Posted tagged ‘cold’
October 19, 2015
Today is cold, in the mid 40’s. The sun is back to playing peek-a-boo. Outside isn’t all that inviting so I guess I’ll hunker down for another day or two. I’m not completely rid of the plague as I still have a voice better suited for an obscene phone call than a regular conversation. My cough didn’t wake me up last night, but it is still hanging in there. My friend is bringing me bread, cookies and a lemon donut from Dunkin’ Donuts. I’m a happy woman, albeit sick but still happy.
When I was a kid, I don’t remember missing much school. I don’t think I was really sick enough all that often. A cold was nothing. It meant bundling a bit better with a new layer or two. We walked to school on even the coldest days. I remember my cheeks turned red and raw from the wind. We’d walk backwards away from the wind when it was the strongest and the coldest. School was a refuge where we could defrost and de-layer. I don’t think we really ever complained much. That was just the way it was. We all walked to school back then despite the weather.
I used to like soup on a cold day. My mother would fill the thermos from my lunch box, add some saltines, and maybe a half of a sandwich and some dessert. Usually it was tomato soup because I could drink it instead of needing a spoon. Bologna was the most popular meat for sandwiches. We always had tuna fish on Fridays when we couldn’t eat meat. My mother added mayonnaise, chopped celery and lettuce so the tuna fish wasn’t half bad. It was always on white bread. We never had any other kind of bread. I think I was a teenager before I found out bread came in many colors and flavors.
Back when we were kids our dinners were meat, potatoes, usually mashed, and a vegetable. We had bland palates. We were seldom introduced to any foreign foods though we did count spaghetti as Italian. My friends and I now eat all sorts of foods from a variety of countries. I know it was Ghana which first introduced me to really foreign foods like African, Indian and Middle Eastern. They opened the flood gates. Now I’m willing to try almost anything though I balk at insects, household pets and rodents.
Categories: Musings
Tags: bologna, cold, Cookies, obscene phone call, plague, soup in a thermos, staying home from school, sun playing peek-e-boo, tuna fish, white bread
Comments: 10 Comments
October 18, 2015
I can’t put my finger on which one but my wheezing reminds me of sound effects from a movie. They are a bit like metal scraping metal. I’m thinking this cold and being by myself for so long are affecting my brain. Sound effects from Wheezing?
Things are getting better. The cold’s grip is weakening. I only woke up twice last night and managed to sleep 11 interrupted hours. It looks like I have to go out sometime today. I haven’t any bread or soup or anything which tantalizes my taste buds. Sweets keep coming to mind. I’m thinking chocolate chip cookies are a possible remedy. I suspect, though, I’ll probably stay home. It takes far too much energy to get up and out even for chocolate chip cookies. Besides, I think I need a nap.
The day is cold. The sun pops in and out but is merely decorative when it appears. It isn’t warmth. I turned on my heat for one cycle this morning. My bed and comforter are sounding more and more appealing.
Not being around enough people is the reason I’m sick. When I worked, I was around kids with their various ills and ailments. I developed an immunity. I don’t even remember when last I had a cold though this may be a whole different strain of something. I think I caught it during my reunion last weekend. With all those people in one room, someone must have had a germ or two and shared. How kind!
I’m combing the TV for classic horror movies. I’m thinking the Holy Trinity of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy. I’m not including The Wolf Man as I always feel really sad for Larry Talbot. He didn’t deserve his fate.
I watch NCIS even though Abby and her pre-adolescent prattle drive me crazy. Just a while ago I happened on the last 5 minutes of The Brady Bunch and left it on as I wanted to watch what followed it. During those 5 minutes I had an epiphany. Abby based her character on Cindy Brady. They have the same child-like voice, intonations and the same childish indignations. Trust me on this one. The only NCIS mystery left is why the prop guy doesn’t realize we hear the echo of the empty coffee cup when Gibbs puts his coffee on the desk.
Categories: Musings
Tags: Bread, chilly, Chocolate, cold, heat, scraping metal, sick, wheezing
Comments: 11 Comments
October 15, 2015
Today is the mass in honor of my mother who passed away ten years ago. I am not there; instead, I am home coughing, sniffling and complaining though no one is here to listen. I do not get colds so this threw me for a loop. My guess is I caught it at the reunion where someone, a Typhoid Mary type, was passing the germ amid all the hugs and kisses. I am not happy.
This will be a short post. I’m going back to bed after dousing myself with a variety of cold medicines. My voice is so deep I could sing bass or make obscene phone calls. When I cough, Gracie lives the room. The cats don’t even notice. They sleep right through my hacking.
I’d like one of those talking dolls they sold when I was a kid. They had a string you pulled to make them talk, and they said things like “I love you,” but I want mine to say things like “You poor baby” or “How about some nice hot chicken soup?” I remember The Twilight Zone episode when the talking doll was evil. “My name is Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill you.” I’ll pass on that one.
