I don't give a hurtling hoot about reality! I want what I want, and I'm going to be forever sad that I can't have it.

I want my children to live with or near me. I want my mother to live with me. I want us all together in a big ole house where everyone pitches in with the chores, and we hold hands at the dinner table, and Grampa says funny non-sequitors and the women sit around the kitchen table drinking tea and talking about whatever's on their minds! I want GRANDCHILDREN around my knees as I teach them how to make the best piecrust in the world or make them great, creative Halloween costumes. I want people in my house who squeal with delight at the "Santa footprints" they find on the floor between the chimbley and the tree on Christmas Day. I might even want real candles on the tree!! I want it ALL, even the negatives. And I don't have it.

Here I sit in my little (though colorful and comfortable) condo with my dog, trying to feel some Christmas Spirit (ah, speaking of Spirit, maybe some of THAT would help) when, honestly, this is the hardest time of the year for me. My older son appears to simply ignore any messages I send him...I realize he usually skiis at Christmas and that's fine, but would it KILL him to answer my invitation to at least get together so I can give him (and his wife) their gifts??? I accept that he doesn't feel and warm and fuzzy about me, and has an apparently fullfilling life on his own, but I gave him life and I love him, dammit, and I think he owes me the respect of returning a phone call or responding to an invitation/question! And there will be no grandchildren from that quarter, either.

The younger son is better, but is still a busy man. I appreciate the effort he goes to to make Christmas (and other times) special for me, but I'm not probably getting any grandchildren there, either. On the other hand, he got all excited about the Paella I'm making for Christmas Dinner, and decided it will need a Christmas tree on the top made of parsley. For him, I'm making doughnut upside-down cake for dessert. His presence does lift me up.

But, frankly, I could die here and the dog eat my body before anyone would notice or think to call and check on me. I'm SERIOUS! I talk on the phone, or by email or make comments on Facebook, but if I died, it would be WEEKS before any of them noticed I was maybe out of touch for some reason and checked on me. I guess I should take it as a compliment that they all think I'll live forever and am fully capable of taking care of myself in the meantime.

But damn, it feels lonely.

I should have had the 5 or 6 kids I always wanted. I should have had at least one daughter. I should now have more than my share of grandkids I could spoil and pamper and babysit. I should have 14 kids all tumble into my house any time of day and shout, "Grandma! What've we got to EAT?" Or, "Grandma! Let's fingerpaint on the kitchen table!" or better yet, "Grandma! Can we stay over?????"

But I'm not Ma Walton, and although for part of their youth my boys and I all slept in one bedroom and did the "Goodnight John-Boy" routine routinely, I guess my job now is to fill my life in other ways and with other people. Sure feels sad today, though.

With that, I think I'll make a cup of tea and turn on some music, and have a good cry before I wrap Christmas presents to put under my tree...

I'm so clever...if I could just remember!

So...I'm writing some clever thing to post in one sentence. I get it all written, then realize I could do better with the beginning of it. Deletion begins: backspace, backspace, etc. I've got the new start in my head and am all set to write, and then I find myself outside, determinedly heading for the fence at the side of the yard. I get there and discover that I was "writing" this whatever-it-was in Scrabble tiles atop the fence, and by the time I watch Roxie chase some animal in the bushes, discuss something with Kevin, and remember that the supply of tiles is back toward my house on a stump, I've completely lost the idea I had. Can't even tell what it was by reading the end of it, still posted in Scrabble tiles on the fence.

Or, I'm looking out my condo window as I often do, toward our entrance/parking lot, and I see in the dusk a white van or something leaving with what appears to be a too-long carpet roll in the back. It's hanging out and dragging on the ground, and because it's dragging, for some reason the driver has to swing the van around and I watch the rug swinging around behind him. All of a sudden pieces of the carpet begin to break off in large clumps...WTF? I look more closely and see that what I thought was carpet is actually a horse, and it is taking the most massive dump in our entryway that I've ever seen. And it doesn't stop. These are pieces of horse poop the size of unsplit logs! On our property! I dash out, and see that the driver has stopped, gotten out, and is approaching our side yard, which is pretty unkempt, with waist-high weeds and many trees, etc. (The horse is still wildly pulling, trying to free itself of the rope with which it's tied to the truck, and pooping.) I approach the man, who is young, shirtless, long-haired and with a beat up straw cowboy hat on. I say, "What's your name? He gives it to me (Troy Peterson) and, that name sounding familiar, ask if he knows TCF (my ex). He says no, at which point I ask if he's planning to pick up all the horseshit in my driveway, and he says no, and starts to approach me (there's a fence in between us). Suddenly he is an older man, dressed in a nice, coordinating outfit of brown slacks, brown shirt, and a tasteful sweater of brown and green argyle over the shirt. He says, "You have missed one important part here. If I were (someone, some candidate in the last local election) and had told you my name, you would have responded in kind." I say, "I'm sorry, I'm old...I'm 84, and my name is Linda. Just wondering if you're planning to pick up all that massive horse poop in my driveway." He smiles a smarmy smile and says, "That's something, isn't it? No."

Then I woke up, feeling once again as if I were swimming upward in molasses.

I "write" a lot while I'm sleeping, and solve puzzles, meet people I've never met and have time for relationships of one sort or another, along with other odd encounters. I actually once dreamed I'd gone to a play and was stunned by the costumes. Went backstage to congratulate the costume designer, then woke up still in awe of that designer and those costumes. It took 10 minutes before I realized that it was a dream, thus the gorgeous and clever costume design was, in fact, MINE!

