Pictures Galore

Good morning!

I am figuring out  more and more how to put on pictures. Thank you thank you thank you to baby sister no. 5, the only one in the family with a brain. (Due to her age, no doubt.)

That's me up there with Sharkey, the most beautiful kitty ever. Sharkey died of old age complicated I am sure by foreign  cat food, last summer. She was old, but, I am now sure, not to herself!   I sat out in the garage with her as she lay dying, and bore out with her for the whole thing.  We buried her out in the yard.  We have a lot of yard what with the Lower Forty and the whole thing. Now I will be able to show you the Lower Forty in pictures, now that I have the Capability.

Oh, yes: the fast.  Well, last night the country did not shut down because a compromise bill was "reached" and things will go forward (badly).  It all sounds fishy to me. Well, I stuck to my plan for eight or nine days, however long it was.   But I guess my obligation to fast is completed as far as politics goes. I will be glad to tone down on the fasting because I felt terrible yesterday afternoon and can't blame it all on the cold and rainy weather. I love rain. (Don't love cold though.)

Some time I will write my colyum about Rains I Have Known.  Paeans, all.  I love rain, I tell you.  We are having alternating rain showers and patches of sun.  Keeps it interesting. I was awakened night before last by a spate of rain on the windows and roof; it just lasted a minute or two, and there was wind.  Driving to my weight loss group yesterday I  drove from my sunny yard, a few blocks later to very wet streets and recent puddling..and arrived at my destination with a few drops from a retreating rainshower still falling on the unwary head.  Interesting.  Oh, and did that eight or nine days of severe (I thought) partial fast produce any weight loss?  Three quarters of one pound.  That's all.  Isn't that strange?  YAZZYBEL

I have been fasting for a week (partial fast)

Wow...that's my daughter in law, Lesa, walking the dog Zero up there in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  Not what I expected to put on this post, but a beautiful photo of a good-looking gal, so I am glad for you to get to see it.  We'll be getting to see them in a little more than a month, as Alex and Lesa's daughter Miranda is graduating from high school and we plan to be there.  There will be a monumental automobile trip (four to five days each way) which will require some time off from this blog as we make it all happen....I am looking forward to it!!

Zero, there, is not too fond of me. (I hope Lesa is.)  Zero growls and bares her teeth at me whenever she sees me.  Two years ago when I house-sat for them, Zero slept snuggled up with me for two weeks, happy as a clam.  The moment the famiy walked in from their vacation, Zero deserted me and never looked back.  Except to bare those teeth.  How treacherous can you be?

We are beginning to make our first tentative plans about how to spend our time from May 21 to June 11.  Our house sitter, a tough Navy veteran, will be keeping an eye on our own concerns here at home.  So all we have to worry about is ourselves--and at our age, that's plenty.  Birdy and Listy the chihuahua twins, Freckles the Surviving Cat, and Pink-Nose the interloper cat who comes twice a day to scavenge food, will all be left behind with nothing to do but watch TV or lie out in the sun.  Well, that's about all they get to do now.  They seem OK with it. I just hope that the weather improves and warms up so that they can be comfy outside. The girls turn 14 this summer, I think.  That's 98 in dog years.  They have issues, and when you think of it they bear up bravely with the problems they have. They are amazing.

The weather is not likely to warm up while we are gone on our trip, thanks to May Gray and June Gloom.  Our weather during those two months gets very dark and gray, even colder than it is at this moment (which is danged chilly) and misty-moisty.  "Once in San Diego's spring, in misty-moisty weather....," chanted Mother Goose once upon a time.  Actually, she didn't know San Diego, poor old gal, but she knew misty-moisty.  Someone (probably weather-casters on the TV) coined the phrases May Gray and June Gloom (irritating, that latter one).  And they stuck, because it's true--the sun does not appear for days at a time except for some golden rays about sunset time.  All the Zonies who come over from Arizona shiver and shake on the beaches in their colorful bikinis, and wish they'd listened to Yazzybel and postponed their vacations till late July or August or September, when it's logical to leave AZ anyway.

