PATTY’S PHONE HAS BEEN DISCONNECTED

I am scared to death.

Patty’s phone has been disconnected.

I don’t know how to find out what has happened.

I FOUND MY BEAUTIFUL ARBOR ARCH ON PINTEREST…..

It is so interesting to post things to Pinterest.  Every time I find something pretty or practical or something that I want to use some day in my life—or dream about it I know it will never BE in my life--I can put it on Pinterest.

Yesterday I was repinning stuff to my Landscaping Board and I ran across a lovely archway that looked familiar to me.  It was in a small image, so I had to enlarge it to see the detail, but I found the bent rods coming down the sides and I saw the pieces on the top (don’t know what they are called) but they are little knob like features and they are the same as MY arch.  Mine is a good 2+ feet taller than the one in the image because it has been set deep in the soil, as I imagine this one was intended to be placed to withstand wind once it has a heavy plant climbing over it.  So I saved it and saved a copy to my computer so I could post it here.  It is harder to make out because of the dark color.  Mine is in PVC white and I would leave it white because I like it to show through the green leaves.  But I want Richard to let me take it to CA with me.  At present he is opposed, but I hope he will change his mind if we find a trailer or little house I can rent.

It is 5:51 in the morning, and I believe my computer is running some stupid scan or another because the keys are far behind my pressing before they show up on the screen.

I have about had it with the computer tonight.  I had bought some MP3 music at amazon.com and I was irked to discover that the only way they will let me download music is with their stupid Cloud Player.  When you buy something, it automatically goes to their Cloud.  If you want to put it on your computer—which, of course, I do—I have to download and install their Cloud Player.  I did not WANT that. I am happy with my Windows Media Player, but I installed the dwxyz thing and it downloaded 4 songs and then stopped.  I had paid for an album and wanted to get THOSE down, but NO way.  I spent half an hour or more looking at their help page and trying out all of their suggestions to no avail.  I finally quit, went to the kitchen and got myself an apple, and came back to post the picture of my archway.

I had wasted the same hours last night trying to download my Pinterest Boards to my own computer in case of a server problem with Pinterest.  No way.  I could not get it with the best program they have designed to do back-ups because they demand that you use Firefox and I hate that one.  It has such a stripped down look and is not very intuitive for a moderately savvy user.  I am very happy with Chrome, but the little Pin4Ever does not work with Chrome.  So I had tried saving the page as HTML by hitting the SAVE button for each page.  To my distress, I discovered that out of 65 pins, it would only save 24 or 25 of the pins and leave the rest of the pages empty.  Wrong!  So I started saving them one pic at a time.  TALK ABOUT TIME CONSUMING!  I was so frustrated, I didn’t get to sleep till almost 11 a.m. Monday.  So I slept till almost 6 p.m.  There went Tuesday.  It is now 6 a.m. on Wednesday and I am not going to sleep at all.  I am going to go as long as I can today and then if I fall asleep at 7 I will (hopefully) have my day/night rhythm back to normal.

Of course, I MUST be awake Thursday night.  That is the last pre-season game for the Hawks at home.

I have to get the rent check tomorrow.  Our rent goes up $25 a month. I think he may have had his taxes go up because of the new Safeway going in so close.  I notice several of the cute little Caldart Cottages are also for sale, so  the real estate taxes may have jumped on homes.  Ours have remained low, but they were a couple of years behind the drop In home prices before they cut our taxes.  It is time to shut this thing down and go back to work.

I hope everyone who reads this is well and happy!

It Has Been a Long Time Away…..Again……

 

So much has been going on in my life that I have not sat down at the computer to write for weeks on end.  With my sieve of a memory, most of what has happened is shaded in gray or completely gone.

I don’t remember exactly how long ago it was—on the one hand, it seems like yesterday, and OTOH it has been like forever ago—Richard called with the news that we had a marvelous opportunity to share a duplex.  A friend of his was buying a place and would be doing some updating and was wondering if he would be interested.

I thought it was so much better than me moving into a residence of my own because of his proximity should I need assisted care.  I would be able to pay someone to come in once in awhile in the daytime, and he would be near if I had a night time emergency.  In the meantime, while I am healthy, I can help take care of his dogs if he and JD are going to be late at work or want a weekend away.

