We had such a mild Winter, and now Spring is here, but I still feel like I’m waiting for Winter to kick in. There was no snow, not even a hint of a possibility of it, and hardly any really cold weather at all. We turned on the fireplace two times, maybe three, over the entire season, but not so much because we needed it, as because we said, “Hey! We’ve got this fireplace! Let’s use it!” But we didn’t run it for long.
And now the trees are blooming, and as you can see from the picture, the view out the front bedroom window is of flowers, all pink and white. This week I wore my summer sandals for the first time. Soon, I’ll be putting the boots away until the end of the year.
I’m glad it’s Spring, I like Spring, I just feel like I got cheated out of Winter this year. But I guess there are worse things that could happen. So I’m not complaining. I just feel a little sad about it, like something is missing.
It’s Sunday night and my week of vacation is almost over. The one thing I can say about it for certain…it sure went FAST! I’m just beginning to get the hang of this vacationing, and now it’s time to go back to work! Not fair! I’ve only ever taken a week long vacation before, never a full two weeks, but I think I could easily become a supporter of the two week vacation. I’d like to try that some time, when I have more vacation hours built up. Not this summer, but maybe next.
Still, it was a delight to stay at home, putter around, get some work done on the house, the podcast, and the new blog. Went to the thrift store one afternoon and got myself a couple of nice “hippie skirts” for the summer. Also found a paperback of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, so I don’t have to lug around the huge library book.
Our new gym has just opened as well, so it’s time now to start getting back to exercise in a much more serious way. Before my vacation, I was beginning to once again take 15 minute walks around the building on my break, but now Russ and I will be meeting after work at the gym. Also looking forward to eating more salads, less red meat. Hope to see some changes in how I look and feel.
That’s it for now. Got to start gathering my stuff together for tomorrow. Not sure how I’m going to feel about having to wake up at 6am, especially since we’ve changed the clocks, and now it’s likely to be dark, or nearly dark, when I wake up. It’s going to be slow going, at least at first. But the days will be getting longer, and that’s always welcome.
Last summer, when Russ and I began producing our Dark Shadows podcast, we were having so much fun with it that we decided we would like to do podcasts on all different kinds of subjects. One interest that we believed would really lend itself to podcasting is a review of Marvel Comics. We worked up a format, developed a website page, and even sat down and recorded an episode, before we realized that with the Dark Shadows podcast and everything else going on, there simply was not enough time for us to be doing another podcast. At least not if we wanted to do it well.
And so the idea of our Marvel Comics podcast was laid to rest. It was very sad for me, to have this big dream of doing a creative project, and have to admit that the ONLY reason we could not do this thing, is because there simply are not enough hours in the day. It’s moments like these that make me long for retirement. But that’s quite a ways off, and in the meantime, I had resigned myself to having to give up this project.
Until a few weeks ago, when it suddenly occurred to me (I would almost use the word “epiphany”) that this review of Marvel comics didn’t have to be a PODCAST. Why couldn’t it be a blog?? Yes, blogging also takes time, but nowhere near as much time as podcasting! So we redesigned the webpage, and got to work revamping the format. I’m on vacation this week, and I’ve been using this free time to write the first half-dozen or so entries. Before posting anything, I wanted to make sure that this was something that was going to work, and that was going to be fun. Because I wouldn’t want to do it if it felt like a chore.
Well, several thousand words later, I’ve found out that this idea is a blast! I love looking at the comics and writing about them. Russ is helping with the technical side of posting to the website, and we’ve got our first entry up at Adventures in the Marvelous Zone: A Girl Looks at Marvel Comics
I hope you’ll visit it, even if you’re not interested in comics. Hey! I wasn’t interested in comics, until I started reading them! There’s something so elemental and fun about the stories, how can you resist?
Anyway, I’ve now set up a “Blogroll” on the right side of this website, with easy links to our other sites, in case you ever want to stop by and see what else Russ and I have been up to. I know our interests may be a little “strange,” not really “mainstream,” but we enjoy these things, and working on these projects sure beats the heck out of sitting in front of The Nancy Grace show every night!
Russ and I are big fans of the Hoarding shows, and try to watch all of them. That’s why we were especially interested in the episode where they visit some of the past hoarders, to see how they’re doing, if they’re making progress or backsliding. We just watched the “Where are they now?” show and saw just about the weirdest thing we’ve ever seen on any of these Hoarders shows.
