Hello Again...

If you are here because you follow this blog, you are a true friend. One that I have proven that I really don't deserve. But I am so glad that you haven't given completely up on me. And I thank you for that. 

Well now, it has been quite a winter so far. Though I can't say as much for the new year. Truth be told, it's beginning to ring in as a 2020 redux.

I spent the entire fall compulsively over-planning my great Christmas train trip. I watched every YouTube video I could find, scouring them for tips, anything really that would help me survive two long trips on very full trains. I got way too many tips, most of which involved purchasing brand specific items. Of course, they did offer helpful links "in the descriptions below" to allow me to order the item. They just get a pittance of a kickback for sending me to the site. I did finally downsize the list of hints into a workable packing plan. My research paid off, I did a fair job of packing for the train.

The train is not as glamorous as Amtrak ads would have you believe. They could improve this considerably if they could convince their employees that customer service is an important attribute. They tend to bark, yell and threaten instead of requesting firmly. They seemed to be of the opinion that it was the passenger's fault that they were overbooked, understaffed and understocked. Customer service snafu's were common, including and attendant with his mask hanging under his nose telling a passenger to put on a mask while the passenger was actively eating. (not me, but I did witness it.) 

All that being said, train travel on Amtrak Coach is better than air travel if for no other reason than to miss TSA checks. The seats are comfortable and roomy. There is a small amount of space to store travelling essentials. There are electrical outlets. Passengers are not confined to their seats, there are other cars to visit. The scenery was beautiful beyond my imagination. I actually had to keep telling myself that I was actually witnessing the outright majesty I was seeing. It. Was. Incredible. I am sold on it. I plan to travel on Amtrak, hopefully extensively this spring, summer and autumn. That is another point, train travel is incredibly cheap. I can afford a couple of trips across the country,

When I left Seattle a few days before Christmas, The weather was warm, but everything was festive. We actually had a fairly socially distanced Christmas parade to start the holiday off. We were decorated nicely. But Cheese, who started actively dying in the fall, took up residence under the tree. He does not have control of anything below his front shoulders anymore. But my sister has been keeping him cleaned and alive, she refuses to put him down. I defer to her, but I'm not enabling it. So, my brother and sister entertained Christmas with a dying cat under the tree. Typing it out, it rings of a storyline from "Christmas Vacation". And I am laughing hysterically as I am typing it. It is funny if it isn't happening in your living room. 

It didn't snow in Chicago. All Chicagans told me  that was a blessing because the snow there is brown and not pretty. But it did snow in Seattle, beginning the day after Christmas and continuing until after I got home on December 29. I got off the train feeling like I was exhausted and walking through a dream, just a feeling of disconnection. My sister had taken down all the Christmas decorations and stripped the tree down, but left it in the living room because Cheese is so attached to it. The assumption is that Cheese will die soon and we can dispose of the tree after he is gone. But for now, we have a dying cat under a dead tree in our house. It's the stuff that comedy routines are made up of.

I woke up early on New Year's Eve because my arm had become painful while I was sleeping. I dreamed that I pulled a muscle while lifting my backpack. Sometime during the night I developed cellulitis and it was quickly spreading down my arm. I went to the ER and received excellent care, but the infection has taken me all of the new year to heal from. During this time, Cheese attacked Karen and injured her hand which promptly became infected. So we have both started the year with a bang.  But even with me traipsing off on a cross country vacation during a pandemic and us decorating with a dying cat under the tree, we were not the butt of the family gossip circle. 

My niece was a bible thumping Trumpster from Tennessee. Her church told her that the Covid vaccines have a microchip in them that is the Mark of the Beast. She unfriended me on Facebook because I pointed out to her the Mark of the Beast will be taken as a loyalty brand to show support for the anti-christ and the one world government. Since the anti-christ is not presently in power and the world governments still stand sovereign the Mark of the Beast does not yet exist. The micro-chip she fears will expose to the government everywhere she's been and where she shops is in her cell phone. Her daughter almost died of Covid over the summer, and we thought for sure she would realize the severe folly of believing the lie, but not so. She spouted Q-Anon conspiracy theories left and right as to why she shouldn't listen to reason. 

