Big Mouth

Hi,
I'm a big mouth. My mother has called me that ever since I can remember. I love to talk. A lot. Often. Some times loudly. I say what's on my mind. Not always a good thing and I've tried to learn to filter before I open up my pisk (Yiddish for 'mouth'). Occasionally being a big mouth has it's pluses. Today that proved true.

I work at the Newtown Athletic Center. I'm there 5 or 6 days a week and I've got to know quite a few of the women who are regulars. When you share space in a locker room, you get rather familiar with one another. I get asked regularly about my bald head. It certainly is a conversation piece. There are no other bald women hanging around the shower stalls at the NAC. Being the big mouth, I am happy to explain my hairless state. Given that open door I emphasize how important it is for people to go to a dermatologist and have their skin checked properly for potential melanoma, squamous cells or other irregularities that may promote skin cancer. The population around here are still very big on tanning and sun worshiping, not to mention the tanning salon obsession with younger women. That's another issue for a different rant some day.

Today when I was getting changed after a yoga class, a woman turned to me in the locker room and thanked me. I didn't recognize her but she said she over heard me talk about my cancer and surgery episode a few months ago. I guess I'm louder than I realize sometimes. She said it prompted her to go and see a dermatologist, and low & behold, he had to remove several melanoma spots from her back. She was shocked to hear that her 'freckles' were not just skin colour irregularities but cancerous cells. Her name is Maryanna and she couldn't thank me enough for getting her to go see a doctor she wouldn't normally have considered bothering with.  She said she had been looking for me for the last month or so to tell me how grateful she was that I told my tale and scared her to death. Maryanna is now a believer in 'skin health' and is spreading her story to all her friends.

Being a big mouth can be a good thing on occasion.

xox
m

3:10am

Hi,
it's the middle of the night, literally, and I'm haunting the house. This is terrible. I never used to have sleeping problems but now sleep has become my enemy.

We bought a new mattress. It's not the bed. I take melatonin most nights. It's not for lack of drugs. There doesn't seem to be any explanation. I just don't sleep. When I do finally drop off out of sheer exhaustion, I can't stay asleep. I get a couple of hours under my skin and then, like tonight, I'm up prowling around our home, looking for something to do to get me back to sleep. It's my worst nightmare.

Reading can knock me out, sometimes. Other attempts just get me hooked into the book and before I know it the sun is up and I have to start the day. I occasionally sit and knit hoping I'll get tired enough to lie down. Infomercials will lull me into the dead zone of TV land but rarely does this help with my sleep issue. I just end up learning about odd fish on the Discovery channel or watching Lavern & Shirley reruns. Late night television is torturous unless you find an old movie you don't mind seeing again, but that's rare. 

The worst part is 'the next day'. I don't function well without a solid 8 hours of uninterrupted slumber. I feel out of sync. I get cranky. My body clock needs resetting. My head hurts. It's a total bitch and so am I. Drugs don't seem to make a difference and the next day I walk around feeling foggy. I can see how you can get hooked into needing sleep aids, then needing something to keep you awake  during the day when you're fighting the residual affects of the sleeping pills.... it's a nasty cycle.

So here I am, blogging at 3:27. It's help me pass almost a half an hour. Maybe I'll try getting back into bed again. Pleasant dreams to all of you.

xox
m

Buying a Bed

Hi,
Once upon a time there was a princess named 'Marilyn'. She hated the bed she had to sleep on. It was lumpy, bumpy and had a cavern in the center that she got sucked into every night. The back pain caused by this bed was unbearable so she convinced her Prince Charming, better known as 'Marshall', to buy her a new bed. He was very gracious about the need for a new bed, but since he slept in the same place as Marilyn did, they felt he should have a say in what the bed should be like also. So off they went on a snowy Saturday morning to try out beds.

Here is where the fairy tale turns into in the horror story.

