woo-HOO! My friends Tina and Ron’s wedding reception was terrific! She looked SO pretty in a beautiful ebony satin dress with an awesome new hairstyle, and he was handsomer than handsome all dressed up in a nice suit. Daughter was spiffed up, too: this one, in addition to being startlingly bright, is showing every sign of growing into a spectacular young woman. Everybody behaved well, at least within reason, and a good time was had by all.
People came from all over the country to celebrate the marriage. The two families have a very interesting combined set of friends and relatives.
Y’know, whenever you get to know new people, you realize that your limited little definition of what is happiness or well-being does not by any means cover the bases. At dinner I sat next to a woman from another flyover state (Arizona being one of those) who lives in a city much smaller than Phoenix. Despite what must have been some very hard times, she came across as a contented and self-confident person — holding down two jobs and making her way through a pre-nursing program. She clearly has a good relationship with her grown daughter and dotes on her gorgeous nephews, who are indeed too adorable to be real.
It’s the second time I’ve met a person who lives a good life that probably would make me restless. SDXB’s childhood buddy and lifetime friend never left the Upper Peninsula. He stayed in the tiny town where they grew up, held the same steady work for year after year, and raised a healthy family in a modest home. When I met him, I thought he was the happiest man I’d ever met. Still true, come to think of it: I’ve never known anyone who seemed more contented and confident in the goodness of life than that guy.
Personally, I’m like my mother: a city girl. I much prefer to be in a big city where few others know my private business. I deeply hated living in the ultra-small town that was the American camp where I grew up in Saudi Arabia, and didn’t blossom until we returned to the US and took up residence in San Francisco.
Yet I can see that people benefit (evidently) from living in a place where everybody knows everybody else’s business. Maybe it’s good for you when everyone knows every time you take a deep breath. I dunno. One thing’s for sure: what’s sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander.
Speaking of sauce: the dinner was awesome. The young people had hired a patio at our favorite hang-out, the House of Tricks, which catered hors d’oeuvres, wine & beer, and a delightful dinner. The weather was unbelievably gorgeous: none of the crazy winds we’ve had, an absolutely perfect evening.
Against my better judgment, I had a glass of wine, a pile of carrots, quinoa risotto, and a piece of roast pork tenderloin. And then a large piece of brain-bangingly rich and wonderful chocolate cake. The salad looked gorgeous, too, but I was too scared to eat lettuce.
And what do we have here that’s poisonous to the old lady?
• wine
• vegetables that haven’t been boiled limp and puréed like baby food
• roast meat
• chocolate
If it tastes good, if it has any texture, it’s gonna try to kill me.
But…nay! Even though I felt like I had a rock in my stomach after consuming all that food, I wasn’t sick. Went home, went to bed, slept seven hours without benefit of Zantac or Benadryl. And when I woke up? No lump in the throat, no queasy stomach, no diarrhea.
It’s a freaking miracle!!!
Maybe I just need to eat three meals a day at Tricks. 😀 It surely would be worth the price to not wake up sick every morning.
Actually, it’s not that big a surprise: whatever ails me has slowly been getting better, in two-steps-forward-one-step-backward fashion.
I suspect the problem was likely an ulcer brought on when the Year of the Six Surgeries coincided with the misbegotten publishing enterprise, which probably would have failed even if it hadn’t been star-crossed by the medical horror show. Either of those would have been highly stressful on its own. Combined, they were toxic.
Six weeks of uninterrupted megadoses of omeprazole — plus giving up on even trying to sell books — seems to be doing the trick.
Young Dr. Kildare thought it would take eight weeks for the stuff to work. The new teen-aged internist at the Mayo thought more like three months.
WhatEVER. It’s so amazing to get up in the morning and not feel miserable, especially after having made an entire meal of trigger items, that I’m willing to gulp the stuff till the cows come home. Osteoporosis (which it causes…) be damned.
This morning I felt so good I took it upon myself to refill the bird feeders, after god only knows how many years, with some stale seed that has been taking up room in the garage cabinets.
Now that the Cat Repelling System is keeping Pretty Daughter’s goddamn cats out of the back yard, I think it’s safe to call in the regular birds. There’s already quite a few — they seem to have discovered the area is relatively safe. They’re welcome to stay, and bring their friends. They do keep the noxious insect population down.
The ant population is much diminished in the presence of the current tribe of birds. I haven’t had to put out ant bait for several months, nor have I seen any of the little gals in the house.
