too many mistakes

I should know better....I do know better but somehow I forgot.
There I was at the supermarket which was remarkably empty, when at the vegetable department a loud, female voice burst into my consciousness....
Saa skal vi osse ha kartofler.....said the voice. In Danish...It translates to something like...then we also need potatoes....
I should have grabbed my cart and walked the other way. I did not. Mistake number one.
I got my stuff and was about to leave when the Loud Lady accidentally bumped into me.
I should have mumbled something in English and fled but, mistake number two, I answered her apology in Danish.
Little Christmas lights of joy appeared in her eyes and she immediately started to converse in the Mother tongue.
I should have pretended that I was deaf or simple minded or only knew a few phrases of Danish but I answered her back. In Danish. Mistake number three.
After a painful and too, too long conversation with her and her hubby she delivered the final insult to my dignity. I had told them that I lived in Mismaloya, in a house, in the woods and with a bunch of dogs.
OH !  said the Loud Lady and leaned close to me with a smirk and said....And I bet you have a little Mexican wife...
I should have walked away when I first heard the voice ask for potatoes.  Now I did. Politely.
I got my cart going and rushed to the check-out casting glances over my shoulder to be sure that I was not followed by the Loud Lady and her husband.
I do know that one never speaks to anybody at the supermarket. I do know that. I forgot and I paid the price.

Eggs

Now ! I thought.  Now is the  time to run down the hill to the local tienda for some eggs.
The mutts, miraculously were all inside the house, resting, so I did not have to do my song-and-dance number to collect them from their street hideouts.
And off I went, down the hill and to the short-cut that now has a been closed with several strands of barbed wire. Whether this is to hold we who live up on the hill inside, or they who live in the shanty outside I am not too sure about, but there it is. Three strands of vicious looking barbed wire that by now has been bent to accommodate easy trespass, well, maybe not so easy, for when I made my way through the opening I heard a distinct....rrrrrip.
Oh shit, I thought. Here goes the shorts and I haven't even been to the store yet.
I checked as best I could and found no visible damage.
I heard the rip; I know I heard the rip. It was loud and it was real, but what if not my shorts ?
My undies.
I had torn my undies.
Nobody would know but it was kind of unsettling to have my boxers split. I blame it--if there is  blame to apportion--on all my vigorous hand washing of my undies. Ah well. One down and a few more to go.
Maybe it is time to start to look for fabric for some new ones. Never a dull moment.

A brilliant thought

On my way to place some still damp undies on the table outside my bedroom to dry, I had a brilliant thought.
Somewhere on the way back from that task, I couldn't remember what the thought was.
All my contortions trying to remember were in vain;
all I remember was that I had a brilliant thought.....
or maybe not.

Now what?

I had this urge to make stuffed bears. Maybe some deep desire for a substitute for the bear that my mother made for me when I was but a wee child, a bear that  she made from leftover brown velveteen and from a pattern provided by some weekly magazine. The best bear in the whole world, shabby and misshapen over the years and button eyes missing and replaced but my bear.
And so I tried to recapture this childhood marvel and finally, eight tries later and six survivors, I said....
stop.
No more bears.
Whatever am I going to do with these critters ? I am not that fond of them, and most particularly not that many of them.
What to do ?
Something will happen; I will have some brilliant idea, but till then, I have six stuffed bears standing on my dining table.
How crazy is that ?

of yellow pads

OK, I thought
enough of this shilly-shally
get with it
and so I picked up my ( last ) yellow pad and sat down at the table and wrote in big, bold letters on top of a new page
TO DO
and sat and looked at it for a while.
Somehow getting to this point seemed such an accomplishment
and exhausting too
so I put the pad away and told myself that I would start the list tomorrow
for sure certain
tomorrow

Doing Dishes

In a mail from a friend he said :

Three things I hate, wash dishes, iron, and fold sheets. When Chauffer gets here, I hope she doesn't see the weeks worth of dirty dishes. I want to say the dw doesn't work and new one is in the middle of the floor, after two trips from GE.
Harold  plumber and Lilia housekeeper and Carlos pool boy is coming Monday

.And I got my dander up. It is so male--I have known very few females friends who have openly admitted to hating doing dishes--and I find it totally unacceptable.

