Mammogram Day!



It’s time for my annual mammogram, ugh! It’s so easy to forget about going or put it off…indefinitely, but we can’t do that. Early detection makes breast cancer very treatable. If you already have a history of cancer, like I do, it’s all the more important to have it done.

I try to schedule it around my birthday. For one reason, I can’t forget about it that way. For another reason, and most important, it’s a “gift” to myself. An ounce of prevention yadda yadda yadda is worth a pound of cure. In this case, a few minutes of my time is well worth it if it saves me months of treatment, and quite possibly my life.

Yes the test is uncomfortable, but it’s fairly quick. The way I look at it, it gives me peace of mind for one whole year. If you notice, on the television, radio, magazines, they all mention breast cancer. It makes me paranoid. I start imagining symptoms I don’t have sometimes. It’s just better to have it done and know for sure everything is ok.

I know, being a mother, that we always put ourselves last because we are tending to everyone else’s needs. No one understands that as long as one of our loved ones needs something, we bump ourselves down on the list to take care of it. I do that all the time. But, one day I was forced to realize, what if I wasn’t there any more? Who was going to be the voice of reason, the one with common sense, the one with intuition and the ability to anticipate needs before they arise? That’s when I decided I need to take care of myself and be around as long as possible, to get my family through this chaotic, maze of life. Part of that is going for annual exams, like today.

So I may be a little sore and cranky, so what? I’ll get over it. It’s worth one year’s peace of mind to me to have one less thing to worry about. How about you bump yourselves up the list today and make an appointment? I’d like to know how many of you are OVERDUE! Don’t be shy…post it!

I Love Lucy...

Lucille Ball would have been 100 years old this weekend. It’s still hard to believe she is gone. I literally grew up watching her shows and movies. She is one of those rare talents who was a legend in her own time. The I Love Lucy show had people laughing 50 years ago and still has them laughing today. Where did the time go?

There was just something about Lucille Ball that made you want to laugh. Maybe it was her red hair or that devilish twinkle in her smiling eyes. I can’t imagine anyone not laughing at her humor. I’m sure I watched all the episodes of I Love Lucy many times, and I loved them all, but some just stand out in my mind more than others.

Remember the episode where she is stepping on the grapes in a huge vat in Italy?

Or the one where she keeps trying to tell Ricky she is pregnant and finally has to do it at the Tropicana, during one of his shows.

How about the time she thinks no one remembered her birthday so she joins a little group called the “Friends of the Friendless!”

I know everyone remembers the chocolates on the conveyor belt that goes so fast she ends up shoving chocolates down her dress, in her pockets in in her hat!

I remember her trying to smuggling a huge cheese on the plane home from Italy, wrapped in a baby blanket!

How about when she tried to steal John Wayne’s footprints from Grauman’s Chinese Theater?

I could probably name all the episodes if I put my mind to it. They were all ingenious, comedic ideas that have stood the test of time.

There will never be another comedienne like Lucille Ball. She was truly one of a kind. Thank God we have DVD’s of all her work so it will never be lost. I’ll bet people will be watching her for many, many years to come.

Nice Surprises!

Well, I have been having a string of bad surprises, some I have already blogged about, some I was too tired to blog about. I’ll some up the last week for you here. There was the hail storm, with hail as big as baseballs, which put two cracks in the windshield of the car while my husband was going to pick up my daughter. It lasted about 30 minutes and put at least 50 dings/dents all over the car. Then there was the identity theft scare, courtesy of Best Buy, who may have mixed up the name of a guy in Virginia with my husband’s, making us think someone took out a Visa card and purchased a TV with it. After 90 minutes of phone calls, we think it was an error. After that I wake up and discover there is no service in my cell phone area for outgoing and incoming calls. I only pay $200 a month for the damn plan so why should I complain? Oh yeah and yesterday I had a fight at the fish store. The guy didn’t want to weigh my fish so I could see if there was enough there for my husband’s dinner (there’s a blog for that)!

