Crabby ....crabby......

LOL>>>this has been my life for the last three weeks.

I believe there are phases in life....and I hit ultimate crab.

My trip coming up in June hit a messy snag. I hired a travel agent to help make my planning easy. I picked (supposedly) one of the best in the area....in fact...they are even listed nationally.
I was even working with the President of the agency. Can we say Bow wow....bad mistake?

I have been chasing after the woman for two months....and the only thing she has done is provide a list of three hotels in Rome...(another travel agent told me they were the standard ones to suggest since they are very nice and there are only so many in this price range.) She also booked my hub's airline ticket from Rome to Israel but forgot the entire conversation concerning his return arrangements and drew a blank. And I'm paying for this? Not any more. I'm finished with her....can book a few things on my own....and now I'm asking a friend, who has been a travel agent, about 5 years to help with a few things.....like tours and other attractions in Rome. I've already switch my solo part of the tour to another travel agency which was only supposed to help with my land package in Israel. She's knowledgeable and quick and there's no messing around.

My solo trip hit snag after snag....going into the Sinai ...trouble.....going into the great desert in Jordan ....trouble.....touring the Negev....trouble. Every day I seemed to get more and more bad news. But just the other day....something broke....a private tour guide (one with a good reputation) became available....and now I see that with a little work.....perhaps I can pull something together.

Even my house has conspired against me....I have almost all of the furniture out of my master
bedroom....the clutter thinned...the room almost painted except for the ceiling .....the new hardwood floor picked out and .......LOL>>> no wood....no floor has arrived. It appears the hardwood color I picked out has suddenly been backordered.....grrrrrrr.....I'm sleeping on a mattress in the middle of the floor with my clothes in boxes.....and the rest of the furniture piled in a corner....and no installers....no wood.

This can make you crabby.

I was supposed to my taxes.....but bah humbug I haven't even touched them yet....haven't opened the envelopes with the statements. That's cause I was rushing to finish the bedroom for the floor and the men....which of course have never arrived.

You know sometimes crabby just snowballs....but I am determined to look on the brighter side starting tonight.

My sister-in-law and her hub have flown in from the West Coast to run a marathon this weekend in our town. So we are pleased to have them and pleased to be touring around in the nice weather....enjoying our city and doing things that are fun.

I think I've decided the corner has been turned....besides it looks like I might book a hotel called the Queen of Sheba down by the Red Sea.....I mean really....that's pretty darn funny and pretty fitting....lol

I Don't Need to Turn up the Thermostat tonight....I can look at this pic and generate my own heat

Really?

An all male panel talking contraception?

So if the topic was insurance coverage of vasectomies....we would have an all female panel?

And just a reminder.....contraception is also about planning for life.....spacing your children....giving yourself more time to save money to buy a house or a bigger apartment...or mature as a couple..... career needs....and women's health (not everyone is lucky enough to be able to birth a zillion babies in a row like the Dugger woman)

Sigh.

Best Vintage Valentine Day Card....ever! LOL

I'm not quite sure I get it......traditional greeting but???

Love in a Sausage???

??????

Hmmmm.....

More Vintage Valentine Day Cards

The postcard reads: I had considerable trouble with my sparker, but hope to arrive.

Hmmmm....no wonder she's turned away from him....a failed sparker could be a game changer in a relationship.





This postcard reads: What are you thinking about Tommy? Same as you. Oh! you naughty man!

And I'm thinking...geez these two look like they need an instruction manual.

Getting Ready for Valentine's Day--Vintage Postcards Style

I have a weakness for antique Valentine Day Post Cards.

I love the cheeky ones...the innocent double entendre...versus Cupids and arrows and hearts.

Since V-Day is only a few days away....I thought I would post some of my favorites from my collection.

"Lucky Jim" is a bit of a puzzler. Dated 1909, someone in very nice script wrote "Happy Valentine's Day" on the back.

Unfortunately, I can't make out the signature...is it from a man or a woman?

Lucky Jim is sure one special guy.....puffing on his cigarette and coddled by three adoring women.

Who sent the post card might skew the interpretation.

Is this a hint from a man to a woman? Is this a hint from a woman to a man?

Is this a reminder of something that happened in real life? A Valentine Menage a Trois?

Or a suggestion for one?

An interesting fantasy a couple share?

A joke...because in real life Jim is not attractive and this is beyond his wildest dream?

So many interesting interpretations....with only one certainty....Jim is lucky!

Revelations on a Treadmill

In third grade, I was kicked out of the Brownies.

I was heartbroken.

I wanted to be a Brownie.... but most of all I wanted to be a Girl Scout.

I wanted to go camping. I wanted to learn how to rub sticks together and make a fire. I wanted to hike and carry around a map and have a compass attached to a string hanging around my neck.

I wanted to sell Girl Scout cookies.

I wanted to go off someplace with lots of other Girl Scouts and camp in the mountains or a meadow or in a forest far from home.

