Monkling’s Blog

What’s really good about the Internet is it brings people together. What’s really bad about the Internet is it brings people together. Before this whole online stuff, I lived in my little world where the only people I knew were from work or the neighborhood, from Church or school. Period. I’d watch stuff on the news and sure, that disaster happening way across the country was terrible but it didn’t really touch me in my little bubble. Not on a personal level.

Then I found this online community of writers 15 years ago and suddenly I knew people all over the country. In March, 2007 I started a blog and that expanded the number of people I knew even further. I’ve come to care about these people I’ve met and that’s all fine and good.

The trouble with caring, though, especially when these people are scattered all over the US, is I’m finding that when things happen in other states, it suddenly matters a lot more. An earthquake in northern CA, a wildfire in southern CA, a tornado in KY, a hurricane in FL, a bridge collapsing in St. Paul - I can’t sit here saying, “Oh, how awful!” shoot off a prayer and then carry on with business as usual.

So I’m finding myself paying much closer attention to Gustav. This time around, it’s personal. I know y’all are praying that New Orleans won’t get hit too badly. Keep up those prayers. I want to see Katie back home. That girl’s been through enough awful things in her 25 years to last her a lifetime already. She’s a newlywed. She deserves a break - time to spend with her new husband, just enjoying married life.

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Lighthouses! Today Frank & I decided to go exploring. There is supposed to be a lighthouse off of the north shore of Long Island, just north of an area called Sands Point. This lighthouse is called Execution Rocks Lighthouse.

I Googled in vain. There were no directions of how to find this lighthouse. There were no maps. Nothing. The only thing I could find was something that said this lighthouse is best viewed by boat. Not having a boat, we decided the heck with that. We know where Sands Point is. Let’s drive up there and find that lighthouse!

Off we went. Sands Point is a community just north of another area called Port Washington, which is where my parents almost moved to in 1976 but then ended up someplace else on Long Island. I was never happy about that because Port Washington is by the water & I love water, but that’s another tale for another day.

Where was I? Oh, yeah! So I have this little map and sure enough, it does show a little lighthouse somewhere out in the water just north of Sands Point. There is just 1 road that goes all the way to the end of Sands Point. The trouble is, there is nowhere to pull over and get out of the car. There are mansions up there. Apparently the rich people do not want trash like us walking around their neighborhood.

We looped around and then decided to just park over in the Sands Point Preserve. In addition to the big mansion out there, there are nature trails that lead down to the beach. Maybe we could see the lighthouse from there. So off we hiked. Do you see any lighthouse anywhere in sight?

How about in this direction?


No lighthouses anywhere. When we got back to the car, I realized that the reason we couldn’t see anything is because the view from the beach out there faces east, not north. There is no way to view anything north unless you trespass. We decided that wouldn’t be a good idea because, as we were heading back south from the tip of Sands Point, we saw police cars racing up there. 4 of them. We figured someone spotted us driving by all those mansions really, really slowly and decided they needed the police to come by and investigate.

Our search for lighthouses, however, is not over yet. I suspect, after Labor Day weekend, after the crowds go home, we may do a bit more exploring, although we may skip areas where the cops like to hang out.

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Or, as Virginia put it, tag - you’re it. You see, a couple of days ago, Nancie gave me this award:

She also had some very cool things to say about me (except I almost missed completely that she was talking about me because she used “Joanne” instead of “Monkling” and gave our other neglected blog a plug (note to Katy & Kim - we need to revive that, eh?)

Now just so you know, I’m not as nice as Nancie so I’m not going to be gushing here about why I picked people. But first let’s get to the rules (I cheated & copied them directly off the official award page):

• Choose 5 bloggers that you feel are “Kick Ass Bloggers”
• Let ‘em know in your post or via email, twitter or blog comments that they’ve received an award
• Share the love and link back to both the person who awarded you and back to www.mammadawg.com
• Hop on back to the Kick Ass Blogger Club HQ to sign Mr. Linky then pass it on!

Alrighty, I’m officially listing my 5 people. They are in alphabetical order. Now you have to know that having a sense of humor is high on my list of important things & all these women have that quality. Not only that but they’re even able to hang on to that sense of humor in the face of… well pretty crappy stuff. Plus they get points for being good wives and mothers. In these days, that doesn’t seem to be such an easy thing to come by - people who have/had good marriages, who have close relationships with their kids.

Jojo
Katie
Katy
Kim
Lanny

Oh, man. I’m not done yet, am I? I still gotta go tell them all that I gave them an award. Ya know, this award stuff is hard work!

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A few minutes ago, I went down into the basement to accomplish 3 tasks: stick some clothes in the washing machine, get a package of batteries and get a package of toilet paper. (Since I like the whole warehouse shopping experience, we have very large packages of stuff like batteries & toilet paper, thus the whole basement thing because I really don’t want an enormous package of toilet paper sitting in the middle of my living room.)

