Yes, it's day 3....

Oy....There are SO MANY THINGS to blog about today:

#1: Laura & Sean are engaged!

My second oldest grandson, Sean, got engaged this morning!  He's been dating Laura for a long time.  Here they are in Sally's breakfast room four years ago!  We know and love her.  She's pretty, kind, smart, gentle. She teaches whatever the Scottish call special education in a little town on the edge of Edinburgh. Sean has finally finished working his way through college (in a bar, of which he wound up as at least part-time manager) and putting in a year on his new job (not in the bar...some IT firm) after graduation.  Today is Laura's birthday, and she says she was surprised when Sean asked her to marry him.  (I'll bet she was!  This old granny and at least one of his aunts were getting impatient--ASK HER, ALREADY!  DON'T LET HER GET AWAY!)  She did say yes, and Laura says she can't stop smiling today.  God love her.  God love him.  They are two of the most wonderful people on the planet.  I asked him when the big day will be.  And very typically of him, he said "Next summer--a year from now. It'll take me that long to save," etc. etc.  Keep smiling, Laura.  Sean, if I (or the aunt) win the lottery, we'll share.

#2:  Jimmy Feeney's doctor, Dr. Atul Gatawande, gave the commencement address yesterday afternoon to graduates of the Harvard Medical School.  And one of the other doctors sent Jim a copy of the speech.  

Five years ago, Jim was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and given a "only a few weeks" to live!!!  Jim and Sandy, his wife, wanted a second opinion, so they went to Boston...and here's Jim's story in his own words:

After getting an initial exam at the DANA FARBER CANCER INSTITUTE, I was immediately put into the hospital in Boston. I saw, by my personal count, 23 Doctors, one of whom was Dr. Atul Gawande.

Gawande, a few days later, told me that he believed my condition had been misdiagnosed, and while I had an "ugly, fast growing thyroid cancer" in my throat, with surgery, chemo and radiation, I had an "excellent opportunity" for success. They still couldn't get a "proper" biopsy, without my bleeding to death, as I was on a blood thinner due to a stint  inserted the previous week for my heart.

He was right and was part of a three-surgeon team who performed an eight-hour operation and saved my life.

As I was 70, and on Medicare, the best health care in the world was available to me at no out-of -pocket cost.

Do you think I'm a big fan of Dr. G, Dana Farber, and Medicare? YES!

What fun it is to be a cancer survivor, and to enjoy each and every extra day of life I have been given!!

What fun it is for us, too, Jim, that you're still with us and what an inspiration that you're still championing humane causes.  Now where is that picture of you and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy??

UPDATE: Ask and you shall receive dept.: Fun at the Kennedy Compound: l-r, Jim, Ted's nephew, Vicki & Ted Kennedy, Sandy

NaBloPoMo, Day 2

(My god, she isn't going to do THAT, is she?  Give every effing blog a number??  Gah....)

Things just keep pouring into the hopper here.  Jim--dear old Jim from 5th grade at St. Mary's--(and yes he's old--at least as old as I am, which is plenty) sent an article this a.m. about David McCullough, who happens to be one of his favorite writers.  McCullough has a 900+ page book about Harry Truman, which I should read--Truman always has been one of my favorites, and until Barack Obama came along, was the only US president I'd ever seen in person.  It was a cool fall night in Fargo, ND, and Harry Truman was making his September 29, 1952, whistle stop speech there. Whether he was going East to West (Minnesota to Montana) or West to East (vice versa), his train stopped in Fargo, where they had set up BRIGHT lights at the Great Northern depot so Mr. Truman could stand on the rear platform of the train and make a speech. Was he pitching for Adlai Stevenson?  I have no idea what he spoke about, but I yelled and clapped  and shivered with excitement in addition to the cold.  His speech was a big hit, as I recall.  Even my mother went with me and said she'd vote for him. I think my dad may have had league bowling night, but he wasn't there.

What I love about the article Jim sent is what McCullough says about writing.  He quotes Dickens: "Make me see!!"  He still writes on an old second-hand Royal Typewriter made in 1940.  It made me think of Martha's dad's typewriter, which Martha gave to me about 10 years ago after her dad died.  Recently I had it spiffed up and shipped it to Martha's beloved granddaughter Ruby.  Things like that should stay in a family.  I hope Ruby will get busy on the typewriter and make us SEE life in Grand Rapids.

Ruby's mom, Gretchen, and dad, Bob, have become friends since my first visit to GR two months after Ruby was born, and we have been exchanging nonsequiturs this past week on the odd FB premise that we wake up in a psychiatric ward together.  We're allowed to exchange greetings, but only FOUR WORDS EACH.  Gretchen has drawn comments like, "Will you marry me?" and "Clunk turned us in." (Clunk being their dog.) Bob has offered, "How many is four?"

I love my friends (that's four words!!)

UPDATE: Jim says he was in the crowd that night at the train station in Fargo, too, and even though they didn't know each other yet, Sandy (his future and present wife) was there, too. What a gloriously small world!

NaBloPoMo, Day 1

.....Or something like that.  I found myself signing up for BlogHer this morning in order to help a friend search for blogs by single women who have retired "early" (at age 62), how they did it, handy tips, etc.

I picked BlogHer because it features WOMEN writers.  So far, I have discovered that the average age of bloggers on BlogHer is YOUNG, and they have been at it for less than three years.

There are older women who produce wonderful blogs, but none of them I know have retired "early."  (I myself retired late, at age 70 and have often said it was one of the best things I ever did because it boosted my SS base and consequently my annuity, too.)  Where would we old gurls be without Time Goes By or Margaret and Helen or Darlene's Hodgepodge? 

