Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Special holidays like Memorial Day give us a reason to have fun, and this one is big because it’s the first major holiday since New Year’s. Most of the country has opened up again, the major vacation spots are posting crowds for the first time in over a year, and even with nasty weather in some spots (like the East coast), it looks like some happiness has returned to the nation.

The holiday is meant to recognize the sacrifice of our country’s military personnel, so as a veteran myself I’m proud to count myself among those who served. Of course, I served in peacetime and was on duty in a time when women did not serve alongside men in the battlefield, and a lot of firsts for women happened long after I got my honorable discharge papers, but it was still an experience I’m glad I had.

The month of June will have me doing more self-care regimens than I’ve done in about eight years, having come off of elder care duties and spending the aftermath overcoming some health issues for which I continue to chastise myself, so this holiday weekend marks a door closing on some of the most unusual journeys of my life.

Since yesterday was plagued by rain, I waited until today to venture out. Despite the morning storms, I broke out the umbrella and visited the farmer’s market to buy produce–farm picked tomatoes, onions and potatoes–for my hamburgers and potato salad. They needed the patronage, since the prospect of getting wet keeps most people at home. Besides, I enjoyed the walking. Afterward, I did some non-fridge food shopping at the market and got some beverages, clementines and such. After that, on to the big box stores to take advantage of bonus cash before the deadline and use up two gift cards with unknown balances on them.

Still on the agenda: gardening, summer clothes duty (along with boxing winter clothes duty), laundry, crafting (hoping to finally get a few hours to make something), take a few chapters from my online class, make potato salad and plot my meals for the four-day regular week.

This is not the weekend for shore excursions or cookouts for me. It’s not easy to do patio parties for one, but every holiday I do some darned good holiday meals, and whether it’s for one or more than one, it’s a way to celebrate, reflect and have a bit of fun. We all need that right now.

I’m glad we got to this holiday. Let’s make the rest of the year a memorable one.

We know Karens have issues. The moniker, given to women who are caught on video vocalizing their displeasure or rhetoric in the middle of emotional bad moments, have kept audiences laughing on social media for some time. Let’s focus on one noteworthy individual who deserves a second look.

From the details available, it seems a Kindergarten teacher named Lisa Platt was at a Walmart on the big island of Hawai’i a year ago, when an altercation began with Hilo police officers over an issue in the parking lot. She called for aid after a local referred to her as an unwanted “haole” (used in a derogatory way to refer to non-indigenous and/or white people), and told her to return to the mainland where he felt she and her ilk apparently belonged. The officers and she did not get far with the conversation, because she had felt threatened by the local, was not receiving support from the officers, and at last she became enraged and began dropping f-bombs, then continued with an equally volatile rant about her issues with the locals. The language was not pretty, as you expect in any “you people” speech.

The problem with Karen videos is that the camera usually rolls only after the first volley has been fired, so we see only the return fire and don’t get what set it off. The cops arrived in response to Ms. Platt’s phone call, so there is no record of the local’s speaking which started it all, unless there is a parking lot camera which recorded his face, and an interpreter could lip-read.

The video of “Hilo Karen” went viral (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtzamSbln58), and Ms. Platt now is the notorious intro sequence for a YouTube channel called “Karens in the Wild.” She also lost her teaching job and, despite a public apology, Lisa Platt is another statistic of cancel culture, public shunning and our society’s festering morals wound that we re-infect with every new rejection.

The human way of handling people in the grip of bad judgment used to be correction of the behavior, not shutting out the person. We throw Karens (and their male equivalent Darrens) away like the weekly trash without a care, but not all of them are the same. The local probably could have benefitted from some sensitivity training himself.

Lisa Platt was on the attack after being backed into a psychological corner, but some Karens are anti-maskers who spend their time poring over resources which they can quote to boost their excuse to go facial commando. Other Karens have issues over waiting for proper service when ordering food. Still others ominously judge people in public places or the neighborhood who don’t seem compliant with the laws or guidelines said Karens are so diligently watchful over. Video cameras capture their passionate soapbox speeches, and we watch open-mouthed as they throw things, upend displays or leave their vehicles to get up close and personal at the drive-through.

We are white privilege personified when we show half a Karen story, don’t help those affected, or act like a full-fledged one ourselves. We shouldn’t turn away from our own shortcomings, but embrace them with solving them the true goal.

And we are capable of being better than a label.

