Writing

When I bought my car  seven years ago it was brand new, and had less then 10 miles on the odometer.

Today it rolled over to the 100K mile mark.

Before

After

(Yes, I pulled over to take both pictures, as you can clearly see.)

100+K and the car still runs great and looks pretty good.  Next goal… 200K.

My free hammock arrived yesterday.

My office is migrating from one (not so great) Oracle-based back-office system to another (not so great) Oracle-based back-office system and a little while ago I got an email warning me that my “reward points” would not be rolled over into the new system, and that, in essence, I needed to use them or lose them.  I had no idea that I had any “reward points” floating out there in intranet limbo, and for the life of me couldn’t remember what I might have done to get them in the first place.  So when I logged in to the Reward Site to see what was what, it it turned out that I had somehow amassed quite a lot of points indeed.

Ever since John and I got back from Maui last year I have been talking about wanting to get a hammock, but hadn’t yet taken the plunge as far as actually getting it rather then just talking about it.

So I redeemed my “reward points” to obtain a hammock and a hammock stand.  And a couple of DVDs.

And I am looking forward to layout on in the sun on it, book in hand.

My Grandma (who is one of my personal heroes, and I seriously hope that I am like her when I am her age) finally, at 93, decided that it was time to move out of her house and into a retirement apartment.  The house has now been sold and moving plans have been made.

Grandma's house

So she is cleaning out her house.  Aggressively cleaning out her house.  She has lived there for more then 60 years, so there is a lot of stuff to pull out and go through.  John and I went to visit her while we were in Cleveland this past weekend, and ended up leaving her house with a trunk full of boxes of memories.

“You like it?  Take it!”

I understand the sentiment and the necessity behind her directive.  I know that it makes Grandma happy to know that her cherished belongings are going to people who will appreciate them and continue to use them.  I know this, and it still makes me sad to pack up boxes of her stuff and put them in my car.  Because it is change, and I think of it as a sad change – an end of an era.  I am happy that Grandma wants to make sure that I have these things, but the implications make me sad.

I have some of the Russian nesting dolls and other old wooden toys that I used to play with when I was little.  (A snafu with the dolls, I accidentally gave my aunt some nesting dolls that my Mom wanted to keep.  Sorry, Mom.  There were only a few small ones left when I went to Grandma’s and I will bring those back for you when I come to visit next.)

I have some afghans that Grandma’s Mom (or Grandmother, which would be my great-Grandma or great-great-Grandma) crocheted.  (I am actually not totally clear on who actually made them, and I think that Grandma wasn’t 100% sure herself.)

I have a fancy blue-and-white doily that my great-great-Grandma tatted.

I have my Grandma’s old travel journals from the 1930s and 1940s.  I have a lot of memories of going up to the attic bedroom/playroom/workroom when I was younger, pulling the journals off of the bookshelf, and paging through them.

I have some more antique glass pieces, including a green pedestal candy dish that belonged to my great-Grandma and that is the “mate” of the yellow one that I received for Christmas last year.  (I have a lot of antique glass now, and an upcoming project will be to appropriately photo-document, identify, and note down all relevant family stories on each piece.  I also have a bunch of books on antique glassware, which should help supplement Grandma’s notes on all of her pieces.)

I have a carved wooden egg that I always admired, that belonged to my great-Grandfather.

I have a serving tray decorated with dogwood blossoms, strawberries, and other fruits and flowers that was one of Grandma’s wedding presents.  Grandma would always use that tray at Easter to display her Ukrainian Easter Eggs.  I have some of the eggs as well – blown and hand-painted ones as well as some carved and painted wooden ones.

John took a couple of boxes of my Grandfather’s old hand-tools.  (We can use a lot of them on the boat.)  When we were in the workshop corner of the basement looking through his old (all hand made) workbenches and tool cabinets was actually the first time that I can remember being back in that corner of the basement.  When my brothers and I were little, my Grandfather used to admonish us not to go near his workbench and tools – “It is too dangerous!  You could hurt yourself” – and it made such an impression on me that even after he died, I never went back there.

