...end of the road?

A walk at work on an icy grey day.

Do you believe hundreds of ways of looking at stuff, whether tangible or conceptual exists?  What percentage of these multiple perspectives actually winds up not thrusting their owners into the abyss of dead ends?

Own best friend; own worst enemy...take your pick; it's all a matter of choice what we hand-select for ourselves.  I believe I'm exactly where I should be.  Plenty of amazing and terrible decisions over a lifetime and here I am.

Do I thrive where I'm at today?  Well, let's just say I'm exactly where I put myself and I have two avenues left...kick myself black and blue, or look up at that star in the heavens and reach for it.  Kick-Me-Thons are overrated, but reaching for a star is really an impossibility all you motivational people out there.

With complacency under my feet and beyond-the-bounds-of-possibility above my head, I've stuck myself between a rock and a hard place quite nicely.  If I can elevate myself a little bit higher from the rock and a little bit closer to the hard place.......

I'm going to take a little nap, and think further on this conundrum later.

The Woolworth Casino

When I was young, the concept of growing old never occupied my thoughts.  I was invincible; I would live forever. Of course, I wouldn't always last, but I was so removed from those decades I assumed would follow, that I never felt compelled to imagine what might lie ahead.  I was what life had chosen me to be, and life had a marvelous way of ignoring my desires and wants, and strapping me onto a lifelong roller coaster ride that would rise to heaven and plunge to hell without warning.  Woe is the idiot that gives fate full reign of their mortality.
  
Escaping the limitations of my small home town, I managed to remove myself to one hundred and twenty nine miles away.  With no car and only a small amount of money, I traveled by bus keeping myself well within the safety zone of mom and dad, in case I ever had to hightail it back home.  Stayed with my younger sister in her college dormitory room, then a month later moved into a rooming house where we all shared a kitchen with Skitzo Lady.  I use the word lady kindly.  Constant arguments with her imaginary friend or enemy, who knows, she helped herself each day to whatever eats were in the community fridge. She was allowed to continue this practice forever because we all valued our lives more than she did.

The name of the first casino escapes my memory, most likely for the simple reason I was fired from my job there.  One of those hiring agencies that get you a job you could have gotten yourself if you only knew sent me there, and I began work as a switchboard operator.  The hiring agency kept my first paycheck as payment. A Greek matriarch owned the place and every member of her family was employed there.  One of her gorgeous sons, a bartender, flirted and talked with me all the time, but I'm sure he was a big flirt with all the ladies.  His mom was always calling the switchboard and leaving me instructions on how to handle all the family calls each day.

To shorten this blight on my working record, let's just say I made the mistake of following her instructions on a day when I should not have followed her instructions.  The next day when I entered that building the hotel receptionist whispered that I had better leave like two minutes ago if I valued my life as Madam Greece was out to kill.

The sole supporter of my life, I was left no room to feel sorry for myself.  I needed a new source of income fast, thus began my second job far from home.  On the Graveyard shift in a smaller, older establishment someone once called the Woolworth of all Casinos, I was machine rolling all those blasted coins that the clueless emptied out of their pockets each day into the slot machines, and the casino collected each evening to make sure I had steady employment rolling them back up again to reuse. Simply stated, the job sucked!  I jumped at the offer of working in the credit-check cashing-cashier department without hesitating.  I really should have looked for another job in a non-gaming industry, but I didn't.

If you're under the delusion that the average John Doe is civilized, then you have never met a desperate tourist who has gambled away every penny to their name, credit card rejects, personal check insufficient funds, gas gauge on empty, nowhere to go with family in tow...they become blasphemous werewolves out to kill the world that is trying to 'get' them.  I've had every cuss word in existence thrown in my face and the back of my head, hairy arms shooting over the counter trying to grab me and I presume drag me over the counter-top if I had been slower on my feet, threatened, lied to, spit at...I quickly developed a healthy loathing of the general gambling public.

There NEVER was a sighting of me at a casino in that biggest little town out west on my off days unless I was dragged there kicking and screaming (not really) by a visiting family member or friend out to have a good time.  I worked for an old tyrant connected with the mafia and his two buck teethed bratty schnauzers who would drop in from their living quarters upstairs any time of the day or night to survey their dominion like sharks out for the kill.

