A Trip To Cambridge, MD

I was feeling a bit restless as the weekend and proposed a trip to Cambridge. My lovely friend Jacque said that one of our company’s suppliers said that he had fabulous luck finding sea glass down there and I was in the mood to hunt some up so I dragged my lovely husband to the truck and off we went to the Chesapeake Bay region.

We visited several public parks which were lovely, and I did have a varying degree of luck finding some sanded shards as we made our way around the waters edge. There was one park in particular that was loaded with glass, many of them with perfectly sanded edges and obviously older. My husband found three pieces of blue glass which was a coup indeed. I was only a tiny bit jealous since I’ve never found a blue piece and I’m the collector in the family.

There was another beach that had glass everywhere, but unfortunately all of it was sharp. It’s a pity too, because there were also some old pieces mixed in with the new. I picked up a large bag of it anyway because I wanted to throw it where it would get polished down to smoothness; a sea glass relocation program if you will.

After we’d enjoyed the beaches, we headed over to the Hyatt where we had some coffee and tea and walked around the manicured grounds and enjoyed the lovely views. After lunching in town, we decided to head back home. I still had the bag of sharp glass that I hadn’t found a place to toss so we stopped by Sandy Point State Park. After hitting the restrooms we wandered down to the water’s edge and I flung the glass pieces as far out as I could (I hope I didn’t inadvertently ruin someone’s beach day later on in the season by putting out something that will cut their feet), then started looking amongst the debris on the shore to see if I could find anything interesting. I was very surprised to have good luck finding glass there as well.

Below are pictures of my finds. I’ve taken close-ups of some of the pieces to show the details on the glass.

Sea Glass found in Cambridge, MD

 

Glass Detail "Forbid" - Must be Poison

15 O or Q? Looks Old

Depression Era Green? Maybe a Plate?

Taco Bell??? Probably Not

Big Cobalt Blue Shard - Probably Milk of Magnesia

Sandy Point Finds - Smaller & Newer

Pottery Shard - Dash PA?

Not Enough Time for Compassion

Today I ran errands at lunchtime during the hour I’m allotted. Mainly what I did was banking and picked up some lunch while I was in town. It’s a rainy, overcast and downright yucky day here. I was in a hurry to get back to the office but I was being careful about my speed because there were police everywhere I drove giving out speeding tickets (no, I didn’t get one, but I saw several people pulled over).

While I was driving back to work with my savory and delicious smelling barbeque sandwich, I noticed a man walking on the side of the road. He had a big pack on his back and was dressed very roughly so I got the impression that he lives outdoors most of the time. He was walking along the very busy road with a little terrier-type of dog that was getting wetter every second they walked in the rain. I was a good quarter of a mile down the road before it even occurred to me that I had a nice hot lunch sitting on the passenger seat. I knew that I was going to be a couple of minutes late getting back to the office and in order to circle back around would take me another ten. I kept driving knowing that I had to get back to work but all the while feeling terrible that I could have given that man my lunch and he and his dog might have had a little comfort while they were trudging down the road.

I wish now that I had turned around. I think I’d feel a whole lot better sitting here in my warm, dry office with an empty stomach knowing that I had helped someone who needed it. I hope that next time that I am afforded the opportunity to help someone, I won’t hesitate, even if it means I’m a little late getting back to the office.

Doing nothing feels like crap.

Food & Lifestyle Choices – It’s a Crap Shoot Either Way

While I was sitting down for a lunch break the day we did the garage clean out, my friend’s daughters were disagreeing about mayonnaise. One thought that eating mayo would invite an early death while the other enjoyed the condiment and had a generous amount on her sandwich. While mayonnaise may not be the healthiest food in the world, I don’t think it causes spontaneous expiration.

I don’t worry too much about deadly food other than I don’t spend a lot of time eating at fast food places. I don’t believe that a particular food will kill you (barring eating 20 pounds of it a day or severe allergic reaction). It’s healthier to make food choices based on moderation and a balanced diet than total avoidance of particular foods.

I was thinking about the food disagreement in the shower (where I usually do all of my critical thinking) the next morning and thought about two separate and opposite situations that I know about where lifestyle choices did not change the outcome of a person’s longevity.

