The Burrow

Not-Kathy and I drove to Tempe to visit JannyLou and Fast Eddie in their new digs.  Their version of senior living resembles a 5 star Hyatt more than an old folks home.  There's a spa, a woodworking shop, a fully stocked art room, a cozy bar/pool table/big tv room and a more intimate room with a poker table surrounded by comfy arm chairs.  There's a beauty parlor and an auditorium, several restaurants, indoor parking with valet service, and the most fabulous light fixtures everywhere you turn. After his last hospitalization, Fast Eddie spent a week in the on-site rehab facility, in a private room just an elevator ride away from JannyLou.  He had no complaints.  (That alone is the most important take-away.... who doesn't complain about the care they receive in rehab?) After a delicious lunch served in one of the restaurants available on site, Fast Eddie took a nap and the girls went to Butterfly Wonderland .   The butterflies were wonderful. But we were...

I've given in.  I fought the good fight for nearly a decade.  It's time to throw in the towel (trowel?) and admit defeat.  Wiser minds have prevailed.  Observation confirmed my suspicion.  Though they love to plant seeds and eat what grows, the most fun the scholars have in the garden harkens back to a simpler time in their lives.   They miss the sandbox. One raised bed has been planted by "the big kids."  Somehow, the younger scholars have internalized the concept of delay of gratification.  They recognize that good things come to those who wait.  They respect the fact that the 2nd bed is the 3rd, 4th and 5th grade garden.  They look on it with admiration.  They caution one another to keep the digging activities to the 1st raised bed, the one I've decided is their sandbox. Grandma's Garden has plenty of trowels.  We also have a big box filled with soil.  Every morning, there are new little shoots popping up.  Th...

I've been complaining about it for a while.  I wrote about it   last week.   The situation isn't getting any better.  Not-Kathy and Dr. K watched the Notre Dame/Ohio State game with us on Saturday .  The game began at 4:30.  Snacks were called for, and Costco provided.  Mini peppers and tiny, multicolored tomatoes and salted pretzels and Coastal Aged Cheddar (another COstco favorite) and roasted-unsalted almonds covered the coffee table. I smiled at the presentation, then realized I'd forgotten the main course (is there a main course when you're serving snacks?).  The plastic lid came off in a snap (cue laughter... it really did make a snapping noise) because the Lift Here tab was clearly evident.  But, as evidenced above, the little foil tab on the cocktail sauce was reluctant to leave the nest. Pinching is hard with my bent forefinger.  I was able to grasp the edge, but pulling it up just separated the tab from th...

We watched the Notre Dame/Ohio State football thriller at our house with Not-Kathy and Dr. K on Saturday night.  We had snacks and dinner and lots of wonderful conversation. They've upgraded their television viewing experience from the always buffering T-Mobile to Comcast/Xfinity's smooth sailing.  Not-Kathy noted that we could now come to their house to watch sports,  although we don't mind coming here. To which her husband replied, I've been doing it for most of my life. We paused.  We thought. We recognized that he's been watching sports with us, at our house, for almost 50 years.   I've been hosting a tradition and I didn't realize it.

There are certain things I count on.   For example: My children will answer the telephone if I call instead of texting.  They recognize that something is up if I'm using the phone the way Alexander Graham Bell intended. In every episode of Law and Order, 20 minutes after the hour the criminal has been identified and the hunt is on. The school bus drives past my window every morning and every afternoon at just about the same time. Mysteries finish with the solution to the crime at hand. When things go awry, I become stressed.  I'm not a big fan of chaos or change.  I like knowing what I'm getting into.   Why am I telling you this?  Because I'm aggravated right now, after finishing a YA book I didn't realize was a YA book until I looked at the spine when the writing seems just a little off.  The TEEN marking above MYSTERY explained it all.  There was kissing angst and clothing angst and parent angst with little lessons stuck in between the...

There are months at a time where there is no football.  While TBG feels the loss acutely, I only notice that I have fewer opportunities to take out my hearing aids and nestle in my chair with a book, content that my spouse is occupied with something that makes him just as happy. But then August rolls around and there is pre-season nonsense, which I feel quite justified in dismissing.  I try not to schedule events when there are games, but I don't worry when I do.  Once the regular season starts, though, all bets are off.   There are windows of opportunity which suit us both.  There's always the DVR.  We get by, just as we have for 50 plus years.  There was a wonderful interlude when Big Cuter shared our living space and occupied the pillow next to his father on Sundays.  He was a Bears fan, then a 49'ers fan, and, like his dad, he tried not to miss any of their games.   Once he moved away from home, they spent Sunday afternoons and ...

It's a beautiful afternoon,  The sun is low in the sky, the temperature is in the nineties, and there's almost a breeze rustling the tops of the trees.  It's my favorite time to be here, at my desk, looking out the window,  having just finished yesterday's post.   Sometimes there's a school bus, and I think of Christina-Taylor and I smile because she was wonderful.  Often, there are dogs on leashes attached to fit people striding or strolling, stopping to smell and investigate and leave their mark on The Doggie Internet (TBG's description of places dogs just have to pee). Our part of the street is flat, and therefore welcoming for cyclists and runner of all shapes and sizes and ages.  One thing I never considered when assessing the ways they differ was politics.  Not until just now. I was gazing and my mind was drifting and then a wiry, 40ish, white guy in tiny running shorts and a tank top in red white and blue came into view.  His legs appe...