She and her family spent Christmas with her mother in Georgia. Her husband arrived with symptoms, and since there are at risk people in the house, they were asked to take a test. Her husband tested positive and was asked to isolate himself in an upstairs room. When he refused to comply, and was called out for it, they left in a huff. We heard that he went into the hospital on New Years Day. Cindy was admitted a few days later. As concerned as I was, I was also furious with them. It wasn't merely that they were careless with themselves, they put everyone else in jeopardy with them. My niece died on Tuesday. I am still too angry. I'm sure I will grieve someday. I wonder if a wrongful death suit can be filed against the church. The power of poor choices...

And we still have a dying cat under a dead tree in the living room. 

 

Summer Round-Up

I find it totally unacceptable that I have to read my own blog to find what the last thing I wrote about. I never plan to close the blog and disappear, but that is in essence what happens. 

The summer has been busy. Quite a lot has happened. As noted in the post from a few months ago we strong-armed the slum lord into fixing the roof. Our plan was to deep clean the house afterward. But first we survived the Seattle heat wave. It was no joke. We made it through by covering ourselves and our animals with wet towels and drinking Gatorade. It's seems like we are complaining excessively about it. But it really was a serious event. Our roads buckled in the heat and the glaciers melted off the mountain.

The following weekend our friend, Sue came to visit. I will probably write about her at some point. She is a real character. This visit was followed quickly by our Family Vacation to Ft. Worden. We stayed at the state park this year instead of the farm. We loved the NCO housing at the fort. To Army brats like us, it was like a visit home. But like so many things, many of the attractions and shops are still closed for Covid. But Sue joined us for the first day and then another friend, Sandy came for the rest of our stay. We enjoyed the beach, the beautiful surroundings, worked puzzles and ate great sea food and just generally had a relaxing time of fellowship. It is really is nice that we have two affordable and enjoyable places to stay there. It is one of our favorite places.

But for me, the best part of the summer was my birthday present from Mollie and Chris. This year they gave me a present of their presence. They flew over from Chicago to celebrate with me. I had four whole days with them and their only request was to let them know they weren't in Chicago anymore. Easy peasy in Washington State. This place is a type A overperformer when it comes to raw beauty. Add the Museum of Glass, Pike Place Market, The Lindwood Troll and a trip through the passes, well I think they knew they were in a different place. 

But the best gift is one that I don't think they understood they were giving me. They have invited me to visit over Christmas. I am so excited. I was disappointed after I flew here more than two years ago. I felt that I had wasted the entire trip because there is this whole beautiful country and I flew over it. I didn't really get to see it. So I will remedy it. I have purchased a ticket on Amtrak's Empire Builder. I will see  the Lewis and Clark trail and Glacier National Park on my way to Chicago. I will be taking the California Zephyr and the Costal Starlight on the way home. It will allow me to see large swaths of the country. It will have me on trains for a total of 5 nights, and I'm a little worried about personal distancing. But I am vaccinated for Covid and the flu and will get a booster before I go if they are available. I will keep my mask on and douse myself with hand sanitizer. What could go wrong? Still, it is amazing what having something I'm excited about and looking forward to has done for my mental health. 

So, I am sorry that once again I have neglected you. I will make no promises, but you may be where I write incessantly about my excitement and upcoming travels.

This Old House...

We pay a price for the autonomy we enjoy in this house. We rent it from a slum-lord. 

We have six cats and a dog who is a pitt-rotty mix. I can't imagine that we could find another house to live in. But over-all the place is benefitting from us living here. The cats are mousers. Living beside a railroad track, that's important. They are abundantly adept at keeping the rodent population of the entire neighborhood down. The dog is his own story. He only looks scary. He doesn't have to be scary because nobody bothers us here. The house from the outside looks like one you would break out of, not in to.

Many years ago my brother and sister were both poor and desperate when they moved in. From what my siblings tell me it was a filthy, horror house dump when SL was showing it. The deal they struck was that SL would leave siblings alone and siblings would pay SL somewhat on time every month. Writing it down that way makes it sound like SL got taken, but not so. Karen and Ken cleaned, painted and repaired the house to make it livable and comfortable. It is in much better shape than when SL was attempting to rent it on Craig's List. 