I was invited to do a project this week, and it involved going someplace to do it! That’s the first sign that things are getting back to normal, when you’re not asked to figure out a remote version of anything. Fortunately my clothes were ready and they fit. Still, I got an early start to make sure I remembered how to do the morning routine, seeing I had given it up fourteen months ago. The traffic turned out to be easy as well, so I guess navigating the rush hour is the same as learning to ride a bicycle, and one never forgets. Also, the same doofusses who were making the commute difficult last year are still out in force this year. Some things never change.

The best part of the project was being in a space with another person. It had awkward moments, mostly when we had to navigate one-way corridors and remember to not enter by the exit only door in the building, but we had checked with each other and our immunity was assured. Thank goodness we also still had a sense of humor, because when we started the project, we needed it.

The task was to spend a day each week mailing out gift cards of various denominations. The word we received was that the prizes had been counted, verified and sorted, so my partner obtained the weekly names and prize amounts, and I did the addressing, stuffing cards and mailing them out using labels on envelopes.

My partner had instructed somebody who had done the ordering and receiving part to leave the materials for the project in a certain locked drawer. They ended up in another drawer which we had to hunt for. Fortunately they were someplace with a key which was available. That would have ground the whole process to a halt immediately. However, it set the tone for what was to come.

My partner supplied the names of the recipients, so my first job was to pull the addresses and type labels to go on the envelopes. This part went smoothly, as I am blessed by my nearly forty years of experience in this realm. Labels were typed, placed on the envelopes, and when the final piece was emailed to us–which gift cards went to whom, which was determined by random drawings–it was time to handle the cards.

From my understanding of how the process began, the box of gift cards arrived and were processed by another party. When we opened the box, we expected them to be rubber banded together by denomination, but no labels appeared on the individual piles; not even a sticky note.

The card values started at ten dollars to one hundred dollars. The amount was only on the card itself, and each gift card had its own holder folded in thirds, with semi circles into which the card’s corners were inserted to secure them inside, then the holders closed with a tab. The person before us apparently was either not told the whole story about how the distribution was to be done, or they may not have been running their day on full mind power. Every holder was taped shut on all open sides, with one piece of tape over the tab closure. It was impossible to read the dollar amount on the card, and it wasn’t written on the generic holder. We looked at each other and expressed our surprise, but thank goodness it was my burden alone to sort it all out, since she had other tasks to do.

Settling in at a huge desk with my envelopes at my side, and my partner’s blessing, I popped a holder open with my letter opener and saw that the first card was ten dollars. Matching it to a ten dollar recipient, I then pulled another card from the same rubber banded stack, and opened it to find a fifty dollar card. So not only were all the holders sealed shut, but nothing was sorted.

My afternoon was spent slicing open several dozen gift card holders and trying to match them up to recipients. Sometimes I went through several ten dollar cards to find one of the rarer hundreds when a winner popped up. Sorting piles helped, and in the end I did not have any odd cards out, which is statistically a miracle.

Mind you, there are a few more days of this to come, taking apart somebody else’s fruitless labor and adding to ours. At least the task was done by day’s end. And I got out of the house and went out. And saw another person. And did a project. It’s normalcy and craziness rolled into one. And it felt kind of good.

Mother’s Day, for good or bad, is a recognition of the fact that we all have one. Many of us have a mother whom we fondly remember, and others would simply rather forget. Still, one had to exist for us to be here.

This year countless people will spend their first year without a mother to celebrate or forget. A certain disease took many away, while others passed from other ailments, accidents, intentional deprivation or simply the end of life’s internal clock.

For those of us who remember our mothers, we may look back to times when we received good advice and followed it, or hated ourselves for not taking it. If we had an epiphany in which we chose not to take any advice from our mothers, at least we did experience psychological growth and the ability to make a choice. If it wasn’t a good choice, we still got advice and learned from what we decided to do with it. It takes our mothers to move us forward, however we do so.

We live our lives without instructions written down on what to expect or how to proceed. Much of what we do is based either upon immediacy (do something/anything), or following a prior example (choose this idea or that). Traditional ways to raise children often come from prior examples, and sometimes we continue good and bad things we learned by what was done to us by our mothers. When we choose not to follow a tradition, we form a new one or break a cycle. The results of the decisions we make growing up or raising children who grow up under our care lead us to days like Mother’s Day, when we stop to reflect on how it worked or how we did.

