Saturday, December 31, 2011

.......Hell and Damn.........Last Day & Blog of 2011 and Nuthin' To Say

Horrors!  I guess I will have to finish off the year with something old and familiar because I cannot summon the Muse.......lots of stuff going on, some good, some bad, but I can't organize my thoughts at all right now, so bear with me, folks.

I am still shlepping along  (and that's a good thing) so the odds are fair that you will get some decent blogs out of me in the new year. just no goodies to wind up the old one.

I must say I am grateful for having made it through another one and am looking forward to doing it again and wishing you all the same.

Meanwhile, in tribute to my old friend, Dorothy, who taught me most of the dirty words I know, let me just say,
                                             
                                                          "Shit, Piss, Fuck"

                 to all of the Bad Guys and the Bad Things That Happen.




  May the new year give none of us any cause to utter that beloved phrase in anything but triumph.

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Merry Mishugina Holiday Madness

What's that you say?  Holidays?  Christmas?  Hanukah? Faugh.

All I know is, it seems to be the end of  December and I will be damned if I know what happened to most of 2011, and I am invited to a Neighborhood Brunch tomorrow and I just made a batch of my trusty Brownies and, for some mysterious reason,  they failed miserably......didn't rise a smidgeon....only fit for the garbage.......OMG, OMG...... ..so I am falling back on a batch of Hummous and am hoping it will be edible....gasp.  Now I only have to toast up some of my  seasoned Pitas chips and I will be ready, almost.  I hope I will be able to force myself into garments of some acceptable type so I can attend......thank heaven it is being held in the daytime before my bedtime at 5 pm, and am muttering words of gratitude because it is only across the street so I can walk and do not have to endanger the Western World (and my own precious bod) with my driving..............if you think I sound a bit hysterical, well.....you would be right.........anything which involves my being surrounded by more than 3 people and further involves my donning clothing and leaving my front door causes an instant attack of hysteria these days.  Any one of those things is quite enough to cause an attack.   Sigh.  Being a hermit does have a few disadvantages......

Before I become comatose with anxiety, I just want to wish all of you darlings a happy holiday season and reiterate my favorite words of caution:

                                              DON'T FALL DOWN!"

And I will try to do the same.

Bless you all

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Hmmmmm.......I am Perplexed


 I received the following email recently and am not sure how you, my beloved and perceptive readers, will respond to it if I accept the offer.
Are any of you interested in Scrapbooking and its related software?
                                 **********************************
 Hi!

My name is Liz and I work for a company called My Memories. We have an award winning digital scrapbook software that is extremely easy and fun to use. My Memories Suite is rated #1 by Amazon and TopTen Reviews. Using this software, anyone can create digital scrapbooks, photobooks, cards, calendars and gifts without having to buy expensive and complicated software programs.
I just ran into your blog and absolutely love it!  I was wondering if you would like to host a My Memories Suite giveaway on your blog? We would love to give you 2 copies of our software ($80 value) for free! One copy is for your personal use and to review. The other is to give away on your site. Additionally, we will give you a personal $10 off promo code to share with followers and friends. Every time this code is used for our software, we will deposit $20 in your PayPal account! It is really that simple! Everyone could use an extra $100-$500 per month, right?
 
Please visit our site www.mymemories.com and let me know if you are interested. I’d love to chat more about it with you.
                                                  **********************************************************
I guess I should not  be so jaded as to look a gift horse n the mouth, but I also would not want you to consider me disgustingly vulgar and sordidly commercial if I offer a free gift and put an Ad on my pristine and virginal blog.



All opinions will be welcomed with open arms.......that is an odd phrase, isn't it?




By the way, I seem to be recovering from my collapse and near demise after the yard sale.  However, before you give vent to too many "huzzahs" I must warm you that I just bid farewell to the Termite Inspector and may go into a decline at any moment............

Saturday, December 17, 2011

I Have Seen Hell and It's.........aYard Sale

Oy Vey.  Let me repeat that for emphasis........Oy vey, oy vey, Groan. Gasp, Screech, Sob.  These words are issuing forth to you from the tattered fragments of a creature who once , quite recently, was  some kind of functioning human being.  No more.  I fear I will never be the same since enduring and surviving my first and definitely last waking nightmare innocently referred to as a "Yard Sale".

Holy Moly, OMG and, to quote my father a non-Jewish Jew, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph".  The Human race is truly insane.  The idea that people willingly subject themselves to such horror......some even more than once........is totally beyond my comprehension.  And, not only are the presenters of these events totally bonkers, but,  from my observations, so are the attendees.


To properly explain my position I have to go back a few weeks and describe the tortures I, the proposed Seller, have endured.  First, I was led through my house by a hired  "Organizer" whose purpose was to help me select and part with things........something I have never been able to do.  I started collecting my treasures when I was young and was constantly putting things like interesting pebbles in my pockets.   I later graduated to saving my pennies to buy things.....one of the first of which was the most gorgeously realistic toy revolver/cap shooter for which I surrendered my entire savings of 25 cents.  I would still have it to this day were it not for the fact that my Mother was getting worried  about my fondness for deadly weapons and was not particularly thrilled by my ambition to grow up to be a  Cowboy  (or an Indian or possibly a common criminal) and she somehow surreptitiously disposed of my gun and collapsing knife  collection when I turned my addiction to Photos of the Big Bands and Frank Sinatra.  But I digress......

