This New “Click and Collect” Service Means Never Having to Get Dressed!

Ain’t technology grand! A new blog post.

OMG!  I just read about the most fantastic innovation.  A grocery story has implemented a service called “Click and Collect”.  You order your groceries through an app or online, set a time when you will drive to the store where someone will bring the completed order to your car and voila – your grocery shopping is done!  The genius of this service is that you can add little notes to your order indicating your preference for brands and how ripe you want your produce (someone else now has to find those crunchy apples).  Just thinking about this makes me giddy because this service is providing me with another reason for not getting dressed every day. Continue reading “This New “Click and Collect” Service Means Never Having to Get Dressed!”

Expert Advice to My Kids – Thank You Medium!

It’s not easy being a mother. I have two kids (aka Kid 1 and Kid 2)and a husband (aka Loverboy) which when I think of it is kind of like having three kids.

There are so many responsibilities and it can be overwhelming at times, especially when I feel that I have a wealth of expert advice to share with Kid 2 who is still trying to find himself.

The problem is that sometimes he isn’t always open to listening and I become one of those “whomp, whomp” voices in his head.

It is at times like these that I have to pull out the “big guns” (figuratively not literally — I am anti-violence all the way) and I have discovered some really “big guns” on Medium.

I am not exactly sure how I stumbled upon the Medium site but finding this great wealth of information has been like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

On a daily basis there are some excellent articles posted that I personally think sound just like me but are actually written by cool twenty/thirty-somethings (who obviously listened to their mothers). It is like these bloggers have read my mind and written down my wisdom in an entertaining, logical and non-judgmental way.

I find the articles I like and that speak to me as a mother, and I share them with Kid 2 via text message, Twitter or private message on Facebook.

I have stopped sharing publicly on his Facebook timeline because he thought it was a bit lame. He also told me it was ruining his sex life and God forbid I get blamed for that, too!

The great miracle of the internet allows me to press “send” instead of calling Kid 2 and sharing my advice orally (aka nagging). Plus he never answers his phone so this is a much better and satisfactory solution.

He gets the information I am certain he needs to help him make those important life decisions and I get the satisfaction of still being able to say mother knows best without actually saying mother knows best. It is the perfect solution!

Here are some of the articles I have shared over the last few weeks and you have to admit from their titles that they are pure gold!

You’re More Powerful Than You Think by The Mission

This is What Stops People From Having the Life They Want by Nicholas Cole

4 Things You Should Do Before It’s Too Late by Nicholas Cole

Don’t Live for the Moment, Live for the Legacy by Brianna Wiest

This is the Process You Go Through When You Decide to Change Yourself by Nicholas Cole

40 Ways to Live a Full Life (And Leave Nothing on the Table) by Age 30 by Ryan Holiday

19 Things You Should Know About Life Before You Turn 29 by Nicholas Cole

Stop Thinking, Start Doing by Ayodeji Awosika

5 Things I Wish I Knew in My Twenties by Scott Tongas

Now my husband, Loverboy, doesn’t really believe that Kid 2 actually reads the articles that I send them but I continue to have hope.

I know that hope is not a strategy, but at the end of the day it makes me feel a whole lot better and helps me sleep at night. I hope that the wisdom Kid 2 gleans from the articles helps him sleep better at night, too.

I am so appreciative of the wealth of information that Medium shares and as a mother, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing my thoughts that others have had the good sense to write down.

Together we are force to be reckoned with!

I Will Only Eat a Few – The Lies I Tell Myself

Oops, I did it again!

Just when I think I’ve learned my lesson, history repeats itself.

I went to the grocery store on an empty stomach. I know this is not a good thing to do because I’ve done it before and the final bill is never pretty.

I was starving and the Christmas candy stocked sky-high in the aisles beckoned and cajoled me. I picked up some of my favorite candy, supposedly to put away for Christmas. At least that was what my brain convinced me was going to happen as I went through the check-out.

When I got to the car, however, my brain did an abrupt reversal and told me to dig in!

What a traitor!

It is Hallowe’en all over again! You would think I would be able to exercise some willpower after that recent fiasco.

As per every year, I bought enough candy for about a hundred little ghosts and goblins.

Loverboy shook his head when I put the candy out and inquired why I bought so much. He pointed out that we usually only get ten little ghosts and goblins.

