I'm an April fool...

Friday.  April 1, 2022.  12:28 p.m. CDT.  

I was on my lunch hour.  I ran by the library to pick up a book I had reserved.  I have entered and exited the library hundreds of times.  But this time as I was exiting I looked away for just a second.  My front passenger-side tire hit the curb and went over, and my undercarriage high centered on the curb.  You may or may not be able to tell from the photo that the driveway has a fairly steep angle of descent.

I was stuck but good!  I phoned Carey, and proceeded to wait.  

The library is a busy place, as is the Home Depot store whose driveway sits directly opposite the library drive.  Every single person entering and exiting the library rolled down their window to inquire if I needed assistance, as did numerous Home Depot customers.  The first fourteen times were very welcome.  The next twenty-two times were pretty embarrassing.  But the last hundred and thirteen times were just downright humiliating.  

Once Carey arrived and looked over the situation, we called AAA to ask for a tow truck.  Several hours and multiple calls later, I told them I would be calling for my own tow truck and submitting the bill for reimbursement.  Finally a tow-truck arrived, and the driver and Carey were able to fairly quickly get all four tires back on the ground, and after a quick once over I was amazingly able to drive it home!  All told, we were there for around five hours.  I never did make it back to work.

Carey gave it a closer examination once we were home, and he said that aside from a few small scratches to the under carriage, everything looked fine.

I am amazed and SO thankful!

You can't go home again...

...and if you do, they may give you a ticket.

Since our anniversary this past April, my thoughts have often turned to our first home together.  It was a pretty terrible little town.  It was rundown and lacked everything.  It was forty miles from the nearest medical help, and the big annual community event was a rattlesnake roundup.  It's been the butt of so many of our jokes and I-can-beat-that stories over the years, that we thought it might be fun to go back and look around.

Why would we move there if it was that bad?  Carey landed a good job there just a couple of months before we got married.  The first time he took me over to look at the housing possibilities, I came home absolutely dejected.  It was truly abysmal.  The one possibility that I remember most vividly was an apartment above a restaurant.  I'm being kind to call it a restaurant.  The apartment was filled with the smells and sounds coming up from downstairs (and probably the vermin too).  I considered postponing the wedding if not calling it off altogether.  :)

We started out living in a kitchenette in a tourist court...the type of place you see in movies from the 1940s.  We were there a few weeks when we heard about a small house for rent.  We rented the house and stayed in it for about six months, when the house across the street from it, which was nicer, came up for rent.  Let me tell you it was not fun moving just across the street...you end up carrying a box at a time from door to door.  Thankfully we were newlyweds and hadn't acquired a lot of possessions.  

We stayed in the second house which we were very happy with for only about six months, because the day after I gave birth to our first child we were told Carey was being transferred.  So we moved again, about three hours away, to a town that I had always thought was very picturesque, and I was in heaven.  I didn't have much time to settle in, because seven months later we were transferred back to the very same awful little town we started in.  

At least this time we had made some friends there, and I immediately started calling them to ask if they knew of any houses for rent.  One sweet friend called me back a day or so later about midday with news that a young electrician in town had been killed on the job that morning, and the house he and his wife rented was clean and decent and I should call the landlords immediately.  And I did.  I have never felt like such a vulture in my life, but that's how real estate worked there...the early bird got the worm.

We were approved by the landlords, but of course they couldn't give the poor young widow the bum's rush.  She naturally needed time to decide what to do and where to go and pack and move.  So while we had that house in our sights, we had to rent another really awful place for a few months until it was empty.

Now if you were counting, that was four houses that we lived in.  Today we drove around the town.  It's a little bigger, a few more businesses, but still terribly run down.  One thing we noticed was that there were way more trees than there used to be.  It used to be pretty desert like.  The trees really threw off my sense of direction.  And being that there was no home delivery of mail when we lived there, and basically no need to memorize your address, not to mention that we were in each house for such a short time, we couldn't definitively remember any of the streets that we lived on.  Oddly I clearly remember that our post office box was number 555.  I think because it always sounded vaguely fictitious to me, being that on American television all phone numbers start with 555.  