I have nearly all good memories of how my mother raised me. I also came to the realization that, being human, we often don’t do a one hundred percent perfect good job. When we enter our adult lives we can choose to adore our mothers for the good they did and decide how we handle any less savory past actions. Having discussed good and bad mothers with others, there are plenty of stories out there, and some who tell these stories either do or don’t forgive. That can make a day like Mother’s Day rankle rather than soothe our childhood memories.

Forgiving is said to be a healing gesture for ourselves if not for those who need forgiving. If it’s hard to forgive, acknowledging can be a step in the right direction. Who knows how many people lost mothers this past year who will have a new way to look at the holiday this time. However we choose to think about the parent who bore us, taking the time to focus on what life has given us can help us make new decisions and decide what the next day will be like.

So here’s to all mothers. You brought us into the world, and we’re here because of you.

Our senior citizens from the outgoing generation (those born near the first major disease outbreak or Spanish Flu era through around the 1930s) are disappearing in large numbers now. As of 2018, the last year in which data was collected, men and women over age 85 died at the rate of roughly 15,000 and 13,000 people per 100,000 in the population, respectively, according to Statista.com.

These are the men who defeated the Nazis in World War II and the women who worked by their sides, whether it was active duty military, working as substitutes in the civilian workforce or maintaining the home. Their social media was the local bar or pool hall, the fraternal clubhouse, round robin phone calls, the white picket fence, or the weekly card game. Bands played brass instruments, not electric guitars, and wore suits. Women wore dresses. Speech was educated and tempered by decorum, and manners were the norm. When they dwindle to their last, we will have lost possibly the last reminders of what our country was like before we advanced beyond restraint and began to lose our sense of place.

I was reminded of this when a good friend of my mother’s became lost to me this past week. I had called her on Easter and learned from her that she was soon leaving, though to where exactly (likely a senior retirement facility) was unknown at the time. Her remaining family were beginning to see, as I was, that her advancing age was putting her at a disadvantage living as a widow in a small apartment in isolation. They decided to uproot her and bring her home to Pennsylvania.

The process was amazingly swift. So much so that I had no time to say goodbye. My attempt to phone her was met with a recording stating the phone was no longer in service. Her family probably wanted to yank off the emotional band-aid and get the inevitable over with, which is understandable. Such decisions never are easy or enjoyable to execute. I quickly wrote out a card and put it in the mail, hoping it will be forwarded and we can stay in touch.

Her departure means I have no more Thanksgiving or Christmas meal planning to do this year; I may never have a turkey breast, pork or eye roast again, which may be good for my weight but not for my emotional balance. Before her and my mother’s circles of acquaintances began disappearing, we made it a point to visit each other for holidays, so I invited her over for both holidays last year (and took New Year’s off) because her living quarters had shrunk from a roomy and sunny full kitchen in her former house to a circle of appliances one had to turn in by degrees to use. Even with a difference in our ages of three decades, her presence in my life was special to me.

So many of our elderly are walking their last miles feeling disassociated or totally alone. It is not how anybody should live their final days. When I see a senior, I always try to acknowledge them; they are the last of a great era and embody everything we’ve forgotten about what a simpler, happier life was like.

We should have been learning from them all this time, for soon they will all be gone.

Drive-through events are still part of our temporary normal, so when my community held a disposal event, it was bring what you plan to dispose of (paper for secure shredding, electronics, etc.) in the trunk of your vehicle and drive in and out without having to exit your car, allowing designated personnel to unload the junk for you.

It’s always nice to have somebody eliminate one of two steps when you have to transport something in your trunk. Getting it in there is half the battle as it is. I hemmed and hawed about taking the handful of items out of the house and putting them in the trunk to take to the event; after all, I still had a few more I could have added. The stuff included some deceased DVD players and clock radios, and still left to go to electronic waste heaven was a VCR and a pair of old non-digital TVs.

The problem with a clutter removal project is that, if you don’t finish a big job in one day, you often have a still big pile of stuff to set aside for the next day you have to finish the task. I ended up with half a mountain of it, and the rest of the items I would have discarded were on the other side, taunting me like a pot of. . . .well, it isn’t gold (it’s worthless).

Anyway, I decided to do what I had waiting for me to do, set the items in my trunk and headed to the event. The initial line had passed, so I pulled up right away, and grabbed my car’s remote to pop the trunk.

The whole thing went downhill from there.

