My entire family is insane.

December 13, 2020 – Does your life resemble a sit-com?

Before I begin, I just have to ask. Have you ever heard of the term, ‘famous last words’? When I signed off yesterday, I made a declaration, “And sleep I shall!” Ha! I should have said, “And sleep I shan’t”. As much as I wanted to sleep, as much as I needed to sleep, sleep eluded me for almost the entire night. I had actually gone to bed at a decent hour for once, eleven o’clock at night instead of three-thirty in the morning. I read a book until my eyes grew heavy and then I shut it off (it’s a Kindle Paperwhite), set it down on the nightstand and closed my eyes. But the brain is a peculiar thing. Even when you will it to shift into neutral or park after being in 3rd or 4th gear all day, sometimes it does whatever it pleases. That’s what happened to my brain last night. And after laying in bed for nearly two hours, tossing and turning, fluffing my pillow and flattening my pillow, counting sheep and cows and chickens, I finally decided to stop fighting it and just get up. If you can’t sleep, what is the point in laying there and getting frustrated over the situation? And what better time to work on Christmas cards than 1:30 in the morning?

December 12, 2020 – The power of suggestion.

I just have to tell you what a relief it is to move off of the topic of ‘trying to save the world’. Even though I am tempted to resurrect it again another day, it was becoming a heavy burden to bear and I recognized it was time to head over to greener pastures. Every waking hour I was thinking about things that people can do to make a difference while simultaneously thinking about all of the things that I feel we have little control over. No, don’t flush your unused pills down the toilet (or your feminine products). Yes, do flush Mr. Goldfish if he floated up to the top of the fish tank yesterday and hasn’t moved since. No, don’t hoard all of the toilet paper at the grocery store. Actually, don’t hoard at all. Once you start down that path, it is hard to turn back and it usually has catastrophic results. Unintentionally converting your home-sweet-home into a fire hazard will be the least of your troubles. Yes, do support local businesses. They need all the help they can get! Those are pretty easy things to figure out. But what do you do about corrupt governments? Or when people attack each other over differences of opinion or religious beliefs or ethnicity or skin color or sexual orientation?

December 11, 2020 – Trying to save the world (PART FIVE)

I’m back! And it looks like I lost a few of you after part three. That’s ok. I know my latest posts have resembled ‘lectures’ so I get it. I don’t like getting lectured to either. It isn’t easy trying to ‘spread the word’ without coming off like a professor giving a lecture in class or a pastor giving a sermon. Or it could be I used the word ‘think’ excessively. I just reread my first paragraph from part four and I’m pretty sure I used it at least five times. Not good! It might be time to pull out the old Thesaurus. Anyway, today I’m going to talk about things each of us can do within our own communities (and elsewhere). And it comes down to what you’re willing to give, time or money. There are so many places and opportunities that many of us aren’t even aware of because most of us spend the majority of our time at home or at work or at the grocery store. But before I start to go into greater detail, I think it’s important that you ~~think~~ ~~about~~ (caught it this time!) contemplate what it is you enjoy doing. Do you like to work with animals? Do you enjoy being around babies or kids? What about helping out the less fortunate? Or working with seniors?

December 10, 2020 – Trying to save the world (PART FOUR)

Welcome back! Good to see you again! Hey, there’s something I have to share real quick before I get today’s blog underway. This afternoon, when I was eating my lunch while seated at the kitchen table, I looked out the glass slider that leads to our backyard and guess what I saw clinging to the screen? Yep, a fly. I think it was on guard duty, waiting for an opportunity to fly in when I had the door ajar. But fortunately I noticed it before I tossed out a handful of seed to the birds, so I was able to subvert its evil plot. Not this time, Mr. Fly! I’m going to enjoy my movie tonight, thank you very much! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you have to read part three, and then maybe it’ll make sense. Anyway, I think today I’m going to exclusively address one of the things that I do on a daily basis that I think all of us are capable of doing with very little effort, reduce/reuse/recycle. It’s a mouthful! As much as I want to talk about all of the other things that matter, I think if you had to choose one thing, this would probably be the one I’d suggest.

December 9, 2020 – Trying to save the world (PART THREE)

Hello again, my friends! Oh my goodness, all day long I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what to talk about first. I thought about starting small and then going big, such as starting out with things you can do within your own household before you turn your attention to your community or even beyond that. Even just writing about what you can do within the confines of your own home and/or property in order to make an impact on our world is quite off-putting. There is the application of conservation techniques to save water and electricity. There is also the concept of reduce/reuse/recycle, which many of us are familiar with. And, of course, there is everything else. ‘Everything else’ consists of what type of plants to put in your garden, composting, donating money to good causes, eliminating or reducing the use of single use plastics, eating your leftovers rather than throwing them away, upgrading your windows, upgrading your furnace, repairing or donating your goods rather than tossing them out. I could go on. This is the tip of the iceberg really. But I have to use some restraint or I’m never going to be able to move past this topic and onto something else. Ever.