The common cold has no cure and you just have to let it runs its course. I sleep and take medicine to dull the symptoms for a while. The only hope I have is pneumonia. That they can cure.
Categories: Musings
Tags: bass, bed, cold, cold medicines, Cough, obscene phone calls, pneumonia, sick, talking dolls, Talky Tina, Twilight Zone, Typhoid Mary
Comments: 10 Comments
October 5, 2015
Mondays are my late day as I go to my neighbor’s at ten and stay a couple of hours. She is from Brazil and thinks her English needs help so we chat. Through our conversations, I get the chance to explain and correct as best I can what she says wrong. Lately it has been subject-verb agreement though I never use those words. She is stuck on he have. She tells me English isn’t easy, and I totally agree.
No weather report today. Just look at yesterday’s and the day before that and on and on. I swear I saw a patch of blue sky but I may have been hallucinating.
I sometimes thought my dad was really born in another country and English was his second language. He had no idea how to spell words. He wrote them the way the way they sounded to him. I had the challenge of translating into English and typing what he wrote for the company newsletter. It took me the longest time to decipher some of the words. I’d read the sentence aloud over and over trying to figure out the word through context. Usually I was wrong. My dad couldn’t understand why I’d miss such easy words. I didn’t bother to explain.
We were a game playing family. Every Christmas we got new games. When we were young, we played board games. When we were older, we played card games. I remember so many nights sitting around the kitchen table playing cards. Cribbage was always my father’s game, and we played every time I visited and every time we traveled together. When it a bunch of us, we played all sorts of card games. Uno was our game for a while. My Dad never remembered to say uno when putting down his second to the last card so he always ended up having to pick up another card. That frustrated him, and he always used the appropriate swear to accompany his mental lapses. We laughed at him. He was never grateful. Finally, after two or three times of forgetting, he took a match book, put it in the middle of the table and said that was his uno. He didn’t have to say it any more. We handed him back his match book without a single word.
We played Jeopardy with clickers so the first person to click got to answer. My dad ignored the clicks. He’d answer whether he clicked or not. We sort of gave up on Jeopardy.
We played hundreds of games of Hi-Low-Jack mostly on Friday nights. One of my uncles was usually there. The bar was set up on the counter, and the kitchen was filled with smoke. Whoever sat out a hand was forced to be the bartender. Those nights were the best. We laughed all night long. We all made fun of my Dad, the perfect target. He bid high and often, and it was a pleasure to take a trick away from him with the jack of trumps. We all did it with a flourish just to antagonize him. If I had three wishes, one of them would be to have one more Friday night at my parents’ house with all of us there playing hi-low-Jack. I’d even volunteer to be the bartender.
Categories: Musings
Tags: board games card games, cold, conversations, counter bar, dank weather, game players, hi-low jack, learning English, new games, smoky room, Uno, verb agreement
Comments: 4 Comments
October 1, 2015
My mother would have called it a deluge. The rain all day yesterday was so heavy it was deafening. The wind came later and then the night got cold. Today is dark, damp and cold. The rain will be back, if not tonight, definitely tomorrow.
When I let Gracie out this morning, I noticed a few yellow leaves on the tree near the driveway. They weren’t there two days ago. I think yesterday’s weather shocked the leaves into changing color. I checked out the rest of the yard and saw more yellow here and there. We now have real fall weather, no more 70’s. It will be in the 50’s the rest of the week.
I keep my outside sandals by the clothes tree in the living room. Around the house I wear flip-flops. Before I go out, I switch from one to the other. Today my feet are cold so I think it’s time to hunt down my slippers and my outside shoes. The sandals will be moved to their winter home, the closet. It’s a sad day.
I have a list of all the chores that need to be done, the ones I’ve ignored for a while. My book got in the way and then I got two new books and started one of them. I have no guilt over being a sloth, but the list seems to get longer and longer so I’m working on crossing off chores one by one. I’ve already cleaned the litter and brought the trash to the car. I have laundry to bring upstairs to put away and I need to change my bed. Once that’s done Gracie and I are going to the dump. I’ll stop to pick up a few groceries on the way home. That will finish my list and I can go back to more days of lolling about reading and eating bon bons, which happen to be on my list.
Categories: Musings
Tags: 50˚ weather, a day of heavy rain, cat litter, cold, dump, lists, winter shoes, yellow leaves
Comments: 6 Comments
May 2, 2015
Cold again but sunny-the weather is in a rut.
