Oh Good Heavens

Look at me, I have not written here in three weeks. I haven't emailed my friend Betty n Maine, either, because I am apparently not about the writing this ... now. I almost wrote "this summer", but of course, summer is over. It just feels to me like the summer vacation that never ended. Which is a good thing, albeit disorienting.

What can I tell you? I wrote a lot more when I was depressed, which I am not, so maybe that accounts for some of it. I can tell you that I have finally stopped having back-to-school dreams, and, many mornings, I actually wake up laughing.

Let's see, some updates. R's wedding is exactly one month from today. The big chore that remains for us is to make the centerpieces, which we'll be working on next weekend. Tomorrow night is her bachelorette party, which fortunately does not include me. My task for this week was to put together a "slide show" -- what is a slide show anymore, eh? -- to be shown at the rehearsal dinner. R and the SnL want no schmaltz at the wedding, i.e., no baby pictures, but his mother is in charge of the rehearsal dinner, and she wants all the schmaltz she can get, and I love doing this kind of thing. She sent me pictures and I made a six minute movie with iMovie. It's probably longer than it should be, but I don't care. It would appear that I love me the schmaltz as well. And it's done.

K is teaching, she is doing what she was trained for, and, dare I say, born for. All is well on that front. She's coming home tired, but happy.

As for me, I'm exercising again -- rode the bicycle around the block this morning -- and eating well. I'm feeling pretty good.

I haven't been writing, but I have certainly been reading, so, thanks for not dropping the ball like I did, everyone. I'll do my best to keep it up.

xoxo

Get a Look at This

I got my new knee brace today. Oy.

It's actually comfortable, because it fits and it's open. I haven't tried to get a pair of jeans on over it yet, but I'm thinking, maybe not so much. I may be looking at a whole life-style change here.

I have really jumped the first true hurdle of retirement, which was not, as I said, watching everyone else go back to school. It was getting to September 1 and seeing if we had enough money to live on. And the answer is that we squeaked through. So, huge sigh of relief here. I can be retired and enjoy it, and still get a job if I feel like it later. This is awesome.

I just made about a dozen little muffin-size turkey meatloaves and a couple of omelet sandwiches, all to freeze and seal up and have when I need them. I also have to bag up portions of a lima bean casserole I made yesterday. What can I say, I like lima beans, and I've been at a loss for vegetables to make and freeze. I guess casseroles are the way to go. One of my projects for today (or tomorrow, or whenever I feel like doing it) is to gather up all my recipes together. Now, I have two separate binders, for no reason, and a lot of loose pages. I'm thinking that if I want to cook, I'd better get myself together.

Hey, did I mention that my electric bill for August was 40% less than for July, and for August last year? Boy, that kid was expensive to have around! (Just another of the lovely surprises that my new life drops on me from time to time.)

Not a Problem

So today was supposed to be The Day. It's the first day of the school year for teachers hereabouts, and according to popular myth, today was the day I wouldn't know what to do with myself BECAUSE I AM RETIRED. Today is the day it stops being summer vacation and starts being the rest of my retired life.

So? Not a problem, not for me anyway. I did go out to breakfast with the Other Chai, a date we'd made, at her request, as soon as we decided to retire. But she's fine, too. For me, it's no different from yesterday, no different from tomorrow. All in all ... nice. Very nice.

I decided to do a Billy Mays commercial just now, because I'm doing things I never ever would even have thought of doing before, but some of my kitchen towels were not as white as I wanted them to be, and I thought, Well of course, oyy-clean. First, let me say that I am trying to cut out paper towels altogether, and after reading this somewhere, I realized that the best substitute are white towels, because you can bleach them. I have towel size ones for food (draining, etc.) and washcloth size ones for wiping up spills, cleaning, and such. My real genius *pats self on back* was figuring out where to keep them so they would be handy. I made two very little shelves by hanging bookends on the wall with stick-on velcro, and then each kind of towel sits on its shelf in a neatly folded stack.

This is all good until I realized that I have also discontinued the use of chlorine bleach here in the house. I have non-chlorine bleach, and guess what? It actually does not remove stains from white towels. Go figure. Then I remembered I had the oxy-clean from god-knows-when and I mixed up a batch and the towels are soaking in it.

How old was it? There were coupons inside that expired in 2006. I have no idea if the stuff is even still good.

My other towel invention was necessitated by this: my husband always uses a dishtowel as his napkin when he eats. It sits in his lap like a cloth napkin. Years and years ago, I stopped buying cloth napkins, because, duh, and instead got a whole lot of kitchen dishcloths to be cloth napkins. Does he use those? No. What happens instead is that I wash dishes or wash my hands and turn around and there is no towel there because he's having his dinner and so has taken the only towel that was hanging there. Husbands, eh? So I got new dishtowels -- no stains -- in black or with black stripes, and new napkin-towels in red, or with red stripes. (Before, I had both sizes in both colors.) All I know now is that there better always be a black thing hanging where I need to dry my hands. How hard should this be to figure out?

I have finished watching the first two seasons of Fringe. Very weird, liked it a lot, looking forward to season three in a few weeks.

Okay, off to the post office.