Since I couldn’t think of a really good reason that he would actually believe, I passed him a couple of bars and they kept him busy, and quiet, for awhile.

That night ten little ghosts and goblins knocked on the door and I was left with a full bowl of treats. (Did I mention that I only buy the treats I like?)

Back in the day, when there were ninety plus treats left over, I ate the remainder with nary a thought to my waistline. I indulged without guilt, or worry about not fitting into my jeans.

I would chow down on the leftovers, in a couple of days they would be gone and nothing about my shape would change.

I was a “treat-metabolizing” machine!

My how times have changed.

This year, I was left with a smorgasbord of my favorite treats and I began my yearly indulgence fest, scarfing them down like there was no tomorrow.

I grabbed a few at a time (they are really really small) and I ate them for breakfast dessert, lunch dessert, dinner dessert and snack dessert.

It was a chocolatey, peanutty, scrumptious, delightful feast!

Unfortunately, those little bite-sized bits caused an immediate weight gain of ten pounds on my hips, my thighs, my belly, and my double chin.

I also got a really bad stomach ache.

It is unbelievable how packages of candy that small can wreak so much havoc. Okay, I admit I did eat a lot of them but this was the first time candy actually made me feel sick!

Now here I am, salivating over my favorite Christmas chocolates and candies that I know I am not supposed to eat until Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, it is more than a month away and I realize that I have zero willpower!

I’ve already opened the Ganong Chicken Bones, those delectable, pink, cinnamon-candy-coated, dark-chocolate-in-the-middle bonbons that can only be purchased around the Christmas holidays. I’ve only eaten two or three but they are calling my name, very loudly I might add!

A box of dark chocolate-covered cherries sits patiently waiting for me to rip open and devour.

I am beside myself!

So I do the only prudent thing a person in my situation can do. I throw the candy in the garbage.

I have double bagged it in ziplock bags in case I change my mind and need to retrieve it but so far, I am okay. I don’t think I will have a do a dumpster dive at this point.

I am also setting a goal for myself and they say that if you want your goals to stick, you need to write them down and then tell someone.

My Goal: I will not purchase any more Christmas candy until just before Christmas.

There, you are my witnesses! I know you will do everything in your power to help me through what I know will be a difficult time.

You probably wondering why didn’t include something about not eating the Christmas candy that I do buy.

That might be taking things a bit too far.

Baby steps, people, baby steps!

I Don’t Do Bright and Early Anymore

I never needed an alarm clock to wake up; I was always told the early bird gets the worm so it was bright and early for me, every day.

It didn’t matter what leisure activities I did at night, (which in my youth consisted of partying til all hours or more recently doing a Netflix binge) what time I went to bed or where I slept.

My internal alarm clock woke me up at 5:00 am, that still dark time when the world is quiet and Loverboy is snoring happily beside me.

Unfortunately, as soon as my eyes popped open I was awake and it didn’t matter if I slept eight hours or three hours.

Some nights I tossed and turned so much, I am surprised Loverboy didn’t give me the heave ho and send me on my way to a spare bedroom.

He can sleep through pretty much anything; that is a real gift!

Now many “experts” say that getting up early is one of the most important habits to form if you want to be successful in life. And although I did enjoy a modicum of success, it was sometimes hard to find the pleasure in it because I was soooo tired!

Things have changed, however.

It happened slowly at first – early bird hours, crack of dawn sort of thing – then gradually I started to notice that the clock beside my bed read 7:00 a.m., then 7:30 a.m., then 8:00 a.m. until now I am regularly waking up at 8:30 a.m.

The more surprising thing is that if I do wake up at night, often due to an occasional hot flash or perhaps a stomach ache from eating too much candy (you can read about that here — I Will Only Eat a Few — One of the Little Lies I Tell Myself) I am able to get right back to sleep.

No more tossing and turning!

Well you are probably wondering what my secret is and how I accomplished this feat. I have one word for you —

RETIREMENT

It is the best thing to happen to me!

My life has changed for the better. No longer am I a slave to the 9–5 or in my last role, 5 am to midnight or beyond.

Without work issues rolling around in my head every night, I now get the sleep I need to function and do the things I enjoy.

I am exercising regularly, reading voraciously, writing every day and exploring areas that I really couldn’t even think about because I was so tired and stressed out from working.

