Woman in the Middle

Is it appropriate to dance at a veterinarian’s office? Because after Dr. B show us little Nox’s x-ray and how well his leg has healed and then pronounced him good to go and resume a normal life doing all those things kitten’s do, I could have danced all over the place.

However, I restrained myself and, instead, just texted Hubby and Youngest Daughter the good news.

We brought the little guy home and released him on my bed, where his brother was already hanging out. He came straight out of the carrier and tackled his brother for all he was worth.

Don’t let Nox’s on the bottom position fool you. That is his preferred position to wrestle from, probably adopted back in the days of his broken leg. Then we got them off the bed and they began to run around and chase each other like crazy cats, just as kitten’s should do. I am sure everything will settle down a bit in a few hours, once Nox has his initial “I am free” energy out of his system.  But we are so happy that Nox can be himself now.

By the way, it is impossible to see in the photos, but Nox has developed salt and pepper fur. His black fur is salted with individual white hairs all over his body. The girls joke that he matches their dad….

My neighbor Linda and her husband Dick just finished moving to Long Beach. The weather is better and the kids are closer down there. They were great neighbors and I am sad they are gone.

A while back (a year? an year and a half?) Linda decided to join our local fitness club. That would be the fitness club I already belonged to and never visited. She told me about the boom class they had, for older adults. I am not proud. I can exercise with anyone. I figured it was better I moved my body with a bunch of folks who were older than me than not move at all. So I went. I kept going because Linda was going. I need that kind of motivation.

Then I got my Fitbit because I wanted to keep track of my steps, since I was taking more of them.

I haven’t lost much weight but I am much more fit due to the classes and me being more conscious of getting up off my booty and  moving more because of the Fitbiit. Heck, earlier this week I walked over 15,000 steps in one day and lived to tell the tale!

All of this increase in exercise and fitness is directly 100% due to Linda.

Thanks Linda!

The parks district whose board I was recently appointed to requested I provide an 8 x 10 photo of myself. The photos of all the board members hang just inside the entrance to the district offices. It is also used on the district website. Oh boy!

As I was telling Hubby, the problem is that any photo taken of me shows a middle aged, overweight woman with grey hair.  While I realize that is me, in my mind I am still thin, 25, and have light brown hair. So who is that in the photos? Also, given the parameters, how great can the photos look?

I decided to make the best of the situation and have them taken professionally. I was trying for quick and cheap, so I looked at the J.C. Penney Portrait website. We have had some good photos taken there in the past, so I figured it was a good place to start.  Happily, they do have a relatively inexpensive package for “business photos.” They take many photos, you pick either one or three, depending on the package, they load them on a CD for you and you are on your way. Even better, they release the copyright so you can use them wherever and whenever you see fit.  This was important to me because I was also taking some to use in my books for the author’s photo.

I survived the experience. It was like ripping off a band-aid – painful but over quickly.  I had to acknowledge that my cooked smile is getting more crooked with age and that I have more fat on the left side of my neck than the right, and maybe my doctor is right and I need to lose weight. But, I got it done in a timely fashion, and that is what counts!

I get bored in that little carrier, which they insist I have to stay in to help my leg heal. Heal Schmeal. A kitten has to do something to keep himself entertained! When all you have is a litter box, a towel, and a jingle ball, you have to get creative.

I guess I got too creative with the litter box. I am told I smelled like poo from head to toe. They gave me a bath. I was not happy.

Back when I was still living at home and my Mom hadn’t had the stokes that would so debilitate her, she loved to shop. It wasn’t unusual for her to bring something home for me. This was great after I had my full time job at the county, as I had a lot less time to shop and a lot more need for dressess I could wear to work.

Yes, back in 1984 women wore dresses and pantyhose to work EVERYDAY if they worked in an office. At least that was the case in the office I worked in!

