Last Clue

Thanks Amy and Bridgette for your guesses. Amy - you had a good guess with it starting with Sc - and Bridgette you had an 8 letter word which is also close.

I'll give you three clues actually.

#1 It has 9 letters
#2 It starts with Sc
#3 It is NOT plural

Ask your class again Bridgette - good job! :)

I'll tell you tomorrow if you haven't already guessed it!

A Clue

Good guess Amy! But not correct - but honestly, a VERY good guess!

Here's a clue: It starts with the letter S.

Keep guessing my friends - it's pretty cool when you find out what it is. :)

A Trivia Quiz

Saturday morning we had breakfast at "Morning Watch" and as you walk in the door, there is a large chalk board that has the day's specials etc. They also had the morning quiz listed and here was the question:
WHAT IS THE LONGEST SINGLE SYLLABLE WORD?

So, I asked the waiter if he knew the answer and he said that he did. Through the entire breakfast I tried to think of the answer. Toward the end of my last cup of coffee, I asked for a clue. Finally, as we were leaving, I had to ask for the answer. I came very close to coming up with the answer, but fell short.

See if you can come up with it - and if I don't have any answers by tomorrow, I will start giving you clues.

There is one rule - you have to think of this on your own. No googling - no dictionaries - no spell checks - nothing like that. Just use your brain. :)

I'll be waiting for your answers! Have a good week!

Mr. Peabody and the Way Back Machine

Jay reminded me today that I was going to post a "Way Back Machine" every Friday. Well, I'm 2 weeks late and today is Saturday, but I'm going to post one now. Thanks for the reminder!

I was remembering cleaning out my mother's house several years ago after I had moved her into a nursing home. You will notice that I didn't say "when she moved into a nursing home." I had to move her - it was an ugly scene and I wouldn't wish that kind of episode on anybody. That being said, she is comfortable there now. She will occasionally bring up to me the fact that I made lots of money from the sale of her house. Another reminder that she is unaware of things going on around her.

You have to appreciate the fact that people who grew up during the depression learned the "value" of things. It's widely known that they rarely throw things away as an adult and my mother was no exception. If I threw away one bottle of glue, I threw away 9 bottles of glue while cleaning out her house. She had rolls and rolls of paper towels. And fabric? Don't get me started. She could have easily opened her own shop.

But I would say one of the areas that I enjoyed cleaning out the most was her den. There was my dad's area (about 1/8 of the room) where he did his drawing and "figuring" as he called it. My father was a carpenter and this was where he drew up plans and figured estimates for people. It was fun to touch the papers and tools he used for his business. Everything was in a neat place and it really reflected his personality.

The rest of the room belonged to mom - and honestly, it reflected her personality as well. Her sewing machine was in there and inside of it housed any color of thread you could want - and not just one spool of each color either. You never know when you'll run out of a color and need one waiting in the wings. She also had a round metal box full of buttons. She bought buttons on cards - and it wouldn't have mattered what she was making, she was ready. That thing was FULL! She had several half-completed projects laying around and lots of patterns in a file drawer. She really was a good seamstress and used to sew quite a bit.

Her desk contained all the equipment she needed for bookkeeping for my father's business. She had a box of yellow sharpened pencils - and I exagerate not when I say there were probably 80 pencils in that box. She also had a huge assortment of pens - and little tablets. I never really had looked through those drawers before, so finding all of these was like opening a treasure box.

One of the things I found was an autograph of Jimmy Durante. If you haven't ever heard of him, google him. He's gone now of course - and I truly cannot remember where she saw him to get his autograph, but I remember she was always very proud that she had it. She also had Jim Nabor's autograph. You know him - Gomer Pyle. Again - google it. :) It's funny to me that this woman from small town USA had two pretty significant autographs.

The prize I found in that room was a photo album with metal covers that belonged to my dad. It had many, many photographs from when he was in the Phillipines in the Air Force. I had never known this album existed before and it made me so sad that it had been there all this time. My father rarely talked about his time in the Phillipines and this would have been a perfect "vehicle" for me to use to get him to talk. As I look through the pictures now, I have no idea who the other men really are. He has some of them labeled with first names, but to hear the stories behind them would have been the best. I wonder why this was stuffed away and forgotten? I'm guessing they didn't think I would be interested in it.

All in all - that room was horendous to go through - but at the same time, probably reflected both of their personalities very well. When it was all cleaned out, it of course made me sad. Not only had a put everything in boxes or in the dumpster, but I had erased a portion of two lives. I did keep the autographs though - who could resist showing off Jimmy Durante?

An orchid in winter

I have a beautiful orchid that was blooming when I got it. I have babied this plant along for quite some time now and finally it has bloomed again. It has to have just the right amount of sunlight and it wants orchid food in it's just-so right amount of water (room temp please).



I just wanted to share how pretty it is - the flowers are just lovely! It sits in the den which really is the chilliest room in the house, especially during the day when we're gone and the heat is down. So far, I guess it doesn't mind.

Anyway - no big news - just wanted to share my orchid with everyone! Have a great Thursday!

A shower with a mind of its own

I want to discuss my shower. More accurately, I want to discuss water pressure.

The water pressure in our apartment has never been tremendous. Sometimes, it is a trickle. Other times it's not so bad, but it has never been great.