Anyway, we never found even one of the houses we used to live in.  They probably have all fallen down by now...seriously!  As we were getting bored with the search, and about to head back out of town, we turned a corner and within a block there was a police cruiser with lights flashing behind us.  We were going 27 miles per hour in a 20 mile per hour school zone.  I'm not even sure it was possible for us to have gone from a dead stop to 27 miles per hour in the after-school traffic.  And the blinking school zone sign was still in front of us, meaning we weren't even IN the school zone yet unless there was another one behind us.  Who knows?  Carey just wanted to get out of there.  He wouldn't even circle around the block to let me take photos of any school zone signage or get a better idea of what we did or didn't do, so we could decide whether to pay the fine or fight the ticket.

Anyway, sometimes you look back on things and let sentiment color it in shades of rose.  Yeah.  We never have, and today assures that we never will.  Back in the 70's we couldn't get out of there soon enough, and today we DIDN'T get out of there soon enough!  :)

My first job...

***Warning:  The following may be offensive to some people.  Look away if you must.  No animals were permanently harmed in the making of this photo...temporarily uncomfortable, yes...scarred, yes, that's what a brand is after all.  Sorry.  Don't worry, the cow had the last laugh, as I'm the one looking a little bovine these days.***

Here's a fun photo I just stumbled upon.  Literally stumbled upon...dislodged it from a box while trying to straighten up my home office.

That's me (circa 1975/76) wielding the branding iron.  I was about eighteen.  My first job was working for a cattle breeders association.  My days weren't all spent like this.  Usually I was going through files, researching bloodlines, and issuing pedigrees.  But this was an occasion when they wanted us to get out and see the real deal.

When I think of the poor cowboy (not the one in the picture) who had to be our keeper for the day...poor, poor man.  He must have been SO ready to drop me back at the office.  We were barely on the road when I innocently asked him a question (really, I didn't know any better then) that made him blush so deeply and stammer endlessly while two of my co-workers in the back seat sprayed Coke-a-Cola out their noses laughing at my naivete.  Then we had barely reached our first destination when I approached an insulated fence around a pen, and, wondering how much voltage it would take to keep a full-grown bull inside, I put my hand out to the live wire.  So how much voltage does it take, you ask?  Enough to knock me back several feet and onto my backside in the dust.  Boy oh boy...the looks on the faces of that cowboy and the ranch owner who was hosting us.

They would probably be surprised to know that I survived to adulthood, and even went on to own a small ranch and cattle.  Yes, I'm twice the woman I was back then.  Literally.  But let's not go there.

Favorite photo memories...

 Is this not a darling photo? This is probably my finest moment, photographically speaking, pre-digital age. Remember back in the olden days when you took photographs, and you didn't know until at least a week later when you picked them up from the developer what you actually ended up with? 

This is my (Great) Aunt Ruth and Uncle Ed.  For all intents and purposes, they filled the role of grandparents for me.  They never had children of their own.  When my dad and I made our summer trips to Nebraska, he would drop me off for at least a few days visit with them.  Aunt Ruth was the one who sat patiently teaching me to embroider and do other handwork.  She gathered rose petals with me from her yard and helped me layer them in a tobacco can with cinnamon...homemade potpourri to take back to Texas with me.  I loved to watch her work in her little kitchen, always remembering what my favorites were and having some on hand for every visit.

Uncle Ed ran her errands, worked in his garden...and sat in his chair or on the porch swing, chewing on an unlit cigar, and teasing in his sweet low-key way whenever the opportunity presented itself.