My house now has a lot of things that I remember and used and played with and admired at Grandma’s house.  And the fact that they are at my house now makes them not quite the same things that I remember.  Ahhh, it is hard to explain… Everything just has a different feel, now that they is out of the context (Grandma’s house) in which I was used to seeing them for so long.

She will move while we are on vacation, so I won’t be able to go back to Cleveland to help out one last time.

That was the last time that I will ever see her in her house.  In the house that she moved into when she and Grandpa first got married.  The house that we always went to for holidays and birthdays and other events and celebrations.  Where will we go for Christmas and Thanksgiving now?  (Logically I know that we will have those holidays at my parents’ house, but it will take some getting used to.)

While we were there last weekend, I ran around and took pictures around the house.  I wish that I had done so sooner, while everything looked the way that I remember and before there were boxes and packing material all over.

Every time my parents and I visit, at some point we end up breaking out the wine, fruit-and-cheese-and-crackers tray, and scrabble board.

Scrabble is something to be taken very seriously.  No Scrabble Dictionary with its ridiculous and somewhat questionable seeming words for us (even though my Mom favors it) – it is the OED or nothing.

Scrabble at my parents' house

The first game was fairly normal, with everyone taking the standard “forever” length to peruse their tiles, the placement options available at the time, and finally make a decision.  I can’t remember who won, but it wasn’t me.  I blame the tiles that I drew.  That and the fact the the board layout was one of the worst that I have even played on, with very few available placement options, and was crowded all on only one side of the board.

The second game was more interesting.  We wanted to play a second game, but didn’t want it to last forever, so we did a speed game.  Everyone got exactly 1 minute to put down a word.  It sure cut down on the number of multiple syllable words that were played.  And the whole game took about 20, maybe 30 minutes.

It worked well, but I think that for the next speed game, extending the turn length to about 3 minutes might be better.

My aunt and one of my cousins (I have an aunt, an uncle, and seven cousins in northern Spain, and I always found the story of how my aunt and uncle met to be a fascinating one) were in the country visiting over the past month, which was the impetus for John and I going to spend last weekend in Cleveland for a visit.  I hadn’t seen any of them since 1999 (11 years!  Though I have faithfully sent them Christmas cards every year, and have enjoyed receiving cards in return) when my Mom’s side of the family had a fairly large reunion.

It was nice to see them again, and somewhat eerie how easy it was to fall back into a pattern of idle chit-chat, as though it hadn’t been over a decade since we did more then just say “hi” briefly on the phone.

Hopefully it won’t be another decade plus until the next visit.

I had the day off today (hooray for the summer hours flexible schedule) and since it was raining, I couldn’t do any of the outdoors-oriented items on my to-do list, I decided to tackle my office closet.

My office closet is a frightening mess.  There are boxes of stuff that I put in there when we moved in, and haven’t touched since.  My old laptop from grad school is in there.  I haven’t used it in I don’t know how long… since I got the first of many work-provided laptops, certainly.  My wedding dress (in a garment bag) is in there.  I try not to open the closet doors for fear that stuff will avalanche out on top of me.

I filled three garbage bags full of trash (including the long defunct laptop) and two garbage bags of stuff for the Salvation Army (how on earth did I end up with those four unused laptop briefcases and two unused laptop backpacks?  well, they are gone now) that  and put a stack of flattened boxes out in the garage for recycling.

I can see the closet floor now.  I found stuff that I forgot I had.  I found stuff that I didn’t know I had.  I threw a lot of it away.

I am not done yet, though.  There are still five boxes on the shelf that I haven’t gone through yet.  But I am done enough for now.  Those will be a project for another day.

Then I will tackle my filing cabinet.  Then my desk.  Then the bookshelves.

One of the good things about being an adult, is that sometimes you don’t have to do things that you don’t want to.  For instance, I have never popped the screens out of my windows and washed them.  (This was a regular part of spring cleaning when I was growing up.) Nor do I bother to make the bed most mornings.  (Sorry, Mom.  You tried.)

On the flip side, being an adult also means doing stuff that you don’t want to do, because you know that you need to.  Like making doctor’s appointments.  And dentist appointments.

Especially dentist appointments.

I hate going to the dentist.

