I'll Always Wonder What Was in the E-mail

Overheard in a bathroom stall:
1st Lady: I told you about my husband Mike, right?
2nd Lady: Your husband died?
1st Lady: No. I asked if I told you.
2nd Lady: What about her?
1st Lady: Him.
2nd Lady: I meant, what about him?
1st Lady: He saw the e-mail my aunt sent, so now we have to have a long talk.

~
I was through washing my hands at this point and had to leave but I did see one come out and she was quite old, so maybe that explains some of it.

I HAD To Make One!

How Most Days Start

Tenacity and Timing

I've been using my Duke purse (the one pictured four posts back) as my everyday purse for several years now. I bought it in April 2004 and it was starting to show some wear so I had decided to retire it after basketball season. But I hate shopping. And I hate shopping for a purse almost as much as I hate shopping for shoes.

~

I get e-mails from Macy's every day. They are an excitable bunch because almost every day is the "LAST DAY TO..." something. If they were to find out first that a meteor was going to demolish the earth tomorrow and they try to tell people, no one will believe them, because it's always the last day to them. Well they had a purse sale and I click over there and just like when I look at the furniture store ads in the Sunday newspaper, I was all, "Gross! Yuck! Yuck! Eww!"

~

I started thinking "Why can't I find a cute tapestry purse like the one I bought in Sand Diego in 2006?" That's this one:

I love that purse but it is too small for daily use and I think of it as my "travel purse" or "event purse." And I could hardly run over to Horton Plaza in San Diego to see if they had something like it but larger. I went over to Yahoo shopping and typed in "tapestry purse" and by golly some really heinous pics came up. Like this:

And this:
Yeah, ouch, my eyes hurt. I hope you weren't eating. Well being the tenacious type, I kept looking, googling all sorts of things, and saw the name "Danny K." Well I recognized that as being the name of the little purse from San Diego. I found their site and it was really cool! You pick out the shape and size you want and then you pick out a material and they put it together for you. And for all that it's really not very expensive. And my new purse just got here about an hour ago:

I LOVE it! It will go with everything I own and the size is just right. And the very sad irony is not lost on me that it came today. Duke lost their tournament game last night thus ending their season. And the purse came today.

I Guess I Need To Sing

Well you know they say "Don't count your chickens 'til you cross the bridge." But I just neatly put away my cold weather housepants and cleaned out and closed up the fireplace on Monday, and this big cold front rolls in today. The high today (Wednesday), and that was around noon, was 62°. Then it went down from there. That may not sound cold to you guys but our LOW has been around 66°. And it's supposed to get colder. These are the clouds I saw today when I stopped for lunch. They were much prettier "live.":

Later today (Thursday) or on Friday there is supposed to be a blizzard in the Texas panhandle. I know! You never hear the word blizzard here. Well, you do on the national news, but not about any place in Texas. They said there would be wind up to 50 mph with an accumulation of about a foot. My question is, with 50 mph winds, how does the snow accumulate? Does it accumulate 50 miles away? If the wind is that strong, how does the snow ever reach the ground? I shouldn't have dropped that Earth Science class. The panhandle of Texas is not anywhere near me, but it's in Texas, which means if it happens, that's all that will be on the news, so if Jennifer Aniston elopes with Mick Jagger, somebody should send me an e-mail.

~

~

When I got to the church today (back to Wednesday) to pick up the MOW food, I realized that I had forgotten Second Pee. I went into the church bathroom and as usual, I was taken aback. Although I've been picking up food at that church for 8 years, I've only used the bathroom about 4 or 5 times. And the decor probably looked good for about 5 minutes in 1982, but oooof! So I'm washing my hands and looking at these things hanging on the wall and I thought, "Oh man, that is just god-awful!" Then simultaneously I laughed and felt guilty. It seemed a weird thought to have in a church.

