Potpourri

Alane, thanks for your last comment. I don't know that Duane & i can make cognitive changes, but i think you've given us thought for a good discussion. Which we will have sometime when he gets home.

Duane is off the hill. The plan was for me to stay home this week to "pill the cat." Who is doing quite well with those pills. He still struggles some for form sake, but not too much as he knows he'll get a treat as soon as the pill is down. But Duane has been gone longer than we had planned. Sunday he wanted to do something & i suggested a visit with his friend JT who lives a little more than 2 hours away. So Duane went there & took clothes 'cause i didn't want him coming back after dark if the road was icy.

The road wasn't wet/icy, but he doesn't see JT very often & it was late before he even considered coming home & we both agreed it would be better if he just stayed there. So, Monday he called me & said that OC was less than 2 hours from where he was at whereas if he drove the 2+ hours home he'd still have to drive the 2 hours to OC the today. So he went straight to OC & plans to come home tomorrow instead of Thursday.
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I've had the best of both worlds & i cheat at it, some.

I believe i've said before that when i was growing up, especially when i was a teen, i often heard folks say to my mother, "You're not old enough to have a daughter that age!" Frankly, i assumed they were flattering her. Looking back i realize they said it sincerely, breathlessly. My mother had no youth or beauty in my eyes. Which is probably typical of children when they look at their parents. I remember being in about 4th grade & another child telling me how pretty my mother was & i thought the girl crazy. But also my mother wore her hair in a particularly frumpy style (& colored it). More so, however, i knew her actual personality, not just what she wore to impress folks.

I've come to realize that my mother inherited beautiful skin, which i have been fortunate enough to have as well. Even now at 72 she has lovely skin.

Also, by the time i was 13 most people were mistaking me for 18, & at 15 most folks thought i was 25. So i probably did look much older than a daughter could have had since she looked younger. If she looked 30 when i looked 25, i can see why folks were shocked.

Fortunately for me, the trend reversed after i was 25, & at age 28 i was mistaken for 22, & so on. (I've had the best of both worlds.)

Well, not that i've ever been mistaken for 15, even when i was 15. I went in for a physical when i was 16. The doc seemed to be taking an inordinately long time to come in. Finally a nurse came in very flustered & said, "We can't find your chart anywhere! We've looked & looked & looked. The only chart we can find is this one & it says that you are 16 years old!"

I looked her in they eye & said, "I AM 16 years old."

"Oh." She didn't say more but she looked astounded.

I can't help but wonder how old she really thought me to be? Thirty, i imagine.

It had its advantages, of course. At 16 i started to occasionally have a glass of wine when i was out with friends. I'm not a drinker, never have been. Don't care for the taste of it & it often gives me migraines. But, at 16, it made me feel very grown up. I was only carded once. It was after i'd moved (for a short time) to Oregon where the drinking age was 21 & i was a year short of that. When the waitress carded me i looked at her absolutely astonished, but i handed her my drivers license (that said i was almost 20) & she brought me my drink.

My mother used to color her hair & i thought it was awful. I swore i never would do that. I didn't want to do anything that would emulate her. But i found my first white hair (folks always say to me "you mean grey?" but the hair was pure white not grey) at age 24. Also, i'd recently met someone with long dark hair who had let her hair go natural & frankly she looked like a witch to me. I don't know if i was correct in assuming i would look similar with my long red hair, but i didn't want to take the chance. So i began to color it.

That's my confession of cheating. I don't use many chemicals in my life any more, but this is the one i do use. These days it comes from the health food store, & over all i think it is better for me (& my hair feels better & has less of a "chemical smell") than the ones from the drugstore. But it still contains chemicals, none the less.

Part of it is vanity, i know. I don't want to look as old as i really am. I sometimes wonder what it would look like had i not begun to color it. My younger sis has let her hair go natural & she is very beautiful. But her hair is also a different color than mine.

Another one of those "not very important" posts. Just blathering out thoughts in my head.

As i'm typing i'm watching a squirrel on the deck. As i've said before, squirrels fight among themselves a lot & do a lot of damage to each other. The one i'm watching has lost his left hind foot. It isn't very noticable (until he tries to scratch his ear on that side) & he seems to manage well. But the damage they do to each other makes me sad. (That loss might not have been from another squirrel, tho. I wonder if he was nearly caught by a coyote. The funny thing is that he's less scared of me than most of the others.)

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