IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING

I am not dead. I just have not been able to write, I hope you do not shed many tears.One of these days I will write again.
Till then, I love you all.
Lo

I Have Absolutely No Idea What to Call This....Maybe Status Report.

Oh Fudge!   ........remember when we used to curse like that?  This is too puny for SPF......I jusgt ewant to let you know I am still here but still embroiled in chaos.  I will update this from time to time.  Perhaps July will be better. The Handyman comes to start emptying the dreck from the garagel.  43 years of junk going in.......maybe most of it can go out  tothe dump.  All prayers will be welcome.

Love, Lo

Thought For the Day

Yeh, yeh......I know...... I'm behind in the rent I havent paid my dues and I owe at lest 7,352  blogs.  So sue me.

This is just bit of a cheat.....I do not have the strength or time today 5to write a proper post, bhut5 I am letting you kow that I qam still rattling round here and will 5try to orgaize my mind to communicate shortly.  Menwhile3, I am just pssing along a bit of cheer from Bob Ringwald whose faithful emails....mostly funny.....keep me goint.  This is my favorite.




 
                                      INSIDE

                                       EVERY

                                          OLD                                         

                                       PERSON

                                           IS A

                                        YOUNGER

                                          PERSON

                                     WONDERING

                                        WHAT THE

                                              HELL

                                        HAPPENED              

                                  

Love, Lo


            

                                           
' 

You Asked For It......Lo During the Big War

I am only writing this because at least 2 of you clamored for more about my life as an Air RaidWarden Messenger during the big war.  I am going to have to expand on that subject a bit to give you the full picture of how it was during t6hos days, months and years.

I'lll never forget the day of December 7,, 1941 whebn I came home from a Sunday matinede movie and my Mamma told me,with great concern in her face, that we were at War.  That war affected the world in many ways, but for me, persohnallt ut was a multi-faceted disaster. 
Tenks gott, we did not lose any fmily members but moth of my most beloved cousins were in the armyand one, a medic trapped in the Battle of the Bulge had memories and invisible wounds which took a long time to heal.

A month after Pearly Harbor I found, to my horror, thst we were moving 3000 miles away from family, friends and my beloved Philly to Los 
Angeles California where we Knew no one and had no one except for a single cousin.  It mean being uprooted from my fi4st year of high school with kids I had grown up with to a huge, unfriendly unknown.  If  I had known the word and not b een so shy and inhibited I would surely have uttered my first "SHITPISSFUCK".

However, we will not dwell on ancient horrors......it appear4s that somehow I did survive this death blow and managed to enroll in a new high school (which I hated because everyone was so up[ity and all the girls except me were beautiful.)    Had it not been for a bottomless deep crush I developed on the school's greatest footbaall hero I would never have survived till graduation.

For one thing, early in 1942 when I had scarcely settled into a set at LA High the government decided t6hat all Japanese living in the US were potebntial spies and must be impriioned to protect the U>S from havoc.  No ,matter that the large Japanese population here were mostly at least 2nd generation Americans.....they all had to be banished to internment ccamps.....the one I remember was up north and was called Manzanar.    The sweet little Japanese girl I sat next to on home room could not meet my eyes anymore and within a month they all disappeared.  It felt awful.  

Next allsorts of laws were passed requiring blackout curtains on all windows and any sliver of light earned the trqngressor 30 lashes.  Periodically strange sirens would wail, being tested to warn us against air raids submarine attacks or genberal invasion.  It took  while till they got all that stuff organized and wworking decently.  I do not think the Japanese had yet figured out how to attck us from the vast distance over the Pacific, but undoubtedly they were working on it.

 Meanwhile, I managed to make 2 friends, both of whom had orniginally been from Philadelphia, but socially High School was not a success.  I filled my life with whatever I could gasther.....got a job working after school hand paintintg fancy bottles,the  intended  use of which I still wonder about from time to time.  I had to study hard because the stress rendered me supid and I had a life and death struggle with solid geometry....I don;t know why since I had gotten strasight A's in plane geometry back in Philly.....put it down to more stress.......I lear4rned to bowl and ws the proud achiever of a score of 130 several timnes and in between I   fantasied about and dreamed about Bert Schneider, the football hero who did not know3 I existed, but for whom I would run up and back down  4 flights of stairs between English and History in order to see him pass down the hall opposite me but not even seeing me.

Then one day late in 1941,  my Mamma asked me if I would be interested in becoming an Air Raid Warden Messenger.  One of the tenants in our building hd volunteered to be Warden for our block or section or whatever and .  he needed a Messenger to ptrol with him to run messages back to headquarters in the  event of an event.  I put thoughts of Bert out of my mind anbd said,"Sure".  I seem to recall vguely several meeting in which we were supposed to be instructed in our duties, but I cannot recall a single bit of information which was passed to us at those meetings.  We received armbands identifying us as offical somethings and flashlights, whistles and an amazing looking Gas Mask (p4robqbl6 left over from WW1) all of which get slung over our shouldersw.....there may have also been a helmet of some sort but I would not swear about that.  Then we pr4oceeded to wait for the air raid sirent to summon us to our posts/rounds.  I cannot remember how often the air raid tests were run.  Of course, when the sirenbs went off we did not5 know if it ws merely a test or if Ja[an ws invading Long Beach.  Our ob was to patrol a certain area of the neighborhood and keep our eyes and ears open for any kind of trouble.  After the first few times it was really very boring.  We were si busy keeping our eyes abd ears open and not alling asleep walking that we rarely exchanges an words much less any conversation.  If there was no moon our main preoccupation was in not tripping nd falling down breakibg out flashlight or crushing our gas mask.  When the all clear sounded we went home abd took off our equipment and made sure we put it in a safe place where we would remember it when the sirens wailed again.  This went on perioliclly for the next 3 years and nothing ever happened to cause me to have to run with an mnessages to Headquarters......wherever the hell that was....I do not remember ever bein told where headquartes actually was tho I guess someone knew.

