Alive and Not Kicking

1. okay (adj.)

being satisfactory or in satisfactory condition                     

• hunky dory
• cool
• swell
• on the ball
• right on
• AOK
• ippsy pippsy
• peachy keen
• copacetic
• cooking with gas

Farewell My Lovelies

Company all gone, frig that was absolutely stuffed a few days ago is pretty much empty. So are the cupboards - when I went looking for a jar of spaghetti sauce just now, none left.  But the pasta was already boiling, so I searched for something to add to it, and in the back of the refrigerator found this tub of turkey slices.  Anna buys them for her boys, must have left them.

So I pulled off some to see if it was too salty -- it wasn't -- and then too late

noticed the top half of those slices.

 

Which inspired me to take a look at the expiration date on the tub.

 

Yes, the kids were here in May...
 I hasten to post this in case you never hear from me again, so you'll know what happened.

Movies -- Did I Post this Already?

As usual, got back in bed after breakfast, as usual turned on tv, and as usual didn't feel like getting up.  Midnight in Paris was playing again, and I found it delightful again. This time I paid more attention to the camera work, so evocative, so appealing.

Got to thinking about which movies I enjoy seeing more than once and came up with a few favorites -- perhaps you'd enjoy them, perhaps you already have.  I won't call them Best Pictures, except that I do remember thinking, the first time I saw Babette's Feast, that this was what motion pictures were invented for. 
The rest is not a particularly intellectual list, now that I think about it, but anyhow, along with Babette, I am fond of Starman,

Moonstruck and -- shoot!  Lying in bed this morning I had a list  and now I can't remember the others. 
I'll let you know if they come to me.  Meanwhile -- Netflix says I need to add to my queue. Your recommendations?

Onset in 1926

       It seems kind of picky for the kids (okay, they're in their 60s but they're still The Kids) to suggest -- more than once -- that I might like to get a driving re-test.  First off, about the only time they get to critique my skills is after I've picked them up at the airport.  That runs less than 15 minutes, and half the time it's "that's okay, Mother I'll drive" anyhow. 
       When I asked Avi point-blank what he thought of my driving ability he said it was no worse than  ever.  Hmm.
       Taking tests can be interesting, though, and if I can explore the matter without alerting the Department of Motor Vehicles  -- more specifically their License Bureau -- wotthehell! 
        Lifespan, our local seniors agency, gave me a phone number to call and I've been offered a lengthy
 evaluation followed by a road test.  It starts with a lot of paperwork, including discharge papers from that recent hospitalization, the TIA thing.  There's a form to be signed by my doctor, and one for me to fill out.  That's what I wanted to show you.  At first I was sure I was in the wrong place.- I am to check one of these boxes for Current Diagnosis:  Learning Disability, Mental Health Condition, Seizure -- then I noticed the ailments were listed in alphabetical order, and Bingo! -- take a look at the very first one:

       
The form asks for Onset Date for each problem.
                                Okay --                  
                         February 27, 1926

Flamingo Update

Wish I'd thought of it first -- these flamingos hang out on a front lawn near us.  They re-group and move around a lot, lending new interest to every drive on busy Elmwood Avenue.  But -- you'd think, after 90 years, I'd have learned life is full of disappointments -- today the lawn sported a new arrival, and frankly, it strikes me as just plain tacky. 

It's not even a flamingo.

Louis's Sundays

His place is about this size.

Record muggy heat this morning, and as I got the Rollator out of the car and started tottering across the parking lot to Louis' hair salon (currently a single basement room in a big apartment building) it crossed my mind -- for the first time -- that I might not be able to do this much longer.  Louis and I have met monthly for half a century now.  While I struggled with the doors, I was rehearsing how to ask if he ever made house calls.
     Then as I inched into a chair he whipped the cape around my neck and said "I have something to tell you.
"They just raised my rent here and I've decided to quit the business.  It'll be hard on the ones that need color, but for just a haircut, and someone like you who pays in cash [?!] I could come to your house, starting in September."
     It struck me as what Annie used to call "COSMIC."      Louis lost his wife some months ago, and as he snipped away he told me that he goes to the cemetary every Sunday, visits his wife's grave and "I talk to her.  Then there's this guy who's at his wife's stone about 100 yards away.  So then the two of us go to breakfast  at McDonald's.  We get the special deal on two Egg McMuffins with sausage, and two free senior coffees."