~

When I first walked into the church, my heart sank. A year or two ago some substitute driver had taken my route instead of the route they were supposed to sub for. That meant I had to drive a strange route and mapsco every single house. I saw just one route sheet there and it was very short so I knew it wasn't my route, which has been long for quite some time. But I picked it up and it said "Route 4." So either a bunch of people all had doctor appointments on the same day, or MOW has changed up the routes again. It was nice. I had 9 people, with two doubles, so only 7 stops. I broke my own record and left the last house at 12:11. My record was 12:15. And that was a LONG time ago.

~

~

I started on my screenplay late, late Monday night. I'm writing a sequel to a 1983 movie set in real time so it's 26 years later. I've written some scenes and dialogue but I'm doing it backwards because I haven't read Screenwriting for Dummies yet. And yes that's an actual book that I actually have and have actually not yet read. I'm just doing it for fun. I should read the book so I won't have to go back and change so much stuff. It's probably a silly hobby but it's no worse than doing a needlepoint that says something goofy like "I lived, I loved, I laughed." Wait that's not goofy. That's my epitaph. But I don't needlepoint.

~

As for this comeback winter thing, it's sort of annoying but at least I won't have to shave my legs for a few days. And you know what they say, "Winter ain't over 'til the fat lady sings."

My College Roommate

I think about my old college roommate a lot. For the longest time I felt sorry for her for getting me as a roommate. She was like someone from a sweet novel or TV show. She came from a little town in the mountains of Virginia and her mother had attended the same college. She had been a cheerleader and was voted "Best-All-Around" and was probably class president. She had a boyfriend that was a year or two older that was in a Virginia college and they exchanged letters almost every day. She was always buying stamps from me. I can't remember why I had so many stamps. I don't think I ever wrote to anyone. On the other hand, that would explain why I had so many stamps.

~

I usually just gave her stamps, but if I was out, she would leave change and a note in my desk. And I always needed change to feed the Pepsi machine. She was the most polite and sweet and neat person. She didn't have a single flaw. She talked in her sleep sometimes and instead of being annoying, I thought it was hilarious. Sometimes she said random things and sometimes she practiced French.

~

In the picture above, she is the one on top of my old mail jeep. I'm the one in red. I once brought a La-Z-Boy recliner to school in that jeep and she and I, alone, took that thing up three flights of stairs to our room. That sealed the deal for our room to be the hangout. Everyone wanted to sit in that thing. All the rooms had for sitting were wooden desk chairs and beds. Sometimes someone would wander in after a tough day of classes and ask, "Can I just sit here for a while?" I could also get by with leaving my jeep parked there for a little while because I think campus security thought it was a pizza delivery vehicle.

~

For the first several months I pretty much spent all of my free time with my high school boyfriend who lived in the dorm next to ours. I broke up with him just after Thanksgiving and we finally started to get to know each other. Although I felt all grown up, I was not mature enough to realize that I could have anything in common with someone so different from me.

~

We were like night and day as far as life experience went. She was a non-drinking virgin that had never even tried drugs. She had early classes and studied all the time or was writing letters. I slept in, went to class and then went to a bar or arcade or was out throwing frisbee or watching "M*A*S*H" in the student lounge. And oddly, although she seemed so classy middle class and I probably seemed sort of white trash, I had lots of money and she was always broke. She was uncomfortable borrowing money from me, so I started borrowing a lot of her clothes and told her that made us even. And I really liked her clothes.

~

Once the HS boyfriend was out of the picture I became more of a part of campus life and got to know all the friends she had made. We were a motley group that went to dinner together every night and did some special game/dinner nights in the dorm kitchen. I was the only one with a car and we would all pile into my jeep and go to the mall sometimes. Oddly, two of our group were girls I knew from high school but hadn't really realized were there before. They didn't join us for dinner as often and would donate their meal cards to us for the "special dinners" where you couldn't get seconds.

