Confessions of a Grandma

I woke up in the middle of the night last Friday with throbbing pain in my right ear.  It has not cleared up yet--although it does feel a bit less stuffed.  Honestly, I totally know why babies cry so insistently when they have an ear infection.  I wanted to howl a little myself.  I took ibuprofen instead.  And keep on taking it at night. I remember having an ear infection as a kid.  It prevented my mother from attending a cousin's wedding with my father.  I cried hysterically for hours and kept demanding, "I want my daddy!" whenever my mom tried to comfort me.  Even at the time I knew I was being unreasonable, but, by golly, if I was going to be so miserable, others were going down with me. Ever since then I just want to be left alone if I am really feeling sick--like with the flu or a stomach upset.  I did not feel sick like that with this ear thing.  It is just annoying.  Right now it itches.  Let me assure you, it i...

We are expecting my sister, my brother-in-law, and my son for burgers and salad on the deck.  It has been quite windy all day so we may have to move the food indoors.  I am hoping this is not a taste of how our summer activities will go this year. I went to the cemetery this afternoon.  I usually plant some annuals by my parents' grave stone, but there is also a hosta that someone put in and it is now taking over the entire area and even covering up   the names.  I will talk to my sister about whether or not to take it out.  It sure is a healthy plant, and it keeps the weeds at bay.  Still, it would be nice to see my parents' names on the stone. Tomorrow we will head to Connecticut for a cookout.  It is a triple birthday celebration and a send off for  the brother-n-law who has now sold his big house and will be moving into a condo.  I have been having a hard time with picture on my new computer--getting them onto my blog,...

This isn't a post about our roof.  The shingles there are in fine condition and I am hoping that they will stay that way for some time to come. It's the other kind of shingles, the sudden wake up of a dormant chicken pox virus.  I am hoping to avoid that bundle of misery.  I had the vaccination.  My neighbor had a bout of shingles last summer. That convinced me to talk to my doctor about the shot.  Shooting pain and body blisters really do strike me as something to avoid if possible. There was a bill before the Vermont legislature this past winter that would have eliminated philosophical exemptions to vaccination requirements for school entry.  It turned out to be quite controversial and got a group of parents very active in fighting against this change in the law. I was interested in one parent's argument -- vaccination is not analogous to seat belts but to air bags that can malfunction, go off with too much force and result in injury or de...

 Some times you plan for a big purchase; sometimes one is forced upon you. After nearly 23 years of keeping the riding lawn mower chugging along and beating down the grass and weeds, Mike was forced into the realization that too much time was being used up on keeping the motor running.  Yesterday, the mower would not start.  He had put in new spark plugs the week before.  He decided he needed a new electric igniter.   That was an $80 part that he had to travel 40 miles round trip to obtain.  He put it in, started the mower without a problem, and mowed half the lawn before it died once again.  Defective part?  Something else going on?  Oh, bother! "Come with me to get a new lawn mower."  So now we have a new John Deere riding mower.  google image of a tree ornament, not our actual new machine

There is an old Vermont saying along the lines of  "Hope the rain don't hurt the rhubarb." In fact, though, there is not a thing in the whole entire world that can hurt rhubarb.  Floods?  Drought? Toxic waste spills? Nuclear plant meltdown?  Rhubarb will survive. (Honestly, Stephen King, I hope you read my little blog because I am just full of ideas for horror story ideas lately.  And they are free for the taking!) Mike has his own food classification.  It includes a category called 'nuisance vegetables' which are not to be eaten and preferrably not to to ever appear on the table.  Rhubarb appears in that category--more than once, actually.  So it is kind of too bad that we have rhubarb growing in the back.  (It came with the house, and as I have mentioned, there is no way to get rid of it.) Mike also likes to have it pointed out that not even the neighborhood woodchuck will touch the rhubarb.  Make of that what you will...

Do you ever think that the i technology is just getting way too far ahead of you?  Is there such a thing as just plain too much information?  Well, I do...and I realize that I am in a minority. But, really!?!? as they say on SNL.  Sunday, I skim through all those ads in the morning paper.  In Best Buy's  ad,  I noticed iScale.  It is a Bluetooth enabled body weight scale that allows you to track calories and your daily activities that burns them up.  You can organize these records and make graphs.  Isn't that just so special?  And here is the fun part--you can share this information with your fitness buddies! As if the bathroom scale isn't evil enough on its own, there are those who feel the need to spawn diabolical little gremlin offspring. Hey!  Stephen King take note.  I think there is a the seed of a true tale of horror here.  Feel free to use it.

Between getting to know my new laptop and spending time at my volunteer library duties (which seems to be a distressingly rapidly growing list of things to do), I have not come up with much to post here. So, I dip into the bizillion travel pictures.  Here we are, Mike and I, in California, a few years ago.  We're doing our best to look like tourists.  We visited Mike's son and family before and after a tour of Yosemite and Death Valley.  Lots of great trips in our memory banks. I have neglected writing after finishing up a short course on writing.  The advise was to write a lot, read a lot, and write some more every day.  In the past week or two, I have read The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, and the War of Art by Steven Pressfield.  They all had the same basic message--write and read and write everyday.  Maybe today...