Category: Stories

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A Solid Color. Don’t Get Used To It.

Today I’m sporting a velvet, floppy butterfly Bow Tie o’ the Day. It’s blue and blue, as you can see. I do not own many neckwear items in solid colors. They have a tendency to be matchy, and you know how I feel about attire that matches. Solid colors make me feel like the Not-Me.

Speaking of “Not-Me,” I think I’m having some minor, but weird, side effects from my TMS treatments. Again, there’s nothing to worry about, and I have no proof it’s even related to the treatment anyway. But when Suzanne and I were at Walmart buying dog food on Saturday, I began to experience a jittery manic episode– the exact likes of which I have not felt before.(I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “Doesn’t everybody feel manic when they walk into a Walmart?” Har, har, har.)

This particular soul-fidget was nowhere near the worst I’ve ever gone through. It was actually quite manageable, though even the smallest bout of mania is always a bit dangerous and scary. We came home, and I got through it. Suzanne spied on me wherever I went in the house for the rest of the day, to make sure I wasn’t going to do something crazy-headed like throw all my Sloggers in the garbage. (Minor mania means I do minor weird stuff. Bigly mania means… you don’t wanna know.) My car keys somehow disappeared from their key hook for the rest of the day, as well. Suzanne, too, moves in mysterious ways. I thank her for that.

Yesterday, Mother’s Day, I still couldn’t focus enough to write posts. And then I did a thing– which was really done by my Not-Me. It was a thing so unlike anything the “real me” would ever do. But y’all will have to wait until the next post to read about my transgression. I’m still trying to figure out how to write about “my bad” in such a way that I don’t end up looking like an ass– if that’s at all possible.

Being bipolar sucks.

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Mom Gets More Than One Day

Bow Tie o’ the Day is providing Mom with some early Mother’s Day flowers. We’re starting to honor the Queen Bee Mother a couple of days early, just because we want to.

I’m guessing this portrait of Mom was taken around 45 years ago, in the early 70’s. Her hair has the “height” she always said she needed it to have. She probably wants extremely high hair now that she’s shrinking. I don’t care how much she shrinks, she’s still the Big Helen. At 88, she’s still larger than life.

I’ve spent my conscious life hearing, from those in and out of the family, about things they’ve witnessed Mom do. I’ve heard about food she made; jokes she played; quilts she made; what she said that left the crowd in laughter; opinions she expressed, whether anyone wanted to know what she thought or not; etc. She’s a wild woman with a wild heart. She’s generous and kind. Of course, if you know Mom, you already know that.

More than once in my life, friends– some of whom haven’t even met Mom in person– jealously commented to me about Mom. I’ve heard, “I wish my mother would send home-baked cookies across the country to me.” And I’ve heard, “I wish my mother talked to me like your mom talks to you.” One of my more envious friends even said about Mom, “I wish my mother loved me like your mother loves you.”

I feel sad some of my friends didn’t have what I’ve always had. I think everybody should be loved like Mom loves me.

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Salt Is Salty. Duh!

Aside from collecting neckwear, I spend some of my time in search of relaxation for Suzanne’s aches and pains, as well as for my stoopid, bipolar head. I seek out off-the-wall relaxation opportunities, on my quest to find something effective. Suzanne and I do like a fine massage, but I’m also willing to try just about anything else that mellows us out– both body and psyche. Heck, I try weird stuff simply to have new experiences. You already probably know that about me. Having a fresh adventure is enough reason to dive into it.

Wood, magnet-clasp Bow Tie o’ a Month Ago went with us on one of our attempts at relaxation. For Valentine’s Day, I gave Suzanne (and myself) a session at The Salt Cave, which is one offering at Awaken Wellness– a New Age-y wellness center in South Ogden. A few weeks after V-Day, we finally found some time to put the event on our schedule.

I didn’t know anyone who had been to The Salt Cave, so we had no idea what to really expect– except salt. I don’t even remember how I discovered the place existed. I scored a Groupon coupon for the 45-minute session, so it wouldn’t bankrupt me all for nothing if it turned out to be a letdown. All we had to go on was the photo and info I found online.

The Salt Cave is not an actual cave, but it felt like one when we were in it. It was a room about the size of a small bedroom. What appears in the photograph to be sand covering the floor, is salt. The lighting was extremely low. The pyramid in the wall was constructed with bricks of salt, and it glowed like a low-ember fire.

We sat in zero-gravity chairs. Calming music played, which we were told was programmed with “corrective healing frequencies, binaural beats, and isochronic tones.” Whatever that means. I don’t know if the music “healed” me, but it did help me mellow out.