He had the great idea of sharing a car which would have stopped one insurance for him and I told him I would insure the car I used and pay for the gas, so he would get a reduction in outgo.  I have not repaid any of the money he paid to fix my car in its recent emergency, so I am anxious to do something to repay him.

He had sent me the real estate ad so I was able to see the pictures the realtor had put online.  He had seen it in person and called with more details. It sounded like we could make a nice situation out of it.

The problem for ME is getting this house cleaned up and emptied out.  Either job will take a long time and to do BOTH as well as clean up the yard and empty two storage units, it is just more than I thought I could handle by the end of the year.

So it was almost an act of God that gave me some time, but destroyed my dream.  The sale of the duplex fell through.  So I will still plan to move to Ukiah and to rent somewhere, but the super security of having the kids next door is gone.  I am going to hope that something better will turn up.  I may not deserve it, but Richard does.  He has done so much for others in his life, it is about time for life to return the favor.

Money is tight for both of us right now, so we are going back to what we were doing before the RUSH flag went up the pole.  He is just finishing the remodel of his kitchen and I am working at getting flowers out of the yard and bushes pruned back to look good when the house goes on the market.  Part of it is just regular care of the yard as it is now because I don’t have a built in sprinkler and the watering during the hot dry summer has been rigorous.  We have had weeks of days in the 80s and this is VERY unusual for us here.

I also have plumbing to fix in the kitchen and a washer to repair, so I have my hands full.

I did see Dr. Gretch in this lapse of time.  I was thrilled that my cholesterol was only 188.  It had been over 200 last time, and I had stopped my supplements to see if they had really had any effect.  All I had done was increase greatly the number of avocados I was eating (Safeway had them on sale for 78 cents) and I have been compulsive about forcing myself to walk with Poquito.  I suspect it is the walking that helped the cholesterol.

I did find that my supplements were doing something important.  After I stopped taking them, my weight only went up 3 or 4 pounds over 6 months, but my pants got much snugger.  Pants that had had as much as two inches of fabric extra were now down to about half an inch of give.  So I have resumed some of the supplements and will add the others as soon as I can force myself to remember to take them.  There are so many and they are so big (in some cases) that with my throat/esophagus problems, it is hard to take more than one at a time, so it ends up being a constant trot to take this pill or that one.  But I do realize that they play an actual part in my overall condition.  Gotta figure a way to make it work.

Thank goodness Poco is well.  I have been buying drug free tenderized beef and fixing it in the George Foreman grill.  He has straight beef with some lo-fat cottage cheese and steamed broccoli off and on. He has started to ignore it if I don’t put a tiny bit of butter on it, but since he is now 11 pounds, I have stopped all cheese and butter.  I try to get him to eat popcorn because he used to love that, but he wanted the kind that had butter on it, and if the pieces I give him don’t have enough of that taste, he refuses even that.  He is spoiled, so I am going to have to go back to force-feeding him the way the vet said.  She said 1/4 cup of kibbles at breakfast time for 10 minutes, and if he has not eaten it, take it away.  Offer the same thing at dinner time and give him the same amount of time.  She says when he is hungry enough, he will eat.  Problem with that is that we have a crazy schedule.  He is never up much before noon and is not hungry when he first wakes up.  He also likes to eat just before he goes to sleep.  It won’t be easy and I hate to add that to the other problems on my “list.”

The one delightfully happy thing in my life is the Seattle Seahawks!  I have people I see every time I get groceries, or go to the post office, or go to the credit union. All of them either love the Hawks, or know how much *I* love the Hawks, so we talk about what is going on and how the city is so excited about this team.  They have won all 3 of their pre-season games, but these don’t count on their win-loss record for the year. Those games are a couple of weeks away.  We play one more that doesn’t count in the record this coming weekend, and we play a team that also has a black quarterback, but he is very tall and very athletic and was the Russell Wilson of a couple of years ago.  He has a very good team.  I hope they won’t beat our guys.

My poor Mariners have not been so lucky.  I swear, when they get good pitching, the guys can’t hit their way out of a paper bag with the end held open.  Then when they are banging out the home runs (they were 3rd in all of baseball for home runs last I heard), the PITCHING stinks.  OR, when they are hitting and the starting pitchers are great, they will get to the 9th inning and the closer will blow the save and all the good work goes down the drain and they lose.  But even with all the problems, it has been an exciting year.  They finally brought up some of the kids from AAA who have been so much fun to watch.  Not only can they hit, but they are good fielders and they can run, so we have stolen bases and great double plays, etc.  But fandom is all over their case because they aren’t WINNING!!  Seattle has a lot of front-runner fans.  I hate that.

