Update: Where Have I Been?

Just in case anyone's wondering, I'm still alive. My parents have needed a lot of help since the beginning of April. Dad was hospitalized from April 1 through the 18th. I've basically been helping them almost every day since then. Paul was in Missouri for six weeks to help. Neither of us could have gotten through these few months alone. I'm flat-out exhausted. Hopefully they are in a place, now, where they don't need me to care for them on a daily basis. There is still a load of work to do. Now that my shoulder's good and messed up, and all the joints and muscles in my legs, arms, and back ache, no more furniture needs to be moved. (Good, but not surprising timing, there.) But there's a lot of administrative work to do, financial, logistical, healthcare, etc.

I haven't been able to get billable hours, to speak of, for this whole time. So naturally, no time to blog. And I'm not ready for any kind of Jar of Goodness crap.

Except . . .

For all of those who helped me, and helped us, and helped my parents, these past months. Far too many to mention right now.

I don't have the time for gratitude now. I shouldn't even be writing this now, because I need to WORK. And I need to mow the lawn before it rains again. And so much more I need to do. I need to make dinner. The beat goes on.

In closing (for now), here's a gratuitous picture of Brenda sleeping on the sunporch. Gggggghhh.

P.S. Oh yeah, we still need to take down those storm windows and put up the screens . . . so much for my sore shoulder . . .

Jar of Goodness 3.9.25: Op Op Anniversary

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for this, the Opulent Opossum!

There have been sixteen years of the Op Op! If you want to start reading from the beginning, visit my humble first post.

Sixteen years. Looking back on that first year, goodness, I blogged a lot. Twenty-six posts in the first month alone! And in the first year, 206 posts!

The annual tally came down quite a bit starting in 2012, with annual posts equaling what I was posting weekly that first year.

From the start, my goal was to post something at least weekly. I had plenty of ideas. I was so enthusiastic. But these days, it’s hard to feel enthusiastic about anything. Okay: Coffee in the morning. The first truly warm days. Crocuses starting to bloom. Ibuprofen. . . . Things like that.

So, the Jar of Goodness concept keeps me plugging away, keeps the focus short and sweet. I guess I’ve gotten too lengthy in most of my recent posts. Too much to say on any subject. Too many tangents. But JOG keeps me on my toes.

But as always, I do have a list of things to write about and share here on the Op Op. I wonder if anybody really reads this. I don’t have a sense of my “audience,” because I don’t believe I actually have one anymore. Do I need to update my design, my masthead, my look? Do I need to animate the thing? Who cares about any of that? I don’t think my posts ever come up as results in Google searches; page titles and key word labels appear not to have any impact on that at all. Maybe it’s because I don’t “monetize” my blog? Do I really need to change the way I label my posts, to try to game the search engines? Look, I ain’t got time for that.

As I write this, it’s clear I’m experiencing another one of my “down” morning moods, so I’m going to stop while I’m ahead. Hooray for the Opulent Opossum! Sixteen years! Op Op Hooray!

Changes

The first snow of the winter of 2024–2025 came today.

I awakened at five and sensed something was wrong. As I grew more conscious, I realized I was smelling smoke. That’s never a good thing, unless you’re sitting near a campfire, or burning incense. And it was ugly-smelling smoke—not the pretty scent of someone’s fireplace or woodstove, wafting in the chilly air. No. It smelled like plastic, vinyl—acrid—nothing anyone should be burning, although we’ve had our share of neighbors who burn their trash in their backyards, in the early hours of the morning, trusting that no one will care about the smoldering dioxins and other toxins they inhale while asleep. Most of our neighbors smoke, anyway, so how would they even notice it?

But I was concerned. I tiptoed around our chilly house in my bare feet, making sure that all rooms on all floors were free of an obvious problem. I mean, we do have smoke detectors, but . . . Then I stepped onto the sunporch, which was colder still, and the attached “screen” porch (now with storm windows, of course, but still fairly open to the outdoor air, since we haven’t yet chinked the windows with insulation). And the smoke odor out there was much stronger. I moved back indoors and down the stairs to the front door, and stuck my face outside: again, smoky. Ugh. Whew.

This information led to another round of the second and third floors, this time with my glasses on, squinting more carefully out the windows. Is one of our neighbors’ houses on fire, or billowing smoke? Or is someone actually burning trash covertly? If the latter, I knew the fire might already be done with, even though the heavy, still air can let the stench linger for hours after the deed. But all I saw was a diffuse haziness in the direction of the motel on the expressway. (Hmm. And we need to clean our windows. Kind of late in the season for that, now.) Somehow, I managed not to awaken Sue with all this traipsing around at 5 a.m. (I also managed not to stub my toes on anything. Huzzah!)

Well, it turned out that around 2:45 a house had blown up on the east side of town. They haven’t yet announced a cause, but my money’s on a natural gas appliance or exhaust malfunction, possibly combined with electric space heaters or some such. It’s the first time this season that people’s heaters are running full-bore, and heating systems in poor repair are getting their dangerous shakedown this weekend. Yeah, while everyone’s observing Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and all that. Happy holidays.

And yes, if you know me, you know I’m too appalled about the results of the presidential election to feel very “thankful” this year. I live in a red state that was a purple state not long ago, before a Republican supermajority and gerrymandering, and toxic fundamentalist misinformation bubbles. I’m literally surrounded and ruled over by crazy, het, right-wing Trump-Jesus-gun worshippers. . . . And Thanksgiving? Are you kidding me?

Also, my parents are a grim situation all by themselves: it’s the inevitable collision between my mom’s unbending and increasingly unrealistic notion that she and Dad can continue forever to live in their home, with its staircases, and Dad’s flat-out exhaustion and increasing disability. He is her caregiver: he staggers and stumbles around their house; he fixes all her meals and carries them to her on a platter, brings her beverages and begs her to drink them, launders her clothes and bed sheets, supplies her with Depends and Poise pads, dispenses and tracks her (and his) medications, deals with all the house upkeep, pays the bills, everything. He exercises, does PT, walks, to stay in shape (“to keep myself physically fit . . .”). As she has for years, she sits in her puffy recliner and does nothing, not even the tiny amount of walking the doctors have been telling her for years that she must do if she wants to stay at home . . . and he’s simply exhausted. And so am I.

In retrospect, my brother and I should have talked them into moving a decade ago, and if they’d done nothing, at that time, we should have done it for them then. Too late for that now.