For the duration of the session, a medical device called a halogenerator dispersed salt into the air. We couldn’t see the salt, but we felt it in our noses. I can say it felt like my nasal passages were clearing themselves out. Salt air has long been thought to improve respiratory ailments, as well as other health issues. We left with a faint layer of salt on our clothes. You can sort of see it on my hat.

The Salt Cave wasn’t magic, but we enjoyed our time in it. We certainly got relaxed. We were kinda sad when the session was finished, and I think we’d go again. It doesn’t matter that the experience was not profound and life-altering. It was fun.

After our session was complete, I was parched for salt. I needed plain old Lay’s potato chips. I did not lick the salt pyramid which was built into the wall. But I thought about it.

Perhaps for Christmas, Suzanne will give me my own salt lick to install in The Tie Room. Better yet, I would like enough salt licks to install one on at least one wall in every room in the house. And in my truck. And in my car. I don’t think it’s asking too much to have a permanent salt lick with me when I travel.

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Cinco De Bison

We celebrated Cinco de Mayo yesterday by participating in nothing resembling a Cinco de Mayo festivity. (You might remember Skitter had already cracked open her piñata a couple of weeks ago, cuz she couldn’t wait any longer.) Mustache Bow Tie o’ the Day helped us pack up the car for an afternoon excursion. We loaded up Diet Coke, water, and bug spray. And we loaded up Skitter. We did not load up The Saddle Purse. Off we drove to Antelope Island– which I always call Cantaloupe Island, convinced someone somewhere someday will think it’s funny.

We stopped at the beach as soon as we got on the island. The lake is so low that we had to walk at least 1/4 mile from the real beach to get to the water. It was the first time Skitter had walked on sand, and it was the first time she had seen a lake. She did well, despite her fear. She did not venture into the water. I think she actually had fun, even though she stuck to my legs the entire adventure.

Our beach-hangin’ did not last long at all. We were at war with the brine flies. We found ourselves in the midst of a near-Biblical true pestilence. We were outnumbered, and our bug spray was no match for the brine flies’ superior weapons of annoyance. They were ultimately the victors. Surrender can be a wise and glorious thing sometimes. When we got home I discovered brine fly bites across my forehead where my hatband had been, and poor Skitter had bites inside her ears.

We spent most of our Cantaloupe Island trip in the car, and we had a fine time. The afternoon was bright. The drive was pretty. We drove the island’s roads, checking out the bigly bison and a few antelope. I met a bison and a deer, and they each wanted a turn wearing Bow Tie o’ the Day. I obliged.

 

 

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What Did You Mean By That?

Mustache Bow Tie o’ the Day presents another story of my overthinking.

Since my TMS treatments are weekdays at 7 AM, I make sure to be up by 5. When I was younger, rising at 5 AM was no problem. But now that I am near-ancient, it’s a tough task. It takes me over an hour to get enough Diet Coke in me to open my eyes wide enough to drive the car safely. (A shower would help me wake up, but I prefer to shower AFTER the TMS session.) I need to be up by 5 to make sure I’m ready to drive to SLC at 6:30. You might chuckle at that, but I swear it’s true.

Before I go to bed before a treatment morning, I grab the clothes I’m gonna wear the next day and throw them in a pile so I don’t have to do any thinking when I first get out of bed. I can find my pile o’ clothes in the dark, so I don’t have to wake Suzanne by turning on the light. Well, yesterday morning I got dressed and all the way downstairs to the kitchen before I realized my pants felt funny. Sure enough, I had pulled them on backwards. Maybe you’ll remember from a previous post that I have no butt. I don’t have to unzip/unbutton to get my pants on. I just slide them on– ready for a day of having to make sure my pants don’t fall down cuz I have no butt. That’s why it took me a few minutes to notice something was not right in the jeans department. I thought briefly of wearing them backwards as just another part of the day’s clash fashion statement. But they were actually quite uncomfortable so I shed them and then re-pulled them up the correct way.

Today is Saturday, so I have no TMS. Of course, I woke up promptly at 5AM, wide awake. It wasn’t difficult to get out of bed at all, since I had no reason to. I mark it down to a cruel joke from the sleep gods. In the dark, I pulled on a t-shirt. I knew from the first moment I put it on that it was backwards.

You know me. I am always on a quest for meaning. Just a few days ago, I posted about getting a sign from the heavens because the car next to mine in a parking lot at my TMS clinic was the same weird color as the shoes I was wearing. And now this! Putting at least one piece of clothing on backwards two days in a row is a bigly coincidence– especially when I haven’t accidentally put on something backwards since I was a wee leprechaun.

