Winter drags on... I am running out of inspiration

The picture you see above is a corner of my front porch, to the left of the door. Our front porch is wide enough to have a glider and chairs for sitting. There is a rail that goes across the front, so it looks homey. My stuff is sort of thrown in the corner there. It is winter and this area has been neglected since November. You'll notice that my decor is pretty tacky. There are some frogs I bought in Myrtle Beach and a dwarf (in honor of my son who steals lawn ornaments from his friends' houses). I put refrigerator magnets on the barrel (where else would you put them?) and sea shells, because I can't help collecting them on vacation, sit on top of the barrel along with some tacky metal yard art sculpture. What can I say? I grew up in a neighborhood with religious statues, chrome balls and pink flamingos. If a tree died sure enough the next day your neighbor would paint it white. Its hard to lose those early influences. I still love those neighborhoods with their heavily manicured evergreen shrubery (japanese yews). In fact I put those same green bushes in my front yard and I keep them neatly trimmed. Our house, which is out in the middle of nowhere looks like it fell out of a suburb from the 1950's, except the yard art has been updated for the new millenium.

As you can see also, the Christmas Owl, my dog Max's best friend, is still around. I told myself that when the temperature got over 32 degrees I would get rid of him. Well it hasn't.

Below is a picture of our cat Tiger and her best friend. Its a weasel that came off some kind of battery operated rolly ball. A christmas present no doubt from one of my nieces or nephews in years past. I tried to wash it once and that was a big mistake. Tiger carries it around with her. I will find it on the couch or the bottom of our bed. This is what she does with it when she's eating her dinner.

My maternal grandparents (again!)

Left to Right: Unknown woman, Henrietta Kappus Fitzgerald, Frances Kappus Reilly, Unknown man, Amelia Caroline Kappus (mom), Dennis Francis Moroney (dad).

Left to Right: Aunt Henrietta Kappus Fitzgerald, Unknown womand in black, Aunt Frances Kappus Reilly, Amelia Kappus Moroney (mom), Dennis Francis Moroney (dad)

The Easter Egg Contest: will you help us?

Nearly every year now for at least three or four, my family has an egg decorating contest.
We are very competative and we have trouble finding individuals willing to judge the eggs under that kind of pressure.
This year my son and I will not be going to Chicago, where the rest of my family resides, so we will be competing in the egg contest remotely, and I suggested that we do the judging using pictures, or I was going to ship our eggs down there early. What my family has agreed on is my posting the pictures to this BLOG and asking my vast readership to do the voting. This will probably require me to learn photoshop and also how to post pictures and text in the proper sequence. Anyway, would you folks be willing to help us? We would be so appreciative. To give you an idea of the nature of the competition, here are eggs from past contests.

SUN BATHING BEAUTY

As you see this grouping all have titles but I cannot read them. Perhaps my family will let me know what the titles of these various entries are.

Here is another grouping from a different year. The red/black egg to the left in this picture is a lady bug and I believe that entry won for that particular year.

Here is a close up with bad lighting (my flash wasn't working) of the lady bug entry. The Beatle eggs are off in the distance.

I have to ask my nephew what the name of his entry was, its the one with the plant material mixed in with the egg. The other eggs in the picture are mine. I rolled them with glitter and then got nervous because I saw my niece and her sister meticulously puting sequin by sequin on their eggs to create the lady bug and the the sun bather, so I added some sequins to my entries as well. Needless to say, I did not win.

La Galena (chicken in Spanish?) My niece did not win, and she is still bitter about it.

LORD OF THE EGG ... this is the entry that won for that year (up against entries like 'La Galena' for example). This was done by my other niece who is cousin to the niece who is still bitter.

Winter Garden

This is the view from my kitchen window. I sit and drink coffee and look out on this every morning. This is how its been since November.

This is my youngest sister's daughter. I love these pictures. Last fall they took a trip to Madison County, Iowa and visited all the bridges that were popularized in Robert James Waller's novel "Bridges of Madison County". My sister told me that some of the streets in the area around these bridges had names like "Francesca's Way" and "Robert Kincaid Way" after the characters played by actors Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood in the movie. If you didn't know this, the plot of the movie is that a bored housewife meets a passing stranger (a national geographic photographer) and has a really heated affair that lasts a weekend. Her family is at the state fair so they know nothing about it. I've been thinking about this for a long time and what gets me is the whole idea that a local government would ok impropriety by naming streets after the characters in this movie/novel. My sister disagrees with me on this point, but I think the government should be above reproach. What people do in their personal lives is their own business and as entertainment I am ok with it. I am an idealist I guess. I also think Clint Eastwood was really hot in this movie.