~

Once my roommate and I relaxed around each other, we discovered we shared the same crazy sense of humor. We laughed all the time and a few times I even talked her into joining us at the bar for Wednesday night nickel beer night where we played drinking games. When she lost, instead of drinking, she donated a nickel.

~

I felt really bad once our friends started looking at dorms for our sophomore year because I knew I wouldn't be coming back. I doubt she was surprised when I told her. I went back for the Halloween party the next year and she seemed happy with her new roommate. I don't think I ever saw her after that. I hope she's happy.

~

Before I started this post, I googled her old high school boyfriend and it looks like they are still married and living in their old hometown. I wrote her number down. I think I'll giver her a call.

Marriage in a Nutshell

There's nothing more annoying to most people than simplifying a giant convoluted relationship down to a sentence. I think that's why most people grew so tired of Dr. Phil. I never grew tired of Dr. Phil, I still quote him occasionally. His show got boring, but c'mon! - "You teach people how to treat you?" That's GOLDEN. But this has nothing to do with Dr. Phil.
~
I mentioned a few posts back that I've been going through a big introspective phase. Or maybe I didn't. I drink a lot of beer. But I was thinking about my two "failed" marriages. I put that in quotation marks because although divorces are considered failed marriages by default, I wouldn't change a thing. And what I came up with is My Theory About Failed Marriages. It is this:

• People waste their time trying to adjust their mate when they should be trying to adjust to their mate.

So that's it, in a nutshell. I think Dr. Phil would be proud of me. Except for the beer. He hates that.

The Long and Winding Post

On People Worse Than You: If you ever feel like you are a bit slow getting around to things or are one of those people that takes down their Christmas decorations on Valentine's Day, this will make you feel better:
Yes, that's a spiderweb Halloween light decoration on a house. I took that picture TODAY. Oh, it's after midnight so I guess I took it yesterday, but, still!
~
On Collard Greens: I can't remember if I told you guys that I read about a fancy southern-style restaurant called Buttons that has collards. Well we went there Monday night because My Sweetie is on Spring Break. Because of his classes we can't eat out during the week and I hate crowds so we saved it. By the way, if you click the link you will love the song that plays. I promise.
~
So this is me dancing with the statues outside of the restaurant:

This is my plate. As you can see I have TWO sides of collards:

This was what My Sweetie ordered. It's called Shrimp, Fish and Grits:

Yeah, I thought it was scary looking too.

~

On Being a Smartass: Today after lunch I was sitting at the bar at Italianni's when a salesman came in to meet with the owner. I'm wearing a Duke girly T-shirt that says "Duke Girls..." on the front and "...The Best in The World!" along with a Duke logo on back. Also my Duke purse with my Duke cell phone holder thing is sitting next to me:

The salesman says, "I take it you're a Duke fan?" I looked surprised and responded, "Oh it's my socks right?" I looked at my ankles (I was wearing shorts and tennis shoes) and then exclaimed, "Oh wait!! I didn't wear my Duke socks today."

~

And Now, Because I am Curious: Do you pronounce "syrup" as SEAR-up or SIR-up? And do you pronounce "culinary" as QUEUE-linary (That's CUE for some of you) or CULL-inary?

Touch Control Lamp Update

Since I have had so many site hits on my previous touch control lamp post, I decided I needed to update the information. I bought this simple kit from Lowe's:
The kit is probably available at any hardware store and is actually a kit for making a lamp out of anything so if you are using it to change out your touch control lamp you won't use every single piece. It was a very simple installation and I will give you some tips here that will not be on the instructions.
~
1) Lay your lamp out and lay out the new parts and you will see that you can keep some of your parts and just add the new things.
~
2) Use some sort of wire cutters to make it simpler to pull the old cord and parts from the lamp.
~
3) Make sure you don't attach anything until the new cord is threaded through your lamp base.
~
4) If you have very narrow areas in your lamp base like I did (it was only about 1/2 inch diameter) you will have a hard time threading the cord through it. I took a rubber coated wire, made it very straight and ran that through from the top then attached that to the electrical cord with a small piece of masking tape to pull it through. If you start with this method it will save you a lot of time. If you don't have wire, straighten a cheap metal coat hanger.
~
I hope this information is helpful. I think the kit was around $12. Now I have my pretty lamp back with a basic push through switch:

Feel free to ask me any questions, and if you are getting here late, just e-mail me. My e-mail address is on my profile. Good luck!