I live in a country where it is celebrated to be male, where mothers form their male off springs to be just like their fathers, which in many cases is a big, bad mistake.
Jeff, the writer of the email, is not Mexican.  What he and I have in common is that we both have lost partners. He is recently widowed from Sally, his wife of many, many years and mother to his two daughters.
When they lived in a condo where there was regular maid service, they decided they wanted  their very own, daily maid. And she is still working for Jeff, and she is doing what females in Mexico do, making life of the male easy.

I don't think I envy him the maid--I would hate to have somebody invade my territory--but what I envy, if anything, is the money to pay for  "Harold The Plumber " and "Lilia The Housekeeper" and " Carlos The Pool Boy"  and the ubiquitous "Chauffer"????  who is coming to visit one imagines.

Folding sheets and ironing are not tasks that I enjoy either, and few people are aware of what lurks in the depths of my linen closet.....but dishes ? Undone dishes ?
The kitchen is open to all and sundry.
 Not doing the dishes is slobbery and slothfulness is what that is. But having a lot of money to pay somebody else to do it changes all that, and one can make a coy remark in a mail about how one hates to do dishes.

And I get to write a post about it.

NÅ

When I wrote to Agnete, my friend of so many years, that I had been exposed to Danish and that I had discovered that there are two words that are used incessantly in my mothertongue..NEJ and NÅ...she informed me that there is a song in Danish, a cabaret song if you will, using the latter word in all its multiple meanings and thanks to modern technology, I found it on Youtube and listened to it and loved all over again.
The artist, a Miss Liva Weel, born in 1897 and making her debut at 18, is a treasure. By the time she hit fame but not necessarily fortune, she was a stout woman with a wonderful sensibility and unlimited capacity for making a song a special event. She died a pauper in a hospital and reading that I could not help but think of singers of today. Few have the talent she had but many, too many, have endless millions and will surely never be left to die in a public hospital.....talent lacking females like Britney Spears come to mind..but then it isn't the thing to make a song mean something anymore.
Oh gosh     I am such a dinosaur...

pizza

I am not sure what made me think of pizza.  Pizza is not a food I spend a lot of time thinking about, in fact, I think I have had pizza about five times in my life. As far as I am concerned eating pizza, like washing the car, is something other people do. Not I.
And yet...in Seattle, in my little house in Seattle, I decided to paint the floor of the kitchen.using a  special paint, a tough and slow drying paint.
And so Chuck and I painted away and when the floor was finished and the kitchen out of bounds with the paint drying, and feeling a bit peckish, pizza was the solution .
I had noticed a pizza sign in the neighborhood and went there for the reward of many hours of painting and stooping. I ordered the thing, I waited, I got the box and I went home only to find out that the shop I had been to was one where they sold pizzas for you to bake at your convenience. In your very own oven. Only my oven was in the kitchen with the wet and newly painted floor. No entry. Total disaster. By making use of a window and kitchen counter I managed to get the thing in the microwave oven and baked. Sort of. And all the time I kept thinking that regular folks, folks who eat pizza all the time, would never have made that stupid mistake buying a raw pizza.
Would I change from being me and knowing nothing about this food to a connoisseur of pizzas ?
in a word.....NO.  I am perfectly fine not knowing much about pizza. I have enough useless information in my head; more I don't need. Leave pizza to the pizza lovers.

How to explain this ?
The neighbor thought he was doing me a favor when he brought his handyman to meet me and talk about a job I needed done.
A small job, but important to me.
We agreed for the handyman to come the following Saturday.   He never came.
Yesterday when I saw my neighbor again he asked about the job and was confused when I told him the handyman never came.
I have lived here for many years and I see things a bit differently than my neighbor from the other side of the river, the rich side, who comes here for only months.
It is quite simple.
The handyman owes my neighbor and paid back by going with him to see me. He then claimed to have tried to contact me with no success and so, obligations fulfilled the handyman can now relax and worry about better and bigger jobs.
I see this clearly but how to explain it to the friendly neighbor ?   Not easy.
And it still leaves me trying to find a person to do the job.
Ah well....the leak is not going anywhere.