Virginia Breeze

How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Maria?
A flibbertijibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!

–The Sound of Music

Remember this song? Some nuns sing it about Julie Andrews. She just doesn’t want to adopt the program. Well I sing it about Evita.

How do you solve a problem like Evita?

Because every time i read one of her posts I end up throwing something out! First it was the rum!

And now it’s my teflon coated frying pan!

http://evolvingwellness.com/posts/160/green-teflon/

I really hope she doesn’t decide that dog hair is bad for us. Sparky would have a fit. Malarky would start reading the help wanted section of the newspaper. And I would have to sleep with one eye open.

But frying pans are not really the issue today. Because I am addicted to sugar. It’s in just about everything we eat and it’s very addicting. You go into withdrawal if you don’t have your fix after awhile.

And I can’t stand the idea of being addicted to anything. So now your blogging buddy is on a diet. And he’s also walking every day. This morning we walked for forty five minutes. That’s up fifty percent from yesterday. And it’s up 150 percent from the day before. Because way back then we were just walking from the living room to the kitchen and back again.

When I noticed that we might one day go in the medical books as a miracle of some sort. Because it looks from up here like we are going to have a baby.

Blogger this year. Reality show icon next year. Right after the cute show about the parents who got six kids at one time after they took fertility drugs.

When I read Evita she mesmerizes me. I’m not sure if I believe everything she says but it doesn’t seem to matter much. Because I was due for an overhaul and she is the only one I see who has a nice looking blog and seems ready to go there with me.

Because when you do stuff like this you need to become really motivated. It’s an extreme deal until new habits are established and pick up some of the load. And even then it’s not a piece of cake as we all know. Hhmmm cake. I have been carrying around a tube of Ritz diet crackers for those moments when death due to starvation seems imminent. And a bottle of diet Seven-Up.

Please don’t tell me they are going to kill me too Evita! I need something!

Sigh. Why am I doing this?

Because you can be a senior citizen who is healthy or at least trying to be or you can go the other way.

Choose. That’s why.

Grumps must move on. . . .have a nice morning.

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The Beatles/ I’m So Tired

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Last night I was glued to the tube watching Frontline and their documentary about life in China. It is not reality tv. It is harsh reality television.

It is “Thank God I don’t live there” television. I was walking around today thinking about the young woman who had to fight off her parents and her community to avoid an arranged marriage. And finally managed to do it.

The alternative? She has a job working in the city in some sort of high tech factory. And she works eleven hours per day seven days per week. Her task is to put four wires into a receptacle six hundred times per hour. That is ten times per minute for eleven hours. Over and over again.

Maybe she gets a half hour for lunch.

But the good news is that she meets someone she genuinely likes and they fall in love. So she has some happiness in her life. And she is a cute little thing. I feel like sending her a wedding present.

She will probably insert millions of wires into receptacles before she is done.

AAggghhhhhhhh.

Anyway. Moving on. There are many interesting characters that we discover. There is a young guy with a winning smile and a very attractive shirt who plans to tailor shirts for individuals and sell them on the internet. And the next time we see him he has ten women working on sewing machines and boxes of shirts ready to go. Amazing!

He becomes a Christian and seems totally satisfied. There’s no girlfriend in the picture so he doesn’t have to worry about supporting a family. It’s just him and dear old mom.

Smart guy!

Most of them are not so lucky. Loneliness takes its toll. But everything revolves around money. Relationships suffer. It’s a hard life. I couldn’t handle it. I would have to take a slow boat to the United States. And that option is available to some of them. But the parents exert an amazing influence on them and they stay.

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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/youngchina/

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I rewrote an older poem today and posted it earlier. I had actually been working on another poem but it wasn’t going anywhere fast so I took a look at this one again.

The one that won’t allow itself to be written quickly is about a more serious subject. It’s about why we allow ourselves to be born. Because I think we do. I think we have a choice and we decide to come here for various reasons. The poem goes into some of those reasons.

It’s really about reincarnation.

I happen to believe in this cycle of births and deaths. But the poem is going to take some real work. Maybe this weekend i can clear the desk and do it.

Today I was distracted by this other poem that I hid in my first blog Shooting The Virginia Breeze (a Wordpress dot com blog I don’t really know what to do with it so I hide things in it.)

I rewrote a bunch of lines in this poem and posted it here.

It’s an orphan poem. It never has received any comments. But I like some of the imagery. And we like to go out on a limb here at VB every once in awhile.