 I remember vividly the night I screwed up my courage and turned to the Warden as we trod the darkness and said timidly, "What are we really supoosed to do if anything really happens?"  He turned to me, looked mesquarely in the eyes and said, "Damned if I know."

Love , Lo

P

And For My Next Number......

This is just  a quick note........several of you showed interest in my brief  career (?) as an Air Raide Warden Messenger back during the Big  War which I entioned ib my lst blog.  Actually, I did write  blog about it a gzillion years ago.....I do not have the energy nor the wit to search back to find it, so I will attempt to recreate it for those of you young whippersnappers who missed alol that fun(?) in my next post. 

Unless something more exciting happens which needs to be reported.........perish forbid!

Love, Lo

Lo's Latest Adventure

So there I was the other night, nestled in my reliner listening to Books on Tape when, suddenly, the whole damned world went away.........the book stopped playing and I was plunged into a darkness blacker than I ever remembered, though perhaps the womb might have been as dark.....I do not really remember that.

Fortunately I knew it was not my failibg visionand had to be an electical failure of cosmic proportions.  The almost funny part was that I got up from my chair intendibg to walk over 4 steps to where I had a flashlight, but once having lost physical contact with the chair I did not know which te hell way was up.  I groped around cautiously for at least 5 minutes abd did bnot encounter anything and it was the weirdest feeling I have had since .......well, never mind.....it was weird and with each effort to find something solid I b ecame more panicky.  Had I suddenly been trabspoted to an unlit closet in the spaceship I am sure is hovering up there somewhere, occasionally shooting strange confusing rays down at me just for laughs?  Still groping and wondering where I was I finally, tenks gott, encountered Glass. A few gropes led me to r4ecognize a sliding glass door at the far end of the dining room and I nearly sobbed in elief.  At least5 I ws still in my own house, though how I had managed to get to that location without tripping over anything or feeling anything solid is still beyond me.  Anyway, I now knew how to feel my way to a flashlight and the world was no longer the depths of a coal mine.

I know they are always telling us to be prepared for emergencies and I have sporadically attempted to do ust that, but after having to dump the tightly covered trash can in my back yard that contained my emergency earthquake supplies because of creepingt mildew and the outdatedness of most of its contents a lot of which was cat food years past its use=by date, I have lost enthusiasm fo such projects.  I did remember that I had a brand new hur4icane lamp in the garage and I actually webnt out and found it, pristine in its box with insgtructions I could not read of course, so Igrabbed a few candles, lit them and stuck them onto a plate, made my way to the bedroom and did what any sensible person would do, I went to bed.

Oooops, not true....I forgot that I had gingerly made my way out the fronbt door clutching my flashlight to see if the rest of the neighborhood was also pitch black and encountered a cr3ew fromn the power company making their way downb the street trying to find the source of the outage.  They asked permission to go into my back yard to examine the powe pole and line nd I gave thenm carte blanch before staggering back in and going to bed.    Contact with a human rather than a creature 3 feet tall with huge eyes did much to reassure me.  Fortunate0ly, my  Braille reader has a battery life of something like 60 hours so I was even able to create a semblance of normality by listening to a Dave Barry book...was I lucky or what?  Thus passed the darkest night since my adventures patrolling the neighborhood as an air raid wardebn messenger during the Big War.  Somehow....that was not nearly as dark......dunno why.  Pauline and I awoke to a sunny day with  appliances either buzzing happily (freezer and frig) and all the others eagerly waiting for me to push their buttons.

The only small disaster centered around the candles which I HAD blown out but which had puddled more wax than one could imagine might be in a little stub of  candle and which had dribbled out of the dish and onto my bedside bookcase, an assortment of old books and, of course, the floor.  I figure I got off easy.  I only had to reset one clock which was plugged in and was about 4 hours behind.

Oy Gevalt. Too muchexcitement.

Love, Lo

PS   I have since learned how to operate the hurrican leamp and have ordered 4 more.  The Boy Scouts had it right....Be Prepared.

aaaarrrrrggggghhhhh !!! Have I Got a Problem???!!!!!

During what I call the Big Blog Disaster one of my beloved readers wrote a comment that  tipped me off to an Ebay offering of the vibrat5ing chair cover that I was lamenting the loss of and was so eagerly seekiung.  When that blog got clobbered by the cyber devils I had to delete it and, of course, lost thecommentts.  Oy.
whicheverr one of you dear souls
Amazingly, in my frantic searches to find a replacement seat cover Ia was led to Amazon and thence to Ebay and managed to buy the  one offered there.  While I `await its arrival I want to thank the dear soul who tried to help me and let you know that you actually succeeded.  A million thanks and please let me know who you are.

Love, Lo