PNewL PNewS Volume 16 #3

PNewL PNewS

Volume 16 No. 3 “All the pnews that phits.” September 2008

The Aging Process, continued

Knowing something is really different from understanding it—it’s part of the reason I changed the heading of the next column from Things I Have Learned to Things I am Learning early on: the process takes more time than that. Case in point: it was the August 1993 issue of the PNewL PNewS—let me remind you that was fifteen years ago—that I thought I under-stood the “Mid-Life Extravaganza.” We decided at a dinner gathering lo those many years ago that we would call it the Extravaganza rather than Crisis and apparently I thought I got it then. What did I know?

[By the way, for those of you who have PNewS archives, you could go back to Volume 2 Number 4 to see the original text. The shameful fact is that I had to go back through hard copies of the PNewS to determine this. With the changes in technology it is close to impossible for me to read the electronic versions of the various generations of this project. Putting together my memoirs is going to be more work than I thought. But I digress.]

Fifteen years later, I am beginning to think I understand some of the aging process. The reason for the last 184 or so words is it came to my attention recently that people of a certain age were making changes. The most obvious examples are physical changes like capping teeth, dyeing hair, losing weight and elective surgeries.

I was telling Patsy about my observations and it suddenly (duh) occurred to me a lot of this is acknowledging our mortality! So I am a little slow on the uptake—now I get it. And Patsy confirmed it. She knows about mortality: she works for Hospice.

Since I moved, I have gotten interested in exercise. What a concept! Never too late to start, I guess. I let my hair grow a little longer (to hide the sagging skin I could eliminate with a slice of the knife?), oh and I moved. Not sure if that qualifies as part of the mid-life extravaganza. I think there were other issues at play there but we could lump it all in together I suppose. Perhaps those things could constitute my participation in the mid-life shift and I can avoid painful surgeries with recovery time keeping me from woods walking and Pilates.

I guess it all boils down to seeing the years tick by and wanting to make the most of it…not wanting to be doing things out of habit, but with intention. As Dad always said it’s later than you think, and maybe the changes, especially the physical ones, make us think we have more time. Some changes make it more likely we will have more time! Whatever it is, I am pleased to note that life is rarely boring.

Things I am Learning & Miscellaneous Observations

• One thing I will do next time I move is shampoo the carpets before I move in. It’s not that mine are dirty—au contraire—which is why I didn’t shampoo them, but they pick up smells and everyone’s house smells differently. For better or worse, they will soon smell like my house, but in the meantime, starting out fresh would be a good thing.
• When I was in New Orleans last spring, we spent some time on the Mississippi coast meeting with community activists who are trying to bring the area back to its pre-Katrina condition, or better. One of the things I was amazed to hear: state officials say everything already is back to normal and so they are diverting $600 million in federal funds for housing to restore and expand the Port of Gulfport, which according to those we met, was not damaged badly by the storm. Much of the wording of the previous sentence is from the AARP Bulletin (Sept 2008, page 6) which corroborates the information from my sources. Perhaps we should ask the 9,000 folks still in trailers if they feel everything is back to normal.
• Cleaning up old pnews. In case you were wondering, unpacking is indeed worse than packing. Several people agree with me.
• And regarding whether one should hang favorite pictures where they are seen from bed or where guests can see them, I think the consensus is to please ourselves first. Karen says our charm is more important when entertaining guests than what’s hanging on the walls. Leslie thinks it’s good to hang inspiring pictures where she can see them; kinda like affirmations …they can potentially change your life. And one of Laurie’s heroes is Ernie Banks. I never knew!
  
• Updating the moving angst: it’s fading slightly. I still wake up in the middle of the night or look at myself in the mirror and wonder what the heck I am doing but there’s a lot of good stuff going on. There are times when I turn the page on the calendar and see a lot of empty, but it fills up surprisingly fast.
  
• Since I last wrote I have had lots of company, including a lengthy visit by the extremely large hound. We had a nice time…actually I had a nice time with all the folks who came through. And I hope more of you will aim at the western North Carolina mountains as a vacation destination. It’s pretty and the food is really good and the art is amazing and the people are really nice even if some of ‘em talk kinda different.
  
