halt stop forget relax

Saturday I went with a sorority sister to see a talk given by a long lost dear friend of mine. She has followed her bliss and is making a living from it: She grows ferns-- from spore. She has become quite the expert in her field. I know! Back when I first met her I was still in high school; I babysat her firstborn, and second born, but not the third; I house-sat for her, and watered her many plants, both inside and out. Yet when I saw her and called her name, she looked at me and said "Gee, you look really familiar..." Of course, she remembered me once I refreshed her memory, but to say that I was a little disappointed would be an understatement. To be fair, it has been 23 years since I've seen her, but I don't think I look any more different than she does, which is to say, a little grayer and a few more wrinkles. And, big clue, I chose to use the wheelchair today, and she knew all about that era of my life.  Oh well, it was still good to hear of her. And she told...

Oh yeah, one more lovely thing happened, or almost happened, as I was driving home from my meeting Thursday night. I made a left turn on a green light in front of oncoming traffic. Yeah. I came this close to getting my car smashed at 40 MPH. I was apparently on automatic pilot and just turned when the light changed. It was a good thing I had enough time to step on the brakes, and the other car had enough time to react and swerve and miss me, and the second much bigger car could pass me on the other side as there was nobody else on the street. It was, after all, nearly 10 PM. The street gets fairly well used during the daytime... not so much at night. My excuse: inattention- pure and simple. I was paying attention to the light and not to the oncoming cars, who weren't there one minute, and were the next.  Apparently because I had just slowed for what had been a red light, and they were already going 40 MPH so they reached the intersection much faster. As I said, I wasn't pa...

Some days you just have to suck it up, ya' know? Last Thursday, I woke up in an adrenaline rush from a nightmare. I was dreaming that I was living with my parents and my brother in Seattle and someone knocked at the front door at two in the morning. Odd, no? My Dad answered the door, being most imposing, and stepped out onto the porch. Then a young couple rushed in, the teen boy pointing a gun at me, and the girl looking around the house anxiously. I yelled "They have a gun, Mom! Stay put" and "WAKE UP. HELP!" to my sleeping brother, whom I could hear snoring upstairs. I had my arms folded around my head until I realized that was no way to identify the intruders, so I looked at them and was amazed at how young they were. The girl ran into our kitchen and turned on all the gas burners on the stove, then blew out the flames. Then I started yelling at the obviously frighted boy, and I don't know exactly what happened, but he told me to get on the floor, an...