The managers feel the pressure.  Our head coach suffered a minor stroke at the ball park a month ago.  He described it in an interview on the sports station.  I will recognize the symptoms if they happen to me.

It is 6:30 and it is light outside.  I need to get some sleep. I slept away most of yesterday so I need to get something done today.  I hope this posts without problem!

HAPPY DAY! MY WASHING MACHINE IS NOT TOTALLY BROKEN!

I am ashamed of myself!  I assumed that because my washer failed to work when I shamelessly overloaded it, it was “broken.”  It had worked to finish spinning out the partial load that had been in it when it “failed to finish,” but because the things were still overly wet, I assumed it would not work on a full load if I asked it to work from start to finish.  So for all this time, I have been washing out undies and socks by hand and drying them in the bathrooms.  Everything else was going into a hamper.  I had filled one and was working on almost filling a 2nd.

So today I asked myself why I had not given it a try on the “mini” setting, where the load it is asked to spin out is very light.  Myself had no good answer so I put in a few very light weight things and gave it a try.  SHAZAM!!  It went all the way through the cycle and things came out clean and spun to the normal state of dryness that it had been doing prior to my mistake in overloading.  I was so happy I was doing the Happy Dance all over the place.  In fact, I was doing mini-loads all day long and I am now down to the last hamper!  I have been grinning all day, but inside my cob-webby brain I am scolding myself for all that wasted time because I didn’t use my head.

I had good luck of another sort this week.  When I was doing the last weeding and cleaning in the carport a week or so ago, I ran across a bag of dahlia tubers that I had bought for LAST YEAR, and had failed to plant.  Bless their little hearts, they had not rotted or dried out and had sent up some shoots that were turning green inside the bag.  I think I had planted some like that in the past and the green parts had died.  So this year, I put them in some flat bowl like containers and barely covered the tubers and allowed the stalks to remain above the ground.  I wanted to see if they would grow.

Bless their little hearts, they did.  Some of them are about a foot tall already and I am going to plant them and brace them with tall tomato cages since they will have shallow root systems.  I will have to dig them this fall and replant them next spring.  When they are planted at their usual 8”, they can be left in the ground here, but at less than a couple of inches, the frosting of our winters would kill them if left in the ground.  But this will give me a chance to see which tubers will produce pretty flowers and strong bushes.

At any rate, both of my “planters” (dishpans) were full of lovely green plants but last night I noticed that some leaves had been EATEN!  There was a snail or slug in the container! I watered them and did a complete search under the rims of the containers and in the soil around the bushes, as well as the undersides of the leaves.  No trace of the little montster, so I put some small lids in the soil and planned to fill them with beer at bedtime, but forgot to do that.  This morning, one of them had no further damage, but one of them had more SERIOUS eating showing.  So this afternoon, Sir Pokester and Mom went to Home Depot and got some Sluggo.  It is a non-toxic granule that turns to fertilizer when it is melted by the rain, but in the meantime is not poisonous to the birds who may eat the snails or slugs who have consumed it.  I sprinkled it heavily around the base of all the plants.  If something is hiding in the soil by the edge of the dirt, when it comes out both snails and slugs like this stuff (supposedly) and it causes their bodies to just dehydrate and they die.

If it will stop raining, I will get them into the ground.  I forgot to buy the tomato cages today when I got the Sluggo.  That means another trip tomorrow, and Poco loves that.  He is getting to be a lot more company than he used to be.  He used to just sleep on his bed, but now he comes into the kitchen when I am working and when I am in the bedroom, if he sees me changing clothes he comes to stay by my feet and yaps when he thinks I am about ready to go to be sure I remember to take him along.  I have to be careful or I will either step on him or trip over him while he is dancing about!

I have been intending to take pictures of the roadsides full of yellow Scotch Broom while it is in full bloom, and it has been blooming almost all month long.  I realized this afternoon that I had left my cell phone at home, so I wasn’t able to get a cool shot at about 7 p.m.  The days are so much longer right now—the longest day of the year is in late-middle June—and that pretty light that comes in the late afternoon most of the year now comes at about 7:30.  We had an overcast day much of today, but by early evening (by the clock) the day looked like late afternoon and the light was coming through the Scotch Broom up by Home Depot.  So tomorrow I want to get some pictures.

