Hi, friends!
Happy Thursday! It’s close to the weekend!
Do you have anything fun that brings you a sense of nostalgia?
2 Septembers ago I dug up a few clusters of irises from my parents’ house and planted in a flower bed in my yard. These irises were planted by my grandmother in the early 00s originally. Last year they grew decent leaves, but that was it.
This week? Tons of lovely purple bearded iris flowers blooming! It makes me smile!
Tomorrow is our anniversary & that always make me nostalgic for the days of my wife at least going along with my efforts to be romantic. I still try to plan things but they go off the rails more than being successful. She actually has the day off & we are heading for warmest days of the year so maybe I can get her to come in from the garden & go to sushi & drinks. On the other hand, long sunny hot days mean she runs in the morning & burns herself out doing yard projects. We will see, I’m going in hopeful but realistic.
Hope things stay on the rails this time.
Congratulations!
Thanks, appreciate that. The fact that she has put up with me this long should be reason enough for me to be happy & celebrate.
Congrats! I don’t know if your wife (or you) would appreciate this, but on occasions like our anniversary and Valentine’s Day I always get Better Half the most outrageously ridiculous, often religious-themed, cards that I can find. They say things like, “God sent me an angel when He sent you to me” and they only get worse. Sometimes I get them in Spanish and translate them line by line, because he doesn’t read Spanish. They are often gilted and/or glitter-adorned, and if there is a religious figure or two so much the better, but usually cherubs have to suffice. Be warned, though, they’re not cheap, but I haven’t crossed the $10 mark yet.
That’s funny & while I would appreciate that, she wouldn’t see the humor & would toss it as soon as I looked away. It’s pretty much puffy jackets or nursery gift certificates that she likes. Even that, I’d probably get wrong color or style of puffy jacket & must be “on sale”
Happy early anniversary!!
i do not….that im aware of
my brain doesnt really know how to do feelings…. memory is not a forte either
like…most of the time im wondering if i feel a certain way…or i just think i should and act like it
eh….dunno.. i do have a garden full of catnip and pretty much all the local cats tho
so…like…thats something
Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is not an entirely beneficent figure in mythology, and you can be cursed by memory. A common example of this is the mother whose child has died young. It’s where we get the word mnemonics, by the way, which is little tricks you can use to remember a person’s name, like you meet a person named Jack, and he’s big and burly, so you think he looks like a lumberjack, and that’s how you remember his name.
Anyway, I have a very good memory, which is something of a curse, much to the astonishment of my friends, which I reveal when I unleash a “That’s not true. Don’t you remember the time in 1983 when we were up in [wherever] and you told me that X…” “God, Mattie, how can you remember that?”
Therefore, I suffer from nostalgia all the time. I’m currently working on something that reminds me of my mother, in a very incidental way, but the memories are pervasive, and what it reminds me of is something that took place over 30 years ago. It was a very happy occasion, but it’s very distracting, and my mother’s been dead for over 20 years.
My siblings are like this. I had the following conversation just recently:
“Do you remember when you got that game Risk?”
“Oh yeah, Christmas, 1974. I was the one who figured out that if you held those four places where Australia is you could hang on until the bitter end.”
“And you remember how [other sibling] used to always try to conquer Russia, or whatever it was called, and…”
And so on and so forth. It is Better Half’s firm belief that my family is…there’s something not right.
You clearly have not been drinking enough. I used to have an obsessive kind of memory (memorizing every detail and going over them ad nauseum). Then I drank my way through my early twenties and here I am in my late thirties with an average memory system.
That’s the horrible thing, I accumulate memories no matter how much I drink. I remember incidents from high school when I first started underage drinking. I have tons of them. Which parents allowed us to do this or when they were away, my first beer served outside the home (my father was a big beer drinker, as were a couple of my older brothers, so I got a taste of the grain pretty early, much to my abstemious mother’s disgust), the first time I had a gin and orange juice, the first time I had a screwdriver, the first time I had a rum and coke, all of it, and I am not in my late 30s. The first time I passed out from drinking. The first time I ordered a bottle of wine at a restaurant. The first time I had sangria, and the first time I had white sangria, and the first time I made both at home. I could go on and on, and that’s only a small, alcoholic, part of the treasure trove of my memories.
By the way, I have another NOT topic if you can find a slot for me. I thought my Vacations From Hell topic went over pretty well.
Sure! Do you want Sunday night?
I’ll take it. I’ll write it up now.
Thank you!
Avec plaisir, Mademoiselle Braï-Terre!
It is done, up and scheduled. My insomnia/loss of sleep is Deadsplinter’s gain!
Speaking of nostalgia and my excellent memory, I am going to be taking a trip down memory lane. We are finally fed up with our local vet practice, the one within reasonable walking distance, so we are returning to the one we went to downtown, where we went for years, which was within walking distance of where we used to live. Before I called the practice I went on the website to see who was on the staff. One guy is still there, but we had a really bad experience with him, which I remembered. Two vets whom we absolutely loved are still there, and I snagged an appointment with one of them. When I reported my success Better Half asked, “Have we ever met her?” “Oh yes, she was terrific, she’s blonde, she was very young but she must be pushing 40 now, and she’s the one who told us–”
“Fine.” Poor Better Half is used to this.
Will you be carrying the Faithful Hound in a backpack on the metro?
https://people.com/pets/woman-carries-white-samoyed-dog-backpack-new-york-subway/
That’s completely unnecessary. Every so often people bring leashed dogs on the subway and no one bats an eye, except the canine-averse, who move away. I always plop down right next to them, if I can. Unless the person is blind and relying on a seeing eye dog, which you should never acknowledge, because that throws off the dog’s sense of mission, I engage. Inevitably the person claims that the dog is their “service animal,” which may or may not be true, but it’s a handy way to travel around, and the dog can be anything from a tea-cup Pekingese to a 100+-lb. hound, like ours is.
No, the only reason that revisiting our former downtown vets is feasible is that now there is something called Uber Pets. Before, and this was like eight years ago, to get down to that downtown practice cost about $70 each way (with generous tip) and you had to find a car service that would accept a dog. I mean, I get it, people have dog allergies, fine. But Uber Pets will do it for a lot less and I think the drivers kind of specialize in this and enjoy it.
We had to do it once when Faithful Hound had to have a couple of teeth extracted and the idiot local practice fucked up (pardon my Germanic phrasing) and the surgery was done hours after after it was supposed to be and they released the poor beast before he had completely come out of the anesthesia. This is what made us vow to never go back.
We were kind of stuck. We’re within walking distance, and it’s not a short walk, but it’s insurmountable when you have 100+ pounds of canine dead weight. The vet practice was no help, but Better Half stumbled on Uber Pets and that’s how we got The Precious back into his comfy bed here in the Casa Encantada.
Hmmmm. I mostly prefer what’s coming than what was. I’m not especially emotional/dramatic, it takes a lot to get me going or to have fond memories. There are a few sayings/actions from my Father that are inside jokes. He used shake the car keys at us to hurry up when we were taking him to various appointments. My thought of arriving the required 15 minutes early conflicted with wish to be there 30 minutes early. So anytime I see a hand shaking imaginary keys I know to get a move on.
Our current foster dog is having potty training issues, which is making me anti-nostalgic for the days when our kids were not getting the hang of moving out of diapers.
okay…correction…i have found a nostalgia
predictably with me its music
seeing that took me right back to twenty years ago when i bought the album
in horsham, sussex, uk…and then playing it to everyone later that night in the park whilst getting wasted