Month: March 2009

The day my #1 grandchild, Robert, was born was one of the happiest days of my life.
A week from tomorrow, said grandson will be going on his eighth grade class trip to Washington, D.C.
Robert will be a high school freshman next year. He’ll be old enough to drive a car in about two years.
It seems like just a short time ago that Peter was tooling around in his first car, a black Mustang.
The years crept up on me and I’m a little stunned, especially since my sister, only 2 1/2 years younger, become a grandmother just a month ago today.
Truth be told, I love my grandkids at their present ages and wouldn’t trade them for all the babies in the world.

Guess Deval Patrick cut the class on ethics at Harvard Law School, but of course, he wouldn’t have been the only one.
This week, he appointed a political pal to a $175,000 a year job – which has been vacant for 12 years. Her husband, by the way, has a state job that pays $133,000 a year, and is in line to receive a pension of $90,000.
This is after “Spend It All” Deval proposed a massive increase in the gas tax in order to buy down the Commonwealth’s 1 billion dollar deficit.
We’ll all be cringing a lot more than usual when we pay our state taxes this year.

Today is my birthday. I got greetings from the Toyota dealership that services my truck, a Twitter friend, Peter, my sister and my three “birthday bunch” friends.
Today, I took care of Mr. Fluffles and the plants, changed the litter box, brought in the truck for an oil change and bought a book for Emme.
My friends took me to dinner; we had a great time and they spent way too much money, for which I feel bad.
Out of all the ways I could have spent my birthday, I decided the most fun would be to poke a few hypocrites and skewer the wicked. I did that and thoroughly enjoyed it.

My cat, Mr. Fluffles, has lived here for about a month and a half, apparently enough time to have become spoiled where food is concerned.
This morning, he sat in the kitchen looking plaintive while I, having fed him an hour before, prepared my breakfast: turkey sausage, home made apple sauce, half a bagel, any one of which would probably have caused him intestinal distress.
I’ve been careful about his diet mostly because of his age, 14, and also because he had slightly alarming blood test results a while back.
The furry guilt trips started when I made the mistake of giving him bacon a couple of weeks ago. He loves it and his former owner told me it was okay to feed it to him.
Since that time, though, he’s been restless around meal time, acting more like a dog than a cat.
If it weren’t for the noises he makes, I’d really wonder.

Bonnie has asked me to post an entry as a follow-on to some ill-considered remarks that I published last December, and I’m happy to do so.
She and I have known each other for over 15 years, but we’ve had trouble making a positive connection. Our culture makes hay on MIL/DIL conflicts: it’s an ugly cliche that has fueled thousands of comedy routines, advice columns and books.
I didn’t realize until very recently that Bonnie thought I hated her and that she’s been upset for years with things that I’ve said.
I know very well how that feels, and I asked her to please forgive me.
It’s almost impossible to, as the poet said, see ourselves as others see us.
There have been times in business in which I’ve been the subject of gossip and resentment, of anonymous bad-mouthing. It’s destructive and counter-productive.
So, I respect Bonnie, who is not a confrontational person, to have the courage to speak her mind.

Continue reading DIL

From Live Journal:
1. If your car/bike is wrecked (if your mass transit service goes belly-up), do you know what you would do to replace it, perhaps even have the car or bike you want already picked out?
Love the urban tilt to this question. If my truck were wrecked, I’d buy another truck, but with a bigger extended cab.
2. A client/friend gives you a lottery ticket, which wins you a prize worth (after taxes) ten times as much money as you earned/received last year. What will you do with it?
Buy a house outright, retire.
3. Fight or flee?
Depends: usually flee, sometimes fight.
4. Someone performs a random act of kindness that is exactly what you need on a bad day. If you wish to pay them back, would you write a poem, bake, buy something, or what?
Last time this happened, I got them a gift certificate to a restaurant. Everyone always appreciates those!
5. Your manager commands you to pick a charity to contribute to. Do you resist? If not, which charity would be your first choice?
What manager, I’m no one’s slave (or master). Leukemia/Lymphoma Society would be the first choice of charities worth donating to, Salvation Army as well.

Mr. Fluffles has taken a liking to an old teddy bear that I made when I was a kid. It’s knitted and stuffed with nylon stockings. He sleeps on it like a pillow.

It’s miserable outside, sleeting and windy.
Rain may arrive later, but in the meantime, travel has got to be horrendous. I’m grateful that by sheer luck, we did our running around yesterday when driving was easy.

I’ve been on the hunt for a new dehumidifier, and visited several stores yesterday to do some comparison shopping.
When I got to Walmart, a salesman named Lou asked me politely if I was sure I wanted a DEhumidifier: did I want to add water to the air, or take it out?
I thought that he was patronizing me and told him so – male salesperson in a hardware department thinking that his female customer was an idiot.
Turns out, he wasn’t trying to give me a hard time at all. He was extremely helpful and passed along 15 years worth of accumulated wisdom, including the comment that, indeed, some people don’t know the difference.
Turns out, he is absolutely right: I ended up buying my dehumidifer at Lowe’s for several reasons, among them a good warranty, but along the way, stopped in to see what Target had to offer.
A young male salesperson insisted on directing me, not once but twice, to two different displays of HUMIDIFIERS. I could not convince him, come hell or high water, that I was looking for a device to take water OUT of the air.
So, apologies to Lou: I am not an idiot, and neither are you, but they are certainly out there. Your customers are lucky, I hope they find their way to you from Target.