Category: Life

S*** happens

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A Common Attitude of Viejos???

As one of my brothers so delightfully pointed out to me, I have entered my 8th decade. For most of my adult life I have more or less tried to live a reasonably healthy life style.

I put down the cigarettes when I was 31. Drugs have never been my thing, and even if they had been, keeping a job in corporate America would have put them on a back burner.

I have and still do exercise regularly. Currently I do a combination of stretches, weights and aerobic exercises for an hour or more on an average of five times a week.  With Señora’s help Continue reading “A Common Attitude of Viejos???”

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #8,600

yeah I know you did not ask!

Divorce is never easy, sometimes very necessary, but never easy.  While going through mine during the last century I came across the following that accurately described how I felt at the time.

Divorce is like hacking off one of your limbs, yourself, using a rusty, very dull, undersized pocket knife.

Oucher for sure.

I was thinking about divorce for reasons I do not need to get into here, but when do you know it is time to get a divorce?  Obviously, it is a very complex situation with many factors, and it is different for every person/couple. Getting divorce can be expensive, time consuming, and emotionally devastating. Frequently it is not for the weak of heart.

However, I think the when can be summarized by saying it is when one or both persons in a marriage stop treating the other person with respect, especially if it is a long term pattern.  It is time to go.  It is time to split the blanket. Life is too damn short to live like that.

And so it goes… about 50% of the time in the United States of Acrimony.

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How Each Little Rascals Cast Member Died (Our Gang)

I subscribe to several YouTube channels and when I go there they usually have several “suggestions” directing you to the YouTube rabbit hole.  I fell into this one as I met a Little Rascal years ago.  Not one the original members recounted in this video, but a later replacement. But still a Little Rascal.  Follow this link to read about my encounter with this child actor: Dissed by a Little Rascal

It was a little traumatic at the time, but now I have a funny anecdote.

And so it goes.

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Veil Replacement

I had to run down to The Hill area close to downtown St. Louis this morning.  On the way back I passed a compact, maybe a subcompact vehicle. I did not notice what brand it was as I was focused on the vanity license plate which read MN’TALA. I was busy trying to decipher what that meant in license-platese. I finally decided it must be a name which piqued my curiosity.

As I passed the vehicle I peeked over from the high peak of my pickup truck to see who was driving the subcompact.  It was a smallish, Arabic looking women dressed Continue reading “Veil Replacement”

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Choice is Good

I have two frequent muses for my silly, little blog.  One is Señora. Most of the time she is okay with being my muse, sometimes she is tickled, and on occasion, she will arch one eyebrow and give me that look. After two bouts of the the brain fever known as matrimonitis I have gained enough “wisdom” to seek Señora‘s approval before releasing stories involving her into the wilds of cyberspace.

My other muse is The Wee Dog, aka Princess Lily, our 7 kilogram rescue dog. A year or so after we adopted her, on a whim – and on sale – we had her DNA tested.  She is 3/8 Bichon Frisé, 1/4 Dachshund, 1/8 Pomeranian, 1/8 Pekingese, 1/8 Shih Tzu and 100% adorable except to squirrels, rabbits, moles and especially chipmunks.

Señora and Princess Lily are essentially surgically/psychically/telepathically connected. Neither one of them can stand not knowing where the other is, generally they are in the same room together.  As revealed in True Confessions, I, by spells, have my roles to play in this ménage à chienne. For reasons known Continue reading “Choice is Good”

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Open or Closed?

Señora and I are having an ongoing “debate”.  After visiting the bathroom for a “meditation session”, do you leave the bathroom door shut or do you open it?  My opinion is that you leave it shut to trap the “aromas” therein, allowing them dissipated in due time.   Señora repeatedly opines that it is better to leave the door open to allow the “aromas” to dissipated quicker.

We keep a candle in there, but the problem with those is that I forget I have lit it.   I suppose that is a minor fire hazard, but mainly they are burning up very quickly.