Medicare pays for me to visit the doctor every year for a total check up - inside my head and my body.  The visit was preceded by fasting labs taken a week before.  The results were in my portal but I didn't open them.   I was weighed and volunteered to be measured.  It took me a moment to stand up straight enough to be five feet tall.  I surprised the assistant by pushing the measuring bar up into her hand, but she, too, is 5' tall and she understood me completely. The on-line preparatory questionnaire took a while to complete.  Most of it was related to isolation.  The questions asked about the recent past - 7 days, 2 weeks - and how often I felt despondent, with no one to ask for help.  They danced around it, screen after screen, not once asking me how often I felt joy. My doctor asked me that.  It's one of the many reasons I like her.  First thing out of our mouths was It's so good to see you!  followed by my favorite quest...

I'm a reasonably intelligent person.  I've lived 71 productive years on this planet and I've encountered all manner of things.  And then there was this. I was able to discern the plastic wrap around the green lid. That was easy to remove.  The same could not be said for the rest of the container.  I tried twisting.  I tried lifting.  I tried squeezing.  I don't remember which one detached the green piece, but I wasn't in any better shape once it was gone. I twisted. I pried.   Then I touched the top .  It moved separately.  The deep edge stayed put.   Looking and feeling produced a very small, very transparent, very stuck to the rim tab. I managed to grab it (no mean trick with my bent, arthritic finger) and access the pesto.  It was yummy. But it didn't end there.  The recipe called for 1/4 cup of white wine.  This Yellow Tail pinot grigio was no easier to ope...

What does this license plate say to you?     M C H U G H 1 I suppose that it's really someone's name, y'know like Jim McHugh. But all I (and Little Cuter when I ran it by her from the car) could see was Yiddish - meshugah. ***** It's the year 5783, according the calendar I learned about in Hebrew School.  A friend of ours was born in 5700.  Rosh Hashana (The New Year) is how we remember his age. It's a time for casting last year's woes and baggage into the sea Tashlik at Baker Beach 2023 and for apples and honey for a sweet new year.   This is the rare Jewish holiday that isn't They tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat  centric.  This is about taking some time to evaluate where you've been and where you're going and taking responsibility for it all.  It was also when I got my new dress up clothes, when Daddooooo took endless photos and 8mm movies, when I sang the same tunes my great-grandparents sang.  It was the past and the presen...

A friend helped me fix the leaky spots in the irrigation system this morning.  I felt comfortable turning it on again.  We were finished with our work by 8:30. After reading  Bear Despair  to the most well-behaved 5 and 6 year olds I've ever encountered, I was back in the garden to supervise some serious planting. Purple basil and the tomato cage. The starts were newly delivered.  The racks were full with happy basil and lemon grass and red bell peppers and lettuce plants just waiting to be photographed on the garden bench. Note giant water bottle and carrots - staying fortified in the hot sun. While some scholars were new to the garden and requested  Lily The Garden Leader 's help, others were quite content to use the foam brushes to water paint the bricks and the fence.   It's strangely soothing, in an I-can't-believe-I-am-doing-this kind of way.  The kids think they are in heaven. And then there were the scholars who were interested in pla...

Fulton County DA Fani Willis has indicted 19 people for the same crime.   Several of those charged want to sever their cases from the others. I don't know these other people  seems to be at the basis of their request.  I was only doing my job  is also underpinning the court filings.   It seems pretty obvious to me that the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States of America is not placing his own phone calls.  Shouting  Get me the guy in Georgia who's in charge of all of this  to Cassidy Hutchinson seems to me a more likely scenario than Mark Meadows doing his own Google search for the phone number to the Secretary of State's office, and then dialing direct.   Aside from the fact (it's in the Constitution) that the Office of the President has no job duties relating to the administration of elections happening in the various states,  I don't think that participating in an illegal activity (creating votes where t...

Both TBG and Taos Bubbe were awakened by a gigantic flash of lightning at 4:30 this morning.  It was followed by a choo-choo train's worth of thunder. I, of course, slept through the whole thing. The difference this time was that all that noise and electricity was followed by rain.  Real rain this time,  not seven drops over five minutes.  The down spouts were redistributing streams of water.  They weren't' the torrents of a true monsoon, but there was enough run off to fill the troughs leading out to the open space beyond. I drove to get my fasting lab blood work done with the windshield wipers doing their magic.  I drove home the same way.   TBG took me to breakfast and I wore my purple suede loafers.  I forgot about puddles in parking lots.  It's a good thing I can leap over them now.  The rain just kept coming.   It rained when I drove to Pilates but it was only drizzling when I came out.  That was enough to keep ...