• Meanwhile, I am taking a wonderful class called Analyzing your Mountain Homestead which will be sorely missed when it is over. The teacher is smart and funny and I am going to tell him that I would happily come in every Tuesday for a couple hours to hear him talk. Neighbors have been very welcoming and inclusive, inviting me to dinner and out on the town. I had two fabulous meals this week, one with a home smoked turkey that was scrumptious, and another out on the town in a sweet French bistro for all-you-can-eat mussels (See? Good food.). A good time was had by both sets of folk to be sure. Oh and Leslie, a fellow graduate of a certain college that no longer exists invited me along to an Asheville Tourists baseball game. She says Kevin Costner’s last assignment in Bull Durham was with the Tourists. It’s a hoot, small town ball. More distractions than mere baseball—I even saw Miss North Carolina complete with a tiara!
  
• Further proof that I am stabilizing a bit is that after a particularly odd haircut, I did not retreat to my bed. A friend said, Oh it’s just those awkward days right after a haircut, it will be fine, or something like that. I am not sure that it will be but this too shall pass and there you have it. So life is good and different and sometimes lonely, but heading towards better.
  
• If you aren’t quite sure where Bhutan is (see article below), I have posted a map on the blog. And if you can’t go there, picture China, picture India. Squished in between them is Nepal and to the right of that is Bhutan!
• Evie and I spent some time scanning family photos. Here’s the first group shot with Little Martha. Standing are Peter David Peggy Evie.

I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane!

I got me a plane ticket—not only that, it is an international ticket with many hours in the sky going long distances to foreign lands. I am ecstatic and a bit nervous.

By the time many of you read this, I will be on the other side of the dateline. I start with a few days in Bangkok, to recover from 22 hours of travel (it’s more than that but who knows how much more and frankly, who wants to think about it?), and to catch some good food. Then on to Bhutan, with a tour— haven’t done that without Dad. It’s something like 13 days (they say it’s more but they include flying days which I have to pay for so I ain’t giving them credit for that).

During the tour, there will be plenty of hiking—three days of it are trekking days though the horses carry our gear and I gather our tents with cots will be all set up when we get there! How’s that for roughing it! I have been doing some practice hiking but I fear not enough. Today I went up on the Parkway and scrambled up and down a nice steep trail, and I was thinking I was giving my gear a good workout but as I slumped into the car, I figured I was giving this body a wake up call too.

On the way home, I stop off in Cambodia for 7 or 8 or 9 days, hoping to see Angkor Wat and some birds and whatever it is I am supposed to see in Phnom Penh (I just got that guidebook and I have some time, like 22 hours on the plane to figure that out.) I know I am sounding a bit vague but I do have these things written down somewhere and I do know when and where and for how long. In Cambodia, I will be on my own but I have some good advisors and just heard that aforementioned Laurie’s friends who live there will be in town so that is a comfort.
Please think positive thoughts for safe travels and I will think of you all being bombarded by news of financial problems and a seemingly endless election process. Buena suerte, y’all.

"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." Mark Twain

Travels with Peggy, cont'd

With out of town visitors now safely home, it is time to prepare for the next adventure. In less than a month, I am leaving for Bangkok, Bhutan and Cambodia. I will be on my own in Thailand and Cambodia (probably Phnom Penh and Siem Reap/Ankor Wat), and joining a tour in Bhutan. It's the only way one can go to Bhutan at this point, connected to a guide/driver combo or a tour. My tour includes a three-day trek and a week + of touring--festivals, culture, scenery etc. I am starting to get very excited. I have a lot to figure out and of course, there is the worrying part: the long flights, the midnight arrival in Thailand, the political unrest in Bangkok, travelling with a small group for many days, tight connections on return flights, remembering how to do this.

Oh wait--that's the fun part. Putting it all together! I forgot, but just for a moment. For those of you who are not certain where Bhutan is, you are not alone. Below is a map.

It's summer in the mountains

...and the gardens are producing...big time. In addition to the farm stand across the road, my neighbors, Chris and Sculley, are out of town and I am watering their tomatoes...and eating them. I thought this made such a pretty picture I had to take one and share it with you. (The basket was given to me by Rusty and Kathy Rudy when I was in Houston for the Quilt Festival there several years back and it was filled with snacks and I get to think of them every time I use it. It has spent time in the quilt room, as a yarn basket and now for toting vegies across the road. Wow. I sound kinda like Suzy Homemaker, don't I!?)

