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My Profile
Because I can't bear to eulogize Doug - 2008-08-19
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12:13 p.m. - 2005-05-13
I've got nuttin' but chair time today, my balance is on strike. Aside from the nausea from feeling like I'm doing a whoopsy-doodle even when sitting still, the balance thing isn't too bad. At least in comparison to some of the other MS happy crappy. If my balance goes missing for a long time my neck and back muscles kink up from bracing like a West Point plebe. Trying to stay upright, don'tcha know. Be that as it may, a day in my chair isn't too awful. It's a gorgeous day. Sunny and a heavenly 49 degrees. Even colder earlier. Not great for my garden, but lovely on my super-heated skin. I've got the windows open and the ceiling fan going. Mike came in to say good-bye this morning. He looked at me in my t-shirt and drawers with the small tendrils of steam rising from my head, pulled his work parka up closer around his chin and said, "Sucks to be you, huh?" I have gotten hot flashes. They're awful. Mostly I'm not flashing, I just get really, really warm and kind of simmer in an invisible crock pot for days at a time. Lisa and I were talking about this at lunch last week. She said she hasn't gotten any peri-menopause stuff yet. Aside from being warm too. She hadn't worn long sleeves all winter. Her mom was well into her 50's before the Change struck. Lisa anticipates it'll be the same with her. We agreed this was a good thing. I should be done by then. The two of us freaking out at the same time would be horrible. YAY!!! Cardinals! (The birds, not the wafer jockeys) 2 nesting pair. One in the neighbor's wildly overgrown forsythia and the other up in the maple that shades Wolf's swing set. I can't see the latter nest from my chair, but I can see the male diving in and out with nesting materials hanging from his beak. The nest in the forsythia is quite near our car park. And I'm stoked because I'm hoping they get used to us coming and going. Then I can watch all the doings in the nest without upsetting them. We had a pheasant in the yard the other day. I'd never seen a wild one that close before. It wasn't 2 feet from the backdoor. It saw me move and trotted around the side of the house. I followed and was able to get Mike and Wolf to the kitchen window for a good long look at our visitor before he flew off. A pheasant. Cool. We have a very birdy yard. I like it. Having the feeders up over the winter helped quite a bit. The winter birds liked the neighborhood and the constant supply of vittles. Word got out (as it always does with a good thing) and now the migrating birds are here too. Stopped for a snack on their way back up from the south and decided to stay where the living is easy, the trees are plentiful and the cats are lazy. The deer have been by, helping themselves to the tulips. S'okay, the deer have only eaten about a third of them. I've got plenty left to enjoy. Not like the old house. My God, it was like Tulip Armageddon. There were over 100 bulbs in the yard and I got one flower. One flower just one year. Ticked me off a little. Ingrates. Who put out hay and a salt lick every winter? Keep their asses from starving and the thanks I got was to have all my tulips bitten off at the roots. I must say the doe herd here at the Hobbit House has much better manners. I don't know what's going to become of the doe herd at the old house. We were through there recently. The pastures are gone. The property on both sides of the street is full of spanking new cul-de-sacs and half built McMansions. "Welcome to La-Dee-Da Acres. Fine Living for Superior People. 3-bedroom shacks starting at $990,000." Crammed in there cheek and jowl too. No fricken way I'd pay a million dollars for a house that was so close to the neighbors' I could spit out my window and hit theirs. For a million dollars I want privacy. Possibly a moat. The zoning says the houses have to be on 2+ acres and they are. It's just that these gaudy McMansions are so big they take up the entire lot. All of them have 4 car garages. Huge 3-story foyers. Master suites in their own wing and the kids' rooms in another. I laugh because a whole lot of these upscale buyers are the children of the Levittown kids. Maybe some even are Levittown kids. Levitt houses ran from 800-960sqft. And that's about the size of the laundry room in these bloated monstrosities. I'm not being a hypocrite. I loved the old house. Yes, it was huge. It was also built in a day when huge was necessary. Tons of kids, live-in help, multi generational families. A 5,000sqft house made sense. Our family was small but we did our best to fill up that space. Always had an exchange student or two. Almost always a barter boarder- cleaning house in exchange for room and board. Long term guests. The old house got used, you know? I just don't see that happening in these new houses. Him, her, a kid, maybe two, but that's it. All that space for very few people and a whole lot of expensive electronics. The McMansion buyers don't strike as the type who'd put out hay and salt either. What will become of those deer? I'm going to wobble into the kitchen now and make some tea. A journey perilous indeed. Wish me luck. ~LA
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