Amelia and Dennis Moroney

This is my mom's parents when they were older. Amelia was about 55 and Dennis was in his 60's.

John Pike died this morning

His family was holding vigil for him for at least a week. He has a fantastic family, very loyal and loving. John stopped eating about two weeks ago and over time was drinking less liquids. It happens fast if you don't eat or drink.

I have blogged about John previously here, and his very good friend, Virginia, here.

I was amazed and impressed with how brave John was, and how accepting of his fate. He was ready. He was kind to his family to the very end. He made their burden easy and for all the friction that may have existed between some of the members, he, and they never showed it.

Per his wishes his brother is going to have him cremated. John's brother is a plumber and has a backhoe so Joe will bury John in one of the family plots that was bought by their father many years ago. There will be no funeral or wake and Joe promised to call me when they bury him. I'll probably take the day off work.

Amelia Kappus Moroney

I work in an office

OK so I work in an office. I work for a well respected, very conservative company that has a history and a reputation and a significant company culture. The way I got my job was my husband. He was an account executive for another very large, very conservative company that sold services to this company. The way I met my husband was as his driver. He was blind when I met him. His company allowed him to have a driver to take him on business trips. He had a Mercedes. Well, it was a station wagon.

Prior to meeting my husband, my work record was not all that stellar. I worked in Cleveland as a clerk for the Cuyahoga County Civil Courts, then as a receptionist at a Lort B Summer theatre company. Tom Hanks worked there too years earlier. He always mentions its where he got his start. During that same period I volunteered at the Natural History museum in University Circle, and worked downtown as a waitress at a fine Spanish restaurant that had a piano and a piano player in the lounge. Naturally, we used to date. One summer my sister and I bought a six pack every night for about a week (i think they might have cost maybe $2.50 at the time), and I couldn't pay the rent that month. That's how bad things were. Also, I had not held a job longer than six months. I was always amazed that I could show up at the bus stop on time, on schedule, five days a week. Trust me, this was an accomplishment. I was always complaining, to anyone who seemed to care, like my cousins who I'd run into downtown, or my boss at the History Museum, or the other gal I worked with there, that I needed to make more money, and I needed a better job. I had a college degree (yeah Philosophy, extremely marketable).

My husband helped me a lot. When I moved to Chicago to be his driver he helped me get a job at his company. It was low paying but a good start. All of a sudden stores gave me applications for credit cards. That was a first. Then after that, I had a friend who got me into her company, a pharmaceutical firm, as a documentation scientist. In college I dreamed of being a scientist. I would tell John's kids "I am a scientist". They were five and nine. They were impressed. It was cool.

I was a glorified proof reader, and even the janitors were scientists aka not Sanitation Engineers because we didn't have Engineers at this company. We had scientists. It was like that). No one needed to know this fact. This company also gave out Turkeys or Vegetarian baskets at Thanksgiving. Everybody would stand in line to get theirs. That was the only cool thing they ever did.

Then my husband and I got married and he helped me get a job at my current company. We were also trying to have a baby, which took like no effort and maybe less than a week. I really wanted to get out of where I worked. It was so poorly managed. So my current company hired me at six months pregnant. I was impressed. They wouldn't let me do training in downtown Chicago second shift when I was eight months pregnant. I respect them for that, because I would have done it because then I could have avoided my brother in law on the train coming home at 5, trying to make me feel better about being fat. "So Anne, where did you find that dress TENTS by OMAR?"

That is how I ended up in Minnesota. I transferred into a new job at this location in Minnesota. We did this twice actually, with a stint in Maryland in between. I worked in the field then and all the driving to see customers made it very difficult. I hated that job. What I do is what I have done since I started. I help customers with their software problems. My customer set has changed and become exclusive. Its all about relationships and good service. To the average person, what I do might put them to sleep or drive them nuts with boredom. I pull a freight train of technical and corporate jargon, and technical and administrative tasks. The nice thing is that I can leave it at the door when I go home because no one would understand me.
Often I will look for ways to find amusement at work. Who hasn't done this? One of my favorite has to do with a gal that worked in our group and then became my manager for a brief period of time. She is not my manager any more, and she wasn't always that good managing people, but she is a brilliant person, with a very colorful vocabulary and use of the English language. Af first I was always trying to figure out where her style came from. Was it some of the places that she had lived or languages that she spoke or what? Then I watched a show on PBS about American Dialect across the United States, and I discovered the source. She is from Texas! They have some of the most creative colloquialisms and they shoot from the hip.

