What's New? (And what's not, too.)

"What's new? How is the world treating you?"
I took a little break in the blogging since early (very early) Friday morning and now I'm back, just as brain dead though I think as I was before.
I got my bread all baked up Friday - and happy to note every last loaf came out fine and dandy too! Mandy got it out to church early Saturday morning for the bake sale and I managed to get up and out of the house - up to the bake sale by 11:30 in the morning too! The kids were pretty busy with the car wash, baked goods lined up across three long tables and doing a good bit of business with that. According the the stepgranddaughter, they took in over $400 for their combined efforts of the day.
Saturday afternoon, Miss Maya and I went up to the local nursery to get flowers for the graves. She actually behaved fairly well for me - enough so that I decided to stop and treat her to lunch out with Grammy.
Saturday evening though Mandy was a little bit tight-jawed at her spouse, at the step-granddaughter over something too. She had to go over to Walmart to pick up a prescription for her spouse (which is what had irritated her in the first place).
Why did that upset her? Because as she explained it to me, she has to keep track on any meds she has to take, when they need refilled, takes care of the other menial details here as well - like insurances, car registrations, driver's license renewals, expirations on some licenses the spouse has and when he has to renew them, etc., etc., and he can't tell her until the day he runs out of his imitrex - which he HAS to have to live with the migraines. Anyway, I do understand her point of view on this. It does get frustrating when everyone else -who may be perfectly capable of doing a few of these things for HIMSELF expects her to take care of her stuff, the kids stuff, and his stuff too! If she could have gone over to the driver's license center and had a picture taken for him for his license, he would have expected her to do that too. As it was, he forgot completely about doing that. Yeah, I'd be miffed too with a spouse that expected someone to take care of every stinking minor little detail that life brings along! (Actually, I think I was married once to someone very similar to that. P.S. I've only ever been married once - too ornery for anyone else to take that kind of risk with ya know!)
So anyway, after going over to get his prescription taken care of we decided to heck with going home and cooking and ended up going to the truckstop restaurant about 14 miles east of here - where I had slaved for seven years about 18 years ago now! I still pretty much know their menu by heart because, true to form as the truckers used to say about that menu, the only thing that ever changes on it are the prices. Still and all, it is a decent eating place - at least most of the time - and comparatively speaking, is relatively reasonable in price too. I was thinking on the way down there of what I should order - what items they served there that I really do like.
When we got in there as we walked in the door and I saw the sign with the "Special for the Day" posted on it, I had no doubt then what I would order. The special for the day turned out to be one of my most favorite of foods - Stuffed cabbage rolls! Boy, how I love those things! And, because the people who own/run that particular restaurant are of Slovak origin, make really good "stuffed piggies" or "halupki" - which ever nickname you might know them as, I knew that there was no question in my mind what I would order then! I did and relished every last bite of them too!
Sunday - Mandy, the little guy and I managed to get up in time to get to church. Coming out of church though, my neighbor three doors down from me told me something we both thought was incredible. She's president of our high school class and in charge of this upcoming class reunion and I've been trying to take care of doing a couple things here and there to help her out. Well, she told me the strangest thing had happened on Saturday in that she had sent me an e-mail message and it had been returned to her as "undeliverable, due to the recipient's inactivity." Say what? My e-mail account was inactive? When? How did that happen?
I then noticed I had a big drop in activity with my yahoo account for a group I belong to and checked on that. In doing so, I found they were unable to send e-mails from the group through to me because my main e-mail was marked as "inactive." So, I sent an e-mail to my provider inquiring as to how this could possibly have come about. The response I got back from them was a message taken verbatim from their explanation on how a person's e-mail account will be deemed inactive if there as been no actions on it over a 90 DAY period! That's right - a 90 DAY period! Mine has rarely been inactive for longer than oh say, 90 minutes at the most!
Needless to say, I was not a happy camper over this bit of information! I wrote back to them requesting that they please re-read my initial message and the questions I had and not for them to send me the quotes from their regulations area! Tonight, after a few more spells of apparent inactivity, I called my provider and they still were unable to tell me why it had been place on "inactive" status! A big Go Figure there, huh?
