DIY, But Only If You Have To

I saw on TV the other day that you should probably redecorate your house, at least enough to update it a little, every five years.  After I realized it wasn't a comedy show and stopped laughing I started looking around and I think they may have been on to something.  The show was about getting your house ready to sell. Every time we have sold a house in the past we have broken our necks painting and fixing and cleaning and then never getting to enjoy the benefits of all that labor.

The problem (one of them) is that the people who lived in the house we own now hadn't seen that show so they had not updated before selling it to us and there was more than five years worth of things to do when we got here.  It wasn't really their fault.  The house was not on the market when I knocked on the door and asked them if they were interested in selling it, so they didn't have much warning.  They may have been a little shocked to see me but they were gracious and let me come in and look around (if burglars were smart they would get rid of those hoodies and disguise themselves as sweet little ol' ladies. Just sayin')  They said they were considering moving when school was over and we eventually struck a deal.  (Oh, stop! The neighbor told me they were kind of thinking about it. You know how shy I am!  I wouldn't have just knocked on their door at random.....It was the neighbor's door I knocked on at random.)

The size and location of this house (just a few streets over from our granddaughters) was just right for us, but it was pretty much a museum of early eighties décor. The fun began before we moved in.  All by myself I "mudded" a wall (I had never even heard of such a thing, much less did it) stripped wallpaper, (three layers in one instance), hung wallpaper, pulled up kitchen carpet (the hardest physical labor I have done in my life including giving birth!) put down vinyl tiles, took doors off the pantry, reconfigured the pantry shelves, did the same for the linen closet shelves, scraped off popcorn ceilings, painted ceilings where the popcorn junk had been, made curtains for every room but one, hung curtains, painted every wall in the house except the living room including one bedroom that turned out school-bus gold and had to be redone twice, and the "red-leather-Bible" color I chose for the kitchen that needed about a billion, okay, more like seventeen, all right, actually four coats to get it right, and primed and painted more than----I am not making this up----1,356 running feet of wood trim, plus thirteen doors. And the people at Lowe's were so used to seeing me each day that they sent someone to check on me if I wasn't there by lunch time.  For the second time.

So you see, I may have "smoked the pack", as it were, concerning remodeling. Once my hands unclenched from the holding-paint-brush-grip I didn't care if I never saw another brush, hammer, scraper, or simple-to-use, revolutionary, all-in-one tool (They all lie!) again.  All I wanted to do was lie on the couch and watch HGTV where somebody else was doing the work.

This is not a good thing since it has been seven year since we moved here, and after awhile there are touch-ups that need doing. I did drag out an old can of paint last fall before relatives came to stay and hit some of the spots on the woodwork that were looking kind of rough.  And when my neighbor put some perfectly good boards in his trash I brought them in just in case they were ever needed. The walls in the entry were looking a little bare after the Christmas decorations came down, so I used one of those boards to make a coat rack, although the neighbor wound up drilling the holes for me.  He was quite surprised to recognize one of the boards he thought he threw out.

Now I've been eyeing the kitchen cabinets.  I wanted to paint them when we first moved here but I finally collapsed, got Legionaries Disease, which laid me low for about three months and Dennis made me quit  But I keep looking at those cabinets.  I wish redecorating was like childbirth. You forget how painful it was after you see the baby.

Maybe I'll lay on the couch and think about it some more.

Here's Looking At You, Kid

I broke my glasses the other night. Not the glass part, mind you.  The glass is thicker than the bottom of an old fashioned soda bottle and I think you would have to drive a car over the lens to break it, but the metal that holds the two lenses together broke, then one of the lenses fell out, to boot. My field of vision is five inches, so it was kind of trial and error while I was looking for them but now I'm wearing my old, old glasses where each lens is somewhere near the size of a tuna can and about that heavy on my nose.

The ones I broke had gotten kinky-wampus. I went up to the glasses place in the mall where I originally got them and asked to have them adjusted.  The lady took little pliers, twisted them back and forth and sideways and they were much better.  That was on Thursday and they broke on Friday night and I really think she had gotten them almost to the breaking point when she twisted, then I finished them off just by moving them up to the top of my head.  I can't blame her, though.They were at least eight years old and probably would have gone some time soon anyway.  Being eight years old, that style is discontinued so you can't just put old lenses in new frames.  I think there is something against that in the Bible anyway:  new wine in old bottles or something. I may be stretching my theology.

