Colds, Earaches, Spider Bites, Birthday Parties, Easter

OK, well, I might not write about ALL of that today but that's been our life lately.

The P's have been sick quite alot in the past couple of weeks; they've also been hanging out alot at the gym's nursery (the gym that DD and SIL attend). So 2+2 were put together and it was decided that the nursery may be the root cause of these various illnesses.

The last blog I mentioned that Precious had an earache and that was off and on around her birthday weekend.



Precious greeting some visitors. She was a beautiful birthday girl and her mama and daddy put on a nice first birthday party for her, her family, and her friends.



Perfect also had a grand time and was completely astounded that Precious was being allowed to stick her fingers in her birthday cake....



He must not remember his first birthday party.



Then when the partying was over, Precious went back down with another earache and temperature and another doctor's visit. During this week, I discovered that I had a spider bite....on my behind.....the second one I've had in close to the same spot. I think they get me while I'm asleep at the country house. The first time this happened, I went to the doctor and lost all my pride as I'm standing with my pants down around my ankles and doctor has a magnifying glass out examining my behind and saying "Yes, I see the fang marks of a spider."

Since I still had cream left over from the previous bite, I decided I would try to pass on another humiliating experience at the doc's unless I had no choice and needed an antibiotic. This has seemed to work although it's been a slower healing process without the use of an antibiotic, but I'm healing. And no, there are no pictures of this, sorry.

Then right before Easter weekend, Precious broke out in an all-over rash.



So another trip to the doctor was in order to diagnose this bumpy baby. Turns out she is allergic to penicillin now (just like her Grammy). A few doses of Benadryl and her rash was gone and as of Wednesday she seemed back to her old self. Perfect was a bit under the weather though with a stomach virus that he had earlier in the week.

Updates: my computer flies along at the speed of light now. D Computer Guru's suggestion of more memory cards has worked marvelously and the installation was a piece of cake. Now I'm trying to get my router for the laptop in tip-top shape and have a dial-up solution for the country house. It's slow but hey, that's all that's available out there for now...it is the country.

I've added some new blog friends for our entertainment. "My Blog" is J.A. Jance, another author who has about 4 series out now--love them all---three are set in Arizona and one in Seattle--check her out. Then there are a couple of others that looked interesting to me but I haven't delved in them too deeply. I'll file a report soon.

Ok, that's enough for today......I'll save my Easter report for next time.

Until then....Grammy

TGI FRIDAY!

Friday, Friday, Friday, SOOO glad today is Friday. This has been a long week for me starting on Sunday when my computer problems struck. Even though that was worked out by Tuesday night......I'm still recooping from the stress of that.

I have noticed that the older I get, I ALWAYS need a day or two or more to recoop from anything/everything that happens that causes stress. I'm big on all that "take care of yourself", "give yourself some time" stuff and sometimes wonder if I give myself too much time or pamper myself just a bit much......NAW!!

Wednesday was P day and what a day. Papa had abandoned me in favor of the country and his search for old, derelict cars, so I was outnumbered from the get go. Precious was sick. Turns out she had an ear infection and went to the doctor on Thursday for medicine (she's feeling much better today). But Wednesday she was sick and running a fever most of the night.

Because of Precious's needy nature on Wednesday though, Perfect felt a bit overlooked and really hit all his Grammy boundaries hard!

Since Precious was under the weather, we scratched a walk off our list and scratched basement play off the list as well. It tends to get a little chilly down there without the stove on. Since Papa was gone and he has yet (we've lived in this house for 4 years) to show me how to turn on the gas for that stove, there was no way to heat up the downstairs. Need to put that on the top of my next list....1. Learn how to light the stove.

So we were restricted to upstairs activities.



See she doesn't feel good, thumb was a constant on Wednesday.

Aunt Cracker, notice my pack 'n play is gone.....really quite easy, pull the "string" in the middle of the bottom and it all folds up magically....even got everything into the handy carrying bag (except the mobile). But I digress...

