Ding Dong

When we lived in Florida the doorbell would ring and either the Jehovah's Witnesses were out there, or the Mormons. This used to piss me off a great deal because the doorbell was on the gate at the front of our 'compound'. That meant I had to walk all the way to the front just to find out that some religious nut wanted to convert me. Now that we're in Chicago I've found out that they do the same thing here. Instead of having to walk to the front gate, I now have to walk down stairs to yell at them. Although sometimes I just open the window next to the porch and yell at them from there. Lately I've noticed that nobody is ringing my doorbell. It's as if they gave up trying to save me from Satan. Have they all decided that I'm not worth the cursing and screaming? It turns out that is not the case. I figured it out the past week when Mark's brothers were visiting. My doorbell is broken. Not only is the doorbell not working, but the buzzer that opens the door remotely from the kitchen is not buzzing. You ring my doorbell, and I buzz you in. That's how it goes. So this is a serious problem. Not for me so much as for Dennis who lives on the second floor. I have Scout keeping watch for our floor. Nobody gets past her without some kind of notice given. A short whiney sound if it's somebody she knows, to an insane barking fit if a stranger dares step on our porch. Anyway, I have to fix that doorbell and buzzer. I've tracked it down to the transformer in the basement and have ordered a new one from Amazon. Yes, I know. Amazon is the great devil of retail, but it is so convenient. When the new transformer arrives today I will try to replace the one that has burned out. Hopefully without getting electrocuted. 

Mummy Dearest, 2020

Now that my nasturtiums have started to bloom, I will turn my attention to the mums. Yes, I know that they don't bloom until fall. My problem is all the weeds popping up among them. Well, actually that is my second problem. First problem is that I don't know what the hell a mum looks like before it blooms. Just like I can't recognize women's faces, can't remember song titles, and end up taking twice as many eye drops as prescribed because I can never remember if I did it or not, I can't remember what my flowers look like year to year. (Yes, I know that's a run on sentence.... or maybe just a very long sentence.) So if any of my plant loving friends out there can help, are the light green things the mums? Do mums have broader leaves of green with a sort of powdery center? If they are the latter, then I've pulled a whole lot of mums out of my garden. I'm really not a very good gardener. My yard ends up looking great every year by accident. Seriously, if it looks good I let it grow because some weeds do look okay. And then there are the perennials like the mums. My friend Chuck pointed out that I had a day lily growing through the slit in the fence, courtesy of my neighbor. The very next day I forgot that he had told me that and I hit it with the weed whacker. So I went over to Lowes and bought another day lily, then planted it at the site of the murdered plant. Just so Chuck will think I nurtured that little sprout he saw on Memorial Day.

Wishy Washy

When we were kids, my mom used us as her dishwasher. We would have to trade off nights, one kid washing the dishes, one drying, one putting them away. As long as there were four or five of us in rotation it wasn't so bad. Then one day the real dishwasher arrived. I don't remember how it happened, if Dad gave in to Mom's requests or if he just surprised her, but there it was. A lovely Kenmore portable dishwasher. You would have to roll it up to the kitchen sink and connect the hose to the sink faucet, but that was fine with us. I still remember that first load of dishes. I'm not sure who did it, but Mom's decades old cast iron frying pan was put in there. It came out a rusted hunk of iron, useful for nothing other than a boat anchor. There did come a day when young Alan moved out of Mommy and Daddy's house and made his way into the world. A world of cheap apartments, hippie hovels, and other abodes without an automatic dishwasher. It was not until September of 2001, when I remodeled our kitchen in Florida, that I finally got a dishwasher. No more hand washing of the dishes for me. I became the dishwasher expert. I knew exactly how to load it. I knew what was needed to keep it happy. And, I knew that I could never live without one again. What I didn't understand was that there are different grades of dishwashers. The more you spend, the better the appliance. So three and a half years ago we installed a nice new dishwasher in our newly remodeled kitchen in Chicago. Unfortunately, I went with the cheaper model. It has turned out to be a piece of shit. I first noticed the bits of food and grease on what should have been clean dishes a couple of weeks ago. Something was wrong. So I took all the racks out and stuck my head inside the thing. I could see the problem almost immediately. The plastic parts inside the machine had degraded and the upper rotator thingy wasn't rotating. It wasn't even getting any water up there. So now I'm debating. Have somebody fix this crappy machine, or buy a new one? While I figure that out I am using only the lower rack to wash dishes. It sort of works. God forbid that I actually stick my hands back into a sink full of suds like I used to do when I was a kid.

