Catch Up Blogger

I'm doing a lot of catching up today - skipped doing any blog reading yesterday completely. All I did with respect to blogging yesterday was make my post and let it go at that. I had lots of other fish to fry.

A former classmate and good friend of mine stopped by yesterday, bringing with her a lot of old photos from her childhood as well as some newer ones too that include her son and grandchildren. Just the exact kind of photos I'd like to be able to acquire from as many from my class as possible to make up a display that - hopefully - will kind of document where we've been, as children, teens, young adults and now, shows us as the wise sage people we have morphed into over the years.

Ok - you through choking now on the "wise sage people" comment? If so, we'll leave that alone and move along to other things.

After she left, I went on a search and destroy mission, trying to locate the many, many OLD photos I know are lurking somewhere in this house. I did find two boxes of photos from the relatively recent past, although I am still in the dark as to where some other more recent (like within the past 20 years) photos may have been stashed. I didn't come across the big box that should have been in the basement - it was the last time I looked at them - which contains the old pics, not already organized and placed in albums from my way, way back in the dark ages past.

And, once I got the two boxes I did find upstairs and went through them, unfortunately I ended up having to pitch a stack of pictures about two inches thick because the box they were in had either been sitting on the floor and got wet, which in turn moistened up this particular group of pics but it seemed more like perhaps something had been spilled on this group of pictures and ruined them. Sadly, the bulk of these pictures were mainly from family reunions and of course, with the losses in our family tree over the past 20 years, having to pitch those photos was like tossing out a whole lot of history and wonderful memories of those who have now gone to the great beyond.

I did however, get a goodly number of pictures to use for my class reunion display. I got them, along with the other photos two other classmates had loaned me all scanned in and saved in a special file just for my class reunion pictures! Ah, the joy of trying to get semi-organized, huh? Any form of organization, when it occurs in my very disorganized mode of living, is a really good thing and should be celebrated - shout it from the highest mountain top if you will, please!

Yesterday was a bit of a wicked day though in other respects. For one thing, I think Maya must have been drinking some special potion or something that gave her ultra energetic powers and she must have shared it with her baby brother too, because a whole lot of the day was spent between trying to scan these photos, trying to keep her out of mischief and the baby happy so he wasn't letting out these ear-piercing yells from his playpen directly behind my desk and chair where the computer sits! Neither of them napped - not even for 10 seconds - yesterday and as such, both were quite wound up - tighter than a drum!

The counselor who works with the granddaughter to help her manage to pass her classes this year - assigned to this counseling routine mainly because the kid had been absent as well as tardy so many times, she was on a form of, I suppose you could call it, probation. The session was not going any place, not making a lick of progress as I could see the kid's eyes were glazing over - indicating she was not absorbing a darned thing. All the counselor was doing was rehashing, over and over and over, how the kid is not really a bad kid, just having a rough spot, yadda yadda and looking for attention from her dad, who is either working at his full time job and then several nights a week, he often works at a part-time job too. And, when he isn't working at the second job, he's busy with other things.

Why is it that kids today seem to think that because a parent is busy, working to make enough money to make ends meet, or doing things around the house or other stuff, that means the parent doesn't care for the kid? Geez Louise! Give the parents a break here will ya?

When I was a child - yes, here we go, waxing on the dark ages and life back then - my life was a bit in the reverse order that my stepgranddaughter's is. She has two younger half-sisters, two younger half-brothers via her Dad and an older half-brother and younger half-brother via her mother. The half-siblings through her Mom live with their mother, the two youngest half-siblings of course, live here and the two in the middle, so to speak, live with their maternal grandmother. There's a 12-year gap between her and Maya and 14 years between her and Kurtis and them being that small, of course, means they don't make for someone enjoyable exactly for her to hang out with. With me, my daughter and son-in-law and the three kids here that makes three generations with some really large "generation gaps" there ya know! And, when I grew up, it was pretty much the same but in reverse as I was an only child, my mom was close to 50 when I hit my teen years (a really 'dumb' time of her life in my opinion back then) and my grandparents were 64 and 70, when I was born. Plus, they had all gone through the "Great Depression" which really had drastic affects on their thoughts, their methods and ways -along with the regular differences all kids and adults have always probably experienced I suppose.

Growing up, I knew automatically not to come and try to demand more clothes, more toys and never thought of wanting "more time" with my Mom or grandparents. Today, I'd give my right eye tooth of course, to have the opportunity to spend that valuable time with them and let them tell me all about their lives as they had lived them! But how many years did it take for me to come to that realization? Way more than I can even begin to think about!

But, I always -or almost always - found something to do to entertain myself when I was a kid. Most of my time was spent either at the neighbors' next-door or the family on the other side of the ones directly next door to me. And most of the "play time" that took place also happened outside at those houses, I might add. Rarely did we kids play indoors unless it was a really yucky rainy day or bitter cold, freezing rain type wintry day. Snowy days didn't keep us inside as we were out on the hill across the road from the houses, sled riding, or building snowmen, snow forts, making angels in the snow! Cold and nasty winter days, rainy days that were the cold type rain that does keep one inside, I usually spent either curled up reading a book or playing with what often was my favorite pasttime as a kid, paper dolls or just "dolls."

This kid does little along those lines. She comes home from school, flops on the couch, ignores the book she may have brought home and the homework assignments, ignores the two little ones most of the time, talks on the phone and now and again, she will read a book - and no, I have no complaint about reading a book, most definitely not! But, when the weather is nice in the spring, summer, fall - gee, take advantage of that and go for a walk, explore; ride a bike or if in a bind, there's always something that a 15-year-old could do to help out around the house or yard too, ya know! Instead, the majority of the time she does nothing productive and when she does speak, it's usually to announce that she is going to do this, that or go here or there - all things you can bet your bottom dollar will cost a few if not several bucks - and the thing that gets me there is that she does not give any consideration AT ALL that people don't all always have a couple bucks to toss out for entertainment type purposes all the time. A question posed as "Could I do this" or "Would it be ok" would be such a breath of fresh air but might send me into having a coronary due to the shock on my system!

I suppose one reason I am such a hard-nose over this attitude harks back to my own upbringing as well as how my kids were raised too. They learned, early -very early on - that Mom had to work two jobs, that money was tight so don't ask for it unless it was absolutely a necessity of life. Don't expect me to hand you things constantly was pretty much the litany when I was a kid and with mine as well. When I was growing up there were a couple things I asked for at Christmas or my birthday (the only times when asking or suggesting something was allowed -lol) that I wanted: 1. a brother or a sister; 2. a tv set; 3. a record player and 4. my driver's license when I turned 16! Obviously, since my Dad was dead, the number one item on my list was defintely out of the question, we did get a tv when I was about 10 or 11, I bought my own record player after I graduated from high school and the driver's license - I got it too, on my own though, after I turned 18 and didn't have to have anyone sign for me to get it!

My kids were allowed to get their driver's license provided they had a job lined up or were already working and had taken steps -on their own - to have transportation available that they found, secured, not that I arranged for them -and they had to be able to pay for their own coverage of a vehicle although I would allow it to be on my policy. If they had no intention of locating a part-time job to pay their gas, their own insurance, there would have been no car, no license - pure and simple.

Well, enough of my lecture, my grumping - time to go since Mandy and the kids are home now and do my patriotic duty and vote! And, if it's election day in your part of the country, here's hoping you did or will do the same too!

And, the Bushism for today - Tuesday, May 15, 2007 is...
"I'm so pleased to be able to say hello to Bill Scranton. He's one of the great Pennsylvania political families." - Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania; September 15, 2003.