There are just not enough hours in the day to do all things you want to do when you actually have the energy to do them.

And so I am refuting the expert’s advice that getting up early is the best way to start your day.

I don’t do bright and early anymore, and I am doing just fine, thank you very much!

Thank You Richard Gere – A Story of Enduring Friendship

The year was 1983, the summer after we graduated from university.

We were grown-up, (or so we thought), joining the workforce and assuming the responsibilities that come with that.

The times we spent together, joined at the hip, laughing and dancing the night away, sharing secrets and crying on each other’s shoulders were now few and far between.

We lived in different locations and we were making new lives for ourselves as we settled into adulthood.

A conversation about how we were moving on in our lives led to the idea of a gathering centered around the films of an actor we thought was one of the sexiest and most compelling of our time.

And so The Richard Gere Film Festival was born.

On a hot summer’s day a group of childhood friends gathered at my parent’s home for the event. We ate, we drank, we watched two Richard Gere movies, (American Gigolo and An Officer and A Gentleman). We laughed, we danced and we sang.

We didn’t know we were making memories, we just knew we were having fun.

Then life happened. We went our separate ways, established our careers, got married, had children, and made new friends in the communities where we lived.

We kept in touch sporadically and then more often through the miracle of Facebook.

That was where someone posted the pictures of that summer at our Richard Gere Film Festival. An idea took shape — what if?

And so the 2nd Annual Richard Gere Film Festival Reunion was born.

Thirty three years after our first gathering, we met and we ate, we drank, we laughed, we danced and we sang.

We planned on watching some of Richard Gere’s newest films but we never actually got around to it because there was just too much to say, too many stories to share in the precious time that we had.

The years fell away that night and we had so much fun. But we also realized, with the wisdom that comes with growing older, that we made new memories to hold us until we can gather together again. And we will!

Thank you Richard Gere.

Questions From My Ten Year Old Self – With (Probably) No Easy Answers

I was ten years old the first time a man exposed himself to me.

Grudgingly delivering my sick brother’s newspapers (back in the days when it was supposedly safe for kids to do such a thing), I noticed the same car pass me multiple times. I figured it was somebody who was lost.

As I was making my way down a quiet side street, the car pulled up to the curb. The window was down and the driver leaned over and spoke to me, asking me directions to a local skating arena. His voice was very low and I had to move closer to the car to hear what he said.

That was when I saw IT.

My first thought was

“Why does that guy have a carrot in his hand?”

I was ten, remember.

My next thought was

“Oh. My. God. That is not a carrot!”

I froze for a moment, speechless, and then raised my hand pointing in the general direction of the river and said,

“That way.”

The man laughed and drove off. I was stunned!

I continued delivering the papers, my shock turning first to nervous laughter and then suddenly fear.

What if he came back?

I made the decision to get home quickly and, with the mostly empty newspaper sack flapping behind me, I ran home to tell my mother.

The police were called, a man was apprehended (he had done this a few times that day and there were several witnesses), I identified him through a two-way mirror at the police station (he was fully dressed), and that was the end of that little drama.

But it wasn’t really the end.

I still feel the shock, disgust and fear that my ten-year-old-self experienced that day long ago, when I reminded on a daily basis that this happens to woman and girls (and men and boys), every single day, often by men they know, love and/or work with.

The perpetrators are not always strangers on quiet streets or so-called perverts in back alleys that we were warned about when we were children.

Some are men of power, privilege and fame who use their position to do unthinkable things to people they know.

And they use their power to keep their dirty deeds secret for a long time, allowing them to feel that they are untouchable.

I have to ask the question —

“Why?”

I am sure there are no easy answers, but my ten-year-old-self still wants to know.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year – Christmas Movie Season

It is the most wonderful time of the year and to celebrate I have a new Christmas pastime.

I have spent the last three weeks, settled in front of the television for far too many hours to even count, watching sappy Christmas movies.

Labeled as the “Biggest Gift” on the W Network, these movies feature a pretty heroine, a handsome hero, lots of Christmas decorations, some snow, virgin egg nog and a problem of some kind to be solved.

I have fallen for these movies hook, line and sinker.

Each evening, I head to my “Woman Cave” where I can watch the movies in peace, away from Loverboy’s critique about the acting, the storylines and the music.

