WOMEN AGES 50+ FOR OCTOBER 2016

Options
1…7273757778…80

Replies

  • grandmallie
    grandmallie Posts: 9,804 Member
    Options
    Morning Ladies~
    I am feeling much better, not 100% but ready to take on the day.. my DSIL is having a pumpkin carving party and she is going all out.. I am going over to that and then doing a grocery shop...I am looking to eat better,as I have not for a long long time.. without the extra freezer space I am missing my frozen veggies, as every time I get fresh ones I dont get to cook them when I want them.. have to get better at that..
    Sounds like alot of us went through the same things.. when I left Rich I got an apt 2 bedroom , it was cute and when I had the kids I slept on the couch,,,then I met Tom.. I was working to jobs just to keep my head above water.. and it was tough.. Tom would come over on the nights I had the kids and would babysit them until I got home, and the head gasket went on my van and I still had 2-3 yrs to pay on the loan. Bless him he paid 2,000 to get it rebuilt .. he was wonderful in the beginning... boy how the times have changed lol.. he does show his love in other ways, he doesn't ever tell me anymore, but I know he still cares for me..
  • kevrit
    kevrit Posts: 3,959 Member
    Options
    Good Sunday morning! Just marking my spot for now.
  • terewilliams
    terewilliams Posts: 336 Member
    edited October 2016
    Options
    Good Morning Ladies! I've had a hectic time since last October....got laid off my job, found a new one where I can work from home 2 days a week (Yeah!), lost my faithful Doberman companion Storm, welcomed a new companion Weimariner Blue, got married, worked with DH through a 4 month illness (he's much better now), started a new business creating embellished glass vases, and now am comitting time to getting my body back to where it was last year or even better. Looking forward to checking in regularly next month.

    Tere in RVA
  • csofled
    csofled Posts: 3,022 Member
    Options
    :)
  • Katla49
    Katla49 Posts: 10,385 Member
    Options
    Tere: It is so good to see you again! Welcome back. Congratulations on your marriage! :flowerforyou:

    Alison: I'm glad you can see that Tom still cares for you. My mama always told me that actions speak louder than words. I'll add that words can easily lie but actions are right out there to be seen for what they are. (((HUGS)))

    Karen in VA: You have made a triumph of your life and I am happy for you. I love this quote and am planning to add it to my list for future use. Thank you for it. Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'!" -Audrey Hepburn


    The household is waking up around me and I am hoping there is coffee. No school this morning so I wonder how we will spend our day. DD is still recovering from surgery so it may be fairly quiet. I won't mind.

    Katla temporarily in Illinois
  • Peach1948
    Peach1948 Posts: 2,473 Member
    Options
    Happy Sunday Morning to All

    Tere ~ What a buy month you have had. Congrats on your marriage and wishing you much success on your new business venture.

    DnL and Grands are dropping by after church and I am fixing breakfast for lunch! Will be so good to see them outside of baseball. LOL

    Carol
  • tngram2seven
    tngram2seven Posts: 465 Member
    Options
    Heather- happy to hear Johnny is still a part of the family. The stories of him must have been wonderful for your boys.
  • Lagopus
    Lagopus Posts: 1,016 Member
    edited October 2016
    Options
    Lisa - I read about your working life and I totally get it. That awful spinning in your head when you've been working furiously – not for hours but for days or weeks. The horrendous emptiness when the s**t is finally out of your hands and you're all revved up with nowhere to dump the excess adrenalin. The Scylla and Charybdis of having a steady job with a paycheck attached, or being your own slavedriver to make sure you can bill somebody for something.

    Yep. I get it, sistah. I read your posts and think: There despite the grace of God go I, darn it.
    Thank you all for listening. :heart:

    Heather - I'm rather touched that you decided to rescue Johnny. I see similar struggles in my future. It makes me feel better to know I'm not alone in being indecisive.

