Nesting

While I was home for lunch yesterday, I ate my food with a great view of the side yard. Since Venise took the blinds and screens off the kitchen windows, we have a clear unobstructed view of nature (which, as I have posted before, I prefer to enjoy from behind a window anyway). I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and finally saw a brown squirrel among the leaves on the ground. I saw her put something in her mouth, then scurry up the nearest tree and jump her way across branches to another tree, wherein she disappeared for a few seconds. Then there she was again, backtracking her same route down to the ground. Ever the nature-ignorant person, I asked Ed to look and tell me what she had in her mouth. He laughed and said she was gathering piles of leaves and taking them up the tree to build a nest.

After I was clear on what I was looking at, the little squirrel began to fascinate me. She could gather an enormous quantity of leaves in her mouth and in her many trips back and forth, I saw only one leaf slip away and float back to the ground.

The irony did not escape me. In my blog, I give a description of Ed and me as "empty nesters," with the kids grown and married and starting families of their own, and "just us" here. That fact again presented itself when we signed a disclosure paper, which in part, gave reasons why we were selling the house. Venise wrote something like, "Their children have grown up and moved out and the house is much, much too big for just the two of them."

"The two of them." Yep, that's us. In my original family, it was the 4 of us - Mom, Dad, sister Joy, and me. Then I got married and again it was the 4 of us - Ed and me, Rachel and Matthew. And now it is the 2 of us. Although we have extended and enlarged the family with additions of Chris and Sarah and Caroline and Charlotte, as well as Joy's family, it still comes down to the 2 of us.

The little squirrel is just starting out for the season, carefully preparing her nest for the little ones to come. And we are at the other end of the spectrum, cleaning out, getting rid of, and other duties befitting our new status of "empty nesters." It reminds me so much of one of the most poignant parts of the Bible:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build...

And the cycle of life continues. And I am so grateful to be a part of it - whatever stage I'm in.

Plate Puzzles

Ed says the older he gets, the more cynical he gets. As for me, I'm getting more easily frustrated by simple, quite stupid things.

One thing that seems to tick me off is trying to decipher confusing vanity license plates. Now I have a personalized plate, myself. I thought long and hard about the meaning of my choice, which ended up being C-HARP. It stands for Celtic harp as opposed to a pedal harp. I realize, of course, that very few people will be able to interpret the "C" for "Celtic." That's OK, and I accept that. The HARP, part, though, is plainly understood. Apparently I play the harp. Some people at first glance thought it said, "C-SHARP," which, of course, is just misreading.

Since I also play piano and organ, as well as transcribe, I initially considered using something akin to KEYBOARD, but that's one too many letters. It would have to be KEBOARD, or KEYBORD, both which would undoubtedly have been understood, but my refusal to have an actual misspelled word on my license plate ruled those one out. Too bad; I thought it was a clever idea.

I also considered something to do with quilts, but a quick check of the State of Maine database showed me the good ones were taken. I'm wasn't going the KWILT route, either.

Ed's license plate is HEALING. People assume he's a doctor, but that's what you get when you make assumptions. He has preached on how the root of "salvation" is "salve," which brings up the healing component. So he uses it spiritually, not physically. At least it's a valid word and spelled correctly.

This morning on our trip to Bangor, I noticed a personalized plate and I could not make out for the life of me what it meant. I can't even remember it exactly so I can include it here, but believe me, I spent a good 10 minutes twisting those letters around to make some kind of sense. Nothing - I got absolutely nothing. That drove me crazy. Here it is 4:30 p.m. and I'm still fuming about it.

It seems to me, if you are going to create a personalized license plate to tell the world something about who you are, or what you do, or what your nickname is, or where you live, or what team you support - it ought to be easily understood. I suppose the owner of the aforementioned plate knew what those letters meant, but I don't think anybody else had a clue.

Ed's theory (cynical as always) is that some people actually pay extra for a vanity plate just so they can put something totally nonsensical on there to drive people like me insane as we try to figure it out.

Please think about this the next time you choose a personalized plate. If I see it and can't make heads or tails of it, you might just ruin an otherwise perfectly good day.

Cleanliness is next to....

...confusion. Our first house showing is tomorrow and we have been cleaning and putting things up all afternoon and evening. Ah, memories - of last year around this time.

It's great to have a clean and shiny house. It's not so great when we want to find something. I can guarantee you it's not where I last put it. It's tucked away somewhere, out of sight, in order to make the house clean and uncluttered. Oh, it's cluttered all right. Just hidden clutter.

The dog bed is rolled up and stuffed in the back of a cedar chest under some hanging clothes in the closet. The shampoo is stuck in a box in another closet. Countless things have been stuck in drawers; they are so accessible for shoving something in. The wall calendar is...let's see, where did I put that?

I think selling houses is for people younger than we are. People still with all their brains, not just part of them. It's hard enough to remember where you put the keys; it's much worse when you've packed keys into boxes. (Yes, our spare house key, which we need to give to the real estate agent, is packed in a box somewhere, so we had to have another one made.)

We are cleaning like the white tornado. You Baby Boomers will remember the white tornado; you younger ones will say, "Huh?" Here's a quote from a computer web site:

AJAX officially stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. Of course for me, a baby boomer who grew up watching TV commercials back in the Sixties, AJAX will always be a "white tornado" for cleaning my kitchen floor, or a "white knight on a horse" who would point his lance at people in the park and their clothes would turn magically clean because AJAX was "stronger than dirt."

So tonight we have a shiny clean house ready for showing. We can't find anything, but it certainly looks good. Just don't open any drawers.

Mind Games

When I was in high school and practically lived at the library, I discovered Agatha Christie and her eccentric Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. He claimed that his unique ability to solve crimes was due to the health of "ze leetle gray cells" - his brain.

Now that the Baby Boomer generation is close to retirement age, magazines are full of articles on how to prevent the dreaded Alzheimer's disease. Part of their advice is to use your brain over and over, in varying ways, to keep the little gray cells active. Things like doing crossword puzzles are OK, I suppose. I get on a tangent sometimes and will do the daily crossword puzzle in the paper for two weeks in a row, then I'll drop it for something else and won't do another for a year. My Aunt June adores crossword puzzles, and she's still mentally going blockbusters.

However, I prefer to personalize my brain activities. What better way than to play around with my memories? It seems that when we Baby Boomers are well into the second half of our lives, we look more to the past and less to the future.

One activity I do with my brain is to try to remember the floor plans of buildings that have meant something to me. Take my home church, Harris Memorial United Methodist Church in Memphis. It burned down a long time ago, but that building (along with the aforementioned library) was our second home for a lot of every week. I go through the annals of my mind and picture each room, each door, each hall, each set of stairs, then try to draw it all out on a piece of paper. Of course, memories are not infallible, and I would really enjoy taking several former Harris Memorial members and having them do this same thing, then comparing the drawings. That would be enlightening! I try to do the same kind of thing with my high school, or the places I have worked. I believe it stimulates the brain very well.

Ever the "method-ist," my second game is a memory game organized under the labels "earth, wind, water, and fire" - the elements. I methodically go through each category and list the memories I associate with it. For example: For earth, I try to remember anything having to do with the ground or dirt, such as sliding on the front lawn on cardboard boxes. For wind, I remember when Joy and I used to play badminton on the front lawn and the wonderful feel of a good hit when the birdie seemed to float through the air forever. Water is pretty easy - I'm sure most of us can think of a lot of memories involving water. One of mine involves the Mississippi River, when Dad would take whoever was willing up to the park on the bluff, to see what he considered the best view of the Mississippi River, bar none. I have Dad in the fire category, too, for all the "wild goose chases" he used to drag us through when he saw a fire engine roaring past.

My third game is to remember things with the senses. I list the smells, tastes, noises, sights, and textures of my life. The smell of fresh-cut grass when our family worked together out in the yard in the summer (and as contrast, the smell of Mrs. Perry's old house with many, many cats). The taste of pot pies, our supper on nights Dad was at a meeting (and as contrast, the taste of milk of magnesia). The sound of our cat Mike jumping on the piano keys when I was trying to practice. The blinding light in my eyes when Dad was filming his home movies. The texture of the sharp jacks and the smooth round ball in my hand at the same time.

So many pleasant memories are from my growing up years, but I have others as an adult. The smell of the ocean up here in Maine. The taste of different brands of chocolate. The first time I heard the beautiful sounds of the Celtic harp. Seeing the kids graduate from high school. "Fondling" the fabric at the quilt store.

It's hard sometime just to ask, "What are the memories of your life?" It's much easier to sort through them using "ze leetle gray cells" and a little methodology. Who knows - it may not ward off dementia - but it certainly is a lot of fun!

Becoming Unhinged

When we first bought this house, we were enchanted by the leaded glass arts and crafts cabinet doors in part of the kitchen. It gave the area such charm. After a few years of dealing with them, though, Ed decided he would rather have open shelves, so he took the doors off and stored them in the garage.

