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Don’t Ask

27 Apr

A sad faced man sat at the bar, staring into his beer. A big burly bloke came over and asked him what was wrong. When the man didn’t answer, the bloke picked up the man’s beer and drained it, while the man looked on, aghast.

“What?  You got a problem with that, buddy?”

“No. It’s just the way things have gone today,” the man replied. “My dog got run over this morning, which made me late for work.  My boss got mad and fired me. I collected my belongings, and when I got outside I found my car had been stolen. I had to take a taxi home, and my wife was in bed with another man, so I came to the bar to drown my sorrows.

“And now you come along and drink my poison.”

It’s been that sort of week. Just don’t ask. Maybe I’ll tell you about it later.

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The Trouble With Getting Old…

23 Apr

…is that you spend all of your spare time going to funerals.

Tuesday, I attended the service for a woman who died at 94; she was born the same year as my mother.  This morning, it was a fellow who was part of my teen years “gang”. He was two years older than I, and I had gone to high school with his wife. Unsettling, to say the least.

Speaking of unsettling – Mrs. G’s coffin was covered with a pall decorated with brilliant rainbow stripes. When my startled eyes sought out the rector I saw she was wearing a stole with the same rainbow – and butterflies.

It was the Crusillo emblem, which is an Episcopal charismatic group, not Gay Pride.  Although as open minded as Eleanor was, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

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A Mentor

22 Apr

A posting on one of the blogs I follow -http://threesaherd.com/ – talked about mentors and favorite teachers – somebody who really inspired you to make something of your life.

Perhaps if I had been able to stay at Samuel Ready, I might have been able to accomplish more according to the ways of the world. Many of my classmates went on to be lawyers, scientists, etc., in a time when this was not expected of women. (I graduated in 1960.) Unfortunately, I finished the last three years of my education in public school, and under my mother’s roof.

Going from a school with an average class size of ten to classes of forty-five to fifty was a jolt to the system, and coming from an all-girl environment to a co-ed situation darned near killed me. In many ways I was much more sophisticated than my classmates, but what I knew about boys could have been written on my thumbnail, with room to spare. I was, in short, a total nerd.  My mom’s attitude swung between “you can do better than this” to “self-praise stinks”.

It was a no-win situation. Whatever self confidence I may have gained at Samuel Ready was shot full of holes.

After The Squire and I got married, he encouraged me to go back to college and take some courses to get ahead at Blue Cross. The beginning requirements were English 101, which was a primarily a writing course. I loved it! My professor spoke highly of my work, and even read some of my papers to the entire class. He encouraged me to use my writing, perhaps going into Public Relations or even submitting things to the local paper. I did take some college courses in PR, as well as sign language, hoping to get into TV broadcasting.

I never go into broadcasting, and ended up leaving Blue Cross with medical problems, but I have used my writing and speaking talents to edit newspaper articles, teach classes in American History, and help deaf patients when I worked at Hopkins.

Not bad for a nerd.

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All Dogs Go to Heaven

21 Apr

The Squire and I normally eat our breakfast in front of the computer, checking our email before we start the day. I bring Blazer’s dish into the den and he eats with us.

Dinner and supper, we eat in the dining room, with the dog’s dish on the floor at the end of the table. He will not start eating until we do.  Today, both The Squire and I were out at dinner time, and even though we had put food in the dish, it was untouched when The Squire got home. When he sat down to work a crossword puzzle, the dog came in and sat beside the dish, looking up expectantly. Finally, The Squire bent his head and said grace over his puzzle, and the dog began to eat.

You may make of that what you wish.

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You Know It’s Going to be a Strange Day…

19 Apr

…when you look out the kitchen window and see a HUGE snapping turtle resting on top of the wood pile.

We have no idea how he (?) managed to get so far from where he was headed, which was probably the pond in the front yard, but the wood pile is against the patio railing, and the stream is just on the other side of the fence. Obviously, the critter was instinctively headed for the nearest water, but he certainly wasn’t going to get there from where he was. What would seem to be the direct route is not always the best approach.

Fortunately, the wheelie bin didn’t have much recycling in it, so I just dumped it out onto the patio. I put the bin behind the snapper and the lid in front of him, and he backed himself up, right where I wanted him. The Squire put the bin in the van and trucked our visitor over to church, where a flight of steps leads directly down into the Gunpowder River. Bon Voyage, Charlie!

Another member of the congregation was working on the Colonial Garden and asked The Squire what he had in the bin. He showed her, and Dot shuddered. “I’m surprised your wife didn’t try to make a pet of it.”

Boy! She’s got me pegged.

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What’s in the Box?

17 Apr

Our bank is closing their local branch, so we had to go over and take everything out of the safe deposit box and move it to another location. They obviously wanted us to move it to the next nearest branch, which happens to be near up the Y, which wouldn’t be wildly inconvenient, but there is a “hometown” bank right in Joppatowne that offered the same size box for $10 less a year.

So much for retiree benefits.

Before taking the contents to the new bank, we spread everything on the dining room table to take a look at what we had.  Home inventory photos needed to be updated, some items moved to local daughter’s safe deposit box. (Hint: do not put your will or your Medical Directive [living will] in your safe deposit box. Ever, ever, ever.)  I must have had a dozen copies of my dad’s death certificate, but did not see a single one for my mom. Obviously, I had one, as I managed to close out her estate.  Eventually.

