Confessions of a Grandma

My Monday afternoon poetry group is on hold for the coming months due to health issues for our "leader," the one who does the technical things that allow us to use Meet. Some conditions, unfortunately, make treatment a full-time job.  Abhorring a vacuum, I joined a drop-in craft group that a woman from church started up. You can bring your own project to work on while enjoying some company on the lanai or you can participate in a group project. This coming Monday the group craft is collage. I have enjoyed collage. I have a lot of crap watercolors that I tear up and use to make collaged scenes. These are a few that I did some time ago.   I have also done SoulCollage (Registered Trademark -- alt code not working). That's a process best done in a group, but in silence. I don't see the silence part happening in a group of UUs so I won't suggest it.

 My idea of Hell is being in a waiting room with nothing to read. Recently, I went to the lab to have some blood drawn in preparation for my wellness visit in a few weeks. I had anticipated a quick in and out as I had previously always experienced. How did I forget about COVID? I quickly ran out of signs on the wall to read and suffered through a two hour wait. My students back in my teaching days never quite believed me when I told them my mother used to tell me to "put down that book and go outside and play." It amazes me to hear that some people only read for a while before bed -- a page or two to fall asleep. Or worse, people who consider reading doing nothing or a complete waste of time! Not being able to read while my eye was healing was the hardest part although eventually I was able to read large print books. Now I can read easily with reading glasses although I did have to trade out my collection of readers for stronger magnification. Don is never at a loss as to wha...

Last October, my sister-in-law, Jean, and I drove to South Carolina low country for the wedding of Mike's first grandchild. The events were on St. Helena Island. It was an evening wedding so on the day of, I walked around the historic city. It's quite beautiful -- the flavor of Savannah or Charleston without the crushing crowds and traffic.   My stepdaughter and her husband built a lovely home on the island a few years ago and are living their dream of plenty of room for grandchildren (two to date), a vegetable garden, and plenty of time to fish, clam, and cook up low country feasts. Looks just out of a Patrick Conroy novel! It was a fairytale wedding. The bride and her three brothers: The bride is a beautiful and talented young woman: Wishing them all happiness! P.S. The tall brother above is married and has two little boys. The middle brother is getting married in the spring. The little brother just graduated from Clemson with an engineering degree. Their grandfather would be...

 Time away was longer than I had anticipated but it was clearly necessary for me to recharge. Mostly I needed to get away from screens of all sorts. I won't say screens were entirely responisble for the lack of progress in getting rid of the swelling/fluid in my eye but it became obvious to me that they weren't helping. What helped most of all with my eye, of course, was coming back to Florida (which I did in mid October) and going back to the retina specialist  who did my retina reattachment. She ditched the "wait and see, come back in a month" strategy of my VT specialist and put me on a regimen of drops. My eye is better and I am weaning off the drops. I've lost my reading vision so I have to search for my reading glasses -- add that to searching for my phone -- nothing most people my age have to deal with so I can't complain. At least, unlike my phone, I have multiple pairs of reading glasses all over the house. I also learned how truly addictingly, mindle...