His television viewing includes every sport known to man, mixed in with CNN coverage of Donald Trump and some conspiracy theory documentaries on the History Channel. All of his viewing takes place while listening to hours worth of singing by the Kingston Trio through earphones connected to his computer.

You can see why I have a “Woman Cave”!

I have even found some great sappy Christmas movies on Netflix and have them queued up for when I have watched all the movies on the W Network and need some new material.

Now you might think that this is all a little mindless and I will admit that it probably is.

I have it bad, but not as bad as the fifty three people who have watched Netflix’s The Christmas Prince every day for the last eighteen days!

Yup, that little news tidbit blew up the internet yesterday.

I am sure that many readers of that story pictured one of those viewers as some pathetic fifty-something woman, ensconced in her “Woman Cave” munching on a tray full of M and M Peanuts.

I swear that I have only watched The Christmas Prince once!

I do have a theory on who those fifty three viewers are, though.

They are kids! Duh!

I remember renting movies for Kid 1 and Kid 2 back in the day before Netflix and they would watch them over and over, ad nauseam, and lots of times, I was happy to let them. It gave me a bit of a break to do the things I loved like housework, laundry, yardwork…okay, maybe I read a book or two.

And so, I know there are parents out there who are happy to press replay on The Christmas Prince because of the stress they are under — the stress brought about by that other Christmas staple, Elf on a Shelf.

They need the time provided by plunking their kids down in front of these movies to come up with all those great ideas I keep seeing posted on Instagram and Facebook.

These movies are a dream for these overburdened and stressed out Elf on a Shelfers because there is no violence, no sex and no swearing.

You can barely hire a babysitter these days with those qualifications!

With thirteen days left until Christmas, I have a lot of movie-viewing to look forward to. I have been making a list of upcoming Christmas movies and checking it twice to make sure I have dates and times correct. And so if you need me, you know where to find me-

I will be in my “Woman Cave” eating M and M Peanuts and watching sappy Christmas movies. It is the most wonderful time of the year!

Shoes Glorious Shoes!

Buying shoes is a personal hobby of mine.  To say I love shoes would be an understatement; I absolutely adore shoes and although I am sure there are other less materialistic things that give me great pleasure, I can’t think of them right now.  Actually, the whole footwear spectrum makes my heart sing.  I am not sure when the whole infatuation-with-footwear thing began, but it has taken me down a road that even Imelda Marcos didn’t travel.  Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I have purchased a lot of footwear over the last few years and I am sure that habit will continue, as much as my retirement cheques will allow anyway.

I love going into a shoe store at the beginning of each season to see what is on display.  I mark those seasonal changes by purchasing footwear that matches the weather: summer is a time for strappy sandals, slip-on sandals, and open-toe pumps, fall means pulling out the flats and the pumps of many colors that can coordinate with whatever outfit I am wearing, winter means pulling out the boots – snow boots, boots for slush, low boots, high boots – you name it, I probably own them in a cornucopia of colors, materials and heel heights.   Thank goodness we get a great variation in winter weather so that I can purchase all the different kinds of specialty footwear required.

Now Loverboy has a real difficulty with the amount of shoes and boots I own.  He can’t understand why I need more than one or two pairs of shoes.  He usually buys two pairs of shoes at a time and then promptly forgetting that he bought two pairs,  wears one pair exclusively until it is worn out.  Despairing that he might have to go shoe shopping, he rifles around the closet, roughly throwing my precious shoes aside by the way, until he finds the other pair he purchased but never wore.  He dusts them off, tries them on to make sure they are comfortable and then gleefully goes back to the Sports Network.  Crisis averted; he does not have to go shopping for a few more years!  If there is something Loverboy hates worse than the large number of shoes that I own, it is going shopping for anything that can’t be purchased at Shoppers Drug Mart or McDonalds!

The only real problem I have with my shoes is how to store them properly.  If I were wealthy and could afford it, I would have a  room dedicated to my shoes.  I  have seen pictures of “shoe closets” in magazines (some are bigger than my own bedroom!) and I will admit I have drooled and fantasized about giving my shoes a fantastic room of their own.  I know they would really appreciate it, too.  Unfortunately, living in house that is almost one hundred years old means that I have many other “useful” things that I have to spend my money on like new sewer pipes, extra insulation, an upgraded electrical system, and the list goes on and on and on.  So a shoe closet, although a very practical idea in my mind, will have to wait until the I win the lotto.  I am keeping my fingers crossed on that one because I just won one hundred and forty four dollars on a Rotary ticket I bought.  If that is not a harbinger of an impending lotto win, I don’t know what is.  Come on Atlantic Lotto, my shoes are depending on you!