This one lady, who they visited and helped during a previous season, has gone pretty much right back to where she was. They sent in a professional organizer to help her clean out again. They started with her collection of hundreds of purses and handbags. The hoarder said she couldn’t get rid of a lot of them, because she was storing them for her twin sister, who did not have enough room at her house.
The hoarder’s husband stuck his head around the corner and said, “That’s a good one. Only one thing: you don’t have sister.”
So the hoarder went on to say, “Yes, I do,” then she explained to the organizer (and the camera, and thus all of us watching the show), “He just doesn’t like to talk about her, because he had an affair with her.”
When the son came over later, he confirmed: Mom does NOT have a sister. She made it all up.
How far will some hoarders go to continue denying they have a problem?
In another story, a hoarder had made significant progress in cleaning up her house, but her sister (this one a REAL sister) was still threatening to attempt to gain custody of the hoarder’s ten year old daughter. Yes, at the time of the original show, the house was a disaster, not safe or healthy for a child to be living there. But by the time of the follow-up show, the conditions were entirely acceptable. (Even the show’s psychologist agreed there was no longer any problem.)
The sister was not invited to the follow-up, but she showed up anyway. The hoarder took her inside the house to see the progress. The sister left with some sarcastic words, clearly annoyed that she was not going to have any ammunition in her plans to take away the little girl. She scowled and left without so much as one sincere, “Good work, sis! Keep it up!”
Last night we were watching a movie and one of the stars was Matthew Modine. The movie was from the 1980’s, so he was very young. This is the way I remember him. But when I look him up online, I find that he is no longer young. Now he’s much older. In a way it’s kind of sad, because there’s a part of my brain that wants to believe that actors never age, that in the next movie they put out, they’ll look exactly like they did in the first movie. There’s something about Hollywood that makes you want to believe in magic, and part of that magic would be that people don’t age. Some stars try their hardest not to age, but eventually it catches up with everyone. And the magic is gone. Eventually, everyone gets old.
Unless you’re a vampire. We’ve been re-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in tonight’s episode, Angel says “I’m not getting any older.” This was in direct opposition to my Matthew Modine revelation. But of course, it’s a fiction. There are no vampires, there is nobody on this earth who does NOT get older. Angel in this 1999 TV episode might be able to say “I’m not getting any older,” but David Boreanaz, the actor who plays him, is now on another TV show, and he has gotten older. He’s aging well, that’s to his credit, and to the credit of Hollwood makeup artists as well, I’m sure, but there’s no doubt he’s older.
I’ve heard it said that Brent Spiner, the actor who plays Data on Star Trek the Next Generation, at some point decided he was not going to play that role anymore, because Data, as an android, is not supposed to age, and it would eventually be obvious, no matter how much makeup they might put on him, that he himself had aged. He didn’t want to risk appearing ridiculous.
For the same reason, if they should ever decide to do a Buffy movie, or additonal TV episodes, we couldn’t really have the same actors and actresses who played the vampires coming back at this point, ten to fifteen years later, reprising their roles. So I guess we will just have to be happy with the existing footage. Which never gets old.
We have started watching this show on the Animal Planet, My Cat From Hell. It’s sort of the cat version of The Dog Whisperer, and you get to see some poor, terrible cats with lots of emotional problems, but then the “cat-wrangler” Jackson Galaxy comes in and teaches the cat’s “guardians” how to help them feel better. It’s pretty amazing, and very educational. We pick up a lot of good tips, even though our cats are not “from hell.”
If you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time, you’ll know that our older cat, Boogie, has had some problems in the past with his digestion. We’re mostly under control at the moment, but not 100%. We may never be 100%, since he is an older cat, and we’re not emotionally willing or financially able to do all the testing, treatments, maybe even surguries, that would be required to completely “cure” him (if it would even be possble to completely “cure” him.) But I do believe he’s currently a lot more comfortable than he was a year ago.
Anyway, by watching this show, I was reminded of something that I already know: that it’s always a good idea to have at least one litterbox for each cat in the house. This gave me the idea that maybe we ought to get Boogie his own litterbox. If he has a place that he feels is uniquely his, he might not feel so compelled to do his business just outside the litterbox, in the hallway. So today, we bought a second litterbox, and we’re going to set it up where he’s been “going,” to give him the idea that this is a better alternative. Once he gets his own smell in the box, hopefully he will feel, “Hey, this is mine, I OWN this.”