For the whole time that she was my manager, and anytime I know she will be a speaker at one of our meetings, I bring a pad and pencil so I can take notes. Otherwise I never do. A napkin will suffice. When she was my manager, in meetings she would look at me and say "Why are you smiling" ..well here is why:

Bulltwinkies ( bs?)
Diddlysquat
Funky & Kinky to describe a technical process
poodle happy
poodle in a springtime shower
shmooze up the yang yang
wonder duds
goat rodeo and headless chicken parade
pain in the buns
scottish Japanese flavor (to describe an account)
up our neighborhood (like up your ass)
hounds at bay
I'll keep my cook out of the kitchen
whammy sticks (you can get hit)
blooming blazes - as in where the blooming blazes
gate guard - like gate keeper
whammy - system goes whammy
drink a lot of fluids but keep it below the knees
the whole shooting' caboodle = the whole nine yards

These are just some of the expressions she would use when discussing pie charts and service contracts and business strategy. I wish you could hear the context. I even have a few of my office mates collecting phrases for me. Occasionally they will come out of a meeting and hand me a little scrap of paper with some wonderful turn of the english language from this person. Eventually I plan to show her the list that I have been compiling, like when her manager asks for letters for her twenty fifth service anniversary. Not sure how I'll put it together though so she won't get the wrong idea. She might think I am well how do I put this nicely, weird (but not creepy - NEVER).

We survived the meteor shower (revised - better word choice)

I have not been watching the weather reports over the last few days, but my husband tells me there were predictions for a meteor shower last night and maybe tonite (Saturday - Sunday). Unfortunately it is cloudy tonite so I may not see them if they are happening. Last month there was a meteor shower and I did see that. What you see is a shooting star or two about every minute (a minute is sixty seconds and that is a long time). It is very dark out here so we have beautiful midnite skies on a clear night.

The big concern for my husband was that the meteors would fall to the earth. Just recently a woman who signed up to volunteer for Pine Area Home Services has been coming to our house and walking with John down our driveway in the afternoon. She is a wonderful person, very chatty, and about forty-five. The perfect age and extraction for my husband. Well my husband was worried that the meteors would be problem while they went for a walk. He was afraid he would be hit like in a hale storm or worse. He also was sharing his concern with anybody who came over plus everyone else he could think of, to warn them. He was suggesting to my son's girlfriend that she find shelter in a basement, and bring food and water to survive the event. We discussed the impact it might have to the house, but since we do have a "bomb shelter" in our basement (under the porch; my husband had a small room excavated that has walls of cinder block under the cement porch and we use it for cold storage) John wasn't worried about this family.

I have to give my son's girlfriend a lot of credit. She listened attentively while I put in my two cents of [good-natured] teasing. Most meteors burn up before they reach the Earth's atmosphere. I did tell my husband this, but he disagreed. My husband suffers from dimentia due to various health issues, so I think he has forgotten some of the things he probably learned in Science class. And he continues to be firm on his opinion. My main argument as to the seriousness of the concern was that meteors only fall to the earth in the southwest, Oregon or New Jersey so the probability of one landing here is small. Tonite my husband's elder son, who lives in Phoenix, Az, called to see how we survived the weather.

Note: Someone (see comments) has reminded me that most meteors burn up before they reach the earths' atmosphere. I do know this, so i revised my discussion above. Sometimes John comes up with the darndest ideas. This one I just had to share.

Brutus

This is Brutus. He lives in greater Chicago area with my sister Laura and her family. My sister's husband, Jim, found him one day in the parking lot of the building where he worked. The dog had a cut on his forehead but otherwise he was in good shape. They ran an ad in the local newspaper and posted signs around the area, but no one ever stepped forward to claim the dog. The dog has now resided with my sister's family for the last two years.