The main disfiguring scar on the house has been the roof. The abandoned satellite dish that was attached had caused such a leak that four years ago the ceiling fell into the laundry room. SL had someone give him an estimate to repair the roof and decided to only repair the ceiling in the laundry room. The leak was repaired by placing a tarp over that portion of the roof and holding it down with large stones. You can see them on the street view of the house on Google Maps. Heck, you can see them as you  pass on the interstate that runs beside the property. SL has no shame. I have wondered if the obvious disrepair wasn't some kind of badge of accomplishment among his peers. We could have had shame too, but the cheaper rent, and the animals, and everyone leaving the old people alone was a boon to us, and no one actually 'lives' in the laundry room.

We limped along, ignoring the elephant for the full two years that I have been here. The tarp did better than expected. It prolonged the inevitable by years. The laundry room ceiling has fallen again. We began discussing how we were going to bring it up to SL when SL informed us of a huge rent increase. He made and excuse, saying that it was due to increases in taxes and insurance. By the time Karen told Ken and I about the increase she had already answered SL. She told him the same thing that was the first to come out of our mouths too; fix the roof. 

On Monday he sent out a man named Rodgers to look at it. Rodgers had been the man who fixed the ceiling without fixing the roof four years ago. He agreed the roof needed to be repaired before the ceiling and took the message back to SL. On Tuesday SL texted Karen that the roof repairs would begin on Wednesday. 

Rodgers came back earlier than we imagined he would. He was on the roof stripping away the old tiles by 8:00 am. He left shortly after noon to return the next day. He has been back every morning since. He is working rather slowly. 

Karen had been panicked that SL would kick us out because of the new roof. But Rodgers says no. SL is only replacing the shingles, not the rotting wood beneath them. He's doing it on the cheap because he does not have enough sense to do it right the first time, and he's watching his pennies.  Rodgers says that not many of SL's other tenants are paying due to the eviction moratorium. That will be ending soon, so he either needs us because we are paying or because soon he will have to decide on evicting the non-payers. Either way, we are the only tenants SL is benefitting from at the moment. When I write it, I kind of feel bad for SL. But he could have fixed the roof four years ago when it would have been cheaper, when it was the obvious better choice than he made. We have no choice but to see if it was worth worrying over. Nobody wants to move; the place fits us now that the roof is fixed. So if he leaves it as it is, and the roof holds out we will probably stay.

Anne Marie

I am still feeling shocked and sad about the loss of Anne Marie. I miss her comments and her concern for Cheese. Funny thing about the internet, we can care about people we never really meet. We see only the portion of the person that they choose to show us. That view can be deceptive. But on blogs, I don't think it is most of the time. I liked the person she told me she was, and I will miss her.

The breast cancer support chat group that I was in used to have dedicated chats for the members we lost along the way. They were very cathartic for those of us who live in the shadow of recurrence. I can't imagine how something like that could work here. It just does seem we should mark her passing.

Scammed In America

 

My new glasses came tonight. I couldn't be happier with them. I'll bet you think they look just like my old glasses. They do; same shape, clear acetate frames. Very, very similar. Let me tell you what is different about them. I didn't have insurance to pay for them. I had to figure out how to make them affordable. 

Have you ever noticed that you can go into the Dollar Tree and pick up a pair of readers for a buck? If you'd like a little better quality you can go to CVS or Costco and pick up a four pack of them for twenty. There isn't so much difference in the actual make-up of the frames and lenses. The quality varies, but the ones from Costco are comparable. G’ 

So This Happened During The Pandemic

This happened a few months ago. The frames are about 12 years old. I liked them so I kept re-using them.  I won't even recite the series of unfortunate choices that led to this bit of destruction. But if your inner voice ever warns you not to put your glasses there, listen to it. 