On a semi-related note, did you know that there are soaps that are solely for decoration, that they are not there for the washing of your hands?

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Mounds, by gawd, Oklahoma

click to see larger

Recently Señora and I were in Oklahoma. First, we made a quick visit to my mother in her nursing home in Owasso. She has Alzheimer’s, so quick or long, the visit it is all the same. In fact given her level of engagement and attention span, a short visit might be better, even if St. Louis to Owasso is a long trip.

Afterwards we headed towards Okemah, OK to go to the Woody Guthrie musical festival.  On the way there I made the impromptu decision to visit Mounds, OK. “Mounds, Oklahoma,” you say, “I have never of it.”  Well do not feel alone in that, Continue reading “Mounds, by gawd, Oklahoma”

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I Just Lacked Patience

I spend hardly anytime on Nextdoor.  I actually have their notifications going to an email account I use if I think I might be spammed by a site or business.  Every day or two or three I flip through this account to see if there is anything of interest there, but mainly just to delete all the trash.  Today, however, one notification of a posting on Nextdoor caught my attention.

Sharon RottlerKirkwood Park / Meramec • 17 hr ago

Someone just left me $60 in cash on my front porch with a note that said “mailbox replacement “ . We have been talking about replacing our mailbox, just haven’t gotten around to it. If you left the cash, please let me know who you are and why you felt the need to give us money.?

Some of you, dear cherished readers, may remember a posting of mine, The Things We Notice, on this same channel.  In that posting I touched on several things but one was the replacing of the post on which rides our mailbox.

After reading the Nextdoor posting, I quickly came to the conclusion that I had not been patient enough, that I should have listened to Señora’s encouragement just a little while longer before undertaking the much needed replacement of our mailbox post.  Since I replaced the old post with a new cedar post, since I reused the mailbox that Sarah had painted, since I did the labor myself, the $60 would have covered my costs, and it would have left me enough over for a six-pack of one of the craft beers that I so enjoy.  Ahhh…Grasshopper… patience.

You have to feel for the poster though.  She tossed a softball to all the trolls out there.  Some of the comments were just funny, but a least a couple were down right mean.  Life on line is not for the faint of heart at times.

And so it goes.

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Señora’s Grilled Cheese Secret

One of the ways that Señora spoils me is to make me a grilled cheese sandwich from time to time.  She is especially apt to do this if I am frantically rushing, gathering the necessaries to go to the golf course, or if I am in the the middle of a honey-do project around our abode.

I find her grilled cheese sandwiches especially delectable.  While making a grilled cheese is not an especially challenging culinary chore, when I make one they are never quite as exquisite as  those that Señora creates.  Externally, they look the same, the beautiful deep brown color of bread essentially fried in a vat of butter – and yes I take my cholesterol  pill religiously. The difference is on the inside.  Her sandwiches have a creamy, melted cheese interior with the cheese dripping from the edges.  I can never get mine to do that.

But I recently discovered her secret, she puts the cheese on a plate and pre-softens it in the microwave and then weaves the cheese into a piece of art on the bread before popping the tasty gastronomic treasure into the skillet with more butter.

Yum, yum.

I might be able to recreate her sandwich now, but it would still be lacking that one important ingredient that makes her sandwich so special, TLC.

And so it goes.

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Speechless after that…

I went to the golf course the other day and picked up a game with a twosome on the first tee, two gentlemen around my age. We rocked along for 16 or so holes playing golf and occasionally, occasionally conversing.  Somehow the conversation turned to social media.

I remarked that I was not on any of it currently, and that I had gotten off of Facebook years ago after discovering that I did not  like many of my relatives. At least a big part of that was that many of my relatives had huge problems with my liberal politics and agnostic stance on religion, and I with their conservative politics and evangelic religion.

After hearing my comment about not liking my relatives, one of the gentleman remarked, “I don’t like anyone.”

Well…I did not know quite know what to say after that.  I’m not sure I have ever heard misanthrope so openly avowed.