Mom, psychologically increasingly like a toddler, expects me to quit my job and move in with them until they both are gone, which, given my mom’s genetics and lack of serious chronic illness, could be another decade, in her case. Well, actually, I don’t think she knows I have a job, because I’ve been so generous with my time with them. As a freelancer, I’ve been able to skip some hours of work in the past five years to drive them to their haircuts and doctors’ appointments, to pick up groceries, computer supplies, and what-not, but those demands have exploded in the past few years, with Mom being taken to the hospital, often with rehab, six times in the past two years, and Dad twice.

Dad had a stroke, and he needed outpatient PT after it, and he needed me to drive him there a few times a week. And there’s always the questions about the computer. Or, Why isn’t the phone working? Or, I think we might need a new water heater. Your Mom needs more Depends: this size, overnight, super absorbency. . . .

Wash, rinse, repeat. I know Dad remembers I have a job, but I’m pretty sure Mom doesn’t realize it—or if she does, she doesn’t respect it.

Talk about pushing my buttons. I try to just see it, acknowledge it, know that it’s old, old material, breathe, and move on without, like, yelling. Of course I’m not respected. And I don’t need her validation anymore.

When I tell her she can’t expect me to come take care of them at their house 24/7 for the next decade or so, she tells me that she and Dad will simply have an elevator added to their house, or they will just hire 24-hour in-home assistance. I recently sketched out the math for her: $30 an hour, times 24 hours in a day, is $720 a day; multiply that by 365 days in a year, and you’re paying $262,800 annually just for someone (some person or persons—who?) to be there to help you, in a home that’s not going to accommodate a wheelchair, which she will soon need to be in—it does not count food or food preparation, transportation, incontinence supplies, heating and cooling bills, water, house maintenance and property taxes, medical copays and drug costs, and the ever-loving cable TV and landline/internet bills. It’s just fantasyland.

In our family, the dynamic has always been to go along with Mom’s ideas, because she’s always been “the practical one.” The one good with finances. The one who takes care of the house, the bills, the do list. Balances the checkbooks. (Kind of like the myth about Republicans being good about the economy.) She was always the one to deal with the plumbers, electricians, and handymen. She used to be sharp as a tack, “on top of” everything. But those days are long gone, as she becomes more confused and lives increasingly in the past. Actually, they both are.

So it’s past time for independent living; it may already be too late for assisted living, for Mom. She’s hurtling toward skilled nursing; she doesn’t want to drink, so she gets dehydrated and gets UTIs, she doesn’t move around, she’s weak, her blood pressure tanks when she merely stands up. The idea of getting her up the staircases is a horror for me. She’s been hospitalized three times in the past six months. But she still expects us to treat her as if she knows best, and we all still tend to twirl around trying to make her happy. Of course, that is impossible. People like her will never be happy; this is how ninety years of untreated depression and anxiety disorder, with a little side order of NPD, ends up. And so we are moving ahead with plans for senior living for them both. Dad is ready. We simply leave her out of our conversations, which is easy to do since she only ever sits in her living room chair and has grown pretty hard of hearing.

So we’re in a race to get them moved into a good place where they can be safe, clean, fed, comfortable and hopefully find things to be happy about, to be entertained with; to have people to talk with; to maybe even find ways to still contribute to the world (Dad would like that, I think).

You know, I started this blog in a state of deep stress and depression. Hopelessness. Things that used to cheer me only made me feel like I’d been slapped. I was repeatedly contemplating suicide. I thought that starting a blog about the things—the few little things—that I can unequivocally claim as good would help me regain a sense that there is something still to enjoy, even when my life seems in shambles, when my career—hell, my whole life—seems a big fat joke, when I see myself as the center of all my problems. Even when I’m almost convinced that I don’t belong here, that I have no place or purpose.

I truly don’t have any goddamn time to be fucking around with a blog, or anything, anything, that is not related to my job, or with the needs of my parents. I’m not going to fuck around with Christmas cookies this year. (Well . . . maybe I’ll make a few kinds. To give to the elders who remain.) Christmas tree? Bah, humbug. I’m down on Christianity, too—all the white Christian nationalists have turned me off of religion entirely—in America and globally, the trouble, the evil, that religion causes far outweigh its so-called blessings. Overall, religion is still, always, eternally a way that greedy, mean, power-hungry people convince other people into doing horrible, selfish, mean-spirited things. I’m sick of it. Grow the fuck up and learn how to be a good person without having the imaginary threat of eternal damnation hanging over your head, okay?

But yeah, I think I’m gonna attempt another year of “Jar of Goodness.” Because I kind of need it. At least, let’s give it try before I call my doctor and ask to “up my dosage.” I’ve been doing a lot of journaling the past few years, and I have a lot I’d like to say about that. And there are several other half-baked posts I can complete and upload. Let’s keep a-goin’.

Jar of Goodness 7.31.22: Wait. Jar of Goodness?

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for . . .

Well, it’s just been kind of hard recently.

I know I shouldn’t complain. There are so many people worse off than us. And my uncle just had a major health scare (fortunately, he seems to be feeling much better now). . . . But we’re getting tired of trouble, expensive trouble.

At the end of June, as we drove home around 9 p.m. after spending Father’s Day in Columbia, my elderly car died on US 63. (I posted about it earlier.) It was a late night as we had to have the car towed the rest of the way to Jeff City, and then, having been dropped off at the (closed) repair place, we had to wait for the one taxi cab in town. It was not marked; it was just some guy’s smoky-smelling SUV. This is a taxi? Anyway, he was pleasant enough. We didn’t get home until about midnight.

The very next day, as we were driving back to Columbia on the very same highway, Sue’s front right brake calipers went bad, and we pulled off at the very same place on the highway. The wheel was sizzling hot. So, we called AAA again and got another tow.

That’s right: we got two tows, for two different cars, from the exact same spot, within a single twenty-four-hour period.

Some of the good parts: We have AAA. We have AAA Plus. We were not physically injured. We have cell phones that work (you young things, try to imagine how much of a pain it was when your car broke down in the middle of nowhere, and cell phones didn't exist). The truck was able to be fixed within a few days. The service rep at our local Honda dealer, where both cars were taken for service, offered us a car to rent, which was very convenient.

But back to the complaining . . .

