As I was driving around doing some quick errands the other day, I realized that I didn’t bring my bottle of water with me in the car, and I was getting thirsty. So I figured I’d stop and pick up some fruit for me and my mother and get something to drink while I was at the market. As I happened by the juice aisle, I noticed a bottle of pomegranate juice — ah, just what I need: something tart, thirst quenching and uniquely healthy. It was expensive, but I bought it anyway. Before I got back in the car, I took a big swig, put the cap back on the bottle, and put the bottle on the floor on the passenger side. Yup. As I turned a corner, the bottle tipped over. That’s OK, I thought, the bottle is capped. Nope. Pomegranate juice all over the mat and seeping underneath. Ever try to rinse out a filthy car mat soaked in sticky juice? It’s a frustratingly impossible job.
Sort of like caregiving. Especially when your phone rings at 1 am and she says she can’t sleep because she can’t find her white beaded purse. You say you’re sleeping and will look for it tomorrow. And then your phone rings again at 2 am. Come over here and sleep here she says. You know she’s afraid someone keeps coming in and taking her stuff. It’s either that or you’re taking it, she figures. There’s perfect denial on her part that it might be that she keeps forgetting where she put things. So you go and sleep in the bed next to hers, even though she keeps rambling on about who knows what until 3 am or until you fall asleep (whichever came first).
Pomegranates are full of seeds and also full of myths and religious connections.
spammers who use their free weblogs to create home bases? I emailed Blogger about the abuse of their service but haven’t heard back. Now that big Google owns what was little Blogger, I guess the personal service that Ev used to provide is not at option.
Bleh. I need a stiff drink. Except it’s still morning.
That’s what pomegranate juice is for.

Several years ago, one of my woman friends and I both read The Artist’s Way, which suggests that you sit down every morning and write, long-hand, for half-an-hour,your Morning Pages. I never was able to do that. But typing is different. I can type in ten minutes what it would take me a half hour to write. (Of course, the linking takes time; but what’s a blog without links?)
So, this morning I sit here in my nighshirt (I don’t like pjs), reflecting.
My mom likes to watch the sunset (some obvious symbolism there, huh?), so after dinner yesterday I took her outside and we sat on a bench near our building that faces west. We sat, quietly, each lost in our own thoughts.
Her feet and legs hurt when she walks. She can’t find shoes that look good (she’s still vain) and are still comfortable. She pretty much wears old shoes of mine that are stretched out and softened by wear.
I have a lot of shoes. That’s the answer to what women want, right?
I also have a drawer full of make-up. And a cabinet full of hair styling products. I’ve got to tackle both in the next few weeks and try to get rid of what I don’t use. The probem is, of course, just like with my clothes, I start figuring that I might wish I had them after I throw them out. Then I remind myself — hey! You’re going to be living in the woods. You won’t even have to bother getting dressed at all if you don’t want to.
I dread moving on to attack my mother’s 89 years of accumulated STUFF — in boxes in the back of the closet, filling dressers and bureaus and table tops. I’m determined to downsize my own belongings so that my daughter never has to go through this kind of purging for me.
But downsizing is really hard to tackle — most of all, of course, if it’s your weight.
Today I’m getting together with my band of women friends for brunch. We all bring something. I’m bringing dessert — a strawberry apple pie.
I like to cook. I just don’t like to clean. Or clean out.
Time to get dressed. And also compose the note that I always have to leave for my mother when I go out: where I am going to be, the phone number there, my own cell phone number, and the time I’ll be back. She seems OK if she has that kind of information handy in writing. Otherwise, she forgets. And then she panics.
It will be easier when we move next door to my brother. I hope.

Maybe a post a day will keep frustration away. It seems to work for Jeneane, who certainly has more do deal with then most of us — recent surgery; a plethora of baby hamsters; a bright, curious, and energetic young daughter; a husband who travels for his music; and, on top of all that, work.
It’s worth a try.
Woke up this morning to a phone call from my mom saying she can’t find her watch, her money, and her curling iron for her hair. I had already put small beepers in her purse, on her keys, and in her wallet. I keep the fourth, and then I can beep my way to their unfamiliar locations. But putting beepers on her curling iron and watch just won’t work. So those are still missing.
I’ll distract her today by taking her out to get a battery for an old watch.
Meanwhile, I wish a had a fairy godmother who’d come in and clean my apartment.
Now, where the hell are my keys? My watch?
No beeps for me — not yet, anyway.