December 8, 2020 – Trying to save the world (PART TWO).

Hello again! Back for more? You must be a glutton for punishment!! Anyway, where did I leave off? I think I was almost to the part where I was going to ask everyone to join hands and sing “Kumbaya” but I didn’t quite make it. No, I would never ask you to do that. That’s a bit of a reach, even for me. And you certainly don’t want me to sing it because you’ll likely lose your hearing as a result. And that’s something I’d just rather not be held accountable for. Anyway, I think I left off talking about the state of our world and how concerning it is. How can it not be concerning? I watch the news and I get overwhelmed. Just the things happening right outside my front door are tough to digest, but when I look beyond that, to everything going on in the country and in the world? Holy crap! So, yes, it does seem like an impossible thing, saving the world. But as I told you previously in an earlier post, “Tell me I cannot cross the river, I will find a way.” I’m just not ready to throw in the towel yet. There still is hope. And as long as there still is hope, there is a way.

December 7, 2020 – Trying to save the world (PART ONE).

There is something about helping people that I find particularly gratifying. And today, I got an opportunity to do just that. It wasn’t a big deal. Just after I left my house to walk the dog and rounded the corner, a white sedan pulled up right alongside me. I glanced over and saw it was a teenager or young adult male at the wheel. I wasn’t sure why he had stopped, but as I continued to walk, I could hear him trying to repeatedly start the car to no avail. I couldn’t help myself. I had to see if there was something I could do. I turned around, walked back to the vehicle, and stood right outside his passenger window. He noticed me and rolled it down. “Are you out of gas?” I asked. “I think so,” he replied, as he tried several more times to get it to start. “Hang on!” I told him. I live right around the corner and I’ve got some back at the house in a gas can. I’ll bring it to you.” With that, I spun around, dog still in tow, and returned to the house in a hurry. It took less than a minute to grab it out of the garage, and then I hustled back to where his car had stalled and handed him the gas can. He poured a small amount of gas into the gas tank and then handed it back to me. I could tell there was still quite a bit left and asked him if he could use some more and he assured me he’d be fine, he just needed enough to drive back down the street and return home. He thanked me warmly, hopped in his car, started it up and off he went.

December 6, 2020 – Struggling with low self-esteem.

My husband looked at me quizzically the other day and gently asked, “What’s with all of the ‘dumb’ and ‘stupid’?” I hadn’t realized I was using those words so frequently but apparently I had. Usually I keep them locked away in my brain and they tumble around like rocks in a clothes dryer but I had let my guard down and they effortlessly spilled out of my mouth. Dumb. Stupid. Idiot. Slow Learner. ‘Special’. Challenged. These are the labels I generally apply to myself. I’m not sure how long I’ve been doing this but I can assure you, it’s been a l-o-n-g time. I have a general idea of when it all started, with the introduction of my stepdad, but I cannot give him all of the credit. There were other people and circumstances surrounding me during those critical years when I was a child and throughout my development, trying to figure out my own worth and how I fit into the world.

December 5, 2020 – The advantages to growing up ‘poor’.

I’ve talked a bit about growing up ‘poor’ and how that experience left me with a certain ‘mindset’. I have a hard time trusting ‘good fortune’ when it knocks at my door because it seems to have such a short lifespan. And growing up ‘poor’ has also made me think a great deal about the ‘what ifs?’ in life. The one that seems to constantly lurk in the back of my mind is, ‘What if something were to happen to my husband’? God forbid! I’m going to be up sh*t creek, that’s what! Why would I even think of such things? Because I’m a realist. And we’re human, not immortals. One of us is going to ‘go’ at some point, leaving the other behind. If I ‘go’ first, he’ll be fine (financially). If he goes first, I’m going to have to get ‘inventive’. Why is that? Because he’s always been the ‘primary breadwinner’ and I’ve always been the ‘dependent spouse’. And if he decides to ‘take the plunge into the great beyond’ first, I’m going to have to get real ‘creative’ in finding ways to make some money. Let’s just hope I go first.

December 4, 2020 – Cherry season is the ‘pits’!

There’s a part of me that’s actually grateful I was laid off because there were certain aspects to the job that I had that were particularly unappetizing. I worked in a facility that provided activities for seniors. They had exercise programs and games as well as knitting and crafts and such. They also served lunch each weekday for a really reasonable price. The lunch generally consisted of the 4 basic food groups and sometimes it would be supplemented with cookies or fruit. I live in an area known for its fruit orchards. There are cherries and pears and peaches and apples and plums and all kinds of delectable fruit to choose from. Oftentimes, local farmers would get a bumper crop and bring a lot of their extra fruit to the facility for the seniors to enjoy. I would usually get excited when I saw people pull up in their pickup trucks and start carrying in boxes of fresh fruit for all to enjoy. But when the farmers showed up with heaping piles of cherries? Holy crap! Bar the doors! Don’t let them in!