One problem was in their construction. The glass was precariously propped inside the door frame. It was heavy, and kept in place with a couple of tiny nails. Every time Ed would open the door, he was afraid the glass would fall out.

The second problem was in their hinge setup. All the cabinet doors in the kitchen used special break-away hinges. If we opened the door to a certain point, the door would virtually come off the cabinet, and part of the hinge (spring-loaded) on the door side snapped back into place, and we had to get our extra-tiny screwdriver to dig the stubborn piece out of the hinge so we could rehang the door. It was a major pain, to say the least. If you can imagine how often one opens cabinet doors in the kitchen, you would be quite accurate as to how many times Ed lost his cool. It was especially hard when I was the door opener, because if I opened an upper cabinet and the top hinge gave way, I had to stand there holding the door while I yelled for help.

So you can see why, as beautiful as they are, the cabinet doors were exiled to the garage.

One of the first things Venise said when we showed her the leaded glass doors was, "These things have GOT to come back up!" We kind of expected her to say that. Since she promised to help us reinstall them, we relented. I told Ed that using those doors would be one of the many "inconveniences" we would have to undergo while the house was on the market. Venise suggested that we clean out the cabinets and then we would not even have to open the doors, and that made sense.

So before our workday on Friday, Ed and I went to the hardware store to buy more hinges, as he had thrown away all the original hinges from the cabinet side. Well, we right off the bat we learned that they don't make those hinges anymore. I guess they just didn't cut it in the market (wonder why?!). So we showed the hardware man the door we had taken with us, and together we searched for hinges of the same general type that would work. We spent close to $100, but we knew it was a good investment in getting the kitchen to look its best.

When Venise tried to hang the doors, nothing fit. The doors overlapped when she tried to close them. She voiced our options: Maybe have a carpenter come by who could either cut off part of the doors (we nixed that one) or could dig out some of the cabinet itself where the hinges were. The problem was that the hinges had a lip that was supposed to hug the cabinet. It hugged the cabinet all right, but that limited the position of the hinges to the width of the lip. Therefore, we couldn't move the doors outward so they would meet solidly in the middle.

So yesterday, Ed hung the rest of the doors on that wall, and as you can see, the doors overlap in the middle and are not straight at all. He said, "Well, if we have a carpenter come by, at least the doors will be up so he can see our predicament and figure out exactly what needs to be done."

Oh Joy, where are you with your knowledge and tools???? What a delicious challenge this would be for you!

Last night, after much thought, we discussed another option. The reason why regular old hinges never worked on those doors was the fact that with regular hinges, the doors would not close all the way. Well, they'd close, but then swing back a little. This resulted in about a 1-inch gap. However, on one of our cabinets, we have little thingies (that may not be the technical term....) installed on the bottom which click and hold the door shut. Ed wondered if we could take all the doors back down and install regular hinges with the "thingies" to ensure the door would stay shut. The old-fashioned, regular hinges would allow us to move the doors over and everything would be fine.

So back to the hardware store we go to see if our plan works. I'll let you know. In the meantime, I am packing up the expensive hinges and sending them to my sister, Joy. I'm sure she can use them in one of her many creative woodworking projects. As for me, it has been quite an experience.

Oh yes - Ed also got tiny plastic thingies (no relation to the cabinet thingies) to screw in place to hold the glass securely in the door frame. When I said, "If it was that easy to be able to hold the glass in, why didn't you do that years ago?" All I got was "the look." You know which look I mean. I imagine I'll be seeing that look more and more as we continue our house-selling venture!

Dream House

On my favorite medical transcription site, there is a discussion around this question: "If money were no object, what would you change about your house?" In other words, what would describe your dream house?

The interesting part of this discussion is that everyone's idea of her dream house is partly dependent on what stage of life she finds herself in. After I posted some pictures of our Victorian house, some posters unequivocably stated this house would be their dream house. Yet, our dream house is not anything like this one, at this time. There are a myriad of dream houses out there. (And, for some Katrinia victims, any viable house would be a dream house for them.)

There are a lot of magazine articles out there about Baby Boomers and their life challenges and opportunities. In my reading, I notice that there are some Boomers who are experiencing the empty nest and are downsizing, as we are. There are others who never want to get out of the race for accumulation. These people think that having less is not more and that the journey of upward mobility never ends. To them, it is a sign of failure if their next car is smaller or less expensive than their present one, or if their next house is not as ostentatious or in as wealthy a neighborhood as the one where they live now. This, of course, may be due in part to our society's insistence on labeling the worth of individuals based on their financial wealth and quantity/quality of possessions - after all, you could be extremely rich, but how would people know that unless your house, car, and clothes reveal your status to the world?

It's all in timing, I have discovered. This beautiful Victorian was our dream house when we bought it. We had 2 teenagers (and one live-in guest), and after all the tiny parsonages we had lived in, we were ectastic to be here.

But as we journeyed on, our situation changed. As our family has gotten smaller, it seems the house has gotten bigger. (Ed, who has lost 30 pounds in the last few years, definitely feels that he has gotten smaller and the house has gotten bigger!) Our needs change, and we adjust.

In the same way that financial experts advise you to take time every few years to reevaluate your investments, your insurance needs, and your financial changes, I think it is worthwhile to stop and evaluate your lifestyle options. Think about your priorities. Think about the hidden costs (not always financial) of your chosen lifestyle. Choose your path with integrity and thoughtfulness, not letting "the world" decide who you are. It may be that you need a smaller house, it may be that you need to use less of the world's resources, it may be that you need to spend more time with your family and less time at the office, it may be that you don't need that new item of clothing as much as you thought you did.

However, if, like our family in 1996 when we moved to Maine, you have several children who need plenty of room to hang out, or you need space for family and friends to visit - well, in that case, this is your dream house. Call our agent, Venise, ASAP!

The Urgency of the Matter

We had our new real estate agent Venise over today for an all-day work session. And boy, did she work! She brought her assistant with her and between the two of them and what Ed and I could contribute, the house got a makeover in several places today. No job was too dirty or difficult for Venise to tackle. She and her assistant took down screens, washed windows, hung doors, vacuumed, dusted, mopped, scrubbed tile - it was totally amazing and gratifying to find someone who wants to sell the house as much as we do!

When we lived in Tennessee, one of our favorite things to do was watch the cable channel A&E, and one of our most enjoyable shows was America's Castles. From that show, we learned how the mansions of America were built for names like the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and other lesser known but just as filthy rich families. A thread of poignancy frequently ran through the mansions' histories, however. So many times the rich old man would spend years having the best architects and craftsmen and goldmiths and engineers build his dream house, then he would move in and about a year or two later, he would die.

We joke about our own dream house, which exists so far only in our minds and in the detailed drawings of the Coastline Homes company, but Ed has mentioned a few times that his desire to start building it ASAP is due to watching America's Castles. He is so afraid that he will finally the get his dream house and then not live to enjoy it.

It is a dream house for us, even while we are living in a house which might serve as a dream house to others. Our future house will not be big, will not be grandiose or splendid in form or decoration. It will not have the most expensive flooring, won't have a hot tub or the latest "must-have" in the major appliance department. But it will be our castle, and we want to have many years ahead of us to appreciate it.

So time's awastin' - and after being stuck with Ed all day, listening to his endless stories, taking his teasing, "laughing" at his jokes, Venise now knows the importance of selling the house quickly, so Ed can live many years in his dream house - that is, if she doesn't kill him first!

Ode to Ed

We are on the last two weeks before the curtain rises on our house, so to speak, and I want to document here that Ed has worked like a crazy man. (Since he has always been a crazy man, he was halfway there to begin with.) Venise left us with a long laundry list of chores, and Ed has responded with alacrity. He has already packed up most of the extra kitchen dishes/pots/etc. He has cleared out the curio cabinet and moved it in preparation for taking it upstairs. He has moved the big leather chair out of the TV room and into the front parlor/dining room. He emptied out the shelves in the pantry. I had already boxed up my Christmas village houses and figurines, but he put all those small boxes into one giant box for me. Then he took all the boxes he had packed upstairs. In the midst of all this, he has been doing his usual cooking, washing dishes, walking the dog, and even did some of my laundry.

He mentioned to me that he wanted to "bowl Venise over with what two old people can do."
Bowl indeed - he is getting strikes at every turn! Go, Ed!

The Life of an Old House

Miss Meg from Georgia responded to my last post with this:

Do you feel pangs of rejection because others don't immediatly fall in love with your house? We have been here 28 years. Our daughter was 5 when we moved in and she now has a 6 yo, 5yo and one on the way. So much time passed, so many memories... and nobody seems to see the beauty of all those yesterdays as we do.

Oh, my, yes! The same feelings we had at our yard sale last year ("Why don't you want to buy our stuff? Are you questioning our taste, our judgment in buying these things?") were magnified many times when we tried to sell the house.

The above picture was taken last week.

A brief history of the house: Our house is a Queen Anne Victorian built in the late 1800s. It has 2 balconies and a wrap-around gazebo porch, parquet floors (beautiful, in need of some refinishing), sitting on a corner lot in a city of 5000 people. We have a picture of the house taken in 1903, which shows an addition of a carriage house on the other side of the picture above, extending at a right angle to the house.

