Ain’t Facebook Grand?

It’s a double edged sword you soon find out, helping your granddaughter set up a Facebook page. We’ve both waited for this day and like all things having to do with technology, we aren’t quite sure why. We can’t know what the experience will bring, so I haven’t thought beyond seeing her cute little avatar right there on my page of friends. And there it is this morning. I check to see how her page is going.

In a few hours she has half as many “friends” as I’ve gathered in over a year. The following day that count surpasses me. So I make a comment to her and she answers me. “kk” What the H— oh, I mean heck does that mean? Conversations between her and friends are even more cryptic. So much for my solemn promise to her mother to be a watchdog. I don’t know what the * uh, heck they are saying. I have to confess here that I even looked up one word in Google dictionary. They had never heard of it either. And they are techies, so that made me feel as little less like a nodding lady in a rocking chair.

The other thing I didn’t foresee was my own words on my Facebook page. Suddenly I begin to go over in my mind what I might have uttered that I wouldn’t in my granddaughter’s presence. Do you know how long it takes to scroll back to older and older posts? At one point I said, “Wait a minute! You talk pretty much to your grands as you do anyone else.” In fact, some of my little stories and opinions in their presence have evoked a cringe factor from adults. Not “OMG Get her out of here before she sends them down the road to ruin” cringe, just a momentary catching of the breath. That will probably be the worst that will happen with my new “friends.” At least I hope so.

There is another thing on my side. With her friends count approaching Justin Bieber audience size, I really don’t think I’ll have to worry about her reading my posts. kk?

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Random Women

I know there are shallow, silly women, but I often  meet  another kind, such as two ladies from the aptly-named waiting room of the eye clinic.

 

Lady No. 1: Who knows who spoke first or what was said. We are women. We talk. After the usual medical exchanges she mentioned she worked at the police department.

 

“What do you do?” I asked.

 

“Work cold cases.”

 

“Are you a detective?” Somehow it didn’t seem a strange question to be asking a woman in her sixties or seventies.

 

“No, I volunteer.”

 

“It must be very interesting,” I said, truly intrigued.

 

“Gory,” she corrected.

 

I’m sure her work could be gory, but I felt her one-word answer masked considerable satisfaction, especially when she contributes to solving a case, bringing answers to a family waiting for years. So if you are a senior volunteer, obviously there is more to do out there than stuffing envelopes. Who knew? Assignments such as hers are probably rare, so “gory” might be as good as porcupine quills in protecting your turf.

 

Lady No. 2:  She balanced a laptop on her knees, and  turned to ask me which kind of diabetes she must have. After a few questions, I told her Type 2. Then she remembered. She had brought her own laptop, but was apparently filling out forms for the clinic. Five minutes later I knew she was having lasik surgery and throwing away her glasses, that she had lost forty pounds with a trainer and sheer will power to bring her diabetes and cholesterol in line. And by the way, that she was diagnosed with MS as a teen. She knew little about the disease, even at what I would guess was age forty. Her doctor said she was so high strung she was better off not thinking about that, but taking things as they come. She was bubbly and cheerful and had obviously taken his advice.

 

She checked her emails, then smiles at the man walking to sit beside her.

 

“You just texted me!” He was communicating from another place in the building.

 

A few minutes later she squealed, showed something on her laptop screen to an office worker.

 

“Not bad,” she said as she sat back down. “I went on the clinic website and found a $200 discount!”

 

That is a woman who knows how to live!

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7 Random Facts

 

 

This is my first meme. Really. Always learning something from Amurin. I’ll send to a short list while I’m on a trial run.

Here are the rules, such as they are: Players start with 7 random facts about themselves. Those who are tagged should post these rules and then post 7 random facts. Players should tag 7 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

 

 

 

1.   In the fourth grade I wrote my first short story. Prominent in it was a rattlesnake. I once had a rat snake under my reading chair for two days, received a gift of a black racer in a bag from my husband, video taped one swallowing a green garden snake. Then there are the steamy photos I took of rat snakes mating on the fence. They have a habit of falling out of trees with a splat when enraptured or fighting. You learn to look up as well as down in a converted swamp. 

 

    2. My proudest recent accomplishment is learning to operate a single

        lever faucet.

 

3.     I still have older friends, but they are REALLY old, including a 92-year-old writer. The “young ones” are unrepentant hippies for the most part, and bikers.

 

 

4.     Beside my husband and children, cats are the most important creatures on earth. My father had an aversion to them, so my first came when I was thirty. Since that day we have not been without purrs and hairballs—and mystery.

