For a birthday in early August, I had 11 helium balloons in the house – not an extravagant purchase because they were only one dollar each from the Dollar Tree. I might have even bought more just for the festivity of it, but it was somewhat embarrassing standing around while a lady filled them, not to mention a challenge getting them into the car without dealing with an escapee.

I have a vague memory of helium balloons in my childhood having a very limited lifespan; they were made of the same stuff as regular balloons, if I recall correctly. These helium balloons I have been buying for a few years are of foil, and to my surprise some years ago, retained the helium for weeks.

They would seek out the ceiling, and if guided, would find a place that would be in someone’s line of sight at unexpected moments. After awhile, you get used to them, and what the heck, they aren’t doing any harm . . . they homestead the place.

Inevitably, however, they do slowly lose their helium and sink a couple of inches off the ceiling, catch air movement in the house and show up at the most unexpected times. That’s not bad, really, because they are still above your head and they don’t have faces that look like monsters. (Although, one year we did have a houseful of Elmos, but he’s such a cute and lovable guy.)

There does come a time when they sink to person level; it’s not scary, but it’s sad. You know they are going and in going, they not only sink, they get more and more concave. Walk through the hall, turn the corner and come face to face with a butterfly that appears to have been punched in the nose and you will not feel festive anymore.

So what to do? Put them out of their misery? Set them free to watch them not soar, but catch on a bush? Wait until they are sitting on the sofa with  you and then just decide you can’t take it anymore and break, becoming a balloon slayer?

As you ponder this, you hear the tinkling of a Christmas tune – BECAUSE ONE OF THOSE NOVELTY HOLIDAY CLOCKS STORED IN A BOX HAS HAD A FLASH OF BATTERY RENEWAL.

Sigh, just sigh.

No surprise there for anyone who has known me for over five minutes; even if I haven’t opened my mouth, I am known for my suddenly appearing Look of Death face that says it all.

So, yes, this is a short tirade of irritation about paragraphs in articles that people write that could be written in a foreign language for all the sense they convey. I just battled my way through one sentence that made up an entire paragraph, and I had to launch an investigative team to locate the verb. Their report was inconclusive.

I went through high school a long, long time ago and we had to diagram sentences in the form of a tree branch with twigs sticking out and twiglets sticking out from them. AND WE HAD TO LABEL THEM. We had years of English grammar and literature classes that were separate. Two hours a day of language.

So now I can’t find the verb in a sentence written by someone who has used really big words to state (I think) an opinion? Are all my brain cells dying? This was an article for average folks – not a secret message from one member of the intelligentsia to another. Or was it? Did I stumble on a message that has vital information on an invasion . . . or a stock tip?

Maybe the writer could see me trying to read his piece and, instead of sneering and using the contemptuous parlance of the day -HEY DUMMY, FCUK YOU, he was opting for GO OBFUSCATE YOURSELF, MORON.

Ok, so this probably isn’t going to be one of my better days; I’ll set out flares.

I know I  sprinkled a mixture of perennials out of a canister last year because i had been spending most of the spring and summer watching over a hospital/recovery patient and then having cataract surgery in Dayton and hadn’t done anything positive here in Kendallville at this lawn. I also know it was a half-hearted attempt to do something/anything botanically positive . . . and that I wouldn’t have to pay any more attention to it until spring came again and things spouted. I also lied to myself that perennials were like animals in the wild – they knew how to take care of themselves.

Well, spring came very late this year and with a lot of rain and everything outside started spouting green. It was then that I realized that most green sprouts look alike. A weed, a wildflower? And if were a wildflower, there were no little attached signs informing me of height, time of bloom, and so forth.

it wasn’t too bad in the beginning because they were all short and basic looking. But then, ACK, some things started getting really tall and others developed ugly leaves and I had no idea what to pull up or mow down and what to cultivate or stake. Now that it is late August, I can see that I got lucky in some of my guesses and, in others, wound up with tangled weeds sprouting new (DIY) seed packets. I’m still waiting on this one plant with cabbage-like foliage because I think in September it is supposed to have lovely blooms. They had better be lovely because I will be pissed if I have tolerated looking all summer at an ugly plant that might eat me in a science fiction movie and NOT at least ease my pain with a blossom or two.

I almost think packets of mixed perennial seeds should come with the warning: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

And, if this perennial roulette game hasn’t been enough, I think I may have discovered that it is not wise to cut back grapevines unless you get all the roots out. Before the leaves came out last spring which would enable the grapevines to more efficiently grab onto hedge branches, Cameron and I spent hours separating  them out. Cameron got microscopic poison ivy and we both have been bombarded with exploding vine growth.

I am toying now with PLAN B, which involves buying some sort of trestle support system and letting them have an arbor of their own, so they will stay away from the hedge. I don’t think too highly of that idea; I think I made a forever enemy when I chopped them down last year and they are probably planning to encroach on everything, including the house. (Sometimes at night I think I can hear them growing and creeping closer and closer.)

