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surrounded by old pantihose

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Not just pantihose, but regular stockings too — you know, the kind you have to hold up with garters ( the kind attached to girdles; of course, if you’re younger than 40, you probably don’t know).

Every time I open one of her dresser drawers, out pops a baggie full of them. And not the kind of baggie with a zip lock that keeps the items inside from spilling out. Oh no — these baggies are either the cheap kind that you’re supposed to use a twist tie with (but she doesn’t) or they’re bags that something else originally came in. Nude, taupe, tan, beige — an ecru avalanche.
Most of them she never wore, and these days she mostly wears socks. Knee-highs if she decides to force her feet into the more dressy shoes that are the culprits in the irritation of her hammertoe and bunions. No use trying to convince her not to wear those aggravating shoes. THEY ARE HER SHOES! SHE PAID FOR THEM AND SHE WILL WEAR THEM! There’s no point in arguing with her; getting her upset only intensifies her dementia.
In anticipation of the day when I can clean out all of those assorted nylon tubes, I did some Googling to see how I might recyle them.
This site is a hoot to read through. — but I’m looking for some actual practical uses.
The best ones I found are on a site called The Jewish Woman. Among the nylon tips were these, my favorites:

• Hand buff a wood floor to a beautiful shine with a pad made by inserting a folded bath towel into an old nylon stocking. The stocking will get snagged, so gather up plenty of old hose.
• Old nylons make perfect applicators for stains, varnish or polyurethane, especially in places a brush can’t handle.
• Keep an old pair of pantyhose in your trunk to use to tie down the lid of your car trunk if you have something bulky to carry.
• Need an extra-large rubber band? Cut around the elastic top of an old pair of pantyhose. Two of these, crisscrossed, work fine when bundling newspapers or magazines. Use one to hold a bag in place in a garbage container, too.
• Make your own inexpensive softball that won’t hurt kids or furniture: stuff an old sock with pantyhose and sew the top closed. Stuff dolls, pillows and toys, too, for softness and washability.
• To find a contact lens on the floor or carpet, cover your vacuum nozzle carefully with a piece of nylon hose to keep the lens from being drawn in. Gently move the nozzle over the floor.
• If it’s difficult to scrub your back when bathing, center a bar of soap in an old nylon stocking and tie knots on both sides of it. Holding one end in each hand, seesaw it across your back.
• Carry some old nylons in your camping kit. In an emergency they can be tied together and used for rope. They also make good bags for children to put their collections in.
• Store plant bulbs in the foot of a nylon stocking and hang them high to dry.
• When you’ve gathered pods from your garden for seeds, pull a nylon stocking over them and hang to dry. When dry, shake, and the seeds will fall to the toe of the stocking. Cut off, knot and store.
• If your skin is sensitive to a wool sweater, line the sleeves by tacking in the legs from old nylons.
• Old nylons make good ties for tomatoes and other plants because they’re strong, yet won’t damage vulnerable stalks.
• Strain lumpy paint through an old nylon stocking. Some interior painters strain all paint this way.


For alternative uses for all kinds of used objects — i.e. dryer sheets, emory boards, coat hangers, candle stubs, etc. etc. — check out Mrs. Fixit’s.
Someday, when I have time to spare, I’ll have to gather up all of my used “stuff” and put it all to good re-use. Right now, time to myself is more valuable to me than anything I can think of.
The trick will be how to extricate myself from all of those old pantihose.

more neocon flim-flam

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From FactCheck.org:

Bush supporters falsely quote Lincoln as advocating arresting, exiling or hanging members of Congress who damage military morale in wartime.
Summary
Supporters of President Bush and the war in Iraq often quote Abraham Lincoln as saying members of Congress who act to damage military morale in wartime “are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.”
Republican candidate Diana Irey used the “quote” recently in her campaign against Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, and it has appeared thousands of times on the Internet, in newspaper articles and letters to the editor, and in Republican speeches.
But Lincoln never said that. The conservative author who touched off the misquotation frenzy, J. Michael Waller, concedes that the words are his, not Lincoln’s. Waller says he never meant to put quote marks around them, and blames an editor for the mistake and the failure to correct it. We also note other serious historical errors in the Waller article containing the bogus quote.

the not wanting

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There was a time when I wanted. And what I wanted, I worked to get. Or played to get. Whatever it was, the wanting of it fired my spirit, made me make the moves toward the pleasure of getting.