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5.     We once had a sailboat business on Lake Monroe and later, a  business doing drug, alcohol and DNA testing.  Mostly “Who’s your daddy?” situations.

 

6.     I was six years old, and could hear the doctor give orders to start cutting out my appendix and the nurse saying I was not under, but could not move or speak. Next thing I knew it was over and Mother was moving me to another hospital. Dr. Frankenstein had used my upset stomach as an opportunity to try the new thread he invented. You don’t want to see how much it really didn’t improve on the current stitches.

 

7.     A young derelict tried to hijack me once, but really pissed me off when he flashed that knife. I drove off.

 

 

 

 

 

http://backyarddetour.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

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Whiny, Pathetic, Ungrateful Seniors

MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics writer says Social Security checks are going up $63 a month for the typical retiree — the largest increase in more than a quarter century but likely to seem puny to the millions who have been watching in horror as Wall Street lays waste to their retirement nest eggs.

 

He goes on to say the Senior Citizens League said (doesn’t he believe them?) it did a study that indicated people 65 and over have lost 51 percent of their buying power since 2000, with the price of home heating oil and gasoline more than doubling since the beginning of the decade and such food staples as eggs and potatoes showing big increases as well.

 

Well, I guess seniors were the only consumers to face these increases for eggs and potatoes, heating oil and gasoline. How does that work? You’re under 65, you get a discount? Oh, I forgot. You get a discount all over the place if you are AARP age. Don’t forget 10% off Mondays at TJ Maxx, Tuesdays at Marshalls (or vice versa).

 

If Crutsinger has really taken the pulse of seniors, what a bunch of whiny, ungrateful, wrinkled old buzzards there are out there. We are talking 5.8% increase. How many younger workers do you know who got that kind of raise this year? (Excluding CEO’s of failed, bankrupt and bankrupting companies)

 

Yes, those felonious Wall Street crooks laid waste to retirement eggs, including ours, but who are we to expect hard working, young wage-earners to make up the difference? Their 401-K’s got battered, too.

 

So if you are a senior, stop your sissy, pathetic whining and enjoy your 5.8% raise by spending it where young workers who are contributing to the Social Security fund every working day will get a little benefit back. Maybe with the new money circulating around next year a few of their tedious, grinding jobs will be saved. It’s the least you can do.

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Hear the Vulture Hiss?

I hope Jerry and I are good grandparents. It surely didn’t start out that way. The first time her parents trusted us alone with our year-old granddaughter we took her to Birds of Prey. It sounded like a good idea at the time. Audubon Birds of Prey in Maitland, FL rescues injured birds and releases them back into the wild when possible.

Haley smiled at the white-faced, barn owl as we entered. That may have been her last smile. We pushed the stroller to the bald eagle cage. There poor, injured, no-longer-majestic eagles loped around an enclosure, some dragging a wing. Haley’s face began to screw into a tortured mask. We quickly turned the stroller toward the cage behind her. On every crooked limb sat an injured vulture. Their bald, blood-red heads popped from fluffy white feathers above their scruffy black bodies. Wings drooped on some, claws or feet were missing on others. The scene we had always looked on with pity we now saw with a toddler’s eyes. Before Haley lay a Tim Burton horror scene of deformed, hissing, grunting vultures. She screamed to the top of her lungs. We calmed her down and cut our trip short, feeling like failures as grandparents. We thought we would be better at it.

Haley is ten years old now and thankfully doesn’t remember our first little foray. Perhaps it had no lasting impact on her little psyche. When we are out in nature now my camera cannot rest in my lap. She shouts incessantly “Ahmaw, take a picture! An anhinga! A gator! An eagle! An osprey!” Is it just possible that we didn’t scar her permanently?

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Everything Old

(Click to enlarge)

Have you ever got that woozy feeling like Whoa! I’ve done this before, said the same thing before, and he’s going to say “———-” next,  and he does?  Then you know the feeling when I bumped into this dress in today’s paper. I carried the paper to a 70’s family collage hanging in the den and held them side by side. No sleeves in the ad dress, but otherwise the feel is exactly the same. I could wear that old dress out on the street tomorrow. Well, if I still had it and if it still fit. Save anything long enough it will come by again on the carousel of fashion — whether you want it to or not.

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I Think Too Much

Multi-generational epics bore me. Just give me a good read about an important slice in someone’s life and I can be swept away. So I find myself verging on vertigo in my real life. Epics are difficult to avoid when you have lived through a few decades. You can’t say, “No, just highlight this part or that.” The parts string along like toilet paper on your shoe until you find yourself tangled in a true-life multi-generational epic. Well, if not epic then situation.