Perfect started the afternoon just fine....watching Cars and having a "chip break."




And Precious had a conversation with Snoopy.







"take me away, doggy" Poor thing and this was how she spent the rest of the evening when she wasn't in my arms, standing with her arms up crying, demanding to be picked up. Droopy eyes, runny nose (made worse by crying) and a Grammy, who for the life of her, couldn't figure out how to work the ear thermometer. Who knew to leave the protective cap on---wasn't a protective cap at all but part of the thermometer's "workings".

In the other room, Perfect was constant motion--running from here to there and jumping and falling and yelling. I didn't have a chance to capture his photo but these pictures that his mother took earlier caught the mood.



Yes, I'm a stinker!



Did I do that??



Just let me kiss you and make it all better!



Let's do it AGAIN!



How can you be too angry at this tiny boy? But it took him back a minute when we heard the back door open and I announced 'Finally, the police have arrived to take you to the Bad Boy's Home' but that lasted only a second until his dad walked around the corner.

Hum...maybe it wasn't the computer stress that I needed recovering from.....

Have a magnificent weekend....Grammy

RUNNING WATER

Hey you. I have been posting every day, have you noticed? Also, I went back and popped some more pictures in.

My computer is working fabulously now. It is virus protected, virus scanned, cleaned out and up, has a fancy new hard drive (where my Itunes library is going to go live soon) and I was able to download things off my camera. Next up is connecting the router for my laptop, but I put that on tomorrow's schedule.

Today is Wednesday and the P's will be awaiting me when I get home from work today. We have spaghetti and salad and banana pudding to eat. A new Animal Baby magazine to look at. And it's gorgeous outside today, so we may all go for a short walk if we can sneak out of the house without Snoopy. Two babies and a dog is a might much for one Grammy to handle. They tend to move in three separate directions.

Papa headed to the country for two days to take care of some business there. He has bought the new kitchen cabinets for our latest rehab project on the property across the road and since it wasn't raining, figured today was a good time to take them out to the house. He has also been searching for another old car to rehab so tomorrow he is headed to KC to look at one he's found in a farmer's barn. I cringe to think about this. Another story for another time.

Saturday before I fled the country in advance of a forecasted blizzard, I happened to walk toward the barn with Snoopy and noticed we had a little river. We have what is called a "wet weather" creek behind the house and this is the second time in 9 years that I've seen water in this creek.

This is where the "creek" begins...what one would call the head of the river! HAHA.






These pictures are looking down the creek (notice our "bridge") to cross the river.





We even had a little waterfall.



Like I mentioned before this is the second time that I've seen water in this "wet weather" creek. The first time was about 7 years ago. I was home alone with Sydney (my elderly dog that resides in doggy heaven now) and we were in the middle of some pretty bad storms. Since we are so far out from town, we don't hear tornado sirens. When the wind blows, the satellite goes down and our radio reception is crappy all the time inside the house. So when we have a bad storm, we were pretty uninformed (not any more though, Papa has since purchased a weather radio that has been sitting in it's box on the kitchen table for several months now!). But it's there waiting for the next storm to hit.

My telephone worked, however. DD, who was working in Illinois at the time, was calling me every few minutes to give me another weather warning "Union is purple on the weather map"---worse than green, yellow or red apparently and there had been tornados sighted in the area.

This particular storm started with wind and rain and I happened to be in the bathroom when the hail hit. Hit indeed...at first I thought a large tree had fallen on the roof it was so loud, but the noise became constant. I looked outside and saw not marble-sized hail or golf ball-sized hail but baseball-sized hail and since I figured Papa wouldn't believe this, I ran out to the edge of the covered porch and grabbed a piece and put it in the freezer for show and tell later. Come to find out later, this large hail busted out the window in Papa's truck that was sitting in the driveway. BIG HAIL.

So we're being assaulted by this large hail, wind, and rain and DD's telephone calls. She finally unnerved me when she said we needed to get to shelter fast. We have a storm cellar underneath our storage shed in the backyard but this meant going outside in the storm and around the back of the house and climbing down a series of steps to the cellar's door. (In the pictures above, the storm cellar is around the bend from the bridge that crosses this "creek".)