I don’t remember how old I was… 5? 6? 7?  It was early grade school, anyway.  The way that I remember it happening, I was running up the steps at school.  It was winter, the stairs were icy, I slipped, and I hit my mouth on the metal handrail.  One of my front teeth was chipped.  (You can still see the chip if you look) My parents took me to the dentist, and he smoothed out the chip.  That tooth wasn’t the problem.  The tooth next to it was the hidden problem.  The blow had severed the nerve as the base of the root, but we wouldn’t know about that for 10 or so years.

Time passed.   I lost my baby teeth, got adult teeth.  I got cavities, and had them filled.  I got braces, and then had a series of retainers.

Then in high school I got a terrible, painful toothache.  Turns out that it was the tooth with the severed nerve.  It had gotten infected.  If it hadn’t gotten infected, I wonder how long it would have gone unnoticed?

I got a root canal.

In college, I had persistent trouble with the root canal.  The filling kept falling out, among other things.

So I got a crown.  (According to the dentist, crowns really only have a shelf life of 10 or so years.  At the time I decided to just not hear that… I was pretty sick of dentists.)

10+ years pass.  Then I have some problems with the crown, which is well past its expiration date.  My current dentist fixes the crown, warns me that it could fail at any time, and strongly urges that I get an implant.

I don’t want to get an implant.  I have to get an implant.  Basically, at this point, I have no other options.

So I got a consult with an oral surgeon, and made an appointment to get the first stage of an implant.  The surgery is this coming Tuesday morning.

I don’t want to have oral surgery.  I hate the fact that the process for getting an implant takes so long and that with the multiple surgeries and healing time, it will probably be close to the end of the summer before the process is complete.  But I have to have it.  No other options.  So I am having oral surgery.

Goddammit, sometimes I hate being a responsible adult.

There is a bush right next to the front door that is some kind of lilac.  It smells wonderful, but is only in bloom for about a week in early spring.  Right now is at the very end of its flowering cycle.  I wish that I could find a perfume that smelled like this bush.

Lilac bush

My hands smell like bananas because they are covered in new-skin, and they are covered in new-skin because I was out doing yard work this morning.

Today is the first day of spring.  It is also my Dad’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Dad.)

The weather was warm enough and it wasn’t raining like it was all last weekend, so I was finally able to get out and clean out the flower beds.  The cleaning, by the way, is pretty minimal.  I pull out all of the dead stalks from last year (from the hostas, the daisies, and the lilies) and clean up the front walk and porch steps, but I leave most of the rest of last fall’s leaves where they are.  I also gave all of the decorative grasses haircuts.  It can be pretty satisfying and a lot of fun to go in with a pair of hedge clippers and whack, whack, whack away until a stand of grasses that was taller then I am is down to a couple of inches of stubble.

My yard style is more “English country garden” then anything else.  Pretty wild and disorganized and lots of plants and other ground cover.  The flowerbeds get pretty minimal interference from me.  I water them when things get too dry, and every couple of weeks I go through and pull out crabgrass, dandelions, and other obvious weeds, but other then that… eh, not so much.  As a result they are a lot rougher looking then most of the rest on the street.  Of course, most of my neighbors are also retired or semi-retired and have moved to doing full-time yard maintenance in the spring, summer, and fall, and as a result have yards and gardens that are very very orderly and pruned to within an inch of their lives.  Especially the across-the-street neighbors, who have mostly mulch and the occasional well shaped shrub in their flowerbeds.

Anyway, the decorative grasses are why my hands and arms look like they are covered in paper cuts, and why I have new-skin covering some of the larger (including a rather impressive one on my right palm) gashes on my hands.  Those dead grass stalks are like razors.

I filled five yard waste bags with all of those cut-away grasses and dead stalks, which are now stacked in the garage and awaiting trash day.  Unfortunately, they may end up waiting a while, since I seem to recall, now that I think of it, that the garbage men won’t pick up yard waste until after April 1.

Damn.

It looks like Dayton is marketing itself heavily to be one of Google’s fiber test cities.

Check out the website for the project. I especially like the “Average” page on the site.

Of course I indicated my support and added myself to the map… what else could I do?

I hope that this project comes through… It would be pretty awesome.