Category Archives: Just stuff…

Around the Second Bend in the Road

Posted on April 9, 2014 | Leave a comment

Hello Everyone!

We had rain Monday.  Not the gentle rains that slowly permeate the ground and nourish the grass, trees and flowers of spring, but the frog-strangling, gully-washing, can’t-see-in-front-of-you-to-drive type of rain.  And we had it for about six hours.  The combination of downpour and time led to a flood of water puddling on lawns, streaming down roads, carving mini-canyons in local gullies and other such stuff.  Water even got into our sunroom from somewhere – we’re not sure whether it came in from the puddle gathering at the back door or from the back wall – but fortunately it wasn’t very deep.

rain, umbrella

Heavy Rain
Photo Credit: http://www.clickartonline.com

Our first hint of the most dramatic consequence of the rain came when I left the house for work in the rain about 8:00 a.m. and saw the “Road Closed” sign on the left side of our neighborhood entrance.  I didn’t think much about it; I just figured a section of road had flooded over and it was closed until the waters could recede.  When I came home at lunch and the sign was still there, I became a little curious and called the police department.  It turned out that a section of road over a culvert had been washed away.

Break in Road

One View of the Washed Out Culvert

We found out later that the white pipe in the picture is a water main that also broke, leaving folks on the other side of the break without water for two hours.  That didn’t sound too bad either, but since the “Road Closed” sign was still up, Kayla and I parked the car at the entrance to the neighborhood and walked down the road a ways.  After two houses and two bends in the road, we came across the washed out culvert.

It was a big deal.

Road Washout

Deep view of washout

It also apparently became a neighborhood novelty.  In addition to the small crowd on the other side of the break (we waved at each other and shouted messages of good will across the gap), a regular stream of people showed up between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. to view the EVENT.

Road Washout

Width and Depth View of Washout

No-one in the town is more grateful for the timing of the wash-out than our family – we can time the washout to somewhere between 5:35 a.m. and 8:00 a.m.  Why?  Mark drove over that very spot at 5:35 a.m. on his way to work.

Have a great day!

Nancy

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Mosquitos, Cool and Passwords

Posted on April 7, 2014 | Leave a comment

Good morning Everyone!

We are going to skip around a bit today, so hold on and keep up!

Noah's Ark

Noah’s Ark
Photo Credit: http://www.clickartonline.com

We went to see the movie “Noah” this weekend.  Some of us liked it (me) and some of us didn’t (Mark), some of us were confused (Kayla – we had a wonderful teaching moment about Genesis when we got home), but watching the animals proceed onto the ark made me think.  The insects and the snakes swarmed onto the ark together, and I have to wonder if it really was necessary to allow the mosquito, the cockroach or the poisonous snakes onto the boat.  I wonder if Mrs. Noah was tempted, when they approached and boarded, to just go ahead and smash the cockroaches and mosquitos out of existence?  I would have been!  I am sure that Mrs. Noah put her foot down about the snakes and made Noah and his sons take care of them.

Man chased by Mosquito

Noah Encounters a Problem Keeping Care of the Mosquitos in the Ark
Photo Credit: http://www.clickartonline.com

I received the ultimate accolade a Mom can get yesterday – one of Kayla’s friends told her that I was a “cool Mom.”  When Kayla told me that, I wanted to do cartwheels in celebration!  Like most Moms, I bring a lot of self-doubt into this job of raising a little person into an adult, and it was unexpected affirmation that I am doing something right.

Cartwheel, Happy Mom

Happy Mom!
Photo Credit: http://www.clickartonline.com

I would like to address a word to the people in charge of websites – you have got to start taking it easy on the passwords! When we had eight characters, I could handle that; when you added a requirement for at least one capital letter, I grumbled but submitted, but now that you are requiring an extra character that is neither a letter or number, I am hopelessly out matched!  To make matters worse, you lock out my account after only three tries for the password.  And why don’t you tell me before I have to reset the password what the password format is?  With the format, I have a much better chance of figuring out what the password was originally without having to reset it

And retailers – why oh why are you making me set up an account for each of you?  I don’t always remember that I had set up an account the last time I shopped with you, and requiring me to go through the entire “reset password” segment  before I can complete an order cools my enthusiasm for the purchase down to about ice cream temperature  Please let me check out without giving you my life story.  At the rate we’re going, you’re probably just going to have to let me start opening everything automatically at the “reset password” link!

