Senectitude

I turned fifty-six in May and I've never really thought I was "out of the loop", "over the hill"," totally clueless", or whatever phrase is appropriate, but I find that I am all of those things. My youngest, darling heathen child, she's twenty-five, came to visit me this weekend and I discovered some new things--all of them proving that I'm passed it.

People, I thought that Kardashians were a species of being found on a Star Trek planet and I am totally serious. While channel surfing with the Child I found out the truth. A reality series...oh, puhlease. And when Carla, the aforementioned h. child, said she had to check on her Bimbo I thought she was talking about her last idiot roommate but turns out she meant Miss Bimbo, the game. I can't believe it--this child, who has a BS in biology has been playing a game that involves going to a virtual library to buy her bimbo an I.Q. (And, sadly, as I type this I know some of you have already been to the site and have lots of bimbo buck.)

It's a good thing I love her or else it would be too much to handle and I'd have to stick my head in the oven and gas myself.

The Yarn of Bodily Regrets

One of the many, many, many things I wish I'd done is to have taken better care of the bod. One never thought one would grow old. One thought one was invincible. Of course, one was an idiot and one is suffering the consequences now.

I never had a militant, Nazi feminist period: I never burned my bra, never prayed to Gloria Steinem, never marched for women's causes, but all anyone ever had to say to me or in my hearing was "women can't do that job" and I'd have to prove them wrong.

In one instance I applied for a job with a roofer who said he didn't think a gal could haul a whole bundle of shingles up a ladder by herself. "Oh, yes," said I. "Prove it,"said he. And could I really haul my ass and a bundle of shingles up a ladder? Oh, hell no--those damn things weighed a ton and, lucky for me, I didn't get the job. Unfortunately, for two of the lowest years of my life I worked for a chicken processing plant. Every job in there was (and is) designed to hurt a different body part--at least until you get used to the job. The work I was doing was hard enough but I bid and won (ha!) a job that paid a whole fifteen cents more an hour and only involved picking up fifty-five to sixty-five pound boxes and then tossing them about three feet to a conveyor belt. I struggled but ended up keeping that job for six months. Don't tell me a woman can't do that job, suckuhs!

And the point, of course, wasn't that a woman couldn't do the job but that she shouldn't do the job. A woman can't do everything a man can, not because men are smarter, something we all know is so not true, but because men, in general, have more muscle mass than women. Men and women both get hernias but men don't have a uterus that dangles by a few ligaments and is just waiting for a woman to lift that Heavy Thing one too many times so it can wave bye-bye to its normal anatomical surroundings and drop through the tormented cervix and into the vagina where Dr. GYN can reach in and yank it out. I lost my uterus during the Great Prolapse of 1983, I was only thirty for craps sake.

So why did I feel I had to be so butch? The current answer is I haven't been therapized enough to know. Perhaps I thought, I'll lift these sixty pound boxes all day and maybe I'll grow a dick and some balls and be able to piss standing up but, really, I never thought I was hankering to grow my own male genitalia. Perhaps my testosterone levels were too high (yes, Virginia, women do have testosterone) but whatever the reason my knees, ankles, hips, and back are suffering from whatever form of mental aberration I was afflicted with, a condition as yet unnamed, although D. U. M. B. comes to mind first.

It remains a puzzlement.

Spring Forward Swap Goodies

Going Veggie

I'm starting on a new me today. I'm deleting meat from my diet. I'm going to give it my best shot and try to keep the positive thoughts going so I'm off to Google veggie recipes with a side of getting-your-daily-adults-from-fruits-veggies-and-such.

Wish me luck, won'tcha.

It was hot today

It was hot today so I thought
A dip in the pond would hit the spot.
So I squeezed my ass in a nice big suit
And smeared some sunscreen on my snoot,
Pulled on my stunnin' swimming shoes
And grabbed my nose plug on its noose.

(It's dry round here and it's hot
You had rain? We have not.
Our pond is down a foot or three
And along the shore are cut pine trees
[Put there for the minnows, don'tcha know,
And it looks real ugly cause now they show].

Though the tree are there to protect the fish
I hate the things and, BOY, do I wish
They weren't there where I swim
(But they were put there by Him)
So I'm stuck with the damn things
And their bits of tinsel and Christmas string.)

Ususally my end's, oh, 'bout five feet
'Cept it ain't rained here in weeks and weeks
So's now my end's barely two feet deep
With a foot and half of mud at least.
It was going to be tricky to get through the mire
And out to where the water was higher.
But, ya know, it sure was hot
And I knew a dip would hit the spot.

I eased on in to the warm, warm ooze
(See, that's why I wear them ugly shoes)
And without more water to buoy my ass
I start sinking in the mud...and fast.
At first I thought, hey, been here before
But I started sinking a little bit more
And soon I was well and truly stuck
Thigh deep in water, knee deep in muck.

Then the reason I hate those damn pine trees
Comes a wiggly out to taste the breeze
I told Him they'd attract snakes
It's WATER and TREES for cripes' sake.
And, oh, shit there's another one
Under the pier away from the sun.
And, SHIT, there's even more!
Why in hell didn't I see 'um from the shore?

Here I'm stuck like a white beached whale
With snakes ready to bite my tail
(Okay, I know that's not what they do
But would it really matter to you?)
They're all around, that's all that matters
So I splash the water to make them scatter
And yell for the dogs to save my life
And call hubby to come get his wife.

The dogs come round and barked a lot
And hubby comes out to see what's what
Then laughs so hard he can't stand
Oh, my hero, oh, what a man.
The snakes go away but now I'm pissed
"Come help me get out of this!
Finally he gets me out of my pickle
With John Deere and a lot of giggles.

But still it was SO damn hot today

So I took a shower.

And by the way...

I would dearly love to know why my font size changes after the first paragraph.

See.

Why? Why? Why?

It's been so long since I started fiddling with my template, I've forgotten most of what I learned and have to refer to my Dummies books. Sad, sad, sad. Image Shack has funkified the way my pics are displayed and I can't copy and paste into blogger, for some reason, and all the changes gave me a feeling obsoleteness, which I am over.

Anyhoo, I went to Ashland, home of former patient, I checked out my animal buddies I used to visit when I lived there caring for Himself--I miss them *sniffle*.

Aren't they bee you tee ful? Destined to never turn up on a plate.

Mr. Bull. He sneaked up on me while I was taking pictures of the others last year. I didn't know Mr. Owner had bought him. He just appeared out of nowhere on my left, scraping his horn on the fence. No big, he's a good tempered baby, but he scared the crapola out of me--he's huge. Mr. Owner takes a lot of guff from the folks in the area because they all have Angus or some other type of beef cattle and he has "pets"--good for him, says I.

I never named any of them except for this fella. I call him Uncle Charlie because he reminds me of my uncle--always dancing to a different beat, belching beer fumes on everyone and playing pull-my-finger whenever we all got together.

There are a lot of rescue burros in Clay County and the one in the middle (mare, jenny, Mz. Burro) is the boss of the whole pasture, even pushes the bull aside when I get there with my carrots.

Ashland is eighty miles south of where I live and I don't think rural is even the right word to call it...rustic would be more like it. It has more than its share of bugs and it sounds like a Tarzan movie when it gets dark and I spent a lot of time bitching about the lack of civilization--no Wally World, no bakeries, no you-name-it, just Piggly Wiggly and Dollar General--when I first got there but I grew to love it. When I went back today all the critters remembered me; I nearly squalled.