And this, I said to the visiting daughter of a friend long since returned to the states due to ill heath, this wall I painted...
not a glimmer of interest in her eyes.
First I, ahem, I painted the leaves and....
still no glimmer of anything.
And then I, I gushed on, then I painted the birds and the flowers and the butterflies,
and looked at her expectantly....
she was thinking hard for something to say and finally said..
It is very lonely up here. There are, like, no stores or anything.
I agreed that there were , like, no stores or anything.
How about a drink, I said, and we had a few glasses of cheap wine, and suddenly I did not mind her lack of enthusiasm for my work.
Wine works wonders all the time.

And so we met for Valentine's day, James, Kathy and I, and at a place we like, a restaurant located at the bottom of some condo-hotel high rise on the way to Mismaloya.
The food was good, the company excellent and the entertainment.....
There was a single guy playing a computerized keyboard and playing a lot of oldies and before we knew what was going on, scads of geezers and geezerettes were on the miniscule dance floor, happily jiving to old Elvis and Beatles tunes.
So they were maybe a tad cautious in their turns, a little slow on the take off, a beat or two behind but, and that is a big but, they were having a wonderful time, and that made it a wonderful time for us-- we who just watched-- too.
Happy Valentine's Day, fellow geezers and geezerettes.

Old dogs, new tricks

I have been making poached eggs for longer than I care to remember, so I thought that I knew all there was to know about the process.
Granted at times the result would be less than stellar, but I always blamed that on old eggs, bad water or whatever excuse I could come up with on a short notice.
So there I was reading a recipe where a poached egg was part of the end result, and the author casually mentioned a way of poaching and all my little and rarely used food antennae went up.
Ohoy, I thought. I shall try this method.
I did. It worked. It worked better that the old method of mine.
This old dog has learned a new trick
and that is a neat trick, indeed.

Gray t-shirts

One of the big decisions in the morning is, which t-shirt to wear or lately, can I get away with yesterday's t-shirt ?
So standing in front of my closet I was pondering these deep questions when I realized that I have nine gray t-shirts in various degrees of decay.
Nine.
Whatever was I thinking ? Did I have a gray period ?
There they are, neatly folded and a testament to some emotion I no longer remember.
Ah well; they too will end up the same as all the other t-shirts...cleaning rags and dusters.
Think of it though...nine gray t-shirts.

I blame it totally on the Worthless Ones. My drinking.
They have times when they bark at things I cannot see, hear or smell and that makes my stomach go into knots and, the best remedy for knots in the stomach is cheap wine, says I.
So I drink, and I blame it on them. The mutts. The unlovable ones.
And they bark daily.
Funny thing that; The Schnauzers never made me drink. In those days I did it because I liked to.
Now I do it to unknot the knots caused by the barking of the miserable creatures I share my house with.
The result is about the same though.

We had planted the Norfolk pine when we moved in to the house, and it had been growing so tall that I got a bit nervous and had it topped.
The vine with the orange flowers decided to use it for support and the result is this.
Mother Nature is truly wondrous.

There had been a reunion of sorts of some of my class mates from college, and they sent me photos of the occasion and it was at first like looking at a party of total strangers.
Later on, when I had studied the photos more carefully, I discerned features that I recognized and little by little the names and faces came together.
It is extraordinary what 45 years can do to a person.
I, of course, have hardly changed....well, maybe a little grayer, maybe a little heavier, maybe a little more wrinkled....Sheesh...who am I kidding.
I am as altered as they are.
It was good to them again though. A bit of my past to hold on to.
A toast to them all.
SKAAL...