I am unbelievably antsy. 

I want to shed the things I own in order to travel, to drop everything and go.  I think it stems from not having traveled much over the last few years of the “economic downturn”.   I’ve reported before of the lovely trips we used to take with hubs employer...those were good days and good times.  (Remember, not “going” was my reason for getting a dog.) 

I miss spending money sometimes but mostly I miss travel.  I miss seeing new things and I miss the relaxation.  Dare I admit that I miss having room service, a never ending banquet of great tropical food and drink.  Indulgence.  I miss indulgence, darn it.  During those times I HAD to shop to BUY new things to wear, to OWN.

I went to Spain and the Canary Islands in one trip.  I don’t think I appreciated it enough at the time. Send me again, please, and I will show you appreciation like you can’t believe.  I will talk endlessly about it. I will effuse, effervesce even.  

These are the things that are rolling through my quiet days.  How I wish I were getting ready for a big trip.  Anywhere, somewhere.  A change of scenery.  Do you? 

I'm all about change.

Now that I have my great little dog, I am back to walking around in the yard for a little while before I prepare myself for the work day.  It's amazing to me how just adding one small thing can change your entire 24 hours.  The little dog requires some exercise and some stretching as she sleeps in a crate.  She requires some care and some affection in the morning, and hey, who doesn't?  


I wasn't one to get up too much before I had to prepare myself for work or whatever.  I just didn't really like mornings so much.  Being a night person, I stayed up late and then slept until I could no longer stay in bed and get on with it.  I liked it.  


Don't get me wrong, I haven't changed completely but the little dog does mean its different.  I have her to think about and she needs to walk.  Well, I'm not going to let her walk around out there by herself, am I?  She needs to prance and dance for me, to show off a bit, to do her turns and paw at me with her silly little feet.  She really needs a belly rub and a treat would be nice, even if she did just eat her breakfast.  


Point is, I'm down there in the yard, walking around in the early morning sunshine.  It's hitting me on the head, it's beating down on my back, it's warming my shoulders and causing me to squint.  I kind of like it.  

Where'd it go?

You know I am a frustrated gardener, right?  It takes so much time, energy and money to have some great flower beds and I have not a spare of any of those.  Here’s the thing, though...where does my time go? And if my time has taken a hike, what the heck happened to my energy? Money? Well, if I had any, I might be able to tell you where it is.  

I saw a commercial the other day regarding, oh, I don’t know, life insurance maybe.  This woman explains that retirement doesn’t mean stop living.  Now, I’m not retired but her story was she retired on a Friday and on Monday was in class, learning how to be a massage therapist.  She’s now working as a massage therapist.  Isn’t that something? Fantastic, really. 

Where do people find it? The ability to be so motivated at an “advanced” age? Is it something we are born with? Learn? Earn? Get bequeathed, like Aunt Ethel’s lace doily collection? Why can one person be so moved to be moving, changing, evolving and others, eh, just, eh? 

I work with some great women.  Motivated, high energy.  All over 50, some over 60 and they are dynamos.  I can’t figure out how I got mixed up with them on some days, on other days, I’m trying to figure out if I want to be.  I am trying to learn from them...get on that bandwagon and do more.  I feel like I use to do a lot and now, eh.  

I think I use to see women such as these women as those who had something to prove, who couldn’t be happy unless they were achieving something, something to point at to say “See?”.  But I don’t feel that way any more.  I think women such as these, and now I know many in their 20s, in their 30s and 40s...not just their 50s and 60s, who just chose to live it to the fullest. Who get ideas and run with them, and why not? Why should they stop?   Maybe they are more motivated because they have allowed themselves to be; they listen, they respond, they do.  

Would one of you come over and do my flower beds? How about the closets I have yet to finish from last week? A massage? Are any of you learning massage? 

Closets

Last year I saw a post from someone, can’t remember who or where, that had started a project to clean out closets.  I’ve done pretty well with our bedroom closet over the past, oh, I don’t know, five years or so, but the other closets were getting pretty out of hand.  I am not someone who hates to throw things away, but it takes me a while. 

So this weekend, I tackled a couple closets.  “Why two at once?” you might ask and I wish I had an answer for that cause it created a lot of chaos.  I just found I needed to move one thing from Closet A to Closet B but that meant I had to make room in closet B and so it began.  

Closet A had a lot of old pictures from my kids high school days in it.  So,  of course I had to sit down for an hour or so and look at those.  Closet B had some childrens books so, of course, I had to sit down and look through those.  I prepared a box for Goodwill and prepared a bag for trash.  I stacked some things for recycling and re-stacked closet shelves.  I was feeling not so bad about the progress.  I managed to condense some boxes and move some cardboard out.  Good for me.  Until I looked at the guest room bed.  I started placing things that needed yet to be determined on the bed.  Old coats, gloves without mates.  Hangers.  My broken reindeer, which is a sore subject around here, and I can’t seem to get rid of it.  

To add to all this chaos, I also sorta started on Closet C.  I began to wonder how this person who posted that she cleaned one closet a month or whatever it was, did it.  I decided to move some cleaning supplies from Closet A to the laundry room (yes, I agree, the laundry room makes much more sense.  Why would anyone put cleaning supplies in Closet A?) But, I needed to do a little spruce up of the area where the cleaning supplies were going.   What’s that? Two empty laundry detergent jugs? Really?  Well, that’s going to mean they need to be turned upside down in the bathroom sink to make sure I get every last drop of detergent out.  Oh, goodness...look at that toilet, I really need to clean that.  Where are the cleaning supplies again? Why don’t I just go ahead and create room in this bathroom closet here for the cleaning supplies I need in here.  Oh, me oh my.  Is that a load of towels that need to be folded? I’ll just throw them on the guest bed and get back to that later because right now I need to scrub the toilet, make room for cleaning supplies, wipe down the laundry room floor, and good gravy the laundry detergent jug just fell over and now, the detergent I was trying to squeeze out is running down the sink drain so I didn’t get it anyway.  