As I went down the stairs, I was mumbling to myself, “Don’t forget the toilet paper and batteries.” The reason for the mumbling was because I knew I would simply put the clothes into the wash and completely forget the other 2 items if I didn’t constantly remind myself of the other things I needed.

It was a success. I actually accomplished all 3 things. As I walked back upstairs with the batteries & toilet paper, after putting the clothes in the washing machine, I then wondered why I needed the batteries. (When I forget why I need toilet paper, it’s time to put me in an institution.)

Here I was with a package of 35 AA batteries and no idea of what I planned on doing with them. I did vaguely remember that there was a reason I needed them but I had no clue what the reason was.

I moved on to other stuff like eating breakfast. Then I walked back into the office to check my email for the 348th time this morning (& considering I don’t really get too much email, you have to wonder why I am obsessed with checking my email.) As I sat down, I saw the webcam & remembered why I needed the batteries.

Steve is leaving Assisi today & heading back to Rome. That means he will have Internet access on a more regular basis, which means I will be nagging him to set up his webcam so we can use it to communicate. Naturally, I need mine plugged in and I needed a flashlight to see in back of my computer so that I wouldn’t end up plugging the webcam into oh, say, the ethernet socket. The batteries in the flashlight needed to be replaced & that is why I needed the batteries.

It only took an hour to remember what it was I was doing. I think it’s time to replace the batteries in my brain, as well.

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This morning St. Janet of ____ had the surgery & everything went okay. I haven’t spoken to her yet since she spent most of the day in recovery.

I know I had other things to post about but I’m too tired. I worked hard today. I walked an entire mile to the dentist to get a crown put in. Fine. It’s only half a mile each way but hey, technically it’s a whole mile round trip. Then there was the grueling trip to the supermarket because a person does have to eat. Next was Laundry Mountain. I haven’t leveled the mountain yet but it is significantly smaller now and this is a good thing because now Frank won’t have to go digging through piles of unfolded clothes at 5 a.m. to find underwear or socks.

After all that activity plus doing actual for-pay website work, I am just too tired to blog tonight. Plus I have to see if there’s any hope in hell the Yankees will not get their asses beaten by Boston.

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Many nights I sit here staring at the screen with no idea what I’m going to blog about. Other times, like tonight, I have way too many things to write about. I’m saving most for another time (including the award I got from Nancie) & will stick to just 1 story that is relevant to something happening tomorrow.

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know my sister, Janet, has had oh, just a few stays in the hospital & some surgery. (If you’re really bored, you can catch up with December of last year.) Let’s just say I lost count of how many & this has been ongoing since she was 12. So pretty much all her life she’s been having so much fun with all this.

Tomorrow is yet another surgery, to reconstruct the right ureter. Ya see, when you have tons of kidney stones forcing their way through that little, itty bitty tube, they can tend to tear the crap out of said tube aka ureter. Thus the surgery.

Now, quite naturally, Janet’s been getting just a bit discouraged with all this. She wants to be healed. In our family, we joke about her and call her St. Janet of ____ (the town she lives in) but the truth is, if anyone is deserving of a miracle, it’s her. That’s not the point of this post, though. Getting back to her being discouraged, she’s been praying to Pope John Paul II, a man who we’re pretty damn sure will be canonized. Actually the entire family is supposed to be praying to him for her. Don’t tell her but sometimes I forget.

A few weeks ago, she was having a little conversation with God saying she needs some sort of sign. He needs to give her some hope that her entire life isn’t going to be like this; that things are going to get better. Now, my sister doesn’t just ask God for a sign. Nope, she then has the nerve to tell Him what the sign should be! Pope John Paul often said, “Be Not Afraid” and that is what Janet said she wanted to see. Not only did she want to see it someplace, she wanted it to smack her in the face.

The following day (or was it later that same day?), she gets a magazine in the mail called Envoy. On the outside, there’s a paper wrapper and the first thing she sees on it is, “Be Not Afraid.” Now how weird is that? But it gets better. She opens it to the front cover and they have a list of some of the feature articles that are inside so again she sees, “Be Not Afraid” and underneath that is another line, “This means you.” Oh, and wait. It gets even better. The article is by a priest friend of hers. She had no idea it was going to be in there, much less what the title of the article would be.

In yet another odd coincidence, she also decided to pray to Our Lady of Czestochowa because Pope John Paul had a particular devotion to her. Guess when her feast day is? Yep, tomorrow, the day Janet’s having surgery.

If any of you pray, Janet could use a few prayers. For those of you that are Catholic, well you know exactly who to ask for favors now - Pope John Paul & Our Lady of Czestochowa. By the way, my sister is a damn showoff. She knows how to pronounce that.

