Snow... finally!

We finally got some snow... not much, maybe 3" or so here.  They said 3.5" at the airport.  But man-oh-man is it cold!  I'm getting ready to leave to get my nails done, which will be my first time out in several days.  I plan to hit the grocery store as well, then tomorrow, I'll get my hair cut & colored.   I'm getting gray fast this time.  I think I've been doing too much worrying about the direction of the country.  Trump continues to scare the bejesus out of me with his crazy extreme changes.  He promised lower inflation and unless there is something that I'm too dumb to understand, I'm pretty sure we're on our way to WORSE inflation.  And his insanity is making the stock market swing like a monkey after a banana in the jungle.  I just keep hearing my mom's voice say, "Stop looking at it!  It'll even out and you'll be fine."  

But on to better subjects, I finally replace my old PC.  This time, I got an all-in-one.  I had planned on just replacing the "tower" because my monitor is fine, but the guy I talked to said there's a good chance my old monitor might not work with a new PC.  And my friend, Marco, told me he'd been using all-in-ones for several years and I guess I thought, what the hell.  It came on Monday and I was prepared to get started with the transfer of all my files to the new computer and lo and behold, there they all were!  I guess they must be all sitting up in one of the clouds somewhere!  I used to consider myself pretty computer savvy, but it's beyond my comprehension now!  Anyway, the one thing I don't like about it is the USB ports are on the back.  What a pain in the ass!  Oh, and there are only THREE!  Two of which are taken up by the mouse and keyboard, leaving only one.  Oh brother!  So I ordered a USB hub that gives me 4 ports.  It was supposed to be here Tuesday, then yesterday, and now it says today.  Fucking Amazon lies! I admit - I've gotten spoiled rotten by how fast they usually are! But if they had just said initially that it would be Thursday before I got it, I probably would have just run to Office Depot and bought one.  Very frustrating!

I have new neighbors as of last week.  I haven't met them yet.  It's a black family - I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've had black neighbors, which is kind of weird when you think about it!  I've been here nearly 38 years...  Wait a minute... I take that back. When Marcy (next door to the west) lost her husband in 2019, her sister moved in.  She had two black children - an older teenage boy who eventually joined the armed forces (can't remember which branch) and a daughter who I think was older than him and on her own.  She also had a younger white daughter.  All very nice folks.  Not that I would expect anything less from Marcy's family!  She's a wonderful human being and I love her to death.  She's there for me when I need her and I try to do the same for her.  Anyway, back to the new family next door, I've mostly just seen a woman and a couple kids.  There may be a dad as well... there were a couple men who helped when they moved in, but I haven't seen them since.  I need to go over and introduce myself and take some cookies or something.  I feel kind of sorry for them as I always do anyone who moves in there.  They're going to find out all the issues with that house, and by this time next year, they'll be gone.  I have yet to see anyone in all the years since Dorothy sold it stay more than one year.  It doesn't look half bad, but it's a real shit-hole.  I talked to the guy who is the property manager a couple weeks ago.  Apparently the owners live in CA and don't want to put a lot of money into it, yet they ask $1900 for rent!  Man, I think if they can get that much for that place, what could I get for mine?  The basement is not finished and, in fact, gets water in it when it rains.  It calls itself a 4 bedroom, though one of them upstairs could only hold a single bed and NOTHING more.  Mine is clearly a 2-bedroom, but the whole basement is finished and one room could be used for a bedroom, though you couldn't technically call it a bedroom unless you put in one of those egress windows.  But I would never want to be a landlord.  I've heard such awful horror stories...

I've been cleaning out my cupboards and getting rid of a lot of stuff I don't use anymore and WOW is that freeing up space!!  So far, I got rid of all my old Mikasa stoneware.  I've got a bunch of lead crystal glasses I put out there for $15 - I'll probably just end up giving them to a thrift store.  And I have only on more stack of soup bowls from my set of china to pack up.  What the hell I'm going to do with that I don't know.  No one wants china anymore...  I plan to make little decorative planters out of the teacups and saucers - I made one by gluing the cup to the saucer, then I'll drill a hole in the cup for drainage.  Someone who is one of those garden artists, who makes stuff out of glassware (like bird feeders) might want some of it...

