Well, today we received a huge gift basket full of fruit, crackers, cake and snack foods delivered to us.  The card said it was from the lady who calls us every morning, thank us for our patience!  Wasn’t that nice of her!  I think accepting it is a violation of the company’s policies, but I’m not the one the basket was addressed to, and I’m not the one who accepted it, so I won’t get in trouble.  It would be interesting to see if anyone DOES get in trouble for it!

My sister and I have been talking about our energy providers a lot recently and trying to decide if we want to go green. We were using Stream Energy Comparison to see how much her provider differed. We both thought that making more green decisions would be harder than it is. Everyone keeps talking about going green, but really I did not know what people meant when they said it. It just sounded like a catch phrase to me. I think it started with my sister always following me room to room and turning all the lights off. I thought it was annoying at first, but she explained to me that we should conserve energy and lights were a part of that. She convinced me we needed to do it with the lights, the water and even with how much trash we threw away. Now the next step for us is choosing a provider that will allow us to keep saving energy and making green decisions. My sister says that no matter who the provider, it really comes down to decisions like turning out the light.

This woman was concerned that her bi-polar daughter might be pregnant.  She had her tubes tied a few years ago, but was now displaying all of the symptoms of pregnancy.  So the mother came in to ask if it was possible she was pregnant.  Knowing that I’m not allowed by law to give medical advice, I was skating on thin ice.  So I told her that I had a girl friend who had her tubes tied and got pregnant a few years later anyway, so yes it was possible.

So then she asked what should she do.  I told her to buy one of the early pregnancy test kits and use it to find out if the daughter really is pregnant.  I told her that there are other medical conditions that could mimic pregnancy, but she should do the test kit and then call her doctor.  She thanked me for my advice and told me that she hoped it was one of the other medical conditions and not pregnancy.  I kept my mouth shut at that point, other than telling her to consult the doctor.  To the best of my knowledge the other medical conditions that can mimic pregnancy are not good at all.  I think pregnancy would be preferable!

After the woman left I apologized to the pharmacist for not asking her to come and counsel the patient.  She was within earshot the whole time.  She told me that I told the woman exactly what she would have told her, but next time to call her into the conversation.  She was nice about it, but I felt bad anyway.

When I was talking with Madeline about how we had to search far and wide for the financial aid, she was telling me that she had heard that her son might qualify for a scholarship for left handed students. I had never heard of any scholarships based on something like that! What will they think of next!

Having made that apartment, our own storage space is now extremely limited, and I have to admit that I get frustrated when I go downstairs to get something out of storage that when I have to move a ton of someone else’s stuff out of the way to get to my stuff it can get annoying. None of us are in show business anymore, why am I tripping over an old microphone stand that has been bent up and is missing the base from it? I fear that my sister is a hoarder, and it is going to be a struggle to keep her hoard out of my space! At least all of her stuff is down in the basement on cement floors so I won’t have to worry about the floors rotting and giving way under all of her junk!

So it was with significant interest when we moved down here, to a different rural area that did not have those same issues with snow plows to see a variety of styles and colors of Gaines Mailboxes and Keystone Mailboxes scattered randomly along the rural roadsides. I suspect that more people in New England would own nicer mailboxes like these if they weren’t always thinking about the snowplow wiping out their investment!

I wonder if that is what is going to happen to the town I live in now; in forty years will it be a city, too? There are more cows than people here, and not a single retail store or gas station or traffic light. How quickly will progress march into this farm town?