To say circumstances were stressful was putting it mildly.  Tons of Excedrin tablets became my friend as I tried to stave off one headache after another for the next seven years.  I was considered exceptional, and we all know how exceptional is rewarded; we get the joy of twice as much work because we can do it in twice the less time than others.  Always in fear of losing my job, no sick leave,  no vacation time, no holidays, and a once a year small bonus to either collect (which I did) or use for the equivalent of vacation leave...the glamorous life of the glittering neon boulevard was only a myth.

The job was killing me.  A wedding was stuck in there somewhere, and my marriage was killing me.  While neither snow, rain, heat, nor gloom of night kept me from walking the five miles to work and the five miles home again each working day; husband always managed to have a car with no remorse for my plight.  When enough was enough, I started over again with not much more than that first day I stepped off a bus all those years ago all wide-eyed and hopeful.  This time I was determined to be more in control of my destiny, but sometimes determination just isn't enough. Sometimes one has to actually understand why they do the things they do.

Orphans in Rags and Other Wild Things

When plan A starts ripping apart at the seams, and the needle has run short of thread in a futile effort to bind it all back together, plan B starts looking mighty reasonable no matter how haywire it really is.  You're dropped off at work on a morning that should be as it appears - sunny and peaceful, but in your head it's morphed into cloudy and troubled cause your mode of transportation is in for repairs and you wonder just how long it's really gonna be before you'll be able to escape THE JOB that afternoon.

Time to think of "what ifs" has vaporized as the phone calls and walk ins are surrounding you like a swirling sea of quicksand sucking your sanity into the vortex of total chaos.  Since "patsy's" stamped in indelible ink on your forehead  and your wispy bangs are doing such a pitiful job of camouflage, it's just a matter of a very short time before the scenario of bad becomes worse...then it happens.

You've just been given a box of rags, and your curiosity instantly dies a short flaming death.  You know something's breathing in there, and what should have been another's problem is now yours.  You're told this is what's left of a possum verses four speeding tires, and you sigh.  Husband's called, then Walden's Puddle Wildlife Rehab, and you're wondering how to set up an appointment when the car could be ready anytime from an hour, or two or three from now.

A time is picked for the hour long drive after husband's hour long drive to pick you and your orphans up.  Husband calls, then Walden's Puddle's appointment is reneged and reassigned a later time after a lengthy discussion. Long story short...the four orphaned babies are now with another group of orphans, cuddled warmly together.  Speeding towards home you stop for a huge bottle of cool pepsi to pacify your defeated soul, cause you passed up a planned afternoon of weed pulling ecstasy in the gardens and the rains are moving in.  Ain't life grand?

Wild Things this April Afternoon

DARN IT!

Know that phrase 'put the cart before the horse'?

Well...

I feel like an old nag head butting an army tank through a field littered with rocks, and my bruised head is killing me.  

Logic has never been a big deal breaker when it comes to choosing my own little black hole of detention that I sometimes loving call THE JOB.

Perhaps, I should have changed that strategy a few jobs back, but I didn't. Hindsight is so useless ;(

My demons are playing with the curling irons today, and have once again fired my tired noggin to a crisp.

Three hours of lectures flying over the top of my head, and I'm ready to enter camping reservations for our park into the new system.  Ya, right!

Why wait until all is ready for direct online access by the customers - logic is so terrifically over rated.

Takes talent persuading a customer to choose a number out of thin air for their campsite location.

The cheat sheet isn't quite right, problem solving's too scarce, reports translate incorrectly to fiscal services templates; feels like Mickey Mouse is mickey mousing all over the darn place, and I need to so desperately ESCAPE!

But, hey!  It's a 24 hour 7 day a week operating system, and I'm a one person office 8 hour 5 day a week type of gal.

It's beginning to creep into my weekends a bit, cause none of my other duties have evaporated into the stratosphere like I willed them to last night. Rats!

Two weeks down, ten more to go before they THINK it will all go live online.

So...

I'm high tailing it to Frugal MacDoogal Wine & Liquor off Division Street to invest in an intoxicating case of Chateau Ste Michelle Chardonnay.

See ya...!

I'm running as fast as I can.

The twenties...20's...10+10+?  I think the best thing about my twenties is that they only happened once.  The job was usually a job scraped one level up from the bottom of the barrel.  I was an adventurer of meager resources tripping from one misadventure to the next.  The best I would ever have would be no more than I could come up with on my own.  No one beside me, no one behind me...I was alone when it came to planning the rest of my life.  I was so totally clueless.