Bed shopping is worse than trying to buy a used car. No two stores carry the same brands, or if they are the same, they have totally different names so you can't compare apples and oranges. Pricing is all over the map no matter what you look at. Regular coil spring, air mattresses, memory foam, combinations of the lot, straw on the floor.... what ever it is, it's so confusing your head spins. Then there are the sales people. They failed at door-to-door encyclopedia promotions so they ended up working at "Sleepy's" (the same kind of place "as Sleep Country Canada" for my Canadian subscribers). There is just total 'bed hell' out there. Everyone I asked about what bed they liked had the same look on their face of "don't go there!". No one seems to like their bed, or like where they bought it, or ever want to go through the shopping experience again.

We spent 5 hours trekking back and forth between bed stores and we must have lay down on 20 different beds. The easiest thing was to eliminate what we really hated from the pile, then work our way down to the tolerable beds. At last we narrowed the choice down to two different styles. One with layers of memory foam and a coil base, designed by "Dr. Maas" (who ever he is?). The latest trend is to have some medical guru put his name on a bed to make you feel like a doctor subscribed the mattress for you.... here take this pill, sleep on this bed and call me in the morning. The other choice was a memory foam, not a Tempur-pedic, we didn't like that one, but a "Comforpedic", sort of the same but with faster foam recovery so you don't have to wait for the foam to re-conform when you change position.

The thing I liked best about the foam style mattresses is that you don't feel your sleeping partner move at all. It also will accommodate the weight differences that cause me to roll into the middle of a regular bed. My 100lbs. can't compete with Marshall's 185lbs. There, the truth is out. I only weigh 100lbs! Who knew that a bed should be such a big part of a marriage arrangement. Marshall was patient enough to put up with all this and went along with the bed I liked best. Back to this shopping spree....

Marshall played one shop against the other to get the best price and free delivery. Remember, this is just like buying a used car so negotiating is a key factor.... and we play hard ball. The bed arrives today and I'll let you know how the princess sleeps tonight. I just pray Prince Charming is still sleeping with me after all this.

xox
m

Customer Service

Hi,
Has 'customer service' gone the way of the dodo bird? I think it has.

Since I have returned home I have spent the last two days running around town replenishing the house stock of food and assorted items. I've been in grocery stores, BJ's, Home Depot, the bank, the post office, Kohl's, Pet Smart, a cosmetic shop, Dick's Sporting Goods..... it's been a busy couple of days. For all this shopping I have noticed two things.

1) retail establishments in this area are deader than door nails. No one is out and it's not due to bad weather. It's as warm here as Florida was last week.
2) customer service sucks.

Of the 10 or 11 places I have gone to spend money in, only 2 have bothered to treat me like they want my business. Several have just ignored my existence, I'm okay with that I can get in & out faster. Five shops have displayed some of the worst management of retail I have ever seen. It's no wonder no one wants to go to a store anymore.

The worst offender was at Dick's. I needed new swimming goggles. It's 11:30am on Tuesday and I'm one of only two people shopping in the store. When I ask where the goggles are a lazy clerk, who is not doing much of anything that I could discern, tosses his head in a general "over there" motion and says "the goggles are behind that isle". "Which isle?" I ask, there are 10 isles in the area he's nodding at. "I'm not sure, but I think they're behind the coolers" he replies. I can't see any coolers.... I walk away to find them myself. After finally locating the goggles, which have no price on them and aren't on a shelf with anything else that looks familiar, I take them to the cashier. At the check out there is the one other customer paying for her merchandise, me, and six employees standing around, including a manager. The manager is talking about his golf game, or someones golf game, I have no clue but they all seem rapt at hearing this story. I stand and wait politely, wondering if they are going to break up the party to take my money today or some time this year. No one moves. No one asks if I need help, or would like to pay for my item. No one even looks my way but I can tell they noticed my arrival at the check out line. I consider walking out and waiting to see if they notice me stealing the goggles. Probably not, and it not worth getting an arrest sheet for a pair of $25 goggles.

Just when I am about to give up the ghost and leave without goggles a girl decided that she's had enough of the golf story and goes through the motions of helping me pay. No apology for making me wait, no please or thank you, no eye contact. NADA! I tell her I was about to leave since no one was making an effort to help me and she could not have cared less. If I hadn't needed new goggles in such a bad way I wouldn't have bothered. My next move is to e-mail Dick's and let them know what poor service they are offering at this location. It's not a whole lot better in most of the other shops I frequent either.