And so, of course, I got right to ponderin’ about what the possible meaning of the alignment of these two backward clothing stars could mean. Is the universe trying to tell me I need to start walking backwards cuz some sort of dangerous unicorn is following me and will do me harm if I don’t see it and slay it first? Is it trying to say my clothes are hideous and I should go shopping for a new wardrobe?Did the universe prank me by putting a silly coincidence in my face– knowing I’d waste hours searching for the meaning of life in a backwards pair of Levis and an equally backwards t-shirt. (The gods must have a good laugh on me constantly.)

Or is the universe trying to say a cosmic thing to me about how I need to reverse my life’s course? You know what I finally decided? The message is this: I must sleep in my next day’s clothes! Or just get dressed in another room, with lights a’blazing.

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Here’s My Fave Wood Mustache Bow Tie

Bow Tie o’ the Day and I are preparing to iron our fancy shirts this morning, as is evidenced by the iron atop the ironing board beside me in this photo.

Although Bow Tie sports the same style of mustache as the bow tie I wore yesterday, the design is interestingly different. This is one humongous bow tie– taller and wider than the usual bow tie by more than an inch. Also, I think the detail of paired up, in-line bow ties on the bow tie itself is a fabulous touch.

Bow Tie was designed and created by a dude I found in Kearns whose hobby is making wood bow ties. He designed this one in honor of his elderly neighbor named MAX, who has worn a bow tie every day for decades. (Sound familiar?) Feeble Max has a collection of hundreds of bow ties, but his collection does not even come close to rivaling mine. I didn’t tell him that though. I thought it would be kind of me to let the dapper, ancient Max think he’s assembled the most populous bow tie collection on the continent. Kindness rules!

BTW   19 TMS treatments down, 17 to go.

 

 

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Tradin’ In The Not-old, Old Cell Phone

Bow Tie o’ the Day accompanied me to the Apple Store to find me a new phone. Bow ties do not get to have cell phones, because they don’t have pockets or purses or even hands in which to carry them. It was only I who was in the market for a phone I didn’t need, but just had to have. And why did I absolutely have to have an iPhone XR, when I had a perfectly functioning, year-old iPhone 7 Plus? Because Suzanne’s work upgraded her phone to an iPhone XR, and I have to keep up with the Suzanne’s– since I don’t know any Jones’s to keep up with. I am such a follower. Not.

Really, though, I don’t know what came over me. I do not have to have the latest version of anything technological. It really doesn’t matter to me how old or new my technology is as long as it does what I need it to do. My desktop computer is at least eight years old. It works almost fine, and I refuse to buy a new desktop computer until it dies. I’ve had my laptop for three years, and it runs like a dream– even though desktop computer/laptop years are not mere years, they are decades. Technology changes that rapidly. But I am not one of those folks who needs to constantly upgrade to the current versions of their gadgets.

When Suzanne brought her new iPhone XR home, I gave it the once-over– playing with its newer features that my “old” phone didn’t have. While checking out her phone, I must have been making a gleeful, noisy fuss about the coolness of some of the stuff her phone can do which my phone couldn’t. And suddenly… Suzanne (who is as thrifty as I am) said, “Meet me at the Apple Store on my lunch break tomorrow, and we’ll get you an iPhone XR just like mine.” And so we met at the Apple Store on Suzanne’s lunch break. And she bought me the phone, cuz she’s a nice human being.

The lesson I learned from the whole experience is this: I should make bigly, joyous noises about every darn thing I could possibly want. Suzanne is bound to buy me at least some of them.

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Check Out The 70’s Paneling On The Bedroom Walls

This is my tblog (tie blog), so I can post whatever I want on it– even if it has no neckwear anywhere in it. This photo is what I want to share with y’all today. I’m super-glad I came across it while cleaning the loft yesterday. It deserves its own post.

Dad slept with a 17-year-old-woman, a 77-year old woman, and a woman of every age in between. It was the same woman. He was a one-woman man, and that woman was Mom, of course. Here, she is getting her doze on.

But Dad had secret loves. Although Mom was his queen love, she sometimes had to share him with his two other life-long loves. Beyond his adoration of Mom, Dad loved every bee he ever owned. I told him he was so attached to his bees that I couldn’t believe he didn’t brand each one’s little butt. Trillions of butts. Occasionally, when Dad paid too much attention to his bees, or bought them literally tons of sugar, Mom referred to them as “Ron’s damn bees.”

Dad’s second mistress was hunting, as represented in this photo by part of his gun collection. If there was a hunt for it, Dad hunted it– successfully. He told me it was the hunting he loved, never the killing. Dad hunted coyotes all across Millard County EVERY morning, even in the last few weeks of his life.

I always knew Dad slept with Mom at his right side and a pistol on his left side (in the nightstand). But I did not know, until I saw this snapshot, that he slept on his guns. As you can see, Dad’s love for his weaponry made him a polygunist. (I just had to get that groaner of a joke in here.)