And if somehow we can keep Squee from taking over this second litterbox as well, that would be great. Actually, this second litterbox is much smaller than the first, so Squee, who is a big boy, may not even be able to comfortably get inside it, so that may discourage him from trying to use it. We’re hoping that will be the case.
I know this is an unpleasant subject, but it’s part of my reality, and I’m just glad that we found this cat show which makes us a little more aware of what’s going on in our cats’ lives, what they might be thinking and feeling, and gives us ideas on how we might be able to help them.
I’ll let you know how this goes.
In other news, this was the first day of my vacation, but it pretty much felt like any other Saturday, doing laundry, food shopping, working on the new Marvel blog. We did watch a show on TV, a documentary about Jules Verne, which inspired me to want to read some of his books. We have a book on the shelf which is actually a compilation of SEVEN of his books, so it’s a bit large and unwieldly. I’ve put it on my nightstand, for reading before bedtime, but in the meantime, today we took a drive out to the public library and picked up some more reasonalbly weighted volumes, which I can easily take with me if I want to do some reading on my lunchbreak. I think I’m going to start with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Let you know how that goes as well.
One of the things we learned on this documentary today is that in the 1860’s, Jules Verne wrote a book called Paris in the 20th Century, in which he imagined all kinds of ideas and inventions which might belong to the future, and now of course we can see that a lot of his ideas have been realized, to some degree. Apparently he envisioned “a worldwide telegraphic communications network,” very similar to…the internet. So. If Al Gore tells you he “invented” the internet, don’t believe him. It was Jules Verne. About 100 years before computers came into existence.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve been here. I’m terrible about keeping up. Some of it is on account of being too busy, and some of it is on account of being too tired. Actually, I think what happens is that I am too busy, and then by the end of the day, because I’ve been so busy, I’m too tired. Sometimes going to work really drains me. But now, I have a week off for Spring Break, and I’m psyched up about that, so I’m going to try to post something here every day, and see if I can’t get back in the habit of posting to my journal.
For today, I’m just here to say…I’m back! And I will also make a couple more observations. One of the things I’ve been busy with is, of course, the podcast. Russ and I continue to do that, and enjoy it. Also now, I’m going to be starting a new blog shortly, called Adventures in the Marvelous Zone, which will be my take on Marvel Comics. Being married to Russ, his enthusiasm for comics has been contagious, and I’ve been infected with the bug! I’ve started writing some blog entries about the earliest Marvel comics, and I’m enjoying that so much—not only enjoying the writing about them, but enjoying the stories even more than the first time I read them. There is so much in these stories! But I’m not going to say any more just yet. I hope to have the blog up and running by the end of this week, and when that happens, you can go there to see what I’m talking about, if you like.
Now, one more thing tonight: this is a thought I’ve had for a while. As we work on the podcast, we are trying to get oursevels more involved in Twitter and Facebook, to get our name out there, so people who like Dark Shadows will know we exist and they can come to our website to listen to our podcast. I have to say this upfront: I have never been a fan of Facebook. I just don’t understand how it works. And now that we’re on Twitter as well, I have to admit that I don’t really understand that either (though it’s not quite as confusing as Facebook is to me.)
When I try to deal with Twitter and Facebook, I feel so old, and old-fashioned. Cos I just don’t “get it.” I don’t know what all the hoopla is about. And honestly…I just can’t figure it out. It’s really weird, because I can do blogs and journals, and I can even do a PODCAST.. but I just can’t get the hang of Facebook.
But there is one thing I’ve noticed about Facebook and Twitter (Twitter especially), and that’s that I think to a large extent it’s not really so much “Social Networking” as it is “Social MARKETING.” There are so many people that have something to “sell,” something they want you to see. It’s so much about getting the word out. Yes, I admit, that’s exactly what we are doing on those sites. I’m just amazed at how many *other* people are doing the exact same thing. I would estimate that at least 80% of the people we see on Twitter are only there to tell you about what they’ve got, what they’re trying to “sell” to you (even as we are trying to “sell” our product to them.) It’s kind of funny, actually…in a sad kind of way.
