If you see me on the 10 most wanted list, don't be surprised.

It seems if I get out of bed in the morning, it is invariably on the wrong side.  Or is it?  Could it be that all the news stations are geared to everyone except me and I feel that maybe I have outlived my usefulness?  I love the news.  I must confess I tend to watch one of the more liberal stations, but to each his own.  For the most part the news is geared for some one way younger than me.  The white headed old farts that I grew up watching and trusting are no longer with us and have been replaced by some young stud or studdette who stands in the middle of the empty stage clutching his/her tablet, which they never bother to look at.  Apparently the message here is that they have one and I do not so ha! ha!

They think the fact that Kim Kardashian went to visit trump is big news, but sadly I do not give a shit.  Wrecks, wars, catching a murderer, the scam going on that affects me is way more important to me than the fact that some young chickadee appeared on the red carpet in a see through dress immediately followed by the news that some lecherous old man looked at her and is now being charged with inappropriate sexual comments.  But I am not going there and it is really not the news that ticks me off, but rather the weather.

I watch Jeopardy! every afternoon at 3:00 and again at 6:30 PM and that is when weather happens.  I am treated to a little gal in her pretty little dress walking back and forth across a bare stage and pointing at a little red cloud with blue edges.  Sometimes it is even in my neck of the woods.  Now I heard her the first time.  And then again 2 minutes later and again when I thought I might catch a glimpse of final Jeopardy!  The bulletins are second only to her giving the regular weather when we are not in danger of blowing away.  This is the time she tells me the "out the door temperature" and what I should wear for that.  This is followed by my "drive home" time.  Apparently this is not my weather station because I do not do the "Out the door nor the drive home" times she is talking about.  My times are crawl out of bed time, Metamucil time, and Late night with David Letterman.

I used to be able to turn on the weather and they showed me a very clear picture of the jet stream and high and low fronts and I could pretty much figure it out, but now I have none of those things.  Just the little woman walking back and forth with her tablet pointing at things that mean absolutely nothing to me and telling me the times this will happen in terms that imply I must work a 9-5 job or I really do not need to know what the weather is doing.  So I have found me a weather site that gives me the jet stream, high pressure and low pressure and throws in a temperature or kind of a guess at it and does not force me to go "out the door" or commute back home from God only knows where.  Like right now, I should be slowly creeping along on the interstate, but I am setting at the computer contemplating whether I should puree my food tonight or put in the dentures and live dangerously.

Thus ends my little rant for today.  Hopefully I will be able to watch Jeopardy! tonight.

Time to settle back into my mundane life.

The trip to Dallas is over and becoming a soft glow in my "been there, done that" memory.  The High Tea at the church is over and done.  The tea cups are clean and packed away down in the church basement.  I have bought "crumpet rings"  for the next endeavor.  First Church Preschool had graduation last night and I cooked 18 pounds of pasta for them.  All my company has departed and Patty is back in Lakin.  Last night I went to bed at 9:00 and did not turn over until 5:30 this morning.  Sadly the worlds smartest mouse is still alive and well in my kitchen.  Thank you Icarus!  Life is returning to mundane here on South Road, which means I must return to my blogging.  That is a chore I really look forward to and enjoy most of the time.

So welcome to my world, writers block!  Normally I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about something and it winds up being on my blog the next morning, but when life is too full, my writing takes a back seat.  I have not had an original thought that did not involve a scone, a pot of tea, or a room full of ladies in their finery for a few weeks.  A time or two I flashed on something, but it was quickly replaced by thoughts of a hot stove, a full oven and jars of lemon curd and clotted cream.

Life goes on.

This blog has suffered and The World is not My Home and my mossy little room over on that blog has really suffered.  I need to reread that so I can carry on where that one left off if I find my notes on that.  In the meantime, I did start the tiller yesterday and made a few passes in the garden spot.  The ground was too dry to do much good, so I watered and will try it again today.  Hopefully, I will wake up in the middle of the night thinking about where I left off and carry on from there.  I can only hope.  In the meantime, send me good thoughts and I will get something done today, even if it is wrong!

PEACE!

What is in that bush?!

I am setting here in Dallas in my bedroom (but I think if I am not here it could be anyone's bedroom, not just mine.) and outside the window is a bush and in the bush is a mother bird and at least 2 babies.  The babies are fully feathered and hopping around from twig to twig.  Mother just flew in and crammed something down the little birds throat.  He does not look very happy about it, but mother knows best!  I am afraid to get my camera because if the flash scares the little fellow he may lose his grip and fall to the ground.  Sam told he there is a cat that hangs out around here and we all know what cats are good for don't we?  Well actually, they are good for several things, but I am talking here about their eating of the birds and such.

(Side note here.  Right now at my house there us a mouse running loose that my Icarus brought in and turned loose for  me to catch.  See, she loves me and knows I am incapable of catching my own mouse so she is trying to make it easier for me.  I am hoping that by being gone for almost 2 weeks, she will be mad enough at me that she will will not care if I starve.  We will see how that goes!)