We had lived our lives in Tennessee and fell in love with Maine on a vacation and for some odd reason just decided to move here. So the next vacation we spent here, we wanted to look at houses. We wanted an old, rambling, house with big rooms for the teenagers to enjoy, room to have their friends over, room for my sewing and quilting things, and a nice big kitchen where Ed could cook. We were living in a parsonage at the time, so we didn't have to worry about selling an existing house, and after years of living in rural Tennessee areas, we had promised Matt (who would be 13 when we moved) a neighborhood. We made our way to a real estate office in and asked to look at houses. We told them we had 4 days before we had to leave for Tennessee, and asked them to cram as many showings as possible in that amount of time.

Alas, the houses they showed us were not quite what we were looking for. The room sizes were not as big as we had hoped. After all, today kids have computers and TVs and stereos, and need more space than in the past. We had a four-poster bed with dresser and bureau and night stand which would not have fit in any of the rooms we saw.

Finally on the third day, we were sitting at the real estate office, once again trying to impart our vision to them when our daughter Rachel found a house picture on the bulletin board.
"Hey, Mom and Dad," she said. "Isn't this like what you are looking for?" We immediately fell in love with the picture and asked to see the house.

The next day, when Matt and I walked first into the front door, I remember distinctly looking at him and mouthing the words, "I want this house!" It just spoke to us. The charm, the history, the well-worn interior. How many children's footsteps had raced down that staircase?

We knew, however, that if we bought the house, we would want to build an addition. The upstairs area was fine for the teenagers, but there was not enough room for us. So we left town after making an offer, and went back to Tenneessee, not even knowing if the house would be ours.

The couple selling the house had recently been divorced, he had moved out, and she had stayed here with her 2 children. She really needed time to find another place. And, as luck would have it, we didn't need to move until a year and a half, when Rachel would graduate from high school. It was a win-win situation. We let her live here rent-free while she looked for another house and gave her kids adjustment time - and she was here in the house so our insurance company was satisfied that the house was been looked after and maintained.

During the time we waited to move, we had an addition built in the back, the bottom floor for a 2-car garage, the floor above that for the master bedroom suite, and the room above that for an exercise/laundry room. Now we had our private space, on the other end of the world from the kids upstairs and their music and friends. Yet, we still had the charm of the older home.
(Rachel used to say, "Yeah, the charm. How come we have to live in the 'charming old part' of the house and you get to live in the new part?")

We have lived here 10 years now, building a lot of memories in the process. The house has been good to us. We have always been well aware that we are but a few years' history for the house. We have improved parts of it and know that those coming after us will improve even more. We have left our mark, and when we leave, we will cry.

I just knew that every single person walking in here like I did would fall in love with the house. I was quite surprised and disappointed when that didn't happen, for whatever reasons. I know there has got to be another family out there who want to walk the old wood floors, touch the unique old masonry fireplace that has stood for well over a century. As they say, "If these walls could talk...."

Yes, Miss Meg, you have hit the nail on the head. I don't feel that we are abandoning the house as much as I feel we are giving another family the exciting opportunity to build their own memories in this house. And so far, they aren't willing.

Two more weeks and we will try again!

Exit Strategy

Yesterday we had our appointment with Venise, our new realtor. She is a self-confessed workaholic who loves challenges and is eager to start marketing the house. Just the person we need! She took us through the house, making a work list for us.

We had just opened the door to Matt's old room, where we are storing extra furniture, when she took a look and and turned to us in astonishment. "You're moving into a house half this size," she exclaimed, "and you still have this much furniture?!" Uh oh. Another wake-up call. Time to pare down again.

The problem seems to be that 1) we can't really visualize the size of our new house, despite the detailed computerized layout, so we don't know what items of our present furniture will work the best, and 2) we keep thinking about Matt and Sarah.

Matt and Sarah have been married for less than a year and live in a tiny apartment. One day, of course, they will have a house and they might be able to use some of this extra furniture. Where to store it until then, however, is the question. This is the "I may need it some day" syndrome that plagues downsizers. (Slightly modified to the "They may need it some day" syndrome.)

Venise is absolutely right, though. We did a lot of paring down this time last year before we first put the house up for sale. It's now time for the second paring, and believe me, it doesn't get any easier. Paring down means making decisions, an skill in which I have always been lacking, due to an inherent tendency to second-guess myself.

And from the fact that Ed spent a good 15 minutes in a diatribe about the validity of keeping several years' worth of quilting magazines stored in perpetuity, I can foresee that the next six months will be - shall we say - entertaining?

Deja Vu

Thanks to my exceptional high school French teachers, my life has been enriched because of my basic knowledge of French. This knowledge especially comes in handy in my capacity as a medical transcriptionist. The average person might be surprised at how many French words and phrases pop up in medical transcription. Peau d'orange is one. Petit mal is another. And deja vu is another. (There are supposed to be accents in there, but with this blog formatting, I apparently don't have the option, at least I can't find the instructions.)

There is a funny story in our family about deja vu. We were all eating at a Cracker Barrel restaurant a few years ago and Rachel blurted out, "Oh my, I just had deja vu!" To which my mother replied, "The bathroom is that way."

I'm getting that feeling of deja vu, because tomorrow our new real estate agent is coming to the house so we can sign the contract papers. Wasn't it this time last year that we went through this? I can look back and remember our feelings - we had so much confidence and hope. After all, the house is so beautiful, we thought it would sell itself. Then came the problems, leading to discouragement, leading to despair, and we took the house off the market with the sole intention of just surviving the winter and trying again in the spring.

So here we are, almost March. I wouldn't quite call it spring here in Maine with several inches of snow on the ground, but it will come eventually. And it's deja vu.

Of course, there's another French phrase I run across in medical transcription - it's jamais vu. The opposite of deja vu, jamais vu means "never seen." Last year we never saw a person or family who went to the bank for a down payment. Last year we never saw someone in love with the house who could also afford it. Most importantly, last year we never saw Coastline Homes break ground for our new house.

Yes, I've had quite enough of deja vu for awhile. Bring on the jamais vu - and bonne chance to us!

Time Warp?

Does time really warp memory? Now that I'm 51 and counting, I wonder how many of my childhood memories are real and how many are embellished by time.

Memphis, my hometown, had snow yesterday. My sister and her family were so excited, as snow is a rare occurrence in Memphis. Then why do I remember many snows from my childhood? We have home movies of my sister and me having snowball fights and building snow forts. Did Memphis really have more frequent snows when we were growing up, or did Dad take the home movies of them because they were so rare?

My general feeling of snow in my childhood is that it was not frequent, but it was not rare, either. I didn't look on it as a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence; I expected it every once in awhile. My son-in-law, Chris, denigrates the idea that Memphis ever gets snow. I had to pull out pictures to prove it. Yes, we had snow. Plows - no. Snow - yes.

So I decided to do some Internet research. I can research a medical term with quick success, but trying to track down the snow history of Memphis was quite difficult. Everyone assumes when you ask for weather information that you want the forecast. Even typing in "history" gives me things like "This Day in Weather History," not at all the information I desire.

I did come up with the history of snow in Memphis on Christmas Day, however, from a study at Oak Ridge Laboratories in Tennessee. Here is what they said:

Records that go back to 1889 show that Memphis had a measurable amount of snow on Christmas only once in 107 years. That was in 1913 when 3.5 inches of snow fell on Christmas Day (1.4 inches was on the ground at 7:00 a.m. that day). Trace amounts (only a few flakes - not enough to measure), fell on seven occasions - 1914, 1918, 1926, 1948, 1975, 1980, and 1992.

There has been a few times when there was snow on the ground Christmas morning (from previous storms). The greatest was 1963 when 10 inches covered the city Christmas morning; 1962 had 2 inches on the ground, and there were patches of snow scattered around on Christmas morning in 1966.

Now this research only covers Christmas Day, not whole winters, which, of course, would have had more snow than this. However, the dates are significant. The 1960s. I consider this the decade of my childhood, basically when I was old enough to create memories, but before I was inducted into the semi-adult world of high school. So, yes, those home movies were not some technological manipulation of my Dad and his film splicer. Those were real snows and I was really enjoying them. My memory is vindicated.

And the walk home from school was long, too. So there.

As for my husband Ed, I'm not sure about his memory. When we shared our first Christmas together, we pulled out the stockings of our childhoods. The size of my stocking was generous, with a wide opening and wide foot, enough room to stuff whatever Santa had in mind. Ed's stocking was limp, skinny, with a hole at the top in which I could barely stick my small fist.

At the very beginning, Ed let me know what "Santa" should put in his stocking. Fruit and nuts. Besides the fact that such a Christmas offering would make me gag unless there was plentiful candy and other goodies accompanying it, I couldn't understand how Santa had given little Eddie his fruit and nut delicacies when he had to get them through that tiny opening in his stocking. I did not see how it was physically possible.

