CHRISTMAS FUN

There is something about Christmas that makes me realize my mortality. Unlike Thanksgiving I find that at ChristmasI am thinking more and more of people who are no longer with us. ( I guess the fact that The Man's daughter died 2 weeks ago might be the reason for this. ).  I am thinking more of Christmas' past and the joy that I remember as a child. When I was in my late teens and 20's Christmas lost its sparkle. I was no l longer a child and there weren't any children in my life. (Although I was teaching Kindergarten so that did help keep some of the spirit alive.)  Once I had my own children the magic returned full force. That was the BEST !  Even if I was totally exhausted preparing and wrapping, cooking and cleaning, decorating the yard and house, it was magical !!!  Christmas morning was as exciting to me as it was to the kids.  

Then the kids grew up and went away to college to start their own lives.  Suddenly Christmas fell flat once again.  That didn't last long before we entered into the greatest Christmas' of all.  Christmas with GRAND KIDS !!!!  I now have the best of all worlds.  Shopping WITH my grand kids is the best fun ever.  I have been blessed to have had the opportunity the last couple of years to shop with my 3 grand kids who live in Pompano. Sadly this year we didn't get to do this.  Time and age got in the way.  Not only my age but the kids are getting older and have so many things on their calendars. 

 This year I DID get to take my grandson, Finn shopping for gifts for his family. We were set to go last week but he came down with some sort of bug so we put it off till 2 days before Christmas.  The traffic was horrific but we weren't going far.  No driving on highways and no crazy parking lots.  Finn decided we would go to our local Walmart which I expected to be a circus. Luckily I think every one decided to shop at Target so Walmart wasn't too bad at all.   We got a great parking spot, a cart that had all 4 wheels working and checkout lines that weren't three miles long.   Finn brought his list and we hit the store with a mission . .. . I can not tell you how many times we walked from one end of the store to the other.  Every time we got to one end for something the next thing on his list was at the other end of the store.  I think I have qualified for running a half marathon. We bought everything on the list and then some.  As we were cutting across the store for the five thousandth time we cut through an aisle full of suitcases.  Finn came to a screeching halt and announced that a suitcase was the PERFECT gift for his mom.   (My daughter has apparently been using an old suitcase that embarrasses the entire family every time they travel. ) So we started looking at the selection before us.  Do you know HOW MUCH a freaking suitcase costs ?    Holy cow !!   But we found one that we both fell in love with because we knew his mom would love it.  Finn was concerned that he only had $20 so we agreed that he would give me his twenty and I would pay for the rest. (I definitely do not come out ahead on these shopping trips.)  We found gifts for the rest of the family, checked out in record time and headed back to my house with one stop at Mc Donalds to re fuel the boy so he would have the energy to wrap. 

Have you ever tried to wrap a suitcase ?   Finn and I decided that this was a job for a large garbage bag with a bow.  Only I didn't have any large garbage bags so I ended up sitting on the floor wrapping the suitcase while he wrapped all his other gifts. On the way home to his house his mom called to ask if I wanted her to stop at my house to pick up Finn on her way home.  We told her we were almost at her home and would meet her there.  Finn now was able to sneak his gifts into the house and hide them before anyone returned home.  

Christmas Day arrived and my daughter LOVED her gift from Finn.  As did his sister and his dad.  They hosted a Christmas feast for me and Uncle Kent and his kids.  It was a wonderful day!  I brought leftovers home to The Man and all was well with the world.  (The Man did not want to be around the kids for fear of picking up any germs.) 

As I crawled into bed Christmas night I tried to figure out why I was so tired.  Then I remembered all those Christmas' when I was a kid and my mom went all out cooking, wrapping gifts AND baking all sorts wonderful cookies. (This is the first year I did not bake cookies.)  I thought of when my family was growing up and Husband and I hosted Aunts, Uncles and cousins for the holidays.  Good times ! 

But today I am still tired.  Guess I'm getting old. 

LU LU "ISIMS"

 Do you happen to remember my cousin Lu Lu ?  She is my cross to bare but she also provides so many good laughs.  To refresh your memory, Lu Lu is 94 years old. She cannot remember that and asks me every time I see her, "How old am I?"  When I tell her she is 94 she either starts planning her 95th birthday party or she starts listing all her ailments. "I never had pain in my legs before! Why do I have it now?"  We then discuss the fact that being her age comes with a lot of aches and pains which are all normal.  She also wonders why she can't remember things. Again I explain that she has 94 years worth of "stuff" in her head. It is not surprising she can't remember much.   Of course the few memories that she does have are shared with me EVERY time I see her.  Things like "When I was a Girl Scout I walked all over the neighborhood knocking on doors.  Cookies were fifty cents a box . . .."  There are so many things that I have heard a thousand times but it makes her happy to talk about them.

And then there are the REALLY crazy things that she comes up with.  Two weeks ago I got a phone call from her at 2:48 in the morning.  Thankfully I had my phone turned off. When I did get up I called her to see if everything was OK.  She had no idea that she had called me. She often mistakes the phone for the TV remote so anything can happen.  When she does call me I can expect the same introduction to the call.           My phone rings, having caller ID I know who it is,  I answer by saying, "Hello Lucile, how are you doing?"   And the answer EVERY time is, " Cathie ??? Did you call me?"   I play along and say, "Sure".  (It's just easier).  And then we get down to the reason for the call.  The call from 2 weeks ago was to tell me she is having an operation to take the bone out of her hip.  She has a lot of pain so the doctor is going to take out her hip bone because it is pressing on her bladder.  My response is, "Really!"  We continue to discuss her up coming surgery. As soon as I can get off the phone I call Lu Lu's aide to ask what is going on?  After the aide stopped laughing she told me she had taken Lu to the DENTIST because she wanted him to pull a tooth that was bothering her. Somehow or other a pulled tooth became the removal of her hip bone.   

