DANGER TO YOUR HEALTH! RETIREMENT COMMUNITY

When I first moved here two things happened.  First I met a couple of gals that I thought were going to be good friends but found that I had spoke to soon.  I had been here about a month when I called my daughter and told her that I have these old gals figured out.  “They are like PMSing 14 year olds with 50 years of bitch under their belt to back it up.”  No offense gals, because I am pretty darn sure that some of you, or many of you or most of you would put me in that category too.  And I for one am proud to be there because lets face it, we have worked all of our lives both in the home and outside of it, raised our families, took care of the hubby, cooked God knows how many meals, day after day after day.  With that we were always TCB (taking care of business) concerning our families, relatives, school, jobs, pets, holidays, etc. and to accomplish that you have to become a strong woman. 

Unfortunately, strong women are also opinionated, set in their ways and let’s face it, we all want to get our way about most things.  (Translate to:  All the time).  Then we have the cultural and geological backgrounds that separate us from our neighbors.  It’s really a wonder that we get along with others as well as we do.  I think that friendship and getting along is the luck of finding just the right woman or better yet a group of women who are truly caring and share values much as your own.  Personally I will add laughter to that list as well.

The second thing was when I began to look around at all the truly beautiful women and I thought to myself, “It must be the water”.  After all, what else could it possibly be?  But this is called a retirement community and after we had lost some of our friends and neighbors due to ill health or just plain age I decided, “Maybe, I don’t want to drink the water after all”.

Wishing you Joy and Laughter Everyday!

ANOTHER BRIGHT IDEA - LADIES OF THE LAKE RED HATTERS

About the time of my girly phase I decided that I wanted to go out and play.  Remember the commercial for spaghetti sauce where a bunch of Italian women friends were running through a meadow and rolling down a hillside?  Think Mama Mia but with a little more flesh.  Well every time I saw that commercial I wanted to go out and play with those gals.  I wanted to jump and run and roll!  Yeah, not a chance with my bad back but I still wanted to do it.  (Can you tell that I absolutely loved Mama Mia!)

I had met a lady before I moved into the park and to see us together you would have laughed.  Here I am at six feet and Carol (a Carol of a different color) has osteoporosis so badly that she had shrunk to probably less than five feet.  Carol was a funny, funny lady and was always in a cheerful mood.  During one of our conversations I told her that I wanted to start a Red Hat club here in the park and she got so excited about the idea that I really started the Ladies of the Lake for two reasons:  so I could go out and play and act not-my-age and because Carol wanted it so badly.  Carol was at the first meeting and stayed in Red Hats until she passed away last year.

But back to the Red Hats:  What I hadn’t taken into account is that any time you get a bunch of women together then you have a vast difference of opinion about how things should be done.  Yes we had a lot of fun but there was also a lot of arguing and we lost several members because of that.  All in all, I think this has been a good experience for most of the gals and I am pleased for them.

Wishing you Joy and Laughter Everyday!

HEY GIRLFRIEND, CAN YOU BE SIX FOOT TALL AND STILL BE GIRLY?

I realized when I was sitting here one day that I didn’t do anything girly for myself.  I think I must have stopped that back sometime in the 80’s when all the girly stuff was for my teenage daughter.  I think I lost myself somewhere in the shuffle.

So one day I sat down and painted my toenails.  Oh Boy, I’m girly now!  Well, maybe not quite so I rushed out bought a toe ring with a little bling on it.  I don’t care what anyone else thinks but I absolutely love looking down at my feet and seeing all that shiny pink or rose polish.  I tried red polish but just a word of advise here, if you use red polish put on an undercoat first or else when you take the polish off, your nails are stained a really ugly reddish brown color. Not pretty!

I bought a couple of girly things for the house or more specifically just for me and then I looked at my daughter Cat one day and she looked terrific so with her advise I went to Sephora.  Wow, this Bare Minerals and Urban Decay makeup is terrific and I feel so, I don’t know, GIRLY!

I laughed at my friend Carole one day after she had started getting the rings (more about that later), because she had a makeover and started using makeup and painting her nails.  I guess it’s something we all have to go through.  I told her that she looked wonderful and Carole answered “I just decided that if I don’t do it now, when am I going to do it”.  Amen girlfriend, scoot over and let me on that makeup wagon too.

Wishing you Joy and Laughter Everyday!

