Tag: Changes

Saturda’s Theme Music

Yesterday, sunshine was uncorked on us. Washing through blue skies, our air temp crested 70 F and lived there for a while. Gorgeous day, right?

Today, it’s 51 F and sunny. But we’re only expecting 63 F. And…rain. Still, pretty springish winter day. ‘Bout average for Ashlandia on Saturda, March 1, 2025.

Yep, a new month has begun. Sixteen percent of 2025 has been experienced. Those expecting a calm after the 2024 elections are probably disappointed. Those working for the Federal government in any capacity are likely stunned. Those hoping for lower inflation are probably too overwhelmed for emotions.

One thing unchanged are the lies that come out of Trump’s mouth. ‘Another lie’: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace smacks down Trump and Vance’s latest claims. No matter the subject, he will reliably lie, twist history, and bloviate, a fool who thinks himself a genius. He’s demonstrated these ‘qualities’ throughout his lifetime. Since he first announced his run for POTUS, it has been recorded and documented. And it sill goes on because his cult followers and the GOTP gleefully slurp it up by the spoonful.

Let me turn away from that. Take a coffee break for a while.

The Neurons dragged today’s song out of 2015. It came from a morning compound of wondering and cogitating as I slept-walked through the morning observances related to cleaning, feeding, eating, drinking. Prepping goes with all that. The routines induced a reflective miasma about being younger. Only, I was not the direct object of these thoughts; I was focused on Mom and Dad. Dad is with his third wife. In his nineties, he has issues but she’s younger than him by a decade and tends him well. His situation is solid.

Mom, though, is 89. She lives with her 95 year-old-fiance. It’s an old, three-story house. She falls a lot. Injuries and worries ripple out of each fall. She blames her back for her falls. I blame pride. I blame her refusal to accept her limitations and adjust her activities to their new scope. I understand; I don’t give up my routines. They’re routines because they comfort or reassure, or we enjoy them. These routines address something in our psychological makeup which isn’t easily altered.

The song is by Lukas Graham. As I went through the thought exercise of looking back, gazing forward, and reflecting on now, “7 Years Old” played in my morning mental music stream. The song is about reflections of being different ages and the attitudes and memories of that age prevail. So it was quite apt for my morning mental meandering.

Coffee and a doughnut are trespassing on my taste buds. Don’t know how they got past my defenses. Hope your day rocks in needed good ways. Here we go, in three…two…one…

Cheers

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Phasing Out

Daily writing prompt
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
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I thought in depth on this. I retired from the military after twenty years. It was surprisingl easy to say good-bye to it. But I’d been ready to leave it for at least a year. The politics and hypocrisy inherent in the organization disgusted me. Also, leaving wasn’t hard because we rotated every two to four years. Little was permanent, thanks to ‘permanent change of station’ orders. I was deployed to theaters around the world, and the missions changed. While controlling nuclear weapons, war planning, and mitigating the effects of disasters were constant, as were the uniforms, the people were not. We were proficient at ending phases and saying good-bye.

That got me to thinking about how it was really about the people. Leaving IBM after fifteen years was like leaving the military: supremely easy. For the final nine years, I worked from home in southern Oregon. My co-workers were mostly voices on the phone. I’d rarely actually met any of them. My niche was small and I typically dealt with the same ten semi-strangers all week. It was boring, although it could be mentally stimulating, but mostly tedious and empty. Projects would arrive with great fanfare. Then the winnowing would begin. Many projects failed to launch. That was the business.

I left home and family when I was seventeen. Mom’s home was riotous with broken marriages and arguments. When I lived with Dad, he was an absent father. I became adept at being independent.

My wife and I have been together for over fifty years. That’s an ongoing phase. I’ve moved around the nation and around the world. Relatively little remained the same for me. Change was a constant phase.

But we usually had cats. They bonded with me more than my wife, with one exception. These cats became my buddies. At one point, I had six living with me. Another four that belonged to neighbors regularly visited. Now all are gone except one, and he’s getting old.

That’s what phase I guess it’s been hardest to let go of. Each fur friend’s death was so deeply felt that I’m weary of feeling it. My wife said the same and has declared, no more cats. I’m willing to accept that for the moment, but it’s the end of a phase, and a very long good-bye.

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A Simple One

Daily writing prompt
What advice would you give to your teenage self?
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This is a simple prompt to address. It’s simple for me because I’ve thought about it before. I long ago read about, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” So I’ve examined. Looked at what I did wrong. Catalogued my failures and successes. Looked at where and how they could be improved.