A friend called me yesterday to see if I was OK, since she noticed that I wasn’t blogging. Then Betsy Devine pinged me and that sent me over to Frank Paynter’s evocative Spring post, which made me really yearn for those kinds of connections again. Not just to nature or Nature, but to those feelings of honoring small, everyday details of a life lived with joy.
The real truth is that I have nothing to write about. And forget any joy. My days are filled with helping my mom find the half-dozen things that she misplaces each day and insists that someone came in and stole — with giving myself a headache shouting so that she can actually hear me and repeatintg everything I say at least three times before she actually understands.
So we took a ride today, she and I, to where we will be moving in a few months. These are my views of the area near where we will be living, where the Catskill cliffs rise awesomely in all seasons and against all colors of sky.

The sky today was a definite early Spring blue even though the trees in those mountains have barely begun to bud. By the time we move, they will be lush and green and I will bring in bags of topsoil for an herb garden in spite of the shale and scrub.
Meanwhile, I share here a chuckle I got the last time I checked Ken Camp’s blog. He stole the following from his son, and I’m herewith stealing it from him because it reminds me just how crazy so many other people are and so I feel a little saner.
TOP TEN THINGS AMERICA LEARNED FROM THE SCHIAVO CASE
1) Tom Delay is a qualified neurologist.
2) Two dozen court cases weren’t enough to really figure out what’s going on.
3) Michael Schiavo is after money, which is why he turned down millions of dollars to sign over guardianship.
4) Right to life applies only when it’s politically expedient.
5) Medical diagnoses are best performed by watching highly edited videotape rather than in person by trained physicians.
6) Minimum wage-making nursing assistants are more qualified to diagnose a persistent vegetative state than experienced neurologists.
7) Fifteen years in the same persistent state is not really enough time to make an accurate diagnosis.
8) Marriage is the most sacred of all unions, except when it isn’t.
9) Interfering in a family’s private tragedy is a great reason for President Bush to cut short a vacation, but getting a memo that warns of a terrorist attack isn’t.
10) Right-wing pro-lifers are the most compassionate people on Earth, which is why they are robbing gun stores or offering money online to make sure Michael Schiavo dies.

I wish I could be there, and I would hope that lots of Blog Sisters will spread the word. Anything that bills itself as “Tits, Twats, and the Politics of Blogging” is my kind of meet-up.
Blog Diva Liza Sabater and Nichelle of Nichelle’s Newsletter are doing the cleverly worded organizing.
There definitely are blog sheroes I’d like to meet who just might be there:
Lorraine of Stregonaria (I’m assuming she took her blog name from the Italian word for witch. My kind of woman!) Her latest post points to a NY Times article proving that “Homo Erectus was a Progressive.” Lorraine, who also posts on DailyKos, ends her post with:
Having just argued that compassionate politics do not have to be reliant on notions of God, that we do not have to cede ground to the Right on this, reading this article presents proof that caring for other human beings is a human impulse, a late impulse that contributed to our evolution, the thing that, gasp! makes us human.
So, long, long ago, our ancestors kept a toothless old man alive. For what reasons and at what cost to themselves? At some point, humans developed the notion of a common bond, of an empathy for their fellow travelers.
Do we have any doubt which party can claim that as our lineage?
And then there’s Elayne Riggs. (In the early Blog Sisters days, we had a thing going about Elayne with a “Y” and Elaine with an “I”…. we’re both pretty assertive about our identities.)
I noticed a couple of interesting recent links on Elayne’s blog. One is about the death of Dale Messick, creator of my other favorite comic book when I was a kid (the top one, of course, was Wonder Woman) — Brenda Starr. As the Times reports: Of her heroine’s profession, she once explained, “She was already a reporter when the strip started, but she was sick and tired of covering nothing but ice-cream socials. She wanted a job with action, like the men reporters had.”
Elayne also links to Tilde~‘s Cafe Press She-Blogger site. I just love the image on the shirts, which, of course, can’t be copied so I can’t put it here. But I sure wish I could. I’ll just have to buy one.
While the younger Blog Shero set is planning for its wild night at Madame X’s, I’m gettng ready to take my just-turned-93-year old neighbor grocery shopping tomorrow. Oh, to be young and a sassy Shero once more!!
As Tild~ says on her Cafe Press t-shirts:
SHE-BLOGGER:

She had the experience of an older woman,

the morals of a liberal —

and all of the internet for her wanton playground!
ADDENDUM: Heh. Over at Tild~’s, there a whole bunch of “Sweet, Savage She-Blogger 1940s-style images. Check ’em out!