Then I learned more - Santa had not only brought him oranges and apples, but the oranges had always been navel oranges and they were GIANT. Huge, oversized, heavy, juicy navel oranges. Now, it was hard for me to stick a regular little orange in his pitiful stocking - but no way had a huge navel orange ever resided there. Couldn't happen, didn't happen. Physics or whatever science supervises that area of space and size would not have allowed it. I maybe could squeeze a couple of small apples and one small orange into it and that would be it. His stocking would then take on the appearance of an engorged snake who had just eaten several frogs which one could see as bulging lumps in his body.

To this day, Ed swears he got those giant navel oranges in his stocking every Christmas when he was growing up. He can't explain how he himself can't fit even one big orange in there today.

Next time you hear about the "magic of Christmas," don't scoff. If there can be snow in Memphis and giant oranges in Ed's skinny little stocking - anything can happen!

The Knowing

As I've mentioned before, I love the Serenity Prayer - to change the things you can, let go of the things you can't change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

That last part is frustrating. The knowing. As you know, I've had an undependable cable Internet connection for a month now. It would go in and out with no pattern and no predictability. Well, of course, I assumed it must be something I had done. I unplugged everything and plugged it back in. I made sure connections were tight and secure. I unplugged the wireless router and tried different cords. I had my son-in-law walk me through Mac network configurations. I called Matt constantly, begging for help.

Oh, I had already made an appointment with the cable provider, Adelphia, but that was a week away and I wanted it fixed NOW.

I couldn't even estimate how much time I spent trying to figure out things to experiment with. I unplugged the whole system and tried to move it to the exercise room and plug it in up there. I tried everything. Still, the Internet would come and go. Once the connection came back on immediately when I did some re-plugging, and I thought, All right! I fixed it! Then, of course, in a few minutes it was out again, so it was just coincidence.

I even went to Radio Shack and bought another modem, thinking maybe that would do it. Alas, Adelphia somehow knew I was trying to hook up an "unauthorized" modem, according to the message I got on the screen. I returned the modem.

Adelphia finally came yesterday. I was disheartened to see that I had my Internet connection when he got here. I was so afraid he would say, "Well, everything appears to be working; I'm leaving." But he checked the system out and found out that the cable had come loose from the pole outside. He spent about an hour here and fixed everything. Yay - I have reliable Internet again!

The frustrating part of it all was that I did not know if I had the power to change the situation or not. In the end, there was nothing I could have done, other than climb up the pole myself.
I spent a lot of time for nothing, all because I didn't know.

Some things we just know we can't change. I can't change Ed's aggravatingly slow energy level, I can't be assured the house will sell this spring, I can't go back and rewind my life and live it better, I can't be taller. No use worrying and fretting over that stuff. Some things we know good and well we can change, but for obscure reasons we haven't attempted the change. Other things are cloudy - do we have the power to change something or not? Might as well try.

I think that's one of the hardest parts of the Serenity Prayer. Knowing whether or not the energy and time you invest in an action can really effect change or not. So much of life, it seems to me, is operating blindly. Some of our greatest heroes in the past have lived and died without realizing the difference they made, whether their efforts were worth it, whether their lives made any difference. Years later, we realize they did make a difference. Even without that assurance, they did what they felt they had to do, whether it was compose music or lead a movement.

I guess that's just life. We have no guarantees, and sometimes we just don't know exactly what we have the capability of changing unless we try. Sometimes we are disappointed, and sometimes we are flat out astonished at the results.

Connections

Ed and I have been reading What the Bleep Do We Know? - and it's taking us a long time to get through it because it is so deep - and intriguing, as it ties in quantum physics with theology and philosophy and biology - a fascinating read.

One of the chapters in the book discusses one incredible organ - the brain. Here are some random facts:

• The brain is at least 1,000 times faster than the fastest supercomputer in the world.
• The brain contains as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way - about 100 billion.
• Number of synapses in cerebral cortex = 60 trillion.
• A sand-grain-sized piece of a brain contains 100,000 neurons and a billion synapses.
• The brain is always "on" - it never turns off or even rests throughout our entire life.
• The brain continually rewires itself throughout life.

It was the last statement that gave me pause. Here is their explanation:

A fundamental rule of neuroscience is that nerve cells that fire together, wire together. If you do something once, a loose connection of neurons will form a network in response, but if you don't repeat the behavior, it will not "carve a track" in the brain. When something is practiced over and over again, those nerve cells develop a stronger and stronger connection, and it gets easier and easier to fire that network.

If you keep hitting the repeat button in the neuronets, those habits become increasingly hardwired in the brain and are difficult to change. As a connection is used over and over, it gets stronger, better established, like forging a path through tall grass by walking it again and again. This can be advantageous - it's called learning - but it also can make it difficult to change an unwanted behavior pattern.

Luckily, there's a flip side: Nerve cells that don't fire together, no longer wire together. They lose their long-term relationship.

I found that quite interesting. It does explain a lot, doesn't it? It explains how habits are hard to break, but it also gives hope that once a habit is repeatedly overwritten, it will eventually lose its power. This is called "rewiring the brain."

I've been thinking about connections recently because my Internet connection - my connection to the world, basically - has been in and out, in and out, no pattern, no consistency, and this results in a highly frustrating situation. I may have the connection for 5 minutes or 5 hours, never knowing when I start typing if I will be able to finish the post.

I really miss that connection to the world. And it's more than just paying bills online, shopping online, or checking today's headlines and comics. It's the connection with people, friends and family, that I miss.

I even miss being able to look up a piece of trivia. Ed and I will have myriad discussions on countless subjects, and there will come a place in the conversation (or argument!) where it comes time to prove whether I'm right or he's right - then Google here I come. At other times, we are both trying to remember a name or fact, and neither one of our old brains can come up with it, so we look it up. Those of you who are our age remember having sets of encyclopedias in our houses, which, of course, were out of date the moment they were printed. But it was the only way we had to look up anything back then. Now encyclopedias come on a single disk and they are updated constantly. And this is in addition to all the free information you can get from the Internet itself.

I heard on the news recently that, contrary to popular belief, the Internet has not made people less social. (A bleak picture had been painted of lonely, isolated people surfing the Internet instead of having relationships in real life.) Indeed, real life has emerged within the technology. It has in fact given people a wider group of friends from whom we receive advice, to whom we give advice, whom we encourage and support, with whom we cry and laugh and emphathize. The world-wide technological connection has not "depersonalized" us; it has widened our connection.

Well, I'm nearing the end of the post and I see the little lights on my modem are still bright green, and I haven't witnessed the dreaded "lights out" syndrome yet. Praise be! I do so like the connection!

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

I played piano for a few years at the local retirement home. My specialties were songs from the '20s through the '50s, as they are songs that I personally love and that the old folks appreciated too.

One of my favorite songs to play was "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." I thought of that song this morning as I awoke in the wee hours of the morning: "Couldn't sleep, and wouldn't sleep..." as the song goes. So I got up, showered, made a cup of hot tea, and sat down to watch PBS and quilt. The song, as is the case for most of us, kept going through my head. I decided that is a description of my life. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.

I am fascinated by the news. Yet, each news spot bothers and bewilders me more. So many angry people in the world! So much hate and intolerance! It's hard to fathom in my relatively quiet life. I'm bewitched - mesmerized - by all the stories and personalities. Every time I pick up a People magazine, I am bewildered again and again - because I don't recognize half the names of supposedly "famous" people. Ah, the difficulties of growing old and being "out of the loop."

Well, I can say I'm "in the loop" with my new cutting edge iMac. Now if Adelphia cable will just get by my house to fix my Internet connection....

I just don't know when to quit....

Matt and Sarah came by tonight to pick up the old computer and, of course, he had to sit down and check up on how my new iMac was going. It was a surprise to me, but apparently I had several applications open. I thought all I had to do was to click the red button in the corner and that was that. Apparently not. Matt patiently explained to me what the significance of open applications was and how to officially "quit" them, as he closed them one by one. All those programs were open yet not being used, taking memory and whatever else from my computer and not giving back anything in return.

Well, I guess I have the same problem in life. I don't know when to quit, don't know how to quit, and even worse, vacillate on whether I should quit. I'm not talking my job here, although I did harbor thoughts about that earlier this year. I'm talking about projects.

As I've said before, I'm the world's worst creator of UFOs (unfinished objects). I get great ideas and spurts of energy and go at something full force, but I soon put it away to start a new project. I don't "quit" - I just postpone. The project is still there, in my mind, and probably on a to-do list somewhere. UFOs like this can drain one's life force pretty quickly. I can name right now at least 4 projects that I have put away for "later" - and later never comes. Sometimes I just need to teach myself to give up, say, "OK, this is not apparently a priority in my life, nor is it very interesting at the moment. Maybe it's time to just let it go. Give it away. Use the materials for something else. Anything but let it sit in the corner or drawer, with my knowing full well I will never get around to completing it." There's a time for planning, a time for completion, and a time for outright burial. There's a sadness in quitting, but a release as well, I would imagine. I'll have to try it sometime. Works great on the iMac.

