6/9/2010 Menopause The Musical, Edmonds Performing Arts Center

*Walks in slowly and flops down*
Hi Mr. Blog,
I saw the funniest show I have ever seen
in my entire life last night over at the
Edmonds Performing Arts Center.
I went to see, "Menopause The Musical"
with my Kenmore home-girls Bev and Connie.
I never laughed so hard in my entire life
and it was perfect timing since
our water main repair bill wiped us out.
I'm selling my stamp collection for
food money next week.
So the musical had four main characters:
The businesswoman, hippie, preppy and drama queen.
Each character represented stereotypical American
women that would be affected by, "The Change"
in different ways.
The horrendous physical and mental effects were poked fun at
with nothing being held sacred.
I felt so validated after laughing at
sleeplessness, memory loss, mood swings,
age discrimination for employment and hot flashes.
The point of the musical is that women gain wisdom as they age.
While our culture celebrates youth and beauty,
our insides ARE more important than our outsides.
One song was even about valuing our insides over our outsides.
Oh how I felt so less alone.
I felt bonded with my friends and the audience.
I felt embraced by my culture for the first time in years.
I know that I have been discriminated against because of my age
for being hired as a full time teacher.
Time to move on and get a job at Grocery Outlet.
I will not be the first person to flush $40,000.00
for a University of Washington degree
down the toilet that leads no where.
While I can't get hired as a full time teacher
at fifty-three, I can get hired at the store.
I can make shoppers feel valued and cherished
and get my ogre of a husband off my back
for being jobless.
I can accept that my maturity and wisdom
and kindness will benefit my community.
Someday, when Gin Latin goes global,
I will look back on these very dark
days and laugh.

6/8/2010 Earring Quest

**Cartwheels in feeling very frisky, does a back-flip and lands on couch*
Good Morning Mr. Blog!
Nothing like coming here where I can
do anything my imagination lets me do.
*Juggles 100 nerf balls while laying on back*
I feel like a million bucks today!
No flu. No cold.
I think maybe it was good for me
to just take a day off from chores
yesterday to goof off.
It was fun to go to Alderwood Mall and see the
movie, "Splice." I only saw half 'cause it was
too scary and I had my hands over my eyes
whenever the suspenseful music came on.
I enjoyed hunting for earrings to replace these ones
I bought in 2003. I'm so picky!
When Gottchalks bought the Lake Forest Park Lamonts,I shopped there until they closed.
It was the only department store in Northshore.
Then they decided to sell that store and had
a big going out of business sale.
I bought four pair of 14 karat gold
leaver-back earrings with .5 carat cubic zirconium stones.
So, I'm too lazy to change my earrings and they
were perfect because I could sleep in them without
getting poked in the neck.
As I lost them, I'd just keep going through the
next seven, then six, blah, blah, blah
until I had one left.
I went to Target and found
nearly the same ones
but only one quarter the size.
So I wore those for a year until I lost one
and then I found an old Gottchalk's one under
my bed, but they were different sizes.
So that is what I have been wearing for the last year.
No one has noticed or if they did
they didn't say anything.
Last time I went to visit Bren,
we went to the Hilo mall and checked
every single store.
Ten stores, without any luck.
So, after my movie,
I went to ten stores in Alderwood Mall
and found some similar
but not exactly what I wanted.
I did find the perfect style and size at Sears
only to find out they were coated nickel
which would give me an ear infection.
Shopping alone made me miss Brenda.
It made me miss our close friendship
that we used to have.
But people and relationships all evolve
over time to different phases
so it was to be expected.
The heart often has
it's own directive
and it isn't always logical.
After two hours I gave up and
hung around at Godiva Chocolates
with my scout pal Grady.
I met him when he was working up
at Camp Brinkley as a staffer
six years ago.
He was only thirteen then
and was there every year for four years that
I took my little cubs
up to camp for a week.
We became pals
and don't live too far apart
and it was fun to visit.

6/8/2010 Melinda Gates, My Hero

*Walks in cheerfully and lies down on couch*
Hi Mr. Blog,
You know how I am always thinking
about how we are going to
end the human sufferings and
socioeconomic inequities of the world?
Well, the Seattle Times had an
article this morning that gave me
great hope for the future of
our people and planet.
THE BIG NEWS OF THE DAY
that has me so excited
is that Melinda Gates is having
her foundation donate 1.5 BILLION dollars
to help women globally that don't have access
to birth control and medical care.
Did you know over 200 million women globally
don't have basic family medical care?
That is so outrageous Mr. Blog.
You know how I think global overpopulation
is going to make our species extinct.
With the abundance of human and physical
resources it seems like we should be able
to solve all the problems of the world.
And here comes Melinda Gates to tell
the world leaders that we haven't tried hard enough.
And she is right.
We are all responsible for taking
care of each other
and having the compassion
and desire to solve our problems.
Melinda Gates is my hero now,
above all others.
I wish I could mail her a thank you card
but I doubt it would ever get there.

6/6/2010 Joyce Allen Williams Lehde Sellards

*Walks in and flops on couch*
I finally got over my cold Mr. Blog.
Took forever.
So all month I have been sorting mom and Lyle's stuff
from the back of my basement where it has sat for seven years.
Yesterday I went through mom's pictures and I felt
much less sad.
She had a great life!
She took a zillion pictures and the times
with Lyle looked the happiest.
This is what I learned from sorting her pictures:
She loved: Lyle, her family, her friends, God and gardening.
I think that is the right order.