I worked a year as a babysitter...nanny...whatever, in charge of a young know-it-all girl with a younger semi-bullying brother to a much younger angelic brother, a don't-ever-tell-me-what-to-do afghan dog, and a smarty pants standard poodle.  Each time I made a decision that their mom would never have made in a million years, or so the young lady thought, she made a phone call to mom at work.  She made many phone calls to mom at work that first week...so many, in fact, that mom was highly motivated to skip work for an hour, come home and lay hand to butt.

The afghan made its home under the kitchen table defying me to change her routine, the poodle popped out ten curly black pups that year and sadly later on she died, the bully brother flushed the angelic brothers goldfish down the toilet  and both brothers spent more than a few time-outs in the corners of their bedroom. We became a tight knit little family after a questionable beginning, and I had only good memories for the rest of that year, except perhaps for that high strung afghan princess.  It was a sad farewell the day I decided to work at the naval base in town...the town that was smack dab in the middle of a desert.

I was a 'blue' collar worker at that naval base with no ships.  I worked on the assembly line making ammunition, you know...250 lb and 500 lb bombs, mortars, shells...you get the drift.  My most favorite of those crappy jobs was in the filling house. Downstairs sucked!  It was the area where the small rail cars traveled on railroad tracks through the bottom part of the filling house, each car carrying six bombs with their base upright to be filled with molten powder.

Platforms bordered each side of the rail tracks, and that is where we stood in our canvas coveralls covering our cotton long johns, steel toed grounded shoes, elbow length canvas gloves, and face shields; holding the pouring hose folded shut, then unfolding to let the molten hot liquefied powder fill up the empty bomb casings to the correct level.  Little bits of molten powder were always spraying up during the filling process, and during breaks we would be gently peeling them off the lower part of our face.

We were always sweating like pigs at a barbecue.  I was the only woman working in that filing house with a fairly rough group of men.  The lower part of the filling house was surrounded by what is called a bunker; tall concrete walls, fat at the base and tapering as they ascent to the top of the first floor.  This would supposedly protect the outside world if we all kissed our butts goodbye...you know...KAPOOEY! and we all blow up.

Finally I was liberated and placed on the upper floor of the filling house, up above the concrete barrier with windows covering all four sides and a second crew of tough men who never seemed to socialize with the lower level crew.  I was the cleaning person.  I knew I was the cleaning person, because in this group of chauvinistic men, cleaning was woman's work.

The alternative to sweeping the raw powder off the floor and platform areas around the cooking kettles and moping, would be work that was as hard as the lower level; but I had my fill of the broom and mop brigade after a short time, and voiced my opinion to my boss.  I wanted to be treated as an equal with these rough characters...I wanted the cleaning job to be rotated through all the crew.  The first rough and tough macho guy that had to clean floors for the next week was...well, let's just say he looked like a wounded puppy with his tail tucked between his legs.  He was a MAN doing woman's work.

I almost bit off more than I could chew.  This was a muscle person job, and my arms were a bit puny.  Okay, they were a lot puny.  I suffered.  Round metal cans with a handle at each side, and a half opening lid on hinges, with somewhere around fifty pounds of loose yellow pieces of raw powder inside were brought in on a conveyor belt from another building.  A person would pull them off the conveyor belt onto the roller bar platform for the next person in line to grab and carry to the next kettle to be filled.  A strain to lift off the roller bars, it was a double strain to heist that can up high enough to dump its contents into the kettle instead of the floor.

The heat was turned on, the kettles were filled, and as they agitated, the uncooked powder on the agitator fins would be scraped off with wood paddles back into the kettle to cook.  The lid was closed during the final stages of melting until it was like molten lava ready for the lower deck crew.  It will never be said that I let any job get the best of me.  My arms muscled out and soon I could keep up with the best of them.  I began to win at arm wrestling with the men.  I actually became a celebrity in the lunch room for my arm wrestling feats.  I loved it.

Rotated to the roller table and pulling those hefty cans off the conveyor belt eventually earned me a squashed finger and a finger nail that had to have a hole drilled in it by the dentist to relieve the pressure.  I went right back to work on the conveyor belt.  Guys are impressed by this kind of toughie stuff.  I was macho girl, fitting right in with all those macho guys.  I was part of the gang and they all seemed to love it.  I couldn't see this occupation following me into older age...the type of work that becomes harder to do each year until eventually one day the body hits a brick wall and screams just forget it.