Yesterday afternoon though, Mandy and the little ones and I took the flowers we had up to the cemetery where my grandparents and several other relatives are buried and after that, up to the cemetery where my parents are both buried too. Mandy dug up the area around my grandparents' stone and as I was setting flowers out there, I asked her to please go up to my aunt and uncle's gravesite and get the ground around the stone there ready to put flowers on there too. No problem she said after asking me where their gravesite is. I told her too go up a few lots from my grandparents site and if she saw the grave of a cousin of my Mom's and her husband, it was right there, around that area. Off she went and I saw her then working away, digging, preparing the soil and then, setting flowers out.
When I finished and started to walk up to where she had planted the flowers, imagine my surprise when I came upon that aunt and uncles graves and stone and no flowers there.
"Mandy," I called, "I thought you put flowers out on Aunt Ethel and Uncle Butch's grave?" And, she called back to me, "I did!" Well, if she had, damned if I could see any trace of them! So we kind of argued back and forth a bit about this - hey, I could tell she hadn't put them on the gravesite where they should have gone but the question then became, whose grave did she plant the flowers on anyway? As it turned out, she had actually planted them on the graves of three of my Mom's first cousins - luckily for her, huh? But how she got the surnames of Gustafson confused with Skogsberg is one thing I still haven't figured out. They sure don't sound anything the same do they?
Today was pretty much a lazy day here too - although it too had some interesting spots. I've been after my son-in-law for the past couple of weeks now to check down in the basement and also, up in the attic here for a box of old photos that should be here someplace. When the stepgranddaughter floated in late this afternoon, she handed me a packet of photos that she said her dad's sister had found down at the storage place where Mandy and Bill have carted many of the items I had here in the house when he and the stepgranddaughter moved in here.
This storage place and how things got taken there is a bit of a sore spot with me because Mandy and Bill just went through stuff about 3-4 years ago and arbitrarily decided on their own - without questioning me about anything they decided to stick into storage - which items should remain in the house and which needed to be put in storage. Now, if he'd had his way, he would have boxed up all my yarn, fabrics, sewing patterns, craft pattern books, most of my pots and pans and dishes, etc., and slid them all on the pallet for the storage place! I did manage to salvage my yarns, fabrics and sewing patterns anyway because, as I explained to him, there was no way I was going to be able to run down to the storage facility when the whim (or need) hit me to sew or to knit or crochet! Count that as a partial victory for the old pack rat here then!
But, according now to Mandy's sister-in-law, he has stashed so much other stuff in and around the boxes of stuff that are supposed to be mine, that getting to any of my boxes is now apparently next to impossible to achieve! Wonderful! I am highly impressed, I truly am! NOT!
Most of the things my son-in-law does, I don't, as a general rule, have a problem with. But, when he gets on a bit of a cleaning binge, Katie bar the door and pass the ammunition! He goes crazy! And to prove that, let me tell you about how he managed to toss $100 in the garbage a few months back because he wanted to clear off some papers from the wrap-around counter between the kitchen and dining room and didn't bother too look to see what else might have been intermingled in with the papers he was in such a hurry to put in the trash! Yep! There was $100 in cash laying there - which Mandy was supposed to put up in a safe place but somehow she hadn't gotten around to doing that either and he, in his hurry to clean, just snatched up old mail, some newspapers and such - mushed it all together -with the $100 in the middle of all that - and kerplunked it into the trash! Nice work, huh?
Now, you'd think mucking up like that would teach some one a little lesson to "look before you leap" but nope, not so here! Ok, he hasn't trashed any cash lately but sure does have a big penchant for transporting stuff of mine, etc., to the storage bin without asking how frequently I need/use things and it's that attitude that does drive me slightly bonkers at times. I don't need any help in putting things up so I can't find them later - I'm notorious enough on my own for doing things like that - so I really don't need someone else who can be just as addle brained then later on and can't remember where he put things either!!! Let me lose my stuff on my own, will ya please? Eventually, I stumble across what I have put up in some kind of off-the-beaten track hiding place.
And there you go - a recap of my lovely lazy weekend!
Now, to start you off for the coming week, here's the Bushism for today!
Monday, May 28, 2007
"One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected." - Los Angeles, California; September 27, 2000.

Ah yes, how true, DUBYA!

And, since it is getting pretty close now to being Tuesday, May 29, 2007, I figure I may as well go ahead and post the Bushism for that day too - while I'm at it, before I forget. Right? Right!
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
"My job is to, like, think beyond the immediate." - Washington, D.C.; April 21, 2004.

Hmmm. Maybe DUBYA and the son-in-law have something in common here? D'ya think?