Once we got it all sorted out we trekked over to Hometown Bank to get a new box.  While we were sitting at the manager’s desk, I noticed the box of tissue, which was labeled “Spring Grove”.  Always nosey, I picked it up and turned it over, to see that it had been manufactured in Spring Grove, OH. The manager chuckled. “Obviously, Spring Grove doesn’t mean there what it means here”.

I told her Spring Grove hadn’t always been simply a mental asylum; it had also been a tuberculosis sanitarium.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. I had two relatives who died there. One was sick and the other was crazy.”

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Restless Leg Syndrome

13 Apr

I have had Restless Leg Syndrome since about 1985 or so, and have been taking Klonopin pretty nearly continuously since then to control the spasms.  I was taking a quarter of a half milligram tablet when my dad had his brain surgery in 1991; I took two pills, and they lasted me the entire week I stayed in Roxboro with my mom.

My regular neurologist retired and I went in to meet his replacement and go over my meds. He informed me than Klonopin was “no longer the drug of choice” for treating RLS. Today, if a doctor told me that, I’d just tell him it works, and that’s that. Go away and leave me alone. Well, the first thing he did was put me on Sinemet, which had a horrific rebound effect. (Doctors call this augmentation; I call it Hell.) It didn’t allow me to sleep all night, but would wake me up after four or five hours with leg spasms, and if I sat still for too long – such as driving to work – my legs would begin dancing all over the place. He refused to put me back on Klonopin, but tried Permax, which made me pass out without warning,  several other equally useless (or worse) things, and finally started me on Neurontin, which led to one of the best lines I’ve ever pulled off.

Neurontin caused horrible insomnia. I was getting by on three hours sleep – if I was lucky. I  had a friend, a surgeon, who used to save me his used scalpel blades. This was back before you had to worry about a lot of odd bugs, but I would boil them, toss the rusty ones, and use the good ones in my X-acto knife. One night, I was working on a dollhouse, and the knife rolled across the table and hit my foot. When I reached down to retrieve it, I discovered it has slipped between two metatarsals and pierced an artery in my foot. I tried to stop the bleeding but only succeeded in turning the bathroom into a scene from the Maryland Chainsaw Massacres. I finally woke The Squire, who came down and patched me up.

Of course, he was afraid I was going to Get Something. “Oh, for pete’s sake, I was working on the dollhouse. The worst that can happen is I’ll get shingles!”

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Confined to Quarters

11 Apr

Wednesday night, I noticed a soreness on the left side of my throat, going up into my ear. Aspirin and lots of fluids, and figured that was the end of it. By yesterday, I could barely speak, which you may have guessed is pretty serious for me.

Last night, I had a choking fit. My throat was sore and my uvula was so swollen I couldn’t breathe. This morning The Squire piled me into the car and took me to the Johns Hopkins Outpatient Center. (A friend says he has a hard time reconciling the words “Johns Hopkins” with “Doc in a Box”, but that is exactly what it is.) I was so exhausted, and still dopey from the codeine cough syrup, that I fell asleep on his shoulder after they had taken my BP and temperature.  My local cousin’s wife (cousin-in-law?) was coming out just as they called me back for treatment. She spoke to me and asked why I was there, but I couldn’t answer her and just motioned to The Squire. Turns out she also had a scratchy throat, and he told her he hoped she “caught” it before it turned into the monster I have.

Anyway, I am confined to quarters for the duration, and on penicillin, codeine and Chloraseptic until further notice.

I have to tell you, Chloraspetic does work, but it tastes the way an old dog bed smells. I can’t get it in the right place when I spray it, so The Squire has to do it for me. True love, and all that. My throat is still sorest on the left side, so that’s where he aims. I was swishing the stuff around and then swallowing it, but he informed me I am supposed to spit it out. He has been fluffing and patting, plying me with hot chocolate, tea, and soft scrambled eggs.

What would I do without him?

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Service, Please!

10 Apr

I swear, The Squire and I spend about as much on critter food as we do on our own. In addition to catering to the whims of Blazer and Eddie, we put out cheap dog food for the foxes, stale bread and corn for the deer, and seed and peanuts for the birds and squirrels.

Apparently, we don’t move quite fast enough for some folks around here.

A squirrel just jumped up, caught his claws on the rim of the storm window, and gave us both a blast of the finest. “The service in the restaurant is just awful! Do you know we are completely out of peanuts at table five? What kind of joint are you humans running, anyway?” And then he hopped down and stalked off in a huff.

And, obediently, The Well Trained Waiter went out and tossed seed and peanut across the ground.

 

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Gotcha!

8 Apr

We have been looking for that blasted dead mouse for about a week now, without much luck. We gave the TV room side a good going-over a couple of days ago. That side has what I would have considered the most likely spots – plenty of tubs of costumes, which have now been moved to the attic, thank you very much – but no luck.

The Squire insisted the smell was much stronger near the sewing machine. I tilted it back and even looked up inside it, but no go. We pulled everything out from under the bed – two large flat boxes, which hold patterns and fabric for Colonial outfits, plus oodles of tissue paper – and still didn’t find anything. We even looked under the mattress and between the mattress and the box spring. Finally, we pulled the head of the bed away from the wall, but we still didn’t see any moldering bodies on the carpet.

Just as we were pushing the bed back, a flicker of movement caught my eye, as the mouse fell from the edge of the bedframe onto the floor. It had climbed up off the floor, I suppose, to avoid Sir Edmund’s attention and died, out of sight but definitely not out of mind.

He was tenderly wrapped in a tissue paper shroud and buried with great ceremony in the trashcan outside.

The song is ended, but the melody lingers on. Phew! Quick, Henry! The Lysol!

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