 
 
 
 





"And then we go to the track and bet on the horses."

bird bath videos

It's clear that if I'm going to continue sending you bulletins from the bird bath, I'd better invest in a tripod of some sort.  Do they even make tripods for these little things?  Yes, I see there's a place to screw it in on the bottom.

 Back in the 1960s, when I started substitute teaching -- first earnings since all those babies, except for the occasional magazine article -- Norm said (we were a different generation, you understand) -- don't use your money for household expenses, do something special.  So I consulted some Kodak people in the Ornithological Society, and bought a really big long heavy affair,

a tripod, different tripod for the car window, took Kodakcrome slides of course and knew what I was doing when I went after the birds. 

 Now I'm too lazy even to learn the latest little digital cameras --  when I lost my old one I went on eBay to find an identical  "vintage" replacement.  That's by way of apologizing for these videos, the first I've used it for.  But it is fun to see, the way some birds won't drink from the pool, but hover by the pipe to catch the drops.  I wanted to show you the goldfinch and the chickaee, who are more photogenic, but as I complained a few days ago, the more decorative birds are staying away lately. 

Note to self:  at least, learn to turn off camera  before ending shot.                       

The Funnies

There's not really much use posting nostalgic stuff when most people who would remember don't read blogs anyhow -- or even have computers -- but last Sunday's  paper seems so pathetic.  It still gamely divides itself into five sections, even when a section, like these Comics, consists of nothing but a folded-over single sheet of newsprint.
And anyhow, those aren't Comics -- they're the Sunday FUNNIES.  Memory seems to skip all the intervening years, and it's maybe 1933, a Depression year   I'm in a small sunny living room, stretched out on the floor with the thick wad of Sunday funnies, and a cheerful voice on the radio is saying "In the first picture we see Mutt telling Jeff..."  It must have been the beginning of the broadcast, because that was the top strip on the first page, as I remember.  The rest of that page was taken up by the Katzenjammer Kids, which they say is the country's oldest still-running strip -- it started in the late 19th century.  I wonder if it's still full of the  stereotyped dialect it used back then. ISS YOU COO-COO? their mother yells.

  Tillie the Toiler I remember because she was so up-to-date.  She'd had her hair bobbed -- something Daddy had not yet permitted my Mother -- and she worked in an office! As you can see in this ad, 30 strips were just about right for a Sunday paper.

Gasoline Alley, it seems, is also still running.  Skeezix had been born (or rather, found abandoned in a basket) on our friend Elliott's birthday, Valentine's Day, 1921.  Elky is gone, but Skeezix is still running -- well, probably more like hobbling.  For a short period under a different artist he stopped growing older, but now he's a white-haired veteran of World War II  and a great-grandfather.
The red dress Little Orphan Annie always wore was brighter, at least in the Boston Globe, than it is here, but Sandy and Daddy Warbucks are just right.  At the age of seven I never stopped to analyze the last name of that conservative capitalist.  They changed him for the movie, but in the funnies he died of despair over the election of  FDR.

So maybe he's what the GOP needs right now, to solve its problems with all those WW I-profiteer bucks.

1 day, 2 days, 30 days

Yesterday Simon and Christy commented that they hadn't seen any blog posts lately, how come?  I chose to take that as a compliment, -- at any rate, I was as the Brits say in hospital.  (I'm trying to think of an illustration to liven things up at this point but nothing appropriate comes to mind.)
I suspected it was just a TIA (sort of a mini-stroke that soon vanishes) but called 911 just in case and the hospital kept me over ("increased risk of stroke for the first 24 hours") and ran a lot of tests.  All came out normal but the MRI was worse than childbirth -- or maybe I've just forgotten.  Meanwhile Anna searched the Internet and found "increased risk of stroke for two days " after a TIA while Avi's research turned up the disheartening report that the British take away your driver's license for 30 days.  But hey -- the British voted to leave the EU, if it comes to that.
So anyhow I'm fine.  Some time ago Anna sent me this link to a delightful article from the NYTimes.  
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/nyregion/a-futuristic-suit-that-allows-you-to-experience-old-age.html?module=WatchingPortal&region=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=1&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2016%2F04%2F01%2Fnyregion%2Fa-futuristic-suit-that-allows-you-to-experience-old-age.html&eventName=Watching-article-click&_r=1
 It strikes me as entirely accurate, particularly the last sentence. But wotthehell, Mehitabel had it right -- Cheerio my Deario.