Monkling’s Blog

When Steve went back to D.C. on Friday, he was able to stuff all his things into his car. Theresa, on the other hand, will require two cars. I’m still not sure we can fit everything:

 

This isn’t even all her stuff. There’s a huge suitcase, an even bigger bin, a refrigerator and a printer.

I have no idea why she has so much more stuff than Stephen. Oh, wait. Yes I do. Steve doesn’t need 329 pairs of shoes or 24 month’s worth of clothes.

One of the things Steve had to bring back was a giant crucifix. It was maybe about 2 feet high. (It’s not his. He is just the guardian of it for this year.) That thing was the dirtiest thing I had ever seen. The wood was dusty. Jesus was so tarnished, he was practically black. Before he left, I decided there was no way he was returning with that thing looking so filthy.

Now since we only had an hour and it was pouring out which meant I wasn’t going out to the store, I needed to find out how to clean silver. When I Googled this, I came up with a cleaning solution - toothpaste. So there I was cleaning Jesus with toothpaste. It didn’t work quite as good as silver cleaner but it did the job pretty well. Jesus was shiny and minty fresh. Then I polished the wood. Strange thing - when Steve got down to D.C. he didn’t tell me how all the boys were so impressed with how clean the crucifix was.

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Tonight Theresa came with us to the nursing home so the 3 of us are crowded around the bed when she notices a few odd looking devices on the night table. One looks like a jump rope. It was a rope with blue foam handles. Now since my mother in-law can’t even get out of bed on her own, I seriously doubt that they have her jumping rope as part of her physical therapy. We did have a camera but MIL was sleeping at that point and we didn’t want to disturb her.

Next Theresa picked up one of those little grabber thingies that was tangled in the jump rope and reached across the bed with it to where Frank was standing, trying to pull his shirt opened. “Hey, remember when grandma had one of these?” (meaning my mom)

After playing around with that I picked up what looked like a giant tongue depressor. Well except it wasn’t made of wood. It was metal with a spongy, rubbery red handle. Theresa insisted it was a sword while I disagreed saying it had to be a tongue depressor for an elephant.

Suddenly, in the middle of our goofing around, I see paramedics wheeling a gurney by the room. My mouth dropped open. The thing was cranked up so the woman on it practically touched the ceiling. I pointed and Theresa ran to the door to look. “They nearly took her head of as they passed by the exit sign!” I had no idea they could even crank those things up that high.

And that was our interesting evening at the nursing home.

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How did it get so late so quickly without a new blog post here? Ah, time just flies when you’re busy installing new software. Thanks to Gin, I have a new, free anti-virus up & running. Then there’s the new, also free, firewall software. Does it get more exciting than that?

It is rainy and dreary and not even 60 degrees outside so naturally, rather than doing something like oh, say laundry or cleaning, I’m parked in front of my computer playing with stuff. Nothing amusing is likely to happen until later when Theresa gets home from work or when we’re on our way to the nursing home in the Bronx. I’ll keep a look out for the red smiley car and carry my little camera. I can’t carry the good camera in this rain.

Stay tuned. Hopefully there will be a more interesting follow-up post. Meantime, sorry for boring ya’ll.

EDITING TO ADD:
I left out a couple of useful little tips. One is, there’s this website that lists The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities. This confirmed Gin’s top pick of AVG free edition as best anti virus. I went with the Sunbelt firewall.

Second thing - I’ve always found Norton to be annoying & difficult to remove. They have an Norton Removal tool on their website & it worked great.

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Late yesterday afternoon, we were driving down one of the local streets towards the highway on our way to the Bronx.

“Okay, that was strange,” Frank says.
“What was strange?”
“I just saw an animal cross the street. I didn’t know what it was at first but it must have been a dog.”
“What did you think it was?” I was picturing, if it wasn’t a dog, maybe a possum or raccoon, although they wouldn’t have been out during the day.
“It looked like a small pony.”

Hmmm….. far as I know, the Parkinson’s drugs don’t generally cause hallucinations.

In other news, I am beginning to think that I must carry a camera everywhere I go. The one in the cell phone is way too crappy. When we were at the nursing home last night, I looked out the window to see if it had started raining. Down in the parking lot was a bright red car with a big yellow smiley face on the hood and a few 60s-like colorful flowers plastered in other places. You can’t even tell what it is from the stupid cell phone camera:

Isn’t that the most pathetic photo you’ve ever seen?

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I’m not sure how much news coverage there was outside of NY about the fire yesterday at the Banker’s Trust building (now the Deutsche Bank building). Frank worked in that building for 16 years - from the time I first met him until they moved his department across the street into the World Trade Center (where they remained until there was no WTC).

Watching the news coverage last night was eerie, especially seeing the pieces of burning, falling debris. Frank & I were both way more affected watching this than we’d be if it was any other fire in any other building. I’m not sure if it’s because it was right there at ground zero, if it was dredging up bad memories of 9/11 or if it’s because that particular building was sort of a backdrop on much of our lives together.

After 9/11, that building looked like it was covered in a black shroud:

This is the building Frank & that entire “cannibal” group worked in. This is where I met him so many nights after work (in the pre-child days) and we’d go out to a club or to dinner.

Anyhow, I just felt like rambling about this. I did warn ya’ll that every once in a while, a serious post would slip in.