Trying to buy a car is a bitch in 2022, especially if you’re in a small town. In a nutshell: The available used cars are crappy and overpriced. Few in the Honda dealer’s lot are Honda Certified; in fact, few on the Honda dealer’s lot are even Hondas. As for new cars, they are simply not available. We find ourselves in the lucky/unlucky position of being able to purchase a new car, to make a sizeable down payment, and have excellent credit, being preapproved for a lowest-interest loan, and yet . . . there’s nothing to buy. So we paid a deposit and are on a waiting list. It will probably be months before our car is manufactured and arrives in Missouri. Meanwhile I can only dream about having a lovely, reliable, sexy new car.

Yes, the above image is shamelessly stolen from the Honda website. Why wouldn't they want someone like me sharing their lovely promotional photo of their top-selling sedan in its most desirable color this model year?

More complaining: the local Honda dealer appears to have done some kind of bait-and-switch on us, promising us that if we paid a deposit before someone else did, we’d be able to put our names on a car that’d been ordered by someone else who’d declined the vehicle, thus getting us ahead of the usual schedule . . . But then that evaporated. I think our young sales associate offered us something he wasn’t allowed to offer. They won’t tell us he screwed up, but that’s apparently what he did. I’m allowed to be angry about that, right? He told us we’d get “that cool Sonic Gray Metallic, by early August, instead of September!”; then he called a few weeks later and said “in early or middle September, maybe, and it’ll be white!” Wait, what? No!

It’s a long story. This crazy COVID economy is most of the problem; computer chips from China are in scant supply, so production is way down. The Honda company, the factory, has to allocate the few cars that are dribbling out of its assembly lines to all the dealers on the continent, and guess what? The rinky-dink small-town dealers like the one in this town are getting the dregs. They’re getting the black and the white cars. I think they’re getting just one or two a month.

Meanwhile, the big-city dealers that sell more cars in a bigger market get many more cars from the factory, and they get a greater variety of colors. So this is why we ended up putting a deposit and placing an order from a St. Louis dealer, too. Geez. It this crazy, or what? It’s about like what happened with us trying to get a new refrigerator this winter.

Again: It could be far worse. We have a neighbor who uses a riding lawn mower as his principal mode of transportation. Our problems are laughable to him. Our problems are “First World problems.” I know it. And we are so lucky that my parents, who are doing much less driving these days, are glad to let us use their car for out-of-town excursions.

THEN, with the one-car situation kind of settling in, Sue and I were driving back home from a trip to Columbia this past Monday, and AGAIN her truck started acting weird. It was making a funny noise. The engine heated up. The battery light came on. The power steering went out. We pulled over, again, on US 63 again, again near Hartsburg (actually, this time it was along the shoulder near the Boone and Callaway county line). (I’m starting to hate Hartsburg!)

Called AAA. Again. By this time, Tyler, the smiling young tow-truck driver for Kendall’s, knows us. “Oh, yeah, when they said it was a purple pickup, I knew it was you!” . . . Again, I’m glad we have AAA. Again, I’m grateful that the repair place was able to fix it. It was a malfunctioning pulley on the serpentine belt, and a broken serpentine belt. (This time, since we’re kind of honked off at the local Honda-everything, we had it towed to Telle Tire, and though they were busy, and we’d dropped it off after-hours without an appointment, they fixed it within a few days, and it was okay.) But I’m not liking this car stress.

Okay, next topic: Did I mention we’re finally getting a new roof and gutters? Supposedly? Yeah. We’re lucky that insurance is covering it, considering the damage occurred in the hailstorm in late March 2020, but fortunately it’s covered, and we have a surprisingly low deductible. But it’s stressful, anyway. We’ve been expecting them all month. We recently found out that the reason for the delay is the combination of our steep roof and the super-f-ing-hot weather we’ve been having. The roofing company doesn’t want the shingles and other materials to be compromised because of the heat. Not to mention the safety of their workers . . . And yeah, we have a sense of PTSD regarding the roofers. When we had the current roof installed in 2006, we unfortunately had a clown/ex-con/ripoff company rip us off. (You might remember our sunporch disaster, thanks to them.)

So we approach this roof work with trepidation. How can we not? This has been the biggest problem with owning this old house: We’re not fix-it people. We’re not carpenters, electricians, plumbers, roofers. And we have a hell of a time finding people to a) do the work, and b) trust to do it right.

Then, Tuesday, the day after Sue’s recent truck incident, and while it was being repaired, we discovered that one of our central air-conditioning units was making a funny sound, like it was straining. The coils had frozen up to the point where we were seeing frost on the outside of the unit. We turned off the system, and the thing defrosted, and we worried. It’s a 21-year-old system, and the maintenance folks have been telling us in recent years that it has a 15-year lifespan.

Fortunately, our annual scheduled a/c maintenance was only two days later, so that service call was covered by our contract . . . but unfortunately, the news was grim. The unit isn’t worth fixing; any fix would require retrofitting the coolant system for a different type of coolant, since the kind our system uses is no longer available . . . and any fix they did would still be a band-aid, as the aging compressor is no longer operating very efficiently anymore . . . So, tomorrow, we’ll meet with a sales representative and see what kind of suggestions and offers they can make.

Of course, they’ll offer us a discount on replacing both systems at once (we have two systems, one for the first-floor apartment, one for the second). But who wants to buy two air conditioners and two furnaces at once? Yeah, it would be nice to have them all be new and identical. But, but . . .

And yeah, I'm glad we have a separate first-floor air-conditioning unit that's working fine, so we can kind of live on the first floor if we need to. And I'm glad we've had relatively cool temperatures this week. But it's going to get back up into the nineties this next week. Ugh, ugh, ugh. The service man said the company might be able to tide us through with some loaner window a/c units until our new a/c unit(s) are installed, in something like one and a half to two weeks.

But who wants to make these purchases when preparing to buy an new car at the same time? And do you know what our retirement investments have been doing recently? Ugh!

So, “Jar of Goodness.” I’m giving you a mixed review this week. We’re just feeling really stressed and tired.

Jar of Goodness 7.3.22: My 2003 Honda Civic

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m expressing thanks for my 2003 Honda Civic.

It served us well. We’ve had a lot of adventures together. From the time we acquired it, on January 10, 2004, when it had only 54 miles on its odometer, to 9:40 pm on June 19, 2022, when it overheated, smoking, near Hartsburg on Highway 63, with 288,380 miles, it gave us countless good rides. It even stayed running long enough for me to swing off the highway, give it one more pulse of the accelerator, and then coast, as the engine cut out, to near the stop sign at the quiet intersection of Westbrook and Mount Pleasant roads, just off the highway, but completely and safely out of traffic.