The red spawn can fly. Yesterday I noticed he was at a different feeder and was sitting and dining al fresco on the backside so he couldn’t see me. I could see only his tail hanging below the feeder. I went slowly across the deck making no noise so he couldn’t hear me. When I got to the feeder, I was so close I could have touched him. His eyes got huge when he saw me and realized he was stuck. I was by the rail, his usual escape route. I stamped my foot to scare him, and he jumped off the feeder and sort of flew to the ground, two stories below. He landed on all fours then ran to the back part of the yard. Sadly, yesterday’s experience will have no affect on that spawn. He’ll be back. I just know he will.
When I was a little kid, feeding the squirrels on Boston Common was exciting. My dad would buy a couple of bags of peanuts and give us each some. I’d shell a few then I’d toss them. A stampede always ensued. Several of the grey squirrels would scurry over, stand in front of me, some on hind legs, and wait for a handout. I thought it was kind of neat to have wildlife so close to me, almost eating out of my hand. I swear the squirrels living on the Common had to waddle from place to place because they were so well fed.
I remember London and Trafalgar Square and the pigeons. My dad and I went touring a bit by ourselves one afternoon. I don’t remember where my mother was. We bought some seed, and the birds attacked. I swear they were Hitchcock extras, hungry and out of work. They jumped on our hands, shoulders and even our heads. I threw the seeds. My dad held on to his, and he was soon covered in pigeons. They were flying around him, and I took pictures. He was laughing in every picture. When he was finally out of seed, we sat on a bench for a bit and concocted a plan. We’d get my mother there, act innocent and have her hold some seeds in her outstretched hands. We did, and the pigeons attacked. I took pictures, great pictures of flapping wings circling around my mother. She was screaming as the birds settled on her head and shoulders. We yelled for her to save herself and throw the seeds. My mother was really upset. This was her first attack by birds. My dad and I acted innocent and solicitous, but I suspected she knew.
I took slides back then and we always had a slide night a month or two later. The pigeons pictures were hysterical, even my mother had to laugh.
Categories: Musings
Tags: attack of the pigeons, bird seed, Boston Common, cold, feeding the squirrels, flying squirrel, London Trafalgar Square, peanuts, pigeons, red spawn, throw the seeds
Comments: 23 Comments
April 26, 2015
It’s cold again today. The high will be 51˚. The nights are still in the mid to high 30’s. The sun was here for a bit then the clouds came in and the sun was covered, but the day is still light.
When I was a kid, I either went to the early mass with my dad, the usher, or I walked to mass later in the morning. If it was a lucky Sunday, my aunt would be at the later mass, see me and invite me to the Stoneham Spa for a lime ricky. The spa was uptown. It was old and looked like the malt shops on TV. It had wooden booths with all sorts of names carved on the tables, faded signs on the walls highlighting some of the menu items and stools at the counter. It had been a hangout even during my mother’s high school days. I don’t remember when it closed down, but I know it was before I was in high school or we would have been there.
If I didn’t see my aunt, I’d trudge home after mass to spend the most boring day of the week in the house. We didn’t go anywhere to play or roam on Sunday because we had to be there for the big Sunday dinner. It was usually the only time in the week we had roast beef so it wasn’t all that bad being stuck in the house waiting for dinner. I’d read the comics, the only part of the paper I cared about, or watch the Sunday movie. Sometimes we’d go visit my grandparents after dinner, but mostly we just stayed around the house. On Sunday nights we went to bed earlier than usual. My mother gave us the excuse, which we never believed, that because we had been up late on Friday and Saturday nights we needed to go early to get our rest for school on Monday. We used to argue and plead but to no avail. I think my displeasure was evidenced by my feet pounding each step as I went upstairs, but I was usually wearing slippers so the noise wasn’t bad enough for my father to yell.
Sundays haven’t really changed much. They are still mostly boring. Now I read all of the papers, but I still start with comics. Old, ingrained habits seldom die. I don’t cook a big meal for myself but I like Sunday breakfast. That comes from when I’d visit my parents, and my dad always made me my Sunday breakfast. He’d cook eggs, anyway I wanted them, bacon and toast. Mostly I liked them sunny-side up. That’s what I make for myself, but he never broke the yolks. I sometimes do.
Categories: Musings
Tags: afternoon TV movie, boring Sunday, cloudy, cold, comics in the paper, early to bed, malt shop, Mass, pounding feet, roast beef, Stoneham Spa, Sunday breakfast, Sunday dinner
Comments: 12 Comments
April 24, 2015
Today is yesterday and it’s the day before that. The temperature is in the 50’s and it is sunny and cloudy. The breeze, almost a wind, makes the day feel colder. I have things to do so Gracie and I will be out and about including a trip to the dump where it will feel like winter when the wind whips across the dump’s expanse.