It does make me feel accomplished when I can add something to the donation box.  I'm tired of all this "stuff" that I hang onto.  I need to simplify my life!!

Here's a tidbit about old houses...  I keep 1/2 gallon jugs of water on hand for those times when I want to do a blast of watering.  I think I have 16 right now, so 8 gallons.  I keep them filled (with fertilizer) in a corner in the dining room, east exterior wall.  I pulled one next to the wall out this morning to water a plant and I thought, "WOW, this feels like it's been in the fridge!!"  So I stuck a thermometer in the water and sure enough, it was 42 degrees!!  I pulled another jug that was in front, about 18" in from the wall and it was 10 degrees warmer.  (But yes, still only 52 deg. in a room I keep about 70!)  Old houses be cold!  LOL

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I started this on Wednesday.  It's Saturday.  I didn't work all week, and I'm thinking I might not work next week.  It's supposed to be horribly cold, like real temps in the single digits and wind chills in the minus double digits!  And more snow.  Next year, I may just tell them to consider me a snow bird and take Jan. and Feb. off...  I'm getting too old for this shit!

Yesterday and today, I got all my music on to my new computer.  That's one thing that apparently isn't in "the cloud".  It took a few hours... I reorganized them as well.  I have nearly 500 songs, and these are simply "favorites" off of CDs.  It's probably silly to keep them since I have access to ALL the music on Amazon.  My Amazon playlists, which I play through my Alexa devices, have a LOT more music on them.  I have 5 playlists, three that I use all the time.  My "Mellow" list has about 430 songs that include stuff like Paul Davis, Gordon Lightfoot, ARS, and some mellow stuff from the 80's as well.  I have an 80's playlist with about 330 songs.  I loved the 80's sound almost as much as the 70's!  Then I have a "Favorite Rock" playlist with about 350 songs that I listen to when I'm wanting to be motivated.  I also have a "Relax" playlist that I listen to sometimes when I'm sleeping.  It has a lot of music from a CD I bought years ago with what I call "space music" by John Serrie.  If you meditate to it, you actually feel like you are floating!  It's very cool...  There are tons of YouTube videos with sleep music, but none of them are as good as John Serrie music!  It also has some great "floaty" songs like Bridge of Sighs, #9 Dream, Only Time...   I think the unlimited music costs me something like $15/month on Amazon and it is probably the best $15 I spend every month.  I can listen to premade lists on Amazon.  I can ask Alexa to play an album... right now I'm listening to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.  I've gotten spoiled.  When I listen to a radio station, I think "why do they think they have to play from such a limited list of songs???"  You hear the same shit over and over on the radio.  I can ask Alexa to play something I haven't heard in 20 years and viola... she plays it! Doesn't matter if it's a b-side of a rarely played song!

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Can't seem to get this one finished up.  I started nearly two weeks ago.  We had a week of such bitter cold weather, I didn't leave the house, so I had plenty of time to get back to it.  I think it's because the cold was ALL I could think about and didn't want to ramble on about THAT!  It was awful.  And to add insult to injury, my humidifier hasn't been working and the air was sooo dry from the furnace running all the time.  I had started the process of getting it fixed... My handyman, John, had been over to look at it.  I assumed it just needed a new pad (I've changed them before and it's a royal pain in the ass!), but he determined that the valve letting the water in was bad.  So I ordered a new valve and a new pad and it got here pretty lickety split.  But when he came back to install it, it turned out he had me order the wrong one.  Well, it was a weird thing - it was for the right model, but the wrong voltage.  I don't really understand those kinds of things, but I had to send it back and order the right one.  That one took a little longer to get here, and then we had the snow.  John had been hit in the first snow and was leery to get out when we got the second snow, so he put it off and then it turned SO bitterly cold that the furnace was running almost around the clock.  The humidity got down to 14% - it was almost painful! So then I started boiling water on the stove for 16 hours a day, but could only get it up to 19-20%.  He finally got back the first of last week and then... another snafu!  He couldn't get more than a spit of water to come through the valve!  Turned out the water valve, the one letting water flow through the pipe, was clogged.  So he replaced that and voila, water flow!  Right now, today, it's warmer and it's actually 60 degrees (!!) and I have 34% humidity in here!  YAY!  What a fiasco!