    Heather, Lisa, Karen, and Kelly - Yep! Me too! When my husband and I were starting our family, we were really poor. Okay, we lived in Sweden, where the system takes pretty good care of people, but we were both new to the country and had no idea what we were entitled to. So we got by for years on one student subsidy and the lowest possible child allowance. It wasn't until our kids left home twenty years later that we started feeling comfortably off. I learned a lot about how to get by on a shoestring during those years, so I could do it again if I had to. But I sure don't want to!

    Hubby's been away for nearly two weeks now (China, Italy, mainland Norway). He's supposed to come home on Tuesday but it isn't 100% certain he'll be able to. The IT department at his employer had his computer in for updates to tighten security and now he can't even log in. :noway: Of course if he can't use it there's little likelihood that hackers can get in, but I hope that wasn't what the IT department intended. (You never know!)

    Anyway, IF he gets his computer back on Tuesday morning, he'll be home Tuesday afternoon. If not, he won't get home until Thursday, because there are no flights up here on Wednesdays in the winter. And I leave for a week of teaching in Stockholm on Friday. :sad:

    I've made myself a to-do list with all the stuff I'm supposed to do. (Duh!) Sure is fun crossing things off that list! I even added something I'd already done, just so I could cross it off.

    Okay, break over. Back to the grind...

    /Penny at the North Pole Breathe, Penny, breathe...
  • KetoneKaren
    KetoneKaren Posts: 6,411 Member
    Options
    Penny LOL again! I add things to my to-do list I've already done, too! :D
  • barbiecat
    barbiecat Posts: 16,980 Member
    Options
    :)Tere, welcome back...congrats on your marriage....hope we see you every day :)
  • cityjaneLondon
    cityjaneLondon Posts: 12,356 Member
    edited October 2016
    Options
    Tere - Can I add my WELCOME BACK to all the other welcome backs. :D:flowerforyou: A lot has been going on for you. <3
    Johnny came out of the washing machine looking quite perky, so now he is in the airing cupboard. :D I will post a pic when I have brushed him.

    Love Heather UK, who has at last cooked the chicken supremes prior to freezing them. DELICIOUS smells. Tick! I also have done my roots. Tick! :laugh: I also replaced the main oven light. It has never worked since we moved in. Tick!
  • lhannon062709
    lhannon062709 Posts: 1,140 Member
    Options
    Morning again, my dears,

    Been working furiously trying to quell the paper snowstorm that is my home office, and am seeing light at the end of that tunnel FINALLY! Just business receipts to enter, and I'm done... but I thought I'd take a break and talk to y'all.

    One of the things that's on my busily spinning brain at the moment is how much we spend for wants, and for comfort... as a species, as I think it's utterly endemic to the human condition. My husband and I spend hundreds, if not thousands a year, merely so we won't be inconvenienced. And I think part of it is our definition of "comfort." It varies so widely from person to person--and now that I'm thinking about saving every single penny we can for the near future, if not for the rest of our lives, it's got me thinking about it.

    For instance, the DH bought me a Keurig coffeemaker, which I have enthusiastically used. At $11 a box for 18 cups of coffee, that's 61 cents a cup. And I drink at least three cups a day, sometimes four. As you can see, the thought of giving up coffee never enters my mind, but that's OK. Stick with me. :) A 30-oz can of Folgers supposedly makes 240 cups of coffee... about one-tenth the cost per cup, at $16 per can, as it's not quite 7 cents per cup. Here's the kicker - you can use one of the little cup filters in the Keurig and use regular coffee in the Keurig maker. Which gives you the convenience of the one-cup-at-a-time maker, but the cost of regular coffee. The equation essentially works out to the fact that I can spend $1.83 to $2.44 a day on coffee, or I can spend 21 to 28 cents. The savings over 365 days = somewhere between $580 to $740 a year. That's groceries for a month, if not two!

    I haven't had to think like this since Corey and I were digging out from under his and my debt load the first few years we were married. We wiped out $115,000 in debt (mostly his) in the first two years, and took another couple years to pay $25,000 in student loan that had been hanging over my head since 1998. We're debt-free except for the warehouse, which we've always looked at as an investment, one that will hopefully pay off in the new year. But we have not been frugal, we've been relaxed, with one signal, of course, being him buying me a Keurig, or we'd have one heck of a nest egg. Time to get frugal, my chickens.