Door without handle

What Logging In to a Website Without the Password Feels Like
http://www.clickartonline.com

 

And that, dear friends, is that!

Have a great day!

Nancy

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The Art of Absent-Mindedness

Posted on April 4, 2014 | 4 comments

Good morning Everyone!

It is well-known at my household that I have a gift for being absent-minded.  My family is resigned to the fact that I will forget the dinner choice they made in the den after I walk the ten feet or less it takes to reach the kitchen and have to ask again.  Kayla, when she leaves the house to catch the bus, makes sure that she locks the front door to the house so I won’t forget. while Mark is very patient when he asks me for something from the kitchen, I leave, go in there, putter around for a while and then return to the den without his original item. Kayla knows when the two of us are riding around to do something to speak up when I am about to pass the original destination, having already forgotten what that was.

Yesterday, I reached what must be the  pinnacle of absent-mindedness for any mom –  I forgot to pick up Kayla!  She has been riding to and from school on the bus, but on Thursdays I pick her up from the house and take her to art, then pick her up from art at the end of my workday.

Yesterday, although I knew I had to pick Kayla up from art when I left the office, I had forgotten by the time I reached the driveway of our house.  I remembered Kayla just as I pulled up into the driveway, so I immediately left and returned to art to get Kayla.

I called our art teacher, Bonnie, to let her know what I had done and that I was immediately turning around to pick up Kayla.  Bonnie is always a very good sport about things and I was so amused at myself I told her what had happened  When I picked up Kaya, she was outside Bonnie’s The Cottage Gallery, waiting for me with that gleeful l look all children get when their parents manage to mess up on something.

After we got home, Mark told Kayla not to worry; he’d always send me back to get her – we would never want to do that to Ms. Bonnie!

Have a great day!

Nancy

 

 

 

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Middle-Aged but Handy

Posted on April 2, 2014 | 1 comment

Good morning Everyone!

Yesterday the three of us went out to dinner, and on the way home Kayla was chattering away when she hit the topic of things she didn’t want to have happen when she got old.  At the top of her list was having her face wrinkle.  Mark explained to her that as life goes on, somehow it prepares you for the next phase of your life so that the things you once dreaded don’t end up seeming like a big deal after all.

MIDDLE AGED

In the midst of this discussion, Kayla started to tell us something and then started to talk about our age.  After a couple of stumbles, where she started to say that the two of us were young, she finally stopped and said, “You might as well face it – you two are middle-aged.”  I told her it was a good thing she hadn’t said that around Christmas time!

HANDY

I do not think of myself as particularly handy.   I can usually handle an electric drill after three false starts – one to figure out how to turn the thing on, one to figure out how to put the drill bit in and one to figure out which way the drill is supposed to be turning  – and I can hammer a nail into a piece of wood without hitting a thumb or finger more than every other time but that is where my tool competencies stop.  However, even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then, and yesterday was my day.

One of the copiers at work was acting up.  It kept thinking we wanted to use the manual feed, which was supposed to be closed, instead of the automatic feed.  I decided that even though the manual feed was closed, I would see if I could press it even closer to the copier and hold the manual feed door shut while I encouraged the printer to print – and it worked!

Then I got home to find out that Kayla and Boo had managed to knock a lamp onto the floor, which broke the shade off.  Kayla said she couldn’t put it back together.  Repair was essential because it was my lamp for my seat in the den, the seat I sit in to cross-stitch, knit and write.  I studied it for a minute, took part of the inner workings of the lamp and made a center screw stand a little higher, then used the pole at the bottom of the shade to attach shade and lamp back together again on that central screw – and it worked!