It was almost like it was taking care of us one last time.

It literally blew a gasket—the head gasket. The only fix, at this point, would be a new engine, which, of course, is ridiculous for a nineteen-year-old car with 288,380 miles on it. All that’s left is to salute it, with thanks, for its terrific performance and reliability.

I have to admit, I was never smitten with the car. At the time we got it, I was hoping to get a car that was, well, a color. Instead, we bought it off the lot when it was the only vehicle with the options we wanted. And, being past the model year, it was on sale. So instead of it being a pretty Galapagos Green Metallic, Eternal Blue Pearl, or Radiant Ruby Pearl Civic, we ended up with a car that was Shoreline Mist Metallic—the “beige” of that model year. Or as my dad called a similar color of their first Ford Taurus, “metallic-dirt-color.” How do you describe that color when you sign in at a hotel, or request roadside assistance from AAA? . . . “It’s metallic tan. Sort of silvery beige?”

My 1989 Civic had been “Almond Cream”—which was unquestionably beige. It was also not a sexy car, but it was extremely practical and perfect for me in the years I lived in Arizona and Montana. It got beautiful gas mileage and also was incredibly reliable. Remember when you could get a car without power window and door locks?

I can totally see why there are Civic enthusiasts. Now that I’ve had a fourth-generation Civic sedan and a seventh-generation one, I’m having trouble thinking of a single reason not to get an eleventh-generation one. Especially since, after some years of designs that seemed uninteresting to me, the current Civics have a simpler, classier, yet still sporty, design.

Our usual m.o. is to hang on to cars as long as they keep running reliably. We accept that as they get older, they’ll start looking cruddy. But until the repair bills start getting truly painful and repetitive, we still prefer occasional repairs to having monthly, mandatory car payments. We know our car’s history; replacing it with some stranger’s used car that is one-third to one-half used up is full of question marks. Yet, replacing it with a brand new car is dauntingly expensive.

Admittedly, as the car has aged, and we’ve gotten more interested in comfort, we’ve opted to use rental cars for out-of-state trips. This kept the extra miles off the elderly Honda while also letting us luxuriate in quiet, smooth-gliding sedans with oodles of cargo room.

My 2003 Civic was totaled twice in recent years. It’s easy to total a car that is only worth about $1,500 or $2,000. First, on October 3, 2018, an 18-wheeler waiting to our right at a stoplight, as we waited to turn left, unexpectedly also turned left when the light turned green, and it crunched against the side of the car (that was a long story involving a construction zone and a less-than-capable construction worker who screwed up as she directed the truck to turn when it wanted to go straight.) Ugh.

The car needed serious work on the front right quarter panel plus the right headlight and bumper; the other injuries, though, were mostly cosmetic. The semi trailer rubbed against the car at very low speed. Amazingly, I could fix the car (enough) for just about the same amount as the insurance settlement gave me for it.

The next time the car was totaled was March 27, 2020, when we got tennis-ball-sized hail.

In the case of the hail, it was only a broken windshield and destroyed windshield washer nozzle-thingie that needed replacing. The rest of that damage comprised dents that were best left alone.

After all this, the car looked pretty roughed up, but amazingly it was not rusted out. It still cleaned up well. I was never embarrassed to drive it (although I was kind of sheepish when I used it to drive myself and a friend to a luncheon with the upper classes at the local country club). But by now, it definitely has a “good side” and a “bad side.”

Man, just think of all the adventures we’ve had with this car! Countless trips to Ohio to visit Sue’s family. Countless in-state trips to St. Louis, Kansas City, Hermann, the Lake of the Ozarks, and all kinds of special places. Plenty of gravel roads and conservation areas, church picnics, state historic sites, festivals, concerts, you name it.

Since Sue has kept her 1994 Ranger, with its manual transmission that I’ve never mastered, the 2003 Civic was “my” car. For four years, I drove it back and forth between Jefferson City and Columbia for work. I don’t miss wasting that 5 hours a week of my life spent commuting. But except for when the weather was nasty, it was usually a pleasant drive, in that car.

Although I can get a little misty as I think with nostalgia about this car, as if it were a part of my family, as if it were a person, I’ll stop. I know it’s just a thing.

And I know we probably held on to it too long. But who has a crystal ball? Since the world changed in 2020 due to COVID, nothing’s gotten back to “normal” yet. Car shopping in 2022 is fraught, whether you’re talking new or used: the prices are higher than ever (but come on, will they ever really go back down?); car production is low because key supplies are low; and there’ve been some notable natural disasters (flooding, hurricanes, etc.) in recent years that cast doubt on the soundness of used vehicles.

Dealer’s lots are shockingly empty. Around here, at least, they’re all looking like used-car lots, and sparse ones at that. They’re just selling any old cars that come to them, you'd think. Around here, they’re not even offering them as Honda Certified Used Cars. And the big dealer-companies shift vehicles near and far, trying to guess what towns will buy which cars.

The local Honda dealers don’t even have sample new cars for you to drive. It’s a three-month wait plus a deposit, if you want to order a new car from the factory.

I suppose times are changin’. More and more people are happy to buy things, anything, online, sight-unseen. And un-test-driven.

Will we ever return to the point where dealers fill their lots with shiny new cars? Even when computer chips and other supply-chain items become readily available again, why would the car industry want to go back to the situation where tons of unsold stock sits out in the weather, needing eventually to be sold with rebates in order to create space on the lots for the new model year? Why would they do that?

After all these thoughts, and after looking at used cars that are available, we decided to put a deposit on a new car. The choices in used cars were pretty unappealing (though I'm pretty sure the ones they showed us were ugly ones in an attempt to encourage us to buy new--dealers can be so frickin' crooked). We got over our sticker shock (when you haven’t bought a new car in about twenty years, the prices seem outrageous). It’ll be all right. The car we’ve settled on is already in production, so we should have it within only about a month. And the new car will be not only reliable, but also attractive (even, dare I say?) sexy. We’re looking forward to having a car that—who knows—might feel like a facelift for our sense of style. The neighbors will be going, “Whoa!”

UPDATE, 7/19/22: Jefferson City Honda pulled a bait-and-switch on us! The nifty sonic gray metallic Civic Sport, already in production and supposed to arrive in early August, that we had supposedly put dibs on with our deposit, somehow simply evaporated (or, I bet, they sold it to someone else--hey, maybe someone offered them more money for it--which is totally crooked if they accepted it), and so they offered us a white one . . . which would arrive in September. So I'm pretty damn down on my local Honda dealer. Not on Hondas . . . just on this damn crooked (or at best, inept) dealer.