When I visit with them, I have observed over time, every family photo now includes the dog. Brutus has many individual portraits as well, including the one you see above. They adorn the walls and tables in various rooms all around the house. They multiply like rabbits, the pictures I mean. This dog weighs less than eight pounds but his presence in the household is enormous.
Whenever they come up to my house now they always bring Brutus. Its a given. I have no problem with this, and we've determined that Brutus and my cats have an understanding, so its ok. And the cats are ok with Brutus playing with their toys, and if he leaves some behind well it works both ways.

Brutus was up at Thanksgiving, but then Jim left early with my nephew Billy and they took Brutus with them. When Brutus got home he stopped eating and peeing. Now this never happens unless its serious. I was thinking that perhaps this dog had a more complicated emotional landscape than I ever gave him credit for. I thought he missed my sister. Actually, I never considered the dog was all that smart, although one time my sister told me the story of how she showed Brutus her son's hamster. The hamster cage was located on a shelf above her son's bed and the dog may not have been in the room when Laura took it out of the cage. Laura just let the dog sniff noses with the hamster. Well the next day the hamster cage was knocked off the shelf and empty, so Brutus found it.

So, it turns out Brutus' behavior was a result of a muscle spasm in his back. He has got a lot of back. I visited at Christmas and now they have a fancy set of steps to get up onto the bed in my sister's room, one of his favourite spots to sleep. There are books and boxes for the dog to step up onto all the furniture in the house practically, particularily those well chosen spots with views out the front and back windows. They are going on vacation over Christmas and rented a house with a fenced in yard with Brutus' comfort and convenience in mind. They bought a special "under the seat" bag so that Brutus doesn't have to fly in baggage. I've heard that will really mess a dog up. They have dog insurance too.

If anything ever happens to that dog I hope they invite me to the funeral. I think it will be quite the par-tay.

Virginia

I wish I had a picture of Virginia, but I am not sure that I could take her picture and be able to explain to her why I needed it. Virginia is John Pike's friend. And it was not long after we met John Pike that we met Virginia. For those of you who didn't read my essay on John Pike, the meanest man alive, he is the man that I blogged about here. John Pike has helped us for the last ten years with our place, mowing our tree fields, maintaining what farm equipment we have, and providing us with much entertainment and advice.

When we first met John Pike, he lived in a trailer rented from Virginia, on her property. She lived in the trailer next door and I think the rent was actually companionship, handyman stuff and whatever, like someone to eat meals she cooked or who knows. He was probably fifteen years her junior. She's close to eighty now, and lost some weight recently and she still looks fabulous in a pair of blue jeans. If you ask her she will tell you she is just a tough old farm wife (she lost her husband maybe twenty years ago and her husband was a good friend of John Pike's).

Over the years we would occasionally visit with them on a summer evening. We would sit in chairs in Virginia's front yard and Virginia and John Pike would tell us all about the "dummy" who drove by. Of course, they weren't all "dummies" and we were way out in the country, so there weren't many people who drove by. One time we took John Pike and Virginia over to our neighbors for a party. John Pike drove Virginia's car. The party was just around the corner but my John wouldn't be able to walk and neither would Virginia. On the way over John Pike spied a couple of young people on a bridge near us where young people hang out. This young man owed John some money for a lawn mower and so John Pike stopped the car and got out and proceeded to discuss the kid up. Virginia had her window rolled down and several times encouraged John to push the young man off the bridge. My husband and I were trapped in the back seat, fearing for our lives. I am not sure what I was more concerned about, a fight breaking out between John Pike, this man and Virginia, or somebody associating us with these two, like we were that tough. I am pretty sure she could have people beat up if she wanted.

So John Pike is going to die. He's been diagnosed with an aggressive tumor in his hip, spread from the cancer that was in his bladder. He refused one of the options for treatment that they offered him and tomorrow I will discuss that with his brother.

John now lives in an old farmhouse that he rents from a decent family, and Virginia is in assisted living in a little town called Wanamingo. Virginia has been staying with John to help him. He's on some complicated medication, and heavy duty pain killers. I am home this week so they have been calling me, and I can tell that Virginia is worried about him, wants his family to step up and help, and after spending two days with them I can see that she is not the one to do it. She's getting too old and she knows it. So she has been calling me, and today I spent the morning with them at the Doctor's office and I asked the questions that she could not ask, like social services, and hospice care and the future. The doctor stepped right in. Told John to set his pride aside and let these women help him. It was great. So I called his younger brother, who is made of the same cloth, and told them that we had to have a meeting at John's, with Virginia. I have some health care directive questions, and we will discuss hospice and John's dog. I am so glad that they called me and that I could help them with this. I have so much respect for Virginia and her practical, tough minded approach to this; and her devotion to her friend.