From a Martian Moon to Manhattan

Deimos

Lately for some reason I've been using the internet like someone with an actual brain. I've mentioned that every night (like a demented addict) I look at the astronomy picture of the day on the NASA website. The descriptions always have a bunch of links and last night I clicked on the link Kepler's prediction and that made me want to look up Jonathan Swift and then I started reading about the English king of his time and then I started reading about all the kings and queens that followed and so I was learning all this history that may come in handy when I watch "Jeopardy" on TV.
~
I also like to do internet sleuthing. I like to see a picture or skyline in a movie or TV commercial and try to find out what the city is. There was a commercial on tonight and I tried to do that and while checking to see if it was some odd angle out of Central Park, I found this New York city real estate site. I've been having a blast looking at these apartments. One is even as "cheap" as $530,000.

For just under $9 million, this could be yours!

(and that's just an apartment inside)

Going to back to all that history I was reading about, I didn't realize there were so many wars. I mostly know of 20th century wars and a few old British ones like The War of the Roses but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Have you ever heard of The Second Anglo-Dutch War or The War of the Spanish Succession? And there are a lot more. Some of them had better names like War of the Quadruple Alliance, but I guess with so many wars they couldn't come up with fun names for all of them. And they were always warring about everything. My guess is the English grew tired of all those wars and that's why they became so polite. See, I'm learning a lot on the internet. Like someone with an actual brain.

Goofy Movie Posters

I found this cool website. It apparently has Photoshop competitions and I found it through IMDB because it had a contest to change one letter of a movie poster. After looking at all the entries, I just had to make one so I made this:

Wow

I was just about to do a mundane post about how I fixed the lamp and what my next rock tumbling project will be and then my old friend called. And this is the old friend that painted that portrait of Dad as well as three others that I have up in my house. We have not talked in years. I knew her daughter had died of a drug overdose, but she told me details and that it was a planned suicide and it was awful. We talked about everything. Wow. That was a lot of information to process. I wish we had stayed in touch.

Things I Used to Do

I don't know if it was Xup's funny post about being middle-aged or because I have a birthday coming up, but I've been doing the usual "going over it all" in my head and I was thinking about all the things I used to do on a regular basis but don't do anymore. I thought I'd make a short list and I bet some of you have things like this too. Or not like this so much, but you know, things you used to do but no longer do.
~
1) Camping: Man I used to be the camping queen, young and sweet since before 17. (OUCH! My apologies to ABBA!) My family first started camping on a regular basis after we bought our boat in 1974. Dad named it "Frawg" because it was something I used to say. (What happened was, when the expression "gross" came out, my best friend and I overused it so much, her mom told us we could not use it anymore, so we substituted "frawg.") Anyway, I camped off and on with different people as I grew up, and by the time I reached my second husband, I was a camping scientist. I had a 1982 white Mustang hatchback and could pack it with firewood, tent, ice chest, food, clothes, sleeping bag, rolled-up foam sleeping pads, fold out chairs, cook stove, lantern and more. To this day I can make anything fit into any space. So when was the last time I went camping? I dunno. Maybe 1993? I know I went in 1991, because that's what I chose to do for my 30th birthday. I probably went a few times after that but can't remember anything specific.
~
And now? You couldn't pay me to go camping. Well okay, you could, but you'd have to pay me a lot! That's my step-dad on the left and my now 24-year-old daughter standing behind me:
2) Bowling: I used to bowl on a regular basis since I was 14. I have my own ball and shoes and towel and powder and everything. I'm not sure how the bowling tapered off. It was probably a vanity thing when I gained weight and didn't want people to focus on my giant butt. Or maybe various old age aches and stuff. I don't really miss bowling in a bowling alley because now I can bowl at home on my Wii. And I can bowl left-handed and not hurt my thumb. I'm maybe 29 in this picture:

