Really?

18 Nov

I went to the dermatologist on Thursday morning to see about a persistent sore on the corner of my mouth. No biggie, he told me. It is essentially a bit of chapped lips. When you curl up on your side to sleep, you drool a bit. Everybody does, and sometimes it causes this sort of thing. He prescribed an ointment which would both clear up the sore and form a barrier between the skin and the moisture.

I went over to the drugstore on Friday morning and was told they had to order the cream, as they didn’t have that size in stock. Hmm.

Went I went back yesterday afternoon, the clerk handed me a bag which seemed a bit heavy. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA I’ve posed the jar beside a two cup measure so you can see how large this baby actually is. A bloody pound of the stuff! I’m seventy-six years old! I won’t live long enough to use all of it!

What was the doctor thinking? No wonder the girl said they didn’t have this size on the shelf!  It would have cost me the same price for a small tube as it did for this washtub, but the wastefulness of it just blows me away.

 

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Update

17 Nov

There is an article in today’s Baltimore Sun in which the man in yesterday’s post both explained and apologized for his outburst. I have edited it and omitted his name.

He stated that the play, Fiddler on the Roof, reminded him of Donald Trump’s policies. His comparison “came out wrong” and was “beyond a mistake”. “Instantly it was like, ‘Oh my God, what did you do?’ The thing that I can’t stand is Trump spreading hatred, and what did I do? I spread hatred.”

So – it was, indeed, beyond a mistake, and well beyond stupid, but at least he admitted it and apologized, although his life will never be the same.

 

 

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What Will Become of Us?

15 Nov

Today, a man stood up in a crowded theatre and yelled “Heil Hitler! Heil Trump!” and gave a Nazi salute.  All of this during a live performance of Fiddler on the Roof. 

These people used to hide in basements and spew their vile threats in secret, but now a man goes out and spends around $20 for a ticket just so he can yell what amounts to obscenities.

And Trump will, of course, claim there are a lot of good people on both sides. Good Lord, deliver us.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-hippodrome-20181114-story.html

 

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Busted!

14 Nov

About two years ago Blazer decided he had enough seniority to sleep in Poppa’s recliner instead of on the floor. Poppa did not agree and kept a large cardboard box on the seat of the chair.  A couple of days ago I found the box on the floor and assumed the cat had pushed it off while he was getting cozy.

Blazer does have a good thick pillow, courtesy of Local Granddaughter, so he’s not sleeping on the bare floor. Because the floor is admittedly cold, I had found an old, threadbare, flannel sheet and put it over the puppy every night, carefully tucking him in.  Sometimes Blazer will get out of bed after he’s gone down for the night, and wanders around with the sheet over his back, The Ghost of Winters Past.

This morning I found the sheet on the floor next to the recliner. I’m not ratting on him, but it doesn’t take much to figure out where he’d spent the night!

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Monsters, Inc.

8 Nov

I noticed a man wandering around in the churchyard while I was at knitting this morning, so I stepped outside to see if I could help me.

“Nope. Just playing Pokémon.”

“Did you catch him?”

“I did, but there are more. Your field is full of monsters!”

“Ah, so. Do you think I should ask the rector to do an exorcism?”

“Not yet.” He tapped his phone and grinned at me. “Let me catch the rest of them, and then you won’t need to bother.”

Whatever it is, fella, I’m glad it gets people out and walking around.

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Family Matters

3 Nov

Both The Squire and I have been tracing our family trees. Mine sort of fizzles out after the German side arrived in America, but he has gotten parts of his tree back to 9-something in France and the 1100s in Wales. That gets tricky, as he’s back to the “ap” names. Ap is the Welsh equivalent of the Arabic bin or the Hebrew bar, and you really have to pay attention.

We are accustomed to people posting odd things to their trees, such as John Singer Sargent’s  portrait of Madame X stuck in to represent a lady from the court of Henry VIII, or Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Woman who was supposed to be Henrietta Marie of England! So – one of his ancestors is John Rogers, the Martyr, who was burned at the stake by Bloody Mary.  This morning The Squire was putzing around on-line when he found a new link to Mr. Rogers. One woman had posted a newspaper article, written by Daisy Dahlrymple, and included a photo. The article was quite informative, except for the fact that Miss Dahlrymple is a fictitious character, a journalist in Hampshire, England.