This particular dress was one of my faithful workhorse dresses that my mother found for me. Denim was in, and I love red, so the red touch at the cuffs and on the placket was very appealing to me. I added a wide, stretchy red belt, a red necklace, red earrings and red shoes and I felt wonderful! It was always a good day when I wore this dress with my red accessories!

This dress represents the love of my mother and the feeling only a woman can have when she feels great in an outfit that is pulled completely together. It reminds me of my first job and that feeling of being a professional with a ”career.” Goodness, is it any wonder I kept it all these years? So much for one poor dress to represent!

The poor thing doesn’t look nearly as good, drooping on a hanger, as it made me feel back 30 years ago. But it sure brings back good memories!

Just before 6 a.m. this morning we had an earthquake. This was my first noticeable earthquake since I became active on Facebook. My, Facebook does change how people react to a little shaker!

No more duck and cover for folks in So Cal! Instead, they all seemed to grab their smart phones and start posting about the earthquake. I do have to say, I found out pretty quickly (once I got out of bed 2 hours later, just sayin’) that our little trembler was a 4.3, located in a city just to the north of us. While I admit it did shake us around for a short second, otherwise it was no big deal, and certainly not something I was going to disturb my sleep over.

But Facebook exploded with “EARTHQUAKE!” I think Facebook has turned previously earthquake hardened Californians into wimps! Before Facebook, people would have gone back to sleep and then mentioned to one or two people later in the day, “Did you feel the earthquake?” Now, everyone posts immediately about the event like it was major news.

FYI, here in So Cal, an earthquake is not major news until it hits 6.0. Just go back to sleep everyone, no apocalypse today…..

I lead a sheltered life, apparently. I had no idea that there were websites that act like dating services for married people who want to have affair. Who knew? I guess it is for people who never saw the Michael Douglas/Glenn Close movie, “Fatal Attraction.”

It was just all over the news that a website that helped people find another person to have an affair with was hacked. The threat is now out there that they may be exposed and their spouses will know that they were looking for a little something on the side. Sorry if I don’t have a lot of sympathy for those folks. I just can’t get worked up about it when your info is stolen from a site you shouldn’t have been on in the first place,

One of the funniest things to come out of this, to me anyway, is the North American city with the highest percentage of adult residents registered on the site in question. Drum roll please….Ottawa, Canada! Supposedly one in five people in that city are registered on the site. Gosh, those frisky Canadians! Still waters run deep there! Eh?

When I graduated from college, I had a part time job working for a professor doing research under a grant he had received. It is hard to fathom now, but making $6 an hour in 1984 was good money. I could set my own hours. I was making enough money to pay all my own bills, including the $100 a month I paid my mother for rent.

Then out of nowhere, it was discovered that the grant money had almost run out and in a week I was out of a job. A friend was working at the local mall in a Broadway department store. I got a job there very quickly, to tide me over while I figured out what to do. Minimum wage was approximately $3.35 an hour then, almost half of what I had been making. Instead of being able to comfortably pay my bills I could no longer pay Mom rent while also paying my car insurance and such.

The other problem was I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was encouraged to go from being a “floater” at the department store to taking on a more permanent job which would included more hours and staying in one department. However, I had higher aspirations, including going on to earn my master’s degree. I was afraid if I took on the permanent job at the Broadway I would become dependent on the income and would never move on from working in retail. I had not gone to college to spend my life working in retail!

Meanwhile, I floated from department to department. Occasionally I was assigned to the dress department. I would, of course, look around at the pretty dresses. I am a girl after all! One day during my several months at the Broadway, I found a dress on the clearance rack that was made out of soft material that felt almost like silk. It was a beautiful turquoise color with a cream design. There was cream stitching on the edges of the fabric attached to one shoulder that was intended to be pulled across your body and tied on the opposite hip. It was my size and everything! I loved that dress, but had no money to buy it.