It is amazing to think that probably 30 days ago this little bird was just popping out of an egg maybe an inch in diameter or less.  And now he has all is feathers and a very big beak for the mother to cram food into.  She just came and did it again.  I am sorry, but if that was my baby I would not feed it!  It actually tries to fight her off when she comes.  I do not see the other bird, so either it flew away or the cat carried it off for breakfast.  Oh, never mind!  They are right there side by side so mother is feeding them at the same time.

It is amazing how nature works, isn't it?  Birds do not appear to be very smart, but this bird has managed to hatch out at least 2 babies and kept them out of the cat's mouth long enough that soon they will fly away and start their own nest somewhere.  If they do not fly away today it is going to surprise me.

Oh, oh!  Sam is home.  I better go clean up my mess before he sees it!

Hello, Dallas!

Well, this morning bright and early, I crawled on a Boeing 737-800 Jet and less than 2 hours later, I was landing in Dallas, Texas and Pueblo, Colorado was back in the rear view mirror.  I have lived 76 years and never even been tempted to leave the ground, but here I am!  When I got off the airplane, I still had no idea where I was and yet Sam found me before I could figure it out.  And then he scooped my suitcase off the carousel and we were headed across Dallas to his house.  7 1/2 hours after I left the house, I have traveled what would have taken me 14 hours to drive, ate a granola bar, had a nap and am on my second glass of water.

So what I have dreaded for all of my life has turned out to be a really cool adventure.  There is something about soaring way high above the earth that is very humbling.  To just be able to look out the window and see the tiny little world down below, is an adventure that can not be told, but has to be experienced.  Something about looking down on the clouds makes one feel infinitesimal.  I had made up my mind that I would just do it and that is what I did.  I had many people give me pointers on flying, but I knew it would have to be done to know for myself.

Oh, when the plane was taxing down the runway and it began to shudder a little and the guy in the seat next to me said, "No, that is not normal" I did know a little moment of panic, but then I remembered what Gayle's husband said about it being much like a car ride only way bigger and there would be some turbulence, I relaxed.  I figured about the worst that could happen was a fiery crash, but hell, when you are my age something is going to get  me and it might as well be a newsworthy event.   But here I am.  Sam had all the work of booking it, and paying for it, all I had to do was get on board and I am very glad I did.  For that I thank him.

I have a book at home by a photographer named Wark that is all aerial photos and I now know what they look like in real time.  There are many circles in Colorado and Oklahoma that I have no idea what they are.  I saw dried up rivers and lakes and reservoirs that I never knew existed.  Lot of farmland all green and growing.  So tonight I shall go to bed in Texas and instead of visions of sugar plums, I shall have vistas of clouds and mountains.  As for flying, I wish I had tried this back when I was young.  I might have been a bird! 

An exercise in futility.

Mother called a lot of the things I did "an exercise in futility" and she was right on things like holding a marriage together, hoping for a raise, cleaning house with 5 kids under the age of 6, and she was usually right.  Now let me tell you what the biggest "exercise in futility" is in my world today.  It is that damned email.

When I open AOL a cheerful voice announces "You've got mail!"  It is such a cheerful voice and I never cease to open said mail box.  I run the cursor down the list and click on the first one that is an actual email from someone I know.  Early in the morning it is not unusual to have 45 or 50 emails and maybe 2 will be real communications from a real person.  I deal with those and then go to any that says  "Paypal", "Etsy" or "ebay".  Paypal will be an order and Etsy is usually a question and ebay requires some sort of action.  These days orders are a rarity.  AOL sorts my email and puts a lot of it in the spam folder.  I look at that list and click the "delete all" button.  Then comes the part that pisses me off.

I go back to the original mail list and look at the first one.  I open it and it is from some vitamin company.  Now if I simply delete it, they think I like to read their crap and the send me more.  Learned my lesson the hard way on that!  So I go to the bottom of their spiel and click the "unsubscribe" button.  It pisses me off that I have to unsubscribe to something that I never subscribed to in the first place, but that is beside the point.  I click on "unsubscribe" and if the gods are smiling on me I get the "sorry to see you go your name has been removed."  That is in an ideal world.  More often than not I get one of the following:

"We are sorry to lose you.  Please update the reason you are leaving." which is a pain in my keester.

Or a simple "you are unsubscribe ."  That is good.

But the one that sends me through the roof is the one that pops up and says: "You must prove you are not a robot."  Then there is a set of pictures. "Choose the pictures with cars."  I do that.  "Choose the pictures with street signs."  I do that.  "Chose the pictures with store fronts."  It is at this point that I loose it.