My mother had a couple of grape arbors at the Lagrange House and she would actually make grape pies. Delicious grape pies. However, did you know that grape pies require a lot of work – you have to peel the grapes, for Heaven’s sake. I can daydream my way through snapping beans – not that I would do so without an older relative handing me a bag of beans and a pot and saying “Snap them.” Same thing with peas. I just can’t see myself peeling grapes. Admit it, you can’t see me peeling grapes; heck, you probably have a hard time seeing me pod peas.

I have to admit, thought, that when I was five, I would think, “Wow! I get to snap beans and pod peas.” I can ever remember being thrilled to stand on a stool and help my grandma wash dishes. WHO WAS I THEN???

Why did I admit that? Forget it, it will be easier that way.

I need little yellow gardener minions who scurry around doing master garden things and jabbering in their cute minion language. Too bad they don’t come in packages I can order from American Meadows . . . or Amazon Prime.

This is not about dentists, despite the title that awakens visions of Laurence Olivier leaning over Dustin Hoffman’s open mouth in “The Marathon Man” and repeatedly asking, “Is it safe?” (Although now I have awakened a craving for Clove Oil.) If it related to any movie experience, “The Poseidon Adventure” is more appropriate, with the upside down life and all that water.

Last Wednesday night, just before the last Gordon Ramsay show, and just after I had slipped into my sleeping attire, my phone alerted me to a text. I am not going to quote the text because sheer panic is not pretty, but the gist is: The water shut-off valve in my older son’s family apartment had broken off and water was pouring ALL OVER EVERYTHING . . . AND GETTING DEEPER (and, if possible, wetter) The fact that the texter indicated she was contemplating crawling under her bed and wigging out was not a good sign.

Repeated texts and the typewritten plea, GRANDMA???

I could post this is the style of Alice’s Restaurant Massacre but I can’t stand the thought of 8 by 10 glossy pictures with circles and arrows and the Group W bench. So this is a summary: I redressed; I drove down; I pulled in and saw TWO cleaning service vans with giant sucking hoses stretching into the apartment . . . and then I squished over to piles of soggy (and soggy means heavy) clothes. That was the beginning.

After this beginning was: Loading cars with wet stuff, driving to a dry refuge (my house), bedding down people and one dog and one cat . . . and waking up to days of industrial strength dryers and washers, not to mention sorting and repacking stuff.(We petered out along the way and so I am giving temporary shelter to some of the rescued things.)

At first we tried to make lemonade – take out food and Redbox movies while we sorted and then discovered the party-like attitude of lemonade made out of lemons loses its appeal after awhile.) Plus, college was starting on Monday, the day the apartment was to be deemed totally dry and our engineering/math person was slowly moving into the 2+2 does NOT = 4 and the SKY IS FALLING phase. And the NURSE member was facing two days of double shifts on the psych floor. (I was wondering how she would be able to tell the difference between being there and here – Oh, yeah, she’d get paid.)

They got back in yesterday; school started, shifts were done and one aging grandma did a faceplant on the sofa.

It is not over; much is still to be done; I do not want any more lemonade.

I forgot to mention, the engineer/math person had a birthday the weekend before and all this washing and drying and sorting and impromptu sleeping and eating was done in the presence of 11 helium balloons floating around.

I may write more of this adventure, or I may decide to return to the faceplant position and mumble into the sofa.

Oh shoot, I hate it when I have to look at my long held policies and think, “How did this turnabout come about?” Wait, I don’t think that. I think, “Well, for crying out loud, this pisses me off.” Or words to that effect.

For as long as I can remember, I had a tendency to adapt the way folks generally did things to my quirks – such as not re-enforcing a sofa leg, but just putting some books under the sagging corner. (This has become problematic now that I’m a Kindle user, but no need to explore the book vs. ereader conversation now.)

My mother was like this to an extent and well I remember the anecdote she told me about  the cooks throwing away a third of the broth that was produced when preparing a certain dish for a holiday dinner. One day someone asked why and all the ladies in the kitchen replied that was the way their mother/grandmother did it. Then this very old lady seated in a corner of the kitchen piped up and said, “We didn’t have a pan big enough for all of it.”

Now, I am the one lamenting, “But that’s the way it’s always been.” I say (whine) that every time software people decide to “improve” something. I’m doing it again today. I opened WordPress to find that they are introducing a Gutenberg format. Oh, great, my WordPress theme is so old it  has not been supported for maybe eight years. I have always ignored these “update” notices.

BUT now Gutenberg is automatically going to be installed unless I elect to download and install the classic editor. I am tempted to just throw it to the wind and let Gutenberg do what it will to my site. However, there are some posts that aren’t too badly written or have memories and pictures I don’t want to lose. I guess I am going to have to research how to backup this outdated theme and be able to actually access the backup.