The thing that's odd and the thing that annoys me is that it is not a continuous water pressure. I know what you're thinking - "You dork - when somebody else turns on the fawcet in the sink, of course your water pressure is going to change." Well, I know that and this isn't the case at all. I can be the only one in the apartment and be in the shower, and all of a sudden there is barely any water at all. Not a great thing when you have soap in your hair. Then, after a minute or so, the water pressure returns.

Other nearby apartments water usage doesn't affect us - we're separately controlled - so that isn't it. I just truly am stumped. And - it really only seems to happen in the shower. We have great pressure in the sinks and in the tub - and it stays constant there too.

I could always say something to the apartment office - but I just hate to walk in and say......well, my water pressure comes and goes. They would just shake their heads at me and tell me to either 1) live with it or 2)that somebody else was using water at the same time I was showering.

I really have no explanation. I just know that it isn't all that great to take a shower under a trickle of water.

Does this blog post go anywhere.... not really. Just venting. Thanks for reading! :)

An evening as a pirate

Tonite, the women's group at our church hosted a "Friendship Dinner". Each hostess had a table of 8 guests and could choose a theme for their table. Carol's table was so cute - the theme was Candy Land - and she had big game pieces and everything. The whole table was the game board.



As it turned out, nearly ever other table went for a more elegant theme. Here is the table that won the prize for the evening. It was Miss Edna's table and it was a Thanksgiving table - absolutely beautiful!



The table I hosted had a Pirate theme.



Here is Jay and I - in our pirate "outfits". We had so much fun and had lots of comments about our costumes.


It was just a nice evening and we met a lot of new people to the church.

Star Wars - An a capalla tribute to John Williams

I just had to share this - I think it is terrific!

Mr. Peabody and the Way Back Machine

There used to be a little cartoon on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show called Mr. Peabody and the Way Back machine. Mr. Peabody and his little friend Sherman would step into the Way Back Machine and travel back in time. I doubt it was all that educational and I would hate to count on it for accuracy, but I do remember it being cute.

So, with that said, I'm going to post a Way Back Machine every Friday and talk about something I remember from the past. There is the chance that it might not be interesting to anybody else but me. That's the chance you take in blogging. Live with it!

Today I want to remember two little girls and the year was somewhere around 1988 I think. Whenever we went to McDonalds or Hardees, we would get the kids meal of course and at that time, usually the prize was a small character made of hard plastic. The girls began to collect them. They stored them in a little tan plastic container with a hinged lid on it. This collection soon became known as "hard animals". Each girl had their own collection, though there were many duplicates. Hard animals were collected in various places, not just fast food chains. That bread-box sized case was soon full to the brim.

In trying to remember what some of them were, I could only think of Strawberry Shortcake and Carebears.

If they wanted to occupy themselves on a Sunday afternoon, they would get out their hard animals and go to the kitchen floor. One girl would sit on one end and the other girl would sit on the other. They would then proceed to meticulously line up each and every figure. I'm sure there was a specific place for everybody - each "person" had a place to be. I'm not sure if they actually ever played with them - though I'm sure they did. The bulk of the time was taken in setting everything up.

I rarely heard a peep out of them during this time. They really concentrated on what they were doing - it was important business.

So whenever I see little hard plastic figures, my first instinct is to take one to add to the girls' collection. But then I return from the Way Back Machine and remember that they don't collect them any more.

MegaSoundaphobia

Here's the deal. I have noticed that I have developed a "sensitivity" to noises. I don't mean noises like creaks or taps or whispers. I mean that whenever I hear things like sirens - a honking car - loud people in the next office - that little boy who visits in the next office on Wednesdays with a whistle that his mother seems not to desire to control (sorry, I got off on a tangent) - the neighbor upstairs who showers at 12:30 at night and when she stands in her bathtub it squeaks - and so on.

I'm not sure how this all started, but I notice that noises like that bother me now. They bother me to the point that I am distracted.

There is a parking garage next to my office. I had the window open today because my office was stuffy. Somebody's car started honking like when it's being broken into or you accidently hit the panic button. This went on for about 5 minutes literally and I was about ready to take a baseball bat to that car. I was - and I'm not proud of it.

The people in the office next to me are very loud at times - in fact they yell. I've discussed this issue before and I know that I need to just adapt. But it is very hard to adapt to a little boy and his whistle on Wednesdays. It makes me cranky.

It annoys me when people are outside of our apartment at 11 o'clock at night and they are loud enough that they wake me up.

Where did all of this come from?

I'm guessing that it's the fact that I spent many years living out in the country where you could hear a pin drop at night. You might hear a car drive by - maybe. You probably would hear a coyote once in awhile and you might hear Molly bark once or twice. But that's it. I've also almost always worked in an office where there wasn't a lot of noise. That and I've almost always worked in an office where the radio was on softly in the background.

At least these are the things I can point to right now that make me believe that I'm not just being crabby. I'm "adjusting".

I don't like "adjusting". I pretty much like things to go my way. And once again, I'm not proud of that fact.

So - what are my options?

I need to breathe. I need to let things slide by. I need to be happy that the mother in the office next to mine has a healthy little boy who has breath to blow on a whistle. I need to be thankful that people are happy enough to laugh outside my window. I need to be glad the lady upstairs takes a shower. Seriously. I guess I just need to get over it. Life is too short and yada yada yada.

OK - I will breathe.