run on sentences

A month  or so  ago I was in Austin, Texas with my daughter and her friends, getting ready to run the Austin 1/2 marathon, which has become a tradition and a time to eat queso, drink many margaritas,  and go to chicken shit bingo.  We stayed at an Air BNB place that was nice, had great pillows and was, as usual, way better than a hotel.  Using my older, somewhat displaced bladder and frequent middle of the night urgencies as an excuse, I got the bedroom with the attached bathroom....and the memory foam pillows. I did appreciate the proximity of the bathroom.  All the memory foam pillows did for me was to allow me to remember my dreams or at least one of them.  And it was about my chin, of all things.   I was at an airport and a woman came up to me and said, "Go talk to that man over there.  He can read faces".  I wandered over to a stony faced guy with piercing, emotionless, blue eyes.  He had a chiseled, assassin lookin...

A while back, I got a text message from a friend that read, “My mom has the “O” sign”. I was reminded of a phone call from this same friend 20 something years ago, which read, “My water broke and I'm going in, letting me know about the imminent birth of her second son. One message indicated the end of a life and the other signaled the beginning of a new one. The “O” sign is not a good thing. It is an unofficial, and maybe somewhat irreverent term used by medical professionals to describe the last stages of a dying person's life. The person is not there anymore but their body is – breaths go in and out, the heart beats, and the mouth is open in an almost perfect “O”. The eyes open but don't see, or at least don't see what we see. Another even more irreverent term used by medical professionals for this phenomenon is “circling the drain”. Of course, you can see the “O” sign on an airplane when you walk back to the bathroom and everyone is sleepin...

Today I walked Toby and Pirate for a few miles at around 730 am.  It was a cool 45 degree fall day and I was a little chilly in my shorts and short sleeve shirt, but unwilling to resort to long pants and long sleeves just yet. It was the kind of day that smelled like fall and my dad and the mountains were turning orange.  The little school kids gathered in bunches waiting for car pools or busses, some dressed in the required school uniforms of khaki pants and golf shirts and others in regular school clothes I suppose.  I had a flashback of going to  grade school in my little town in the fall, and wearing my new clothes.  I can remember how it felt to wear new things to a new year of school.  The leaves turning on the trees and bushes reminded me of a favorite outfit I had- a green pleated skirt with a white cardigan sweater decorated with green and gold leaves that matched the skirt.  I wore the sweater buttoned up and I think I got the outfit from M...

It's been more than five years since my mom died. Maybe because it's just past Memorial Day or because I washed walls or because I saw this old lady with a Dowager's hump and a jacket like my mom's coming out of Walgreens that I have been thinking of her and feeling sad. Maybe it's just a mom attack that leaves me missing her so much but yet feeling she is “around here somewhere” as she used to say. “I'll talk to you tomorrow,” I always said, to which she replied “I'll be around her somewhere”. I never know when one of these attacks will strike or how long it will last. I used to get them on my way to work, and would have to compose myself before I went in - after crying all the way down Foothill drive - silently crying of course, as my mom taught me so well to do. Silent crying still involves tears and red puffy eyes which has never been a good look for me. There's just no loud wracking sobs that actually would be better for a perso...

Recently I read a blog post written by a woman about why she decided to give up wearing leggings or yoga pants.   You can read her post here.    While I respect this woman's right to her opinion and her decisions, I find the whole idea that I might be responsible for the lustful thoughts of men insulting to women in general while giving guys an excuse for bad behavior.  Why aren't men responsible for their own lustful thoughts?  Don't they have any control over them?  Is it true what they say about why men name their penises?  Answer:  "So they aren't led around their entire life by someone they don't know?"   What if my wearing sandals or shoes with toe cleavage incites these same feelings in men with feet fetishes?  I think men are better than this.    Yes, women also have lustful thoughts...even us women of a certain age and back in the "old days" it was never proper to admit to this.   When I see men ...

In July of 2013, just after I returned from Michigan, my sweet mother in law Jeanne died after too long of a time with Alzheimers.  She who in the end, knew none of us, had taught me so many things.  Like how to properly fold shirts and hang clothes on the line and to use all the leftovers.  Our children taught her to say "I love you" out loud.  We knew she loved all of us, but it wasn't something freely said to her when she was little, so maybe she didn't feel comfortable  with it.  She taught me the importance of writing letters and for a long time, we got a letter from her every week.  I didn't write back as much as I should have either.  Oh those regrets we always have when someone dies.  I never liked her Christmas bread, Stollen , which was like fruit cake but I never told her...instead I just took it to work with me and the staff seemed to enjoy it.  We always loved her cookies though and she sent them every year until she became ...

So many good things (and some not so good) happened in 2013.  But I didn't write about them.  I am not sure why.  I meant to.  I had so many titles in my head but apparently nothing else followed.  I don't have any excuses at all but feel that I cannot "move on" to this year's thoughts till I say something about last year.  I do not want to be like Terry Tempest William's mom and leave a bunch of blank journals (or blog pages) for posterity.  Read her book "When women were birds" and you will get what I am talking about.  So here are the highlights.     Your parents have sex, get over it!    I had a lot of time during the first few months of 2013 to think about stuff and this is one of the titles of a post  I didn't write.  In January I had an MRI and had shoulder surgery in February - right after Kseniya and I, with some other friends, did our annual Austin marathon.  I had surgery one day after getting home ...