Wishing all of you a safe and happy 4th of July!

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Happy Fourth Of July

It’s been a year since my husband had a stroke and we rushed him to the hospital as fast as my pumpkin-colored PT Cruiser could go.

Since then he’s improved a lot. He came out of the hospital in a wheelchair and gradually got to walking with a cane. Following months of physical therapy, he was able to walk without the cane on solid surfaces, but still uses it sometimes when we walk around in the yard or down the driveway for the mail. The yard and driveway are rough enough that there are times I wish I had a cane.

Since then he returned to work, only to be part of a mass layoff last fall.

Since then, I’ve doled out thousands of pills (most of them for him *grin*). I’ve had a few dark nights when I consumed large quantities of alcohol and sent drunken Twitter messages to an amused and understanding group of friends. Thank you for listening.

Since then he’s strengthened his arm. Immediately after the stroke he couldn’t lift a set of car keys. Now he works out with a half-gallon water jug several times a day.

Since then, I’ve been a bad blogger. I don’t post very often and I rarely get to visit blogs that I enjoy reading. I deeply appreciate those of you who’ve stuck by me and still drop by once in a while. Thank you for being here. I tried to post a message here last month and learned that my blog had died. I suddenly felt very disconnected, even though I hadn’t been using my blog much. It brought home how detached I’ve become from the people I love. God bless Amy for getting me back on my feet with this beautiful new (and functioning!) design.

Since then I released a new book and got some terrific bloggers to contribute and help make it a success. Thank you to Chris Brogan for writing the foreword, and to Becky McCray, Susan Reynolds, Terry Starbucker and Liz Strauss for contributing chapters of wisdom, and to Jeremiah Owyang for doing an interview.

Since then we’ve had good times and bad. We’ve taken his mom (I am her caregiver as she has Parkinson’s) to the hospital several times, and klutz that I am, I’ve managed to injure myself more than once. Our eldest son had his car stolen on Monday. But we always pull together as a family, everyone pitches in and somehow we make it through. Sometimes that involves a lot of yelling, but that’s just being a family

Since then I’ve come to appreciate even more, the value of you, my cyber-friends. We’ve never met, yet I feel like I know you. I’ve shared my life with you for five years on this blog and have received so much pleasure from interacting with you. You’ve laughed and cried with me and offered your support and prayers, and I can’t thank you enough. But I have to try.

Thank you one and all. May your lives be filled with love and laughter, and may we continue to be friends for years to come.

Ack! Run in circles, scream and shout! There’s a new flu bug about!

But it’s not the one you’ve been hearing about on the news. The one I’m talking about is The Whine Flu. The symptoms include irritability and a tendency to complain.

The first signs of Whine Flu appeared in early April, and were of the subset “Weather/Whine”. A manifestation was an initial euphoria upon noticing that it was 80 degrees and the daffodils were blooming. This quickly dissipated when snow fell and caused the daffodils to wilt and the roads to become slush fields. The slump deepened as flooding and high pollen counts were reported by increasingly caffeinated weather reporters, who were gearing up for their annual assault on programming.

This led to second-stage Weather/Whine. Just as the TV season was winding up with series finales, meteorologists across the land began consuming mass quantities of lattes and Red Bull. At the first hint of clouds, they leapt in, interrupting regular programming to show off their latest Doppler Stormtrack Superscope Lightning Detection Bite-Me-You-Other-Forecasters NASCAR Radar, to tell us that it was raining. Viewers experienced this in a directly proportional measure - as the tension on their favorite TV show reached the most climatic moment, the greater the chance of interruption.

Having now been deprived of the Big Reveal on their favorite TV program, and being forced to read a recap or wait for online release of the show, the Whine Flu mutated into “Government/Whine”. The government was doing too much. There were too many agendas. The President was a raving lunatic communist.

Then we morphed into “Swine/Whine”. Schizophrenic cable newscasters alternately decreed that the world was ending, and then told us not to panic. Citizens wailed that the government wasn’t doing enough. Where are the programs? The President is the only one who can save us!

