Woman in the Middle

Both of the girls and I went to Zumba class yesterday. The class is going on hiatus for September, so it as the last morning class for a month. Perhaps the teacher was trying to give us a little more of a workout than usual, to help get us through the Zumba free mornings in September. What ever the case may be, she changed it up quit a bit, put in some more intense moves, and kept the class going an extra five minutes (gasp!).

At some point, about 10 minutes into the class, this funny feeling came over me. I started thinking how I actually WANTED to be there, sweating and exercising. I thought about how if I worked harder I would burn more calories. I started moving faster, moving harder, and I found my self really working it because, get this, I wanted to!

Seriously, I think I was ill or having a stroke or something! Believe me, I never ever ever want to exercise. This feeling came and went for about 20 minutes. I am happy to report that as we got closer and closer to the end of class the feeling finally went away. I probably sweated it out of my system!

Hopefully, I can keep this virus from returning. I have to clean house for the meeting tonight. I am sure I will do plenty of sweating again because it is summer and if I just lift a little finger I sweat.

Here is hoping you are getting any funny viruses!

How has your weekend been? Mine was …normal…for us anyway.

I finished a story for our local daily newspaper. I write a local history column every other week, along with a friend who writes the other weeks. This coming week is my week, so it was down to the wire, time to get ‘er done.  This one was very interesting to me, about a high-ranking Russian family who moved to my area after the Russian revolution. Who would have thought?

I also got the notice about an upcoming meeting of the board of an organization I belong to….that will be at my house on Tuesday! Oh boy! I scrambled around and did some house straightening. The cleaning will come on Monday and Tuesday.

Saturday night we had dinner with friends and then enjoyed another night of line dancing and music. I really really think I am getting the electric slide down! I am not saying I look graceful or anything, but I get the steps right about 80% of the time. I also got in about 5000 steps line dancing. Yay!

There was a trip to Michael’s to pick up some embroidery floss, a trip to McDonald’s to get lunch, and more paper sorting and house straightening. Hubby spent some time on various cars, including time on the ground under a car. Not so fun for him anymore, that lying around on hard cement.

Oh, and of course, we cleaned up pet poo, we petted all four animals, we tried to get Blackie to eat, we did another socialization session with Honey and Nox… You know, just the usual! LOL!

What did you do this weekend?

In that organizing book I am using for a kick in the pants to get some things cleaned out around here, an order is given which Marie Kondo recommends you clean out things. There is a reason why that particular order is recommended. Clothes are first because those are the easest for people to go through, sort,and get rid of. That gives you confidence to move on to books, then papers, then all that assosted crap stuff we all have and, finally, when you are just full of confidence, have an understanding of what you want to keep and toss, and brimming with the zeal of cleaning out your life, you attack the hardest category of all, mementos. The author fully admits that memntoes are hard. Boy oh boy, is she both right and wrong about that!

What she is right about is that mementoes are hard. What she is wrong about is the lack of ackowldgement that mementoes will be scattered throughout those other categories.

I can see why I didn’t go through all the papers in the desk and file drawers before. All those papers are just littered, JUST LITTERED, with what I like to think of as “memento bombs.” Gee, what is in this file? EEEK! A check with my mother’s signature on it! The grant deed for the house we were living in when I was going to high school! The receipt of my mother’s donations to the church we attended for many years that Hubby and I married in that is now closed! Help!

All of these bring good memories. Then comes the agony of tossing it into the trash. Guess what? Not all of it is going into the trash. I just can’t do it and even a  Japanese woman with a whip and an organizing book can’t make me do it.

That being said, a lot of it is going into the recycling bin or the to be shred pile. I know I will be happy to have it gone and to never have to deal with these memento bombs again. The rest, well, maybe I will be able to get rid of them at a future date….

I recently sat down with an old friend. I first met my friend when I was 13 or 14 years old. Sometimes we don’t get together for a few years, but, when we do, I love to revisit old times.  This is my friend:

I distinctly remember sitting on the couch in the den of our house on Beechwood Place, finishing this book, pausing for half a moment, and then turning to page one again and staring all over. It was the first and last book I have ever down that with.

Descriptions I found online of Red Sky at Morning call it an “enduring coming of age story set in New Mexico during World War II. ” I just call it an old friend. I love it because of the way the author creates such memorable characters and settings. It makes me want to go live in a small mountain town in New Mexico.