Our high school was so poor that for our graduation in 1951, all we had to decorate our stage was big containers of Scotch Broom with crepe paper bows.  We thought they looked good.    I know that I didn’t want to bring them into the house in Alaska because up there, they were full of Aphids.  I have not checked here to see if that is the case, or not.

Speaking of Alaska—the Copper River Salmon are in the stores now.  It is $22.50 a pound at Safeway, but it you have their club card, it is $9.99, and a pound is enough for several meals.  I found a package the other day that was just right for 2 meals and had one today.  I will get to have the other one tomorrow.  I also have several ears of corn shucked and in the veggie drawer in the fridge, so I need to microwave those before they get slimy.  Safeway has this program for the computer where they give you some special offers that you can put on your list and load it on your card, and when you buy it in the store, the special price rings up. I got some gorgeous berries today and actually had berries and cream for dinner.

I am not a basketball fan ordinarily, but Kevin Calabro is a basketball announcer from Seattle who used to call the games for the Seattle Super Sonics before they were stolen out of here by the jerk who took them to Oklahoma City.  It is ironic to me that Oklahoma is having all of these disasters.  When bad things happen to people on either coast, the crazies in the Republican Party always say that the disasters are God’s way of punishing Liberals for things they have done that are against God’s will.  Here all this horrible stuff is happening to the states of the “Great Heartland” (such a misnomer!) and I am naughty enough to think that it is Karma coming back on the man who bought our team and who is in a position of power to block the really rich men who wanted to rescue the team from Sacramento, California.

Sacramento’s team was losing money hand over fist.  The city had refused to build a new stadium that they owners said they had to have to profit, and no one with money would come forward to buy the team, so they opened it to any bidder.  Then as soon as we had this really neat guy who lived in this area but made his money in the finance business in California who wanted to buy the team, the mayor of Sacramento (a former basketball player himself) got his butt in gear. 

Our man’s first name is Chris—can’t think of his last name, as usual.  Anyway, had paid the current owners millions of dollars as a down payment—had gone through all the planning at the city and state levels here, had designed a new stadium and even bought the land for it--even had several more really rich guys to back him up (as partners), but as soon as they applied to the NBA to buy the club and move it, Sacramento finally got their act going.  The crook who stole our team was the chair of the committee that decided whether or not the NBA would allow the move, and the rat shot us down.

Anyway, Kevin Calabro is a brilliant man when it comes to calling a basketball game.  His descriptions and enthusiasm are so contagious that me makes me like the game in spite of myself, so I try to listen any time I know he is doing a national game.  He has been covering the play-off games between the Miami Heat and the Pacers from somewhere in Indiana.  (As I said, I am not a basketball fan, so I don’t know what city they are in.) Kevin called them the Indiana Pacers, so they represent their whole state, and they have a lot of very enthusiastic fans who all wear yellow tee shirts to the games.  The crowd was very happy and noisy today because they won.  The teams are now tied and they play the 7th game in South Beach to decide who will face the San Antonio Spurs, which is Ros’s team.

After dinner, I put a last load of fleece throws in the dryer and we went to the back bedroom and jammied up.  Well, *I* did.  Pokeyman just hopped up on the bed and started hunting for his spiral toy.  I am watching the Hallmark Movie channel and he is sleeping.  I am hungry, but it is 2 a.m. and I can’t eat at this hour, so I guess I should shut off the light and watch till the end of this movie and then see if I can sleep.

Interestingly, I wasted several minutes searching the TV Guide and clicking the channel remote to find the Sunday night programs I thought were on.  I won’t tell you how long it took me to find out that this isn’t Sunday.  LOL  So I will see my Sunday shows tomorrow when they are all ON.  Which makes me think of my memory, and that makes me remember what I did last night.

AARP sends out a newsletter that I subscribe to, and yesterday it had a link to the medicines that old people may take that have an effect on memory.  I had always blamed my anti-depressant, Effexor, as being one of my demons.  Wrong!  It said that of all the meds for either depression or anxiety, this is the ONLY one that has no effect on either long or short term memory.  However, two others that I take DO play a serious part.  The Beta blocker I take needs to be replaced with a Calcium blocker and I am going to ask Dr. Gretch about that in July.  And I also have to find a new antihistamine.  Benadryl hurts memory retention, and it have been taking that for 20 years or more.  I felt satisfied after having read that article.  Finally did something good for myself.