My initial thought about Twitter was that phone commercial from a couple of years back, where the dad is sitting on his back porch, and entering into his smartphone: “I’m…sitting…on…my…back…porch.” That’s what I originally thought Twitter would be all about, people posting inane things about their lives. Boring and inane observations. I almost would have preferred that. But instead, I find it a little discouraging that people are not just there to talk to each other as much as they are to tell and “sell.”
And the whole idea of “twitter,” the word is like a bunch of birds just chirping away. That’s really what it is. Everyone’s chirping, but I don’t know how many people are actually listening. But you know what? There’s so much chirping going on around us all the time, that you couldn’t possibly listen to it all, all the time. It would drive you mad. So you have to be selective, you have to choose what you listen to, what you watch, what you read, what sites you visit. If you don’t, you’ll be on total information overload.
A milestone! A day we have been waiting for, for a long…long…time. Russ and I have been watching Dark Shadows starting at Episode # 1, and now at last today, in Episode #295…COLOR!!!
Yes, you heard me right. We have watched the first 294 black and white episodes of Dark Shadows. And enjoyed just about every moment of it, had a lot of good laughs, suspense, fun characters, and plenty to discuss on our podcast, The Drawing Room.
But now we are watching in COLOR. It’s a big thing, a big moment. In a way, I’m going to miss the old B&W eps. But just like everything else, we keep moving into the future.
Talked to Mom today and she sounded better than she has in a long time. She is out of the hospital and improving. I’ll post again if there are any dramatic changes in her condition, but at the moment I would say that her recovery is on track, and God willing, she will continue to improve.
I have also gotten over my strep throat and starting to feel more like myself and take on some more projects around the house, cleaning up and clearing out. There is a charitable organization that sends a truck around every few months to pick up your “goodwill” items, and I think I’ll have some stuff for them this time.
Also, I am going to be trying a new kind of litter for the cats, one that is supposedly 99% dust free, and doesn’t “track” as much as some of the other litters. It got really good reviews on Amazon, and as a matter of fact, I was able to order a 40 pound bag of it from Amazon, with NO SHIPPING CHARGES (because we have Amazon Prime). I think part of the reason I decided to try this litter is because I was so fascinated with the idea of being able to have something that weighs 40 POUNDS shipped directly to your front door, without having to pay for the shipping. I don’t think our UPS guy is going to be too happy with me, though. 🙁
Also under the heading of “Getting Better,” I’ve been listening to our latest Dark Shadows podcast, #15, as I drive in the car, and I marvel at how much better it is than the first or second one we did. James told me this would happen. And studying what we’ve done already gives me ideas on how to do the next one even better.
I haven’t had a chance to talk about this yet, because I’ve been so busy posting about Mom, and then of course I was sick, but as we turned over the new year, I weighed myself, and compared it to what I weighed last year on January 1, and guess what? It seems that somehow last year I actually lost about eight pounds! It’s been up and down, up and down, but in the end, I actually did make some progress. And now, I am inspired to keep it up, and try to take off a few more pounds as this new year develops.
Well, that’s all for now. Just about time for bed, as tomorrow is a big day with lots of stuff to do!
There is a new development in Mom’s health issues, I’ll post this portion of an email James sent me earlier:
I wanted to let you know that it looks like Mom is back in the hospital
again. Not sure if Dad got a chance to tell you. Her bladder
infection was just getting worse and after talking to the nurse it seems
this is resistant to the medication she’s been taking for it and this
morning she said she may need to go in to get put on an I.V. that would
constantly give her meds to take care of it. They left this morning
and she isn’t home when I got in so it sure seems like she got admitted
today.
She is very down and out about this going on and on. I tried to cheer
her up saying it sounds like she’s at the end of it. Her heart issues
seem to be doing much better, she just may need some medication
adjustment there. Once this infection is done she can feel good about
getting her life back to “normal” – normal meaning no hospital visits
and feeling better. 🙂
I do believe that when they get this infection cleared up, she will feel significantly better, and that at last her good health is returning. I know even just these past few days being sick with strep that you don’t realize how important your health is until it is on the decline. But then once it starts coming back, it’s delightful how much better you feel. Hang in there, Mom! Brighter days are ahead!
A milestone! A day we have been waiting for, for a long…long…time. Russ and I have been watching Dark Shadows starting at Episode # 1, and now at last today, in Episode #295…COLOR!!!
