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 |  My Blog....Pearls of wisdom and/or foolish mutterings.....You be the judge.... |
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A little of this, a dash of that......epic mood swings.......A LOT of foolish mutterings and occasionally a few words of wisdom. It's a crapshoot. You never know what you'll find in here... |
| April 15th - we all know the meaning of that date. Tax Day. Da-DUM!! But for my hubby and me, April 15th has another entirely different and very significant meaning. Yes indeedy, tomorrow - April 15th - is our 31st wedding anniversary. Yes, I know, I can hear you saying it now - and you're right - I do look entirely too young to have been married for 31 years. Thank you, thank you. But it is true - thirty-one years. I find it hard to believe too, buth then I do have all those children and grandchildren. My oldest daughter was born in 1978 so she will turn 30 this year. How can that be? I still feel like I'm thirty. Well, in my mind I feel like I'm thirty. My body has an entirely different opinion. As a matter of fact, just wait until you hear how Hubby and I will be celebrating our anniversary tomorrow.......... may I have a drum roll, please?....... are you ready for this?...... it's a little wild ..... are you sure you want to know? Okay, here goes. We are going to the doctor together - our family doctor, who has been our doctor for twenty years now. We have appointments 15 minutes apart - I am going because that injured foot I complained about while I was in West Texas has just gotten worse and worse, to the point that I can barely walk on it and now my back is out because of my gimping around for the last two weeks. And Hubby, well he is going because he has apparently injured his back and his right elbow. He has been having bad spasms in his back for several weeks when he turns just the right way and he says his elbow feels like someone drove a nail through it. Oh, I almost forgot to mention his bad knee that pops out of place and almost takes him down. So we've both been gimping around. Can't have that - it definitely gives the impression that we are older than we really are. Besides, it's hard to feel young when you can barey walk. Hubby made the statement today that we said we wanted to grow old together, so we may as well get accustomed to these joint doctor appointments. Hardy, har, har, huh? He's a pretty good guy though, so I think I'll keep him. |
| Got this in an email today and just couldn't resist sharing it...... How to tell you are married. Three women: one engaged, one married and one a mistress, are chatting about their relationships and decided to amaze their men. That night all three will wear black leather bras, stiletto heels and a mask over their eyes. After a few days they meet up for lunch. The engaged woman: The other night when my boyfriend came over he found me with a black leather bodice, tall stilettos and a mask. He saw me and said, "You are the woman of my life. I love you." Then we made love all night long. The mistress: Me too! The other night I met my lover at his office and I was wearing the leather bodice, heels, mask over my eyes and a raincoat. When I opened the raincoat he didn't say a word, but we had wild sex all night. The married woman: I sent the kids to stay at my mother's house for the night. When my husband came home I was wearing the leather bodice, black stockings, stilettos and a mask over my eyes. As soon as he came in the door and saw me he said, "What's for dinner, Batman?" Kay Jordan ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| This morning Hubby took me fishing. Yahoo! He hasn't taken me fishing in - hmmm - let's see, it's been about ten years. He used to take me fishing a lot - I love to fish, and I guess the fishing gods are just a little more fond of me than they are of Hubby. I refer you to the pictures below reflecting our fishing results today, which are a fair representation of past fishing expeditions and the reason Hubby quit taking me fishing. Exhibt A My catch for the morning: ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** Exhibit B Hubby's catch for the morning: ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** I think it may be a while before I get to go fishing again. |
| Hubby and I hit the road today headed out for a long weekend at a beautiful place in the Hill Country. Our destination was only about three hours from Houston, but first we had to navigate across the wide expanses of the city to pick up a gun that Hubby won at a shooting tournament. For his birthday last year, I gave him one of those nifty little navigation devices that are so popular now. I have to admit, it is very handy when you don't know how to get where you're going, but it has the voice of a phone sex operator and can be very pushy at times. So, our navigator, I like to call her Muffy, starts us out headed in the general direction of the gun shop on the far corner of north-central Houston. Actually, can a north-central location have a corner? Maybe not, since it's in the middle at the top of Houston so I guess Muffy actually sent us on our way to the far rounded-edge