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Showing posts from January, 2025

The Anti-Healthcare Method

The Friday night before the 2019 Thanksgiving week, I drove the five-minute ride to our local hospital’s emergency room with my husband—as he was in and out of pain along his rib cage from the xiphoid process of his sternum outward. He’d had an annual about mid-August 2019 and as protocol for a routine physical—he was to have an endoscopy early December 2019. It was scheduled for the extension of that routine examination done in August. My husband always had good health, healthy habits for the most part. He was healthier than most Americans. He was not on any medication as of then, at age sixty-three years old. We rarely went out to eat. He drank plenty of water, he was well within his weight with his height of 5’10” at about 165lbs. He ran four to six days a week, did pushups, sit-ups, lifted weights at home when there was no landscaping to be done by him for our home. He was a high school teacher and was on his feet most of the workday. He’d built a chin-up bar in our backyard and ...

No. I Won't.

Recently, I'd started a new job. One of our daughter’s friends parents stated, "Wow! You are really enjoying this like you had with the service in AmeriCorps last year." I remarked, "Yes, mostly young people ages 18-34 pretty much. They're just so nice. They're kind." Anyone knowing that I grossed upwards of $150 per hour for 28 years having my own business would be stunned that I've chosen this job at near minimum wage for a few reasons. No. It's not a bucketlist. Nope. It's a break from writing. Too, it helps with the extras for my living and I've always worked outside our home regularly until sometime in 2021 till May of 2023. I've been working outside and inside the home in caring for others since age eleven. Then in the workforce since age fifteen cleaning grease vats for $1.50 per hour. Illegally as that was. Basically, I've always worked. I've always earned some money as an adult from pennies to having the ability to pa...

Leaving 2024...

Leaving 2024 on the back burner... 1. Cleaned out our attic by 50%. 2. Redesigned our side and front landscape,  took about 40 hours or so. Neighbor Tony gave me a days worth of his time during the final stages. And towards end of 2023 another person gave me a couple hours and helped me get the correct design for what I wanted to do. 3. As mid-Spring arrived, I spent days refurbishing our backyard area where I'd dumped extra sticks and leaves over past four autumn's. Now there was two inches of new topsoil underneath the most recent leaves I'd left there. 4. I'd built a 30 pound Lavender outdoor chair for that new area in the back, took about 120 rocks and created an outlining border to separate lawn from the chair and new bird bath area I'd also put together. Neighbor Frank helped me carry the new chair from our deck to the back location which was just before his backyard property. 5. Sawed down a 30 foot maple growing in our backyard hidden inbetween some hem...

Perfectly Imperfect

We will always have the poor with us. We will always have the haves. We will always have skirmishes and wars. We will always have illness and death. Yet at the end of each day we have a choice. Do we reside with anger? Or do we hold Peace within us? These thoughts always come to mind, nearly every day. What perpetuates them is my own living to do better in thought and action every moment in all of my living. I have been this way since I could remember, as I see every day, every hour, every second as January 1st. Perhaps, the eternal 'goodie-two-shoes' effect brought on by my witnessing of people's hatred, greed and suffering early in life. We could also suppose it'd arrived from a life we could not remember in years past. I had a supervisor once accuse me of being so busy that no way could I have time to ponder. I explained to her, "I ponder much." She shook her head in disbelief. My mind had been on automatic-pondering of thoughts. As it always has b...