For those of you who are not Catholic and find all the devotions to saints & the Blessed Mother as strange, let me leave you with this analogy. We don’t worship saints & the Blessed Mother. It’s more like - say I worked in Madison Square Garden and I had access to all the big name stars who perform there and you wanted an autograph. Now wouldn’t you ask me to get one for you because you know I’m right there?

Back tomorrow with:
1. A Janet surgery report
2. The blog award I got
3. How I got my job as a parkie

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Do you remember watching Batman back in the…. I guess the 60s? Or 70s? Anyhow, the one where Robin says stuff like, “Holy macaroni, Batman!” And why did the bad guys always trap Batman & Robin with those weird contraptions where they always had time to escape? If the bad guys were that bad, would they really have given them all that time? But that’s not really my point. My mind tends to wander. Oh, y’all noticed that already?

Back to my point. So when they jumped into their Batmobile, they came out of the batcave and there was that road barrier that automatically went down. We needed a car like that, that could make those road block thingies go down. Well. plus it would be really cool to drive a car that could go that fast.

Tonight, after the nursing home visit and after dinner, Frank & I decided to drive down to the beach and walk along the boardwalk. It was starting to get dark but we’ve been there in the dark before. There are lights on the boardwalk. So off we go, with our grand plan. We arrive at Jone’s Beach. The entrances to the parking lots are all blocked off. Now I know there are people in there. Why did they close the parking lot? Should we go in the exit? Nah, we’re too old to go breaking the law.

I realized that, those times when were were there late, we had arrived while it was still light. I don’t think we ever actually arrived after dark. But I was still annoyed that the parkies closed off the park. Don’t they realize I was a parkie once & that I have certain rights??

Ah, well, it was a nice drive anyway. We did get to spend time together and we did get to smell that ocean air.

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It is migration time; that time of the year when all the college students load up boxes, bags & suitcases, cram them into their cars and drive off to school. I’m guessing the average family with college age kids probably own SUVs or some sort of large vehicle and do not need to drive 2 cars packed full of everything a 20 year old kid owns.

Fine. Even if we had a larger vehicle, we still would have driven 2 cars over to college because we did need to go help her carry everything she owns up FOUR flights of stairs.

On the second trip up those stairs, I decided I must be a genius. There were millions of other kids and parents going up and down those stairs, lugging TVs, refrigerators, and assorted huge, heavy items. Upon reaching the 4th floor, everyone then had to put down whatever they were carrying because the door to the stairwell was closed. Who was it who decided that was insane, scrounged around for a piece of cardboard and propped the door open? Yeah, that would be me. (Where did I put my gold medal?)

Every muscle in my body now aches because I am horribly out of shape. I think I will have to act like I’m 85 and go to bed early. Maybe I should consider exercising so something like this won’t tire me out so much? Nah! That would be madness!

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You know that button that’s on your alarm clock? The one RightNextTo the button that shuts off the alarm? Well I have a suggestion for the inventors of alarm clocks. You need to move those damn buttons further apart! Yeah, I was up until 1 a.m. last night and sure I could use a good 8 hours of sleep for a change but I really didn’t want to get up at 9 a.m. this morning. I had stuff to do. Lots of stuff.

Because you, dear Mr. Inventor Person, didn’t think that oh, maybe we shouldn’t put those buttons so close together, I hit the wrong one. When that alarm went off at 7, I really did not want to turn it off. I just wanted another 15 minutes. That’s all. But because you screwed up, I ended up sleeping way longer than I wanted.

Personally I think the inventor responsible for this obvious flaw is the one who needs to come to my house and catch up with my laundry, help Theresa pack because she moves back to her dorm tomorrow, clean my floors and while he’s at it, heck, get up into that attic and start clearing out 23 year’s worth of accumulated junk. After all, it’s not my fault I lost an hour and a half today.

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Here it is, 11:30 p.m. & I hear the loud engine of the car that belongs to the kid next door. Now that’s nothing unusual. Actually it’s kind of early for him. Usually I hear his engine revving loudly, along with the radio blasting rap music closer to 1 a.m. Aside from the unusually early hour to be hearing the revving, the sound seems to be coming from the backyard. I guess it’s that time again, where we park our cars in the backyard. Too bad I don’t have one of those fancy spy cameras that can take pictures in the dark.

While we are on the subject of odd people (What? You didn’t realize that was the subject today?) who would spend $14 for a ticket to see The Dark Knight in a movie theater in Imax and then talk on their cellphone during the movie? Who the heck does that? And why did that person have to sit next to us?

Yep, not only were we not lucky at the casino. It seems the bad luck followed us into the movies. The good part is that the movie was so loud that it drowned her out. Most of the time. Plus we only paid $8 for our tickets. Oh, did I mention we also got a suite with an ocean view for $8? I guess that’s what happens when it’s crowded in the hotel and they promise you a free room but run out of the cheap ones. And yes, free does mean $8 because they do have to get those taxes on the free room.

In other words, even though we lost, we still won.

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