I got my first pair of glasses when I was ten years old----no, not fitted for me by Benjamin Franklin!----and I'll never forget how shocked I was to look out the window of the doctor's office and see individual bricks on the wall of the building across the parking lot.  And there were lots of leaves on the trees, each one separate! I don't know how my parents decided that I should have my eyes checked, probably I failed a test at the school nurse's office, but after that I could see all kinds of things. Those glasses were robin's egg blue and shaped like cat-eyes.  A mixed metaphor but very fashionable....I thought. Plus the lenses magnified the fact that my eyelashes, to go with my red hair, were almost colorless. But I didn't care what people were seeing when they looked at me. I could see them!

A few years later I got my first contact lenses. Contacts really weren't perfected then, I guess, and it didn't take me long to get an infection, go to the E.R. in the middle of the night and have to wear patches over my eyes for a couple of days, so that didn't last too long. Later, after Dennis and I were married, I tried contacts again and wore them for probably twenty years. They created bonding in our marriage. I would drop one; Dennis would have to stop everything to find it for me.  I would plug the sink up and leave the water in there to keep them from going down the drain; we would have to have negotiations to trade bad habits. I even lost one in my eye occasionally and Dennis would calm me down till it worked it's way around.  But, then, another eye infection happened and contacts made way for glasses once again.

Being nearsighted has it's advantages.  I can't even see the big E on the eye chart so since I don't wear my glasses in the shower and I can't really see the soap scum or whatever is growing in there, it can't be my fault if it's never sparkly clean, can it?  Sometimes the frames of my glasses go right over my eyebrows, so if I don't pluck my eyebrows consistently, who knows?  I can't see what's going on up there anyway.  And get this: at Christmas, if I take off my glasses and look at the Christmas tree, the lights have a beautiful, soft glow with halos around them that I don't think anybody else gets to see. I will let you borrow my glasses sometime and you can try it in reverse, but I don't think you will get as good an effect as I do.

Yes, I know that being myopic is so last century!  Everybody gets Lasik or it's equivalent these days, but I think I've reached the age where I'll stick with what I know.  I used to think that when I started to get far-sighted my near-sightedness would merge with my far-sightedness and I might actually see clearly without glasses for an hour, but, if it happened, I missed it. I think if I didn't have glasses on my face my head would be out of balance and I would fall forward.

Of course, when I got about five inches from the floor I would see it coming at me just fine.

Kids in Cars

My two oldest grand kids are big enough to ride in the front seat beside me now.  I can't imagine how that happened. Of course they wear their seat belts but it seems like it's only been a few months since I was struggling to buckle them into their car seats.

I was very careful about the car seats with the grand kids.  I always had our son, Jake, who had been trained in installing them when he was a police officer, take them out and put them in for me, but one time when he wasn't around and I had his girls, I had to go over to the Broken Arrow Fire Department to have them check them for me.  I remember how scared I was driving....very slowly....all of two miles to get there when I thought the car seats might not be safe enough.

Times change.  When I look back and think how we rode when Jake and his brother, Josh, were little and compare it to how safety conscious we are now I am appalled. We did have car seats but nobody ever installed them. They were just held in by the seat belts.  And if one of the kids cried enough, I took him out and held him. While I was driving!!  Okay, you will not believe this and guys, you may want to just skip over this part, but I have even driven while nursing a baby. I'm pretty sure someone would be arrested if she did that today.

Angels of Protection were obviously riding in our car. There was plenty of room for them since the kids were usually standing behind the driver’s seat talking to me while I was driving. Most of the time we had a station wagon when my kids were little.  There was a bench seat in front but it had an arm rest that you could pull down in the middle and the kids called it "The Hump".  It was a treat to ride on The Hump and whoever "called" it first got to sit there, the other had to sit in the front passenger seat, or stand in back, or lie in the floor somewhere pulling toys and french fries and who knows what from under the seat.  It seems I've heard since then that spot where The Hump was is sometimes called something else. I think it was called "The Death Seat".

