May 2014
A friend of mine (no names, please) is trying to lose weight
for her daughter’s upcoming wedding.
She’s not trying to lose a lot of weight, just enough so that she
doesn’t have to wear those dreaded Spanx, the torture device intended to make women
look slim by crushing our internal organs just to hide the old muffin top. Is this really necessary? As she pointed out, if she has a little extra
girth around the mid-section, it’s not as if someone is going to think a woman
in her 60s is pregnant. That ship has
sailed. So is it really worth squeezing
our body parts to the point where we can neither breathe nor relieve ourselves
without the use of the “jaws of life?”
Who wrote that song, “I Enjoy Being a Girl” anyway?
I just saw a promo for a new TV show that debuts in the
fall. Really, what makes ABC think I'll
remember it by then? I can hardly remember it now.
If I even think about getting the car washed or watering the
grass, we get rain. I should be
dispatched to drought-stricken areas.
Wouldn't it be better for the
staff at the eye doctor's office to take my co-pay before the doctor dilates my
pupils? I have a tough time writing out that check AFTER my appointment
is done. Usually I just do it in advance
and hand it to them as I leave the office, ready to drive myself home with one hand on
the wheel and one hand on the road.
What with the dwindling supply of paper bags from the
supermarket (whose existence has been superseded by reusable canvas bags), what
am I supposed to use to recycle my magazines and junk mail? Now I am hoarding paper bags and may have to
break into the collection of paper shopping bags if this crisis is not averted.
I have a bit of a recycling obsession, I must admit. Not only do I faithfully put it out, but my
newspapers are bundled up so neatly that my sister once said it looked like I
was gift-wrapping them. My cardboard is
cut to a manageable size, as if they won’t take it otherwise. And I carefully put out the junk mail and
magazines in paper bags (as we know, worried about securing the needed supply) and
out at the curb – almost invariably on an evening when it rains.
Just so you know, the elevator won’t come any faster if you
keep pressing the button. And my browser
won’t open any sooner if I press the ENTER key really hard.
I hope I live long enough to watch everything I have
recorded on my two DVRs and to read all the magazines I have put aside. At this rate, I’ll live forever.
I hope I live long enough to read all the magazines I have
piled up. Obama won the last election,
right?
Do me a favor: When
you are going down the aisles in the supermarket, please keep your cart in front of
you. Don’t walk down the aisle side by
side with it, or you effectively block the entire aisle. Don’t make me get all road ragey on you with
a shopping cart.
In real life, do we ever need more math knowledge than how
to calculate the tip in a restaurant or the 25% off at Macy’s? Really, when was the last time you thought
about sines, co-sines, tangents or algebra?
Apologies to my math teacher friends.
When I am folding the clean sheets, I’m always amazed to I
think of them in their original plastic package. I defy anyone to refold the sheets into the
size the set came in when you bought it.
I wish I had a dime for every serving of chicken I have had
at special event luncheons and dinners.
But why does the chicken always look pink? I was at a dinner recently with a lot of red
light in the ballroom, and I actually took out a small flashlight to inspect
the chicken before I ate it. A few people
refused to eat it at all, but, according to my flashlight, it was the lighting,
not the chicken. Still, nobody wants to
eat raw chicken, right? And then there
are the vegetables. These banquet places
can take one carrot and use it for the the entire room. Could they make them any thinner or
smaller?
I attended one of these
luncheons the other day and expressed my confusion over the place
setting. I never know which water or
roll is mine, it seems. Until now. A woman at the table gave me a great tool to
help me remember which is which. Just think BMW (like the car) -- bread-meal-water, going left to right. Let's hope I don't get it confused
with Mercedes or Ford or I'll be searching under the table for something to
drink.
Helpful household hint:
Keep the tops of the margarine containers and stick them under jars of
pickles in the refrigerator to collect any spills, or use them under the dish
detergent if you leave it on the counter to protect from drips. The larger ones I use as mini cutting boards
when I am slicing berries. When they get
ruined, they get tossed.
You know you are getting old when
you find yourself reading the column on senior activities in the local paper
and it isn't about the high school. And worse, you start thinking,
"That sounds like fun."
What is it with the clock radios in hotel rooms? There are so many buttons and no indication
of how to set the time. You can charge
your iPhone or wake up to music or a buzzer, but if you can’t set the time, all
is lost. I carry my own little travel
clock and it’s a good thing since the last few hotels had radios beyond my
realm of technical competence.
I think all credit card machines should be required to be
identical so I’ll know how to swipe my card, where to sign, etc. Sometimes the glare of the store lights on
the screen makes the content illegible.
While we’re at it, let’s address that issue, too.
Don’t you have a bunch of old keys lying around? Chances are you don’t know what they open but
you are afraid to throw them out because you might need them. For what, you don’t know.
In preparation for spring, I took apart my gas grill and
cleaned it to within an inch of its life, scrubbing and shining it so well that
I hated to use it for the first time and mess it up again.
Meanwhile, speaking of grills, why is it that men consider
themselves the kings of the grill? My
brother-in-law, who can barely make toast, loves to throw burgers on the
grill. Is it that men can only cook
outside the house? I can hold my own
cooking over fire AND I can make toast, too.
I’ve heard a lot of bad things about the new Windows 8
operating system, but it turns out not to be so bad after all. On my new HP, Windows 8.1 computer, I simply
hit the box called DESKTOP on the lower left and see the same desktop I am
accustomed to seeing. Now the computer
is set up so that I don’t even have to hit that box. By the way, I bought my new laptop at Staples
and for $100 they transferred all of my files at the store, then the technician
came to the house and installed the new printer, set up the wireless network
and showed me how to stream Netflix on my TV.
I made the poor guy earn that $100, but it was a good investment. He left me with the old hard drive (which I
guess I can hit with a hammer) but even got rid of the computer tower for me. Well worth the money.
After the horrible winter we had, where there was so much
snow on the ground that I couldn’t get out for a walk, I swear I won’t complain
about the summer heat. Unless, of
course, my air conditioning goes on the fritz.
If you have ever had one of those little cubes of note
paper, you will know that they last forever.
I have one that promotes a website and I know I acquired it before I
retired at the end of 2006. The cube
will probably outlast the website. I’m
going to leave it to someone in my will, because I have a feeling there will
still be paper on it. I often will find
little notes I have written myself, frequently with phone numbers but no names
associated with the numbers. I guess I
thought I’d remember whose numbers they were, but I never do!
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