Just some stuff...

Did you ever notice that fireworks look even more spectacular when they’re going off over water?

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My brother once told me that people live longer in the colder northern states than people in the warmer southern states because bodies tend to rot in the heat and the cold preserves people. He told me that a long time ago. I have no documentation to prove any of it. But since I hate the heat it sounds like a nifty tale.

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The Old Guy (sometimes known around these here parts as the dog) threw up in the in the wee hours of this morning (try 2 am). I had just considered closing my book and turning off the light to go to sleep since The Rock had already succumbed to the ZZZZs when I heard the unmistakable sounds of a dog in distress. Aw shoot… Poor Rock…he had to get up and go for the Resolve and paper towels since he can still get down on his knees and I can’t. The Old Guy, in typical dog style, had most of it cleaned up already himself. Yuck! How can dogs do that?!

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Speaking of dogs, The Old Guy has to have his nails trimmed and he gets as stressed over that as I did the MRI this week so they’ll have to knock him out to do it. Probably just as well, it usually takes 3 men and a boy, as my dad used to say, to hold him down. He has long ‘quicks’ so it’s tricky to cut his nails without him bleeding like a stuck pig. Poor ole guy. He seems to be having another ear infection and they’ll be able to tend to that without a problem too. He’s half Sharpei and half Dobie and his ears are all folded over, giving him a square headed appearance. It’s very cute but a bad design which causes recurrent ear infections and which may have contributed to why he’s deaf now.

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Confession: I like to fill and empty the “recycle bin” on my computer’s desktop because of the crinkly paper sound it makes…

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They’re digging up the street for water main repairs down the block from us and the heavy equipment sounds just like that danged MRI I almost had this week.

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Beautiful daughter and family are currently in Ghana until the middle of August and according to the weather report I read, it looks like they might be having the same or nearly the same weather as we’re currently having here in New England. Who’d a thunk it..?

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Younger Sonny is heading out to San Francisco for a week with a friend, to visit another mutual friend. We’ll be taking them to the airport and that means we will have to pick them up around 3:15 am, which means we’ll have to get up around 2:30 am. Heck, we’re often just getting to bed at that time, but going to bed then is a totally different thing than getting up at that time. Ooh, the things we do for love.

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The other day when The Rock was home for lunch a stranger showed up at the door claiming we’d requested him. He was an insurance salesman from some company or another! I didn’t think they did that anymore…show up uninvited on people’s doorsteps. Of course he didn’t gain entrance.

He was all dressed up in a blazer and driving a fancy Audi with a veteran’s license plate. Out of his respect for veterans, The Rock opened the door but Mr. Insurance Salesman didn’t gain entrance. For heaven’s sake, why would we abandon our regular insurance man that we’ve known and liked for a long time and who has served us well, and his father before him, for a total stranger who shows up at our door?

We haven’t had any uninvited people knocking on the door for a long time, not even the very polite Bible-toting doomsayers who regularly canvas the neighborhoods. Does this occurrence mean we might see a resurgence of Fuller Brush men and women coming to the door? Good grief, I hope not! Or sellers of magazine subscriptions? Would we open the door to them? I think not.

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Do I even have anything of consequence to say here today? Probably not…

The big bad machine...

I’m a failure, a quitter, a ‘fraidy cat, an hysterical wreck, a total coward. That’s right, I’m a coward. I never thought so before. I always thought I was reasonably brave and I’ve even been told so before by people I respect. But no more…

You see, tonight I had an MRI…well part of an MRI…the first five minute part. And then I bailed out. Oh the shame, the humiliation, the shakes and the weakness. I am currently filled with self-loathing. I had no idea I was such a weenie. When they asked me if I was claustrophobic I said nope, I didn’t think so, not really. WRONG!! I am so claustrophobic that even now, an hour and half later, I’m still trembling inside, have a headache and feel faint. I don’t feel very good. What a wuss…

The awful silly thing is, I wasn’t even all the way in. I was having my knee MRI’d because pain is making it hard to walk and it is particularly excrutiating when trying to negotiate steps, especially going down.

I have arthritis anyway and a little over a year ago I fell over The Old Guy in the middle of the night when he was in invisible mode in the middle of the hallway. I had gotten up to use the bathroom and BOOM! I bumped into the invisible dog and then tried to step over him which caused him to panic and rear up and then I was airborne and finally landed (kerboom!) on my left knee which immediately started throbbing and swelling without even waiting for me to take a proper breath. It took a very long time to heal and lately it has started getting worse again.

The Rock took me to the doctor’s last week and the doc set me up for the MRI appointment to find out “what was what.” MRI. Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine they call it. Monstrous Rotten Intimidation machine I call it. It’s big and loud and the core part, the part you’re slid into is little and cramped and loud. The platform you lay on is narrow and there’s no place for your arms to go so you have to put them up on your chest or up over your head, neither place being suitable for the amount of time you have to spend there, unless you don’t mind having parts of you go numb or tingle with the urge to move.