I took this photo in 1977 or 78.  They would have been married around fifty years then.  They loved each others' company, and they were still playful together.  They were my best example of what a happy marriage could be.  On this day, when I asked them to let me take their picture, they stood side by side, and stared straight faced at the camera.  I asked them to smile, and Aunt Ruth resisted, at which point Uncle Ed, with his arm behind her, gave her a little goose.  In her surprise she gave him a little punch to the belly (you can see him holding her fist), and they both ended up laughing.  I could not have asked for a better photo representation of their personalities.

It's a real treasure.

True love...

Awhile back a blog friend commented on something I said here about my husband. I believe I said I adore my husband, and she commented that she was happy to hear that, because she wasn't always sure that she believed in true love any more. That blog friend is in her late twenties. I have to say that when I was in my late twenties, I had been married for ten years, and I wasn't sure I believed in true love anymore either by then.

When I was seventeen, I decided that I hated dating. It made me feel completely disrespected and disheartened. I kept seeing very unattractive attributes in young men. One lied about me to my friends. One believed those lies. One threatened me with a gun.

I started praying about it, and asking for a particular kind of person to come into my life. I didn't have marriage in mind at that time, I just didn't want to keep having unpleasant dating experiences. Within a month or so, I met Carey.

What made me fall for him?

...On our first date, I had to drop by my sister's house to borrow some baking utensils so I could bake my roommate a birthday cake. On our second date, he approached my door with a hand behind his back, and when I answered the door he brought it out and handed me a spatula with a ribbon tied around the handle. I thought it was the most romantic gift I'd ever been given. :)

...We'd been dating about a week when he came over to change a flat on my car before work.

...About a week after that, my mother was going into the hospital for surgery. I was telling him that my sisters and I all had conflicts and couldn't drive her to the hospital which was an hour away. He volunteered! When they got to the hospital, he helped my mother out of the truck, and he carried her suitcase into the hospital and made sure she got checked in before he left. At which point the nurse said to my mother, "You have a very nice son." My mother said, "He's not my son, he's my daughter's new boyfriend." The nurse said, "I think he's a keeper." (She was right!)

...One time we were driving down the street, and he saw one of his co-worker's car parked at a bar. He said, "I don't understand why he's there, when he has a wife and little children at home."

...Once he was watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, and he laughed at it over and over, and I found it so enchanting that I remember thinking that I could listen to that laugh for the rest of my life. (I have been!)

We were married within a year.

Now, I have to say that that's when things got difficult. Living with someone else is the hardest thing I have ever undertaken. He came from a very traditional family where his father was THE boss. I came from a family where my father was sorely outnumbered by females, and my mom was the one in command. Can you say culture clash?

What I have noticed is that marriage is cyclical. When everything has been going smoothly for awhile, you will hit a pothole that knocks the whole thing out of alignment, and it takes a great deal of patience and work and time to make it run smoothly again. The potholes come along about every four or five years for us...and they aren't necessarily big events...maybe just a lack of effort or communication.

I am not one of those people who claims to be married to her best friend. I think that we need best friends so we have someone to complain to about our spouses. (And for that matter, I would never say that either of my children are my best friend either. I wouldn't want to saddle them with that responsibility. They need best friends of their own to complain to about ME!)

Neither do I believe in 'soul mates' or that there is only one love for each person. I'm not even sure that love is the most important thing in a relationship. I'm pretty sure that respect and honor and caring and humor has gotten us a lot further than love alone would have. But love is the reward.

And today we've been sharing that reward for 34 years.

A change of seasons...

I met a woman today. A woman who dressed in the colors of spring, and carefully applied makeup and pearls. A woman of beauty and grace. A woman who was having her portrait made.

She was engaging as she chatted about the books she has read, and the friends she has made. About the life she has created. About the many places she has lived, and the many more places she has visited.

She is preparing for a new journey, and as she does, she takes the time to mark her place in this world one more time. Something for her family to remember her by when she has gone on ahead.

And on that day in the not too distant future, she will be shedding the things of this world that are keeping her tethered here. The oxygen tubing, the pains, the worries and cares. And she will become lighter than the shaft of a sunbeam, and she will rise up at the call of the great I Am. And her story of this life will be fulfilled. And she will start another chapter.