Today, I was sitting around reminiscing about the old days.  Back to the year or two after I got out of high school.  And I was finding I couldn't remember some of the timeline, so I thought I'd come here and try to sort it out.  

Paul and I got married in July, 1977, 2 months after I graduated.  We moved into that cute little apartment in Harlan and in August, he got offered a job at Wheeler's in Seward, Nebraska, so we packed up our things and moved out there at the end of August.  (Just a bit of trivia... Elvis died on our 1 month anniversary!)  We rented this shit-hole apartment above the JC Penney store on the town square.  At the time, it was ok - it's looking back that I realize what a shit-hole it was!  Nothing like the adorable apartment we left in Harlan.  But this place had a TON of potential, if someone would have just put some money into it! Paul went to work at Wheeler's, which was right on the edge of town, and I took a PT job at the Tru Value hardware store within walking distance.  I don't really remember the job itself that much, but I remember my boss, whose name was Dan Bank (or was it Banks??) and a college guy named Mike... something like Heidbrink, who made the job kind of fun.  We were about the same age.  We used to go to a bar down the street from our apartment and have a drink or two and play foosball.  No phone, no TV.  Pretty basic living!

But what I can't seem to figure out is when Mom left Harlan.  I can not remember anything about her selling the house.  Not hearing her talk about it.  Nothing!  That seems weird to me.  Selling a house is a pretty big event and it's just blank.  But of course, since we didn't have a phone, we weren't talking to them much because it required going across the street to a payphone and taking change to make the call... what a pain in the ass that was!!  But a phone was a luxury we couldn't afford then.  So I've been trying to figure this out.  Merry got married in April 1978 (yes, she's 4 years younger than me, so she was only 15!) and by then, Mom was living in Council Bluffs because that is how the Merry/Rick thing got started.  Mom moved and Merry stayed to finish the year, living with a friend from school.  Rick was her friend's older brother.  And so the saga began.  So I have to assume that if she was in CB by April of 1978, she must have sold it (or put it up for sale) not that long after I moved out.  Why don't I remember that?  

So with this realization of the hole in my memory, I was thinking, I don't really remember ever coming home and staying at Mom's.  But then I think we probably wouldn't have because my bed was only a single.  So I thought I guess we must have stayed at Paul's parent's home when we came back, which got me thinking about when they sold their house.  Oh, yeah... they had mostly moved out when we got married.  We had our ceremony at their house in Harlan - in the back yard, with Gary, Paul's brother, officiating.  (This was before every Tom, Dick & Harry could get ordained - Gary was a real minister.)  It was just family... siblings. Gary's wife and gaggle of kids.  Dave (Paul's oldest brother) and his wife and 2 kids.  Betty, Paul's teenage sister.  Of course his parents, Cliff & Lois.  Wes and Merry, Mom.  I'm pretty sure my Grandma Dogs (as we called her - she raised Dachshunds... Dad's mother) was there and maybe my cousin Jon.  Dad didn't come.  Oh, and my HS friend, Merry Jones stood up with me.  We had a little cake and punch reception after and this is how I remember they were mostly moved.  There was a couch and a few chairs and no other furniture.  They had moved to Hancock, Iowa.  I think they moved there because it was closer to where Cliff worked in Oakland...