Going...going...

Now that I'm getting acclimated to my new iMac, I'm taking some time to reconstruct all my bookmarks for Internet sites. As I looked up my old high school, East High in Memphis, I stopped long enough to peruse the news of my class of 1972. I do believe a fourth of my class has died.

Perhaps I'm exaggerating, but there are certainly a lot of "see obituary" comments on the list of alumni. Ed, who is 8 years older than me, has always been amazed at how many of my classmates have passed away. He says, "Your class has more people dead than my class, and my class went to Vietnam!"

I would expect to see a lot of deaths if I were much older. But this can get depressing. Our class of 1972 is dwindling. We've had murders and suicides and accidents. We've had a lot of cancers. I can't help but think of all those lives cut short, especially my friend Bernie. And here I sit, relatively healthy and happy and so blessed.

For the first time, I scrolled through the 25th reunion pictures, grainy though they were. They weren't captioned, and even though the participants had name tags on, the pictures were never close enough to read them. I recognized for sure about 3 people. Of course, the 25th reunion was in 1997, and since then we've had a few more deaths. I didn't attend that reunion, as the trip from Maine was too much for me to handle the year after we moved up here, financially and job-wise. Maybe I'll make the next one. I'd better at least try, assuming I'm still around.

I do notice, though, that this focus I have on death has accelerated since I turned 50. Until I reviewed the alumnae list today, I had forgotten that there had been so many deaths of people my age. Usually in life, you think, "That's not fair!" when you get the short end of the stick. Yet, you can have the long end of the stick, look around, and still say, "That's not fair!"

"Why me?" doesn't always have to be said with resentment. Sometimes I look at my family, the love that surrounds me, the forgiveness and encouragement that envelop me, and sigh, "Why me?" Then my next thought is to live in the moment, to reach my goals, to hug my spouse and kids and grandkids, to call my mom and sister, and to live the life I've been given, all the while remembering that others were not so fortunate.

Our paths diverged from the moment of graduation, but never so much as when we have divided ourselves into those living here and those living "beyond." God bless the class of 1972.

Technical experiment

Now I'm testing a system whereby I create my post in a journal software program and publish it to the site. If all goes well, this will be posted to my blog. Then I can chalk up another success for the ole gray brain cells! If not, it's back to the drawing board.

Head trip

Now that I am back to semi-normal life with a new iMac computer, I have to pause to ponder some things. Specifically I wonder if there is only so much a 51-year-old brain can absorb without self-destructing.

I know they say that one way to keep a brain young and productive is to keep it active. Learn new ways of doing things (such as brushing your teeth with the toothbrush in your non-dominant hand). Memorize lists. Do crossword puzzles. Read. All these lifestyle changes are supposed to ward off dementia. I always figured that, as a medical transcriptionist, I learn enough new facts every day to fulfill my brain activity obligations.

Now, however, I find myself in an information jungle, and I only hope I am up to the task. In the first place, at work I am learning to transcribe in EAR, Electronic Ambulatory Record, new software our hospital is using for the medical office transcription. It is not well written. In fact, it is very poorly written, and I don't even need Matt's professional opinion on that - It's inept and clumsy and it reeks of inefficiency and bugs. It's my job to learn it, though, so I am. Score one more activity for my brain.

Also in the last couple of months, I have been studying for the Certified Medical Transcripionist exam. Talk about harrowing - I do believe the American Association for Medical Transcription misunderstood my goal and thought I wanted to become a physician. Some of this information is pre-med level. The fact that I won't get a pay raise if I get certified will not deter me, however. I'm determined to learn this stuff one way or another. Score two for the brain.

And now I am maneuvering my way around a Mac computer. That's a whole new world in itself. Fortunately, I have my son and son-in-law to help me, but in the end, it's my half-century-old brain that has to absorb and remember the information. (The first piece of information that was hard to absorb was the fact that I have over 14,000 photos. And Caroline and Charlotte are still under 3 years old? Wow!)

Can I really learn as well at 51 as I did when I was in high school or college? Apparently it's possible. Here's some food for thought from Psychology Today:

Time To Remember: Elderly people are likely to forget anything--from where they left their house keys to where they live.

That doesn't mean they have Alzheimer's disease. Studies by University of Colorado psychologists Matthew Sharps and Eugene Gollin show that, given time, older people can remember as much as college students do (Journal of Gerontology, Vol. 42, pp. 336-344).

"You see deficits in the aging mind, but these differences may not be very important," Sharps says. "How important to everyday life is the ability to do everything fast?"

In the first test, the researchers showed a black-and-white map of a room containing 40 common objects to 28 retired people aged 65 to 87. When later asked to recall where the objects were located on the map, the elderly recalled only a few. However, when they repeated the test in an actual room using the same objects, their recall improved-- to 25 objects or more.

By comparison, college students scored higher on the map test, but did no better than the elderly did in the room exercise.

In another test, elderly and young people viewed pairs of geometric figures presented from different perspectives. The task for both groups was to rotate these images in their minds to see if they were the same. Under time pressure, Sharps says, the elderly performed "horrendously." Without the stopwatch, however, the elderly did just as well as the college students did.

I have learned from this that I should have faith in my old brain to still function at a high level. I also learned to remove the "stopwatch" technique and allow myself more time to process all this new information. Now I need to ask Matt why my blog formatting options on the Mac have suddenly been drastically reduced from what they were on the PC. Hmmm... time for more new information!

Harmony

A few years ago, someone created a thread on one of my MT sites about favorite words. Medical transcriptionists in general love words, love spelling them, love pronouncing them and hearing them, love the history of words, and love how the words are placed together to form ideas.

Some words are just beautiful to my ears. Harmony is one of those words. Of course, here in the North they pronounce it "hahmony" which translates to "hominy" which leads to "grits." But, of course, I digress.

I grew up loving music, and being the daughter of a choir director, harmony was in my blood. Singing a solo is very enjoyable, but there is something fulfilling about blending my voice with another voice in a duet, and trios and quartets more so. Then you get to the full choir. If it's one of those days where everyone's voice is in good shape and no one is confused about what their correct notes are, the effect is magical. The sound soars across the sanctuary like a magnificent wave. The choir can feel the energy. The right song with the right harmony can send chills up the spines of the listeners.

It's a sign of getting older: You don't really appreciate the music of the younger generation.
There is some modern music that I like all right, but on the whole, I miss the harmony, the blend. The great hymns of the church provide that harmony "fix" for me.

I like to say sometimes that I have sung with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It's true - at least it's true when I sing along to their CD, which I can't help but doing. I work on Sundays now, and haven't been to church in ages. I miss singing with a choir. To take various voices of various people of various ages and talent and experience - and to combine them into one harmonious whole - it's a feeling like none other. It's OK to hear a choir, it's OK to hear a CD of a choir - but the real joy is being in a choir (and it helps to have a great director!).

Ed learned in seminary that the more hymns a congregations sings, the better, because it is a proven fact that the singing forces the congregation to breathe together, and those breaths in unison have a way of uniting the group, making them more receptive to the sermon and prayers and everything else that constitutes a church service. Maybe that's another benefit of being in a choir.

Of course, most congregational music is sung "in unison," which means everyone is singing the same melody and there is no harmony. That has its own value, providing a strength and force of every voice pulling together. And there is a place for unison.

But there is also a time for harmony - a time when we are a group not trying to sound as one voice, but as a blend of very different voices, each of us bringing our share.

I wish society as a whole could nurture that feeling of harmony - balance - beauty. When we all work together for a common goal, each lending our little voice (which is always unique, of course) to the other voices, hitting those perfect notes, that perfect blend. When that happens, it's pure heaven.

All is not lost, but....

The good news is: I have my repaired computer back. The bad news is: There is just data and Windows, no programs. The good news is: There is some data that managed to be retrieved. The bad news is: I can't find my Quicken CD to load in order to access my financial data and update it. The good news is: Most of my pictures were retrieved. The bad news is: I can't get an internet connection working, so the computer's value to me right now is just as a storage facility.

So here I am blogging on my work computer once more.

I am a record keeper. I get it from my dad, who kept records of every bill he ever paid, I think. I remember that every once in awhile, just for kicks, he would dig in some files and look up his utility bill from 15 years ago. He wrote dates in his hymnal by each hymn to record when the hymn was used (so he didn't repeat them too often; he was a choir director).

For several years, I kept a diary of sorts. After we moved to Maine, the habit dwindled away, mainly because I found myself writing the same boring schedule ("I worked today."). When Ed was an active pastor in Tennessee, and I didn't have a job except that of pastor's wife, my diaries were full of interesting things. I recorded everything about each church service, the sermon topic, the choir's music, general attendance at each church, etc. I wrote down every time we ate out, every night we went to a high school football game, what book I was reading, how much I exercised, my attempts at making homemade bread, what TV shows or movies we were watching. I wrote diligently about our vacation trips. I recorded car repairs, errands, things the kids were doing. I mentioned our visits to parishioners' homes.