3) Dinner parties: Actually I was only into this when I was married to my second husband, but I was forever having dinner parties or cook-outs. And it wasn't because we had a pool, because I also had them in the winter. The very idea of having a dinner party now almost gives me a heart attack. I prefer to meet people at restaurants.

~

4) Ballet: This one is different from the others because I would do that right now. The thing is, I was lucky to find adult ballet for exercise classes as I started to get older, but I can't find them now - and believe me I have looked. If I had lots of extra cash, I would have private classes because that's about the only way I could have ballet class around here. Age discrimination, no? I think I am 31 or 32 in this picture:

5) Rock Concerts: Although I always say my first concert was Aerosmith, I did see The Carpenters when I was 9 and The Who when I was 14. I don't really remember those as much as all the rest. Probably because I was sober. Or just young and overwhelmed. But I used to be a concert fanatic. I not only went to oodles of concerts but went to the giant mishmashes like Texas Jam and even Champagne Jam in Atlanta. I posted about my crazy Rolling Stones weekend. Okay, maybe I didn't, I couldn't find it. But it was one very long weekend. Anyway I haven't been to a concert since 1994 and it was either Elvis Costello or Bonnie Raitt. I did internet searches and found that Costello was May 1994, but I couldn't find a record of when Bonnie Raitt was here. And now? I'd list going to a concert just a hair better than going camping. You'd have to pay me. A LOT.

Shoulda Stuck With The Vacuum Cleaner

I was originally going to do a big rant about my stupid vacuum cleaner, but it was a little after 2:00 a.m. and I would have had to take pictures and do some Photoshop labeling and whatnot and thought, "Hey! That's a lot of work and it's Friday and maybe everyone would like another bar joke. And that's a lot easier." Or so I thought. Man, I'll be glad when I finally have all 18 transferred to the PC (although I won't put all of them on here). Tonight was worse than ever, not only was the PC putting up notes to me about "invalid markers" and whatnot, but the mac actually yelled at me in a loud woman's voice. It sounded like "Warning! KGB at the door!" but it was hard to tell with the rock tumbler going in there. And then to top it off, when I tried my 4th floppy disc (do those things just go bad over time like potato chips?) it had a picture called "Dad." So I copied the Dad pic onto the pc and then went to get rid of it off the floppy and the pc asked me "Are you sure you want to delete "Dad"? Well that was just awful and I almost burst into tears. It seemed at this point the computers were just being cruel. I finally got hold of myself and the Dad pic disc finally worked so here is another Bar Joke. Happy Friday! (and if you are new here, you will have to click on it to make it bigger. )

Highs and Lows?