The switchboard operator position at the base headquarters got me out of the living on the edge to the living on the bored-out-of-my-mind working group.  My entire day or night was monopolized by that antiquated switchboard staring me in the face defying me to remember who was plugged into whom.  I was in a two handed plugging purgatory.  Uninspired subnormal intelligence was not my forte, so I was well on the way to hell in a hand-basket just my second day out on the job.

Friday Musings

I'm looking out my office window at silence.  Wind plays with all the layers of tree boughs on the hardwoods and evergreens at the far end of the pond...they look like they are swaying to the music of the heavens.  Eastern Red Cedar dominates the area...it grows everywhere a ray of sunshine touches the earth.  Shrubs hardly exist, over browsed by the many deer that pass back and forth through this small 164 acre park.

The pond is motionless...a pile of flat rocks forming a curved wall, bone dry.  The pump hasn't worked for several months, so it sits there daring you to sit on one of the two wooden benches facing it to watch the algae bubble and toil.  At least I think it still has enough water in it to sustain the mutants it has spawned; after all, it has rained a few of the days these past two months.  I'm counting the minutes until I can rush home to pull another two garbage cans full of weeds before sunset forces me indoors away from all that fun and satisfied fulfillment.



I'm becoming a stranger to my own blog...I'd rather go antiquing, traveling and partying with husband.  I'd rather not pull and whack weeds, prune and saw tree and shrub limbs, raise up sunken pathways, relocate volunteer plants, tuck in newly bought plants, thin out the pond plants, and on and on...but I do; and today I just sit here trying to keep my leg from cramping before it's time to escape one job for another.

Seconds to go and I'll be speeding over the horizon to grab a shovel and pop two shrubs into the garden before the rains hit tomorrow.  Too bad popping a few shrubs into the ground requires more than the snap of two fingers  :'(

Glum, Glummer, Glummest

It's begun!  Late this year...I thought they had migrated to Florida, but alas...the pitter patter of little hairless mice tootsies tap dancing across the terminally mildewed and dirt saturated carpet that no one in their right mind would ever set a bare foot upon without the dreaded possibility of the charge of a billion bacteria entities and all their cousins scampering up ones leg in a feeding frenzy, has begun at THE JOB.  I'm the executioner of these little angel faced fluff balls of destruction.

Such innocence, thinking that no one would ever notice when the office copier gave up the ghost after the wires within it were chewed to smithereens and a bedroom was set up for all those babies that would come.  Perhaps they should have been a bit more discreet with the pooh trails and all that chewed up shredded copy paper scattered about.  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...I could go on and on and on...but when the machine innards are pulled out, and the repair man is waving his arms running down the road yelling the copier has given birth to a multitude of hairless little munchkins, well...you know the outcome for those clueless sweet faced tikes is going to be bad...very, very bad.

I am the keeper and protector of the new office copier.  I inherited the drudge, because no one else will step up to the plate.  No one is fazed by losing a second machine to the same fate as the first...no one except little ole idiotic me.  So...each day rolls out before me...a day of empty traps and relief, or a day of many oh's as traps are vacated and refurbished.  Each winter I settle down with my family of termites in my crud encrusted office armed with a new stash of shiny spring traps, disposable latex-free gloves and a very large jar of extra crunchy Skippy super chunk peanut butter which is sadly, mouse approved eats, and wish summer would hurry up and get here.

 

Dark Side of Eden

Turkeys...we have plenty of them on this park, but today I'm not talking about the human ones.  Out of nowhere, three hens and sixteen chicks have materialized near the pond area.  The adults are scratching wildly around that large dirt patch, chunks of soil flying in all directions, sashaying their bodies back and forth as they flip dirt on themselves before settling into a nesting type mode on that bug quenching dusty mound with wings outstretched.  The chicks settle in to the same routine after the hens have risen and pecked their food picking way over to the pond.

After a while a few of the chicks rise up and join the hens, but most of those chicks are content to just stay put with wings outstretched in their huddle of bodies on that dusty patch of ground.  The biggest hen moseys over to that display of lovely young bodies, and starts kicking the hell out of the dirt sending the rest of the chicks scattering to the pond.  She settles down to a second dust bath before rejoining the gang.