Back up to the topic up there--Yes! It is more than a week that I've been fasting from  breakfast until dinner or four o'clock if I cannot last longer. So far I have done fine as we eat at five p.m.   It does not get any easier. The hard part is when one's out in late morning or lunchtime, and the tummy, slave to custom, smells all that good Mexican food frying out there and just screams for attention.  Well, too bad. I have found that I can do it.  I do not need to eat all day long.  I know that the healthy way is to eat a small amount at regular intervals, but I am doing this for political reasons right now and think I'll be OK. I don't think I've lost any weight so far, strange though it may seem.  But I have the old-lady metabolism and obviously don't really need most of the food I regularly consume.  Perhaps I am just making up for my calorie content by a larger supper.  I'll know today, when I weigh at my weight-loss club.  And I'll let you know tomorrow for sure. YAZZYBEL

Timorous Thursday

Good morning!

Well, I am still trying to load a photo, but now that I have started writing I won't try further on this one. My sister no. 5 is coaching me from afar, but so far there have been no positive results.

 Wow--my sister told me how to do this again, I tried again for the trillionth time, and THERE is Taterton eating his lunch!!!  WOW..it worked. Now --will it work again?

And there below is a wonderful plant that I got from my sister no. 3 in Arizona, where it was growing as a "baby" beside the big one in her front yard.  It is still surviving here with me in moist cold Southern  California, though not doing its best.

In that pot there are some fossils found by Theodore here in Chula Vista in years past.  Developers have pretty well demolished some of the most accessible fossil beds that could exist.  There's a snail--see it?  And some other piece of animal.  We have sharks' teeth too.

I am thrilled.  The photos it gives me as a selection when I hit "browse" is very limited.  The one of the plants in front of the garage wall is not on there, that I can find. But, now encouraged, I shall keep trying.  Thank you, birthday sister no. 5. I really appreciate your persistence in spite of your calling me a nitwit. (Mild, in comparison to the usual family epithets.)  Love to ALL, YAZZYBEL

Music, Again?

Good morning!

Know what? I just wrote a whole posting and blew it away while trying to add a photograph.

I am crushed; may come on later and write more again.  It will be different though; I don't do well with rewrites. YAZZYBEL

Tuesday with Little to Say

Good morning! 

That title should be a relief after my long posts of the last few days.  But yesterday was  a busy day though nothing big happened with the exception of my husband's return in late morning with his TROPHY--his renewed driver's license!  That was a big thing for him and of course really for me, because things are really different around a household when only one person is able to drive.

Last night was the book club, and Theo dropped me there at seven thirty.  It was nice to see my old friends, and now I'm afraid I do mean my old friends.  Everyone was perfectly charming and sociable as usual, and we sank our teeth into some delicious candies and nuts as we waiting for the serious work to begin.  Lee N. did a wonderful job of laying out all the necessary info about a book that I can only describe as "difficult."  Some people apparently think that Michael Ondaatje is a wonderful writer, and perhaps he is. His main work is poetry and he should stick to that.  Turns out that his novel is deliberately spotty and sketchy, a "pastiche,"  a "collage," because he likes that style of tormenting the reader. (My interpretation , those last few words.)  Cats do the same with mice, and I will do with Mr. Ondaatje's work what I would do with the cat, were I a mouse--avoid it if possible. Theodore picked me up and brought me home and I got to sleep about eleven o'clock, late for me!! And him!!

Book for next time is The Old School by  Tobias Wolff.   I think I'll like it if it's not too clubby, and in any case  I shall read every word because this is getting embarrassing.  Belonging to a book club and not reading the books.  More than embarrassing, disgraceful.

I am sticking to the fast pretty well. Yesterday I had a breakfast of flakes, almonds, almond milk and sliced banana.  I really suffered when we went shopping because it seemed that every place in the world was frying chicken or fish, baking breads, and otherwise making wonderful and piquant odors of savory food.  Fasting makes one realize how much of one's eating is impulse-born.

 But I endured until dinner when I found that I could not eat all my salad, beans, and PB sandwich so I put the rest of the  veges and beans away till next day's soup. Ate three small cookies with glass of milk, and that was the end of supper though I had given myself an extension of dinner for the sake of the book club's eats. But I was good there, ate few snacks, drank water and a dab of wine, and a very very small piece of cake with a very small 2 spoonsful of vanilla ice cream.  And no coffee.  This morning,   I have had one scrambled egg and salsa on green corn-nopal tortilla, coffee, and orange juice.  So now, to endure today, on a few sips of leftover coffee until dinner time. YAZZYBEL

Even As We Speak....