Five basic tenets emerged.

  1. Have more confidence.
  2. Pursue more education.
  3. Party less.
  4. Be kinder and more helpful to others.
  5. Have the courage to chase your dreams.

I imagine many people have similar insights into themselves. Fortunately, at 68 years old, I can still pursue these changes for myself. Especially the ‘party less’ aspect. I mean, do you know how much energy it takes to party? I don’t have it at my age.

I’d rather be reading a book.

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Frieda’s Theme Music

The weather warmed, delivered rain, and the massed, pile snow is dwindling.

Good mornin’, afternoon, or evening, wherever you are. Today is Frieda, February 14, 2025. Valentine’s Day, so here’s to that if you’re into that commercialized celebration. 37 F air holds us in its palms. White clouds overlay the valley, piles of graying white towels fresh the laundry, waiting to be folded. No breaks are permitted for blue sky, no cracks for sunshine. Rain has fallen and probably will again within a few hours. Our air will warm to the low forties, upper thirties, ‘they’ tell us.

PINO Trusk established a new commission. MAHA: Make America Healthy Again. They’ll be working under the ideas that that vaccines which so effectively curtained the effects of a number of diseases didn’t work. Trump, who gorges on McDonald’s food, wants MAHA to look at food and water, this by an administration which is on a run to gut the EPA and the clean air and water standards. Irony laughed so hard when it heard this news, it peed its pants and farted.

MAHA will stand alongside PINO Trusk’s other initiatives, MADA: Make America Dumb Again; MASA: Make America Sexist Again; MAWA: Make America White Again; MARA: Make America Racist Again; and MAPA: Make Americans Poor Again. The rinions — right-wing minions — will eat it up.

In honor of what our nation is enduring under PINO Trusk’s lawless guidance, The Neurons have dragged out an old Black Sabbath offering. After dusting off the 1972 song, they have “Changes” orbiting my morning mental music stream. It’s an odd BS composition, as it’s slow and reflective, with no guitars and drums. “What?” You exclaim. “And this is Black Sabbath, you say? The group who gave us “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”, “War Pigs”, “Paranoid”, “Iron Man” and “Snow Blind”?” Indeedio, it is.

Coffee ambushed me in the kitchen. Next thing I knew, had a cup in my hand, breathing in its heady fumes, testing it on my tongue with tentative sips. Hope your day goes through some changes for the better. Let’s rock. Cheers

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Mom & Dad

Daily writing prompt
What were your parents doing at your age?
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I often think about Mom & Dad at my age of 68 and what they were doing.

Mom, with a couple divorces behind her, was a late bloomer in some ways. She’d given birth to seven children. Five lived. Forfeiting graduating high school to leave her small town of Turin, Iowa and find employment and begin her own life, she eventually acquired her GED. That was long after I’d left home and begun my life. After gaining her GED, she went to college and became an LPN and RN. A twenty-year in that followed; she retired at my current age, devoting herself to being a grandmother.

Dad and Mom had divorced decades before. Dad was in the military, the U.S. Air Force. After retiring at 20 years, when he was thirty-nine years old, he worked in the grocery business as a produce manager and then bought his own restaurant. When he was around 48, twenty years younger than I am now, he moved west to Texas. He worked in different retail businesses while becoming a real estate agent. He always like running stores, though. Eventually, he was running the largest truck stop west of the Mississippi. Along the way, he met another woman; she became his third wife. They’ll be married 33 years on Valentine’s Day of 2025. Meanwhile, he kept managing that truck stop. Every time he told them he was thinking about retiring, they’d offer him more pay, bonuses, and vacation. He did eventually give it up when he was 80. So at my current age, he was fully in the thick of running it.

They’re a surprising couple. From lower class working roots, they married many times. Each had productive careers. Between the two of them, each was parent to seven children but they also buried three children. Five of us siblings shared them as parents. I left Mom’s home when I was 14 to live with Dad and then left his house at 17, joining the military as Dad had done, so much of what I saw of their lives was through a long distance lens. Mom and Dad remain alive. Mom is 89 and Dad is 92. Both endure health issues but because of the era when they worked and the effort they put in, they have excellent health benefits.

Of course, the flip side of it all is, what will I be like at their ages?