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So close that my neighbors are sitting on their front porch and my kitchen smells of cigarette smoke. By the way, there are houses that are even closer together (not counting the ones that are actually attached). Can you imagine how unbearably annoying I would be if I lived in an attached house or , even worse, an apartment?

The house where Frank’s mom lives is the house he grew up in. It’s a 2 family house in the Bronx. His grandparents lived downstairs. When he was a boy, if his grandmother thought he was being too noisy, she’d hit the ceiling with a broom handle. If she was as short as my mother in-law, she probably would have needed to stand on a chair to reach the ceiling even with a long handled broom.

On a totally different topic, we finally had the new priest for Mass today. I didn’t even get to whisper any comments about his name being Elvis. He made Elvis cracks himself.

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It’s Superboy! Faster than a speeding paint can, able to leap tall dressers in a single bound…

Yesterday Stephen was leaving to go back to school in D.C. Before he left, he decided he was going to paint his room. At 1 p.m. he says, “I’ll have everything done in a hour.”

“It’s going to take at least 2 or 3 hours.” I told him. Naturally, he didn’t believe me. He went out to the store to buy paint, rollers and other painting equipment.

The time is now 1:30. All week long I have been asking him when he needs to leave. The only response I got was, “I don’t know.” Yesterday the answer was, “I want to leave as early as possible. By the way, after I finish painting and before I leave, I’m going to drive up to the Bronx to see Grandma.”

He did get the room painted in under 3 hours. Steve calls down to me, “Come see how it looks.” I walk into his room. He has the air conditioner on and the windows shut. I nearly pass out from the fumes. Okay, I need to get to the window. Are paint fumes like smoke? Should I crawl on the floor and make my way over to the window? I throw the window open, put on the house fan and pray my son didn’t do any sort of damage to his lungs or nasal passages.

Then Theresa calls up. “When is Stephen leaving?”
“Soon.”
“Don’t let him leave until I get home!” It’s pouring outside. Will she get home in one piece? Will he still be hanging around when she gets here or will his car be packed and he’ll be ready to take off?

Luckily, he was just finishing with the packing when she arrived home. There would have been no living with her if he had been gone. Also, luckily, this meant she could help carry stuff to the car.

As he was leaving he asks how to get to Jersey from the nursing home in the Bronx. No clue. We’ve never done that before. “Don’t worry. I’ll figure it out,” was the response. He called from D.C. this morning so it seems he did figure it out.

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This guy did not want to get into the toaster oven this morning:

And you thought it was only vegetables who were alive!

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Today I am going to take you into the exciting world of lotion making. Yesterday I decided to play chemist. I have all sorts of lab equipment like digital scales that weigh in grams and sophisticated mixing devices like a stick blender. I bet you never used any of this fancy stuff in chemistry class:

Why do I bother making my own lotion when I can just run out to the store and buy it? Because it’s messy and fun. I get to measure and weight and mix. If I don’t have the stick blender in the mixture just right, I get to splash lotion all over my kitchen.

First I have to get all my ingredients together. I have lots of strange stuff in the house like cocoa and almond and shea butter.

There isn’t actually any almonds or cocoa powder in the lotion but I thought they’d look cool in the picture.

After everything is sterilized and carefully weighted, all the liquid oils go into one container and the solids into another:

The solids get nuked until they’re melted. Then they get poured into the liquid oils and the whole things gets beaten until it thickens and turns white. It still amazes me how these things magically turn into lotion.

If I had Theresa here to take the photos while I worked, you could have seen the lotions splattering as I mixed it. Then you could have seen half the lotion end up on the counter because I couldn’t tell how full the bottles were as I filled them.

There’s what I end up with - and it’s just like the real stuff you buy in the stores. Eventually there will be another blog post all about making soap. Maybe I’ll wait for an assistant so I can get better photos.

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On Tues. night when we were at the nursing home, we were discussing an incident that happened over 20 years ago. I have decided it needs to live on and so I am posting the story here.

One evening on a subway car, there was a group of young professionals traveling to dinner. You could tell they were professionals by the way they were dressed - the men all had on suits and ties, the women wore dresses. This was back in the days before the work place dress code was relaxed a bit.

It was clear they were heading to dinner because they were discussing this as they rode the train. It was 1 guy’s 30th birthday and this was the reason for the celebration. After listening to them talk and watching them, however, you may have found them just a little bit odd.

“We’re having you for dinner,” they told Birthday Boy with strange smiles on their faces. Then 1 man took out salt & pepper shakers and began seasoning Birthday Boy. That was followed by another man pulling out an apple and sticking it in Birthday Boy’s mouth.

When they arrived at their subway stop, they walked out of the subway station and then took Birthday Boy’s tie off. They used it to blindfold him as they walked to the restaurant. They lead him into the restaurant and to a table where they then removed the blindfold. A waiter came over to them and one of the men says, “This is the guest of honor.”

The waiter looked him up and down and then nodded. “Yes, he will do nicely.”

Sounds like a scene out of some Amazon jungle rather than a restaurant in The Village, eh? Frank was not the birthday boy but he was one of the co-workers involved in this. I think he may have been the one with the salt shaker.

This took place at a restaurant in The Village that no longer exists called Kitchen Witch. I wonder if word got out about the cannibalism.

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