My Daughter is moving to Colorado. Her move starts tomorrow. She will be back again Saturday night or early Sunday for more stuff and expects to be at the beach cottage with us in just over three weeks, but it all starts tomorrow.
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If you are wondering why I hadn't mentioned it before, it's because it all happened rather suddenly. I mean not like yesterday, but maybe just two or three weeks ago. An opportunity came up and she took it.
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I am happy for her and think she (they) will be much happier there, but you know.... Well it's going to be weird not having my daughter just 2 or 3 miles away. Oddly, every year when we are melting here, I tell My Sweetie: we should go to Colorado for the weekend just to cool off. But we never did. I guess we will now.
I apparently walked right by that huge lizard a few times before I noticed it. It was in the hallway near my bedroom door. I didn't see it until I was walking out with the sheets to wash. Then I shrieked and ran back into the room. I was panicky and called my husband and told him I was trapped in the bedroom. He laughed.~I got the golf club and the cat gate and used those to shore myself up to get by the lizard and then I went outside and called my neighbor. I was really freaking out. You would think I had a velociraptor in my house. I felt like I had a velociraptor in my house.~Carole came over, cool as a cucumber. I handed her a large plastic storage bin and a broom and she swept that creepy thing into the bin. I shakily handed her the lid and she popped it on. She could tell it was injured and felt sorry for it and I was just: GET. IT. OUT.~It's pretty obvious that the only way it could have gotten in the house was through the pet door in Barney's mouth. I guess he brought it to me as a gift. No thank you, Barney. But thank you Carole. A lot!
Wow. I had way too much fun this weekend and probably killed half a million brain cells. We did the furniture shopping on Sunday but delivery will take 4 to 8 weeks. I hate delayed gratification. But I guess I'll have to live with it. I hope my brain heals.
My Sweetie was in Seattle earlier this week on business. He called me and gave me a budget number and asked if I could get the living room furniture I want with that and if I would be happy with that as a birthday present. Well, yeah! So I immediately thought: Forget Scarborough Fair, I want to go furniture shopping on Saturday! Then every time I watched the weather forecast all week, it would drop a few degrees for Saturday. It magically dwindled from 77° to 74° to 72° to 69° and always sunny.~And of course I would think: But that sounds like such nice weather to be outside at Scarborough Fair. On the other hand, since I had decided to ditch that, I had added the $100 we would spend there to the furniture budget. Because that's how I roll.~Then Wednesday afternoon I went to the grocery store after my physical therapy and as I'm walking around, that creepy saleslady voice came on the sound system. She freaks me out because she always starts out with, "Hi ya'll, it's Kathy Yates and...." And she always says it like we are all old friends and she's being really really helpful. She usually says stuff like, "Hi ya'll, it's Kathy Yates. Are you ready for Easter/Christmas/Superbowl Sunday/The Fourth? Right now we have ham/turkey/party platters/hot dogs on special!" But this time when she came on she talked about Scarborough Fair and said they had discount tickets.~Synchronicity! My brain was all: Is this a message from the universe that I should go to Scarborough Fair instead of furniture shopping? Logic interceded and I realized that the saleslady voice in the grocery store was not the universe speaking to me. I have obviously watched too many goofy romantic comedies.~Oh yeah, so what I was going to say was that I changed my mind about the renaissance festival and am going furniture shopping instead. It's my birthday and I can change my mind. I really really want new furnure.
I finally decided on something to do for my birthday. We're going to Scarborough Faire. We haven't been in years, and I used to go all the time. And now that I think about, I remember why we haven't been back: It was insanely hot. And muggy with no breeze at all. We felt horrible. It must have been in the 90's.~The extended forecast is guessing that this Saturday will be sunny and 77°, so it should be a lot more fun. Also that's the same weekend as Fort Worth's Main Street Arts Festival so I'm hoping that might put a dent in the Scarborough Faire crowd. ~I have so many fun memories from there. I'll try to dig out some old pictures this week. I even dressed up a few times. And one year my friend had a booth (shoppe) there with a private upstairs room. That was really cool. Anyway, so that's what I decided to do and I'm really looking forward to it. It's not often you get to drink a cold beer surrounded by Renaissance whimsy and watch a lady in costume playing a hammered dulcimer. Hear, hear!