6/4/2010 I Am The Inconvenient Friend

*Walks in slowly and lies down on couch*
I am feeling a little better but cleaning out
my parents' stuff is wearing me down a bit.
I think that is why I keep getting sick.
Stress from sorting my dead parents stuff
just makes me feel weak and tired and vulnerable.
So three days ago my childhood pal Sarah
called out of the blue.
I hadn't seen her or talked to her for six years.
She is so bubbly and delightful and sounded
very interested in rekindling our friendship.
I was tickled and asked if she would like me
to pop down Sunday afternoon.
She said that would be lovely.
The next day I woke up and thought,
"Wait a minute. The last four times we got together
I went to her house, even though it is way down in town."
So I called her and said that since
I visited her the last four times,
it was time for her to to make the effort to visit me.
Guess what she said, Mr. Blog?
"I'm not driving out to Kenmore. That is inconvenient."
Well, I told her that when she had more energy,
that she could make the effort
and then I'd go down and frolic at her place with her.
She just laughed and I did too but I don't think she'll call again
because I think that I am just
the inconvenient friend.

6/3/2010 I Love Those Big Recycle Bins! Tree Climbing Old Ladies

*Walks in slowly and flops on couch*
Hi Mr. Blog.
I finally feel a little better.
Do you think stress can make you sick?
I was pretty hysterical and disturbed after
my day at the graveyard
and have felt poopy ever since.
I want to work tomorrow very, very much
so I'm going to go to bed at six tonight.
I am so happy the recycle and garbage man came yesterday.
I love the giant green wheeled bins they invented
so we could all pitch in and help our environment.
I filled them so full of stuff from mom and Lyle's
junk in the basement last week that I had to climb up
inside the recycle bin and jump on it.
I know I hurt my back a little but it was worth it.
Reminded me of how much I love love love
to climb trees!
The last time I climbed one was six years ago
down in the swamp.
I was only forty-seven and I was babysitting
Jacob Waldrop for Wanda.
He and Troy and Teddy and I were down in the swamp
and I saw some pussywillows I wanted and started climbing.
They were quite surprised to see an old lady
climbing a tree.
Well, going up was fairly easy
although I was certainly not as limber
as a monkey like I was in my thirties.
I seemed to have gotten a tad heavier too.
I was about fifteen feet up when the branch under
my feet broke off!.
Lickety split I was sailing through the
air like a missile
and landed on my butt in the mud.
Now there is a situation where a big butt
is highly advantageous if I ever saw one!
I turned red with embarrassment and the boys cracked up.
Now I read years ago that it is biologically impossible for
someone over the age of thirty to blush
and I beg to differ on that point.
If there was ever a person that could do or say
something embarrassing once a day,
I'm that person.

6/2/2010 Nobody Likes a Whinebaby

*Shuffles in and blows nose, flops on couch*
Oh Mr. Blog,
How cruel is it that I love to teach
but seem allergic to my little customers?
Every time I sub
I get sick. How I admire full time teachers.They seem to have antibodies
built up against all the little germ-spreaders.
Must be nice.
I'm so glad you are here.
I'm bored and tired and lonely and sick again/still.
I can talk to you about it and you don't care.
You are paid to listen to whatever drivel
my little mouth dispenses.
This is the place to whine
or crow
or what? All points in between?
I had a life-changing experience in 1979
when I was a substitute mail carrier out of Bitter Lake
Post Office. I'll bet I have spent more years
of my life lost and trying to find addresses
than any other person in America.
Five years.
It was dark and rainy and
that wet cold that only Seattle has.
The kind of chill that gets right
inside of your bones
so that you wish someone would skin you
and plop your bones in a big pot of water
over a bonfire to
warm them up
and then pop them back inside your body.
So I had never delivered mail on
Greenwood Avenue in Seattle before.
I had come to work with a cold
and any postal worker can tell you this:
If you show up, you have to work.
If you can't work, stay home
but be prepared to drag yourself
to the doctor no matter how awful
you feel because the supervisors
believe/trust no one.
You have to have a note from the doctor
or you can get fired.
So I came in a at ten AM to carry swings
and was sent out to deliver Greenwood Avenue
from 105th NE to 110th NE and one block
East and West on both sides.
It got dark at four, which is common in Seattle
in the winter, but I kept slogging along
trying to locate the mailboxes
of the apartment buildings.
Most people don't know or care
that postal workers have to find them at some point.
I mean, if someone was having a heart attack
you'd hope there were a bunch of indicator signs
on the road below long driveways or house numbers
that weren't covered up by bushes...
I was aching from my head to toe
and wishing I was dead when I heard a
cheerful voice behind me.
"Hey Gretchen, how are you?"
It was the delightful, sunny
curly red-haired Bobby Geiger,
who had come to look me up
to help me finish the swings.
I looked at him and started crying,
"Oh Bobby, I'm sick and tired and can't find
the mailboxes in the dark."
He looked at me and said,
"NOBODY LIKES A WHINEBABY, GRETCHEN."
The impact was instant and profound.
I would NEVER be a whinebaby again!
So ever since that fateful night, Mr. Blog,
I have made a conscious effort not to
be a whinebaby Mr. Blog, because
NOBODY LIKES A WHINEBABY!