I Have Old Timer’s Disease
I have noticed a trend in my daughter of late and it is driving me nuts.  I like anyone else, old or not, have mind hick-ups.  You know what I’m talking about, those moments when you’re trying to remember a name of someone or something.  Maybe it’s the name of a place or maybe a street.  You also have the old standby, why did I come in here.  You know what I’m talking about.
I don’t see myself doing this any more often than normal but let me do it around my daughter and she is jumping all over it telling me I need to have my memory tested.  This isn’t the only area she concerns herself with but it shows more than anything just how old she thinks I am and that concerns me.
No I’m not out running triathlons or attempting to swim the English Channel but come on people that doesn’t mean I’m heading my walker toward that big hole for the final sleep.  No I don’t use a walker for those of you who are wondering.
I’ve got a lot of years stored up in that old brain of mine and sometimes it takes a moment to access what I’m trying to say or do.  Think about it a minute.  You load up your PC with a lot of crap and it slows it down, the brain isn’t much different.  There is also the fact that I’m an older model and I haven’t had all the updates and patches that younger folks have had.  Most of the time I thank God for this.  You add to that the fact I’m usually multi-tasking and things aren’t going to just pop up front and go here I am.  Also I’m not someone who totally concentrates on what is going on at any given time, unless I’m writing, and that just adds more to the equation.
Yes I admit that I’m a scatter brain a lot of the time but that doesn’t make me ready for the whole, your mind is gone, speech.  I like the way my brain works.  It has seen me through a lot of years of dealing with a lot of ups and downs of day to day life and I see no reason to start questioning it now.
So what brought this on?  When driving home from her new house last night I was trying to tell her another route she might consider going from her new house to mine when I forgot the name of a street.  Again she made the comment I needed to have my memory checked.  The fact that she couldn’t think of the name either wasn’t lost on me and I pointed that fact out to her.  She thought about this a minute and came back with, “well I don’t live close to it.”  I may live close to this street but I am rarely on it and since it plays a super small role in my life it rarely has any reason to cross my mind until now.  I can assure you it is forever stuck there now and I seriously doubt that I will forget the name of it again.
I do have a confession to make here however.  I couldn’t tell you the names of most of the streets around my home because I don’t spend my time reading the street signs when I’m driving on them to get in and out of where I live.  To me streets serve two purposes.  One is to add to a number so you can get your mail and the other is so I can easily maneuver in and out of my neighborhood.  Why the hell to I need their names stuck in my head.

Have you ever found an old abandoned building and something about it touched you?  Have you ever walked inside a place left lost in time and wonder about the people who might have been connected to it?  I have.  Actually it’s not that uncommon for me.
I find a place like that and I wonder about the people who once occupied the rooms or walked down the halls.  What did they think about as they strolled along the surrounding grounds?  Were they happy or sad?  Was it a place of love or fear?  The sad part is you have no way of knowing the vast majority of the time.
My imagination can run rampant in an old abandoned place, any old place abandoned or not.  Old buildings, houses, old businesses, hospitals, schools, or churches have seen so much of life of people who have walked through their rooms and long since passed from this Earth.  The stories of their lives have been lost in time and there is no way to recapture them.
If you think about it, it’s kind of tragic.  I’ve been talking to my husband about writing down the stories he tells me about his father.  The man was an evil genius when it came to pulling pranks on people.  I have spent so much time laughing at those stories and the fact that when my husband leaves this world so do those stories.  If you’re wondering if there are any regarding my husband, well he pulled his share of stunts as well only not usually in the form of pranks.  He just got into stuff and pulled a lot of stunts that if one of our kids had ever pulled them and he found out he would have killed them.
We learn about the history of our country and even our planet but we neglect to do anything about our own history.  Take the time to record those memories for your children and grandchildren and give them something of yourself to hold on to after you’re gone.  Who knows, maybe you’ll inspire a distant descendant to go explore, pull a great prank, take a chance on an awesome stunt, aspire to be something more.  You take the time to share your story now and who knows where in the future you might rise up again.