I love shoe shopping so much that I have even directed those who know and love me that upon my death they are to bury me at DSW (Designer Shoe Warehouse for those not up on the footwear acronyms).  Where else can you find every style and color of shoes, boots, sandals, and sneakers under one roof … well, besides my house, that is?  DSW is really a shoe lover’s fantasy and I am a shoe lover so I think this is the perfect place.  I am not sure about the legalities of this idea so I will leave it to those I leave behind to ensure my wishes are honoured.  In the meantime, I will continue to buy the shoes because, after all, I am still alive and kicking!

Mice Beware!

A couple of cats (of the feline variety) have moved into the neighbourhood.  And let me tell you, they certainly don’t seem to know their place.  I have found them passed out on top of the barbecue after an obviously hard night of partying, laying naked on the picnic table sunning themselves and hanging out on the garbage can, cleaning themselves (which seems an unlikely choice considering the venue).  I am not what you would call a cat lover.  It all stems from a horrible book a friend loaned me when I was in university.  It was about feral and bloodthirsty cats who spent all of their time searching for and killing the people who had left them to die in the woods.  I had nightmares for years!  I have had time to be up close and personal with a cat when my son John brings his cat and dog home at Christmas.  Now you might think having this time with the grandkitty  would change my mind about cats, and his cat is okay…as long as he has his antipsychotic meds!  When John forgets to give them to him, that cat is the feral cat of my nightmares. So you can see that my cat experiences don’t lead me to think highly of cats.  I could give you a few more examples of my adventures with cats but I don’t want to scare you, too.  So imagine my surprise when I was discussing the new neighbourhood cats with Loverboy and he provided a silver lining about these cats hanging around.  They would look after any mice in the yard.  This quickly changed my perspective because as much as I dislike cats, I hate mice even more!

I am a city girl and so I was well into my forties before I ever saw a real mouse.  Well, that is not really true; I did see two white mice that my brother bought off a classmate when we were younger.  My parents were away and we had some hapless babysitter tending to my siblings and I so this was my brother’s chance to do something radical.  He arrived home with the mice and proudly shared that he had also bought the cage for them.  My sisters and I were not impressed but he assured us that he would keep the mice behind bars at all times.  Unfortunately, the cage was actually for a larger kind of rodent and the next morning, to my brother’s dismay, he found that the mice had made a daring midnight escape.  He barely had time to break the news to our babysitter when bloodcurdling screams rang from my sister’s room.  She was still in bed and the two mice were snuggling in with her, having made their way under the covers.  Well before you could say pest control, my brother was on his way to his classmates house hoping for a complete refund, the two mice in a box under one arm and the cage under the other.  I thought that would be the last time I ever had to look at a mouse.  How could I have been so wrong?

I traveled a lot when I was working and I often packed some breakfast bars to take with me.  This saved me from having to eat at a restaurant, allowing me a little bit of extra time to sleep.  On one trip, I pulled a breakfast bar out of the box I had brought with me and noticed that it was half eaten.  My first thought was that one of my boys had opened it, taken a bite,  and didn’t like it so put it back half eaten.  That is something that my kids would do.  However, when I looked a bit closer, I noticed that not only was the bar half eaten, the paper was also chewed away.  That might be something that some kids would do, but my kids weren’t really in to eating paper and so my mind raced to figure out how this had happened.  And then I realized the cause – there was a mouse in my house!  I called Loverboy and asked him to check the cupboards for any sign that we had mice.  He looked (obviously with his eyes closed) and then informed me that there was nothing there.  I was not convinced, but what could I do?  I was away from home and would only be able to verify upon my return.  Each day, when I checked in, the topic of a possible mouse in the house came up, but Loverboy assured me that he hadn’t seen anything.  Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

I arrived home that Sunday and, of course, the first thing I did was check the cupboards. And guess what I  found?  You got it!  There were plenty of mouse droppings in plain sight.  It is amazing what you can find when you OPEN your eyes!  Loverboy was just getting ready to head out on a work trip of his own but I begged him to go to the hardware store to get me some traps.  I was going to be left to deal with these mice and I was already panicking.  He bought a few of those old fashioned traps for me and then made a hasty exit; I don’t think he likes mice either.  I set up the traps in some of my cupboards and hoped for the best.