The urge to move… I figured that was the part that was going to get me. I can’t sit or lay still for very long before I get that urge to move, to wiggle, to scratch, etc. Tell me to lie still and not move and you’re asking for the impossible. I also have trouble with the tonometer or the other thingy they use to puff air against your eyeball to check the pressure within said eyeball. The test is used by the opthamologist or optician to check for glaucoma. They always tell you not to blink for a minute. Not blink! What?! That’s all I need to hear to set that ole eye up for twitching and blinking double-time. I hate that test! And you know what? I now know that I HATE having MRIs.

What makes this especially hard to take, is that Older Sonny has endured not one, but two (2) MRIs on his brain recently, topped off by an EEG (electroencephalogram) and grueling hours of survey questions . And he did it voluntarily, as part of a research study being done at McLean’s Hospital in Massachusetts to study differences in brains of people with schizophrenia opposed to people without schizophrenia. They’ve been doing this research for 10 years. I wonder how many people they actually get to go through with it. I’m in awe of him. He never balked nor complained. And he was all the way in the damned thing!

I was only partially in it, up to my chest. My head was out. Honest to goodness, I never for a second figured it would be like that. I kept thinking of Older Sonny going in that tiny tube twice, all the way, and doing it like a trooper. If he could do that I figured, how hard would it be for me to go part-way? It turned out to be hard. It turned out to be impossible! It turned out that I am not the woman I thought I was. I had the mother of all panic attacks! I thought for sure I was having a heart attack. I thought that I would rather just go quietly along with my painful knee and not look back.

Tomorrow I’m to call my doc again and after he finishes laughing hysterically and making rude remarks (we’re friends you see…), I’m to suggest that he send me up to the big hospital in Concord which has what they call an ‘open’ MRI machine. They tell me it’s bigger, more open and probably easier to take. They gave me a brochure about it. They told me not to feel bad. Lots of people have this trouble. Lots of people have to take sedatives before undergoing an MRI. I’m not lots of people!

Psychologically right now, I’m a mess. My adrenalin rush has dissapated itself, the nausea has passed and I’m left with the dregs of my tarnished ego. I have decided that it would just be easier to get a pair of crutches and learn to use them skillfully than to face that damn thing again. Please, be merciful in your thoughts regarding me. I’m mortified enough! Siiigh….

Just a lucky so and so...

As happens sometimes, life gets in the way of coherent blogging and that is what has happened the past couple of weeks. The trouble is, once the stitches are dropped it’s hard to knit the thing back together. I’d like to be able to fill you in but it’s not just my story, so I won’t… Let’s try to get past this hiatus, shall we?

Last night as we came back from visiting Older Sonny, a state policeman stopped us. Quelle shock! We were driving peacefully along in the dark when suddenly we saw flashing blue lights behind us. “That can’t be for us, can it(?)” I asked. “It looks like it,” said The Rock, “but I don’t know why since we aren’t doing anything wrong. I’m not speeding or anything” he said. And he wasn’t, thank goodness. Of course we pulled over post haste and so did the policeman. Gosh…

The policeman asked where we were going and we said “home.” He asked where we had come from and we told him. Of course he checked The Rock’s license and registration. It turned out that our left rear tail light was out, as was the brake light. We had just had the car in for a servicing the week before and in April it was inspected too, so we were surprised.

He was satisfied with our answers and told us to get it fixed as soon as possible for our safety and then bade us a good evening and a safe trip home. Whew! There’s nothing like flashing police lights to get your adrenalin flowing, even when you’re not breaking the law. I suspect that his adrenalin might have been flowing too. After all, they never know when they stop someone what might happen. It’s not an easy job that they have and I thank them for doing it.

This morning The Rock checked out the tail light and we were in luck. We didn’t have to buy a new bulb as it turned out to be a loose wire and a bad connection and easily fixed. It could happen to anyone at any time. We were lucky. And to think, I’ve always worried about moose crossing the road in the dark. Over the past few months we’ve travelled in pouring rain, thunderstorms and heavy fog. We’ve passed by accidents. And we’ve shared the roads with motorcycles by the hundreds who were travelling up to Laconia for motorcycle week.

It’s usually a pretty drive, especially at this time of the year and we’ve watched as the trees and grass have come alive again this spring. Vacationers are clogging the highways now, passing through our fair state on the way to Maine. Soon we’ll be making a few trips up to Plymouth as well, to the Silver Cultural Arts Center for some good concerts.

Life could be better but it also could be a whole lot worse. The sunsets have been spectacular and I’ve always been a sucker for a good sunset. The stars have twinkled in the heavens to help guide our way and the fireflies are out and sparkling in the fields and trees. Now if the highway department could just see fit to paint some lines on the roads we’ll be all set. Who’d have guessed that there’d be a paint shortage?! Okay, I’m being sarcastic.

Tomorrow we’ll make the 102 mile round trip again. I hope we’ll stay lucky…

A small tale of woe...