It was certainly not that I didn't care about my children's safety. We just didn't know back then.  We didn't have automatic locks on back doors and seat belts were lap belts that I hear now can slice you in half in an accident if the impact is strong enough. Once, when he was about four, we had a friend of Josh's riding with us and the back passenger door flew open when I went around a corner.  For some "strange" reason I had just had Josh and Clay both move over behind me, there was an argument or something, and when the door flew open nobody was near it.  Of course I stopped the car in a panic and after I got back in from closing (and locking) the door I said, "Wow, our guardian angel was sure in the right place that time!"

Clay looked quizzical.  "What angel?" he said. "I don't see any angels."

Josh knew better.  "There are always angels around us, watching out for us."

Clay pumped his fists all around him.  "Oh, yeah?  If there are angels in here, how come they didn't say 'Ouch'?"  I didn't have an answer.  I guess angels know how to duck. 

On trips we folded down the back seats of our station wagon and made a bed back there, then I loaded it up with toys and snacks and a big cooler that could slide around and whack someone who might be in the way.  Of course there were pillows and blankets too and my favorite thing was to fix it up for the boys, then sleep back there myself while Dennis drove and the kids were relegated to The Death Seat.  Who knew?

Not so today, of course.  I won't even pull out of the driveway without my seat belt on and if you ride with me you wear yours too.  I will admit, though, that sometimes I start to take it off as I approach the house instead of waiting till the car comes to a full stop.  A few years ago, when she was about four, Miranda called me on it.  She said "Grandma! The Bible says 'Wear your seat belt at all times.'"  Her theology may have been a little off, but the message was still there. 

The Farm

Yesterday would have been my Grandma Anderson's birthday, though she died when I was nine.  She is the one whose picture I pass and then look at my face in the mirror and think, "Oh, Grandma came to visit!"  I am also her size and shape and she had breast cancer like I did, so I identify with her a lot.

She and my grandpa had a farm in Valley Falls, Kansas and every summer from the time I was three till she died my sisters and I spent the whole summer there.  My mom took us there the day after school was out and picked us up Labor Day week-end. My grandma must have been a saint!

There were cows and chickens and horses. There were pigs in a fenced in area across the driveway that had a mulberry tree right in the middle.  If you ran really fast you could get to the mulberry tree, climb up it before the pigs saw you, and eat mulberries till your face and hands were purple. The pigs only got the ones that dropped to the ground. Sometimes Grandma asked if I had gone there and I denied it but somehow she always knew.

One of the years we went there Valley Falls, maybe all of Kansas, I'm not sure, held their Centennial celebration. Grandma made us all special outfits, with the extremely politically incorrect name of Squaw Dresses, and bonnets like the settlers wore that we could wear to the festivities in town. She had a treadle sewing machine and even though we weren't allowed to wear shorts back in St. Louis, she made shorts and sleeveless tops for us to wear in the devilish heat. Air conditioning wasn't even heard of then, at least not in people's houses.

We had an ingenious way to deal with the heat sometimes.  If you shut yourself (and your sisters) into the outhouse and stayed till the heat in there was so off the chart that one of you was about to faint, then when you opened the door and came out, the contrast was so great that you were fooled into thinking it felt almost cool outside. Perhaps that is where some of my missing brains cells went.

The barn had a hayloft and my sisters, much more adventurous than I, would climb up the ladder and jump down into the wagon load of hay that was just under the loft.  I was too scared to jump but my sister, Arleta, the daredevil of us all, climbed clear to the peak of the huge barn,---on the outside!---straddled it and sat up there waving to the rest of us.  Grandma almost had a heart attack when she saw her, of course.  To this day I don't know how she got down without killing herself, but she did and lived to torment me (and me her) another day.

The horses were really work horses so they didn't get ridden much, but we often had to go out to the pasture and bring the cows back to the barn in the evening, so instead of riding a horse, I rode my black and white cow. She was named Patty, after me, when she was born and I considered her mine. Fortunately they were milk cows not beef cows.  I don't think I could have handled eating anybody that I knew it's name.