This poem originally came about because we often have dinner with the television on. We like to watch The Andy Griffith Show. I had never seen any of the episodes before and they are actually pretty good. There’s a reason this show is still on the air after forty years.

At some point during dinner a commercial comes on about Cialis and impotence. I am sitting there with my wife and often her parents when this thing comes on and they start talking about erectile dysfunction. I find it very strange to be listening to this over dinner with my mother-in-law.

But everybody seems to think it’s pretty funny. There’s a couple in the kitchen and all of a sudden the faucet explodes and water starts geysering towards the ceiling. What’s that all about?

That doesn’t sound like impotence to me. Maybe something else but not that. And then the couple start laughing.

I can just see my wife and i sharing a laugh if our kitchen sink exploded. “HAHAHAH look at that honey! The faucet is sticking in the ceiling and the water’s a foot deep on the floor. I bet there’s a waterfall over by the stairs there. HAHAHAHA.”

What do they put in this medicine. . . . some sort of hallucinogenic? But then I realized that I liked this couple. Because they were happy together and they wanted to work out all their problems together. It wasn’t just about sex. It was about home maintenance and probably a lot of other stuff.

They were not going off looking for thrills with other partners. They were not trying to escape the challenges they faced. They were going to work things out and get old together. And they were going to do it with a sense of humor.

I liked that a lot. So I wrote this poem.

I am also hoping the Cialis people will see it one day and decide they need it for one of their ads.

That way I won’t ever have to worry about home maintenance again. I will have my own live in maintenance guy plus a cook and a cleaning staff.

I really do have this whole thing worked out. And I am a very patient guy sometimes.

You can ask my wife.

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Do you believe in reincarnation?  Have you ever felt like you knew someone from a past life or were in a place that maybe you knew from a past life?

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It is eight am and we are having an early morning thunderstorm. Usually these things drop by in the late afternoon after a day of oppressive humidity. And the air lately has been very dry and cold so I don’t quite understand what is happening.

My weatherman skills only take me so far.

And my dog Sparky doesn’t understand either. I built him a big doggy door on the porch so he can go outside and investigate any potential problems whenever he feels like it. You never know when you might be enjoying yourself somewhere in the world and a reader decides to drop in.  Sparky loves those moments.  But he has decided to come in this morning and take a nap about five feet from where I am sitting.

I won’t say he’s afraid of the thunder. He probably just wants to be close in case the thunder god decides to attack his beloved master.

I’m not sure you are that quick Sparky boy.

I read a story once about this guy who was inside talking on his telephone when lightening came in through the window and zapped him pretty good.

He has been able to see dead people ever since just like the little kid in The Sixth Sense.

Good for him I say. Let’s just hope he’s not interested in politics. We have enough of those guys voting already.

So I received a very nice comment sometime last night from Jordin’s grandmother Nana. At least I am pretty sure it was her grandmother. I remember Jordin thanking everybody the night she won AI and was standing on the stage raining tears. It was a wonderful moment. And she thanked her parents and “Nana and Poppy” I think. Maybe I have the Poppy part wrong. But I remember it because we called my grandmother “Nana” and we called my grandfather “Pop”. Probably Poppy would have been nicer but we all grew up in New England.

I would explain but somehow I don’t think it’s necessary since you all have heard a New Englander talk at one time or another. They get to the point very quickly. I never noticed how strange they can sound with their profound accents until I moved down here to Virginia.

After a few years it was clear to me that I had been abused by abrupt speech and hard accents as a child (as well as by older kids who liked to sit on my head).

In any case the sky is “Popping” and “Whamming” and “Keyrashing” out there this morning. And I did receive this comment. This must be a trying moment for them. It has been one success after another for Jordin in th past year. But isn’t this just what happens to all of us when we are going along and things are moving in our direction? Suddenly and seemingly for no reason the stars turn against us.

But they are such a strong family. They will run through it like Emmitt Smith used to run through a line of really big guys (who probably would have enjoyed sitting on his head).

My wife and I still would like to take them all out to dinner if they ever come to Virginia Beach.

Beth returned from the wedding last night in high spirits. I think she wants to get married again. Hopefully to the same person she married last time. But she is sleeping now and the dogs are sleeping nearby or under the bed.

All the flowers are blossoming and this rain will encourage more to come out. In between rumbles I can hear the fan turning and the wind outside. This is Virginia Breeze after all.

And all is well. We thank God this Sunday morning for keeping all our children safe. No doubt they are sleeping too wherever they are.

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