John Rogers died in 1555.

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One More Week!

31 Oct

One more week until the official election day, and it can’t come fast enough to suit us. The phone rings constantly with robo-calls, Name Unavailables, or calls from people pretending to be local.

The Squire went to a site called NoMoRoBo and signed us up; it’s free and even if it wasn’t it would be worth getting. The phone rings once and then stops. The others we just don’t answer. To make matters even worse, several months ago we were called by one of the “official” poll takers – Gallup, perhaps. The woman who called asked if anyone in the house was under 65, which neither of us are, and then said she would “mark the records” and hung up. If they don’t care what we old fogies think, why would they care how we vote?

The mailbox is almost as bad. We get four or five mailings every day from various candidates, and we drop those directly into the recycling bin without taking them into the house. One candidate annoys me particularly. The man is a physician, and he voted to allow an increase in the lead in the paint used on children’s toys. I didn’t know they still used lead paint! Vote to ban the stuff, not increase it! The average ten year old knows better than that. He also brags about how much he does for the military, both active and retired, but a quick search of his voting record shows that is not the case. Does he think we are all that stupid?

Yeesh.

C’mon November 6th!

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Every Year The Same Thing

29 Oct

Yesterday morning The Squire and the dog came banging in to prod me out of bed. Scared me half to death; the way they acted, you’d think the house was on fire or something.

However. Once again the clock in our bedroom has taken a mind to fall back to standard time a week early. The thing is guided by some mysterious mechanism in outer space, and seems to have a mind of its own. While I was snugly thinking it was a bit past 7:30, it was a actually pushing 8:45.

Time to rise and shine, girl! Time to rise and shine! For some reason, even though this has happened several years in a row, it always ends up on a Sunday I’m on the altar. Could I not have to serve and just sneak in the back to sit down? Noooo – I have to get robed and get in procession. Yeesh.

 

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Early Voting

27 Oct

The Squire and I went yesterday afternoon to cast our ballots. Rather than go to our regular place we were directed to a Community Center, about 5 miles in the opposite direction. Actually, we were quite pleased at the change. There were about twenty five voting booths, rather than the five they had at our usual polling place, and five or six scanners instead of only one.  The door to the gym was in the center of the hallway but the line stretched from one side of the building to the other, made a U turn and came back to the middle. One lady had brought a book, and stepped forward in line without missing a word. My kind of people.

As we were signing in the man on the other side of me reached for his wallet and asked if he needed to show any ID. The clerk chuckled and shook her head. “This isn’t Georgia, sir.” We gave our name and when the clerk had it on the screen, we had to tell her our birthdate and address, so it was pretty easy to prove who you were.

One of the docents (I love that word!) was a young woman wearing a hijab, who still had an accent. I smiled and told her we were glad to see her here, and she replied she was glad to be able to help. “And I voted yesterday!” At least some people take their civic duty seriously.  As if I had any room to talk. I’ll have to see how I can help next time around.

When we picked up our ballots I asked the woman how it was going. She said they had had 1200 voters on Thursday and it looked as if it would be a lot more than that by the end of the day. If it was this busy at 3:00 or 3:30, it was going to be a mob when the “after work on Friday crowd” showed up.

I simply cannot imagine trying to have everybody vote on one day! Dear Heavens!

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Matthew Shepard

26 Oct

Matthew Shepard was laid to rest today at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. His ashes were interred in the crypt, twenty years after his death. He is the first of a national figure since Hellen Keller in 1968 to be buried there.

I have never been more proud of my church for their willingness to embrace the outsider and marginalized.  Mr. Shepard was one of that rare breed, a cradle Episcopalian. He served as an acolyte in his home church, and where he found warmth and welcome.  The service was lead by V. Eugene Robinson, our first openly gay bishop. I have to admit Bishop Robinson’s consecration was not met with universal approval (our own rector pitched a most un-Christian fit) but we’ve come a long way, and maybe starting at the top was better than trying to sneak up on this business.

The parish The Squire and I attend refers to itself as “A bridge to the future, anchored in the past”. That might be a good motto for the Episcopal church in general.

 

 

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