And there are towels on the bed, on top of the coats and the books I pulled out for the grandchildren but need to clear a space on the end table shelf.  All the while, I am making a mental list of the decorating ideas I am coming up with but have yet to share with hubs, who has walked through the house grumbling about lunch a couple of times.  I have also made a list for him, yet to be sprung, and it begins with my broken reindeer.  I am about to make his day. 

Anyone who has known me or my family for any length of time, or who lived in our neighborhood, knows that we had a great family dog named Seymour for 15 years or so.  He was a delight.  A good dog through and through with one brown eye and one blue, and we loved him.  

We haven’t wanted another dog for a variety of reasons but I started really wanting a dog a few months ago.  Hubs was not as convinced as, well, we had a lot of freedom, he said.  We can just go whenever we want.  I bought that for a long time.  Until I realized we never just go somewhere, anywhere.  We just stay.  

I spend a lot of time on my own and decided a small dog is just what I wanted.  One that will ride in the car when we do “just go”, and one that will love the grandkids and not bark, and not make a mess, and won’t shed so much.  In other words, the perfect dog. 

Needless to say, its been a struggle.  I have found a couple dogs that were close but either too expensive, too old, too big, or, in more than one case, too sick.  But, I kept looking.  

I found my dog! I have a friend who posted on facebook that she had a friend looking for a good home for her small, young, polite and adorable yorkie dachshund mix.  Oh my word.  She is so sweet, so well behaved, so pretty.  She’s my dog! 

I picked her up today from her heartbroken owner.  The owner just felt giving her up was in the best interest of the dog.  She loves her and I was sad for her but after spending some time with her, I agree that her decision to let her dog go was the best for her.  She carried the little dog to my car and now, she has her home with us.   Grandkids will love her, she hasn’t barked a peep and she is perfect.  

I am so happy! 

Now that gets my goat!

I sorta hate the media..the press…news. I don’t usually say that I “hate” something. Well, wait a minute, yes I do. I say it all the time.

I am not, I repeat, NOT, voting for Mitt Romney.  Secondly, I am really riled up over the media reaction to this Hilary Somebody who said in referencing Mrs. Romney that “she never worked a day in her life”. That led all sorts of people to respond to her statement – including Mrs. Obama for crying out loud - that stay at home moms deserved some respect, and of course they “worked”.

I am pretty sure that’s not the point Hilary Whoever was trying to make. I think she was talking financially and how Mrs. Romney could not relate to struggling families economically. I am pretty sure she was talking about Mrs. Romney being a woman of privilege ~ a whole lotta privilege. A ton of privilege. It had nothing to do with her parenting choice for crying out loud, or whether homemakers, mothers and others, deserved respect for what they do.

Why oh why are we so quick to jump all over a statement, take it out of context, change its meaning and run a dang presidential campaign on it? It matters not whether Mrs. Romney is a stay at home mom or goes out to perform neurosurgery at the crack of dawn, the point Hilary Whosits was making was the woman is golden. She has been since hooking up with ol’ Mitt, the multi billionaire, and maybe even before but, I’ll be honest, I haven’t bothered to check. They are rich for goodness sakes…stinking rich and she lives a completely different life than the rest of us…or to quote Hilary Unfortunate, “Lets face it”.  She may not relate well to you and me. You know any stinking rich people? STINKING rich? I think you may find them a bit out of touch with daily financial struggles…just a guess cause I don’t know any STINKING rich people of the Romney’s level.  

Gosh, I hate media manipulation almost as much as I hate political manipulation. For goodness sakes is there anyone in their right mind who doesn’t agree with the statement that Mrs. Romney has never “worked” a day in a purely financial reference, which was the dang point? I am so incredibly outraged that female politicos all over this country including Mrs. O, who is one of my faves, are twisting this statement into some sort of platform on which to set up camp. Do you really think Hilary Stepped Right In It was disparaging stay at home moms? Seriously, do you? If you do, have you even bothered to listen to the whole presentation or are you reading the ONE sentence and listening to pundits who are manipulating the interview and creating a national fallout in defense of stay at home moms everywhere? How ridiculous. You know what she meant. Stop making this a statement about something it was clearly NOT about. The woman is filthy rich. Filthy with it. Talk about dumb…this debate has been about the dumbest I’ve heard since Alexander Haig said he was in charge. Do not manipulate me. I won’t stand for it.

Here it is!

Spring.  This is the real spring, not the spring we just experienced that was really the oddest winter on record.   I am very grateful for the odd winter as, well, I started that job, you know,  and the one thing I feared was my drive in the winter.  Well, I didn't fear it, I'm not that kind of gal...but I did not want to do it.  Typically, if I don't want to do something, I don't.  Glad it worked out for me! 


Life is very pretty looking out my window.  I love sunshine, I love flowers and I love the lake when its quiet.  I love the light at dusk and how the flowers seem to absorb all the light possible throughout the day and for that very short time period,  just glow at dusk.  I love when its grey out, the whites are so white.  Like the swans that station themselves just off our shore line when the lake is quiet.  


 The flowers seem to have taken off and everything is blooming at once instead of on "schedule".   It makes the yard look amazing, riotous even.  It will change as the blooms start to fade all at once, too, I suppose,  but for this week...well, its fantastic.  


Spring has sprung, ladies and gents.   I hope you are able to get out and bounce around in it! I will!