Leaves of three, leave them be.

...or, It use to be a lot easier to score drugs!

For over a week I have been battling a case of poison ivy. At first I thought it was a spider bite. That should have been my first clue. I actually blamed it on the apartment outside Memphis. I just know it has spiders! I should have known.

Two days later in horror I am watching it spread! I am naturally scratching it and complaining. My brother, N., takes one look at it and says those dreaded words, "That's poison ivy."

Oh hell no!! Please, hell no! The last time I had it I had spread it into my ear and had to call in to work because my face was so disfigured!

Immediately I began to be advised on what to do.

"Pour Clorex on it, that works. No, really, it works! I swear."

I can't imagine.

Next was Joe, "Once I had it on my back...." then I hear the whole story about how he and a friend rolled around in it while playing and ....." Baa, (his grandma, really, her name was Baa) told Mama to crush up some aspirin and mix it with alcohol and rub it on my back. It worked. Mama didn't grind up the aspirin very well and I had chunks of white stuck to my back, but it worked pretty well."

This sounded like a much better option. I bought BC powder (less grinding and chunk problems) and mixed it with rubbing alcohol. Oh sweet relief!! Joe took a basting brush and helped me get to those areas on my back.

Guess what? I spread it some more. Oh but that cold alcohol sure felt good on that burning rash.

So, off to the health store where I searched high and low for some Jewel-weed spray or dried herbs. They had not heard of it. Or course by that time I was close to pulling my skin off and was calling it Jewel-root. Finally I located a bar of Bert's Bees Poison Ivy Soap which contained (as the very last listed ingredient) "garden balsam leaf" aka jewelweed. But first I had to endure every horror story they had to tell about poison ivy.

"I had it for three and one half months."

Sweet Lord!!

Yesterday found me in the doctors office showing off my revolting skin. I could wait no longer. At least he did not recoil like the nurse did the last time I had it.

Like I said, it use to be easier to score drugs!

Pardon Me Boys, Is That the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?

It's been asked in which industry my Hubs works that entails such drastic transferring. Why it's the dern Rail Road. He worked for a Class I company for over 30 years when they computerized his job and he was forced to go into management! That is how we at first ended up in Cincinnati in a 'hold over" job until he was hired on in FW (the town who's name must be whispered). We were there for approximately two years. He then transferred to Louisville to be closer to family. My father was gravely ill and we were acquiring Grand children.

But, he hated the Louisville job. He worked over 60 hours a week. At times he would cover a job for someone else so that they could have a day off! At one time he worked 14+ hour days for 12 days straight. I have never seen someone so unhappy before in my life.

So, he interviewed with a much smaller Class II carrier and now runs the show in the Memphis area. He works 40 hours and has week ends off! Yea!! And he is the boss!

I love my house in the Louisville area and leaving my family, a third move in three years, is not something I am thinking about at the moment. We have leased an apartment here and will take six months to figure out what we are going to do.

One day at a time.

It looks like I will have to find a job. I certainly have enjoyed this year of not working, though I am tired of the question, "What do you do all day?" I do a lot! I know that I will take to retirement when it comes like a duck to water.

In the meantime, I need to find a job.

Yuck.

Second Test

The Book Store

Thank heavens for MapQuest which got me to a used bookstore in a small part of mid-town known as Cooper-Young area. Nestled among ethnic restaurants, yoga store fronts, palm readers and an Irish Pub was this jewel of a book store.

As I was diving into the book cart of $1.00 bargains a yuppie enters (are they still called yuppies?) and spreads his arms and exclaims, "I've died and gone to book heaven!" That made me smile. "I'll start with photography and then on to philosophy!" he stated to the hippie looking shaggy gray haired book shepherd.

I thought he might be nuts, but I understood the emotion.

Are You Sirius?

I am a terrible blogger. In the beginning I was bubbling over with things to write about every day. I had to hold myself back! My days were spent composing entries about every single thing that happened in my day! It was preposterous! And then it all changed and I was reluctant to share. Possibly because I realized the banality of most of the blogs on the WEB, mine included. It did not feel right any longer.

Surprisingly all week I thought, "that would be good to blog about" and I proceeded to compose once again in my head! It felt good!

A lot has happened recently. The most important is that Joe has taken a job with another company. We were thrilled to move to Louisville, but the job sucked. Big time. So, he found a position with another company and that company wants him in Memphis. As in Tennessee.

Memphis Tennessee.

There are many ways to have first impressions about a new city/town. For me, as you drive into a new foreign land you first encounter their radio stations. It took several days for the "dial" to land on WUMR - Jazz Lovers.

One word, Wow. Who knew?

Now, Lexington (my adopted home town) has terrible radio that forced me to AM talk radio. At one time there was the coolest station out of a small private college in G-town tried to create a new genre called "World Radio". It lasted maybe three years until it was sold off and became a Christian Radio station. I almost cried.

Cinti has the greatest stations and I believe I wrote about them some time ago when we were living in two cities at once. They have one station that is broadcast from some tiny town close to the Sin City that sounds like it is in the basement of some house. Yet, it was wonderful!!

