to call him and tell him. Or if I have a gap in a childhood memory, I want to call him and ask him. When Duke wins a basketball game I want to call him and discuss it.
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My best friend and I met through Dad but became best friends after he died. Dad would have been so tickled by that. Here's a bit of that history from an old post:
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In case anyone doesn't know the history of Lo and Me, we had met once for about 20 minutes at my Dad's house while he was napping in his recliner and then we smoked together by the bar at my Dad's retirement party (and she also drove us there). She was very helpful that next week, because my Dad died at his retirement party and I was staying at his house working on funeral arrangements and stuff with my brother. This was October 1998. In May or June of 1999, I was still suffering from post-traumatic stress from Dad's death and DREADING the anniversary of his death, so I called Lo and told her how I felt and asked if she'd like a trip to Vegas for that week. We didn't really know each other, but she had known Dad for years - she was a neighbor, and had been so helpful after his death, it just seemed like a good idea to me. We have a 14 year age difference, but I didn't even think about that. She flew into DFW and we flew together to Vegas and made a memory to last forever. It was just the beginning of many trips and a very long friendship.
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Dad left me with so much, and I appreciate all of it - but I sure miss him.

Penny Candy

I miss penny candy. When I was a little kid we had a little store in our community. Going to the store was really the only thing to do besides just playing or exploring the woods. My parents had a charge account there. They would send us quite often to get bread or cigarettes or soft drinks. That was a bitch for the first several years because it was quite a walk, but at the end of third grade we moved right across a dirt road from the store. Everyone called the store "Leroy's" as in "I'm going to Leroy's" even though I'm pretty sure that wasn't the name on the sign. Leroy was the nice old man that ran the store. He probably wasn't really old because his youngest daughter was just a year older than my big brother. But anyone older than my parents always seemed old.
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The door to the store was like a regular house door. There was a wooden door with windows and a screen door. When the weather was nice the wooden door stayed open and you entered through the screen door. The door was in the center of the building. When you walked in you were facing the counter. On the right against the front wall there was one of those drink fridges that are about 3 feet high with the doors that slide open and you reach down inside for your drink. That always felt so good in the summer and I'd always stick my whole head down in there. Usually someone was sitting up there, so when you wanted a drink, they'd have to hop off. I spent quite some time sitting up there myself.
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In the back right of the store was a bench and a little short table with checkers and a few chairs. That's also where the big brown metal furnace was. That was a cozy place to hang out in the winter. The cold drink machine tops were the best place to sit in summer. And speaking of summer, on the left front wall was the slide top freezer - much like the drink coolers. It contained frozen popsicles and fudgesicles and ice cream sandwiches. Good stuff on a hot summer day. Except a good third of it ended up melting all over you.
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The best part of the store was down the left of the front counter area. It was a glass paned box framed in dark wood strips and filled with penny candy. I loved the variety. On any given day, if I had a dime, I'd get: 3 Pixie Stix, 2 Bazooka gums (I loved the Bazooka Joe comics!), 2 creme filled caramels (like in the picture at top), 2 fireballs, and a grape gumball. I mixed it up all the time and sometimes I might just be in the mood for 10 Pixie Stix or 10 fireballs.
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There were some items in the wonderful glass box that weren't penny candy, like baseball cards, candy cigarettes and seasonal items like the "edible" wax teeth at Halloween. I remember when Leroy got the wax "pop" bottles. You bit off the top, spit it out and poured the quarter ounce of fruity sugary liquid in your mouth and life was good. I used to even buy baseball cards because I loved the gum and I loved the way the cards smelled. And it was something to read.
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Every once in a while I think about those caramels and fireballs and grape gumballs and really wish I could walk across a dirt road and get a little brown paper bag full of penny candy. Or maybe I'd really just like to step back in time and walk through that screen door into Leroy's. Good times. And good memories.

Crispy Critters (Day 21)

After talking about my flowers the other day looking like crispy bits of a brown paper bag, I thought I would take some after pictures. And by after, I mean after 21 days of triple digit temperatures. I didn't take any pictures of all of the fried plants, because I don't have before pictures of all of them.
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The picture below shows my before of the mixed pot of calibrachoa. It was a mix of dark blue. tangerine and scarlet (their words, not mine and by their I mean the folks that printed the plastic description thing that comes with the plant) next to the after picture: The funny thing is, that dude is actually making a comeback. It looked worse than that a week ago. I moved it to a shadier spot that might also pick up some extra water from the yard sprinklers. And that petunia in the turtle? Not only has that been dead for a while but one of the poor turtle legs died and broke off from heat exhaustion. I can fix it with Gorilla Glue, but that's right! ding! ding! ding! It's too hot to do that right now. And for some reason I am amused that I will fix a turtle's leg with Gorilla Glue. Gorillas and turtles. Oh and I was not compensated for mentioning and linking to that glue because I don't even know how to do that. I just think its a good product.
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These next pictures are really sad. These were my petunias and that unknown plant that even my blog readers could not help me with. We'll call the unknown plant Ralph.
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In the before picture Ralph is on the bottom and the purplish petunia is on the top and they are switched in the after picture.:

As you can see if you look at the top right, Ralph is still okay. Ralph has like a bottom cabbage growth after a time and then I cut away all the tall stuff and he starts all over. That happened last year too. Plus, Ralph lived through our record breaking frigid winter and crazy snows we had last year. Ralph is TOUGH! The petunias, not so much. And that's not even a good rendition of the yellow petunia. It was huge and gorgeous before the mad heat.