Every time I was assigned to the dress department, I checked the clearance rack to see if that dress was still there. Every time it was. Meanwhile, I had finally begun to apply for jobs at our local county. It took months, as the wheels of government move slowly, but I finally got a job at the county planning department.  After I gave my notice at the Broadway, but while I still had my employee discount, I went to the dress department and bought the dress I had been dreaming of for so many months. I wore it to a couple of weddings that summer. I bought a straw hat and spray painted it cream to match the cream of my dress. I bought some ribbon the same turquoise color and glued it around the crown of the hat. I felt grand in my long dreamed for dress and my do it yourself hat.

I was much thinner then. I can’t say that the dress did a whole lot for me. But what it represented – dreams of a real job and better pay, and then that becoming a reality, meant a lot to me then and now. It is good to long for something a while before finally achieving it. It means so much more then. And now you know why I kept this dress for so many years!

Yesterday was a cat kind of day around here, filled with mystery and surprise.  That kind of sums up life with cats, doesn’t it?

First, I got up, came into the family room/kitchen area and saw this.

Blackie looks fairly content, catching some sun out there on the patio. Except HE NEVER GOES OUTSIDE BECAUSE HE IS AN INDOOR CAT AND WE HAVE COYOTES! Talk about having a heart attack! I couldn’t get to the sliding door fast enough to scoot him back in. When he heard me open the door he stood up, turned around, got his head in the door and just stopped. Maybe he was thinking that he liked the outside world and wanted to stay out there a little longer. Whatever the case, I  finally picked up his rear in and hauled it into the house with the rest of him. Hubby and I have absolutely no idea how he got out there. He was in the house at 6:30 a.m. I, of course, think it is Hubby’s fault. He thinks it is mine. It will forever be a mystery!

While the black kitten wiles away his time in the small carrier, the better to keep him from further messing up his leg, we have turned the back bathroom into a kitty lounge for his brother, the orange kitten. But however delightful we make it, however many toys we put in there, however much time my daughters and I spend in there with him, he still gets bored at times. Today was one of those times.

This tiny little kitten figured out how to unroll an entire roll of toilet paper. As you can see, there is no guilt there, just ridiculous cuteness!

I keep all the normal mementos that most people keep. Photos, programs of plays I was in in high school, the tassels from various graduations, etc… But I also have a thing about keeping clothing that represents good memories to me.

I have the shirt I was wearing the first time Hubby kissed me, way back in high school. I have the dress I wore to my college graduation, the dress I wore to my rehearsal dinner, and various pieces of clothing that my mom bought me and I have kept all these years just because of that connection.

I bought the new best selling organizing book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” I have to admit, at first read, it didn’t do a whole lot for me. However, I decided to work on things in the manner suggested by the author, Marie Kondo. She suggests working on categories of things, not areas of your house. The easiest category, she feels, is clothing, and she recommends doing that first.

She wants you to drag every scrap of clothing out of every drawer and closet, taking it all to the living room, and going through it all at once. Not. Going. To. Happen. However, I have been systematically going though all my clothing drawer by drawer and, finally, I bit the bullet and did drag all the hanging clothing out of my closet and onto my bed to go through. The good news is this has allowed me to find a pair of pants and a pair of shorts that actually fit me but that I have never worn. Both still had tags. Yay!

The bad news is that I have had to acknowledge that about a fifth of my rod space was taken up by clothing that had  sentimental value but no earthly use to me otherwise. Oh, what to do? I have thought about it quite a bit. I decided that the quilt route is not practical. Many of the items are made from material that is just not practical to use in a quilt. Second, the piece of clothing means something to me, not just the material it is made of. If I cut a square out of a skirt, I will likely not remember in five years time what that small square meant.

I have decided to  take photos of these sentimental pieces of clothing, write their stories up in this here blog,  and then get rid of them. I realized it is the story each piece of clothing represents that is important to me. I decided t was time to get the stories out, and then I can set the clothing free!   Be on the look out, the stories are in process and will be coming to a blog post near you soon.

Do you keep clothing that has sentimental value to you? Am I the only crazy one?

P.S. That top I was wearing when Hubby first kissed me? I won’t be getting rid of that!