Bookends

I don't do as many swaps on SwapBot as I used to.  But I do like exchanging post cards and journals.  This year there have been monthly journals, where you keep a journal for a whole month and then send it off to your partner.  There has been one of these journal swaps every other month, and they've all been fun to do.

The day before I began the current (May) journal, Walt and I met our friends Jeri and Phil (the other Jeri and Phil) for lunch at Fenton's in Vacaville.  At that lunch, I discovered (after years of eating there) that they have (free) post cards, including the one at he left, which is one of my favorite pictures--a larger-than-poster size copy of this picture adorns one of the walls of the restaurant.

I brought home a couple of the free postcards and so the first page of my May journal was this photo and a description of Fenton's.

Today is the 30th of the month and the journal will end tomorrow, and yesterday I met Char...at Fenton's, so I got a different free postcard that that will be at the end of my May Journal.  It's kind of like Fenton's was bookends for this particular journal.  

Given the distance from Davis to Vacaville it's definitely rare that I would eat at Fenton's twice in one month.

As usual we had a great lunch.  We started with shakes (I had a vanilla malt) and I learned a great secret for next time.  It used to be I would get a small sundae which comes heaped high in a small bowl and dripping with so much topping that the topping all rolls off the ice cream and pools at the bottom of the plate that the bowl sits on.  Awhile ago I asked for my sundae to come in a LARGE bowl and that was just GREAT.  For the first time I didn't have to try to figure out how I was going to get hot fudgs off of a flat plate without licking it.

They deivered the shakes.  The waitress had asked us if we wanted whipped cream and we both said yes, but my malt had no whipped cream on it.  When I complained to the server who brought it to me she said she would get some more.  She came back with a whole little bowl of whipped cream -- easily twice what would have been squirted on the top.

(the whipped cream was actually heaped on this bowl)

 

Next time I will order my malt with whipped cream on the side and see if I get that much whipped cream again.

My new favorite menu item is a crab melt sandwich which is different from the usual crab salad sandwich I have gotten on several trips to Fenton's.  The melt comes with avocado and I like it a lot better.

The sandwiches are huge and I usually bring half of my sandwich home to Walt, if he doesn't come with me.  Today he was here with Ned while an assessor came to check the house and give us an idea of what it might be worth.  We have no plans whatsoever to sell it, but Ned thought it would be good to get the assessment before he and Marta start doing major rennovation around here.. 

When I finished the first half of my sandwich, I did consider taking the other half home, but it just tasted too good, so I ate it.

After lunch, my plan had been to stop at one of the other stores in the mall where Fenton's is located, but once I got into the car, I felt so full I couldn't see getting out and wandering around a store again, so I just drove home.

I got home in a full post-prandial exhaustion.  I thought about the standard Mexican siesta after heavy meals and what a good idea that was.  It took me a good, oh, 5 or maybe 10 miutes to get to sleep and I slept for an hour or two.  I woke up still groggy, was up for an hour, trying to think about what to cook for dinner, given that there was no way I was going to eat anything.  I was so groggy that I went back to sleep for another hour.

I finally woke up and made dinner, but gave it all to Walt and stumbled back to the recliner.  It was probably 8 p.m. before I actually felt "normal" again!

I woke up in time to paste a Fenton's postcard into my May journal, to make the second half of the Fenton's bookends.  Now it's time to go back to sleep.

The Cool Kids

Well, this damn cough did me in for a second weekend.  I had been looking forward to this weekend almost as much as last weekend's wedding.

Walt's cousin Ernie Baur and his wife Lucille, two of my favoritest people in the world, were in town from Maryland.  They had been to So. California and are flying back home again tomorrow, but they came north to spend a day with Walt's brother and his wife, Walt and me, Ned and Walt's sister and her husband.  We were going to celebrate Alice Nan's 70th birthday (Feb. 12) and Walt's 75th (Feb 26).

The plan was to go to San Francisco and walk around all day, have Irish coffee at the Buena Vista (where it was invented), and then return to Norm & Olivia's to have dinner.

I already knew that walking around San Francisco all day was not going to work for me, so my plan was to stay at Norm and Olivia's for the day while the rest of them went to play.  Walt said we would have to leave by 8 a.m.

I got up at 6:30 to get my hair washed, and change into clothes for lounging about for the day.  I packed up my iPad, got my book, and was ready and waiting for Walt to finish his breakfast.  

While I was sitting there, I continued coughing and coughing and coughing.  The bad kind of cough where there is phlegm in your lungs and you can't bring it up and the trying doubles you over until you feel like you're going to vomit.

"What am I doing?" I thought to myself.  I was going to spend the day spreading germs around Norm and Olivia's house and when everybody got home, I was going to try to visit with them while coughing my lungs out.  NOBODY was going to be happy to see me, for sure!