We roamed those eighty acres and even onto neighboring farms from morning till night sometimes, just the three of us.  We didn't even have cell phones to check in, can you imagine? More dangerous than that, the quintessential memory of the farm, the first that comes to mind whenever we think of that time, is the sound of the horn on my Grandpa's 1952 Ford every night when he came home from his job in Topeka.  He would  start honking when he turned the corner at the neighbor's wheat field and we would run as far as we could down the gravel road to meet him.  Then we jumped up onto the car and rode all the way home on the hood.  I held onto the chrome hood ornament but my sisters road free-hand, the wind blowing in our faces.  And lived to tell about it.

Taken together I guess it was only a total of about eighteen months of my childhood but it is the time I remember clearest and most fondly. A time of adventure and freedom and joyful exploration. Thanks, Grandma.  Happy Birthday.

Boxing Day

I just got bopped in the head by an avalanche of cardboard boxes falling on my head. Again. I have a closet shelf devoted just to boxes but they have evolved over the years from lightweight gift boxes to mostly heavy cardboard boxes that come by UPS or in the mail.  Those hurt more. I don't know what it is.  I just can't seem to throw a box away.  You never know when you are going to need one for some reason or another.

It is very satisfying to be able to nest them together and stack them on the shelf.  For years I have had gift boxes, collected from Christmases, birthdays and, of course, the neighbor's trash (what was she thinking throwing away perfectly good boxes like that?). Any time you need to wrap a gift, I am ready.  Lots of them still have tissue paper in them too. I have a suit box from Dillards's, smaller shirt boxes and dress boxes from Penney's and Sears and various department stores, a square one from Children's Place.  Some of them fold up flat, others fit into the next one up and there are sizes all the way from the suit box to teeny ring boxes.  The littlest boxes have cotton in them to hold precious jewelry, like necklaces made from soda bottle tabs that don't come with their own containers  from the store. Here is a general guideline:  if you are shopping in a store that gives free gift boxes, ask for the box even if you are buying the item for yourself.  You can never have enough boxes.

When Josh first started college I sent him cookies each week in boxes that I covered with the Garfield comic strips, his favorite, that I cut out from that week's newspapers. I figured it would be a good way for him to get to meet new people in his dorm.  It was an adventure every week to find a box the right size.  Too small and the cookies wouldn't fit, too big and I had to send too many. (You have to save a few to eat yourself, of course.) It was before online shopping so that size box was hard to come by.

These days, when we shop online a lot, things come in heavy corrugated boxes and we tend to remove things from those boxes and place them in gift bags before giving (we recycle the gift bags in our family too, but that is another blog)   In case you need to mail something, you have it.  I have one cardboard box that my sister in Kansas and I sent back and forth to each other about seven times, just covering up the address with a new sticker.  It seemed like whatever we were sending always fit in that box.

I'm not as bad about hoarding, excuse me, I meant collecting, boxes as Dennis is.  At least my boxes all fit on that closet shelf.  Most of the time. Unless they get unbalanced and whack me in the head. Dennis collects the boxes that things come in from the store, like TVs or computers.  He wants to be ready if he ever has to send something back.  If they are giant, like computer boxes, I get to put them in the attic.  Others, like the electric toothbrush box or all the boxes from all the phones we have ever had or the camera boxes, are under his desk.  With some of them the toothbrushes and phones are long gone but he still has the boxes.  You can't reuse them or wrap anything in them because of the logos on them. Now, tell me. Who has the hoarding addiction here?

Cardboard mailing boxes are great to hold roly-poly bugs---just add grass---or turtles temporarily, when the grand kids are here. You can decorate boxes with stickers and markers and while away a whole afternoon sometimes. When we got a new toilet a couple of years ago our granddaughter, Miranda, found ways to play in the box it came in for about three months.  She covered up the words with duct tape so you didn't know it was from a toilet, then she could sit in it---it was just the right size---and close the flaps for her own secret hiding place.  It held bears and dolls and all kinds of things to make it a house for toys and graced our living room for longer than you can imagine.  I tried moving it into the garage once on the pretense of needing to vacuum, but she brought it back in the next time she was here.

The best boxes for kids, of course, are appliance boxes.  They make great forts and playhouses, especially if you cut windows in them. When our oldest son, Josh, was about a year old, he and I went on a business trip with Dennis. It didn't take Josh long to get bored with the few toys I had managed to pack into a small suitcase and Dennis had the rental car. I can't remember how I discovered that there was a refrigerator box on the other side of the golf course where we were staying in a guest house, but while Dennis was at work one afternoon, Josh and I walked across and dragged that box back, through sand traps and past water holes, golfers eyeing us suspiciously, and he had a fine time with it the rest of the week.