Since it was still hailing, I grabbed a heavy quilt to put over my head to prevent me from getting knocked unconscious by the baseball-sized hail and one of the neighbors finding me laying out in the yard later on. I put Sydney on her leash, another thing out of the ordinary, but I didn't want her to get spooked and run off from me in the storm. Then out of the door we went. Syd was pretty distressed that I was dragging her out in this mess and I was literally dragging her too.

We left the cover of the porch, went around the corner of house and got to the steps going down to the storm cellar. There was our "wet weather" creek that had actually turned in a roaring river and was rising pretty fast. It had already risen about half-way up the door to the storm cellar.

Syd and I looked at each other and made out way back to the safety of the house. I shut all the windows and closed all the drapes and curtains and started to make dinner, trying to ignore the chaos in nature that was occurring outside. DD called and asked why I wasn't in shelter and I said our shelter was about flooded and I chose to take my chances with a tornado rather than drown in my storm cellar. I told her I was making dinner and if I should be blown away, well then it was meant to be.

We all survived that night (except the windshield of the truck) and in all the years since, I have never seen ANY water in this creek until this past Saturday. It sure wasn't the roaring river it had been on that night many years ago, this time it was a calm, quiet little babbling brook. Photogenic and relaxing. Almost like one of those fountains you can now buy for the inside of your house that run on electricity.

Until next time.....Grammy

It's a Small World, After All

I mentioned yesterday that I was having computer problems that were leading to more computer problems until I was almost ready to start banging my head against the wall or at the least...start crying.

So much for my smart co-workers and their bag of "tricks". Nothing I tried last night would work to trick my internet company into thinking I had more RAM memory than I did.

Sunday I called Aunt Cracker and asked for the phone number of another friend who is wise in the ways of the computer---we'll call him Computer Guru D....or D Computer Guru (I like that better!).

So I called D Computer Guru after seven hours of trying to install a new hard drive to increase my memory---this was what the Office Max guy sold me and said would work. After seven hours, I made a few other calls when D Computer Guru hadn't contacted me. I found out I had been sold the WRONG hard drive. So back to the store, exchanged my drive, and took the correct one home, installed it and did all the things the software told me to and got a "Congratulations, YOU ARE SUCCESSFUL" note which I kept on the screen for about an hour just to boost my self-esteem after 8 hours of working on it. Too bad, Perfect wasn't around to clap with me. He would have, you know. I couldn't get Papa to do much but glance at it, no clapping or high-fiving.

So discovering my new drive wasn't doing the trick, I consulted co-workers yesterday and got some ideas on what to try. That didn't work. So this morning, I sent an email to D Computer Guru. First, he gave me a very understandable lesson in Memory: RAM vs HARD 101. For the first time, I understand how it all worked and what I needed---understanding far more than the guy at Office Max did!

And then D Computer Guru simplified things even more.....rather than trying to load what my internet company was trying to make me, uninstall what I had from them that was out of date, and go with a new approach--another free approach with an comparable quality of product. In 1/2 hour at lunch, I had accomplished this--no head banging whatsoever.

Then continuing further, D Computer Guru solved my RAM memory issues for under $20 and a link to Amazon.com (my favorite online shopping site). What a marvel! I wished I would have called him first. I would have saved myself about a $100 for something I can't return, only exchange....STUPID Office Max guy!

But what was so funny was that as I was corresponding to D Computer Guru this afternoon, I realized that a co-worker of mine that sits close by had the same last name as D Computer Guru and I asked "could they be related"? And found out, yes, they are brothers. In fact, my co-worker knows several of my friends, Aunt Cracker, The Weatherman, and another friend or two. It's funny that we've never crossed paths before but we haven't. It just goes to show that it's a small world.

Humming to myself....Grammy.

