Blah…Blah…Blog

I got up with no real intention of being up. (When you get to my age “holding it” past the point of “it” intruding upon your dreams in the shape of only being able find bathrooms with no walls in public places or only finding stalls with no door and no toilet paper is not a good idea. “TMI, TMI,” I can hear my kids shouting.)

Anyway, I was up, so I might as well get myself to morning Mass. As the master bath was full of my husband, I headed downstairs, unbelievably stopping to nuke a giant mug of coffee before finally heading to the bathroom. The kitchen garbage smelled funky, the dishes from yesterday were piled in as slimy mess in the sink, and in the laundry room, there was a questionable load that waited a tad too long to be dried. I managed to tackle a few things while brushing my teeth and getting ready. Boom I was out the door, not in enough time for Daily Office prayers, but plenty of time for mass.

Wat, wat, waa. My car was trapped. Arrg. My teenage daughter who has been working hard nearly every day had pulled in behind me last night. Have I mentioned our driveway looks like a used car lot—not the one run by the shady guy but the small lot with halfway decent cars you would buy for your kid. Normally it is not a problem. Yesterday however, I took over the garage in an effort to paint a second-hand dresser I picked up for our son coming home from the marines in a few weeks. The dresser, kind of an odd piece, was in great shape, but I hated that way the wood grain was inlaid in diagonals. In my book (these days) anything painted black has been improved, so I went to town on it all day, sanding priming and spray painting. Would have had it done too, except that last can of spray paint decided to be semi-gloss when I had apparently been using satin—and why had I bought satin??!!

Anyway, that is the longish version of why the garage was unavailable for parking. That is not the reason however the driveway looks like a used car lot, mind you. At present, we have a total of five cars and a motorcycle, and when Marine I comes home we will have another SUV to work into the queue. Where was all this going anyway?

Oh yeah, knowing the possibility of waking up the dead and getting the white LeSabre moved at 6:30 am, I gave up, finished the dishes, folded a load of laundry, washed the sink and stove and voila, found a few minutes to blog. And there you have it.

Have a great day all.

Don't be selfish...

As far back as I can remember, I have had words running wild in my head. I began spilling them on paper as soon as I could write. When I was seven, my dad let me use his old mechanical typewriter, a Remington monster in a huge grey metal case that weighed more than I did. It was painstaking work. Pushing hard to depress the keys, unsticking  them when two or three decided to kiss down at once, manually slinging the carriage return at the sound of the bell. Two sore fingers diligently tapped out words at a rate of half a page for half a days work, at best. I was and remain a horrible typist. It was excuseable at seven, decades later, not so much.

I was visiting my best friend in Albany recently, and she had occassion to observe my typing as we multitasked on her couch catching a movie, sipping drinks and working on our laptops. She was flabbergasted watching me mess up and hit the backspace key more often than any other key.

“Carla, didn’t you ever learn to type?” she asked. I told her no, and she responded laughing, “Well that explains a lot.” She reminded me of many a late night email ( I don’t backspace as often after ten) filled with typos. I remember once, I had a deadline–in my head, anyway–and she replied to an email with a stern warning, “You better not be working on your book!”

Anyway, I’m faster than when I was seven, and I thank God for the backspace and delete keys. My dad had this strange pencil with an ink type eraser on top and a fan thingy on the bottom. When you hit a wrong key, you had to lift the metal bar, roll your paper up a bit, try to scrub the ink, and then get your key back where it belonged and re-type. Needless to say my paper was filled with holes, and xxx’s where I gave up and would begin again in a clean spot. Eventually, Pop’s old typewriter was replaced with a state of the art IBM Selectric. Ooo, lighterweight, although still heavy for me. It had keys a little more like we have today, which depressed effortlessly rolling a metal ball of letters over a ribbon of ink. It even had a white ribbon for…, wait for it, corrections. Unfortunately for me, the white ribbon never seemed to be replaced, and I was still in the roll-and-manual-erase mode, but white-out was around the corner.

Buried in our attic somewhere are those early ramblings. I’ve thought a hundred times of digging them out and seeing just what a seven year old me thought was so important, she would give up hours and hours of fun with siblings and neighborhood kids and Brady Bunch episodes to commit it to paper.

Well, that sounds like fodder for another post. Have a great day and if nothing else, those of you who remember how typing used to be can thank God for computers and laptops, or just smile at the memory, cause nothing felt quite the same as a typewriter under your fingertips.

Don't be selfish...

It’s August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption for Cat-licks like me. It means  a lot of things to me, though I don’t intend for this to be a religious blog, so what it means for this post is fitting Mass into another busy day. The choices are endless, but I have blown past the 6:30 Am Mass, the 8, and now the 8:30. There is a noon downtown, and hubby is going to the 5:30 after work. Sounds like a lot of choices. We’re pretty well off in this area; pretty much can’t chuck an apple without hitting a Catholic Church.

As I type, at a few minutes to 8, a giant slab of pork is sizzling in the red cast iron pot on the stove. I like to brown it before I cook it in the crock for pulled pork barbecue. Had to cut the monster up into three pieces to fit it in the browning pot. It will make a few meals, and I’ll feel like I’m off the hook for a while. Cooking as well as well, everything else, gets in the way of writing–an awful, honest admission.

If you must picture it, I am on my laptop at the dining room table, my present “office” of choice. I run a diagonal to the kitchen stove every 4-5 as the time dictates to turn the pieces in the pot. (The sizzle is electrifying and the smell is pretty great.) On the way, I pass my one year old granddaughter Sophia, who is sitting in the highchair eating a banana and going between saying “Nana” and na-na, seemingly fascinated that her grandma is named for a fruit. I’m trying to map out a day that makes sense, instead of the day I would prefer–guess what that is. 🙂

Back again. That last turn went a little long, leaving a burnt tang in the air. My eldest daughter, who must have said “The timer is going off,” at least three times before it registered with me, is awake and she will begin work soon. For now she is making breakfast and tending the baby. The three teens are fast asleep, enjoying what is left of sleeping-in summer. The house, a tornadic explosion of things-not-put-away, needs attention for sure, and if I’m a good mother and wife, I will behave on this feast day of God’s own Mother and clean it up.

I’ll let you know. 😉

Don't be selfish...