Max and the Christmas Owl

I let Max, our chocolate lab, out Christmas morning and this is what he brought back. Not sure what kind of owl it is. I thought it was a Barr Owl. I saw one in the woods last fall. In this picture it looks like maybe a Horned Owl. Those are the two varieties that are most common here. We think maybe someone shot it. I can't believe that the bird would just die. The carcass was in pretty good shape before Max "adopted" him.

Season's Greetings! We're off to Chicago to visit the fam...

Catching up...

Harry turned 18 on December 1st. He is very happy about that. He no longer has a curfew (he thinks!).

The Snow Pile

The last time we lived in a suburb, with neighbors at our elbows, was when we lived in Ellicott City, Maryland. We lived in a great place, but our next door neighbor was a big jerk. It was the mid '90s and one winter we had a terrific snow fall which gave us two to three feet of snow overnight. My husband, John, was very active and used to do lots of snow shoveling in the winter. The snow fell over the weekend, and at some point I came out while John and Harry were working on the driveway.

Me: You'll never guess where our neighbor Paul is putting all his snow! Its on the sidewalk between our driveways! Its about four feet high right now. He’s been doing it with his kids all morning!
John: Paul's an idiot. He’s never forgiven us for putting up a fence. It’s just been one thing after another. What a pain! First that letter to the chairwoman for our development, then the dog whistle whistling to make our dog shut up. Now this. Well, he'll have to move the snow. I’d bet this is against city ordinances. What could this guy hope to achieve with such a stupid idea. What a major nuisance he is! What an immature stunt. He’s an idiot.
Me: I know! He’s putting it on the sidewalk right between his driveway and ours! You know that patch of sidewalk. It goes maybe five feet from our driveway to theirs. He’s put it smack dab in the middle.

The snow pile was still there on Sunday and growing. Paul and his kids were adding to it. Monday morning school was back in session and the city was open for business. The snow was piled high everywhere, but streets were plowed and sidewalks clear. It was John's job to take Harry to the bus stop.

Me: Oh John, the snow pile, its ten feet wide. You’ll never get around it. You’ll have to walk down our driveway and out in the street. Its way too deep. And he’s built up the sides around his driveway so you can’t walk around and go over the yard that way either. You and Harry won’t be able to make it to the bus stop."
John: Harry…

Sweet little five year old Harry, bundled for school, skipped over to his dad. Harry had a back pack in one hand and took his dad’s hand with the other. I got a long look from John.

John: You wait…

So I did. I watched from the front porch.
John with his white cane, and little Harry, attempted to navigate the huge snow pile. The sidewalk was clear on John's side, as John and Harry had spent Saturday and Sunday shoveling snow. On either side of the snow pile was a wall of snow at least two feet high that bordered Paul's driveway. On the other side of the snow pile, Paul's children were waiting for the bus with Paul. There were some other kids there as well; the boys from down the street. I could see that John was asking Harry about the snow pile.. John was pointing from side to side with his cane. Then Harry led John down into the street and over toward Paul's driveway which was the official bus stop. A few cars drove by, at speeds that must have been more than 40 miles an hour. Just as they came up the apron the bus pulled up. Both Harry and the other children began boarding the bus.

Paul was walking toward his house.

John: Paul, you need to get rid of this snow pile. You are blocking our path to the bus.

Paul: I don’t think so…

John: What? What? Paul….I'm blind and I am walking with a five year old. It’s not safe to have a blind man and a five year old going out on this road to get around that snowpile.
Paul: I'm not doing anything of the sort. I have a sore back.

John: Why'd you put it there in the first place? Sore back my foot. What you’re doing is against the law!
Paul: ( laughter )

John: Are you laughing Paul? You think that this is funny? Why your a menace... your ...your just a big boob!"

John walks back to our house by way of the street.

To me, standing on the porch:

John: This is it. The guys an ass! I 'm calling the police!

John goes in the house. He goes to the kitchen phone and dials the police station in Ellicott City.