of north-central Houston. But, I digress. Muffy is supposed to make contact with Navigation Central and route you around any and all construction, thereby saving you much time and frustration. Well, today it appeared that Navigation Central was either understaffed (or closed) or that Muffy was being just plain pissy (maybe because I was in the car?) Instead of taking us around any construction, she seemed to continually send us right into the big middle of torn up and blocked off roads. At first, Muffy was doing fine, no problems. We were making good time, speeding along at the customary Houston speed limit of 90 mph. Hubby and I were both feeling very relaxed and were in jovial moods. As we joked and laughed, Muffy kept interrupting us with comments like the following: Muffy: Keep to the right, followed by keep to the left. Hubby and I looked at each other quizzically, then resumed our joking and laughing. Muffy then chimed in again. Muffy: Make a slight right turn ahead. Hubby: (to Muffy) I can't go that way, the exit is blocked. Hubby keeps driving straight. Muffy dings her bell at him anxiously, which causes Hubby to say to her, "I told you, the exit is blocked." Muffy: (now slightly exasperated) As soon as possible, make a legal U-turn. Hubby: I'm not turning around. The exit is blocked. Muffy: As soon as possible, make a legal U-turn. Hubby: ......silence.......keeps driving straight Muffy: (a little louder now, with a bit of an attitude) Recalculating route........Continue on current route for 6.2 miles. Score: Hubby 1; Muffy 0 Five miles later, Muffy has regained her composure. Her sultry phone-sex-operator voice interrupts our conversation once again. Muffy: Prepare for a slight right turn in 1.2 miles. Hubby has no comment. Muffy: Prepare for a slight right turn in .9 miles. Hubby again has no comment. Muffy: Slight right turn in .5 miles. Hubby has no comment. I sense Muffy is getting miffed. She dings her bell at him rather loudly and says, "Approaching slight right turn!" DING! Hubby: Okay, okay, I got it. Hubby makes slight right turn. Muffy is silently sulking. We resume our conversation, but not for long. It appears Muffy has sent us into road construction hell, so Hubby begins to maneuver his way around the traffic cones and barriers. Muffy is having none of this. In a decidedly pissy tone, she tells him, "As soon as possible, make a legal U-turn." Hubby tells her to kiss his ass. This banter continues for the next several miles until Muffy decides to try another approach. Muffy: Recalculating route. (I can hear the unspoken "loser!" in her tone. It's unmistakeable.) Hubby smiles. Score; Hubby 2 Muffy 0 We finally make it to the shop to pick up Hubby's gun, then pull out of the parking lot to begin our trek to the Hill County. That Muffy is a sly one. Knowing that we are in unfamiliar territory, she turns on the charm and sends us in the complete opposite direction from where we should be headed. Hubby keeps questioning her directions, but decides Muffy knows this part of Houston better than he does. Until we suddenly find ourselves in a familiar part of town and realize the trickery Muffy has engaged in. Hubby turns the truck around and gets us headed in the right direction, all the while arguing with Muffy who wants us to make a legal U-turn, blah, blah, blah. I keep expecting Muffy to say something like, "I said turn around, A-hole!" She never does, but I know she is thinking it. Especially after Hubby calls her a bitch in a moment of sheer frustration. It was an interesting dynamic between Hubby and Muffy for most of the trip. Things seemed to have finally settled down after a couple of hours. Muffy had been unusually quiet for many miles. Suddenly she came alive and started barking orders like a mad-woman. Yep, she had the last laugh after all. She routed us right through San Antonio, threw in some more construction and an extra thirty minutes or so. Hubby finally pulled the plug on her about 20 minutes from our final destination. "I can't take any more of her," he told me. I don't know how well I'll sleep tonight knowing that Muffy is out there in our truck planning some kind of revenge. It could get ugly out here. |
| When I was a child, one of my favorite things in the world was to gather with my mom, aunt, grandmother and great-grandmother around the kitchen table at my grandparents' farm to look at old family pictures. My great-grandmother had a big box of pictures - not sorted or in any kind of order, really - that she would bring to the table and we would spend hours going through the pictures. I loved hearing the family stories related as each picture was drawn from the box. I never got tired of seeing the pictures and hearing those stories. When my mother died, followed shortly in death by my grandmother, I was fortunate enough to become the new "keeper of the pictures." I was thrilled. And now, through the miracle of modern technology, I have scanned a great many of those pictures and have them on my computer. For our last family reunion, I put together a slide show on DVD with a bunch of those old family pictures set to music. I've also scrapbooked many of those pictures since I can now keep the originals and print copies for my scrapbook pages. The older I get, the more I appreciate having those pictures. I don't know what it is about getting older that makes us want to understand more and know more about our ancestors, but it seems to be universal. Today, I want to share some of the oldest of the pictures with my "online family." ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** This is a picture of my great-grandather's grandmother on her farm in Indiana. This is one I never even saw (or at least, don't remember) when I was a kid, but when I ran across it in the box of pictures from my mother, I couldn't believe my luck. This woman is five generations removed from me, died before I was ever born and I have a picture of her. I think that is just so cool! ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** This is my great-grandfather as a teenager. I don't know what year this was taken but probably sometime around 1910. His name was Leon Coffin, but we called him Skipper. I don't know why. I asked my aunt (my mother's sister) recently if she knew why, but she didn't know either. I don't know if he ever even owned a boat. I remember that my great-grandmother referred to him as The Skipper, as in "Go ask The Skipper." I know that he had several different careers during his lifetime. He was a "Railroad Man," he jointly owned and operated a pharmacy for a time with his brothers, he owned one of the last places in the Texas Panhandle to manufacture and sell ice - as in, ice blocks for "iceboxes", the precursor to refrigerators, and he was a farmer in the last part of his life. He and my great-grandmother had three sons - Parker, Bert (my grandfather) and Leon Jr. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** This is a picture of the three Coffin boys - Parker, Jr. and Bert. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** This baby with the crooked smile is my granddad. I called him Bert (as did all the grandkids after me.) Don't ask me why my family seemed to have a predilection for calling grandparents by their first names because I don't know the answer for that one either. I inherited Bert's crooked smile. I used to hate my crooked smile, but now I'm kind of fond of it, knowing that it got passed down to me from the grandfather I adored. That's the Coffin family history lesson for today. I have a whole box full of pictures, but won't bore you with too many of them. The one I want to leave you with today is one of my Great-great-grandmother Grogan. She was one of the Outlaw Grogans from Albuquerque. Her daughter - my great-grandmother, Myrnie, who I thought was one of the sweetest women to ever live, used to say that Grandmother Grogan was the meanest woman who ever walked the face of the earth. Looking at this picture, that's not hard to believe. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| Today started out to be a really good day. I started the day off by going to the YMCA with my daughter where we both worked out for an hour! I felt a great sense of accomplishment. Woo-hoo! We had to go early so that I could get back home in time to get a shower and get ready for my standing appointment at 11:30 on Mondays with my therapist. I made it to the therapist on time and that's where things went south. For the past couple of weeks, I've been very emotional - crying easily and just feeling kind of sad. So today was a rough day with the therapist. I really hate it when those things I've pushed deep down for years finally make their way to the surface and demand attention. I knew it was coming, just didn't really want to deal with it, but it was inevitable. I mean, that is why I see a therapist, after all. Turns out that fifty years of stuffing things isn't really the best way to handle it. I thought I was handling everything pretty well and had dealt with most of my "issues", but my therapist thought she knew better and that there was still more in there to deal with. Turns out she knew better than I did. Dammit. She tells me I am courageous. I don't feel courageous. I just feel sad and angry. She tells me there will come a day when I won't feel that way anymore. I'm sure looking foward to that day and I hope she's right. Sometimes I think I liked it better when I didn't remember much of my very bizarre childhood. I knew I didn't have an Ozzy and Harriet-type family, but I was able to block enough of it out that I could live with it. At least that's what I wanted to believe. There comes a point though when you just have to look right at the ugly truth and face it down. Until you've done that, you just can't leave it behind. Well, I'm here to tell you that it hurts like hell staring that truth in the face. And that's where I am today. I don't like it, but I know I have to do it and I know I'll be stronger and healthier in the end. Can't get there fast enough for me, though, I'll tell you that. |
| I just have to post these adorable pictures of my newest grandson. He just gets cuter every day - what a personality! ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