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about cars by owning them and tinkering with them in case something came up that required knowledge beyond on what side the gas cap was located. I’ve mastered the hood, washer fluid, oil reservoir, and the usual miscellany in every vehicle. Until this one, which I’ve had for six months.

My car has so many safety features, I suddenly found myself a victim of my own ride’s overbearing rules of the road. The thing I was not prepared for was the fact that one cannot pop the trunk of the vehicle if it’s turned on and running. This makes drive-through a more difficult process. When I couldn’t open the trunk with the remote from the inside, and had no button to open it other than that on the remote, I handed the remote to the attendant. He also could not do it from outside the car, so I tried to turn off the ignition. My car responded by telling me that my remote was not with the vehicle, and it refused to shut off. I had to retrieve the remote from the attendant, turn off the car, then hand him the remote back. While he popped the trunk, I received a message that I couldn’t turn the engine back on without the remote. Meanwhile, two or three vehicles were waiting behind me for this dreadful mess to be over. Fortunately nobody honked at me or became a Karen about it.

With the trunk empty and my remote in hand, I finally departed, glad for a car that won’t let me move without being focused on the road, but rather embarrassed that going forward with removing clutter was going to be an exercise in complicated procedural folderol. Maybe by the time I am ready to dispose of the rest of the junk, I can haul it around without being part of a car conga line or needing a remote in hand.

Open the trunk, Hal.

My weighted blanket caused some issues for me, so I’m taking this time to make a public service announcement for those of you considering making one a sleep aid purchase. Some time ago I wrote here about the effects of adding a weighted blanket to my evening routine; it did help me fall asleep, and I have been using it for awhile.

When I chose the blanket, I based my purchase upon body weight as prescribed: blankets come in children’s sizes, too, but for adults you may find blankets for sale weighing ten, twelve, fifteen, eighteen or twenty pounds, so you could buy based upon how much compression your body would need. Naturally I chose the high end weight class, based on my weight at the time, for myself. I didn’t realize the mistake until about a week ago.

Weight loss is popular right now, because we’re expecting to return to work and normalcy and don’t want people to see how much we’ve let ourselves go. I lost a few pounds in the past month, but didn’t think about it when going to bed at night. Suddenly I started waking up as early in the morning as 3:00 AM with intense back pain so crippling that I couldn’t bend, lift, or walk normally. The pain went away within one hour of being up, so my first impulse was to blame my mattress (which, if you’ve been following me, is only six months old).

Shirley Holmes was back on the case (no deerstalker cap or sidekick required).

In the past, I managed to figure out that two chairs I had been using were inches apart in height and saved my arms from sudden pain (caused by having to raise them higher while seated in the lower chair), so apparently another investigation, with my well-being on the line, was ready to be solved.

The first thing I did was flip the mattress; it had been six months, after all. Other than a squeak from an apparent stubborn inner spring coil, nothing else changed. I then put a board under the mattress. Nothing. I shifted the board to go under me, thinking the mattress might have developed a sinkhole in the middle. The morning pain continued.

Then a few days ago, the temperature overnight changed dramatically, I was suddenly overheated and threw the covers off the bed when I was jolted from my sleep around 3:30 AM. Within minutes, my body began to unwind itself and adjust its alignment as I lay there cooling off, and tension melted away. Eureka! I had an answer.

In addition to the blanket’s weight, it became apparent that the bedspread added some five to eight pounds; since my weight was going down, the effect of that combined poundage in my bedding was going up. The weight in the blanket is designed to provide the comfort of a hug, or somebody who normally sleeps beside you, but it is dead weight. That’s pressure on your whole body, restricting your movements at night, both voluntary and involuntary. Your body does a lot of its repair work when you sleep, and autonomous bodily motions are a part of it. When constricted by a weighted blanket, your body can’t perform those movements. My command center was awakening me every morning, trying to warn me that, hey, we need to be able to wiggle a bit in here.

When I removed the weighted blanket and substituted light warm blankets instead, the pain disappeared the next evening. Mystery solved.

My advice is to purchase the lower weight class of blanket than a chart may recommend, keeping in mind that your other bed linens will pad the amount of pressure on your body while asleep. Also, by investigating further, I saw articles noting that those with muscle or bone issues may want to check with a doctor before using one, and they should be kept off of the elderly, babies and small pets.

So there is my caveat for those out there seeking the sleep we all enjoyed as children. The answer may take some research, but it’s worth finding.