I think I am going to be smart and rest on my laurels for a while, before I assume that my two little repairs yesterday makes me capable of tackling a really big problem, such as replumbing the kitchen sink.  None of it is ever as easy as it looks on TV.

Have a great day!

Nancy

 

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Moving

Posted on April 1, 2014 | 2 comments

Good morning Everyone!

I recently have had occasion to reflect upon the adventure of moving.

Hand truck with crates

You know you’re moving if: 

1) You changed all of the shelf paper in the house any time recently.

2) You order new checks with your address on it.

3) You are on a first name basis with The Home Depot greeter who  keeps  a stack of boxes reserved especially for you.

4) Images of full trash bags dance in your head.

5) You tell someone, “I don’t care what it costs; all of the books are coming with us!”

6) You have to search your 12-year-old daughter’s bags every time you leave the old house going to the new house to be sure she isn’t trying to sneak more toys to the new house than her room will hold.

7) Your husband gives you an uneasy glance when you inform him that you and you alone will be packing the craft room.

8) You raise the art of swearing at the tape gun that refuses to work correctly for you to new heights.

9)  You are seriously considering donating everything you own to charity and then moving to Key West where you will live in a tent in ultra minimalist style.

10) You ditch the Key West idea because two parents, one 12-year-old and three dogs are too much for one tent to hold indefinitely.

11) You have to navigate a labyrinth of boxes to reach either end of the house.  While navigating, you discover where the book boxes are by running into them.  The following trip to the ER is optional.

Have a great day!

Nancy

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The Best Diet Plan Ever!

Posted on March 20, 2014 | 4 comments

Good morning Everyone!

Quite by accident, I have discovered the single greatest diet plan ever – even better than the 1 to 4 ratio imposed on anything that we eat around here that the dogs feel they should get a part of  (one bite me, three bites dogs!).

Clip Art Illustration of a Silhouette of a Woman Holding Her Wai

The Best Diet Plan Ever!
PhotoCredit: http://www.clickartonline.com

You need two ingredients:

1) Food in the house;

2) A 12-year-old girl.

A dill pickle

A Dill Pickle

Kayla started riding the bus to and from school a couple of weeks ago, which leaves her with a short period of time during which she is free to raid cupboards and the refrigerator to her heart’s content.  While Mark had already reconciled himself to the fact that he will never have a pickle he can eat at the house until Kayla goes to college, and I was already checking whether we needed peanut butter at least twice as often as I used to, we didn’t really expect that everything sweet in the house (except for the box of HoneySmacks I have hidden on the top shelf of the pantry behind the bread maker so Mark will have something – shhhh!) would be gone each week by Tuesday.  By Wednesday, fruit, apple sauce, peas, stew and vegetable beef soup have managed to disappear.  I suspect by Friday, we will be down to bread and water.

empty refrigerator

Looking for Something to Eat!
Photo Credit: http://www.clickartonline.com

The start-up costs for this diet were pretty low, since we had all the ingredients to hand, but I suspect that the long-term costs may end up being astronomical.  At least until Kayla graduates college and enters into a profession that will enable her to support Mark and I in the lifestyle to which we desire to become accustomed!

Have a great day!

Nancy

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Parking Not

Posted on March 19, 2014 | 6 comments

Front Parking

Photo Credit: Me!
Parking Lot in front of Our Building

Good morning Everyone!

To quote my husband when he and Kayla were pulling into the garage last week (gleefully repeated to me by my daughter later), “I love your mother, but she cannot park.”

He’s right; I can’t. My co-workers know it; I’ve hit at least two of their cars over the years while parking. I was over the age of 35 before I managed to parallel park, and I’m still not sure that I would have managed it if the parallel spot hadn’t been the only spot within a mile of the office in the midst of a frog-strangler. FN1.

One of my fellow attorneys has a beautiful Porsche coupe convertible; it’s now about 10 years old and still looks like it came off the show room floor. Pulling off a rare successful practical joke, I walked into his office one day and said, “Randy, I’m sorry about the Porsche.” I don’t think his heart stopped, but I’m positive his face blanched for a second before I started laughing.