So after we left our "reception", we took our old Galaxy 500... I'm trying to remember what year it was... downtown to the bank to cash the checks we got so we could afford to go on our "honeymoon" which was coming up to Omaha for a couple nights.  There is diagonal parking in front of the bank, and as we were pulling out, a woman came roaring up and hit us, pushing us back into the parking spot!  It totaled the car, crushing the trunk so much we had to struggle to get the suitcase out that we had packed to come to Omaha!  Backing up just a bit... Paul and his dad had bought two Galaxys, a 500 and a 2 door, and overhauled one engine and put it in the 500.  So, if I remember correctly, when we got back, they put the engine in the 2 door, which I actually liked better...  We borrowed his Dad's car to come to Omaha for the weekend.  We stayed at the Hilton, on the 16th floor.  The only reason I remember that is because we had a good thunderstorm overnight and, because I love a good thunderstorm, I got up to open the curtains so we could watch the lightening and I looked down and there were fire trucks pulled up to the hotel with lights ablaze!  Of course, it was a couple years before that one of the blockbuster movies was The Tower Inferno, so I was kind of freaking out!  LOL!

Anyway, we spent a little less than a year in Seward.  I think it was July of 1978 that we moved to York, into a mobile home, for just a month, because Paul was transferred to the Wheeler's in Grand Island, which was about 50 miles away.  Looking back, I wonder what we were thinking!  A 50 mile commute is a lot to expect with an old beater!  So quickly, we decided to buy a mobile home and move closer.  We ended up in a mobile home park (a very nice one!) in between Grand Island and Alda, a little village about 7 miles from GI.  It was a nice, new but small mobile home - 53' x 10' if I remember correctly.  

But before we left York, we made two major purchases.  We decided it was time to have a second car, so we found a cute little Toyota Corona, a 1972, and we financed it - this was going to be "my" car!  I loved it.  It was brown, a standard transmission.  We had gotten a Sears card when we first married to establish some credit, because back then, they didn't just "hand" you credit on a silver platter - you had to earn it!  And that was something that was always important to us - to have GOOD credit.  The second purchase was a set of cookware.  Paul's brother, Gary and his wife lived there in York and they had a Saladmaster party.  Saladmaster is kind of the Cadillac of cookware.  I bought their smallest set, which cost $300 on which we made $12/month payments for 2 years.  I was so excited!  And here I am, 47 years later, still using them and they still look like new!  I checked it out a Saladmaster demo a few years ago and their cheapest set is now close to $3000!!  On the other hand, I can't think of one other things that I still have from 1978!

We lived there outside of GI for about 18 months, then Paul went into the USAF, joining up in Dec. 1979.  He went off to boot camp and I packed up our stuff over the next 6 weeks.  Back then, if you joined the service and you owned a home, you could let it go back to the bank and it would not affect your credit, so that's what we did.  I don't remember the details of how I got all our "stuff", furniture and all, moved out!  I assume Wes helped, but who else?  There was a couch, bed, table and chairs... stuff we wanted to store until we needed them.  I wish I could remember!  But we got it moved to Paul's parent's home and they stored it for us. 

In January, Mom married Herb - I was a bridesmaid along with Merry & Aunt Judy. Paul got out of bootcamp in early Feb. and found us a (another) shit hole furnished apartment.  Herb had a van and we loaded it with the necessities -  clothes, dishes, my expensive pots and pans, some of my plants, I think we took our little kitchen table...  Then Wes drove the Galaxy and we towed the Toyota behind, 1000 miles down to Biloxi, Mississippi.  My first time seeing the Gulf... WOW.

Things I remember about Biloxi... Bugs big enough to saddle up!  The roaches were disgusting and huge, and I would keep a shoe next to the toilet so that I could squish them when they scurried about at night when I sat.  YIKES.  The apartment was actually an old home that had been turned into two apartments.  Another couple lived above us.  Ours was dark and dingy with a screened in porch.  I hated it and was so happy when he got orders to California and we were on our way.  But it was awesome that we were about 3 blocks from the water and hanging out on the beach was nice.  Paul made a lot of friends and we had fun while we were there, in spite of our yucky apartment.

And that was our life up to the summer of 1980.  I may try to see if I can find some photos to scan and interject later.