Bug and other things...

I was thinking this morning about how to get rid of some of the bugs which are eating some of my plants and then I got to thinking about how that might make a good blog! Last night I went in to my bedroom to turn down the bed, (is that phrase too old fashioned for you guys?) and when I came out of the bedroom I saw what looked like a piece of black fuzz or lint. I took my cane, (thank goodness!) and tried to push it around to make sure it was fuzz or lint and the thing started to move. It wasn't moving very fast so I went back into my bedroom and picked up a "Kleenex" and came back and picked it up, with that, a big old spider!!! Ugh! I think it came in under my screen door or in the door while I was letting Rose outside to go home! I shut the door right away and since I had my fan on and the window open was plenty cool enough so I didn't have to keep the door open! I, after picking up the spider and giving him the ride of his life in the toilet, sat down in my lounge chair. I started some of my prayers and reached over to pick up a booklet and here was some kind of "bug" sitting on the booklet! I thought, where are they coming from? Needless to say I felt creepy and crawly for quite awhile, even after I got in bed!! Mark, one of my nephews said at my party to give him a call and he would come over and spray my plants or whatever. I haven't called him yet about it but I seriously think I will this weekend!

Then I got to thinking about gophers, those stinking little things that make piles of dirt all over the lawn and anyplace else they can and are so hard to get rid of!!! There is one in our yard here and there is a neighborhood cat that sits right by the mounds of dirt hoping I think for a good meal! When we lived in Fresno, I had so many gophers in my yard! They would pull my tomato plants or any other thing right down into their "nests"! I thought one day, I'll get you so I got the hose and I started finding out where the holes were and started filling them up with water. Not smart, I was standing there putting water into one hole after another and looked down and here between my feet was a really wet gopher!!!! I screamed and dropped the hose, the neighbors came running over and I will bet to this day they are talking about that!!! When Cappy came home from work I told him and he went to the store and got a few "gopher bombs" put them down into the holes and covered them up and well, for awhile we didn't have any more gophers there!!!! My Father, when I was little used to take stryknine (I know that isn't spelled right!) and he would dig around the mounds and find out where the hole was that the gopher had come out of and take a long, really long-handled big spoon and quickly take the lid off the can of poison and dump a spoonful into each hole. He had to cover the can each time he took a spoonful out of it because it was not only deadly poison to smell but also to ingest!!! How I know that is because one time when I was very small, those terrible winds we had in Wawawai had blown down the sack where my father had put the poison in the garage rafters and I took the spoon and I guess tried to lick the spoon. I came into the house gagging and my mother wanted to know what I had done, (she was nursing a baby at the time) and anyway, I took her out to the garage and showed her the "spoon"! She called the Dr. who was 20 miles away and he told her to give me some warm lard to get me to vomit. She put some lard in a spoon and put it on the stove. Yup, you guessed it, I did throw up but I had a blister on my tongue for days!! The Dr did get there on time or I wouldn't be doing this "blogging"!!! Bye.

Footware??????

Someone sent me an E-Mail the other day with some of the most ridiculous shoes on it that I have ever seen and the article said that these were really shoes and women were buying and wearing them!!!! Ouch!!!!! They were the most outlandish "heels"! I was one that even as a child I liked to go barefoot, mainly in the summer because where I lived up in the states of Washington and Idaho, it was too cold to go without shoes in the winter!!! I had as a child, "Mary Janes" which were patent leather shoes that really had a good shine on them! In later years, some folks were saying that you could see the girls panties in them. Well let me tell you, in my day they wouldn't have been able to see much!!!! We wore bloomers and sometimes they were black. BUT... they covered your whole behind and then some they had elastic around the waist and also around the legs which hung down to your knees!!!! When I became a teenager, I started wearing silk stockings, (not nylons, they came later!) but before that our stockings were cotton and came up over the knees and we wore garters to hold them up!! Garter belts, I guess they were. And then the shoes, which were usually good sturdy oxfords and you got one pair if you were lucky, a year!! After I started wearing the silk stocking the style changed for them and we started to roll them down below the knees and then were rolled over elastic bands called "garters!" That was quite the fad, the rolled hosiery!! Then after I got out of High school and started to buy my own shoes or, at least was able to tell my parents what I wanted in the way of shoes and stockings, I bought "heels". They were not as high as the ones that I have seen advertised in some of the recent catalogs, but they were miserable too but what the heck!!! That's what everybody was wearing!!! The highest, I think, that I ever wore were about three inches high! Do I have to tell you as soon as I got home from a date or wherever, my shoes come off and I felt soooo good!!!! Shoes also started either being square toes, round toes or pointed toes!!! These pointed toes were terrible. One's feet were crammed into a space meant for about three toes and since you were in "heels" they really were "crammed" into a tiny space!!! But as I said before, style is style and you HAD to be in "style" When I look at my poor feet today and have to wear "flats" and I do mean "flats" I really thank my lucky stars that I can't be "stylish" anymore!!! I have a bone on the top of my feet and high arches and so when I wear anything that has to press down on that bone, Wow, more misery!!! Now for a little secret! (I still take my shoes off as soon as I get in the house and either "slop" around in a pair of sloppy slippers, or, you guessed it! I walk around barefoot!!!! Second childhood, but, oh how good it feels to let my feet free!!!!!!!!

Guardian Angels...

I don't know where I got the idea of calling my Guardian Angel "George"! It just sort of came to me one day years ago and I was very exasperated about something and out of my mouth came this," Okay, George, why aren't you helping me????" And whatever it was that I was exasperated about eased up and so from then on, I have called my Guardian "George"! I thought I was rather weird until one day about ten or twelve years ago, a bunch of us got to talking during Bible class and this one "Old" lady, (for those of you who knew her, she was Louise St. Marie!) said that she had named her Guardian Angel "Agnes" quite a number of years ago! I perked up and asked a few other people and I guess I'm not the only weird one in the world!!! Seemed that everybody in the room had a favorite "name" for their "special" angel!!! I don't know how many times "George" has helped me get through a day, find a convenient parking spot, gave me a bit of humor when I needed it and a shoulder to cry on when I get "EXASPERATED"!!!!! I told my sister Barbara about it and she promptly named hers!!! I have asked "him" to calm me down to get a night's sleep when I begin to think that I was never going to get to sleep!! Father Matt O'Connell when he was having our Bible class asked us one day, "how many people in here have given special names to their Guardian Angels?" I asked him what about himself and he told us that he had named his Guardian when he was still a boy! So Steve, you're not off your "rocker" so to speak and I'm sure that "George", "Laurence", "Agnes" and whoever, are pleased that we think about them once in awhile in a personal way even if it is in desperation!!! Try it and I'm sure your "special" angel will show you just how special "it" is. Since it is a creature, again, so to speak, of God!!!