    Off to the races... finish up with these business receipts, then time for brunch with the hubby.

    Love y'all,
    Thanks for listening to my wandering brain spouting,
    Lisa in West Texas
  • pipcd34
    pipcd34 Posts: 16,713 Member
    Options
    yo peeps
  • margaretturk
    margaretturk Posts: 5,093 Member
    Options
    Tere congratulations on your marriage!
  • MountainMomma58
    MountainMomma58 Posts: 44 Member
    Options
    Just in from my daughter's wedding weekend. What a great time. Have to get back into reality tomorrow.
  • Lagopus
    Lagopus Posts: 1,016 Member
    Options
    Oh Peachy Carol! I can smell the leaves and hear them rustling... Thanks!

    /Penny, nostalgic at the North Pole
  • klanders30
    klanders30 Posts: 2,569 Member
    Options
    lisa way to go on finding the coffee hack to save $$. I love finding those ways to shave off even more from the monthly expenses. We've been mindful and finding ways to save as well. I rely on an app to track everything, really helps me from impulse buying.
    Just got an app to get $ back on groceries called checkout51 and will let you all know how much $back I can earn.

    Had a productive weekend and have earned my nap,zzzzzz
    NYKAREN
  • GRITSandSLUTSandWINOS
    GRITSandSLUTSandWINOS Posts: 2,573 Member
    edited October 2016
    Options
    Charleen – DH and sons have planted trees and DYS has also taken acorns and planted them and both had done well. We really were surprised that the acorns he planted actually came up and now they are taller than we are. Roughly 15 years old. He probably should have planted the various types of trees along one side of our driveway a little further apart; but, at least they are not crowding one another … just close. They were planted as small trees; and, are now easily 20 or more feet tall; and their trunks are about 10” in diameter. We have a beautiful cypress tree in our back yard that was planted as a small tree; and, it is so beautifully shaped, too. Last year, when it needles started turning brown; I got upset because I thought it was dying. DH laughed and said, ‘no, it loses its needles every year; and this is the first time you’ve noticed’? Well, DUH, yeah!


    Glo – I guess I really thought if we could come to some ‘agreement’ about behavior; and, forgiveness given … I sort of expected that ‘the past’ would stop being thrown in my face all the time or that her feelings of jealousy about the other DnL would stop being brought up all the time. I guess I just find it difficult to believe in forgiveness, when this has become a ‘constant’. But, I will try to place it in God’s hands and go from there. He is my strength.

    I have not checked [color+strawberry]CaringBridge to see how DBnL’s night was; but, I am sure by now the MDs have come in to check on him. He will be in the hospital for at least another 2 weeks, more or less; then getting him back to the Atlanta area will need to be dealt with. I doubt seriously that they will allow him to fly (other than to be airlifted by a helicopter). I think their oldest daughter will be flying back and then driving down and driving them back when the time comes. DS had not even wanted to leave long enough to go take a shower; she has been at the ICU 24/7 since early Friday AM. Hopefully, nieces can talk her into doing so. But, I do understand where she is coming from. He has been awake; recognizes them, talking and even joking with the surgeons. The surgeons told DS that his blood clot was the biggest, most extensive clot that any of them in the practice had ever seen; but, for him to be awake, talking and joking and recognizing his family is a great sign.

    I know when I was in the hospital in order for my MD to tweak all my medications, my counselor was one of only two ‘grief counselors’ in the entire state. He helped me to learn how to ‘grieve’ for those things that had occurred in my life that was hindering my process of becoming a 'normal’ person as compared to how I ‘felt about myself’. When I got ‘out of the hospital’ I typed him a 35-page letter telling him all the things that I had ‘come to grips with’. He sent a copy of it to my MD and now he knows how things have affected me. One of the things he asked me was ‘try to go back as far as you can remember and see if you can tell me when you first felt that something in your life was different’. I’ve had signs of being ‘bipolar’ since my early teens for sure; but, I was also a very determined child. Maybe even defiant at times. But, my parents were both very patient people and they did everything possible to encourage the ‘good’ in me. I could never ‘thank’ them enough to make sure that I had an ‘art teacher’ from the time I was 7-years-old. I love it and lived for it. I just did not like ‘art school’ where it was shoved down my throat 5 days a week, 8 hours a day; not counting homework and projects. For years I had packed up my art stuff and forgotten about it. When we were moving, DH found the box and asked me why I wasn’t doing anything with it. I still do not want to think that I have to do it for a living. I paint and draw for pleasure, at my leisure. I have been commissioned for a few things; but, most of what I do, I do for my family.