Seriously, how do you get off?  I’m sitting next to Maniac and Lunatic with Mad Mind and Dark Humor sitting across from us.  Oh and Screwball is running up and down the isles causing all kinds of mischief and havoc.
So much has been going on these past few months I’ve hardly had time to breath.  Between birthdays (with several more to come in the next couple of months), wedding vow renewals, one daughter and her sweetie going through the process of buying a new house (they signed the final papers about an hour ago), anniversary, a family reunion this weekend, two daughters starting new jobs at the same place (I refer to these two as evil Einsteins), and various other things.  I think I’ve actually seen more of my family as well as more of them in the past few months than I have combined in the past few years.  I know that sounds awful but’s it’s true.
Don’t get me wrong all those things are great and I’ve enjoyed most but I’m a quiet person as a rule and enjoy my solitude.  I was raised with four brothers and as we each found our other halves the family grew.  Boy did it grow.  After my divorce to the nut case I married first my mom moved back from Florida and in with me.  That meant that most family get-togethers were held at my house and it would be nothing for twenty or so people at least to be running in and out of my house.  Don’t even get me started on what it was like when my oldest brother divorced his second wife and moved in with me.
Shortly after he became the police chief of our little town we lived in at the time locals began referring to my home as city hall two.  My home became a notorious place talked about for at least fifty miles around.  People driving through our fair little town started wondering what kind of criminals lived there because of all the police cars that were forever in my driveway.  When I would go to another town or city close by people would find out where I lived and ask what was with the white house sitting on a hill on such and such highway because there was always lots of police cars there.  I know I told someone once when I was in a particularly foul mood that I lived there and every time a new body turned up they came knocking on my door.  I turned and walked away after that so I never did see what kind of a look the guy might have given me.
After this weekend things should quiet down a bit.  There are only four more birthdays between now and the first of August that should involve big to-dos for those events and after that nothing major until the holidays come up.
Anyway, back to the crazy train.  I tend to get a little wacky when I feel like I’m in a constant time crunch and that is what I feel right now.  There is never any telling what I might do when I get like this.  Watch out world, things might blow.
 

I have taken one.  A very long one.  Why you might ask.  Because I damn well wanted to.  Well that and the fact I have a family that has required a lot of attention of late.  The past few months have been some of the busiest I’ve dealt with in a while.  I wish I could say that things are calming down but that wouldn’t be true.  Between now and the end of July things will continue to be busy and crazy.
Most of us have families and as a rule this leaves all of us who do have those loved ones with hyper drive personal lives wringing out hands and pulling our hair out.  That’s the problem.  No matter how crazy my family is as a rule I’m spared the crazy things that go on with most of them but between the end of February till the first of August things get busy at my house.  Yes there is Thanksgiving and Christmas but things tend to run rather smoothly and drama or not we get through it with few bumps and bruises.
But this time of year is another story.  We have loads of birthdays during this time and no matter what it is about this time of year things go crazy around here.  This is always the time when everyone in the family goes through life changes, face major life altering decisions, and if anything is going to go down the crap hole it picks this time to do it.  Maybe because so much is bundled into this time period.  Anyway dealing with the family even when it isn’t wrapped in drama per say not only takes up a lot of your time but it takes a lot out of you.  Don’t get me wrong, pretty much everything is on the good side and I’m grateful for that but damn I could use a rest.  With a husband, three daughters, three spouses of said daughters, four grandchildren, three remaining brothers with their families, not to mention a number of people outside that group that I care deeply about, I have a lot of people that can and often are on my mind.
All that being said I do have to remember that I also have other responsibilities and I need to take care of them.  I have to keep up with my website, my facebook friends, and other things that I have left on the side.  So let’s hope that the bottom doesn’t fall out of something around here and we keep treading along.