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I just checked and it's supposed to be 104° today (Sunday, I mean even though I'm still Saturday night until I go to bed). I'll try to stay indoors as much as possible so I don't end up like my plants. Who wants to look like crispy bits of a brown paper bag?

Family Stars

One of the things we did at the beach cottage in May was play Trivial Pursuit. But it wasn't regular Trivial Pursuit, it was some sort of juvenile version. At first we thought it would be so easy we changed the rules, but after we finished that first game, we went back to original game rules.
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Sure some of the questions were really easy, but because none of us were actual juveniles, we did not know, for instance, the name of Strawberry Shortcake's best friend or house or whatever. So then the game just became funny, because for the most part either everyone knew the answer or no one knew the answer. And we were playing in teams.
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I have such good memories of some of the questions coming up that sounded something like, "What was the name of Snargle Runkle's puppy?" There would be a dead silence, we'd all look at each other and then all burst out laughing.
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I always played on a team with my nephew A.C. He's the one that I won my very first game of Cranium with a year ago when we were all together in the North Carolina mountains. When someone got the question "How many planets are in our solar system?" He and I both immediately asked, "What year did this game come out?" He not only knew that Pluto was recently downgraded to a dwarf planet but that it is actually smaller than our other dwarf planet Eris and that both are part of the Kuiper belt. So depending on the year of the game, and the perspective, the answer is either 7, 8, or 9.
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A.C. pointed out the Milky Way Galaxy of stars to me last year when we were in the mountains. Because I developed my love of astronomy in my later years and live in such an overly lit metroplex, I had never seen the Milky Way except in photos. It was truly beautiful. I'll never forget that. Also on that trip, my nephew was openly impressed that I had both a planisphere and a compass - not to mention that I had a great telescope at home.
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His 15th birthday is the 26th of this month and for his gift I bought the family a membership to the Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I hope they will get to take him there often and I hope he enjoys it. I really love that guy.

The August Baked Blahs

Well my official annual summer torpor (or ennui) has officially started. If you have been reading me for a long time, you know this happens every year. It's rough watching the nightly news and see the weather man excitedly predicting that the temperature will come down to 100° maybe this weekend. Yes you read that right: come down to 100°. And maybe.
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Yippee. Nearly all of my flowers now look like crumbly bits of a brown paper bag. And I watered them every single day. But as we like to say around here, "Well it's just too hot."
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Every day I wake up and think of all the things I want to do and then I just don't quite get to them. Oh, I'm doing all the neccessary things: cook dinner every night, clean the kitchen, wash the sheets every Wednesday and deliver my MOW food every Friday, but other than that? Not so much.
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My house was so messy last Thursday when the termite guy came for his annual inspection that I thought it would be funny to mess with his head and tell him I was the live-in housekeeper. But I didn't. (Ennui.)
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The one project I do want to get to soon is my daughter's wedding veil. Carole's daughter gave us her wedding veil and I have great plans for it. My mother had a gorgeous necklace and earrings set of Austrian crystals from the 1960's. My daughter is going to wear the necklace and I deconstructed the earrings:
That left me with 36 gorgeous Austrian crystal beads in two different sizes. And by the way, Austrian crystals are really hard to photograph. I took maybe 10 pictures trying different things and this was the best I could do. And that picture doesn't look at all like how the crystals look to my live eyeballs.
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So I have a plan for doing beadwork onto some as yet unbought and imaginary thing that I will magically find at the fabric store. This will be on top of my daughter's head attached to the veil. That's my plan, anyway. But the thing is, it's too hot to go to the fabric store. Or do pretty much anything really. I'll get around to it later.