But there is no point in wanting these days because wanting without the freedom to go after what I want hurts more than not wanting anything at all.
And so I don’t want anything at all. Nothing.

words and music

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This is about two movies with words and music — two very different movies, yet I have to admit that I was enthralled by both..

The first is actually called “Words and Music,” and I tuned into the Turner Classic Movies channel because I thought my mother would like it. Of course, as usual, her attention span ended in a half-hour, and I was the one who became thoroughly engrossed in the words and music of this 1948 musical.
A fictionalized look at the lives of the famous songwriting team, Rodgers and Hart, it’s a film filled with famous Hollywood names, many of them playing themselves: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Mel Torme, Perry Como, Lena Horne, June Allyson….. Gene Kelly dancing “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue!” [ DROOL!] Mickey Rooney plays Lorenzo Hart, giving lots of (I’m sure fictionalized but neverthless fascinating) insights into how the lyrics for some of his most famous songs might have originated.
The other movie, filled with a totally different genre of words and music is “The Lost City,” beautifully (I think) directed by and starring Andy Garcia. This movie is a love song to the city and the country of his heart and soul — Havana, Cuba. The cruelties of Batista, Castro, and Che Guevera rip into the tapestry of 1950s Cuba, a land richly textured by the music, dancing, and culture of its diverse people. One of the comments about this movie is that it offers A Dialog that’s been lacking for 50 years. While the “dialog” to which this comment refers is about the politics of that time and place, the writing itself is also full of compelling dialog.
Words and music. Love those movies.

Harper’s Tipsy Tuesday

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To hell with Hezbollah and its daily headlining. Sometimes it’s important in keeping one’s spirits up to be reminded about life’s more fun-damental absurdities.. The following are excerpted from Harper’s Weekly Review:

Colombia began exporting its big-butt queen ants (Hormiga culona), which taste like juicy popcorn when toasted.
Venezuelans were spending their oil money on Scotch whiskey, [The New York Times] and American guitars were dominating Japan. [MSN]
In Thailand, a preoperative transsexual named John M. Karr claimed to have been present for JonBenet Ramsey’s 1996 death, which he called “an accident.” [The New York Times]
Benedict XVI complained that being pope is “really tiring” and emphasized that “seeing the funny side of life” is crucial to his ministry. [Yahoo! News]
It was reported that U.S. military recruiting violations rose in 2005, as did the number of troops discharged for homosexuality.[Washington Post]
Houston’s rising crime rate was blamed on refugees from New Orleans, which has been gripped by a baby boom.[The New York Times][Breitbart.com]
Officials in Canton, Ohio, decided that a 13 percent pregnancy rate among its high schools’ females justified moving beyond an abstinence-only approach to sex education, [LA Times][Local6.com] and a secretly pregnant 21-year-old in Florida went into labor, sneaked out of her parents’ house, crashed her car into a canal, then delivered standing up in the wreckage. She named the baby Myracle.[Palm Beach Post]
Doctors in India speculated that the birth of a one-eyed girl might be attributable to her mother’s exposure to Cyclopamine, a cancer drug derived from wild corn lily that causes cyclopia in sheep.[Wired News]
South Korean DNA tests on tissues obtained during a 2003 hysterectomy indicated that a Frenchwoman was the mother of two rotting infant corpses found in a freezer at her home in Seoul, but she and her husband denied any relationship to the dead babies.[Digital Chosunilbo]
Sir Mick Jagger lost his voice, [The Daily Mail] a Chicago ice-cream-truck driver was shot dead behind the wheel,[Local6.com] and a tree in Texas was mysteriously spouting water from its bark.


And, on the home front here in the mountains, at various times during the day, I found that mom had dressed herself in two pairs of slacks, three blouses, and two different shoes. She never sits down for more than 15 minutes. She walks. And walks. And rearranges dresser drawers and closets. Her language center seems to be affected most of all; she thinks she’s using the correct word for what she wants, but, for example, when she wanted a “kleenex today”, she asked for a “cushion.” It’s getting more and more frustrating for both of us.
I feel the need for a respite coming on.