BABBLING

Well, no topic today. I have a bunch of pictures I took in the country this past weekend but my computer is being finicky the last few days and I haven't had a chance to download them. It's being worked on but as I'm the mechanic, it's a very slow process.

I've had to add an additional hard drive which took about 8 hours yesterday (seems I was sold the wrong hard drive to begin with and after 7 hours, made this discovery). Now I'm working on tricking the security suite of my internet company into believing I have much more memory than I have in order to download what they sent me. Helps that I work with some very, very smart "computer people" (software engineers) who are chock-full of tricks that they pass on to me when I go into computer "distress". It is about time to buy a whole new system but, but, but....that seems like such a lot of work backing up everything and reloading, so I'll limp along a little longer with this one.

I did manage to capture with the camera, some yellow forsythia bushes before they turned green entirely and before the snow did them in...Yes, SNOW.





(Sad Daffs,,,,they did look much happier a week or so ago!)

Supposedly, we got a dusting at the country home but I ran like a rat in a sinking ship Saturday afternoon when the forecast got the better of me. We got 3 inches in the city home (or actually outside the city home) but it was all melted by the early afternoon. Now that's the kind of snow I enjoy.

Friday night Papa and I met Tiny Sun and her husband, let's call him Tractor Man for dinner. We went to a restaurant in Washington, American Bounty. I've had some meals there with the Elders in the past and was telling Papa he would enjoy this place since he'd never been and that I'd only eaten on the patio, so I didn't even know what the inside looked like. Until we walked in and realized we had both been there last winter, again with Tiny Sun and Tractor Man. Six months ago. Eating inside. More crossword puzzles are in our future, I can see.

Sun took some pictures of us at dinner so they may possibly end up here if she remembers to send them to me.

OK, so enough blog babbling for today.

Until next time....Grammy

NIRVANA?

For about a year now, Papa has been contemplating retiring. Alot of people are convinced that not working and having their entire day free to do whatever is the perfect life. But is it?

Papa has now made some comments about possibly being lonely after retirement not having the interaction he does at work with alot of different people every day. I can see his point. Being male, he does not have the constant interaction with his friends like most women do. He doesn't read, doesn't care for handywork around the house, no gardening aspirations, he enjoys watching movies and playing baseball in the summer months but otherwise no real hobbies. Playing baseball in the summer and watching movies all winter? Would that be it?

Sure we all get tired going to work day after day and we so look forward to our weekends, vacations, and any other time off work but I've noticed on our two week end of the year holiday break, I do start to get a little bored. Maybe it's because I'm usually also running out of money and need to get back to work and collecting those paychecks to continue my life as I've grown accustomed to it. But really, how much shopping can one do?

I also notice that when Papa and I spend a considerable amount of "quality" time together, we both start getting a little testy with each other. We sometimes need more interaction with others and less with each other and going to work usually satisfies this.

As I've been thinking about whether I would be happy not working, I discovered something in another little daily routine I have. Every morning, when I get up, as I'm trying to pry open my eyes and get all my parts working as they should, having breakfast, and taking my assortment of medications (pain and allergy) and vitamins for the day, I watch Andy Griffith. There are two episodes on every morning 5:00 and 5:30 a.m, Monday-Friday. I usually only catch the 5:30 episode and then watch just a few minutes of news before I'm finally awake and my body is functioning and I can then start getting ready for work.

I have discovered watching 30 minutes a day of the exploits of the Mayberry residents really improves my overall mood. I not only want to live in Mayberry but I want to hang out with Aunt Bea sometime. (In reality my time for that has passed as she has also.) Such a positive person she is and nothing ruffles her feathers and she's got a kickin' car as well. Papa explained to me what it was but it's a convertible and I love those.

OK, you are saying now, she has gone off on another tangent. No I've not, I'm setting the stage.

Recently, there was an episode of Andy Griffith where Howard Spray (he's some sort of accountant, I believe), had met someone who didn't work and lived a dream life....Howard believed. So Howard thought about it and decided he wanted this type of care-free life also. He sold his business, packed his bags, told everyone in Mayberry goodbye, and went to live in a hut on a tropical island.