A Well-Crafted Song

I wanted to hear "At Last" and went to YouYube. I listened to the classic Etta James version and then I listened to the Beyonce version. I found the comments fascinating. There seemed to be a big feud going on about who performed it best. Me? I just love the song.
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Oh sure there have been songs that I've argued, "Oh no! That version was better!" But the reality is: a well-crafted song stands on its own and is not dependent upon the performer.
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It's odd that people argue over these songs without giving credit to the writers of these songs. The very fact that a song evokes such strong feelings means it's just a very good song. Oh, I know that for many people the strong emotion comes from the song memory being from a certain time and certain circumstances, but a truly great song is just that.
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There are some songs that could be performed by anyone in the world with a good singing voice and I would just be happy to hear them, like, "If I loved You," but okay, I hate when people sing "Somewhere over the Rainbow." Why do they even try?
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Okay, now I'm not even making any sense. Maybe contradicting myself even. So some songs are about the song, and some songs are about the singer. I guess we sometimes have an association with a certain singer.
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And then there are songs that you never particularly cared for until a singer or band that you like performs them. I have one of those. In fact, as far as I can tell, I am the only person in the world that prefers the Aerosmith version of "Come Together" over The Beatles version. But then I also prefer the "Oooga chuka ooga ooga" version (Blue Swede) of "Hooked on a Feeling" over that of the boring original by BJ Thomas.
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But if you really want to hear a really well-crafted song performed in two distinct manners you should compare The Temptations "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)" with The Rolling Stones version. Two different tempos, one great well-crafted song.

A New Hot

So instead of my usual laments about how frikkin' hot it is here, I thought I would let the lovely Ella Fitzgerald explain it to you:

The Baseball Game

Last Thursday we went to a Texas Rangers baseball game. It was a work event sponsored by one of My Sweetie's company's vendors, so everything was very nice. We had a suite and parking passes. On the way there I had a good view of the new Dallas Cowboys football stadium:
According to Wikipedia:

• The stadium seats 80,000, making it the 3rd largest stadium in the NFL by seating capacity.
• The stadium is the largest domed stadium in the world.
• It has the world's largest column-free interior.
• It has the largest high definition video screen

And that all makes sense for a Texas thing I guess. If we ever get free vendor tickets we will go. Otherwise, ....not so much.

Anyway the baseball stadium suite was very nice. This is a view from the suite looking out over our outdoor seating area:

That guy on the far left was a really good-looking New Yorker that I called "The Missing Baldwin Brother." He said he gets that alot. He was one of the vendors throwing the party.
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This was the view of the field from the seating area:

And they had way too much food:

That wasn't even all of it and that's after the poor lady in charge of our suite had just taken out one of the chafing dishes (to the right of the mustard) to make room for a whole new dish of blueberry cobbler. I felt bad for her because my best friend used to do suite service at a ballpark and she always hated when the people ordered more food than there were surface areas. So I told those vendors to leave her a nice tip.

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That takes care of the photo part but what this post was really about was the difference in myself since the last time. In May 2006 we also did a work/suite/baseball game and I was so nervous it was ridiculous. I looked back through my blog and saw that I didn't even post about it. This time I was relaxed and comfortable. I had fun. I was in the moment. I walked away from that game feeling very good. I think I'm ready for this wedding thing now.

Business Smells

I was reading the paper yesterday and saw an ad for a tire sale and all of a sudden it was like I could smell tires.
I was all, "Yuck! I hate that smell!" And that made me think about how certain businesses smell.
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When I was very young, Mom was always going to the Cloth Barn because she did quite a lot of sewing for us. This is an actual picture of that old Cloth Barn which is no longer there. I couldn't believe it was on the internet:

Anyway, I absolutely hated the smell of that place. I don't know what the hell they were using to make fabrics and fabric dyes with back then, but that place burnt the bejeezus out of my eyes and nose. I go in fabric stores all the time now and it never smells like that.
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For three or four months, I worked outside sales for a pest control company and I really really hated the way that place smelled. You could smell it as soon as you pulled into the parking lot. I had to check in in the mornings and evenings and I kept my time there to a bare minimum. The place smelled so toxic - and I imagine it was.
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I worked at three different printing companies and I absolutely LOVED the smell of those places. To me a printing company smells like fresh paint and I love the smell of fresh paint.

Of course, not everyone loves the smell of fresh paint or of printing companies. On occasion, someone would come to take me to lunch and ask, "Ewww, how can you stand that smell?" That always surprised me. Also I've seen TV ads for low smell paint which puzzled me, because the second best reason to paint is for the smell.
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Like cloth stores, another place where the smell has improved is hair salons.

I used to hate the smell of a hair salon. It burned my eyes and nose just like the cloth store of my youth. But as this century rolled around, people pretty much stopped getting perms and that was the smell that was so hideous.
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My very favorite business smells are those sort of hippy (hippie?) oil and candle shops. They remind me of funky little shops at the beach when I was a kid, so that's more of a relationship smell memory I guess. (Sort of how I love the smell of diesel engines because it reminds me of the county fairs of my childhood.) And although the oil and candle shops sort of bombard with you with a multitude of smells, I abhor the perfume counters in department stores. So that's probably odd.
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I imagine someone out there loves the smell of a tire store and hates the smell of a print shop or a candle shop. And there are probably people that have always loved the smell of a hair salon and relish standing in a department store and trying on various perfumes. I guess except for the smells that are hard wired into our animal brains: baby head good, rotten food bad, people will never agree when it comes to smells. But I know what I like. What do you like and dislike?