Nothing like a cruel wake-up ….
Nothing like a cruel wake-up call after a big four-day birthday celebration. I told you some of the beginning last week. Then the actual day arrived, and besides a cupcake for lunch from the Rehab Center, only a single card came in the mail. Outside of lots of “happy birthday” wishes from staff as it was listed on the monthly activity calendar everyone gets, there wasn’t much going on.
I’d already finished supper and was just killing time waiting for something to come on television. All of a sudden another parade started, led by guess who? Jackie. She had lied to me earlier as I wanted some coat hangers, but she claimed she didn’t know when she could come.
The parade included her two girls, their families and maybe an extra two or three people who were tagging along. It was too many for my penthouse room; we moved down the hall to a larger conference room. A strange question still lingers in my mind. I asked the gentleman about it this morning when I was getting a shot of insulin. How are all those Hershey candy bars going to sit with the insulin you are giving me? He didn’t know but thought my reading this morning of 145 showed I handled it pretty well.
Now for the cruel awakening. Actually it had gone through my mind in the night. With a holiday coming, isn’t there going to be an early deadline for news for this week’s paper? Sure enough. I turned on the computer and there it was. An e-mail from Karie Schmidt telling me about the early copy deadline. She did soften the blow a bit by wishing me a belated happy birthday.
While it might seem cruel, it also means I’ll have a few extra days before another deadline rolls around.
Someone might be wondering if at some point I might quit writing.
Well, right now age is just a number on paper. I feel great and can give a lot of credit to the Clark County Rehab and Living Center for their care. Maybe it just goes to show there was good reason this was voted one of the top places in the state. Their 101st year in the business stands for itself.
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I had to cut out an item about the Elvis Presley impersonator I wrote for last week. Seems like everyone went but me. I guess you could say I never really got into the Elvis music. We had a lady guitar player the week before who sang lots of old familiar hymns and songs. I recall the last one she sang was “Ghost Riders In The Sky.” That’s more my style.
One of my favorite programs on radio was the Gene Autry Show. The year I got out of high school and went to St. Paul to work, he came and actually did his broadcast there one week. It was really interesting to watch how they did the sound effects during the show. Later that night we went to the St. Paul Auditorium and watched the rodeo.
Then one year we attended a National Newspaper Association annual meeting somewhere in Texas. The Texas association had bragged about the conference and the fact we’d be treated to an old-fashioned Texas bar-be-que and real live rodeo.
The bar-be-que turned out to be a hamburger and plate of baked beans. Like I said, I’d been to Gene Autry’s rodeo. This one was like you’d just been to the Indianapolis 500 and then went to one of the early stock races we used to see someone we knew driving in.
I remember one summer I drove and we went all the way to St. Cloud, Minn., to watch a friend drive. Back then it was almost all old, pre-World War II cars. On the way up there was a section of highway being rebuilt. A stone had flown up and broke the glass in the sediment glass in the gas line. He couldn’t find a replacement that fit just right, so he wasn’t much challenge to anybody that day.
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What’s the most favorite color for a car? I never thought too much about it until one Sunday morning while waiting for church to begin, I was watching the traffic zip by on Highway 29. I was right on number one; it was the white cars. Black was second, followed by gray and silver.
I was surprised red didn’t make the list, but I think that might fit into the pickup category instead.
On the subject of cars, I can’t understand how GMC gets by advertising the ability to drive one of their pickup trucks without any hands on the wheel. I thought it was just common sense to keep both hands on the wheel. I guess that should apply for all the other extras on some cars and it might even be a factor in the number of accidents.
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Maybe because I don’t have anything to do, I sit and think of questions I don’t know the answer to. This week I came up with the question, “Why do we say shoes and socks, when we put our socks on first?” I thought for sure I’d stumped the computer. So I put the question in and back came an answer. It is because the “o” vowel in shoes is softer than the “o” in socks. Now I can sleep better tonight.
The other question that came to mind after watching the golf tournament going on in the rain, was: What sports don’t they play in the rain? Baseball, auto racing and tennis come to mind quickly. I suppose there are more.
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Hope you had a nice holiday weekend and I’ll leave with this little thing I saw the other day. Then I can throw this page of notes away. Did you hear about the Scandinavian Marathon? It started in Norway and ended at the Finnish line.
