Live and Learn

Now that I've been in my apartment for a month, there are some things I will think about next time I'm looking for a place to live. This is the nicest home I've had, though. I actually lived without a dishwasher, disposal, lighted closet or "people". Now I have people to take care of everything. Water drains from the dishwasher onto the kitchen floor, I call someone. Window missing a screen? Fixed in an hour. For someone who doesn't like leaving the house the apartment life is wonderful.

Speaking of the kitchen floor--I'm picking up tips for us boomers as I go along. Take your pills in a room with a dark floor. When I dropped pills in my old house with the white floor, I could crawl around there for hours trying to find the estrogen before the beagle got it. Now with a dark fake wood floor, picking pills off the floor is easy. It's easier for the dog too, so move with purpose.

Big mirrors are used a lot in apartments here. They pull in the light, make the place seem bigger and unfortunately  remind you had a C-section twenty-five years ago, have tributary leg maps and like glaciers, some slow but trackable downward movement. Having to begin and end each day looking at yourself across an entire wall of reminder can be depressing; talk about your wailing wall. Boomer hint: cover them with mourning cloth and have another glass of wine. If you can't pound nails into the walls, just put a little table outside your bedroom and take your glasses off before you enter the reality zone. What you can't see won't hurt you, unless it's that little spiky dog toy you just stepped on.

Death by Pita

The few times I visited southern California before moving here, it struck me how few flying bugs there were. Coming from Packerland, we're used to sharing our homes with ants, wasps, bees, spiders, mosquitoes, dragonflies and endless numbers of flies. But not down here, here seemed like paradise. Leaving the patio door completely open extended the living room, brought in the fresh air, and welcomed rather than fought nature.

Now that I'm here I realize there are at least two flies in California. They are freeloaders and constant irritants to my poor old dog. She is doing her best trying to catch them in her mouth but its been a rather pathetic and sad exercise.  I felt really bad for her, so I started going after them myself, although not with my mouth. We both looked ridiculous. I would swat at them with a pillow until I started breaking things. She would take over and snap her floppy old jowls in the air, then look at me as if to apologize. At her age, she shouldn't have to apologize. Since I threw all the Wisconsin fly swatters away thinking I wouldn't need them anymore, I had to go makeshift. The obvious choice was the plastic handled pancake flipper, mistakenly called the spatula back home. The noise and wreckage caused by the slamming metal brought this idea to a quick end. Besides, this was just too easy for the flies, who looped around in front of us, wearing hideous grins of superiority. I don't know how they know, but flies can tell what you're thinking if you're out to kill them. My arm barely moves and off they go, rolling around in the air holding their laughing stomachs with their six little spindly legs.

I stand defeated at the counter and see a plastic bagged piece of  bread laying there. It's just the right size--bigger than a fly. One Pita, a yardstick and four feet of duct tape later, I've created the perfect killing machine. Pita on a stick. Normally I would be one to try to coax insects out of the house rather than squish them, but they were taking their toll on my now rather OCD-ish old dog. She was losing it. She'd snap her jaws together, then look at me, snap, look, snap, look, snap, look. Unless we sat in complete darkness, she was on call. I had to end the humiliation. So how did my death by Pita experiment turn out?
I taped the two dead California flies to the sliding patio door so any of their little friends with big ideas could see the fate awaiting them. 

We come from hunting country.

Breathe It All In

There are some little things that are really different here than back in the midwest. The first smell of outdoor California every morning, at least out my door has become an aroma-therapudic way to start the day. Maybe it's because the groundskeepers are constantly cutting and trimming that such sweet smell is ubiquitous, but it is fresh, green and tropical with hints of Eucalyptus. It doesn't really match the smell of wet leaves, wet dog and mud, but it's a close second.

Another difference is the grass. The texture is different. The grass here seems very astroturf-ish to me--the stuff Brett Favre used to not be able to play on. Each blade is thicker and it feels rougher on bare feet. It does make picking up after the dog easier though, so that's a plus. The grass sort of holds things up so dropping your keys, phone or change doesn't have to mark the beginning of twenty-three minutes on your hands and knees hoping to catch a glimpse of something shiny.

One last point for today...people out here don't honk their horns the way people in more challenging climes do. I am amazed at how patient people have been with me going 30mph down streets that are marked 55. I wait for my Garmin lady to tell me which way to turn and people just wait. It's eerily quiet on the roads, and people's arms aren't flailing around as they shout like lunatics through windows rolled up.
Probably the Eucalyptus.

A Big Gulp of Salt Water

Moving from the midwest to Southern California takes a little bit of adjustment. If any of you are planning to move here, there are ways to prepare yourself for the change.

1. Get your teeth whitened. Fake white has become the new normal here, especially if you're over 50. It's the white picket fence around the possibility that someone will believe you when you say in your profile that looks don't matter.

2. For the first month or so, wear a hat in the house, especially if you lived in a house without a sliding patio door. After hitting my head twice going after the dog, I finally figured out to do everything with my arms out.

3. Learn how to do at least one thing in water.

4. When you go to the beach, if you wear jeans and tennis shoes and a big wave washes toward you, the bottom of your pants will get soaked and everyone will know you're a transplant.

5. Cat is pronounced caht here.

6. Dogs are welcome everywhere and can really be conversation starters. If you don't have one, borrow one. The weirder looking the better.

7. If you live in an apartment, get used to the fact that someone is always working on the trees or the grass or the bushes. The sound of power is one you'll have to learn to ignore. Before you move here, sleep for a week to the sound of a dentist drill and you'll adapt much more easily.

8. Before you move here, get rid of your black car. It has to be white unless all the windows are tinted so dark that nobody can see you.

Chew on these for awhile and I'll have another set soon. All in all, it's been a great move on my part but I'm still virgin. If a haiku, I'd be about the third syllable. Or should I say:

My life as haiku
Three moves into the journey
Of seventeen parts

So much to learn...

Boomertisements

Corporate America is looking out for us boomers. The product investments on television are particularly telling. Kids, if you want to know what happens to you as you age, pay attention to what they are trying to get us to think we need. I have a couple favorites. First is the Heel-tastic! I never realized how rough the skin on my heels would get as I aged. Schedule time for sitting on the edge of the bathtub scraping layers of dead skin off your feet. Think of it as an archeological digs; each layer revealing a unique time in your life. When to do it? When they catch on the sheets as you straighten your tired legs, it's time for another expedition. If you can't find products like Heel-tastics, then you can use the Ped Egg, featuring a cute little catch cup for all the dead epidermis. Sweet.

While you're focusing all that attention on your feet however don't forget ladies, that your facial hair is growing all the while you do. Time out for a Tweezie. That's a little grabber that yanks those straggly hairs off your chin and jaw. They grow overnight and when you talk with people the following day, that's all they will be looking at.

Boomer guys, if you can't increase your size and performance by now there's no hope for you. Since Bob Dole spoke the praises of Viagra years ago, we've all had to picture the guy on the Cialis or ExtenZe commercials performing with increased effectiveness. You can't get enough of the image of two senior citizens in bed together after a double tub moment, right? More of that, please. I wonder how long it will take for someone to come out with Extenz for pets? Our companions aren't getting any younger either.

There is great news for us Boomers. Turns out the cat's out of the bag on Depends. I never realized until recently how many people wear adult diapers! Models on long photo shoots or stuck in a dress they can't bend in, astronauts, people on long cross country drives and criminals on the run. The stigma is gone. Now let's get the designers in on this and before too long we'll have diaper thongs! Oh, America...land of the free.

Life Without an Apostrophe

Maybe it's because I'm a teacher that I've come to become an advocate for the poor, misused apostrophe. I don't think we should even teach kids about it until middle school. Tell the kids now, that they are getting older, they can handle meeting Mr. Apostrophe. Before this point kids think that anytime there is an s at the end of a word, it gets apostrophized.

Unfortunately, no one along the way no one stepped up to clear up the serial apostophizers. Tire's For Sale! Store Hour's...,Car's Park Here. You see them in every city, coast to coast.

If you don't know how to use an apostrophe, please don't. It drive's the rest of us nut's.

The Day After You Retire

I was ready to go. My love of kids was not tarnished by virture of being with them for 30 years, I was on top of my game, had good humor and the kind of freedom that competence can bring you if you push long enough. First and second graders are really easy to enjoy, however, so maybe calling it work is a bit of a stretch. But I did have to be dressed by 7 every morning. There were no tears on my last day at school, at least not from me. I loved what I did, did it and am now ready for the next act. I have not stopped thinking or learning. There is actually more to think about when you don't have to write notes home to parents explaining why you took their kid's smencil away (that's a pencil that smells like something every other kid wants to smell while you're teaching math). Here are some things I've already learned since retiring in June:

-get a big dog. I realized that without little kids to take each arm and pull, it is very helpful to have a dog tall enough to be of some good.

-use the hearing or vision impaired option when asked to type in word verifications on those websites requiring it. I'm not sure what that's all about. The squished together, bent and floating words you're supposed to figure out and retype are more of an eye or patience test than anything else. Why suffer the humiliation?

-eHarmony has a lot of guys over the age of 60 who are physically fit on paper.

-Even if you can't afford it, hire people to do everything for you. It's much easier than trying to explain what happened, how you tried to fix it or why you used a butter knife instead of a Phillips screwdriver.

This blog will give my AARP homies something to laugh about other than the list of things they said they wanted to do when they retired.