Things I Haven't Done Yet
Mamacita says:
1. Family snapshots are still strewn all over the living room floor. They’ll be there until the family gets here to go through them. A word of advice: label all of your pictures while you still remember names and dates. You think you’ll always remember, but you won’t.
2. There are very few good pictures of my father-in-law that we’ve ever seen, but while working in my mother-in-law’s garage yesterday, we found some excellent studio portraits of him in an old box. I’m going to frame two of them, but I haven’t done it yet. I did scan all of the pictures, so they’re showing up on my wireless picture frame, thanks to FrameChannel.
3. My spring break is now over, and I’m more glad than sad. I don’t get paid for spring break, and that week really hurt. I do love sleeping in, though. It’s nearly one in the morning, but I haven’t gone to bed yet. It’s just not in me to go to bed early, or even want to. When that day finally comes, I’ll know I’m old. My funky body clock makes it difficult to get up early when I have to! And tomorrow, I have to.
4. Probate sure takes a long time in Indiana. We’re still waiting. I just hope they don’t shut off the utilities in my mother-in-law’s house before we can get her bills paid. We can barely pay our own, and there’s no way we can pay hers, too. Sigh.
5. We’re going to fix up our family room downstairs into sort of an apartment. Before we can do that, however, we have to pack up all those books. Whew. We’re talking THOUSANDS of books. We’re not getting rid of them; we’re just moving them. Neither of us could live in a house that wasn’t full of books, and we don’t think YOU should, either.
6. I still haven’t put tomorrow’s lesson in my briefcase. I know what it is; it’s just not packed yet. My lessons are always thoroughly planned, unless it’s a day when they aren’t. 🙂
7. My black cat, Millie, always manages to shed her collar and tag. Her cousin, Vera, loves the bling, but Millie is a panther at heart, and yearns to run naked through the wilds. Both cats really need to wear identifying tags in this community, but this time Millie outdid herself and we can’t find the collar OR the tag. I’ll get her another, but I haven’t had time yet. As for Millie – as I type this with one hand, she’s sleeping on top of my other hand. She’s a one-woman feline, and I’m the woman. Seriously? I’m honored.
8. I hate it when the bills pile up. I especially hate it when I get the second bill before I’ve been able to pay the first one. Those duns are so condescending. But then, that’s how they pay the dun-writer to be, I guess. We always pay, though. We’ve never NOT paid. We are people who pay our bills. I wish businesses would have a nicer dun to send to people who’ve always paid, rather than send the same semi-nasty “I’m sure you have simply overlooked our previous bill” message. In this day and age of computers, they’d know the difference, wouldn’t they? Sigh.
9. I haven’t started playing with my Tumorless Sister’s birthday present yet, but if she doesn’t get down here to claim it soon, I will. I like it. I like it a LOT.
10. I will soon have a copper-colored sofa in the same room with a red wing chair. Fortunately, I have never cared much about feng shui, other than that I have to LIKE it, to have it in my house.
I have to get up at 6:30, which is a lovely hour in which to GO to bed, but a ghastly hour in which to rise and go to work. But when I work, I get PAID. What a lovely concept that is!
Hark ye, my creditors. Soon the internet will bring you happy banking news from us. Be patient!
Quotation Saturday: Spring
Mamacita says: Yesterday WAS the first day of spring, you know, not to be confused with the first spring day, which, as Henry Van Dyke tells us, can differ by as great as a month. The weather here in southern Indiana has been lovely: warm and sunny and breezy, and there are crocuses blooming all over town.
1. Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener seems to be only one of the instruments, not the composer. –Geoffrey B. Charlesworth
2. It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade. –Charles Dickens
3. Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. –Ranier Maria Rilke
4. It’s spring fever. that is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so! –Mark Twain
5. Hoe while it is spring, and enjoy the best anticipations. It is not much matter if things do not turn out well. –Charles Dudley Warner
6. Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush. –Doug Larson
7. Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquilizing agent as a sunny spring day. –W. Earl Hall
8. If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would no be so welcome. –Anne Bradstreet
9. No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn. –Hal Borland
10. Spring shows what God can do with a drab and dirty world. –Virgil A. Kraft
11. In June as manyh as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them. –Aldo Leopold
12. In spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. –Margaret Atwood
13. Every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment. –Ellis Peters
14. Spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men. –Chinese Proverb
15. In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours. –Mark Twain
16. Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. –Rainer Maria Rilke
17. If you’ve never been thrille3d to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom. –Audra Foveo
18. The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day He created spring. –Bern Williams
19. If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. –Nadine Stair
20. The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase. –E.B. White
21. In springtime, love is carried on the breeze. Watch out for flying passion or kisses whizzing by your head. –Emma Racine deFleur
22. You can’t see Canada across Lake Erie, but you know it’s there. It’s the same with spring. You have to have faith, especially in Cleveland. –Paul Fleischman
23. The seasons are what a symphony ought to be: four perfect movements in harmony with each other. –Arthur Rubenstein
24. An optimist is the human personification of spring. –Susan J. Bissonette
25. Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day. –Elizabeth Bowen
26. A little Madness in the spring Is wholesome even for the King. –Emily Dickinson
27. I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face. –Langston Hughes
28. Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. –Victor Hugo
29. If spring came but once a century instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
30. Spring: an experience in immortality. –Henry David Thoreau
31. Spring is a heart full of hope and a shoe full of rain. –Unknown
32. Expect to have hope rekindled. Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways. The dry seasons in life do not last. The spring rains will come again. –Sarah Ban Breathnach
33. For every person who has ever lived there as come, at last, a spring he will never see. Glory then in the springs that are yours. –Pam Brown
34. I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time. –Robert Browning
35. Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn. –hare charles
36. The cool wind blew in my face and all at once I felt as if I had shed dullness from myself. Before me lay a long gray line with a black mark down the center. The birds were singing. It was spring. –Burl Ives
37. I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees. –Pablo Neruda
38. Spring is God’s way of saying, “One more time!” –Robert Orben
39. Well, spring sprang. We’ve had our state of grace and our little gift of sanctioned madness, courtesy of Mother nature. Thanks, Gaia. Much obliged. I guess it’s time to get back to that daily routine of living we like to call normal. –David Assael
40. Listen, can you hear it? Spring’s sweet cantata. the strains of grass pushing through the snow. The song of buds swelling on the vine. The tender timpani of a baby robin’s heart. Spring. –Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
41. March is a month of considerable frustration. It is so near spring and yet across a great deal of the country the weather is still so violent and changeable that outdoor activity in our yards seems light years away. — Thalassa Cruso
42. Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. –Unknown
43. The last fling of winter is over … The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it. It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
— Donald Culross Peattie
44. I have said that there was great pleasure in watching the ways in which different plants come through the ground, and February and March are the months in which that can best be seen. –Henry N. Ellacombe
45. Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime. –Martin Luther
46. Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings. –Gustave Flaubert
47. To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon. –Kurt Vonnegut
48. How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude! –Emily Dickinson
49. Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance. –Yoko Ono
50. Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy’d the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done… –Matthew Arnold
I am hoping the old quotation, “When March comes in like a lamb, it goes out like a lion” isn’t true. It also bothers me greatly that the seasons aren’t capitalized. By my way of thinking, the seasons are important enough and individual enough to merit capital letters. I like to capitalize them when I use them myself, but I have to tell my students not to, because the rule is in their book. Then, after that particular lesson is over, I tell them to go ahead and use capital letters for Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter if they darn well want to. “Just remember to use lower case when you fill out your final exam.” I do not feel the least bit guilty about this, either. I like the seasons. When I think about them, they’re personified enough to have proper names.
Some day, I hope to be brave enough to tell my students to take a gel pen and cross out that silly rule. How sad, isn’t it, that something like that is on my “Bravery List.”
Negative Improvement
Mamacita says: We used to be big fans of Noble Roman’s Pizza. We’d drive thirty miles to the nearest city, just to eat there. We felt this way for many years.
Then one day we drove up there to Noble Roman’s, and when our pizza arrived, we discovered that somebody in corporate had decided to change the recipe for the pizza sauce. We went back once more to make sure, and the sauce was still nasty. We never went back.
Over the years, we’ve stopped going to certain restaurants and stopped buying certain products because of what we now call “negative improvement.” In other words, somebody in charge of something besides customer satisfaction decided to save money by cheapening the ingredients or changing the recipe for a product that people liked, into something people decided wasn’t worth shelling out the gas and dining out money for. Somebody got a big raise for “saving the company money,” and the customers stopped coming around. Everybody knew why, too, but nobody “up there” believed it.
We went to Steak & Shake tonight. Their menus were new and different, and many items were missing. They no longer offer “platters,” and all the sandwiches come with fries. If you don’t want fries, you have to order your sandwich from the a la carte list on the back of the menu and pay more money for any extras.
I’m sure there was a good reason for this change – other than money, I mean – but nothing comes to mind. Except money.
I’m not a person who resists change, but I do look down my nose on change for change’s sake.
We go to certain restaurants for certain types of atmosphere, and we don’t appreciate cutesy attempts to transform an established atmosphere into some other kind of atmosphere. If we wanted some other kind of atmosphere, we’d go someplace else.
And, of course, it all boils down to the almighty dollar. Then again, if corporate pisses off enough people, we’ll take our almighty dollars elsewhere, won’t we. Well, I will, anyway.
It’s enough to make a person just stay home and cook. Almost.