So my energy is depleted. I am tired of battling nature, the credit bureaus, the phone company and fish mongers. I go downstairs to start dinner and stop to check to see if we got mail first. There, behind my door, is a box. I’m thinking great! My daughter’s textbook came early and I would have to call about it. But, this box is really too big for a textbook. So I take a look at the name. It’s from a friend online. She writes a note thanking me for me friendship and I didn’t even do anything. So, I take my box to the kitchen and open it up. Inside is a beautiful basket! It has pears, crackers, lemon cookies, caramel corn, and cheddar cheese. I am so delighted. I love baskets of assorted things. I should mention, I am not used to getting packages or surprises. I rarely get anything, my family never knows what to get me. It’s not really their fault. They try, I know they do. But that is just the way it is. So, needless to say that on top of the week I had and considering I don’t often get gifts, this was such a thoughtful, totally unexpected and welcomed surprise. I actually forgot every bad thing that happened prior to that moment!

I hurried back to the computer and write a thank you note. But sometimes those two words just don’t “cut it” when someone goes out of their way to do something this kind, out of the blue and for no reason. I am going to enjoy my goodies and try to maintain a positive outlook for a while. After all, what’s more important? A string of meaningless irritating events or a thoughtful gesture of someone who makes me feel appreciated and cared for just because I’m me?



Fish Market Argument!

I was too pissed to write this earlier, but I am getting a hold of myself and going to try to write this up without having a mini stroke. I buy my fish at the fish store. In my neighborhood we have little stores that specialize in things like butchers, fish store, fruit stores etc. I have had issues with the fish store before, after it changed owners. The woman told me one day that the crab cakes weren’t ready, I should come back later. Well I went back hours later, against my better judgment and she still didn’t have them! We may have had another incident too, I try not to remember these things for too long.

Today I went in for jumbo shrimp for my husband. They had about a dozen, but they belonged to someone else already. Someone had put in an order. So she asks me if I want the next size down. I say ok instead of 8 jumbo give me 12 of those large ones. So there is a guy cleaning shrimp and he tells her to take 12 of those and to charge me $7.50. I ask her if she can weigh the shrimp for me because I need to know if 12 is enough for my husband’s dinner. The man takes a fit. He tells me 11 shrimp is half a pound. I tell him yes but I need to know if that will be enough for dinner. He tells her forget it don’t give them to her she doesn’t understand! I tell him I DO understand. The shrimp weigh more uncleaned, I am not questioning that. You don’t understand, I want to know if there is enough for my husband to get full on. As it turned out the 12 shrimp were less than ½ pound and I got two crab cakes to make sure I had enough fish for dinner.

Now I am pissed! The woman tried to make him understand what I meant. He is going to argue with me like I am implying he is cheating me on the money when all I needed to know was how much 12 shrimp weighed. What ever happened to the day when the customer was always right? That’s what I want to know. And this store isn’t exactly packed wit customers either. Fish is too expensive for most people in this economy. They used to have so much more fish in the store and now it’s down to the bare minimum. If there was another store nearby I would not think twice about never going there again. I really need to find another place for fish.

Good Bye Jerry Lewis!

Jerry Lewis is no longer going to be on the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon or Chairman of MDA. He is 85 and has been hosting the show since the 1966, on Labor Day. I grew up with that show and my father looked forward to it every year. It was on practically the whole weekend. He loved watching the money totals go up. The telethon raised over one billion dollars over the years. Last year alone they raised 59 million.

No one explained why Jerry Lewis won’t be there this year. He had planned on retiring and saying his final goodbyes. It’s too bad they didn’t allow him to do that, it’s the least they could have done to honor him for all his time, work and dedication.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am no fan of Jerry Lewis. I never liked his comedy. I never found him funny. If anything I found him annoying. But I do believe in giving credit where it’s due, and he does deserve to exit with some show of dignity and respect and not cut off at the knees. I seem to recall some outlandish statements he made in recent years, which might be behind this decision. We all know when people get to a certain age they feel they are entitled to speak their minds about everything and anything…either that or their mental censor is burnt out.

I just looked up what I was trying to remember. In 2007, Jerry Lewis called someone an “illiterate fag” during the telethon. That caused a ruckus with the gay community and rightfully so, but he was 81 at the time and, as I say, people are not always in charge of their utterings after a certain age. In June of this year he cancelled a tour in Australia because he was suffering from exhaustion. Maybe his health is not up to doing the entire weekend, maybe he is suffering from senility? Who knows?