The first is that my grandmother is 100 years old (actually 1 year + 1 month). She eats bacon with her breakfast several times a week at the nursing home where she lives. She insists upon it. Yet she has lived into the triple digits. The sin of eating bacon has not killed her. She doesn’t seem to have any diseases related to her diet and she happily enjoys her sodium nitrate laden breakfast snack often.

She has willfully eaten bacon in spite of the possible consequences and lived to do so for years!

The second scenario – I took a class a couple weekends ago on death scene clean up. Not a romantic sounding topic, but I find it interesting and wanted to at least learn a little more about it. While I was at the class, we had the opportunity to view and assess an apartment where someone had died alone and unnoticed for several days. As it happened, when we got to the property, there were relatives there waiting to see if they could access the property in order to begin the process of handling the man’s estate. We talked with them for a while and exchanged information on his health and how he had died as well as what we were trying to find out about what was necessary for the clean up.

Heart problems ran in his family and he suffered from congestive heart failure. As we viewed the living space (looking for a set of keys in addition to figuring out what needed cleaning up), I focused on the clean up area, but I was also trying to figure out the man who had lived there based on his possessions. It was obvious that he had tried very hard to overcome his congenital weakness by trying to stay fit and eat right.

All the food on his kitchen counters was healthy (no junk). He had an entire couch full of free weights and there were two bikes that he stored in a spare bedroom. It seemed like the man had done everything he could to stave off death and beat the issues he had with his heart, but died in his 50’s of a massive heart attack in spite of his healthy lifestyle.

I think the best any of us can do is enjoy our lives and make choices based on moderation.  It’s cool that I have a grandmother who has lived such a long life (though I’m not sure that her bacon actually makes her happy). I think it’s tragic and sad that the man who’s apartment I saw tried so hard to beat death and died young(ish) anyway. I hope that he was happy during his life and that he enjoyed all those bike rides. I like to think that maybe he kept that second bike so that a friend could join him when he rode.

April 2nd – Goddess ’64 Garage Clean Out

My girlfriends and I (Goddess ’64) have all complained about the various trouble spots we’ve got in our homes; those places that seem to always have clutter or piles of crap that seem unconquerable. Since several of us have had some experience digging ourselves out, we volunteered to help at each other’s homes to help tame the trouble areas and purge all the excess stuff that doesn’t belong.

Since our friend Cindy was anxious to clear her garage of excess stuff, we devoted part of a Saturday to at least get her started. We carried everything out of the garage and placed it on the driveway or lawn and started to sort as best we could. It’s amazing how overwhelming it is to start a project like this, but the thing is that once you get started, it becomes easier and things begin to make sense, especially when you start organizing everything into piles.

The weather didn’t cooperate as well as we hoped and we did have to dash around in the rain and hail to pull electronic type stuff inside. I wound up leaving at around 2 after we’d set up a rough layout of where things should go and the family took over putting things back, recycling, trashing or yard sale boxing the remainder of  the items that were outside. We got an update that things wrapped up well on Sunday and that we’re invited over for a barbeque in about a month so that we can see how well they finished up the job and that they are indeed maintaining the space.

Hopefully my friend Mary steps up next because I need to do some serious preparation before I subject my friends to my storage room!!!

My WordPress Stats – I Am Not Worthy

I’ve been writing entries on this blog for about a year and a quarter now. During that time I’ve written 150 posts. Not too shabby when I look at it that way, but given that roughly 450 days have passed since I began, I’d be a lot prouder of myself if I’d had 300 posts under my belt by now. I won’t beat myself up here in front of you. It’s pointless, boring and nobody likes a whiner.

What is interesting though is that in spite of my lapses in posting blog entries, I’ve got some relatively healthy stats (in my viewpoint anyway). There is rarely a day when my hits are under 10. Yesterday I had 25 and today I’ve got 27 so far and I haven’t written anything since 3/27.

So if you’re out there blogging and not getting much traffic, don’t despair. Keep writing. Make sure to use tags (I have 381 of those) since those are what search engines point to – for guaranteed hits, make sure to use Disney Princess, nerf gun, sharpie, JLo, Skinny Jeans and Meryl Streep at least once in a blog. Management Style also seems to be trending right now. Aim for 100 posts – that seemed to be the magic number for me.

I’m still writing sporadically, but I’m not giving up and hope to find that fire in my belly again before too long. It’s really cool when the creativity hits and I’m able to harness it.

Good luck with your writing!