This is what brought that on. We are planning a few upgrades on the home we have lived in for almost thirty-two years. One son re-roofed for us a few years ago, his friend installed new windows, and another re-habbed the master bath. Our son-in-law (an electrician) upgraded the power box. Strangers installed carpet. How did that happen? Now for a second stage the same friend will tile the other bath, the neighbor kid, now all grown up, will do the plumbing. The son of our son’s best man will do exterior painting.

In that mix of characters are a father fighting for custody of a child, another denying his child until DNA evidence turned him into a real father. That son is being a real father to his new child. A couple of young fathers being fathers with or without marriage, a worker with great promise ending back in jail.

Do you need a scorecard? The point is almost all these very competent workers we knew as children or knew their parents before they were born (except the jailed one). We are aware of many of their most private struggles and successes, many poignant slices of their lives. Those slices now strung together form the ingredients of an epic.

Okay, it’s just a house that needs work and has no other significance. I’ll just curl up with a book of short stories until it is finished. Sometimes I think too much.

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Distance

I have an “elder” aunt who is. Aunt Fayrene has her finger on the pulse of our “tribe.” We don’t seem so far removed from the ancients when I look at it that way.  Our modern tribe’s feminine head creates family connections and archives not by chiseling stone, but on Hotmail. The result is the same. She is the glue that binds our family and records our progressions.

When the two of us were young a few years age difference seemed as vast as the distance from the street to our house. Now I drive by the old homestead and my front porch is almost sitting in the street. It’s not such a big step to relate this to the winnowing of family members. The top layer of the family has been peeling off over the years until now only a few aunts remain above me. Aunt Fayrene is the hub of the family, the go-to person, the “exalted elder.” At some point I came to realize our age difference is not as vast as it seemed when we were younger. She is only eight years older than I. Eight! All of a sudden I see myself sitting much closer to the street.

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Lame LaLanne Birthday Stunt

Jack Jack LaLanne, my role model, on his 70^th birthday swam 1.5 miles handcuffed and shackled while towing 70 boats with 70 people from Queen’s Way Bridge in the Long Beach Harbor to the Queen Mary.

I think I’ll pass, but on my 70^th there should be something I can do to honor his influence in my life. So check out these pictures taken today of the pose I held for 70 seconds. It’s the best I could do, Jack.

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Belly Button Lint #2

Like belly button lint, I have no idea how these thoughts collected, but this is cleaning day.

The sound of a word doesn’t always reflect its meaning.  Mildew was always said softly, lovingly by an old friend. She liked the way it rolled off her tongue and thought the unfortunate connotation a shame. I think of her when I hear light, sweet crude. But fun words are my favorites.  Is there a more entertaining word to say than  onomatopoeia? And then there’s tarmac and rejigger, which is probably not a word, but says a lot. Isn’t that what words are supposed to do?

Did you ever run into an old acquaintance in the grocery aisle and you greet each other like long lost friends.?Then you don’t know what to do when you meet again and again on subsequent aisles?

I heard a good term the other day, linguistic barrios, describing areas where a language other than the host country is spoken.

Do you know some people who have standards so high only they can meet them?

We have a new navigator with choices for (a) most toll road use (b) shortest route (c) fastest route. No where can I choose (d) all right turns.

I’m waiting for someone to invent a motorized treadmill. It would putz around allowing you to enjoy the neighborhood sites while you worked out. Don’t laugh. My husband is working on a helium bra.

What is with those high-rise desks school boards, councilmen, etc. sit behind? Do they think they look like Abe Lincoln up there? We know the intent is to intimidate; we just don’t like it. I’m giving judges a pass. They represent the law while those other jokers popping out of a Jack in the Box represent you and me. Come on down!

I’d like all the personal-habit nannies out there to lay off. If I saved all the money I spend on lattes each year and invested it at 5% at the end of the year I’d have — zero. And while we’re at it, the number of calories I’d save by skipping the chocolate each day is –what do we have here?—zero again.

Gerontocracy is another favorite word, meaning, of course, government based on rule by elders. I understand France is fast becoming just that. They do seem to be thinking more rationally lately.

This from Neal Boortz: How do you have a fire museum? Doesn’t the fire go out? Maybe it’s an “old flames” exhibit.

Two South American brothers are the last  people on earth who speak a dying language, and they don’t like each other and don’t speak. I am guessing we won’t have to “press 3” for that language.

Would someone tell our Persian Emma she is supposed to let us sleep? It’s professional courtesy.

“The windows throbbed,” the young man said, describing the tornado. I don’t know about you, but I like that. Colorful descriptions by witnesses are rare, but worth listening for.

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