Outdoor beautification has begun. My neighbors are blocking time to mulch, prune, arrange, clean, adjust and repair the fronts of their homes, and it’s a fascinating ritual to behold. When I and my family first moved to the neighborhood back in 1964, my parents were given a dressing down by a couple who were miffed at the replacement of the front steps. The original was wood and had developed a slippery and warped appearance, so concrete was poured and molded instead, along with nice wrought iron railings. The neighbors’ complaint? That everybody else would have to redo their fronts, too.

They must be spinning at double speed in their graves right about now. Landscaping is a big-buck business, and spring is the perfect opportunity to make changes to that post winter front yard.

I wish I could join the throngs, because I have ideas and plans for the front, but the opportunity may well pass me by because I’ve been recovering from an unexpected medical event and can’t do any big bending or lifting. My lawn care man has been by himself the whole past year, because unemployment was a better incentive than actually going out and doing lawn work, so he had no back-up staff as they elected to stay home. I can’t be so unthinking as to ask him if he would want to redo my flower beds while he is attempting to mow a sufficient number of lawns all summer to make his seasonal income all by himself.

There seem to be some bizarre, unidentifiable pods growing in my flower bed, along with the merciful balance of a pleasant array of jonquils and recently retired early season crocuses. What follows, though, is a massive invasion of ferns which overgrow my walk and have outlived their contribution to any joy. I want to mulch and put in some low shrubs instead.

On the other side are Japonica in the town’s school colors, a bird bath my neighbor was nice enough to relocate up front for me, and a holly tree stump which is trying hard to come back from the dead as a bush. Some of the ferns have also invaded that side. Fronting the house is a lovely dogwood, and the town’s shade tree commission just planted a European Hornbeam at the curb. They even included a watering bag to help it along in its first weeks of being planted. I have already filled the bag and put the tree on a schedule so it gets refilled once a week per the township’s much appreciated instructions.

Maybe the tree will grow big and fast enough to hide the fact that I’m failing as a curb appeal fanatic.

My Good Friday fish dinner was a bust. It seems I didn’t follow the package directions for my fish fillet, and it turned into a limited edition Gorton’s fish brick. The sauce melted off of it, and it shrank to the size of a mutant child’s half deck of playing cards. I ended up eating pesto pasta by itself, and the sauce had spilled over the pot because my burner decided to amp up past heat level eight all the way to Hades’ hot tub temperature, which is somewhere around 15. At least it wasn’t burnt.

Not one of my better dinner attempts. And I still have not tried to nuke popcorn in the microwave.

Having been on a diet for medical reasons, I was really looking forward to breaking the restrictions and enjoying some sweet things. I knew Easter was coming, but my diet started ahead of Lent, so I didn’t feel the need to wait beyond that. Haven’t I suffered enough?

What I did do last week, being the last week of the fasting season, was go on a bit of a dessert bender, ordering some food from online services. Since the minimum quantities to order are sized more for one of those huge families profiled on reality networks like TLC, I shared with friends and neighbors, keeping a couple of pieces for myself. It helps bond the neighborhood, nobody has to put up with my kitchen failures (luckily I just cooked the fish brick for myself), and nobody gains twenty pounds (we each simply gain two).

The service I tried is called Goldbelly, which is known as a curator of regional restaurant foods which are delivered nationwide. It can be a bit pricey, but when you’re transporting food which would normally go a matter of miles by car to homes within a stone’s throw of its origin, to places far-flung across the country, there are fees involved. I started simply with some pastries from a New York bakery, and they arrived well packaged and in a timely manner. The leftovers refrigerated well until they went to grateful homes.

Of course as soon as I have food to give out, everybody goes away somewhere. I can safely say that if this happens to you, your order from Goldbelly will keep until they give up and come home. I know an office manager who has used Goldbelly, and the delivery doesn’t seem to survive the trip past escaping the box for a cell photo for social media, so refrigerating is never his issue.

I also ordered some fudge and some pecan turtles from a place called Chocolate Moonshine, based in Pennsylvania, which I will now forever refer to as fudge crack, because it’s that good. My order was for chocolate cherry bourbon fudge, and it’s divine. All conveniently delivered to my front door in no time flat.

So my stomach will never be flat again.

The great thing about these food orders is that you can space them out to suit special needs or occasions, so trying them out one time and then saving your next order for a milestone makes perfect sense. I figure I’ll order some more fudge soon, in time for some upcoming celebrations.

I’ll add it to an order for some real fish fillets that somebody else has to cook properly first.