Good morning!  It's Monday, and I think I'll get a few Monday things off my mind for today.  There's lots to think about and say.  Taterton is off to the San Diego Department of Motor Vehicles, hoping to breeze through his driver's license renewal more easily there than in Chula Vista. I wish him the best and hope he is made happy by the experience.  (It becomes more worrisome as we age, my children.)

An important part of my Monday morning experience is always looking in on the blog of James Howard Kunstler's blog, Clushterfuck Nation.  Kunstler, a denizen of Saratoga area, New York state, is a very smart man who is writer, social commentator, urban architecture critic, wit, wonderful painter, and you should go to his site, http://www.kunstler.com/, and click on all the links. I haven't checked the paintings for a while, but they are wonderful and perfectly evocative of the fading buildings and the terrain surrounding that northern New York area.  He write this blog every Monday morning and in this particular part of his interest and expertise, he concentrates on Peak Oil and the repercussions to our lives as oil peaks and fails.  Which he has absolutely no doubt that it's doing.  Today's link touches on the subject of renewal and refurbishing and rebuilding of our nation's passenger train service, and I couldn't agree more that it needs to be done NOW.  Whenever the subject comes up in the papers, it's slid into "fast rail"...NO, we need to fix up our intercontinental SLOW RAIL and get it on the tracks.  As a lover of trains and train travel, I feel that it is so important.  One of these days, it may be the only way to get from San Diego to, say, Iowa...and it needs to be humanly feasible.  Comfortable seats built to a human scale, reasonable and nourishing food, good scheduling and planning.  Why is this not being done?  Only last year, when I was in Cedar Rapids, I read of a plan to run a train from Chicago to eastern Iowa...which was being turned down. Why?  "Well, we already have a perfectly good bus system, " puffed some presumably red-faced politco of Iowa...Hello, Iowa!  You don't! You are not even on the Greyhound grid. I have never known a place that was so hard to get into and out of as Iowa.  And if what Kunstler (and others) are predicting comes true pretty soon, there won't be gasoline for those fabled buses anyway. WE NEED TRAINS, SLOW TRAINS, FAST TRAINS, LITTLE TRAINS, BIG TRAINS. WAKE UP IOWA and everybody else. Fix up those ancient tracks. Make more engines that will run on coal, which at least we shall have after petroleum is gone, for a while.

Enough of that, and I will now slide into finishing up yesterday's story about one trip I made to Iowa.  After I went into that railway station, I consolidated my ticket and made sure I had a sleeper into Omaha. And I went to the phone and called my friend from high school who lives in Denver. Always a wonderful idea, my dears, to call that friend.  She came to pick me up and took me too her house for the few hours'wait for the train to Omaha. She gave me a sandwich and a drink.  She brought out her husband whom I hadn't seen for many years and we had a nice visit. She went into the basement and gave me  the walker belonging to her mother, Mrs Longnecker of beloved memory, which had been stored there since the older lady's decease. That walker came in so handy!!! It walked me all the way into San Diego some weekslater.

When I got into Omaha the following morning, I was greeted by my cheery forty five year old lad of a son, who was his same funny disrespectful self as he mocked, "Hobble, hobble, hobble," when I was trying to keep up with him in the gravelly rail-yards of Omaha.  When we'd made the forty-five mile drive to Walnut, Iowa, my wonderful  daughter-in-law took one look at my twisted ankle and made me be driven by her to the hospital in Atlantic IA, some twenty five miles in the other direction, where I was x-rayed and pronounced to have a fractured fibula and put into a stiff boot.  Lucky. At Kaiser I would have been in an immobilizing cast.  Then home to the family and the wonderful grandkids.