 

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Judging The Same Book By Its Differing Notes

Bow Tie o’ the Day’s rad sunglasses see the future. On the other hand, my jeweled reading glasses help me read about the past. Suzanne uses the same pair of reading glasses to see what she’s sewing or crocheting or otherwise crafting.  We do not wear them at the same time. We have a bunch of pairs hiding around the house like Easter eggs. Whoever needs a pair, grabs the first pair they can locate. It’s not like we intentionally hide them though. I have no idea why it’s always difficult to find a pair when you need one, but you nearly trip on the trail o’ many reading glasses around here when you don’t need any help with your vision. They are everywhere. Until they disappear.

I have posted about this “here-one-minute,-gone-the-next” phenomenon before, but it still mystifies me on an almost daily basis– because it goes beyond glasses. This happens with scissors, and wrapping tape, and cough drops. It happens with matches and with toothpicks. It happens with flashlights, candles, and bandaids. And so on. We know we have a million of each thing but we can’t find a single one when we need it, so we buy more of it. And five minutes after we get home from the store, we almost immediately come across what we had spent hours scouring the house to find. It was sitting right by the television the whole time, where even Ray Charles could have seen it.

We are dopes! We are dopes with so much stuff we can’t keep track of it. Really, we can’t keep track of things we regularly use– like reading glasses and scissors. Not finding what we have plenty of should be a hint to us to pare down a bit. Here are my new arranging-the-house-stuff guidelines: IF AN ITEM DOESN’T HAVE A SPECIFIC PLACE WHERE IT BELONGS IN THE HOUSE, IT GOES. It never comes back either. And it doesn’t just go live in the garage until we can finally decide what to do with it. IF AN ITEM HAS UNNECESSARY DUPLICATIONS, THE EXTRAS GO. And they never come back.

Having made these new rules, I freely admit there will be exceptions. I am, in fact, keeping all the tape, scissors, and reading glasses. And I am keeping the 7– count ’em, 7– copies of T.S. Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND. Why do I need that many copies of any book? Same reason I have kept my copies of the Scriptures I’ve accumulated over the years. When I read anything, I underline; highlight; make notes in the margins; and flip around to find certain references– until the pages are filled up and/or fragile. Time for a new one!

I don’t get rid of the old battered book, because it’s a kind of journal. My underlining and highlighting and margin notes show me what I was thinking about– what was of concern to me– during the time I read that particular copy of the book. The margin notes I wrote in the Triple Combination I packed around in high school are different from what I noted in the copies that followed– right down to my newest Triple Combo that currently sits atop the stack of books in the bathroom. Reading through the different notations I have made in each successive copy of my Scriptures (or of any book) is part of how I can tell I’ve grown up.

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It Was A Verbal Knockout

Bow Tie o’ the Day added a formal, black tie flare to our venture to LAGOON last evening. It was a night of appreciation for Davis Schools employees and their families. Free parking, free eats, cheapo tickets. It was a bit chilly but still a blast, even though we didn’t go on even one ride. The place was packed, and I swear we had to park clear up in Kaysville. We’ll go again later this summer. We didn’t get to LAGOON last year because of my pancreas surgery. I am looking forward to testing my innards on roller coasters this year. My guts better stay put together.

My favorite part of last night was the fisticuffs I nearly got into when I had to defend Suzanne’s honor. Long story. But the gist is this: We were in the very, very, very long food line and some bigly, portly guy ahead of us accused Suzanne of twice bullying his kids. Excuse me!!!! She hadn’t even spoken to his kids. Clearly, this guy was frustrated with the long food line. I could be rude and make a joke right now about how the rotund guy was probably dying of hunger and was afraid he’d lose a calorie off his not-sexy gut if he didn’t get a free hamburger at that very moment. But I won’t do that (although I just did). I’m a nice person, and I take pity on those who are less fortunate in the politeness department.

Anyhoo… This dude got in my face, as they say. And I got in his face. And I admit that I made fists, although I did not lift them. Instead, I used words I know he had to go home and look up in the dictionary. That’s my secret to winning verbal scuffles. If the person I’m jousting with doesn’t understand what I’m saying, they aren’t sure if I’m with them or against them. Thus, they have no idea how to respond. Let me be clear, folks. Don’t ever, ever, ever be disrespectful to Suzanne. You will pay. I will be the one who exacts the payment from you. And you might not even understand how my words did it.

FYI   My DI hat does not refer to Deseret Industries. It’s from our trip to Dauphin Island, AL last year.

And another FYI   That’s Suzanne’s back, in front of me in the bigly eats line. You can clearly see she is not bullying any children.