Remembering Mom

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Jan C. Johnson

My mom loved wearing necklaces. Several years ago, I realized she’d almost stopped wearing any. She couldn’t work the catches anymore. She had a few long necklaces that she could put on over her head–and double them if she wanted. The rest lay in her dresser drawer, unused.

The week before Mother’s Day that year, I visited the nearest “Charming Charlie” store. They have tons of accessories, the displays grouped by color so it’s easy to narrow down your search.

Mom loved turquoise, blues and greens, so I trekked back to the blue-and-green color families’ corner of the store. In minutes, I’d found the perfect necklace: Blue, aqua, teal, and green beads, all different shapes, with silver accents. It was long enough to wear doubled or even tripled, and not a catch in sight.

Only one thing kept it from being the perfect gift: It came in a set, attached to a coordinating pair of drop earrings. Pierced earrings, and Mom never got her ears pierced.


Ah, but I have pierced ears, and I also love blue, teal, and turquoise.

So I gave Mom the necklace and showed her my matching “mother-daughter” earrings. I’d wear my earrings when I went to visit and, as often as not, found Mom wearing her Mother’s Day necklace. I kept the set together after Mom died, but hadn’t worn the necklace anywhere.

We spent this Mother’s Day weekend with Brent’s wonderful mom, Jeannine. I brought a floral print dress in burgundy, green, and turquoise, and packed my earrings and the necklace. I’d wear them to church to honor my mom.

Sunday morning, we gave Jeannine our gift, then Brent presented me with a small box. Inside was a beautiful, delicate pair of earrings. “Look, they go with your dress,” Jeannine pointed out. Sure enough, the dark red stones picked up the burgundy flowers.

But I couldn’t decide.

We got into the car for church, me still wearing my mother-daughter set… but with the little box tucked into my purse.

We got within three blocks of the church before I made up my mind. I slipped off the beaded set and hid it in the pocket of my back-seat door. Out came the new earrings. We parked just as I got the second one secured.

Brent opened my door and said, as I got out, “Oh, you’re wearing your new earrings!” I smiled and nodded.

After church, I thanked him again for the earrings. “I’m glad I wore them today. I’d planned to wear my mom’s necklace set for Mother’s Day…”

He gave me a sympathetic, almost regretful look. “Aww, you could’ve worn them for your mom.”

“Yeah, but I have you with me now.”

What I meant was, I loved my mom, and she knew it. I don’t have to prove it to her now. She is not looking over my shoulder or keeping score.

I’ll never forget my mother, but as near as I can figure, now is the time to appreciate and celebrate the loved ones who are still with me.

By the way, I’m not trying to tell anyone else how to grieve. We all deal with loss in our own way.

Thanks for reading,
Jan

I welcome your comments in the “Leave a Reply” box below.

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A “Cutting-Edge” Mystery

Posted on May 12, 2017 by Jan C. Johnson

Exhibit A


Last week, Brent pulled this broken juice glass from the cabinet.

Neither of us remembered putting a broken glass into the cabinet, which gave rise to questions like,

How did it break?
When did it break?

I recalled, early in our marriage, pulling half a plate out of a kitchen cabinet. After blinking at it a moment I’d reached in again and found the other half. The plate had somehow split in two after being put away. Maybe that’s what happened to the glass.

Was the broken-off part in the cabinet?
>searches< Nope.

Maybe it broke in the dishwasher.
>opens dishwasher door, scans top rack< Didn’t see it.

Ummmmmm. . . somewhere in our home, a sharp and jagged chunk of curved glass is hiding. . . just waiting for a bare foot or an inquisitive doggie nose to wander by.

Whenever we were in the kitchen, we’d peek under the fronts of the lower cabinets with deep suspicion. I’d get out the stepladder to look in the juice-glass shelf one more time. We checked the pantry. Looked in the cabinet “one more time” again. Pulled out the lower rack and examined the dishwasher floor. Asked each other, “Where could that stupid piece of glass be???”

We were just waiting for one of us to step on the missing shard. I wore shoes at all times.

Gradually, though, the sense of danger faded. Perhaps the shard had walked away, or fallen into the trash of its own accord.

We both tend to use the same drinking glass over and over, so the top dishwasher rack doesn’t fill up very fast. It was days later that I pulled out the rack to load some glasses and coffee cups that had collected. There, in the rear corner, curved over the rack and nearly invisible unless you were looking straight down at it, lay the missing piece.