I wish they would just leave my pot alone; I don’t want a bigger one; I’m happy throwing a third of my broth away. Sometimes this Lifelong Learning stuff stretches my mind too much.

So, I have whined and lamented and complained and now I am going to my fallback behavior – pouting.

We folks at the PBC&R have a confession to make: We have started watching Frankie & Grace, a series shown on Netflix which we know would cause some of our relatives to cringe. I mean Jane Fonda could be a “turn that off” trigger for one person quite close to us. In fact, he might just resign his charter membership in the Foo Bar in protest.

It is not as if we went out of our way to be annoying to some. It’s just that the show was frequently suggested and after awhile we looked at the synopsis and saw the blurb about two husbands of 40 years announcing that they had been gay lovers for 20 years and were leaving their wives to marry. And those two men were MARTIN SHEEN and SAM WATERSON.

Ah, you can’t really blame me for going “hmmmmm?” and pushing the play option. Well, maybe you can. Forget that; it’s over with; it’s been done. I stared at Sheen and Waterson for the first couple of episodes in a sort of stunned state. Then I started thinking that maybe the jokes were a little raw for me.

However, it was forbiddenly entertaining and I looked up reviews. Like me, the first season got a so-so rating with the remark that much of the script relied too much on off color references. HOWEVER . . . The next two seasons were judged to be much classier and “hilariously funny”. (And, actually, in the first season, I did really laugh at the yearly ritual of watching the National Spelling Contest, including the heckling from Lily Tomlin and Sam Waterson. Oh, and some of the words I had to look up for meaning, let alone spelling – that was a poke in the ribs.)

Well, I’ve confessed. I suppose there will be fallout. I have had practice with handling that. My father was very much a gentleman, but not a self-proclaimed censor and so when I visited there were some shows I was not welcome to watch in the main room. It went along with the recurring comment that began when I was in my early teens, “I don’t believe a lady should use words like that, Jody.”

I know I will probably have to sign into Netflix on the account not associated with Der Bingle to watch. That would be a problem at the apartment (The Ohio Redoubt) so I will have to binge here or rent DVDs.

I suppose it would have been smart not to have written about this at all.

I was scanning the “What’s Going On” column (otherwise known as Facebook) in the local paper stocked here at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse and see that a friend of mine is in New Orleans with her husband and dining at Antoine’s. I have an old, old menu from there, courtesy of my Great Great Aunt Sara who lived the latter part of her life in that city.

I don’t think Aunt Sara had red hair until the day she died, but it was probably close. Aunt Sara always had red hair; well, maybe not as a girl or young woman, but from when I first met her when I was close to one and she was about 71. She was about three years older than my grandmother, being the youngest sister of Grandma’s father. So, in fact, they grew up more as sisters than aunt and niece – Sarah and Jessie. Both became teachers at the turn of the century – you know, the one before this one – but Aunt Sara parted with her “H” and Grandma remained Jessie.

Though Grandma had been at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, she didn’t travel much more and married and had a daughter. When that daughter was one, Aunt Sara, who was teaching in Kalamazoo, married an Encylcopedia Britannica salesman and traveled around the United States with him and . . . then, well, let’s just say there are lots of stories.

Should my friend who dined in Antoine’s be reading this, I must assure her that she and her husband probably blended in better than Aunt Sara. I can’t remember if I told her about my Aunt Sara or not – such as the time she had a big hat before (1915) that she couldn’t wear comfortably in my grandma’s old Buick, so she rode all the way into town with her head out the window. Fortunately, cars chugged along much slower then.

Bluto is starting out with a basic Wubba, a training model, if you will:

He will, no doubt, move onto those that have special powers, such as a Santa Wubba:

No matter how much serious stuff is going on in life, people seem to be able to find something actually unimportant to trigger obsession. I was wondering if I should get my hair trimmed or wait until the heat/humidity of summer had passed.

First I gathered my shortish hair in a mini ponytail in back. I probably am being generous in calling it a mini ponytail, for I’m almost certain a rubber band would not be able to hold it. I think what I am doing is scrunching hair toward the middle with my hands and discovering a little might stick out the hole in an adjustable baseball cap.

That is not what is on my mind now. A while ago, it was and then I happened to look in a mirror at the hair length and I thought, I believe my teeth are too short. You really should not try such thoughts at home for you have too much time to do something crazy, such as look up teeth measurement on the Internet.

Yes, I did that. Pages of technical articles, pages of cosmetic remarks and many, many images of smiles with before and after shots. I have yet to actually measure my front teeth, but I know I will. I am going to be 70 and I am concerned about tooth length; I think that is not senile – it goes straight to crazy.

However, I did come across two images that put me off the idea of thinking about my teeth. Now I am trying to get them out of my mind.

#1 PACIFIERS:

#2 BABY WITH PACIFIER:

And now it is time to return the favor.

Perhaps Bluto will want it played over and over again, as someone here did.