Life was certainly full of things to record back then. The kids were still at home, which made a difference. I wrote letters to Rachel and Matt until they turned 18 years old, then had them bound as my gift to them. So back then, I was still writing down things for posterity.

I mention all this because, of all my Kodak digital pictures that could be salvaged off my computer, there is a month or so missing. August 2004. Ordinarily, if you asked me what I was doing in August 2004, I wouldn't know and wouldn't care. But now that August 2004 pictorial documentation is missing, I'm obsessed with what I did in August 2004.

My family can attest that I have a passion for photography. Rachel says I've taken more pictures of Caroline in one year than I took of Rachel in her whole life. The guy who restored my computer was amazed at the quantity of pictures on there. I guess, then, instead of documenting my life with journals now, I am documenting my life in pictures.

The pictures come in handy, too. I once had an disagreement with Ed over whether our couch had ever been in the front parlor. He said it hadn't, and I knew it had. So I dug through my pictures and triumphantly produced the evidence - there it was in the front parlor, sitting by the bow windows. After the picture proved my point, Ed did vaguely remember how our dog Rusty used to jump on the couch to look out those windows at the cats.

It's just this August 2004 business. My lost month. It's just a few days, yet it is bugging me, because now I know I don't know. Before last night, I didn't know I didn't know, but now I do. (I sound like politician-speak.)

So I've retrieved most of my photos, thank goodness, but I'm still without a working computer, at least one that does me any good, until my new Mac comes.

The good news is: I'm getting a Mac!

Personalizing death

When you get past 50 years old, thoughts of death are much more prevalent - not just of our own mortality, but also those we know and love. I know for my mom and her friends, attending funerals is almost a full-time job these days. When we were members of the Episcopal church, they told us the reason their funeral services were so similar was that death is the great equalizer. Whether king or pauper, each would receive basically the same funeral.

Of course, when it comes to obituaries, that theory does not hold. Your obituary usually is in direct correlation to how famous you were in life. And if you have the misfortune to die the same day a really famous person dies, I guess your death would be quite overshadowed.

I spent yesterday afternoon, still sans computer, watching a seminar on Lincoln, one of my favorite subjects. Specifically, the participants were lecturing on his assassination. I started wondering who else died on April 15, 1865. They are long forgotten, I suppose, and the date lives on primarily as the day Lincoln died.

Up here in Maine, I enjoy reading the obituaries. In Memphis, my hometown, the city is too large to have detailed obituaries (unless you're famous, of course), so the facts are sparse and the life (many times the remarkable life) is reduced to some dates, a place of employment, principal survivors, and funeral arrangements. When my grandfather died in Memphis, I can remember going with my sister to the newspaper, asking for a longer obituary for him, hopefully with a photo - something to intimate his unique life journey. They acquiesced, and ended up printing a great article about Paw-Paw's days as a radio pioneer and his other accomplishments.

Here in Ellsworth, a town of about 5000 in the winter, The Ellsworth American goes whole hog on obits. The local paper knows how to publish a life story. These stories were written by loved ones and are in amazing detail. The people mentioned here have lived, for the most part, ordinary lives - but they did live and love and had passions and interests and did make their mark on the world.

An obit from December especially struck me. For one thing, it was her age - 53. It says she died of cancer. I like it when they print the cause of death in this case. I am annoyed when a relatively young person dies and the obit says, "died unexpectedly..." Of what? I guess it's none of my business, but it leaves a hole in the story. For each obit is a story.

The 53-year-old, though, died of cancer. Here are some of the things said about her:

Janice was a vibrant and beautiful woman who lived her life with audacious courage and no small amount of wit and wisdom. Loved by many, Janice explored many areas. She could play clarinet, banjo, bongo drums and loved to dance. She loved music from doo-wop to classical. Janice also abbled in poetry and short stories. She did many kind of handiwork, including basketry. Janice was an accomplished decorator and created beautiful flower arrangements...

What a remarkable and talented person! I wish I had known her.

The center of her life was her soul-mate husband, Bucky, her children, and her extended family. The sanctuary for the family was her very unique and lovely home. There was always something wonderful cooking and several projects underway at Janice's house. Friends were welcomed and they came frequently, and never left emptyhanded. Generosity was a value that Janice lived by. She listened, offered advice, and provided any support available to her for a friend in need including money, transportation, lodging, clothes, jewelry, food, hugs, tears and laughter. Janice loved people and was geninely interested in the people she met. She was guileless and trusting and offered assistance whenever she saw an opening.

I read that and think of the hole there must be in the lives of those who had loved her.

She attended many births both in the family and with friends. New life was as high a priority for her as living life to the fullest. Janice held life as a whirlwind adventure and she never wasted a moment. She looked and leaped for all that caught her attention.

An amazing woman, wouldn't you say? It goes on to say that in the last two years, the only regret voiced through her surgeries and cancer treatments was the fact that she wouldn't be able to give her children and grandchildren the beautiful Christmas she wanted them to have. So the obit states at the end that in lieu of flowers, those wishing to can make a contribution to a fund to provide her children and grandchildren with a beautiful Christmas, Janice's last wish.

After I initially read that obit, I cut it out of the paper. Every time I read it, I shed a few tears. Without this full, personal obituary, I never would have known the name of Janice Louise Hastings Maddocks, for it, like other "ordinary" people, would have been relegated to a small paragraph which would not have done justice to her "extraordinary" life.

So in a sense, the local Ellsworth paper DOES adhere to the theory that death is the great equalizer. Those who are NOT famous or infamous are given the same treatment (in this case, a whole column from top to bottom of the page, with photo) as others. I like that.

Clutter revisited

I am still not the owner of a working computer, but am borrowing one in order to post.

By accident (serendipity!) today I came across an article online called "Clutter-Clearing and Your Authentic Self" by Stephanie Roberts. With such an intriguing title, it had to be interesting. Clutter is one of my visible weaknesses. (As an aside, I want to quote another article, specifically about cluttered desks: "Northeasterners are more organized than their Western, Central and Southern colleagues." I guess my desk et. al. was never told we had moved from Tennessee to Maine.)

The article by Roberts focuses on feng shui, which I know little about, but this part speaks to me so clearly that I must quote it:

Have you ever felt so discouraged, your life so out-of-control, the universe so unresponsive to your needs and desires, that you couldn't help it: you just had to clean up? By paying attention to these impulses we recognize the deep connection between our personal environment and our innermost selves. It's as though by shifting the arrangement of our belongings we hope to rearrange the molecules of our emotional lives as well.

Feng shui teaches us that our spaces both reflect and affect our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. When our homes become cluttered and disordered, other aspects of our lives tend to feel gridlocked as well. It's a chicken-and-egg kind of situation. Not only does a cluttered home reflect a distracted and cluttered mind, it also makes it hard to focus and think clearly. It gets easier and easier to stop making the item-by-item decisions that could put you back in control of the mess
and help you to feel more in control of your life.

Eventually, we give up. The task seems overwhelming, and the clutter is so pervasive that we can't figure out where to begin. We slog through our days thinking "someday when I have the time I've got to clean this up." Clutter clearing becomes an abstract goal that awaits a mythical future time when our calendars will be free of obligations, we will awaken one weekend morning well-rested and energized, and mysteriously through some unseen grace we will have acquired the focused clarity and enthusiasm that will finally inspire us to dive in and get it done. We wait for the moment to be right before we begin, so beginning never happens.

We're approaching the clutter challenge backwards when we think this way. Regaining a sense of clarity and order is more easily achieved by putting our space in order than by trying to order and control our thoughts in a disorganized space.

Clutter saps your energy and erodes your spirit. Clutter makes it difficult to get things done, enjoy peace and quiet, or spend time the way you really want to. It adds to your stress, slows you down and drains your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual strength. Clutter is disempowering.

The words saps and drains are only too well known to our generation. Does the expression "It sucks the life out of you" have meaning in your life, too? Energy is as precious a gift as time to us. For what is time without the energy to make use of it?

We have an effect on our environment, and it has its effect on us. I can read the statistics that state those who have a messy desk are more likely to make big money, and the messier the desk, the greater the genius. I am not a genius, however, and so far I don't see that a messy environment has afforded me any benefits.

My rationale is that I have too many interests, the accoutrements of which account for a majority of my clutter. My hobbies of piano and harp force me to acquire large piles of music.
My hobbies of quilting and sewing and cross-stitch similarly require accumulations of books, fabric, and other accessories. I receive several magazine subscriptions which I wish to save for other family members to read, so they have to sit somewhere. The newspaper, coupons to clip, bills to pay, papers to file - all pile up. And at my age, if I file it somewhere or "hide" it, I will definitely forget about its existence. "Things to do are things in view." That's my personal motto.

On top of all that, I am studying for the Certified Medical Transcriptionist exam, so I have that material sitting in a few handy places.

Oh, yes, I have rationales, but I have to cut through them because "it just ain't workin' for me."

The Roberts article goes on to talk about clutter in this way:

Opening the dictionary we see that "clutter" derives from the Old English word "clott", which means: "to cause to become blocked or obscured." Like a blood clot blocking circulation in our veins, clutter prevents energy from circulating through our homes and our lives.