The next morning I got out of bed and put on my shoes because I wasn’t going on a mouse hunt in bare feet.  I made my way to the kitchen and very slowly opened the first cupboard; the trap was still intact, just as I had left it.  Phew! With a pounding heart, I moved to the next cupboard and again, opening it very slowly, I took a peek.  To my horror, there was a dead stiff mouse, arms and legs raised like he was doing the sun salutation.  I screamed, slammed the cupboard door and proceeded to run around  the house, hyperventilating.  I tried to calm myself and gain the courage needed to deal with the situation and so when I was finally a bit calmer, I made my way back to cupboard.  Well, guess what?  When I opened the cupboard that dead mouse was still there, splayed on the trap for all to see.  I screamed again, threw the door shut and ran around the house again.  It was not a pretty sight I am sure!

Finally, I realized that I had to do something more than scream hysterically and so I called Loverboy at his hotel and screamed at him about the dead mouse.  He groggily told me to leave the mouse there and he would deal with it when he got home three days later but I watch CSI and I declared that was not a great option! Once he was a bit more awake, he directed me to call our neighbour and ask him for help in getting rid of the mouse.  Now for most things, this would probably be a good suggestion because my neighbour is pretty handy and he is always willing to help out when asked, but he had just returned home after receiving cancer treatments so I didn’t think calling him about a dead mouse was really a good idea.  He had more important things to deal with.  I found my courage with a pair of rubber gloves and two plastic bags, and so I made my way back to the cupboard.  I opened the door, threw one of the plastic bags over the dead mouse in the trap, grabbed the trap now well protected by the bags and the gloves, pulled it out of the cupboard and dumped it into the second bag.  I then threw the whole thing into the outside garbage can.  Wow! I had actually dealt with this on my own and I felt pretty good – grossed out of course, but accomplished.

As I have admitted, I am a city girl and so I didn’t know that old adage that when you find a mouse in your house, there is probably another…or two or three or ten!  And so began my battle royale with these little rodents who had not yet realized that they found refuge in a house of horrors for mice.  The best thing I discovered in my bid to rid my house of mice were sticky traps.  Now for all you animals lovers who want to complain about my mouse catching methods, I have left all those humane traps that you like so much at the hardware store so you go ahead and use them.  I find the sticky traps particularly effective and Loverboy will agree, except when they stick to his shoes.

One mouse, who was particularly wily, decided to taunt us from his new home under the washing machine.  Loverboy had laid one sticky trap in the room, but in my new mice-hunter wisdom, I deemed that one was not enough but four or five would probably do the trick!  By this time, I was buying the biggest sticky traps I could find.  Bigger is better when you are buying traps, in my humble opinion.  These traps were so big, they could actually trap a small dog but since we didn’t have any pets at this time, we felt safe to use them.  Loverboy hesitantly made his way into the room, and while the mouse peeked at us from under the washer I handed him the traps to place strategically around the room.  Just as he was finishing, the mouse decided to make a break for it.  Screaming, I hurried from the room and slammed the door shut, trapping Loverboy in the room with the mouse.  I think Loverboy was screaming, too and when I opened the door, I noticed that he had stepped back on one of the traps and it was now stuck to his shoe.  As I tried to remove the trap, the mouse made another a break for it and so I slammed the door again, safely outside of the mouse zone.  Loverboy was yelling, I was screaming and the mouse was laughing his little rodent head off.  When I opened the door, I saw that Loverboy had grabbed the broom, obviously to hit the mouse with, but now it had another trap stuck to it.  Those traps not only caught a Loverboy, they also caught a broom.  I told you they are the best.  If that mouse had made another break for it, goodness knows what else would have ended up in a trap.  I do know that I would probably have been looking at a d-i-v-o-r-c-e because Loverboy was not impressed.  We finally did catch that mouse and several others who were visiting so all was good in the end.