A-a-a-a-n-d…as we scribble, here comes a hummingbird to inspect the newly refilled hummer feeder, too. Hummingbirds eat mosquitoes, along with gnats, aphids, and other small delectables.
Even though the CDC says our area has a low to moderate risk of getting the zika virus very soon, I’ve seen A. aegypti in the house. Whether the little ankle-biting desert mosquitoes will also carry the disease remains to be seen…but I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t. A blood-sucking bug is a blood-sucking bug, no matter what its genus.
Now that the economy is better, fewer houses in the ‘hood have empty pools with green mosquito-breeding puddles at the bottom. So we have had fewer skeeters these past few springs and summers. But we haven’t had a hard frost for years…and that’s about all that keeps the nuisance bugs at bay around here.
Here’s a curve-billed thrasher, too: voracious ant-eater. Dude! Have a few seeds and make yourself to home! 😀
It’s been so long since I refilled the hummers’ feeder that the jar of sugar water I keep in the fridge for the purpose had a wad of black fungus floating around in it. That is something! Because supersaturated sugar syrup is not what you’d call friendly to microbes.
So I had to dump that out and make a couple of quarts of new sugar water for the three feeders front and back.
Cassie just chased a young mockingbird off, the little twit! Fortunately, he wasn’t fazed.
The arborist is supposed to show up here mid-morning. It’s now after that, but he operates on mañana time, so I’m not concerned.
This guy is a great tree dude. Nay, he’s an artist: he really knows how to trim and shape trees. He does the job by hand, and he engages the brain…and a formidable eye for tree development. So I’m mighty happy to have found him (at work in a neighbor’s yard!) and to be able to persuade him to come in my direction.
The trees have run amok this summer, so the bill is going to be pretty bracing. Trees that he worked on last year still look pretty good — they only need a little pruning. The ones we skipped now need some serious work, though. They’ve all grown exuberantly this spring, thanks to the soaking rains we got during the winter. If only we could have El Niño permanently…
If and when Tree Dude arrives and gets himself established for the day, I hope to meet M’hijito at Costco, where I propose a) that he help wrangle a year’s supply of pool chlorine tablets into a basket, then into the car, then into the back shed; and b) that he advise and consent on the purchase of a new iPhone.
Yes. As much as I cringe at the prospect of yet another attempt to lash myself to an electronic tether, I see that Costco offers a monthly plan for the iPhone at just about what I’m saving by extracted a rate cut from Cox.
I’m told that the iPhone is a little easier for elderly pholks to learn. And since I’m already familiar with the mentality behind Apple’s software, I’m hoping that I can figure out how to use one of the things.
If I can make it work and find I actually use it, then after a year (when Cox will try to up its rate again), I’ll cancel the land line service and connect the cordless phones to Ooma, a VoIP service that will let me use NoMoRobo and costs a tiny fraction of Cox’s gouge.
The plan to use Cox’s selective call-blocking and anonymous call rejection features to cut down on the phone solicitation nuisance has had, as expected, only qualified success.
I’m no longer getting half-a-dozen calls a day. At least, for the nonce.
However… To use selective call blocking, you have to enter a code: #0#. My phones read that as “start a conference call.” And they refuse to STOP the conference call. So the first time I tried to block some SOB who got through the anonymous call rejection, I tied up every phone in the house and could NOT untie them.
Tried to call Cox on the flip cell phone, but found I couldn’t dial through the umpty-umpteen berjillion god-DAMNED punch-a-button hoops because the keys are so small my fingers can’t press them accurately. After five tries at 9:00 on Friday night, I was beginning to feel a little desperate: too late at night to call friends to ask them to let me use their phones. And pretty damn scary, not being able to dial 9-1-1.
Finally I was able to get through on the one remaining non-cordless phone by going around the house and unplugging EVERY cordless extension and power charger from the power and from the phone outlets. Cox’s tech and I screwed around for half an hour trying to un-conference-call the phones. Eventually another mass unplugging and replugging worked.
But I sure don’t want to do THAT again.
So now I’m getting two calls a day, consistently. That’s better than six. But I’d sure as hell rather have none. Zero. 0.00. Zip.
NoMoRobo is reputedly the best junk-call bouncer available. So, if I can force myself to learn how to use an iPhone, then I can use that for personal calls and the VoIP for business calls. How exactly you keep people from pestering you with ads on a cell phone escapes me, but we’ll cross that bridge if and when we get there.
Welp, I’ve killed half the morning here…and probably in your precincts, if you’re read this far. And so, away…