My father loved to go to the dump. He usually went every Saturday and always asked for someone to go with him. There were few takers. That dump was a dump of old with high piles of trash and seagulls flying overhead squawking the whole time. The piles and the seagulls could be seen from the highway. I always told people coming to visit to keep their eyes peeled for the dump as we were the next exit.
My father would be disappointed at the dumps now with all their recycle bins and trash bins. The fun is gone and so are the seagulls.
I always found nuns mysterious and a little bit scary. I used to wonder what their hair looked like under their habits, and I also wondered why they had white handkerchiefs stuffed up their sleeves instead of in their pockets. I thought it was sort of gross. My first nuns had white blinders so they couldn’t see sideways without turning their heads. It was always to our advantage that by the time the nun turned we weren’t doing anything. She could hear the whisper but not pinpoint the source. The nuns also had a piece, sort of a half veil, across their foreheads just below the wimple. We got quite the shock when we went back to school when I was in the eighth grade. The blinders were gone and all that was left was a little visor across the top. That nun could see everyone and everything. Nuns 1, kids 0.
Categories: Musings
Tags: blinders, cold, dump run, habits, nuns, piles of trash, recycle bins, seagulls, sunny, wimple
Comments: 8 Comments
April 20, 2015
Cold, windy day today. The sky is a light grey. The high will be in the very low 50’s. I have no plans for the day so I’m staying home, cozy, warm and, best of all, comfortable. Huzzah, there are buds on my forsythia and on my wild rose bushes. I noticed them this morning. They are always the first to bloom.
Today is Patriot’s Day here in Massachusetts, a state holiday. It commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the start of the Revolutionary War. That day helped define the character of Massachusetts.
I remember in the sixth grade learning about the Revolutionary War. Miss Quilter told it like a story, and I was enthralled. She explained about Paul Revere’s ride and how he, William Dawes and other riders rode all night to get to Lexington. She told us why it was called the “shot heard round the world” in Emerson’s poem. There was a picture in my textbook of Patriots hiding behind rocks to shoot at the Redcoats. Miss Quilter explained the picture and guerrilla warfare. That word wasn’t in my textbook, and I thought it was the same as the big monkeys. Miss Quilter went on to tell us the Red Coats didn’t see the shooters or know where the bullets were coming from. The Patriots followed the British all the way back to Boston and shot from behind rocks and trees.
We did a family outing one Sunday to Lexington and Concord. It was history come to life. I remember walking across the Old North Bridge in Concord and I remember standing on the Lexington Green just imagining the battle. The statue of the Minute Man seemed to stand above all else. We went into the tavern where Adams and Hancock were before they fled. On the way home we traveled the same route Revere had. I was in awe that whole day.
Categories: Musings
Tags: cold, comfortable, Concord, grey day, guerilla warfare, Lexington, Minuteman, Patriots' Day, Redcoats, Revolutionary War, windy
Comments: 8 Comments
April 9, 2015
“Rain, rain go away. Come again another day. Rain, rain go away. Little Johnny wants to play.” I suspect saying this over and over won’t have any affect. This is the second day of cold, chilling rain. Last night the rain was heavy, and I fell asleep to the plinking of drops on the roof. Last night was also cold again, in the 30’s. I watched the Sox play Philly (they lost their perfect record), and when the camera followed the pitcher ‘s wind-up, I was distracted by seeing the pitcher’s breath and watching him trying to keep his hands warm. The players were bundled as much as they could be. Long sleeves were part of the uniform of the night. It was football weather.
When I was really young, I learned all the nursery rhymes from listening to my mother. She’d say them in a sing-song voice which my ears loved hearing. I remember seeing a ladybug outside on a leaf and telling her to fly away home, her house was on fire and her children were gone. All the Littles were friends of mine. I felt bad for Little Bo Peep and Little Boy Blue but really bad for Little Miss Muffet and her new founded fear of hungry spiders. I am a child born on the Sabbath, fair and wise and good in every way. I liked quoting that one. Some of them I could sing, badly, but it didn’t matter. They were fun. Old MacDonald’s was the best with all the animals sounds. Row, Row, Row your Boat was a round but somehow we always ended up finishing on the same lines no matter when we started.
Thinking about these rhymes got me to look them up, and I was surprised to find out how old some of them are. Little Bo Peep lost her sheep in 1805 and Little Boy Blue fell asleep in 1744. Miss Muffet has had her spider phobia since 1805. Ding Dong Bell is the oldest dating from 1580, that poor kitty.
I don’t know if nursery rhymes are still popular, but I really hope they are though it would be okay with me if the kitty finally came out of the well.
Categories: Musings
Tags: cold, Ding Dong Bell, football weather, Little Bo Peep, Little Boy Blue, Little Miss Muffet, nursery rhymes, rainy, Red Sox, Row Row Row Your Boat
Comments: 12 Comments
keepthecoffeecoming.blog 