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Saturda’s Theme Music

Mood: Fogbound

Rolling out of bed and ambulating down the hall, I checked the windows where my eyes met a wall of fog. Inspiration seizing me, I reversed course and dropped my head back into its indentation on my pillow. A floof’s unending breakfast song forced a reassessment of my moment after an indeterminant amount of additional Zzzs. I rolled back out of my warm coccoon of sheets and blankets and gave it the old Ashlandia try once more.

This is Saturday. January 11. 2025.

Yarp, fog socks us in. 37 F, air stagnation advisory, high of 42 expected, sunshine is being offered if we can slip fog’s tenacious grasp. Then it might be a pretty day.

Or not. As the barista related to me yesterday morning, “I was on the phone with my room mate and she said, ‘Oh, it’s a pretty day. Think I’ll go outside and do something.’ Then, five minutes later, it was foggy and pouring rain.” Yep, and it didn’t stop until daylight no longer let us in on what was going on outside.

The state of fog has fog-themed music energizing The Neurons. But some of ’em were hooked on an earlier thought about breakfast. Shuffling around, The Neurons pulled up Breakfast in America. Released in 1979, the album gained a life in my music rotation. See, this was back in an era when I bought music albums. Through tech’s evolution, the media shifted. Vinyl, tape, CD, whatev, we hooked the album up with the appropriate device and played the album. By then, I was 23 and made enough money that I could drop $8 on a new album now and again. Put it in perspective, gasoline was less than a dollar a gallon and a cup of coffee was usually less than two. Also, phone service was waaaayyyy cheaper and we didn’t have the net. We in the U.S. had cable and paid less than ten a month for basic.

@humanoidhistory

The brave new world of cable TV, 1979. #tv #tx #cable #tech #cabletv #television #hstory #texas #dfw #dallas

♬ original sound – Humanoid History

So you’d take your new album home and play and listen to it while cleaning the house, washing and waxing the car, making and eating meals, and other activities. Happened with sufficient frequency that the songs came to be known in order. Every note and nuance was etched into The Neurons’ aural wetware. Today, they began playing the album for me in my morning mental music stream (Trademark droppy).

First song up is a guitar & keyboard-driven offering to Hollywood, “Gone Hollywood”. Supertramp wasn’t happy about the place at first. Complaints about life and Hollywood interspersed with moody sax playing. Real picker-up with lyrics like, “Ain’t nothing new in my life today. Ain’t nothing true, it’s all gone away.”

But the self-pity fades after the guitar solo and musical bridge. A more upbeat mood takes over. “I’m the talk of the boulevard. So keep your chin up boy, forget the pain, I know you’ll make it if you try again. There’s no use quitting when the world is waiting for you.”

Then there’s the rest of the album. Several hits on there. “The Logical Song.” “Goodbye Stranger.” “Take the Long Way Home.” Yeah, you might know those, if you’re of a certain age and musical preference, or if you drove around with the automobile’s music turned to pop stations in the 1980s.

The fog hasn’t let up but coffee and I made a pact, and it’s going to carry me through the trough of the day. Be good, be real. Here’s the music, and off we go, into the wild gray yonder.

Cheers

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Three Pieces of Dream

A long and chaotic dream won the morning memory. There was another dream about having sex with a French woman in a desert after being accused of some crime, but it’s not a sharply recalled.

First I was with a group of friends, all males. We’d been out having a good time in the outdoors and were now filthy. Many of these people were real life familiars from across my stretch of existence and life stages. I was young and it was sunny. Many more groups of similiar people were out there on a large, dusty, gold-sun plain, like knots of bison congregating around a larger herd.

A sudden call to go get a beer put us in motion. We ran along, laughing and eager. We were going to have a beer! “Don’t worry, I have chits from last night,” I shouted, holding up discolored pieces of white paper. I reached a table and sat, still outside, but now on a plateau. My friends were coming but were behind. I pulled out the chits and discovered, they were chits; they were just torn pieces of paper. Some fluttered out of my hand and dropped into the mud as my friends arrived and I explained, “I don’t have chits after all.”

We all set out to go somewhere and were now downtown in what looked like a small city. Without preamble, I decided that I’d had enough and started in another direction. I was soon running in the streets alone but as I turned a corner, I saw ‘my crowd’ running in parallel in the other direction. They saw and recognized me and called out, but I’d kept going in the other direction, alone.