So, sadly, once again I backed out of something I had been looking forward to for several weeks and Walt went off without me.

There were all sorts of things I was going to do in between coughing attacks (I can actually go for 2-3 hours without coughing at all, but then it all comes back again).  First I thought I'd watch a movie, so I chose Kinky Boots, which I loved. 

Then I was going to do something but first I had to check Facebook.

Lo and behold, someone had started a group called "Old School On Line Journalers."  It was for people who were, many years ago, very active in journaling (before "blogs" came along) and who may or may not still be writing.

Oh. my. word.

Out of the woodwork they came.  All those names I knew so well from the late 90s and early 200s.  People I met at the second Journalcon, a convention of on-line Journalists held in San Francisco, where I read one of my entries, thinking it was hilariously clever, only to have it bomb.

It was such fun to see all those familiar names again, and yet it brought back all those feelings of being on the outside watching all the cool kids.  The fact that most of the posts I made in the various conversations seem to have been ignored just reinforced the feeling I had when I was at Journalcon.

I've never done parties or groups well.  It's why I have a camera.  I can find pleasure photographing all the cool kids interacting than trying to enter into one of the conversations.

Not only am I terribly shy, but I also had the extra handicap of being old enough to be mother to most of the cool kids.  As they all virtually high fived each other and talked about what they had been doing over the last 10-15 years, I realized that they had gotten married, found jobs, had babies, etc.  I had retired and buried children.  Whoopie!  Not much to interest the cool kids.

But that didn't mean I was not enjoying the conversation.  There were several threads going at once, the "what have you been doing" thread, the "if you are still journaling, what is your URL thread," the "Which of our members have we lost" thread and a few others, like remembering writing entries in HTML code and the sites like GeoCities, where many of us started, which no longer exists.  There were so many people posting that I was literally getting 3 new messages every couple of minutes.  Not messages to me, of course, but messages to the group that I was enjoying reading.

I couldn't believe how much time I "wasted" reading those messages, but then rationalized that if I had gone with Walt, I wouldn't have gotten anything done either, so I didn't worry about it.  It was nearly 5 p.m. before I could tear myself away.

I really enjoyed seeing all the cool kids again but I felt the same detachment from them that I did back at Journalcon.  

In 1996 I went to see a therapist to help me through the grief after Gilbert's death.  She gave me an assignment at my first meeting, which was to draw a cartoon of how I saw myself.  I loved my cartoon which showed a worm slithering across the floor to a group of people.  The worm raises up and joins the conversation and everything is going fine until someone suddenly points at me and says "Wait a minute...you're just a worm!" and I sink back down to the floor and slither away.

Sadly, the therapist never asked to see my drawing and was too busy telling me her problems to bother listening to me and I never went back, but still today, when I am around "cool kids" I think about that drawing and realize that yet again, I am the fat kid in the brown loafers and the thick glasses hiding behind the potted palm (threw that in for you, Ron) living vicariously through watching the cool kids. Which is my own weird kind of pleasure.

But lemme tell you, when you feel like a nerd in a group of cool nerds, it's really bad!

Preserving History

There are really good things about keeping a blog, or about journaling in general.  It's wonderful to come across things that people in the family have written about certain parts of their lives.  For example, I have a travel diary that my godmother kept when she and her husband (my grandmother's cousin) went on their honeymoon to Europe in 1913.  The ink has faded so it's difficult to read, though her handwriting is very neat.  I don't know exactly how long the trip took, but several weeks.  I have not read the whole thing, but what I have read has been fun to see what travel was like in 1913 -- they had to take the ship to Ireland, for example, since there were no flights! 

(In the back of the book are a few little clippings that she saved, and a little pamphlet advertising the Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls, which cost, at that time 50 cents.)

My mother kept a journal when she and her then-new husband traveled to the Netherlands to visit his family and do some traveling with his cousin and her husband.  My mother is not an interesting writer and while she told me about the frustrations she was going through at the time, her written account reads more like an itinerary than a journal, so I have only read a little bit of it, but it's there if I want to read it.

(The videos that they took on that trip kind of match the tone of the journal.  Fred was a carpenter and the video that I saw showed a brief clip of a bunch of windmills and then endless inside shots of nails and joints and how the windmill was put together.  I fell asleep when they showed it to us.)

Funny the World is the story of my life from 2000 forward.   Prior to that, I kept copies of letters for a number of years until the size of the collection started to get out of hand (I still have those copies) and then kept journals for various stretches of time.  I kept a journal for about 10 years or so of our kids' early life, which I retyped, edited, and had hard bound for the kids one Christmas.   I called it "How I 'Did It'" since everybody always asked me how I managed to survive raising five children. Knowing how positively that book was received made me sorry that I didn't continue it, but there is a big gap from about 1988 until this journal started in 2000.  Some interesting things happened during that time.