. . . No wonder I hate buying cars. It's much better to find a good one and drive it until the gaskets blow out. We've just started looking at other dealers now, with our arrival date shifted to, probably, October. JC Honda just kinda wasted a month of our precious time.

The Op Op Turns Thirteen

Ohmygosh, there’s a teenager in the room!

Happy anniversary to the Op Op! My first post was on March 3, 2009, which seems like just yesterday. Everything since 2000 always seems fairly recent. It’s kind of scary to think that kiddos born in 2006 will be getting driver’s licenses this year. (Little babies, driving? So frightful!)

And yet . . . the year 2009 also seems like it was in a different century. At this point, we have what’s become a historic era in most people’s minds called “The Before Times”: the lifestyle we enjoyed before the Covid-19 pandemic altered so many of the ways we do things, and even whether we do things at all. Like, I used to write a lot of posts about restaurants, because we used to eat out at restaurants a lot. Now, um, not so much. Will that ever change back to the way it used to be? I don’t know.

Meanwhile (and I might have mentioned this before), I took myself off antidepressants last year. I weaned myself off of ’em. Why? First, I had already halved my dosage in Nov. 2019 (with the concurrence of my GP doctor, who just told me to let her know if I was having any problem and wanted to return to my longtime, full dosage). And halving it didn’t cause any problem. I hardly noticed any changes in my mood, or my ability to rebound from emotional blows. And second, I was getting annoyed at the every-six-month checkup with the doctor to satisfy the needs of the insurance company and/or drug regulators and/or healthcare system before getting prescriptions refilled. (After years of accomplishing that with an annual checkup, switching to six-month checkups seemed like I was having to visit the doctor every time I turned around.) (And yeah, it seems that dumb and tragic people have found a way to abuse what I was on, no matter that it easily kills you if you try.) So as I was nearing the end of another prescription, I just said “aw, to heck with it” and gradually decreased my dosage, going from daily to every other day, to every three days, to none. (Can’t split ’em when they’re time-release.)

And I was really starting to think that maybe I didn’t need to be on that medication forever. I’ve always been skeptical of the healthfulness of taking any medication forever. Or even just for, you know, decades. You see enough news about class-action lawsuits against some drug company or other, and you can’t help but be skeptical.

All kinds of medications that we used to think were okay to use have been pulled off the market for some reason or other. You know? . . . Like, remember this?

I picked a great few years (the start of the Covid era) to remove antidepressants from my life, but so far, so good. I think being on them so long changed me. It gave me a break from what had been a lifelong emotional Möbius strip. It disrupted the cycle of depression. Or maybe I’ve just survived long enough, with that safety net in place, for my life circumstances (and hormonal influences) to change so that I feel more secure and have a sense that life is worthwhile again. And that ups and downs don’t “mean” anything. Anyway, I’m feeling much, much better now, thanks.

I guess the reason why I’m associating this topic with my Op Op anniversary is because I started this blog during a really dark and hopeless period of my life. Indeed, that’s a main reason I started blogging; it seemed like one tiny thing I could do that didn’t remind me of the things I seemed to be losing, or failing at; that focused on the things that seemed good and authentic; that gave me a creative outlet where it didn’t MATTER if I was good at it or not. (Since who’s gonna read this, anyway?)

It looks like my number of posts is going to be way up this year (lord willin’ an’ the creek don’t rise), since I’ve embarked on the Jar of Goodness idea. It obligates me, yet frees me up for (indeed, demands) shorter, quicker posts. So already, I’ve done a dozen posts for 2022, which is more than I did all year in 2020, 2018, and 2017. And at this pace, I’ll easily have posted more than I did in the years 2019, 2013, 2014, and 2016.

And I have several ideas for new posts. Also, more old-new posts. I guess I'm always behind.

Not like I’m really counting. Blogger does that tally for me, because, you know, computers and data; “analytics”! I learned a long time ago that a journal that must be written in regularly is one that will be put aside and forgotten. At least for me, the better agreement is to cut myself a break when I don’t feel like writing, or it’s inconvenient. It’s like meditation, or anything else worth doing: If you get off schedule, or you get distracted, don’t give energy to the lapse. Just keep turning your attention to the thing you want to do. Just keep a-goin’.

I’ve often thought that my initial three years of heavy blogging was caused by a need to assuage my depression, but as I look back, I think I need to give myself more credit for reveling in the fun of exploring a new medium, relishing the good feedback I was receiving, and learning how to take pictures. Plus, I had a lot of territory to cover. Also, I was content to do rather short posts. (I’ve gotten much wordier in recent years. Does anyone really read this stuff? “Helloooo?”)

By now in the Op Op, I’ve written about most of my favorite hiking spots, my favorite restaurants, our Christmas traditions, and so on. There’s not much left to say about the storm windows, and I still make red cabbage the same way. See what I mean? And anyway, there are lots of better food blogs out there.

Still. There is a lot to share and celebrate. Plenty of stuff to share. Fun things I haven’t told you about yet!

And now that I’ve set up a YouTube channel and uploading videos is easier, I can explore posting more videos. Maybe some that will even be worth watching! And you never know what new fun things we’ll get into—such as last summer’s boat ramp excursions; who could’ve predicted that would become a “thing”? At this point in late winter, I’m yearning to go back to some of those places; we really had fun.

Looking at the amount of posts, my productivity was up last year, too. And looks are deceiving; although there are 31 posts for 2021, my actual output was more like 38, since I was shamefully/not-so-shamefully posting entries retroactively, even into previous years. I had several semi-finished posts that just needed finalizing and whose pictures just needed cropping, sizing, and uploading. (Yeah, the good ol’ “follow through.”)

So do you think that me taking myself off of the medication has anything to do with the uptick in blogging? Or do you think it’s the lifestyle changes wrought by the pandemic? I’m certainly not hanging out at restaurants like before, so I have more productive time for other things. Also, I’m not spending hours each week attending meetings for the various organizations I used to be active in, so more free time is gleaned from that. Well, anyway, it’s all seeming okay to me, more or less. I don’t think anyone’s really missing me from those organizations, anyway. Life moves on.