No cares in the world right? Well, after a day or so, he got extremely bored. Nothing to do and no one to talk to. He went on to meet some other island inhabitants who had been on the island for years but had started off like him and they had gotten so they didn't even care about their looks any longer...your typical hermit-types; long, tangled hair and beards, and glazed eyes from just not doing anything or caring about doing anything.

The episode wrapped up with Howard having a dream (nightmare) that he turned into one of these island inhabitants and when he woke up, he packed his bags, and headed back to his old life in Mayberry.

The moral of the story was that Howard found out he was actually happy with his life back in Mayberry but it took a total change in lifestyle to make him realize this.

I think I've mentioned before about a co-worker of mine who retired and moved to the island of Roatan. I read their daily blog and it is a pretty exciting existence. BUT I saw a picture his wife had taken of him the other day and immediately thought of Howard Spray.



I must agree that this is a gorgeous picture but it seems so lonely to me at the same time. Don and Jeanette love their life on Roatan but.....they kept their house in St. Louis. They did not completely cut ties to start over. Who knows maybe they will sell it eventually but they have a safety net to their old life for now. (Ok, now I've gone off on the tangent!!)

So back to Papa and retiring (or retiring for any of the rest of us), maybe it's not the ideal existence for him or many of us, at this time, if there are doubts. Maybe we all just need a change. It seems so many people retire and then go back to work doing something else, but they go back to work. But that's for each of us to decide. For now I'll just sit back and keep dreaming of the perfect life in Mayberry as I sit at my desk at my job doing what I do everyday.

Grammy

YELLOW

What a gorgeous color this time of the year. Although rain and (deep breath) snow is forecast for Saturday, last weekend in the country, everything was YELLOW.....Daffodils and Forsythia bushes were seen everywhere I went this past weekend. Yellow sun too.

But sadly I didn't have my camera with me and I'm sure by the time I go back out there tomorrow, the yellow will have turned green. But I still have the Dogwoods and Bradford Pear trees to enjoy with their sprouting blooms.

But what I do have is.......



Precious in her Easter dress. She is about to turn 1 in about 2 weeks and so DD took her to get her one year picture(s) taken.



This is her birthday party dress---theme is cupcakes. And, of course, Perfect went along in case he was in the mood for a photograph:




AND, of course, he wasn't. We don't know what's gotten into him lately but he just does not want his picture taken. He's only closing in on 3, surely we haven't worn him out with the camera! But just because he cries and is unhappy, we're not about to miss out on taking his picture, me and DD. We'll continue snapping and then have something to tease him about when he's older.

That reminds me....where are the naked baby pictures of Precious!! (Are you reading this, DD?) I have Perfect's all over my bathroom--where else would the naked pictures belong! These poor children...

They were both over last night and Precious is definitely walking and such a stinker she was. Into everything and she crawls very fast when she doesn't want to be caught, otherwise she tried to walk mostly.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed Perfect was showing a little jealously. I shouldn't really call it that, he was just acting more needy when his sister was getting more attention but he is so sweet with her. She enjoys walking from one person to another and when Papa got busy elsewhere, Perfect became the "catcher" of Precious. She walks about 7-10 steps and then enjoys falling into her "catcher's" arms.

And finally at our house, Elmo is getting dusty, Blues Clues DVDs sit on the shelf unwatched. We are all about CARS now. This Grammy had to go out and buy another CARS DVD (see older blog about the demise of our original CARS DVD) and we watch it about 2-3 times on Wednesday night but poor DD and SIL. They had to also purchase a CARS DVD and it runs non-stop at their house. Precious is hanging right there with her brother and the cars so much so that we are spreading the word that she needs some "girl" cars for her birthday!

Well, enough for today. Hope you still have some yellow in your life to enjoy this week, this Grammy has a tiny little girl in flowers and yellow to brighten up the days.

Until next time.....Grammy