Taos Bubbe and I have started walking the Chuck Huckleberry Loop  again.  We start early in the morning, before it's too hot.  The path goes behind office complexes and apartments sprawled over paved lots, separated from the path by fencing, or low border ledges, or sometimes nothing at all.  Large trees shade the path and provide screening for the residents and worker bees. Underneath those large trees, on the grassy verge between exercise and real life, there are tents.  There are bbq's and lawn chairs and laundry lines.  There are fire pits and piles of beer cans.  There are people engaged in meaningful conversations with invisible interlocutors.   When there are others on the Loop, we continue walking past the encampments.  When there's no one else around, we turn back.  We are sympathetic to their plight.  We are also scared out of our wits.  Yesterday there were tree trimmers clearing the overhanging branches shelter...

She was born on a tragic day.  She died on a tragic day.  In between she was magic.  She was 6 going on 16 when I met her.  We bonded over pick up sticks.  She played well with others. Big Cuter, CTG, and her big brother breaking out the 30 year old dinosaurs in 2010. She was interested in politics and religion and family connections.  She was brash and silly and full of energy.  She was my friend, always willing to go on an adventure, right up until our last one. Happy Birthday, sweetheart.  I miss you every day.

We were up late.  I was up and out early.  It was just too hot to be outside, even with my gigantic thermal water bottle keeping me hydrated. To-Go-Cup for comparison purposes only Triple digits on the thermometer at 5 in the afternoon could not deter me.  I lolled on the pool mat, doing leg and ab work while letting my mind drift.  I lasted about 20 minutes.   My brain and my body are fried - literally and figuratively.  I'm going to watch Coco Gauff play tennis (once the protester is removed from the scene) and regroup.   Have a wonderful, relaxing weekend if you can, and spare a thought for the parents of young children, who never really have a day off at all.

E. Jean Carroll's second suit against the lying liar was to start in January.  Instead, that trial will be about the money. The judge said that since the lying liar had already been found to have assaulted her, there was no reason to relitigate the issue.  Facts are facts.  All that's left is to decide how much he owes her.   He's already been assessed $5 million.  She's asking for $10 million this time. Just keep talking, Don.  That's what you're good at.

 Tom Hanks is worried that his son isn't learning geography. I am worried that they are not teaching critical thinking.  This happened: 4:30pm  Pizza Place We've Never Tried opens for the day. 4:37pm  I call PPWNT and order a pizza.  The Delightful Young Woman's voice tells me it will be ready in 20-30 minutes, and that I should expect a text when it's ready.  I set an alarm to get me there in 15 minutes (because I'm always early) as TBG and I laugh that the text should say Your pizza will be ready in X minutes. Otherwise they are just telling you that your pizza is sitting there getting cold. 4:48pm  My phone chimes with a text:  It's time! Your order is ready! Total time elapsed: 11minutes.   4:48:30 I get in The UV and drive the 6 minutes to the shopping center with all my favorite restaurants in just that many minutes (never varies, no matter the time of day or amount of traffic, I don't understand it but it's true). 4:54pm  I park i...

This is a day when no one should work.  Laborers should be celebrating and celebrated.   When I expressed dismay about her having to work today, my favorite Penzey's lady smiled and said Time and a Half! When I similarly commiserated with the cashier-just-a-little-younger-than-I as she helped me navigate the self-checkout at Safeway this morning, she gave me the same response.   Then she shrugged and said What else would I do?  I moved here and I love it but it's hard to meet people.  One very full, very large, very well insulated grocery tote later, she was thanking me for the link to The Happy Ladies Club. Tomorrow I have many things to do.  Today, I am going to lie back and enjoy the fruits of my labors. And to all those who cannot share in my plan, I hope life gives you time and a half today.

    Here's my Labor Day post, recycled and improved every year since 2012. ***** My  Zaydeh  was a paperhanger. So was my uncle,  his son, . They belonged to the Paperhanger's Union. When he retired, my Zaydeh got a lapel pin and a photograph of himself. The also-retiring Union Rep got a pension and health insurance. No one knows if he got a copy of the photograph, too. It was that kind of complicated relationship to Labor, with a capital L, that dominated my growing up years. Daddooooo's father owned a business. G'ma's father was a worker. In the same way that her parents' accented speech and his parents' religious devotion were cudgels in their relationship, management/labor spent a lot of time bruising the edges. I sat on Zaydeh's shoulders, bouncing around the living room to his enthusiastic rendition of  Zum Gali Gali , a Zionist/Socialist work song.  When I needed a biography for a book report in second grade, his daughter, my mother, suggested E...

It must be noted that there are very strict rules about what one can do with a saguaro.  They only sprout arms after 75 or 100 years of growth.  This is what the healthy insides look like. This is what the dead parts of the inside look like.  Once the knob calcified around to the juncture with the healthy arm (see above) the whole thing detached itself and landed on my driveway.  It took The HandyMan heavy work gloves, straps rated to 1000 pounds (the 500 pound ones failed), and all his superhuman-since-his-car-accident strength to maneuver it into place.   This is at the end of what we were dealing with. It was gooey.  It was sticky.  It was firmly attached. And it stank.  Not just smelled bad.  It stank.  Plus, it left little pieces of thick goo and a rancid looking and stinking streak up the middle of the driveway.  It's too far from the hose bibs to be sprayed away.  We laughed at each other as we said, with ironic syn...