Hey everyone - I've been doing a lot of R&R latey and I came across a newbie that I am so impressed with. You absolutely must check out her port. She writes poetry - and I am not a big poetry fan - but the poetry that dreamersmuse writes really grabbed me. Check her out. I think you'll like her.  |
| Uh-oh, I’m in trouble with my sister. She faithfully reads my blog and when she read what I wrote a few days ago about me always being visitor and seldom the visitee, she promptly called me on that one. Which she had every right to do since she has made the trek from her house to mine (Albuquerque to Houston) numerous times, even paid me a surprise visit when one of my sons graduated from high school. So, here’s my printed retraction. My sister, Kathy, is the exception to the rule when it comes to me being the visitor and not the visitee. She visits me as often as I visit her, maybe even more. In fact, I think I owe her a visit now. About every three months or so, each of us needs a “sister fix” and we are way overdue on that at the moment. The last time we were together was back in October when Hubby and I flew out to Albuquerque for the Balloon Fiesta (which was incredible, by the way). Here’s a pic of the two of us and our respective hubbies. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** My brother-in-law, Dar, is having some health issues right now. He is a really neat guy – you would all just love him if you met him. He’s one of those kinds of people who you feel an instant connection to when you meet him. He can talk about anything (and even speak intelligently about most of those things!) He has been really good to my sister – it’s obvious he loves her with his whole heart. And he has a pretty big heart. He will do anything for anybody. Never met a stranger in his life. He has some incredible stories to tell. I guess he was quite the hell-raiser at one time. Couldn’t tell it now – he’s one of the most gentle, soft-spoken, easy-going men I’ve ever known. Anyway, he just had surgery to remove a couple of large tumors on his thyroid. They will know in a week or so if the tumors were benign or malignant. They got all the tumors, but in the process had to remove and then reattach something called the para-thyroid, which is how your body produces calcium. You can’t live without calcium, so the hope is that his reattached para-thyroid will start producing calcium again. Calcium apparently depletes fairly quickly from your body, so they are giving him supplements now and trying to regulate the calcium level in his body. Too high is as bad as too low, so it’s quite a lengthy and precarious process. He is still in the hospital (and hating every minute of it) while they try to regulate the calcium level and can’t go home until they have gotten that accomplished. So please keep Dar and Kathy in your prayers. He’s a good brother-in-law – all broken in and everything, so we want to keep him around. |
| Glory Hallelujah!!! We finally made it home last night at about 1:00 AM. Southwest re-routed a flight from Phoenix through Midland-Odessa to pick up 33 stranded passengers and take them on to Houston. Never was a crowd of people so happy to board an airplane (well, I'm sure somewhere at some time there probably was a happier crowd, but we were all pretty damn happy.) So I got to sleep in my own bed last night - short night though it was. And I started off the day with a two hour massage, so I'm feeling halfway human by now. Hubby had to rush off to his shooting tournament and all the kids are gone here, there and everywhere, so I have the whole house to myself. Woo hoo! Of course, it smells like my kids got both dogs soaking wet and then rubbed them all over the furniture and walls while I was gone, so a major cleaning is definitely in the offing, but for now, I just lit candles. Today, I'm Scarlet from Gone With the Wind - as in, I'll think about that tomorrow. I'm just enjoying being in my own home. Ahhhhhhhh. I called my daughter on her cell phone and asked her how they got this particularly strong wet dog smell in the house. I asked if they did indeed rub the wet dogs all over everything. She said she didn't think anyone did that. I'm not sure I believe her. The candles are helping a little - now it smells like Tyler Candle Diva-scented wet dog in here. Not really the effect I was going for, but maybe if the candles burn a little longer, they will overpower the dog smell, at least until tomorrow. I really don't want to jump into full-fledged house cleaning mode today - not after that two hour massage. That hardly seems fair, don't you agree? I do have to go buy some groceries, as there is nothing in this house to eat. Riddle me this..... my house was inhabited by four fully grown adults comprised of one woman and three men--or as my son likes to say - grown-ass men. As in I'm a grown-ass man, you don't have to tell me that. Or I know that. I'm a grown ass man! So, following that line of thinking, if there were four grown-ass adults in this house for a week while I was gone, why does it smell like wet dog, why are there no groceries and why is there laundry spread all over the den? It does make one wonder. Looks like break time is over. I must make a grocery list.  |
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