PNewL PNewS Volume 16 Issue 2

PNewL PNewS

Volume 16 No. 2 “All the pnews that phits.” July 2008

At least my hair looks good

I confess to being a bit of a drama queen. I am inexact in the words I choose and tend to exaggerate. Now that I have moved to a new place (I am not certain that it has really sunk in that I live here now, that this is not a brief visit), I want to choose my words more carefully so I don’t frighten people, so I don’t go off sounding like I am preparing to jump off the bridge. That is not the way to make friends and influence people.

Anyway, I tend towards the dramatic and so, six days into this new life I just wanna say, what the ^#**$?! was I thinking? How did I think I could handle this? Absolutely everything is new and out of my comfort zone and beyond my abilities. It makes me wanna barf…or hide under the covers or well…I am not to the jumping part but I can imagine getting there. OK, lotsa drama there.

Here’s the scenario (in case you missed this whole extravaganza I have created for myself). I was living a perfectly fine life in a beautiful resort community in Southwest Florida and other than the fact that the summer which lasts about five months drove me mad because of the obscenely hot weather and 18 other things I won’t go into here, I have made some of the best friends I had ever had and I had a pretty good set-up. That is, of course, the time I decided I should leave. And so that is how I got to where I am today.

I guess I would say I am at one of the many really yucky parts of moving. I KNOW it is a phase but here I am: I can’t remember why I thought this was a good idea or what I am supposed to do now. I can’t seem to do anything right. I am late places when I have no schedule. I arrive without coupons or the mail I wanted to mail or the address of where I am going, the phone isn’t charged and the grocery list is nowhere to be found. Everything is kind of a mess. When I step back and look at it, I realize it’s little messes, but it still drives me bats.

Recently, I bought a computer desk from a young woman moving to LA for graduate school who needed the money, and it came with two other pieces of organizational furniture and it is surprising how satisfying and productive a little thing like that can be. I have places to put things! Then I bought three little dining room chairs which match one I got from my parents. They make me happy, and, coincidentally, the woman I bought them from spends half her time in SW Florida and is a quilter (and she probably doesn’t need the money but probably wants the space). Finally, the true organizational queen of the house: I got a “hutch” for glasses and all that stuff so things are starting to look put away. And the best part is I bought it all used on Craig’s List (my new favorite time sucking device/black hole of time/hobby) so I am not adding (too much) to the consume consume consume problem in our country. Some days actually work out pretty well.

Others, however, don’t. More often than I prefer, it is before dawn and I am on the computer because I couldn’t sleep. I have things I would like to accomplish but I have a sneaking suspicion that I will be able to sleep when I would like to be busy and that could make for bad driving and/or inappropriate snoring and/or drooling. It's frustrating.

Perhaps by the time I get to writing the next edition of the PNewS, I will be over this rambling lost in a fog of no sleep and uncertainty-about-everything phase and I will sound like my usual whiney self. Meanwhile, at least my hair looks good. (Or it did when I first started writing this but as we all know and hope, hair grows and does different things as the weather changes, but I am feeling better able to handle it, which seems like a step in the right direction.)

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Here’s my latest brilliant idea: I am going to write a How-to book about moving to the country by someone who has basically lived in the suburbs her whole life. I can include the part where I didn’t have hot water for a week thinking I was doing something wrong only to find the pilot light was out. (After brushing the four foot long snake skin away from in front of the hot water heater, I lit it all by myself.) And then there’s the part where I assumed I had to turn on the gas to the house which seemed too scary so I made coffee on the front steps on my camp stove until the neighbor came over and lit the stove on his first attempt. See? It’ll be informative, expose me as a moron and make everyone else feel like they are way ahead of my curve!

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I cut out the comic strip Lola from the paper last week. She was at an anger management class and she said, “I have issues…None of which existed prior to Bill Gates…” I thought there must be someone I could send it to. After spending several hours wrestling with MS Word, I think I will keep it for myself. Be well.

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Things I am Learning
And Other Miscellaneous Observations