Then there is the little inconvenience of the pandemic, and lockdown, and social distancing. Eye exams are an in your face kind of thing. So I have been wearing the 14 year old pair for a while. Then the CDC said that vaccinated people are safe to go maskless. I decided that I was willing to risk a masked visit to an eye doc. That happened last weekend. New glasses are on the way. I should have them next week. After I ordered them I took a last peek at my old pair. I'm pretty sure that I just ordered that same frame again. At least I know my sunglasses clip on will fit.

Housekeeping

Are you Netflixed out yet? I have binged on all I have ever dreamed of binging on over the past couple of years. Now I'm on to re-watching the old-timey stuff from the 80's. I was watching Big last night and thought about what an amazing career Tom Hanks has had. Then I started pondering what it must be like to click on your TV and watch yourself from your 20's and 30's. I'm pretty certain that I wouldn't enjoy that perk.

This morning those thoughts were on my mind as I opened up my blog to check comments. I love getting them. Most of them, that is. There is a subset of people who want to use comments to sell their sordid wares and a few of them found their way to my blog. I'm sorry if you were exposed to their messages. The comments were mostly imbedded deep into posts from past years. I'm not sure of the marketing strategy there, but there it is. I wouldn't have noticed it at all except that I clicked on the Comments tab on the left and they were near the top. They are deleted now. But now I'm alerted once more to the reality that this place doesn't clean itself. If I'm keeping it as a live blog I need to do some upkeep. 

The biggest issue with this blog is purely it's age. If it were a child, I'd be expecting grandchildren by now. I switched from the earliest platform I blogged on to Blogger at the end of 2006. Over the last decade and a half I have deposited a ton load of  information that is of little interest to anyone save myself. And I don't even look at it that much. And to top it all off my life has changed so drastically since I began blogging. I have grown, and changed. I don't really believe everything I put in those blogs anymore. And I just don't want it all out there anymore. A permanent public record of all my mistakes and foolishness doesn't seem so attractive anymore. 

I don't want to lose blogging. It has been a big part of my life. I decided  that the way to go with this is to make the posts I wrote before December 2018 private. I still have them and all the wonderful comments. I am just not going to share them anymore. December 2018 seemed like a good reset date; it marks the beginning of the journey I am on now.  

Over the next week I will be making some tweaks to the template I am using. I've had it a long time and it's time for a few upgrades. Nothing drastic, but every new version of Blogger the template gets a bit more skewed and some things need to be moved around a bit. 

Who knows, maybe the place will become respectable again.

Unexpected

News came in the mail on Saturday morning along with the pre-approved credit card offers and the urgent pleas for political donations. Two of the letters were for me. 

The first I had been somewhat expecting. The American Rescue Plan included a stipulation that increased the subsidy for health insurance. I suspected that my monthly payments might be decreased, but I was shocked at how very much. The plan was already a quarter of the cost of the plan that my former employer wanted to pass on to their retirees. I did not grudge paying the premiums. I only grudge the deductibles. Now I am literally paying twenty percent of that already acceptable price. It's a nice reminder that I voted for the right president. I will remember it every month when I make that token payment.

The second letter came totally out of the blue. My retirement plan wrote to tell me that they had miscalculated my monthly pension. They will be increasing my pension by more than ten percent and sending me the increase retroactively. Next week I will be receiving a small windfall that I had not foreseen. Between Social Security and my pension I had been receiving close to what I had been making before I retired. Now I will be making a small bit more. I don't have the expenses of working and commuting any longer so this really does feel like a major shift in my circumstances. 

Yay for me! I may need to start planning a trip. I'd love to go to Ireland. I wonder if they are still rejecting Americans.

Dozing Cats

The cats are very snoozy. It is by far their favorite thing to do. Most afternoons I have three or four of the six dozing on my bed. 

Yes'm, I said six.

Cheese is still clinging to life. He does not cry in pain, has a good appetite and can still control his own functions so we are inclined to make him as comfortable as possible and show him as much love as he will withstand. 

That still leaves the number six...