That's pretty clear, and as a medical analogy, exceptionally understandable to me.

Well, it's one thing to work on while my computer is gone....

Prevention

"It's better to be safe than sorry." "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." How many times I have heard those expressions! Well, this week I was privileged to experience their wisdom for myself.

Part of the journey to simplicity, I have learned, is to de-stress your life as much as possible. Part of that involves prevention.

Prevention in itself can be stressful. It takes time and energy and probably money (doesn't everything important?). But the minor stress you experience in your act at prevention does not compare to the major stress you experience when the worst comes to the surface.

In my case, "worst" means a crashed computer.

Oh, there's a tiny glimmer of hope. (I haven't heard back yet from Jasper, the computer guru.) But I'm a realist at heart. The prognosis is not good for retrieving any kind of data from my computer.

I was complacent because I had Raid, the extra hard drive which was supposed to mirror the regular hard drive. But alas, nothing is ever guaranteed, and Raid failed along with its mirror image, and the first thought that went through my mind when I saw the dreaded screen which had the word FAILED in it a few times, was, "Oh no! I haven't backed up my pictures to CD since the middle of 2004!"

I have learned a valuable lesson. If I take a few minutes to back up data, I'll probably reap the benefits for less stress in the future. And that sounds like simplicity to me.

Young and Old

Baby Charlotte had a stressful first Christmas. She tested positive for RSV and spent Christmas night and today in the hospital. As a medical transcriptionist by trade, I am always ready to research information on anything medical, so I did some searches on the Internet about RSV. Doctors like to monitor RSV in infants because it can so often turn into pneumonia, which, of course, can be fatal at such a young age.

Charlotte only has one risk factor - that of her age (6 weeks). At a birth weight of 10-1/2 pounds, she definitely was not premature, nor did she have any other risk factors on the list. Only her neonate status.

I found it interesting that the very young are at risk for RSV - and the very old.

People my age are called the Sandwich Generation. Many of us are caring for children still at home and at the same time, having to care for aging parents. Both groups rely on us to be there, demanding our attention, energy, concern, money, and love.

Today I had to work, although it was understandably very hard to focus, as Charlott'e condition was very much on my mind. I transcribed a report of a 91-year-old woman. They admitted her to the hospital with the symptoms of pneumonia, to monitor her and try to catch the disease with antibiotics. As I listened to her diagnoses and plans for treatment, I was thinking about this old lady and young Charlotte, both having to be hospitalized for a respiratory illness because their health risk factors make them vulnerable.

Viruses that might visit the healthy adult population as a minor inconvenience suddenly become extremely dangerous when they fall into the very young and very old. Both the very young, and frequently the very old, are also totally dependent on others for their care, what the medical community calls their "activities of daily living" (bathing, dressing, toileting, etc.) So many of Hurricane Katrina's victims were poor, but the very old and very young - those who were dependent on others for their very lives - shouldered the most burden.

I once for fun rewrote all the Christmas carols from the viewpoint of an old man. The most provocative one, I think, was The Little Drummer Boy. In my version, the old man is looking at the Baby Jesus and remarks, "He has no teeth like me; he has no hair like me." Babies and old folks might have more in common than we realize!

It's the cycle of life. What goes around comes around. The alpha and omega. We are born dependent and we so often die dependent. And I guess it's just as frustrating for the baby as for the old person. It is hard to be so vulnerable, our very lives dependent on others' responsible (or irresponsible) natures. At these two extreme stages of life, some are blessed to have that support in place. Others, unfortunately, are not.

Ed, when he was a pastor, once visited the beside of a dying woman. He told me she was ready to go, and he knew that because she was in the fetal position. A fetal position - ready to leave the world she knew and be born again into another. From womb, back to womb.

I have heard it said that every society will be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. I think as individuals and as a society we need to be reminded every so often who fits in the "risk category" for that label and act accordingly.

Charlotte came home from the hospital this evening. I don't know what will happen to the 91-year-old lady. But she is in my heart as well.

Under the microscope

I had another opportunity to fool around with Photoshop, the editing software, this week. I was uploading another photo of myself to an MT site, and all of a sudden, my curiosity was piqued and I performed the greatest of fear feats, more horrible than King Kong, more scary than Fear Factor. I decided to use the microscope tool and zone in on my face.

Awash with the feeling that I definitely should not be doing it, I zoomed in on a pink spot I considered a defect. Then I zoomed a little more. Anyone with photo editing experience can deduce what I saw next. I saw no defect. I saw no skin, no face, no follicles, no cells. All I saw were pixels. Various color pixels. Unrecognizable pixels. Meaningless pixels.

Where was the defect? I even got geographically lost on my face. I couldn't even remember exactly where I was in the picture. My cheek? My chin? My forehead? Good grief!

I reversed the microscope and zoomed back out, then out some more. Ah, there I was! It was my face! With the defect! Clear as day!

I repeated the steps, zooming in, zooming out. The difference was amazing. The entire picture was made up of pixels (thousands? millions?) which, standing alone, had no identity and no meaning. But together, they made up my face.

It seemed kind of backwards, really. Usually the closer in you get to something, the larger the defect looms. Instead, on closer microscopic-like inspection, defect had virtually disappeared.

One of Ed's sermon involved a cross-stitch picture I had made (and never had framed). He showed the congregation the back of the picture. It was a mess of tangled threads and colors that twisted and criss-crossed with pieces of thread hanging off where they were cut. It was basically unrecognizable as a picture. He would say, "That's what our lives look like to us."
Then he turned the picture over and showed the congregation the front - a perfect, well-stitched picture. Then he would say, "And that's what our lives look like to God."

I am always brought to a new level in thinking when something like this happens. When you look at yourself (and humanity) through God's eyes, you see the recognizable picture. And somehow, the defects recede and you focus on the beauty of the picture. It's my wish for all of us this year.

Merry Christmas!

Light a candle

Every once in awhile in my reading I will come across an interesting tidbit that I feel led to share with others. In the latest issue of Oxygen, there is an article called "Your Key to Success in Life." One of those keys, the article maintains, is resiliency - the ability to bounce back after life knocks you down. By the time you are my age, you've had your share of those situations. In a perfect world, age brings wisdom, but not always, so I am always anxious to hear others' experiences about their ability to transcend failure and disappointment.

The woman quoted in this article is Dr. Carol Orsborn, speaker and author. Here's her take on not letting negative emotions defeat you: "It's important to feel your emotions, but sometimes when you're in a crisis situation you have to be able to set them aside momentarily," she says.

Admit to yourself how big the emotional wound is and buy a candle that matches how upset you are. Some upsets are little and require a birthday candle. Other upsets are worth bigger candles, which you can burn for an hour a night. As long as the candle burns, allow yourself to feel your emotions. When the candle burns out, it's time to move on.

I was impressed with this idea. So simple, yet potentially so effective.

When Ed was going to AA and getting sober, he was frequently warned about the "pity pot." "Get off the pity pot," they would say at meetings when a member would just have depressing and discouraging things to say and would not come out of a funk. My friend Bernie, before she died when she was in the last stages of hepatitis C, would ask her husband permission for a few minutes to complain, then it was over with and she resumed her usual positive attitude.

I really like the candle idea. It forces us to evaluate exactly how deep the hurt/offense/failure is (we usually tend to overestimate this), and it gives us a tool to allow ourselves to feel hurt and sorry for ourselves, but at the same time, allows us to move on with our life in a positive and productive way. Acknowledgement of the hurt, but not defeat - relinquishing the pity pot to its proper place. I thought that was interesting enough to share.

I Want That!

There's a TV show on the Home and Garden Television channel called "I Want That!" One of their ads for the show (I'm paraphrasing here) announced that the products featured on that show were things that yesterday you didn't know existed but today you just have to own. That's not the exact wording, but you get the gist. It sounds like a situation where you aren't thinking about cake, don't care about cake particularly, but you see a photo of a cake on the front of a magazine and suddenly you want cake. If you have had cake before, this one promises to be more delicious than anything you've ever tasted. If you have never had cake before, well, then you deserve some cake, now that you see it and have awakened to what you have been missing. Oh, yes, the marketing teams have done their research.

I've watched the show a couple of times, and it is truly amazing the inventions they are creating these days. I can understand how the marketing executives came up with that catchy title. I can imagine viewers watching the program, saying, "Hey! That looks handy!" "Such a great idea!" "I could really use that!" and finally, of course, "I need that!" No matter that I have lived 51 years very nicely without "that," thank you very much. All of a sudden it is a priority. The "want" list gets smaller as we transfer items over to the "need" list.

Recently I was out with Ed running errands, and I suddenly realized I had left the cell phone at home. Horrors! I was actually going to be away from the house without the cell phone! I could not be contacted! No matter that we had an answering machine at home to take messages - I had a few seconds of panic anyway. Then Ed, the ever practical Ed, turned to me and said, "A few years ago you didn't even have a cell phone. You got along wonderfully without it. You could actually drive locally without having to be available to someone who wanted to talk to you." And then Ed with a gasp, eyes wide, said sarcastically, "And you actually survived!"