Oh, also, if you’ve read this far, you might take note that I’ve not been announcing every single new post on the Op Op Facebook page. Some of these blog posts have been a bit more personal, so I don’t want all the world’s hackers, spammers, and nutjobs to be attracted to my little corner of the ’net. You might have to just make a point of visiting the Op Op website on your own, or else, when you do see an Op Op Facebook notification, take a moment to see if there are other recent Op Op posts you’ve missed.

So, here’s to another year of Opulent Opossumness! Here’s to another year of celebrating the ordinary and the sublime. If you were here, I’d offer you a cocktail or other fun beverage to celebrate. But until we’re together again, a picture will have to do. Cheers!

Shameful, What I'm Doing

You can take the word shameful two ways, as in “I should be ashamed of myself,” but also as “I am shameful—full of shame—and I’m trying to make amends somehow.”

It’s not as if I haven’t meant to post blogs these past few years; I have, in fact, prepared all over the place for them. I’ve taken pictures and made videos. I’ve even written entire posts . . . then simply failed the last, critical step: the posting.

Blogger has gotten stupider to use in the last ten years. You have two ways of posting, as plain text, where you can edit codes yourself (“HTML view”), or in the semi-convenient “Compose view.” Neither has ever been completely convenient, but now the Compose view is bananas with the extraneous codes that it adds (after using it, peek at the HTML codes, and you can hardly find your actual text anymore!). Meanwhile, the HTML view no longer provides simple niceties like automatically transforming hard returns into paragraph breaks. Not that I can see, anyway.

So now that I’ve been coding it mostly myself, posting takes more time and it feels more like work. Fortunately, there are still buttons for uploading links, images, and videos, but anyway . . . This last step—putting the content online—has been irksome enough that I’ve gotten way behind in posting.

So, while I have some time without yardwork, and no big work crunches, by golly, I’m posting some older material. To mess up everyone, I’m posting them retroactively, dating them on the actual dates I composed them, and would have posted them, if I hadn’t gotten sidetracked by other things first. So they’re suddenly shuffled into my blog as if they’d always been there.

I can picture people checking my blog, rubbing their eyes, and going, Hey, where’d that post come from?? I didn’t see it before! Am I losing my mind?

If you want to find these new, but older posts, you’ll just have to scroll down and look for something you hadn’t seen yet. Hint: anything posted as 2018, 2019, and 2020 might be “new.” Another hint: these new/old posts may go back at least as far as August 2017, when we had the big eclipse!

So, I am ashamed of myself—so much so, that I won’t hesitate to alter history by making it look like I’d been posting all along. Maybe then, I won’t feel like such a slacker.

Long Overdue Update: Good Riddance to 2020

Hi, folks, you’d think I’d dropped off the face of the earth, huh? It takes a message from Blogger or Google or whatever telling me I need to show some activity on my blog, or it’ll, like, disappear or something. So, here is a post.

Really, honestly, I should have been posting every damn day this year, considering that my original intent with this blog was to cheer myself up. I certainly needed it this year—me and everyone else, except perhaps Jeff Bezos. Back in November 2019, I told my doc that I wanted to try lowering my dosage of antidepressant—a dosage I’d been on for years, with no problems. I certainly picked a hell of a year to halve it!

The most recent grief has been the death of Lorie Smith, owner of Vines on Broadway, about which I've blogged. After a nearly year of pandemic-hampered business, she had to temporarily close, since the weather got cold and her customers could no longer sit outside in the fresh air. We hesitated to go very much as the year wore on, as so many people there were maskless. And the virus numbers were going up around here. And she was having heart trouble. So Vines was closed for over a month. She died soon after undergoing a procedure intended to fix her arrhythmia; apparently, the procedure led to blood clots in her brain, at least one of which was inoperable. She was only sixty. I’m devastated by the news; I’m still in shock.

I believe that at least 75 percent of the people who stepped foot in her business wished they could be the proprietor of such a cool place. I know I was envious. One of my friends walked in there for the first time and within two minutes of meeting Lorie said to me, “I have a big girl crush on her!” I’m hoping against hope that at least one of her many, many friends or family will find a way to continue the business, and keep her dream alive. It was very successful . . .

 

I could go on and on and on about how much Lorie and her business made our street, our neighborhood, our town much better. She influenced and improved everything and everyone she came in contact with. So much of Vines on Broadway was her. 

I have come to associate her, and Vines, with many of the fun things in life. Things like kicking back on a nice patio with a glass of wine; fixing up a nice, inviting patio to begin with; enjoying cordial, convivial conversations; noshing on attractive, tasty snacky-snacks; warmth and coziness and candlelight in the winter; chillin’ in the misters on the patio in summer . . . even friendship itself. Her disappearance from the world makes me afraid to face these otherwise very pleasant things; I feel as if those things will all come with a pang of emptiness and grief—if we ever even have them again. (When will we ever feel comfortable sitting close again?) If Lorie had been a grouch, or snotty or snarky, maybe I wouldn’t feel this way. But she was faultlessly kind and good-natured, with an easy, ringing laugh that still echoes inside my head and heart. Even though I only knew her for a few years, I can’t imagine how there can be a world without her.

 

And that’s only the most recent loss. The past year has felt jinxed. Sue’s mom passed away in December of last year, and we can’t help but feel she was lucky, in a way, to have left the world before the pandemic changed everything. Living as she did in a studio apartment in an assisted-living community, she wouldn’t have had company for months; the loneliness would have been excruciating for her (and nerve-wracking for us). And the nurse assistants and other staff would have had to wear masks around her, and with her hearing loss, she wouldn’t have been able to understand much of what people were saying. And then, also, she tended to suffer badly from respiratory ailments, when she got them, so . . . it’s almost like she knew, somehow, when to go.

She always was very intuitive, with a strong faith in her ability to sense things that are not physical; maybe her departure from this plane was an example. Who knows.

And we had a rough summer, traveling three times to Ohio (despite the worry of COVID) to go through things at Sue’s mom’s house. The lifetime accumulations of two people. Furniture. The antique railroad lantern collection. The kitchen treasures. And on and on. As if all that that wasn’t going to be difficult enough, we experienced some shocking interpersonal strife with one of the family members, and because of that, our final trip there—for just a few days, solely to be there when the movers came—really felt like it could be our final trip there.

In September, we lost Patches, the original Opulent Opossum. She had lived with us for seventeen years and was probably eighteen. In recent years, we had made every accommodation for her sweet, elderly self. She had become deaf; and she put the “cat” in cataracts; she also had that old-cat kidney disease, so each morning we puréed special canned food with extra water, just for her. I burrowed my face into her neck and hummed little tunes, like the cadences of my speech, so she could feel the vibrations of my voice. She would purr in response, and burrow her head against mine. She was a good friend, for a long time, and I still miss her.