FRIENDS - LADIES BUNCO OR LADIES OF THE EVENING

By the time the next New Year’s Eve rolled around and I decided that I was NOT going to sit here by myself.  I thought about it and then it dawned on me that I was in the midst of a whole bunch of single gals. I called my daughter and told her I was going to have a party for the single ladies in the park.  Cat listened and then she said “and what are you going to do at this party?”  Well, darned if I knew, my bright ideas only stretch so far.  Cat suggested that we play Bunco and I thought about it and decided “Yeah, we’ll play Bunco” and then I even made it a potluck because all us old gals really could use a special New Year’s Eve celebration. 

I got on the phone with my handy, dandy park register and started calling everyone who didn’t have a husband or ‘significant other’ and before I got half way through the list I had 16 gals lined up.  I reserved the clubhouse for the 31^st. and every one showed up and had so much fun that they wanted to do it every month.  So we have been playing Bunco once a month for 7 years now – and that’s how the Ladies Bunco was born.  (My choice for name was Ladies of the Evening but that got voted down.)  Some month’s we only have 10 or so but as word has grown, there are times that we have 40 or more gals.  Yes, we are loud and noisy and every time we switch seats several of the gals get lost but oh well, we have fun and that’s what it is all about.  At one time some of the gals decided that we were too noisy and yelled too loud when we got a Bunco, I guess they got a headache from all the noise, so we played a couple of times and when someone Buncoed they were very quiet about it and almost whispered Bunco.  Now me, being the one who yelled the loudest, finally told them that we are there to have fun and part of that fun is to be silly and make noise so we are back to shouting and laughing and some of us (me?) even do a little happy dance every chance we get.

My knee and my shoulder have been bothering me, what can I say I’m not quite as young as I once was.  So I went to Bunco just to take the gal’s picture and came home laughing because every time I said, “Okay, act like you’re having fun!”  As one, they all started talking and of course I picked a night when we had a very small group but I heard this morning that they had a really good time.


Wishing you Joy and Laughter Everyday!

ALONE AND TRYING TO LOVE IT! OR LEARNING TO LAUGH AGAIN!

I am a mother and a grandmother and once upon a time I was a wife but now I am living alone for the first time in my adult life and there are many changes that I have gone through to get to the “happy” stage but I’ll save that story for another time.

Well, no I won’t because it is the beginning of the “new” me.  So I moved into a retirement community (a large senior mobile home park). I moved from a huge house into 1440 sq. feet and was trying to find a home for everything that I brought with me and getting more and more depressed.  One day I bought a new address book and sat down that night to transfer my friends into it and omit “his” and “our” friends. Gals, sometime when you want to be depressed try this little exercise and you will be surprised at the “friends” that were “ours” and no longer or maybe never were yours.  I even lost some relatives in the deal!  You want a number; okay from two address books full of names I was only able to transfer a handful into my new book and two of those friends live out of state.  These were friends that I knew were mine and mine alone.  Sad, isn’t it?  Yes, it’s sad and it scared me half to death.

I moved into my home in November and spent my birthday with my daughter Cat and I went to her house for Christmas.  I knew I needed to meet people and do it in a hurry to save my sanity. While I was still unpacking, I became secretary on the park’s social club as a way to meet people and I also started going to the park’s craft class. (More about the Crafty Ladies later.)  Then on New Year’s Eve the social club held a dance and, no I did not go.  I sat here by myself watching Tvland and I thought, “Is this the way it’s going to be the rest of my life”.  That’s when I made the first new years resolution that I had made in years and it turned out to be the smartest thing that I could have done.  My resolution was this:  Everyday, I would walk out of my house and talk to someone even if I had to go knocking on doors to do it (and I sometimes did).  My daughter knew about my resolution so she wasn’t surprised when I called her one-day and told her “I just walked out to the mailbox and talked to five people so I’m good for the week!”  No, she didn’t let me get away with that and I had to remind her of whose resolution it is, anyway!  But what it amounts to is that I met a lot of people, some acquaintances, some eventually became great friends and a special few became my back-door friends.

The point is that I was really in sad shape when I moved in here.  I had lost my gorgeous big home, my not so wonderful husband, I had very few friends and here I was at my age alone, a place that I never thought about being.  I guess what I am trying to say is that I had to learn how to laugh again and find the humor in my life, in all the day to day happenings and conversations. ***