All I know is there goes another remnant of my childhood out the window. Another reminder that not only is Jerry Lewis getting old, but so am I. There is nothing to be done about it but wallow in pity and blog about it. Now I feel better. Thanks for listening.



Another Politician Bares All!

A Public Service Announcement!

A new trend among politicians is to send out nude photos of themselves. Weiner opened the gate and now all the weiners are trying to get out. The latest weiner (and then some) comes from Freehold, New Jersey from Louis Magazzu, a Democratic congressman of seven years. Leaving nothing at all to the imagination AND learning nothing at all from the Anthony Weiner fiasco, Lou sends out a full frontal nudity picture of himself to a woman he corresponded with. Apparently Lou learned one thing from Weiner, he decided to step down one day after the media got hold of his pictures instead of denying it, or making up a hacking incident.

Magazzu, 53, has five children and is separated from his wife. The pictures were revealed on a blog following the politician. The woman herself contacted the blog first, but the owner told her to go to the media. When the media wasn’t interested, the owner of the blog decided to publish the photos.

The picture shows more than I care to post so check here if you are interested: http://magazzuwatch.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/whathedoesntwant22.jpg



Mother Nature Can’t Be Blamed!

People are not taking “Global Warming” seriously enough. There are enough facts to prove that it’s happening and on top of that, even if you disregard the facts, no one can dispute that weather patterns everywhere are changing and mostly for the worse. Never have we heard of so many tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes and all creating devastating consequences and happening more and more often. Last year, in Queens, NYC, we had a tornado that knocked down 3,000 trees! I didn’t even know we that many trees. And many of the ones left standing are a pretty sorry sight because of the trimming of branches that had fallen during the storm. We never had tornadoes here as far back as I can remember, but now we are always watching for them. Why?

Well, today I am peeved, but I can’t blame Mother Nature. Yesterday, my husband went to pick up my daughter. He left work at 3:30. The sun was shining. But, by the time he got to the next to the last exist on the parkway, there was thunder and big bolts of lightning. Then the hail started. Hail as big as golf balls, even baseballs. He called to tell me he would be late picking her up. He sounded scared and said he never saw anything like this before. I could hear the car being pounding in the background, and could only imagine what it must have felt like sitting in that car as the hail was hitting it. Traffic was moving very slowly. Then I get a call from my daughter. She tells me it’s so bad no one is leaving the lab and she heard from my husband. My husband told her he had to pull over to the side of the road because the windshield was shattered. I call him up to see if he is ok. He tells me again how bad it is and that he can’t go anywhere until it stops. The windshield is pretty bad, but fortunately it was mostly off to the passenger side and he can still see. Finally, the hail lets up and he can move again. He gets to my daughter and sees at least one other car with a shattered windshield in the lot.

All I can think of is that I pray they come home safe. This was an isolated storm that came out of nowhere and hit that particular location. The sun was shining here, just a few miles away. I thought about my mother’s instinct. My daughter should have been driving herself around yesterday, and for the past two weeks. But, my gut would not agree to it. I can’t bear to imagine her out in weather like that. Last time we had the tornado that knocked down all those trees, she happened to be driving from school. A 15 minute ride took her over an hour. I was panicked to no end. She wasn’t answering her phone and didn’t call me when she had the opportunity to tell me she was fine, but would be late. She was maneuvering around fallen trees and had to watch what the other, more experienced drivers, were doing. There was a lot of flooding then, and last night there was a lot of flooding too. My husband had to wait and watch to see where it was best to drive through because we have a tiny car. When he got home I looked at the car. The passenger side of the windshield had two spots where it was impacted by the hail. The rest of the car had about 50 dings all over it!

This morning I was ready to curse out Mother Nature. First we have the winter from hell, with so many storms and inches I lost count! And now, we have the summer from hell too! I wasn’t even complaining about the heat because it’s easier to deal with than snow and ice. But, despite 90 degree temperatures, my husband was pelted with ice the size of baseballs balls! Something here is just not right!

I think it has to do with Global Warming and if that is the case, then it’s not Mother nature’s fault, it’s ours.