As I review this stupid year—a year when every trade group’s cheesy annual convention theme was gonna be “2020 Vision,” dontcha know, and a year about which we’ll all be seeing reviews cleverly headlined as “Hindsight 2020” in the coming weeks—I’ve actually been okay, for the most part. I recently saw a thing about how Gen X people like me are perfectly prepared for lockdowns and solitude; how we effectively trained for this from a young age, how we know how to wait and wait and wait, and how we know many ways to entertain ourselves and survive on whatever’s in the cupboards.

But I’m basically lucky in other ways. I’m lucky I don’t work in at a job that requires me to interact with people all day, or even work in an office place among other people (don’t get me wrong: I’d still love to have benefits, like group health insurance). I’m also lucky that this freelancer lifestyle is something I’d already gotten used to way before everyone else had to adjust. Lucky that my major client still wants my services. Also, lucky I’m a pretty okay cook. Apparently, the food I fix is healthier than what we get when we eat out; I’ve actually lost weight this year, without even trying. It certainly isn’t any increase in exercise.

So, this is the end of the calendar year, but it’s certainly not the end of this merry-go-round of pandemic and the political mayhem that will no doubt persist for the foreseeable future even though we will be getting a psychologically stable new president.

Tomorrow night—December 31, 2020—we’ll be eating as many good-luck foods we can find. Pickled herring, mutzens, hoppin’ John, grapes, you name it. We’ll make an outrageous amount of noise at midnight, to frighten away the evil spirits that have pursued this year. I feel like building a huge, round-eyed Jagannath icon and carting it down High Street, with fireworks going off on all sides. Take that, 2020! Good riddance!

 

In reality, the plan is to make our mutzens first thing in the morning; let them cool a bit for transportation, then drive them to my uncle and aunt’s house and to my parents, along with a bunch of goodies for a New Year’s Eve party: some decorations for them to hang up, some Prosecco to sip at midnight, stuff for a veggie plate, including some dips, some black and green olives, samples of nice cheeses and sausages, pickled herring, shrimp and cocktail sauce, crackers and sliced baguette, and so on. A party to-go!

Then, Sue and I will come back home and let the weather do whatever it wants to do. For a long time, it was looking like it might snow on New Year’s Eve, but that seems unlikely now. Anyway, as we did at Thanksgiving and Christmas, we’ll have our own festivities, just the two of us, and we’ll make phone calls to the people we wish we were partying with.

Should you wish to do the same, on New Year’s Eve, the appropriate way of greeting someone you’ve just called is “Hey! This is the neighbors! Keep it down over there!”

This post has already gotten too long and has said too much that I ought to keep to myself. But whatever—as long as the whole blog doesn’t disappear into nothingness.

Because that would really bum me out, too.

Middle of January Ramblings

I’m writing in 2019, but I’m not sure I’ve even digested the reality of 2018. I suspect I’m not the only one having vague recollections of life in the 1970s and 80s, and thinking that the 20-anythings seemed waaaaay far off. Seriously, is it really 2019 already?

This must mean I’m getting old, according to my projections made as a kid. As Rose O’Neill commented upon her sixtieth birthday, “How roguish.”

In case you’re wondering, 2019 has actually started off on a promising note. I am entirely grateful for many things that seem to be going well. Let’s use some bullet points, shall we? Taking stock:

Patches, our elderly kitty, had a pretty bad spell with her arthritic hips in early December (right when we were heading to Ohio for Sue’s niece’s wedding). But boy howdy, with a new supplement for her joints, she’s been doing real well. I get her to “walk around the block” (circle through the kitchen, dining room, living room, and front hall) each morning once or twice before serving her her beloved soft food (Royal Canin or Science Diet kidney chow). God love her, she’s deaf, and she puts the “cat” in “cataracts,” but she shows lots of affection for me, and she’s comfortable, and she makes sure to give Lois hell whenever she sees her. I’m grateful for this time with Patches. She’s a really sweet kitty.

Patches.

Church, which has been a topic of recent posts, has been going well. Our new congregation is growing, and the sense of freshness continues. Also (and I’m glad about this, too), my former congregation seems to be moving past the split, as well.

Christmas was good, though a bit strange for me—we didn’t put up the famous Weihnacthspyramide this year . . . we simply ran out of time. That, and we weren’t excited about giving Lois the opportunity to completely destroy it. Next year, Lois will be another year older, and maybe we’ll be able to trust her not to leap onto it and, like . . . destroy it. BUT! We did help my parents put up a Christmas tree, which was right in my Mom’s sight-line as she sits in her chair, and it was there for when my brother and one of my nephews came to visit at Christmastime.

And the visit with my brother was good, too. I’m grateful that my relationship with him is maturing, just as we both are. Sometimes, in the past, I haven’t clicked very well with him, but now . . . we see more eye-to-eye. Funny how, over the years, we meet each other in between our various flip-flops . . .

Also Christmas: once again, I made a bunch of different Christmas cookies. I’m starting to accept that this “gift” is as much for me as it is to my recipients. Of course I give most of them away to family and friends, but we do end up with some ourselves. And I’m doling them out. Tonight, I relished a few of the old-fashioned ones that no one else seems to make anymore: lebkuchen, springerle, billy goats. And I let the waves of memory wash over me, Christmases past . . . my childhood, my family, and I could feel we were still connected over space and time.

Financially: I was rather foolish in 2018. Generous with my time, but it bit too much into my professional life. I don’t regret volunteering so much with local organizations, but I see that I let it get out of balance. I need more “billable hours” in 2019, and I’m off to a good start. Feeling good about a renewed discipline regarding my freelancin’.

Looking out the windows: The Capitol looks really funny, all wrapped up in plastic (or whatever that is). The maintenance is long overdue. I'm glad its under way.

Sleeping: it wasn’t occurring to me, exactly, how much my sleep (or lack of) was messing up my life. I’ve come to the conclusion that the mushy foam mattress that I’d hoped would end my problems has actually been worse than what I had before. For one thing, it absorbs heat, and with my hot flashes (!!!), it gets intolerable. Tired (exhausted, actually) of getting out of bed, standing up, in the middle of the night, with back and hip pain and sweating. It’s not a good thing when you wake up for the umpteenth time thinking, “please kill me now.” So until I find something better, I’ve returned to a futon, and I’ve been waking up feeling . . . good.