Safe journey, Barbara.

Did I say computer problems?...

I spent a good half hour on the phone with tech support. I could feel the tech rolling his eyes at me when I kept dropping the cords behind the desk and having to retrieve them. He finally told me that I had one of two problems...either my wireless router had gone bad, or my wireless card in the computer had gone bad. Neither of those sounded good to me, as we are in the middle of an emergency fund crisis right now with Carey's truck...transmission went out...$4,000 repair...but that's another story.

Well, since I have no other computer to test the router, I took the laptop to a wifi spot in town today to see if I could get connected there.

At first I had no luck. The pop-up message told me I had no wireless...damn...then I noticed the help links for troubleshooting.

Step one: Make sure the wireless button on the front of the computer is in the on position.

You've got to be kidding me.

Yes, I am that clueless.

I'm just happy...a) that this didn't cost me anything --not counting the blow to my pride--and b) that I figured this out on my own in the privacy of a public wifi hot spot, and not while on the phone with that tech support guy.

I feel 16 again...

Well, maybe that's a slight exaggeration. But I did have an experience today that every sixteen year old anticipates with great eagerness and trepidation.

In order to receive my driver's license (renewal) I had to take a driving test with an examiner in the passenger seat. =O This is what I get for being terminally honest.

I went in last week to renew my license. I was feeling so proud of myself for not waiting till the day it actually expired to take care of this little task. I was told I would have to fill out a half page of questions regarding events since my last renewal. Uhmmm, have you had any medical event which caused you to lose consciousness? Hmmmm. Oh, well. I cannot tell a lie; I did have that pesky little blood clot go to my lungs that put me out, so that's what I recorded. I took the form to the desk, and it may have been my imagination, but the clerk seemed to pale a little as she said, "Uh-oh." She asked me a few questions. She went into a back room to check with a supervisor. She came back and apologized as she informed me that I would have to be tested. I got the sense that maybe nobody else is completely honest on that form.

I didn't do any trial runs. I didn't study any manuals. I didn't even get nervous. I just did what I normally do. And I don't think the examiner was exceptionally impressed. I could have debated some of her decisions, but I just nodded and thanked her.

I passed, and I guess that's the important thing. Albeit with a lower score than when I was sixteen. But there are so many things where the reverse is true and I would score much, much higher today than back then: wisdom, salary, perspicacity, vocabulary, life achievements, weight, blood pressure, kisses...

I'll take the pass, and be happy. You know, I could have taken a fail and still been happy. Inconvenienced, but happy.

And that's the important thing.

(But some things never change, and I still celebrated passing my driver's test with a trip to Sonic!)

New updated version...

If you're from my generation, you can't help remembering the iconic Chatty Cathy. And if you happened to be named Cathy, or any version thereof (as millions of us from that era were), let me pass on my deepest regrets for all the times you were actually called 'Chatty Cathy.' I feel your pain, for it was mine.

Well, the new improved version for our enlightened era is here...Conversationalist Caitlyn.

She is truly a living doll of the four-year-old variety. A natural social butterfly, who makes the rounds at every public event to visit with each person in the crowd. The kid should consider politics.

Oh, and when you pull her string, she looks more like this...


When they hired new staff at her daycare when she was two, the new employee asked how she should keep track of who was who and what belonged to whom, etc. The supervisor pointed across the room, and said, "See that little girl? Her name is Caitlyn; that's all you need to know. She can answer any question you have."

The other day, Caitlyn asked out of the blue, "Mama, do I talk too much?"

Struggling to choke back a laugh, Kasey asked her, "Why Caitlyn? Did somebody tell you that you talk too much?"

"Yeah. My teacher did. And my friends tell me I'm not the boss of them."

So I guess life experience is teaching her that there is a time and place.

But I hope that her natural enthusiasm for communication and personnel management is never curbed.