I like to reread books, but usually, after rereading a book a time or two, I know I am done and I get rid of it, to make room for more books But this is one book I think I will be keeping for the rest of my life. When I read it again recently I enjoyed it as much as ever.

Do you have any books that are old friends, that you read again and again? I want to know what they are!

I thought babies grew up fast. But kittens, wow, you blink and they are almost teenagers! Soon I won’t be able to post kitten pictures anymore. But then I get to post cat pictures!

The little guys got their second set of shots last Friday. Unlike the first time, when they got a fever and were off their food for a day and a half, this time they didn’t have any problems what so ever. Lumos weighed 5 pounds, fifteen ounces. Nox weighed five pounds on the dot.

We have had kittens once before, when the top cat, otherwise known as Blackie, was born with his three brothers in our front planter. Back then I was a busy mom with two little girls and I didn’t get to enjoy the kittens as much. Now I am still busy, but I can stop and play with them and cuddle them a lot more than I could 16 years ago.

Meanwhile, Blackie continues to enjoy the window seat he is sure Hubby built just for him.

I am continuing to follow the suggested sorting and tossing guidelines in Marie Kondo’s book, “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” First it was clothes, and I got rid of six 13 gallon bags of clothes. That wasn’t too tough, actually.

Next she wants you to work on books. That one was harder. I got rid of about a dozen books. I had purged books relatively recently and over half the books on bookshelves in my house aren’t mine. A certain Hubby likes to keep all the books he buys. Ahem….

Having done books, I eagerly went to her book to see that the next category of cleaning out was to be. Oh no…papers! Yuk!   She thinks you can get your papers down to one or two file folders. Maybe a single woman living in Japan in a small rented apartment can have one or two file folders of papers, but that is not going to happen to the married couple with two children who live in a mortgaged home in the U.S. That being said, I was deeply distressed to realized how much paper we moved with us five years ago that we should have just gotten rid of.

I discovered we have every tax return we have filed since we got married 29 years ago. I know we only need to keep seven years worth (take that, Ms. Kondo and your one file folder!) but 29 years??? The worst part is I haven’t been able to make myself throw them away yet. I feel weirdly sentimental about those tax returns. They are a record of most of my adult life. Every job Hubby and I have had, when children joined us, the record of adult things like mortgages, charity donations, and such.

I fully admit that I am probably the ONLY person who feels sentimental about tax returns. But then I thought  about going though them  and adding up how much we have paid in taxes over the years…..suddenly I felt motivated to get rid of them! Some things just should not be revisited!

The good news is that I completely emptied one file drawer (out of six), another is almost empty, and all of them are no longer packed with paper, are easier to get into, etc….There is something to this tidying up magic!

Next on the list are the flotsam and jetsam of life such as CDs, kitchen things, and all that junk that is on my closet floor. And I thought paper was hard….

The black dress. Oh, the black dress!

I was working full-time and Hubby’s 10 year high school class reunion was coming. We had gone to the same high school and I knew these people, too. I needed to look good!

I rushed to the mall and went in a store I didn’t usually shop in. I found exactly one dress to try on. I tried it on. It looked fantastic! Really, amazing! Thank goodness because my lunch hour was almost over!

Because it is a black dress, the photo doesn’t do it any justice. Here is a close up of the top part of the dress, with its wide collar, double row of buttons, and wide belt.

The material had a kind of crinkled look to it, which, in real life, but not necessarily in this photo, added to the dress.

The collar went around to the back of the dress as well.

Unfortunately, the day of the reunion I had a horrible experience at work. I won’t go into it, because horrible happenings don’t deserve my time and effort to memorialize them. Suffice to say a person in another department didn’t like something I said and went off on me in front of some coworkers of mine. I remember obsessively telling Hubby about the horrible event as we drove to the reunion.

But, whatever the case, I looked good. Maybe I looked good because I wasn’t obsessing about my looks. But the hair looked good, the makeup looked good, and the dress looked fantastic. For once I have the photo to prove it!

Seriously, this was the one time, the ONE TIME, in my life that I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I looked my best. That isn’t saying I didn’t look good other times. I didn’t usually scare small children in my youth. But this time I had supreme confidence in how I looked.

I looked so good I stunned people at the reunion. They knew who I was and they stopped in their tracks to say, “Wow, You look really great!” What they really meant was “Wow, you look way better than I remember!” Aren’t reunions delightful?

