PERSPECTIVE

My watch broke last night. The band, which has been slipping around a bit for a while, finally decided to file for divorce from the main face of the watch, and demanded, besides visiting rights to the links, a complete and final separation, effective immediately (alimony is still under debate at this time).


It's not that I am simply accustomed to wearing a watch. I am totally and completely ADDICTED to wearing a watch. I go into immediate and violent seizures if I cannot - well, not really tell what time it is, because I do have an eerie sense of what time it is naturally - but if I cannot BEGIN A TIMER.


I blame it on being a piano tuner in the past. With tuning, you need to have an exact sense of (no, not pitch, believe it or not, but) TIMING. You have to be able to tell the difference between eight beats per second and nine beats per second - which means it's very important to be able to tell EXACTLY how long a second is.


And somehow that carried over to me having to know EXACTLY how long... well, just about anything and everything in the universe is. I time my naps - I begin to time whenever an actor says "The bomb will explode in 15 seconds!" and then announce to everyone present that it actually took 38 seconds instead of 15 (ask Harmony, I drive her crazy with this) - I time how long it takes to fill the horses' watering trough - how long traffic lights are - the list is endless.


(And to prove this, if you look up the word 'compulsive' in Webster's, you will see a photo of my watch, set on 'timer', next to it!)


So where do you go to get a watch fixed?


I learned a long time ago the watch repairmen (repair person?) actually expect to get PAID when they do something, and I'm too cheap for that - so you go to an expensive jewelry store. They have the equipment, usually have the experience, and they do NOT expect to get paid. I guess their logic is that the next time you want to go into debt for some incredibly expensive piece of pressed rock, you will come BACK to them.


However, today I was dressed in my regular attire - blue jeans that were not exactly clean (you try to graze two horses for 45 minutes before you leave home and stay pristine), my regular slightly-stained blue tee-shirt (see previous excuse) and untied tennis shoes (I've gotten into the habit of just slipping my feet into my shoes - takes time and effort to tie them).


Then add to this overwhelming pleasing (albeit sloppy) picture the fact that I have JUST worked out at the gym. For those of you who do not know me (i.e. Jen), when I do any more physically tasking than walking (and, yes, I'll admit, sometimes JUST walking... SLOWLY), I get very red in the face, and I sweat PROFUSELY.


So, here I am, even by southern Arizona standards, not at all dressed-to-impress, hot and sweaty and red, walking into the big jewelry shop at the mall (yes, I live in a small enough town that we only HAVE one mall) to ask for help with my watch.


I figured an extremely well-dressed salesperson to ignore me at first, and then turn elegantly on their to hear my plea, and then take my watch (probably after putting on non-latex gloves and picking them up with a delicate pair of tweezers, and examining the damage with a monocle).


So I didn't at first realize that the woman with velcroed - closed sandals, a mumu - like dress (and not nice formal Hawaiian wear mumu, but the old ladies section at WalMart for senior citizens with poor vision and a taste for loud, obnoxious prints), incredibly teased and sprayed bright RED hair and (I kid you not) TWO missing front teeth (honest, I'm not making this up, even for the sake of the storyline) was the salesperson.


I suddenly felt much better about myself.


And she did fix my watch.


Moral of the story? Someone ALWAYS looks worse than you do.

BLIND, DUMB AND THIRSTY

One doesn't notice modern-day conveniences... until they are not there.

We live far enough out in the country that we get our telephone service via antique copper wiring, which is buried in cables which are brone to breaks, and installed only after months of pleading.

Our electricity is conditionally on the weather - any major rainstorm which included lightning (which is almost all of them down here) knocks it out and keeps it off for hours, sometimes days.

And our community water comes from an actual, drilled well. It's mechanical (wipe the rustic screen of drawing up buckets of water from your mind - sorry), but works fairly well 99.9% of the time. One neighbor of the five that share this water source had been designated as the one responsible for maintenance and repairs.

Yesterday was one of those 0.01%s - water pressure began to drop about 2:30 p.m., and by 4 o'clock, it was dry. All frantic telephone calls went straight to their voice-mail for the first couple of hours, so I had to deal with all those things you don't normally even think about:

1. Toilet. Only flushes that first time. Hmm...

2. Washing my hands. I have animals, and I play with them, scratch their tummies (the horses especially - Najale will do anything I ask of him as long as he knows I'm going to rub his belly) - needless to say, I wash my hands about 492 times a day, and not just a cusory wash - I have to SCRUB those fingernails to not look like a coal miner.

3. Laundry. I have a lot of dirty clothes (see #2)

4. Dishes. Can't even rinse off dishes even to put in the dishwasher (and my dishwasher is not a new one that operates as a garbage disposal - dishes in it just get sanitized)

5. Did I mention the toilet before?

Problem was resolved about 7:30 p.m., but not before it's import had been fully felt.