I was able to collect a lot of great art during my years as a starving artist since all of us were poor as churchmice and the only presents we could give each other were pieces of our own creativity.  And, during my 20 years of traveling the world I managed to bring home mementos of my trips......sometimes a thing as simple as a particularly lovely stone from the beach below Taormina, Sicily, and other times a gorgeous majolica platter from Ravello, Italy or salad servers carved from an ox horn in Bali.  Then there were the mementos inherited from my family which alone could fill the Superdome.......and every crumb was precious to me, so imagine my horror when Ms. Organizer began  to seize items from my shelves, stuff them into  boxes and say heartless things like,  "You don't need this."   The anguish was intense or worse.

However, after a while I began to tune into the charm of reducing the clutter so that one could actually SEE the things that remained on my shelves. I managed to join in the gathering process, even though I suspected I might sneak back during the night and rescue a few of the items I still coveted.  After all, they were still in boxes stacked in every room in the house plus the front porch covered in a tarpaulin,,,,,not the pleasantest way to live....but it would just be till Saturday.......right?

Except that, after crawling thru channels between stacks of boxes for days, the weekend arrived with rain forecast so the whole thing had to  be postponed for  week, whereupon there were another 7 days of crawling and another rainy weekend.  And the following week was Thanksgiving, so that weekend (which was sunny) was out.

Each nite during these three weeks was spent not in restful sleep, but in anxiety and worry, plotting how to construct display tables out of the scrap drywall and lumber in my garage, how I was physically going to drag boxes and lumber around when I was incapable of picking up a 20 lb bag of birdseed anymore and, worse, yet, how was I going to price these precious artifacts so people would not have to sell a child or 2 to afford them.  The nites may have  been the worst.

And then came a weekend which was dubious weatherwise, but not actually forecast to rain on Saturday at any rate.  So I called all of the people who had earnestly promised they would gladly help me when the big day finally came and found that, amazingly, things had come up and none of them could help me, gosh darn it and so sorry.  So I had to hire Ms. Organizer for the day and she couldn't get there in time to set up the tables, but she would help unpack the boxes and display the mdse.  Well, to trim a few pages from this endless epic, let me just say that by the time the first customers arrived we were still in the process and my back and assorted joints were threatening mutiny if I didn't lie down at once.  To which I laughed and kept unpacking wildly, managing to display my gorgeous precious objects in such a way as to make them look like the most quintessential JUNK.  Seeing them cast down there thusly, even I didn't want them.

And then there was the horror of the customers............one arrived with a Jewelers' loupe and proceeded to examine the bottoms of everything looking for valuable hallmarks I guess, looking for the Romanoff jewels,  while wearing an expression of total disdain.  He picked up a lovely carved stone box from Alaska and sneered, "how much?"  "Three dollars",  I quavered, whereupon he cast it back down and stomped off
to his car.  Meanwhile a strange waif with hair painted /dyed 3 colors was slouching up the drive peering through puffy half-closed eyes.  I did not want to speculate on what her night had been spent doing.  This one idly picked up 2 or 3 things, replaced them on different tables and slouched off.  At this point I could hardly care, having collapsed into a handy garden chair, carefully guarding my bag of ones, fives and tens, withdrawn from the bank under the impression that someone might offer me more than a quarter for something.  And so it went.  Finally a few people bought something for a dollar or even two  Wow.  I could hardly  cram it into my pocket fast enough in case they changed their mind.

But amazingly enough, something that I had put on display for decoration but never expected to attract any interest were a bunch of my late partner's colorful abstract paintings which I had bought from her son fearing he would simply trash them.   Quite a few of our few attendees were very interested and asked for prices.  Cosmic joke.  Before her death I had bought my favorite from her for  $600.   For once I decided to be smart about this.  Most of the canvases were large, about 40 by 60, some were medium, 40 x45, and a few were smaller.  A  few were modestly framed, the rest just on stretchers.  They would enhance any wall they got near...............I decided I wanted them on someone's walls if I had to give them away so I quoted between $15 and $30 and, wonder of wonders, one lovely lady who was an artist herself bought 3 as gifts for her family members.  Another young couple wistfully singled out 2 or 3 and said they would come back.  Damn......I wish I had given them the paintings right then, but I goofed.  Ah, well, at least 3 of Peggy's lovelies will brighten some rooms somewhere.  (I have hung as many here as I have walls for).

About 3 pm I had had it and so we staggered around and repacked everything into the boxes and returned them to the front porch from which they will go to some charity.  I paid Ms. Organizer for her help and ended up only about $50 in the red.........a cheap lesson at twice the price.  I spent the rest of the day and the subsequent week lying in my reclining chair panting quietly, wiping beads of perspiration from my forehead and being grateful that I was able to escape from hell after only 1 day.......the others on my block did it all again on Sunday!

As I said at the beginning......people are undoubtedly insane..............but not me.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Pollyanna Checks Back In

Amazing things do happen, I guess.

1.  I  do believe I am feeling somewhat better. 

2.  I  find myself disagreeing with my blog-idol, Ms. Moon,  who wrote quite a rant recently against being grateful..........sorry, Mary, old thing, but I cannot help it.   I am so grateful.

I am so damned tired tonite that I cannot blog another note.  I made the mistake of gathering up all the fallen limes from my prodigious tree and decided to turn them into marmalade, forgetting what an energy intensive job it is and how endlessly and disgustingly sticky.  I had thought I cleaned up all the various drips and dribbles, but just now I put my forearm onto the desk and had to spend 5 minutes prying it off so I can see I missed at  least one place if not more.   The only possible thing now is a shower and bed.

Sorry to have to short change you, but at least the sun is peeking out.   With luck, there is always tomorrow.