Y.A.S.N.Y.

The first job I had when I landed in New York, was working for a boutique named YASNY
( You Aint Seen Nothing Yet ) , located on Broadway and close to Lincoln Center.
The people in charge were all dancers from NYCB, and there was an eclectic selection of merchandise spanning from Mexican pottery to simple, reasonably priced dresses, produced by me in the basement.
I was still close enough to my years of schooling to still doing things the old way, which was not always appreciated.
One day a lady was checking out one of my dresses and turned to the sales person and said
But the hem
and pulled nervously at the dress
the hem is done by hand
and put the dress back on the rack.
This was more than she could cope with.

A bargain ?

Alice likes Advil; I am an Aspirin person myself, but I thought that maybe there was something to the Advil I did not know.
I take at most a couple of Aspirins a month unless I have a cold or drink way too much.
So today at Costco, buying food for The Worthless Ones, I saw the pharmacy department and decided to check for Advil.
They had a small box of twenty and an enormous box of generics for almost the same price.
I hailed the lady in the white coat behind the counter and asked
Are they the same ?
yes, she said.
But, I said, one has twenty tablets and the other has one hundred and two, and they cost almost the same. Are they really the same ?
Yes, she said again. Good brand, she said and pointed to the generic brand.
Well now, I thought. That is one big bargain and resolutely put the box of generics in my shopping basket.
When I got home I thought a bit more about it.
If I continue to take tablets at the rate I do now, I will have enough for ten years;
And the expiration date on this box is Jan 2010.
maybe it was not such a big bargain after all.
I have a head ache now,
Quick, the advil.

Pen And Ink

It was pen and ink, I said to my niece.
It was pen and ink I used for that drawing.
Deep silence.
Well, like when in grade school we had learned to write the alphabet with pencils, we progressed to pen and ink.
The pen was a steel nip and the ink was right there on the desk, in an inkwell.
The desk was 0f wood and....
I know, I know , yelled my niece, excitedly. I saw that in a movie about the old times.
So there were my earliest memories of writing and reading, remembered as if they were part of a movie.
And yet. It did happen more than fifty years ago.
And here I am, using the same equipment I used to learn to write "skoenskrift", literally "beautiful writing", only this time I am making silly drawings of cats dancing.
It feels like a big circle, and it does not feel so bad.

Pas De Chat

I was trying to think of something very clever, but failed.
Something funny then ? Same result.

A truism then. Or one of my home made "sayings". So here we go.
All dancers are fools
but all fools
are not dancers.

Housework.

I do certain things well.
Housework is not one of them.
I do like a clean house, but as I get older the futility of constant cleaning gets more and more obvious, and it doesn't help having five undisciplined and unbathable mutts ( four, actually and a Schnauzer ).
And I think of my mother who, when she finally got rid of her mutts ( we, her children ) would really rather spend time painting her exquisite birds on porcelain plates and reading trashy novels than cleaning house.
I think she was very happy when my dad retired and sold the barber shoppe and suddenly had time to help out with the housework.
And so I look at the dusty/dirty floors, the dust balls in the corners the size of rodents, the windows that could do with a wash, and I say to myself
Self; One of these days we will have to do something about this
and then I scribble some or write some or find a trashy book to read ( or Trollope if all else fails ) and decide that too much housework is not good for the constitution.
Hey, I only have to convince me, and I am easily convinced.
One of these days though, one of these days.

The Iguana

Living in the jungle as I do,you develop certain rules for critters who invade your house.
In my case they are :
Snakes and scorpions, instant death.
Birds and butterflies caught and set free.
Toads and frogs captured and reassigned different living areas ( the jungle )
rodents and geckos and ants, some kind of symbiotic existence.
But iguanas
it never was a problem till to-day when some scared, confused and not so small iguana suddenly came barging into my house causing wild havoc with the worthless ones in hot pursuit.
Once it got out of a window and, confronted by the mass of snarling and salivating mutts, decided to enter the house again and had me in a tizzy warding off the worthless ones with a broom whilst trying to make the iguana make a run for the open door.
It chose to attack the broom.
Well now, thought I, this calls for drastic measures, and grabbed the tongs from the kitchen and grabbed the now exhausted iguana with the tongs and carried it, with the mutts attacking me, out to the lower deck, and then with a flick of the arm, sending the culprit out in the jungle, only, it ended up in a tree.
So now guilt came crashing down on me....had I squeezed it too hard with the tongs and crushed its ribs ? had I , because I really, really don't like them, let my dislike get the better of me and deliberately squashed it ?
because there it was, just hanging from a branch of a tree.
I even fought my way through the jungle to the tree to check the creature who was still breathing.
And now, after many checks on the condition of the iguana it has finally moved and is now sitting in the tree, a little more alert.
Which then leaves me with the question
What does one do if an iguana enters your house ?

Blood Type

For so many years I have wondered what my blood type is, and promptly forgotten again for in reality, how often are you asked about your blood type?
But then Flemming told me about a card we old geezers can get here in Mexico to obtain discounts on a number of things, such as bus tickets ( long distance ) .
So now I again had interest in knowing the blood type since this is required information for the card.
And I made a search on the web for places where one would get this info and in the middle of the quest a thought came to me.
My discharge papers.
Surely they would have that information and I found my dog tag ( I save everything ) and yes, there it was.
I am A pos.
Now I know, and all the time the information was right there, only I did not know where to look.

Words.

Too many words, I thought. Time for some picture or pictures. But what of ? I wondered.
Pets.
That always works well. A picture of some cute and cuddly pet. But that kind of excludes the Worthless Ones, who are neither cute nor cuddly.
Babies then.
Doing cute and babyish things. Nah. Not really.
A view then, a view like the one I tried to capture of the sun when it, because of some atmospheric trick, appeared as a big, bright red balloon, only the camera did not see it as I did. So no spectacular blood red sun picture.
And the photo someone forwarded me of a poor, unfortunate female with saggy teats and dyed red hair, standing on the street in bright blue knickers, knee socks, angel wings and not much else, would just turn everybody off.
So what ?
Well, it seems I managed to write a post without a picture.
Maybe next time.