I wanted to make s'mores and tell ghost stories and be too scared to sleep.

I wanted to wear a green uniform and a little beret and have one zillion badges.

But I was kicked out of Brownies.

My mother told me that I had missed too many meetings and I couldn't go back.

They didn't want me.

I suffered through a sore throat that turned out to be Strep and then progressed to Rheumatic Fever...a complication of strep....where the bacteria seeds into other parts of your body.

I was hospitalized for two weeks. Out of school for a month.

I wasn't in pain....but I was very very tired....and very afraid... as my parents went home at the end of visiting hours (they both worked) and I was all alone during the night at the hospital.

How could the Den Mothers not understand? How could they say I missed too many meetings when I was far away in a children's hospital? Why wouldn't they give me another chance?

But my mother said, "no ...no....no...don't even ask because you've been kicked out."



The hurt healed.

I used the incident for joke fodder.

"Hey, I got kicked out of Brownies as a kid." Ha Ha Ha. It seemed so unrealistic ...it was funny.

Years passed...I bought Girl Scout cookies....my two sons were in Scouts and I still buy Girl Scout cookies today....or I should say, my hub does, coming home with a semi-guilty look on his face and big bag of cookies. "We can freeze them," he says joyfully. I know he doesn't want to turn down parents/fellow employees who have quotas and lots of kids. So we freeze lots of cookies.

Sometimes when we'd defrost a box of cookies, I'd say to my hub, "How could they kick a kid out of Brownies for being sick? I mean, I didn't purposely miss the meetings."

My hub would come up with a new snotty answer each time....something like "they knew you would never be able to rub sticks together" or "they saved you from flunking knot tying and map folding." Two things which, I admit, I cannot do.

The other day I was on the treadmill at the gym. They have three rows of treadmills and three TV's on the wall. One has ESPN on....the other has NBC or ABC.....and (ironically) the one on the far right hosts Fox.

I head for the center treadmills. I jump on...and mostly ignore the TV. My earplugs are in and my Iphone on.

But the images on the TV crystallize and I notice Katie Couric interviewing little girls.....little Girl Scouts. I pull my plugs out.

Perky Katie is rolling off statistics....80% of women executives were Girl Scouts as kids....10000% did this.....10000% did that.

I repeat my old comic line to myself....."Ha Ha...I got kicked out of Brownies"...which is why I'm probably not the head of Chrysler or Microsoft.

And then a bolt of lightening.

I punch the "stop" button and stand there.

"You alright?" asks Dottie, the 70 year old scarecrow of a woman, who treadmills every day for a couple of hours.

"Yes."

And then I say to myself in a calm voice....."My mother lied to me."

I was NOT kicked out of Brownies.

The truth is so self-evident ...so real....so "right"....I am stunned.

My mother wanted me to be a princess.

She bought me expensive Italian suits (which I hated) to wear to Church.

She forbade me from joining my Lithuanian grandmother on her weekly outings to the forest preserve.

She did not want me to be "rough" or "common."

She wanted me to be interested in clothes and fashion and princess-y things.

My mother hated that I loved the outdoors, that I planted tomatoes in the yard and collected worms and buried dead baby birds.

She didn't want me to sell anything....she would habitually buy up anything the nuns would distribute to us for sale...from candy to wrapping paper...so I wouldn't ask anyone for money. My mom considered that very un-lady-like....and "beneath us."

Rubbing sticks and hiking was too peasant-like...smacked too much of the "Old Country" which was just a generation behind her....and my mother certainly did not want me to aspire to a weekend in a tent on the ground ....somewhere away from her watchful eyes.

It all made sense...that's why she didn't want me to talk to the Den Mothers and plead my case....because there was no case.

I suppose you might wonder why I didn't realize this possibility years ago....I knew my mother was very capable of such an agenda....she had no qualms squashing things or adjusting the truth to fit her needs.

But why did this all come together now?

Because I just finished going through 60 plus jumbo boxes of her papers....

I discovered over and over again....what she said in public was not always the truth.

From her financial status to her personal history to our family stories....my mother created her own truths.

With each new box I opened...I would shake my head and mutter "Holy Shit" when I chanced upon fact from the fiction she told....from her real name...to her real age....to her real education....to her finances....she was....creative.

My mother was goal-oriented and she told tales/adjusted reality/changed facts to fit the direction she wanted her life and her family to move towards.

And so, there it was.....a small sentence which has slightly haunted me since I was a child.....

"The Brownies don't want you...you missed too many meetings"

...........exposed as a lie.

Katie Couric was smiling and telling the world how inclusive and welcoming the Girl Scout organization was to all girls.... I smiled back and nodded.

The Brownies did not kick me out. The Brownies did not kick me out.

I punched "start" on the treadmill and put my plugs back in.

I felt a sense of relief....as if a small sliver had finally freed itself from a wound.

The Brownies did not kick me out.

I waved to Dottie and cranked the machine up.

The Brownies did not kick me out.