What a relief!

But I still wear shoes in the house. . .

Your turn: Have you dealt with mysterious household gremlins like we have? I’d love to hear about it in the “Leave a Reply” box below.

Thanks for reading,
Jan

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Cinco de Mayo in Three Time Zones

Posted on May 10, 2017 by Jan C. Johnson

Last week — May 5, to be exact — I flew to the Seattle area for some weekend Grandma time. Here are a few notable things I remember from my trip.

 

The dyslexic vending machine at the airport: I inserted cash and pushed “56” for a bottled water. The mechanical arm rushed with an important air to item number 51. Which was also a bottled water. Not having a mutual-trust relationship with vending machines, I’d made sure to pick a row full of nothing but bottled water.
I win!

 

 

 

My surprisingly spacious hotel room. We’ve stayed here before, in normal hotel rooms. Somehow I was assigned this suite with a living area — and a kitchenette by the entrance. It was, like, the Taj Mahotel or something. Not only could I sprawl and read (at least, I could have if I’d spent enough time in the room), but the coffeemaker was not in the same room as the toilet. A real step up, in my opinion.

This cool lighthouse that we were going to tour but couldn’t because somebody was having a wedding there. From the outside, it looks like it would comfortably seat about ten guests… if three of them were underweight.

Brother-sister luv. Enough said. (Sigh…. my heart….)

 

 

The exuberant display of flowers on this shrub on the lawn of the family’s church. It was a great place for the kids to enjoy their after-church cookies. Bonus: It’s big enough to climb.

 

 

 

 

The quick Caesar wrap I grabbed at Sea-Tac Airport before my flight home. In a commendable effort at maintaining freshness, someone had rolled the poor thing in Eight Layers of Micro-thin Plastic Wrap (yes, I counted as I unrolled) before encasing it in a cellophane overwrap. The overwrap was fastened with a sticker and roughly a teaspoon of Super glue. Seriously, I thought I wouldn’t be able to infiltrate to the actual food until time to board.

Anyway, I’m home now. Time to get back to work…. before my next adventure, that is.

Thanks for reading!
Jan

PS: Like many norteños, I was surprised to learn that Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day. According to this post on Vox.com, Mexico actually declared independence from Spain on September 16, 1810. Cinco de Mayo commemorates a victorious battle against invading French forces. This battle took place at the town of Puebla more than 50 years after Independence Day. Though the French eventually took over, the battle served as a symbol of resistance.
US commercialization of this holiday, as with many others, seems to have diluted its meaning.
jj

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iPod No-no

Posted on May 5, 2017 by Jan C. Johnson


My new car betrayed me.

My previous crossover, “Reveille,” had a hard drive where I could store music from my CDs. So when the time came to replace Reveille, I got the new version of the Very Same Car. Oh goody, I’d have fun playing/copying my CDs to the new hard drive.

Only, Reveille II doesn’t have a hard drive.
Because “everybody” has their music on their phones or iPods.

Seven months later I was pretty well done with juggling CDs, or re-listening to the same one four times in a row on longer drives. Also I’ve been planning a road trip to Missouri, and am not about to juggle CDs all the way up and down the Indian Nation Turnpike.

I finally reached the only possible conclusion. “I need an iPod.”

After a due amount of hemming and hawing, I got an iPod Nano. Nano is a smallish version, but not the screenless, overly simple one that looks like an eye shadow compact. When we got it home, I grabbed some CDs and went upstairs to add the music.

I looked over the “quick-start” guide, which didn’t say much, and plugged the Nano into my desktop computer. Having already saved a couple of CDs to the computer, I decided to start with those.

I’ve copied many a file to an external drive. How hard can it be?

So I opened the Nano drive and the music folder, and dragged a CD folder to the Nano.
“File copied to (G:) iPod_ control”

Bingo.

Then I unplugged the iPod and tapped the “Music” button to see how the file looked in there.

“No Music.”

What? Where did it go??

I had to go online, download the user manual, and rummage through multiple pages of text to find out where to start.

Apparently, “iTunes” and “iPod” are two different things.

Within half an hour, I figured out how to save music to my Music Library. Then, and only then, could I sync the iPod to the Music Library, wherever it may actually be, thus making the music available to play through the iPod.

As it turns out, all this is fairly simple compared to playing the music in the car. My media screen and I don’t seem to speak the same language. Pushing the “Menu” button may or may not lead to a screen with options I can use.