My friend Alison recently gave me her collection of letters we wrote to each other while writing the Lamplighter histories, and that was fun to re-live.

I also kept travel journals when we traveled to England or Ireland or Scotland (by the time we went to the continent, I had Funny the World to write in)

Sometimes it's not exactly nice to relieve those parts of your life. I took a trip of a couple of weeks with my mother and her husband in their RV.   Keeping a journal kept me sane.  Fred and I were usually cordial to each other, but there were things about him that drove me to distraction, primarily his bigotry.  My mother would deny vehemently that he had any bigotry about him, but I heard every ethnic and gender slur there ever was on that trip, to the point where I would go to the back of the RV when he was driving just so I would not have to listen to him.   When we parked on their property, I was so very glad that there was a separate trailer on the property to which I could escape when I couldn't take it any more.  He would also do things like come into the trailer where we were watching a program on TV and just change the channel because he wanted to watch something else, or turn it off in the middle of a program without saying anything because he was tired and wanted to go to bed.   It's all written down in my journal of that trip, which I don't want to throw away.   Fred is gone and my mother wouldn't remember.

I found the worst journal this afternoon, though.  I haven't seen it in years.  It chronicles a period of several weeks when I went to help a friend who was going through some difficult times.  I'm not going to be specific, but I remember the time as being absolutely horrible, but when I came across the journal today and re-read it, it was much, much worse than I remembered.  She and I were barely speaking during parts of that time, her husband hit on me every single day that I was there and made lewd phone calls to me at work.  I barricaded myself in my room each night, piling furniture and suitcases up against the door, for fear he would come in and rape me.  The tales went on and on and on. Walt remembers my calling him in tears because I was so miserable. Reading it now, I wonder how I would behave today.  I would like to think that I would be on the plane home after the first week, but I was trying to keep peace, grit my teeth and just count down the days until I could finally go home again.

The thing that hurts the most about that time was that I finally talked with my friend after she and her husband had split up, about how he had behaved toward me and how miserable I was, but to this day she has not said one word about it.   No apology, no sympathy, no excuses.  She just listened.  Twice.   And after I tried to get her to express something about what I had experienced, she seems to have ended our friendship.  I haven't heard from her in two years.

I really should send her my journal.  But I won't.  I'm still trying to protect her from the worst of it.

I am, for all intents and purposes, still a wimp, even 20+ years after the fact.

My New Passion

I'm developing a new passion.  It's not exacty "new," and it's not exactly unexpected, but I joined SwapBot a couple of years ago.  I'm not a crafty person, and most of the folks on SwapBot are knitters, crocheters, makers of something called ATCs, quilters, jewelry makers, and all sorts of talented crafty people who like exchanging things with each other.

I joined a discussion group there for people over 50 and have enjoyed that, though it's not nearly as intimate or as lively as our CompuServe group.  But still it's fun to learn about other people.

I've also joined post card swaps, some of which involve just sending a regular postcard to someone, but I've also made my own postcards, and sent specific kinds of post cards, like "ugly" postcards, "weird" postcards, "free" cards (advertising cards), and other themes chosen by the person who is running that particular swap.

I've joined pen pal swaps, most of which involve sending one letter to one person, and sometimes they write back, but your job is done when you've mailed that first letter.

There are recipe swaps, which are fun, though I reached a point where I decided I don't really collect recipes any more and while I was more than happy to share what I have, I didn't really want any other recipes cluttering my files!

And then there are the journal swaps.  The first one I joined was a Composition Journal swap, where you keep a journal for at least 2 months, with a minimum of 50 entries and then send it off.  My journal was OK, but the one I received from someone named Linda in Georgia was amazing and I posted this picture of some of the pages to give people the idea.

This creative I ain't but I had so much fun getting this one that I decided to join the next Composition Journal Swap and I'm having the best time creating pages.  They don't equal Linda's by a long shot, but here are a couple of favorites.

The left page is about Polly but the right page was a way to preserve a weird catalog I received.  What I have written there is "Father has strange tastes in clothing."

And then there was this fun page.  The woman I'm making this book for lists butterflies as one of her favorite things and I found some butterfly sticker edging at Michael's Craft Store and created this page.

On the left side of the page is a gift notecard for her...when you lift the note card out of the envelope it's a butterfly, of course.

I'm really sorry I didn't take pictures of the last book I made.   I'd like to compare them, but I'm going to have a record of this book and am pretty happy with how it is turning out.  It's a nice respite from worry about my mother.   Once she is safely ensconced in her new home, I can relax, but right now it's what I think about when going to sleep, what I wake up thinking about, and what obsesses me during the day.  Is this the right decision?  Will the money last?  Etc., etc., etc.

I'm not sure if there is a correlation between creativity and stress, but I'm glad I have this composition journal to busy myself with and forget about thinking for a few moments!