• When moving/packing, I vow to put all pieces of a thing (knobs, plugs, cords, shelf brackets, etc) in the same box so I won’t think I have lost them. It’s a hassle and a drag to worry about lost bits in the tangle of packing paper only to find them a couple boxes later. (Still missing the top to a little china teapot.)
• I love the internet. For the past several days, the little Oregon Scientific clock/alarm/indoor-outdoor thermometer has been ringing bright and early. I went online and found the manual!! Yahoo. I can’t find anything specific on the internet that does something about the dogs that bark all night a couple houses down but hopefully this too shall pass.
• I am very pleased with the new quilt group I went to (with celebrity quilter Patsy Thompson, a close personal friend, ahem). Despite a lengthy discussion of nametags and font sizes which boggled the mind, I was blown away by the caliber of talent in the room. I suspect at some point I will be exposed for the fraud that I am and they will ask me to leave (with a couple others I detected were a bit out-classed) but in the meantime, I will sit in awe.
• Getting accustomed to a new house is an interesting process. There are new noises…the hot water heater seems to go on rather loudly around midnight (does it have a watch? Should I be worried?) Late one night, a moth got stuck in a little spot around a window frame and sounded like an electrical rattling thing. (I got up to check it out and Ok I squished it but it had been on its way out—one can only take so much.) The creek out back ebbs and flows and gurgles based on rainfall. Then there’s always those things that go bump in the night.
• The latest thing I am grappling with as I settle in: Do you put your favorite art/photos where you can see them when you wake up or out there where everyone who comes to visit can see them? Do tell. Inquiring minds want to hang pictures.
• I have a had a bit of a problem getting hooked up to television (be glad I didn’t tell you the whole story of wrangling with the internet—oh my!) here in the woods. So I have now watched every videotape and DVD I own. Then I moved on to the supply at the local library. Buncombe County where I now live has an extensive library system (“You are never more than five miles from a library in Buncombe County!” they proudly declare, though I think that must be as the crow flies.) Anyway, the local video section doesn’t even fill two shelves so I am finding myself limited. The night before last, I watched State Fair (1945) and lo and behold this 60th Anniversary Edition includes the updated 1962 version starring Pat Boone, Bobby Darin and a 21 year old Ann-Margret. Oh my! Why they haven’t made a version since I don’t know—the music’s real snappy, but for now I think I have had quite enough State Fair.
• Going through Mom and Dad’s stuff back on Sanibel (including things like old bills and menus for dinner parties among other more precious items), I went back and forth from wanting to throw everything away to wanting to ask them questions about what where who when why. I came across a receipt from a time when Dad had to “Surrender to the Crown” some pepper spray. And I thought he was such a law abiding citizen!!

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“Justice is what love looks like in public.” Cornel West

Moving: Closing in on the final chapter I hope

I am in the house: me, my vehicles and all sorts of stuff. I have "only" 38 boxes to go, but that includes several that will be finished up once I get additional organizational bits of furniture. It's funny how furniture in one house doesn't necessarily work in another. Colors are different and styles of course, and then there's size and scale...but there are other things. Aw heck. Maybe there aren't.

Anyway, the unpacking continues and here's the big question: is it possible that unpacking is worse than packing? Ring in. And I will get back to my boxes...

27th Annual Angel Island Picnic & 6th Annual Dirty Towel Tour

Once again, I managed to connect with many wonderful old friends in a variety of beautiful places. The Bay Area (I went from Carmel Valley to Santa Rosa) is a remarkable and wonderful place. The food is good, the views are stunning. Too bad so many people agree with me.

This year two of the many were hurting and that is hard to see. I hope that soon this won't be the case but I guess pain, illness, death are part of the package, and there ain't nothin I can do about it. My thoughts remain with you all, and I hope for rain without lightning to deal with some of that fire.

The Angel Island Picnic was a rousing success with the addition of more in the 20-something category. (Katie Scherbel brought along a whole slew of folks who seemed to enjoy themselves enough to agree to bring the keg next year!) Unfortunately a number of the regulars couldn't make it because of things like family reunions and children's activities. Enough excuses: next year's picnic will be on June 27 (wow that's late--remember: it's the Saturday after Father's Day), so put it on your calendar and show up.

We talked to a very nice candid ranger there about fixing the road to Perles Beach which has been washed out for several years, causing aging picnickers to have to vault down a steep hillside. We thought if we offered to find someone to fix the road and pay for it, we could get it fixed. Unfortunately FEMA is already on the case and the ranger said "So just like New Orleans, it's almost fixed..." or something like that. Sigh. Well, it's gonna get hard to get the truly aged down that hillside, but maybe when we are that far along, we will have other technology to aid us down. Until then...see you next year.

The Last Lunch

A wonderful lunch took place on my last real day in Florida. (I spent some time there after, but it was well...a bit unreal...) It was totally fun to be surrounded by people I really like. I hope you can see the gift from Darla who had...well I can't tell you the whole story, but trust me, the gift is priceless (and it only cost $1 at Noah's Ark Thrift Store) and the reason behind it is even better...

too bad I look so tired...