FW (because I learned my lesson about critising FW and dare not whisper the name) was as terrible as Lex and I had to Sirius. And then, I could not figure out how to get it installed in the car....the Company Car. So, we just listened at home. Sometimes. FW must have some sort of block, like a shield that surrounds the area that makes the satellite difficult to receive. No matter where I placed the receiver! I complained a lot, hoping to complain enough to get a refund, or a reduced rate.

Never happened.

But Memphis...that Jazz station is the greatest. And you can listen to it about 100 miles out.

I'm sirius.

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I walked five miles to school in the snow!

Somethings just make you realize that you are turning into your parents. I find that I yammer on and on about things that as I hear the words ring in my ears, I know that I sound like an old fogey. For instance, I can not stand that all the trees in my hometown downtown have been chopped down! I realize that they are those Pear trees that have a relatively short life, but still the area looks so exposed and naked. Then, they decided to redo the sidewalks, the roads, tear down the old buildings that lined the once familiar streets to erect a modern style multi-retail building. Yuck and double yuck! I want back the old glass front "Mattress store" that old blind Bess L., who could barely see (and be seen) over the top of her steering wheel drove right into the show room after running the stop sign.

I miss having that memory rekindled every drive by.

I hate the Car dealership that now shines like a beacon on beautiful Lex. Rd. Did I say beautiful, the once beautiful Lex. road. It once boasted beautiful horse farms, gentle rolling hills with the tobacco bases, corn fields and stately mansions (at least they looked like mansions to me when I was a child) sitting behind white washed fences on expansive farms. In a rush to make a buck, the past is quickly being swallowed up as Dairy Queens and sub-divisions chop up the most coveted horse farm land in the world. The absolute worst is the farm that was sold by the heirs and leveled out for a Wal-Mart then went bankrupt. The ugly slash on our beautiful bluegrass sits undeveloped, as the preservationists slug it out with the visionaries, with a large weather beaten sign promising us a new shopping center "soon".

Ver/Lex Rd. will quickly become like the Lex/Nicholasville corridor. Nothing but ugly commercialism as the two towns attempt to merge into one.

I like stuff to stay the same so that I can count on it, look forward to it, and when it finally arrives know that it will be like it was before. Like strawberry season! And Keeneland Race Track being a 21 day event. And when Keeneland closes the spring meet they move to Churchill Downs and its Derby Week!

This year Derby week began yesterday. Let's see, Derby week use to be the lead up tothe Derby beginning with the Balloon Race on the Saturday morning before, the Chow Wagon on Main (which was as many people as possible squashed into a small fenced off area, drinking beer),  $1.00 Derby pins, the parade, the Riverboat race, a couple of local events thrown in and then the Oaks, and suddenly its Derby Day!! One week.

Now, it begins three weeks before Derby,starting with the Thunder Over Louisville firework show. The biggest, baddest spectacle of shooting showering color you will ever see!

That reminds me of another story, the one where I attended the very first Thunder! It will have to wait.

I must go make strawberry pancakes.

I've Been In and Out of Happiness *

I was leaving the Kroger store yesterday, a 12 pack of Miller's Chill in one hand, a bottle of the hard to find Ken's Sun Dried Tomato salad dressing in the other and I became aware of this strange sensation as I walked out into the waning light of a sun drenched day. What is this thing on my face? It's a smile! By gosh, I'm happy!!

Have you had such moments? I remember them like four leaf clovers pressed in some lost book I use to have. Last year I was in a Walmart and suddenly knew I was soooooooooo happy moving to the Louisville area. I don't know why they take me by surprise, but they do.

My daughter is moving into a better apartment across town and I was helping out (just a little) in the clean up and I ran across an old hard plastic pencil box from her grammar school days. I held it up and began to laugh. I had been looking all over for that damn box and had given it up as lost. And there it was, with her.

Rightfully, it/they are hers. She collected them when she was a wee thing. She collected, I bought. I loved those things!

I never did see the "Mary" version of the Garbage Pail Kids, but Bridget hated hers...I'll post it later.

This was my favorite.

* "Is your Love in Vain?", Bob Dylan, Street Legal, 1978

The Fog Rolls in

Or...What I am reading at the Beach

Oh woe is me, nothing to write about that is interesting. I did go to the beach in Alabama and it was a very chilly experience. Did manage to catch a little sunshine. I think I was in charge of two teenagers, I say think because my husband could be considered to have just a smige more maturity than those two. Just kidding, but one of them did manage to get a severe sunburn under my care and I am ashamed to say that I trusted that kid to put on sun block! When I say, "Are you using sun block?", and they say, "Yes I am!", I should know, I should have known to ask, "Okay, what SPF is that so called sun block?" It was pretty bad, poor baby.

Anyway, that is as exciting as my life gets.

I brought along several books to read supposedly while I laid around with my SPF 30 in the spring sun shine of the Gulf Coast.

Man, what was I thinking bringing along "The Snow Leopard" by Peter Matthiessen! Not exactly a beach book. It reminded me of the time I read "Love in the Time of Cholera" while on another beach last year (a much warmer beach in Mexico).

 

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