Yes it looks like this post is about baseball, but I am just creating a diversion. It's about photography. I am not, nor have ever considered myself to be any type of a photographer. I took one great picture in the early 90's of my daughter and second husband in a park with the St. Louis Arch in the background. It was a really good. I had an 11" by 18" print made and it was in our living room. I gave it to him.~I believe this is my second best picture. Or maybe it ties with that other one. I think the definition of a good photograph is how much time you spend looking at it. I love a picture that makes you feel or think. When I look at this one I see all the tension. This photo is of a highly publicized BIG MONEY PITCHER throwing his first pitch of the season. I love the implied action, the tension, the colors. I think I did pretty well.
Have you noticed people stopped saying "died?" What's with that? Now people pass away like some ship in the distance or worse, they just "pass." Really? Fred passed yesterday? What? Did the grim reaper show up and ask Fred, "Do you want to keep living?" And Fred responded, "I'll pass." ~I've noticed when I say something like: '98? My dad died in '98, people sort of grimace or jump. And it's not because Dad died, it's because I said "died." I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating: People die. Everybody dies. It's such a basic fact of life, I don't understand why everyone feels the need to tiptoe around it. And changing the wording doesn't change anything.~Another goofy one is "no longer with us." Really? Your grandmother is no longer with you? So now she's against you? Because everyone knows, If you're not with us, you're against us. No thanks. I'll pass.
Since I haven't been posting much, I realized that I need to put some stuff on here since I consider my post to be a sort of life journal so here goes:~I started back with Meals on Wheels two Fridays ago and they had almost doubled my route and had some really stupid instructions on a few of them and so my two Fridays so far were both unpleasantly eventful. I'm glad I have this next one off (Good Friday).~I really like my new physical therapist. I like the people and the location.~I spent 10 or 15 minutes trembling in abject terror in a closet on Tuesday while the center of a rotating storm - that had already produced a few tornadoes - moved over my house. It was so loud and there was so much banging and shaking it felt (and sounded) like I was inside a closet inside a moving freight train rail car that was next to an airplane. The good news is that no skylights were broken. The picture at the top is hailstones all over my deck. There by the hose, it looked like someone had dumped out an ice chest.~I discovered a cool secret bar today in the back of a cigar store. Nothing outside of the cigar store or inside the cigar store gives even the slightest hint that there is a bar back there. I'm not even going to tell my daughter about it.~Today is my husband's 45th birthday. He won't be home until almost 9pm, but I hope it's going to be fun.
I think this will be my first birthday in my entire life that I haven't made a plan for what to do. I think the birthday in that picture may have been the last one I didn't plan, or maybe I planned that one too. Mom was telling me the other day how odd (and easy) it was for her that she would come home from work one day and I would tell her that I was going to need potato chips and onion dip and a birthday cake. Of course she would always suggest ice cream, because she was old school and thought cake should be served with ice cream, but I never got that. Cake and ice cream together always seemed sort of redundant to me.~I always gave her at least a week's notice. And there was nothing she could do to stop this train because by the time I gave her my list, I had already invited everyone. To me, my birthday was A BIG DEAL. Always a big deal. It was like Christmas, but all about me. And with cake (but not ice cream).~I have many, many great memories of my birthdays past and I imagine that's because I always did make it a big deal. Heck, I think I spent about 18 months planning my last birthday. That's why it's so weird that I have nothing planned for this year. I was in Dominican Republic one year, on the local news (in Greensboro, N.C.) one year, at the beach with three girlfriends one year, camping with friends and family one year, watching the U.S. Olympic beach volleyball players in a tournament one year....and so much more.~So why have I run out of things to do? Was I born with a 50 birthday limit? Am I just too preoccupied with going to the beach in May? Have I lost my creative spark? Did I just become dull and boring? Maybe I just can't figure out how to turn 51.