I have been know to write scathing letters telling them that no way in hell do I need Viagra or whatever they are wanting to sell me and hit the send button.  On those occasions I immediately hear the click on AOL that means I have mail and it is to say that my missive has been returned because that mail box is not a reply address.  Grrrrrrrrrrrr!

So now here I set wasting time telling you things you already know.  The cat is on my lap digging her claws in the tender part of my legs and bumping my chin with her head and the mailbox is continuing to open and close over on the open screen under this one.

So there you go.  My bitching for the day.  A definite exercise in futility if I ever saw one!

It must be spring.

I was setting at the computer today and I felt something brush my hair.  Now since I live alone here with a cat and a dog, something brushing past my head is cause to make me become alert.  Sure enough, a little Sparrow landed on the shadowbox on the wall by my desk.  I opened the front door and tried to shoo him that way, but he did not understand.  Of course Icarus was helping me since she had brought him in with hopes of him being supper for her.  I finally got him herded into a place where I could drop a dish towel over him and carry him outside.  I found him a nice place inside an evergreen where he could safely get his bearings before flying back to his family.  

I do not know why that silly cat becomes a hunter in the Spring of the year or maybe it is the birds are young and not wise to the ways of cats and are more easily caught.  Now the wind is whistling through a window that is not quite shut and scaring me.  I guess maybe I am a little paranoid because I went out to Los Pobres for lunch with my friends out there and on the way home I got to thinking about that little white line in the middle of the road.  Life is sort of like that line.  As long as I stay on my side and the car coming towards me stays on the other side, we are both good to go and will pass by never really seeing each other at all.  But if one of us were to cross that line we would both suffer.  Life is like that.  As long as I do the things expected of me and you do the things expected of you, we will never have a problem.  We drift through life never really knowing the people we see on a daily basis and then one day, we are gone.  

Some times I think maybe I am lonely, but I do not want to change my life to incorporate another human into it.  I go to bed when I am tired and get up when I am through sleeping.  If there were another person here, I would need to take their needs into consideration.  I eat what I want, when I want and rarely close the door when I shower.  I may get up at 3:30 AM or sleep till 6:00.  I have been known to eat lunch in my pajamas's and sometimes the sink is full of dirty dishes and the laundry covers the floor in the bathroom.  I do not always answer the phone just because it rings.

So, this is my mood tonight.  Needless to say, I do not like the wind.  I have never really seen a use for it,  but then nobody really asked me, did they?

My bleeding heart.

There was one thing my mother always had growing in a shady part of her yard and that was a Bleeding Heart plant.  I never quite figured out how that worked, but I know I bought her several over the years.  Every time I wanted to get her something she expressed a desire for a Bleeding Heart.  The preschool at our church was having a plant sale a couple weeks back and I just could not resist.  One Bleeding Heart.  Right now it is residing in the refrigerator because it is not quite planting time.  Over  the years I have planted a couple in my yard, but they are no longer there whether it is because I neglected to water them or mowed them off or what, but I shall try again.  I seem to have the same luck as my mother on keeping things alive!

I do not know how many years my mother has been gone, but I never see a Bleeding Heart that I do not think of her.   I know my fascination with the plant is tied to her, but what was it that drew her to the plant?  I do not remember grandma having one in her yard.  She had Spearmint.  Lots of Spearmint.  I remember that because it was right under the window of the room where they slept and there were big spiders that lived in the Spearmint patch.  I used to live in fear of the spiders coming in, walking across the grandma's and coming into the room where I slept.

I had Catnip growing here over the septic tank.  That stuff really spreads.  I never really seen the cat in it, but some times Charmin or Boots would act very weird.  I planted Poppy's there once.  They were double and they were lavender.  Those were nice, but when they reseeded themselves they came back as single red Poppy's and then they died out.  Once when we were in Grand Junction Joe Fisher picked me a bread sack full of Apricots from a tree up on the BLM land.  I made jam out of them and threw the seeds out over the septic tank and they all came up next Spring.  I planted several in the yard and planted 12 over at Kenny's  mom's house.  Now 25 years later those are all died out except one behind my house.  It has bores and I have to trim it on the side closest to the house every summer so it does not rub the roof.  I am thinking at the rate I am trimming this side that soon it will be hanging over in the field next door and I will not have a tree anymore.  I am hoping I can get one more harvest so I can grow more trees and next time plant them away from the house.

Of course there was a time when I had 68 Hybrid Tea Roses growing in my yard.  The kids used to give me a bush every Mother's Day and when I had 10 kids total it did not take long to fill up the yard.  Course roses need fed every month and pruned every time they bloom and I am basically lazy, so here I now set with 5 that I do nothing with and they just refuse to die.  So I am going to plant a Bleeding Heart.  Not sure if I will do that before I go to Texas or wait.  I can hear the weather lady down on the television yapping about a coming snow storm.  I hate to pay $14.00 for something just to let it freeze.

Well, the sun is up now and it is time to get around and do something constructive.  Or not.