I constantly amaze myself. I didn't have a particularly good day, but I felt perfectly fine and in a pretty good mood when My Sweetie got home and asked how my day was. And even though I was majorly stressed at 4:30 with millions of racing thoughts about "what to do!? what to do!?" that had all passed and I simply said, "Oh, it had its highs and lows." He then asked, "What were some highs?" And I was speechless. I couldn't think of anything really good, so I sort of stammered, 'Well, uhm, I finally got the last piece of cloth I need to make the cat pillow."
~
My day started a tad late, but not too late. I was about 5 minutes later than usual getting to the church to pick up the food. But there was a new sheet there. A sign-in sheet that had three sections. One for my signature, one for my route and one for the time I left the church. And there was a note on there that said, "Remember the food arrives at 10:30." I was all "Really? since when? No one told me!" I've probably been there 3 dozen times at 11:00 and had to wait 10 or 15 minutes for the food to arrive, so I always get there about 11:15 to 11:20. I saw on the sheet that two people had signed their time as 10:40, which made me think that the food must really get there now at 10:30. I felt like an errant child that had been caught at something. It wasn't a good start to my day.
~
Then I caught the damn train:
Since I already felt LATE, catching the train just made me more tense. Everything went fine from there until I got to one house and got no response. I followed procedure, which ends with calling into MOW, and they said they had called in the cancellation to the church, so being the honest knucklehead that I am, I just blurted out, "Oh! Okay! I was freaked out by the sign-in sheet and didn't even look at the cancellation sheet. My bad!"
~
Then I got a text from my daughter asking if we could have another goofy game afternoon and I said, "Sure, I'll call when my errands are done." After lunch I returned the printer cable I didn't need to Best Buy and then went to the fabric store. I called my daughter and she was on the other side of town. I was all, "I thought we were going to play games!" and she said "How about in two hours?" UHm, no. That would have been 5:30. I was pretty disappointed because we had so much fun last time and I had been really looking forward to it.
~
So I grabbed a beer at Logan's and got two side salads to add to the dinner I was going to make (I'm addicted to their house dressing) and came home. I got home around 4:30 and saw I had a message on my home phone from my special MOW lady and the message had come in at 12:26. It was a very long distraught message about water all over her bathroom floor and she hadn't been upstairs in 4 days and had no idea how long it had been leaking, etc, etc,. So here it is, prime rush hour time, her house is 15 miles away, and I'm trying to come up with some good ideas and sort of panicing, but when I called her, she had already called her Thursday MOW guy and he had come and turned off the water and put towels down.
~
And it was the toilet valve that was leaking. I had also been freaked out because that was one of her bathrooms that I had replaced a faucet, so I had worried it was something I had done, but I have not touched that toilet. (I had worked on her toilet downstairs.) Anyway her Thursday MOW guy will be there later today and he is going to help her out and if she needs me she can call me.
~
So when he asked, "What were the highs?" I really couldn't think of anything. But I did finish my crossword puzzle in 30 minutes with only 7 writeovers (I use a pen).

Bar Joke 3

My brain has finally started processing information. I went on the old Mac today and was opening the old bar jokes to save them in a better format and realized they were originally done in Aldus Freehand, which is such an old illustrating software it's not even on Wikipedia. Oops, my bad! Anyway I finally looked at a window when I was opening one (I've mentioned many times how lazy I am) and it said something about "converting Aldus Freehand." So that's how I figured that out. Also, one of my problems is forgetting that when you go from Mac to pc you gotta tell everyone what sort of file it is. You have to actually type ".jpg" or ".tif" so a pc knows what the hell to do. Okay, I know this is boring the hell out of everyone so...
This is for VioletSky who commented on the last one that my comics "have definitely stood the test of time." Well, one of them had prices on it from 12 years ago. I hope all this exposition doesn't spoil the joke:

In The Bar 2

It's bad enough that I'm semi dylsexic, but all this going back and forth and formatting between Mac and PC is getting my brain all confusilated!

I feel like I've been doing this for two hours now. I wish I could remember what I did Saturday night!

The Lost Comics

Wow! The coolest thing happened tonight. I was looking for a particular graphic and used the old Mac and then needed an IBM floppy to bring it in here. I found my old floppy box and found my old comics! I think I made them in 1997. I had seen some interesting static comics and thought, "Well heck, I can do that!" Since I can't draw I realized I could do some clip art static characters and then it's just about the writing. I wish I had kept my rejection letter from the comics rag that I had sent some to. Anyway, I thought these guys were LONG gone. Not only did I find them but was able to unstuff them and open them and everything. And this will sound very egotistical, but some of them actually made me laugh out loud. I'm guessing you will have to click on it to read it, but here's one I liked: