Guys, I got all the emails and read all the posts here (Stagg and Candy, I love you and will be writing to you this weekend.))I have recently recovered from walking pnuemonia and I know life is heading toward an even keel when I've begun to start thinking about topics for this blog again!
Thank you all for sticking with me. It's been one hell of a last few months but you can't keep me down for long! :)
Yesterday we buried our female lizard. I noticed last week that her spine was protruding and she had stopped eating. I knew, at over eight years of age, that she was failing. I did not want to deal with this and hoped that she was having a simple minor set back. This was not to be the case.
These two lizards were not our first. Our first bearded dragon was stolen from the place we boarded him while we were on vacation. He belonged to our son who was a child at the time. This lizard was a giant of his species and very pretty (as lizards go.) We came home from a week at Virginia Beach to a phone call telling us that someone had entered their lizard room, took our lizard from his cage, stuffed it under their jacket and run out the door. Of course, we were a devastated.
The store replaced the stolen lizard and John purchased another to keep it company. These two were a mere half inch in length and were adorable. We called them 'our babies.'
We had them sexed and found out we had a male and a female and sure enough, within the next couple of years, she became loaded with eggs. I read up on them and filled a little five gallon tank with dirt, added a bit of water and formed a cave. I placed her in there and she backed into the cave and laid a dozen eggs.
I made an incubator and carefully spooned out each egg and laid it in the incubator, all the while my female lizard protectively watching. (anyone who thinks reptiles do not have maternal instincts is just plain wrong; this little mama was nervous and did not leave her perch from where she watched everything I did with her eggs.
In her lifetime, she laid five 'clutches' of eggs, each between 12 and 14 eggs but somehow I never mastered the proper formula of humidity/temperature etc, and none of the eggs ever hatched.
She had an endearing..at least to me..feature of an underbite. Sometimes she had difficulty holding on to a wiggling cricket and had to be helped getting it into her mouth and down her throat. She was worth the effort it took to help her; I truly loved her.
This breed of lizards is from Australia, gets to be over a foot in length and are known as the felines of the lizard world. They are slow moving, calm, and bond with their owners. She was always interested when we turned on her light in the morning, and watched us with curiosity.
The male seems to be grieving. I hope he doesn't waste away, missing his mate.
I cried when she died, but also I was glad we had her for so long. I know she had a good life and she earned her name.. Lucky.
This is what I've decided: Folks just have too much time on their hands. I came to this conclusion because I am, of late, just way too busy to fret over life's BIG questions or to worry about what other people are doing wrong.
Both of my kids have moved back home, which is fine. I work retail in a little bookstore which is in the tail end of a busy Christmas shopping frenzy. I am busy, way too busy, to do much else other than work, cook, shop for my own family and friends and keep this house running somewhat smoothly.
In all this I think I have stumbled upon a little truism about life; if you spend any serious amount of time fretting over much of anything, then you are not busy enough just living.
I fall into bed each night too exhausted to do as much as open a book to read a bit. And I fall into that bed really early, sometimes before 7pm.
Every now and then, life hands me a little reward, like yesterday. In fact it happened twice to me yesterday. First, our local tv weatherman, Vernon Connor (no relation to me), stopped in the store.
"Hey Beej,"he said. "Watch the 10 o'clock news tonight. I'm going to pull on my ear like Carol Burnett used to do, to give you a little greeting over the air."
Rest assured, I was deep into la-la land by 10pm, but I am confident that while I was asleep, Vernon Connor was tugging at his ear lobe. I missed it but I know thousands of folks witnessed it.
The other little reward truly touched my heart. An elderly gentleman approached me at the store.
"Can you do a favor for me?" he asked. "There's a little lady back in the kids' books section. She's pushing a stroller and has five other little kids with her..."
He reached out his hand and gave me five $20 bills.
"Can you give this to her and tell her Santa says Merry Christmas?"
"Of course I can." and off I went.
She wasn't difficult to find. Pregnant and pushing a stroller, she was surrounded by five other little ones. They were all extraordinarily well behaved. I gave her 'Santa's' message and she protested. I assured her the gentleman had left the store and she meekly took the cash. she was, of course, unbelievably touched.
Of course, she was touched, but so was I. It was a gift for me, too, to witness this.
This is Christmas. This is the spirit that was intended. This is the selfless thought behind the gesture of giving, the gesture of caring, the many gestures of loving.
Here it is after 5pm on my day off and I have accomplished NOTHING. In fact I did something I very rarely do; I stayed in my robe until mid afternoon. It was relaxing, of course, but I feel like I've wasted the entire day.
The doctor's visit; First, I lost six lbs in the past week which left me a bit bewildered because I've been eating like a horse, including a wonderful Thanksgiving day meal. But the doctor was amazed at how much better I looked even though he kept me on restricted work for another week. He gave me a refill for pain meds because my left arm is very sore and he told me my teeth, which still hurt, can take a few more weeks to 'settle.' After I left, I went right back to work.
We've been in the throes of a cold snap. I am not used to cold weather but living in south Alabama, winter will come and go in a matter of weeks and then we should be blessed with another typically beautiful early Spring.
Right now, all is peaceful in our household. John is playing wii with our son and our daughter is making chicken fettuccini alfredo (my recipe, of course!)
It has been a week since my fall. I have a doctor's appointment this morning to see what residual damage is still lurking. My left arm is so sore that it keeps me awake at night. My eye teeth still hurt. The swelling on my upper lip has subsided quite a bit (or as my daughter so eloquently stated, I "don't look like Marge Simpson now, but more like Elvis Presley and his sneer.")
This has been a lesson that despite what happens, life goes on. Unless we die. But then it still goes on for those who outlive us.
They say bad things happen in threes. I guess my three bad things had stockpiled because they all came rushing unexpectedly into my life recently. First, my sister became ill and we almost lost her. Then, my 23 year old daughter became ill and was hospitalized. Lastly, I fell at the bookstore.
When I say I fell, I do not mean that I simply slipped and got knocked down on my bum. One of the kids who works at the store left a large plastic tote on a walkway, one I did not see until it was too late. I went over it, meeting the floor with my two eye teeth and face, just about knocking myself out. (It's debatable as to whether I actually did lose consciousness, tho I believe I did not.) I ended up with a fat lip which made me look in profile a lot like Marge Simpson.
Even if I did not lose consciousness, I did shake my brain and could not even gather my senses enough to call for help. After about five seconds, i was able to make a noise and folks came to my rescue and I was taken to the doctor.
After many many xrays, they determined that I had a cervical sprain and a couple loose teeth (they still hurt.) I have road rash on my face but I'm glad to say that the extreme swelling on my upper lip is beginning to go away.
I am sore. I feel foolish but I got back up on the saddle and went to the bookstore the next day, tho I did not need to do this.
My sister is recuperating as is my daughter. My pain is slowly lessening and all seems to be righting itself.
I am tired of being a event about to happen. But you know what? Thursday my family and I prepared the usual huge Thanksgiving dinner and sincerely expressed gratitude for all the good things in our life. Even tho this trio of bad events happened, we are so blessed that there were optimum outcomes all the way around.
In my younger life, there were several milk toast men who had become enamored with me. They were all pleasant, sweet, compliant young men, men who would have tried to move the earth and the heavens if they believed it would have made me happy. Most SMART young women would have felt blessed with these Charles Bovary types. Not I. Not at all. I would have rather run into the abyss upon their exclamations of love. I preferred the passionate sort, the ones who exhibited a lust for life. The ones who made my father shudder.
My first 'luster for life' was a brooding teenage boy named Paul. Paul had that bad boy brooding look. In my fifteen year old mind, I thought he was beautiful. Troubled, sure, but nonetheless, beautiful.
Paul was a neighborhood boy. I had decided that my life legacy would be as a 'SAVIOR OF THE WORLD.' At least that was my excuse for going through a long period in my mid teens as being 'SAVIOR OF THE WORLD.' I would be akin to the saints, a lover of the unlovable, a healer of the troubled. And Paul was troubled.
Beej, Savior of the World.
I first felt affection for him after he was released from some juvenile institute to which he had been 'assigned' after he burned a couple of abandoned buildings to the ground. Yup. Paul was an arsonist. He was my first attempt at 'saving.' Of course, I did not save Paul. He eventually dissolved into a black hole of my feelings and I'm sure I moved on to my next venture as, 'SAVIOR OF THE WORLD.'
Having said all that, and probably revealing more to you about myself than I would ever want to reveal, I am using that story as an example of my basic nature to explain why I love Vincent Van Gogh as much as I do. If any person had ever lived a troubled life, it was Vincent. Of course his art expressed his 'lust for life' (which is, of course, the title of a book by Irving Stone about Van Gogh, a book I have just finished reading.) I love his art but it is the man behind the art that truly enthralls me.
Take his ear, or more accurately, his ear lobe. why did Vinnie lop off his ear lobe? Because an underage prostitute asked him for it! Now, that's passion! (I must tell you tho, that this hooker, upon unwrapping the paper holding the lobe, passed out cold on the foyer floor. It was this act of ultimate generosity that landed our dear artist in the insane asylum.)
I am not a fan of physical mutilation. I do not find that attractive. But it was the passion behind the act that captured my heart.
A lust for life is not the same as a love for life. We all love life, whether we want to admit it. it's the lust, the LUST for life that is so very attractive to me. It's a passion to feel all of life, to see colors brighter, to have the energy, both physically and emotionally, to go for the gusto.
Okay, maybe Van Gogh was more than passionate. He was a genius. Smart and passionate?
.jpg)
