June 2026 Message from Tina - June Gems

1.    Last weekend, I stayed in a hotel where my room and my sister’s room were on the same floor. But the numbering was so strange on the sign near the elevator that one day I went looking for her room, ended up back at my own room and knocked on the door, thinking I had found her. I should have used a GPS!
2.    My 70-something girlfriends are all hooked on “Off Campus,” a new series on Prime Video about a men’s college hockey team and the girls they date. My friends insisted I watch the 8-episode season, and I was hooked immediately. I saw the first 7 in one day and then finished up the next morning. I won’t go into detail here (look for my review at the end of the month) but I can just say that women like me, old enough to be the grandmothers of the main characters, are hooked. Lots of cute guys with their shirts off, lots of smoldering looks and more, and great music. Season 2 comes out NEXT YEAR. Damn, that’s too long to wait!
3.    My entire supply of rubber bands comes from bunches of broccoli or grapes in a plastic bag.
4.    With the growing use of GLP 1s for weight loss and health conditions such as diabetes, side effects of these drugs are affecting the users. There’s the usual nausea, diarrhea and constipation, but then there is hair loss. I foresee a future filled with balding, thin old folks like me!
5.    I appreciate the fact that Thomas’ English Muffins come pre-split. I worry that young people might just slice them with a knife and ruin the nooks and crannies.
6.    For someone with no known allergies, I sure sneeze and blow my nose a lot.
7.    There is always that one traffic light that I never get. It always turns red as I approach it. Without fail. I just assume I will have to stop there. If I ever made it through that light, I would plan a parade!
8.    If you are driving the car at the head of the line at the traffic light, you are responsible for moving ahead quickly when the light turns green. It is so frustrating to miss the light because the idiot ahead of you didn’t go as soon as the light changed. 
9.    Whenever I buy something packaged neatly in a box and open it to remove the contents, I’m always surprised how everything I took out fit in that package. Buy a set of sheets or a new phone and just try to get the packing material back into the original box. It’s like clowns getting out of a Volkswagen. How did they fit in there in the first place? You just hope you don’t have to repack the item to return it!
10.    I always have trouble with those plastic containers from the salad bar or from leftovers from a restaurant. I can’t get them to stay closed so the contents won’t spill out, and then I can’t get them to open when I’m ready to eat!
11.    I have bought more than my share of gadgets over the years from infomercials and online ads, and some of them have worked out great. I still have my V-slicer, which is a mandolin for use with vegetables. I could never get it clean enough to suit my standards, so actually I have replaced it twice. I also have my bread knife – appropriately called the “TV Knife,” which still works perfectly after many years. So not all impulse buys are duds after all.
12.    Since I am retired and don’t have to go to work Monday through Friday, there is no reason I can’t change my sheets on, say, a Tuesday or Thursday. But old habits die hard, and changing the sheets remains a weekend chore.
13.    I saw an ad online for Old Navy that boasted “50% off EVERYTHING.” Underneath, in small type, it read, “Exclusions apply.” OK, if it is 50% off everything, that would have to be WITHOUT exclusion. Which is it? There is no truth in advertising.
14.    Considering that my bachelor’s degree is in English, I would think I would do better on the online game Spelling Bee. Sometimes I can’t even get to the “Amazing” level, and I have only achieved “Genius” level twice. I’ve been so bad at it lately that I am worried someone is going to come to my house and take back my graduation diploma!  
15.    I park my car so badly that I am worried about someone showing up to confiscate my driver’s license, too!
16.    I think that once you have grandchildren who get married, you should be classified as old. I don’t have any grandchildren, so I’ll never get old!
17.    As I attempted to lick an envelope to seal it and then realized that there was an adhesive strip for that purpose, it occurred to me that young people today have no experience with having to lick envelopes and stamps to put things in the mail. Christmas cards could make you sick (which happened to George Costanza’s fiancée Susan, who died in a Seinfeld episode from licking the stamps on their wedding invitation). I doubt they use USPS much anyway. 
18.    The nice thing about ordering items online is that by the time they arrive, I have already forgotten what I ordered, so it’s like getting a surprise gift!
19.    When I found a T-shirt online that said, “Back and Body Hurts” in the familiar Bath and Body Works design, I just had to buy it! The folks at my physical therapy place loved it!
20.    There was a woman in the restroom at the gym the other day who was washing her hands so vigorously and for such a long time that I thought she was scrubbing up for surgery.
21.    And why do we call the ladies/men’s room a restroom anyway? Who is in there taking a rest?
22.    My Mercedes just turned a year old and a few of the features that came free with it have now expired, though I can renew them and pay. Most of these I didn’t know I had, and I’m pretty sure I can survive without geofencing, since I don’t know what it is. If the car is stolen, there is a service for that, although calling 911 might just come in handy, too. Apparently, I had a parked vehicle locator, a vehicle tracker and a remote vehicle finder, which sound to me like overlapping services. Maybe the remote starter would have come in handy had I known I had one, but most of the time my car is in the garage, so it is safe and warm. And I wonder what “car to X communications” means. Now I’ll never know, because I will pass on the opportunity to purchase these services I didn’t know I had in the first place!