It turned out to be my moment to go back and shine. One year later when it was my 10 year reunion I was two months pregnant. I was growing all over (yes, even at two months) and had no hope of shopping for a dress for that event. The night before, I went though my closet until I found a dress that would fit my growing stomach. My hair didn’t cooperate and I somehow ended up with a sausage roll thing going on on top of my head. I won’t be sharing a photo of that event and that dress is long gone. But I will always have Hubby’s 10 year reunion!

This is turning into one bad week on the pet care front. I already told you that my local grocery store is stopping carrying Blackie the cat’s favorite food.

Well, I took the kittens down for their second set of shots. The good news was they tested negative for feline leukemia and feline aids. Yay! But the bad news was delivered that both Dr. B and Dr. P, the regular vets who we adore, will be leaving soon. They are each relocating due to family needs and it is completely understandable. But, given Blackie’s long and sordid health history, I am deeply distressed. How can I possibly bring another doctor up to speed on everything that has transpired, everything we have looked at, etc….

So, if yesterday at about 3 p.m. you heard another weird noise, that was me screaming “NOOOO!!” again.

“I don’t care of Dr. B. and Dr. P are leaving. They both stuck needles in me and poked around my rear end and strapped me down to take pictures of my insides!”  

Our weather has cooled off and we are opening the windows again in the evenings. Bliss! I love to air out the house at night. Even with the air conditioner on it just seems to get stuffy and unpleasant if we can’t open the windows.

(An aside – I think wanting the windows open is a thing that comes with age. I could have cared less about “fresh air” when I was younger but I remember my grandmother opening windows even on cold days. I was always so puzzled why. Now, not so much!)

An added benefit right now is that, with the windows open, we hear the kittens playing in our bedroom. The tinkling sound of those balls with bells in them comes out of the bedroom window and into the family room. Kittens at play!

Even better is when someone goes into to visit the kittens and  we can hear loud and clear their laughter, because kittens cause laughter all the time! When the person comes out all the rest of us insist on the story behind the laughter, and then we usually get a laugh out of it, too. Last night it involved a plastic bag with one kitten inside and one on the outside.

I had to go in and I got to see Nox POUNCE on his brother the second Lumos stuck his head in the bag and couldn’t see Nox coming. It was so funny!

Tired out from playing. Lumos in his typical belly up position.

P.S. Don’t worry. The bag has been put away since kittens, like babies, should not play with plastic bags without supervision!

Did you know that while humans have an average of 10,000 taste buds and dogs have an average of 1700 taste buds, cats, on average, only have 470? When I learned this a couple of weeks ago it explained so much. This is why the smell of food is so important to cats. Which  is why the kibble fresh out of the bag is so much more desirable than the kibble that has been in the bowl for a while. Which is why cold food is so much less desirable than room temperature food. In other words, this is why cats are so d*** picky.

That cats are picky is very obvious when you visit the cat food aisle at any store. There are so many different kinds of cat food, both in taste and in texture. There are slivers and chucks and pates and things with gravy and things with out gravy. There are several kinds of fish flavors, morning flavors with egg and bacon, flavors of food from every kind of animal you can think of other than roadkill. (Not that cats wouldn’t like roadkill, I am sure they would.)

Which brings me to Blackie, my 16-year-old picky eater. Blackie likes the pate types of food. In particular, he likes the Iams pate because it is completely smooth, with no chunks, and he doesn’t really like chunks. If we give him a canned food with chunks he will lick the chunks dry but not actually eat the chunks. Since he usually gets medicine in his canned food, we feel it is better to give him the food that he will eat completely. So, Iams it is. There are about three kinds of the Iams pate. Local pet stores carry two or three. But my local grocery store only carries one kind. That is OK. Blackie likes it. He eats it. When I am in a pet store I pick up a couple of cans of the other flavors for a treat. Otherwise, I just buy the variety they carry in my local grocery store.

I was in the store yesterday and one of the items I needed to pick up was some Iams for Blackie. It was on sale for 49 cents a can. Oh goody! But the shelf sticker had an additional tag attached. It said “Closeout savings.”   That weird noise you heard yesterday afternoon about 4 pm pacific daylight time was me screaming “NOOOOO!” Needless to say, I bought every can they had, 17 in all.

The nearest pet store is at least 15 minutes from my house and not on my way to anywhere. My area has five grocery stores – four of them are all the same company, so I am out of luck there. The fifth one doesn’t carry Iams. The only thing that is good in all of this is that there is a Petco down the street from where Hubby works.  Obviously I will have to monitor much more closely our inventory of the precious Iams pate and call him when more is needed. Sigh….