I may decide to look around for just one more box, a really big one.  I could fit the big boxes into it, then the medium boxes into them and still have room for a whole bunch of small boxes.  Then I could shove it into the closet where the boxes are attacking me now and put a box in front of the door to keep them all in there. Otherwise it might take boxing gloves to defend myself.

Ink Spots and Holes

Okay, I'm just going to say this.  I'm not a tattoo person; I find them even hard to look at. And the only extra holes I have, despite what you may have heard about my head, are the two in my ears for earrings.  One in each ear.  I hope I am not offending you.  Please don't hold it against me.  Really, don't. Don't touch me with them. I think it's creepy.  Sorry, sorry, sorry!  I'm trying to develop an open mind, but, you know, I'm really old and I haven't gotten used to it yet.  I'm working on it.

I know I'm in the minority.  In fact, sometimes, like at the baseball field when our granddaughter, Hayley, was playing ball in a municipal league, I'm pretty sure her mom and I were the only two women in the ball park without a tattoo of some kind. Most were on view when I was sitting in the bleachers and the women in front of me had jeans that rode down and shirts that rode up and, perhaps they were from plumbers' families, I'm not sure, but lots of artwork was on display whether I wanted to view it or not.

I know there are some that are tastefully done, like little flowers and butterflies and things.  In fact, I have even been offered to have my own done at no cost to me.  When I was having reconstructive surgery after my mastectomy last year the plastic surgeon had a tattoo included in the deal but I declined.

So what happens if you get a little rosebud when you are twenty-two and weigh a hundred pounds, but then you get married, have a couple of kids, gain weight with each pregnancy, a couple of pounds each holiday season, it just creeps up, ya' know, and then what?  Does your tiny hybrid tea rosebud turn into a floribunda Queen Elizabeth Rose known for it's four or five inch blooms?  Or Tweety Bird turn into Big Bird?  I worry about these things.

There used to be a Piercing Parlor across the street from the bank I go to.  I could see the phone number in big letters on their window while I was waiting in the drive-through line.  It was 251-OUCH.  At least they believed in truth-in-advertising, and, as a matter of fact, there is a Christian Science Reading Room in that spot now so perhaps their business didn't survive their honesty. But, really, why would you put yourself through that?

When I was about twenty my sister talked me into getting my ears pierced.  She and her sister-in-law had pierced each others' ears with a needle, a cube of ice, and a potato held behind their ears. When I finally got up the courage I decided to do it the right way, of course. I went to the doctor and had my ears pierced professionally, in sanitary conditions.  Did my sister have problems?  Of course not.  I, on the other hand, got infections in both earlobes. They got inflamed and swelled up until it looked like I had apricots hanging off the sides of my head, and when I got one of the earrings caught in the blanket in the middle of the night and Dennis turned over and took the blanket (and my earlobe!) with him, I screamed like a banshee and wound up having to have sutures in my ears for a month.  So two is all I have ever wanted.

That was the good ol' days when the only men who wore earrings were pirates and the most tattoos you saw were  "Mom" on sailors, or on bikers who wanted you to know they were born to raise.....um, mischief.  Anyway, then came the nineties and suddenly some regular guys were wearing earrings and our son, Jake, when he was a teenager wanted to be one of them.

We resisted.  "Not while you are under our roof,."  we said.  "Not while we're paying the bills,"  we said. "No son of ours!" we said.  And then we were teaching a Parenting Class at our church and at the end of the course we invited our son, Josh, his new wife, Jerilyn, and Jake, who was nineteen and in college, to sit in and let the people ask them questions about how we had parented them. Somehow, the discussion got on the earring thing. Even though I rarely express my opinion, as you well know, I said "Admit it. It's just a peer pressure thing."

"No," Jake said.  "I haven't gotten an earring out of respect for you and Dad as my parents.  If it was just a peer pressure thing, I'd be getting a tattoo."

"Get the earring,"  I told him.  And he did, the very next day.