The problem is that I usually can't remember all my cleverness, not to mention the brilliant writing, once I surface.

Thanks, Effexor, for another entertaining nap. And (here's the tie-in, lame though it is: Thanks, "Old Age" for the need for naps.) Besides, I had to post this somewhere, and it's WAY too long and strange for Facebook. And I'd embarrass my children, other family members, and my friends.

My regrets...

It seems I haven't been very inspired by or interested in the vagaries of growing older since my gentleman friend rather unceremoniously announced he'd cheated on me and I told him to take a hike. I think I've been feeling old, and it isn't funny.

But I do have one Big Query: when did all the women in the country start waxing or shaving their Hoo-Ha's, and is it now considered de rigeur? I mean, I knew about bikini waxes, and heard vaguely about Brazilian waxes, but it never occured to me that the latter was anything more than an extreme bikini wax, and didn't know (I still don't, obviously) that it seems to be something that's now expected.

Could that be the reason my gentleman friend cheated on me with his ex-lady friend? He did mention once that she did that, and maybe I didn't get the hint.

On the other hand, would I have done this even for HIM????? Honestly, I don't think so. Not at my age. (With some perspective I can now state that he wasn't actually all that good/worth it anyway.) For one thing, I can't even prop my leg up on the shower wall to shave it anymore. I have to sit down...and how would that work when I'm trying to shave my Hoo-Ha? Which I'm sitting on!

I can't imagine a more difficult daily personal task . Sure, add THAT to all the other things I do in the morning not to look like an old lady... And once you did it, you'd have to continue, or there'd be an itch for weeks!!

Besides which, isn't that hair there for a reason?

I remember when it was pointed out to me at school in the 7th grade that I was the only one of the girls not yet shaving my legs, and I went home and told my Mom that I wanted to shave my legs. She said, "Oh honey, once you start doing that you have to do it all the time....and the hair grows back in thicker and coarser!" (The latter I later found out is not true...it just seems that way because the hair is growing in with a blunt-cut end.) So, do Moms now say, "Oh honey, etc. etc." about the Hoo-Ha wax? And does it come later than saying it about shaving legs? Or are all 12-year olds now saying, "Mom, I need to start shaving my legs and my Hoo-Ha and please, puh-lease buy me thong underwear and wonderbras!" Or maybe they're just doing it.

I won't - be doing it. Unless someone I really, really, REALLY like tells me straight out that my natural hair is truly offensive in some way.

Hell, let's be forthright here: the older you get, the more your hair follicles get minds of their own and migrate in directions you never dreamed of. Oh yeah, old women start getting hair on their chinny-chin-chins they have to deal with on a daily basis, we all know that; and I now have one or two errant follicles that have migrated to my right ear in an ugly way, but the secret no one talks about is that you also get - deep breath- hair on your ass! And how the hell am I supposed to shave THAT???

No adventures, so you get some household laundry tips

It appears I'm not having many "adventures" right now unless you count looking in the mirror every morning at new wrinkles and such, so decided to share a brilliant tip and a more ordinary tip.

A couple of weeks ago I spilled some melted butter on my favorite, warm, cuddly, embroidered-logo UCSB sweatshirt. I pretreated it before washing, but when it came out of the dryer, the giant spot was still there. Damn! So a couple of days ago I googled "getting out old grease stains" and clicked on this site: http://members.tripod.com/~barefoot_lass/grease.html . There were lots of interesting suggestions, but the strangest (and therefore, the most intriguing) to me was this one: Spray WD-40 on the spot, then add liquid dish soap and scrub it a bit. Rinse, repeat the dish soap application, and launder as usual. Weird, eh? Well, I had a couple of other grey sweatshirts that had even older grease stains, so decided to try it on them first. The fabric didn't dissolve, the spots didn't turn black, so I went ahead and did my fave too. The only thing I did differently was that instead of the 2nd application of dish soap (I have a front-loader and didn't want all the suds from the dishwashing soap), I used my liquid laundry detergent (All "small and mighty" 3X concentrated, for those who want all the details). Then I flung them into the washer followed by the dryer and VIOLA! The grease spots are completely gone with no sign they were ever there! The fabric is intact, and the sweatshirts look like new. Whodathunkit? I must admit the washer smelled a little like WD-40, but I washed a "rough" load and the smell now seems to be gone. Will next try it on some brightly colored sweatshirts, see what happens to the color, and report back.

My 2nd tip is this: instead of buying Oxi-Clean, when I want to "brighten" a load of laundry, I pour into the liquid bleach dispenser somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 cup of plain old, cheap, 3% hydrogen peroxide. It works better than Oxi-Clean, which I had used for several years. Got this tip from some list of uses for hydrogen peroxide someone forwarded to me by email.

And here's a bonus tip: You can use Softscrub to clean tough burned-on gunk off your glasstop stove. Won't hurt it at all and works really, really well. Thanks to my DIL and her mom for that one!

So long, toots!

Where, oh where to begin?

I woke up this morning with this idea for a blog name. I like it because it's an old Knock-knock joke and it also contains clues to the content. As in, old people become invisible. As in, who's an old lady? The subtitle, "Adventures in Aging" followed close on the heels of the blog name in my brain, so am going to try it out.

The thing is, one of the "adventures" older/aging people have is REMEMBERING the brilliant idea for a blog post they had, oh, 5 minutes ago while they were brushing their dentures. That said, I am now excused to go take a nap.


So long, Toots!