Catchy Name Needed

I'm not doing NaBloPoMo this year, and I'm not even sure if Holidailies is going to happen this year at all, but I find I can't start thinking about the holidays without wanting to write stuff down in a journal-ish format. That habit seems to have gotten ingrained with me. So I'm going to try to start writing, and we'll see how it goes. I'm not going to try to write any kind of a coherent catch-up post or this will never happen at all - I know how I am about that. Maybe later, but not to start with. The best you're going to get for now is random-ish stuff.

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We had dinner with Art last weekend, which I guess is why I was thinking about him earlier. Some of you may remember hearing about Art back when - he was my mother's boyfriend, and he just turned 89 years old last week. He lives in the same apartment complex we do nowadays, but we really don't see him often, which is why we periodically call and ask him out to dinner. (Usually we go to one Italian place that we all like - Angelo's. We tried to vary this up and took him to our favorite Chinese place last summer, but this time we were back to Angelo's.) Art is getting very deaf. I'm not sure if he has a hearing aid - actually I'm pretty sure he does, but he doesn't wear it. Every time we see him it seems to be a little worse. On the other hand, if you're 89 and that's the worst problem you have, I guess you're doing pretty well. He has assorted other aches and pains, too, that's probably not the worst problem he has, really, but on the whole he's holding up remarkably well.

One reason we don't see too much of him, apparently, is because he spends all his time at the Senior Citizens Center a couple of blocks away. (We are not far from being old enough to hang out there if we wanted to - I think the lower limit is 55 - but we are not quite there yet. Darn.) He works out, and then he stays for lunch, he told us. He has lunch there every weekday, he said. It costs $1 for lunch. We spent some time wondering who subsizes these lunches, because somebody must. I wonder if it's a federal program - although I'm sure the city picks part of it up too. Friendswood is a very affluent place, but apparently similar programs exist in less affluent places, too. (And I seriously doubt that Rick Perry's Texas is picking up the bill.)

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Like (apparently) half the women in the world, I continue to be obsessed with my nails. I've been informed by such luminaries as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that it's not just me (not to mention just by half the women I know, online and off). I have been trying to restrict the worst of my nail-related nattering to Google Plus, where I can keep it mostly to the circle of people I know are also similarly obsessed, plus a few crazy people who have at least expressed some degree of willingness to listen. But it will inevitably spill over here if I write here for any length of time, so be prepared! For example, at the moment I am involved in taking off what I had on - which was glittery and is rather involved just to get off - and deciding what to replace it with. Which may end up being something similar - it was coppery glitter over brown, and seems very seasonally appropriate to me. (What I do on G+ is usually a more involved explanation than that, delving into brand names and how many coats and such, but I will certainly refrain from going into that much detail here.)

I am so happy to have a job where the color of my nails is a non-issue - nobody cares if they're glittery or black or bright orange (all of which they have been at one time or another lately, what with Halloween and everything). I'm also happy to have a job where I don't have to hang around for 8 hours every day whether or not there's anything to do. Seriously, you have no idea how happy that makes me. I am finding that I very much do not want to go back to the world of the 40-hour week. Of course, the other side of that coin is that I need to go do some work so I'll get paid enough to pay for all the nail polish and other goodies I keep buying. So I think I'll post this and talk more later.