Thanks to the boot and walker, I got around well in Walnut, IA, for a few days before another incident put me into the emergency room in that aforementioned hospital and into enforced rest for several days.  Without detail, I needed that time.  So, when I got back to the house at Walnut, my stay had to be extended for a week, and the kids and I put it to good use playing cards and games. Though I like to say with glee that I gave my kids the "mother in law visit from hell," I have never had a better time than that lovely extra week in Walnut with my loved ones.  Then I boarded the plane in Omaha and hobbled in with Mrs Longnecker's walker to my husband in San Diego. YAZZYBEL

A Different Sunday, but Yet the Same

Good afternoon!!

My breakfast was eaten out to day, late, after church and the Forum.

I met a long ago friend after church and we went to a Mexican restaurant across the street from St Paul's...it's a new rather upscale place called Barrio Star. I had the Breakfast Tamal plate...they called it Tamale Plate ;  I hate to be the one to tell them that one is a tamal, not a tamale. It was a fresh corn tamal and it was just delicious.  There was that, a large serving of black beans, grrr, with sticky mozzarella  cheese that I can't swallow (but I did, just was careful to cut tiny little portions)grrrr, and a good salsa, and a huge serving of good scrambled eggs that I could not finish.  Then he showed me a large collection of old family photographs which he's formatted and gotten ready to give to some members of his extended family's younger generation, so they could see people and pets and houses that they might not have known.  That is a very considerate thing for him to have done, I thought.

The Forum today was about the Atonement, again, and  I found it a very difficult topic to comprehend.  Next week is the wrap-up, at which time we are promised some clue to this very hard study.  As that is not the end of Lent, I don't know what will happen to the rest of the time--well, Passion Sunday, Palm Sunday, and I guess that does indeed bring us to Easter.

Today at church I had a revelation, and came up with a timely thought of whom I wanted to pray for. I think I 've mentioned that I get to church, and when the time comes to mention the sick, or the dead, or people in difficult situations, -- my mind gets blocked and I can't think of the names  I need to think of.  But in the middle of the night last night  I'd gotten to thinking of a young man I have been wanting to thank.

I have a confession to make about a failing of mine: I like to take bus trips, and have taken many, far and near.  Several years  ago I was traveling toward Iowa on the Greyhound on my way to Denver to catch the Amtrak into Omaha.  In the middle of the night, I was awakened as we stopped at a little restaurant in the wilds of Utah...Everyone got out. It was about two or two thirty a.m.  I thought about staying on, as I was not hungry, but then decided that it might be more healthful to stretch my legs a bit and move around.  Wrong decision.  No sooner had I gotten off into the pitch dark than I fell descending an invisible step in the sidewalk as I approached the cafe.  My whole left leg collapsed under me and my left ankle turned in very awkwardly.  I fell to the ground.  By this time, many of the cohorts from the bus were sitting around on a low wall along the sidewalk,  and a young Mexican man came running up to me and helped me up and stood me on my feet.  I was able to get about awkwardly and I thanked him and made my way back to my seat on the bus before we took off.  My left ankle hurt a lot all the next morning and I thought it was a pretty bad sprain.  The same young man, who was truly one of the kindest and most compassionate people I have ever met, one of those people who are Good in the inimitable Mexican way, was my close nursemaid and companion.  He gave me a clean black sock to bind about my foot and ankle, without which I could not have functioned. Oh, and about dawn, some really bad and rowdy young men of the criminal type had boarded and were seated about close by as well. Well, most of the people were apparently on their way to Beyo, Colorado, to make their fortunes (test of your Spanish: of what Colorado town am I speaking?), but when we got to Denver I asked the driver if he would let me off at the railroad station before getting to the bus station where everyone would transfer.  That way I could get off near the door..but I still couldn't handle my baggage into the station, so I tucked a twenty dollar bill into my pocket to give to my kind friend when he took the bags in for me...But, when the moment came, one of the CROOKS pushed himself forward, made a big show to help me, and shoved the good young man back. (Note to all:  This is where sins of omission start.  Where you should have spoken up for the good guy and not let the crook get away with a show of helping.)
But I was tired and in pain and the bus driver was impatient--you know how it is with sinning--and the crook took my stuff in for me and I gave him the twenty dollars.  I have grieved for this ever since.  I think about that good young man and pray that he has gotten the work and opportunity he so much deserved there in the ski capital of Beyo, and I wish he could know that I will never forget him. So that's who I prayed for today.  Him. And me, of course. YAZZYBEL