And there you have it. A little update from here. Who knows what 2019 will bring.

Belated Birthday to the Op Op

Oh. My. God. Can you believe the Opulent Opossum is nine years old already? My first two posts were on March 3, 2009, and here it is May of 2018. And look how far we’ve come! Obviously, since my blogging is diminished so much, there must not be much more to say. About anything!

I’ve covered it all!

. . . Not! I’m starting the tenth year of blogging, and the only problem now is, how do I find time to write about all the ideas in my head?

I’ve been busy doing things instead of writing and reflecting—and I suppose that’s a very good thing. Naturally, all the usual stuff continues. The house, the yard, the kitties. The elephant ears and the storm windows. You deserve an update!

Well, yes, there was the springtime landscape work.





AND we adopted a new kitty at the end of March! He’s from the Wild Thing people. He was trapped along with a clan of other cats in on a road in the south part of town called Hiview. They neutered him and ear-tipped him, thinking he’d be released with the rest of the feral/semi-ferals . . . but as he recovered, they realized he wasn’t like the others. He was nice. He liked people. He wanted attention. Somewhere in the process, the veterinarian who did his neutering surgery also fixed his cleft palate. (Didja know kitties can have cleft palates? Sure enough!)



The surgery didn’t quite “take.” It kept getting infected; stitches came out. Well, they tried—but he basically went back to the default condition. Here's a picture taken of him after his surgery. Try to imagine if this had healed:



The foster family called him “Macaroni,” I guess because he’s orange. We, of course, call him all sorts of variations of the name: Mac. Mr. Mac. Mackie. Mr. Mackie (“mmmm-kay?”) Mackadoodle. Mackie Doodle Dandy. Mack the Knife. Macaroon. . . . You get the idea!

One reason I was interested in adopting him was that Lois needed a friend with her on the first floor (elderly and deaf Patches lives on the second floor with us, and she really doesn’t deserve an immature little “friend” to surprise her as she walks blearily around the house). Another reason we wanted to adopt him was indeed his peculiarity: His cleft palate, combined with his grown-up status, meant that he wouldn’t be as readily “adoptable” as other kitties, especially during kitten season. And more—I remembered Miss Rhue, who used to rent the first floor from Grandma. She had had a cleft palate, and I liked the idea of her somewhere, somehow, maybe smiling down on a sweet kitty with the same congenital weirdness.

So . . . in addition to the extra care and attention called for in the process of adopting a new kitty into the household, I’ve been busy with some other doings, too. This year I’m the secretary of the Old Munichburg Association and have volunteered to be the “vendors coordinator” of this year’s Oktoberfest celebration (September 29 is coming up really fast!)

Also, I’ve been involved with a brilliant new arts organization here in Central Missouri, the Southside Philharmonic Orchestra. I was even persuaded to be the president of the board! I’m pretty sure that means that the SPO is a priority for me, so I’ve been trying to behave appropriately.

Meanwhile, Sue’s mom had some pretty gnarly surgery in early March, so we were in northern Ohio for a week.



The surgery was a success, but the recovery was lengthy (and continues). In fact, Sue returned to Ohio in mid-April in order to help her sister, who was simultaneously dealing with medical issues with her father-in-law (who recently passed away). Sue’s still in Ohio!



I’ve been batchin’ it. Goin’ through all the church nonsense, dealing with a health problem with Patches (yes, she has that old-cat kidney disease, it’s official), moving all the big potted plants outside, putting the elephant ears into the ground, helping put on an SPO concert, and a lot more stuff I won’t bore you with but which ate up entire weekends.

Amid all this, I took Mackie to the veterinarian that had seen him previously—who attempted to repair his cleft palate, etc. Even though she was not our usual veterinarian, I thought it was only fair for her to see him again for booster shots and whatever. And she surprised me by saying that Mackie is FIV+. What? What-the-what?? What does this mean?

Looking back, I realize I had only inquired whether or not he was feline leukemia positive, and didn’t ask about feline immunodeficiency status. Fortunately, FIV isn’t as communicable as feline leukemia, but still . . . Lois had been living with him almost a long as he’d been with us. They got along within only a few days of his arrival.

And the Wild Thing liaison had been under the impression that he wasn’t “strongly” FIV+; and if it was only a “weak” positive, it probably meant he’d only been exposed to the virus and didn’t carry it. But I did have him tested with my own vet, and sure enough—it’s a “strong” positive. He has the virus; they say his life will almost certainly be shortened to 3–5 years and end with an infection some sort, or, more likely, with cancer.

Anyway, at first, it seemed like it was no big deal. It seemed really unlikely he could transmit the virus to Lois. FIV is a lot like HIV—the virus is relatively fragile outside the body, and it pretty much needs to be injected into a recipient. Since Mackie was neutered and Lois spayed, he wasn’t going to try to inseminate Lois. We changed the water regularly, so it was very, very unlikely he’d pass it on through sharing a food or water bowl. He’d have to seriously bite her in order to give her the virus.



But within a week of learning this fact about Mack, I started noticing that he is . . . nippy. I think he just does it because he’s worked up, and he’s craving attention. But he does occasionally “strike” at my ankles as I walk around, as he weaves among my feet. And I knew that he and Lois played rather hard together—chasing, playing “gatekeeper,” and so on. Had he bitten her? Could he?

As far as I know, he hasn’t bitten her hard enough to break the skin. She’s fast! And she’s amply covered with fluff. But as he has gotten more comfortable with me, he has gotten more comfortable biting at my ankles and calves. Hard enough for me to actually say, “Ouch!”

So, as of May 21, Lois has moved up to the second floor. Sixty days after her last possible exposure to the virus, I can get her tested to see if she’s acquired it. So now Mackie’s alone on the first floor, and Patches lives in one of the second-floor bedrooms (I’m currently trying to get her and Lois to make some kind of peace). Three litter boxes to clean!



Lois’s move to the second floor meant that I had to take measures to Lois-proof our general living area. Hide/secure all the electrical cords; relocate anything she’s likely to destroy (feathers, vases); clean up and throw away the antique vase she did break . . . repair the speaker wire she did manage to sever, even though the wire was hidden under the stereo cabinet, I thought . . .

And this, my dear friends, has been my spring. Have I not been posting regularly? Well, this is why: A constant mayhem, one thing after another. And there you go.