Tahoe

Tahoe
Photo Credit: http://www.cars.com

The office breathed a collective sigh of relief the day we traded in our Chevrolet Tahoe for an Aveo. The Tahoe was a great vehicle, but there was just too much of it!

Another collective sigh of relief emanated from the office when Mark and I got the car I currently drive, a Hyundai Sonata with that greatest of miracles – a rear view camera! As one co-worker observed, since then I have only needed one parking space to park in instead of two.

At home, the relief was short-lived. Did you know that the rear view mirror (passenger side) can still hit the frame of the garage door even when the rest of the car has clearance?  The mirror is sturdier than it looks; it’s survived three hits so far. Mark is pretty certain it won’t survive a fourth, though. Now if I pull into the garage and Kayla is with me, I go ahead and let her out to go on in the house while I concentrate on getting the car into the garage. So far, the record is about six tries before I got it right. Backing out can take anywhere from one to four tries.

So, the other day, when I parked the car at the grocery store, and I walked up to the person in the car beside me to ask if I had left him enough room to back out, explaining that I was not good at parking, I can hardly fault Kayla for chiming in brightly, “It’s true; she’s really rotten at it!”

Have a great day!

Nancy

FN1. Frog-Strangler – a downpour; a gully washer

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The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Posted on March 6, 2014 | 1 comment

Good morning Everyone!

Have you ever wondered where dreams come from?  I‘m not talking about the “Be President/Travel the US in a RV for One Year” type of dreams, but the crazy jumble of facts and fiction that parade through our heads every night.

My husband and daughter rarely remember their dreams – although there have been one or two Saturday mornings when Kayla asked for just a few more minutes of sleep to “finish off her dream.”  What dreams my husband remembers, he controls.  He has the capability to tell his subconscious, while he’s still asleep, how he wants the dream to end.  My subconscious, however, wanders footloose and fancy-free, taking me wherever it wants to.  Maybe in part it’s rebelling against the control I place on it during the day.

I have one or two recurring dreams.  I groan every time that I have to dial a number two or three times in “real life” before it goes through, because that means that the “I need to make a phone call but I can’t ever get the phone to put in the number correctly” dream is sure to pop up in the next week.

After over 20 years, I finally figured out that the “I forgot to attend a class for an entire semester and now the exam is tomorrow” dream occurs when I am under an intense deadline.  Usually the dream includes the certainty that I have made an F in at least two subjects that semester and I am trying, in my sleep, to figure out what that does to my grade point average, can I somehow get around the F’s or will they matter and why on earth I didn’t drop the class before the drop/add deadline passed.

Most of the time, my weird dreams are simply curious to me, even the recurring ones, but I still can remember the dream I had 28 years ago when someone broke into the house and was about to kill me.  A man was pointing a rifle right in front of my face while I was lying in bed.  I woke up with a start as I heard the gun click as he pulled the trigger.  I have one truly beautiful dream I dreamed back when I was about 15 that I also remember, for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it was in color, one of the rare dreams I remember being in color.  The second is that it was set in a radiant meadow where an absolute stunning mare and her foal were grazing.  I don’t remember what happened in that dream, but the scene has stayed with me for more years than I care to count.

Horses

Photo Credit: http://www.clickartonline.com
My horses and meadow were even prettier than these!

Scientists have been studying dreams for a while and are still speculating as to their biological function.  What they do know is that the crazy night-time peccadilloes that our subconscious engages in are essential to our health.

Indian Dream Catcher

Photo Credit: http://www.clickartonline.com
Indian Dream Catcher

Do you have any crazy or recurring dreams?  Can you remember your dreams?  Have you every kept a dream log?  I’d love to hear what you have to say on the subject!

Have a great day!

Nancy

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Help for Newcomers to the Deep South

Posted on March 3, 2014 | 2 comments

Hello Everyone!

If you are going to move into the Deep South from anywhere else, here are some tips:

1)  Yes, we are as friendly as we appear.

2)  A southern accent does not equal a low IQ.  It’s not our fault that national news media like to show our most ignorant on TV.