If the economy is in such bad shape I know know it's not for lack of money. It's because they have made spending your money so painful we would rather just let it pile up under the mattress. Internet shopping is looking better and better.

xox
m

meeting spot

Hi,
I have a new friend, John. He's from northern Illinois. He's a warm, smiling man, quick to say hello to everyone on the beach and give hugs to all the women he greets each morning. I like him a lot.

John walks the beach every day at sunrise and makes his way up to a special spot where he sits down on a sand dune and faces the Gulf of Mexico. Then he has a chat with his wife. He tells her about how he's feeling after having had his knee replaced last November. He talks about their children and grand kids. He says a brief prayer for her, then he gets himself up off the ground and walks back down the beach to the condo to make himself breakfast. Alone.

John's wife died of cancer two years ago and her last wish was to have her ashes scattered into the Gulf outside their apartment. She knew that John would keep coming down to Marco Island to see her if he did that for her, otherwise he'd shut himself up in Illinois and become a hermit. Smart thinking on her part. John stays true to her memory and loves the fact that his morning strolls allow him to visit with her everyday. He sheds a few tears and gets his crying out of his system but considers that a good, healthy thing to do. I think he's terrific.

I try and meet up to walk with him in the morning after he's had his chat with his wife. We talk football (well, I listen anyway) and I'm learning about his children and his life story. He'll be 80 years old this year and looks about 65. If not for the fresh knee replacement I'm sure he'd be running down the beach and not walk. He misses his wife but has moved on. John even had a girlfriend for a while but it didn't pan out. He's cool with that but has decided he doesn't like the drama and would rather be on his own. I don't blame him at all. His morning meetings with his thoughts are what keep him sane and focused. I know his wife would approve. She's there for every meeting.

xox
m

Panther Traffic

Hi,
I'm still in Marco Island, and it's still cold. Nothing new there.
This morning at 4am my dad and I were awake and leaving to go to the airport. He's going back to Toronto for 11 days while I stay here and look after my mom. The airport run at 4am looked like this:

I was able to talk him out of schlepping a glass bottle of tequila home in his carry-on bag. First, he would have to check the bag with alcohol and a glass bottle was never going to make it back to Toronto alive going through baggage handling facilities. Score one for Marilyn.

On the way to the airport we decide to stop at the 24 hour Walmart and pick up some juice and bananas for me to take back to my mother. I was pretty impressed that there is a 24 hour Walmart open in the middle of nowhere on US41... and we weren't the only shoppers at 4:30am. I certainly don't have a 24 hour anything where we live and we're not in the middle of mangroves with deserted highways. What does Walmart know that I don't? I guess if you build it, they will comes proves true in this case.

My favorite part of this strip of highway is the signage. "Panther Traffic" in a big yellow sign with a silhouette of a panther slinking along. There are 4 of these signs along a 10 mile stretch on both sides of the highway. In the almost 30 years I have been coming to Marco Island and travelling this road, I have yet to see one panther, let alone any panther traffic. Brush fires, stuck semi trucks, osprey nests and lots of giant blue herons are around, but never panther traffic. I would love to see a pride of panthers cross the road (this comment needs a punch line but I'm too tired to think of one right now, it's 7:20am). I bet the highway patrol guys have to replace the 'panther traffic' sign on a regular basis. If I was into stealing signage, this would be one I'd work at getting. Maybe it appeals to me because you never would see a sign like that in Toronto, other than in the zoo, and I don't think the Toronto Zoo even has enough panthers to create 'traffic'.