I have had some success in keeping those mice away from my house or at least trapping them before they wreak havoc.  I have learned that the key is not to let them inside in the first place and I have done my best to locate any holes and fill them with foam or steel wool.  I had hoped after the first event that word would get out to the mice community that our house was not that desirable.  It’s not even that warm! That hasn’t seemed to be the case and so every fall, I usually find a mouse or two in the sticky traps I keep in the basement. With Loverboy’s insights about those cats keeping the mice at bay, however, I think I will finally have a mouse-free house this fall. I now recognize the genius of actually welcoming these cats to our yard.  I might even put out a little treat, just to encourage them to come around more often.  And as long as they keep their focus on killing mice and not killing me, we can all enjoy the yard together.  It’s a win-win!

 

 

 

Getting Through Security With Our Fingers Crossed!

Traveling is a lot of fun; you get to see new places, meet new people, and gain new understandings about how the world works.  Loverboy and I love to travel, and we enjoy pretty much most of the experience.  There is one part of traveling the drives Loverboy a bit crazy and that is the jaunt through airport security.  He rarely makes it through security without some incident and history seems to be on repeat with every trip we take.

Over the years I have adapted my flying routine to better suit what needs to happen when you hit airport security. This includes never wearing pants that require a belt (thank you leggings!), not carrying any fluids at all, even the supposedly acceptable 100 ml size, carrying a really small purse and putting only underwear (ain’t nobody wants to search those), medications and some yummy snacks (have you seen the price of airline snacks?) in my carry-on.  When I get in line, I have everything organized to ensure that I make it through to the other end unscathed.  For some reason, Loverboy treats every foray into a security line like it is a new experience.  It is as if he can’t remember what happened the last time; he has suppressed those memories deep in his subconscious.  And every time, he becomes a marked man with the same scenario played out over and over again.

It begins with the loading of the trays.  Loverboy just dumps everything in to them and hopes for the best.  When it is his time to walk through the metal detector machine, it beeps.  Oops, he forgot to unload the change in his right pocket!  On his second attempt, the machine beeps again.  Oops, he forgot his keys in his left pocket!  Third attempt and he continues to set off the alarm, which now means he has called attention to himself, and the agents gather around to watch another agent run the wand over him.  It beeps loudly when it passes down his left arm.  The agent does a pat down and tries the wand again.  It beeps again as it passes down his left arm.  The agent looks at him puzzled until Loverboy tells him he has titanium elbow.  The agent subtly suggests he tell them that before he goes through the machine the next time, then sends him on his way.

Next, Loverboy goes to pick up his bag but is stopped by another agent.  She asks him if he has an I-Pad in his bag.  He answers in the affirmative (he forgets to take it out even though he has traveled with that I-Pad several times and knows the rules) and the agent, after giving him a withering look, disappears with his bag.  Loverboy is left standing there without any idea where his bag has gone, or if he is going to be arrested.  It is not pretty and by this time he is feeling a little stressed out.  In most situations, you would think his trials and tribulations at security would attract a crowd but everyone else is so busy trying to get through security themselves without attracting the agents’ attention that he is the least of their worries.

Now, although Loverboy is often the purveyor of his own folly, I sometimes wonder if the fact that he is a man causes him more angst.  On our last trip, our hotel prepared each of us a lovely bagged breakfast because we were flying out very early in the morning.  Our breakfasts were identical: yoghurt parfait, a banana, an apple, a breakfast bar and a juice box.  Each of us placed the bags on our trays, not knowing if they would survive the trip through security but, hoping for the best.  Mine went through no problem – nobody blinked an eye.  Loverboy’s was removed from the tray and a security agent went through it and pulled out all the things that couldn’t be saved, namely the yoghurt parfait and the juice box.  When I showed her mine, which was exactly the same, and said it had passed muster, she replied that his didn’t and he couldn’t take it.  Huh?!? I thought she would call security over to grab mine back but she just shook her head and walked away.  Some things you just don’t pursue!

Even with all of his issues with security, Loverboy still likes to travel.  I have been trying to think of ways to help Loverboy avoid these security stresses in the future and I have a few ideas for him including carrying a purse, wearing leggings, and … Okay, those suggestions aren’t going to work.   I guess, he is just going to have to figure it out on his own because he really doesn’t like me reminding him about what to do when we are standing in line.  They say failure leads to success so it has to come at some point.  Fingers crossed!