Ideas, Insights,& Intuitions

So, at long last, here I am with two of my friends, performing a song I wrote 18 months ago, and had to wait this long to get the people I needed to provide the male voices. It is a simple ballad with a reggae beat, about a little girl, a young mother, and an old woman asking questions of God, and the answers they get. The man standing in the center of the photo is also a singer-songwriter, and one on the left has a beautiful baritone voice. It was fun, and was very well received by the church congregation.

Performing My Latest Song

 What is not fun, is enduring hours of shopping in crowded stores, looking for parking spaces, and standing in line. So I have ordered online all the items on my Christmas shopping list (except one for an elderly aunt who already *has everything*.) Also no longer fun, was riding my stationary bike this morning for a whole 20 minutes. I do it because it helps my knees. It will probably be fun to have Thanksgiving dinner at the home of friends, since all I need to bring is cranberry sauce—mostly for me. And these folks have a houseful of cats (and a few dogs, too), so I will get my fill of kitty-cuddling.

 You really don’t want to know how the rest of my life is going. From now until the end of the first week of January, I have come to realize that I cannot expect to relax, and know that things I think I have handled are going to stay handled, that nothing out of the blue is going to pop up, and I won’t wake up in The Twilight Zone. In short, life has become unruly, and I feel that I am too old for that. Just call me “Grumpy!”

 It’s not fun to challenge the unknown at my age. It doesn’t keep me young, and it can for darned sure keep me from getting any older! I think I have done well enough by starting to use the freeway to get to some places when it saves time. I’ve done well enough by fashioning a new hanger out of plastic-covered 14-gauge electrical wire and crimped pull-chain connectors for the birdfeeder, instead of buying a whole new feeder. And I have been known to download a new program for my computer now and again.

 But mostly I do the same things every day/week and buy the same things at the grocery store for my meals—last time I tried something really new, I bought prickly pear fruit, 6 for $1, and asked a clerk if I had to cook them. She said with a straight face, “No, but they have a lot of seeds.” Took them home, peeled one and cut it open. There was nothing but seeds, and didn’t taste good, either. How do people use these for food, I wondered? And if they don’t, why are they sold in the grocery store? Well, so much for adventurous eating. I’ll stick with my good old American favorites.

 I have been craving a large hand-tossed thin-crust pepperoni pizza, though! May have to get it delivered…

The icons on my desktop that are shortcuts to websites had different logos yesterday–and one even showed a question mark…today they are back to what they were, I swear!……..The AV program that I had been using kept freezing my browser, so I got rid of it and installed one that I thought would be better. Yes, it works, but it always seems to be doing something invisible while I wait 10 minutes for my mail program to open…It is November and it’s snowing in some of the northern states, while here in south Texas it is 80º and a hurricane just blasted its way over Cuba! Meanwhile, the arctic glacier is actually growing. (Losing my grip!)

Some big insurance companies are going “bust”; meanwhile, 50 different Medicare D and C Plans are all asking me to join. My Medicare D Drug Plan just went up $13 a month for 2009, so I have been looking…and they all looked good, until I found out that some are HMO Plans. For others I was ineligible (wrong county or not open to new members), or they had high deductibles. I guess I will just stick with what I have; I will still save more than I pay. But here I have to agree that there is too much wasteful competition. They are shooting themselves in the foot by cutting here, padding there, and wrinkling each plan with so many details and tiny variations that each one is useless in some way to most people. (Losing my grip!)

Things are changing, all right, since Mr. Obama became President-elect. And that’s what the people wanted–”change.” But a change to what? It’s different, yes, there is a different feeling, all over the world. History has been made. People want to hope. But it’s like the extraterrestrials dropped an electromagnetic bomb on us and our engines won’t start….my IRA is losing value, and I was sort of counting on that to help me put groceries in my shopping cart. Oh, I know it will turn around; the shares are still there, like dried-out seeds. When the drought is over, they will swell, put down roots in the fertile soil of this country, and grow, bearing fruit again. Wow! That was poetic–patriotic, even. I wonder where it came from?

Meanwhile, I feel as if I have entered a parallel dimension where I cannot touch things I reach for, but just pass right through them…

(Losing my grip!…uh-oh……lost it!)