We have a new cat. Or does a new cat have us? About a month ago we noticed that a group of homeless had set up a camp in the hedge that separates our property from the railroad. The railroad and the police are pretty consistent about breaking up camps there. Though the impractical side of me wishes sometimes that they would just leave them alone. This group was not one of them for many reasons. They had a cat that would wander into our property. Our cats (except Pippi) didn't seem to mind. The cat must have wandered off when they camp was dispersed because a week later we found a live trap in our yard. A car had been stolen from our neighbor, and when they were reviewing their camera footage they noticed they had captured video of one of the homeless climbing over our fence to put it there. The cat stayed around and we noticed that he was becoming markedly thinner. We started feeding him last week. Today he must have decided that he likes it here. Instead of running from us, he came when we called him. He is a tuxedo cat. We are calling him Felix.

I guess I am officially an old cat woman. I never saw this coming.

On Tulips and Tacos

This blog post was started on Cinco-de-Mayo. I am not certain that it will be ended on this date. But I do know that I need to stop the disappearing act that I've been pulling on this blog for far too long. 

The last time I checked in I was looking forward to going to Skagit to the Tulip Festival. We went. I kind of mucked it up by being in an awful mood by the time we got there. Traffic getting there was terrible, making us an hour late for our appointment. And once we got there, well the kindest way of saying it is that the festival is lame. Maybe it used to be different before covid. Maybe there used to actually be something fun to do. Basically I paid to walk on crowded paths beside tulip fields. It looks amazing, but so do the fields of other farms you can park on the side of the road to see. I've seen it. I was underwhelmed. My pictures actually look better than the experience was. Unfortunately it is Karen and Ken's favorite spring ritual. We will see how this goes. 

We had planned to eat at their favorite (Mexican) restaurant after seeing the fields. When we got there it was crowded. There were dozens of bikes in the parking lot. We decided to go somewhere else. Karen asked if anybody had a preference. Nora said she'd seen a Thai restaurant that looked interesting. I said that I like Thai food. Ken said he'd never had it before, so Karen said let's do something else then, and that there was a town close by that had more restaurants. We got to the small town to find most of the businesses closed at 7:15 pm. They had a Jack's, a  Wendy's, a Taco Time and a hole-in-the-wall, mom and pop Mexican place. I ordered chicken nacho's. I didn't think they could mess that up. They used cheddar cheese. It wasn't impressive. 

A few days later I got the second dose of the Moderna vaccine. I was pretty sure that it was going to make me sick. I was very wrong. My arm hurt for a few days, then I was fine. I feel like I dodged two bullets with that one. 

So today (still Cinco-de-Mayo) is the two week mark since my shot. I'm good to eat in a restaurant. We had planned too. We even left early to beat the crowds. Karen knew a great place in Renton, so we headed that way. When we got there, it was closed down. Not to worry, we passed a hundred or more of them on the way there. She knew another place in Kent, so we went there. That restaurant also was a victim of Covid. I calmly said again that we'd passed many Mexican restaurants on out way there. Karen then decided we should go check out a place we'd eaten at in Black Diamond. We passed a Pho restaurant going into the parking lot. I said that we were eating Pho if this one was closed. We went around the corner to find out that it too was closed down. Then I said "You know, Taco Time will do." not really being serious. Karen seriously jumped on it. I should have kept  my mouth shut and enjoyed the Pho. Driving to the Taco Time in our town, Karen was saying that it would be crowded and we'd be in a long car line. It wasn't because the casino across the street was having a party. Neither Karen nor I were interested in eating from the casino buffet so Taco Time drive thru it was.  

No margarita and eating at the coffee table. Let's YouTube a Mariachi band. Such a celebration, we should do this every year. 

Sorry about this tone, especially after being gone for a month again. I have come to the realization that my sister became a chef because she has an overwhelming compulsion to control the food supply. I had taken over cooking for the family, but it made her so unhappy that I had to concede that back. And well, unless the restaurant is her choice she's going to torpedo it. The restaurants I understand. She's a vegetarian and wants one where she's likely to find something on the menu. It still frustrates me.

Tomorrow I'm going to Zola's and eating in the restaurant. I'm not taking my sister because I can just hear that conversation in my head..."I know this other restaurant that I used to go to. We could try that out. We can eat at Zola's anytime." Sure thing...

Please stay. See, I have pretty pictures.