Loss of electricity is not enjoyed, but I have TONS of candles. I do miss music, however - if it's quieter for longer than five minutes, I begin singing, and I am not a good singer.

Civilization, I may bemoan global warming, air pollution and destruction of our rain forests. But when I can't get water - keep on keepin' on!

HOW LONG CAN YOU KEEP PUTTING SOMETING OFF?

I can create very professional-looking timelimes, schedules and extremely colorful to-do lists. PrintShop's graphics and I have a wonderful relationship - just as a magician can pull a rabbit out of a silk hat, I can insert, modify and rearrange almost any jpg, gif and/or png you could ask for.

But actually doing what is on the list... ah, there's the rub.

I have one project in particular, which involves paint, sponge and a ceiling (you probably know what I am referring to), that I did not finish. And it'a been easier and easier to put it off and off and off - I mean, it's a ceiling that no one but ME looks at (okay, I guess Murray also), so like, who is gonna notice?

So can someone kick me in the butt and make me move and get this chore DONE?!?!

YUMMY IN MY TUMMY

I have some remaining baby fat around my middle - from my last baby - who is now 24 years old. When they removed my uterus a few years ago, I tried to talk them into combining it with some sort of liposuction around that area, but the surgeon wouldn't buy it (I think they get paid more when it's actually liposuction, not just a hysterectomy).

And I rarely (if ever) do ab work. I'm pretty good at doing aerobic (like the elliptical - I'm up to 25 minutes now), and I love lifting weights (that is, if it's a machine that I already like and especially anything with shoulders - I have awesome shoulders), but I hate sit-ups.

I also hate using the 'ball' for ab work (I generally fall off it long before I can even get close to actually concentrating on my abs). And I hate using anything that even looks like it could be related to ab work - my stomach triggers specific muscles in my legs and force me to walk away.

Have I stressed this point enough to go on?

Okay, so here's the weird part - two days ago a section of my flabby midsection sort of... left.

I haven't done anything additional, I am still eating like a pig (healthy stuff, but as usual, too much of it), and I certainly have not done anything to strength my flabby gut.

But two days as I was buttoning up my classic jeans, I realized that I could (and if this isn't one of the most humiliating things that could be admitted on the Internet, I don't know what is) TUCK IN MY SHIRT, and NOT be embarrassed by the overhanging flab that I would hastily un-tuck the shirt and slink off into the shadows.

Possible explanations?

1. A ten lbs. kidney stone that somehow was passed without me ever noticing (probability - zero)

2. My lungs, which are already one-third the size of a normal person's, have shrunk even more, leaving room for my stomach to be sucked up into the chest cavity and less in the mid-section (probability - less than zero)

3. Pure fluke that will never be repeated and has nothing to with my abs (probability - pretty good).

Stay tuned - let's see if any of this dream remains for another day.

Mother Nature At Her Best

Photobucket Album

MIDNIGHT MADNESS

What do you do on a boiling hot, muggy night at midnight when you can't sleep?

YOU REARRANGE FURNITURE.

It was a bold move on my part. For one thing, the chest of drawers had not been moved since Harmony and I painted it, and small, scary and sometimes poisonous things often take up residence under and behind things that do not get moved very often (read 'seven years' here).

It was also daring in that my television/VCR/DVD/satellite was on TOP of that chest of drawers, and it not only weighs 487 lbs., but the four separate components were linked by a wondrous variety of cables, wires, and unknown life forms that needed to remain in a very particular order to work (and how could I possible deal with not having my "The Office" reruns daily?)

My 53 year-old back had already moved 750 lbs. of hay that day, so, hey, what's another miserly 487 lbs.?

Well, about 263 too many, it turned out. My back didn't collapse, but it expressed it's displeasure fairly well.

So the furniture is moved, I killed more than a dozen bugs, and I ended up taking a grand total of FIVE showers yesterday - thereby destroying a unique ecological niche AND wasting a good part of the water table in southern Arizona.

It just feels good to be me!

PROVERBS YOU WON'T FIND IN THE BIBLE

Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film.

A day without sunshine is like... night.

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.

When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.

Seen it all, done it all, can't remember most of it.

Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt, it doesn't fit anymore.

Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.

I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted and then used against you.

Despite the cost of living, it remains popular.

Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.

Nothing is foolproof, since fools are so ingenious.

It is hard to understand how a cemetery raised its burial cost and blamed it on the cost of living.

Just remember...if the world didn't suck, we'd all fall off.

The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.

It is said that if you line up all the cars in the world end to end,someone would be stupid enough to try and pass them (probably someone in a pickup truck with a gun rack, or, if it's snowing, someone in an SUV).

You can't have everything - where would you put it?

Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world'spopulation.

The things that come to those who wait are usually the things left bythose who got there first.

A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.

It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.

I wished the buck stopped here, as I could use a few.

I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.