One of BlogHer's neat things, however, is NaBloPoMo--National Blog Posting Month. It was inspired by NaNoWriMo--National Novel Writing Month. I encountered this daily posting during Lent, when Whoopee, writer of one my personal favorite blogs, announced she was going to post every day for Lent--40 days' worth, which is even more than a month.  I don't recall her saying she was inspired by BlogHer for this, even though one of her devoted readers is the woman who STARTED NaBloPoMo.  An oversight, I'm sure, perhaps in my reading!  Anyway, it was a great treat to get a new blog from Whoopee every day for the duration of Lent.  She did take some breathers--during which she posted a kitten photo.  Nobody but a total grinch would complain about a kitten photo breather post offered by a young woman with two very lively children under the age of 5 or so.  Actually, one of these children has just turned 1 and is very big and smart--like everyone else in the family.  Which means he needs some watching out for.  A big task.

Lent is over now, and I can't think of any other suitably BRIEF period of time other than a simple month during which I can promise to post every day. 

It's not even the beginning of the month.  It is, however, THE DAY ON WHICH OPRAH BROADCAST HER LAST SHOW!!  Will the world come to an end?  What will Oprah do?  What, for that matter, will I do, now that I've decided to blog every day for a month??

Pardon me if I mention once again that I do not have a working TV any more, so I haven't watched Oprah for years.  Oprah and I are connected in a mysterious way, however.  When I started writing in addition to proofreading for my job in marketing research for the broadcast industry, Oprah's station was one of our clients, and I was happy to write the sections in the station's research report about Oprah!  She was clearly VERY popular back in Baltimore, even when she had just started her job as a TV reporter for WJZ-TV.

Of course, Oprah has gone a lot farther in broadcasting than I have.  I retired after 10 years with the marketing research company.  I was in my early 50s, and I wanted to spend some time writing my own stuff.  So I cashed in my share of the company's generous profit-sharing plan and moved to Iowa City to sit by the river every morning and think.  Oprah now is worth about $2.8 billion bucks.  I am not, but that doesn't mean I'm not as good as Oprah.  We are equals (oh, go ahead, laugh).  We're all equals in this world.

I'm going to mention my other favorite blogs written by retirement age ladies in a nother post, possibly tomorrow.  There are LOTS of them, and their blogs are wonderful, too.  Yes, that includes you, Kay, and Naomi, and Nance, and Shammy, and Sherwood, and Ole Phat Stu (you'll be honorary dames for this, Sherwood and Stu....how could I pass up an Irish astronomer and a Scottish mathematician from Germany? You get to be included for your uniqueness and sheer entertainment value.) (Charles....you're too young, but maybe I'll have a post on Up and Coming Bloggers, too.)

Addendum:  OMG, how could I forget Claude of Photoblogging in Paris??  Well, I'm getting OLDER now, and it's past my bedtime (8:30ish). 

Been reading.....

I've quit buying steak but not books. Found a swell one this week: THE MAN FROM BEIJING by Henning Mankel, one of the bright lights of Swedish noir mysteries. (Now THERE's a mixed metaphor: bright lights, noir, heh.)  Whatever, I've enjoyed his Kurt Wallander mysteries very much.  I relate to the cold weather, the snow, the forests, the intelligent cop Wallender, and the coffee and sandwiches the good guys are always stopping to consume. It's never ONE sandwich, either--always plural: sandwiches.  If you haven't lived in a cold climate, you don't understand.  His books can be bloody and violent but not in a Hollywood shoot-em-up way.  They're simply shocking, especially in the gentle little villages in the woods of Sweden.  

In any case, this new one is nice and fat: 456 pages, which means it's lasted nearly all week.  I read on the metro during the day and in bed at night, but I tend to fall asleep in both places, so it's slow going. 

I'm also reading Deepak Chopra's THE BOOK OF SECRETS, which has fascinating passages about cells, and how we should live as they do. Cells!!  I think I've written about this recently, but probably on FaceBook.  Anyway, Walt Whitman wrote, "I am large. I contain multitudes."  He was ahead of the recent science that has revealed how our gut is intelligent, for example and how our liver cells can do 50 different things, but he had it pegged.

Our mind has been raptured....

Apparently we are on hiatus of sorts.

"Who's we? Got a frog in your pocket?" 

Yes.  It's the papal we.  We haven't had any ideas about what to write about for quite a while.  We keep finding wonderful things in blogland, though.

Mature Landscaping has a poetry section including work of some of our favorite poets.

And one of our favorite blogs, WHOOPEE, has started a Flick'r group "What Are You Doing For The Rapture."  You can go there and join if you want.

Coincidentally, son-in-law Henry offered this this morning on FB: "A suggestion for Saturday: Leave shoes filled with dry ice in random spots, hide, watch reactions of non-Raptured people."  

That gives us pause...I thought we were ALL going.  

Obituary.....

Got this from Jim F., who got it from Tommy S. How would I ever keep up with this blog without my grade school classmates??

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn't always fair;
- and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).
His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.
It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims.
Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.
Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.

Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.
He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers;
I Know My Rights
I Want It Now
Someone Else Is To Blame
I'm A Victim

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing .

Happy Cinco de Mayo and 120th Anniversary of Carnegie Hall!!

Let's have a little Mexican music for Cinco de Mayo!! Never mind that the day's festivities spring from a beer company hoping to increase sales.  We're happy we live next to Mexico, and we love the Mexican people.

democracyforcalifornia introduced me to Los Tres Ases (The Three Aces) a popular Mexican band of the 1950s:



This tribute to Carnegie Hall, which celebrates 120 years today, comes from Open Culture.  When I took classes at the Art Students League in NYC in the 90s, the building was always easy to find because it's across the street and down the block a bit from Carnegie Hall.  I am sorry to say I've never been inside for an event. I went to Reb Lisa's post-ordination luncheon at the Russian Tea Room, though.  That's in the same block....