3)  “Y’all” means you and those immediately surrounding you, as in “It’s great to see y’all!”   “All y’all” means you and your household, regardless of whether they are there at the moment, as in “All y’all need to come over to our house sometime for supper.”

4)  Do not make fun of us when we are shivering in sweaters at 50 degrees.  You will need us when it is 98 degrees with 100% humidity.

5)  Do not immediately begin to tell us how much better things are done wherever you came from.  You are the person who chose to come here.

6)  Do not be offended when someone asks you to church.  You can say no, after all.  We are the Bible Belt and to not ask you to church is downright unneighborly.

7)  If you move here during the gloomy, rainy Dark Days in late December, January and February, take heart!  By the end of March, the Southern Spring Show will leave you breathless.

8)  College football is a second religion down here.  Live it, learn it, embrace it, enjoy it.

9)  If you are running low on self-esteem, go to Wal-Mart on a crowded Saturday.  You will feel better.

10)  Remember that your accent sounds as funny to us as ours sounds to you.

Have a great day!

Nancy

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Talented Phones

Posted on February 28, 2014 | 2 comments

Good morning Everyone!

old telephone

Photo Credit: Purchased from http://www.clipartonline.com

Some of you probably remember using phones where the receiver was attached to the main phone with a wire that kept you close to the phone when you were using it.  In order to figure out the range of the cord, you needed to look at the length described on the package and then mentally decrease it by 1/3 to compensate for the way even the best  phone cords tangled.

tangled telephone cord

Photo Credit: Purchased from http://www.clickartonline.com

To those of us who were slaves to the cord, the cordless phone was revolutionary! You could talk to your friends and family on a cordless phone and still move around the house!  It was astonishing.  The cordless phone allowed us to talk on the phone and still cook, dust, fold clothes, iron and let the dogs in and out of the house.  It rocked!

Today's Cell Phone

Photo Credit: Me!

At our house, we always like to have the latest, greatest electronics (well, some of us do – for myself, I’m drawing the line at Blu-ray DVDs) so, of course, we have cordless phones. Our favorite type for the last two decades or so has been the AT&T Dect 6.0. It does everything you would expect a household cordless phone to do in the modern era – it has three handsets expandable to 12 (not that we’ll ever have or need a house that big!), takes messages, has an intercom feature and lets us have caller id and call waiting when we are willing to get off our wallets with the phone company and pay for them. They also have one other, non-advertised, talent – they are extremely gifted at camouflage. In fact, if the Russians ever invade the great state of Alabama, my three cordless handsets will be the last thing they will be able to find!

We have three people in the house, so you would think keeping track of a cordless phone would be easy – one phone, one person – but it’s not.  Take for example, this seemingly innocent couch top.

couch top

Photo Credit: Me!

Yet, upon closer inspection (usually accompanied by a fair bit of mental censorship as we hunt for the phone while its ringing), you find the following:

Cordless Phone Handset in Couch

Photo Credit: Me!

I believe that certain of the handsets have their favorite hiding spots.  I thought this one was particularly clever the other day.

For the casual observer:

cordless phone and iPad

Photo Credit: Me!

For the accomplished phone set hunter:

cordless phone and iPad

Photo Credit: Me!

Sometimes I think the poor things just get cold, and need to warm up. When that happens, their favorite room is my daughter’s room. For example, take a look at my daughter’s sheets from the other morning:

Cell Phone

Photo Credit: Me!

A careful search (by me, not her) revealed the following:

Cell Phone

Photo Credit: Me!

Sometimes all three handsets have decided to hide in her room!

I also think the handsets are capable of developing their chameleon-like abilities. Handset 2 had been missing for about five days, and we thought we had searched everywhere, including in this box right beside the phone.

Cordless Phone in Snack Box

Photo Credit: Me!

Today, however, I happened to drop something on the floor, and reaching down to pick it up, noticed the following:

Cordless Phone in Chip Box

Photo Credit: Me!

I can’t wait to see what they come up with next! [I think!]

Have a great day everyone!

Nancy

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