    Karen in Virginia – Our 3 granddaughters by our DOS (live next door); the oldest one is off at college; she calls us 2x a week. DYGD comes over almost every day; but, DMGD only comes ‘if’ oldest DGD is home and comes over; but, I think she feels like she can’t come over or if she does she might be ‘accused’ of ‘playing one side against the other’. I’d NEVER tell her to do something that her parents have told her not to do or otherwise. She is just at that age, I guess (15); but, one thing that she won’t do is ‘drive’. The grandmother of their Mama’s BF stopped picking them up; because DnL#1 has cussed the friend out 2x in as many weeks. I know why the first time; then they ‘kissed and made up’; but, I don’t understand the last time and I won’t ask. I know that I will get only my DnL#1’s side of the story; and, she doesn’t want me to play the “Devil’s Advocate” … she is always right; everybody else is ‘wrong’. Not worth doing. I’d be the one to come home ‘mad’. Haven’t yet met DMGD’s new boyfriend, who is a Senior at school; but, she has fallen ‘hard’. When she gets ready, then she will introduce him to us. DnL#1 really ‘likes’ him; but, I sure hope that she doesn’t try to ‘make friends’ with him or his parents on any ‘social networking site’ and I rue the day they ever break up. When DOGD broke up with her first real boyfriend, DnL#1 called him AND his mother and ‘cussed them out’. This embarrassed her ‘step-daughter’ and I, personally, think that teenagers need to go through things without their parents’ interference so they learn how to handle things the next time around. She’s now been dating her boyfriend who is a year older and a class ahead for 4 years.

    I have to laugh at this DMGD’s boyfriend because he will say, ‘I love you’! whenever DMGD says it to her parents when they are walking off. DMGD asked her Dad why he won’t say “I love you” to her boyfriend? He told her that he had not even said “I love you” to her older sister’s boyfriend … and has no reason to do so, unless he puts a ‘ring on her finger’. LOL! I find this a little funny because she (DOGD) is a product of a very young marriage. I know she’ll never ‘go there’ … she has lived and seen what it is like to be a child in a marriage that did not last 2 years.


    Lisa – I think that DH and I are in our 3rd lifestyle. I no longer work; and he works; but, really needs to slow down. I just do not want his ‘slowing down’ to be something that is ‘forced on him’. I think about my DBnL#1 and know that ‘his lifestyle’ will come to an abrupt ‘change’ and it isn’t going to be easy for him. He was always so active since his retirement; playing tennis several times a week, and just going and coming as he pleased. Now, after his stroke, he won’t be driving for a long time, if ever again, he won’t be playing tennis or doing the stuff he had always done. He told sister, yesterday that he was ‘frustrated’ (being in the bed all the time and tied down to many, many machines; and, having others making decisions for him). DH and I were talking yesterday about 20/20 hindsight. We had both noticed that when we were going to and from and while we were at the beach with them; that he seemed to be overly ‘agitated’ or would get ‘angry’ over little things. I think the Thursday, a week before, they had diagnosed him with something – brain wise – that had the same symptoms as having a mild stroke. But, they only kept him overnight and said that making the trip was not a problem. Of course, DS called them; and, when the time comes for them to go home, they will be ready to see him immediately.


    Heather – When my sister got a divorce; alimony was set up as a ‘settlement’ instead of ‘alimony’ so sister was not the one who had to pay taxes on it. It stopped when she hit early retirement age; but, then she could still collect on his Social Security which gave her a little more than if she had collected on hers. She got first shot at the amount; because she was older than his 2nd wife (for her amount to collect on him). They’d been married roughly 35 years. Apparently, the UK doesn’t have social security or anything like that.


