Author: Peg

Today, I had the wrong lens on the camera when I came upon a big butterfly.

Enjoyed a very lazy hot summer day. Time for a shower. Then dinner. Maybe hot dog and a cold beer. Good summer dinner.

Mindless shooting at a Walmart in El Paso today. Wondering how it went down. El Paso was always a rather heavily armed town. Once when I was there I was offered a gun “because everyone packs”. Well, said I, if everyone is armed then I don’t need to be.

Surprise surprise. Two in a row. Two days in a row my blog seems to be working. Two days in a row we have prunes.

And, I wandered by a black swallowtail with the correct lens on the camera.

Made some progress on my project at work. Spent a few minutes talk story with the new person in charge of The Asylum Foundation. She has the unenviable task of trying to separate old people from their monies. (Don’t worry Carlton, my hand was clasped on my wallet.) And, had a nice dinner on the patio with a couple of friends. A good day.

Three weeks from now, I will be in Bermuda. Funny, that will be three times in the last 12 months. Bermuda must be my new favorite place. But, if I lived on the left coast – I am sure I would go to Hawai’i 3 or 4 times a year. So, it isn’t so strange. All up, it would be cheaper for me to go to Hawai’i. But, it is hard to beat the 2.5-hour plane ride.

. . .

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Mark Twain

I did not get my blog going again. My hosting service did. I checked around and have no clue what they did. Well, I have been with them since 2012 and this is the first major outage I have had. So, I am just happy that they got it going again. I backed everything up. Twice.

The continuing Prune Outage.

Some grumbling was heard that the prunes were too hard. But other people liked hard prunes.

This is the normal breakfast fruit lineup. Sliced oranges, prunes, pineapple, melon, and grapes. The three tubs of library paste looking stuff are cottage cheese, plain yogurt, and regular yogurt.

You get a lot of really fun junk mail when you are old. Like this one: Free Lunch and Informational Seminar for those “considering cremation”.  If it had been at a barbeque place, that would have been finest.

Now, how exactly are they going to tell me that their crematorium is better than the other crematoria?  Must be a pretty hard thing to sell. Thank you, Carlton, for leading the way for me by going to Georgetown as a “First Patient” AKA cadaver.  And Georgetown did give me a free lunch. And you got a free cremation. What’s not to love?

Consider the Anatomical Donor Program at a medical school near you.

 

For 48 hours or so, I lost access to my site. I still had FTP access. So, I tried everything I could think up to get it going. And, I can think of a lot of things.

Finally, the good people at A Small Orange, my hosting service, got it going while I was sleeping.

So, now I have to go back in and very carefully put things back to “normal”.

Thanks to everyone who was concerned that I might have been the one who was down. Some day that will be the case. But not this time.

Today was one of those hazy summer days. It is 88° at 8PM. But, we still had a nice dinner outside on the patio. 

Hopefully, Sisco delivered a case of prunes today!

Pretty simple  make that boring day for me. Work, yoga class, water my flower boxes. And by then it was dinnertime. And tomorrow will be the same. Just a different yoga class.  

 

Today I found a mourning dove. They are big and fat and slow-moving.  My kind of target.

Today’s small project was to do a little wardrobe culling. So, I found some clothes that I had lost interest in. Or that I was never interested in.  It was about 1/2 a trashbag’s worth. 

Here at The Asylum, we put our excess clothes in our “Resident Storage Room” and something happens to the clothes. Most likely they end up in some landfill or the other. But, we like to think that the clothes go somewhere where they might be needed. Since my clothes nearly all came from a thrift shop – they will be making the trip for a second time.

“Resident Storage Room” is one of the scariest places in The Asylum. We each have a 4X4X4 foot chicken wire cage/chicken coop. I don’t use mine. There is nothing that I value so little as to leave it down there. 

Back to work tomorrow and back to back days of yoga classes. 

Honestly, how can this happen? For some of our residents, prunes are the most important food group. (I find beer to be an excellent source of dietary fiber!) Surely the kitchen gets prunes in #10 cans. How hard would it be to check the cupboard and say “Gee, we should order prunes.” Or is there some worldwide prune shortage that I haven’t heard about? 

 

. . . 

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.  Eleanore Roosevelt

Found one flying bug today. Plus some ants. 

Thinking about long-range planning at an old folks asylum. I understand that management should be thinking. planning and even acting long range. And, management pays lip service to resident involvement in the process. But,  reality check: we are old people.  I am not sure I need to buy a Five Year Diary. Or an extended warranty on anything. 

So, management has meetings to “Report on the Strategic Plan”. Where they talk about how good it is going to be when…

Some day when… we implement/install the wonderful “Smart Apartment” hardware/software. Well, by the time management gets the “smart apartment” going it will be obsolete and in the meantime, one of my neighbors really wants an Alexa device but she has no smartphone and no amazon account. Instead of a grand “Smart Apartment” 5 years down the road, management should figure out how to deploy an AWS Enterprise Alexa system and just give the residents a Dot and Echo Connect to plug in and they would be good to go with no setup. And no ability to order a case of condoms. 

After they deploy this stop-gap system – then start working on what might be the next big thing for the smart apartment (senior style). 

But don’t tell me how good it is going to be after I am dead.

OK, it has happened again. We either need a bigger table of the dead or healthier residents. Such is life and death in The Asylum. Most of the pictures are pretty sorry. But, my across the hall neighbor made sure that her memorial picture was of her as a smoking hot stewardess standing in front of a Super Constellation in the early 1950’s. 

Occasionally, very occasionally I have reason to visit the executive suite.   I am always charmed by the oriental carpet in front of the executive water fountain. But, next time I am going to look under the rug. Is it hiding a  disgusting stain?

Today, I wore O’Neill board shorts, an Aloha shirt, and my OluKai slippers to supper in the “Formal” dining room. I view this as the high point in my guerilla campaign against the 1950s country club dress code in the white table cloth venue.  

So, life goes on. And, when I land on the table of the dead, what do I want? Ding Dong the Witch is Dead? 

Skipper and Lantana – sounds a little like a musical group from the 60’s doesn’t it? Sonny and Cher, Captain and Tennille, Simon and Garfunkel, Peaches and Herb,  the list goes on.

Anyhow, Skipper and Lantana. Realized that I hadn’t gone on even the smallest bug quest this summer. It was a lovely afternoon, so, I went in search of interesting bugs. I didn’t find very many. On the other hand, I didn’t look very hard either.

And, it was another busy day. But not too busy to fit in a nap. It’s Aloha Wednesday. Don’t think I’ll go the office until Monday. Got enough to do around here to keep me busy. 

I am a pretty boring old lady today. Sorry. I’ll try to do better.

Summer. Busy Everywhere. Guess that is all good. 

Actually they had arrangements like this in Singapore too. Maybe if I traveled in more upscale circles here I would not be amazed. 

A normal summer day. Freezing cold in my office. Hot outside. 

Good news, I survived today’s yoga class without falling. Will try to repeat the performance at tomorrow’s class.  

Had a really fine salad for dinner. And we ate outside. A fine little old lady evening.

Four years ago, I was locked in getting ready to move to The Asylum Hell. And one of the many things that I hated about the Asylum was the glass top stove. I am sure that I would still hate it if I cooked. But, I don’t cook. I microwave. I make coffee. Even French press coffee. But, I do not cook. 

AND, it turns out that a never used glass top stove is a wonderful work space for cutting paper to size for origami projects. I am currently going crazy making stars. It is almost like making a thousand cranes. But, since each star is made from 5 modules, maybe I’ll only make 200  Actually, I am not counting and I keep giving them away. Making stars is just amusing me right now.