John: This is John Moore. Yes. This is not an emergency. Yes, I want to file a complaint against my neighbor. Yes.... Yes.. He's shoveled his snow into a snow pile across the sidewalk between our two houses. The bus stop for school is on our neighbor’s driveway. The only way we can get to the bus stop now is by walking in the street. Here is the reason I have called. We live on a very busy road. I am blind and my son is only 5 years old. This is a dangerous situation for us. There is no way that my son and I can get around this snow. It blocks my son's path to the bus stop! I want to report it! (...silence.......) Thank you.

John: (to me) Well, they will send a policeman out to check on it.

Within the hour a policeman knocked on the door. He carried an expression that conveyed he wasn’t happy about making this call.

Policeman: Good morning Mr. Moore. We received your complaint this morning. I see the snow pile you are referring to. Have you talked to your neighbor about this? Asked him to remove the snow?"

John: Hello officer. Yes. I did speak with him this morning! I asked him to please clear a path, but he said he had a sore back and he laughed at me. You understand that the reason this is an issue is because the school bus stop is on his driveway. My son is only five years old and I am blind. This is a very difficult situation for us. Cars drive very fast on the street here and it creates a dangerous situation for us if the only way we can reach the bus stop is to go out in the street.

Policeman: Well, Mr. Moore, I understand your concern but in situations like this there is not much I can do.... It’s a shame that you and your neighbor cannot work this out amongst yourselves. I will go over and talk to him.

Me: (Policeman is gone) He thinks we're silly John.

John: Maybe so, but I couldn't let that boob get away with this. Somebody’s got to stop him. He needs to pay for being such an idiot!

Twenty minutes later there was a knock at the door.

Policeman: Mr. Moore, I spoke with your neighbor Mr. Lyons and unfortunately, there are only two things that we can do in response to this. I can issue him a citation, if that's acceptable to you, and I would be more than happy to do this. The other thing that you can do, is call the school and get the bus stop changed. They would probably agree to that under the circumstances.

John: Yes officer, that’s a great idea. I will call the school. That would solve everything. Thank you.

Policeman: No problem, Mr. Moore, but I will still issue Mr. Lyons a citation. It’s the least I can do.

John: (to me) Holy cow! Paul must have showed his true colors.

I didn't hear the phone call John made to the school because I had to leave for a customer appointment, but the school agreed to change the bus stop for the very next day. John called the neighbors whose kids used the bus stop living the other side of Paul’s house, apologizing for the inconvenience...but they understood. Everybody felt the same about Paul. The neighbor kids made paths around the snow pile. Their paths looked like deer trails. It was a cold winter with no warm spells, and so the snow pile remained till early March.

More on Beep Baseball

I blogged about Beep Baseball here. Just recently I came across a website for Villa Park, IL. Villa Park was one town over from Elmhurst, where John and I lived in the Chicago area. The website has some pictures of the game. Check it out: http://www.invillapark.com/beep.htm

This is a link to one of the teams and gives information on the tournaments: http://www.chicagocomets.org/

When John was playing baseball we went to most of the tournaments. We went to tournaments throughout the midwest, places like Kalamazoo, Michigan and Marion, Indiana. The biggest tournament was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where teams all over the midwest and west coast participated. The various teams had definate characteristics and personalities. The teams from Oklahoma City and some place in Kansas had huge players with no fear. The team from San Francisco was very diverse and they were small and oddball.

There were times when we would pull up at a motel, and these were the same places where all the various teams were playing and staying, to find a paddywagon and the police and a fight that had broken out. Alot of these blind players had multiple problems, and were on various types of medication; so mix that with alcohol and women and you would have a fight. When we went to the tournament in Minnesota everyone was staying at a very nice hotel in Bloomington. What a riot for the hotel staff. Blind people tend to run in packs. The guy with the cane or some sighted person was out front with a cluster of visually impaired persons clumped behind. Movement was awkward and they knocked stuff down. This hotel had upright ashtrays with sand in them and everyone of these had a pile of sand on either side of it so you know that they were being continually tipped over. My favorite memory was of the mezzanine, where there was a balcony that had a rail at waist height. There were these upright ashtrays with sand in them against the rail at twenty feet intervals. Blind people walk next to walls or use rails. As with everywhere else in the hotel, there were piles of sand on the floor on either side of these ashtrays. I watched this blind person navigate down the mezzanine. He hadn't reached an ashtray yet, but you could just tell that he was going to knock over each and every one of them.

What do you want to do when you grow up?