Better Get Going to Walgreens

I take at least one Excedrin every day and have done so for nearly fifty years. Sometimes I'll do four or six in one day. Excedrin contains acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine. If I don't take my Excedrin, my head is foggy all day long. The company that makes it is having problems supplying it to stores, so I have been using a Walgreens generic version. It seems to be just as good, so I'm happy. Yesterday I had one pill left in the bottle so off I went to Walgreens for a refill. As I pulled into the parking lot it was apparent something was wrong. The parking lot was empty other than one Chicago Police car sitting there. On the windows of the Walgreens were numerous hand lettered signs saying, " Closed". No problem. There is another Walgreens about a mile away, so I went over to that one. Again, empty parking lot, cop car, and hand lettered sign telling me they were closed. Grrrr.... I then went over to Target, about half a mile away. Sonofabitch. At the entrance to the target parking lot sat a Chicago cop car with lights flashing. Target was closed. By this time I was frantic for my Excedrin fix. I drove west to Lincoln Avenue and took that into Lincolnwood, a town separate from the city. A mile into the town was another Walgreens, and it was open. I got my pills and a big jug of Drano Max. My newly longish hair is clogging the shower drain. I left Lincolnwood happy and started home with the radio turned up loud. As I passed the Walgreens closest to my house, the first one I had gone to, I could see the paper signs were off the windows, the cop was gone, and the lights were on. Well, double sonofabitchmuther..... Not my day.

In the Time Before Air Conditioning

Yep, that's me

Yesterday afternoon I was in my office at home when I heard the crack of thunder. A few minutes later I could smell the rain outside. If it weren't for those two things I wouldn't know what the weather was out there. Summertime is officially here and on Memorial Day I put the air conditioners in the windows. So we are all sealed up inside. Yesterday the temperature was in the high eighties and the heat triggered the thunderstorms to move through. It all made me think about how it was when I was a kid. In the heat of summer, when the temperatures would climb up and up, we had no air conditioning. Dad wouldn't pop for air until the year I turned seventeen. I remember heat waves with the temps in the nineties, nearing one hundred without a wisp of a breeze. In our first house on Ravinia Drive, we kids slept on the second floor, the heat rising up the staircase turning our bedrooms into little ovens. In the only two windows up there, Dad put a couple of fans. Fans that didn't blow cool night air into the rooms, but sucked the hot air out. Actually sucking all the hot air from downstairs, through our rooms. During the daytime hours, on those hottest of days, Mom would close all the windows and pull the shades to trap whatever coolness was in the house. She would then send us down into the basement to play. It was a bit cooler down there, but dank. When we got bored with the basement, we would venture up to the Walgreens at the end of our street. It was two blocks of walking in the sun, on the hot, bubbling macadam, to get a popsicle. I still remember the smell of the ice cream case at the Walgreens. Because by the time we got to the store we would be fried, and I would stick my head all the way into that freezer. It was a nice aroma of chocolate, sweetness, and a milky coolness. In the 1950s nobody had air conditioning except for the stores uptown. On Sunday's we would sit in Saint George Church, roasting while the giant fans near the altar would roar like a DC3 ready to take off. They pretty much only moved hot air around, cooling nobody. My dad would always attend Father O'Connell's mass, because Dad told us that Father O'Connell said Mass faster than any of the other priests. It was still not fast enough.

So now I'm a spoiled adult who cannot live without the air conditioning. Seriously, I can't understand how I ever lived to the ripe old age of seventeen without it.