I arrived at my wife’s mother’s house. I knew that’s what it was even though it was nothing like any of her places in real life. My wife was there, along with my sister-in-law. She was sitting crossed-legged on the ground. As I see her in that scene after awakening, she looks as she did as a young pregnant woman in a photo taken of her when she lived in New Mexico. Giving no warning, she pulled her breast to feed an infant. I was a little surprised but then went, okay, she’s comfortable with it, and my wife, beside me, showed no reaction, so I should be okay, too.

I went off because I noticed my mother-in-law was busy digging. In real life, she passed away about six years ago. She was about the age she was when I first met her, mid-forties, in my dream. I spoke with her briefly but don’t remember what we said, and then wandered around the yard to see what she was doing. She’d dug a moat around her house. Then, I thought, she expanded an existing moat. It wasn’t large as moats go, about a yard wide, and didn’t seem deep. Water lilies floated in places. I discovered little tiles. Two inches square, I realized that she was going to ourline her moat with them.

The first one I turned over was scarlet. I put it in place on the moat to see what it looked like. Next, I found one that was yellow. I took out the red one and put the the yellow one in. It was a soft yellow, not as bright as a lemon. Next, I found a sage green tile. As I was going to put it in, I heard a man calling. A tall male stranger, dressed in a tie with a rust colored corduroy and tan pants and large, handlebar mustache was walking up, telling me how much he liked the yellow tile because it was a bold and striking color, and he approved my choice. I was just beginning to explain to him what was going on when another man in a charcoal business suit came up, urging me to go with the first color, the red, because it looked sharp against the water and grass. As these two began talking about the tiles, I turned over a third one, which was sage green. That was my preference, but I also thought that a pattern using all three colors could be made.

I went back to tell my MIL that, which is where the dream ended.

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Thursday’s Theme Music.

Today is Thursday, December 26, 2024. Five more days to the year. A year stamped with historic and personal significance. Wonder how 2025 will compare at this time next year.

Gray. Rainy. Chilly. Call it 44 F. Light rain. This is winter in Ashlandia. Snow hugs things above three or four thousand feet, looks like at a glance. Down here, we’re stuck in the gray. Sunshine muted through gray clouds from mountain to mountain to mountain. Gray clouds as far as I can see, looking down into the valley. And rain.

Yes, I’m complaining.

The cats are not, however. After a night of howling wind and incessant rain, Papi dragged in his wet Butter Butt and found a warm space to sleep off the day. Tucker (pronounced Tuck-ah) had already set the example, staying in, finding a comfy zone, nodding into slumber.

Late post as I spent the morning writing. One of those days when the muses arrived early. The house was quiet and the coffee was hot, so. Seated myself at the laptop and added 2,500 words. Excited by the twist added. See if it stands revision, editing, and further thinking.

Today’s music selection was made by The Neurons after a friend’s comment yesterday. A decade older than moi, she’s not known for her colorful language. But there she was making a risque, off-color comment at the Christmas bash. As we reacted and laughed, she turned as red as Santa’s outfit. Net result: The Neurons have “Dirty Mind” by the brilliant Prince playing in the morning mental music stream (Trademark filthy).

Well, deep breath. Dredge up some positive energy. Here we go again. Let’s start with the music. Cheers

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Thursday’s Wandering Thoughts

Coffee warms my throat as I watch fat dark gray clouds sailing across the sky. Sunlight clears the clouds, dramatically lighting their heights. Looks like fall, alright.

Many people live by the weather when it comes to the season. I’m one of those. My attire today are jeans. Long pants. Long sleeve shirt.

Wind, chill, and rain, and lack of sunshine pulled the decision to don jeans free of my brain cells. Much as anything, it’s that feel to the air, the color of the sky, and the mood it all presents as winds chase leaves down the street, that the seasonal change is really here.

So, I’m wearing jeans, looking back on the hot, smoky summer, shifting my gaze toward the future, to the coming winter, and what it might bring.

Much like my ancestors probably did. Without the jeans.

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Today’s Wandering Thoughts

I‘m suffering from usedtoitis today. You may have experienced usedtoitis at some time in your own life. It’s when you start thinking about how it used to be for you and how matters have changed.

Mine is a minor flare up. My wife’s comments to her friend as I was sitting there triggered it. My wife said, “Oh, Michael used to have such pretty curly hair,” and, “Michael used to have such gorgeous sexy legs,” and, “Michael used to be so muscular and skinny.”

Sure, the Positive Neurons chide me, “Hey, at least you were like that once and there was a person who appreciated it.”

The Curmudgeon Neurons reply, “Screw you.”

It ain’t easy going through the aging changes.

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