Ages ago, when I had been working maybe four years at my current company, a manager ask me what I wanted to do with my career. I can't remember how he phrased it, but thinking back, I definitely misunderstood the question. My answer was not what he expected. I told him I wanted to be a Private Investigator. He got this weird look on his face, but it never dawned on me that it was a wrong answer. Instead, i gave him my credentials. I realize now that he wanted me to tell him what I wanted for my future in the company. I've thought about that incident many times and can you believe it has taken me ten years to figure out what I should have said? I have gotten much better at answering questions like that these days, you can be sure of it.
At the time, my son was about two years old. My husband was as he is today; blind and diabetic and needing help. Back then he was working remotely for a large communications company as a trainer. He was much more independent then than he is now.

I was your typical working mom, an eight to five person; my family was my absolute first priority. If i worked overtime I worked my lunch hour, no exceptions. I told my boss that was the best I could do and that was all I would do. When I got to work , I worked my ass off. At 5:05pm I was out the door. My productivity was through the roof, and I had pretty good results. I was totally stressed and internalized everything, but that's just me and I am working on it because I need to change.

One of my favorite movies is "Twelve Days of Condor" (correction: Three Days of Condor, per anonymous) with Robert Redford. I think it came out in the 80's, and as the story goes, his character worked for the CIA reading fiction to look for information about terrorist plots, whatever. He goes out for Chinese (take out - lunch i mean) and when he returns everybody in his office has been shot / killed. So then he goes on a mission to find out what is going on, and who killed his co-workers. He takes on aliases, gets into offices disguised as a telephone company journeyman, or technicians, and eventually figures it out. I loved this movie because I wanted to be him. I loved that he knew how to be a chameleon and used disguises and blended in. I wanted to do that.

I've worked for my current employer almost 19 years, but before landing here I had lots of jobs. I figured I could use my experiences in all these places for my dream job of Private Investigator. Plus, there are so many shows on TV about Private Investigating I figured I knew what it took to do the job. I learn alot from TV.

So here it is: I worked for the Clerk of Courts office in Cleveland, the Civil Courts, in billing. Among other things, I would look up the divorce records for my friends to tell them whether the guy they were dating was really divorced. There were a few times when I would show someone their files. Many times the individual did not know the status of their case until they got billed. I am not sure that any of what I did was legal, but I found my access to this kind of information very exciting. I worked as a receptionist / secretary for the Great Lakes Shakespeare Theatre Company. I dated just about every guy in the office plus I realized that image was everything and you could create your own persona. Everybody I worked with did. I became the chauffeur for a blind man and learned how to be invisible. I worked at AT&T and did telephone fraud investigation and was pretty good at it. Its surprising how much people will tell you without realizing what they are telling you. I was a DOCUMENTATION SCIENTIST at a Pharmaceutical company. My ability to spot typo's in script as it was running down a screen landed me my a job in PC Support at the company I work at now. (Back then all the configuration files and PC programs were written as batch files (like flat text files) and you could watch them as they executed on the screen.) So I felt that I had done quite a few different things in my life and had a rich background to mine from if I needed some kind of technical pseudo persona, and this would perfectly suit the kind of qualifications and characteristics needed to be a top notch PI.

In retrospect, I think that manager treated me differently after that meeting. I think that is when he became my advocate. Its probably because he realized he couldn't motivate me with threats or fear of losing my job. He even defended me once. He told someone that if they didn't work with me they would end up working without me so the guy better make an effort and work with me. That was nice. And, he asked me if I would consider a management position. Then we moved to Maryland so I had to look for another job. I stayed with the same employer. I have since given up the idea of being a Private Detective. I've decided its too dangerous and I don't want to be in business for myself. I spend most of my energies now checking up on my son, but he's growing up and will be leaving home soon, so who knows.

The history of Crazy Sister....

It was this incident that gave me the idea for the brochure. We found this shop at a marina in Murell's Inlet, SC and my sisters insisted that we take this picture. Apparently they think that I am THE CRAZY SISTER in our family. Its all relative, because I think I am low key and not that over the top. After this event I made up the brochure featured below and sent it out to members of my family. My family and I enjoy staying at B&B's when we travel and my husband and I entertain the idea of setting up a business here, and how we'd rearrange the house. We had some good friends who had a B&B in Maryland. Its fun to imagine anyway.

Someday maybe...