Somewhere along the way he stopped wearing the earring, the hole closed up and his seven and ten year old daughters were shocked...shocked! when they heard that their dad had an earring when he was younger.  The tattoo never happened though, and I'm glad. They don't just go away like a piercing if you change your mind.

 I don't think he would have gotten one that said "Mom" on it anyway.

The Bob Joke

This is our family's favorite joke:

Two guys are standing next to each other in a bar (sorry, Mom) and one of them, Bob, keeps having people come up to him to say "Hi" or clap him on the back.  This goes on all night long till finally the other guy, Fred, gets fed up and says "Do you know every darn person in this bar?"

"Well," Bob says, "as a matter of fact, I do know everybody here.  I know pretty much everybody you'd ever want to meet"

"Yeah, right!" Fred says.  "I bet you don't know Jay Leno."

"Yeah, I do."  Bob says.  So they get in a car, drive out to the NBC studios where the guard takes one look at Bob, waves them on in and they drive up to Jay Leno's parking spot where he's just getting into his car.  Leno sees Bob coming, gets out of his car and says "Hey, Bob! Great to see you ol' buddy. How are ya doing?"

Fred can't believe it but he saw it with his own eyes.  When Bob gets back in the car Fred says "Ok, so you know Jay Leno.  But I bet you don't know President Obama like that."

"You'll see," Bob says.  And they take a road trip across the country to Washington D.C., people waving to Bob and greeting him all along the way.  At the gate to the White House the Secret Service stops their car and Fred starts grinning....until he hears the agent say, "Bob, the President heard you were coming and wants to know if you can fit in time for a little B-ball with him."  Sure enough, when they get to the White House gym President Obama lopes over, slaps Bob on the back and greets him like an old friend.

Fred cannot believe it.  As soon as the basketball game is over he grabs Bob and says "Ok, Ok.  I see you know a lot of people.  But I know for sure the one person you don't know is the Pope. In fact, just to prove it, I'll pay to fly us over to Rome and you try to get in to see the Pope."  Bob just shrugs and off they go.

When they get to Rome they hear that it's a Feast Day and the Pope is going to make an appearance and bless the people, and the courtyard of St. Peter's Basilica is crammed with the faithful.  They can hardly move through the crowd.  Bob says to Fred, "See that little balcony up there?  That's where the Pope comes out to speak to the people.  I'll go in and come out on the balcony with him and wave to you and you'll know once and for all that I know the Pope."

So Bob disappears into the crowd and Fred keeps watching the balcony. Pretty soon, sure enough, Bob and the Pope step out onto the balcony.  Bob is looking down to see where Fred is so he can wave and he sees a big commotion where somebody has fainted dead away.  It's Fred.  Bob hurries back down to the courtyard just as Fred is coming around.  "Fred, Fred!" he says. "Was it that big a shock to see me with the Pope?"

Fred stares at him.  "No, it wasn't that.  It was when I heard all the people around me saying 'Who's that guy up there with Bob?'"

Back when we lived in Oklahoma City, Dennis was the "Bob" of our family.  We couldn't go anywhere that there wasn't someone who knew him.  Every restaurant we went into he knew someone who was there, and then he had to table-hop, of course.  It might be fifteen minutes before we got to order our food.  We might be standing in line at a movie, there would be someone coming up behind us saying "Dennis!  How have you been?"  Sometimes it was a little disconcerting to the boys such as when we were on vacation and just as we were going into a Dairy Queen in a small southwestern Oklahoma town  Dennis was stopped by someone who was coming out, chocolate dip cone in hand. Dennis had sold him land somewhere and they talked like old friends.

Well, it kept us out of bars and casinos, I guess, because you never knew who was going to be coming up to greet him. He had been in real estate for a couple of decades, chaired a lot of committees, been on boards of directors, taught adult Sunday School classes almost forever and made friends wherever he went.  And, hey, he's a memorable guy.

Now that Dennis has been mostly retired for a few years and we live in a different city it doesn't happen as much.  Meals out are a lot more peaceful. We thought.  Except now our daughter-in-law, Robyn, goes out to eat with us frequently.  She is a school teacher, and guess what.  Almost everywhere we go we hear "Mrs. Carey!  Mrs. Carey!"  and it's a student, a former student, or a parent who knows her and wants to say "Hi".  The torch has been passed. Robyn is The New Bob.