Two Hours Until 2012

Out with the old. In with the new!

I'm going to try to accentuate the positive as the New Year rolls in -- and I am really aware of how much I have to be positive about. So here's to all of us and best wishes first for good health, then happiness, enough money to splurge a bit, good times, and lots of laughter, especially at ourselves. Happy New Year!

My Incredibly Stupid Move

I haven't done anything this stupid in a while. I was whining that I had to go to the mailbox on the corner, and I had worked this up in my mind on par with climbing Mount Everest. After much procrastination, including deciding to take a shower, wear my new winter coat, take out the garbage as I go, I head toward the door carrying the bunch of outgoing mail, the garbage, my keys, my purse. I see that my maintenance bill (like a condo fee) is under the door and I contemplate whether I should stop and write the check or just keep going. I decide to keep going, and I open the door to see what might be a letter carrier at the mail boxes which means I could just hand the mail to her.

In other words, I had a lot of details on my mind. It turned out to not be a letter carrier so I proceed outside, throw away the garbage, go to the mailbox, stop to buy a magazine, stop at the corner pizza place for a late lunch, come back home, sit on my steps for a while because it really was a mild day.

A grocery delivery guy arrives to deliver to my building and I start to get up so he can get by me with all the bags of groceries. And I decide to get up and go back inside. I hold the door open for him, and finally as I turn to go to my apartment, I see my front door is wide open.

Yes, folks, I never closed the door behind me.

What was funny is that I had also left the lights on since I wasn't planning to be gone long so any n'er-do-well would no doubt be hesitant to enter my apartment since who the hell would leave their front door open and the lights on if they weren't home?

Nothing was amiss, and I remembered that about 25 years ago, I spent the evening with the keys to my apartment in the front door. Only when I tried to leave in the morning and turned my apartment upside down looking for my keys did I open the door in desperation and found them.

I do not take this event as the onset of senility -- diagnosis is too much on the mind.

Back to Betsy Wetsy

You may have missed this comment from Barbara since I am probably the only one that goes back to see if there are any new comments -- and this one made me laugh.

She writes:

I never had a Betsy Wetsy, but I DID have a "Flying Nun" doll --based on the TV show at the time. Ugh! As for dolls that do things, I saw a "Kissie" doll at a flea market recently that reminded me that my oldest sister had one of those -- you push her little arms together and she puckered up and made a kissing noise. What I remember about her was that you couldn't kiss her on the lips while she did her thing, because her arms had to clap together to make it work, so the arms were in the way of actually kissing her while she kissed you. Maybe the manufacturers were worried that we'd grow up to be lesbians if we could actually kiss the Kissie doll back?

Momentary Ethical Dilemma

I had a pile of mail and cards, some opened, some not, that I finally went through last night. There was one piece of mail from Citibank and their "Thank You" program. I know I had signed up for that via my Citibank accounts, thinking why not? You get a point for every dollar or something, but I never paid much attention to it.

So I open this letter, thinking it's going to be about some aspect of the program and since the program has been in existence for a few years I'm thinking that maybe I have enough points to do something interesting.

Inside is a letter with a $50 gift card to Bloomingdale's spot glued to the letter. Wow. I instantly start thinking what I would buy at Bloomingdales. Then I read the letter that starts, "Here is the gift card you ordered..."

Hmmmmm. Uh, no.

It is only then that I notice that the letter is not mine -- it's addressed to someone else in the building.

OK, the thought did flit through my mind to keep it. Only for a second or two.

Then I was faced with the dilemma of do I fess up to having opened the letter. I had opened it roughly so there was no chance of resealing.

What I'm going to do is put the original opened envelope in a bigger envelope with a note of explanation. I will sign my name, thinking it wasn't my fault that the post office delivered it to the wrong mail box.

Politicizing Christmas

This is from a Tweet via Salon.com -- it's the California cop pepper spraying the occupying students -- although you could have guessed that yourselves.

Mary Heading Home



Mary writes: A beautiful drive home today - this was approaching Gettysburg. The sky was like this the whole way south. Now I'm home and relaxing.



Christmas Kitties

 Fran checked in on Milo while Mary went to Pennsylvania, so this was Milo on Christmas day awaiting Mary's return while Fran plied him with some sort of kitty crack so that Milo is always happy to see her.

This is a new cat -- Calvin -- and it's the companion of the folks where Fran had her Christmas dinner. Evidently Calvin is part of the family as seen here eating Christmas lasagna at the table. I must say Calvin looks very well-behaved; no elbows on the table.

Back to Fran's kitties. Here is Angelina selecting the Christmas CD she wants to hear:



And more of Fran's cats with her captions:



Angelina turning her back to the world.



Valentino and Angelina, getting high on powerful catnip, which I think was cultivated in Colombia.

Valentino with his Dyanmite.