Then today I got a call . . . "Cathie ???  Did. you call me?"     That call was to tell me she is having her toe cut off.  The doctor said it was no good so he was going to cut it off !!!  OK,  we entertain the toe surgery for a while and then she hangs up.   Once again I call the aide who is now rolling on the floor.  Lucille has a hang nail on her big toe.  The doctor told her he will fix the toe nail as soon as the infection is taken care of. He prescribed an antibiotic and will see her again next week.  

I swear to you I am not making any of this stuff up.  Every phone call is an adventure and I never know what the crisis of the day will be.  I do keep laughing and PRAYING that I do not become a cousin LuLu  when I get really old.  At this rate I'll probably die before Lu. 

I NEED TO BUY A RAKE. !

 Of all the things I hated about owning a house the thing at the top of the list was raking leaves.  I HATED to rake all those miserable leaves each autumn.  Our yard was full of big, tall oak trees so each year, come September the acorns and leaves started to fall.  Add to that the pine trees dropping needles and you can only imagine what a chore it was to clean up the front yard.  (I never raked the back yard because the leaves would cover the dirt so the yard looked better with leaves on it.)  The reason we had bought our house back in 1970 was because it had all those wonderful trees on the property.  Little did we think about raking leaves.  Having been raised in NYC neither husband nor I gave a thought to the work that would await us each fall.  

Once we moved to Florida I said good bye to raking leaves and shoveling snow. Shoveling snow was probably the second thing I hated about owning a home.  Now in Florida we have landscapers to rake and blow palm fronds and any leaves that might be found.  The closest I ever came to raking was when we had our Florida house with a pool in the back yard.  The pool was not covered so anything that fell from the sky landed in the pool and I had to skim it off each day.  NO Problem !  A very small price to pay for living in Paradise.  Husband's nemesis was the palm tree just outside our back yard fence.  Every year it would grow these huge bunches of seeds. (Think of a bunch of tiny grapes on their vine.) That's what would grow from the palm tree. We would watch these pods grow bigger and bigger until they would explode and drop into the pool.  It was a daily chore to get them off the surface of the pool.   Because I had done 90 % of the leaf raking in NY because husband worked 2 jobs the pod collecting fell to him. He would curse that damn tree every day!

But now husband and the big house are gone and so is the chore of raking.  Or so I thought.  We have LOTS of trees around our condo but they are all taken care of by the landscapers.  We are responsible for anything inside our screened in lanai, the gardeners take care of everything outside the lanai.  I do happen to have 2 plants in the lanai that drop their flowers all year round.  If I leave those flowers on the ground they stain the floor of the lanai so each week I wash them off with my hose.  That's it for my gardening!

Life is good.  I live in Florida and don't have any fights with Mother Nature.  

Except . . .    Our community is filled with oak trees.  All the streets are named after different oak trees. These oak trees do not have the leaves and acorns like the oak trees up north.  These oak trees have small slender leaves that fall ALL YEAR LONG !!! I'm serious . . .  there is no season with these trees. They don't loose all their leaves at once but instead they shed and grow at the same time.  It is the strangest thing I have ever seen.  The trees aren't tall and slender but rather shorter and fuller than a normal oak.  Thankfully we do have a great landscaping service in the community and they keep the grass trimmed and the leaves swept.  

In our community we also have assigned parking spots.  As fate would have it The Man has the spot on one side of a large "oak" tree and I have the spot on the other side of the tree.  Our cars a constantly covered in leaves and bird droppings.  We spend a lot of money at the car wash.  

This week The Man was in the hospital for 4 days because his lungs were filling with Co2, (A normal person breathes in air and the our body takes the oxygen out of the air to fuel our blood and organs. We then breathe out the Co2 so that we don'e asphyxiate ourselves. The Man has terrible COPD so his lungs don't work well at getting rid of the Co2.  Instead it collects inches lungs and slowly asphyxiates him.)  Luckily I realized something was very wrong and got him to the ER on Saturday.  He got great care and came home on Wednesday afternoon like a new man.  (He was put on a non-invasive ventilator for 2 days so his lungs got cleaned out.).  

Anyway . . .  It was a busy couple of days running back and forth to the hospital so when I got home on Thursday from running some chores I parked my car, locked it up and didn't get into it again until this afternoon when I went out to go to 4:00 mass.  I opened my car door and out blew and ton of leaves. There were leaves on the seats, floor and dashboard. I stood there looking at the mess and thought to myself someone must be playing a prank on me.  But who?  And how would they get into my car which was locked?  And then I looked UP .   Dumb ass me had left the sun roof OPEN.   I had been such a beautiful day on Thursday I had opened the windows and sun roof open to enjoy the balmy breezes.  When I got home I shut the windows but never thought about the sun roof.   So there my car sat for 2 days, UNDER THE TREE that happily dropped leaves right down into my car.  

Freaking tree !!!  I need to buy a rake.