Here I sit in front of the computer…bleary eyed and sighing. I cannot sleep, even though it is the middle of the night. I cannot sleep because there is a man in my bed. The man is my husband. I dearly love that man in my bed but…he snores! I am sensitive to noise in the night and snoring definitely is noise. In fact, snoring is extremely unpleasant noise and it keeps me awake. I wish he had come with a volume control knob but he didn’t. So here I sit in front of the computer…bleary eyed and sighing because I cannot sleep. Sighhhhh…

Meme thingy...

Oh my goodness… I have been tagged for a meme by Ozzilyn Bean. I don’t even know what that means…a “meme.” Where did the term come from? Is it a bastardization of memo or memory or what? That doesn’t make sense... As a rule I am not a gameplayer. When I espy one of these things on someone’s blog, especially if they say something about looking for someone else to tag, I take off running and don’t come back for a little while until it’s all gone and safe again. I hate ‘pick one’ kinds of things because they’re never the things I would pick one of and I particularly hate anything that asks me to prioritize my answer by numbers of 1 to 5, or 1 to10. Quizzes that ask me to answer certain questions never ask anything I would find relevant or else they ask in such a way I can’t figure out how to answer since it either doesn’t apply to me or it’s asking for black or white when I see gray. I never answer surveys unless it’s something I absolutely can't avoid, like a doctor’s health quiz or something (and even then I balk). I have often wondered what I’d do if tagged for one of these game things and the answer I always gave to myself…quit blogging. But here I am now with a dilemma and I guess I shall have to soldier on and comply since I like Ozzilyn Bean…

As I understand it, the rules are: to choose five things from this list to expand upon and then add one more category to the list and pass it along to some other unsuspecting soul. My problem right now is this…if I comply and then choose someone else to foist it upon, that would make me fair game for them to hit me back with something else sometime later and I sure don’t want that. But then, most other people don’t seem to share my aversion to these things so maybe “whomever” will answer their challenge and that will be that. I don’t much cotton to fantasy games, books or movies. I’m 60 now so I don’t indulge much in ‘what ifs’ because I’m struggling to keep up with the ‘what actually ares.’ Life is keeping me amply supplied with those right now. I have found that advancing age doesn’t take away your dreams but it places limits on your choices and time to fulfill those dreams. It’s a whole ‘nuther ballgame…

Anyway, for Oz:

If I could be a scientist…

If I could be a farmer…

If I could be a musician… I would be able to speak the universal language and communicate with everyone. I could be a conduit to carry the sound of the spheres. If I could be a musician I could channel love through my instrument and touch the hearts of others and bind souls together. If I could be a musician I could well and truly speak…

If I could be a doctor… I could heal and ease the pain of others. I could fight against sickness and disease and pain and improve the health of others. I could help to put some quality back into their lives and maybe replace some of their despair with hope. If I could be a doctor I might have a chance to act positively for others and give them a useful gift of my time and skill and it would be a gift for me also…

If I could be a painter… I could create, create, create… I could use all those marvelous colors of our dreams and make things of beauty to move people and uplift them. I could take my dreams and render them real for all to hold if they so desire. If I could be a painter I could capture that spark I see in others without blowing out their flame and enhance that flame to ignite others who suffer poverty of spirit. If I could be a painter I could push back some of the darkness that surrounds us and let some light through…

If I could be a gardener…

If I could be a missionary…

If I could be a chef…

If I could be an architect… I’d love to be an architect! It’s the ultimate creative experience because you can provide shelter and practical function while assuaging your artistic nature. If I could be an architect I could do something useful while making great art. I would be like Frank O. Gehry, whose architecture is like giant sculpture. I love it! Or I could be like Buckminster Fuller who dreamed of sheltering people while setting their spirirts free to dream and roam. He believed that plants should have roots while people should be free to develop and be able to take their housing with them, or at the least, have less maintenance to enslave them. He wanted to make shelter practical but affordable for many. I could be like Frank Lloyd Wright who created what he called ‘organic architecture,’ organic education and conservation of the natural environment and who created Taliesen and Taliesen West, an enclave dedicated to the education of architects. Glorious stuff! Oh yes, I could be an architect…

If I could be a linguist…

If I could be a psychologist…

If I could be a librarian… I’d be surrounded by peace and quiet and erudition and would probably be very happy. I’d try to find different ways of getting folks in the library habit so as to arm everyone with ‘keys to the universe.’ If I could be a librarian maybe I could help to wipe out illiteracy and empower people with knowledge…

If I could be an athlete…

If I could be a lawyer…

If I could be an inn-keeper…

If I could be a professor…

If I could be a writer…

If I could be a llama-rider…

If I could be a bonny pirate…

If I could be an astronaut

If I could be a world famous blogger… You mean I’m not? Sniff…

If I could be a justice on any one court in the world…

If I could be married to any current famous political figure…

If I could be a show dog owner…

If I could be a fictional character…

If I could be a species other than human…

If I could be a funeral director…

That last category was my addition…ha, ha, ha, ha, ha… So, this then is my meme. I now turn you over to Heather because I think she likes these things. (I hope I’m right…)