How many panthers do you need to qualify as 'traffic'? Is it like having more than 2 cars at a traffic light in Muncie, Indiana where they consider that a 'traffic jam'? Or are we talking a couple of gross (a gross = 144 for the measurement impaired)? In Yardley we have 'duck & geese traffic'. That can back up the main street for over a half hour when they decide to waddle across from Lake Afton to the church lawn to get some fresh grass. No signage warns you of that pending traffic disaster. Maybe 'Goose Traffic' isn't as terrifying sounding. One day I'm hoping to be driving Route US41 and get stopped by panther traffic. I'll make sure to take pictures.

xox
m

32°

Hi,
I'm in Marco Island, Florida but you would never know it walking outside this morning. Dad and I hit the beach for our morning constitutional at 6:30am. It was 32°F. Crazy Canadians that we are. We certainly had the whole place to ourselves. No one else around here was braving the elements at that temperature. Yesterday the wind kept me off the beach. I walked the town main drag for two hours instead. The winds almost lifted me off my feet a couple of times but the temperature wasn't too bad with the sun on my face. I know it's colder and more miserable up north but the people starting to migrate south to get away from this weather are truly bummed out right now.

My favorite parts about walking Marco island beach are the fabulous sea shells and the 'regu;ars' who walk the sands early in the morning. Since the wind has whipped up the Gulf for the last 3 days, the sea shells are everywhere and you have to watch every step so that you don't trip over a conch or smash a sanddollar. I limit my daily take to what ever fits in one hand, other wise my compulsive-obsessive nature would fill a green garbage bag with flotsam every time I hit the beach. The morning 'walkers' are usually all out and everyone had their set walking times. It's very funny how they all know each other and keep track of who shows up on time, who's late for their walk, which one skipped too many days in a row. They seem to keep score or attendance records on one another. I have been coming here regularly enough to almost join the ranks. My dad knows everyone by name and they usually stop and have at least a brief 'hello' while they pass along the shore line. Sarah is a runner so we get a wave. Brent is a serious shell-hound and he passes me a prize from the water some mornings. John is widowed and goes out to talk to his wife, whos' ashes he scattered into the Gulf last year as per her wish. He gives me morning hugs. Dwane has become a family friend and buddy to my dad. We used to live near him and his wife Barbara in Indiana.

The world is a small place when you walk the beach.

xox
m

2012... some things never change

Hi,
the calendar has flipped over. It's Day #3 of 2012 but other than that, not much has changed. All the news wants to talk about is the Iowa caucus that votes today. Nothing else is going on in the world except who wants 'Mitt' and who wants 'Newt'... or maybe I should root for 'Ron'? Does it really matter? Trust me, it isn't going to make a hill of beans difference and no one is paying attention in China or India.... and that counts for almost half the planet.

I'm down in "not so sunny" Florida. The politics here are very different to those up by our house. Here the term "Liberal" is a dirty word, said with a sneer and a shake of a head. Anything other than a 'good ol' white boy' is barely tolerated and that's only because it's against some stupid law to do other wise. Bigotry, racial profiling, narrow mindedness and down right hatred own this part of the state. It's ugly to try and join in on a conversation by the pool. I can play the innocent Canadian and stay out of most of it but I get suckered into talking about health care and  it can come to blows if I don't walk away. Having had the misfortune of experiencing health care on both sides of the 49th parallel I feel I am qualified to talk about both sides strengths, and weaknesses.... of which there are equal amounts. A woman in the pool the other day was hell bent on converting my opinion to hers about the terrible state of 'socialized' medicine in Canada. It doesn't work, everyone dies in waiting rooms and all Canadians run to the USA to get free medical attention on her dime & dollar. No, she wasn't kidding. Yes, she truly believed this. I got out of the water before I drowned her right then and there.

On a brighter side.... the beach is still awesome. Today is very, very windy and rather cool (high 57°) but that will not deter me from wandering out there and looking for seashells or watching for dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico. I can't take being indoor even in crappy weather. The constant blare of CNN from my dad's TV is enough to drive me out even in a hurricane. I don't want to hear another statistic on the vote this evening in Iowa. There are still 9 more months of election crap to live thru and I may not survive it. I think I would be a fantastic political pundit for the networks to interview, but I haven't the hair-do for it and James Carlivale has the bald look all sewn up. I guess I just yell into the wind today. Maybe the seagulls, pelicans and terns will care to listen to me.

xox
m