    KJLaMore – I agree with you, nothing is better than freshly washed bedsheets; I also make my bed every day after getting out of it; makes me have the feeling that I am getting into a fresh bed. Also, helps make my house look clean, not cluttered. Sorry that you and your DYS have been sick … hopefully nothing that puts you into bed and not getting out. Do you have help with your daycare? I’d think you’d probably need someone, if you were to be sick enough to have to go to bed.

    I have this ‘angel’ with a clear body; and, I’ve cut up credit cards; so that it is a constant reminder to never get to the point of depending on them. I have 2 and DH has (maybe) 3; one of his has a very low credit limit; and, he only uses them for certain things; but sparingly. We always keep one of them low, in case of emergency. I have one that I had all my other credit cards charging me high interest and had them all transferred to one that for a period of time was charging no interest; and, even when it did … was lower than the average of the others. Of course, it is pretty close to limit, so I don’t charge on it … other than just enough for the bank not to close it for ‘lack of use’, then I have a Belk’s card and I buy my clothes with it. The shocker was that the bank man did not make it clear that to transfer the balances, there was a small fee to do this. I bought 2 tops the other day; and, they were having a ‘pre-sale’; and, while I hated not being able to bring them home then; what is one more week and a few dollars off going to hurt? We have lived paycheck-to-paycheck several times in our married life; now, we are way more comfortable and don’t spend nearly what we had been spending. For once, DH will pull out ‘cash’ instead of a credit card. He really hates using his credit cards now. YEAH!!!!

    DH and I have started having a ‘date night’ once a week, we generally go ‘out to eat’ and/or pick up a few items we need here and there. I don’t think DH will EVER invite the kids along or even take them out to eat and pick up the bill because of how DnL#1 has treated us lately; it has gotten a lot worse since DYS got married. So we keep our ‘opinions’ to ourselves; because we don’t want to interfere with DOS and DYS’s relationship. DYS has stopped calling his OB just to ‘chat’ because he has always been so ‘negative’ lately … more so than normal. All of us are just ‘flabbergasted’ at what he seemingly is willing to put up with, in his wife’s behavior around us, and others. DYS has always been the one to initiate the calls to OB; and, he said, that it should be 'both ways'; but, hasn't been. I know that I don’t want to be around her, even at the knowledge of knowing this means that I won’t be around my DGDs who give us a lot of love and pleasure. I’m NOT her real "Mama", so she can leave her "Drama" with her ‘own’ Mama. I doubt that they’ll ever separate; but, DH says they (DOS and he) will go places and DOS will ‘turn heads of a lot of women’. I just do not ‘think’ that he has ever ‘fallen in love’ like his YB has. Took DYS a long time to find a woman that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. DOS and his first girlfriend got married because DOGD was ‘on the way’. Even though I had told DOS that he did not ‘have’ to get married, he could legitimate baby and still have child support to pay, and also get ‘child visitation’; but, I guess he felt like he was ‘doing the right thing by her’. Even her own Daddy tried to talk him out of it. When DYS fell in love, it ‘hit him like the ton of bricks’ that I had told him it would when he found the ‘right’ one, it’d do; and, it did!


    DH has the 'joke' that has always been an 'inside' joke ... of 'that's what the girl at the picnic said/says'; I finally realize that it had become a way of saying ... 'get me OUTTA this situation'!!!!! I'm surprised that the person he says this in front of has not picked up on it. Yeah, it is DnL#1.

    I have a sheet of paper that shows what 'normal people' see as colors; red, purple, pink, orange, yellow, green, and blue (8); then it shows what 'artists' see which is about 30 different colors. I'm going to try to see if the [color=] is by a 'normal' person or by an 'artist'. Yeah! It recognized, most of what 'artists' see.

    Got to go check CaringBridge.org to see how DBnL#1 did overnight.

    Lenora

Categories