I called Mother last night and she said Matt had called her on his cell phone while he was riding in his car (just the passenger; not driving). In the ensuing conversation, she talked about her amazement that someone could call from his car. We talked about the people in her generation (she is 82 years old) and all the technological changes they have experienced in their lifetimes.

"I Want That" certainly understands this. According to the show's web site, they "...showcase innovations for the home that are so new they almost haven't happened yet." And with each new technological advancement, whatever you own has become obsolete. Haven't you heard? They are building bigger, better, more complicated, more intriguing, more powerful things than whatever you have now. Don't you want to be on the cutting edge of invention? Don't you want to be the envy of all your friends? Don't you want to be the first on the block to own one?

I started thinking about how many things our generation owns that we consider necessities - the very things that in previous generations were things that were luxuries - or things that had never even been imagined yet, even in their wildest dreams.

A friend of ours is trying to sell her house. It is a modest one, in downtown Ellsworth. It looks like a good price and is in a good neighborhood. She confessed to me why she thinks it hasn't sold. "It has only one bathroom," she stated sadly. One bathroom! I grew up in a house with 3 other people and we all shared one bathroom and managed fine. Now it's a necessity, even in modest homes, to have at least 1-1/2 bathrooms, preferably 2. This big house of ours has 2-1/2 baths. I imagine there are some families who won't even consider a house with less than 3 bathrooms.

I'm not trying to judge what is necessity and what is luxury for everyone. I wouldn't presume to. But it is helpful sometimes to stop and think just what is considered a necessity in our lives and why. Some inventions in my lifetime, like seat belts and child car seats, are truly for society's welfare. Others, though, seem to be just one more way for me to throw away money in that elusive search for contentment and fulfillment.

Watch out, Seiko

It appears that a lot of folks have the same reaction to the latest round of Seiko watch ads that I have had. Disbelief. It's one of those times you just have to shake your head, because there's nothing that can be said. Nonetheless, I will try to say it anyway.

For the uninitiated, Seiko's latest commercials state a number of "facts." These "facts" rotate depending on the commercial (in print and TV) but they state things like this:

It's not your car. It's not your music. It's not your favorite color. It's not your neighborhood. It's not your perfume. It's your watch that tells the most about who you are.

Now, during the Christmas season, I expect to be inundated with senseless, moronic ads that try to entice the consumer by playing on greed, envy, lust, power - you name it. You have to admit, though, this is a new low.

I've talked a lot about Identity in this blog, and I can guarantee you it isn't revealed by the watch you wear. I'm sure most people know this, but Seiko is apparently trying to convince us otherwise. Or maybe they're pushing the envelope of advertising nonsense for the publicity.

Martin Marty of The Christian Century writes, "The most pathetic in a field rich in pathos is the Seiko ad pronouncing, 'It's not your shoes. It's not your car. It's not your music. It's your watch that tells most about who you are.'" There seem to be many bloggers and others posting on the Internet who are lambasting this senseless ad.

Of course, my background is in the church, and the Bible verse that came immediately to my mind during this ad was, "They will know you...by your love." But I guess that wouldn't sell jewelry.

Ah, the magic....

Not of Christmas ---- of Photoshop!

The family got together recently to take our annual family Christmas picture. This is a major feat, and the difficulty is compounded with every new individual in the photo. It's one more person who needs to have his/her eyes open, pleasant expression, hair in place, and all the other requirements of a decent family Christmas picture.

Now notice the picture to the left. Something is obviously awry.
I have my back to the camera, Ed is apparently creating mischief, Matt is either attacking or saving Sarah. The people on the couch are even worse! Is everyone trying to sabotage the photo I work so hard to create?

No, this is our "stupid" picture. It has been our tradition that after taking about 15-20 photos, for the final photo we are encouraged to assume "stupid" expressions and "stupid" positions for the "stupid" picture. It is the last photo of what is usually a lengthy and grueling photo shoot, and all involved are encouraged to let off some steam at having been made to sit for a long period of time with smiles on their faces.

Even in the "stupid" picture, you can see there is work to be done in the background. There are shadows behind the people standing up, a key rack on the wall and a framed picture that could be erased. Those (and other minor irregularities) were in the official photo, too. Not any more! Thanks to Matt, the geek king, I have learned how to use Photoshop and get rid of pesky things like pimples and flyaway hair (the flyaway part, not the hair, although I can do that, too). I can maneuver buttonholes, beards and bra straps. I can even add teeth! Hoo boy! I am invincible!

Seriously, though, my newly acquired skill did make me stop and think about the validity of this fact: We hear so often that the aging American woman cannot look at the models and actresses in magazines without thinking, "Why can't I look that good?" Well, heck, if I can do this minimal photo manipulation with Photoshop, I have to remember what the professionals can do with their editing software. The women you see in their photos don't even exist - at least not in that perfect form. I read once that those editors routinely enlarge the pupils of the models, creating a more "attractive" look. (And I thought inserting a tooth was the epitome of expertise!)

Just a reminder to all the aging women out there: Next time you see a gorgeous, perfect model in a magazine, say to yourself one word (and it helps if you do it with a moderate smirk) -
PHOTOSHOP.

So this is love?

Honestly, very little surprises me anymore. I was reading a magazine the other day and came upon a full-page ad. On the top of the page was this message:

What extraordinary love looks like.

For the first second of seeing the ad, that phrase was all I had noticed. Extraordinary love? What would you expect to see after that phrase? A photo of Mother Teresa ministering to the dying? A parent donating one of their children's organs? A little kid collecting thousands of stuffed animals for charity? Jimmy Carter building a Habitat for Humanity house? An old woman taking gentle care of a spouse with Alzheimer's? How about a newborn in its mother's arms? Maybe, because it's Christmas, a manger scene?

Well, if you guessed any of the above you guessed wrong. Under that phrase there was a huge color photograph of 3 Cartier rings dripping with diamonds.

Christmas seems to bring out the worst and the best of us all at the same time. We have enough problems at this time of year equating love with material things. Extraordinary love, indeed! Shame on you, Cartier!

Betrayed!!!

What's the closest relationship we have in this life? The one that makes us vulnerable, scared, surprised, aggravated, disappointed, ecstatic, or sad?

Yes, we have such a close relationship with our parents. Definitely our siblings. Also, our kids. And certainly, our spouses/partners.

What happens when we feel the most awful emotion of betrayal? The closer the relationship, the worse it is. Our vulnerability has been breached. Our love has been tested. We are innocent, we tell you, innocent!

Indeed, sometimes we are, and don't deserve betrayal. Yet sometimes our actions have instigated it and deep down we realize that this is true.

But most of the relationships above are limited. We will undoubtedly live part of our lives without one or the other. There is one relationship, though, that we are stuck with. Permanently, at least as long as this fleeting life can be called permanent - kind of an oxymoron, I know. At any rate, I think in your 40s and 50s you have to come to terms with this relationship, step back, observe, and - yes - eventually feel betrayed. The relationship I am talking about is the one between us and our bodies.

Most of us are ambling along in life just great, feeling wonderful, young, carefree - until one day we start realizing that we are on the downhill slope. We are slowly deteriorating. It certainly does not happen overnight. But it happens. And I, for one, don't like it.

Hey, Body, I thought we had a fairly good relationship! We've been through a lot, but come through OK, haven't we? In one piece? Not the worse for wear? We're in this together, Body. We're all we've got, and our goal is to live long and healthy, right? So what's this about cropping up with a thyroid nodule, hmmm? What's this about a bone scan that shows that my spine is weakening year by year? What's this about fat and wrinkles and muscle cramps and fatigue and gravitational droop and poor eyesight and decreased hearing and gray hair? What's that all about?

Betrayal! I shouted. How could you do this to me, after all I've done for you?

Oh yes, I was furious. I had every right to be! Then I stepped back and thought a minute and tried to observe my body's point of view. (I guess I had an "out-of-body experience.") What have I done for my body to turn on me? OK, I realize some of this is just the natural cycle of aging. As in any relationship, both sides grow and change and these things happen. But I am not innocent. Oh, no, after the things I have done (and not done), I can't weep innocently. I know what I have contributed to the breakdown of this relationship. I knew exactly what had been going wrong all those years. The ice cream and Cokes. The on-and-off exercise. The job of sitting all day. The face creams I bought but rarely used. The sunscreen I forgot to put on. The sleep I missed. The stress I did not alleviate.

Maybe it is really I who have betrayed my body. And now it's payback time.

It's a shame that the closest relationship of all has to ensure such betrayal - on both sides. My part in the betrayal especially hurts because, as most of us, I have always been blessed with no diseases and good health. And I have squandered many years of it, taking it for granted.

May we all give ourselves the perfect gift this Christmas season. Peace with our body, and a commitment to be "faithful" to it for as long as we are "together."

Sorry about that, Body. You deserve better.