Interestingly enough, I took several of their Trivia tests on a variety of subjects from health to politics.  I got mostly 70s and 80s on them except for the test on the Democratic party.  Most of the questions were of historic basis and I have not studied where the party began—only what they believe and do now.  So I scored the lowest score I have ever gotten on any test in MY LIFE--20%!  At that, I quit and went to sleep!  Which I shall attempt to do now.  I will send the link for this to Ros in Texas, Rosie in Canada and Patty in Bremerton.  I think Rich and JD will get a notification in their e-mail.  If not, they won’t have missed anything.  None of you care about sports, so you can skip all of that anyway.

I hope you are all having sweet dreams!

I HAVE NOT BEEN WRITING ENOUGH

I am still awake at almost 3 a.m.  I had taken my Acetaminophen with the allergy meds included (which usually makes me sleepy) and had turned out all of the lights to sleep.  Problem was my muscles were tired and I couldn’t settle down to sleep.  For whatever reason, Poco, who seems to be very independent of me while we are awake, has decided that he MUST sleep smack against me when the lights go out.  This would be wonderful, except for the fact that he has to chew on his smelly bully stick.  That darned thing just GAGS me.  I know that my doggie wants to snuggle, so I *try* to ignore the smell and sleep. But it has always ended in Failure!  I just can’t hack it.

This morning, I gave up and turned the lights on.  I would rather be sleeping. I did a lot today and I deserve a good night’s rest.  I think I have found a way around my failure to stay at a task in my cleaning.  I used to try to work in a steady block of time till I was tripping over *everything* and in danger of falling down.  By then, I was usually so tired that I would end up having to lie down but would NOT go back to work after I had rested.

Today I started working for half an hour to an hour and then lying down till the aches subsided and getting back up.  Instead of doing things as I had done in the past, today I started doing things in *pieces.*  Instead of mopping the kitchen and entry and baths all on the same day and one after the other, I did just one.  Worked on the entry.  Was not as worn out or frustrated, and now there is one area of the floor that makes the rest look like I MUST get to it.  I hope it is going to keep me focused and moving.

I had to take not one, but TWO little 13” TVs to storage till I can dispose of them.  I broke the little white one I had bought at the garage sale for ten dollars (and it had worked like a charm—had the VCR in the base, and all—when I was in the process of replacing a dead modem/box from Comcast.  I had given my little black Toshiba to Coral when they were up here a couple of weeks ago.  I had used it in the bedroom, and when I set up the new LCD TV, I didn’t want to pay to dispose of it, so I gave it to Coral.  I didn’t send her the remote, so she could not set it up.  Sadly for me, when I tried to set it up in the kitchen, I could not get a picture.  I assumed that I would need a remote and still could not find it.  So, for all intents and purposes, it is dead in the water and now sitting in storage.

Since I have many hours of work facing me in the kitchen, I wanted a TV, but the 20” one that sits in the little den has not been hooked to the cable for months since the new modem that is a part of the rental DVR would not work with a 20 year old set.  It lacked the proper hook-ups.  But since I now had a little simple box, I was able to take it to the den and hook it up to the 20” set.  By setting the cart in the doorway to the den, I can watch it across the entry hall.  I mostly listen when I am working, anyway, so it will work fine.  If it weren’t so darned heavy, I could put it on the counter in the kitchen; but because of its weight, I am afraid to haul it.  I can just see me dropping it—probably on my FOOT—and then having no TV and an instant need for an ambulance!  But it was super to be able to listen to The Voice while I got our dinner.

I did a batch of vacuuming and tossed several pair of many-years-old shoes that I had been waffling back and forth about keeping. 

Cleaned the oven and fertilized houseplants.  Sorted some dishes in one cupboard and found a box full to take to give away.  Cleared out a couple of shelves in the door of the fridge and tossed some old stuff from the freezer.

I was really pooped by that time, and came to bed to watch some TV.  But my meds made me sleepy enough that I *thought* I was going to get a good long night’s sleep.  It is now 4 a.m., so I expect I will succeed now!  I hope so, anyway.