Eventually they begin pecking their food picking way into the tree covered beyond and become invisible to my eyes.  I'm looking at all those 'weeds' out there.  Most people hate them with a vengeance, but the turkeys need them for the seeds they provide and the insects their green leaves hide.  Turkeys would starve if we had our own way and herbicided all those pesky weeds into oblivion to satisfy our need to have nature wrapped up tidily in a straight jacket of neatness.

Do gardens have a dark side to their personality?  Mine do.  Baby thugs hid in the greens I've planted, silently becoming tomorrow's teenagers of destruction.  Maple, elm, bradford pear, eucalyptus, chinese redbud and japanese/chinese honeysuckle seedlings become six foot monsters before I discover their existence.  Bermuda grass, yellow nutsedge, japanese knotgrass and stiltgrass, and who knows what else, busily tries to smother my natives and non-natives into oblivion; and this is all with the courtesy of mother nature and my lovely neighbors; both whom I have no control over whatsoever, kapoot, zilch, nada nada nada, zero baby zero.

Neighbor to the left has a healthy patch of bermuda grass mingled with another coarser grass on steroids.  Always a day late and a dollar short on the mowing time table, those grasses are trying to set up housekeeping on my grounds and are succeeding quite marvelously much to my horror.  Neighbor to the right has developed an allergy to yard work beginning some years ago, and has become the living manual of all that is so wrong with life among the lazy elite.  He has every known obnoxious entity the world has ever harbored proliferating wildly away in his reserve of dubious origins and questionable motives.

I've even become my own worst enemy and have begun to sink in a losing battle with the eradication of that oh-so-cute native river oats crap that I planted three little tykes of some ten years ago, and now at last count have cut down more than fifty clumps of that baby-faced monster.  I need some time for myself outside of the gardens and have deserted the healthy and gone over to the dark side.  It's spray, baby, spray...kill, kill, kill.  I'm on a mission...I need a life outside of my gardens..so sorry National Wildlife Federation, Audubon, and Wild Ones...my bad.

Japanese Stiltgrass

River Oats

Dwarf Joe Pye Weed 'Gateway'

5 to 6 feet tall

Part of cicada damage where eggs were laid

in the stems of Spicebush - after eggs hatched,

stems are warped and split open

Miss No Name

Was given a piece off a lily bulb

at a Master Gardener Meeting.

Took about seven years for it

to become big enough to bloom.

Love it - whatever it is.

Keeper of the Pond

Beautiful blue dragonfly

Blackhaw Viburnum berries

after the rain

Blackhaw Viburnum berries after a short drought -

they all fell off the tree

Hosta 'Halcyon'

Have to water this baby everyday, or

it refuses to bloom. 

Hairy Sunflower

Giant Coneflower

Rudbeckia maxima

against a 6 foot high fence

Too hot to actually use this deck

for anything but a collect all

Dustin's stamp of approval is lacking on the front yard.

It's leash territory for him, as he is so addicted to

running down the street with his owner

hot on his trail, her arms wildly waving,

yelling 'come back here, you little sh*t!'

Glossy Black Chokeberry

I tried one of these...only a bird could love it.

Clematis i. 'Hendersonii'

Royal Catchfly

After five attempts to get a completely undamaged

85 pound  umbrella stand, I gave up.  The only piece

lacking is a screw tightener replacement, but UPS

keeps insisting on using the straps for handles

even though it is printed on the straps that's a NO NO.

The last shipment for me to just remove a tightener

from the tube and have the rest returned, was actually

missing the tube...it fell out somewhere along the route. 

I'm buying a large bolt from the hardware store,

and will just live with that conversation piece.

Blue Star Threadleaf

Belladonna Lily

I'm in love!

Beautiful pinks with golden and bluish highlights.

Fat strap leaves in the spring disappear,

then the flower stems shoot up later in summer

two feet tall,

and produce these deadly sweet blooms.

July 28, 2010

Birth of my little baby

Perfection...More or Less

and

the beginning of

my descent

into

blogging

addiction 

most sublime

with my first post

"Just Perfect".

Thank you, Tracy,

It's an Average Life,

my first follower

outside of family...

although,

 I do sort of think

 of her as distant family.

She encouraged,

plugged my blog,

wonderful comments

 left and right,

she's a sweetie!

Thank you all

for reading

 whatever I throw at you...

normal,

near-normal,

abnormal...

you're awfully good sports.

And

to all of my friends

who post more than once a week,

you're killing me...

it's like running a marathon

 trying to keep up

 with all your posts,

lol.

Love you all.