Yeah, this is about the Pope. The Polish Pope being mourned by people of many religious persuasions, not just Catholic. We share the same heritage, he and I, with Polish blood running strong in our veins. Well, not his, any more, but you know what I mean — that tireless dedication to democracy and equality (except, on his part, where Catholicism was concerned), that hunger for Solidarność (except, on his part, where Catholicism was concerned).
For almost all Poles, Polish history began somewhere in the 9th century when Christianity did its thing with the “Polians”(dwellers of the field).
From here:
Polishness was traditionally identified with Roman Catholicism. Indeed, it was the “baptism of Poland” which put the country on the cultural map of Europe in 966. However, the Polish – Lithuanian Republic was a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational country (Catholicism, Orthodox, Judaism and even Islam). This tolerance attracted religious dissidents from all over Europe. The decline of the Polish Republic and the transformation of a multi-ethnic society into a modern ethnically homogenous nation, plus the struggles for independence with Orthodox Russia and Protestant Prussia, strengthened the stereotype of the Pole – the Catholic. Under the partitions the Catholic Church was a mainstay of the Polish identity.
An acceptance of hierachy is fundamental to Catholicism. There are people, then there are nuns, then there are priests — and then the clergy has its own hierachy, culminating in the Pope. As a red-blooded and full-blooded Pole, dedicated to democracy, equality, diversity — and, as importantly, the importance of dissidence — I could never understand how the Catholicism (as different from the more general concept of “Christianity”) practiced by the Polish Pope jibed with his Polish roots.
Now, I happen to know a lot about Catholicsm, having gone through 13 years of its schooling. I also know a lot about growing up Polish, having been part of a large extended family of first and second generation immigrants. In my early years, I was even bi-lingual.
Polish and Catholic. That’s how I grew up.
My family, of course, was ecstatic when the first non-Italian Pope in some 400 years wound up being Polish.
As a diplomat, as a performer for peace, as a negotiator, Karol Wojtyla … revolutionised the papacy with his formidable energy and intellectual abilities, but his most lasting memorial was achieved in politics – the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe…. He left one of his most momentous acts to the twilight of his papacy – an attempt to purify the soul of the Roman Catholic church with a sweeping apology for sins and errors committed during its 2000 years of existence, implicitly invoking the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust.
However, as the leader of a purportedly “Christ-ian” sect, Pope John Paul II set the causes of gender equality and personal rights back into the last century. Christ, as I learned about him wasn’t at all hierarchical. He left that behind with the Old Testament god.
Because of the Polish Pope’s personal charisma and his success in living up to the legacies of his national heritage, people all over the world stand ready to excuse him for his unfortunate success in further entrenching the reactionary and oppressive hierachy that Catholicsm has always been.
In his usual cut-through-the crap style, Andy Rooney, on tonight’s 60 Minutes pointed out how most people who say they are Catholic don’t really follow the leader of their religious hierarchy. They use birth control, have abortions, get divorced and remarried. They marry individuals of other religions. They do all of the things that Pope John Paul II said they’re not supposed to do.
As for me, the older I get, the more I enjoy being Polish (especially since now there are web sites that deal with Polish paganism — you know, all that Polish history that happened before the 9th century). And the older I get the more I can’t stand the hypocrisies of hierarchies.
May he rest in peace, even though, because of the influence of his narrow religious opinions, many of the rest of us won’t be able to.