Still, nothing can squelch the victorious feeling I got when I plugged in, selected an album I haven’t heard in years, and got to listen to it while driving to the grocery store.

Yeah, I’m tech challenged and in waaaay over my head, but I’m trying.

Thanks for reading!
Jan

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Geriatric Puppy Training

Posted on May 3, 2017 by Jan C. Johnson

Hello, friends! It’s good to be back at my blog after a month in Fiction Jail. I think my Cell mate main character needed a break from me, just like I was starting to need a break from her.

Such an innocent face…

Just so you know, I did more than just write fiction in April. Another lofty ambition was to teach our 14-year-old Pomeranian-Sheltie mutt a new trick.

As I learned some time after we adopted Tipper, her Pom heritage would haunt us. Who knew Pomeranians were bred solely to sneak away from polite company and pee on carpet? That was super aggravating in our last house, with its living room and bedrooms all carpeted. The living room was pretty safe, since it saw lots of traffic and therefore didn’t qualify as a “sneak-away” destination.

But all the bedrooms. Sigh.

In this new house, most floors are hardwood or tile. We have one carpeted guest room, and area rugs in three downstairs rooms. One day during a storm, I got a little lax with Tipper. She went behind a wing chair and peed on the living room rug.

Brent and I bundled the unwieldy rug into the laundry room, rinsed the wet spot, cleaned it with white vinegar, rinsed it some more, and propped it up to air dry.

Not wanting to go through that again, I went to PetSmart for some puppy training pads.

After gating Tipper and myself into the laundry room, I pulled out a pad and let her sniff the pheromone attractant guaranteed to send the irresistible signal:

“This, my canine friend, is where you pee!”

Me: “Here, Tipper, potty. Potty.”
Tipper: >wags tail<
Me (spreads pad on floor and puts dog on it) “Potty!”
Tipper: >wags tail<
After several tries, I let her outside where she immediately went to the grass and peed.

Day 2:
“Here, Tipper, potty. Potty.”
Tipper:

“It’s a little thin, Mom, but I can nap on it okay.”

Day 3:
I followed Tipper outside, pad in hand, to see if I could get her to pee on it.

Nothing doing.

The closest I could get was to get behind her and sneak a fold of the pad under her rear while she was peeing. I hoped she’d smell the pee and get the idea next time.

She didn’t.

Day 8:
After more failed attempts with the pad, I let Tipper out in the living room. She marched over and peed on the living room area rug.

More vinegar. More rinsing. Only this time, I was working alone and ended up knocking over everything in the laundry room trying to wrangle the rug around. Finally rolled it loosely and propped it up on the sink, leaning it against the cabinet to drip dry.

So…. what’s next?

I’m glad you asked. See, adult coloring books are all the rage. I think I’ll pull out a new pad and a bunch of colored markers. Maybe if I disguise the pee pad as a tiny area rug…….

Your turn:
Surely Tipper isn’t the only beloved family pet who gets called “Weasel” on a regular basis. I’d love to hear your pet frustrations! Please share in the comments below.

Thanks for reading!
Jan

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Fiction Jail: Update

Posted on April 26, 2017 by Jan C. Johnson

My outline / plan morphs as I go….

Well, I’m almost out of “Fiction Jail” (or more precisely, “Camp NaNoWriMo”) and here is the promised update on my project.

Have I achieved my goal of drafting all the remaining pivotal scenes?
No.

Have I written more than I could have imagined prior to entering Jail?
Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I have.

I also…

  • Outdid myself in coffee consumption.
  • Kept up with my weekly class at the gym, plus went out bicycling at least once each week.
  • Made a killer lasagne.
  • Planned an out-of-state road trip, to be made later, coordinating travel with my brother.

But more to the point, I…

  • Not only made a research visit to a very helpful Anderson County Ag Extension agent, but totally geeked out about doing so.
  • Realized that at least three of my hard-earned scenes are basically filler, and need to be scrapped entirely.
  • Walked my main character through an existential crisis that threatened the entire series.

See, I’d been trying to follow advice that was meant for drama / suspense / super serious fiction, none of which I am actually writing. My main character finally convinced me she exists primarily to have fun. Or at least, to let her readers have fun.

That brings me to my most important accomplishment during my incarceration….

  • I’ve lightened up.

I’ll be out of Jail by next week, and will see you on Wednesday with a normal post.

“Normal” for me, anyway.

Thanks for reading,
Jan

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