The only saving grace and temporary reprieve was the general consensus that the new Presidential Puppy was cute. A more long-term solution being considered is to pipe pop music into every home, and infect people with the much less serious “Earworm/Whine” whereby people can’t stop a silly piece of music from repeating over and over in their head, and feel an overwhelming urge to Twitter about it.

My favorite

#6: Nixon for President
1992: National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation program announced that Richard Nixon, in a surprise move, was running for President again. His new campaign slogan was, “I didn’t do anything wrong, and I won’t do it again.” Accompanying this announcement were audio clips of Nixon delivering his candidacy speech. Listeners responded viscerally to the announcement, flooding the show with calls expressing shock and outrage. Only during the second half of the show did the host John Hockenberry reveal that the announcement was a practical joke. Nixon’s voice was impersonated by comedian Rich Little.

Source

What’s your favorite April Fool’s Day joke/hoax/prank?

Spring has sprung, and so has the cat - right across my face.

What?

OK, backtracking a bit here.

Springtime means lots of new noises out here in the boonies. There are birds warbling in the trees and frogs croaking in the ponds. Daffodils are blooming (they’re actually very quiet about it though) and crickets are chirping again. Crickets, not content to make noise outside, occasionally slip indoors to sing their springtime song.

Crickets and cats do not get along.

We learned this harsh lesson last night, as we sat watching TV. Daughter was sitting next to me on the couch, holding the cat on her lap. There was a noise on the curtain behind us - the sound of a cricket, that apparently to cat ears, sounded like a long string of expletives ending with “you pussy”. Which you wouldn’t think would really be offensive to a cat, but it must be, because he lit out like his tail was on fire.

Unfortunately my face was in the way.

Before we knew what happened, the cat had leapt out of her hands (leaving a long scratch) and clawed his way past my obtrusive head to get to the damnable bug.

We were in a state of shock and bleeding. We don’t know if the cat caught the cricket. I don’t think the PETA people would be too offended if I say I hope he did. If they’re offended, well, tough

So to paraphrase George Will:

Don’t play poker with a guy named Slim.

Don’t buy a Rolex from a guy who’s out of breath.

Don’t get between a cat and a cricket.

There’s so much about middle age that nobody tells you about.

Oh sure, I expected to have less energy, more wrinkles and body parts relocating downward due to gravity.

But nobody tells you about the hair.

Many people start experiencing hair loss. Not me. Mine is growing like crazy - everywhere!

March roared in like a lion, which is my astrological sign and what I am starting to see in the mirror.

I haven’t gotten my hair cut for a while so my mane is a bit wild. I closed the car door the other day and half of my hair got caught in it. Sadly, this is not a first.

But even worse are the places that were formerly (and I foolishly assumed would always be) hairless. Like ears.

Who expects to have hairy ears? Yet when I put on earrings recently, there it was. Can I get my ears waxed? An ear Brazilian? I think not.

Then there are the eyebrows. Of course I’ve always had eyebrows, but they used to be manageable, normal eyebrows. Now they rival Andy Rooney. I wake up and see a jungle growing on my forehead. And not just wild and unruly, but trying to mate, growing together towards the center, practically as fast as I can tweeze them. If I lose my tweezers I will have a Rooney uni-brow.

And the chin. While reading or watching TV, I rest my chin in my hand and it feels like barbed wire. I have bristles that could impale a person. So I go for the trusty tweezers again. Only the chin hairs are tough. Real tough. I try to pluck, but only succeed in dragging the tweezers the length of the hair but not dislodging it. The dragging has the same effect as scissors dragged along Christmas ribbon though, causing the chin hair to curl, leaving me looking like I have pubic hair on my chin. Not pretty. I halfway expect to look like this within months.

We won’t even discuss what’s going on below the neck, but I will say…I never expected to have to shave my toes in my old age. :