Woke up this morning with Perry Como singing this in my head:
Oh it’s a good day, for singing this song
and it’s a good day, for moving along
Yes it’s a good day, how could anything go wrong?
It’s a good day from morning till night
Yes it’s a good day for shining your shoes
and it’s a good day, for loosing the blues
everything to gain and nothing to loose
cause it’s a good day from morning till night (you’re right!)
I said to the sun, good morning sun
Rise and shine today
You know you got to get going if you’re gonna make a showin
And you know you’ll got that right away
Cause it’s a good day, for paying your bills
And it’s a good day, for curing your ills
So take a deep breath throw away all your pills
Cause it’s a good day from morning till night
Just this very day i said to the sun: ‘Good morning sun’
Rise and shine (why don’t you rise and shine)
You know you got to get going if you’re gonna make a showin
And you know you’ve got the right of way
Cause it’s a good day, for paying your bills
And it’s a good day, for curing your ills
So take a deep breath (ahhh) throw away all your pills
Cause it’s a good day from morning till night
say that again
yes it’s a good day from morning till night
that’s what he said
cause it’s a good day from morning till niiiiight!
Of course, the sun is shining and it feels like Spring, so my subconscious must have harkened back to those early 1950s days when life was just a bowl of cherries.
I know the feeling will last only as long as it takes for me to go over and wake up my mother. But it feels good while it lasts.

Non-blogger/friend myrln sent me the above cartoon a while ago. I wrote to the cartoonist to try to get permission to blog it, but I never got a response. Heh.
According to an op ed piece in today’s Times, A Pastime of Grandma and the ‘Golden Girls’ Evolves Into a Hip Hobby
Carol E. Lee, who chronicles the place of knitting in American culture, has discovered:
These days, young women knit during their lunch breaks, on the subway and in cafes. Trendy coffee shops offer knitting classes and sell yarn. Across the country, young women get together to “stitch ‘n’ bitch,” as a best-selling book is aptly titled. Amtrak is offering “Stitch ‘n Ride” cars out of Oakland for people who prefer the click of needles to the buzz of cellphones.
I knitted through my college days, my mothering days, and continue to do it through my aging days. The cartoon pretty much sums it up for me.
Today I went with my friend Joan — an amazing quilter — to a fabric art exhibit. She didn’t submit her work for the exhibit, but she certainly should have.
I spent most of my time looking at the yarn creations. It annoyed me somewhat that there were so many ponchos on display and for sale. I was making and selling them three years ago; unfortunately, my ideas were so ahead of the trend, that I gave up before the big wave hit. Figures.
I don’t participate in any of the knitting blogs. Practically, and spiritually, I don’t subscribe to patterns. I make it all up as I go along.

Over on Metafilter, there’s a flaky conversation about Dyngus Day, which they keep misspelling.
Smigus Dyngus (shming-oos-ding-oos) is an unusual tradition of Easter Monday. This day (Monday after Easter Sunday) is called also in Polish “Wet Monday”, in Polish: “Mokry Poniedzialek” or “Lany Poniedzialek”. Easter Monday is also a holiday in Poland. It was traditionally the day when boys tried to drench girls with squirt guns or buckets of water. “Smigus” comes from the word smigac meaning swish with a cane since men tap the ankles and legs of the girls. “Dyngus” comes probably from German word dingen which means to come to an agreement since the girls needed to give men money to stop being swish and splash. The more a girl is sprayed with water, the higher are her chances to get married. Usually groups of young boys are waiting for accidental passerby near the farmer markets or in the corners of the streets. Older men behave like gentlemen spraying their wives with cologne water rather than with the regular one. The girls got their chances for revenge the following day. They can spray boys with water as much as they wanted on Tuesday.
Dousing may have pagan roots, or it may reflect Christian rebirth and baptism. It may hark back to the baptism of Poland’s Mieszko I and his court on Easter Monday in 966. Whether the tradition is historic or religious in origin, Smigus-Dyngus remains a significant, well-loved Polish tradition.
My childhood Polish community in downstate New York didn’t celebrate Dyngus Day, and my mother says she never heard of it, even though she lived in Poland for eight years during her childhood.
Nevertheless, that it should show up on Metafilter is a hoot.

The following from Yahoo News via Toolz of the New School:
It’s not that Sam Kimery objects to the views expressed on Fox News. The creator of the “Fox Blocker” contends the channel is not news at all. Kimery figures he’s sold about 100 of the little silver bits of metal that screw into the back of most televisions, allowing people to filter Fox News from their sets, since its August debut.
The Tulsa, Okla., resident also has received thousands of e-mails, both angry and complimentary — as well as a few death threats.
“Apparently the making of terroristic threats against those who don’t share your views is a high art form among a certain core audience,” said Kimery, 45.
As John Ennis of Toolz, concludes:
Now if we could just screw that into the back of Bush’s head…