those small miracles

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skink2.jpg
 It’s those small miracles that keep me going.
The one enchantingly irridescent baby skink who lives somewhere near our cement steps and who somehow survived the snake who prowled the area not too long ago.
The new green growth at the tip of the one piece I broke off and stuck in dirt from the 35-year old cactus (inherited from a former lover who was moving) that I had carted along on my last four moves and finally chucked into the woods because I was sure it was dead.
The avocado plant I grew from a pit whose tips I had pinched back and thought I killed that is now sprouting two new branches.
My garden’s yellow pepper plants nipped early in the bud by deer? squirrels? now two feet tall and budding again.
My spunky chubby cat who comes when I call her, no matter where she is outside, and who continues to try to teach me her meowy language.
Life responds to patience and tenacity. So I order lily bulbs to plant in the fall, seeds to start indoors in winter.
My mother has two days of partial awareness, responding to both a visit to a priest staying briefly in the area who was a close friend of both parents and also to a visit from our cousins from Florida. And then she has two days of rummaging through her closets taking out all of her clothes, forgetting who we are, wandering around her three small rooms looking for ……. something. First she’s cold and puts on layers of blouses. Then she’s hot and tries to take off all of her clothes.
We have eaten the last of the tomatoes that I was able to salvage from the beleaguered plants. They were deliciously satisfying small miracles. I am awaiting the blooming of the resurrected peppers.
I have always been tenacious. Now, I am learning patience. A small miracle.

aging fast

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A.jpgs I was uploading photos from my cousins’ visit, I took a good look at my own image and realized just how many more lines and wrinkles I’ve developed in the past year, how much older I look, how much more tired — how fat my upper arms have gotten.
So I took a look at how I’ve changed over the past half-dozen years. I am quickly developing the face of an old lady, and I don’t like it one bit. Feh on caregiving!!
six years.jpg

George Soros calls me friend

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W.jpgell, me and the millions of others who got his email asking me to share his message with my colleagues. Since it’s a message the point of which I share, I will share it. Here:

“Wall Street Journal
”A Self-Defeating War”
By George Soros
By George Soros — The war on terror is a false metaphor that has led to counterproductive and self-defeating policies. Five years after 9/11, a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts — Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia — a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world. Yet al Qaeda has not been subdued; a plot that could have claimed more victims than 9/11 has just been foiled by the vigilance of British intelligence.
Unfortunately, the “war on terror” metaphor was uncritically accepted by the American public as the obvious response to 9/11. It is now widely admitted that the invasion of Iraq was a blunder. But the war on terror remains the frame into which American policy has to fit. Most Democratic politicians subscribe to it for fear of being tagged as weak on defense.
What makes the war on terror self-defeating?
• First, war by its very nature creates innocent victims. A war waged against terrorists is even more likely to claim innocent victims because terrorists tend to keep their whereabouts hidden. The deaths, injuries and humiliation of civilians generate rage and resentment among their families and communities that in turn serves to build support for terrorists.
• Second, terrorism is an abstraction. It lumps together all political movements that use terrorist tactics. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Sunni insurrection and the Mahdi army in Iraq are very different forces, but President Bush’s global war on terror prevents us from differentiating between them and dealing with them accordingly. It inhibits much-needed negotiations with Iran and Syria because they are states that support terrorist groups.
• Third, the war on terror emphasizes military action while most territorial conflicts require political solutions. And, as the British have shown, al Qaeda is best dealt with by good intelligence. The war on terror increases the terrorist threat and makes the task of the intelligence agencies more difficult. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large; we need to focus on finding them, and preventing attacks like the one foiled in England.
• Fourth, the war on terror drives a wedge between “us” and “them.” We are innocent victims. They are perpetrators. But we fail to notice that we also become perpetrators in the process; the rest of the world, however, does notice. That is how such a wide gap has arisen between America and much of the world.
Taken together, these four factors ensure that the war on terror cannot be won. An endless war waged against an unseen enemy is doing great damage to our power and prestige abroad and to our open society at home. It has led to a dangerous extension of executive powers; it has tarnished our adherence to universal human rights; it has inhibited the critical process that is at the heart of an open society; and it has cost a lot of money. Most importantly, it has diverted attention from other urgent tasks that require American leadership, such as finishing the job we so correctly began in Afghanistan, addressing the looming global energy crisis, and dealing with nuclear proliferation.
With American influence at low ebb, the world is in danger of sliding into a vicious circle of escalating violence. We can escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false metaphor. If we persevere on the wrong course, the situation will continue to deteriorate. It is not our will that is being tested, but our understanding of reality. It is painful to admit that our current predicaments are brought about by our own misconceptions. However, not admitting it is bound to prove even more painful in the long run. The strength of an open society lies in its ability to recognize and correct its mistakes. This is the test that confronts us.
Mr. Soros, a financier, is author of “The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror” (Public Affairs, 2006.